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Richard’s Correspondence on Mailing List ‘B’ with Respondent No. 31
RICHARD (to Respondent No. 33): How is learning all this [eastern metaphysics]
going to bring about a cessation of suffering for each individual and all humankind? RESPONDENT: Simple question. The answer is ‘unlearning’ all the stuff that one has learnt. RICHARD: Will knowing this eliminate animosity and anguish? RESPONDENT: The obvious answer is No. Millions years of humanity and civilisation testify to that. RICHARD: What is one to do with all this information? RESPONDENT: Answered in the first above. RICHARD: A subtle sense of humour is something to appreciate. How about this for subtle wit: ‘All gods were immortal’.
RICHARD (to Konrad): I read your story with rapidly mounting interest, and only for the sake of brevity
have I cut out all but the most important part in order to paste it above. But all of what you wrote has that ring of truth that
is impossible to not recognise. And as you have been living with this enlightenment for seventeen years. RESPONDENT: Oh God, Richard, now you might motivate our friend to figure out a way to write even more stuff using the ‘compressed format’ of yours!! RICHARD: Isn’t life great! Somebody comes onto this list and tells their story. Simply and directly: ‘This is what happened to me ... and this is what I thought ... and this is what is going on now’. And what a fascinating inside view it is, into the workings-out of the existential dilemma that all humans find themselves in, into the bargain. It is far more interesting and alive and happening than the theoretical pursuit of whether thought imputes this or that or whatever. Or whether an ‘I’ that does not exist can know whether it does not exist ... or not ... or whether an ‘I’ who knows it exists can know that it does not exist ... or not ... or whatever. Konrad has an actual experience – that has lasted for seventeen years – and he will not even be given the benefit of the doubt? So what happens? The cynics come out of the woodwork and slam someone for being open enough to talk about what he himself took to be madness. Well, well, well! Wouldn’t Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti be real chuffed to know what is happening under the auspices of the teachings he brought into the world ... where is the spirit of exploring together, sharing together and finding out together what it is to be a human being in this world as-it-is? [Quote] ‘We are friends, sitting under a tree together, talking over this matter of ...’ [Endquote] He is not saying that he is enlightened ... he is saying that he is ‘living with enlightenment’ ... that a process began seventeen years ago that is still occurring ... that there still is an ‘I’ ... and he is willing to talk about it. What more could one ask for, eh? But, to save people’s bandwidth limits being breached, Konrad and I are corresponding privately. I am finding his experience fascinating, and his views on life, the universe and what it is to be a human being extremely intriguing. Anyway ... what’s with the ‘compressed format’ dig? Hasn’t No. 57 asked us all to be succinct! I cannot resist giving the pot one more stir: I read, years ago, that Mr. Gadadhar Chattopadhyay (aka Ramakrishna) thought himself to be insane ... until he was adjudged enlightened by some pundits brought in specially to determine his exact situation. I just thought I might share that with you.
RICHARD: How is learning all this [eastern metaphysics] going to bring about a cessation of suffering for each individual and all humankind? RESPONDENT: Simple question. The answer is ‘unlearning’ all the stuff that one has learnt. RICHARD: Will knowing this [eastern metaphysics] eliminate animosity and anguish? RESPONDENT: The obvious answer is No. Millions years of humanity and civilisation testify to that. RICHARD: What is one to do with all this [eastern metaphysical] information? RESPONDENT: Answered in the first above. RICHARD: You do have a subtle sense of humour ... that is something I truly appreciate. RESPONDENT: No, Richard, I am serious. RICHARD: This comment of yours is still part of the joke ... right? Because No. 33 was suggesting I learn an extremely complex and complicated metaphysics that did nothing to eliminate the self ... the ego and soul. In fact, if one were to apply his eastern-derived religious and spiritual system, one’s self would be endorsed, enhanced, glorified and rewarded for staying in existence. And this would be a monumental blunder. All the wars, murders, tortures, rapes and destruction that have eventually followed the emergence of any specially hallowed religiosity or spirituality attests to this. Also, all the sadness, loneliness, grief, depression and suicide that has ensued as a result of following any specifically revered religious or spiritual teaching renders its mute testimony to anyone with the eyes to see.
RICHARD (to Respondent No. 12): Whilst Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti, being in a state of enlightenment himself,
might have felt free to condemn Gurus and Gods, he did not dismiss the source of enlightenment itself. In fact, he was in
reverence of: [quote] ‘That which is sacred, holy’. [end quote]. In a biography, written by Ms. Pupal Jayakar, she
relates a scene wherein Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti said that: ‘There is that which is beyond thought, that which is sacred, holy.
