AT HOME WITH THE INNER SELF

by J.B.

[[ Kitchen Press, 1996; Digital Edition, M.R.J., 11-2000 ]]

CONTENTS:

Forward ....................... i

Introduction ......................... 7

The Success Mode .................... 11

Society .................................. 21

"Mental Illness" ............................ 29

Method .............................. 41

Childhood ...................... 57

Psychology ............................... 67

Philosophy and Mysticism ....................... 97

"I learned how to lock onto my inner self at all times." - JB

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FORWARD

The compiler first met J B in the kitchen of Richard Rose, founder of the T.A.T. Foundation, in about 1981. George Blazier, a friend of Rose's, had brought Jim to visit as he expected Rose and JB might have much in common. Richard Rose, a Zen Teacher, had a number of students in the area, and gradually about a dozen of us gathered. That Sunday afternoon was a day that none of us will likely forget. For about eight hours an intense discussion went on, mostly from JB's side. Much of what he had to say was so unique that we all but sat with mouths agape, from shock at least. It was a rare event with one man from mesmeric force pulling everyone in the room up to another level of mentality.

JB's life has been anything but normal, which no doubt partly accounts for the unique nature of his insight. He was when young probably what would be labelled an autistic child today. He was of high intelligence as it is normally thought of, which he proved when able to apply himself scholastically. For some reason JB has always been unfulfilled and incongruent with any of the things that keep most people going and functional in the world. For him a normal life in any sense just would not work, and who can understand completely the mystery behind unique human destinies? The result

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was, that for most of thirty years, JB was in and out of mental institutions and the psychotherapy system. His unusualness is that instead of succumbing to mental affliction, he continually pushed his thought and sensitivities to completely understand every aspect of mental illness and the workings of the mind. As he puts it: "I was someone who marched straight through hell and lived to tell about it." Mental illness is but an extension of normal psychological processes, and as such, what JB has to say applies to the workings of everyone's mind and not just to the mentally ill. The reader is invited to judge the value of JB's findings himself.

The compiler is a Theosophist, a student of H.P. Blavatsky's writings, and looks to these with confidence for the solution to life's biggest mysteries. He also believes he recognizes an expression of understanding and genuine knowledge when he sees it. The Eastern method seems to be to stay above and detached from the muddy stream of the lower mind. While this may be an alternative or best way, it may not always to degree be a matter of choice. It is possible that sooner or later in one's evolutionary journey, everyone must come to an understanding of these matters.

The technical definition of the word "adept" is that of a person who has achieved nearly total mastery in a particular area. The master car mechanics

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of the world are "adepts" in this sense. The compiler's evaluation is that JB is an adept in largely the kama-manas part of the mind in Theosophical terminology. The "desire-mind" is concerned with ego, personality, and normal everyday consciousness, as separate from higher aspects of mind, "buddhi-manas", which is focused in spirituality and spiritual ideas.

The following is a compilation of excerpts from many hours of tapes of informal study group meetings held by JB in 1984-5. The nature of the compilation necessarily resulted in some discontinuity in the flow of the narrative. The words are JB's own as closely as possible.

Despite a likely limited circulation, it is hoped the following is a valuable contribution of ideas to humanity in our effort at mutual understanding, empathy, and progress.

- Compiler (July, 1990)

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At this date six years (1996) later I cannot much differ with any of the above other than to make some updates and clarifications. Richard Rose (author of The Albigen Papers and several other books), who helped popularized JB, and some of who's students felt an affinity to what he said, has been ill for several years at near 80. JB, who's employment has been sporadic

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throughout his life, now at about 60, has been working steady for the last several years. His life-long situation was complicated from having only partial use of one arm. I haven't seen or talked to JB too much over the past years except for an occasional phone call or letter. An informal group of students and friends meet with him relatively regularly.

I did not in the above "Forward" wish to give the impression that JB's expertise is limited to the mundane or everyday mind. He is also a rare and profound mystic, and deep understanding of one likely leads to the other. I also dislike placing the phenomenom of JB's search within the paradigm of an escaping of mental illness. It is my belief that those who are too sensitive and too intelligent to fit nicely into the normal and social mentality of the common world, are driven out and maybe driven "insane", so to speak, from the pure madness and resultant lack of rapport with what is to them an objectively insane state of affairs which is regarded as normalcy. Indeed, someday, our current world may seem as insane a place, as we might view the feudal middle ages and Inquisition.

For Theosophists, JB is someone this writer would think a good candidate for being what is called a "Fifth Rounder", or someone who is relatively far ahead of most of us evolutionary-wise - which has its price, as a modern

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intelligent person would pay a price if he was magically transported back and forced to live in the dark ages of feudal Europe. Ideas of human rights and freedom of thought - or inner understanding in this case - which we take for granted would be regarded as dangerous and criminal because of the common status of undevelopment and ingnorance. A someday utopia on earth will come about by inner understanding and from following the exhortation "Know Thyself" rather than infinite technical and scientific development.

