July 2026 TAT Forum

Shawn says “If we could just connect with our fundamental not knowing of who we are.” 

Ok. How do we connect with not knowing? A koan for sure. Do we do it by seeing what we are not? The Via Negativa? The path of self inquiry? Do we have to start by admitting that we don’t know who we are?

Shawn continues: “The fundamental illusion that we live every second that we exist as an independent self.”

That’s a tough one. The sense of self. Another koan. We feel like we are someone. But what if that’s not true?

He continues: “doing things and making decisions and being in this world.”

Another tough one. If we are not who we think we are (sense of self) then who is running around “being in this world”? “Being all these names like these names are real and they’re not.”  A conundrum.

And finally the kicker: He’s trying to get us to see that we don’t know who we are and we are living an illusion of free will in an unreal world. But, not only is it not real, it is clearly not real!

Shawn says that “the evidence presents itself to us continually over and over and over again.”  

Evidence? He says the evidence of illusory control of this life is plainly there to see. What is this evidence that Shawn sees that we don’t see? Is that why life feels like such a struggle? Because we’re just not getting it?  Another conundrum. 

But, while the koans and conundrums are challenging, even frustrating, Shawn is also giving us a reason to hope. The key is in his opening line, “If we could just connect with our fundamental not knowing of who we are.” That implies that it is possible to connect. There must be a way or why urge us to do it?

So, where does that leave us? We seek. We question. We look. We push against the “not knowing” and the “not knowing” pushes back.

I had been given access through a professor whose name I will not put into this video because he is still alive and has not yet retired to a private theological library in a city in northern Italy. The library belonged to a religious order. Most of its holdings had never been digitized. The librarian was a man in his late 70s, a priest of the same order, who had worked there for 40 years, and could remember the shelf locations of manuscripts as if they were rooms in a house he had grown up in. 

That afternoon in a cafe across the street from the library with a late October light turning the buildings the color of honey the old priest told me what the truth was and what Damasus had done with it and why for 1600 years no one had ever heard the verse the way the early Christians heard it. I have spent the 19 years since that afternoon trying to verify what he told me. I have read the Greek of John 8 in every critical edition I could find from Nestle Island to the older Wescott and Hort. I have read the Latin of Jerome’s Vulgate side by side with the old Latin translations that preceded it. I have read the surviving sermons of the church fathers of the second, third and fourth centuries on this passage. I have read the seven extant letters of Pope Damasus I. I have read the acts of the council of Rome convened by Damasus in the spring of 382 AD.

The old priest was right. Every word of what he told me I have been able to verify. The verse you read tonight in your Bible is not the verse Jesus spoke. And what was removed from your understanding of it is the most consequential single act of editorial censorship in the history of the Christian tradition. Let me show you what was taken. The Greek of John chapter 8:31 and 32 as the earliest manuscripts preserve it reads as follows:

Eodio to althian kai he alleia eltheros he. In English word by word Jesus said therefore to the Jews who had believed in him: “If you remain in my word, truly disciples of mine you are, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

Three things in the Greek that the modern English translations do not let you see. Three small things, each of them so small that you could miss them in a casual reading and together so large that they change everything about what Jesus was promising. The first thing, the verse you know, the truth shall set you free does not stand alone. It is the second half of a conditional sentence.

There is a word in front of it that you have never heard quoted from a pulpit. The word is if. The full sentence is: if you remain in my word then you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Jesus is not making a universal promise. He is making a contingent one. The truth is available only to those who remain in his word.

And the word he uses is menete from the Greek verb meno which means to abide, to dwell, to take up residence inside. It is not the verb you use when you are reading a book. It is not the verb you use when you are attending a weekly service. It is the verb you use when you are inhabiting a house, when you have made it the place where you live.

The second thing, the Greek word translated as truth is aletheia. And in the Greek of the first century, aletheia did not mean what modern English speakers mean by truth. It did not mean a list of correct doctrines you should believe. It did not mean a set of accurate factual statements you should affirm. It did not mean information at all. The word aletheia is built from two parts: the prefix a meaning not, and the noun leth meaning forgetting. In Greek mythology, the river Leth was the river the dead drank from in the underworld which made them forget their former lives. Aletheia is what is left when the forgetting is removed. It is reality that has been unhidden. It is what has been forgotten coming back into view. The truth Jesus is promising is not information. It is awakening. It is remembering.