That I bow down to; that I would prostrate myself to’ (I do not have the book so this is not a direct quote) If her
recollection of the incident is a factual record of what actually took place, then it is obvious that Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti was
still in the state of reverence himself ... he was in veneration of what he named: ‘the absolute’, ‘the other’, ‘the
supreme’, ‘that which is eternal, timeless and nameless’ (which is still divinity by whatever name). And there are many,
many other instances throughout the extensive writings, by both himself and others, that clearly points to the fact that he was a
spiritual and religious man. (Editorial note: the exact quote is as follows: [Ms. Pupul Jayakar]: ‘... the feeling of presence was overpowering, and soon my voice stopped. Krishnaji turned to me, ‘Do you feel It? I could prostrate to It?’ His body was trembling as he spoke of the presence that listened. ‘Yes, I can prostrate to this, that is here’. Suddenly he turned and left us, walking alone to his room’. page 364; Jayakar, Pupul: ‘Krishnamurti – A Biography’; Harper & Row; San Francisco; 1986). RESPONDENT: Don’t be misled by what Pupal Jayakar wrote. Some of the stuff is quite exaggerated. RICHARD: I would not contemplate for a moment, even, basing my understanding only upon one person’s account ... that would be silly. And, after all, I did condition her statement quite clearly ... vis.; ‘If her recollection of the incident is a factual record of what actually took place’ . Still, I thank you for your warning. Should I apply the same view of ‘stuff’ being ‘quite exaggerated’ in all the other writing as well? Including the, purported, verbatim transcripts of conversations between Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti and many, many other people over the sixty-odd years of public and private talks? Like the one between him and Mr. David Bohm, for example, that you snipped off the paragraph above? To wit:
To which I added the comment: ‘sounds like a divine mover to me ... almost a creator god, in fact’. Am I somehow misunderstanding this? Could you, perhaps, throw some light onto this issue? I have also listened to audio tapes ... are they exaggerated stuff too? And I have seen with my own eyes video tapes also purporting to be Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti talking ... and the image on the screen looked like the flesh and blood man to me. Methinks you are defending the indefensible. Why? RESPONDENT: What does your experience in ‘actualism’ say? RICHARD: My personal experience says pretty well what I have been saying in all my posts since I came onto this List. Namely that to stop at dissolving the ego and becoming enlightened is to stop half-way. One needs to end the soul as well, then any identity whatsoever becomes extirpated, extinguished, eliminated, annihilated ... in other words: extinct. To be as dead as the dodo but with no skeletal remains. To vanish without a trace ... there will be no phoenix to rise from the ashes. Finished. Kaput. Then there is peace-on-earth. If one is not at all alert, then one will conveniently over-look the strange goings-on that are the consequences of the strangle-hold that divinity has upon one who has surrendered their will – romantically believing that they have surrendered their ego – to the ‘Unmanifest Power’ that inhabits the psychic world. In order to feel that one has arrived one cannot afford to know the ‘Unknowable’ because the ‘Authority and Power’ that makes up the ‘Cosmic Energy’ is dependent upon mystique for its perpetuation, its strength and its survival. Its apparitions – either godly or devilish – rely entirely upon remaining a mysterious intuition of ‘being’ ... that which is ‘sacred, holy’ ... that which is beyond thought. Such an inscrutable ‘otherness’ cannot endure exposure as it crumples like a leaky balloon when faced up to squarely ... the success of all esotericism depends upon the maintenance an enigmatic ‘Presence’ which thus preserves a cryptic ‘Essence’ or ‘Source’. The psychic world is hatched from the intuitive faculties which, coupled with a feverish imagination, rules the human psyche with the extrasensory powers born of awe and dread. Knowing all this is the beginning of the extinction of the psyche and all its contents. For eleven years I lived in an Altered State Of Consciousness, so I had plenty of time to examine all its nooks and crannies ... and I found much that was murky and dirty lurking around in the outer darkness. Bewitched and beguiled by the glamour and glory and glitz of the seductive ‘State Of Being’ that ensues when one surrenders to that ‘Power and Authority’, I spent the first three years swanning along in a state of ‘Oneness with everything’. I was Love Agapé and Divine Compassion all rolled up into one ... and my reward for being the latest ‘Saviour Of Humankind’ was to be able to live in ‘Rapturous Bliss’, ‘Ineffable Ecstasy’ and ‘Exalted Euphoria’. However, my native intelligence would not let me get away with anything false and I soon found enough to make me start suspecting something very serious was wrong with Spiritual Enlightenment. To start off with was the inescapable fact that I had a ‘Sense Of Mission’ to bring ‘Peace and Love’ to a suffering humanity – I was driven to spread ‘The Word’ and to disseminate ‘The Truth’ – and this imposition did not sit well with me. In my fourth year I started to question the efficacy of Divine Compassion as a means of resolving sorrow once and for all. As a palliative for suffering it was beyond compare – it superseded pity, sympathy and empathy by a mile – but it remained forever a panacea only. Consolation for sorrow, no matter how divine that solace may be, is not a cure that lasts. In my sixth year I was ready to examine Love Agapé – which up until then had been far to sacred to put under the microscope – and I soon found enough to warrant further investigation. If Divine Compassion had been found to be murky and dirty, I was to go on to discover that Love Agapé was sordid and squalid to the extreme. Just as compassion has its roots in sorrow, so too has love its origin in malice. Hatred is the essential companion to love; the one cannot exist without the other. When I first saw the other face of love I was horrified ... for I was in the grip of a ‘Demonic Power’ disguised as ‘Divine Authority’. The diabolical is but the essential sub-stratum for the righteous; the sinister for the good; the fiendish for the glorious; the infernal for the heavenly; the wicked for the charitable ... and so on. Love Agapé – which has been touted as the cure-all for the ills of humankind for thousands of years – was hand-in-glove with evil. No wonder that religious wars have beset this planet for aeons, for the central tenet of any religious or spiritual path is love ... and love is the very element that will sabotage any well-meant endeavour with its secret agenda. A loving self is still a self, nevertheless. And a self is made out of the sorrow and malice that are generated by the instinctual aggression and fear that humans are born with in order for the species to survive. In my eighth year I turned my attention to the ‘Timeless and Spaceless’ aspect of being enlightened, for although that was my inner experience of myself, I found that I was occupying space as a body moving from place to place – and it took time to do this. The clock kept ticking the hours away and the sun consistently rose in the east, traversed the sky throughout the course of the day and then set in the west. I could clearly observe that time and space were definitely an actuality, despite the feeling that they were an illusion. I also had the sure ‘knowledge’ that I was ‘Deathless’ ... or as they say in the eastern tradition: I was ‘Unborn and Undying’. Had I lost my marbles completely? I would go around telling people that I could not die as I was dead already! Yet what was this corporeal body doing if not eating and drinking, urinating and defecating, waking and sleeping, walking and talking ... and so on? I had to be deluding myself to say that all this gigantic happening called the universe was nothing but an illusion. The eastern philosophy of Maya – although very real – did not hold up in actuality. Then one day, as a result of my deep questioning of my state of being, I was able to experience that without these senses I would not know that I exist. I was the sense organs and these sense organs were me. I was mortal. Immortality was nothing but a self-centred escape from the actual. It was all a case of the persistence of identity. In my tenth year I tentatively approached one of the last bastions of spiritual
enlightenment: pacifism. Almost all of the other attributes of what I called an ‘Absolute Freedom’ had been stripped away and
if I was to undo what is called ‘ahimsa’ The Altered State of Consciousness – in particular, spiritual enlightenment – needs to be talked about and exposed for what it is so that nobody need venture up that blind alley ever again. There is another way and another goal. The main trouble with the enlightenment is that whilst the ego dissolves, the identity as a soul remains intact. No longer identifying as a personal ego-bound identity, one then identifies as an impersonal soul-bound identity – ‘I am That’, ‘I am God’, ‘I am The Supreme’, ‘I am The Absolute’ and so on. This is the delusion, the mirage, the deception ... and it is extremely difficult to see it for oneself, for one is in an august state. This second identity – the second ‘I’ of Mr. Venkataraman Aiyer (aka Ramana) fame – is a difficult one to shake, maybe more difficult than the first; for who is brave enough to voluntarily give up fame and fortune, reverence and worship, status and security? One has to be scrupulously honest with oneself to go all the way and no longer be a someone, a somebody of importance. One faces extinction; ‘I’ will cease to be, there will be no ‘being’ whatsoever, no ‘presence’ at all. It is impossible to imagine, not only the complete and utter cessation of ‘me’ in ‘my’ entirety, but the end of any ‘Ultimate Being’ or ‘Absolute Presence’ in any way, shape or form. It means that no one or no thing is in charge of the universe ... that there is no ‘Ultimate Authority’. It means that all values are but human values, with no absolute values at all to fall back upon. It is impossible for ‘me’ to conceive that without a wayward ‘me’ there is no need for any values whatsoever ... or an ‘Ultimate Authority’. Thus I find myself here, in the world as-it-is. A vast stillness lies all around, a perfection that is abounding with purity. Beneficence, an active kindness, overflows in all directions, imbuing everything with unimaginable fairytale-like quality. For me to be able to be here at all is a blessing that only ‘I’ could grant, because nobody else could do it for me. I am full of admiration for the ‘me’ that dared to do such a thing. I owe all that I experience now to ‘me’. I salute ‘my’ audacity. And what an adventure it was ... and still is. These are the wondrous workings of the exquisite nature of life – who would have it any other way?
