The Mentor

In memorial of Richard Rose - The spiritual vortex - and his teachings I have decided to write this post that highlights his way and philosophy, hoping that it might inspire whoever reads it.

"What I presume, though," Rose went on, "is that there are a few people out there who are looking for something more. Looking for something real, something that will stick with them. Something they won't end up regretting twenty years down the road. People who aren't satisfied just living out their lives as ignorant animals. These are the people I might be able to help. They want to know who's living out this experience, and what might continue to live and experience after death. And if I'm lucky enough to run into those people and they ask for help, then I'll try to work with them any way I can. But before anyone can be helped they have to become somebody who is capable of being helped. It's foolish to bail out a leaky boat without also plugging up the hole."

"You mean a person has to change his way of life," Leigh said. "Right, right." Rose said enthusiastically. "You get attached to the flesh, but after awhile you realize you're no better than a dog in the street. Of course, our egos offer all sorts of noble pretenses for indulging in pleasure--poetic rationalizations about love, and 'experiencing life to the fullest.' But eventually we run out of excuses, and by the time the ego lets loose of us, it's usually too late to do anything about what's up ahead. That's why so many people die screaming."

"This whole planet is fiction," he said. "A picture show. Sometimes it can be a rather engrossing picture show, but that doesn't make it real. Our heads are programmed to get puffed up with all kinds of infatuations and obsessions. Some of them use up years and decades of our lives. Then when the spell breaks on one of ‘em you shake your head and wonder, ‘What was that, a bubble?’ But you turn right around and get obsessed by something else. Entire lives pass this way, from one petty obsession to another. Eventually, if you’re lucky and if one of these obsessions doesn’t kill you, you come to realize that life is at best a dream, and at worst, a nightmare."


"Then, at a certain peak moment I became aware that I was not the person having this frightening experience, that I was observing myself have it from another vantage point. And I knew with great certainty that at that moment I was being offered the chance to see myself, to see who was watching. That if I turned my mental head, I would see who I really was."


"Nobody wants to give up his cozy illusions," he went on, "no matter how painful they are. Most people never do. They never even consider it. A few people, though--the lucky ones--have something happen to them that makes them start to grow up. They begin to see through the illusion just enough to get curious. So they look into it a little, then a little more, and they begin to see that this life isn't at all what it seems. After that, finding out the Truth becomes the only thing that matters."


"You can't just hope that some day you'll have conviction. You create conviction by action. Action precedes conviction. Most people wait to be inspired to do something with their lives, when what they really need is to just get moving in some small way in a positive direction. That action will then result in the inspiration to perform increasingly larger and more beneficial actions."


"The mistake people make is to wait for something to happen to them before they begin searching," he said. "They want the voice of God, or something, to tell them to get started. Or maybe they know they should be doing something but they procrastinate, hoping that tomorrow they'll have more conviction and be more determined. What they forget is there may be no tomorrow for them."


"If you don't know what you're looking for, how do you know where to look?" I asked. "That’s exactly my point!" Rose said enthusiastically. "You can’t approach it directly because you don’t know what direction it’s in. The only thing you can do is create a reverse vector--a movement away from ignorance. You approach the Truth by retreating from un-truth. You don't know what the final or Absolute Truth is, but you can see what isn't true all around you every day of your life. These untruths are what you're looking for, and what you've got to discard once you recognize them.


"To begin, start looking back at the people and events of your life, especially the traumas. Everybody has an unfinished agenda that needs cleaning up. It’s beneficial to meditate on those people or situations that left you with a sense of injury. Times when you felt mistreated, events that left you feeling sorry for yourself, perhaps. I don't mean relive them or psychoanalyze them. Just go back and try to remember them, then see if you can observe them dispassionately. If you stick with it for awhile, eventually you'll start seeing what a fathead you were, seeing what got you into trouble. And if you follow up on it, maybe you'll see that you're still making the same mistakes right now.


"Yes, between-ness," Rose nodded. "Running between the raindrops. If you make your life a prayer, true prayer--one person continually asking one question--then all the rest is just details."


There's a story of the student who asked a Zen master what it took to reach Enlightenment. The master led him into a nearby lake until they were chest deep in water, then he grabbed the student and held his head under water. At first the student didn't resist because it was the master and he figured there must be a good reason for it. But as he started to run out of air he began to struggle more and more until eventually he was fighting with everything he had to get free. Finally the master let him up and the student gasped and coughed and almost collapsed. When he got control of himself again he asked the master why he had held him under. The master said, "When you want the Truth as much as you wanted air just now, there’s no way you can miss it."


"What are you doing for certain and what is done to you?
"Do we think or imagine that we think?
"Does a tree create wind by waving its branches?
"If we observe our thoughts, who is looking?
"Is there a soul?
"Did it exist before the body or must it be developed, grown, or evolved?
"Can a man become?
"How shall he know what he should become?"


"Maybe," Rose shot back, "but for how long? If a man has even a shred of curiosity or self-honestly, he'll wake up one day and realize he's been deluding himself for thirty years. Society and religion brainwash a man into thinking he has to believe a certain way. So he tries to assume a posture he thinks will mesh with what's expected of him. First he puts one over on society--convincing them he fits in, that he's a nice fellow, that sort of thing. Then he puts one over on himself by believing his own act. By this time he’s hopelessly caught in the web of lies that has become his life.


"You have to act as if you can change things. Act as if your actions make a difference. That's the only way you can be sure you've played your part out to the fullest. But once you've given it a hundred percent, relax and let the gods work their magic."

Richard Rose Quotes

"The highest form of spiritual work is the realization of the essence of man. The final definition of man. And with this definition -- the definition of all things, and a realization of the Nature, Absolute, or God behind all things."

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"What is reality? We can only know the truth by teaching ourselves to face the truth in all things. If we encourage our computer to come up with erroneous answers, because they are more desirable, then we are developing a computer that we may never be able to trust. Truth is that which Is."

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"Experience is a worthless and transient existence unless the experience is known."

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"Man demands that God prove Himself in terms of symbols and paradigms or be considered as non-existent."

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"For those who are somewhere in between the folly of youthful hedonism and the indifference of old age, some system needs to be salvaged from the experience of those who managed to make a grand assault upon definition, and who admittedly found an answer."

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"The path to Truth begins with the self. We cannot properly isolate, identify, or analyze the self, because it is the subject about which we know the least."

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"We live in a cloud of illusions and rarely realize that we are spinning this web of fiction for all the hours and days of our lives, unless we are fortunate or unfortunate enough to die slowly. Perhaps slow death may be the only moments of reality for the total life of many earthlings. Because the dying person is forced to face the fact that he about to become zero."

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All the above dialogs are taken from After the Absolute written by David Gold.
For more information about Richard Rose check out http://www.richardrose.org & http://tatfoundation.org