- Compiler, June, 1996

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INTRODUCTION

"KNOW THYSELF"

Perhaps it is best said at the outset that we consider ourselves to be at the earliest beginnings of man's first true awakening. We consider the problems of the world to be rooted in the fact that each individual person has not yet discovered the nature of his own consciousness. The grand awakening, should it ever come, would be one in which every individual person is brought to realization and complete, clear awareness of their own internal workings. We consider that in some point in time this will be required by school and statute. The general maelstorm mankind finds itself in and has to do something to get out of, is the result of all the machinations of projection and transference in which everybody is working their own internal conflicts out on everybody else.

Freud and Jung were the godheads of a new beginning. They pointed a course as to what has to be done to get beyond the mass externalization of stress that results in bloodshed and insane, abusive wealth. Internal disharmony can be traced to being at the root of our problems from starvation to ghetto muggings, and until people are able to be responsible to themselves for themselves, there is not a faint ray of hope. Until something is done about the source of the carnage, there is no hope on earth. Working on your own mind-set and improving your understanding of yourself

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and others has been alluded to since Grecian times, but it is no longer a pleasure for the idle rich, it is a necessity for every person on earth.

Everyone goes through life picking up from everybody around them pieces of mind-set that are devoted to one's own destruction. That is why you have to get down to the raw elements of where the whole things started and trace it all through. I've spent forty years doing this and believe such a process is the only hope for humanity and a new dawn coming over the earth. In the destroyed condition I've been in and come back from several times in my life, I've seen what is possible and know that there is real hope. There is a process going on we are only at the beginning of.

People talk about meditation, talk about T.M., talk about tantra, talk about prayer, talk about books on philosophy and psychology, talk about discussion groups, talk about this and that and the other thing - but no one makes a clear statement of what they are trying to do. A person is bound to get confused. If you've gotten to a point where you realize that the thing you would like most to find in this world is a steady source of guidance, to help you become your own source of guidance - then that's what you are after. You never find that stated anywhere in simple language.

The key to the whole process lies in the fact that there is a fountain-

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spring of endless guidance and information within every human being. One only has to learn to get out of its way, to let the consciousness generate in a stilled and quiet mind. Because of our western heritage, I'm tempted to use the term that is common in the A.R.E. and the churches - that the Christ-head reigns supreme within. When you begin to have experiences of the information from within, you learn how perfectly attuned the inner mind is to your immediate and momentary circumstances. It can guide you exactly to the thinking required to deal with the outer circumstances or other aspects of consciousness that is absorbing your attention. It is perfectly attuned to the potential of expanding your total consciousness to its absolute maximum. It is designed to do this. It is endlessly trying to do this. It can't stop doing it. The fountainhead lies totally within. All we discuss here pertains to the methods and particulars that are involved in uncovering the wellhead.

- J.B.

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THE SUCCESS MODE

...I really can't talk to people who can only think what they can get out of it. There are people who think every second they are with someone what it's going to get for them. When I lived in the ------- area of -------, there were people there with almost exclusively that mind state. As far as I am concerned, they are a cancer.

The key to understanding the essence of the circumstances of these driven type of people, lies in the fact that they almost universally had bad childhoods, in varying degrees. It is beyond my capability to imagine a person with that unusual amount of energy to have found that energy through anything but through frustration. What they are doing every day is going out the door to prove what a "good kid" they are. They don't care a thing who they kill in the process. They are still being a "good kid."

If I go out the door in the morning to be engaged with society, which is a specific feeling, for me the greatest kick is just to be knocking around with other people. It doesn't matter if it is teaching or digging ditches. This is not true of the success-oriented person. The success-oriented person sees everything in the form of hierarchies, and evaluates everything in terms of his position on the pole, and what it's going to get him.

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Nothing succeeds like success except for one thing that is wrong with it. It's addictive. Like all addictions, it takes a little more every day to get the same high. If the person is fortunate and happens to be at the right place at the right time often enough, and also able to do what is required of him in his work without messing up wholesale in his handling of people, then he can make it and continue succeeding. In the long view, though, how many corporate presidents are there?

Obviously the success-oriented person is necessary for our economy. As soon as these people get into middle management positions and climb about as high as they will, their dreams begin to die. I've seen half a dozen of my friends in their fifties go through this process. Everyone of them became a total loss. They start getting their hopes up about being able to accept defeat, which they are never able to completely do, and somehow crawl across the line to sixty-five and retirement, which becomes a vahalla of sorts, whereupon they promptly die within six to eighteen months.

No matter who you are, if you don't die young, the bullshit is going to be stop being bought sooner or later. If you have to prove yourself every day all over again, it gets very tiring. Even if a person doesn't know what's going on, it still gets tiring. You get all sorts of variation of reaction. One guy will go home and whimper to

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his wife all night, which is a common reaction. Some go whimper to the bartender. Some go whimper to their buddy. I'm referring to people who are in relatively high achievement positions.

What I'm trying to suggest is that I would love to see just one case of a person who isn't like this, because I don't think there are any. I'm saying that they are poor Johnny one-notes. Some are just the opposite. They scream from the minute they come in the door until the minute they leave. If you are saddled with having to prove yourself all the time, it's a hopeless task. I had a couple of friends I thought weren't going to have this problem. They got to forty-five or fifty though, and every one of them fell apart. There has to be some that don't fall into this pattern, but I've never met them.

I gave up on altruism as an explanation of people's actions. There are a few people who's basic interest is knowing how to be important to other people in positive ways. They are not masochists or sadists, but a third type. These people are interested in getting the day's affairs in order and accomplished and in developing a smooth flow of effort, and so are the best kind of managers. Unfortunately there aren't too many of them.