RESPONDENT: Richard, I have a few fundamental questions. I am starting with just two questions: From what I have been reading you stake your claim to (f)actualism. Is this something like proceeding from the known to the unknown? RICHARD: That would be a good starting point, yes ... to proceed from the ‘known to the unknown’. This is what enlightened people have done, and they reside in the ‘unknown’. From this position they are aware of an ‘Unknowable’. Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti referred to this in his diaries (the ‘Krishnamurti Journal’?) where he wrote – at least twice from my memory – about there being ‘something beyond Love’. Mr. Mohan ‘Rajneesh’ Jain was more specific in detailing it as the ‘Known’, the ‘Unknown’ and the ‘Unknowable’ ... of which, he said, the latter could never be known. Generally speaking, Buddhism calls this condition ‘Parinirvana’ and Hinduism names it ‘Mahasamadhi’ ... which, of course, can only occur after the physical death of the body. I am speaking very broadly here so as to convey something of the flavour of an actual freedom, here on earth, in this life-time, as this body. It is not a small thing ... as one spiritual master from over-seas said to me last year:
* RESPONDENT: I am confused here. You do not deny the facts. But why then undertake this ‘esoteric’ journey to nothingness? Is it because of going beyond facts due to boredom? RICHARD: ‘Due to boredom’, eh? That is actually quite humorous ... maybe it is as good a motive as any! No, it is not a case of going beyond facts ... going beyond fiction, more like. Shall I put it this way? The enlightened masters state – quite correctly – that normal people are living in an illusion ... right? This means that every-day reality is a dream, a figment of the imagination ... the real world is not what it appears to be. Okay, so far? So, they say, it is possible to ‘wake up’ from this dream and realise who you really are ... As Mr. Venkataraman Aiyer says: ‘There are two ‘I’s ... the self and The Self’. Realise that you are ‘The Self’ – existing for all eternity – and you will have realised your ‘True Nature’ ... you will be residing in the ‘Greater Reality’. This ‘Reality’ – by whatever name – I discovered to be a delusion born out of the illusion of everyday reality. And it is all to do with the persistence of identity. ‘I’ – as ego – dissolve and one transfers one’s identity, via a quantum leap, into being ‘Me’ ... by whatever name. ‘I’ survive, triumphant now, for ‘I’ am one with everything and everyone. ‘I’ manifest Love Agapé and Divine Compassion and tout ‘The Truth’ all around the world to a suffering humanity. Some are so deluded – Mr. Franklin Jones, for example – that the ‘I am everything and everything is Me’ Oceanic feeling of Oneness and Unity translates as: ‘I am God’, or ‘I am The Supreme Being’ or whatever ‘Being’ one may name it (capitalisation is nearly always important, you will notice). RESPONDENT: Please keep it simple, I am trying to fathom your posts. Of course your account of your adventures make fascinating reading and contemplation. Ramana Maharshi adopted a similar approach (forgive me). He proceeded to enquire ‘Who am I’ starting from the human body and further on. I am not clear about the second ‘I’ you mentioned. RICHARD: When one sees – as an actuality – that enlightenment itself is a delusion born out of the illusion of everyday reality, then something very curious happens. This second ‘I’ dies also. Then any identity whatsoever becomes extirpated, extinguished, eliminated, annihilated ... in other words: extinct. Speaking personally, there is no ‘being’ ... no ‘presence’ at all. There is simply this flesh and blood body bereft of any identity whatsoever. Now, there is peace-on-earth ... it exists in the actual world. There can never be peace in the real world. The reality of the real world is an illusion. The Reality of the Mystical World is a delusion. There is an actual world that lies under one’s very nose ... I interact with the same people, things and events that you do, yet it is as if I am in another dimension altogether. There is no good or evil here where I live. I live in a veritable paradise ... this very earth I live on is so vastly superior to any fabled Arcadian Utopia that it would be impossible to believe if I was not living it twenty four hours a day ... and for the last five years. It is so perfectly pure and clear here that there is no need for Love or Compassion or Bliss or Euphoria or Ecstasy or Truth or Goodness or Beauty or Oneness or Unity or Wholeness or ... or any of those baubles. They all pale into pathetic insignificance ... and I lived them for eleven years. RESPONDENT: Why do you say ‘peace on earth’? Is that an insistence that every person annihilate the two ‘I’s, the soul etc. RICHARD: No, not at all. When one is already living freely in the actual world, life is experienced as being perfect as-it-is right now and here on earth. One knows that one is living in a beneficent and benevolent universe – and that is what actually counts. The self-imposed iniquities that ail the people who stubbornly wish to remain denizens of the real world, fail to impinge upon the blitheness and benignity of one who lives in the vast scheme of things. The universe does not force anyone to be happy and harmless, to live in peace and ease, to be free of sorrow and malice. It is a matter of personal choice as to which way one will travel. Human beings, being as they are, will probably continue to tread the ‘tried and true’ paths, little realising that they are the ‘tried and failed’. There is none so doggedly obdurate as a self-righteous soul who is convinced that they know the way to live ... as revealed in their ancient and revered scriptures or in secular philosophy. RESPONDENT: Or is there peace on earth because there is no ‘I’, no ‘soul’ to ‘experience’ the turmoil? RICHARD: No, not quite ... though I see why you would say that. In actual freedom there is no turmoil. ‘I’ create the turmoil by ‘my’ very existence. All suffering is self-inflicted (I am not talking about physical pain). All sorrow and malice – and the love and hatred engendered – exist only in the psyche. There is no good or evil in the actual world. This is not to be taken as being detached or indifferent ... I do not suffer from disassociation. I am well aware of the incredible anguish and animosity that everybody experiences and acts out in their daily life ... I watch the news bulletins on television and interact with people on a daily basis. There has been 160,000,000 people killed in wars this century alone ... and nearly 200 minor wars since 1945. I personally served in a war zone in 1966. Yet it is all self-inflicted. RESPONDENT: Sounds like escapism. RICHARD: Life in the actual world is what is genuine and authentic ... to escape from a grim and glum illusion and not become seduced into the loving and compassionate delusion of mysticism is an eminently sensible thing to do. You may call it ‘like escapism’ and be probably correct ... but it sure beats the masochism and sadism of everyday reality. The only good thing about suffering is when it ends. Yet it can end for anybody ... and when it ends for everybody, there is global peace. This ‘escapism’ sounds pretty good to me! I may be a lot of things ... but I am not silly.
