Actual Freedom – Selected Correspondence by Topic

IRENE to Peter: Richard sees that feelings and intuitions are the main-cause for all misery and suffering in the world, and believes that women must be helped to get rid of these unfortunate and malicious tendencies ... and become like him.

RICHARD: Why this one-eyed view? Why do you turn these discussions into a woman versus man issue? What is your agenda? I talk equally to man and woman ... men have intuition too (popularly known as ‘gut-feelings’ or ‘hunches’). When tested exhaustively, male intuition was demonstrated to be as unreliable as female intuition ... 50/50 on average (which is the same as guessing). The male clairvoyants – now there is proof that intuition is not the exclusive domain of the female of the species – could not better a 53.4% accuracy. Also ... men have feelings too. It is just that they express them differently to women ... a man knows what another man is feeling. We have discussed these issues before – you and I – and you came to recognise the ‘code’ that men use to convey feelings to each other. It is surprising to see so much recidivism in such a short time.

RESPONDENT: ‘The solution lies not in struggle, a propensity of both instinct and intellect, but in an unmoving awareness that allows our full nature to come into view and a third source of understanding to come into play, the intuition’.

RICHARD: Speaking personally, I have no intuition whatsoever ... that faculty disappeared in 1992 and I mourn not its departure. Nor have I the imaginative faculty ... I could not form an image if my life depended upon it.

RESPONDENT: ‘Please note, I am not talking about the confused notion of intuition that is rampant in new age circles, which is most often a mistaken attempt to return to a dependence on instincts. I am speaking about accessing an innate ‘intelligence’ that is already always functioning in the each of us and the universe as a whole’.

RICHARD: There is indeed an ‘innate ‘intelligence’ that is already always functioning in the each of us’ which I consistently call ‘native intelligence’. Its sagacity filters through despite the best attempts of the passions to swamp it with feeling-fed notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ... and is known in the ‘real world’ as ‘commonsense’. Thus ‘commonsense’, when freed of the grip of the instinctual passions, is what I call ‘native intelligence’.

There is no ‘Intelligence’ that is running the universe, however. Only the human animal is intelligent.

RESPONDENT: I see the intuition as the key to the proper integration of the intellect and instincts. And I am very clear and pointing out that I am not talking about the common use of the word. Rather, I relate it to an ‘innate intelligence’ that is already always functioning in each of us and the universe. You then quickly point out that you ‘have no intuition whatsoever ...’.

RICHARD: Indeed ... the intuitive/ imaginative faculty disappeared when the entire psyche became extinct.

RESPONDENT: On exploring your web site it was clear to me that what you call ‘intuition’ is precisely the so called intuition of many new age circles. That was certainly best left behind, but it is not what I am talking about. I suspect what I call ‘intuition’ relates very well to what you call ‘native intelligence’ and we would agree that this sense if mostly distorted as long as the intellect’s capacity to clearly reflect it is diminished by emotional confusions.

RICHARD: One’s native intelligence cannot operate and function cleanly and clearly whilst ‘I’ am in there trying to run the show. The nearest thing to what I call native intelligence is known as commonsense in the ‘real world’. Intuition, be it of the NDA variety, or any other variety is affectively-based ... thus you would be relying on the notoriously unreliable feelings to be the arbiter of what is appropriate or inappropriate action.

RESPONDENT: I’m not sure even this distorted ‘filtering through’ is what is normally called ‘common sense’ (the term is so poorly applied these days. It is also this faculty, (‘native intelligence’ to you; ‘intuition’ to me) that I am referring to when I speak of one’s ‘sense of responsibility’.

RICHARD: I use the phrase native intelligence in the meaning of ‘autochthonous acumen’ or ‘indigenous prudence’ or ‘congenital judicity’. I am meaning a down-to-earth and matter-of-fact practicality ... an innate sensibility. Intuition is not sensible.

I have no sense of responsibility whatsoever ... the ‘I’ that was took full responsibility and an action that was not of ‘his’ doing resulted.

RESPONDENT: You have intuition but you have placed it in denial.

