Actual Freedom – Mailing List ‘B’ Correspondence

March 15 1998:

RICHARD: Yes, it is self-aggrandisement ... narcissism to the hilt. Unitary perception means: ‘I am everything and everything is Me’ ... which is easily translated as ‘I am God’. Before the recent influx of Eastern religious and spiritual thought and belief into the West, such delusional beliefs found one being institutionalised. Nowadays such a person is considered by main-stream society to be belonging to the ‘Lunatic Fringe’. Of course, they conveniently overlook the fact that their God – Mr. Yeshua the Nazarene – was one of them.

RESPONDENT: An unitary perception is an observance of oneself as an integral ... one is the world, the universe ... in time and movement.

RICHARD: It rather depends upon whether you mean by ‘integral’ either ‘essential to completeness’ or ‘lacking nothing essential’. As the universe does not need you to be complete, so I am assuming you mean that you are ‘lacking nothing essential’.

RESPONDENT: This is not a perception of being one with the universe, an egotistical delusion, (where ‘I am everything and everything is Me’ ... which is easily translated as ‘I am God’) but rather integral.

RICHARD: If this is indeed the case, why do you write the exact same thing as being your condition in your first sentence? Vis: ‘one is the world, the universe’. Take that notion a few short solipsistic steps further and you will be proclaiming yourself like Mr. Franklin Jones, for example. It is a slippery slope to embark upon, this ‘unitary perception’ business.

RESPONDENT: One is of the puzzle, therefore one is the puzzle, one is not separate from the puzzle. Can one know ‘the puzzle’, ‘the painting’, when one is part of it? (Painting is the better metaphor for the scenery is in constant change.)

RICHARD: Oh good ... you are meaning that you are part of the whole and not the whole itself. I take it that you mean ‘integral’ as in the ‘integrity’ commonly referred to in psychology when they speak of a ‘well-adjusted personality’ as being that of one who has integrated all the conflicting demands of self and society into a healthy ego.

If so, then no ... one can never know the puzzle, the painting.

RESPONDENT: My perception that one only perceives ‘knowing’ when in a perception of a separation. Where the observer is the observed, the experiencer the experienced ... there is an unitary perception that is only of observation and listening – not in proclamation, definition, or determination that comes in the separate.

RICHARD: Whoops, we are back to unitary perception again. Where the ‘observer is the observed’ and the ‘experiencer is the experienced’ you are standing on that slippery slope into solipsism once again. You are saying, in effect, that the truly wise person is the one who says: ‘I do not know’.

This type of thinking has been going on for centuries.

RESPONDENT: Those who need an answer need a saviour, need a tangible God or substitute agent of denial and safety.

RICHARD: Unless one needs an answer with all of one’s being – it is that urgent – one will never live fully. One will never be here at this moment in time and this place in space. One will never be free from the Human Condition. One will never live this peace-on-earth that is already always here.

One needs to know like one has never needed to know before.

March 19 1998:

RICHARD (to Respondent No. 14): This has been going on for century after century ... and there is still no Peace On Earth. A recent estimate that I read about demonstrates that only .000001 of the population throughout recorded history have ever become enlightened.

Hardly an encouraging success rate, to my mind. Maybe – just maybe – it is because it is extremely difficult to be deluded enough live in an hallucination permanently.

RESPONDENT: Who is it that determines that only 1 in 10 million becomes enlightened?

RICHARD: I would say ‘what’ rather than ‘who’ determines it ... and it is possibly a genetic predisposition. Just like schizophrenia, for example, it has something to do with the ability of the individual’s brain to hallucinate. The cultural milieu and environmental pressures would also come into play ... family tensions and so on. Plus the general insanity of the Human Condition.

March 24 1998:

RESPONDENT No. 12: If you understood Krishnamurti, you would not have conceived of an unfragmented observer. That is like saying that there is an unfragmented fragment.

RICHARD: I know it sounds strange ... that is because it is strange. Fragmented means nothing more than consisting of fragments. If the observer becomes the observed, the fragments come together ... they are an integrated whole. The observer experiences unitary perception of ‘centre-less seeing’. There is still an observer in existence ... now at one with everything.

RESPONDENT: Surely the observer cannot experience ‘centre-less seeing’ – for the observer is the centre.

RICHARD: Centre-less seeing is when the observer has become the observed ... it is an holistic vision. This whole observer – unfragmented – is god.

*

RICHARD: That is why I wrote ‘unfragmented observer’. That is what wholeness means, when all is said and done.

RESPONDENT: Is it? Or can wholeness only take place when the observer is not? I don’t know what you mean by ‘unfragmented observer’. Isn’t the observer thought which has separated itself from other thoughts, which it calls the ‘observed’? The observer is therefore always a fragment.

RICHARD: Do you really see ‘the observed’ as referring to thought which has separated itself from other thoughts, which it calls the ‘observed’? You do not consider that Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s use of the word the ‘observed’ refers to the world of people, things and events? Things like trees and mountains and so on? The ‘observer’ quite obviously refers to an entity – a little person – inside the head looking out through the eyes as if looking out through a window to the world outside the house ... but to understand that the ‘observed’ is ‘other thoughts’ is stretching credibility a bit too far, is it not?

Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti refers to the world of people, things and events .. for he said:

• [quote] ‘Do you have a sense of beauty in your life? What is beauty? It isn’t a sensual question, nor a sexual question. It is a very serious question because without beauty in your heart, you cannot flower in goodness. Have you ever looked at a mountain or the blue sea without chattering, without making noise, really paying attention to the blue sea, the beauty of the water, the beauty of light on a sheet of water? When you see the extraordinary beauty of the earth, its rivers, lakes, mountains, what actually takes place? What takes place when you look at something which is actually marvellously beautiful: a statue, a poem, a lily in the pond, or a well-kept lawn? At that moment, the very majesty of a mountain makes you forget yourself. Have you ever been in that position? If you have, you have seen that then you don’t exist, only that grandeur exists’. [end quote].

Or are you one of those persons who maintains that the objects of the world of people, things and events exist only in the brain? That an object has no substantial reality ... as in being actual of its own accord? Because if you do, this is bordering upon solipsism. That gives rise to pithy aphorisms like that hoary adage about a tree in the forest only falling if someone is there to see it fall. If we cannot understand that the physical world exists as an actuality independent of this body seeing it ... well then, we might as well all pack up our books and go home. Because then ... anything can be true, it is all a matter of thinking something to be and it is so being.

Thus a devout Hindu will see a blue-skinned Mr. Krishna playing a flute and a devout Christian will see a fair-skinned Mr. Yeshua the Nazarene hanging on a cross ... and the Hindu will not see Mr. Yeshua the Nazarene and the Christian will not see Mr. Krishna. As they are both thus so obviously culturally derived truths – and not actual and substantial realities – then your version of understanding life is extremely subjective ... as I said, bordering upon solipsism.

*

RICHARD: If Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti had meant that the observer becomes extinct he would have said so ... he had a good grasp of the language. But he talked of a state wherein the observer is the observed. He called that state ‘wholeness’ and being ‘holistic’ ... even to the point of explaining that ‘holistic’ means ‘holy’ ... as in ‘that which is sacred, holy ... that which is beyond thought ... timeless ... ineffable ... the absolute ... the supreme ... that which is the origin of everything ... of all nature ... of all humankind’.

RESPONDENT: Not correct, Richard. Krishnamurti repeatedly stated that when the observer is the observed, there is then neither the observer nor the observed: Krishnamurti: ‘Isn’t there – I am just suggesting, I am not saying it is, or it is not, it’s for you to look to find out – isn’t there a sense of observation without the observer? Right? Do you understand? Which means there is neither the observer nor the observed. I wonder if you get this ... meditation means that there is neither the observer nor the observed. So the observer is not, only ‘what is’.’

RICHARD: There are two ways of reading this:

1. In meditation, when there is neither the observer or the observed, it is because the observer has become the observed and there is union, unity, oneness, wholeness ... then ‘what is’ is holistic seeing. The observer then is the observed and there is the delusion that there is only observation ... what he calls choiceless awareness. This is a state of ‘pure being’ ... which is when the ‘I’ in the head has vanished and one’s sense of identity has shifted to the heart. This is ‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being ... what is known in Christianity as the soul realising itself to be the ‘Immortal Soul’ and in Hinduism as the atman realising itself to be ‘Brahman’ and in Buddhism as remembering your ‘Original Face’ and, realising your ‘Buddha-Nature’, you are a ‘Buddha’.
2. In meditation, when there is neither the observer or the observed, the physical plane disappears – it being ultimately not real as per Hindu and Buddhist belief ... and only god – the void – is real. Thus the observer is ‘what is’ ... and ‘what is’ is god/void.

Of course, it could be – and probably is – a mixture of No. 1 and No. 2 for he spoke about the same thing in another passage, saying that this was ‘the highest form of a religious mind’:

• [quote] ‘It is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbour, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods – you have nothing but images. The images create the space between you and what you observe and in that space there is conflict, so what we are going to find out now together is whether it is possible to be free of the space we create, not only outside ourselves but in ourselves, the space which divides people in all their relationships. Now the very attention you give to a problem is the energy that solves that problem. When you give your complete attention – I mean with everything in you – there is no observer at all. There is only the state of attention which is total energy, and that total energy is the highest form of intelligence. Naturally that state of mind must be completely silent and that silence, that stillness, comes when there is total attention, not disciplined stillness. That total silence in which there is neither the observer nor the thing observed is the highest form of a religious mind. But what takes place in that state cannot be put into words because what is said in words is not the fact. To find out for yourself you have to go through it’. [end quote].

Where he says ‘That total silence in which there is neither the observer nor the thing observed is the highest form of a religious mind’ is why both Buddhists and Vedantists claim him as being one of them. That ‘total silence’ that ‘cannot be put into words’ is the ineffable ‘Truth’ of all mystical endeavour. And as Hindus and Buddhists are either Cosmic Pantheists (‘God is everything and everything is God’) or Acosmic Pantheists (‘God is beyond everything and everything comes from God’), you then understand what the source of the ‘Teachings’ are.

This has been going on for century after century ... and there is still no Peace On Earth.

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