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 No. 9: 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. RESPONDENT: I would also ask, ‘How do we know that about .000001 or so of the population have become enlightened? RICHARD: Some enterprising individual did a head count – I do not have his name to hand at the moment – but I could get it for you if you really want it. An associate of mine found it on the Internet somewhere ... on the Mr Andrew Cohen site, if I remember. The next time I see him I will ask him who and where exactly he got it from. RESPONDENT: If we go by standard terminology of ‘enlightenment’ do we know that there are a number of entities who live in oblivion and not revealing their ‘enlightened’ nature? RICHARD: By ‘standard terminology’ they would not qualify as being fully enlightened ... for it is deemed selfishness to sit in ‘Lotus Land’ and do nothing about the plight of one’s fellow human beings.
RESPONDENT: I would also ask, ‘How do we know that about .000001? or so of the population have become enlightened? RICHARD: Some enterprising individual did a head count – I do not have his name to hand at the moment – but I could get it for you if you really want it. An associate of mine found it on the Internet somewhere ... on the Mr Andrew Cohen site, I think. The next time I see him I will ask him who and where exactly he got it from. RESPONDENT: If we go by standard terminology of ‘enlightenment’ do we know that there are a number of entities who live in oblivion and not revealing their ‘enlightened’ nature? RICHARD: By ‘standard terminology’ they would not qualify as being fully enlightened ... for it is deemed selfishness to sit in ‘Lotus Land’ and do nothing about the plight of one’s fellow human beings. RESPONDENT: Well, thanks for the response, I think I may not have communicated well. The fact that you have split my ‘one’ response into two parts and then responding to the two parts does not seem to get anywhere. All I wanted to ask is how does one know one is ‘enlightened’? And I didn’t mean oblivion is doing nothing about the plight of one’s fellow human beings. RICHARD: One most definitely knows when one is enlightened. The chief characteristics of Enlightenment are: the presence of ‘The Absolute’, union with the ‘Divine’, ‘Universal Compassion’, ‘Love Agapé’, ‘Rapturous Bliss’, ‘Ineffable Ecstasy’, ‘Exalted Euphoria’, ‘The Truth’, ‘Timelessness’, ‘Spacelessness’, ‘Immortality’, ‘Aloneness’, ‘Oneness’, ‘Pacifism’, ‘Surrender’, ‘Trust’, ‘Beauty’, and ‘Goodness’. An enlightened person is driven by a ‘Divine Sense Of Mission’ to bring ‘The Truth’, ‘Universal Love’ and ‘Divine Compassion’ to the world in order to ‘set humankind free’. This is by no means an exhaustive list ... one will be ‘Unborn and Undying’ or ‘Never-born and Never-dying’ and so on. Probably the most significant characteristic – which should set the alarm bells ringing for any intelligent person who has the misfortune of becoming enlightened – is an over-arching delusion of grandeur in which one fondly feels that one can ‘save the world’. One will gather many disciples ... people want somebody else to do it all for them. Nobody, but nobody, can set you free but yourself.
RESPONDENT No. 5: You ... infer a ‘religious belief system’ on my part. RICHARD: Maybe I can draw your attention to a recent post of yours: ‘For those of us interested
in investigating Advaita Vedanta, (a philosophical system that quite closely parallels what Krishnamurti pointed to in his less
formal manner), I’ve turned up the following very intriguing and carefully designed WWW site: www.cco.caltech.edu/~vidya/advaita/.
