Actual Freedom – Audio-Taped Dialogues

Q: How is it for you ... in relation to that whole spiritual goal of ‘No-Mind’?

R: To make it clear from the start: I am certainly not into the ‘No-Mind’ business at all. What is meant by ‘No-Mind’ is that in the deep, meditative state thought stops and there is a profound silence. This silence is what is referred to with the phrase ‘No-Mind’. Read virtually any book by enlightened people and they will say the same thing: in deep meditation, thought stops and this state is called ‘No-Mind’ or ‘The Void’ or whatever.

Q: A state of bliss?

R: That is one way of describing it, yes.

Q: My experience of that is that I can get into a blissful state ... which takes varying forms and lasts for varying times.

R: It is difficult to find genuine information, regarding how it is for them, out of enlightened people. One such person kept a diary for a period of time, which has been published, in which he would describe going into that ‘No thought’ deep meditative state more or less on a daily basis.

Q: You mean no thoughts coming in at all?

R: Yes, no thoughts at all ... and he would walk along in what he described as a vast silence. He described it well; it would last for maybe twenty minutes to half an hour or so. Otherwise thought operated. It is not a continuous state of being twenty four hours a day ... that is a myth.

On a couple of occasions he described going ‘beyond Love’ ... although the very next day he once again talked about Love as being the be all and end all of life! Yet on a least two occasions he described well a state beyond Love ... and therefore Compassion, too. I thought, along with other scant information I had gleaned, ‘that is good enough for me’.

Q: What do you mean ‘Good enough for me’?

R: Here was another person saying there was a condition that is beyond Love. This was some years ago when I was still extolling the virtues of Love and I was looking for confirmation of my own experiences ... I was on the verge of stepping out on my own into territory where no human had lived before.

Q: Beyond Love, beyond Compassion, beyond all the Gods and things like that?

R: I was about to let go of the Soul, the Self, the Absolute and go into what another enlightened person has called ‘The Unknowable’. He stated that there is the Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable. He was situated in the Unknown and was having glimpses of an ‘Unknowable’. This is, to use their words, where I am living these days.

Q: This is what he described as ‘Beyond Enlightenment’? Was he living that?

R: He inferred that he was ... yet his Teaching continued unaltered; he still talked of Love, Godliness, the Ocean of Oneness and all the rest. So he obviously was not.

Q: I can’t remember him ever describing ‘Beyond Enlightenment’.

R: No, he never, ever did. I went through about ninety of his books trying to find out ...

Q: Including during that period?

R: Specifically that period. I was searching for information: when I was in India in 1984 I explored Buddhism, and in that discipline is a state called ‘Parinirvana’ ... which one can only enter into after physical death. The way ‘Parinirvana’ is described loosely matches where I am living now. The Hindu religion has something similar – you know of ‘Samadhi’, their word for enlightenment – well they have ‘Mahasamadhi’, which also only happens after one physically dies. Their description of that likewise approximates what I am living now.

Q: Right, so they safely describe what is beyond enlightenment as being after physical death so that if anyone finds bits about enlightenment that they don’t like then essentially it’s safe because it’s after physical death.

R: They call it the ‘Final Liberation’; that one is released from the body by physical death and one is finally fully free.

Q: Which is a thing common to most religions.

R: Yes, beyond death.

Q: So, in all of the enlightened teachings there is something beyond physical death ... they have, all of them, experienced it from time to time.

So, we are talking about that on the spiritual path it is possible to get to where you are at?

R: That is how I arrived here. If you had talked to me back in ‘81, ‘82, ‘83 and ‘84, I would have been talking to you about Love and Compassion as being The Way. That is one of the reasons why I burned all of my writings of that period in ‘92 ... they were no longer relevant.

Q: So we are speaking of a spiritual path, in your case, although in ignorance of the formal, traditional spiritual path. And now what is happening is that the spiritual path, in the world, is corrupted.

R: It is inherently corrupt ... it has not become corrupted, it has always been corrupt. There is a self in there, built upon much malice and sorrow, polluting everything it touches with Goodness and Love. No matter how well-intentioned one is, if there is a self – by any description – things must go wrong.

Q: Okay, it has always been corrupt. So the jump from the spiritual path into this new way of looking at things doesn’t have that corruption with it. The difficulty I see is in maintaining some of the concepts but seeing them clearly without all the hoo-haa and the corruption and the misinformation and conditioning around them.

R: Hmm ... yes ... sort of. Look, I can be more clear about it than that. If one looks at it ... where you want to get to is beyond enlightenment. The question is: Does one have to go through Enlightenment?

I say no. That is the way I went, but my favourite saying is that James Cook spent many, many months of hardship in a little old wooden boat to get to Australia – including running aground upon a reef into the bargain – that is what I did. Now one can hop into an aeroplane and get here in twenty nine hours whilst watching an in-flight movie and eating pre-cooked meals on the way.

Q: Right.

R: So, what I have done – and this is where others before you are a great help – gives me great confidence that the way I am operating can only produce success. Already there are some who say that where they are at – virtual freedom – is so special that if nothing else ever happens they would be most happy with it. You have heard another person say that yourself, on many an occasion, and I find that indicative. They are so satisfied with what they have achieved that they do not mind if they do not go any further ... it speaks volumes about where they are at.

