Richard Rose
Richard Rose
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The Albigen System
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Insightful Quotes
What is the Albigen System?
The Albigen System of Richard Rose, a spiritual system
involving a threefold path for finding Truth
What follows is a very brief overview of the Albigen System. To explore more, an excellent and concise introduction to the Albigen System is provided by the book Passages: An Introduction and Commentary on Richard Rose's Albigen System.
If you're ready to dive even deeper into the teachings, consider attending one of our TAT retreats.
A threefold path for finding Truth…
- A way of living your life aimed at understanding that life.
- A life of brotherhood—helping and being helped by others with a common goal.
- A system not of learning but of becoming the Truth.
Based on the Experience and teachings of Richard Rose…
- A man who reached enlightenment at the age of 30, in 1947, and dedicated his life toward helping others who were seeking self-definition.
- Who learned that the direct path to Truth is through retreating from untruth.
- And who thus recommended an approach that is “subjective, subtractive, immanent and designed for immediately changing and becoming.”
A system that…
- Aims at self-definition and considers all knowledge incomplete until the knower or experiencer is known or identified.
- Does not attempt to prove itself by the vanity of logic but is inductive and answers to common sense and intuition.
- Revolves around confrontation, both in friendly questioning that challenges each others’ thinking to the point of retreating from error and in self-confrontational meditation.
| “The purpose is to find the Truth—meaning self-definition, and the true relation of man to his fellow man, and a true understanding of our life’s events.” |  |
The Albigen System is a method for stripping away the glossy veneer of life in the pursuit of the greater Reality that lies beneath its surface. It is a spiritual system of seeking for those who are sincerely interested in becoming the Truth.
Becoming aware of our essential nature is a single goal with many paths leading to it—most of them very long and slow. Some paths, such as traditional religions, appeal to emotional-devotional people, some paths appeal to intellectually curious people, while other paths synthesize and employ techniques that combine aspects of many different systems. But there is another approach, one that aims directly at that elusive state of total knowledge often described as Enlightenment. There are few schools or spiritual systems of this type in existence. The Albigen System is one of them. It will help sincere seekers discover the ways and means to shorten the time needed to find their true state of being.
An intense spiritual path such as the Albigen System will not appeal to everyone. But there is a certain percentage of people in every generation who are blessed, or cursed, with the ability to see through some of the illusions of life and who are curious about what may lie beyond the illusions. These people are inevitably drawn to books and people that purport to answer the questions that are beginning to haunt them and that can address the nameless hunger that is forming inside them. Today there are more spiritual organizations, teachers, and books than perhaps at any time in history. This is both good and bad. Good because of the wealth of information that is available. Bad because of the wealth of misinformation that comes with it.
In practice, each individual seeker has a particular path to walk, and one person’s path is never the same as that of another. But there are common denominators and universal pitfalls. The Albigen System is a practical approach to self-definition and spiritual achievement that also allows for the many and varied individual paths. It is at once a complete system itself and also a tool with which we may evaluate all other spiritual systems as well as our own thinking and philosophy at each stage of the search
It is a system that does not seek to define Truth, because Truth can not be defined for us by others. It can only be experienced directly. And until we have experienced Truth ourselves, how can we possibly know what it is or in which direction it lies? Therefore the only sensible approach is to retreat from untruth. That is, to seek out the phoniness, illusions, lies, and inconsistencies in our own lives and in everything else—including spiritual systems—and back away from them. In this way, by becoming more and more skilled at recognizing untruth and backing away from it, we will automatically be approaching Truth. That is the path.
In his book, The Albigen Papers, Rose covers key principles for a spiritual search. A key to the Albigen System is it’s maximum reversal technique, in which the natural direction of life’s energy and purpose is reversed away from the material and mundane pursuits of ordinary life and turned in upon itself to retraverse the projected ray of life back to the Source. A useful analogy is that of someone in a movie theater who finally thinks to turn around and look back through the lens of the movie projector rather than be totally identified with the colored shadows on the screen. In this way, one can discover the source of the projections and also the true nature of the viewer of the picture show. The Albigen System looks at the looker and examines the examining instrument—the human mind. It is a mental technique for realizing the existence of your Essence and a method for redeploying your energy so as to achieve a direct experience of that Essence.
Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going when I die? The purpose of the Albigen System is to help you gain a direct experience of the answer to these questions for yourself.
The Albigen System is a system with proven results. Several of Richard Rose’s students have realized what he was pointing at with his teaching and, in turn, are working to help others in this grand adventure.
Read a sampling of Richard Rose’s writings by searching the TAT Forum index, and learn more at the links below.
Quotes from Richard Rose's books and excerpts from the Mister Rose video
Excerpts from Richard Rose's Books
"The highest form of spiritual work is the realization of the essence of man. The final definition of man. And with this definition -- the definition of all things, and a realization of the Nature, Absolute, or God behind all things."
"What is reality? We can only know the truth by teaching ourselves to face the truth in all things. If we encourage our computer to come up with erroneous answers, because they are more desirable, then we are developing a computer that we may never be able to trust. Truth is that which Is."
"Experience is a worthless and transient existence unless the experiencer is known."
"Man demands that God prove Himself in terms of symbols and paradigms or be considered as non-existent."
"For those who are somewhere in between the folly of youthful hedonism and the indifference of old age, some system needs to be salvaged from the experience of those who managed to make a grand assault upon definition, and who admittedly found an answer."
"The path to Truth begins with the self. We cannot properly isolate, identify, or analyze the self, because it is the subject about which we know the least."
"We live in a cloud of illusions and rarely realize that we are spinning this web of fiction for all the hours and days of our lives, unless we are fortunate or unfortunate enough to die slowly. Perhaps slow death may be the only moments of reality for the total life of many earthlings. Because the dying person is forced to face the fact that he is about to become zero."
Excerpts from Mister Rose, the video...
"When you question any consciousness, it will have to answer you or leave. That's the Zen technique for everything."
"The things that are holding you up personally are the negative things that have happened to you."
"You have to start with the recognition that we do not have the truth."
"A searcher for truth can never be an acceptor. You have to be a challenger."
"I do believe there's a system that searches for the Truth, and it's a process of challenging everything."
"It's good to challenge a person's thinking. You get them out of their daydreaming by saying, 'Hey -- what are you thinking? Why are you thinking it?' "
"The person who has an ability to love has a much greater chance of immortality."
"IQ is not the greatest value. Rather, try to develop intuition."
"You're on a desert with no railroad tracks. You will have to go on intuitional hunches."
"We have to fatten up the head before we can chop it off -- have to do a lot of studying -- have to become virtuous. Conservation of energy results in using a body function to transmit the mind into discovery."
"Keep active along the direction of truth, the direction of discovery."
"Then you find out you don't discover anything -- you become."
"The whole path to truth is through the umbilical cord -- a mental umbilical cord. It links you to the Brahman. We are the Atman."
"The spiritual experiences that people have are a result of looking inside themselves."
"You'll not find the umbilical cord by reading books. You find it by going inside yourself. By observing yourself."