Art Tichnor

Essays and verses from TAT

TABLE of CONTENTS

1. All You Need to Do 2

2. Words of Wisdom ~ Douglas Harding 3

3. Becoming Unstuck 4

4. Beyond Bliss 6

5. Inspiration 8

6. Paean to Group Work 11

7. Rabbit-Proof Fence 12

8. The Innermost Longing 14

9. Thinking about Thinking 16

10. Asking Ourselves out of Depression 20

11. Becoming Your Own Authority 22

12. Breaking Through Beliefs 24

13. Do Not Fear the Darkness 26

14. Heaven 27

15. Inspiration, Intention & Commitment 28

16. Look at Awareness 29

17. Magnetoresistance & the Search for Self 30

18. Meeting Richard Rose 32

19. Mirror Therapy 41

20. Nine Verses Made upon an Ecstasy of High Contemplation ~ St John of the Cross 44

21. Last Supper 46

22. Nirvana Project Management 46

23. Of Goats and Gates 48

24. Our Purpose 49

25. Richard Rose on Controlling the Mind 50

26. The Final Hour 56

27. The Problem's not in the Transmission 58

28. Petition 60

29. Acceptance & Surrender 61

30. Beyond Relativity: Transcending the Split Between Knower and Known 62

31. Living on Borrowed Time 67

32. Common-Sense Meditation 68

33. I Am Always Right Behind You 73

34. I Am Always Right Behind You ~ Follow-up 80

35. The Ego 83

36. O Come All Ye Faithful 84

37. Three Questions 85

38. Work, Watch, Wait 88

39. Your Strategy 91

40. Where Is Permanence? 98

41. A Direct Path? 99

42. What of Me Will Remain? 100

43. Why Do You...?, 101

44. Why Do Seekers of Truth Fail? 103

45. Is the World an Illusion? 108

46. How Is It Possible? 110

All You Need To Doby Art Ticknor

Guru: All you need to do is let go.Chela: What do you mean? Let go of what?

G: Your faulty beliefs about what you are.C: How do I do that? I don't know how.

G: Everyone knows how to let go. What prevents it is pride or fear. It's generally easier to see the fear side of the argument. What are you afraid to let go of? What is the threat?C: Well, I'm afraid to let go of control. The fear, I guess, is that things will spin out of control … my life will become chaotic, maybe I'll even go crazy.

G: And what are the implications of that?C: Well, if I go crazy I won't be able to function normally, people will shun me or lock me away somewhere. I won't be able to live a productive life, to get what I want from life. I'll die miserable and unfulfilled. Even if I stay sane but things spin out of control, I won't be able to pursue what I want and may not be able to stay alive.

G: If you let go your hopes will die … or you will die….C: Yes, that's what it comes down to.

G: You're stuck, then, aren't you … postponing the inevitable.C: That's how it feels. Isn't there any way out?

G: That brings us back to the solution, which is quite simple: just let go.C: If I know how to do that, as you say, what prevents it?

G: You're turning away from the fear rather than facing it.C: How do I do that?

G: By introspecting the mind … learning to watch the mind without getting caught up in its activity. Specifically what you'll be looking for is to observe what you actually control of the mind's operation. You tell yourself that you're in control, afraid to let go of control. Look, and see what of the mind's operation you actually run.C: That's it?

G: That's it.

Words of Wisdom

Some of you will remember that in that very basic Mahayana Buddhist scripture, the Diamond Sutra, it says that if you can look into your emptiness and not be somewhat scared, congratulations! Because it is a very uncommon thing. We have a great fear of looking this way because it is a kind of death. If you are scared of it I congratulate you because it means you have got it. I say, go on with it and you will come out at the other end. Beyond the fear is the experience of death, what I call the Present Death Experience. And then Bang! the resurrection. So you die as one tiny little lump of stuff and you explode to become the lot, you are resurrected to become the lot. So if you feel a little bit scared I would say that is absolutely great. Stay with it and it will come right.

~ Douglas Harding - 1991 Sydney workshop

Becoming Unstuckby Art Ticknor

What would it be like to wake up in a hospital bed and find a hand missing? Or an arm, a leg, or more? This is a real situation for some war vets and other casualties. It amazes and inspires me whenever I come across a story of someone with a trauma like that who accepts the loss and moves on with determination to pursue their life goals.

For many years I carried around half a dozen "pain balloons," as I thought of them. These were experiences where my feelings had been hurt and embarrassing personal attributes that were painful to recall or acknowledge. Then I came across a definition of acceptanceby a French psychiatrist and student of Zen, Hubert Benoit, in The Supreme Doctrine:

"To accept, really to accept a situation, is to think and feel with the whole of one's being that, even if one had the faculty of modifying it, one would not do it, and would have no reason to do it."

When I read that, my mind began arguing with it. Accepting something would cast it in Lucite, I felt, preventing any possibility of change. But then I found myself making a list of those painful items and considering the first one. Could I really think and feel with the whole of my being that I wouldn't change it even if I had the power to do so? It was as if my mind went into turbo drive and a great deal of mentation occurred, much of which I could barely witness. But the resulting conclusion was that yes, I could accept it in those terms since my life was too complex for my limited mind to get its arms around. In other words, if I could and did change anything, the intended fix might actually make matters worse.

I then considered the second item on my list, and my mind again went into supercharged mode. (These two instances were the only times I've experienced that phenomenon.) And again, after a great deal of mental activity, the conclusion came out the same. I then felt my consciousness transcending its usual state. The words that came into my mind to explain the new view were these: "I encompass a sphere of knowing too large for my mind to comprehend; and from up here, everything down there is perfect exactly as it was and is." The offshoot of that satori or insight was like a great weight lifting off my shoulders. And although I didn't know it at the time, it effectively ended a state of depression that had gone on for six or seven years.

The depression had been triggered by a loss that convinced me that accomplishing my deepest desire was hopeless. Rather than accepting the loss and moving on toward my goal, I became stuck. I became stuck in the belief that only by retrieving what was lost could I continue on.

In retrospect, life was trying to teach me the lesson of acceptance — and I was a slow learner. Pride based on false premises prevents us from acceptance. True acceptance forces us to bow in humility to the truth.

Beyond Bliss

by Art Ticknor

Franklin Merrell-Wolff, in an essay The High Indifference, wrote: "...This is the nature of the All in its essential organization that balances the great law (equilibrium). Karma is simply the law of equilibrium in action. All action whatsoever invokes a tension which is balanced by a counter tension so that the equilibrium is never broken. The High Indifference is a consciousness focused at this zero point of balance, but it implies something more. In many of the reports of deep imperiences, the ultimate characteristic given is that ofananda or delight. What the imperience of the High Indifference says is that while this is a stage on the way, beyond the predominance of delight and bliss is the neutral consciousness that stands between bliss and suffering and all other polarities."

He was referring to a realization beyond conceptual knowing or speculation that he had "imperienced" a month after an event that was the culmination of what he'd been intentionally striving toward for many years and which had brought him to the "state of high Delight or Ananda." Like Bernadette Roberts when she reached the "unitive" state in her twenties, he thought he had reached the final summit of self-knowing. And like her he was completely unprepared for what followed.

Richard Rose said he had "dialed bliss" during the years of his search between twenty-one and twenty-eight, but he eventually realized he hadn't reached the final answer. When it came, at age thirty, it was not at all in line with his expectations. He later concluded that there is a natural progression of states of being and that our graduation from one to the next takes a definite form: a salvation experience, the dropping of the ego when we fall in love with someone or something other than ourselves, accompanies the jump from the instinctive to the emotional level; a satori or eureka! experience announces our transition to the intellectual level; and cosmic consciousness signals the arrival at the philosophic level. While there is great relief with each graduation, cosmic consciousness is the one most associated with bliss.

The distribution of states of being is pyramidal, with the largest number of people in the instinctive level and so on up the pyramid. The incidence of graduation experiences is likewise distributed. We hear of many more cases of salvation experience than satori, and Richard Bucke estimated that only one in a million reach cosmic consciousness. Cases going beyond cosmic consciousness to the ultimate realization or recognition are even rarer.

Those who experience one of the lesser realizations rejoice justly at their good

fortune, but it's very easy to get sidetracked by them. It may be that those individuals who approach nonindividuality through first recognizing their nothingness are liable to get stuck in the conceptual realization of no-self, while those who approach it through first recognizing their oneness with everything are liable to get stuck in the emotional realization of bliss. In any case, our essential nature is beyond all thought and feeling. Feelings and conceptual realizations are out here on the periphery, not at our center, and identification with them or attachment to them prevents full satisfaction of our innermost desire.

Bliss is like the nacre on the inside of an oyster shell: it's beautiful to look at, but it's not the pearl beyond price.

Inspirationby Art Ticknor

Could your deepest yearning be the desire for absolute security or unity? Does your intuition tell you that what you're looking for lies at the core of your being? If so, then all you need to do in order to satisfy your deepest longing is to know what you really are.

How is it possible, though, not to consciously know—not to know that we know—what we really are? What could possibly prevent us from such self-knowing?

When we ask ourselves what we know, or how we know what we know, our observation leads us to the fact that there's a split between us-the-knower and the objects of our knowing. If that's an absolute limitation, then we can never know ourselves … can never know the knower. That would make life ultimately absurd, as many existentialists and other nihilistic philosophers evidently have concluded. It may well be a limitation of perceptual and conceptual knowing, but is there a knowing beyond subject-object knowing?

There appears to be an in-between stage, represented by the cosmic consciousness that Walt Whitman experienced, where we become one with everything, and by the unitive experience of contemplative Christians like John of the Cross who become one with God. But since it's an experience, it comes and goes, in intensity, frequency and duration … and the core state of being remains unknown.

If our intuition tells us, or our intellect admits the possibility, that there may be a knowing beyond conceptual knowing and even beyond cosmic consciousness, then we're faced with the how-to-get-there question. And that's where we're liable to run into the inspiration roadblock as witnessed by complaints like these:

"A lot of action may be required, and I don't have the inspiration to dedicate myself to the necessary effort.""I don't feel inspired. I just have to wait for my mood or something to change so that I can act."

Sure, the statistical odds aren't good. Richard Bucke, a friend of Whitman's who also experienced cosmic consciousness and published a book of case studies, estimated that cosmic consciousness occurred in 1 out of every million people. If that's accurate, then around 6,000 of the people now living should reach cosmic consciousness. (Bucke was optimistic, feeling that the rate was increasing, as do modern gurus Andrew Cohen and Eckhart Tolle, who both write about a planetary shift occurring, an evolution in consciousness. Personally, I haven't seen any evidence for it.) Eleven climbers perished recently on K2, the second highest peak

on earth but considered to be the most difficult to climb. In fact, for every three people who try to make it to the top, one dies trying. Not very good odds. But look at human life: for every 1,000,000 people who desire absolute security and unity, at least 999,999 of them apparently die trying.

What is inspiration, and where does it come from? We identify it as a feeling or a mood. We feel inspired in relation to negativity or flatness … when the pendulum swings from negative to positive, from being "down" to being "up." The extreme case is bipolar depression and mania. Feeling inspired may last for an extended period during which it produces great activity, as in the manic phase of bipolar disorder, but in most cases it's fleeting and produces little if any productive action. Action for action's sake is nice, especially after a period of inaction, but action toward our primary life-goal is what we're concerned with here.

I experienced inspiration for new or renewed action toward my primary goal mostly when I was on solitary retreats—about the only times my mind relaxed sufficiently, I suspect. The accompanying feeling was like champagne bubbling through my cardiovascular system. I felt bubbly inside and would be hit by many ideas for action. Those periods of inspiration were the only times I felt able to scan my mind for resistances and make honest commitments to myself to carry out actions with great determination—almost exactly unlike New Year's resolutions, which might be made with earnestness but evaporated with great rapidity.

There's a message being piped into the mind from its source, and that message is the cause of the deepest inspiration. It's the voice of nostalgia, calling us home. Home is not a place, but it's where we came from … and actually have never left. The "return" pull is really a call to awaken to our true state of being. Sometimes a book or a person triggers an inspiration. At other times there's no discernible catalyst, with the inspiration seeming to come out of nowhere. In any case, when it penetrates down to our deepest longing, it motivates action toward returning to—really recognition of—our changeless state of being.

We desire inspiration and fear expiration. Emotionally, inspiration is like feeling full while expiration represents emptiness. Douglas Harding, a witty contrarian, referred to a quote from Meister Eckhart ("He who created me rested in my tent") in an essay by that title in To Be and Not To Be:

For many years now I've been in the habit of silently repeating to myself, from time to time, my own secret mantra, "To be saved is to be Him," while breathing out very deeply indeed. My whole body down to my toenails seems to be expiring,

breathing me out and You in. The strong sensation of leaning back and collapsing into Your Immensity, of merging with You utterly, brings with it the profoundest physical relaxation I know. As I say, it's as if, breathing out thus deeply, I breathe You in; and, breathing in again, You breathe me in. It's very much as if, having just saved me from drowning in the Sea of Death, You were giving me the Kiss of Life.

Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in Blink how the

neurological changes that produce happy feelings and subsequently cause contraction of the associated facial muscles also occur as the result of an intentional contraction of those facial muscles. In other words, feelings produce action but actions also produce feelings – a chicken-and-egg standoff in terms of which came first. It's not necessary to wait for inspiration in order to be able to act. We can intentionally contract the "inspiration muscles." A good example of that occurred recently in the Pittsburgh Philosophical Self-Inquiry Discussion Group. One of the participants, who had been voicing his lack of inspiration and the conviction that all he could do was wait for inspiration to visit him, volunteered to lead the discussion at the following meeting, and another participant put together a poster for that meeting. It contained a quote from Seng-Ts'an, the 7th Century Chinese Zen Patriarch: "... Just because I wondered deeply, I later attained penetrating understanding.... If you do not reflect and examine, your whole life will be buried away." He titled it Wondering Deeply, found and included the photo accompanying this paragraph, and added three questions: What is death? What is life? Who are you?

They will likely never know the extent to which their action may have inspired someone else, and they may never know the extent to which their action inspired their own continuing action—or inspired the help that's necessary for bringing about the satisfaction of their deepest longing.

Paean to Group Work, by Art Ticknor

Invocation:O healer of the gods,Cure the earthbound humansof their mortal status.

Monody:The Real Self, being Nothing, weighs nothing,while the illusory self is a heavy set of beliefs.How can you remove the selffrom blocking the view of Self?As Archimedes discovered,it takes a lever and a fulcrumto move a seemingly immovable object.The lever is relentless determination,born of commitment.The fulcrum is affliction to the self-beliefs,provided by the law of the jungle.To accelerate the process,harness yourself to other selveswho are attempting to accomplishthe same Herculean task.Expect the self to rebelsince the effort of self-inquiry is anti-self.

Chorus:Onward self-inquiring soldiersHeading in to warWith the foes of freedomMasking what you are.

Monody:Working closely with others will provideplenty of irritation and afflictions to your pride.which can be used to broaden your viewif you don't run away and hide.

Chorus ….

Monody:If you persist to the point where you can seethere's nothing in it for the self,the Self will take overand finish the work for thee.

Chorus ….

Eulogy:O ghost of self, you weren't all bad or all goodbut a mixture of both, like all selves,designed to function in a dreamof perfect imperfection.

Chorus:Onward self-inquiring soldiersHeading in to warWith the foes of freedomMasking what you are.

Rabbit-Proof Fenceby Art Ticknor

One of those synchronicities like Jung used to talk about: I was talking with some friends on Monday night, and they referred to a movie titled "Rabbit-Proof Fence." I'd read about that fence in Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It had been constructed across the entire length of Western Australia in an attempt to control the destructive rabbit population. My friends said that wasn't what the movie was about, but the conversation jumped to something else, and nothing more was said about it. On Tuesday I decided to watch the second of two DVDs I'd rented the previous week—and it turned out to be "Rabbit-Proof Fence," which I'd picked up from reading the jacket blurb and then forgotten about, the title not ringing a bell when I heard it mentioned.

It turned out that the movie was based on the real-life adventure of three sisters from Jigalong in the northern part of Western Australia. They were daughters of an aboriginal mother and three different Caucasian fathers. The movie depicted what took place during 1931 when the girls were forcibly separated from their mother and taken to a camp near Perth, about 1,200 miles south. This was part of a program to integrate half-caste children into western society. The three children ran away from the settlement and headed north, hunted by an aboriginal tracker as well as the police. When someone along the way told them about the rabbit-proof fence being close by, the oldest girl knew that if they followed it, they would find their way home.

After many weeks of walking, the girls heard from another person they encountered how their story was in all the papers and that their mother was waiting for them at a nearby railroad station. The oldest sister intuited that the fellow was lying to them and tried to get the girls back on their trek along the fence, but the middle sister rebelled and headed for the train station. The other two girls turned back for her when she didn't follow them, but before they could be reunited, they saw her picked up by a policeman at the train station. By then the youngest sister was about done in and had to be carried most of the time by the oldest girl. And their hearts dropped when the saw the fence end at a death-valley stretch of desert. But the older girl found faith and told her sister that it would reappear. So they trudged on across the pathless wasteland.

It struck me when I received an e-mail from a friend today, Wednesday, asking: "Is there any way to know if what you're doing is actually helping you in the search, if there is no path...." that this movie contained a good metaphor for the situation faced by the spiritual seeker. When we begin the adventure of knowing ourselves, we may start off by moving away from a way of living that we find untenable. This often involves rejection of previously-held beliefs and adjustment of habits that impede clear-headedness. Then we come across a teacher or teaching that offers specific recommendations of what to do—we find our fence to follow. We may be like the middle sister and veer off the path at some point. But if we persist long enough, we'll come to the trackless desert. To keep going toward truth (i.e., away from illusion), there's no longer a program or fence to follow. It now depends on intuition. And if we've learned to pay attention to the intuition, to the "voice of silence" coming into the mind from its source, its messages may register on our consciousness as signs. After the two girls had collapsed in the wasteland, an eagle appeared overhead, which the oldest sister recognized as a sign.

There is a path that leads back to the source, the Unconditional. But, as with the aboriginal girls in the story, beyond a certain point it can only be followed by intuition and by persistent effort.

The Innermost Longingby Art Ticknor

There's an innermost longing that tries to get our attention and never lets us rest for long until it has been satisfied. Bernadette Roberts had a clear feeling about it at the remarkable age of ten:

"I went on to discover that in its deepest sense, the will is not primarily the faculty of desire for anything known, but rather, the desire for something unknown, an innate desire for something that lies beyond ourselves, a longing for something we know is missing in us. This longing is always uplifting, never focused on anything in the world we know of, and no matter how intense this longing, it is never a downer or sad, never focused on what is low or ugly. It's a need to have something, know something, possess something in order to fulfill ourselves, to be complete or whole. We may think at times it is a longing for beauty, truth, goodness and much more, but nothing short of God will ever satisfy." ~ From Contemplative: Autobiography of the Early Years.

Many of us become aware of a deep longing, and we arrive at various interpretations of what will satisfy it. Some of us pursue personal love, seeking the perfect mate as our savior. Others pursue wealth or knowledge or fame. The biologist Robert DeRopp, in a remarkable book titled The Master Game, laid out a hierarchy of life-aims and the corresponding strategies, or life-games, used to try to attain them:

Game Life Aim

Master Game awakening

Religion Game salvation

Science Game knowledge

Art Game beauty

Householder Game raise family

No game no aim

Hog in Trough wealth

Cock on Dunghill fame

Moloch Game glory or victory

Few of us start out playing the Master Game but come to it only after disillusionment with lesser games. Bernadette Roberts latched onto it at a very early age, although it was undoubtedly mixed with the religion game. She entered the Discalced Carmelites at a young age and, around twenty-five, had what the Catholic contemplatives call the unitive experience. As far as she knew, that was the end of the line, so she left the monastery and entered what she referred to as the marketplace, later marrying and raising a family. Then, in her fifties, she had a profound awakening which she described as the experience of no-self. Since then, she's dedicated her life to letting the Catholic contemplative community know that the end-point of the spiritual search is beyond the unitive experience.

Reading her books gives me the feeling that she indeed reached the realization that satisfies our innermost longing. The fact that she's seemingly stuck in the Catholic paradigm, seeing it as the best path and feeling she can only help others on that path, reminds me of the life of Francis Thompson. Thompson was the Englishman (1859 - 1907) who wrote one of the most glorious poems in the English language, The Hound of Heaven. It was abstractly autobiographical, depicting the deep misery of his life, his search for God or Truth, and its satisfactory attainment. The background, not clearly spelled out in the poem, is that he was a young man who failed at everything he put his hand to, becoming a laudanum addict in his twenties. He was rescued temporarily by a publisher and his wife, and there followed a four-year period of withdrawal during which he presumably had the awakening that led to writing The Hound of Heaven. Eventually, though, he relapsed into the laudanum addiction and died before fifty.

There's a Zen saying that before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; with enlightenment, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers; and after enlightenment, mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers. You'd expect that the enlightenment which brings satisfaction of our innermost desire would remove all personal limitations and lead to a happy-ever-after life. After all, it's associated in the popular view with uninterrupted personal bliss. But that's not really it, at all. It's much more; inconceivably so.

When we peel off the outer layers of personal desire and get down to the innermost one, its satisfaction coincides with the death of the personality-conviction. We find that what we thought we were, an individual something, is the faulty product of a finite mind, and what we really are is in no way affected by individual circumstances such as joy and sorrow—or life and death.

Thinking about Thinking

by Art Ticknor

We become complete when we know what we really are. Knowing our true identity is different from the type of knowing we're familiar with, though. The knower is no longer a thing apart from what's known.

But that's not all of it. There's a state of perception where a person becomes one with everything—every thing. The best-known example of this in the West is in the autobiographical poetry of Walt Whitman. The Canadian physician R.M. Bucke wrote a book on that perceptual state, which he termed cosmic consciousness. (See Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness at Google books.) Cosmic consciousness is a blissful state and is the unwitting goal of many seekers. But it's not a permanent state—and is thus ultimately unsatisfactory. As Whitman described his own case, as he grew older the cosmic conscious state came to him less frequently and stayed for shorter durations.

When we truly know what we are, there's no longer a split between the knower and what's known—and what's known is the knower. We discover or recognize that the knower is no thing. Of course we can't imagine what nothing is. The closest the mind can come is to imagine an empty space that has no objects in it. But the no-thing that we are, at the core of our being, includes all things. So we have to resort to paradox when the mind attempts to conceive of it. We are, essentially, nothing and everything.

Whether we're conscious of it or not, we're all striving to find completion. It's the deepest need, and therefore the deepest desire, embedded in every human organism. Most people strain to find that completion by manipulating the external world or their internal world. (Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs chart is a classic representation of where we try to find satisfaction.) Relatively few arrive at the point where they intuit that such completion requires certainty and that such certainty cannot come until the knower is known. Language becomes contorted when we try to think about what we are or to interpret our feelings about what we are. But thinking and feeling are the two tools in our

toolbox.

Feelings are facts—not right or wrong—just as perceptions are facts. Where the error comes in is in our interpretation or thinking about observed facts. And until we get to the position where we're ready to go through the final doorway to self-knowing, we have to rely on the combination of conceptual thinking and feeling to guide us.

At the core of our existential suffering is a feeling … a feeling that something isn't right, that we're somehow incomplete.

I heard some dialogue on a TV program recently—an episode of "Numb3rs," a series about an applied math professor who helps his older brother solve crimes for the FBI—that goes to the heart of the problem. A psychologist was counseling the older brother and gave him this advice: "If you want to feel better, take a pill. If you want to get right, face the truth."

Most of us spend our lives trying to bully or seduce the world, and attempting to twist our internal psychology when the world doesn't respond satisfactorily, to make things right. What we try to avoid at all costs, though, is facing the truth about ourselves.

