October 2023 TAT Forum

Humor {(h)yo͞omər}

“One thing you must be able to do in the midst
of any experience is laugh. And experience
should show you that it isn’t real, that it’s a
movie. Life doesn’t take you seriously, so why
take it seriously.” ~ Richard Rose, Carillon

Happy Halloween

Image by Coral from Pixabay

Less Condescending

~ Thanks to Michael R. Image appears on social media sites, source unknown.

Prisoners

~ Thanks to CoolFunnyQuotes.com.

Inspiration & Irritation

Irritation moves us; inspiration provides a direction

Being Lazy

TIME magazine article: Why Being Lazy Is Actually Good for You.

~ Thanks to Brett S. Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash. Questions posed by Brett:

Q: When do insights tend to come to you: when focused or unfocused?

Q: When doing nothing? Driving on the highway in light traffic? Reading a book? Watching a movie? Listening? Going for a walk? Dreaming? Daydreaming? Writing? Doodling?

I Unplugged Completely for Two Weeks…

And CRAZY Things Happened!

~ A 12-minute video by Mayim Bialik.

Be Stupid!

Japanese Zen master Bankei Yotaku (1622-93) never wanted anyone to become fascinated by anything other than our Infinite Nature. And so, when a monk stepped forth in a vast assembly and proudly told Bankei, “I diligently chant the Light Mantra night and day and my body emits rays of light,” Bankei replied: “Those rays of light of yours are nothing but the flames of the evil passions consuming your body”….

Bankei criticized fellow Japanese Zen teachers who hid their own failure to realize Unborn Buddha-nature with, instead, a mish-mash of confusing old Chinese-language koan-anecdotes, the “dregs and slobber of the Chan Patriarchs” as he called the ancient lore! And he chided the overly clever who are deluded by their own cleverness. “I tell my students, ‘Be stupid’!… What I’m talking about isn’t the stupidity of (mindless) stupidity or (clever) understanding. That which transcends stupidity and understanding is what I mean by stupidity.”

~ ZEN MASTER BANKEI ON OUR UNBORN TRUE-NATURE. Image of Bankei from Wikimedia Commons.

Avoidant Personality Disorder – How I Cured Myself

This 23-minute video is from a TAT friend who wishes to remain anonymous, who writes: “It is from the context of mental health healing, and avoidant personality disorder specifically, but its approach and method seems to me universal enough that it can be used for a wider variety of concerns and spiritual enough to be interesting in the TAT context. There might be other TAT forum readers with mental health issues or those without but who could still find benefit. I myself can testify that upon applying the described method I experienced a deep healing, on a level that I did not experience in 5 years of classical psychotherapy. The comments section also testify to the efficacy of the method.”

He later added: “I rewatched Curtis’s video and did his method again. My reaction is still pretty much the same: it’s amazing to find someone who overcame severe mental health problems by himself and with a relatively simple and quick method. The psychiatric system is not very good and mostly just manages the severest of symptoms, not even trying to heal people completely, so whenever I find someone talking about overcoming symptoms for good, I listen intently. For seekers, who are mostly aware of their own mental troubles, which may be of a lesser intensity than Curtis experienced but still of the same ‘flavour’, I believe the value of the message of the video is that these symptoms can be overcome and peace/well-being attained through introspective methods. Alas, even though I suffer from anxiety as did Curtis, his method does bring me relief and positive feelings, but only for a while. Hence, I am not proposing him as some sort of mental-health guru but just as inspiration.”

Please your thoughts on the above items.

Reader Commentary

Encouraging interactive readership among TAT members and friends

A reader wrote that what would make the Forum more interesting would be:

Hearing from people who are searching—and have questions instead of those providing endless advice and “answers.” What challenges they are facing. What their doubts and questions are. How they perceive their path is going. What they are doing in their lives. Where they think they will end up, etc., etc.

Can you help make the Forum more interesting?

The Reader Commentary question for the October TAT Forum comes from Bob Cergol:

How do you perceive your path is going?

Responses follow.

From Peter O’Doherty:

Honestly, it’s a question I try and avoid. Having spent years telling myself stories about how well or how poorly it was going, I’ve learnt to avoid this question. For me, any answer I tell myself is going back down the rabbit hole. Back chasing a dream. Caught up again in an internalised story of how close I am to the promised land. The closer I felt, the better I felt. Secretly enjoying a feeling of superiority. All the while trying to mask deep feelings of inferiority.

So truthfully, I’ve no idea. I’m not interested in the answer anymore. And when it tries to come back up, I try to ignore it.

From Dean F:

Honestly I’m struggling with the social dynamics. I have a strong inclination to be left alone and read the works of Rose by myself knowing full that those works say to find others to work with. So I push myself to the meetings knowing it’s good medicine even if I don’t like the taste of it.

From Sarah J:

I don’t perceive a spiritual path.

I undertake spiritual practices but I feel a conscious, ego-led ‘path’ is a myth we tell ourselves.

