August 2026 TAT Forum

“It’s almost like I can hear the sole of my shoe rubbing against the skateboard as I position, reposition, and reposition again – waiting for things to align just right so as to alleviate the fear of falling. Exactly when I’ll drop in or how that will look is speculation, but I know I’m not getting off this damn ramp, and I’m growing tired of this coward.”

 As I read this, a thought came to mind that is reflective of a shift in perspective that’s occurred since writing those words—who’s growing tired of this coward? 

There’s a kind of inner division, a tension, made up of conflicting desires and beliefs about myself that all mash together and form a sense of “growing tired of this coward.” Short-term gratification of desire, long-term goals imagined to be fuller gratification of deeper desires, the necessity in some cases for the former to be sacrificed for the latter, the unknown of whether the latter will ever be known, the sense of there being a higher (virtuous) path and a lower (worldly) path, the belief that I have a say in which path I’m on, fears, values, choices, the story continues.

On closer inspection, the “who” that’s tired of this coward isn’t a “who” after all, it’s a desire (Realization), various beliefs about that desire and it’s fulfillment, and identification with all this as a kind of “higher me” that has control over action but, for some reason, won’t just do what I believe I’m supposed to do. Thus the inner conflict—there’s a good me and a bad me, a grand desire and want for its fulfillment, and frustration that I don’t do the things I believe I can and should be doing.

So then what of “dropping in” and, perhaps more importantly, the skater kid who wants to do so? It still seems that when the desire to drop in supersedes any conflicting desires standing in its way, then it happens. From what I can see, this is how any decision happens, any commitment, any action at all. Seen through the lens of time, which is the primary lens I currently know, it’s mechanistic, almost mathematical, a process, a reaction pattern. Seen through the lens of now, now, now, everything that happens seems to simply arise spontaneously. Where is the moment of so called individual free-will in all that? Where is a coward? Where is the holy one?

And where is the skater kid, the seeker, when ideas about deciding, doing, committing, and the likes come so deeply under question? It’s like I’m sitting on the fence at the edge of the skate park, watching myself “position, reposition, and reposition again.” But there’s nothing to do from the fence, I just watch. And somehow that kid up on the ramp sees what I see and something changes, ever so slightly. He keeps showing up every day, keeps reviewing the steps, keeps climbing to the top of the ramp, but now he also lets go a bit, trusts something beyond himself, and sees that it was all coming from beyond him anyway.

Maybe these evolving insights are closer to dropping in than how I once envisioned it, closer to surrender, commitment, and free-fall than when seen through the eyes of a seeker-self. Perhaps the view from the fence is more clear, more true, closer to Home. Maybe I’m fooling myself and that will be seen at a later time, a later place of insight. For now, returning to the Message in a Bottle I left myself four years ago, with italicized thoughts from the fence:

“Love with abandon, lose yourself.”
Yes, what does it mean to love God? To love what is? What is abandoned?

“Slaughter your sacred cows.”
Indeed, they’re all imagination, aren’t they? Which Buddha have you not yet killed?

“Once you understand it all, you’ll have to live it all.”
And what is it that you know for sure?

“There is no certainty in the relative world, nothing Real –
please, dear heart, stop looking here….”
How is it that a you would see beyond the relative? Can you stop looking and See?

I also recognise that everyone’s body-mind responds differently to psychoactive substances, so I wouldn’t encourage anyone to expect a particular outcome or assume another person’s experience will mirror their own.

Looking back almost a year later, I’ve come to appreciate that while such an experience can open a door, it doesn’t walk the path for you. The deeper transformation in my own life has come through the ordinary, day-to-day practice of self-inquiry, presence, and learning to meet whatever life presents. The recognition itself was profound, but it has been the quiet integration afterwards that has brought the most meaningful and lasting change.

When the drug wears off I assume I would be back where I started but maybe I had a realization of where I could go whilst under the influence.

It could appear much easier to analyse me than it is in reality for example and therefore give me answers that are not possible in reality.

Looking for answers to Self-Enquiry I think via the use of Psychoactive substances would only work whilst under the influence, when reality kicks back in, after the drugs wear off I think I would be very disappointed to find that it was only a solution during the period of being under the influence and in reality I would still be seeking the answers unless – Do we actually already know the answers but in day to day life we are missing the obvious? Can’t see the wood for the trees??