Why is that? Our thinking is the source of the problem—specifically the beliefs we hold about what we are. (The line between thought and feeling becomes blurred when we look at beliefs. Beliefs are feeling-convictions that we often haven't expressed to ourselves conceptually.) In order to face the truth about ourselves, we may need to do a good bit of thinking and feeling about thinking and feeling. How do we go about that productively?

I came across a fascinating book a few weeks ago titled How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman, a practicing physician and teacher who holds the Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Groopman is an engaging writer and someone who I get the feeling would make a good friend. He relates how the research that went into the book was instigated one morning when he was doing rounds with students and residents, when he found himself asking himself a simple question about medical diagnosis: How should a doctor think?

That question triggered others, which could be summed up as: Is there a best way to think, or are there multiple, alternative styles that can reach a correct diagnosis and choose the most effective treatment? Or from another angle, "… when and why does thinking go right or wrong in medicine?"

To find what we intuit is missing in our lives that would make us complete, all we have to do is face the truth. The truth seeker is like a physician who is his own first patient. Is there a best way to think about the diagnosis and the treatment? Where does thinking go right—or, more importantly, where does it go wrong—in the business of truth-facing?

If you're like most physicians in this respect, you won't be surprised by Groopman's discovery: "Nearly all of the practicing physicians I queried were

intrigued by the questions but confessed they had never really thought about how they think."

Why is that? Why don't we consider our thinking and make allowances for its shortcomings? The simple answer is because we're too close to it, as if we had our noses against a large-screen TV.

Another finding that shouldn't be a surprise is that the physician's mood and temperament strongly influence his medical judgment. In a study of radiologists—doctors who read x-rays and more advanced image scans—the ones who tended to be risk-takers had more false positive readings (where normal conditions are seen as abnormal) while those who were risk-averse had more false negatives (seeing abnormal conditions as normal). In between were the indecisive, who were reluctant to come to any conclusion about what they saw. Duke University's advanced imaging labs found that the average diagnosis error by their highly trained radiologists runs at 20 to 30 percent. Imagine what it is for the truth seeker diagnosing his own situation.

Dr. James Lock, chief of cardiology at Boston Children's Hospital, whose early hero was Sherlock Holmes, said: "I keep an ongoing tap on what I know…. Epistemology, the nature of knowing, is key in my field. What we know is based only on a modest level of understanding." As he gained in maturity he realized that "Impeccable logic doesn't always suffice … there are variables that you can't factor in…." The self-inquirer, the truth seeker who is looking to find what he really is, finds that epistemology is at the heart of his inquiry, also. The pretense of knowing what we don't know—about what we are—is what prevents us from seeing and accepting what we truly are.

Donald Schön at MIT says that a good physician "expresses uncertainty, takes the time to reflect, and allows himself to be vulnerable. Then he restructures the problem." The same could be said for the productive self-inquirer.

Jerry Katz, a physician who teaches at Yale Law School, comments on the "pervasive and fateful human need to remain in control of one's internal and external worlds by seemingly understanding them, even at the expense of falsifying the data." Accepting the truth about what we control, or don't control, is a huge stumbling block for most truth seekers.

Stephen Nimer, a physician at Memorial Hospital in New York and researcher at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, says that specialists commonly use the phrase "it's a bad disease" privately to explain why a patient isn't responding to treatment. Nimer remarks how that shifts the burden of thinking off the specialist and acts as a buffer against the fear of failure. He also notes that a focus on possible side effects often makes people reluctant to undergo treatment. That focus distorts the risk-to-benefit ratio in Nimer's opinion and avoids dealing with the problem at hand. The self-seeker often arrives similarly at a point where he labels his ignorance as intractable in order to remove the burden of inquiry, and it's very common to see truth seekers settle for ignorance after they have arrived at the faulty conclusion that searching for the truth of what they are is opposed to

"living life."

Jeffrey Tepler, a hematologist and oncologist in private practice at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, notes: "It's hard to think deeply about patients at the moment when you are seeing them. You need to have some quiet time to reflect and formulate a cogent opinion." He routinely leaves his office at 8:30-9:00 PM after reading recent medical literature and thinking about his patients. Imagine if the self-inquirer considered his own condition as seriously and productively as Tepler considers that of his patients.

One of the most intriguing stories in the book was the author's description of his first night in charge of a hospital ward as a new intern. He was chatting with one of the patients, who suddenly went into extreme respiratory distress. Groopman said he just stood there "with an empty head and my feet fixed to the floor." Fortuitously, an out-of-town doctor who was visiting a friend walked by the room just then, examined the patient, and told the author what to do. That was Groopman's first lesson in becoming his own authority. He realized, "I needed to think differently from how I had learned to think in medical school—indeed, differently from the way I had ever thought seriously in my life."

The truth seeker will similarly reach a point where he needs to think differently from the way he has ever thought seriously in his life. Physician, heal thyself.

Asking Ourselves out of Depressionby Art Ticknor

Many people are motivated to look for answers to the big questions of life when they hit a patch of depression, and many who enter a path of finding answers hit spells of gloom and feeling inadequate.

From my own experience with depression, and viewing it in retrospective, I've come to the following conclusions about it:

•Depression is on the feminine/feeling side of the mind.

•Emotionally we're convinced that something we dearly want is unattainable.

•Intellectually we may see that it's not necessarily so, but the feelings of personal inadequacy and hopelessness dominate.

•The solution lies in reaching the dispassionate point of observation where we're no longer lost in the morass of negative (and positive) emotions.

How do we go about climbing out of the pit of depression? I languished in it for nearly seven years, and it was a tremendously valuable time for getting to know the mechanics of the mind, so it may be more productive than we give it credit for. But I suspect I could have gotten the life-lesson in a shorter period.

Depression is the reaction that sets in after our I-amness has received a deflating blow. It lasts as long as it takes us to get over the feeling of inadequacy that follows having our emotional socks knocked off (1). We've been knocked down, and it remains to be seen how long it will take us to stand back up and risk the next knock. The internal caucus votes, the pride vs. fear tally is taken, and we see whether the belief of personal inadequacy still holds or has been overridden.

Life is an attack on pride — on misplaced self-esteem. Depression is a spa for wounded pride. If our pride has hit bottom, we admit to ourselves that we need help and may find ourselves sincerely asking for help from something bigger than the little person we believe ourselves to be.

But to get back to the question of how we can minimize the time it takes us to learn the lesson that depression is trying to teach us, there's a fascinating story of a man named Mike May in Robert Kurson's Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure and the Man who Dared to See. Mike was born in 1954. At age 3 a chemical explosion destroyed his sight. One eye was replaced with an artificial eye, and the cornea of the other eye was destroyed so that it could no longer prevent cataract development. A leading eye surgeon at the time tried corneal transplants, but Mike's eye rejected them. He didn't let his blindness get him down, however. As an example, he started snow skiing as a young man but not by holding onto the ski pole of a sighted person skiing in front of him as was the technique at the time. Mike wanted to go fast, so he had a sighted friend ski ahead of him and guide him by yelling instructions. He and his buddy snuck into the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo and

set a new speed skiing record for the totally blind (65 mph!). President Reagan honored him along with the U.S. Winter Olympic team at the White House.

When he was 45, Mike met a surgeon who examined his remaining eye and told him that he was a good candidate for a highly risky experimental procedure in corneal transplanting. After extensive consideration, Mike had the surgery, and it was successful. His eye and optic nerve functioned extremely well, giving him excellent color and motion detection. Facial recognition, depth perception, and object recognition were poor, however, and didn't improve in subsequent months. Mike became increasingly discouraged. An fMRI scan eventually showed that the areas of his brain associated with the second, more complex, set of functions weren't being activated. The researchers concluded that those neurons were no longer available for learning. Seeing under those circumstances was a horrendously tiring effort, making his life with sight more difficult than it had been before his sight was restored. The researchers reluctantly concluded that there was nothing that could be done for Mike's brain to improve its functioning with respect to those complex functions of seeings.

Mike let their prognosis sink in. But then an amazing thing occurred. He shook off their conclusion and asked himself: "What if I try to see by being blind again?" and began formulating a plan. He effectively told his vision to back off, to play a subordinate role to the other senses.

Over the following weeks he made astounding progress with recognition of what he was seeing when he could investigate the objects with his other senses, which had been highly developed during his decades of blindness. But then he asked himself how he could comprehend things that were out of reach of his other senses. That was a real puzzler to him. Then it dawned on him to ask himself what he was really good at. The answers he came up with didn't really apply ... until he hit on his organizational skills and memory. He began constructing a mental catalog of clues that would help him recognize thousands of common objects without having to think about what they were, and the prodigious memory he had developed over the years began substituting for the nonfunctioning parts of his brain.

By asking himself relevant questions that he didn't know the answers to, Mike effectively challenged the parts of his internal dialogue that were arguing for hopelessness and self-pity.

(1): The phrase ["knock your socks off"] first appeared in the mid-19th century meaning "to beat or vanquish someone thoroughly," at first used literally to mean to win in a knock-down fistfight so savage that the loser might expect not to only lose his shoes in the fracas but his socks as well. The number of brawlers who actually lost their socks was probably pretty small, but a threat "to knock your socks off" was one of a number of such hyperbolic pugilistic phrases popular at the time, including "knock your lights out" and "knock you into next week." ~ From The Word Detective Feb. 18, 2004 issue.

Becoming Your Own Authorityby Art Ticknor

I heard a similar message from two good friends recently. One is an older fellow who has been at this business of self-inquiry for a couple decades, who wrote:

I wish … I could pinpoint the reason I departed from a course of action…. I continue to see it as a major reaction to going along with programs and philosophies that inspired me, but should not have infiltrated my thinking to the extent they did. I blame myself, not the sources of inspiration. That doesn't mean I won't or can't ask for help from others, which I know I need, but I want to intuit better a course that arises from personal history and experience. To find your own voice, as they say.

The other is a younger fellow who has been trying to answer the big questions for six or seven years. Referring to a situation he and another mutual friend find themselves in, he wrote:

Both of us had picked up a message … that felt stifling because we weren't our own authorities and felt we had to be a certain way.

Any genuine teacher in the field of self-realization will tell the student that he has to do the truth facing for himself, has to look for himself and see the truth for himself. The sentiment of becoming our own authority is a valid and worthy one. And yet I have the feeling that both of these friends are employing that sentiment as a wall to hide behind.

Personality is a mask we wear. Belief in individuality is identification with a mask. A self-professed individual is a belief-state – a paradigm or model that is trying to validate itself as reality while masking reality.

Life threatens that mask, and death may ultimately triumph over it. The truth seeker is looking for an answer while living, but the personality is constructed to avoid unmasking. Whenever an affliction to the personality occurs, we tend to quickly focus away from the truth by reactions such as rationalization, distraction and procrastination. Facing the truth is looking back at what we're looking out from, and when we do that we "see" silence and non-movement. To the personality, silence and non-movement represent death. Thus the belief in personality or individuality cannot be reconciled with the truth of what we see when we look inward at what we really are.

In order to face the final contradiction of what we see we are versus what we believe ourselves to be, there are outer layers of self-belief that need to be peeled away. That challenging of beliefs is painful, so we hide from it as much as possible.

All men should strive to learn before they die,what they are running from,

and to, and why.~ James Thurber

Questions we can ask ourselves:

1. What am I running from, and to, and why?

2. Have I honestly admitted to myself what I want most from life? Or am I trying to juggle multiple number-one priorities?

3. Am I avoiding situations that remind me of my lack of determining what's most important to me or of my lack of action toward its accomplishment?

The role of the friend or teacher is to help the truth seeker find out what he really wants since the truth seeker often encounters an inner resistance to answering the question for himself. That resistance takes the form of fears. For example, we might fear missing out on other pleasures, or we might fear that we won't have the courage to face possible challenges. Many fears remain unarticulated, as if expressing them even to ourselves would be like opening a door that may let out a monster. Our basic psychological fears, such as fear of rejection or failure, go back to the fear of annihilation. Seeking the truth about our self is in large part facing these psychological fears.

Becoming our own authority does not imply thinking for ourself – which is wishful thinking, since all thoughts and feelings are reactions – but looking for ourself. Looking for oneself implies a certain objective detachment from our thoughts and feelings rather than being caught up in them. Becoming our own authority thus challenges the validity of our conclusions and beliefs, undermining the ground upon which our individuality stands.

Breaking Through Beliefs,

by Art Ticknor

How do we break through beliefs? There's a gradual method—doubt, and an instantaneous method—shock. Which method disrupted an early childhood belief for you, such as a belief in Santa Claus? Was it a gradual doubt, or was there a shock? It could be that there's a clue in your early experience that would tell you something about your disposition regarding the spiritual search.

For an intentional path, we need to generate doubt. And first we need to identify a belief—a belief about the self, not about Santa. But we're generally caught up in our beliefs and don't see them except in retrospect.

A friend, SF, wrote last December: "I think my state of mind changed. I had the belief that to do things in the world about the search and about going on with life was in vain ... and that ... caused me to believe 'There's no way out and acting is vain; therefore I will not act, and I will live to disdain the futility of acting.' And this belief wasn't making me free. Now I don't ... care about acting or not, I feel that gathering people to start a group is very positive, not sure why. And I have no idea about what I am nor why ... I do whatever I do. But ... I feel/think that I have to go on with what I feel is right and expecting nothing. This going on with what I feel and expecting nothing feels liberating." This change in his perspective resulted from questioning, with help from others.

In November 2000 I became aware of my long-time conviction state and found words to describe it to myself. I wrote about it to my friend Bob Cergol, and here is his response interspersed with my description:

1. That somewhere there exists a person who can provide what's missing, whose constant love will elevate me into 7th heaven.BC: An echo of the inner man, who indeed has already provided what is missing through his constant, unconditional love.

2. That when that person comes along, then I will no longer be utterly alone.BC: An echo of the inner man, who indeed is already there—utterly alone with you.

3. That such fulfillment offers the best chance for completion, in that it doesn't require any effort on my part (and is therefore more likely to occur than self-realization).

BC: An echo of the inner man, who indeed, is not dependent, fortunately, upon your ability to make yourself into something better than yourself. And is not dependent at all upon you.

Of course intellectually I can see many of the holes in the above wishful thinking. What confounds me ... is why I'm willing to hold out hope for a shot at the impermanent and superficial.

BC, quoting Alfred Pulyan: "... for the self to abandon (even for a fraction of a second which is all that is necessary) its own proud assumption of being the ultimate decider is ... almost impossible."

Do you see that belief—of being the ultimate decider—in yourself? Is there a way you can question it?

Do Not Fear the Darknessby Art Ticknor

Dylan Thomas, knowing that his father was dying, extruded his feelings into a poem that ended with the lines:

Do not go gentle into that good night.Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Do they resonate with your own feelings?

There is no need for fear.

My velvet blackness removes all cares,dispels all vulnerabilities,terminates all threatwithout and within.

Immersed in me emptiness is filled,longing is finally answered,permanence is found.

Here, and only here, is love complete,mother, father, mate, child, friend perfect.

Only when you have lost your self in mewill you find what you've been looking for.

Dylan Thomas

Verse by Art Ticknor

Heavenneither travels aheadnor lags behindbut is always with you.

Simply remove the barriers,and you're there.The barriers have no heftbeing nothing other than beliefs.

Beliefs of being right or being wrongare intermediate barriers.Beliefs of being somethingare the final barriers.

Heaven is the placeof no place, no time.No thing has ever made it throughthe gate between thingland and heaven.

Inspiration, Intention & Commitmentby Art Ticknor

Many of my younger friends are afraid of commitment to a spiritual path. They worry about making a wrong choice and cutting themselves off from all the pleasures they assume such a commitment would eliminate. They typically develop the sense of a dichotomy between spiritual work—i.e., defining the self, answering the "Who am I?" question—and "living life," by which they mean pursuit of games other than the Master Game.

This is not said to knock their seriousness or their effort, which impress me. But in the dimension of duality where our attention is captive until we cut the Gordian knot, we cannot transcend contradictions. We can't both eat our cake and have it remain uneaten.

The serious young seeker on a "qualified" spiritual path, a project that's not whole-hearted, may become expert at seeing both sides of any issue as having equal value and thus be unable to distinguish the more true from the less true. Introspection may bring the seeker to the point of seeing that thought and decision-making are automatic processes within the mind. Or an internal "voice" may tell the seeker that he's powerless to choose or to act. In various ways the uncommitted seeker may arrive at an obstacle that leads to temporizing and then giving up the search.

Richard Rose said he became determined, as a young man with soft features, never to let anyone intimidate him. When I met Rose, I found the missing purpose and meaning that I'd been searching for during the previous ten or twelve years. Shortly afterward I made a commitment to become the Truth regardless of the cost. Over the following years there were several times when I renewed the commitment, sometimes finding new words to footnote or refine my understanding of it. I remember clearly one instance, which occurred when I was on a solitary retreat and read a remark made by Ramana Maharshi that inspired me: to obey the Lord in thought, word and deed. It expressed a deep need or desire—and the reason I recall this so clearly is because it was the first time that I felt inspired to make a commitment when I also felt the necessity of making a serious scan of my mind to be sure there were no reservations.

It was almost only during such solitary retreats where I experienced inspiration, which I attribute to the fact that my mind only relaxed sufficiently during those times. And my impression is that it was only when I felt inspired—which would come to me as if my insides were filled with champagne-like bubbles—that I could make commitments. But I can see that it's misleading when I describe that to my young friends. Commitment isn't something you force yourself into or trick yourself into. It's basically finding words that express an inner yearning and an intuitive reading of a desired intention. I believe that's what motivated both Rose's determination and my commitment in the examples mentioned above.

I was always irritated when I heard or read the advice that all a seeker needs for success is x or y. "Earnestness" or a "pure intention" were among the two most irritating to me. But here's my attempt: all a seeker needs for success is whatever motivates him to persist.

Look at Awarenessby Art Ticknor

To know the self, look at awareness

To become your own reliable authority, look at any belief or assertion until its relative truthfulness becomes intuitively obvious.

The following assertions are meant to be verified or invalidated in that way. They build on their predecessors, so each one needs to be looked at without moving on until its truthfulness has been established -- but not merely by agreement, not by discursive logic alone or by feeling alone, but by that mysterious refinement of feeling and reason which is higher intuition.

• You are what's observing. (True or false?)

• You are what's aware. (True or false?)

• You are what you're looking out from. (True or false?)

If you've breezed through the above items (as I would have been likely to do) possibly with the half-thought of going into them sometime later, what can I say. It's more of the same, which maintains the status quo.

•Where do all the objects (people, chairs, thoughts, feelings, and so on) that you're aware of appear?

•On a mental viewing screen?

•What are the features of that screen?

•No features ... blank ... no edges ... unchanging?

If you've given the old college try to looking into these questions and have stopped at an "I don't know" roadblock or an "I don't know how to do it" belief block, you may find it productive to turn the light of looking onto the assumed blockage. Given an algebraic equation, I may honestly conclude I don't know the answer when I first scan it. But I have the conviction that, if I put forth sufficient effort, I could solve it. Of course sufficient effort in that case may involve days or years of mathematical studies. What is your "I don't know" or "I don't know how" really saying?

•When you look back at what you're looking out from, what do you see?

•Empty space ... a blank screen with no features?

•The screen that objects appear on and the awareness that you're looking out from are one and the same. (True or false?)

•There is only one awareness. (True or false?)

•The fact that you know you're aware is a revelation of the fact that awareness is self-aware. (True or false?)

What looks at awareness?

Magnetoresistance & the Search for Selfby Art Ticknor

The Royal Swedish Academy of Science awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2007 to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for their simultaneous and independent discovery of a quantum mechanical effect in the field of magnetoresistance. What caught my attention in the award article I read was the description of magnetoresistance: a phenomenon where the electrical resistance of certain metals decreases by an unusual amount in the presence of a magnetic field. More specifically, it was the connection between a magnetic field and decreased resistance that rang a bell.

The incentive to know the self arises when our "commerce with the world" (to use a phase of Martin Seligman's1 ) isn't going too well. We start off by trying to change others when we aren't getting what we want – and when that fails, we may start toward ourself. We may try altering our appearance and, when that doesn't work, we may go after our personality – trying to learn how to project a more attractive or less irritating image in order to satisfy our desires.

Eventually life teaches us, if we're paying attention, that the world cannot provide the satisfaction we seek. In addition to not getting what we want, or to satisfactions not lasting, we are subject to all sorts of vulnerabilities – physical and emotional – including sickness, embarrassment, rejection, failure and, ultimately, death. That realization is bound to bring an experience, or a series of experiences, of hopelessness. If we're fortunate, something awakens our intuition to the recognition that there's a new possibility to explore, and it's within.

Within is an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of dimension that can only be explored inversely – by backing away from what we experience in order to get a better view. We see that personality, as the word derivation points out, describes the characteristics of a mask and tells us nothing about what's behind the mask. All our beliefs about "I am a person who…." are beliefs about a mask.

When we see past faulty beliefs in personality as what we are, we're still left with a belief in individuality, in being a separate being who's tremendously vulnerable. The journey to knowing the self, which begins with the push of dissatisfaction from not getting what we want, steps up in seriousness with the admission that the individual's vulnerabilities rest on a fear of annihilation, followed by the universal reaction of trying to find something that will make that vulnerable individual self invulnerable.

At some point along the way, as more and more of our faulty beliefs about what we are come into view, the motivation for the search changes. We see or feel that

the problem is, and has been all along, that there is too much "self" – i.e., those beliefs about what we are. The search becomes what Richard Rose termed an egoless vector. We no longer see anything in it for the belief in individual I-amness, the ego-self, whose inflation is the problem not the solution, but the momentum that has built up keeps us moving in the direction of finding the answer to the "What am I?" question. Another way to describe this is to say that the movement now comes from the magnetic pull at the core of our being, which – as the voice of nostalgia has always hinted – is leading us back to our real home.

The problem in the final phase of the search for Self is that the ego-self can't detach itself from itself. The belief in individuality can't unimagine itself. The final transition to knowing the self requires a discontinuity from the type of knowing that we're familiar with – to a knowing by identity, of recognizing our "oneness with." We've unknowingly come closer and closer to the recognition of our true identity as we've seen through the illusion of our faulty self-beliefs and, in the final hour, the magnetic pull at the center of our being overcomes the remaining resistance.

(1) As quoted by Charles Barber in Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. "… Negative emotions contain 'messages about how our commerce with the world is going.'" Seligman is a psych professor at the U. of Pennsylvania. His books include Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness.

*

Question: What are you?

Answer ~

Phase 1: "The question never occurred to me."Phase 2: "I hear that it's relevant, but I don't see the relevance myself."Phase 3: "Intellectually I see its importance, but it's not a burning issue."Phase 4: "I see it's the only hope."Phase 5: Period of hopelessness.Phase 6: Self-realization.Phase 7: "It's no longer an issue."

Meeting Richard RoseNotes from 1978

by Art Ticknor

Author's note: After seeing the value of the "Quotes and Notes" material that Shawn Nevins contributed in the August 2005memorial issue of the TAT Forum, I was inspired to go back through my own journals to capture things I'd made notes on that I heard Richard Rose say over the years I knew him. Not surprisingly, there was a gold mine of material from that first year, 1978, beginning with what follows.

March 29, 1978

I had been attending weekly meetings of the Ohio State University "Pyramid Zen" group for the previous five weeks. Richard Rose showed up unexpectedly for the meeting this evening. When I came into the room and saw him, I introduced myself: "You must be Mr. Rose," I said. "My name's Art Ticknor. I know why I'm doing this, and it's for selfish reasons. Why are you doing it?"

In retrospect, I saw that this was rude, but it wasn't my intention. I'd heard that he did all sorts of things and didn't charge for them, so I figured he must have some ulterior motive, and I wanted to get the cards on the table.

