Actual Freedom – Audio-Taped Dialogues

R: Most Religions and Spiritual Paths advocate putting the other before oneself ... it is their way of preventing selfishness – which they assume to be identical with self-centredness. Yet it is self-centred to want to be a ‘good’ person and therefore gain one’s post-mortem reward in some after-life. Immortality for the self has to be classified as being the ultimate self-centredness. Self-centredness is translated as egotism ... is there such a word as ‘soultism’? There should be!

Let us have a look at the practice of putting the other before oneself: Take us four sitting here – and presume we are all ‘good’ people – and I am not going to be ‘selfish’ at all. Therefore I am going to totally look after (Q) ... I will put her before me in all circumstances. Now, (Q) is also a ‘good’ person and she is not going to be ‘selfish’ either ... so she is going to put Q(1) before herself. However, you have also been brought up with this religious and humanitarian concept of putting the other before oneself ... therefore you will put Q(2) before yourself ... and Q(2) will be putting me before himself. We have come a full circle; do you see the nonsense that is going on? Because the end result of putting the other first is that eventually you get looked after anyway. If we all just stop this charade and start looking after ourselves then we will be a lot better off. It makes much more sense.

Q: Then nobody owes anybody anything ...

R: There is no investment.

Q: ... and nobody owes me anything, either.

Q(2): There is no relationship.

R: No relationship ... right! It is a free association.

Q(2): The other way that happens is with love. It is like you are always relating ... well one of the ways of relating is mainly through love. If you love another you put your love on them and they put their love on you.

R: And it intrinsic to the nature of love to put the other before yourself – it is part of love itself. However, if one digs deeply into love, one finds that love is so selfish that it is almost unbelievable that one could have been deceived by the apparent altruism displayed. It is utterly selfish; if you dig down under the layers of the ‘selflessness’ of love ... it is so very selfish.

Q(2): Because there is this ‘I’ll love you if you’ll love me’ thing going on. It is a bargain. And if one stops the bargain you get the hatred ... if the love is cut ... or ...

Q: Or just the absence of love.

Q(2): With the absence you get the cold ... the cold treatment.

R: Dig another layer deeper and one finds that love supports the very sense of identity it purports to transcend. And with love, the self survives ... to live another day. Everything that comes out of the self is designed to keep that self in existence ... all the morality, all the humanitarian ideals ... they all keep the self alive. The whole structure of society ...

Q(2): The whole structure of beliefs.

R: By starting to work in the other direction the self becomes weaker and thinner; more and more insubstantial until one day it can disappear completely.

Q(2): By examining the beliefs the self can disappear?

Q: That’s the identity. The identity is the one that has accumulated all the beliefs and has become an entity unto itself. No person is free of it; everybody is a slave to their identity. They are all ruled by morals that just do not work. They have to do things with people that they really don’t want to do, with people they don’t want to do it with, for people they don’t want to be with ... and the time: When? Where?

R: Years ago I had some religious people bail me up and attempt to convert me to their belief – it would often happen in those days – and they were saying that I should always help people; that that is what we are all here for is to help other people; to put the other person before oneself. I said to them: ‘Who are these people to be helped? Who are these ‘others’? What is going to happen to them?’ I would ask this because if one does do all this – only help others and never oneself – then one goes into an After-Life of some description. I said: ‘What about those people who are being helped? Where are they going to go to?’

Q: (Laughing) Oh! I like that question!

Q(1): Good question!

R: Well, if one wants to be a helper – a ‘good’ person – one needs a ready supply of victims, of helpless people. And where are those helpless people going to go to after they die? They are not going to go into some glorious After-Life because they have not been helping people ... in fact, they have been sucking upon the helpers. So ‘do-gooders’ need a steady supply of victims in order to reach their After-Life of Rapturous Bliss.

And then I would say to them ... because they would tell me I was being selfish ... I would say to them: ‘But you want to go to your heaven when you die?’ And they would say: ‘Yes’. And I would say: ‘You are only helping other people in order for yourself to attain your After-Life of Heavenly Bliss. And is this not selfish?’ They would not like that one. The whole structure of morality hangs upon stuff like this ... that is why there is something really going wrong within society. The whole morality is back-to-front.

But, please, do not take me wrong. I do not mean by this to be self-centred. The whole thrust of examining these morals is to eliminate the self. Do you see that all of the wars and the rapes and the murders and the tortures and the corruptions and domestic violence that is going on in the human world is caused by the sense of identity and the self? From being self-centred? And do you see that the ways that people have devised – which is well-meant but fatally flawed – are not able to work?

