Richard Rose’s Psychology of the Observer The Path to Reality Through the Self

280 Richard Rose’s Psychology of the Observer: The Path to Reality Through the Self
Q: “When you reach the point where the physical world and time become unreal in a
way; when practical life loses its value and doesn’t matter—it can become pretty
difficult.” Rose: “I know. I know that. The only thing I can say is to try to keep yourself
chemically balanced, that’s all. You can handle it, if you don’t become unbalanced
chemically.” (1985, p. 97).
He is implying that the process of internal preparation operates largely according to a schedule
and by an intelligence over which the seeker has no control or even understanding, that the
ordeal—however frustrating and bewildering it becomes—is endurable, and that healthy body chemistry
is one of the keys to a clear state-of-mind and to insuring one’s safe arrival.
Rose assures the seeker that this period of trauma is the necessary doorway to the discovery of
Essence:
The observance of the mind with the mind, and with what might seem to be infinite
variables for factors and explanations, leads to a resounding disaster for the mind. It is
necessary to note here that the disaster which the mind encounters is the threshold of
man’s final form of existence—his final illumination, from which he looks back and
correctly defines all that he previously experienced (Rose, 1979c, p. 57-8).
This testimony also indicates that we cannot have a clear, comprehensive perspective on our
own experience of life while still within that life. It is only from having stepped outside that stream of
experience that its real nature and meaning can be recognized by the final Observer.
The next three quotes provide some of Rose’s most precise descriptions of the workings of the
Psychology of the Observer in actual experience. Some redundancy is allowed here because so little
lucid information is available in esoteric writings about the precise nature of the inquiry on this
highest level of meditation, and this insight is most critical. Although his testimony is autobiographical,
he feels that every seeker who goes through this process of work will find the same rungs of
Jacob’s Ladder being climbed that he did, and the same final point of Realization attained.
This first statement shows the realism of the path he describes: the actual experience of doubt,
of abandoning oneself to the effort of self-definition, and of the unpredictable final triangulation:
(You feel) you don’t have any answer—nobody knows who they are, and maybe at
that point never expects to find out who they are—but by the persistent sticking of that
problem into the computer, on that binary system: “What is the relation between pure
awareness, which I may be—I seem to be aware—and the pointed observer/
awareness?”—you continue to analyze all of this. And all at once, the thing pops.
Now, this is the path to Sahaja Samadhi. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. But at a
given time, this awareness pops and you are one with Oneness. And that’s the end of
the trip (lecture, 1979).
He next describes more specifically the experience of self-observation taken to its extreme, as
one’s point-of-reference in awareness struggles with the impossible task of realizing itself:
The person who has reached the Process Observer becomes a very real creature. This
is where a man is no longer living [solely] a somatic life. He is watching his own mind.
He has risen to the point where he is concerned not so much with the body as he is with
consciousness and the workings of the mind. He becomes obsessed with this—this is
the center from which he works. But he again discovers that there is another relative