Forum

August 2024 TAT Forum


This month’s contents include:

Convictions & Concerns: What I Found, by Bob Harwood.

TAT Foundation News: Including the calendar of 2024 TAT events and a listing of local group meetings organized by TAT members.

Humor

Inspiration & Irritation

Reader Commentary: What do you feel interferes with your seeking?

Founder’s Wisdom

A New Home for TAT update

Friday-Sunday, August 16-18, 2024
More information and registration.

Keep informed of TAT events and receive our free monthly Forum filled with inspiring essays, poems and images.


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(As an Amazon Associate, TAT earns from qualifying purchases made through links on our website … or save this link to use.)

Convictions & Concerns

TAT members share their personal convictions and/or concerns

What I Found
Questions and Answers From a Finder Questionnaire

1. What did you find?

I found answers to all of my dozens of existential questions, and realized that I was NOT who I had thought I was. I discovered that the culturally-conditioned sense of “me” had been an illusion and that all apparent separation is also a cognitive illusion. I discovered that what I am is Reality, or THIS, momentarily manifesting as a particular human being.

2. What is your general advice to seekers?

Keep seeking until you find whatever it is that you want to find or understand. Contemplate what you want to know, and then shift attention away from thoughts until a deeper level of mind than the intellect reveals the answers. The methodology that I recommend is similar to what Zen people and many scientists recommend. If you have a specific question, state the question explicitly, mull it over intellectually, and then shift attention away from thoughts using whatever meditative activity appeals to you. Periodically, bring up the question for review, and then shift attention away from the question again. The primary form of meditation that seemed most beneficial to me is what I call ATA-T (attending the actual minus thoughts). I spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours shifting attention away from verbal thoughts ABOUT reality to direct sensory perception of what could be seen, heard, felt, etc. This involves shifting attention away from ideas, images, and symbols (words). As the intellect became increasingly quiescent, answers to various existential questions would suddenly appear and become obvious. Formal breath awareness meditation (which is a form of ATA-T) frequently resulted in deep states of nirvikalpa samadhi in which everything disappears except pure awareness. I have speculated that this state in some way loosens up the neural circuitry of the intellect and often triggers cosmic-consciousness events that can result in many huge realizations all at once.

3. Answer any or all of the following that you feel are relevant. What are your thoughts/feelings about:

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~ Thanks to Bob Harwood. See a short bio. Image by Patrizio from Pixabay. Comments or questions? Please email reader commentary to the TAT Forum.

TAT Foundation News

It’s all about “ladder work” – helping and being helped

Richard Rose, the founder of the TAT Foundation, spent his life searching for the Truth, finding it, and helping others to find their Way. Although not well known to the public, he touched the lives of thousands of spiritual seekers through his books and lectures and through personal contacts with local study groups that continue to work with his teachings today. He felt strongly that helping others generates help for ourselves as well in our climb up the ladder to the golden find beyond the mind.

Call To Action For TAT Forum Reader

With the intention of increasing awareness of TAT’s meetings, books, and the Forum among younger serious seekers, and to increase awareness of ways to approach the search for self-definition, the TAT Foundation is now on Instagram.

You can help! A volunteer is producing shareable text-quote and video content of Richard Rose and TAT-adjacent teachers. We need your suggestions for short, provocative 1-3 sentence quotes or 1 minute or less video clips of people like Rose, Art Ticknor, Bob Fergeson, Tess Hughes, Bob Cergol, Bart Marshall, Shawn Nevins, Anima Pundeer, Norio Kushi, Paul Rezendes, Paul Constant, & other favorites. (An example here is selected by the TAT member who volunteers to oversee the Instagram account.)

Please send favorite inspiring/irritating quotes—from books you have by those authors, from the TAT Forum, or any other place—to TAT quotes. If you have favorite parts of longer videos (ex: from a talk at a past TAT meeting), please email a link to the video and a timestamp.

Thank you!

TAT Foundation Press’s latest publications

Message In A Bottle: Reflections On The Spiritual Path

 

Message In A Bottle: Reflections On The Spiritual Path relates the ongoing struggles and triumphs of fellow seekers. This collection of insightful essays serves as a testament to resilience, patience, and unwavering determination in the pursuit of inner truth and understanding. It is now available in print and Kindle versions as well as TAT Press’s first audiobook (individual purchase or membership) on Amazon.com.