Q(2): It supports the status-quo. It creates victims ... the other half of humanity.

R: It has been around for thousands of years. This morality has had plenty of time to prove itself successful – and it has not. There is just as many wars, rapes, murders, tortures, domestic violence and corruption now as there was then ... if not more so. That was three thousand or more years ago! So ... it just has not worked and it never will. Why not try something entirely new?

That was my whole approach back when I was a normal human being with a sense of identity and self.

Q(1): That would have been a bold step – all on your own, I mean.

R: It was simple, actually. It was just this: Let us try something new, something that has not been done before, because we all so obviously need a new approach. The old way has not worked. To repeat myself for emphasis: It has had thousands of years – shall we call it an experiment in living – this experiment has had thousands of years to demonstrate its efficacy. And let us face it: It has failed.

The same can be said for Spiritual Enlightenment – which goes back buried in the mists of time. Who was the first? Maybe Mr. Zoroaster? If so, that is at least three thousand years ago. Mr. Gotama the Sakyan: two and a half thousand years. Mr. Yeshua the Nazarene – although it is hard to classify him as Enlightened – two thousand years.

Q(2): It may be all the fashion now, but it’s nothing new.

R: Nothing new. It has had thousands of years ... how much longer are we all going to give it before we say the ‘experiment’ has failed? How long before we say: ‘Hang on a minute, I do not think that love and compassion, enlightenment and pacifism and all the rest of it is the way to go. Nor the morality that flows out of all these people. They are the ones who invented the morality ... the Saviours and the Saints and the Messiahs and the Avatars and all the rest ... they invented the morality.

Q: And maybe they didn’t invent it ... they copied their predecessors. But somewhere along the line, someone must have begun the process ... discovered what it is to be enlightened ... how to do it. And ever since then, everybody has copied them. It’s already ... the persons who go for enlightenment already know the goal. The goal is known. It is not – as they say it is – the ‘unknown’. It’s a laugh, in spirituality, that they still say that it is the ‘unknown’. It’s not! It’s not ‘The Unknown’ ... everybody who is anybody already knows what it is. It is all the same: they know in advance what they go to, what to expect.

Q(1): Do they? Really?

Q: Oh yes.

Q(2): From a peak experience?

Q: No, from enlightenment. You go into meditation ... it’s an image to find: This is ‘The Truth’, and you plan to live in it all of the time. You expect ‘Truth’ with a capital ‘T’.

Q(2): And you find it.

Q: Yes. You find ‘That’.

Q(2): And that is the delusion ... you’re actually following a framework that’s already established. You simply follow that.

Q: Yes. You do meditations ... you do mantras ... and you know that you have arrived because you can say: ‘I am That’.

Q(2): On the way you can have experiences – spiritual experiences – which have been induced by your knowledge. This proves it to be true, for there is the proof. Off you go into delusion. Into Samadhi. You become ‘One With The Whole’. And it is all a massive delusion.

R: Out of this delusion – out of those people – comes morality. Because the average person is not enlightened – not a Messiah or an Avatar – they are therefore egocentric. So all these enlightened people tell them how to live. As Mr. Yeshua the Nazarene said: ‘Love one another as I have loved you’.

Q(2): It comes from the enlightened religion ...

R: In comes the morality.

Q(2): From spirituality comes the morality.

R: Yes. And that is what everybody in the world is stuck with. Now, from where I am sitting in actual freedom, I come out with certain priorities which, while not being morality, are ways of living ... a new significance. I talk about benevolence and benignity and magnanimity and so on which, while not being your actual condition, you can apply them in your daily life – and you find that it works.

So, that is why I hold them responsible; because they invented the morality that just does not produce the goods.

Q(2): What you are talking about is neither morality or immorality. Is it ‘amorality’?

R: No. What I talk of sidesteps that whole minefield. I say: Throw the entire package out.

Q(2): When you say ‘benign’, what you are talking of is for the whole planet. You are talking of peace on this planet. If people become increasingly benign then there will be, increasingly, peace on this planet.

R: By ‘benign’ I mean it in its literal sense: Harmless.

Q: Yes, rather harmless. You don’t put out any ‘stuff’, you don’t add to it. You don’t take offence ... you stop adding to it. For a start. That’s the best you can do.

Q(2): Stop causing ripples.

R: If somebody gets angry with you, there is no need to get angry back. Why add to it? Not that I am advocating becoming a wimp ... deal with the other person firmly if necessary, but without anger. Then there is no need to be loving to compensate.