He looked at me with a humorous sparkle in his eyes. "First of all, what you're doing isn't selfish. And I do what I do because I can't help it—it's an obsession."

That's all it took to knock the chip off my shoulder. "This guy's okay," I told myself. I sat across from him and started a conversation by asking him about the meaning of his statement (in The Albigen Papers) about following the thaumaturgical laws of abstinence to protect yourself from entities.

Rose talked and answered questions during most of the meeting. I felt terrific rapport with him. Most of the things he said rang "true"—i.e., when I heard them verbalized, I recognized them as things I knew nonverbally. For example, you can't force yourself along the path.

Some ideas that Rose talked about:

1982 feature articleAkron Beacon Journal

1.You have to set priorities based on what's important to you.

2.If you're interested in spiritual search, it will be fun (not a chore).

3.Set a 1-hour meditation period every day. Many, many things will come up to compete with it. It will take about a month to get to the point where you can do some effective introspection toward the end of the hour—and another five months to get in the groove.

4.Memories of interaction with parents and siblings are good material for meditation. Realize that you weren't always in the right.

5.Anything within the past 2 - 3 years is probably too recent.

6.Dreams are a good source of material for meditation. Write them down.

7.The biological role or natural purpose of the female is to bear children and be submissive to the male. The role of the male is to protect the female and children.

8.When he wrote that you must tell the truth ("Tell the truth in all things relative," in his Threefold Path paper), he did not mean indiscriminately—not to the boss, the cop, the judge, etc.

9.Sociologists and psychologists are building a paradigm full of lies. Most psychologists since and including Freud, with the exception of Jung, have been packagers and marketeers.

10.All you need to do is listen to the conflicting voices within "yourself."

11.Zen is the best method for finding your Self. Give yourself the koan, "Who am I?" There is no real Zen practiced in the US now.

12.Committing yourself to helping others on the path will speed up your own search.

13.Gurdjieff defined four levels of people (i.e., stages of development): instinctive, emotional, intellectual and philosophical. Only the latter can effectively search for the Truth. Rose said that the first 5 Albigen Papers operate at the intellectual level, hoping to stimulate intuition in intellectual seekers.

14.Psychology is extremely simple—only three items: perceiving, recording and reacting.

15.Paradox: we don't have free will but we must act as if we did.

16.Children have great intuition for the first couple years, until we take them from the general to the particular (seduce them, almost). We must learn to be like children again.

There was a margin note in my journal: "He rang bells in me; I felt tremendous joy; afterwards, felt as if I was walking two inches off the ground." I suppose I didn't write more about that because I felt I would never forget the details. What I didn't write:

At some point in the conversation, a brass gong was struck inside me. I had no idea there even was such a thing. The words that formed in my mind were, "This man is telling the Truth. I've never heard it before, but something in me recognizes it." After the meeting, we adjourned to a McDonald's restaurant in the basement of the student union. Rose continued talking and joking in the same vein as in the classroom upstairs. People at other tables were obviously fascinated by the drift of his remarks that they caught. When I walked out of the McDonald's along the student union corridor, every indication that was coming into my brain said that my feet were honestly not touching the floor. I wasn't hallucinating in terms of thinking that others would see the same thing if they looked at me. But it dawned on me that the phrase "walking on air" wasn't just a loose metaphor and that others had obviously experienced exactly what I was experiencing in sensory perception. The walking-on-air was accompanied by an intense euphoria.

A day or two later, I was scratching my head asking myself what it was that Rose had said that had induced the joy and euphoria that meeting him caused. And it dawned on me what it was: "The answers are all within."

For the previous ten or twelve years I had gone through periodic identity crises (I don't know why I labeled them as such at the time, but in retrospect it was a perceptive label). I had all the things that should have made me happy—wife and kids I adored, career, house, cars—but it wasn't enough. I felt there was some missing meaning or purpose. But I could project every remedy I could think of down the road to acquisition or accomplishment, and they all came up short. I had been scanning

the horizon for answers, never stumbling onto the intuitive truth that Rose had verbalized.

May 11, 1978

Rose gave a public talk at OSU this evening. I made notes of these items:

1982 feature articleRichard Rose in 1934 (age 17)

1.In the final case, there is no mind.

2.Rose found no "discrepancy in interlinear meaning" in Paul Brunton's writings. (In other words, he thought that Brunton was honest and without ulterior motive.)

3.Each man has to have his own trauma. Let it lead you to ultimate reality.

4.Every man has his own path.

5.Truth is in the individual—not in a cult or a geographic area.

6.Koans are artificial trauma. Like studying mathematics, you can get a satori experience. [Satori: momentary "wow!"; things fit in place.]

7.Changes in the self:- The instinctive level is transcended by a salvation experience, by falling in love with someone or something other than the self.- The resulting emotional level is transcended by a satori or eureka experience.- The subsequent intellectual level is transcended by a cosmic consciousness or unitive experience.- The "fourth way" or philosophical level is transcended by sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi or ego death.

8.The real answer is inside. Find a system of work. Meditate—wrestle with thoughts—and hope.

9.Rose said he learned mind-to-mind transfer through a Zen teacher [long after his own self-realization]. Any true Zen teacher can do this.

10.Organizations kill the vital part of you.

*

11.Psychology of the Observer [an approach to observing the observer that he described in a subsequent book of that title] will bring you to the point [of self-realization] if you stay with it long enough.

12.The koan called life will remove your mind for you.

13.Rose recommended reading Gurdjieff's philosophy through Ouspensky's Fourth Way. Rose didn't think that G. or O. had found the ultimate realization, but he thought the material was valuable. Rose said his path, unlike Gurdjieff's, was not a path of extreme observation.

14.It's nonsense that you're going to bliss your way to eternity. Trauma is what produces the ultimate experience.

15.Man finds God within himself. You have to go through the experience of nothingness.

16.It's possible to produce "miracles" without knowing who you are (like a chemist

producing reactions).

17.Don't continue to lie to yourself. When you see this, quit it. Change your lifestyle, etc. if necessary.

18.The only vehicle we have is our mental apparatus. Use it to become the Truth. The only way you can do this is by becoming truthful in small things and working your way up.

19.The individual self that approaches the Self is the observer.

20.The somatic mind at work deciding the lifestyle of the vehicle is the umpire. You need to get behind the umpire.

*

21.When you observe the appetites, the umpire becomes external. The appetites (physical drives) are not you because they are observable. [Likewise with the umpire.]

22.Then watch your head working—analyze thinking processes. This is the process observer. Wrestle with gestalts. Realize that the mind is not you.

23.The mind eventually blows up, stops. This results in Oneness.

24.You don't overcome egos (pride, morality, etc.) by throwing them away. The egos are taken away when the head explodes.

25.There's no such thing as good and evil in this or the next dimension, but man has to be disciplined until he can discipline himself. You need to keep the body neat, build a healthy body and mind so you can take it apart.

26.We're a soggy bag which impressions are made on and which makes wild reactions.

27.You destroy your path if you eliminate egos in the wrong sequence. Just move away from untruth.

28.The umpire is the coordinator of all the voices [egos; desires and fears]. It tries to keep them all alive. It's the watchdog of the somatic department.

29.When the observer puts in a factor of spiritual survival, the umpire may encourage it.

30.Don't consider letting go of your position in society, keeping yourself looking good, pride, etc.—unless you discover they are lies.

*

31.Release energy for choosing truths.

32.If a promotion comes in your job, take it. Don't make a big deal of it.

33.Rose said he didn't know why he was born. The blueprint is already made. No point in trying to manipulate it.

34.Every person is the end of the ray of the Absolute. Tremendous equality.

35.Intuition is the trip between the emotional and the intellectual approach. It's the only tool you have. Certain things can destroy intuition. An LSD habit, for example. Redevelop the faculty that we're born with. Become as a little child.

36.Life is an act, a play. Love is the theme of life. Love is not sex, not hypnosis. Love is friendship and devotion. Love can be hell or happiness.

37.You can't work for yourself after you find there's no self. Then work for others. The greatest lovers are the quiet workers for others—for kids, helping people with flat tires, whatever.

38.Forget about the lover while you're trying to cultivate the observer.

39.Emotional reactions can be good in the search. You only have a few years of your life when your mind is flexible enough to search for truth. Get angry at the phonies [pretending to be teachers] etc.

40.Indulge in trauma. You'll find euphoria in the cemetery.

*

41.Take a rest at each plateau, then start fighting again.

42.You have to fight like hell to find out there's nothing to fight like hell for.

43.Allow your concern to stir up your head.

44.The process observer watches thinking and feeds info to the umpire. Most of us can't keep a state of mind long enough to solve a problem.

45.Words are all foolishness, but we must get on with them until they can be surmounted—direct mind transmission.

46.If you dedicate yourself to the Truth, irritations and traumas will arise. Don't hunt trouble and misery. They will come by themselves.

47.Mantras are lullabies to keep you from thinking.

48.You can't go anywhere unless you help others. Don't wait until you reach an experience. Loan a book, etc. Don't waste it. Keep the laws in mind. [Rose outlines transcendental laws in the 7th chapter of The Albigen Papers. The Law of the Ladder states that we shouldn't try to reach down further than the rung below ours.] Wanting to help everyone is ego.

49.Rose learned to hypnotize through mind-to-mind contact. He felt that hypnosis is the best way to make people see that man is a robot and that every teacher (psychologist, esotericist) should be a hypnotist, both for demonstration and in order to resist conditioning.

50.The infant and the pure person are safe from possession. Entities [which Rose believed in strongly] are physical creatures which our senses don't pick up. They are not evil per se, but when we break laws, they get in. They're after our energy. They're symbiotic, like pilot fish that guide whales to the feeding ground. Rose believed that everyone has a guiding force—a guardian angel—an intelligence pulling your wires for the good and that everyone is possessed to a degree by both positive and negative entities.

October 10, 1978

Richard Rose gave a talk at Ohio State University on moods. Here are some of the notes I had made:

Richard Rose, age 42

1.Communication—getting into someone's head—through mood.

2.Three major moods in the dream world:- Fear (nightmare, delirium)- Seduction (including acquisition)- Nostalgia

3.Guilt = fear + nostalgia.

4.Seduction: there's a time in all dreams for acquisition. The unconscious mind of all people seizes things. If you like someone or something, you approach and grab.

5.The nostalgia mood is the language of the soul and the guide of daytime behavior.

6.We perceive with the mind, not the senses (easily demonstrated by hypnosis). The Allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic is about mind-perception. The mind can still be fooled (again, witness hypnosis). Under hypnosis, the hypnotist can induce the mind to have moods.

7.The average color of dreams is gray. Blackness causes the worst mood.

8.No words are spoken in dreams. Messages are picked up through direct-mind contact.

9.Frightening someone who's sleeping has a tremendous affect on waking life.

10.A person in jail can become suicidal based on a mood.

*

11.Fear mood grows like a disease.

12.The seduction mood is dangerous, but it passes.

13.We like the nostalgia mood. It uses memories of pleasantness. Movies, commercials, billboards, etc., appeal to nostalgia.

14.Colors, smells and sounds impel moods.

15.When dreaming takes us back to a happy experience, we awake saying: "Why can't we live this way?"

16.Examples of a nostalgic book (also made into a movie): How Green Was My Valley, and songs: "Red Sails in the Sunset" and "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord."

17.There's a definite language of nostalgia. Typical devices used include deliberate unreality, falsetto voices, schmaltz and inhibited manner of seduction. Nostalgia is like a disease. It determines 95% of people's waking behavior. Seduction (including acquisition) and fear contribute the other 5%. The human family tries to live like Pollyannna [i.e., foolishly optimistic; the name of a little girl who always saw the bright side of trouble, in a novel by Eleanor Portman]. It's there all the time, but easier to see in the Christmas mood, with its colored lights, traditional music, etc.

18.Nostalgia includes the consciousness of what everyone wants:- Acquisition without conflict.- Peace. The archetypal mind is filled with 10,000 years of fighting.- Love. The cottage and beautiful children.- Permanence.

19.One type of dream could be called "contact nostalgia." It picks up a thread via Mind contact that things are perfect. Acid [LSD] and pot sometimes produce such a vision.

20.Nostalgia promises, in order of importance: kindness, love, peace, beauty, eternality, and inoffensiveness.

*

21.In dreams, the egos of daylight conflict are gone. Mind contact indicates that people do the best they can.

22.Any collective action has inoffensiveness and peace as motives. Politicians are for everything, against nothing.

23.Cop movies on TV: we reassure ourselves that they're sweet guys.

24.Pollyanna more than anything else expresses the mood of mankind. It comes from the language of nostalgia—communicated through dreams with great force.

25.A mood can cause a person in prison to hang himself, can cause a hobo to go back home after 15 years, can cause the conviction of daylight hours to dissolve. You must survive a mood several times to get strong enough to resist it.

26.Nostalgia is a direct-mind wavelength. If you pick it up, realize that everyone shares it. It can be a channel to find out what you're supposed to do, the master plan. The Australian aborigine contacts the "elder brother," who see a rabbit over the kill and guides the boomerang.

27.Most dreams are gray because the light [i.e., the projection] is fickle, which also causes daytime illusion.

28.The mood when awakening in the morning is set by the last dream before awakening.

29.There is a continual urge of man to go back to eternal peace. Eternality is the main theme of personality. Nostalgia is the language of eternality. It is a voice saying "relax," there's a blueprint, harmony, which is the destiny for mankind.

30.We get better readings about people in nostalgic than other dreams. Certain artists and poets get in contact with a universal mood (zeitgeist)—the reason for rhyme, for color on canvas.

*

31.Rose's blank verse "Three Books of the Absolute," which was an automatic writing, conveys his realization through mood.

32.You can learn to contact the eternal language of the soul.- But must be firmly centered first. The trick is to keep your consciousness on your point of consciousness.- Can learn that there is no death.- Can learn that we can move toward patience and understanding.- Dreams must conform to balance, or they would drive man to lethargy on this plane.- We're here for a purpose.- Can tune into this mood best when you're in a horizontal position.- Yogis see visions but don't reach this language.- Dreams are the door to the voice seeking eternality. We fear death because we're afraid we'll never see Mom and Dad, the kids, etc. again. It's not true. In dreams we can recall anything we want to remember. Gives a new slant on what part of us exists after death.- Beauty, as Jung said, is the eternal reflection of absolute reality, the real language (mood), and the real meaning from the mind strata.

33.The child becomes seduced into living with relative language [words] and loses the direct-mind capacity.

34.When a man's walking, he's logical, pragmatic. When sitting, receptive. When horizontal, in contact with the direct mind.

35.In dreams, there's head-to-head contact, through moods.

36.In rapport, let yourself read the mind of the other person—don't try to force it. This creates brotherhood, no misunderstanding. The spirit of nostalgia is the language.

37.We're programmed by Nature to have short seduction moods. The new theme of movies is seduction, which isn't a good sign for civilization. This may change.

38.Nostalgia settles on us when we graduate from high school, when we drop out of class,

after we first get married.

39.For all eternity, the beauty that existed between any two people is there. Actions are eternal.

40.The shutter of consciousness allows one thought at a time. If you're watching a dream, you may continue to see it after you wake up.

October 30, 1978

I had done the first of quite a few solitary retreats at Richard Rose's farm the week ending October 21st, and I wrote the following letter on October 22nd:

Dear Mr. Rose:

This is a personal status report, of sorts, after my week at the farm. (A Columbus TAT report will be forthcoming after our next business meeting on November 12th.) There were five basic questions I wanted to resolve during the week:

1.Age—am I too old for the University group?Resolution: I may be, but I'm going to continue actively in the group until you tell me I'm too old.

2.Meditation—how am I doing?Resolution: I'm just playing around in my head. I may have gained a little more insight from rereading the Meditation Paper last week. Also, I plan to follow your recommendation to Mark S. of listening to the Psychology of the Observer tape regularly.

3.Celibacy—I would like to use this as a technique of building energy, but would it be fair to my wife?Resolution: My 34th birthday was this past Tuesday. In the Transmission Paper you mention that celibacy is dangerous after 40. So that doesn't give me too long. However, I will try to work this out with my wife before I make an arbitrary decision.

4.What is my goal?Resolution: I had gotten sort of foggy on why I was doing spiritual work. The week clarified my objective, which is to find out who I am and what the purpose of life is.

5.What is my commitment to the goal?Resolution: It will be the work of my entire life. I'm probably too old, and not enough of a fighter, to reach enlightenment—but I'm damn well going to try.

I wish I could tell you how fortunate I feel to have found your group and how proud I am to be a part of it.

I remember being outside raking leaves on a sunny autumn day when Mr. Rose's response arrived in the mail. And I remember being infused with joy when I read a sentence in his letter that he had underlined: "I think you'll make it."

December 31, 1978

Mark S., an OSU student who was taking the spring quarter off in order to spend three months in a solitary retreat on the Rose farm, and I were the only people from the Columbus group who went to West Virginia for the traditional New Year's Eve party at the farm.

During a conversation with Mr. Rose about not remembering childhood trauma, he said that traumas were there or I'd have memories of joy.

When I asked for advice on monitoring the OSU self-inquiry meetings, which responsibility I was taking on, he said to keep them friendly above all. To use humor. The transmission of energy goes on all the time between people. An example is healing relatives. And he advised never living with somebody who hates you, or it will make you sick. For teaching purposes, the teacher only needs to be at a higher level to transmit. Final transmission to help someone make the leap has to be done by an enlightened person.

On the topic of how a person goes about dropping false egos: When you really see that which is not you, it will be taken away.

Mirror Therapyby Art Ticknor

Walt Whitman traveled to Virginia during the Civil War to look for his brother, who had been wounded at Fredericksburg. He wrote to his mother about the "heap of feet, arms, legs &c." he saw under a tree in front of a hospital tent. He then spent three years attending to wounded soldiers, which led to the "Drum Taps" section of his evolving and growing masterwork Leaves of Grass.

A common phenomenon of the soldiers with amputated limbs was feeling those missing limbs, and frequently the feelings were painful. Silas Weir Mitchell, a Philadelphia doctor who became a friend and correspondent of Whitman's, kept a medical notebook documenting the "sensory ghosts" of the amputees from the battle of Gettysburg, thinking he was the first person to do so. However, as Jonah Lehrer points out in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, a dozen years earlier Herman Melville gave Captain Ahab a sensory ghost of the leg eaten by his nemesis, Moby-Dick. Ahab tells the carpenter who's fashioning an ivory replacement leg, "here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul," and says that he felt tingling life there just as before.

Mitchell felt that the amputees' sensory ghosts supported Whitman's poetry, which stated that matter and spirit were not separate but intertwined. He wrote an anonymous short story, "The Case of George Dedlow" (published in The Atlantic Monthly and available now as a free e-book) giving a first-person fictional account of waking up in a hospital tent with all his limbs missing.

I saw a segment on a TV news program recently showing a treatment for phantom limb pain that's simple and surprisingly effective. Navy doctor Jack Tsao prescribed it for artillery sergeant Nicholas Paupore, who was wounded in Iraq.

Participants in a trial administered by Tsao1 used the mirror therapy technique—simply moving the leg, watching the movement in the mirror and imagining that the missing leg is making the movements—15 minutes a day, five days a week for four weeks. Pain levels came down the first

week and continued down. Every person experienced relief, with pain completely disappearing for some. Paupore and some others were able to get off painkillers entirely. "It tricks your brain into thinking your leg is still there, so it's not misfiring," Paupore said. "I don't know how it works, but it works."

Pain is a signal that something's wrong. Seeing their missing legs in the mirror convinced the subconscious mental equipment that they were whole again and relieved the pain associated with the phantom limb.

Consider now, if you would, the existential pain that people suffer. I recall reading somewhere years ago that social outcasts were sometimes banished outside the protection of a city's walls and survived on the city's garbage dump—and I thought, "That's it!" We court the approval of others to fix some perceived lack—some missing limb—and fear the hell2 of social ostracizing.

Even worse is the fear of annihilation. We believe we're separate creatures, and we know the creature's existence is threatened every moment. What will death bring? We don't know, so we latch onto beliefs and repeat those beliefs as a mantra whenever the subject of death passes through our awareness: We will continue on forever in the Happy Hunting Ground, in Paradise, in Heaven … or our molecules will gracefully disperse back into the cosmic soup … or we will slip placidly into the comforting oblivion of dreamless sleep. But those beliefs don't really eliminate the underlying fear; they merely provide distraction, like sticking our fingers in our ears and singing or talking loudly when we don't want to hear something someone is saying to us.

Can we apply mirror therapy to the existential pain?

We believe ourselves to be individual human beings, irrevocably separate from whatever created us and from other human beings. No matter how close we get with another person, we never approach absolute knowing. And we feel even more not-one with whatever created us.

Our self-beliefs—for example, that the self is a separate entity; is somehow depen-dent on a body that was born and is going to die; is or has an individual conscious-ness; is limited, changing, vulnerable, uncertain—cause psychological turmoil and suffering. Like the amputee's phantom limb pain, it is phantom-self pain. Panic attacks (fear of dying or going insane, which reflect the fear of losing the phantom self) and clinical depression (based on the conviction that something that's necessary to our happiness is not possible to attain) are extreme examples.

Have you ever stopped to wonder how it is that we know we're conscious? Our self-consciousness indicates a mirroring effect that's already taking place in the mind. It's as if there's one part of us looking outward and another part of us that's looking backward, aware of the part that's looking outward. But what does that backward-looking part of us see? Nothing … no entity, no Wizard of Oz making things happen … an empty, boundless, changeless, aware non-space.

We have a feeling of what we are. Sure, that's our bike, our car, our toes, and so on, but we feel we're essentially something deeper than those things. We feel that we're what's aware … aware of external things but also of inner things such as thoughts and feelings … and also, somehow, mysteriously self-aware.

We believe mightily that we're a separate, isolated entity attempting to know an unknown self … as if we needed to look into a reflection of our eyes and, in that mirror image, see a reflection back into our "real eye." The hang-up is that we can't conceive of direct seeing without an intermediary. We can't conceive of seeing without a separate seer doing the seeing. We can't conceive of our self as not being a separate seer. How do we get beyond this phantom-seer pain?

Looking for the self, we need to notice what we're looking at (i.e., what we're aware of) and continue looking at it until we see, intuitively, what its relationship is to us. To do this systematically, we begin with more exterior objects—like bikes, cars and toes

—and move inward to thoughts, feelings, and beyond. Doing occasional credo exer- cises to identify our current beliefs about what we are, or what we become identified with, provides us with ongoing material for investigation. All the while, we compare what we're looking at to the feeling of what we really are: that which is aware, which we sense (intuit) from the mirroring aspect of awareness itself.

Letting go of faulty self-beliefs may cause some jolts, but if we persist we will get down to a final faulty self-belief … and a final jolt will leave us with a recognition of direct seeing and absolute knowing.

1Mirror Therapy Shows Promise in Amputee Treatment

2The Old Testament term "hell" is a translation of the Hebrew word Gehennam, which Wikipedia says derives from "Ge Hinnom," meaning "Valley of Hinnom"—the location of the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem.

Nine Verses Made upon anEcstasy of High Contemplation

by St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)

I entered in, not knowing where,And there remained uncomprehending,All knowledge transcending.

I entered—where—I did not know,Yet when I found that I was there,Though where I was I did not know,Profound and subtle things I learned;Nor can I say what I discerned,For I remained uncomprehending,All knowledge transcending.

Of peace and holy truthIt was knowledge to perfection,Within the depths of solitudeThe narrow path of wisdom;A secret so profoundly hiddenThat I was left there stammering,All knowledge transcending.

I was so caught up and rapt away,In such oblivion immersed,That every sense and feeling layOf sense and feeling dispossesed;And so my mind and soul were blessedTo understand not understanding,All knowledge transcending.