RICHARD: You do seem to know more about me than I do ... yet I have repeatedly written that the intuitive/imaginative faculty disappeared back in 1992 when the entire psyche vanished concurrent with the deletion of the software program of instinctual passions bestowed at conception by blind nature. And in this ‘computer analogy’ I have also written that there is no ‘Recycle Bin’ to retrieve the program from ... and your advice is: ‘you have placed it in denial’. Now, as some peoples like to re-name their computer’s recycle bin – into ‘trash can’ for example – I have accordingly searched throughout this body for a re-named recycle bin named ‘denial’... wherein you maintain I have placed intuition.

Nope ... ‘denial’ does not exist on this flesh and blood hard-drive.

RESPONDENT: Surrender and intuition shall return.

RICHARD: Hokey-dokey ... whom shall I surrender to? Which of the 1200 gods do you recommend? Which god did you wish to be, back in the days when you started to lose the plot, and which god did you end up being? And what is so crash-hot about intuition anyway? When tested exhaustively, the most intuitive peoples could only muster a 53.4% accuracy rating and all the others 50/50 ... which is the same odds as guess-work. It does seem to me to be a lot of trouble, to ask for the CV’s of all 1200 gods (in order to ascertain which one has the better track-record) and then trustingly surrender just to regain a very unreliable faculty called intuition.

Mr. Mohan ‘Rajneesh’ Jain (self-acknowledged to have surrendered), for example, predicted on 2 September 1983 that:

• ‘Beginning next year, the world will face 15 years of catastrophic natural and man-made disasters – including nuclear war. Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Bombay all will be destroyed – but the holocaust will not be confined to these major political centres. And unless human consciousness changes totally, man cannot survive. As he is right now, he is already out-dated. There will be floods which have never been known since the time of Noah, along with the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and everything else that is possible through nature. There will be wars which are bound to end in nuclear explosions, hence no ordinary Noah’s Arks are going to save humanity. (Here) we are creating a Noah’s Ark of consciousness, remaining centred exactly in the middle of the cyclone. I say to you that except this there is no other way’. (© ‘The Rajneesh Times’ 1983).

My high-school arithmetic tells me that 1983 plus 15 makes 2 September 1998 (last year) the end of his 15 year holocaust. When I watch television I see places like Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Bombay still standing – and still expanding – so I guess there is a giant conspiracy going on and it is old footage being replayed so as to lull me into a false sense of security!

But ... so much for ‘divine’ intuition, eh?

RESPONDENT: They [feelings] are never the same.

RICHARD: Oh, yes they are ... they are tediously repetitious.

RESPONDENT: Sometimes they are. Those are the emotions.

RICHARD: Not only the emotions ... also the passions and calenture. And from the way you are leaning toward having faith in intuition ... so to is the psychic. It is all the same-same stuff that human beings have fallen prey to for millennia ... with disastrous results.

RESPONDENT: They are always new.

RICHARD: Oh, no they are not ... they are the same old same old.

RESPONDENT: These are the insights. They just come to one ‘out of the blue’. This is what I mean by ‘true feelings’, the sixth sense. You are a firm adherent to the five senses; haven’t you come in contact with the sixth one yet?

RICHARD: Yes ... many years ago. You are not talking to a beginner here ... I have already been down that path. The ‘sixth sense’ is where one enters into the psychic world of prescience and clairvoyance and all that stuff. Also notoriously unreliable ... and down-right dangerous into the bargain.

RESPONDENT: Don’t you ever just ‘know things’ without any reason or rhyme? Do you listen to this sixth sense?

RICHARD: No ... I no longer have it. Intuition (and the imaginative faculty that it is born of) disappeared completely in 1992 when the soul ‘me’ vanished entirely from this body. Thus I know as a fact that it is all born of the affective faculties, as I have had no feelings at all since then.

RESPONDENT: For instance, a couple of years ago some numbers came to me, in my ‘feelings’. I knew they were ‘magic’ numbers, but I didn’t know what to do with them ... we don’t have a lottery in Arkansas, and I have no idea how a lottery works anyway ... something to do with numbers. Anyway, we were driving through a state where gambling was legal, and when we sat down to eat, the waitress brought us a card to play keno on. I had a certificate to play the game, but I didn’t know how. It was worth a two dollar bet, so I used all of my numbers, and they came up sequentially on the game board and I won a hundred dollars. (Now I know that if I had played only my numbers, I would have won about $50,000). I new I was wasting the numbers because I just knew (felt) they were worth a lot of money, but I had been carrying them around in my head for a long time, and I was ready to get rid of them. This is not the only instance of ‘feelings’ I have had ... when you just know things that have happened or are going to happen.

