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Taking Stock
What do I know for sure about who/what I am?
I have not been able to come up with a credible self-definition that holds water of any kind; in other words, I have no clue.
I know some things I am *not.* I’m not actually Ben. I wasn’t born on my birthday. I don’t know anything about the past or the future. I am now. I am. I have nothing else. But I don’t know what I am. I don’t know where I came from, I don’t know where I’m going. I assume when Ben dies that I will experience no experience, same as deep sleep.
I appear to come up against a block when I try to look at myself or ask who I am....
See the complete article.
~ Thanks to Ben E. Image from clipartmax.com. Comments or questions? Please email reader commentary to the .
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 ReadersWith the intention of increasing awareness of TAT's meetings, books, and Forum among younger serious seekers, 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 . 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!
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Project: Beyond Mind, Beyond Death IITAT Press's Beyond Mind, Beyond Death (BMBD), published in 2008, covers selections from the first seven years of the TAT Forum, from November 2000 to December 2007. We've had 14 additional years of monthly TAT Forum issues since then. And we're getting ready to launch a project to solicit recommendations from all readers for a 2nd volume of BMBD from the seven years of monthly issues spanning January 2008 to December 2014. Our approach will be to have a brief, interactive survey each week for participants to rate the items in one issue of the Forum for inclusion in volume II. That will take about 20 months, during which time volunteer co-editors Abhay D. and Michael R. will arrange the selections into chapters and organize the book's contents. Within 2 years BMBD II should be available in paperback and e-book formats. Your participation to any extent practical for you will help the best formulation of Beyond Mind, Beyond Death II. If you haven't opted-in for participation notices, you can sign up at BMBD_II.htm, where you also can find links to all active surveys. |
TAT Foundation Press's latest publication Passages: An Introduction and Commentary on Richard Rose’s Albigen System The latest book from the TAT Foundation Press, Passages: An Introduction and Commentary on Richard Rose’s Albigen System, is now available in print and Kindle versions on Amazon.com. Mike Gegenheimer and Shawn Nevins combined their experience with Rose's teachings to create this introduction to Rose's work. Passages highlights the tools and techniques for self-realization that Rose recommended. It is a concise yet deep plunge into these valuable spiritual teachings. Please add your review to the Amazon listing. It makes a difference! |
Random rotation of |
2022 TAT Meeting Calendar
February Virtual Gathering: Saturday, February 5, 2022
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See TAT's Facebook page. |
TAT's YouTube ChannelHave 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, Bart Marshall, Paul Rezendes, Tess Hughes, Art Ticknor, Howdie Mickoski, Shawn Pethel and other speakers. This month's video is part 2 of a collection of excerpts by Gábor Hényel from Richard Rose lectures.
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Local Group News
Groups with new updates are featured below. Link here for a complete listing of local groups.
Update from the email self-inquiry groups:
TAT Press publishes Anima's and Art's book: Always Right Behind You: Parables & Poems of Love & Completion. |
"Ignoramuses Anonymous" blog
See this post from a Four-day isolation retreat at TAT Center, with photos and YouTube clips. |
Update for the Online Self-Inquiry Book Club:
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Update from the Pittsburgh, PA self-inquiry group:
- Every Wednesday 8-10 PM EST regular Zoom group confrontation meeting. - Monthly on Sundays joint confrontation meeting with the Dublin, Ireland group. - Monthly on Sundays joint meeting with the Online Book Club discussing John Kent's dissertation on Rose's Psychology of the Observer chapter by chapter. - Monthly Monday 7-9 PM in-person meetings have resumed in the Oakland (college) part of Pittsburgh. Email selfinquirer (link below) to receive invitation to monthly in-person meetings in Pittsburgh. - Wed, Sep 7: Shawn Pethel is host: "On the Path, ignorance is believing in the illusion. When the illusion falls away, you are freed from the burden of belief. To find the illusion, follow the signal—it manifests as longing, curiosity, suffering." - Wed, Sep 14: Len S. is host: The Power of Adversity: "Without adversity, everything would lose strength and die." - Sun, Sep 18, 3:15 PM ET: Dan G's monthly chapter by chapter discussion of John Kent's dissertation on Rose and the "Psychology of the Observer," Ch 14: "Meditation" part 2 (can be downloaded here: https://www.searchwithin.org/johnkent/Chapter_14.html). - Wed, Sept 21: Shawn Nevins is host: Topic TBA. - Sun, Sep 25: Dublin-based and Pittsburgh-based Joint Confrontation Meeting, 2-4pm EST; Patrick K. is host: "Diminution of Pride" based on a chapter from Hubert Benoit's The Interior Realisation. - Wed, Sep 28: Gloria N is host: "Love and Suffering as Paths of Liberation...looking through Christian, Buddhist and Sufí traditions." |
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:
Latest recordings:
TAT's Novemeber 2021 online gathering, titled What Do You Really, Really Want From Life?: 3.5 hours of selected sessions.
