Actual Freedom ~ Commonly Raised Objections

Reading the link you gave me, I still think that you are mixing dodgy Spiritual claims with descriptions of freedom (or actual freedom if you prefer) into one category and dismissing them all. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

For his own reasons, which I have speculated upon already, Richard insists on maintaining a hazardously unnuanced view of feelings, and hence, vitiates the qualitativeness of consciousness. He tosses the baby out with the bath water. In knee-jerk, he’d probably say that he has no feelings to toss out, and plunge us back into his vague, irrelevant and apodictic statements.

Based on your other writings, you appear to be retaining a healthy prejudice toward religion, and have tossed out the baby with the bath water. You haven’t explicitly claimed to be all-knowing, but you seem to be behaving so. Sounds God-like to me. This not to detract from the richness of what you have truly contributed here in these discussions. I’m eternally grateful.

My first questions relate to what is (apparently) lost in AF. If there is no imaginative faculty, no mind-space at all in which to visualise objects and processes, how is it possible to understand systems and processes that do not occur right before one’s eyes? (...) More generally, if you are wholly immersed in the actual world 24/7, and have no ability to be otherwise, how is it possible to understand systems and processes whose meaning and purpose is only comprehensible at higher levels of abstraction?

[Richard]: I was told it [my journal] was too radical, that I was ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’.

Will this ‘experience’ bring peace on earth? Only if it brings lasting peace within, yes, but also as an expression of the individual. In your rejection of all religious theory, practice, and experience, I think you are throwing the ‘baby out with the bathwater’. Yet I agree that present day religions are corrupt, and of those masters of the past: who’s to know what they actually stated? But, there is a path or way to become more than mere human and yet not reject one’s humanity.

When I first came into contact with my scientists, they were talking about how they could not tell the difference between madness and creativity. ... The problem was that they could not eliminate the madness without also eliminating creativity. Similarly, your lizard[brain] has other talents than malice and sorrow – so even if you could modulate its output, you might flush the baby out with the bathwater.

Having been trapped in Rajneesh movement with the feeling to have lost years and years for nothing, you probably exaggerate the evilness of the so-called global spiritual world. We have a French proverb saying you ‘throw away the baby with the water of the bath’. Like people judging the whole Christian civilization only from the Inquisition, the Opus Dei and the Borgia popes. I mention Ramana, Nisargadatta and Aurobindo and you reply with the ‘enlightened Ones Rajneesh, Da Free John and John deRuiter’. Please be honest enough to consider they don’t play in the same category. Please be honest to acknowledge you use caricatures.

What I understand as love is not born out of thought or time. No, you are throwing out the baby with the bath water. There is no denial of time operating in the physical world. You define what it is and then say that is false. I agree what you describe is false. The physical world of solid objects is real but it is not all that can be seen. In the psychological realm there is real separation, no entities existing inside anything. There is a sensitivity that is without cause, without motive. It is effortless.