The third thing the Greek word translated as free is eleutheria [freedom, liberty] from the verb ethereum, which means to liberate, to release from bondage, to set free in the sense of releasing a slave from his chains. And the bondage Jesus is talking about (in the verses that come immediately after) is not the bondage of Roman occupation. It is not the bondage of sin as the church would later define it. It is something much more specific and much more dangerous to the religious institutions of the day. It is the bondage of being told that your access to God depends on someone else.

Now, here is what almost no one will tell you. The crowd that Jesus is speaking to in this scene is not a crowd of outsiders. Look at the Greek again…. He is talking to his own followers, to people who had already accepted his teaching, to people who in the categories of modern Christianity would be considered saved. And what he is telling them is that belief is not enough. Belief is the beginning. The work after belief is to abide in his word until the forgetting is removed. Until reality stands unconcealed before you, and you are liberated from the long human habit of needing someone else to mediate the divine on your behalf.

• Discerning when to inspire and when to skillfully irritate the seeker.

• Having intuition and wisdom about human psychology and suffering.

• Having the seeker’s best interest at heart.

• Knowing when to provide encouragement and when to provide tough love.

• Teaching with a strong air of friendship and desire for rapport.

• Discouraging dependency on the teacher and encouraging friendships with others who are exploring spiritual paths.

• Listening intently to get a clearer understanding of the seeker’s perspective; knowing when to talk and when to remain silent.

• Willing to work with seekers at various levels of spiritual maturity and Being.

• Being transparent about his or her own life.

• Ensuring that seekers never cede their own authority.

Warning!

Lest the teacher do more harm than good, all seekers should use sharp discernment and remain wary of the following:

• Teachers who are dogmatic, narcissistic, controlling, or self-deluded.

• Emotional and physical abusers, bullies, charlatans, moneygrubbers, ego-flatterers, and sexual exploiters.

All of these behaviors and traits serve as the basis of a cult. Self-realization should never excuse a teacher for these behaviors, regardless of the seeker’s tendency to minimize their importance. Caveat emptor!

1. Be cautious of anyone who says they know what will take you where you want to go. Don’t assume that anyone or any organization has a formula.

2. Work with seeker-peers and with anyone you intuit who has found something you’re looking for.

3. Consider the possibility that the ultimate spiritual goal is finding your true identity. Labels such as Self-Realization or Becoming the Truth imply an absolute state of being that encompasses what you are, always have been and always will be.

4. Richard Rose, my primary spiritual teacher, cautioned students not to believe what he said but to find the Truth for themselves. Google’s response to: spiritual teacher Richard Rose “don’t believe me” began with:

Spiritual teacher Richard Rose taught that you should never blindly accept his words or adopt a belief, famously urging students: “Don’t believe me.” He argued that belief requires no genuine investigation and only masks one’s ignorance. Instead of accepting dogma, he challenged seekers to verify spiritual truths for themselves through direct experience and diligent self-inquiry.

and included a Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rose_(mystic).

My insight, which I am sure most do not share, is that it is the troubling bits of wisdom that I hear that seem to point at the truth for me. I don’t think a one-day or a one-week retreat-escape would benefit me at all. I would look forward to it with enjoyment! Gurdjieff once said that effort on the path is meaningless—it is only the extreme efforts from which one could benefit. For me this is troubling, and if this were so, then what am I avoiding? Where would I need to apply the extra effort in order to progress? That, I am convinced, is not during any escape I could arrange, no retreat, cave or joining a club of deprived would-be monks or nuns. Something much more severe for me would be a constant vigil, one in place of my near continuous sleep-state existence and one of extreme effort.

