Richard Rose (mystic)

Rose continued to write and publish while his study groups expanded. His public lectures continued until the early 1990s, when he started to show signs of deterioration from Alzheimer's disease.

He worked closely with groups, beginning with university students and professional people, mostly in the Northeast (e.g. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Maryland, West Virginia). Over time, as the students graduated and entered professional lives, groups were also established in Colorado, California, North Carolina, Florida, and Maine. After he was hospitalized with Alzheimer's in the mid 1990s, many of the organizations failed, but some continued - notably, the Self Knowledge Symposium founded by August Turak at universities in North Carolina.

Rose had a high regard for Alfred Pulyan, a Zen teacher in Connecticut, who gave him a method of Transmission referred to in Zen literature. Rose wrote a handbook for local group leaders, The Monitor Papers, currently unpublished, giving instructions on how to create rapport, which in his view is a precursor to Transmission, and he published Energy Transmutation, Between-ness and Transmission in 1975.

A few years later he married and raised a family. He supported the family as a painting contractor and by raising cattle on the family farm. He worked with people who were interested in parapsychological phenomena such as ESP and hypnosis, but said he never came across anyone working to answer questions about the nature of the mind and reality. During this period he compiled his first book, The Albigen Papers, outlining his philosophy, but it was not published until 1973.

He published The Albigen Papers in 1973, which he called a guidebook for seekers. His theories about the transmutation of energy from the body through the mind up to what he called the "spiritual quantum," were published after that and similar to some recent theories describing the mind as a force-field. He produced a pamphlet on a method of meditation involving the dispassionate review of past traumatic events as a way to overcome psychological problems and to understand the ego. His book Psychology of the Observer encapsulated his views on the structure of mind-processes and what he described as the internal ascent from a personal, conflicted view of the world to a more Universal perspective.

In 1972 Rose was invited to give a talk at the Theosophical Society in Pittsburgh. Two students from the University of Pittsburgh attended, and they were inspired to start a group at the university to apply Rose's teaching. In 1973, Rose and a handful of students set up the TAT Foundation — "a circle of friends with no head" — to promote their efforts to reach out to others. The acronym TAT stood for "Truth and Transmission." The Pittsburgh group spawned groups at other northeastern universities and even a couple of western locations (Denver and Los Angeles). Rose made his farm available for group gatherings and individual retreats, and students built two large buildings for meetings as well as cabins for individual use. The following two decades saw hundreds of people inspired to launch their own spiritual searches.

Rose gave a series of lectures in the 1970s which outlined his approach to Zen and which incorporated the term Zen in the title: The Psychology of Zen; Zen and Common Sense; Zen and Death; etc. Several of these have been transcribed from the audio tapes and published. He published for limited circulation a paper titled The Monitor Papers which established rules, guidelines and techniques to be observed during confrontation in the private group meetings where confrontation was permitted.

In 1967, Rose attempted to create an ashram of spiritual seekers on his Marshall County, West Virginia farm, and composed a letter which was published in the San Francisco Oracle expressing his desire to try "to form an ashram of sorts here in West Virginia, in the rural section where I own about a half a section. The conception is one of a non-profit, non-interfering, non-denominational, retreat or refuge, where philosophers might come to work communally together, or independently,—where a library and other facilities might be developed.",

Rose was working in the spring of 1947 as a waiter at a tennis club in Seattle when he experienced what he described as "God Realization". Several months later, he wrote a description of what had occurred in The Three Books of the Absolute.

Richard Rose (March 14, 1917 – July 6, 2005) was an American mystic, esoteric philosopher, author, poet, and investigator of paranormal phenomena. He published a number of books and spoke widely in universities and other venues across the country during the 1970s and 1980s.