The one who truly reaches thereNo longer in himself remains,And all that he had known at firstSeems base and mean to him, and wanes;So great a knowledge then he gainsThat he is left uncomprehending,All knowledge transcending.

His understanding is the less endowed—

The more he climbs to greater heights—To understand the shadowed cloudWhich there illuminates the night;Thus he who comprehends his sightWill alway stay not understanding,All knowledge transcending.

This knowledge through uncomprehendingIs of such supreme dominionThat by learned men contendingIt is never grasped or won;Their learning never lights uponThe knowledge of unknowing,Beyond all knowledge going.

And that exalted wisdomIs of such a high degree,It can be undertakenBy no art or faculty;Who knows the way to masteryBy a knowledge that unknowsTranscending ever goes.

And if you wish to hear,This highest knowledge is conceivedIn a sense, sublime and clearOf the essence of the Deity;It is an act of His great ClemencyThat keeps us there uncomprehending,All knowledge transcending.

~ Translated by Gerald Brenan. The original Spanish and several English translations appear in the Theosophical Publishing House

Last Supperby Art Ticknor

Surrounded by friends one last time,No more arrivals or departures.Movement ceases,Silence prevails.A solitary tearHalts on its downward journey.Sorrow blends into joy.Knowing melts into unknowing.Color recedes with the observer.Anxiety fades into Peace.

Nirvana Project Managementby Art Ticknor

The path to nirvana is a seemingly complex undertaking. So the question may come up about whether we can apply modern project management techniques such as Critical Path Analysis (CPA) to expedite our success.

CPA was developed in the 1950s to control large defense projects, and it has been widely used since then to plan a project's tasks, relate their

interdependencies, and monitor their scheduled completion. With the project to find or recognize what we are at our core, however, we don't know what it will take to accomplish it. In fact, the goal itself isn't known. The best we can do is to get an idea of what it's not. And, in fact, the entire process is not one of construction but of deconstruction. We find or become the truth by retreating from illusion and delusion.

There is a path, but we will not know whether we're truly on it or off on meandering byways. Richard Rose described this path as a ladder, the next rung of which wouldn't be known until we are standing on it. He laid out an approach for climbing this "Jacob's Ladder" in an inspired small book titled The Psychology of the Observer. In the story of Exodus, Jacob dreamed one night of a ladder set upon the earth, reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and descending it. Our climb up the ladder of self-definition is one of retreating from untruth about the

self, using the mind to understand the mind and, if successful, to go beyond it. The reason this retreat is possible is that messages from the core of our being are coming down the ladder into the conscious mind. If the core of our being is referred to as Light, the messengers coming from the center to the periphery, where we're currently caught in a hypnotic trance, are like photons—not fully subject to the restrictions of space-time relativity.

The modification to Critical Path methodology that we need to make in order to apply it to our quest for self-definition—for realizing what we truly are, and the unimaginable Full Satisfaction that results—is to focus on the critical. We will need to monitor what we're doing, and whether we're living our life in a way that's aimed at understanding that life, with ongoing careful evaluation. There will be crucial, decisive forks in the road where choices will either hasten or retard our progress. The more we clarify our values and convictions, the more we'll be capable of sustaining a nuclear chain-reaction when something bigger than our individuality—Francis Thompson called it "The Hound of Heaven" in a moving poem by that name—has withdrawn all the props that hold that artificial self-identity in place and has given us the opportunity of completing the journey back to the point we've never, in reality, left.

Q: So is it attitude, is it hard work, is it luck? ... I continually feel that my spiritual path is one of hurry up and wait. Do this, try that. If that doesn't work try this. It's not what you do but that you do something, but you must meditate and conserve energy. But wait, what's with all this effort? That's my problem, too much effort :)

Oh well, at least I get to vent out my frustration. I feel better now.

A: Attitude? Hard work? Luck? The truth is, we don't know.

If you stand by the door long enough, it may open.If you knock loudly enough, it may open.If you pound hard enough, it may open.The door is behind you; you're looking away from it.The door is already open, but you can't see it.The non-self cannot see the Self.The non-self is all that is knowable.The doorway is the threshold between the knowable and the Unknowable.The Unknowable cannot make the transition known.The more we realize that the Unknowable is what we desire,And the more we lose our desire for the knowable....

Frustration is good. Action increases frustration. Spiritual action = questioning. Questioning occurs both by thought and feeling.

Of Goats and Gatesby Art Ticknor

First, I'd like to try to convey a general perspective:

•You're here, conscious of individual existence, for a purpose, and that purpose is to know yourself.

•You are not [your name goes here]. You are what you always have been and always will be. You are that which was never born, never dies.

•You couldn't accomplish your purpose if the happy button were stuck in the "on" position. Your unhappiness, suffering, misery are the great gift that will lead to Full Satisfaction.

•Desiring an end to suffering now, desiring instant satisfaction, is good. Knowing yourself is instantaneous. Beyond time.

•Pursuing self-knowing—your job, your real purpose—as a conscious goal and as your life-priority is surrendering to the Self. (Thy will, not mine, be done.) Your self-consciousness, your I-amness, is the clue that can be followed back to the Source.

•[Your name goes here] will surrender in the final analysis. It can be done the hard way or the easy way, but in the end, every individual is going to lose the battle. Thankfully.

Now, to get a little more specific, I'll tell you about my experience while living on a farm many years ago. There was a herd of goats there, whose job (although they didn't know it) was to keep the multiflora rose bushes and other brush from taking over. In the summer they roamed freely, although we had the farm fenced in sections to keep them in and to keep the wild dogs out. In the winter, they would go out foraging in the day, but then we kept them in a barn at night and fed them. Getting them back to the barn might mean having to get them through a fence gate, depending on where they were. Trying to herd them through the gate from behind was an exercise in futility. They'd pretend they didn't see the gate and would run one way or the other along the fence line rather than go through. The only way to get them through before they were ready (if they ever were) was to be on the other side of the gate with some corn—like candy to them—in a can and to rattle it around to get their attention. Then they'd rush through the gate, stampeding to see who could get through first, entirely willing to trample you down to get at the corn.

The moral of the story: The teacher can't push us through the gate. The Self entices us through when we realize it's The Way to satisfy our greatest desire.

Our Purpose by Art Ticknor

Like the buds on an apple tree, we are parts of something bigger than ourselves. And our purpose is part of a larger purpose.

The apple tree plays its role in the cosmic symphony, interwoven in an intricate network of mutual existence. The buds are designed to flower, out of which come fruit and seeds to continue the cycle of the apple tree and its cosmos. That is their ultimate purpose.

The fact that we are created to believe that we are separate from That which created us and with a yearning to return to that Home provides us with a clue to our ultimate purpose. The buds on the human tree have the potential to blossom, to become aware of That which created them and to realize their essential identity with That. Then those flowers produce seeds of continuance whose purpose is to "feed My lambs ... feed My sheep."

Richard Rose on Controlling the Mind~ From a presentation at the June 2006 TAT meeting by Art Ticknor

Discussing the technique that Richard Rose laid out in the final section of "The Psychology of the Observer" for bringing the mind under control:

I'd like to begin with a little survey, to get your opinion:

Q: Do you feel you have some control over the mind? If so, what %, or what % of the time? If not, is your mind otherwise controlled? Out of control?

This presentation is organized around some key phrases from "The Practical Approach" section of the book. Here's a test you can try. And while you're doing or not-doing that, here's a question to consider:

Q: "Do you think, or do you think that you think?"

That's a brain-teaser that Rose commented on in the Meditation Paper. We identify with our thoughts and desires as if they were our proud possessions, or sometimes our demons.

Q: Do you intentionally start thinking when you awake in the morning? Can you stop thinking? Try it now....

Q: "How does a person realize he or she is not really thinking? We can't stop thinking or start thinking, and we can rarely choose the subject material or the direction of thought."

Q: Do you intentionally select your thoughts? Your feelings? Other objects of consciousness? Do you select the opposing fears and desires that cause your internal conflicts? Do you select your reactions to the above? Do you select their recording and recall?

1. in search of awarenessHave you ever thought of the search for whatever it is you're looking for in terms of a "search of awareness"? My feeling is that if a person pursues whatever he's searching for deeply enough, it will become a search for the source of his awareness. Rose equated that with an investigation of the self—of the real self or Ultimate Observer. He also referred to it as defining the self.

2. romance & make-believeWhat do romance or make-believe have to do with controlling the mind? If you watch a child at play, you'll see that we begin indulging in these moods at an early age ... and they stay with us for decades. These particular moods control our minds and encourage a great deal of unrealistic thinking. Rose comments that most people "cast their lives away almost wantonly." Have you observed that?

3. freedom from facing oneself (bad)Freedom has the connotation of being good. If a person is drawn to meditation, I assume it's because of a dissatisfaction they're trying to neutralize. Such dissatisfaction results from not knowing the self, and to know the self, we have to face the self. But is that what the self really wants? And is there a technique for doing it—or are techniques used to procrastinate doing it?

Rose wrote that we need a system that will allow the student to really think, perhaps for the first time. His conviction was that posture doesn't matter. Walking may be best. The important thing is to spend a prescribed period of time alone each day in some manner.

4. excessive indulgence of the appetites (good)Indulgence has the connotation of being bad, but it's often the initial catalyst for real self-analysis. You might think it would begin with an adolescent fear of death or the shock of rejection, but generally that doesn't lead to a questioning of what's alive and facing death. It's informative to observe the effect of too-muchness on the body and mind. Rose advised that it also pays to observe others' attitudes toward us and to note the effects of their appetites on their health and peace of mind.

5. destined to do mighty things"Almost every young man thinks that he is an outstanding creature, that is destined to do mighty things...."

6. intense appreciation of the selfHe has an "intense appreciation of the self as being unique and of extreme importance to the world"—and typically treats his "family as being secondary or implementive."

Q: Sound familiar?

Being successful in one of the life games (e.g., fame, wealth, knowledge; see Robert DeRopp's Master Game for a table of object games and metagames) might complicate this delusion, but in any case life is organized to provide what Rose termed "afflictions to the individuality sense" that will challenge this vanity. Life is generous in handing out those incidents, so it's a question of whether we use them in our search for meaning.

7. dynamic search for the permanent centerWhat would propel you to a dynamic search for the permanent center of yourself? The bhakti mystic has a feeling for it (Love). The idealist has a desire for it (Truth). The dissatisfied have a longing for it (Reality, Peace, etc.).

What currently prevents it? Hesitation, playing it safe, trying to appease all the desires and fears—that's the mode of procrastinating it. The core reason: the pride of individuality.

8. lonely in the face of infinityMany people feel lonely, and fear of dying alone is a common fear. These are both symptoms of the recognition that we're facing the unknown, infinity. The only comfortable view in the face of infinity comes from the seat of non-transience.

9. aware that something is awareYou appear to be a separate individual. Your thoughts are not the same thoughts as your neighbor's. Your inner struggle is not the same as your neighbor's. "Something in [your] consciousness is aware of [your] struggle. Something is aware, and [you are] aware that something is aware."

Q: You are aware that you desire. But do you desire, or are you caused to desire? Do you select things as objects of desire—such as picking the type of

person for a mate—or "is all that selection determined by computerizations more intricate than [your] conscious mind is capable of having?"

10. something within you....Something within you "urges and inhibits." Sometimes it causes you to take risks. At other times it results in caution. Something in you causes you to "enter joyously into the game of life"—and at times makes you "long for death."

"And yet all of these things seem to form a pattern, which makes for some sort of destiny. Something within [you], if [you] allow it to, will make decisions for [you], take care of [your] children, and condition [you] for dying when the time comes."

That something is the decision-making program at work. Rose labeled it "the Umpire," which will make perfect sense to you if you see it in operation.

11. no consideration for your spiritual hopesWhen we observe the decision-making at work, we see that it's apparently programmed to follow a blueprint, a plan of nature, which makes any consideration for our spiritual hopes secondary. It doesn't discourage religion, but it "encourages all religions which encourage nature."

12. disciplines for spiritual survival"... and it draws the blinds of drowsiness over the minds that speculate too long on immortality and the disciplines for guaranteeing spiritual survival."

The quest for permanence is a game that's contra-ego and contra nature's hypnosis. ("We stagger soberly between the blades of the gauntlet with recklessness and conviction, but we pick our way through the tulips with fear and trepidation because the trap of the latter is sweet." Richard Rose, "Notes on Between-ness," The Direct-Mind Experience.)

13. self-aware yet painfully subject to a termination of that consciousnessRose points out that we can assume that there must have been some purpose in creating individuals who are "self-aware yet painfully subject to a termination of that consciousness." But the question must remain unanswered for now because:

14. one job at a time"The energy and commitment of the observer can only handle one job at a time"—that job being defining the self, answering the "Who am I?" question.

"Who is living? Who is faced with oblivion?.... Who is asking the question? Who is it that observes the glassy fragments of thought and self, which if sorted and properly arranged, will form some magic crystal ball that shall for all time answer our questions about our future?"

So we puzzle over this unseen self, trying to put the fragments together into some satisfying answer—typically with these results: We get frustrated, angry, discouraged, self-pitying ... whatever negative emotions our personality has learned to use to reinforce its tenuous position.

Douglas Harding, in Look for Yourself: "How is it that we need all this prodding, all these warnings and earnest invitations and promises of infinite rewards, to persuade us to take a really close look at ourselves? Why don't all intelligent and serious people

make it their chief business in life to find out whose life it is?"

15. Is there an adverse force?

Rose: "Keep to the business of observing. When observation turns into a course of action in regard to adversity, then a religion emerges. And when a religion is formed, dichotomy of the mind follows. In other words, observation is just looking until realization is reached. The only action that should be taken is some form of self-discipline to keep the focus of observation from wandering, or some change in the immediate environment to make thinking easier."

John Wren-Lewis ("Unblocking a Malfunction in Consciousness"): "One thing I learned in my former profession of science was the right kind of lateral thinking can often bring liberation from Catch-22 situations, provided the Catch-22 is faced in its full starkness, without evasions in the form of metaphysical speculations beyond experience."

Why control the mind?

There are some obvious practical advantages—doing chores or homework regardless of our mood, for example. But we're here to talk about the search for your awareness. And that's where the topic of meditation comes in. Productive meditation involves using the mind as a stick to stir the fire.

What meditation technique should you use?

•Theory: Self-inquiry is the fast track; devotion the slow path.

•Theory: "Seeing" is the fast, direct path, but we're often diverted at the cloverleaf junction into the way of the devotee, the way of the servant, or the way of the artist. (Douglas Harding, To Be and not to be [capitalized as on book cover].)

•Theory: "One should not think of [the Self] with the mind. Such imagination will end in bondage.... Enquiry into the Self in devotional meditation evolves into the state of absorption into the Self and leads to Liberation.... Because the ego in the form of the 'I-thought' is the root of the tree of illusion, even a tree is felled by the cutting of its roots." (Ramana Maharshi, "Self-Enquiry.")

•Theory: Most testimonies have come from people who have found the Truth through the path of feeling. Thus their advice commonly consists of stopping thought. The minority have gotten there through thinking. The fastest route is for the individual to hone whichever faculty—thinking or feeling—is more dominant. (Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Pathways Through to Space.)

•Theory: We have two tools to use—common sense and intuition. They need to be employed together, to check each other. (Richard Rose.)

Richard Rose's 4-step technique for controlling the mind ("I do not wish to leave the impression that there an exact number of steps but rather that things should be done with definite preparation and in proper sequence."):

1.The body has to come under control. Force it to sit ... outwit it by exposing it to tapes or reading, then go for a walk and allow whatever thoughts happen to come.

2.Establish an objective. First realize that thoughts happen on their own, each paving the way for the next. (It may take some "effortless" watching of the mind to reach that realization.) Insert our objective into the seemingly endless chain of thought-caused thoughts. We wish to scrutinize the self.

3.Avoid trying to view the self directly and objectively until the mind is placed under some control. The self is not something that can be imagined or visualized objectively, like a gold nugget. Don't try to visualize an Umpire (the decision-making process), for example. Wait until you know the mind well enough so that the workings we label as the Umpire become overwhelmingly manifest and the mind realizes that no other explanation of those workings is possible than to view it as an Umpire.

4.The fourth step begins by isolating the mind so that there is nothing else of importance to think about. Surround yourself with pertinent books, tapes, reminders. Make the commitment of step #2—a silent order to the computer that we prefer to think of nothing rather than tolerate rambling, irrelevant thoughts. Thoughts may stop by this technique of turning the head away from irrelevant thoughts. It's important to have a mental vector or philosophic direction established first.

Exercise: Think only of thought. (Discuss afterward.)

"Real concentration at its best is only a very artful way of allowing yourself to think along desired lines," Rose points out.

The four steps provide a framework for getting started, but eventually we come to a point where progress depends on insights gained from our introspection of the mind.

In the Psychology of the Observer, Rose has provided examples of how to go about the discovery of the Umpire and then of a Process Observer beyond the Umpire.

He tells us: "The Umpire is discovered by the recognition of polarity in all mundane things, including the mundane mind.... Such a somatic Umpire rules our life until we can build, synthetically, a philosophic Umpire, focused by our desire upon the self for its survival and definition...."

Poems read at the end of the above presentation

"Alone"

We're here todayworking togetherin hopes of acceleratingyour return ... recycling.

You fear being alonebecause it reminds you of somethingyou don't want to think about:that we die alone.

Jesus said:"Many stand before the door,but it is the Alonewho enters the bridechamber."

The word alonecomes from Middle English,a contraction ofall and one.

We are working togetherso that you can returnto your true stateof nonseparation.

"The River"

The Ohio River flowsalong where I walk most days.It begins in Pittsburgh,formed by the confluence

of two rivers there,then meanders for nearlya thousand milesbefore flowing into the

Mississippi, which in turnflows for about anothereleven hundred miles beforemerging into the ocean.

What is a river?Without the waterit is a dry abstraction,a mere concept.

A river with no water:no-river.A mind with no thought:no-mind.

The Final Hourby Art Ticknor

The underlying problem that plagues individual human existence is survival – or I should say non-survival. We suffer from a conviction of our vulnerability and the miserable feeling of unfulfilled desire that accompanies it. This vulnerability is reflected in our fear of failure or rejection, with their threat of overwhelming us. The ultimate failure or result of being overwhelmed is, we fear, our personal annihilation.

Fortunately, vulnerability is disposed of and desire is fulfilled when we recognize what we really are (which, mirabile dictu, is whole, complete and eternal). But that is just a possibility until discovered.

The project of discovery:

Recognizing what we truly are – which, as it turns out, is what we always have been and always will be; time is actually within us rather than vice versa – is merely a mental process of paring away the inessential to reveal the essence.

Ramana Maharshi reportedly accomplished the task within an hour as a teenager. He was walking home from school one day, was assailed by the feeling that he was dying, went home, lay down on the floor in his room, and asked himself what would remain when he died. The duration's about right, but most of the small number of people who pursue the project of self-discovery to its conclusion spend years or decades fooling around before getting down to that final hour. (A quarter century in my case.)

An example in microcosm of what gets in the way can often be seen in lesser projects. A friend was asked by another friend to proofread a book for publication. He jumped into it enthusiastically, even expanding the project to include page layout, font selection, writing style, and so on. He attacked the first chapter with a flurry of activity then got bogged down. When a deadline was eventually set for about three months from the beginning, he completed reviewing chapters two and three – altogether less than ten per cent of the book.

Similarly, once the search for self becomes a conscious project, we overcomplicate it, probably inflating it to match the size of our self-image. And then, being convinced that it's a potentially overwhelming task, we procrastinate working on it – making occasional flurries of dust when we're inspired then "forgetting" about it in the periods between inspiration, which tend to grow in duration.

The antidote is to work at the project each day. And if we miss a day, not using that as an excuse to prolong the rest period.

The work is really quite simple in a profound way. We feel the deep longing of unfulfilled desire as an emotional reminder. (This only takes an instant.) And we have a worded question, which probably changes over time, as an intellectual reminder. It will be some variation on the "Who or what am I?" question since our intuition tells us that salvation lies in self-definition. The work process, at heart, is one of observation, or looking.

That which we're looking for is what's looking. The subject of the search is never the objects that come into view, whether those objects of consciousness are apparently outside or inside. Thus paring away the inessential is a simple process of subtraction.

Each day we take up where we left off the day before. Eventually we will reach the core lie or pretense that generates the fog of illusion, and then the light of truth will dispel all vulnerability and unfulfilled yearning.

The Problem's not in the Transmissionby Art Ticknor

Who's to blame when we're unhappy,dissatisfied,malcontent?

It starts out being Mom or Dad,then other kids,the teacher,the boss,him or her,them,the Universe,God.

Some of us graduate to the next formand decide that the problem's within.So we try to change "ourselves"—our bodies or our mental characteristics—in order to get what we think will make us happy.

We may have temporary successes.The world runs smoother the more we know ourselves.But it's not sufficient, never enough.We want lasting peace,permanent peace of mind,permanence.

The list of culprits becomes narrower.We can't expect other people,themselves impermanent,to provide us with permanent anything—much less permanence itself.

So we have to blame the universe,God,fate,whatever put us here.

It's as if we were at the movies,or at home watching TV,and we're dissatisfied with the picture,upset about what's appearing on the screen.We can blame the producer,the director,the cast,the crew,the equipment—or, more generally, the quality and/or content of the transmissionof what's passing through our field of awareness.

Our life sucks, and the problem is in the transmission.

So, what can we do?We can acquiesce,accept our fate,and slide down the drain without protest.

Or we can shake our fist and curse the universe(or God if we're not staunch believers in No-God).

Or we can cajole God or the Powers-that-Beif we admit the possibility of such.

Or, if we're a bit more sophisticated,we can pray the "serenity prayer":asking for the courage to change the things we can change,the serenity to accept the things we can't,and the wisdom to know the difference.

And what might The Transmitter be telling usabout what we could changein order to find the lasting fullness we're looking forif our ears were open?

"Tune the receiver.The multisensory picture you're getting is picture-perfect.Every particle and every wave—every wavicle—is exactly as it's meant to bein order to get the message across.Life is a classroom.If you apply yourself, you'll get the lesson.And when you get it, you'll be amazedbeyond your wildest imaginings.Tune the receiver."

A poemby Art Ticknor

"Petition"

Our one father,Please remove the cloak of faulty beliefsAbout what you and what we are,Which prevents us from acknowledgingWhat you and we really are.

In a dream some friends and I were voicing some well-known prayer. After the 3rd line, everyone stopped & looked at me. I'd apparently gotten the words wrong. One of the friends asked me if I'd like to lead a prayer. I said no thanks, and he laughed at my response. As I awoke, I was having second thoughts about my response … thinking about a prayer I could construct for my friends. Above is the prayer that then composed itself for them.

Acceptance & Surrender, by Art Ticknor

We often see the truth before accepting the implications. Acceptance is another way of describing surrender. To accept the truth, we have to surrender a contrary belief.

If we observe children at play, we see that kids surrender a favorite toy when they become tired of it or when they see another one that looks more enticing. Our pet beliefs are like the toys of childhood that we don't want to let go of. Eventually we may tire of them or trade them for more appealing ones.

The final belief that prevents us from accepting the truth of what we are is the conviction that we are a separate something, an aware entity. If we look at or feel directly what we're looking out from, we intuit that it is the ground of awareness. In other words, what we are at the core of our being is awareness. But accepting that fundamental truth involves surrender of the core belief of separate I-amness. Getting to this final surrender is a struggle, a fight to the death. The trauma accompanying this ego-death varies in intensity depending on age and other factors, but describing the final self-realization or recognition as a death experience is a common denominator across centuries and cultures.