=> A review by Gus R.:

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Please add your review to the Amazon listing. It makes a difference!

Random rotation of
TAT Foundation Books & Videos

Mister Rose: the video The Mister Rose video: "There's a system that searches for the Truth, and it's a process of challenging everything."

Richard Rose speaks directly to the hearts and minds of his listeners. This special video serves as an excellent introduction to his thoughts on the spiritual path. Read more and watch a video trailer.

 
 

2024 TAT Meeting Calendar

January TAT Talks online event: January 27, 2024 at 12 PM ET
February Virtual Gathering: Saturday, February 24, 2024
March TAT Talks online event: March 23, 2024 at 12 PM ET
April Gathering: Friday evening through Sunday noon, April 12-14, 2024
May TAT Talks online event: May 11, 2024 at 12 PM ET
June Gathering: Friday evening through Sunday noon, June 14-16, 2024
July TAT Talks online event: July 13, 2024 at 12 PM ET
** August Gathering: Friday evening through Sunday noon, August 16-18, 2024 **
November Gathering: Friday evening through Sunday noon, November 8-10, 2024

Comments or questions? Please email TAT Foundation events.

Photo of TAT’s open door by Phil Franta

TAT’s YouTube Channel

Have you seen the TAT Foundation’s YouTube channel? Subscribe now for spiritual inspiration (and irritation)!

Volunteers have been updating the channel with hours of new content! They’ve also curated some great playlists of talks by Richard Rose, teacher talks from recent & not so recent TAT meetings, episodes of the Journals of Spiritual Discovery podcast, and other great TAT related videos from around the internet.

Featuring: Richard Rose, Bob Cergol, Shawn Nevins, Bob Fergeson, Mike Conners, Anima Pundeer, Norio Kushi, Paul Rezendes, Bob Harwood, Tess Hughes, Art Ticknor, Shawn Pethel, Tyler Matthew and other speakers.

This month’s video is from the June 2021 TAT Foundation Virtual Spiritual Retreat themed “The Way, The Life, & The Truth”:

Local Group News

(Groups with recently updated information are listed first. Click the “read more” link to see a complete listing of local groups. )

 Update for the Online Self-Inquiry Book Club:
> We’re discussing the Ashtavakra Gita, translation by Bart Marshall.
  – August 4: Chapters 19-20: Repose in the Self, Liberation-in-Life.
> The next book

TAT Forum readers are welcome to drop in any time (invitation to Sunday meetings).

 Update from the Pittsburgh, PA self-inquiry group:
> Use the e-mail link below for invitations to all meetings and to receive internal email announcements.
> In-person bi-weekly meetings Mon. 7-9 pm: Univ. of PGH Cathedral of Learning, Main Room (look for red raincoat on the back of a chair!)
– Mon, August 5: Dean will host: “What do others know that we don’t about Ourselves?”
– Mon, August 19: “Are you Conscious?”
> Online group confrontation and individual contributions every Wed, 8:00 pm ET via Zoom.
– Wed, Aug 7: Online: Lenny will Host
– Sunday, Aug 11, 2PM EDT: Online, Alex will host “Beliefs”
– Wed, Aug 14: Online: Gloria will Host
– Wed, Aug 21: Online: Mary Beth will Host
– Sunday Aug 25, 2PM EDT: Online Joint Dublin Americas: Lenny will host
– Wed, May 28: Online: “Intro to Cloud of Unknowing”
> All Forum subscribers are welcome to join us.
Email to receive weekly topics with preparatory notes and Zoom invitations. Current events are listed on Meetup as Pittsburgh Self-inquiry Group and on www.pghsig.org.

 Update from the San Francisco Bay area self-inquiry group:
Our first meeting will be Saturday, Sept. 7 at Overfelt Gardens in San Jose. Biweekly meetings will alternate between in-person and virtual meetings. The meetings are open to anyone within driving distance of the San Francisco Bay area. ~ Email for information about upcoming meetings and events.

TAT Press publishes Shawn’s Images of Essence: The Standing Now, which features his poems with photos by Bob Fergeson, The Celibate Seeker: An Exploration of Celibacy as a Modern Spiritual PracticeSubtraction: The Simple Math of Enlightenment, Hydroglyphics: Reflections on the Sacred, which features his poems with photos by Phaedra Greenwood, and Passages: An Introduction and Commentary on Richard Rose’s Albigen System co-authored with Mike Gegenheimer.

