Actual Freedom – Audio-Taped Dialogues

Q(1): I thought today that the attraction of love causes others to see new lovers, who have this thing of looking into each other’s eyes and all that, with cynical eyes ... and yet when the love goes sour they want that new thing back. People joke about it: ‘Oh yeah, you two are just in love’. They try to put you down, yet the other side of it is: ‘Oh yeah, just wait until it wears off’.

R: Is it not interesting that love is praised so highly, yet when one does fall in love, as you say, other people do make jokes about it and speak condescendingly or disparagingly: ‘Oh, you know, he or she – or them – well, they are in love. They’ll get over it’. Or: ‘Now you’ve got to understand, they’re in love. Just wait until they come to their senses’. Yet it is praised so highly as the cure-all of humanity’s problems.

Q(1): And when they fall out of love and it’s all over, they want to go through it again – with another person. Or give up trying and live with each other in resignation.

Q(2): No, then you’re obliged to turn it into a religious love: forgiveness, submission, surrender ... it’s morality, actually.

R: Then they start talking about tolerance.

Q(1): ‘Be tolerant of each other’s shortcomings’.

Q(2): They stay together, although they’re not in love, through tolerance.

R: Speaking of tolerance and religious love, people say one should have tolerance of another’s religion; to accept that other people have their beliefs and you your own – it is even built into the United Nations Charter – and to be tolerant of one another’s religion. I have no religious tolerance at all. There has simply been too many wars for that creed to have any hold on me whatsoever. Too many murders, too many tortures, too much rape – and all in the name of religion.

Q(1): You are to be tolerant about the system – an ideal of religious tolerance – and yet it has never been tried successfully out in the world. And it has never been shown in the New-Age people, or the different spiritual followers of modern day gurus. This group of followers are not tolerant of that group of followers at all.

R: They will tell you that you should be tolerant ...

Q(1): That’s right. You can’t talk from one group to the other about ‘My Master says this’. Or: ‘My Guru says that’. When I was in the system – in my days on the spiritual path – you were in your own clique.

Q(2): But then everyone has to go their own way to come to an understanding. You can think another person is going off the track, but when I look back on my own life there were some things I couldn’t understand earlier ... I was just not able to make certain experiences make sense until I came to a certain understanding.

R: That is true ... I would not get into a fight with anyone about their religion being dangerous to world peace ... when I say I have no religious tolerance whatsoever I mean that I do not hold that as a belief. I will go along with just about whatever is going on out in the world, when push comes to shove. One has to live in this world as-it-is; that is the actual fact of the situation. And there is this entire system in place which has evolved over countless years which, to a certain extent, restrains most excesses of violence, so we are reasonably safe with things as they are. I was talking more of believing in tolerance as a creed to live by.

Q(1): I was speaking with someone the other night about what I’ve been doing in this last nine months since I met you and she would keep saying to me: ‘Oh you’re not open’. I said: ‘Well I’m not open to religion or spirituality at all’.

Q(2): But she’s not open herself!

Q(1): No she’s not. But she – and all of those people I used to be on the spiritual path with – are saying to me: ‘You’re not open’. Yet she was not listening to what I have to say, only telling me that I’m not being open. In other words: I don’t believe in what she believes in.

R: That is what a person means when they accuse you of not being open: ‘Believe in my belief’. And they are the ones who talk of tolerance. They do not live their creed. Why hold it so strongly? Why hold it at all?

Q(1): Now, I’ve been in that belief system for fifteen years – I have a track record – and now that I’ve come across something entirely different, which I experientially know to work, I say to her ‘Here is something different. Here is something new. This is what I am doing.’ She won’t listen ... and she tells me I’m not open!

Q(2): Okay. I’m wondering about myself – what does it mean to me when I say that I’m open? I’m not open. It’s that I’m rather seeing the person behind the display and thinking: ‘What is she, actually? What is she actually living? What does she mean? How is her life going on with this kind of belief?’ I’m wondering what kind of person that is. Or I can say that I’m not interested and trash the whole thing ... which is sometimes intelligent!

R: The advantage of living in freedom is that none of this matters. In an ultimate sense it does not matter what anyone believes in or what mayhem their belief causes. In freedom, one has one’s own universal peace-on-earth. Global peace is not essential, then. The human world has been blundering along for five thousand plus years and will probably blunder along for the next five thousand or so. The other person has to live their own life and suffer the consequences of their belief system – the main consequence being their own lack of personal peace. One does not have to get caught up in any of their trips and game-playing.

When I meet someone who is either in distress or is complaining about their life, then I am very ready to say whatever it is appropriate to say to them. If they then object to what I am saying I will say: ‘No, that is fine. You live your life – in the final analysis it is up to you whether you are happy or not’. Of course, there are those who then try to tell me that they are happy ... I say: ‘Then why are you complaining?’ If someone complains to me, then they are giving me permission to speak my mind about why I consider they are unhappy.