It may be possible to bypass a prolonged struggle and go directly to the final opposition of truth and belief, but it's more likely that there are secondary beliefs or self-identifications that will have to be seen through and accepted first. The secondary misidentifications take forms along the lines of: I am this body ... I am the thinker, the feeler, the experiencer ... I am the doer, the decider, the judge, and so on.

I met a student recently who was graduating from a top-flight engineering school and had been accepted in a Ph.D. program in computing and neuroscience on the west coast. During an earlier period in his undergraduate studies, he had realized that the self is merely a construct of the mind -- and that threw him for a loop for several months. Since then he's kept extremely busy -- a technique we use to avoid accepting implications -- and has determined on a life-direction of being able to bring scientific proof of his realization to the academic community.

His realization is a valid one, but a conclusion that the self doesn't exist is a faulty deduction. Buddha's comments on anatman, Bernadette Roberts's calling her awakening an experience of no-self, and the various descriptions of ego-death from self-realized individuals need to be understood as attempts to point to the truth by negating a universally held belief. When we discover or admit what we really are, we surrender our belief in individuality as our essence. The individual self exists as all things exist, in the sense of the Latin roots of the word, by standing outside of the Self. The individual exists as a projection of the Self, as an entity in a projected world of entities.

Upcoming book excerpt.

Beyond Relativity:

Transcending the Split Between Knower and Known

by Art Ticknor

[Chapter 1 excerpt]

1. Dissatisfaction

There's no set practice, route, or number of steps that you can follow to find your self – the self. Each individuality or personality is built up based on possible predispositions and life experience, and finding the self is a subtractive or reversal process.

Fortunately we don't have to undo all the learning, all the conditioning, and all our genetic dispositions in order to return to knowing our true state of being. But there is an unfolding, a process of disillusionment, that occurs as we see through our faulty beliefs about what we are. And like the dairyman notes of his cows, there are many paths back to the barn.

I've looked back at my particular path of unfolding by going through 26 years of journals kept between 1978 and 2004, and I've extracted some details for the beginning section of each of the following chapters. The message I hope that comes through: If this fellow can make the trip, anybody can do it.

What you're looking for is closer than you can imagine … closer than your breath, closer than thought or feeling. But if you think you know how close you are, or that you can gauge your progress, you may be fooling yourself. A better way to say that is that an outer part of you may be fooling a more interior part.

The critical factor that led to my success was perseverance. Persevering is difficult during periods where you're not inspired, and even more difficult during periods where you lose hope. But there is always a way … and it's often elusive in its simplicity. For example, my friend and mentor Richard Rose once advised: If you can't inspire yourself, find someone else to inspire.

WHAT CAUSES ACTION is irritation. We move toward acquiring what we desire and away from what we fear. The search for self is prompted largely by the dissatisfaction that goes with believing we are something that was born and is going to die—a thing apart, incomplete, vulnerable, and uncertain. There's a feeling that something's missing, that there's a hole in the center of our being. Coexistent with that deep want

is the desire to fill it. But try as we might, we find that nothing is completely and permanently sufficient.

We may go to extraordinary lengths to convince ourselves that the longing is no big deal, or that there's no way to really satisfy it, but we have to try to keep ourselves as distracted as possible to avoid feeling the deep longing, or as medicated as possible to numb the feeling.

Like all pain, the pain of dissatisfaction and unfulfilled longing is trying to tell us something … that there's a problem that needs attention. Trying to mask the symptom doesn't really help in the long run. Pain is a motivator, and the pain of existential dissatisfaction is trying to motivate us to look for wholeness, for completion.

MY MOTHER TOLD me, when I was a grown man with a family of my own, that I had uttered my first complete sentence standing at the screen door in our kitchen, looking toward the back yard: "I want out!" I carry a picture of that scene in my memory now, but I have no idea if it's an actual childhood memory or one that was conjured

up as an adult. In any case, and in retrospect, that demand became my silent mantra as an adult. Maybe even before that.

I did a fair amount of skiing when I was growing up near the Vermont border in upstate New York. There were occasional times when I would get a sense of great freedom while skiing down a hill. An even greater sense of freedom occurred in infrequent flying dreams. The night I met Richard Rose, at age 33, I experienced "walking on air." To me,

freedom was associated with not being attached to the earth. It was a particular feeling. And the problem was that it was 1) infrequent, and 2) transient.

I HAD A SHELTERED, physically comfortable childhood and parents who provided a stable and secure environment. But I had an increasingly miserable time from school age on, feeling anxious and uncomfortable in my own skin.

Despite gliding through high school with good grades, I flunked out of my first year in college, not having a clue about how to study effectively. Toward the end of that summer my girlfriend announced that she was pregnant – and I was delighted! I felt like I'd found a direction for my life for the first time.

Several months after our son was born, I experienced what I considered the first spiritual elevation of my life. Without any warning, one day while looking at my son the words formed in my mind: "Here's someone I'd like to see ahead of myself at the trough of life's goodies." In other words, I'd fallen in love with someone other than

myself. And the revelation simultaneously showed me the "before" condition: "I've been the most selfish person on the planet." I was 19 years old then and felt like I'd been blessed far beyond anything I deserved.

A FEW YEARS LATER, when I was nearing the completion of an undergraduate degree in math, I got hit with a mental bucket of cold water: I admitted to myself that I had no great talent for math and that to continue on with my sleepy plan to go to grad school and stay in academia wouldn't be honest to future students or myself. "I'll have to get a job and go to work eight hours a day five days a week for the rest of my life" struck me as a horrendously boring prospect.

But I took my responsibility to my wife and son seriously and turned my head away from the disappointment. At that time large corporations were starting to install computers to manage their finances, and I stumbled into the nascent field of computer programming for data processing. After a few years of working for my first employer I was distressed at not yet running the company or at least being one of the top executives – my belief in unlimited capability not yet having hit the wall of objective evaluation – and I signed on with a smaller company that was more dynamic in its use of technology.

Before I was 30 years old I was in charge of data processing for the second employer, managing a department of more than 30 people and a multimillion-dollar budget. I had a nice home, a wife and family of three children all of whom I loved dearly – but there was some missing purpose or meaning in my life.

I suffered through periodic bouts of intense dissatisfaction and frustrating attempts to identify what would ease the anguish, but for everything I contemplated I could mentally fast-forward to its attainment and realize, "No, that won't do it." I thought of those agonizing periods at the time as identify crises, although I had no idea why that label occurred to me. But in retrospect, it's exactly what was happening.

In order to ease the pain, I began self-medicating with alcohol, trying to keep a mild buzz on after work and on week-ends – a symptom of covert depression, I suppose. I could see no exit from my prison.

I still have the piece of paper where I wrote, on April 1, 1977, “What I want out of life”:

1. Self-realization (Watt, Leary, …)2. Self-employed3. Very informal life style (clothes, house, …)4. Compatible friends5. Provide great atmosphere for kids, other people to develop6. Integrated neighborhood7. Private room8. Experience commune living9. Travel

I also have the following notes I wrote for myself on 6/14/77 on the topic: “What

have I learned from the first 32 years of my life, and where am I going from here?” including:

Things I've learned about myself:

1. I'm basically a loner – not by choice, but by nature; I would like to have friends very much, but a combination of shyness and over-criticality of others keeps friendship from developing.

2. There's a big gap between my self-image and the person I think I should be; this is what causes my shyness with others – not wanting them to see the real me (fear of exposure).

3. The only things I'm really interested in are: a) Building a beautiful personal environment (architecture, landscape design,

interior design). b) Learning more about my self and actualizing my potentials.

4. I have a deep desire to experiment with human relations; whenever I read something like Rimmer's novels about premarital living groups or books about communal living, I want to experiment with the ideas immediately.

5. I have a romantic, unreal streak. When I think how out-of-touch I was as a child, I'm constantly surprised at how practical and realistic our kids are – very little fantasy compared to what I think my early years were like.

6. I have positive vibes toward ecstatic experiences (e.g., Leary and LSD, Yogananda and religious ecstasy) but have very little respect for institutionalized approaches.

7. I get great pleasure from holding our children when they are small (before they're say 8 to 10) and would always like to have a small child in the house..

Things I've learned about other people:

1. Other people are a mystery to me.

2. I want other people to like me.

3. I try to treat other people with respect and not make demands on them.

Things I've learned about life in general:

1. From a practical standpoint, I believe that my individual life is of finite duration and has no inherent purpose (other than being part of the scheme of species survival).

2. I like the idea that the individual may be an eye on the universe – that in

reality there is no separate self, that we're just manifestations of the universal and infinite whole.

Where am I going from here?

1. Since I'm “going” somewhere effortlessly, why not just relax and enjoy it? (Flow with the Tao.)

2. In my own low-investment way: a) Pursue Eastern philosophies and the art of meditation/consciousness

expansion. b) Find work that is satisfying.

ONE RAINY SUNDAY AFTERNOON in the spring of 1977 my wife and I had taken the kids to a local library, and she spotted a poster she thought I'd be interested in. It was about meetings of a Zen group at Ohio State University. I'd been reading Alan Watts, who popularized Zen in the US, and although I didn't understand what Zen was really about, something in me was fascinated by it. So I decided to check out the group at OSU.

I had done some graduate work in computer science there but was not in school at the time so wasn't in tune with the academic calendar, which ran on quarters. When I went to a meeting, it was during a quarter break and the meetings weren't in session. I think I forgot about it for a while then went again … with the same results. I called the university and talked with the faculty adviser, who said he didn't really know much more about the meetings than I did. I don't recall the details of my procrastination and forgetting, but some-thing in me wouldn't let up. It was nearly a year after seeing the poster when I finally attended a meeting of the Pyramid Zen group.

Based on my impression from reading Watts, I was expecting something like people in black robes sitting silently and staring at burning candles. What I found was a group of a dozen or so people sitting in a circle of chairs, talking … talking … talking. My reaction: "These people don't have a clue what Zen's all about." But after getting over my initial snit, I realized that they were talking about things I'd never heard anyone talk about (and hadn't come across in my decades of obsessive reading) and that I was deeply interested in.

THAT WAS IN 1978, when I was 33 years old. The Zen self-inquiry group had formed a few years earlier after students had heard a talk by Richard Rose. I became a regular participant, even spending several nights a week talking with some of the folks who were seriously pursuing a path to Truth or Reality and had rented a house in the campus area that they treated as an ashram, albeit one without a resident guru.

Living on Borrowed Time

There's the small problem of life and the big problem of life.

No one knows if they'll live to see another day. Is there a penalty for dying ignorant of what you really are? That's the big problem of life.

Then there's the relatively small problem of the quality of today's life. You're on the roller coaster ride of experience … not knowing why you're experiencing or what experience really is, experiencing less perceived control over experience the longer you live, afraid to look behind you (sensing the hound of heaven's incessant footsteps behind you), moving, always moving physically or mentally (afraid of staying still, of silence), procrastinating, always procrastinating.

There's no solid ground under your feet. Your feet are a projected belief … that can walk on 1,800-degree coals and not be burned. Is your entire life a hypnotic projection? What do you have that won't be taken away? At gut level, what do you want out of life? Why are you here?

Are you what you experience? Does experience define you? Are you relying on experience for your salvation or rescue? What if all experience is the flickering of shadows on the cave wall of mind? What if the dream of life ends before you awake? Where will that leave experience-defined you?

*

To & FroTo and fro

Heel and toeThe older I getThe slower I go.

*

Common-Sense Meditation by Art Ticknor

Everyone has a built-in longing for … well, check your own feeling and fill in the word or phrase that describes it best for you. I would say "completion." Or I might borrow Franklin Merrell-Wolff's phrase, "full Satisfaction."[1]

When a person realizes that no external pursuit or acquisition is going to provide true satisfaction, there's only one remaining possibility, and that's going within to find what one's searching for. Meditation is the process of going within, which ultimately leads to discovery of our real self – our true state of being – and the end of the feeling of being incomplete.

Going-within meditation involves backing away from faulty beliefs about one's identity. This requires becoming conscious of what you believe yourself to be and then looking for evidence that supports or denies those beliefs. The crux of the distinction between self and other, or self and not self, is the distinction between subject and object, between viewer and view. You're looking to know the knower, the subject – and anything that becomes an object of consciousness can immediately be disqualified. Since we're looking to know the knower, there's an obvious paradox here that can only be transcended if it's possible to go beyond relative knowing to a state of absolute being.

Rest and relaxation are necessary ingredients for a healthy life, but to be a process of self-inquiry, meditation needs to beconfrontational not restful. It also needs to be observational. Consider what a person may say when first asked what they believe themselves to be. They're likely to begin with something relational (I'm my parents' child, my spouse's partner, my child's parent, and so forth) or something they do (I'm a student, an employee, an employer, and so on). When reminded that those aren't self-definitions, they're likely to zero in on some variation of "I'm this body with its consciousness and memories." If they say: "I'm a soul" or "I'm a collection of molecules" it's going to be a long row for them to hoe, since they're afraid to face the facts of life and death and have buried their heads in the sands of wishful thinking.

Nobody wants to do the necessary work involved with self-definition, and everyone tries to find a way to skip directly to the expected reward. It doesn't come that way, though. Conceptually the going-within process is simple but ultimately unexplainable, since it relies on seeming accidents. Like learning algebra, for example, we struggle to comprehend whatx, the unknown, represents. Sometimes the answer comes in a flash, sometimes it just becomes intuitively obvious, and sometimes the aspirant never gets it.

When we "get" the algebra[2] of self-inquiry, we realize that we're looking for the self – and anything in the view is not the self. Therefore self-inquiry becomes a process of looking. Or, to use a more neutral term, observing. We're constructed to look outward, and the farthest out we generally identify as our self is the body. Our common sense tells us that even without our fingers or toes we'd still be here, and that agrees with the self-inquiry algebra law that what's in the view is not our essential self. But if we consider the part of the body from the neck up, doubt comes into play. Doubt, by the way, is our greatest ally in self-inquiry. Would I still be here if my head were lopped off? We may not be ready to test that observation yet. But why does that question arise? Because we're thinking about thinking. In other words, when observation moves inward a bit – like retracting the zoomed-out lens on our camera – we become identified with thoughts. If someone asks us if we can observe our thoughts, we may say no. But since we can remember some of our thoughts, that's a clue that thoughts are being observed and recorded even though we're not conscious of it.

Becoming aware that we're able to watch thoughts may come as an accident – as when we're caught up watching a film and suddenly remember we're sitting in a theater watching the film. When it occurs, the lens of our camera has receded back a step. We know then that we're not our thoughts.

Feelings are entangled with what we generally refer to as thoughts, and since they're often sensed as occurring in various body locations, we may need to go through a separate process of detachment from identification with them. A little investigation into the basic description of how the nervous system functions will show us that we perceive a feeling in much the same fashion as we perceive a tree: something affects a nerve ending near the surface of the body, which causes a series of electrochemical reactions to travel up the nerve pathway to the brain, where a picture of a tree or the sensation of a feeling mysteriously appears in consciousness. When we're talking about an emotion type of feeling, some stimulus had produced a reaction that may then be felt as located in some area of the body, but again the feeling appears mysteriously in consciousness. In any case, since they're observable, we're not our feelings. What then are we if not our thoughts or feelings and not our body (at least not parts that aren't essential to support consciousness)?

An irritation that keeps us looking for what we are, or a conscious strategy that fills in the gaps when irritation isn't present, is necessary to maintain the self-inquiry as it becomes more abstract. We may try to skip to consciousness itself as our self-definition, but if we do so we'll need to come back to something not as far within – and that's the belief in being the decider in charge of doing. Symptoms of this belief are statements we tell ourselves such as: "If I don't make the right decision, there will be a price to pay," and "If I stopped making decisions, all action would come to a halt."

Generally we don't become aware of decisions unless there's prolonged conflict between various desires and fears. But if someone asks us, or we ask ourselves, why we did or

didn't do something, we can often remember parts of a decision-making process that led to the witnessed results. The fact that we remember some of the details indicates that they're being observed and recorded even when we're not particularly conscious of it. But this indirect evidence may not be sufficient to convince our self-inquiry algebra that we're not doing it, that we're not the decision-making process. It may require an accidental retraction of the camera lens so that we consciously view decision-making as it's occurring in order for the fact to sink in that the process is observable and, therefore, not us. What does that leave then in our bag of beliefs about what we are? Are we ready to tackle consciousness itself?

If we define ourselves as consciousness, then we're faced with saying that we're something that comes and goes with the waking state and the dreaming state. This is liable to lead us back to our belief that we're the body, with its waking, dreaming and non-dreaming sleep states. But to believe that requires that we take somebody else's word for the body's existence during sleep. And other people, with their testimony, are appearances in our consciousness. Since we know nothing directly about their existence, they have the same merits as any other objects of consciousness – our thoughts, for example. No matter how believable, their testimony is not acceptable evidence in the court of self-inquiry algebra.

To find what we're looking for, which could also be described as ultimate certainty about what we are, we cannot rely on any external authority, no matter how much value we place on it. We must become our own authority. When we have peeled away the outer layers of what we once believed ourselves to be and are left with a belief in "this individual consciousness," we seem to come up against an impenetrable barrier. Is it possible to go any further within?

I can see that I'm not my thoughts or feelings and that I'm not the decision-maker or causal agent of my body's actions (since I can observe thoughts, feelings, and decision-making). If I'm my body with its consciousness, then I'm something that was born and is going to die. I have a feeling, which might be wishful thinking or it might be intuition, that I'm not going to cease existing – although I have to admit that I can't actually conceive of nonexistence. The closest I can come is to imagine a bodiless awareness with no

sensation or perception, perhaps limited to endless memory replay or even witnessing a blank screen. Even the state of dreamless sleep is beyond my conscious imagination. So let me come back to consciousness as the only object of continued self-inquiry. What can I observe of consciousness?

Since consciousness appears to come and go, I can deduce that it's similar to a kitchen appliance. I can also inductively reason that something switches it on and off, and it has a power source that energizes it. Self-inquiry then might lead me to ask myself what is the source of consciousness. That very question latched onto my mind one time when I was on a solitary retreat. It stayed with me for a couple days, being the first thought on my mind when I awoke in the morning, the last thought as I went to sleep at night, and a recurring thought throughout the day. And an answer came to me one afternoon as I sat down on a tree stump in the woods. It came in the form of a simple vision or picture in my mind, where I saw that I was connected to something bigger than myself at the end of a long string. The picture satisfied the question, which then evaporated.[3]

Another clue about consciousness didn't occur to me until years later. The reason I was identified with the body and its consciousness, both in its dreaming and waking states, was that in addition to being conscious, I knew that I was conscious. That self-consciousness, with its associated fears as well as prides, didn't appear until a few years after the body's birth. So there are two observable facts: I feel or believe that I'm what's conscious – what's looking outward and is aware of the cosmos, the exterior of this body, its thoughts, feelings, decision-making, and so on – and I'm also what's aware of that outward-looking awareness. This second me is inward looking. I can say that I'm a composite of the outward looking and the inward looking, but that's at the conceptual level. At the level of observation, I'm one or the other at any moment. Either I'm aware of being what's looking outward or I'm aware of being what's looking inward (or maybe remember that I was just, an instant before, one or the other). Thus I firmly believe, although it may be hard to admit to myself, that there are two me's. But I also believe that to be nonsense, that there's only one me.

If you persist with self-inquiry, you'll arrive at a final opposition or contradiction in your beliefs about what you are. Continued persistence in the face of the seemingly insoluble final opposition will burn out or blow out the resistance circuitry that prevents individual consciousness of awareness. The power source – what you really are – has always been self-aware, and now by some mysterious discontinuity, the appliance becomes a conscious mirror of self-awareness.

A Practical Guide

Establish a daily meditation time. Establishing and maintaining a daily meditation habit may be your biggest battle. "How much time?" you may be thinking. How important to you is knowing what you are, of finding completion, of transcending life and death? An hour, for example, is 6% of a day in your waking life. What investment is pursuit of life's highest goal – with no guarantee of success – worth to you?

Self-inquiry meditation can be done sitting or walking. Lying down generally leads to sleep. It works best to find a place where there's no distraction. It may take some time before you build a reservoir of mental energy to make productive use of the time without

becoming lost in thought for extended periods. As for any worthwhile goal, energy needs to be conserved from other activities and channeled into self-inquiry. Meditating after a meal is generally tough because brain activity is being affected by digestion. These are a few of the factors that you'll need to experiment with to find out what helps and what hinders self-inquiry.

When you begin each meditation period, remind yourself why you're doing it. If you don't remember your worded goal (to know the Self, become the Truth, or however your phrase it), feel the feeling that propels the search – the hole in the chest, the longing. Then recall where you ended up the previous day. A journal helps greatly so that you're not dependent on a memory that's subject to painting the picture erroneously. The journal should document what beliefs you have about what you are, which ones you've worked on and have seen through, and which one you're currently investigating.

Beliefs about what we are aren't all that unique, but typically we haven't tried to put them into definite form. Working with others can be tremendously useful in bringing the beliefs into view and in questioning them. The basic operation during meditation is one of looking. We look (or whatever sensory analogy makes sense to you) until the belief is verified or invalidated. Thinking about what you see and your feelings about it are more material for observation.

Finding the real self is looking until what's looking is known.

Work diligently for the beauty of working, but don't strain. It's a fascinating mystery to solve. Look with light-hearted curiosity. Look for insights into your behavior. Look (feel, listen, etc.) then relax. It's the most natural thing in the world.

[1] From his magnificent poem "Nirvana" in the autobiographical Pathways Through to Space.

[2] The word comes from the Arabic al-jabr, (the science of) reuniting.

[3] When my friend Dan G. read this essay, he asked me why it was a long string that separated me from my source. I hadn't thought about that before, but my immediate response was that I wasn't ready at the time to see how closer than close that source-self is.

I Am Always Right Behind You

by Art Ticknor I had been searching consciously for my self-definition since meeting Richard Rose in 1978. The paradigm for finding the self that I'd been working in was one of the self being inside, the observer, with the non-self being outside, the observed. As introspection broadened my view, the dividing line between inside and outside became progressively more interior. First thoughts and then decision-making and other mental processes became observable and therefore outside, not-self. I no longer defined myself as the thinker or the decider, having peeled off the false-identifications until what was left was the conviction of being an undefined but separate observer-self with no attributes. In October 2003 I wangled an invitation to meet with Douglas Harding in his home outside Ipswich, England. His first words to me were: "Your job isn't to become Douglas Harding or anyone else -- it's to become yourself, your true self." On my third and last day there, he invited a couple of his long-time students to come and participate in a mini-workshop. He did his tube experiment (see the experiments section of www.headless.org for a description) with me as his partner, and I had a very clear vision of what it was I was looking out from. This vision produced the conviction that everything observed was inside me, and for the following six months I could flip back and forth between the contradictory inside-outside paradigms, seeing each one as equally true. I made a second visit to the Hardings in February 2004. On my return I purchased a copy of his Little Book of Life and Death. When I read the Prologue, it left me with a strong desire to get more serious than I had yet become, and I hoped the mood would last until my scheduled retreat at the beginning of May. The following notes are from that week-long retreat.

Isolation 2004 I spent the week from Monday 5/3 through Monday 5/10 in a cabin at Listening Point, a collection of three hermitages in a wooded area on the property of a Benedictine monastery just east of Erie, PA. Douglas Harding's Little Book of Life and Death -- the Prologue in particular -- had triggered a desire to really get serious a month or two earlier. Along with this, I had a growing sense over the preceding months that I was running faster and faster to avoid facing something. I began the isolation retreat with two days of fasting, water only, cutting off the planned third day due to discomfort and the shortness of the retreat. On Wednesday evening I began drinking other liquids and stayed on that plan for the rest of the period. On Thursday I was feeling much better and began taking walks during the day, one of which was across the main road that divided the property and down to the shore of Lake Erie.

