|
Richard’s Correspondence on Mailing List ‘B’ with Respondent No. 41
RESPONDENT: Richard, Are you familiar with General Semantics? It is the system advanced by Alfred Korzybski that holds that our use of language is not only a reflection of, but also shapes our personal reality, as well as the reality conveyed to those with whom we communicate with. RICHARD: My use of language is an accurate representation of how the human world really is – the human condition is a reality for 6.0 billion human beings – and to pretend otherwise would be silly. I speak frankly because political correctness is but a gloss covering the underlying truth ... I have regard for my fellow humans and I will not treat them like that. I would suggest that Mr. Alfred Korzybski does not understand human nature if he fondly thinks that it is the use of language that shapes reality ... it is the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire which blind nature bestows on all sentient beings at birth that shapes the reality that 6.0 billion people place over this actual world of sensate delight, peace and freedom. RESPONDENT: The words you choose (or do they choose themselves?) ... RICHARD: I choose my words carefully and they are consciously designed for a specific effect. RESPONDENT: ... to communicate with seem to exhibit a worldview that is beleaguered ... RICHARD: I do not experience being beleaguered ... even though (except for a handful of people) virtually everyone tells me that I have got it all wrong. RESPONDENT: ... spiteful ... RICHARD: I never experience any form of malice ... as I am incapable of taking offence I am free from the horror of revenge. RESPONDENT: ... presumptuous ... RICHARD: I do not have to be presumptuous ... I see for myself the fact and it is the fact that dictates. RESPONDENT: ... condescending ... RICHARD: I cannot be condescending if I tried for I am in no elevated or otherwise ‘holy’ position. I am a fellow human being sans identity ... yet this way of living is so superior to any other way of being on this verdant planet that it beggars belief. Yet it is actual – as evidenced in a PCE – and is freely available for those who dare to care and care to dare. RESPONDENT: ... reductive, etc (see posting from No. 40 for ample examples from your writings – Thanks No. 40!). RICHARD: If you took the time to examine what I write instead of relying upon another’s selection you would find that I also say things like: • [Richard]: ‘My writing is both heretical and iconoclastic ... a fact that I make no apology for. The wars and rapes and murders and tortures and corruptions and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides that afflict this globe are far too serious a matter to deal with for me to spend time in mincing words. The Divine ‘Beings’ have been peddling their snake oil for centuries to no avail. Their time has come to either put up or shut up ... how much longer than these thousands of years do peoples need to further test the efficaciousness of their failed Divine Message?’ RESPONDENT: These views seem contrary to the idea of freedom, actualised or otherwise. RICHARD: Ahh ... therein lies the nub of the problem: ‘the idea of freedom’ is a far cry from the actuality of freedom. If you have an ‘idea of freedom’ – and set out to achieve that – then you will wind up being a self-righteous prude, for the ‘idea’ is not what the actual is. Whereas I know where I am at and where I came from and how I got here and I can write meaningfully, trenchantly, direct and to the point. As no one else, as far as I have been able to ascertain in eighteen years of scouring the books and travelling overseas, has become actually free of the human condition, then there is no precedent or example that you can use to judge me by. RESPONDENT: Is this indicative of the Actual Freedom that you write about? RICHARD: No ... what you see being written here on this Mailing List is my response to dogma and doctrine. If each and every person were to be happy and harmless (free from the human condition) you would never see me write like I currently do. RESPONDENT: As you are the spokesman for Actual Freedom, it would appear so. RICHARD: In an ‘idea’ of freedom, people are into altering behavioural patterns (rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic) whereas what I speak of is the elimination of that which causes the aberrant behaviour in the first place. As pacifists and their ilk (those who live the doctrine of non-violence) do not eliminate the source of aberrant behaviour ... then they have to imitate the actual ease of an actual freedom from the human condition by making a big splash about their ‘goodie-goodie’ behaviour. To put it simply – and in a way that might just convey it to you – this what I speak of is somewhat indicated by what is possibly the only passage in the Christian’s Holy Scriptures worthy of note. Vis.:
Which means: clean up your act on the ‘inside’ and the ‘outer’ actions are free to be appropriate to the circumstances. This applies to all anti-social behaviour ... not just a minor thing like sex outside of marriage. Things like all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and suicides, to give but a small yet very representative example. If someone were to bop me on the nose I am free to bop them back.