What I have done is set up a parallel path that runs side-by-side to the spiritual path and then it sneaks around, as it were, ahead of it to the end-point. Having said that, making the analogy of the actual freedom path running parallel to the enlightenment path, once one steps onto this path, one actually finds that the path diverges off. The further one goes the further it goes off into a vastly different direction.

What you will find me doing is that I will do nothing that supports your ego and soul: your sense of identity and self receives absolutely no sustenance whatsoever. Things like thoughts stopping, meditative states, bliss, ecstasy, euphoria ... anything that supports and enhances the identity and the self ...

Q: Which keeps you separate.

R: ... which keeps you separate, which will send you into ‘Aloneness’, if you are successful – for they all talk about ‘Aloneness’ – and in that ‘Aloneness’ you will feel a ‘Oneness’ with everything. So the identity – and the self, which is the basis of the identity – is still intact. What I do is nothing to support and enhance that identity and self whatsoever: no Love, no Compassion, no Trust, no Surrender, no Master/Disciple relationship ... all that supports it. I can not do it, anyway, for I do not have a Self. If I did, I would be wanting you to connect with me in terms of surrender; in terms of ‘loving the Guru’. I say No! to all that ... I will not allow that to happen. It is very easy for me to not allow it to happen for I do not have a Self and it all bounces off, anyway.

Other people have described it to me, what it is like for them to relate to me in the traditional way. Someone said: ‘I send out things, my ‘grappling hooks’ and they just fall down flat on the floor between us’. I said: ‘Well, you keep on doing that until you have used all of your normal ‘hooks’ to try and get hold of me. When they all fail, again and again and again, when they all fall off me, then you will start to use that ‘something’ inside you that has not yet been used’.

Then, and only then, can we step together on the wide and wondrous path of actual freedom, which runs parallel to the spiritual path, to this condition of ‘Beyond Enlightenment’. But you will find, as you proceed, that it diverges wider and wider away from spirituality until it appears to be going in the opposite direction.

Q: Yes, this is what I was saying to my partner: it is a hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction.

R: The end-point for the spiritually minded is to be a point of bliss on the farthermost edge of some spiritual void which is located outside of the universe. The end-point of what I am speaking of is right here in this armchair in this house in the midst of the trees and the flowers and the grass ... right here in this physical world. So, being a hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction, it is not parallel at all. It appears so only to start with.

A friend of yours said it well: She said that when she first started listening to me she equated it with everything enlightened people had said and thought that what I was saying was the same as they had said. She said that as she got to know me better and listened more carefully to my conversation and talked with me more and more about it she realised just how different it was. And the difference got bigger and bigger and bigger until now she sees it as a totally different way.

Q: That is what I see, now.

R: To get back to your original question: No, I do not have a ‘No-Mind’. I am not concerned with stopping thoughts. What has stopped, vanished altogether, is the ‘thinker’ ... the little man who used to be in there doing the thinking. He has disappeared. I am very happy with thought; thoughts simply think themselves.

Q: Do they just appear in your head?

R: Yes, they merely wander in, saunter around and wander out again. Most of the time – except when like now where we are talking and I am thinking as I speak – I am observing things rather than thinking about something in particular. If we were sitting here not speaking and you were to ask me what I am thinking about I would possibly say something like: ‘That pine tree over the back fence looks very nice silhouetted against the sky’. Yet I am not specifically thinking those words; there is an awareness of whatever it is I am looking at.

Q: You don’t sit down and have to immediately start thinking about something?

R: There is no ‘thinker’ who needs to keep himself busy.

Q: I find, often, that I will fill in ... yes, I guess the thinker is so automatic that I will sit down and start looking for something to think about.

R: No, I do not have that at all. I have very few thoughts about yesterday or tomorrow; about what I did this morning or what I will do this afternoon. I have very few, if any, private thoughts about you when you are not here or anyone else who is not here in front of me ... unless there is some issue you are dealing with that requires further thought than the immediate. It very rarely happens though. I am far too busy with being here, where this moment is, to spend it thinking about something that is not happening. This moment is alive, dynamic, vital and actual. Why would I want to go some-place else in my mind? To somewhere dead ... be it the past, the present or the future?

Q: Essentially then, you are in control of it rather than it being in control of you; in terms of being the ‘thinker’.

R: No. There is no ‘thinker’ to either control or be controlled.

Q: Yet you interpret a situation. You use the mind to interpret.

R: There is an appraisal of a situation. My senses are very alert, easily aware. It is altogether easy and effortless. I rely completely upon things like body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, choice of words and so on to find out how another person is for I can not feel their emotions and passions. I can sense an atmosphere but I can not feel anything. I have no feeling capacity at all. Just like there is ‘No-Thought’, I have ‘No-Feeling’! Enlightenment is No-Mind; actual freedom is no-feelings.

With no ‘thinker’ and no emotions and passions, there is always, here where this moment is happening, an utter stillness – not a vast Silence – which is the essential nature of this universe ... the foundation of all that is apparent. Here is a perfection wherein purity and intimacy are what Beauty and Love can only vaguely imitate. Here is a magnanimity and benevolence that Forgiveness and Compassion come only a poor second-best to. Here, there is no malice and sorrow whatsoever. Here duality has not been transcended ... it has been eliminated. Here, in this actual world, lies what people die for!

Here lies universal peace. It all depends upon one’s willingness to abandon the traditional, the ‘tried and true’ ... which are, actually, the tried and failed. It is possible, in our life-time, for there to be genuine peace-on-earth.

It is possible for anyone to be free.