Actual Freedom – Mailing List ‘A’ Correspondence

RESPONDENT: After so much of what you write about the wonderfulness of living, etc., I inject ‘he obviously hasn’t had to deal with a teenager’. Don’t write me back that you are blissfully swimming in a house full of them.

RICHARD: No, I do not have a house full of children. I am a fifty year old father of four adult children and seven grandchildren from my first marriage. My current companion and I are, by choice, childless and will stay so ... enough is enough! I am also retired and on a pension, so I am able to thoroughly enjoy all the household tasks if only simply because this is made so much easier now that the children are grown up. However, I know full well what is involved in raising teenagers ... I raised teenagers myself. In fact, when my first marriage ended in 1983, I became a single parent, looking after three children (the oldest son having already left home and got work) and I raised a teenage son and two daughters on my own.

Actually, I had a wonderful time. I never sent any of my children to full-time school until aged eleven-twelve (so as to avoid the inevitable indoctrination cunningly disguised as socialisation) and taught them at home instead. With the freedom from authority that this brings the children and I were able to be ‘best friends’, in those latter years of parenthood, as I was thus able to experience them as fellow human beings living this life for the very first time. Consequently I had no need to be a disciplinarian, which is the invidious position parents usually place themselves in, as in my early years. Being radical as I am, we travelled all over the east coast of Australia for some years before heading west and, after some time there, going to India. By this time my second-eldest son had ‘left home’ and obtained work and my youngest daughter decided to live with her mother. Thus my nine year old daughter accompanied me on an exhilarating trip through Singapore, Madras, Delhi and up into the Himalayas where we rented a stone hut about one hundred kilometres from the Nepalese/Tibetan border in Northern India. She thoroughly enjoyed everything.

I currently live on the most easterly point of the Australian seaboard in a small village called Byron Bay. I have an affinity for the small-town life as I was born and raised on a dairy farm in the south-west of Australia.

RESPONDENT: Seriously, I am really interested in what you are saying.

RICHARD: I am genuinely glad to hear this, because I write not only for myself but for my fellow human being. This is my position: We are all fellow human beings who find ourselves here in the world as it was when we were born. We find war, murder, torture, rape, domestic violence and corruption to be endemic ... we notice that it is intrinsic to the human condition ... we set out to discover why this is so. We find sadness, loneliness, sorrow, grief, depression and suicide to be a global incidence ... and we gather that it is also inherent to the human condition ... and we want to know why. We all report to each other as to the nature of our discoveries for we are all well-meaning and seek to find a way out of this mess that we have landed in. Whether one believes in re-incarnation or not, we are all living this particular life for the very first time, and we wish to make sense of it. It is a challenge and the adventure of a life-time to enquire and to uncover, to seek and to find, to explore and to discover. All this being alive business is actually happening and we are totally involved in living it out ... whether we take the back seat or not, we are all still doing it. I, for one, am not taking the back seat.

Despite of the fact that every single human being has had at least one pure consciousness experience (PCE) in a peak experience – and usually more – in their lifetime, they somehow can not differentiate between that experience of apperception (wherein ‘I’, the thought and felt ‘being’, temporarily quits the scene and the actual world becomes apparent) and their pre-conceived notions that everyday reality is an illusion disguising some metaphysical ‘Greater Reality’. The Glamour and the Glory and the Glitz of the Altered State Of Consciousness has a tenacious grip upon the minds and hearts of a benighted humanity. It is indeed strange, to the point of being bizarre, that so many persons will turn their backs on the purity of the perfection of being here – of being alive – at this moment in time. Here in this actual world, which is where this flesh and blood body is living anyway, is the peace that everyone says they are searching for. All that is required is that one comes to one’s senses – both literally and metaphorically – and spend the rest of one’s life without malice and sorrow. One will then be blithe and benign.

I have no doubts that actualism is for any body and every body ... any body, that is, who is willing to go all the way into what is possible for a human being to actualise. And what is possible is a purity that is way beyond normal human expectations; actualism is vastly superior to anything that has ever gone before in human history ... and there has been a plenitude of ‘isms’ to precede this venture. However, all of these ‘tried and true’ philosophies and doctrines have failed again and again to produce the promised effect. Actualism works because it produces the desired results along the way ... the goal in life being to live freely now, not off in some distant future. After all, this moment is the only moment of being alive; this is the only moment to be happy and harmless in, for the past is no longer, the future is not yet and the present is but an illusion sandwiched betwixt the two. If one examines one’s life carefully, one will quickly ascertain that it is always this moment ... and if one is not feeling good right now, then that is a signal that something is amiss. Consequently, one can rectify the situation and ‘get back on track’ as swiftly as possible ... the aim being to have ‘feeling good’ as a bottom line in one’s life. The essence of actualism is to constantly ask oneself this:

• How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?