RESPONDENT: Richard, Are you familiar with General Semantics? It is the system advanced by Alfred Korzybski that holds that our use of language is not only a reflection of, but also shapes our personal reality, as well as the reality conveyed to those with whom we communicate with. RICHARD: My use of language is an accurate representation of how the human world really is – the human condition is a reality for 6.0 billion human beings – and to pretend otherwise would be silly. I speak frankly because political correctness is but a gloss covering the underlying truth ... I have regard for my fellow humans and I will not treat them like that. I would suggest that Mr. Alfred Korzybski does not understand human nature if he fondly thinks that it is the use of language that shapes reality ... it is the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire which blind nature bestows on all sentient beings at birth that shapes the reality that 6.0 billion people place over this actual world of sensate delight, peace and freedom. RESPONDENT: Are you saying that language does not shape reality? For most of us, language is the predominance of reality! RICHARD: Language certainly cultivates and refines the reality that one’s identity automatically pastes as a veneer over the pristine actuality of the physical world of people, things and events ... but it is the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire which blind nature bestows on all sentient beings at birth that creates the reality known as ‘normal’. RESPONDENT: I would suggest that our instinctual passions [emotions] are a catalyst for our actions, but in many cases thought/language serves as the catalyst for the emotions. RICHARD: Yes ... so long as you are not suggesting that ‘thought/language’ creates the ‘instinctual passions [emotions]’. * RESPONDENT: The words you choose (or do they choose themselves?) ... RICHARD: I choose my words carefully and they are consciously designed for a specific effect. RESPONDENT: ... to communicate with seem to exhibit a worldview that is beleaguered ... RICHARD: I do not experience being beleaguered ... even though (except for a handful of people) virtually everyone tells me that I have got it all wrong. RESPONDENT: OK, let us examine what you said above from a General Semantics perspective: ‘I do not experience being beleaguered ...’ This was well stated: you are not beleaguered, you do not ‘experience being beleaguered’. Well put. RICHARD: Yes ... but bearing in mind that, for most of the time when I report my experience and explain myself in the context of past and current human experience, mostly people do besiege me (as in ‘attack’, ‘accuse’, ‘ridicule’ and so on) ... which peoples are defending the status-quo. But I do not experience being beleaguered. Anyway, running the gauntlet of peer review always happens when someone comes out with something new and serves to weed out anything invalid – that which cannot stand the test of fire, so to speak – and, as such, is beneficial. Needless to say, I am no wimp (meek and mild) and although I have no desire to argue, I can give as good as I get if the occasion warrants. RESPONDENT: ... ‘even though (except for a handful of people) virtually everyone tells me that I have got it all wrong’. This statement is very imprecise, and leaves room for misinterpretation, hence a distortion. What do you mean by ‘virtually everyone’? All of humanity? All on this list? All that you meet and whom speak to you? RICHARD: Okay ... to be precise, it is not only 99.9% of the people whom I interact with face-to-face or via the written word, but includes virtually everyone living and dead. I am well aware, that for anyone listening whose psyche is still in place, there is a psychic dimension wherein myriads of atavistic ‘voices’ are insistently whispering ‘wrong, wrong, wrong’. Mostly people experience this as being that they ‘intuitively know’ that Richard has ‘got it wrong’ or that a ‘still, quiet voice silently speaks the truth within’ and so on. RESPONDENT: Your statement could be read as: ‘I do not experience being beleaguered, even though [all of humanity] [everyone I meet] [everyone on this list] tells me that I have got it wrong’. Do you see what I am saying? Even if your words were confined to the people with which you have corresponded with on the list, I have seen a lot of people question you about your claims, but I would hardly say that they have all told you that you ‘have got it wrong’. Even though you made a statement that you are not beleaguered, the undercurrent of the statement says otherwise. Didn’t you write once that you are a firm believer in communicating with precision? RICHARD: I do like to be as clear as it is possible to be in communicating ... yet many of the words in any dictionary have two or more meanings ascribed to them. I generally like to explain which significance I am giving to that word, if that particular connotation is not readily apparent from the context of the sentence or paragraph or the subject being discussed, so as to obviate misunderstanding. Given the controversial nature of the topic, misunderstanding (through cognitive dissonance) is inevitable. As what I am living is unnatural it is predictable that it be received as me having ‘got it wrong’... and what you call the ‘undercurrent of that statement’ conveys this. * RESPONDENT: [The words you choose seem to exhibit a worldview that is] spiteful, presumptuous, condescending, reductive, etc (see posting from No. 40 for ample examples from your writings – Thanks No. 40!). RICHARD: If you took the time to examine what I write instead of relying upon another’s selection you would find that I also say things like <clipped for brevity>. RESPONDENT: To be fair, I did a somewhat superficial review of some of the correspondences you have had with ‘B’ list-members, to find examples of spite, presumption, etc and did not find any that were clearly so. My disbelief of you or anyone claiming to be enlightened, or beyond, seems to have clouded my perception. There may have been examples there, but I did not, in my limited investigation, find any. I apologize for speaking without basis. RICHARD: Okay ... and where you say ‘my disbelief of you or anyone claiming ...’ it is vital to make sure that one never swings to belief so as to counteract this leaning. I do not want any one to merely believe me. I stress to people how vital it is that they see for themselves. If they were so foolish as to believe me then the most they would end up in is living in a dream state and thus miss out on the actual. I do not wish this fate upon anyone ... I like my fellow human beings. What one can do is make a critical examination of all the words I advance so as to ascertain if they be intrinsically self-explanatory ... and only when they are seen to be inherently consistent with what is being spoken about, then the facts speak for themselves. Then one will have reason to remember a pure conscious experience (PCE), which all peoples I have spoken to at length have had, and thus verify by direct experience the facticity of what is written. The PCE occurs globally ... across cultures and down through the ages irregardless of gender, race or age. However, it is usually interpreted according to cultural beliefs – created and reinforced by the persistence of identity – and devolves into an altered state of consciousness (ASC). Then ‘I’ as ego – sublimated and transcended as ‘me’ as soul – manifest as ‘pure being’ (a god or a goddess or that which is ‘timeless and spaceless and formless’) which is ‘unborn and undying’ or ‘deathless’ and so on. I am mortal.