Within perennial wisdom is a statement always curious to me, something about something “outside the scriptures,” outside any prescription, direction or path that someone, anyone else, has traveled or even suggested. Mr. Rose as well as many mystics describe it as “entering the desert,” where there are no footprints, no path, no sign posts to follow. Is it possible that one could live one’s life as if in that desert, always alert, always watching, on a journey always leaving behind more and more to become less and less as if to reduce oneself, in preparation for an eventual most difficult passage, one demanding such incredible commitment and effort to just get there, and then to only not know. The guidance provided could necessarily only be from within, always an invisible but always increasingly more reliable. It would be a lifestyle like no other. It’s easy to live the lifestyle of a farmer if you live on a farm, or to live like a doctor, a priest, monk or salesman—the roles and accoutrements are laid out for you. Lifestyle is a way of life in an environment aligned to one’s commitments, but this seeker lifestyle is one of commitment directed within. True adventure is tempting the fate of an otherwise sleeper struck by the allurement of the Not Knowing characteristic of that eventual desert within. It is through what FMW referred to as “our door to the Eternal (that) has been neglected.” Through his “Induction” he hoped to lead some who were brave enough to enter.

I recall a short story about a green door that would suddenly and mystically appear only to disappear before the adventurer could return to further investigate. He missed the opportunity when it would present itself. It seems some opportunities are available only when the time is right, when one must jump at the opportunity, as if into a passageway which would lead elsewhere to that which one would never know once the opportunity had passed. The green door is just that for me: an opportunity yet a troubling bit of wisdom that I fear, yet still anticipate to be right before or behind me, always in reach. Yet, do I hesitate awaiting the time to be right, too?

Perceptions, projections, visions

There’s one other point in the basis of perception. As I said before, there’s more than one type: there’s sensory perception and mental perception And it’s necessary to understand this. Because we see a lot of stuff and we like to think “we” see it, but we don’t define who is “we”. We don’t define what’s going on when we’re seeing.

For instance, suppose you see a green apple – this is visual perception – and you throw the apple out the window. And then we can visualize the apple sitting right here on the table. We can still see that apple in our mind’s eye, sitting right here. We can even close our eyes; we don’t have to see it sitting there, we can see it in our minds. And we can see almost anything that way. Now of course they call this memory. But – supposing we have this apple in our mind’s eye and we decide that we’re going to have little red diamonds a half inch apart all the way around the outside perimeter. We visualize an apple with little red diamonds. Incidentally, there are a lot of cults – and I identify them as cults – that do nothing but visualize. I was listening to this tape the other day and somebody is saying, “See o-r-a-n-g-e. Now see blue.” And so on. And he’s taking people through this course, a hundred and fifty bucks for a weekend, for seeing different colors, being able to visualize them.

But regardless, you can. You can see an apple with swastikas on it if you wish. Now what is this? This is actually a mental picture. It is a mental picture that is seen that has never been real; there has never been an apple that grew on a tree that had diamonds or swastikas on it. So this is what I call visualization. This is the ability of the mind to create. And what it does, it projects someplace. As we say, we see it in our head, it’s projected there. A picture is seen. Anything that is seen is substantial. Whenever anything is recorded – like if five people see a mirage – then that mirage is substantial. That’s the same evidence that sends a man to the electric chair – five people, two people perhaps, can send him to the electric chair. If two people see a mirage, that’s legal evidence. It’s scientific evidence, it’s testimony, it exists. Erratic? – sure, it may be erratic; because when they move up to the scene where the mirage seems to be it’s not there.

But regardless, we have that ability to project, to create. And unless we understand our ability to project and create, we cannot start to look inside of our own head, because every step of the way we’re visualizing and projecting. How many people have been in the process of projecting what love is? – the color of the horse the man had to ride in on, what the horse looked like, what the guy looked like, the qualities that he had inside of him. Then projecting phony qualities of the person who is meeting the man on the horse. We’ve built up a whole phony system of the princess with no faults, nothing but every superlative, meeting the man on the horse, who has nothing but superlatives, and waiting for ten, fifteen, twenty years for this visualization to come true – angrily hating the world, because other people refuse to believe that dream.

So unless a person sees this early in life we go on. Sometimes we don’t know it; sometimes we think, “Oh, yes, I know what you’re talking about. I don’t get into that stuff.” No – you’re into something else, some other form of visualization. But this form of internal looking is a projection of this process-observer mind. It’s a mental projection. I’ll give you some examples of these different things now.

Examples ²⁰

Sensory perceptions: Objects are apprehended. Now when I say apprehended it means the things that you see or things you hear, touch, smell, etc., the five or six senses.