The majority of people are motivated by their effectiveness at what they are doing. If they loose this effectiveness, although it doesn't happen too often, they just fall apart. All

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people are effective at least to a degree at what they do. The minute they don't have something to give them a sense of accomplishment, they have nothing to fall back on and their whole world comes apart.

The average guy has a job because the boss has to have somebody there to do it. If the boss could do it himself, the guy wouldn't be there. He doesn't see the boss that often, but generally speaking, bosses have a tendency to be a pain in the rear because of some specific reasons. The boss got to be boss because he was effective at doing something real. Now he's got nothing to do, so he has to stick his nose in somewhere it doesn't belong so he can have a feeling of effectiveness. This is the biggest problem with managment. They have a tendency not to have anything real to do. It depends on the situation. Most are up to their eyes in paperwork. The paperwork isn't like being on the line and doing the work. You don't get the same sense of effectiveness out of it.

In psychological patterns, it is a matter of having or not a sense of effectiveness. If there is no one around to listen to the bosse's ideas, then no matter where he is in management, in his own eyes he considers himself a peon. He's always looking to be upstairs, so he always has the inferior feeling. Every time he gets a rebuff of any kind, it comes back down the line. That's the difference between

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good and bad managers. The whole error in their thinking lies in that they see thier whole world as tied up in their job situation. They have no world view.

If I had had my mind and gone into something, I would have, I think, come to the place where I was doing as much as I wanted to do. I've known a few people that consistently turned down promotions because they didn't want to be bothered with the pressure of the higher level. The trouble with most corporations is that they won't let you get away with it. You turn down a promotion and they end up firing you.

To me the idea was to run just as fast as the situation pulled me. I wasn't interested in being anything beyond what I wanted to be. I knew that in myself I didn't want to be over-driven. I knew too many people in way over their heads.

In the matter of continuing to maintain a sense of function and capability, which is the key to the whole thing, there are people who want to feel personally close to those around them and there are people who abhor it. The ones that abhor it are the ones who have the negative pattern of having never known what it was like to be cooperative with anyone in their life.

When I was working and had any type of job with people working for me, the thing that was most important to me was the sense of personal involvement. There are some people you work with

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that don't want any part of it. They can't tolerate the sense of closeness, any kind of a sign of closeness. They want to come in, do their work and leave, and they have nothing to do with you personally. There are others who are just crazy to have company.

We are always looking for an expansion of the communal feeling. The fact that people do this or that because there is a buck in it is what kills it. It is cheap prostitution. The power-chaser will never let you see his soft side. On the other hand, a person who trys to be all heart with people will never let you see how they cheated someone. Generally, neither can even see it themselves. That place in the middle is what we're seeking. The more good company you are, the more you get. The more you give, the more you get.

"Positive thinking" or "correct mental attitude" has nothing to do with success. If you examine the people that propose these theories and say they are responsible for their success, you find the theory has nothing to do with it. They were in the place it happened and there's nothing more to it. It is outside our range of control. Success comes to one person and not another and there is no accounting for it. There is no rich man who ever created a family of rich men. There is no king that ever created a king. There is no philosopher that ever created a philosopher. It just doesn't work that way. Our type of comprehension wants us to believe

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that when we get smart enough we'll achieve success. This is the tragedy of the ego.

At puberty and after puberty for a certain period of time exists the possibility of knowing that what you want to know is about your own internal nature. If you don't have any reinforcement to know what you can find, you don't find anything that means anything to you. So you end up loosing the opportunity. Once you loose the opportunity, the urge gets misplaced or sublimated into the urge for material things, status, and all the rest of it. But you can never satisfy the need for a square peg with a round one. You can just never do it. You can chase it all your life and never get any measure of what you are looking for.

What is unhappiness? People are unhappy and never question it. If what you have now makes you unhappy, what would make you happy? In each person's mind are a certain number of routes to his own fulfillment. They are different from person to person. What are you really striving for? It is the desire for a fulfillment which can't be found in the marketplace.

I am convinced that the people that succeed in this world in the ordinary sense, have views of the world that permit them to maintain fantasies that will not suffer examination. Their head is addicted to some view that permits their mind to function in a response pattern where they are beyond the

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capacity of doubting. This is not really bad. There would be no life on earth as we know it if it weren't so. We have the belief that we have to answer to success in order to answer to our own inner needs. It is a fallacy of reasoning that is almost universal. We're putting round pegs in square holes. It is an inaccurate view of what our needs truly are.

I have had a very clear outer mind at times in my life. This permitted me to understand that when a mind is free of the inner stress, it hungers for activity in the outer world. Not for the purpose of success, but for the purpose of utilization of energy, to maintain a sense of internal tranquility. As soon as you're doing something in terms of success, you're off the track. The reason you do things is that the pressure is there to do so. If you do nothing, the build-up becomes unbearable. The doing is the satisfaction, not the successfulness. The real relief is finding a place to put the energy that answers to itself in the doing of it.