Could it be that using drugs may allow our minds to just be and therefore we don’t question but just allow it to happen and solutions take their course without us trying to make them happen??? Hmmmm.

Somewhere in the early 2000’s psychologists began to refer to psychoactive substances as “entheogens,” substances that would give one a sense of God. And in controlled – ritual or clinical – settings, that is quite accurate. Without going into my own speculation on the brain-chemistry effects, I perceive that entheogens open one up to non-ordinary experiences and interpretations of being, that resonate as real and remain as influences upon awareness. However, if ingested as play or in uncontrolled situations, psychoactive substances can take one into a “bad trip,” in which the lack of controlled setting can plunge you into a chaotic and distressing experience that can be very psychologically injurious, and may lead to foolish actions that result in serious bodily injury. Another caution is to witness those who use psychoactive substances recreationally, who often become “burnouts,” wastrels who rationalize their existence as in some way superior to the “bourgeois” and the “mundane,” unable to face their own degraded existence. I often feel blessed that I did not get lost on such a path.

Like more well-known experimenters who preceded me – Richard Alpert and Carlos Castaneda – I eventually came to the conclusion that psychoactive substances can be powerful and effective in shaking one’s convictions about what is real, and, thereby, open you to possibilities of reality that were unseen up to that moment. But ultimately, they will let you look through the gate, even explore a bit in the other world, but will not allow you to enter into the real reality you seek.

So, in conclusion, I cannot say that psychoactive substances are bad or good, but are tools (like celibacy) that are to be used carefully for their capacity to do serious harm. And like celibacy, are not, in and of themselves, the purpose and goal of the practice.

Therefore, it’s one of those things which once you have done it once or twice, it’s enough.

Self-inquiry is conducted as I am, as it is, as THIS is, no drugs needed.

Thank you team!

I think a danger with psychoactive experimentation is the frequent conviction that the experience needs to be repeated, and repeated.

In my first solitary retreat, I experienced a new view that came “out of the blue.” As I observed it, the words came into my mind: “My only chance for clarity is through an extended period of celibacy.” And celibacy (which Richard Rose defined as ever-decreasing intentional sex action) actually descended on me and continued without struggle for nearly 5 years. An unusual circumstance had also eliminated a long-term cigarette habit about 3 years before that, and my desire for mental clarity eliminated alcohol after the retreat.

I didn’t have an experimental mentality, and my focus for the quarter-century of my conscious search was on trying to observe from a consistent position. I even eliminated reading fiction (I was a long-time detective fiction fan). I did experiment with fasting during solitary retreats though, eventually water-only during the first 3 days and sometimes juice only during the remainder of the retreat.

I think the best we can do is to use our analytical common sense, intuition and felt convictions to guide our own search.

want the parent to leave, it doesn’t want to be weaned and this sort of thing. Those are all implants. They seem very complex, but after you look at them for a while they go back to a very basic appetite: we have a desire to possess and we have a desire to be in charge. The child has the desire to be in charge of its mother, and it will go through a period when it will try to run the whole house, to get things that it wants.

But these are all programmed in, and they go from parent to child to child, on indefinitely. You trace certain desire-patterns. Whether they get them by watching the parents or they’re inherited with the DNA molecules, I don’t know. But these are two things that are not us, and they’re organic, animal. The animals have them too. It’s very difficult when you observe the behavior of an animal closely enough and then observe the behavior of a human being, to see much difference in the program. The only thing that I could see is that somehow we’ve got a better choice; we can choose our actions a little better and we can think more. We also have more confusion, and out of more confusion can come more wisdom – I shouldn’t say wisdom, but more realization. In other words, we invented a complex language that gives us something to worry ourselves with.

Projections

Q. You were talking about projections. Let’s say an individual is looking at a female – could that be a projection that could be pulled back?