TAT's February 2021 online gathering, titled In Thought, Word and Deed : 2.5 hours of selected sessions.
TAT's August 2019 Workshop was titled Beyond Mindfulness: Meditation and the Path Within and included three guest speakers who each led separate workshops. The following audio recordings are now available in the members-only website area:
TAT's June 2019 Spiritual Retreat Weekend was titled Between You and the Infinite. The following audio recordings are now available in the members-only website area:
TAT's April 2019 Spiritual Retreat Weekend was titled Once in a Lifetime is Now. The following audio recordings are now available in the members-only website area:
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 links on our website. 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. |
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.
~ Thanks to CoolFunnyQuotes.com
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21. Have a water fight. * ~ Thanks to www.laughteronlineuniversity.com. First 10 ideas. Second 10 ideas.
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~ Thanks to Paul Constant. The image comes from Funny Husbands and Wives.
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We enjoy presenting humor here from TAT members and friends. Please
your written or graphic creations. Exact sources are necessary for other submissions, since we need to make sure they're either in the public domain or that we have permission to use them.
Here is a table I came up with after my vector [effort in a direction - Ed.] kind of ran aground lately. After doing a retreat and generally continuing my efforts with self-inquiry, I got a surge of validation about myself being where I want to be, doing what is the most important thing I want to be doing. But instead of using this sense of validation wisely, a really old, forgotten behaviour came to the fore where the sense of validation just kinda sent my ego off on a rampage believing in my own delusions of grandeur. It shocked me because I thought I was past all that....
See the complete article.
~ Thanks to Patrick K. Image from the Sun Text Free Icons Library.
Eye of the Tempest
Your life is before you, while Source calls you within. The beauty that lives about you is unmistakable, a beautiful dream, a delicate balance, seemingly eternal. You have seen the beauty from outside the dream, and yet feel still a part of it. That such beauty should bear with it such pain, the pain of knowing it is transient, impermanent … and you hear the whisper, feel the whisper, bear the memory of Being outside the dream. The tempest of your mind rages about you, and in sorrow you know You are not of the dream; and you need not fear what awaits when the tempest passes. The lamentations echo as memories, the clouds disperse, the tempest quiets. You may turn within, holding in your heart a single prayer, a single purpose which serves not the self, which cares not for what may be seen or seemingly lost, inclining the mind not to the tempest but turning your back on the beautiful dream for no one, but Truth for its own sake. May Grace befall you.
~ Thanks to Mike Gegenheimer. Photo from clipartmax.com. |
Your battles are countless
Perhaps now,
You feel you are on your last rations
But you are a veteran
But the war
Who is your opponent, soldier?
Like two palms pressing against each other
The wars of men have come and gone
There is a war that cannot be won or lost
Rather than surrender a single battle This is your Holy War
~ Thanks to "The Hand." Photo from Wikimedia Commons. |
Clutter
~ Thanks to Julia Cameron.
Q: Mental clutter? |
Please
your thoughts on the above items.
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?
Thanks to Michael R. for the set of Reader Commentary questions for the September TAT Forum:
Where are you? Where do you feel yourself to be? Are you inside the body or is the body inside you? Are you inside the mind or is the mind inside you?
Responses follow.
From Sergio F:
"I" is a thought, but it points to "myself," and I am not a thought. Thoughts, perceptions like body sensations, feelings, all that, appear in "mind"/"myself"/awareness. So where is awareness? It's nowhere as a concrete thing, but it's everywhere as the capacity for things to appear.
The concept or feeling of a specific place is not where I am, because awareness is not a thing in space, I guess. The body is in awareness. "The Mind" and "awareness" may point to the same "thing."
From Sarah J:
Funny question because I used to feel my mind to be inside my head, looking out through my eyes, but I don't now.
I experience my mind inside my pain, experiencing the world, my life, through pain. There is a lot of physical pain - nerve damage from a spinal injury and with it a very odd and displaced feeling of the centre of my body; there is a medical term, but I don't remember it. There is pain in my legs but it is from the central displacement I experience and feel my mind is located. I hadn't noticed the change. This only now feels a little uncanny.