The other day I was coming from downtown --------- on the bus. There was a street person who got on the bus. You don't see nearly as many of these people in Pittsburgh as you do in some of the bigger cities. This person was probably in her fifties, massively overweight, wearing about five coats, the last of which just fit around her and was buttoned at the top. She had

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on a knit hat and was carrying four cloth shopping bags. Because of my knowledge of these people, she was carrying everything she owned. She was completely out of her shoes, her feet were sticking out all over. It was cold, she had on about three pairs of stockings and then a pair of socks. It's a great question whether she had a regular place to sleep.

Now this can be very upsetting. It is upsetting to everyone on that bus, whether they know it or not. We all identify with the possibility of being in that condition, whether we identify with it or we don't. It's automatic. This is why we like to be near successful people. The load is less. That's the only reason. The mutual responsibility is less, period. But if you get too far down the road, being around successful people can be a very bad drain because that side of your being feels inferior. You find youself in the flip-flop of the thing.

I lived in the YMCA downtown and all the rest of it. It's an existence that completely eschews the success mode. For one reason, it isn't available to these people. Anyone, on the other hand, who answers to the success mode in that their bills are regularly paid and they can be looked upon as being about the norm in society... So long as these conditions are met, a person is incapable of escaping it. It requires personal failure to generate insight, the way we go about it.

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It is my hope that when we come to know how to answer to the inner being as its capacity develops in children... If we come upon that line and never loose it, we can attain the ability for insight by a totally painless route. The way it is now, it takes a crash before the outer self can be forced to admit that there even is an inner self.

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SOCIETY

By design everybody from the beginning of mankind until now, starts with the notion that life is a bed of roses, its nothing but kicks, a glory road. That's the way your mind points when you are born. Our mind is of such a nature that it cannot survive and won't work without a fantasy, a fantasy that has nothing to do with reality. If you get stuck looking at too much reality, you're going to come apart a the seams. Life will become meaningless and your mind will refuse to have anything to do with it. The longer you live, if you live long enough and can maintain any essence of sanity, you discover that these fantasies are built into your head to keep you putting up with it. You may get to the point where you're not willing to put up with it under any circumstances, and your mind collapses, which is what happened to me.

The whole of society is endlessly trying to make good on things that are worthless. They spend their lifetime pumping themselves up with fantasy because they can't stand the facts. By design you are extremely limited from this physical side as to what you're supposed to be concerned with. You cannot maintain interest in what you're not designed to be playing with. Although we're designed to look at the world a certain way, when you start calling this basic design "pollyanna," you are

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in trouble over your eyealls.

Anything that pays the bills or works in the everyday world, including psychological systems, is never able to be rejected or seen for its errors. As long as you pay the bills, you have little chance of escaping your thought patterns. You never get to see how things are on the other side of the street, so to speak. If it works, it is self-maintaining, including all the mistakes built into the mind set.

The average person has a set of succeeding habits designed to master the simple production of livelihood and never seriously questions life unless he has a disasterous defeat. You are incapable of it. Knowing this is necessary in order to understand people's personal psychologies. You never get to the other side of the street because you are satisfied with what is on your side. This is why the older a person gets, the narrower their inner options get. They've been successful so long looking at things one way. We're creatures of habit. We want to have all the answers out in front of us and everything ready. That's why a person always goes back to his old answers. You're in a dilemna. You do want to change, but you don't want to change. It's threatening and painful to change. The essence of change is discomfort. People only go as far as they need to go.

There are very few people that have the capacity to separate themselves

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from the people around them. Familiarity breeds contempt. You don't knowingly heap yourself with your own abuse, you heap somebody else with it. This is all to answer to getting the crops in. When you are threatened, you "dump" it on everyone and anyone that is available in order to get free enough to be able to do the day's work. You've got to get free enough to be able to do the day's work done, pay the bills, and get fed. It all comes back to that first necessity of survival that we're all painfully grinding on. All of us.

The average person due to the needs of the functions of projection and transference, is out working on somebody else all the time without knowing they are doing it, trying to discharge their own anxieties. Some actually live on other people's pain. It's what keeps them going and how they get their feeling of effectiveness. Their unconscious reactions come out as sadism, which give the person enough of a day to day high to keep on going. Transference, projection and the like obviously work, because they keep people out of the booby hatch.

People keep to themselves because of the threat of being blown out of their own mental cocoon. People who can't stand to have other people in their home or go out in public are on such a tight little island because they are sitting on the killing urge. They feel so terribly threatened that they have to go to all of these extremes

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to keep from killing something. They have to walk in a tight little circle.

You may not be as fragile when you get out of childhood and adolescence, but no one is autonomous. Can you actually say you can get by without any good experience? You never get autonomous from your family. Your family extends into your peer group and you die dealing with your family and peer group. The only thing you have to take into the foray is the mind-set that was cast upon you as a child and that you cannot change.

If you like a person you are inclined to show it to them. While some people avoid others, some see their solutions in others. With the security-seeking type of person, you are always being tested. They are incapable of a level relationship with somebody. They can only be inferior or superior. It is because of their desire to work out of the environment the factor they need to feel secure. But, so long as you are seeking security, you cannot achieve it. This is a broad-based characteristic in many people and oddly nearly has become the basis of our society.

You are in a social circumstance as long as you still remember your last face to face confrontation or are under the influence of it. Your entire being is affected. This applies whether the confrontation was verbal or nonverbal. The point is that you have to become aware that as long as you are within eyeshot or earshot, you are constantly

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being affected by the internal condition of those around you. If they have no idea of their internal turmoil, then it is left for you to deal with, which is how most people get along.

