Spiritualteachers.org
Spiritual Books
The Unpublished Works of Richard Rose edited by Alan Fitzpatrick: Novelty, collectible, or essential part of the author's canon? That's the question that faces the potential purchaser of "unpublished work" collections from any author. In this case, I can't say the volume adds anything previously unknown about Richard Rose's teaching, but it highlights the many facets of his thought.
At 146 pages, the book contains poems, essays, and epigrammatic works that reveal Rose the romantic, the moralist, artist, critic, psychologist, fatalist, magician, dreamer, spiritual teacher and through all, the paradox of a mind that survived transcending the mind and returned to try and lead others to that perspective. Absent a true biography, this collection in a way serves that task with photographs from throughout his life and poignant, personal works such as "I Had a Dream Last Night," in which Rose describes his thwarted longing for a dream of eternal youthful peace.
For the long-time student of Rose's work, these personal glimpses are fascinating. In the poem "Before My Wife was Born," Rose describes the oneiric vision of his first wife walking down a country road in a red dress. Years later, he saw a girl, the sister of a friend, in a red dress and, "... I told her/ That some day I would marry her." In "On the Illusion Experienced when Traveling," Rose poetically describes those magic vacation moments when we look through the window with eyes cleared of habits and the daily details of life fade.
In the clear desert air, the cities' lights were like a million red and green stars twinkling with the heating or cooling of the earth.... The city looked enchanted to a point where the viewer nearly made decisions that it would be a nice place to come to retire.
Yet Rose never fails to point out the illusions of even his life. Ever the teacher, he ends the story on a wistful note that beautifully drifts into Reality:
When I pass a beautiful farm, nestled in the hills, I am less likely to attach serenity to it, for I will remember one like it, owned by a spinster who married a younger man just before she died in a fire at the farm. The younger man remarried and raised children who became prominent in the community.
And so life goes....
For those less interested in biographical material, works such as "The Logic of the Albigen System," "Points of Reference" and "The Mind" revisit core themes of Richard Rose's teachings: that the viewer is not the view, that "we" are undefined, the need to refine the relative mind and develop intuition, and that we must observe the interior observer. This short review can't do justice to his essay "The Mind." In a single, concise diagram, he illustrates an entire cosmology of creation. Nearly an abstract of his book The Psychology of the Observer, "The Mind" is a gloves-off explanation of what we (the mind) are.
Finally, there are works that seek to inspire the intuition. "I Believe" alternates between mechanistic and transcendent statements about the body and mind:
The only immortality is memory of self. If the self dies, all is oblivion.
A corpse weeps for its dead children. A baby is an angel descending; an old man or woman dying is an angel released.
No one Dies anywhere.
"What do You Know for Sure?" is the text from Rose's "Lecture of Questions." With minor variations, this lecture was literally a recitation of a list of modern-day koans: "What do you know for sure? Does a man own a house or the house own him? Does a man have power or is he overpowered?" With over 150 questions, each one designed to attack some assumption or belief about your self or life, this text may leave you overwhelmed in thought or quietly facing the depth of your unknowing.
Though not a perfect collection — there are a couple of unfinished works that never really make their point — The Unpublished Works of Richard Rose is a worthy addition to the Richard Rose canon. Currently, the book is only available directly from Rose Publications.
Back to more literary recommendations.