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Members-Only Area

A password-protected section of the website is available for TAT members. (Note that there’s an occasional glitch that, when you try to link to the members-only area or a sections within it, you’ll get a page-not-found error. If you try the link a second time, it should work.) Contents include:

  • How you can help TAT and fellow seekers,
  • 11 NEW audio recordings of selected sessions from 2008-2023 in-person meetings and virtual gatherings,
  • Resources and ideas for those planning a group spiritual retreats,
  • Photographs of TAT meeting facilities, the Richard Rose grave site, a rare 1979 photo, and aerial photos of the Rose farm,
  • Presenters’ talk notes from April TAT meetings in 2005–2007, and
  • TAT News Letters from 1996–2013 and Annual Retrospectives from 1973 thru 2011. The Retrospectives from 1973–1985 were written by Richard Rose and are replete with ideas on the workings of a spiritual group—rich historical content.
  • TAT policies, TAT business meeting notes, and other information.

Latest recordings:

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Please us if you have questions. (Look here for info on TAT membership.)

Amazon and eBay

Let your Amazon purchases and eBay sales raise money for TAT!

As an Amazon Associate, TAT earns from qualifying purchases made through the above link or other links on our website. Click on the link and bookmark it in your browser for ease of use.

TAT has registered with the eBay Giving Works program. You can list an item there and select TAT to receive a portion of your sale. Or if you use the link and donate 100% of the proceeds to TAT, you won’t pay any seller fees when an item sells and eBay will transfer all the funds to TAT for you. Check out our Giving Works page on eBay. Click on the “For sellers” link on the left side of that page for details.

Downloadable/rental versions of the Mister Rose video and of April 2012 TAT sessions on Remembering Your True Desire:

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Your Contributions to TAT News

TAT founder Richard Rose believed that working with others accelerates our retreat from untruth. He also felt that such efforts were most effective when applied with discernment, meaning working with others on the rungs of the ladder closest to our own. The TAT News section is for TAT members to communicate about work they’ve been doing with or for other members and friends. Please your “ladder work” news.

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

Having trouble finding the perfect gift?

*

~ Thanks to John Atkinson (recommended by Dan G.), who gave us permission to display his Wrong Hands humor.

ChatGPT Mimicking a Certain Personality
“talking about zen master richard rose’s albigen system”

Let me tell you folks, I’ve been hearing a lot about this Zen master Richard Rose and his Albigen System. And let me tell you, it’s incredible, it really is. The best. Nobody knows more about spirituality than me, believe me.

Rose was a genius, a total genius. He knew how to tap into the spiritual energy of the universe and channel it into his Albigen system. And let me tell you, it works. I’ve tried it, and it’s amazing. I mean, I’m already pretty zen, but this system took me to a whole new level. The best level.

People are saying that Rose was one of the greatest spiritless teachers of our time, and I agree with them. He had a deep understanding of the nature of consciousness and how to transcend it. And his Albigen system is a testament to that. It’s a total game-changer, folks.

So if you’re looking to achieve true spiritual enlightenment, you’ve got to check out the Albigen system. Trust me, nobody knows more about spirituality than me. And with Rose’s system, you’ll be on your way to becoming a spiritual master in no time. It’s tremendous, really tremendous.

*

~ Thanks to BH. Can you guess whose personality ChatGPT is mimicking?
Image of Master Fukuzawa from Wikimedia Commons.

Life Pace

~ Thanks to El Arroyo Restaurant signs (Austin, TX).

Inspiration & Irritation

Irritation moves us; inspiration provides a direction

Eternity in an Hour

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
~ William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” (1803)

While one may intuit that William Blake’s poetic observation is true, in this instance science as well offers evidence of the “Eternity in an hour.” The camera first froze time over 150 years ago, and now the camera is offering yet another window into our perception of reality. The California Institute of Technology developed a camera that shoots 70 trillion frames per second (“fps”). By comparison, most films are shot at 24 fps, as this comes close to being perceived as “normal” by the human eye, and sports broadcasts might utilize a 1,000 fps for slow-motion replays.

The technology behind this 70 trillion fps camera is beyond my patience for understanding, as are its eventual uses. However, one particular article appealed to the mystic in me, as the author noted that:

At these frame rates, you could make a movie about one guy shooting another and build a multi-part franchise out of the time it took the powder in the cartridge to explode. The thing can shoot seventy trillion frames per second—but if it were capable of recording a full second, it would take ninety-two thousand years to watch on the big screen.