Memory perception: This is remembering and also visualization. But when you remember anything – for instance if I say to you that you would remember that log cabin you were born in, and it flashes back into your head: a farm back on a hillside with a certain slope, the logs sticking out of the corners of the log cabin, etc. – an exact picture, everything coming back to your head. Now this is a vision. This is not a projection. This is a perception. Whenever the memory is stimulated it produces a vision – even if it’s only a split second, if you’re running through things very rapidly …

[ break in tape ]

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²⁰ Also see Psychology of the Observer, pg. 22-23, “Six different forms of perceiving”.

… and you can see that, you can recall that. Call it back and it will appear.

Reaction visions: There are visions that we can only describe as being reactions; we don’t know their nature, we just react and we see them. We react to a certain situation, place, time, etc. – these are ghosts, visitations, mind projections. Sometimes these are things that we project out of the mind and seemingly see with the physical eye. But we project them first.

Holograms: A hologram is a reaction but we just don’t react properly with a hologram.

Hallucinations: Again, we don’t react properly; we see something that’s not there because it twists somewhere inside our seeing mechanism. In other words, our sensory-perception mechanism is not infallible. And this is another reason why we should question our own judgment in a lot of things.

Mental perceptions: This is a person perceiving with their awareness; true revelations about an unknown environment acting upon the mind, or the mind acting upon the mind.

Then we have deliberate projections. Is it possible to deliberately project? This is the fifth quality of the mind. We have ESP – that seemingly people do sit down and project. Also astral projection; and there’s another thing called zapping – this has been pretty well substantiated as being a power of the mind.

Okay, I don’t know whether I got the point across. If not, I hope that some of your questions will bring this across to you.

Man’s purpose

Q: In what you’re describing about nature, what is the purpose of getting this knowledge? To prepare you for the transcendental? [rest is inaudible]

R: I wouldn’t say that. I’d just say you start to see your purpose. And I don’t think that needs to be the only purpose, and I’m not inferring it’s a negative pursuit. I’m just saying that once you get wise to it, you may not have to suffer, you may not have to drown as quickly. In other words, you’re going to die. We’re talking about death. You’re dying right now; everyone here is dying, we’re approaching a certain end. Now – you can jump out the window or you can do it slowly. Consequently, when you realize what you’re programmed for, then naturally the unspoken thing is – what can you do to prolong it, while you’re taking time to learn? You don’t know, and a person has to prepare themselves in order to find out. What I’m trying to avoid for you is this idea of blasting yourself into knowledge. And instead trying to take a methodical, possibly laborious course of finding your definition, as opposed to extreme measures. It’s never been done with extreme measures.

And the other inclination we have, and I can’t argue with it, because every one of us has it: everyone moves as they’re supposed to move. Each person has a certain capacity, and no rationalization will identify their capacity, and you don’t argue with it. I hear people saying, “What good is that? – let’s eat, drink and be merry, because everybody’s kidding themselves who thinks there’s another objective in life.” And the proper thing to do, outside of saying, “Well, what is happiness?” or, “Who is being happy?” is to let the person eat, drink and be merry. Because if he doesn’t have the intuition or instinct or whatever is necessary, or hasn’t inherited the proper computer to do the work, he’s not going to go anyhow. He’s going to do what he was destined or programmed for. But the whole idea is trying to get a breath of relief from the programming, the treadmill.

Zapping

Q: What is the zapping you referred to?

R: Well, zapping is an instantaneous hypnosis. Zapping is a technique that came out of India. Gurdjieff ²¹ could zap. The first instance I ran into with zapping – there were certain yogis who came into this country forty of fifty years ago. One of them was Meher Baba,^{22, 23} and he could look at you and you would collapse; he would just stare at you. Gurdjieff could look at you and you’d collapse. Because he established a mind-to-mind contact and then he pulled the strength out of you. There has been enough of this that has happened, and it’s predictable. They can predict they can do it and it can be done. And you can do it if you’re somewhat astute in hypnosis; you can knock people off their feet.