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By Friday my physical vitality had revived. I had several periods of quiet contemplation and began getting inspirations for personal and group work. I went through the first four of Harding's "tests for immortality" in the above book and had no trouble seeing what the tests were aimed at. On Saturday I went back over the four tests more thoroughly, with the idea of distinguishing very clearly what I saw versus what I didn't see in those exercises on in-seeing. I also reread the sections in Harding's On Having No Head titled "The Barrier" and "The Breakthrough." I regretted not having a copy of the transcript of Franklin Merrell-Wolff's "Induction" talk with me so that I could compare his material on the ego with Douglas's. A doubt that troubled me at this point was on how I could distinguish what I actually saw inwardly from what my imagination might create, suspecting the ego's ability to confuse the latter with the former. As an example, I could see that there was an awareness watching images on a blank screen or featureless background. But I couldn't see whether this awareness was self-aware or whether there was another observer separate from it. My concept of an observer implied (unwittingly) the existence of a thing, so if this space or no-thing is the ground of all things, then it would include any separate observer-thing. Thus the awareness as self-aware seemed reasonable. But then I was not aware of this awareness during dreamless sleep, so it seemed possible that it was a limited consciousness dependent on the existence of my physical organism and not the "true awareness" that people throughout history had discovered as being the essential self. My tentative conclusion was that it may well be true that this self-aware capacity is what I am, but the ego was not likely to ever accept its own non-existence or subservient position without some catalytic shock. During further looking I saw that this featureless capacity must be unique -- i.e., there could be only one shared by all of us. There was a great deal of additional mentation that occurred when going through each of the four tests carefully, which I won't go into here. My summary notes for Saturday were as follows. I see that: 1. I'm the featureless space in which all thing (thoughts, fingers, other creatures, scenery, etc.) occur. I first saw this clearly as a result of Douglas's doing the tube experiment with me when I had visited him last October. 2. This featureless capacity is: > Boundless > Motionless (no coming or going, e.g.) > Timeless (in terms of no time at the center) > Unchanging (and unaffected by the seeming changes it reflects/projects, including the birth and death of Art Ticknor) > No-thing > The First (and Only) Person (meaning the I AM)

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3. "I am That" (i.e., Nothingness) I don't yet see that: 1. I am also Everything (as the tests point to) -- i.e., all the things that appear on and disappear from the screen. But I do see that all things are within Me, and must be projected from Me. I felt that I was changed and forever unchangeable thanks to Douglas and his tests for immortality.

* It had started raining Saturday afternoon and continued throughout the night. I expected to sleep well, making up for lack of sleep the previous night. But I didn't get to sleep until around 3:30 and awoke around 7:30. It was overcast most of Sunday, but the sun came out late in the afternoon, raising my hope that I could see the sunset over Lake Erie, which I had left for the last night. I noted in my journal on Sunday evening that Sunday had been an "unplanned transition day" from the relaxed but intense focus of Friday and Saturday to the expected end of the retreat on Monday. I also recall feeling "antsy" all day, up through and including my 8 P.M. walk to the lake. At 9 P.M. I noted the following: Have been sitting not doing anything since I got back to the cabin around 8:30. Great! This is something I have never been able to do as long as I can remember, always having to have some distraction to occupy the time. Found myself looking into what I look out from spontaneously, as has happened a couple times earlier today. Just occurred again as I finished tea, moved from the kitchen table and sat in a chair in the living room. This might have been a deeper glance, for it became obvious that what I'm looking out of is Self-aware -- that there's no "little person" inside my head watching a movie screen. The screen is self-aware. There can only be one observer -- and that's IT. I -- the Screen -- am seeing pictures that I create and project. And one of those pictures is this body with its thoughts and feelings and sense of individual identity. So, yes, I'm not just Nothing. I'm also Everything. When I attempt to look, the question: "What am I looking out from?" pops into my head, and that seems to be the open-sesame. Then at 10:12: This creature moves from the chair to the kitchen table, to record what has occurred over the past hour. His hand writes, not knowing how it knows. His memory is somewhat sketchy, so he will see how much of what occurred comes back. I say "he," but he is really Me. Well, as real as a shadow gets. I have created this one -- a tableau of events, a story -- and projected it so that he

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thinks he's alive, experiencing events over time. Experiencing his "inner" and "outer" changes as well as the changes in his environment. One of the occurrences in the tableau of tonight's realization was the realization that I -- his newly found I -- created him ("this creature sitting in the chair...") and projected him. Then he thought of the nice old nun, Sister Phyllis, who's in charge of hospitality here -- and realized that he/I had created her to think that she is alive. And then he/I felt the love I have for My creations -- and he/I felt the poignancy of that creature's belief that she is a separate being who was born alone and is going to die alone. And he wept for her. And then he/I realized that he (this creature) had really felt for the first time. Then this creature realized that he/I had also created the projected story [what he knew of it] of his friend SN, and of his friend BC, and of Richard Rose, and of Douglas Harding. He thought of seeing the SN-creature and, with a grin, saying to him: "I created you!" And he thought of MC, another of his/My creatures -- and instead of the previously critical, let-me-correct-you attitude, he/I now considered him with love and concern. And then a current-time reflection: He/I just took a pee-break then heated water for another cup of tea. Everything is the same and yet somehow slightly -- no, extraordinarily -- different. He had a thought that has escaped him, so he/I went back to stand by the stove, and memory returned it: "I can see now why Richard Rose thought he might have been crazy (after his self-realization)." This creature is questioning whether he's gone off his rocker, too. And he sees, too, why BC may have wanted to wait for a few days after his self-realization before saying anything, to be sure the change was permanent -- because he's thinking the same thing. This creature's brain feels like it's been fried (he thinks...). He took his first sips of tea -- and immediately realized why Douglas Harding says drinking is like pouring liquid into a great hole. And now he's thinking about Sr. Phyllis again -- and how he'd like to hold her hand, and tell her: "I couldn't have said this before yesterday, but God is closer to you than your breath or your heartbeat -- and He loves you. You are his precious child." And this creature is crying again -- he doesn't know why (he's feeling His love). I am feeling My love through this creature -- and he weeps. And this creature wondered if his friend BC was aware of what was occurring here. And I turned his body toward NC, and I commanded Bob's attention. (11:00 P.M.) And now he's thinking about tomorrow's self-inquiry meeting in Pittsburgh. And the thought comes to him: "I created these creatures and their stories, as I created this creature, and the stories include the ‘right' words being said at the proper place in the play."

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The spontaneous word is better than the planned word. (This doesn't negate the value of planning.) This creature (Art T.) is hanging out of me. Dan [one of the regular participants at the Pittsburgh meetings]: you are hanging out of your creator. He has created you to think you're alive. The end of worry comes when you turn your attention toward what you are looking out from -- the real you -- and you will see that your position is impregnable. You are the observer -- but the observer is not a thing. It's a self-aware no-thing.

* Notes from Monday: Went to bed at 11:45 Sunday night. This creature felt something like a switch thrown sometime after falling asleep and immediately awoke -- time 1:45. Lay in bed hoping to fall back asleep; got up to pee; lay back down and checked the clock-radio: 1:45! Watched it for a long time and it finally changed to 1:46. Couldn't fall asleep and the voltage (?) in its inner ear (?) became so uncomfortable that it got up. Q: Do you know yourself? A: Yes. Q: Who are you? A: I am not a who. I am a no-thing. And everything. Q: Where are you? A: I am here -- but where I am, here is everywhere. (And nowhere.) When you are with Him (your creator), you are not two. Later Monday, before leaving Listening Point: Finally went back to bed around 3:30 AM. Awoke around 7:30. Now 9:00 -- have showered and put on clean clothes to go for breakfast (near the Interstate). Awoke with the ringing in my inner ear -- still there. Thinking typically gets in the way of observing. It's not necessary to fight it. Relax into the looking. (This may be a key -- to put forth effort then allow for conditions that let the mind relax. Mr. Rose says something about that at the end of the Temptation paper.) For this mind, isolation retreats have provided the only conditions where relaxation of the mind occurs. Verses from 5/10/2004: I am always right behind you But turn around and you won't see me I am never not with you. Why aren't you always with me?

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I am at the center while you stay at the periphery I am there, too, but you won't find me there. When you turn round the center stays behind you Stand still while turning your gaze around and look at what you're looking out of. * Are you looking for love? Love on the periphery is partial and fleeting When you are with me We are not two -- and I am Love Absolute. Are you afraid of dying? I created you to think you are living Return to Me here, at the center and find your undying Self. Are you pursuing understanding? It's a path to Truth But conceptual understanding is of the periphery To return to the center is a subtractive process, leaving behind the pride of knowing. * Looking for love? Keep looking and it will find you It may not be what you expect but it will be satisfying beyond your imagining. * Forget what you're looking for? That may be a good sign. Keep looking.

* Retrospective note, September 2005: When my conviction of being a separate observer-thing was burned out or blown out during that Sunday night in May 2004, the understanding that came to the mind was: "Art T. was never alive." I had expected that all thought would stop before the identification with the mind was broken, but in my case the mental activity continued without

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interfering with the observing. And it took considerable, repeated staring at what I was looking out from before the mind admitted or accepted the truth of what was being observed. It was some months later before the mind became comfortable with the fact that conviction is within the mind and always subject to doubt, whereas knowing that what you truly are is beyond the mind, in fact the source of mind, is an unquestionable Unknowing. This is not something that can be captured by thought or feeling but, as Merrell-Wolff phrased it, is a knowledge by identity -- by realizing your complete oneness with what you're looking out from. You can't discard your conviction of individuality. It has to be taken away by shock or erosion. And when that happens, there won't be any regret. When people first asked me about how I was different and whether all the years of effort were worth it, I sometimes gave flippant responses. When you lose the faulty conviction of individuality and realize that what you are is a self-aware, immortal no-thing, it seems absurd to try to explain that to someone who thinks you're the body-image that appears in their consciousness. But there are noticeable effects on the mentality of Art T. who doesn't exist. The most dramatic change is that the feeling of neediness is no longer there. I recently recalled a remark attributed to Gautama Buddha that I'd heard or read long ago about how the ridgepole of the house had been broken. I looked it up: Through countless births I wandered, seeking, but not finding, the builder of the house. I have been taking birth in misery again and again. O builder of the house, Thou art now seen! Thou shalt build no house again. All thy rafters are broken. Thy ridge-pole is shattered. My mind has attained the unconditioned. Achieved is the end of craving. Attaining the unconditioned is what occurs when the individuality-sense is blown out during the conscious state. And the result is exactly what Gautama stated: the end of craving.

I Am Always Right Behind You Follow-up Correspondence, by Art Ticknor

On May 21, 2004, Art responded to a series of questions from AP, a TAT Foundation member and good friend. The following email correspondence provides a deeper insight into Art’s Experience.

* I had sent the notes from my isolation retreat to several friends, including AP. Her response included the following questions: • is mind really the bridge that you need to cross over...what does it mean... • was Art really never alive....what about this body suit we are wearing... • does that inner eye turn away from this view and look back...is there an inner eye that

can look at itself... • what is God......what does he/she feel like.... • what is the small ego of Art doing these days.... • do you think i'll lose this separate self some day.... • what is this no-thingness/every-thingness that people write about...what did you find... My response follows. Dear friend, Glad to hear your reaction. Both KP and JM had the same reaction. In fact, J. said she grinned the whole time she read the isolation notes. That's probably the Joy in thee that's the same as in me and all god's little ones. Here goes with responses to your questions. Don't worry too much about the words. I think the important thing is to pick up a feeling about what needs our attention next (in addition to the bambinos...:) is mind really the bridge that you need to cross over...what does it mean... > I think mind is what keeps us focused outward, identified with what we see outside ourself (creations of our Self). > In my case, I didn't sense the mind stopping -- it seemed able to continue on with its thinking without interfering with the observation process. > But something seemingly has to break the hypnosis of the outward focus and set up a simultaneous (maybe not with some cases, where thinking stops) looking back into what we're looking from. The Harding exercises may do the trick in some cases. > What we're looking out of is Self-aware ... which doesn't make any sense to the mind ... and doesn't need our help...:) > To really admit what we see when looking back at what we're looking out of -- i.e., that It is Self-aware -- doesn't happen until we simultaneously admit that whatever form of subtle

© 2004 Art Ticknor. All rights reserved. www.tatfoundation.org

observer we thought we were is not a separate "thing" aware of Self-awareness. My realization or admission or acceptance of that was translated back to the mind as "Art T. was never alive." was Art really never alive...what about this body suit we are wearing... > ha -- just anticipated and answered the first part of this question...:) > The Art body-mind is a creation of the one-and-only real Self -- an animated show being viewed by the Self in a seemingly complex way, since the AP body-mind, one of 6 billion similar creations also imbued with the conviction that it's alive, is seemingly also viewing the Art-story -- although that's really the Self viewing the Art-story through the AP-animation. In other words, the stories are integrated. And the Animator is viewing the interaction of the animations. The difference is pointed out by Harding in that the Art-animation has no head when the Self is viewing the AP-story through it, but it does have a head when it's being viewed through the headless AP-animation. Get it? does that inner eye turn away from this view and look back...is there an inner eye that can look at itself... > There is only one Eye, one Observer, which apparently views pictures of "things" it has created for a reason that it doesn't seem to know. ("Why" only applies on the periphery, in the stories, where there is time, space, causation, etc.) > In an intermediate stage, where we haven't yet admitted our non-existence as an individual something, it feels as if Art or AP has opened the proverbial third eye which is now looking back at what is at the core, at what Art or AP is looking out from -- back along the ray of creation in Richard Rose's poetic phrasing. what is God...what does he/she feel like... > God smiled at this question...:) > She/I must be female -- she seems to have no idea why she's doing what she's doing...:) > I think the mind only gets a narrow impression -- perhaps mine being even narrower than many others'. > So ... imagine something with absolutely no features (a Terribly Plain Jane) ... in fact so few features that it's not even a thing ... an absolute No-thing ... with no wristwatch or clock (it has to create galaxies with planets whirling around suns in order to tell what time it is) ... with not a muscle to twitch nor a hair to get out of place ... ain't never changed and never will ... couldn't find a stitch of clothes to wear if it wanted to, since it has no boundaries ... and so forth. > And yet the damn funny thing is that its creations feel. what is the small ego of Art doing these days... > Have no fear -- it's "alive" and kicking and less inhibited than ever. The anxiety it lived with for it's entire self-conscious life seems to have disappeared. > Everything's the same as it was ... with one slight attitude adjustment...:) do you think I’ll lose this separate self some day...

© 2004 Art Ticknor. All rights reserved. www.tatfoundation.org

© 2004 Art Ticknor. All rights reserved. www.tatfoundation.org

> I'd say you're a good candidate. > The truth is We already know Ourself, but we've managed to distract Ourself with the fascinating pictures we've created. > The pictures aren't alive, but they're created to think so -- and to think and feel all sorts of stuff -- and to have a hidden longing or yearning to "remember" their Self through realizing that their self-awareness is really Self-awareness -- that I and my Creator are not-two. > The separate selves are creations with limited shelf-lives. One thing for sure is that their belief in separate existence will end -- possibly before the animation itself reaches a complete halt. > I don't think that we as Creator "know" how the story of Art or AP is going to turn out. We apparently want to experience it in time, sort of like a mystery novel. Possibly there's an occasional "foreshadowing" (a device that novelists use to give a hint as to what's coming) or even a "sneak preview" (as when one of the animations has been created with a scene where it foresees something in its or another animation's "future" unfolding). what is this no-thingness/every-thingness that people write about...what did you find... > I saw -- or the mind understood, as mental doubts were quelled seemingly by repeated seeing -- in two stages that what I really am, at the center, is, first, no-thing, and then, later, everything. Doing the tube experiment with Harding last October really gave me the view that what I was, what I was looking out of, was essentially a featureless space. But my mind (read: ego, individuality-sense) couldn't accept the implications. The progression from there is captured in my isolation notes better than I can remember it. The jump to everythingness came as a result of seeing that I created every thing, and these things -- mountains, people, etc. -- are merely ghostly images that I am projecting on myself, on this blank screen. The Love that we're looking for is the Love that comes with realizing our true identity.

* About ten days later, AP had a breakthrough. She said the phrase "Don't worry too much about the words.... the important thing is to pick up a feeling" was on her mind when she awoke in the middle of the night and may have been the catalyst.

The Egoby Art Ticknor

The final, most obstinate, and most wily of all obstructions to crossing the finish line to Nirvana is the ego.

The ego is not:

•Pride ("He's a proud fellow, struts around like a rooster").

•Selfishness ("She only thinks of herself").

•Narcissism ("He's in love with himself").

•Something to school, polish or perfect.

•Something to try to minimize or to kill off.

The ego is not a collection of our negative attributes. The ego does have a game it likes to play, though, splitting the personality patterns into two camps: the "good" ones that it identifies with (me, the saint, the angel) and the "bad" ones that it disowns (not me, the devil made me do it, the sinner).

The ego is a belief planted in us by what created us—a belief that we're something (some thing).

The ego is the individuality-sense itself. It is the "I am" that identifies with certain forms, feelings and constructs:

•I am hungry.

•I am the guy in the mirror.

•I am the person who wakes in the morning and falls asleep at night.

•I am unhappy.

•I am the person who was born a certain number of years ago and will die at some uncertain time in the future.

•I am the person with this name and this set of personality traits and memories that make me unique.

•I am lovable.

•I am the individual body-mind that is separate from other body-minds and whose existence is threatened and subject to extinction.

•I am the spirit or soul that will survive the death of the body.

We view our life-experience through the sense-of-self. It is the innermost observer that we're identified with and is thus not something that comes into our view. So how can we observe it?

Richard Rose has the most practical, common-sense system for bringing this about that I've come across. The general outline is one of retreating from false identification (a process which Merrell-Wolff also touched on in his "Induction" talk). It's not a

logical process that can be conducted by analysis or argument, but a process of introspective observation. A sample progression might go something like this:

•I have a body—which implies that it's not the innermost me.

•Similarly, I have thoughts and feelings—admittedly more interior possessions than my shirt and shoes, but still not me.

•I can scrutinize the beliefs and convictions that run my life, thus putting them more consciously into my view, where I realize they, too, are possessions (or obsessions).

•I can view my decision-making process—first indirectly, by looking at the results, and then directly—seeing that this process is part of the mind's automatic machinery that functions regardless of whether I'm aware of watching it or not. I see that I'm not "the decider," and yet I insist that I'm the final arbiter.

•I can see that I'm not "the doer," since action results from thought, which has already happened when I become aware of it. Yet despite lack of control, I try to be in control. After all, what would happen if I just gave up?

•I can view and review my defensive reactions when I feel threatened—anger, sarcasm, lashing out, withdrawal, arguing, feeling superior, feeling hurt, shocked, rejected, looking for comfort, replaying events in my imagination and having them come out differently, planning revenge, etc. These threats are afflictions to the individuality-sense and therefore clues to its existence and whereabouts.

•As Merrell-Wolff sums it up: "I'm not the mind, I'm not the feelings, I'm not the body—that I see. But I surely am, I surely am an individual, apart from others."

This sense of being something apart is the ego. Eventually there is a direct seeing into what we're looking out from and a realization that the only observer is the Observatory.

O Come All Ye Faithfulby Art Ticknor

There are those who have faith in Me but aren't good listeners.And there are those who don't have faith in Me and refuse to hear Me.Are you unsure of what direction to take, what option to choose?I am the path to all that life has to offer, but you don't remember Me.Thus speaks your inner self, the Love and the Answer that you're looking for.

Three Questionsby Art Ticknor

What are you able to see by introspection?

For the person seeking self-knowledge, the distinction between subject and object, between viewer and view, is critical. And the view needs to include what we generally consider interior territory. But when we observe the mind, we often find ourselves going round and round in whirlpool-like circles. So the question arises of whether there is a certain progression of focus that may help. I think there is and that it can be represented by a series of questions that the introspector can ask himself.

Question 1: Are you the thinker, the feeler?

Are you able to watch thoughts and feelings with detachment?

If not, an "effortless" meditation (see the December 2005 TAT Forum for a description by Mike Conners) or vipassana technique may be useful. The key to a dispassionate observing of thoughts may be a certain inner relaxation that gives us a degree of freedom from being identified with them. I'm using the term "thought" in a broad sense to include the ever-changing series of images flickering on the screen of awareness, including mentation and feelings as well as what we generally suppose to be the outside world—all objects of awareness.

I realize I may be skipping blithely over something that's a stumbling block for many of us, which is watching feelings with the same detachment as we're able to summon for watching thoughts. For the emotional seeker, identification with feelings is the seeming life-blood of existence ("I might as well be dead as have no feelings"). It's not a question of having no feelings but of not being identified with them, of realizing that they are parts of the scenery, not parts of the viewer. For the intellectual seeker, feelings are irrational and therefore somewhat of an embarrassment as well as threatening—clues to their unacknowledged importance in our self-belief.

If you are able to watch thoughts, where do they come from?

Are you selecting which thoughts to have? Do you create your thoughts by premeditated choice? Or do thoughts happen to you, coming into consciousness—including dream consciousness—without your making them? Are you the thinker, or are you experiencing thought? If you're not sure, keep looking until you are.

Question 2: Are you the decision-maker, the doer?

Once you see the truth about the first question, then it's time to take the next step inward. This involves an expansion of the view to include mental processes such as decision-making. Just as you don't know where the switch is to allow the objective observation of thoughts, you don't know how to switch your focus to get behind the decision-making process. These inward steps occur by seeming accident but are propelled by effort.

• By considering the results of decisions and wondering about why they came out the way they did,

• by keeping alert to the inner conflicts that occupy a good part of our interior scenery, watching the ongoing arguments without trying to interfere in the process, an accident may occur sooner or later, and you'll see the decision-making process itself from an anterior point of observation.

In my case, I witnessed the decision-making process operating in slow-motion at a time of high tension—like the slow-motion witnessing that often happens to people who realize they're about to experience a car crash. But inner seeing doesn't necessarily have a visual feel to it. More generally it's an intuitive seeing, as in: "Oh, now I see what you mean." In other words, something has become intuitively obvious to us.

As with the first question, look until you see clearly what your role is in the decision-making process.

• Are you the decision-maker, determining which inner conflicts will arise at what times, orchestrating the courtroom procedure as judge and jury?

• Are you then the "doer" who carries out the decisions that you, in your role of judge and jury, have made?

• Or are you the awareness that is observing the inner argument, the decision-making, and the resultant doing?

The greatest miracle of existence is the impossibility of existence itself. (How did the first thing arise out of nothing?) Miracles affecting physical manifestation are the lowest level of amazements. Between these two extremes are the miracles that occur as the mind's processes come into conscious view. And when that occurs, your conviction of being in control, of being in the driver's seat, may run into overwhelming data to the contrary. Your belief that if you "let go" and just let things take their own course, your life would fall apart at the seams, may be based on a delusion of control—like the child whose car seat has a steering wheel, which he uses to steer the car.

Question 3: Who or what is observing?

The path to self-knowledge has two broad avenues, one being the route of bhakti or devotion and the other the path of jnana or self-inquiry.

The devotee hopes to lose himself in the object of his worship, while the self-inquirer hopes to find himself through direct seeing or wisdom. The process of questioning the self by observation probably appeals more to the latter than the former. True knowledge or wisdom comes through knowing what you're not, but the two categories of mentality approach this in different ways.

The self-inquirer knows that to find the self he has to distinguish self from not-self. Faulty identification with the not-self is what prevents true self-knowing. The self, the subject, is the observer. Everything that comes into the view is an object of observation—and therefore not-self.