It seems to me that our material lives are inextricable from the spiritual, not separate conditions. And I feel myself as being drawn or led by something far beyond my small self — a longing, but I don’t know how, or why, or where I’m being led, or how I’m doing within this strange dance in which I don’t know the steps.

Tasking the ego with overcoming itself is absurd. Yet everything important, including in our material lives, requires at least a measure of it.

I just try to follow if I can but without ever being sure of anything.

From Mary H:

I am currently following my fascination which is creativity, painting ignites me inside … so I have been following a teacher called Michelle Cassou and her teachings of process painting also called point zero painting. I am currently doing a 7-day workshop in Taos, New Mexico. I’d done an online workshop but wanted to get deeper into the process. This is so pure, direct, beyond thought and words, trying to stay in the moment by moment and listen to intuition. Boy do you come face to face with your self, your limiting thoughts, prejudices, ego operating, because there is no escape … just you and the white paper, and the paint brush. And it’s wonderful when you see a block, like controlling what you paint because it needs to look nice, so on the paper you can break that boundary and make the ugly image that intuition is calling for, and on the paper become free of that control … and this filters through into my life, because I have physically done it on paper.

From Anonymous:

That’s a good question, and I have been wondering if truly going or if it is an ego’s subtle manipulation to be perceived it is going because you are doing meditation, reading spiritual books, doing self inquiry.

I am not sure how to know the path is going. However, there seems a difference since self-inquiry where something/my mind (?) is to remind my self on reactions, random thoughts, or to acknowledge thoughts, reactions not go on and on.

I am not sure if this difference would be a little sign for the path is going.

From Anima Pundeer:

I am assuming that finding Truth/Absolute is the end goal for this question. How do you perceive your progress when the goal is something that is beyond the realm of the mind/world dimension? Asking questions like, ‘Is this practice that has the promise of resolving all my life problems, really in line with my goal of realizing Truth, or is it keeping me stuck in life drama? Is this practice putting me in a slumber state or increasing that inner tension required to propel the vector to move?’ As a seeker, I didn’t know what would work or be helpful. But there is a voice of common sense, maybe intuition, that helps you to discern. Learning to hear that voice and trusting it is progress.

I can’t remember if I ever felt that I became good at meditation (since I believed that meditation is what leads us to enlightenment). Having a group of friends and a teacher helped me understand what ‘become your own authority’ meant. To me, this shows progression in the right direction, hopefully.

From Patrick K:

To try to answer this question as directly as I can I feel I need to break it down to two parts: 1.) Diminishment of the ego self, and 2.) Getting in touch with the longing for Self, for knowing Self, which incorporates the practice of Self-definition, trying to define and work with what I am seeing.

No. 1: I feel that the diminishment of the ego self is progressing along nicely. The groupwork along with trying my best to work with dreams are helping to prise open that defensive hard shell. Dreams, I want to point out, have been crucial to me, because they connect me with feelings that were previously beyond my experience. After all my best dreams, the message of the dream I already had intellectual knowledge of to a certain degree, but not the “feeling”. Like the dreams are working to bring my intellectual ideal into my state of being, a way of becoming. But the dreams don’t “cook up” things either, they are pointing at a truer way of knowing myself and illustrate things in a way that would be very difficult to argue with. There is something kind of beautiful about the dreams, too, which makes the heart ache to have seen and experienced them. I do notice major glitches in my personality still, but I feel the trajectory is good, and whatever props up will get ironed out accordingly and in due time. My rating of how well I am moving along on this part of the path is 7/10.

No. 2: Getting in touch with the longing for what I really want is tough going. My last dream gave me some kind of feeling of going “home”, which is the strongest “pull” toward something that I have felt so far. So I plan to keep going into that feeling and exploring that. The feeling that something is missing pulls at the longing; these two forces act on each other. If I stop distracting myself, artifically trying to fill that feeling of lacking something, those two forces would by themselves, I feel, start to reveal some direction/answers. I put “longing” and “Self-definition” in the same category because I feel that I have a “True Natural Identity” back there somewhere and trying to look for that, seek it out, define what that could be, is real tough work. My current belief about what I could be is that I am an awareness outside of “physical space and time”, on which my body/mind is dependent. [The awareness that I speak of is like a separate awareness which is also connected to the all encompassing awareness, like the Atman within the Brahman idea]. That scenario is my fundamental Identity, that I sense right now, but I am not conscious of it. Me in my body/mind world am only conscious of consciousness. My rating of how well I am moving along on this part of the path is 4/10.

From Jerry S:

Definition of Progress: “process of gradually improving or getting nearer to achieving or completing something.”

Definition of Sabotage: “the act of intentionally trying to stop someone from achieving something or to stop something from developing.”

Call me seeker, self-inquirer, spiritually minded — but I am a saboteur, slowly unwinding, deconstructing an elaborate fantasy. Despite many little ups and downs, the path is one of grinding, unwinding and watching.