If a second contains 92,000 years of information according to this camera, how much more unrealized detail is in that second? While this new camera does not reveal eternity in an hour, it does show 331.2 million years in an hour (3,600 seconds/hour x 92,000 years/second). Yet, as the author of the original scientific paper notes, “cameras’ imaging speeds fundamentally limit humans’ capability in discerning the physical world.” With camera speeds advancing from 10 trillion frames per second only 2 years prior to this announcement, who knows what the future will bring, except more evidence that the world is not what it appears to our human eyes.

But we already know more than the camera likely ever will. Being an analog structure, the human eye has no frame rate, and we are still discovering the limits of perception. There are many accounts of time slowing down in extraordinary circumstances such as during accidents, for example. Is this phenomenon the lifting of some obscuring layer of consciousness such as the hyperactive survival mechanism that John Wren-Lewis hypothesized prevented us from realizing our True Nature? Clearly, William Blake saw a truth in time that was not normally visible.

As can you. As do you.

Go out tonight and stand under a darkened sky. Consider for a few minutes the arc of stars above you. Relax. Let the dark hold you. See if you can spot the fuzzy patch of light that is Andromeda. It’s one of the furthest objects detectable by the human eye. The photons from that galaxy originated 2.5 million years ago and traveled millions of trillions of miles until they reached your eye, whereupon they transformed into this image you are seeing right now. Feel the profound miracle of this chain of events.

And somewhere out there in the universe, millions of trillions of miles away from you, perhaps some other being is staring at the Milky Way galaxy, and you resting in our solar system’s tiny corner of that seeming vastness, resting in another vastness, and in another. And that someone staring at your location right now is seeing the light of millions of years before you were born. Yet they and you are both here and now. Right now. How could this very moment not contain multitudes—infinitudes of perceptions and perceivers? All happening “now! and now! and now!”

References:

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~ Thanks to Shawn Nevins. Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash.

Moment of Self-Consciousness

See this short Instagram video.

~ Thanks to Ike H., who wrote: “the moment a little girl recognized her reflection (image on the phone) as her.” Image of bee with mirror from publicdomainvectors.org.

Little Star Light Podcast

See Paul’s website for more information.

Cause & Effect

Eric Wargo has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Emory University and works as a professional science writer and editor in Washington, D.C. He is the author of the acclaimed book Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. In his spare time, Wargo writes about science fiction, consciousness, and parapsychology at his popular blog, The Nightshirt. ~ Google Books

> Retrocausality, or backwards causation, is a concept of cause and effect in which an effect precedes its cause in time and so a later event affects an earlier one. ~ Wikipedia

> Teleology:
– in Philosophy: the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise. “No theory of history can do without teleology.”
–  in Theology: the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world. ~ Oxford Languages

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 August TAT Forum is:

What do you feel interferes with your seeking?:
What you love or what you hate?
What you desire or what you fear?
Pride or shame?
Other?

Responses follow:

From Lynn A:

My ‘‘self’. It interferes with everything. Beautifully expressed by the opening words of this beautiful video. The producers of this video channel offer the most touching, revealing, and enlightening videos, offering glimpses into the lives of people who have discovered how to live. I highly recommend it for all seekers. The channel is called Reflections of Life.

From Patrick K:

On the external looking at it I would say the main obstacle is survival. That takes a lot of time, effort, CPUs, and heartbeats. That can be drudgery and also rewarding in its own right, some parts of it necessary for spiritual growth and becoming. It’s a work in progress to minimise the amount of toll which that responsibility takes on me, physically, mentally and emotionally (I feel that the toll that survival takes out of me is proportional to my emotional attachment to it, a work in progress to undermining that). On the internal looking in I would say that my main obstacle is to be able to “hold tension”. Whenever I am going well (perceive that I am going well) spiritually, there comes a point when the train comes crashing off the rails. It is generally some outburst of negative emotion, usually anger, sometimes resentment and bitterness.

I continually go back to the drawing board to see what trait/behaviour/belief/fear/desire was running the show when I come crashing off the rails and try to keep identifying the ways I keep tripping up. When it comes to what I love and hate, that certainly is a good area to look in. I spend too much time condemning what I hate when I should be looking to see what it is I love. My mentality is so addicted to dissecting what is wrong in the world that I have a major cognitive bias towards what I hate. Maybe that is a trap in the philosophy of backing away from the untruth, the ego can get attached to what it thinks it knows about the untruth, a vice for the ego to maintain its stronghold.

