Downloadable/rental versions of the Mister Rose video and of April TAT talks Remembering Your True Desire:

"You don't know anything until you know Everything...."

Mister Rose is an intimate look at a West Virginia native many people called a Zen Master because of the depth of his wisdom and the spiritual system he conveyed to his students. Profound and profane, Richard Rose was not the kind of man most people picture when they think of mystics or spiritual teachers. Yet, he was the truest of teachers, one who had "been there," one who had the cataclysmic experience of spiritual enlightenment.

Filmed in the spring of 1991, the extraordinary documentary follows Mr. Rose from a radio interview, to a university lecture and back to his farm, as he talks about his experience, his philosophy and the details of his life.

Whether you find him charming or offensive, fatherly or fearsome, you will not forget him, and never again will you think about yourself, reality, or life after death in quite the same way.

3+ hours total. Rent or buy at tatfoundation.vhx.tv/.

2012 April TAT Meeting – Remembering Your True Desire

Includes all the speakers from the April 2012 TAT meeting: Art Ticknor, Bob Fergeson, Shawn Nevins and Heather Saunders.

1) Remembering Your True Desire ... and Acting on It, by Art Ticknor
Spiritual action is like diving for the Pearl beyond Price. What do you do when you don't know what to do or how to do it? An informal discussion centered around the question: "What prevents effective spiritual action?"

2) Swimming in the Inner Ocean: Trips to the Beach, by Bob Fergeson
A discussion of the varied ways we can use in order to hear the voice of our inner ocean, the heart of our true desires.

3) A Wider and Wilder Vision, by Shawn Nevins
Notes on assumptions, beliefs, and perspectives that bind and free us.

4) Make Your Whole Life a Prayer, by Heather Saunders
An intriguing look into a feeling-oriented approach to life.

5+ hours total. Rent or buy at tatfoundation.vhx.tv/.

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Reader Commentary

Encouraging interactive readership among TAT members and friends

The Reader Commentary question for this month is:

How do you know which feelings, thoughts, intuitions to trust?

~ Thanks to TAT member B.H. for the question.

The complete response from Tess Hughes:
I'm going to hone in on one particular aspect of this question; intuition.

Never was there a word with more interpretations, descriptions, associations and so on, than this word. Every major religion in the world and philosopher and psychologist has had something to say about it.

Check out what Wikipedia has to say on the matter.

Everyone, it seems, is the authority of their own idea of what intuition means to them. When I've questioned people about what they see as their intuition I found they gave me descriptions that sounded to me like: rapport, business acumen, perceptiveness about human personalities, psychic phenomena, synchronicities, paranormal phenomena, prayer, dream interpretations and so on. As I said everyone had their own interpretation. The only thing they had in common was that it referred to something non-rational.

So, for what it's worth I will share my idea and what I experienced as what I refer to as intuition. I have heard others write of "inner guru" and maybe this is the same thing or not.

On my spiritual journey, as my mind and emotional life quietened down I became aware of inner spaciousness. Not all the time but some times. On occasions I would find myself in a state of simplicity, what I called the state where one is wondering about something. This wondering would be about some spiritual teaching or practice that I was doing. For example, I might be wondering what Richard Rose meant by let's say nostalgia and how that idea might be relevant to me.

I then began to notice that sometimes in this state an idea would pop into my head, out of the blue, as the saying goes. It would typically be a way of looking at my query in a way that was novel for me.

When this had happened a few times I took note of it and began to wonder about it! I wondered if this was what was being referred to in Christian teachings as "the still small voice".

Over time, and I mean over the space of a couple of months, I became familiar with this happening and began to ask it about itself. This again was in the nature of wondering what it was or what it signified, or what was this new facility that had arisen in me.

It strengthened into a definite "voice" in me. I named it Universal Mother, because at that time I thought of it as something other than myself. I found myself having "dialogues" with it. These "chats" tended to be short, an exchange of a couple of thoughts at first but this lengthened over time. I often asked questions, not verbally, but in terms of wondering about whatever had popped up. I found that when I asked for more information about the future, it always cut me off. I was given only so much, and no more.

I also found that if something had come up in our "conversation" that I didn't understand or know how to interpret it I would get a dream that night which would be obviously related to the issue and would illustrate it from a different perspective or give a clearer understanding of it. Sometimes I was given a visual image to either introduce the "conversation" or explain something I did not understand. This went on for around two years, after which time Universal Mother disappeared, forever.

What I learned about this phenomenon was that I could not call it up, it appeared of its own accord, randomly. I think the receptive conditions had to be in place for it to be "heard." This meant that there wasn't much or any gross thinking or emotions happening.

It gave me limited information that was relevant to my immediate situation. It was specific to me, always. It helped me along the spiritual path by accompanying me, so to speak, and giving me the confidence that what I was doing was working. It knew more about me than I knew about myself.

It was trustworthy. Or should I say, I came to trust it.

This is what I call intuition.

I have come to think that intuition, of this kind is available to everyone all the time but because it is subtle in nature it is not heard or recognised. One needs to have developed some inner calm, with gross thoughts and emotions having died down enough for the more subtle thoughts and feelings to get noticed.

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TAT Press publishes Tess's easy to read, profound This Above All, the story of her journey of Self-Discovery. Email .

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The complete message from Shawn Nevins:
I assume Harari only refers to the phrasing (rather than the idea) "follow your heart" as a product of 19th and 20th century myths. Certainly the Greeks distinguished between intuitive and empirical cognition. In the modern-day Clairvision school, there is a distinction between feeling and emotion which I find helpful to establish a language to answer the question "How do you know which feelings, thoughts, intuitions to trust?" "Emotion" is defined as reactions having a quality of grasping that ultimately stems from a traumatic experience, while "feeling" is a reaction that stems from a connection to a higher self. Feel free to debate the details, but what's key to understand is that a feeling can be directly perceived, or a feeling can trigger an emotion which then covers the feeling. In that case, it is only the emotion which is perceived. That "the heart is a double agent" is true—to a degree. The messages from the heart are influenced and overlaid by our fears, desires, hopes, dreams, traumas, preconceptions, biases, etc. For example, one need only think of motherly love which becomes stifling.

Whatever you want to call feeling/heart/intuition, how do you know what messages to trust? Richard Rose's advice was to experiment -- that the intuition can be developed. This relates to Jung's admonition that, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." Train the conscious mind to notice the unconscious promptings and allow it to follow some of them—experiment and learn. See this article I wrote on "Developing Intuition" for ideas on experiments. Doing so, you will learn the feel of intuitive promptings uncontaminated, or at least less contaminated, by the little "s" self.

A quote from Joseph Sadony (Gates of the Mind):

All I knew as a child was that I had some sort of relation with what I could neither see, hear, smell, taste nor touch; and that relation was a "feeling."

But I found that "thinking" and "imagining" first created a false feeling that lied to me. It was only when the feeling came first, without thinking, that the feeling was right. And my thoughts and imaginations were right only if they were induced by the feeling, and not by association of thought resulting from what I saw or heard. Sometimes there was nothing in my experience to fit the feelings that came to me. Often I could not understand them at all in terms of words or ideas familiar to me. Still I "knew"; but I couldn't explain it.

There is no magic formula for "knowing" what to trust. It's work, but the beautiful work of revealing. Like every endeavor in life, follow this advice Art Ticknor is fond of quoting: "Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place you are."

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Shawn Nevins (http://www.spiritualteachers.org/)

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