Even yours truly, he of the rather obviously impaired scholarship, found it very informative’. RESPONDENT: As has been previously stated by others in this list a few utterances and actions do not make one locked into so and so belief system. RICHARD: Would you really call that which No. 5 wrote merely a ‘few utterances’? Are you seriously suggesting that he is just wasting my time and yours by talking about something that he has not the slightest interest in? Do you read his other posts to this List? * RICHARD: Is Advaita Vedanta really a ‘philosophical system’? It is a sect of Hinduism after
all ... and Hinduism is a religion. RESPONDENT: Advaita Vedanta as far as I know is a ‘philosophical system’ that could have been relevant to the times and conditions existing at that time. But to me a religion and philosophic system are two different things. They just happened to be linked by coincidence. As in India today, most people who ‘practice’ the ‘iconic’ Hindu religion have no knowledge about Advaita Vedanta. This is not a criticism. Having heard you say so much about Brahman etc, can I infer that you too are conditioned by Hindu/Buddhist beliefs? RICHARD: No, I am not at all conditioned by Hindu/ Buddhist beliefs ... I was living it for eleven years, but that all abruptly ended five years ago. I am inordinately pleased to be free of those insidious doctrinal truths that masquerade as actuality ... by both word and deed. You say that ‘a religion and philosophic systems are two different things to me’. I agree ... up to a point. But that is not what I was referring to. I was pointing to the fact that Advaita Vedanta is a spiritual philosophy – not a secular philosophy – and that it has its origins in the Hindu religion. Central to Advaita Vedanta is Brahman ... and Brahman has its historical beginnings in Brahma, the Hindu God of Creation. Mr. Shankara, inspired by Buddhism’s Sunyata – an attribute free void-that-is-full – accommodated Buddhist thought into Hinduism (Hinduism has been absorbing all religions into its fold since time immemorial) Basically, Mr. Shankara pointed to scriptural texts, stating identity (‘Thou art That’) as declaring the true meaning of a Brahman as Nirguna (without qualities). Human perception of the unitary and infinite Brahman as being the plural and infinite is due to human beings’ innate habit of adhyasa (superimposition), by which a thou is ascribed to the I (I am tired; I am happy; I am perceiving). The habit stems from human ignorance which can be avoided only by the realisation of the identity of Brahman. Brahman is the Absolute or Supreme Existence ... the origin of all things. Brahman is the eternal, conscious, irreducible, infinite, omnipresent, spiritual source of the universe of finiteness and change. According to the non-dualist school of Advaita Vedanta, Brahman is categorically different from anything phenomenal, and human perceptions of differentiation are illusively projected on this reality If that lot is a secular philosophy then I would like to know what is a spiritual philosophy. * RICHARD: A ‘deep, passionate seeing’? And ‘past the letter’ of Mr. Jiddu
Krishnamurti’s words, Mr. Shankara’s words and Mr. Gotama the Sakyan’s words? You must mean one is to live what they talk
about, surely ... or am I ‘inferring’ again? RESPONDENT: No. There is no living what ‘they’ talk about. What is deep passionate seeing? Is it living Buddha’s ideals? We see so much of that name being used in this list. One of the things he said: ‘Right speech’. We don’t see that here. I admit I too am a culprit here. A deep passionate seeing is a personal thing. It is ‘I’ that see. Nobody can help me see. There is only pointing on the ‘false’ by the other. But ‘I’ have to see the false. There is listening to what is being said. RICHARD: Yes, I am very busy ‘pointing on the false’ myself ... but it falls on deaf ears, apparently. Nevertheless, with patience, perseverance – and a tube of jelly – one can do pretty well anything, eh? Actually I was asking No. 5 if he meant, by a ‘deep passionate seeing past the letter of the words’, whether one was to live that as a reality in one’s daily life. Not the words ... the reality that the words pointed to. If that is the case, then one is indeed ‘locked into a Hindu/Buddhist belief system’. * RICHARD: It all sounds rather metaphysical to me, whichever way you are going to jump. RESPONDENT: Yes. Only a sound after all. The ‘sound’ of ‘metaphysical’. And you seem to be concerned about this. RICHARD: If I may point out? It is not just a ‘sound’ for millions – if not billions – of people. It is a Reality to aspire to for them. And it is not that it ‘sounds’ like it is ‘metaphysical’ ... it is indeed metaphysical. That is why I write so prolifically about it all, for it’s metaphysicality has been one of the main reasons why all the wars, murders, tortures, rapes destruction, sadness, loneliness, grief, depression and suicide have continued to blight this verdant planet we all inhabit. All the Saints and the Sages; all the Masters and the Messiahs; all the Saviours and the Avatars; all the Gurus and the God-men have not been able to bring about their much-touted global Peace On Earth. This has been the sorry lot of humankind since time immemorial. Over 160,000,000 million people have been killed in wars alone this century. Nigh on 200 wars have occurred since the dropping of the atom bomb in 1945. RESPONDENT: Don’t worry, you have already attained peace. No. 5 is not jumping into the frying pan. RICHARD: The expression is ‘jumping out of the frying pan into the fire’, actually ... and as to whether No. 5 has already or is planning to do so remains to be seen. I have yet to hear from him regarding his position.