R. Well, you always have some type of projection. The idea is basically that a person doesn’t pull them back, but you outgrow them, you wear them out. You marry the character and then it belches in your face – and you say, “That ain’t a princess.” You just outgrow it. But you have a new projection then, a new rationalization. A new one will be built up. And of course we’ve got some magical words we use to supplant them. One of them is friendship. If we can develop a friendship, we can tolerate all of our disappointments and our projections.

Q. Could our connection with reality then be changed from that?

R. Oh, my lord yes. This is the whole thing. You realize that the only contact we have with reality is our senses, which themselves are erroneous, as evidenced in the ability to see a limited color range, a limited hearing range, the ability to see mirages, hallucinations and that sort of thing. We have a limited world that we live in. And we realize after a while that this entire world could very well be projected. All of it. This is the great possibility, when you’re watching your mind – if we can momentarily detach ourselves from this world of agreement and just not agree to all of it, and then see what happens.

Gurdjieff’s grandmother supposedly when she was dying said to him, “Whatever people do, no matter what it is, do the opposite.”³⁰ In other words, in order to shake this; to shake this idea about everybody – that the people are right, that the law is right, that the minister is holy. And

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³⁰ Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, vol. 1, ch. 1, pg. 27 in the pdf:. “From the moment of its arising, [this] became as it were the chief directing lever of my entire whole.” http://selfdefinition.org/gurdjieff/

one by one over a period of years we come to a new state of mind on the thing. We catch the preacher in the beer joint, we catch our judges in similar situations, stealing and so on. But generally by then it’s too late. When you find these things out it’s too late to form an honest appraisal or to look at things differently.

Q. Is there is a way we can change our perspective and not allow our egos to control us?

R. Well, you can’t. You can’t rise above your own convictions, until they are replaced by themselves. But as Dan said, if you loaf with a bunch of people who are just trying to challenge their thinking, to challenge any system of thinking, this helps. It’s not to denounce, it’s not to say something is bad. Everything’s good, everything has its purpose. Everything lifts somebody up a little bit. But maybe it won’t lift you up. Maybe you already went through it

And I know with myself, when I was into this stuff I thought, “Boy, this is it.” I was about twenty years old and I was getting into spiritualism and I thought, “All I have to do is go out and talk to these dead people and find out where they’re at, and get a map of the place, and that’s it, and everything’s solved.” But I found out that you couldn’t tell. I could talk for two hours on spiritualism and the things I discovered, that assured me that you’d never find anything through spiritualism; because everything is evasive.

And then I got into yoga and I thought, “Oh, boy, now I’m finally getting wise, I’m getting away from this nonsense, this superstitious stuff. And I encountered the same thing there.³¹ I took initiations in kriya yoga and shabd yoga – Kirpal Singh³² was one of the teachers. It was the Radha Soami³³ science, basically – Eckankar³⁴ is an offshoot of it – where you visualize sounds, visualize molasses on your tonsils.³⁵ These are all little things that when you first hear them you think, “Oh, boy, we’re getting into this magical world.” This is nonexistent. It’s a curse. You’re creating something that you’re going to have to erase.

Now maybe some of you people are into this and you’ll get angry. “Oh, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because I was in that movement.” Okay, don’t argue with this person, because they have to go through it, that’s all. But if you can talk to him maybe you can save that guy ten years. I talked to a lady one time who was going on to seventy years of age, a Rosicrucian.³⁶ And believe me, everyone I talked to – if a man told me he was a Theosophist³⁷ or a Rosicrucian, especially if they’re sixty or seventy years old – I asked, “What did they do for you? What did you get out of it? Were there any great truths brought to you? Do you know the answer?”

Bob Martin and I when we were young went up to Cleveland and knocked on a Rosicrucian’s door – he was the head of this local circle up there. And he opened the door and took us in. This

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³¹ Richard Rose: “Yoga: Hatha, Shabd, and Raja”. http://www.searchwithin.org/download/yoga.pdf
³² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirpal_Singh
³³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_Soami
³⁴ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckankar
³⁵ Spiritual nectar trickling down from the chakras.
³⁶http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosicrucianism
³⁷ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophy

man had spent twenty-four years sending away for those monographs through the mail – two dollars a week for the rest of your life. So I thought this guy should know something; he should have something. And I said to him, “Would you endorse then the Rosicrucian Order?” And he said, “Oh, yes, a wonderful, wonderful group of people.” I said, “What did they do, basically, for you? Is there anything you can tell us, for instance, that would inspire me to follow your path?” And he said, “Let me think – did you ever see a needle float on water?” I mean this is the truth. He takes me into the kitchen and floats a needle on water. And I thought, “Twenty-four years to learn to float a needle on water?” You could at least have him change the stock market or something.