Q(1): Where you said then that it doesn’t matter to you what happens in the world ...

R: In an ultimate sense.

Q(1): Is this what the enlightened people are trying to get to where they say: ‘The world is an illusion’?

R: That is the way that they deal with an intolerable situation. They are actually affected by all the suffering in humans and are thus driven to bring ‘Peace and Love’ on earth. That is what drives compassion. Why they are affected is that another person’s suffering – the other’s sorrow – touches their own transcended sorrow ... which manifests as compassion. When one eliminates sorrow from oneself there is no compassion. No compassion means no drive to help. Then any assistance is a freely given assistance. There is no hidden agenda ... meaning: ‘I can not be at peace until there is World Peace’. Of course, even global peace would not satisfy ... but they are not to know that.

This is why, when I say that I have no religious tolerance, I do not go around arguing with and fighting people to prove my point. I am free to say: ‘That is your own business’. All the while, of course, I know that they are totally up the wrong path.

Q(2): Which is also ... when the belief is too strong then the individual disappears into it. Then there is nobody to meet, actually.

R: No one, that is right. One is merely talking to an image.

Q(2): Then a conversation with such a person is not interesting at all. When I find a person who picks up some ideas or beliefs to make a life ... where is the real person?

R: I always like to get past the image, past the identity and speak with the actual underneath ... which happens rarely. It is fun, though, trying.

So global peace is not necessary for ultimate satisfaction and fulfilment. But to have discovered a way that could lead to eventual global peace – now there is an achievement. That discovery is satisfying in itself. Maybe in five thousand years time there may be global peace ... but even then ... probably not. That is the first thing to realise.

Q(1): But amongst the spiritual people – those who are looking for the meaning of life – so many are trapped in the surrender and ... they are well-meaning, as you often say.

R: Well-meaning, yes, they mean well; but what they fail to observe is that on the way to their Peace On Earth they cause much disturbance and mayhem. This is on the way to their goal – let alone their goal itself if achieved causes war. I have noticed that people aspiring to ‘The Truth’ are absolutely ruthless in their zeal. Anyone who dares to question them in their ‘truths’ are cut down with a verbal sword. That drive to discover ‘The Truth’ causes a person to become utterly severe.

Q(2): That demonstrates that it is a belief that they are following. With a fact you don’t have to defend anything.

R: That is right.

Q(2): Someone can question their ‘Truth’ and they start getting defensive.

R: If one is on the way to discovering the secret to life – which means peace for yourself and thus peace-on-earth, by extension – if one can not be friendly to other people on the way then one is on the wrong path. Obviously. There may be the occasional slip-up – a reversion to type – but the way to success needs to imitate the success itself. The way of actualism is a congenial path. If one can not be genial with other people, then what is one doing? Getting peace through war?

Q(1): This is what I like about all this. Like the other day when I was interacting with [a spiritual leader] who says one thing but does another. I was quite happy that I was able to be congenial with him; I came away very pleased with myself and actual freedom. I thought: ‘This works’. And I did it with no effort ... and I think that’s because I wanted to do it that way. I actually did not want to ‘get back’ at this man for what he was doing.

R: And in that you are the winner. That is the goal, is it not? To be at peace? That is winning – if we want to divide things up into winning and losing in our interactions with other people – then if I can remain unaffected by whatever tricks they get up too, then I am a winner. This is making use of that urge within a person to be a winner rather than a loser. One has to work with the material at hand, after all. If I can remain friendly, kind, considerate and so on under all circumstances ... then I am winning. I am achieving my goal at this moment, not off into a far-distant future. If I can be happy and peaceful on my way to the ultimate goal – the elimination of sorrow and malice – which results in me being happy and peaceful spontaneously, then that is the goal happening now ... almost by default, as it were.

Q(1): Yes, I was pleased that I was not harmful; I did not bite into his stuff, I did not get back at him no matter what he said. In the end I could see that he was bewildered ... and the best part was that that left him being okay with it all. Even if he didn’t understand why. I don’t think he knows what is going on, in a way ...

Q(2): Well, he probably feels that he can’t get it ...

Q(1): He can’t. He tried two or three times to get at me, but it wouldn’t work.

R: People want to get at you. It is something to watch out for. And there is something else, too. I have found, over the years, that my very congeniality sometimes actually exacerbates the other’s ‘trip’. It frustrated people in that I was untouchable and I did, from time to time, find that a trifle disconcerting for my whole thing was about peace right now between me and whoever I was interacting with. When the other person was acting naturally – which is wanting to ‘press my buttons’ – then they would get more and more upset when they could not. And they would become more upset because I would chuckle with delight at being free from it all. They, of course, thought that I was laughing at them ... if anything, I was laughing at the situation. But I thought: ‘Oh, I must watch my laughter, because I am dealing with an angry person’.

It is more the hilarity of the circumstances that I find so amusing.