RESPONDENT: Richard, I don’t know if you are subscribed to the list or not, but I would appreciate your input on the posting [regarding identification]. RICHARD: I was born in Australia, of an English/Scottish Hong Kong-born father and an English/English Australia-born mother. With this British background, I was enculturated into believing that I was, literally, an Australian citizen ... but with British blood. Now, blood is blood ... there is no such ‘thing’ as an ‘Australian’, an ‘American’, a ‘German’, a ‘Japanese’ and so on. Thus the wars and the suicides – the blood shed and the tears shed – are precipitated because of the absurdity of identification ... is not all this acculturation ridiculous! However, as an infant, a child, a youth and then a man, I was so programmed as to be unable to discriminate fact from fiction. I had no terms of reference that I could use as a standard to determine which was which, as every single human being on this planet was not simply a flesh and blood body ... but similarly conditioned into being an ‘ethnic’ human being. Thus I bought the whole package. Hook, line and sinker. As I slowly started to unravel the mess that humankind was deeply mired in by unravelling it in me, I discovered a second layer under ‘my’ acculturated ethnicity ... ‘I’ was brainwashed into being a ‘man’ and not simply a flesh and blood male body. Under the enculturated layers lies a further identity ... the genetically-inherited animal ‘self’. It took me years and years of exploration and discovery to find out that ‘I’ was a ‘me’ – a ‘being’ – and not simply a flesh and blood body. By identification as ‘me’, a psychological/psychic entity was able to ‘possess’ this body. It is not unlike those Christians who are said to be possessed by an evil entity and require exorcism. Only this ‘possession’ was called being normal. Therefore, every human being is thus possessed by an ‘alien entity’ ... I discovered that a ‘walk-in’ was in control of this body and that this ‘walk-in’ was ‘me’. So, superficially there is a composite conditioned social identity that encompasses:
These are related to roles, rank, positions, station, status, class, age, gender ... the whole organisation of hierarchical structure and control. But behind all that – underlying all socialised classifications – is the persistent feeling of being an identity inhabiting the body: an affective ‘entity’ as in a deep, abiding and profound feeling of being an occupant, a tenant, a squatter or a phantom hiding behind a façade, a mask, a persona; as a subjective emotional psychological ‘self’ and/or a passionate psychic ‘being’ (‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul) inhabiting the psyche; a deep feeling of being a ‘spirit’; a consciousness of the immanence of ‘presence’ (which exists immortally); an awareness of being an autological ‘being’ ... the realisation of ‘Being’ itself. In other words: everything you think, feel and instinctually know yourself to be. A person’s deepest feeling of ‘being’ – the real ‘me’ – is evidenced when one says: ‘But what about me, nobody loves me for me’. For a woman it may be: ‘You only want me for my body ... and not for me’. For a man it may be: ‘You only want me for my money ... and not for me’. For a child it may be: ‘You only want to be my friend because of my toys (or sweets or whatever)’. That deep feeling of ‘me’ – that ‘being’ itself – is at the core of identity. It arises out of the basic instincts that blind nature endowed all human beings with as a rough and ready ‘soft-ware’ package to make a start in life. These instincts – mainly fear and aggression and nurture and desire – appear as a rudimentary self common to all sentient beings. This is why it is felt to be one’s ‘Original Face’ – to use the Zen terminology – when one accesses it in religious and/or spiritual and/or mystical meditation practices and disciplines. This is the source of ‘we are all one’, because ‘we’ are all the same-same blind instinctual self that stretches back beyond the dawn of human memory. It is a very, very ancient genetic memory. Hoariness does not make it automatically wise, however, despite desperate belief to the contrary.
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.
Richard's Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust:
1997-. All Rights Reserved.
Disclaimer |