I feel guilty about TAT and about answering this question. I have become completely disillusioned with 'enlightenment'. This attitude started to burn during covid. There was a dearth of awareness of the whole narrative not hanging together. I felt cynical about 'awakened awareness' in relation to the covid narrative and manipulated fear. I expected awareness to be aware, mature, not subject to fake contagions of the ego. This may be Maya but there is bullshit within Maya: manipulation, fear mongering, lies.
During a break within a TAT retreat my computer was on. I had a coffee and something to eat. I was across the room and a few of the retreat leaders were chatting together, talking of covid. I wasn't paying much attention but I felt uneasy. I pricked up my ears the way you do when something you identify with, (in this case New Zealand) is mentioned. They complimented our 'success' as if we were a kind of lucky exemplar. They had no inkling anything was wrong with what they were hearing. I don't mean with NZ's false 'success', but the whole palaver....
See Sarah's complete response.
From Isaac H:
Where am I? "Here" is all I can say with any measure of honesty. When the stimulus to see myself as inside the body arises, seeing from that perspective arises, though the opposite seems just as valid. Likewise with the mind. The mind seems more like a thunderstorm, and I'm the air. Or it's a web of mycelium, and I'm the soil. Most of the time though, these thoughts don't occur to me, and I don't see myself as either inside or outside the body and the mind, though it looks like I act more as if "I" am inside the body, or at least co-present with it.
From Colm H:
Where are you?
The best answer I can give to that, is 'here'.
Where do you feel yourself to be?
Again, I feel myself to be 'here'.
Are you inside the body or is the body inside you?
This is a tricky one which seems to almost move depending on where my attention is. In meditation and in quieter times of observation, I can see that the body seems more like an object in the view, so somehow there is a sense like it is outside, as opposed to inside, me. However, when engrossed in day-to-day life, I can easily feel like I am inside the body, like when I have an intense experience and my attention is very focused on the experience e.g. pain, pleasure, fear, etc.
Are you inside the mind or is the mind inside you?
This depends on what the mind is, which I am not fully clear on, and also on what I am, which I am also not fully clear on. I seem to experience a local mind, I refer to it when speaking as 'my mind' where I also seem to experience 'my feelings', 'my thoughts', etc., that seem to be unique to me, so that points to the mind being inside a separate me, somehow in a separate body. However, it is not clear how and where to draw the boundaries and limits on that. On the flip side, I can also observe the processes of the mind, thoughts, feelings, data processing, etc., which implies a higher vantage point to that seeming 'local mind'. The idea of 'me' looks to be a set of experiences held together as memories, projections, images, etc. When looking I can also see that that idea of 'me' is basically a web / mish mash of data. That web / mish mash of data called 'me' also seems to be an observable object in the view, which therefore implies that the idea of 'me' sits inside some kind of larger mind.
From Tim H:
This is a troubling question for me. I know where I am. Right here and in the province of the mind and separation. If nonduality is to be believed or KNOWN the answer is not what mine would be right now.
From BH:
Thanks to Michael R. for reminding me of this destabilizing line of questioning. These are the types of questions I imagine the guy in the zen story was asking the rest of the students at the ashram right before they chased him out :) There is a “me-ness” feeling that feels internal. Internal to what? I am not certain. But I feel the “me-ness” is here and not over there. If I take it as far as I can, what I feel myself to be is a verb not a noun. Because there isn’t a placeable thing anywhere that I can find, although there is a deep sense that some thing is being. There is a seeing and seen, a feeling and a felt, a sensing and sensed but I can’t place them anywhere in physical space besides that space feels a part of the relationship (i.e. “here” and “there”).
Attempting to answer the last two questions, I’d say I am inside the body because it feels in my waking experience that there is the outer world, then a subsequent internal layer inside consisting of my thoughts and feelings and the internal feeling places/screens where they manifest, then another layer even further inside where something is seeing and perceiving it all. I definitely can’t say for sure if that’s the actual relationship, but that’s what it feels like. I cannot place the borders of those layers specifically. My sensations seem to be tied to the body more than they seem to be tied to another body I perceive or the table I’m using to write on. I don’t feel to be inside the mind or reliant on the mind, but I also don’t feel strongly that everything, including the mind, is inside me. I can see logically how you might get to that conclusion, but that’s not what it feels to me. If anything I would say the mind and thoughts and perceptions are outside me with all other phenomena.
