Actual Freedom – Mailing List ‘A’ Correspondence

RESPONDENT: But is not the sex drive an instinct? Where do you draw the line between the ‘instincts’, and the emotions you enjoy? Forgive me if I’ve missed these points previously.

RICHARD: Yes, the sex drive is an instinctual drive ... and, along with other instinctual urges, can be eliminated entirely. Then one is free to act appropriately according to the circumstances and not out of an instinctual reaction. Instincts are not set in stone, they are simply ‘blind nature’s’ way of ensuing survival. With our thinking, reflective brain we can improve on nature in this respect, as we have done in so many other ways. Any instinctual drive can be eradicated.

Then one is free to enjoy the sexual act as a physical, sensual pleasure (not as an emotional or passionate ‘solution’ to loneliness and sorrow via love) or free to enjoy celibacy as an idiosyncratic celebration of singularity (not as a dispassionate or detached way to dissolve the ego via craftiness). It is then an act of free choice to have sex, or not have sex, just as easily in either alternative. No drive means no urge. With no urge there is nothing to have to deny, nor anything to have to indulge. Thus it is neither ‘Asceticism’ nor ‘Hedonism’ ... this is an actual freedom.

I do not have any emotions to enjoy (or to dislike) as all feelings – emotions and passions – are no longer extant. And, yes, you may have missed out as I have written elsewhere on this list:

• [Richard]: ‘I do not experience feelings per se because I do not have any anywhere in this body at all ... this body lost that faculty entirely when ‘I’ became extinct. Thus to use the jargon: no one can ‘press my buttons’ as I do not have any buttons – nor any feelings under them – to be activated. Literally I feel nothing at all. Even when, say, watching a magnificent sunrise where some lofty clouds are shot through with splendid rays of golden light, transforming the morning sky into a blaze of glory ... I feel nothing at all. These eyes seeing it delight in the array of colour, and this brain contemplating its visual splendour can revel in the wonder of it all ... but I can not feel the beauty of it in the emotional and passionate sense of the word feel.
‘Just as when a person becomes physically blind all their other senses are heightened, so too is it when all feelings vanish entirely. This body is simply brimming with sense organs which wallow in their own sensual delight. Visually, everything is intense, vivid, brilliant; sensually everything is dynamic and alive with an actuality ... a matter-of-fact actualness. Everything is endowed with a purity that far exceeds the now-paltry feeling of beauty ... and an intimacy that surpasses the highest feeling of love. Love is actually a pathetic substitute for the perfection of actual intimacy. Actual intimacy is the direct experience of the pristine actuality of another, unmediated by any ‘I’ whatsoever’. [end quote].

I did not ‘arrive’ here in this condition by either denying or indulging in sexuality ... I did not do anything at all for I have always been here. It was ‘I’/‘me’, the psychological/psychic entity residing within this body, that did all the work. ‘He’ self-immolated, psychologically/psychically speaking ... and only ‘he’ could do that (I did not realise ‘myself’ ... I am not a ‘Self-Realised Being’). I am not an enlightened being any more, nor will I ever be again ... that hazard is over forever for ‘I’ do not exist. I am this living, breathing body being alive at this moment in time. By being here, as an actuality, I am the universe experiencing itself as a thinking, reflective human being.

Because the universe is infinite, it is perfect. Infinity is perfection – it can not be otherwise – because there is no ‘outside’ to infinity for there to be an opposite. Thus there is no ‘outside’ to perfection. Consequently, it is all perfect and has always been thus. Any imperfection was but a nightmarish fantasy created in the fertile imagination of ‘I’, the fictitious alien supposedly residing ‘within’. ‘I’, the ‘self’, am comprised in two parts: the ego (as a generalisation, located in the head) and the soul (as a generalisation located in the heart). Over-riding this ‘self’ is a sense of identity ... the ‘who’ that ‘I’ think and feel that ‘I’ am when ‘I’ ask the question: ‘Who am I?’ Whereas Richard is not a ‘who’: I am what I am ... these eyes seeing, these ears hearing and so on. Hence my immutable stance:

Do not, ever, ask the question ‘who am I?’ for one may be in danger of accidentally realising ‘who’ one is and, by thus becoming enlightened, continue to perpetuate all the appalling misery and suffering that has endured throughout the centuries because of the Enlightened Being’s well-meant but fatally flawed ‘Teachings’.