RICHARD: This is a subject that I have examined with great interest over the years ... it is not something that I have discarded capriciously. These days, when someone sits in my living room and makes these kind of statements – detailing their case-history – I always ask them to remember when their much-treasured intuition did not work ... and eventually they come to see that it works out at about 50/50. As this equals guess-work, they invariably leave much more soberly – and wiser – than when they came in. Intuition cannot survive scrutiny.

RESPONDENT No. 25: It is this imaginary self-image which is the agitator of wars (and no doubt the chimpanzee, with its rudimentary self-image-structure, is able to be xenophobic too – though fortunately not to such a twisted and destructive extent as his fellow primate – the human being).

RICHARD: This ‘imaginary self-image’ arises intuitively in the instinctual passions themselves (intuitive ‘self’-consciousness’) and is the instinctual passions, at base. As such, the instinctual passions, in conjunction with their intuitive ‘self’-consciousness, are the ‘agitator of wars’. That this intuitive ‘feeling-self’ (‘me’ as soul) has given rise to a narcissistic ‘thinking-self’ (‘I’ as ego) in the human animal only serves to make the wars more deviously contrived than the wars of the chimpanzee.

The chimpanzee have been observed and documented to having a remarkable correspondence to humans (to being beset with virtually the same-same ills that beset the human animal) ... a difference in degree is not a difference in kind.

RESPONDENT: Is intuition innate in the instincts?

RICHARD: Intuition is innate in the instinctual passions, yes. It is easily observed that animals not only operate instinctively but suss out other animals, things and situations intuitively ... whereas it is not evident that animals can think (as in observe, reflect, remember, compare, plan and propose considered action).

Otherwise they would not languish and/or die-off in droughts and famines and so on.

RESPONDENT: Could it be said then that ‘me’ as soul is intuition or that ‘me’ as soul has intuition? In other words is the ‘me’ instincts or is the ‘me’ intuition that arises out of the instincts?

RICHARD: The instinctual passions and their ‘sixth sense’ are inseparable: thus it is both the affective feelings and their inherent intuition – both of which animals have – in conjunction with a third factor: recognition (incipient identification). Thus ‘me’ as soul (‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being ... which is ‘being’ itself) arises in the activity of intuitive ‘self’-recognition and/or ‘self’-identification ... which activity, being rooted in the instinctual passions, is affective.

Put simply: it is the feeling of being a ‘self’. There is some evidence to indicate that the chimpanzee intuitively recognises itself as being a separate ‘self’ – albeit rudimentary – whereas the monkey does not (it sees its reflected image as being another monkey). Just recently there were reports that dolphins may be able to recognise themselves in a mirror.

Concomitant with ‘self’-recognition/‘self’-identification comes the capacity to intuit a similar ‘self’ in others ... with all that inheres in that recognition.

RESPONDENT: Does the ‘I’ arise out of intuition also?

RICHARD: Not just out of intuition: out of all of the above ... plus thought. ‘I’ as ego is a mental-emotional construct.

RESPONDENT: What I am trying to ask is: Is the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ intuition?

RICHARD: ‘I’ as ego is mostly experienced as being a thinking-‘self’ (popularly located as being in the head) and is characterised as capable of being insightful; ‘me’ as soul is mostly experienced as being a feeling-‘self’ (popularly located as being in the heart) and is characterised as capable of being intuitive.

But it is all an admixture – none of it is as distinct and compartmentalised as detailed above – as all overlap and interpenetrate each other in a composite package.

In a word: identity.

RICHARD: Does this not stretch one’s credulity somewhat?

RESPONDENT: It’s not about credulity, but intuition and faith.

RICHARD: What is the difference between ‘credulity’ and ‘intuition and faith’ ... according to you? Because, when one intuitively knows who ‘I’ really am (as in ‘I am the Self’, the second ‘I’ as explicated by Mr. Venkataraman Aiyer aka Ramana) one is living in an apotheosised field of consciousness where one has the power of attaining to direct metaphysical knowledge without evident sensible thought and rational inference ... which indicates credulity stretched to the max: a readiness to believe, to have faith and trust, that ‘The Truth’ is genuine, authentic, bona fide, valid, legitimate.