About Richard Rose
by Michael Treanor
Afterword to The Albigen Papers
Richard Rose wrote the Albigen Papers to fulfill his commitment—a commitment he made to the living and to the unborn who, like himself, have already, or will eventually become weary of the "picture show,” the "dynasty of fear in a playhouse of desire." The book was his last hope for sharing what he had found during his life of search and struggle, all other casts of the net having been fruitless.
Few people, in the twenty years between the experience described in the "The Three Books of the Absolute" and the writing of The Albigen Papers, were willing to listen to a short, stocky chemist, popcorn vendor, physicist, waiter, contractor inform them of the possibility for each of them to know, beyond any haze of ignorance, what he IS, ultimately—take away name, take away body, take away birth, life, and death; take away mind.
Fewer, still, were able to accept that the knowing comes, not only from subordinating all other desires to the desire for Truth, but from laboring under the long, painfully slow process of exposing, rooting out, and dropping the many contradictory concepts, binding gestalts, and false self-images that impair perception—the myriad grains of sand in the inner eye that is single. So Rose, in 1971, removed the dust cover from his typewriter and pecked out his message-in-a-bottle, his note to those lost at sea.
The finished work, originally intended as a series of papers, lifesavers, to be sent to those who responded to Rose’s ad in an esoteric magazine, was first published in 1973. It is a history of Rose’s battle for spiritual understanding and survival, a philosophical autobiography. Every direction that Rose suggests, or warns against in the book, he has either tried himself, or has witnessed the trying of, firsthand. The hypothetical examples he uses are factual cases, divested of names and dates.
When Rose speaks of churches and monasteries, he draws upon his years in the Capuchin seminary at Herman, Pennsylvania. When he speaks of the illusions and entanglements of love and sex, he recalls his attempted suicide over a young love, his seven years as a celibate observer of the mating drama, and his twenty-five years of marriage and family life. When he speaks of the "confusion and" charlatanism in the various cults, religions, and systems, he opens the files from his foot-slogging, door-knocking, library-raking investigation of every teaching and technique that offered hope for diminishing man’s ignorance of his true nature. When he speaks of the mind, he relates observations won in forty years of studying his own mind—in the tone of one who has viewed it from an indefinable vantage, from the point of no-thought, no-memory, no-feeling, no-perception. No mind.
Spiritual history began early for Rose. As a young boy, he had wanted to find God. So, at the age of twelve, he entered St. Fidelis seminary. He believed that to succeed in the search, he must go to those who had dedicated their lives to God, where he would come in contact with people who knew Him. But in 1934, after five years, he realized that the priests, though they may have been devotional men who were well versed in the scriptures and Canon Law, knew no more about God than he did himself; at seventeen he left the seminary and sought Truth elsewhere. He looked into spiritualism and the occult, and he read what books on psychology he could find. He went to college and became a chemist, hoping to intellectually solve the problem he began to call "self-definition"; and he juggled symbols and concepts until he realized that wisdom is vanity.
At twenty-one he began his study of yoga, seeking to change his state of being, rather than accumulate knowledge. For seven years he practiced hatha and raja yoga, vegetarianism, and celibacy. And for seven years he languished in bliss, free from life’s irritations, convinced he was "dialing heaven."
But at twenty-eight Rose awoke from his serenity. The face he saw in the mirror was aging, hair and teeth were beginning to go. He realized, for all his tranquility, that he still did not know what he was, Essentially, and he feared that he had botched up his life. In mounting despair, he let go his disciplines and entered the main-stream of existence—the pictureshow. But he still read his books, and he meditated. Half of him wanted to give up the spiritual goose chase; the other half clung desperately to the drive.
At thirty-two, [actually, age 30, in 1947] the contrary forces finally ripped him apart, and the dominoes of his personality, the egos, the urges, the many aspects of himself began to topple over, one after the other. He experienced death. He was torn from his body and brought to an intuitive mountain peak where he saw the world, the universe, as illusion, a cosmic hypnosis. From there his stark I-ness slipped into oblivion, and then into the ineffable experience yogis call Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi—what Zen writings refer to as Enlightenment.
Rose returned from the experience, a state of being he terms the "Absolute," and descended again into the world of illusion and relativity, a world inhabited by sleepwalkers and robots, to discover that he had no means of communicating what he knew. He was unable to convince people that they were not that which they assumed themselves to be, and that the reality of their nature was indeed attainable, however small the eye of the needle, however immense the haystack. He could not speak of the unspeakable, though he sensed, he knew, that he must. For two decades, then, he weathered the gales of unsociable stares and indiscreet pointing of fingers, only to acquiesce in the end, and jot down a few pointers to whom it may concern. And it was while writing the Papers, while "leaving a few tracks," that his voice was finally heard.
People started to show up at his farm near Wheeling, West Virginia, local people at first, people who had heard stories of this peculiarly wise man, this unshakable, determined man. He was asked to give talks at the Theosophical Society m Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh, and at Kent Ohio. And from these talks came college students, people who, on LSD, had tasted dimensions other than this arm-pinching "real" one, had opened unconscious, psychic doors, and had begun to wonder about themselves, about death, and about illusion; people who, with or without the hazardous influence of drugs, had delved into the sundry methods of God. or Truth seeking, and were frustrated by the towering, complex babel of systems and religions and sciences and philosophies at odds with each other, at odds with themselves, at odds with intuition and common sense.
A group formed, "ignoramuses anonymous” Rose calls it, a small group of individuals who came together to take advantage of the. Contractor’s Law—the Law of Extra-proportional Returns—and to get help and advice from someone who has "been down the trail," a teacher who is more of a psychic mirror and a catalyst in times of spiritual crises than a figurehead, a dogmatist, or a preacher. Richard Rose has fulfilled his commitment, yet he works on, standing by those who wish to make the same bold commitment.
[ end ]
Fair use extract. For a hard copy of The Albigen Papers: RichardRoseTeachings.Com