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Richard Rose: "When I was in my twenties I pursued a very ascetic lifestyle. I had decided to make my body a laboratory rather than a cesspool. I did yoga and quit eating meat. I meditated for hours at a time. Every six months I changed jobs so my brain wouldn't harden. I had no attachments, nothing tearing at my hide. If my intuition told me something might possibly be of benefit, I gave it a try." "And
most
important,
I
believe,
to
my
eventual
discovery,
was
celibacy.
Between
the
ages
of
twenty-one
and
twenty-eight
I
was
totally
celibate.
I
was
celibate
because
my
intuition
told
me
it
was
worth
a
try,
and
because
all
the
people
I'd
read
about
who'd
achieved
anything
of
a
spiritual
nature
had
an
energy
retention
plan--they
were
celibate. But
when
I
got
to
be
twenty-eight
years
of
age
I
took
stock
of
myself
and
had
to
admit
that
even
though
I’d
had
some
beautiful
experiences,
I
still
didn’t
know
anything.
I
still
didn’t
know
who
I
was
or
what
was
going
to
happen
to
me
when
I
died.
I
decided
then
that
I'd
been
wasting
my
life
with
this
spiritual
stuff. But once I got out there I went back to my old ways. I kept drifting down to the library to read esoteric books, or ending up in a yoga pose, meditating. I was trying to forget the search for Truth because I was convinced it was a waste of time, but I was too far along to put it down and walk away from it. I couldn't stop. I had become the search. Anyway, I worked as a waiter at the Seattle Tennis Club. She had a job riveting airplanes. We were on different shifts so we didn't get to see much of each other. But one day I got off early and decided to stop by and surprise her. She lived on the third floor of a boarding house, and her room was right across from the steps. When I got to the top of the stairs I heard strange noises coming from her apartment, so I put my ear to the door. I heard her voice, squeaky bed springs, and a deeper voice. I raised my fist to pound on the door, but then thought better of it. There was only one bathroom on the floor, so I decided to sit down on the stairs and wait ‘em out. They'd have to come out eventually and I'd see who the guy was. Sure enough, after an hour or so I heard the sound of heavy work boots. I stood up and the door opens. Out she walks with her lover. Except it wasn’t a man. Her lover was a thick-legged woman with short hair. So I stumbled back to my hotel room in shock--I had a cheap room over top of a Japanese restaurant. Next thing you know I’m propping myself up with my feet tucked under me in a yoga pose to meditate. But I’d barely got started when something happened. It began with a tremendous pain right in the top of my head. Now I've had pain before, but nothing like this. Tears were streaming down my face. I couldn't stand it. My head felt like it was going to explode, and I thought, 'Oh boy, three thousand miles from home and here I go.' I was convinced I was dying. Nobody could have that much pain and live. I remember thinking it must be a stroke, and I worried about how my people were going to get my body back home. They didn't have money to be shipping bodies across the country. Then, at the peak of the pain, I went out the window. I could see the Cascade mountains from my hotel room, and that's where I went--out the window and towards those snow-capped mountains. I was aware of seeing people on the street, except that I was above them. I passed over the people, and then over the mountains, and I watched this just like I was in an airplane. And I kept going out until I arrived at a 'place.' I don't say where. It wasn't the Cascades or anywhere else I knew. It wasn't on Earth because there was no sun, there was no sky. I simply arrived at a high place, and it was beautiful. I became aware at some point that I was in a causal realm--that I was the reason for its existence, that whatever I thought became a reality. In other words, I was causing things to happen, to be created, merely by desiring or thinking about them. The thought passed through me then that I was alone and that I wanted to see humanity--all of it. And so they appeared, all of humanity--everyone who had ever lived, everyone who ever would live--covering a huge mountain below me, crawling over each other like maggots, trying to get to the top. I was aware that they were engaged in a struggle that had an ultimate spiritual goal, but their immediate lives and pleasures were pathetic. I was still in some sort of astral form at this point--still maintaining an attachment to the body and to these people--and so I felt a tremendous amount of grief and sadness for their seemingly senseless struggle. I knew that if I desired