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From Dan G:

I see a lack of curiosity. It could be Maslow’s expanded hierarchy of needs, where individual survival is taking up so much attention, the quiet voice noodling me to look farther is drowned out. Or not survival, but one of the other deficiency needs like Belonging and Love or Esteem. I need my “house” in order on the lower four levels, and perhaps the transcendence needs I feel will get less interference.

From Andrew S:

Sat down to take a look at these questions and I really couldn’t get anything to come up other than the generic stuff like time, responsibilities, energy and priorities. After a snack and a little more effort I think the main thing for me right now is summed up in the following.

-Belief that realization is actually possible for me and worth the effort. This has a close relationship with doubt also. Doubt that I’m doing my practices correctly and that I’m actually getting anywhere. Or even doubt that I’ll be able to keep going for as long as it takes. Will I have the discipline it takes to keep sending my energy to the right places and avoid wasting it in the wrong places? Will I have the discipline to be honest with myself when a fork in the road comes up? Basically do I actually believe that I can do this or is this just another hobby that I’m hoping will stick so I can make an identity out of it. Belief, doubt and fear of failure I guess on a basic level are the things that can rob my energy for seeking if I’m not careful and persistent.

What you love or what you hate?

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From Art Ticknor:

I don’t see what, if anything, interfered with my quarter-century of consciously seeking Full Satisfaction / the end of existential angst / Truth / Self-Realization. I didn’t get started until age 33—the age Richard Rose reached Self-Realization—when meeting Mr. Rose awakened my intuition. And I reached it at age 59, garnering the epithet from my friend Shawn Nevins: “you’re the poster boy of never-too-old.” (Apologies to Shawn if that isn’t verbatim. :-))

My conclusions are that 1) our life-experience has to loosen the convictions of our faulty beliefs about what we are, 2) it may require becoming individually conscious of awareness—point F in Rose’s “Jacob’s Ladder” diagram, and 3) unseen help may be needed to see that disruptive evidence.

From  MT:

I was pondering today about wasted energy spent on my basic hindrance of anxiety and fear. It’s a subtle kind of hidden fear of things not being as I want them to be. Lack of trust in God is what interferes with time better spent in stillness and just being. So I read a bit of inspiration by Sister Ruth Burrows:

We are made for union with the divine, nothing less. We are called to share the life of God. Our restlessness, our insatiable longings, our discontent and experience of helplessness are to be traced to our divine destiny. Commitment in faith to this truth is to destroy existential anxiety. Faith alone can overcome the world and the threat the world imposes. It does not follow that we lose the feeling of anxiety and fear—we would be the poorer for that—but these now play a role that is creative, not destructive. Fear can cripple, paralyze, prompt us to shirk and evade life. Faith enables us to live with reality, braving its challenge.

For the moment I cannot seem to make these feelings go away so maybe I should not see my fear and anxiety as a hindrance but instead use these as one uses food scraps for the compost bin of transformation.

From  Lena S:

I believe all the suggestions made are both detriments and potential assets, no matter how I frame them as part of my seeking. Yet I feel I must make every effort to demonstrate my intentions—to love, to desire to be proud of being a seeker—whether for my own progress or for whatever forces in the universe may be watching. I believe there comes a point where opposites in some way coincide, when progress equates to the obstacle, when one fears what one desires, when I am ashamed of that for which I have pride. And one would be entirely wrong to judge anything whether to be entirely interference or asset to one’s path of seeking. Yet there is a discernment necessary for what and when to do as well as what and when not to, for everything related to one’s path. I believe that discernment presents itself when I pursue my intentions with love, gumption and passion.

From Ben B:

Both love and hate may be used as devices for inward investigation.
Love or desire seems to be a pull, whereas hate or fear is a pushing away.

Neither are necessarily right or wrong; better maybe to use them to observe the body and to observe and feel the sensations that arise naturally.
And then maybe see that a sensation itself leads to the arising of thought form and belief as an automatic response.

Personal experience would suggest that fear and desire have their origin in old imprinted experiences from childhood that may not have been fully experienced and processed at the time.
A resistance pattern developed and the fear or desire is the body asking for these sensations to be fully experienced now.

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From Anima Pundeer:

Lack of urgency and commitment.