I saw something that explicates this on television some time back ... it was a forum where they pack about a hundred people into the studio and they have a particular topic and everybody can air their prejudices. This one was about the issue of a state banning homosexuality and did it have the right? Into the studio came some Christians to put their point of view: that the bible condemned homosexuality. There was this youngish woman, in particular, a really ‘decent’ person, a ‘born-again’ Christian; and there was a young man, a self-professed homosexual, who was putting the line that it was his life and what he did in the privacy of his own home was his business and that the state should have no right to send its police in to arrest him and put him in prison. She was arguing that it was an abomination in the eyes of her god ... so this what the type of debate was that was going to and fro ... and it became rather heated. He was putting his case quite forcibly and she was lecturing him equally forcibly. Then came this really cute bit – which is actually quite sickening – where she said, with syrupy sweetness: ‘But I still love you.’

Q: Oh yes, I remember it now!

R: She said: ‘I don’t like what you’re doing – but I still love you.’

Q: She had this sickly-sweet smile ... she didn’t love him at all.

R: Sanctimonious. That’s their morality.

Q: That’s also their hold on the other person ... especially in one’s development.

Q(1): Oh yes.

R: Whereas my attitude was that people could angry at me all they liked – their anger was not going to make me change my mind. Quite the reverse, in fact, for I would be catering to their modus-operandi if I caved-in under pressure ... it would demonstrate to them that anger was an effective means of getting their way. I had the attitude that the other can go as red in the face as they will – have an apoplectic fit if you will, you will not get your way with me by acting thusly. You may dance up and down in a rage and make yourself look really stupid ... but it will not work.

Q(1): I’m getting ... I don’t know if it’s what we’ve discussed ... but I’m getting really faint. Is that likely?

R: Of course it is! We are ...

Q: ... we are busy at your foundations ...

Q(1): It’s like there is a hole ... a big feeling of a hole right through the centre of my being ... I have been having trouble breathing a bit ...

R: As (Q) says: we are digging at the foundations of your being.

Q(1): As it was happening I was feeling so happy ...

Q: Yes, but there is still quite a few big things, you see, about yourself that go very deep. You have made ... you have counted on that, upon the beliefs about yourself. When you see a ‘truth’ as being a belief, things start to shake up quite a bit. Because it has a lot of ramifications.

R: What we are actually doing is getting at the person who you think and feel that you really are – the psychological entity within is made up of the very things that we are talking about: this morality; this whole system of value judgements ... feelings of guilt, for example. Guilt is part of the social identity; take guilt away and it is as if an arm has dropped off the identity. Take away compassion and the other arm drops off.

Q(1): Until I’m quivering in the corner!

R: There is more to come yet.

Q(1): Oh, that’s good.

R: So you may very well feel faint from time to time ... it is nothing to become worried about. It is not your health.

Q(1): In that case ... oh it’s good ... you see, on the conscious level I’m so glad that this is happening. Then to find this reaction.

R: That shows that it is hitting home – you could be quite pleased with it. Otherwise you would be understanding intellectually ... but not actually. This is understanding on the experiential level. Not just an intellectual grasp of the subjects to be filed away under ‘M’ for ‘morality’ and ‘C’ for ‘compassion’. It is not just talk that we do around here.

Q(1): No, not at all!

R: This is full-on involvement – we mean business here. If you wish to remain a persona then realise your dealing with danger by being here.

Q(1): I’m ready to go all the way – as far as I’m conscious that I can, that is.

R: You will find that you do not go any further at one time, than what the body can handle anyway. Your body shuts down after a while, if it becomes too much. You are feeling faint – some persons feel dizzy, some get a pain in the head, others feel sleepy after a while. It is too much information coming in to process, the brain shuts down.

Q(1): Well, I feel like there is a hole right through my heart.

R: A large chunk of your identity is in the heart region. Feelings, emotions, passions. The heart has led humankind astray for century upon century without ever being questioned as to whether it is the final arbiter of how to live. For sure, being ‘emotional’ has been decried – but, they say, one should reach down into the ‘deeper feelings’ or to the ‘true feelings’. Love, without a doubt, is an affective response ... and although some people have tried to ‘still their passions’, they have, nevertheless, maintained their self via calenture. To go beyond all feelings – without becoming merely rational and logical – has never been done before.

So there is a feeling of imminent loss – not only of your cherished feelings, but grief at the loss of self. This – your ‘self’ – we are referring to is ‘me’, and you have known ‘me’ all your life.

Hence the ‘hole in your heart’.