LSD trip

Q: [mostly inaudible – John Lily’s immersion tank ]

R: [inaudible – cracks some jokes] I’ve never been in one. I don’t know what it would do for you. It might be worth trying. I just don’t like the machinery there. It might be good. I’ll tell you something else, though: I don’t believe that you can take just anybody and put them there. It’s like LSD. I remember talking back four or five or six years ago with some people who had LSD and psilocybin and some other drugs. And I said, “What does this do for you?” One girl was talking about it, and she was pretty much of an authority on it – she had ruined both her kidneys with it. I don’t know whether the LSD did it or the needles or what, but her kidneys were shot, and she was pretty much of a philosopher in her last days.

But she said to me, “You get out of LSD what you put into it.” And I find that this is very true. Certain people take the same LSD – and one has nightmares, pursued by monsters and bad trips or something, while another person will take the identical LSD and have almost a spiritual experience. And I think the same thing goes for any of these experiments. You can’t get blood out of a turnip. If a person has certain basic innate qualities and they go into spiritual research, they either have to change their state of being – this is one of the secrets of it – before they go

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²¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff
²² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meher_Baba
²³ See 1976-0304-Group-Meeting-Pittsburgh for a lengthy discussion on Meher Baba.

… [whether that’s] for two lifetimes or ten lifetimes. He has to put something out there. I took LSD once – I was trying to see whether it would break open an experiential field that I had been in before. And I had a beautiful, a very beautiful experience. I died, incidentally. It started off by dying – I went through a death experience, and then I had a very beautiful experience.²⁵ And I compare this with hundreds of young people that I talk to, and they couldn’t understand: an old bastard like me should have had a rough trip. I had a nice trip. But I think it was because of the way I approached it. I had prepared myself for it too.²⁶ You can prepare yourself for these things.

I’m not trying to change a trend today, I’m only trying to sort some people out who may pick up an intuition from what I’m saying, that you can’t indulge in these many voices that the umpire would reject and come up with any good results. There has to be a certain change of being before you go into a search for spiritual experience. In other words, there’s a trend to have experience; there are a lot of people who want experience. And I’ve run into quite a few of them; they’d come down to my place and want to stay there, and I’d find out that they were into – I mean a whole lot of vices – and they thought that they could continue these things, all of these let’s say open spigots on the computer. The computer has to be shut. You have to put the material in the computer and then you shut off the input and the output, if you want a decision out of the computer. You can’t have a bunch of monkeys in there all the time jumping around.

You’ll have an experience and what will your experience be? Monkeys. That’s all.

[ break in tape ]

Words

Q: [Mostly inaudible question on meaning.]

R: Here’s the whole thing about words: words have whatever meaning you give them. That’s why I talk about the language of agreement. The unfortunate thing is that we don’t always agree on words or understand what another person means. For instance we use this word exceptional – you think that an exceptional person is a genius, but you pick up a dictionary and no, it’s a resident in a nuthouse. Another example is the words objective and subjective: as soon as a

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²⁴ Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey.
²⁵ Rose details his LSD experience in a letter to Robert Martin, February 18, 1969. See pages 104-105 of Peace to the Wanderer, pdf in this directory: http://selfdefinition.org/rose/
²⁶ By being celibate.

subjective matter is under scrutiny it becomes objective. This may be along the lines you’re talking about, semantics or meaning, and the meaning is very vague. The words don’t mean a whole lot, no matter who it is who’s talking. Sometimes the most you can do, as I said, is pick up something by intuition. That’s the key. Because words will confuse you.

Q: What was it you meant by “somatic”?

R: Somatic means the body

Q: You were talking about somatic religion.

R: I believe that a lot of our religion is somatic, and a lot of this is rejected. That we can only think in terms of ecstasy or hell. Especially the Christian religions. The tremendous love relationship between a sadistic God and a whole herd of masochistic people, who just love to go to hell.

Umpire and egos

Q: Once you realize that the umpire is programming, do you gain control over that and maybe stop its vices, or do you just watch its vices go on forever?

R: We know in almost all cases where we undertake therapy, that the change occurs with the recognition of the error. There’s no sense in trying to change the mechanism. Like with this idea of the survival urge: the survival urge is contributory to death but it also contributes to long life. If you try to mess with it you may get into prostate cancer.²⁷ But you recognize what’s going on: where previously you thought that you were reproducing, that you were the rooster of the world, now you see that all of it doesn’t matter; it’s going to happen whether you’re there or not.