If the average person's mind were hooked to a loudspeaker and you could hear what went through it, you would probably look for the highest building around so you could be dead the first time. You are walking around in a reality that is the production of this common consciousness. There are very few who understand the functions that the mind is trying to fulfill and maintain. My view of the common consciousness is that it is a trash heap, a mouldering dung heap. How many people do you know that are clearly conscious of and broad and deeply versed in the information required to insure that their children will have insight, understanding and wisdom?

Normal people would do anything on earth to avoid talking about or looking at what goes on in their own head. That thought lead me to the first clear insight I ever had: "These people are crazy!" I was just a kid. Then I spent a year on who was crazy. They were out there living in the world and I was just a kid. They paid the bills but were scared to death of their own heads. So I was crazy, but who was sane? Something that helped me was the thought that I was crazy, but that it was a perfectly normal reaction to the circumstance. That left me off a big

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hook.

People defend themselves from their own best interests, and don't know how to stop it. The objective is to get a natural process to come back into operation. It comes back into operation spontaneously. You stumble onto it and then you learn how to use it. The whole thing is that you have an ego set up, without knowing how it came into existence or the ramifications of it, that prevents you. It has to leak through, or trick you out of the way, so to speak, so you can get out there where you can see things.

In this world there are two available mind-sets. One direction is to experience Truth, to know what it means to light your whole body up with insight, to make it your highest goal, to have the experience of overwhelming insight and comprehension of the whole realm of human experience. That's one mind-set or direction that accounts for maybe one hundreth of one percent of the total. The entire rest of the mind-sets is what you are involved in in everyday life, and is running away from the first mind-set. You are terrified by it. Everything everybody does is designed to destroy the possibility of ever getting to the first mind-set. That is the big problem.

The average person's mind is full of so much tripe and garbage, and is so far divorced from understanding what is going on here, that the miracle is that anything gets accomplished. If

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it weren't for mankind's capability of reducing complex tasks into simple repetitive tasks, we'd have nothing. If it required a creative imagination every minute to survive, the survival rate would be zero. The average mind is a garbage heap that is ninety-nine percent disabled.

My view is that through our capacity to reduce things to simple elements, and resultantly the ability to maintain vast hordes of people in a very materially comfortable life through simple efforts, that we've finally gotten to the point where we've bought enough time for a few people who have the genetic propensity, to be the resolvers, the true researchers, the perceivers of new information and insight into the workings of the mind. We finally have the circumstances where they can maintain themselves while trying to do this work.

If we survive without a nuclear war, which I don't think we will, but if we should happen to, and get another 300 years or so of working on consciousness, we will have in fact the Garden of Eden. If we could train people to have the capacity to come to their own fulfillment in minding their own business instead of somebody else's business, we would have such a blissful state on earth that it truly would be the Garden of Eden. That's my view of what could be.

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"MENTAL ILLNESS"

You have to have some form of work. I could say universally that all the long-term patients I knew in mental institutions were there largely because, for some reason or another, they missed the time to plug themselves into the work-a-day world, to find their place. Most were brow-beaten so badly by their surroundings that they never had a chance to get up off the floor. If this goes on long enough, it becomes a habit pattern. They learn to dodge themselves and the things around them by going internally. 'Not in the sense of insight, but in the sense of withdrawal. They go into a state you and I would call "numbness." When something traumatic occurs you can go numb in reaction to it. It is like when a fuse blows. It's too much to handle. You have to back up and take it a piece at a time. If things are too overwhelming, you go numb. If you can't stand the numbness, you go into a rage.

What they do is that their mind recycles on very short patterns, at least in some. They think about very little things in circles. The thing it effectively does is keep their attention span down to zero. If the attention span is kept down, you never have enough clearness to be aware of the pain. The mind does this as a protection mechanism. When somebody is forced into this pattern just after puberty, which is when all hell breaks

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loose, for any period of time over a year, then there is no changing it during their lifetime. It can't be done. I am lucky to have had the strange set of experiences that permitted me to become insightful instead of "circular." This type of circular thinker is a very small percentage of the population even in institutions.

"Defenses" aren't actually defenses, they're offences. Your defenses are you resisting the idea that you are sick. When you go through the full blown emotional experience of realizing that you are sick, guess what will happen. You will fight the thing right down to a stop, a death, an ego death. When it's over, you will no longer be sick. Sickness is about the emotional response to the realization of sickness. What is unusual about me is that I went through ego death when I was thirteen, and that was why I could study madness. The way out is through the middle, the only way out. I've been crazy, but I know everything there is to know about it. The craziest are those that are running away from it.

Everytime you deal with a deflated ego, you always find that the child part of you is behind it. Roughly speaking, the way it goes is... You may be driving down the road and you're thinking... I assume you accept the fact that you discover what you are thinking and darn near never decide what you're thinking, which is the fix we are all stuck with. You notice you're

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bent out of shape about something, but can't quite put your finger on what it is. You might be thinking about why you're driving an old junker instead of a new Cavalier, and on, and on.