We can, through Douglas Harding's experiments for example, glimpse what we're looking out from. And of course what we're looking out from is the us that's aware, isn't it. But then the contradiction arises between the conviction that what we're looking out from is Awareness and the conviction that I'm a separate something observing (i.e., aware of) Awareness. Do we own a personal awareness, each of us grasping his own separate "mind," scared to death that disease or death will destroy that prize possession?

There is only one Awareness. God, the Source, the Real Self—whatever you want to call it—is the eye that sees itself. To know the Self is not a perceptual or a conceptual knowing but, as Franklin Merrell-Wolff stated, a knowing by identity. We recognize our Self when the false identities drop off. That is also where the paths of losing the self and finding the self meet.

Work, Watch, Waitby Art Ticknor

So Jesus said to those Jews who believed in him, "If you live by what I say, you are truly my disciples. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." John 8:31-32

Chela-A: What does it mean to know the truth?

Teacher: Knowing the truth is not a knowing in any form you're familiar with. It's seeing what is as opposed to what seems. "What is" is what you truly are. Do you know what you are? Do you see the truth?

A: Apparently not. I don't really know what I am, and I certainly don't feel free. So I must not see the truth.

T: What do you tell yourself the reason for the non-seeing is? Do you feel it's because the truth is in the dark and when light reveals it you'll be able to see it? Because a new "eye" has to open in order to see it? Something else?

A: I keep seeing my personal self! It's annoying. It's just a damned notion, but I take it to be so real. No, no other light, or new eye, just a stupid conviction that needs to stop happening. "Unclenching" sounds kind of like what's needed.

T: Yes, the personal self is a clenched fist. A fist has no sight. Only the Truth/Self sees, and only the Truth/Self sees itself. Reflecting back on my life, I could say: "I looked away and saw a projection of myself. I looked back and saw my real self."

Teacher to Chela-B: Do you feel you currently see the Truth, or that it's hidden from you?

• If you do see it: do you recognize it or admit the implications of what you see;

• if not, how do you explain to yourself the non-recognition or non-admission?

B: I feel that I can see the Truth. I can see that all things arise and disappear in the view, including every single aspect of I/me. I/me is not-I, yet all not-I are contained in I.

I tell myself that there must be something I'm NOT seeing clearly, which is why I persist in craving, seeking and trying to become something. I don't know which of the two categories this explanation falls in, since the explanation probably contains aspects of both. I am tending toward the interpretation that if I notice what I haven't yet noticed, then the unbelief or non-admission would be impossible to sustain.

T: "As a child, I held on to childish beliefs."

Chela-C: Hidden. The mind is attached to the mental drama and pretend ego-building but could tire of this and begin to turn its inquiry to the observer and over time

somehow the resistance would wear out and a vision would happen that hasn't yet. I've also been assuming, since what I see isn't me I need to see something I haven't yet, when the observation is part of the truth too. It's that kind of mental blinders (in this case a misinterpretation perhaps) that keep the view focused on the parts rather than the whole and I don't know how many are left and how long it'll take to see them.

T: "I was in love with sorrow."

Chela-D: I often feel like I see the Truth. I don't fully accept it because I still have attachments to untruth. Some of these attachments I'm not seeing yet. Some I'm not willing to let go of yet.

T: "I concocted elaborate stories to try to still the troubled waters."

Chela-E: It feels like it's hidden. I tell myself it's not seen because I'm not ready yet due to continued strength of the ego (individuality sense) and all its attachments. I can hypothetically understand that Truth may be perfectly obvious and I'm just ignoring it because of this. Also, the Truth as expressed by those reporting back feels extremely right, but somehow seems too good to be true.

T: "I prayed to my Self, imploring my Self to show me the way, to reveal the truth of myself to myself. But when my Self asked me if I were ready, I said: 'Not just yet.'"

Δ

Chela-D: I've been working hard, writing down my observations, learning new things, etc. Is all this an elaborate story I've invented to avoid the Truth?

T: That's a question you'll have to answer for yourself. You're the only authority to gauge whether my response ("I concocted elaborate stories to try to still the troubled waters.") fits your situation.

D: Is despair a valid strategy?

T: Despair (loss of hope) is not a strategy. It's a feeling-reaction that generates a belief or conviction. The feeling is a fact; the belief or conviction is an interpretation that may be more or less valid. The existentialists like Sartre and the popular crop of today's advaitins (who share the view that "you're already enlightened … just admit there's no self," etc.) represent exhausted seekers who stop short of realization by latching onto the belief that there's nothing to be done. That's a premature interpretation of hopelessness. Of course some people never start seeking due to an adolescent interpretation of hopelessness ("there's no answer" or "it's too big for me to tackle," and so on). A valid strategy is to make our life a laboratory for finding the truth of what we are and to feel our way intuitively, allowing intuition to refine the strategy as we go along. Mental clarity increases as we "back up" within the mind ... as more and more of the mind's activity comes into view. Final mental clarity is only possible if we can see mind from a higher perspective.

Chela-B: There was a deflating effect of your statement that endures to right now. Thing is, we've done this before. The affliction, the response, the story, the forgetting – and repeat the cycle. Perhaps there is a bit more honesty, a bit more acceptance of

my complete ignorance, than the last cycle. What is it that your question and feedback was designed to do? Is there a better way for me to approach this? To show that it's time that I let go of mental forms that have been repeating since childhood? But if I am convinced I am those mental forms then how is that necessary higher perspective achieved?

T: What I said was a statement reflecting my life-experience triggered by your answer to the question. You might take a look at whether your prolonged focus on your balloon's frequent deflation is a possible defense mechanism that allows you to avoid looking at the facts that life is trying to present to you … and therefore allows a reinflating of the balloon (ego, self-belief) to prevent its collapse.

Chela-E: Had a big blow to the seeker ego this past week by realizing that I'm the same old unenlightened schleb I've always been. It's like there was a house of cards being built up represented by hours of meditation, retreat attendance, doctrine study, etc., which was severely shaken and damaged if not toppled. This resulted in being distraught and a lingering feeling of gloominess. Seeking activities will continue, but I feel the grandiose ideals of Enlightenment need to be replaced with practicality, simplicity and realism.

Δ

Recognizing what you truly are takes work – possibly years or a lifetime of work. I doubt if anyone puts in the necessary effort unless they come to see (i.e., intuit) that it's the only solution to their deepest question, desire or dissatisfaction.

What obstructs our clear view is a field of faulty beliefs about what we are. Life erodes those beliefs over time, sometimes providing traumas that knock them down. We can speed up the process by intentionally looking for them and consciously doubting them. Introspection – watching the mind's activity and looking for patterns – provides the data to challenge the validity of self-beliefs. We work then relax; pray then listen; push then wait.

We can't force a breakthrough to self-knowing. The pins have to line up properly for the lock to open, and we don't know what key will do that.

If you have any questions or comments of your own, email Art Ticknor : selfinq@gmail.com

Your Strategy by Art Ticknor

A question for your consideration: What's the best way to read an essay or listen to a talk? (I'm really asking, so I'll put a pause here for you to consider the question.)

If you just kept reading, it indicates you're looking for answers outside yourself, from external authority. If you're looking for solid footing, on the other hand, you'll eventually need to turn to an internal source and become your own authority to answer the father of all philosophical questions.

But to get back to the "best way" question, in the past I read and listened critically, sorting what I read or heard into things I agreed with, things I disagreed with, and occasionally something to look further into. These days I tend to pay attention not so much to the words as to what's behind the words. When you read or listen, you're following a strategy – consciously or not – that may be active or passive. You're at a point of non-action when you're consciously viewing that mental activity or relative inactivity.

You're reading this today because you're pursuing a strategy to get what you want out of life. You may also be reading it because there's something you need to "hear." If that's the case, I don't know what it is, and you don't know what it is, so we'll have to rely on accident … or on intelligence greater than human knowing. Would it bother you if you knew you were dependent on such an intelligence to find what you're looking for in life?

There was an old woman in Birmingham, Alabama who knew about that intelligence. William Samuel1 told about her in a weekend retreat he held in Georgia in 1993, which was filmed by PBS. Samuel (1924-96) was a soldier who became a metaphysician and then a self-realized man. He was commissioned a lieutenant at age 18 and fought for about three years leading a troop of Chinese soldiers in their resistance against Japanese invaders. His interpreter turned out to be a Taoist master, who Bill spent some time with after the war. He then returned to Birmingham and became a well-known Christian Science practitioner and metaphysician. Then in the late 1950s or early 1960s he awakened to a realization of his essential being.

In the 1993 retreat Bill told how twelve days earlier he'd had a massive stroke, which left him unable to speak or move. The quantum physicist David Bohm was to have been there, also, but likewise had suffered from a critical medical problem at about the same time. You could see that Bill was having some difficulty with his speech at the beginning of the weekend, but his astounding recovery continued and his speech improved noticeably by the end of the filming.

Bill told about having had open-heart surgery some years before, followed later by an angioplasty. Everything seemed okay, then the angioplasty collapsed … followed by a collapse of each of the earlier bypasses. His doctors apparently didn't give him any hope of surviving. He said he was lying in bed, should have already been dead, when an old woman who came in to take care of him leaned down and whispered in his ear: "Do you know what love is?" He said he was totally honest perhaps for the first time in his life and replied, "No. But I'd like to." She

© 2008 Art Ticknor. All rights reserved. www.tatfoundation.org

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responded: "It doesn't matter. God loves you, and I loves you." He said he began healing at that instant.

I suspect she'd had a rough life, a life that had been tough on her pride. I also suspect that Bill's "total honesty" reflected the inverse of pride. The intelligence that healed him was what the old woman felt as love. And it was transmitted when he was in the receptive state of total honesty. The only impediment to its transmission at every moment – at this very moment – is pride.

Hunger

When you're hungry, you follow an action plan to satisfy that want. You're reading this because you have a hunger or thirst you haven't been able to satisfy. It may not be defined, but it's something you feel – an unfulfilled longing that's deeper than words. Feeling that longing, that deep want, is the starting point – always come back to that. Whatever put that want there does the work of satisfying it if you allow it.

Everyone has a strategy they're pursuing to get what they want out of life. It may be conscious or largely unconscious. Becoming conscious of your strategy is a step in the direction of waking up. Observing it may have an impact. Part of becoming conscious of the strategy is refining your understanding of the goal it's aimed at. Cooperating with that goal is equivalent to getting out of its way.

Regarding that goal, what is it that you really want? Answering the question requires becoming aware of the goal that your ingrained strategy is pursuing. In a workshop last September, I heard several people say basically this: "I don't know what I want. I guess what I really want is to find out what I want." A want is a feeling – a feeling that something's missing, or lacking. You have to feel it … and it's unpleasant. Knowing what you want is an interpretation of the feeling. It comes by using the tools at hand (intuition and reason), and it provides a tentative answer to the question: "What will satisfy the want?"

I was reading the autobiography earlier this year of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas2, the African-American man whose 1991 Senate confirmation hearing was such a travesty. He's not at all the stuffed shirt I thought him based on seeing newscasts during the hearings, and his book is extremely honest and revealing. Anyway, one of the things that stayed with me was his description of how, as his 31st birthday approached, he took a day off and spent it at a law library with only pen and pad. The purpose? To focus on what he wanted out of life.

I heard an Internet interview recently of a British entrepreneur, Jim Mellon, who had written a book3 on financial planning with his business partner. His primary suggestion was to take a couple days, go away from the family and other commitments, and sit down and really think about what you're going to do when you're 65 and retired. He was referring mainly to financial planning, but his approach is a good one.

If you "know" what you want out of life, you're half way there. If you "don't know," when are you going to get serious?

© 2008 Art Ticknor. All rights reserved. www.tatfoundation.org

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Getting Serious

Getting serious is the equivalent of getting honest with oneself. Are you serious about finding the truth of your existence? I'm not talking about running around like your hair's on fire but of getting down to business – like Clarence Thomas did. Gautama apparently got serious when he sat down under the Bo tree; Jesus, when he spent 40 days in the desert; Paul Wood, when he put his head down on his desk and prayed for God to kill him. Unless you spent time around Richard Rose you probably haven't heard the story of Paul Wood. Richard said he was one of a handful of people he'd met whom he felt certain were self-realized. Paul had grown up a fundamentalist Christian and during World War II was a bombardier dropping bombs on Japan. When he saw the devastation that he was part of, all he could think of was what he'd learned from the Bible about how God was concerned with the fall of every sparrow. But where was God while the bombs dropped?

Paul became unable to function and was sent home to Texas. He couldn't hold down a job there, and his wife and kids left him. He said all he could do to try to figure things out was to say the Lord's Prayer, taking it apart phrase-by-phrase and word-by-word. He eventually found work as a used car salesman, but one day he was having a difficult time with a couple who were prospective customers, and he said he put his head down on his desk and prayed for death. He awoke a week or so later in a hospital, knowing the answer to his questions.

You can't force yourself to get serious. You basically have to run out of other options. As Winston Churchill quipped or complained about Americans, presumably because it took them so long to get into World War II, "They can "always be counted on to do the right thing – after they have exhausted all other possibilities." (His mother was an American, by the way.)

Surveys cited by Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness show that: most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student; 90% of motorists consider themselves safer-than-average drivers; and 94% of college profs consider themselves better-than-average teachers. "If you're like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people," as Gilbert writes in his typically clever fashion. Are you more serious than the average seeker? Is your strategy going to keep you in the game until real seriousness grabs you?

The Strategy for Knowing the Self

The strategy for self-definition requires becoming your own authority. How is that done? By doing it on your own? By not being influenced by others? I've known people who have followed those strategies, and I agree that they are effective – for isolating yourself from possibly useful influences. They're really two sides of the same coin, the former ("no help") motivated by pride and the latter ("no influence") by fear.

It's far better to immerse yourself with people who are striving for what you're striving for, including those who may have preceded you down the path. But carve out alone time for yourself – daily, and occasionally for longer periods.

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Do you become your own authority by thinking for yourself? I used to feel that it was the solution, but when I saw that all thinking is a reaction process, I realized that thinking for myself was literally impossible. What is possible, though, is to look for yourself with an unbiased eye not affected by thinking or feeling.

Whatever set of fears and desires is making the most noise determines your action or inaction – until there's sufficient detachment from identifying with the view (i.e., those fears and desires). To look objectively means not flinching from the contradictions you'll see about what you believe yourself to be.

Our primary desire is for eternal survival in a state of grand equanimity. Permanent healing brings us to that state when we realize the truth that "God loves us." The purest form of love is the identity of exact sameness. "God loves us" is equivalent to "God R us" – or "God is All, and all is God." Thus the search for permanent healing or satisfaction is the quest for knowing the self, for self-definition.

Going Within

The self is located, intuitively, within. Finding the self could therefore be described as going within. When you recognize that your hunger won't be satisfied by even the highest external games (for example, the metagames of art, science and religion in DeRopp's The Master Game), then the only possibility for satisfaction lies within … the game of discovering what you truly are.

Going within expands the view. But since the view is not the viewer, going within expands the view of what you're not. This is what Richard Rose termed retreating from untruth about what you are. It's a journey of disillusionment.

Like the zoom on a camera, when the lens is fully zoomed out, you get a close-up view. Retracting the lens expands the view. Eventually you back up to a blank wall or abyss … the boundary of the individual mind. And then a reversal of focus leads to a quantum jump or leap.

Speaking of focus, I hear friends who are attempting to know what they are but feel they aren't making sufficient progress say they need to focus more on self-definition. How is it done? Here's what Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, had to say about focus in a 3/17/08 Fortune magazine interview:

People think that focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully…. Life is brief, and then you die, you know?

How Can You Gauge if You're Making Progress?

Are you moving … or are you just keeping busy? The journey is a chipping away at identification with what's not your essence, a backing away from faulty beliefs about what you are. An acid test: Have you seen anything new about yourself that dispels a previous belief/delusion?

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What do you believe yourself to be? Until you become the consciousness that knows itself, you're stuck in the land of belief – and that's the source of your unsatisfied hunger. Fortunately, though, we're designed to look for the solid ground of certainty.

Are you challenging your beliefs about what you are? You first have to become conscious of your current self-definition then look for rigorous evidence of its validity – not what you read or someone tells you but first-person evidence that comes by looking for yourself. Admitting that you don't know what you are may be a sign of progress, but don't let it be a comfortable resting spot or insurmountable hurdle.

Why isn't everyone devoting every spare moment to conscious pursuit of what they want out of life? I hear friends say things like: "I don't know how … I'm lazy … I lack courage … I haven't found Grace," and so on. Those are all beliefs about what you are! All you have to do is look at your complaints and excuses to find beliefs.

Other signposts of progress include satoris, natural koans, and mental processes seen in slow motion. As an example of a satori experience, after a one-week intensive early in my years of searching I was back at work and found myself holding off something until the other workers had gone home for the day. Then I felt myself going "up" (although I was still conscious of being seated at my desk) and getting a view that my mind found these words to describe: "Something IS!" I realized with amazement that for something to be, an original something had to arise out of nothing – a logical impossibility. I felt myself seemingly going up a second time, and my mind found the following words to describe the second view: "Everything is just the way it is." This realization was actually an appreciation for the conciliation of opposites, seeing that "true" and "false" have equal validity from a view that transcends them.

A natural koan found me one time when I was doing a solitary retreat. It came in the form of a question that presented itself and latched onto my mind. "What is the source of my awareness?" was the first thought I awoke with, the last thought I went to sleep with, and was rather constantly on my mind for a couple days. It was wonderful. And then late one afternoon as I sat resting on a tree stump in the woods, an answer came in the form of a quiet vision: I saw that I was attached to something bigger than myself at the end of a long string. A few years later I heard Richard Rose say that every seeker has to find his umbilical cord, the mental umbilical cord connecting us to our source, and I knew then what I had seen.

An earlier time when I was on a solitary retreat it had rained for several days, and I was cold (having no heat source) and hungry (from fasting). When the rain ceased, I went for a walk and spotted a boulder on the edge of a stream with the sun shining on it. My first thought was how nice it would be to warm myself there. But then I saw a "no trespassing" sign posted on a nearby tree. And my reaction was fear that an unfriendly property owner might shoot me for trespassing. I found myself stopped in my tracks on the dirt road, watching the argument in my mind in slow motion. It was like a tug of war, with the opposing contestants trying to win their side of the argument. The "team" that finally made the most noise won the argument – a very primitive operation, indeed.

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Another sign of progress is becoming less personal in your interests. We generally begin searching for happiness (emotional) or meaning (intellectual); later stages of the search gravitate toward truth or reality. What takes place is a refinement of your understanding of your deepest desire. What you believe yourself to be is shrinking; more view coincides with less self.

If Your Strategy Doesn't Seem to Be Working

At the heart of the struggle for self-realization is an opposition of wants: one is to be relieved of your burden, while the other is to maintain the feeling of being the final arbiter. The feeling that you are in control, or should be, is the basic symptom of the illusion of individuality.

It's no mistake that the first step in the AA 12-step program is admitting that your life is out of (your) control. Have you reached that point of honesty yet?

If your strategy doesn't seem to be working, it may help to look at it ("Sometimes you can observe a lot by watching," as the famous yogi of baseball, Yogi Berra, was credited with saying).

• The mind is an addiction machine. Bernadette Roberts4 at 17 was so good at disciplines that she realized the next step in discipline was giving up disciplines. (Don't overrate yourself on this!) Does your strategy condone habits?

• The mind's a forgetting machine. Gurdjieff5 urged his students to wage a war against (mental) sleep, devising alarm clocks to awaken themselves from daydreaming. Does your strategy compensate for forgetting?

• The mind's a distraction machine. "If you throw enough mud at the ceiling, some of it will stick," as Richard Rose would tell his listeners. Does your strategy divert energy from non-critical pursuits every day?

• The mind's a fickle machine. Does your strategy accommodate varying moods and convictions?

The spiritual path is contra-habit, contra-forgetting, contra-distraction, contra-fickleness.

For years I dreamed of being an architect. I read biographies of architects, studied their designs, luxuriated in their successes of creating beauty. But I never followed a strategy or action plan for becoming an architect. Are you merely dreaming about self-realization?

More Stumbling

The author of Stumbling on Happiness cites a study in which 96% of the cancer patients claimed to be in better health than the average cancer patient! Does your strategy enable you to avoid the facts of your life?

Gilbert also notes in his witty style the many studies indicating: "The self considers itself to be a very special person." Is your strategy enhancing this conviction?

© 2008 Art Ticknor. All rights reserved. www.tatfoundation.org

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He tells us that 9 of 10 people say they'd regret a foolish action more than a foolish inaction – but that studies actually show that people of all ages and walks of life regret inactions more than actions. Does your strategy allow fear of making the wrong decision to lead to inaction?

Not making a serious commitment to yourself to pursue your deepest desire wholeheartedly is a way (a path, a strategy) to try to avoid something you fear. But will you regret it??

Footnotes: (1) See Selfdiscoveryportal.com for more on William Samuel's life and teaching. (2) My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir, by Clarence Thomas (3) The Top 10 Investments for the Next 10 Years: Investing Your Way to Financial Prosperity, by Jim Mellon and Al Chalabi (4) Contemplative: Autobiography of the Early Years, by Bernadette Roberts (5) G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep, by Colin Wilson

© 2008 Art Ticknor. All rights reserved. www.tatfoundation.org

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Where Is Permanence? by Art Ticknor

What are you looking for?

Peace of mind ... power ... permanence? Contentment ... comprehension ... completion? Security ... success ... satisfaction? Hopefulness ... holiness ... happiness? Freedom from worry ... worship ... wisdom? Lightness of being ... latitude ... love? Pleasure ... perfection ... purpose? Experience ... entertainment ... eternality?

Our psychological wants all point back to a core belief: I am an individual being.

Along with that core belief comes a companion fear: all the data points to an eventual annihilation of this individual unit.

• If our experience is plagued by anxiety, we desire peace of mind.

• If we're beset by a conviction of the insignificance of our existence, we want meaning.

• If we suffer from an intense feeling of separation, we long for union.

Our interpretations of those feelings can be argued with, but the feelings themselves are facts -- and they are rational facts resulting from the core conviction of individuality.

So, where do we look for permanence, peace of mind, meaning, or the end of separation?

• If we believe ourselves to be a body, our best shot may be for possible future resurrection via cryogenic storage of whatever we think encapsulates our individuality (our brain? DNA?).

• If we identify ourselves as an individual mind, consciousness or spirit, our best bet is to find some reassurance of possible future postmortem continuation without our body.

Against those belief-based gambles is the possibility of actually finding permanence, peace of mind, and so on, while living.

How?

By discovering our real identity.

Where?

Where that true identity resides.

Where is that?

Where Isness is. Where permanence is. On the high seat of silence and nonmovement from which all observation arises. Every observation ever experienced has occurred there -- where you're looking out from.

A Direct Path?

“When the man is ripe for receiving the instruction and his mind is about to sink into the Heart, the instruction imparted works in a flash and he realises the Self all right.” ~ Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, 5 November 1936, Talk 275

The final act in the play of life will be the mind sinking into the Heart of All, its source. There, only, do we find total freedom, unalloyed peace, and never-beginning, never-ending satisfaction.

We, the mind-limited self, get a taste of the mind’s sinking into the Heart whenever we fall asleep. But we awake none the wiser. The unripe mind closes its eye when it sinks into its source. The sun disappears below the western horizon when night falls.

The seeker of Self asks: Who am I? or What am I? in worded thought or emotional longing. As that mind-self is battered by life experience, resistance to seeing or admitting the truth about its status burns out … slower or faster depending on the erosive or traumatic effects of experience. Faulty beliefs about I-amness come into view and thus loosen their hypnotic hold.The seeker may discover the mental umbilical cord that connects the mind with its source and which, unlike the maternal umbilical cord, is never detached from the child. The vibration of that umbilical cord is picked up as a nostalgic longing for Home. The mind-self then has a conscious connection with its source, although its conviction of individual-being status, of being or having a separate awareness, prevents it from seeing its source as anything but Other.