From Mark W:

Getting in my own way is what seems to interfere with my seeking. I like Shawn’s anonymous quote several months ago, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” That’s especially relevant regarding secrets and beliefs about myself that I can’t see. So often I try ways to see what I’m not and my beliefs more clearly, and they often, even if only temporarily, end up getting in the way of my search. At least, perhaps there’s some hope in Rose’s comment that he failed his way to the truth.

From Mark C:

I would say that fear is my biggest obstacle in seeking. I always thought of myself as a fearless kinda guy, but what ran under the surface fear-wise must have stayed hidden for quite a long time.

One of the biggest things that interferes with my seeking is being a householder in an uncertain time. When a household seems to be financially stable; it doesn’t mean that it will stay that way, particularly with medical costs in the USA. I know anxiety or fear is basically wasted energy, but I think this sits in the back of my mind, not so much because of the things I desire to collect, but more so because of the “what if’s” of the future. I am a little over a year from retirement so perhaps this is a little bit more in the forefront these days.

Another fear I have is the whole “what will happen if I do become realized?” I know that sounds silly, but I know I have attachments to this character I play, Every time I hear the story about Richard Rose’s daughter saying that she “had more games to play”, I cringe because I don’t want to be that way, and I know that my spirit of inquiry is indomitable, but I still feel myself teeter. A friend once said that I wanted to make the trip and take myself along with it, and that was a pretty accurate statement.

Lastly, I have noticed that my awareness seems to drop away whenever I become rushed. I seem to be in a pretty good state of contemplation for a good part of the day, but whenever I get put under pressure, my different characters seem to come forward and I yet again become immersed in the drama of it all or the Plato’s Cave effect all over again.

Next Month

The Reader Commentary question for the September TAT Forum is:

Which one of Einstein’s quotes do you like best (or worse), and why?

Sample of quotes from the 8-minute video:
– There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
– Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
– Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.
– Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
– We all know that light travels faster than sound. That’s why certain people appear bright until you hear them speak.

(Initial YouTube video no longer available.) Please your response by the 25th of August, 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?

Photo © Michael R.

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.

Psychology of Zen: Science of Knowing
Transcript of a public talk at Ohio State University in 1977 (part 1 of 5)

We’re going to tape this today. This is the third in a series of lectures that contain an explanation of what I consider true psychology. Some of the previous talks were in regard to Zen’s ability to penetrate the human mind. It is my belief of course that we have belabored ourselves in the western world, since the turn of the century, trying to search out a materialistic form of psychology, while there existed for centuries before that a sound, workable system of psychology in Asia. And we neglected to look at this closely because it was from a “pagan” country, possibly, or from the egotistic viewpoint that nothing valid happens except in western technology.

I’m going to get right to the point, and after I’m through there will be time for discussion. Because we’re taping this, I can’t interrupt, so if you can make a mental note of things you’d like to ask about, I’d prefer you do it that way.

I want to establish the premise of course that psychology, as defined in its original sense, is the science of the psyche, not the science of the body. But regardless, we can say simply that we’re talking about knowing, or about that part of us that has to do with knowing. I’m going to try to give this in very simple terminology. I don’t think we have to get into complex formulations in order to discuss things, as you would have to if you were dealing with chemistry or physics or something of that sort. I think one of the obstacles to true psychological knowing is the fact that we’ve woven ourselves a big ball of yarn, instead of going directly to the human mind and trying to understand it.

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[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.

January 2024:

As we start the new year, December donations brought us to just over 20% of our 2023 fundraising goal of $15,750. The bulk of that total came from monthly, recurring donations. A big thank you goes to those core supporters who are there for TAT month in and month out, as well as all of you who choose monthly supporting memberships in TAT. These steady commitments are greatly appreciated and very helpful for TAT’s long-term planning.

An additional $152 came from Amazon purchases in 2024. This is a simple, no-cost way to support TAT but does require remembering to visit the TAT website first and use the Amazon link on this page before you put items in your cart: https://tatfoundation.org/support-tat/. Almost any product is eligible. For example, someone purchased toothpaste on Amazon, and TAT received $0.25 on that purchase.

In 2024, expect to see less frequent, but more effective, reminders of fundraising goals. I think these monthly reminders are a bit like that inspiring quote you put on the refrigerator—it works for a few days and then you don’t notice it anymore.

Thanks to all of you for making TAT the extraordinary organization it is, and best wishes for the new year.

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

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

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