RESPONDENT No. 15: I don’t mean to focus attention on Krishnamurti, except in so far as it may help to understand what he was getting at in his writings/talks. Also, this is not meant to say that there is not a great deal that was valuable in what Krishnamurti had to say, obviously there was. But, there seems to also be a great deal of room for deeply questioning; specifically questioning how it all relates to real life in 1998. RESPONDENT: I do agree with what you are saying. I could not say any better. If one were to ask what Krishnamurti was really trying to get at I would say it was about the supremacy of an enquiry as a process to an ‘intelligent’ living. Perhaps I am unable to express it the way I see it, but I think this would be a way to describe his focus. Krishnamurti was not a teacher in the sense we understand ‘teaching’. He was a catalyst inciting an inquiring process keeping the flame alive there for the inquirer to continue. Krishnamurti in that sense had nothing to ‘teach’, no conclusion to ‘reach’ and nowhere to rest a case. He simply urged us to continue, continue even deeper and ‘see’ through this (a) our own contradictions, (b) our infatuations with our ‘created universe’, our impatience for attaining a closure, and (c) the process of enquiry itself. His urging to continue was not just through a bunch of dry statements, he definitely tried to ‘seduce’ us through a lot of trinkets which, for some of us, appeared as legitimate goals to be attained. Historically, his role was similar to Buddha and Socrates. But he went a little bit further. Whereas Buddha and Socrates (apparently from what we learn from the texts – and this is my understanding and need not be even true) eventually helped the inquirer to make a closure, Krishnamurti would continue, Krishnamurti would ask the inquirer to try to conclude and see for himself how it is impossible to make a non-trivial closure anywhere. RICHARD: Yet Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti had already made a closure for himself ... he had found a ‘place’ where everything stops. He called it the ‘origin of all things’. He had himself reached a conclusion and had plenty to teach ... he wanted you to get to the place wherein he himself ‘rested his case’. Just because he said he had nothing to teach does not necessarily mean that he had nothing to teach. That was his very teaching method ... to make you think that you and he were just two good friends talking things over together on an equal footing. Make no mistake about it ... he knew and you did not. That he had made this closure himself – come to the end of his search – is exemplified rather well in this statement:
Hmm, ‘a spring that knows no summer’ ... do you get it?
RICHARD (to Respondent No. 7): What is the point of listening to ‘Teachings’ if they cannot be lived?
Is it not a case of ‘listening’ and ‘listening’ ... and never being able to be living fully because the ‘Teachings’
get in the way of an actual freedom? Can the ‘Teachings’, in fact, be ever lived by anyone? If Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti cannot
live the ‘Teachings’, then who can? Who on earth is living the ‘Teachings’? RESPONDENT: There seems to be a distinction made between ‘living the teachings’ and ‘listening’. Why is there such a separation? Aren’t they the same if one looks deeply? Of course K had nothing to teach. He pointed towards the way thought works. For example as I read your post there are various emotions going on. There may be anger, hatred and so on. In listening to one’s own reactions, there is an understanding. Is not that living? It is not that you listen to something verbally and then live it. These are typical of the way religions are. Again, why be concerned about ‘K living the teachings’? What matters is ‘you’ see the validity of what is being stated. RICHARD: What about seeing the invalidity of what is being stated? Why do you assume that what is being stated is ‘valid’?
As for the distinction between ‘living the teachings’ and ‘listening’ ... once you have ‘listened’ – and two minutes was enough if you listened totally – you then ‘lived the ‘Teachings’’. You are then to throw the speaker away ... in other words; you no longer need to ‘listen’ for you have got it for yourself. And make no mistake about it, Mr Jiddu Krishnamurti wanted the listener to live the ‘Teachings’:
I consider that it is all very clearly stated.
RESPONDENT No. 12: One word is too much. RICHARD: So, ‘one word is too much’, eh? This sound suspiciously like a variation on that
pithy aphorism: ‘He who knows does not speak’ ... and it took you five words to say it. This ‘ancient wisdom’ stuff is all
so silly that it is puerile. RESPONDENT: Again, dear friend Richard, just a sound. RICHARD: Is a gun-shot ‘just a sound’ also? Is a scream of terror ‘just a sound’. Were the atom bombs exploding over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘just a sound’ also? These are the type of sounds that woke ‘me’ up to ‘my’ part in all the animosity and anguish that blights this otherwise fair earth we all live on ... not the sound of silence. RESPONDENT: Is there ‘listening’ when the words ‘One word is too much’ is heard? RICHARD: Oh yes, there is indeed a ‘listening’ ... and I hear my fellow humans crying out in pain and bewilderment as they apply the ‘Tried and True’ again and again ... but to no avail. The ‘Tried and True’ is the ‘Tried and Failed’. RESPONDENT: Why is there an association between what is being said in the present to the past ‘He who knows does not speak’? RICHARD: Oh dear ... to list examples of why there is such an association would be too long for this E-Mail. It literally runs into the tens of thousands of millions. What if we were to start with the 160,000,000 human beings killed in wars in this century alone? You see, we would have to include all the wars, the murders, the tortures, the rapes, the domestic violence, the corruptions, the sadness, the loneliness, the sorrows, the depressions and the suicides ... and all because – as you say – there should be no association ‘between what is being said in the present to the past’. This is because there has been a plenitude of this ‘ancient wisdom’ stuff like what that psittacism conveys: ‘He who knows does not speak’. Just who was the wise guy who first said that? Peoples long dead – a pile of mouldering bones – are ruling the world of today.