You have to start by indentifying what is causing the problem in the clearest concepts possible, and let your thoughts run before you can find what is behind them. All of anxiety, shame, guilt and fear are generally wrapped up in the area of self-rejection. When some part of you is pounding at you, it's because it isn't getting something. When you can learn how to give it what it needs, it shuts up, whether it is the "child," the "adult," or the "engineer"-moderator part of you between the two. This is three different people. The key to the whole thing is tied in the hope that if you can find out what the part of you is really after, you can put it to rest.

When you get into childish, blind emotions, you have to go into them and find out what is behind them. When, on the other hand, it is the ego that is agitated, it's because you have not let the process of imagining run far enough ahead. In other words, the ego part of comprehension operates on the basis of images of where you want to go. When your ego starts hammering you, it's because you're not paying attention to what it is trying to give you as input in the process of letting your imagination run far enough to say that "this is what you want." It wants you

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to reach for this. It's hammering you because its not getting its point across.

The more effective you become at being the "engineer," the more that's the person you become. That's the identity you develop. The engineer becomes the central ego. You're in the process of becoming a person out of the three that would never have been there without the effort. You become an entirely different person. Eventually this third self becomes the only person that remains. The other two selves just become aspects of the central engineer.

The way it starts with everyone is that they stumble into the bad side of internal experience. You never stumble into the good side of internal experience. Nobody does. I never heard of a case. It always starts out with the nightmares getting you, and that forces you to do something about it. After years of sweating blood, you get to the point where you start working your way out of the mire. Then comes the good time, but only later. In the last analysis, some variation of inner sickness is the human condition for the reason that we have not yet learned enough to not have it be so. The paradise mankind is looking for lies in the direction of knowing enough about the psyche to raise children so that they never have to be sick. Children have to be raised to have an inner life.

People will die before they admit that they have an inner problem. So long as any part of you is that strongly

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denying a problem, you can see why they say schiz-ophrenia - two persons. One part of you knows as well as it knows anything that something is seriously wrong. The other part of you is saying "I am never going to cast myself with the outcastes." It's two egos fighting.

One ego says you're sick, that something is wrong. The other claims it's not true. You can never let go of the ego that knows something is wrong. You can never achieve it. You can let go of the one but you can't let go of the other. If you want to bleed it down, just let the words "I'm a freak, a mental case" play over and over in your mind. All the aberrations come in when the energies of the two egos, the one that says you're OK and the one that says you're not, collide.

All mental illness is the result of loneliness. Freud makes the remark somewhere that mental illness exhibits itself when the person first experiences the depths of loneliness. This is true no matter what the age. That's when it starts. If you are true to yourself, you will be abandoned, and you will do anything to avoid abandoment - which is the whole crux of the internal argument. The reason I got so violently sick when I was young was because I realized how wrong everybody's life was. If I'd have been able to go along with all their BS, I'd have never been sick.

We are gregarious by nature and the minute we start to feel separated, we

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are in trouble. This is because of the habit built into us of blaming ourselves instead of others. Seeing through this habit was the big difference for me. When I was driven crazy, I knew it was others that did it. I fought with the instinct to blame myself and said to myself that I would not buy it, that they caused the condition and not me, that they were responsible and not me. That was why I was such an oddball among the mentally ill. The mentally ill go around all day smearing feces on their face and the like, and doing everything they can that is self-demeaning. Their behavior is symbolic. In one form or another they are saying to the world "Look what you did to me!", but they do not go through the consciousness of it. Everything they do speaks to the issue of "Look what you've done to me." It is easier for them to blame themselves than to face the abyss of isolation.

When two people have an argument, it is similar to what occurs when two parts of the self are arguing. When two people come to a resolution, how is it possible? There is something in it for both sides. That's the only way resolution is possible. People argue about the fact that they want "theirs" everytime.

In an argument, one side says something and the other comes in and modifies it. This process goes on until the two become clear about what they want. Afterwards they don't know what

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the argument was about, because if they'd have looked, the answer was there from the beginning. Until the people look across the street and see what they want, the argument will go on.

With psychological problems, the only way that the part of you that says you're sick can win the argument is if it can make it blatantly obvious. The more you resist, the crazier you get is how the pattern works, until you break down and say to yourself "All right! All right! I'm crazy as a loon!" The other side collapses under the load. The part of you that wants to demonstrate how crazy you are is the emotional side, which people instinctively feel is right on the dark edge of the abyss. The part of you that wants to demonstrate that there is really nothing seriously wrong is the mental side. When the emotional side has spent itself through the admission that you really are crazy, then the mental side has calm to deal with.

The inner argument goes on and on and a chipping away, a little at a time, showing you how sick you are. It's saying "Look how sick you are, you idiot! When are you going to get wise!" It's serving a legitamate function. It's making it unavoidably clear that there's something wrong. When its finally made the whole point as an emotional experience, it just goes phhhttt. It's gone. Your mind doesn't set up all that energy for no reason. It's trying to do you a favor, but you will shake the shake of the

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damned before you can let go. But at the other end is the golden field.

When the emotional part has peaked, when it has driven you in your own experience in consciousness to the point where you realize you are completely bananas, then the ego dies. That's the emotional side's function. Then you say "Ahh, yes..." and the whole thing is over. You are no longer the same person. You no longer live in the same reality. It will take awhile before you realize some of the differences. You no longer strive to be like the people you have been unknowingly striving to be like. You look at people and realize that every one of them is wacky. It's an entirely different reality. The argument is gone. Both sides die and you become a new third person. You are back to spontaneity versus constantly planning. You are back to where you started with the exception of knowing how you got there.