I could pick out individuals, that I could see any man or woman who ever lived or ever would live. Because there was no such thing as time. These people were all living now--no matter what the earth time was for their lives--and all I had to do was pick them out, if I wished. So I thought to myself, if everyone is down there, then I must be there, too. And I looked down into the maggot pile, and there I was--Richard Rose. I could see myself struggling down there, the little man, happy in his illusion. I could see his whole life pattern. And then I thought, 'If that's Richard Rose down there, who's watching all this?' Suddenly I realized I was not just my individual self. I was the whole mass of humanity and the Observer watching it all--I was Everything. This propelled me into an indescribable experience of what I can only call ‘Everything-ness.’ There’s just no words…no way I can talk about what that was… no way to begin to describe the…Totality. Then, as I was experiencing this Everything-ness, this Totality, I got to wondering, 'If this is Everything, then what's Nothing?' Because even though I was in an Absolute dimension I still carried traces of my relative mind, which is always looking for dualities, for opposites." As soon as the thought of 'Nothing' occurred I started falling. I fell through an incredible void and blackness. And I thought, 'Oh boy, this is it. I'm gone forever.' But I wasn't. At the end of Nothingness I was back on Earth, in my room in Seattle. And strangely enough, something was aware of the Nothingness as I fell, and of the Everything-ness as I took command of creation. That's why I say, in the final analysis, what you are is the Observer. That which you see is never you. That which sees, that's you. The world is never the same again. For me now, it's like I'm an insane man watching all this. Of course that's a very liberating state to be in," he said with a grin. "An insane man is free to do all sorts of insane things. It was pretty rough at first, though. The night I came back I couldn't stop weeping. I just wandered the streets crying uncontrollably, looking for a bridge high enough to jump off of. Seriously. I didn't want to live. I couldn't stand the thought of being back here in the nightmare. The only reason I didn't jump is the rivers are shallow out there and I was afraid I'd just get stuck in the mud. Then I passed a church and that gave me hope. I figured that priests spend their lives looking, maybe one of them has read something about what just happened to me. So I knocked on the door. This blob of a priest with an enormous gut answers and he looks at me like I'm some kind of worm. I knew he wasn't going to be any help, so I asked him, 'Are there any older priests around?' There I am, standing on the church steps with tears streaming down my cheeks and he doesn’t even invite me in. He just scowls at me and says, 'How long has it been since you've been to confession.' And I thought, 'Where's my gun?' Really, I wanted to shoot the bastard. But the anger was good. It helped bring me out of it. It helped me stop weeping. Gradually, the worst of the trauma passed and I started drifting back into life again. But I still felt terribly out of place in a world that I knew without a shadow of a doubt was an illusion--having just visited the real place. For several weeks people were transparent to me. I mean literally transparent--I could see right through their bodies. So I figured I'd better head back home, because I still wasn't too stable. I had an old friend living in Alliance, Ohio, and he got me a job at the place he was working. That's when everything became beautiful to me. Hills were once more hills, valleys once more valleys. Children looked like baby dolls. The starkness of the Absolute I had visited now made life and motion appear as beauty to me. Those months following my Experience were the happiest of my life, except maybe for the years of peace and bliss I had in my twenties when I was living a very ascetic lifestyle. Every day I'd come back to my room after work and sit down in front of the typewriter. I'd given up on trying to talk about the Experience--you just can't describe an Absolute condition using relative terms--but I had hoped to write a book of poetry and at least try to capture the beauty of the illusion I'd been forced to come back to. Most of it I tore up as soon as I wrote it. But then one day something came over me and I was able to write about my Experience. That’s when I wrote ‘The Three Books of the Absolute.’ It was like automatic writing, the words just appeared on the page." Source:
" After
the
Absolute
" -
David
Gold |
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