From Art Ticknor:

I’d say that for the first dozen years of my search, I felt I was making progress. Then that was abruptly changed by a conviction of hopelessness that lasted for about 7 years. I remember feeling after 25 years that I was right back where I had started: walking in circles with one foot nailed down in a dark room. Friends told me that there had been lots of change, which I wasn’t seeing. In that final year, up to the final evening of a solitary retreat, I had no clear view of how close or far away I was to my objective.

From Brett S:

I once asked an older friend at a TAT meeting, “How is your search going?” In my memory, I kinda bounded up to him enthusiastically like we were coming back to school and I was asking how he spent his summer vacation. As I remember it he looked at me kinda warmly, openly, but with a seriousness, and said “I don’t even know whose search it is anymore.” I don’t think I can top his answer. Sometimes I try to compare my current state of mind with my state of mind a few years ago. I like to think I’m a little bit softer, more open to feelings, and generally “know” less than I did before. Whether any of this is progress would be a judgment from a mind that knows nothing experientially about Self-Realization or what it takes to get there. It is sort of comforting to believe it could happen at any moment.

Next Month

The Reader Commentary question for the November TAT Forum is:

Do you consider thinking and feeling to be complementary tools or opposing activities in knowing yourself?

Please your responses by the 25th of October, and indicate your preferred identification (the default is your first name and the initial letter of your last name). “Anonymous” and pen names are fine, too.

PS: What question(s) would you like to ask other TAT Forum readers?

Q: What are your thoughts on this month’s reader commentary? Please your feedback.

Richard Rose described a spiritual path as living one’s life aimed at finding the meaning of that life. Did you find anything relevant to your life or search in this month’s TAT Forum?

We like hearing from you! Please email your comments, suggestions, inquiries, and submissions.

Sign up for notices of TAT’s four annual events and free monthly Forums by email on our contact page.

Founder’s Wisdom

Richard Rose (1917-2005) established the TAT Foundation
in 1973 to encourage people to work together on what
he considered to be the “grand project” of spiritual work.

Notes from a 1982 Winter Intensive

The following notes come from a journal I kept during an intensive retreat with Richard Rose from January 2nd through the 31st of 1982. The daily schedule began with silence from 6 AM until noon. We were to be out walking when the dawn broke each morning, fasting the first three days, then tea only before noon after the initial days of fasting. Coffee and tobacco were off-limits; one smoker couldn’t handle it and left. We worked outdoors from 1 to 5 in the afternoons—my main recall is of hauling huge tree trunks out of ravines and of splitting an endless supply of firewood. The farmhouse was heated by wood stoves in the living room, dining room, and a room that had been added for group meetings, where we gathered in the evenings. We usually started those evening sessions with an hour of “numbers exercises” that Rose had created to build intensity. They accomplished that, to the point where it would give me an instant headache to even think about doing them. 🙂

> Rose talk 1/6:

• Dawn and dusk are magical times … times of between-ness … they inspire moods (“eye of the soul”) … you can get gestalts, insights
• New, massive perceptions can occur during mental dawdling
• Be one-pointed in life—make life an obsession for finding out; mind will come around; revelations will occur at unexpected times
• Be aware of moments of awakening and going to sleep; encourage the nostalgia mood
• Between-ness occurs at moments of intense relaxation

> Rose 1/9:

• We’re in an emergency (“the great sleep is on”)
• Once you see an obstacle, you have to act immediately
• Live decisively, with a ways and means committee
• Zen: reach wisdom through an attack on vanity
• What we are is our meaning

~ From Art Ticknor. To be continued….

Definition of Terms

Index of many of the key terms and principles in Rose’s work, with brief definitions, from Richard Rose’s Psychology of the Observer: The Path to Reality Through the Self by John Kent.

Jacob’s Ladder © 2001 Richard Rose. See this transcript of a talk on the topic by Rose.

Homing Ground Update

… A spot on earth where people can do retreats and hold
meetings; where the emphasis is on friendship and the search.

October 2023:

September donations brought us to 12.5% of our 2023 fundraising goal of $15,750. Recall that TAT Center’s first floor air conditioning system went kaput in July and had to be replaced for close to $6,000. A few dollars a month from just a portion of you who read the Forum or enjoy visiting the TAT Center would make a big difference, so please consider helping out.

Thanks to all of you for making TAT the extraordinary organization it is.

Sincerely,
Shawn Nevins

PS: Monthly contributions are a great way to support the TAT Center if making a larger one-time donation seems too much. If you’re so inspired, click the Donate button below, then check the box for “Make this a monthly donation” as in the example below:

Let’s bring this to life! “The job is upon us,” Richard Rose said, “and it is worthwhile.” To contribute to the TAT Center, mail a check made out to the TAT Foundation to:

TAT Foundation
PO Box 3402
Roxboro, NC 27573

Big checks, little checks, all are welcome. Or use the PayPal link above (though we lose 2.2% of your donation to PayPal fees).

* See photos and more on the Homing Ground page. *

Did you enjoy the Forum? Then buy the book!
Readers’ favorite selections from seven years of issues.
Beyond Mind, Beyond Death is available at Amazon.com.