What finally happens is that you realize everyone is messed up, so what the heck. But only after it has driven you through the agony of response and ego death. You say to yourself: "Every ounce of my energy, every second of my consciousness, is caught up in this %$&#$! thing! I just can't stand it anymore!" It'll work you until you drop.

When it occurs to you that you have psychological problems, the first reaction that happens is "What did I do wrong?" That's why your ego fights it for so long, because you paint it

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on yourself. You blame it on yourself, and you go through a whole round robin until you come to the point where you say, "Wait a minute here Jack. Where is the baby that can change its own diaper? Where's the infant that can form its own mind? Somebody messed me over!" Before you know anything about how they did it, know that they did it.

The question is not really whether you did something wrong, but did you learn something? That's all. The worst parental attitude is the same as that of the Catholic Church, that you are ipso facto wrong, that there is nothing right about you, and that you couldn't do anything right except occasionally by accident. The business of your mind getting going on that "something is wrong" can be a blind alley. I'm not saying it always is.

You cannot do anything, this side of total insanity, that comes to you as being a wrong action that is not some form of hostility. You cannot have a hostile reaction without a cause. The cause is always not being understood when you wanted to be. It is not having the opportunity to talk to someone about what was on your mind, and be understood. When you talk about cause and effect chains, I will make the claim that there can never be anything that comes to guilt that did not start as loneliness. As a result I quit dealing with guilt altogether. I went back to the loneliness and dealt with that, and the guilt just

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doesn't exist. It evaporates. Guilt is one of those traps. Loneliness is something that always afflicts those with high IQs. They have nobody that takes as obvious the things they take as obvious. They are bound into higher concepts.

If you are into working on consciousness, into seeking to unlock the hidden resources, you aren't going to find much company. Let's hope you find enough company. The average person is so frightened of these things that if he ever gets an insight into them, he will run away and never come back. I really think it takes a conscious effort to stay away from inner study. Instinctively people know that they have the same problems and questions, but a little less of it. They can play the game of "stay away," and they stay away as long as they can, just the same as you or the same as I did. "Why" is because it is more important to get your face fixed than to get your head fixed. There's nothing more difficult that this work, but if you want to know what it is like to feel like a giant, wait until you get to the other side of this mountain.

I never saw anyone that didn't take this inner conflict down to the last agonizing grunt. Until you are prostrate and totally without energy to fight it, you can't let it overcome you. And until you can let it overcome you, you can't be set free. To have any choice about the matter is almost impossible.

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If you have the opportunity to let it loose, don't deny yourself the opportunity.

If something is serious enough that it keeps coming to the surface, sooner or later it will come to the point of you using all your energy to try to keep away from it. My doctor used to be the automobile. I drove hundreds of thousands of miles. It gives the outer mind just enough to do that it allows the inner mind to come up for some air. Whatever is trying to get to the surface, don't be startled by its first form. What it really is, is likely an eternity away from what you think it is. I never saw anyone who wasn't brought to a crossroads before they achieved insight. I just wish I knew why it is this way. Until you are total wreckage you can't get saved. That upsets me.

The first thing that comes to your mind when you finally have to let go, is that it is the end of your world. You think your mind is going to run amuck and they're going to find you running down the middle of the street babbling at the moon. The first time it happened to me I only ended laying down face first in my roon for about twenty minutes. It was the rage to live. 'To be alive, to know, to feel, to love, to be.

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METHOD

We were talking about free association the other night and someone brought a point up. This point has to be brought up. When I was doing this, I had no one to talk to. I had no one to turn to. I had no place to go to discuss these things. So apparently, the forces that exist decided that they were going to give me the special gift of teaching me how to do my own learning, how to do my own teaching, how to do my own insighting. I learned how to free associate. I asked myself the questions that would take me out of the blind spots. Most people doing this get into a blind spot, get into a thought that becomes repetitive, and they're done. You don't know where to go with it.

People get into a blind spot and might stay there for the rest of their life. I didn't have that problem. I learned to ask myself the questions: What does it look like?; What does it feel like?; What does it seem like?; What does it act like? - endlessly asking myself questions. Until suddenly there was one thought that was blank and would go no further. The free association word wouldn't yield anything like the release necessary. I would change just one little inflection in the words as I repeated them in my mind, just one little inflection. I'd ask myself: What does this mean?; What does it suggest?; What does that make me think of? I never found one of them that I didn't find my way out of whatever trap I got into by doing that. I don't know anybody

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else that knows how to guide themselves out of that hole. I can guide someone else out of a hole, but I can't seem to teach them how to do it themselves.

Everything you've went through in you lifetime and haven't resolved is still sitting there waiting to be worked on. Either you get straight with some of this stuff, or you'll wish you had. It is a mountain of work. You don't deal with each individual circumstance but with the abstraction of the problem. You deal with the still existing patterns. You don't deal with the individual circumstances of things in your life. The singular psychological patterns that maintain presently held values and patterns of thinking are what you deal with. You don't deal with the individual circumstances that gradually imbued you with one particular aspect or complex. Even then it is a mountain of work.