The Guru or Teacher may appear, either externally or internally, when the mind-self is able to see the Truth as reflected in another apparently individual being or separate intelligence. This form of conscious connection allows Self to suggest directed action to the self: What you’re looking for is within. Come Home.

The mind-self overcomplicates, procrastinates, and forgets. It gets caught up in the drama of life then gets hit with shocks to its self-sense or individuality sense. In a resulting deflated or depressive state life may seem pointless, and attaining true satisfaction may seem hopeless. The feeling of purpose, which is intuited by the quiet mind, is lost behind the focus on foreground noise.

The point or purpose of life is death. The lesson of living is dying. Life is effortful: the doer has to “do” it. Dying is effortless. Life after the “death” or stepping aside of the doer-sense enjoys intervals of effortless “being in the zone.” Life after the death of the individuality sense is simultaneously effortful and effortless – and beyond bothh.

~ Art Ticknor

What of Me Will Remain?by Art Ticknor

"What of me won't remain when I die—and what of me, if anything, will?"

I don't doubt that if you could hold that line of thinking in focus, it would do the trick. You would transcend life and death.

An ancient Zenist phrased the above question as: "What is your original face?" Douglas Harding couches his experiments in terms of seeing what it is we're looking out of.

The answer—your original face—is that which is here before you (or Adam, or the cosmos) were born. Not in the words, but in the finding.

The answer is also that which is self-aware: meaning no subject/object split: meaning no subject.

In my experience, you can glimpse what that is while still identified with the subject-object dimension, the mind. But the glimpse is a shadow of the reality. How then can we comprehend the

incomprehensible?

Alfred Pulyan pointed out that "nothing of you remains" when the body dies. That seems to indicate that the lights go out, nothingness prevails, and you're done. If that's the case, then the only meaningful philosophy would be a utilitarian one of optimizing the pleasure-pain mix, or a hedonistic variation such as "eat, drink and be merry" (for tomorrow we die). Fortunately, that's not the case. Nothing of what you think you are remains.

Objection: "I don't see that approach as a concrete way of facing mortality, and I think that efforts to try to isolate what would remain after death would be futile because they'd be based on conjecture unless I actually died."

Agreed, thinking about it isn't going to provide a satisfactory conclusion. What is it that we know the least about? The self. In fact, all that can be observed (known) by the mind (knower) is not-self. To isolate what of us might remain after death, we can eliminate anything that can be observed. We can observe the body and, moving inward, we can observe thoughts, feelings, and mental processes. What we run up against is the seemingly impossible task of observing the observer.

When we get frustrated with trying to know the knower, we may opt for a clever out and decide that what we really are is our consciousness. We're awake, and we know we're awake. The problem is that our consciousness doesn't even last through our daily cycle. It comes into existence when we awake, or when we dream, and goes out of existence between those states.

But what may happen, if we continue to to try to know ourselves in the face of seeming impossibility, is a glitch in the matrix, a lapse in the space-time continuum, a burning out of a resistance circuit—which frees our identity with the mind and provides the mind with a conscious connection to its unbounded source.

Why Do You...?, by Art Ticknor

Richard Rose organized a winter intensive in 1979-80, and in one of the sessions he posed some rhetorical questions for consideration, which I made notes of. One set of questions was the following:

•Why do you study, or why do you work?

•Why do you pursue whatever you're pursuing so actively?

•To get a better job? To get a better mate? To get a better position besides just food and shelter?

•Is this a pursuit of wanting fantasy that will beget fantasy, and fantasy again that will beget agony?

•Or do you study or work to buy a better house, so that the house will own you, and then this house will stand to constantly remind you that you are locked in space and time....?

Are you acting out the script to a play you didn't write? Sleepwalking through life—a life that's like a puppet show?

It doesn't make much difference how alert you think you are. You can vipassana orzazen until the proverbial cows come home—without awakening. Spiritual action involves turning the attention around, letting go of the fantasies.

Rose was pointing to the reversed focus of spiritual action in the opening lines of his blank verse poem "The Mirror": Who is it that speaks to you? Who is it that listens to me? Rumi was indicating the same direction in "Table Talk": Who says words with my mouth? Who looks out with my eyes? If you could let those questions get past the ego defenses, they could trigger the doubt sensation that announces the opening of the door to looking—and the possibility of awakening from the sleep of merely believing.

Another line of questions from the intensive was:

•Does a robot have any meaning or purpose beyond the intents of the program?

•Can a robot program himself to any degree?

•Can a robot be programmed by other robots for his own good?

•Can a robot decide on a purpose and know what is good for himself, enough to submit to programming by another or with the help of another robot?

•Would such a robot come to know himself in this manner?"

Do you long for inspiration? Do you say to yourself: "If only I knew what I really wanted, what to do...."? Can inspiration come via logic? Or is logic a "well-coordinated robot functioning, reacting with seeming consciousness" as Rose asked in the 1978 intensive? Is there any spiritual hope unless our intuition sees a possible solution?

Rumi was appealing to the higher intuition when he spoke these words:

Lo! I am with you always, means when you look for God,God is in the look of your eyes,in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,or things that have happened to you.There's no need to go outside. Be melting snow.Wash yourself of yourself.

Does a man intentionally go out from his source—or is he propelled? Does a man do anything volitionally—or is he compelled to rationalize actions and inactions? Does a man sincerely hope to find happiness in transience—or is he programmed to choose temporary pleasure?

What brought you to read these words? Were you drawn by your "magnetic center," by hope and longing? Why do you keep busy with the inessential, which keeps you locked in space and time?

Why Do Seekers of Truth Fail? ~ by Art Ticknor

I recently read a Forbes magazine interview of Kristen Ulmer – someone I'd never heard of before. Ranked the top women's extreme free-skier for a dozen years, Kristen made movies jumping off 70-foot cliffs and was caught by avalanches in several of the films. She was the first woman to ski down Wyoming's Grand Teton mountain and was voted one of the ten skiers in the world "most likely to die" while skiing. Now 41, she runs a program at Utah ski resorts that uses Zen to teach students how to master fear and boost performance:

"The first clinic was more psychological than spiritual, and I thought, 'This isn't it.' then I met Zen master Genpo Roshi. The first hour of the first clinic we did together taught me more about myself, and how skiing affected my life, than my entire 14-year career."

Participants in those clinics aren't likely to get much out of them if they don't apply what they experience there. They need to take the insights and feelings of inspiration they leave with and apply them to the ongoing "work" on what's most important to them. The same is true for those whose goal is self-realization or truth-realization.

Why do seekers of Self, Truth, Unconditional Love, or any absolute condition, fail to find what they're looking for? Here are three possible reasons:

1. Failure to feel their deepest desire consciously. (We all feel it, but we're afraid of the implications, so we distract ourselves from it.)

2. Failure to find and work with a teacher. (It isn't absolutely necessary to find a self-realized teacher, but it's immensely helpful. The Guru is always with us, but many of us fail to recognize him when he appears. Ramana Maharshi related a humorous story about this condition from the Ribhu Gita about the sage Ribhu and his disciple Nidagha that you can find on the Internet and is well worth reading.)

3. Failure to find and work with fellow seekers.

What's so important about finding and working with other seekers, you may ask. (I'll pretend you just did.) What prevents realization of an absolute state of being is, ironically, what is looking for it. What we believe ourselves to be is actually "the penny that blots out the sun" in Alfred Pulyan's great phrasing (see his article by that title in the October 2004 TAT Forum). Something has to help us transcend the searching self. We need help – and helping others inspires help.

The TAT Foundation has several members who have "crossed to the other shore" and now function as teachers. (I think this is a highly unusual, perhaps unique, situation. All the self-realized people throughout history that I'm aware of apparently were sole practitioners.) And one of the shared observations is that at each of the four annual TAT gatherings it's like starting all over again with most of the participants. Several of the people are likely to get hotly inspired and motivated, but within a few days of returning home the inspiration generally wears off. It doesn't get transmuted into sustained action.

One of the definitions of the Sanskrit word dharma is the principle that orders the universe. It's popular among modern materialists to believe that there is no such ordering principle, that the universe exhibits the principle of chaos and that each man is a god who superimposes order on that chaos in proportion, I guess, to his mental power. These unfortunate folks are blinded by pride, unable to see the miracle of creation unfolding in their mind's eye at every instant – the miracle of creation and destruction that some intelligence far superior to man's puny intellect has imagined and launched, complete with its evolving and devolving patterns, its expansion and contraction, birthings and deaths – all this movement, all the comings and goings, held in an impossibly intricate balance of equilibrium.

We need to find that equilibrium in order to find what we're looking for, and it doesn't come by trying to stop the pendulum's swing half way between life and death. It comes by transcending the pendulum swing, returning to the still point from which the pendulum arises. To do that we need to transcend the split between self and other. It requires work, and even if we're fortunate enough to be working with a self-realized teacher, the teacher can't do the work for us. We are what observes, and that observing has to become detached from what's observed. Our seeing needs to become its own authority.

We begin our lives as takers, wholly dependent on others for our survival. As the sense of self develops, so too does the orientation toward taking. We become one-sided, unbalanced, nearsighted. Finding and working with other seekers provides helpful irritation to prod us out of the comfortable ruts we fall into, helping to counter the procrastination, rationalization and forgetfulness that besets us in our search for completeness. It will be a frequent challenge to pretense and self-deception, and it may start opening us to the joy of helping others, which in turn may challenge the barrier between self and others. As our nearsightedness is corrected by learning what it feels like to walk in another person's shoes, that adjustment simultaneously broadens our internal view.

You can probably sense the direction I'm heading, which is that seekers of an absolute state of being will increase their chances of success by finding a few like-minded people to work with on a frequent basis. And since the distribution of such work-groups – people who are consciously seeking truth, admit their current ignorance, want to work with others and live in close enough proximity to meet on a regular basis – is somewhat like the distribution of planets in the solar system, in most cases the seeker will need to build a work-group.

Establishing a local self-inquiry group:

I came across such a group at Ohio State University in the 1970s and since that time have tried to find or establish similar groups in the various places I've lived. I started working to establish the current group I'm active in ten years ago, and I'd like to tell you about it in order to give you some details about how it developed.

First of all, I looked for a likely place to find people who might be interested. The nearest population center to where I live is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is about seventy-five miles away. I found that there were two universities adjacent to each other in the Oakland section of the city – the U. of Pittsburgh with a student population of about 30,000 and Carnegie Mellon U. with about 10,000 students. And I found a coffee house that was conveniently located between the two campuses.

Next I visited the two schools and asked where I could put up posters. Then I began posting flyers to announce each weekly meeting of the Philosophical Self-Inquiry Discussion Group at the coffee shop. The flyers had what I hoped was a provocative phrase or question as a headline followed by some combination of a short quote that was relevant to the topic, one or more additional thought-provoking questions, and an attention-getting graphic (thanks to the Internet). I would compose them on my home computer then print them at a local copy shop in black ink on colored paper. I took a collection at the end of the meetings, when I remembered to do so, asking for pocket change to cover the cost of the posters, believing that participants should share the cost of the meetings.

During the first several months of the meetings there were typically half a dozen or more participants – many of them new people, some returnees – and I would divide the available time (which I set at 2 hours) among the participants so that each person would have a chance to give his views. My idea was to encourage people to express their thoughts and feelings on the topic and to hear others do the same. I didn't try to impose my views or sway people to my way of seeing things.

After a few months I had the feeling that the group wasn't going anywhere, and I decided to change the format. The change was that after individual participants expressed their beliefs, the rest of us would ask them questions about why they believed what they did. The goal of that kind of questioning is to assist the participants in their efforts at self-inquiry by helping them discover the prides and fears underlying their beliefs. When the prides and fears that we identify with – false selves or egos – come into our view, it provides some detachment so that we can see that they're not really us. By paring away the layers of what we formerly believed ourselves to be, we eventually get to the core of what we really are.

Don't get discouraged if you try to establish a self-inquiry group and it's not immediately successful. I have friends who have given up after a few months when they weren't getting a good turnout. There's a story about Bodhidharma, a 6th century Indian guru who was told by his teacher that he should go to China, where he would find students and a successor. According to the story, Bodhidharma sat staring at a wall for nine years before any students showed up. I suspect many of

the guru stories of employing hyperbole (and I doubt the specified duration of his wait), but I think there's often a kernel of truth in them. He eventually had four main students, one of whom became enlightened – starting the chain of the Patriarchs of Ch'an, the Chinese forerunner of Zen.

In the Pittsburgh group I was fortunate in having a Pitt undergraduate who was actively involved from the beginning, although he gradually faded out before his graduation. Then in the fall of the second year, a newly married woman from India attended a meeting on Life Goals. I went around the table asking people what their life-goal was, and she surprised me by saying that hers was to become enlightened in this lifetime. (That's not typical of the Indian psychology, which tends to be more fatalistic. In fact her husband, who had come to CMU for a Ph.D. program, said he was shocked to find that Americans approached enlightenment like a management-by-objectives project.) That young couple became the core of the group and sustained it for nearly three years until the next serious people began showing up. We also became deep friends, like the best possible combination of family and friends.

I hear many rationalizations from friends who ask for advice about their search for self-knowing when I suggest they start a group. Much of the rationalization for not giving it a try has to do, I believe, with fear of rejection. I sidestepped the initial problem of fearing rejection by not pretending to be a teacher. I think the only honest way for a seeker to approach setting up a group is by admitting his ignorance and inviting other ignorant people to form a cooperative effort. I didn't escape the fear of rejection, though, and learned something about my psychology. When I was a kid I liked people and was a friend to everyone. But eventually I recoiled from shocks to the ego and retreated to the defensive position of waiting for the other person to extend the first sign of friendship. Here I was reaching out again – and suffering the inevitable real or imaginary rebuffs. But I came to a conscious conclusion that the pain of possible rejection was worth the potential of making genuine friendships.

A core group of serious seekers will attract others. In the fourth year of the Pittsburgh group two CMU undergraduates showed up during the fall semester and became solid participants. Several more CMU undergrads became active over the next two years, and in the following year two of the students shared an apartment that they treated as an ashram. The focal point of the group shifted from the Indian couple's apartment – they had moved to Texas when he completed his Ph.D. program – to the student ashram.

The following year those two students, one of whom had graduated but stayed in the area to work, were joined by two other CMU undergraduates and one of the original active undergrads, who had moved after graduation and worked in other states for three years. They leased a house for the 2005-06 academic year, which they treated as an ashram.

During that winter Shawn Nevins interviewed those five participants along with two others who were active in the self-inquiry group for a documentary film he was

making. You can see clips of it at Poetry in Motion Films. As Shawn described it so well on the web site, "One remarkable afternoon in 2006, seven friends gathered on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, to discuss their longing for a deeper meaning in life, the doubts and distractions that keep them from searching intensely, the friendships they have developed along the way, and the hope that keeps them looking. Their heartbreaking honesty resonates with all of us who were ever struck by the immensity of life and wondered what it was all about...."

Technology is probably close to the point where virtual face-to-face group interaction is feasible and practical … but there is a great value to time spent "hanging out" with friends in the work-group. Ashram experiments like the ones conducted by CMU students and recent grads provide a wonderful opportunity to combine relaxation with intensity of effort in a setting of mutual support.

In the Pittsburgh group we also find that combination in smaller doses in our weeknight meetings – which we moved to a public library between the two campuses after the first year or two – by hanging out at the coffee shop after the meetings, often staying until it closes. And we alternate the public meetings with invitation-only weekend meetings for people who want to work at a somewhat more intensive level, which we cap off by having dinner together.

There's an archive of meeting topics and more details on what the Pittsburgh group is doing in the Self-Inquiry Group section of theSelf-Discovery Portal website.

Is the World an Illusion?by Art Ticknor

In his extensive introduction to The Divine Life, Swami Yatiswarananda of the Sri Ramakrishna organization gave the following synopsis of the Vedantic views of God and the world:

According to Vedanta, the highest expression of spiritual knowledge in Hindu culture, there are three points of view from which God's relationship with the world can be discussed. In dualism god is personal and extra-cosmic, and the universe, like a machine or a pot, made out of self-existent materials called atoms. This may be called the theory of atomic agglomeration. In what is known as qualified non-dualism, God is personal-impersonal and immanent in Nature. Here, therefore, the universe is looked upon as an Organism. It is real and passes through gross and subtle states in a cyclic order. This is the theory of evolution and involution. In the third point of view known as non-dualism or monism, the Divine who is really impersonal and transcendent appears as the universe through the power of Maya or delusive and creative ignorance, which, with its limitations of time, space and causation, forms, as it were, the matrix of matter and mind. This appearance is taken to be real, as long as the soul is in ignorance, but it is realised to be unreal with the dawn of true knowledge, which reveals the nature of Reality.

The question of what's real falls into the realm of ultimate knowledge, and India has historically produced the largest body of literature about such knowing. But the Vedantic teaching, as summarized above, doesn't provide a definitive answer. So let's take a look at our first-hand experience. The waking-state world appears as terrifically solid as well as amazingly complex and consistently commensurate despite being replete with contradictions and paradox. And yet what do we really know about it? All our impressions come through limited sensory channels, with the percepts that don't get filtered out of attention then being interpreted through memory-association and training. What we "know" are the percepts and concepts that form in our consciousness. About the world itself we know nothing directly. The percepts and their interpretation can be drastically affected by anything that affects the electrochemical operation of our neural system. As an extreme example, we have the testimony of those people who have ingested hallucinogenic substances. Even in everyday experience our hormone-producing glands and our emotional states interact to alter our perceptions and reactions. When we get right down to it, there's no steady baseline we can use to determine a correct interpretation of our perceptions.

And then we have the dream world, which is every bit as convincing when we're dreaming as the waking world is when we're awake, and yet it operates under a different set of rules. I had a dream a while back in which I was walking rapidly through a desolate landscape, watching the terrain at my feet. I descended a gravelly path skirting a small hill, and behind me I heard the voice of a friend, KP, saying to other unseen people, "There goes a [some positive adjective, which I didn't recall exactly] man" and then something about: "I've got to go see him."

His tone was enthusiastic, sounding like he was happy to have spotted me. I heard him running to catch up with me as I kept walking. When he neared, he started to go around me in order to get in front of me — i.e., to face me — and I said to him, "You

could have just gone through me" (rather than around me, since I'm not solid).

This made perfect sense to me in the dream, where otherwise-opaque walls can be seen through or even walked through. I knew that what my friend saw was actually a projection of his mind. How could that be solid? Why did he walk around it? The projection ("my body") didn't prevent it. It must have been some belief he maintained.

The physicist and astronomer James Jeans wrote way back in the 1930s: "... The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter ... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter." By the 1990s, particle physicists were collecting more and more evidence in line with the Jeans view. The findings were described in Michael Talbot's popular Holographic Universe, which conveyed the conclusions of David Bohm and others that despite its apparent solidity, the universe was actually a hologram or mental projection. But let's get back to our first-hand experience.

What happens to the waking-state world when we fall asleep? Based on personal evidence, it disappears when we disappear into sleep and reappears when we awake. If we ask our friends and family, they may testify that the world still existed while we slept — but those folks are parts of the world in question, so that means we would be taking the world's testimony as to its independent existence.

The world appears to be outside, appears to have dimensionality and substantiality, appears to be composed of an endless list of irreconcilable opposites such as up and down, coming and going, before and after, birth and death, and so on. But when we investigate a bit, we realize that we perceive the world on an interior viewing screen — like a movie theater in the mind — and the mind somehow projects those TV images to appear outside. How then can we know anything certain about its reality?

A hologram exists and is real in that sense. But if we assume it to be solid, we find that our interpretation is faulty. Similarly, the mirage that we "see" of a puddle in the road or an oasis in the desert exists, but the puddle or oasis may not. If we can splash the puddle or find shade and water in the oasis, we say that they're real. But if we then awake and realize they were convincingly real in the dream world, we say they weren't real after all.

Questioning the world's reality or illusionism puts us in the philosophical domain of epistemology, the nature of knowing, where we encounter the sickening spin of looking for certainty in the mind. If you and another object are alone in space and the other object is getting closer, how can you determine whether you're moving? You only know your position relative to that of another object, which may or may not be moving. In order to know for sure whether you're moving, you would need to have an absolutely still point of reference. In the same way, in order to know with certainty whether something is real or illusory, you would need to have an absolutely real point of reference. If there were an absolutely still point of reference, or an absolutely real point of reference, how would you know it? In order to know it, you would have to become it.

What an absurd possibility! Or is it?

How Is It Possible?by Art Ticknor

How is it possible that you know you're conscious?

Did you ever stop to consider that? Now is the perfect opportunity to do so....

What rationalization will you give yourself to keep moving instead? What excuse will an outer part of yourself use to fool a more inner part? That need to keep moving is based on fear, on lesser desires, and on false pride.

To know that you're conscious, "something" must be staring at itself. What is it that can stare at itself?

Did you keep reading, keep moving, keep running from the "hound of heaven" when you read the previous paragraph?

Knowing that you're consciousness isn't like pulling one of your eyes out of its socket so that it can stare at the other eye. In that case, each eye would still be seeing the other eye, not itself. But that analogy is basically what we say is going on when we try to explain self-consciousness to ourselves, isn't it. You may tell yourself: I'm what's aware—aware of objects outside myself and aware of thoughts and feelings inside myself; but I'm also aware that I'm what's aware. There's me #1 that's conscious of the world, that looks out and sees objects outside and inside myself. And then there's me #2 that looks back and is aware of me #1.

Are there really two of you, both apparently performing the same function—"me" here in the foreground, aware that in the background is the "me" that's aware?

Intuitively we know that isn't the case. But to become whole or complete we have to know what we are at the core of our being. And that knowing involves climbing to the top of the triangle whose baseline is formed by the above opposition.

The Buddha raised one flowerSharing a silent sign;Maha-Kasyapa smiled,Keeping an open mind.Truly eye to eye, free and kind,Outside any scriptures, beyond the lies;Fresh flowers in a sunny sky.~ from Dogen's "Hokke-ten-Hokke"

The story of Buddha's transmission to Kasyapa is really the story of how one looks back, sees oneself looking out—and "becomes" That which one is before birth.

INDEX

Acceptance & Surrender 61All You Need to Do 2Asking Ourselves out of Depression 20

Becoming Unstuck 4Becoming Your Own Authority 22Beyond Bliss 6Beyond Relativity: Transcending the Split Between Knower and Known 62Breaking Through Beliefs 24

Common-Sense Meditation 68

A Direct Path? 99Do Not Fear the Darkness 26

The Ego 83

The Final Hour 56

Of Goats and Gates 48

Heaven 27How Is It Possible? 110

I Am Always Right Behind You 73I Am Always Right Behind You ~ Follow-up 80The Innermost Longing 14Inspiration 8Inspiration, Intention & Commitment 28Is the World an Illusion? 108

Last Supper 46Living on Borrowed Time 67Look at Awareness 29

Magnetoresistance & the Search for Self 30Meeting Richard Rose 32Mirror Therapy 41

Nine Verses Made upon an Ecstasy of High Contemplation ~ St John of the Cross 44

Nirvana Project Management 46

O Come All Ye Faithful 84Our Purpose 49

Paean to Group Work 11Petition 60The Problem's not in the Transmission 58

Rabbit-Proof Fence 12Richard Rose on Controlling the Mind 50

Thinking about Thinking 16Three Questions 85

What of Me Will Remain? 100Where Is Permanence? 98Why Do Seekers of Truth Fail? 103Why Do You...?, 101Words of Wisdom ~ Douglas Harding 3Work, Watch, Wait 88

Your Strategy 91