Actual Freedom – Mailing List ‘C’ Correspondence

June 30 2000:

RESPONDENT: Richard, I have some questions. 1) Do you see enlightenment as pathological?

RICHARD: Yes, my experience, night and day for eleven years, showed me intimately that it is indeed a morbid condition. In psychiatric terminology it is a dissociative state of being, sometimes known as ‘disassociative identity disorder’, complete with self-important delusions of grandeur and megalomaniacal demands for recognition, adulation, surrender and total obedience ... the ‘contracted ego’ (or ‘self’) has transmogrified into a fully expanded soul (the all-expansive ‘Self’).

Generally speaking, all dissociative reactions are attempts to escape from excessive trauma tension and anxiety by separating off parts of personality function from the rest of cognition as an attempt to isolate something that arouses anxiety and gain distance from it. For example, in everyday life, mild and temporary dissociation, sometimes hard to distinguish from repression and isolation, is a relatively common and normal device used to escape from severe emotional stress and anxiety. Temporary episodes of transient estrangement, depersonalisation and derealisation are often experienced by normal persons when they first feel the initial impact of bad news, for instance. Everything suddenly looks strange and different; things seem unnatural and distant; events can be indistinct and vaporous; often the person feels that they themselves are unreal and everything takes on a dream-like quality. Dissociation becomes abnormal when the once mild or transient expedient becomes too intense, lasts too long, or escapes from a person’s control ... and leads to a separation from the surroundings which seriously disturbs object relations. In object estrangement the once familiar world of ordinary objects – the world of people, things and events – seems to have undergone a disturbing and often indescribable change.

Thus, just as a traumatised victim of an horrific and terrifying event makes the experience unreal in order to cope with the ordeal, all the Gurus and the God-Men, the Masters and the Messiahs, the Avatars and the Saviours and the Saints and the Sages have desperately done precisely this thing (during what is sometimes called ‘the dark night of the soul’). Mystics have been transmogrifying the real world ‘reality’ into an unreal ‘True Reality’ via the epiphenomenal imaginative/intuitive facility born of the psyche (which is formed by the instinctual passions genetically endowed by blind nature for survival purposes) for millennia. Mysticism in general is a psychotic sickness; a head-in-the-sand escapist ‘solution’ to all the ills of humankind and is otherwise described (in non-psychiatric terminology) as ‘Theodicy’ (a vindication of a god’s and/or goddess’s goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil).

The altered state of consciousness known as ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ is nothing more and nothing less than a frantic coping-mechanism that became culturally institutionalised, into being a legitimate and venerated social metaphysics, over thousands and thousands of years.

RESPONDENT: 2) Do you see enlightenment as necessary step to get to where you are at?

RICHARD: No ... no one else need ever take that route again (and I would not wish upon anyone to have to follow in my footsteps for I had to run the full gamut of existential angst to break through to what lay beyond). I always liken it to the physical adventure that Mr. James Cook undertook to journey to Australia two hundred plus years ago. It took him over a year in a leaky wooden boat with hard tack for food and immense dangers along the way. Nowadays, one can fly to Australia in twenty-seven hours in air-conditioned comfort, eating hygienically prepared food and watching an in-flight movie into the bargain.

No one has to go the path of the trail-blazer and forge along in another leaky wooden boat.

July 01 2000:

RESPONDENT: So I think you are saying that enlightenment is not a necessary step to where you are now?

RICHARD: It is totally unnecessary ... plus detrimental to both individual and communal salubrity.

RESPONDENT: Is enlightenment a more useful or evolved place to be than pre-enlightenment?

RICHARD: No, to be enlightened is to be anti-life ... peace-on-earth is scornfully discarded so as to secure a vainglorious after-death ‘Peace That Passeth All Understanding’.

In other words: selfish immortality.

July 03 2000:

RESPONDENT No. 8: Have you ever been in the company of a truly enlightened being?

RICHARD: Yes – night and day for eleven years – thus I have intimate knowledge ... and enlightenment sucks.

RESPONDENT: Richard, whose company was that?

RICHARD: The most optimum company possible for a ‘hands on’ exploration and investigation into the inner workings of ‘Tried and True’ solution ... the grandiose ‘Me’ that was inhabiting this body from 1981 to 1992.

There was nowhere to hide.

August 01 2000:

RESPONDENT: Is enlightenment a more useful or evolved place to be than pre-enlightenment?

RICHARD: No, to be enlightened is to be anti-life ... peace-on-earth is scornfully discarded so as to secure a vainglorious after-death ‘Peace That Passeth All Understanding’. In other words: selfish immortality.

RESPONDENT: Richard, is enlightenment a thing at all?

RICHARD: It is certainly possible to be enlightened ... therefore it is ‘a thing’ inasmuch as an altered state of consciousness can and does happen, but it is not actual.

RESPONDENT: Is it a biological condition, a belief?

RICHARD: It is ‘a biological condition’ as enlightenment occurs in the psyche and the psyche is born of the genetically inherited instinctual passions (such as fear and aggression and nurture and desire) ... which passions are indisputably biological. Likewise is ‘a belief’ biological as the activity of believing per se – along with imagining, intuiting, visualising, conceptualising, trusting, hoping, having faith and so forth – also occur in the psyche (all of which can give rise to epiphenomenon such as prescience, clairvoyance, telepathy, divination and other psychic effects).

RESPONDENT: Does it exist?

RICHARD: It does ‘exist’ as a metaphysical ‘Reality’ in the psyche but it is not actual (actual as in the sensate world of this body and that body and the mountains and the streams; the trees and the flowers; the clouds in the sky by day and the stars in the firmament by night and so on and so on ad infinitum). It is a delusion born out of the illusion of the ‘real-world’ reality – everyday reality is a grim and glum veneer pasted over the top of this actual world of the senses – which is why only .000001 of the population have ever become enlightened.

It is extremely difficult to live in a hallucination full-time.