The ability of getting a feeling to translate into words is a tricky business, but it is well worth the effort. When some insight comes up, you should stop everything you are doing, if at all possible, and pay attention to it. If a word associated with a current feeling comes up, it is often extremely important. Repeat the word until you get some sense of what it means. It is often a word at the crossroads of other concepts, and ties them together. Before you couldn't figure out how this tied into this or this tied into that. You begin to build a

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structure and develop comprehension.

If you hold center on a problem long enough, things will open up. It is especially difficult when you are first trying this. It takes awhile to develop the expertise. Sometimes the effort of trying to hold center and bring something up is so great that you simply can't do it. It takes practice. You are facing a void because you don't know what you are looking for. If you keep mentally facing forward, it will eventually focus itself. You will focus on what your inner nature is seeking. If there wasn't an unanswered and even unstated question you wouldn't be doing this. At this point the question isn't even formed. You just know that there has to be a better state than that which you are currently in. The unanswered is what you are seeking.

It is difficult to stay on the point when thinking about something. It may be something is so painful to you that the mind will keep drifting to almost anything to get off the painful thought. When facing the unknown, the key is overcoming the fear. You must have faith that it will work. Fear is absolutely the hallmark that you are getting near something important. When you get to this fear you know something you are looking for will be found. You know that you've found a hot spot.

You have to have consistency in doing this and facing it to produce results. You can't meditate this week, do it again next week, and then let it go.

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You'll wind up always going back to the beginning. On the other hand, don't expect too much of yourself. When it gets too hot, let it go for awhile. The next time around you'll be a little closer when you start and you'll go a little farther before uncomfortable again.

If you're being bothered by something, I've found that if you let your body run the show, just laying horizontal, that all the things that wander around in your mind will drift off. You'll start getting a feeling that an important thought is coming. It's a physical feeling that a thought is coming up into your brain. As soon as this happens, you know you're on the road home. The pain diminishes and you start realizing what is disturbing you.

Learning this technique is like learning a new language. The first couple of times it is not going to be very effective. You just have to lay there and be quiet until the problem comes to the surface. You have to face forward into the void, as it were, a type of tunnel vision. Ideas will come to you and eventually one will come that really hits the gong about problems you are facing. Different ideas will come to fill that void. The thing that is hard about it, when you're first attempting it, is to realize that you're searching for something you presently have no answer to. It is hard to realize that you are putting effort into putting something where there is now nothing,

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as far as consciousness is concerned. I came upon this method instinctively. For the first year I wondered what the heck I was trying to do. Finally it started to work. This, meditation and dreams is where I've learned everything. I never learned anything from a book.

You may unconsciously be chastising yourself that inner work is not a good use of time and energy. You may be prejudiced against your own thinking compared to what someone else says or what you read in a book. You have to think as much of your own thoughts as you do of somebody else's. In any effort you start out from zero. You may feel foolish about the things you are thinking about, but you have to start somewhere. You have to realize that you are trying to be a student of yourself and that it is a good effort.

I was stumbling around with meditation and I discovered that if something was bothering me and an answer to the problem occurred to me, then it stopped bothering me. So when something started bothering me I knew I was looking for a specific answer, which was the golden key to the thing. Little did I realize how much work it would be. At first you don't know what you are seeking. Once you make the discovery of this inner statisfaction, then you know what you are seeking for. You're blind to it for quite awhile. You just know things aren't what you'd like, but you aren't able to be specific about it. Our major appetite is the need to comprehend.

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Comprehension is a specific appetite and even needs to understand itself. You need to know what the mind is trying to get done so you can be more effective at it. Your internal system is entirely capable, given the opportunity, to teach you what it is trying to teach you. Your inner being knows. Your outer being is always unknowing.

Your system is constanty trying to get some inner job done. It is constantly trying to get you conscious of what is distressing you. Secondly, it is tring to get you to comprehend what natural laws and patterns that distress is involved with. 'To know where the mistake is so you can evade making the mistake and start going with the natural flow. This is all built in by design.

Try to place the problem mentally in front of you and let every tension go out of your body. Let the thing just hang in front of you. Gradually a word will come to mind that will begin to explain and alleviate the circumstances. The words form so long as you hold that center. It is uncomfortable, miserable, and the only thing that is worse is what you're trying to escape. If it is something superficial, you can deal with it superficially. If it is a deeper problem, you have to pinpoint what is bothering you. To find out what it is you have to stay on center on the problem and not slip off the point. Sometimes a flash of insight might come which lasts but milliseconds. If you miss it, you can only get back to that insight

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by plodding and working step by step.

You can bring on insight experiences if you learn how. You have to let go of the trivia. But you have to learn what the trivia is in reference to what you are seeking. It may not be trivia in all situations. Some insight might come up when you're at a business meeting. Now to me, for the time being, the meeting would be trivia because it is more readily accessible, and I'd have to get away. 'Maybe excuse myself to go to the bathroom, to get at the source of what's coming up. You may have to try to get a handle on it by repeating the word or concept over and over to yourself. When you get a handle on it, you can keep it to get back to later. If you let it go, it may not come again. It is a way of life. You don't want to give your job away, but you have to do what is ever possible.