From Art Ticknor:
I am here, seemingly at the center of my experience-world, and I am Here/there, at my perpetual abode. I can’t see myself here, but I can feel myself Here/there although the only times I feel the need to do so are when someone asks me a question that strikes me as dead-serious. Then, not wanting to give an off-the-cuff answer, I touch back to the absolute point of reference and wait to see what comes to mind.
My relationship to the experience-world is that I can flip back and forth between viewing through the paradigm or model of being inside the body or of the body being inside me. That flip was precipitated by Douglas Harding doing his tube experiment with me in 2003 or 2004. Before that I had been working with the inside-outside paradigm of the unknown viewer-me being inside and anything in the view being outside. Doing the tube experiment with Harding exposed me to the opposite paradigm of everything in the view being inside me. “Seeing” (intuiting) that those contradictory views seemed equally valid was a watershed moment in the loosening of my faulty beliefs.
The mind to me is the same as the experience-world, including the body. When I saw that looking through either of the opposing paradigms of inside-outside was equally valid, my viewpoint jumped to the top of the triangle above the baseline of those contrary views.
From Chitra D:
The body is inside (my) awareness. It could be said that I am aware of the body, of the thoughts. But more accurately there is an impersonal awareness of the body and the mind (the thoughts & emotions & judgements that rise—spontaneously, it seems. The ego-thought, too, arises in awareness; it says "This body and mind and their problems or glories are mine" and it identifies with a name).
But awareness is not limited by the body or mind. In awareness many things arise and are seen. They also subside into it. That too is seen. Sometimes only silence arises in it.
I may call it "my" awareness, but that does not seem accurate because "my" is a limited concept. When the attention turns to/rests in awareness, there seems no limit to awareness, and no qualities to it.
But then, at times, the attention gets pulled into a strong/turbulent thought or emotion, the I-thought gets tangled with it, the ego arises, and things get confused and an identification with body and mind occurs.
Then again that whole occurrence is observed, and identification lessens & drops away. It's like waves rising and falling. Sometimes the identification/attention is with the wave, but always the wave exists in the ocean and in its essence, the wave is not different from it.
That's the state right now!
From Mark W:
I want to take a different approach and rather than directly responding to this month’s TAT Forum questions, which are burdened by so many programmed beliefs and preconceptions that it’s difficult to know where to begin in trying to provide an answer. Rather, I’ll answer those questions indirectly by first answering the question “Do we possess awareness; or are we awareness?" I’ve come to believe, however tentatively, that I am awareness. While still a relative belief, it seems to be more real, and every time I look it’s always there, without fail. There’s a significance to that.
There’s not much I can say about awareness except it doesn’t seem to be a thing, not physically and presumably not mentally either. I speculate that there might be some kind of intelligence or perhaps a True sense of Self behind it that might be where I’m located, so to speak. But that’s merely a guess on my part. I also wondered if awareness is some kind of connective sensing or seeing process between another dimension and our relative dimension through which I receive intuition. Likewise, I wonder if it is only a coincidence that I’ve read about others attempting to sense or see back through the projected ray to see their True Self. Is the projected ray the same, similar, or somehow connected to awareness? I don’t know, of course, and this is all guesswork and speculation, which I don’t normally do on this topic. I can only try to look and become more vulnerable.
Consequently, I do tend to think that the body and the mind are outside of me although I’m all too thoroughly attached to “my” body and mind and from which I’m all too erratically and slowly detaching – or so it seems. It feels like, in addition, that I am back there behind the head and behind the mind, and even further back from where awareness and maybe intuition and maybe the projected ray come through and connect with a mind that is not me. Truly a world of seeming, to paraphrase Richard Rose.
Next Month
Thanks to Don A. for the Reader Commentary question for the October TAT Forum: What about you do you think or feel needs to be fixed? Please your responses by the 25th of September and indicate your preferred identification (the default is your first name and the initial letter of your last name). 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?
Autumn Quakies (Quaking Aspens) above Glade Park south of Grand Junction, CO. Photo © Bob Fergeson, Nostalgia West. |
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* Peace of Mind in Spite of Success – Irwin, PA *
* ~ Thanks to Shawn Nevins, who commented: "Notes I took from several Rose audiotapes. This must date to 1994-95. Direct quotes are in quotation marks, but the rest I assume is paraphrasing." There are quotes and notes from 20 audiotapes. The first set appeared in the July Forum, the second set in the August Forum.
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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
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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.