To actually see the enormous suffering – the massive confusion and untold misery that there is in the ‘Human Condition’ – places radical accountability upon each and every person to do something now. It is to no avail to hope for some Divine solution for the Sacred has had tens of thousands of years to fix things up ... and it has not happened. As being Holy has not worked it is up to oneself to fix oneself up. Be alive – completely alive – as this moment in eternal time and as this place in infinite space is happening. It requires a startling audacity to evince what is possible ... to dare to live life fully. If I can do it then anyone can. I was not someone special ... I had an ordinary birth and upbringing. I went to an ordinary school and took an ordinary job. I went into an ordinary marriage and had an ordinary family. All one gains by waiting for some God to step in is yet more waiting. Is not the evidence of thousands of years of people being on one’s own sufficient to demonstrate that one must do it oneself? Reach out and extend oneself ... live like one has never lived before.

I look forward to hearing from you again.

RESPONDENT: If I had not had a PCE just recently I wouldn’t know what you were talking about. As I read what you say, I say, yes that’s it – that’s what was going on and I wasn’t there! Impossible to put over to someone in words – so unusual – yet so, so real. A lot of words now make sense – like emptiness.

RICHARD: I am pleased to hear that not only have you had a PCE recently, but that you can remember it as well. Most people can not and need a lot of prompting to retrieve it from their memory. If you would care to describe it in as much detail as possible and send it to me, I would appreciate it very much. I will include here a description of such an event, written by a woman from The Netherlands, for your perusal and comments.

• [quote] ‘One of my PCE’s happened in a peak experience on the fore-shore. All of a sudden, unmediated, ‘I’ and ‘my’ world-view had disappeared and an immediate intimacy became apparent. Although I had lived in this village before and had grown very fond of it and its residents, there had always been a distance between me and other people, which had to be bridged by temporary feelings of love and affection which were never satisfying for long. Now a shift in seeing had occurred, and looking at the people around me, I noticed that the distance between me and others had miraculously vanished. Not only between me and other people but equally between me and the trees, me and the houses on the boulevard, even between me and the ocean. Nowhere was there a boundary. Another dimension had taken its place, which I initially experienced as a closeness closer than my own heartbeat, yet it was certainly not love for all or oneness with everything. It was another paradigm than the one in which the opposites play their major role ... and to depict it I needed another vocabulary than words like distant and close, separation and oneness. Opposites can only be used when there is a stationary benchmark to judge them by. When ‘I’, the standard from which everything was measured, ceased to be, a pure appraisal of the situation could take place. I saw everybody, including me as-this-body, and everything else, in its own proper place and nothing was wrong in any way. The concept of bonding, belonging and relationship could simply not be applied, not even with my partner, as there was nobody inside to do the relating. This perfect intimacy was everywhere at once, not generated somewhere specific and then diffused to other locations as is the case with love’. [end quote].

However, if I am imposing into your private and personal space, then it does not matter ... and I will understand.

RESPONDENT: If I had not had a PCE just recently I wouldn’t know what you were talking about. As I read what you say, I say, yes that’s it – that’s what was going on and I wasn’t there! Impossible to put over to someone in words – so unusual – yet so, so real. A lot of words now make sense – like emptiness.

RICHARD: I am pleased to hear that not only have you had a PCE recently, but that you can remember it as well. Most people can not and need a lot of prompting to retrieve it from their memory. If you would care to describe it in as much detail as possible and send it to me, I would appreciate it very much.

RESPONDENT: Here is a description, you may have already seen it as I posted this in to another mailing list before: ‘Went to New England last month – there is a lighthouse and a small parking area out on a peninsula – sitting there in the car – two geese flew from left to right across the front of the car about 20 feet out and 20 feet or so above the water – about eye level. As I remember afterward – there was no time – just the geese flying – their dark eyes, beautiful and wonderful – along with a verbal WOW from me – but I wasn’t there – just this timeless happening’.

RICHARD: I am interested in this topic as I had the first PCE that I could remember in 1980 ... and that triggered of memories of similar incidents in my child-hood. I had one when I was eight years old and had locked it away, out of sight, for twenty six years. It proved to be the turning point of my life ... and it can be for others as well. It is possible to live like that, twenty four hours a day, for the rest of your life. This I call an actual freedom. It is here on earth, in this life-time, as this body.

Everybody that I have spoken to over the last eighteen years – everybody – has had at least one PCE. It is a universal experience common to all humans from all walks of life. It is objectively authentic, unlike religion and spirituality which require belief and faith, and is the genuine peace-on-earth we have all been looking for. It is what gives rise to such expressions as: ‘There must be more to life than this’.

Nevertheless, as I said before, people do not usually remember them easily. This is because, in a PCE, there is no ‘I’ to record the memory on the affective ‘tape-recorder’, for the PCE is not a matter for the emotions and passions. All other (normal) memories have an affective component ... which is why there is nostalgia and sentimentality in people’s reveries.

Life is great, is it not!