And it isn’t a question of denouncing, or labeling stuff as evil, or something of that sort – that’s nonsense. I don’t intend to imply that. I’m just saying that you become detached. And most people when they get older – I’m not saying all; I’ve seen people ninety years of age who couldn’t see, they were blind, they were still trying to feel, and they never got detached – but most people after awhile look upon all of this scheme as nonsense. But by then it’s too late.

What I’m trying to do is to age some young people. And that’s basically why they get their detachment, if it’s done.

I was doing a little bit of reading or digging, trying to find out where this thing of guilt came from. And I noticed the predominance of guilt in the Christian religion. Then I started looking through the religions of India and Asia and Zen and all this sort of thing. And where is the guilt in Zen? You don’t find it. You find that they pretty much ignore it. But there’s a thread that runs through all the Hindu religions, and it’s generally spoken in let’s say little aphorisms. I ran into this when I first started studying yoga, years ago; I was a kid about twenty-three years old. And there was this little aphorism – I can’t remember exactly, but it says basically that all pain is caused by

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²⁷ Rose advocated celibacy for young people but believed that extended periods of celibacy for older men could cause prostate trouble.

desire. Now where the Christian religion builds up a tremendous monster, “Oh, don’t you do this, because you’ll get so many years in the hot seat,” the eastern religions recognize the fact that man burns himself. Like St. Paul said, “If you don’t marry, you’ll burn.” ²⁸ That man can burn himself by his desires. Now – this means that for anything you desire there are voices. These are egos. And any ego if you don’t develop some sort of detachment from it can burn you. It can cause you pain, ultimately. It can obsess you. It can develop a monkey.

Q: When you start the spiritual search you discover your selfishness and your egos and your desires. And then you move through that, you keep going and you lose your original reasons for searching. So then what keeps you going?

R: I’ll tell you what happened to me. Different people have different motivations. My original motivation for getting on a spiritual search was selfish. Looking at it from this viewpoint, I consider it very selfish. I had the conceit, number one, that I could master psychology, magic, kabala, astrology, all of these – which I look upon now as very weird pastimes – I would master all these things and become somewhat of a threat to humanity. But I didn’t go very far until it dawned on me that while all this power was being built up, I wasn’t achieving the big thing I would really want. And that was what? – that nowhere was I incorporating or getting in the general package enough knowledge to prolong my life, beyond the ordinary span of any other animal that was programmed to live so long.

And I came to the conclusion – and I don’t expect to and don’t particularly care to live any longer than my lifespan – but I realized then that what I wanted was to know the score. The motivation changed, and the ego-prompted thing wasn’t so important. But I maintain that you’ve got to hang in with your egos. This thing of abolishing egos or dropping egos is foolishness. This is the reason people get into too much dope or too much booze. They write it off in a sort of suicidal thing: “Oh, well I’ll go out that way, I’ll return to nirvana.” I heard a person make a remark one time – they found some people dead on a doorstep up in New York who had overdosed – and somebody said, “Oh, what a beautiful way to go.” How do they know? How do they know they went to nirvana, that they dropped all their egos? They may have entered oblivion, because of the range of their experience.

But regardless, it’s necessary to hang onto the survival ego, until you’ve got something better to replace it with. When you reach your final experience you’ll drop it – you have to die, you have to go through the death experience to achieve it – but you return. And you return once more hanging onto your survival ego, or you can’t function. So these are all implants, necessary to keep you moving. They’re not evil. They’re not evil in themselves. The only thing is to learn how to play the violin, to learn which finger to play, which ego to play. I call it “milk from thorns” – use this interior negative energy to develop curiosity – the right curiosity, not for the porno movies.

But you do change. You create what I call a vector – it’s an engineering term but it describes best what happens – that after awhile you’ll realize that you’re not an individual, you’re not a unique rooster that the world will never forget. And when that happens, the rooster that caused all this seems to be left behind. But what happened in the meantime was that you developed a vector – a curiosity, a dynamic hunger, a drive – and that stays with you. And that is basically who you are when the thing is over. You are not the rooster, you are not the person named Jack or Jill, you are a vector. You are basically a vector. You are what you do. Every man is what he does.

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²⁸ 1 Corinthians 7:9. “But if they cannot contain let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn.”