RESPONDENT No. 19: When we go against what we know in our heart and stomach is the wrong thing to do; when we choose to do it anyway, we will suffer the guilt (some may not). It is certainly not a ‘belief’, as you suggest, that I am the initiator of a wrong or right action. It is a fact. How do I know I know it is a fact? I can only know that by listening to the feelings I get when I do it. It is wrong because it ‘feels’ wrong. It is not just something that I have to be told. This is the essence of right and wrong. Are you suggesting that there is no right and wrong, that right and wrong exist only by judgement brought on by conditioning? Surely not! RICHARD: After all your years of sincere self-investigation are you really going to go on record as
saying that feelings are to be relied upon as the final arbiter for living a salubrious and sociable life? Feelings are
notoriously unreliable ... people have been living according to their feelings for millennia ... just look at the mess the world
is in. Calenture is no better than the conditioned judgement you rightly put aside. ‘Right and Wrong’ is nothing but a
socially-conditioned affective and cognitive conscience instilled by well-meaning adults through reward and punishment (love and
hate) in a fatally-flawed attempt to control the wayward self that all sentient beings are born with. RESPONDENT: So is there a suggestion about the ‘absence’ of feelings for a ‘peaceful’ life? What about the Unabomber? I presume the Unabomber had no ‘guilt’. Is the world a mess because of ‘feelings’? Or the non understanding of these ‘feelings’? RICHARD: A partial absence of feelings – guilt, for example – leads to socially reprehensible acts ... like the Unabomber example you give. A sociopath (psychopath) has no feelings of shame or guilt ... and look what they get up to. It is the feelings that lie under the socially-imposed controls that need to be eliminated ... the deep feelings. These are the passions that all sentient beings are born with. It is the ‘being’ – the rudimentary self that arises out of the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and desire and nurture – that is the root-cause of all the ills of humankind. It is through the ending of ‘being’ that one can live freely without either the animosity or anguish that epitomises the sense of identity that infiltrates from the affective faculties into the cognitive ... and needing to be controlled. A conscience is a social identity ... a psychological creation manufactured by society to act as a guardian over the wayward self one was born with. Everyone is born with a biologically coded instinctive drive for personal physical survival which, when one is operating and functioning with a group of people, is potentially a danger to the survival of other group members. Hence the need for moral rules and ethical laws to regulate the conduct of each person ... with appropriate rewards and punishments to ensure compliance. In a well-meant but ultimately short-sighted effort to prevent gaols from being filled to over-flowing, the social identity – a psychological guardian – is fabricated in an earnest endeavour to prevent the offences from happening in the first place. This ‘guardian’ is programmed with a set of values and charged with the role of acting as a conscience over the wayward self. A conscience is made up of a sure knowledge of what is Right or Wrong and Good or Bad ... as determined by each society. By and large this enterprise has proved to be effective – only a small minority of citizens fail to behave in a socially acceptable manner – but the price for this effectiveness is the lack of the ability to be unique. The lack of uniqueness results in a generalised suffering for all of ‘humanity’. ‘Humanity’ is faced with the invidious choice between curbing aggression and ensuring suffering, or curbing suffering and ensuring aggression ... or so it has been up until now. Something can definitely be achieved in regards to this culturally-imposed social identity ... one can
readily do something about it if one is suitably motivated to do so. One can bring about a benediction from that perfection and
purity which is the essential character of the universe by contacting and cultivating one’s original state of naiveté Societal values are a psychological method of control
CORRESPONDENT No. 31 (Part Two) RETURN TO CORRESPONDENCE LIST ‘B’ INDEX RETURN TO RICHARD’S CORRESPONDENCE INDEX The Third Alternative (Peace On Earth In This Life Time As This Flesh And Blood Body) Here is an actual freedom from the Human Condition, surpassing Spiritual Enlightenment and any other Altered State Of Consciousness, and challenging all philosophy, psychiatry, metaphysics (including quantum physics with its mystic cosmogony), anthropology, sociology ... and any religion along with its paranormal theology. Discarding all of the beliefs that have held humankind in thralldom for aeons, the way has now been discovered that cuts through the ‘Tried and True’ and enables anyone to be, for the first time, a fully free and autonomous individual living in utter peace and tranquillity, beholden to no-one.
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