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

Personal Accounts of Transpersonal Experiences 315
don’t create that. You just find yourself in that. You’re not trying to hold or maintain
the awareness. You’re simply aware. You’re in openness without a point of view. You
are listening without there being a listener. What happens is you can objectivize the
awareness, which is a very dangerous thing. Your job is not to do anything, but merely
to see. You have to be very quick to see even that trick of the mind occurring. Otherwise,
it becomes another object and it can’t be real awareness.
Then, living in that as it flows, you have to see these objects that are appearing and
disappearing, and tell: Where did they come from? How did they come? We will see
that they are happening because the senses themselves create them. But they’re not
real. We often think that there is a tangible and genuine object out there in a real world
impressing itself upon the senses and to the mind. But it doesn’t work that way. It
works the opposite way. There is awareness of consciousness, which flows through an
inert part of knowledge, which is totally mechanical. Because of the way they function,
they, in their outward movement towards reality tend to give reality to form, to space,
to time. If you see that that’s how reality is being formed—and it takes a very sharp
awareness to watch that as it’s going on, you will see that in fact you are creating this,
you are dividing the world into bits and pieces, and then assuming it has absolute
reality in itself. It’s a kind of mental trick that goes on. In order to do this, you have to
stay very close to the situation. This thing becomes paramount. You won’t get stuck in
any of the particulars or the outer limits. It becomes a question of the very way in
which reality is being constructed by the mind.
This becomes a TREMENDOUS puzzle, and highly engrossing. You want to know
what the hell is really going on!: is there a reality out there, or am I making it up, or
where is it? You begin to feel you don’t know. You watch this process as it flows, as
well as in your in-between spaces, when it’s just pure awareness. At a certain point,
you will ask yourself the key question: “Who am I?” You will say: “Either I am one of
those objects, or I am the consciousness behind it”. It’s just a question of disidentifying
yourself with this body-mind mechanism, which is creating a reality of its own, and
really identifying with the only other thing it can be, which is the background of all
that. Then you will know. All of a sudden, you will cross a certain threshold. You’re
in a safe place at that point. There is nothing left that is outside of you. It all comes back
into the wholeness, of itself.
Q. Did you experience this Realization as death?
There is no time and space in the Absolute sphere. That is the absolute truth. In the
relative sphere, it is only time and space and that has truth only within its own sphere.
But the relative sphere is wholly dependent upon the Absolute sphere, so ultimately it
has no validity whatsoever. So, with it goes crashing, not just you as a person dying,
but the whole world of objects dying; the whole thing dies. There’s nothing left but
awareness, by itself.
Q. The path can be very treacherous. There are some high level plateaus. How can one
ever be certain that full Realization has genuinely occurred?
You’re right—it can be very tricky. If there’s any one touchstone to this thing, it’s the
feeling of your movement unfolding closer into Truth. I don’t like to use the word
“return”, because it implies there’s someone who returns. But, there is an opening.
Instead of movement into greater clarification or more substantial certainty in truth,