Then this other lady from New York who was in the Rosicrucians – the purpose of the Rosicrucian Order was to find your astral master while still living in your physical body; the Guardian of the Threshold³⁸ so to speak. So I’m always curious – because these people spend forty years of their life and what are the results? – that they know which horse is coming in? And so I asked her, “What were the results?” She said, “Well, one day, I wasn’t really sure that I was awake, but he appeared at the foot of the bed and I asked him the two questions.” And I asked her, “What did he say?” She said, “He just shook his head, ‘No,’ and left.” And that was your one shot and you’re done, and he never came back again. So I think that from all the evidence that comes in, it doesn’t justify a lifetime of research. It might justify a lifetime of socializing with the people, if you like to do that. But whole the point in this is whether a person has the intuition to pick it up. If not, then you’ll offend him when you talk about it. So you just have to let them run their course.

Becoming

Q. I think maybe what you’re saying is that if you are, you are, and if you will be, then you will be, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

R. No, no. What you desire, you may be also.

Q. And you can become?

R. Sure, sure. We have no proof that we’re agents of free will. But unless we operate that way then there’s no other course but suicide. There’s no point in just continuing. In other words, if you don’t have any choice in your efforts, you couldn’t avoid suicide; that would be the next step. So anybody who isn’t committing suicide believes that he can do something. He may be fatalistic, but he believes that somewhere there’s a hope. As I said, we’re all robots, but everybody’s reaching behind themselves for the key; hoping to find the key that will make the mechanism deviate from its original course. There’s a hope of change, and this hope of change creates change; the desire to know will bring you closer to knowledge. The desire to experience pleasure will bring you closer to pleasure.

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³⁸ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_of_the_Threshold

Now whether all the people who succeed were basically the people who desire – that it’s just a coincidence, that people were doomed to succeed and doomed to desire success – that could be. Or it could be that certain people who would not have succeeded otherwise developed a dynamic hunger, and the hunger caused them to act. Either one. But we can only operate with the latter: conviction. We have to operate as though we can do something. And all those people who succeed operate with that same principle. They believed that they could.

Resistance

Q. I find that people in general are afraid of metaphysical thoughts and resist if you talk about it.

R. Well, the things that I talked about tonight and the experiences I had were years ago, and I kept my mouth shut because of that same thing. I had a family to keep, I had three children to raise, I was in the contracting business and working different places, one place in the capacity of a head chemist. And if you even talked about these things you could get in trouble.

And I don’t know where this comes from, but I think that nature somehow avoids investigation of nature; that’s the feeling I have. I can’t prove it, but I have a feeling that nature would like to avoid the investigation of nature. So the religions that are natural religions just say, “Well, go ahead.” And this is one of the complaints I have had against a lot of the religions all over the world – Christian, Buddhist and all – that there’s was a certain group of people who searched quietly and they built morals around the search laboratory. And a lot of them pretty much kept their lives under control; they stayed away from extremes in sex and alcohol and that sort of thing. But they preached for the populace to reproduce, and to get drunk so that they could confess.

And this was one of my protests; that I do believe that you can and should take whatever information you have to the general public. And I’ve suffered – if you want to call it suffered – I don’t give a damn – because I’m at the point where I can’t suffer too much. But I’ve come to a point of freedom in which I can say what I please and express the things that have happened to me. And if they do somebody some good, well then I feel as though I’m functional. Otherwise there’s no point in me living. I’m not too good at passing on any other skills. But I agree with you a hundred percent.

Q. Inaudible.

R. There is a tremendous lot, yeah. Like Dan said, this group that they have here in Pittsburgh basically doesn’t advocate addiction to any religion or group. And because of that they came under criticism for not being true Zen or something like that. True Zen means being true fanatics, to some sandal-cracking groups of people.

[ end of tape ]