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

Introduction to the Albigen ystem 71
of many earthlings. Because the dying person is forced to face the fact that he is about
to become zero. Nothingness has more meaning to him now. This dying man knows
too late the value of the doubt, and the foolishness of faith, unless that faith be in his
own power to solve the problem. (Rose, 1984, p. 20).
This recalls the bumper sticker that says: “Hell is seeing the truth too late.”
This insistence upon determined action, based on a wholehearted conviction about the urgency
for such action, is stated quite emphatically by Rose: “Christ said ‘Seek and you will find;
knock and it will be opened to you’. When He said ‘knock’, He meant put your head against the door
and rap with your head; not just with your knuckles!” (Rose, 1985, p. 116).
To sum up much of the material up to this point: Rose’s basic message in introducing this
work is that the real quest does not consist of our trying to “find” God, like some longlost relative.
God is not lost. Rather, we need to find ourselvesthe one who is looking. We are lost. God (meaning:
Reality) is already here, for there is nowhere else to be but HERE. Butwe do not know where “here”
is nor “who” is here.
Nothing is wrong. Ignorance is the only problem. We are the ignorance. We do not need to
wait for the Messiah to arrive to save us. The perennial philosophy is that the Messiah has always
been here, waiting for us to wake up.