Actual Freedom ~ Frequently Flogged Misconceptions

RICHARD: How on earth can I live happily and harmlessly in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are whilst I nurse malice and sorrow in my bosom?

RESPONDENT: Hum, Richard, you can’t.

RICHARD: Indeed not ... such a simple statement, non?

RESPONDENT: And what need is there for ‘happily and harmlessly’.

RICHARD: What need is there for me to be living happily in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are? The need to put an end to all the sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides ... that is what need is there for me to be living happily. What need is there for me to be living harmlessly in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are? The need to put an end to all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse ... that is what need is there for me to be living harmlessly.

RESPONDENT: If there is ‘malice and sorrow’, the malice and sorrow will overcome the ‘happy and harmless’ in an instant or less!

RICHARD: Yet you have already agreed (above) that whilst I nurse malice and sorrow in my bosom I cannot live happily and harmlessly in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are ... did you not? Therefore there is no ‘happy and harmless’ to be ‘overcome in an instant or less’ with ‘malice and sorrow’ ... this sentence of yours is nothing but an entirely pointless observation.

Was it not such a simple statement after all?

RESPONDENT: Now, you say the instincts must and can be removed. I say this is impossible. You say you have done it. I say what you have done is to unravel the intertwined drives/thoughts that resulted in a confused feeling and mental capacity. It is the emotional confusion that has been cleared away, not the instincts.

RICHARD: Hmm ... the emotional confusion comes, of course, primarily from the emotions; the emotions come from the instinctual passions all sentient beings are born with. Ergo: eliminate the instinctual passions and there are no emotions to cause confusion. As it is impossible to be a ‘stripped-down’ self – divested of emotions – for ‘I’ am ‘my’ emotions and ‘my’ emotions are ‘me’, then anyone who attempts this absurdity would wind up being somewhat like what is known in psychiatric terminology as a ‘sociopathic personality’ (popularly know as ‘psychopath’). Such a person still has emotions – ‘cold’, ‘callous’, ‘indifferent’ – and has repressed the others. My whole point is to cease ‘being’ – psychologically and psychically self-immolate – which means that the entire psyche itself is extirpated. That is, the biological instinctual package handed out by blind nature is deleted like a computer software programme (but with no ‘Recycle Bin’ to retrieve it from) so that the affective faculty is no more. Then – and only then – are there no emotions ... just as in a pure consciousness experience (PCE) where, with the self in abeyance, the emotions play no part at all.

Unless you are proposing that emotions can be ‘clean’ and ‘pure’ and ‘clear’?

RESPONDENT: I expect you still eat when you are hungry.

RICHARD: Yes.

RESPONDENT: You seek shelter or other safety in physically threatening conditions.

RICHARD: Yes.

RESPONDENT: Do you still have sexual relations?

RICHARD: Yes.

RESPONDENT: You certainly seem to have the capacity to care for others.

RICHARD: Yes.

RESPONDENT: Do you take actions to protect your property from theft?

RICHARD: Yes.

RESPONDENT: Have you a copy right on your published materials?

RICHARD: Yes.

RESPONDENT: Would you knowingly walk into a life threatening situation for no good cause?

RICHARD: No ... and probably not for a ‘good cause’ either.

RESPONDENT: You may call these the actions of ‘native intelligence’ and I would agree ... but they are actions that stem from the instincts as they have been properly integrated through understanding.

RICHARD: How on earth can one ‘properly integrate’ fear and aggression (savage) and nurture and desire (tender)?

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 claim the beast is an illusion. He is real.

RICHARD: An illusion it is ... but a very real illusion, for all that. This is why I draw a sharp distinction between the word ‘real’ and the word ‘actual’ (and between ‘true’ and ‘fact’) even though the dictionary gives the same meanings.

RESPONDENT: He will not die at our will.

RICHARD: With sufficient dedication and purpose – with the diligence and application and patience and perseverance born out of the PCE – ‘the beast’ has no chance whatsoever.

RESPONDENT: He may change forms and appearances, but like the serpent of old, he will merely take another form, perhaps posing as all sweetness and light this time.

RICHARD: Yes indeed ... and no ‘perhaps’ about it either. I warn everybody who steps onto the wide and wondrous path to actual freedom of the only danger that lies on the way. You may become enlightened. I kid you not.

RESPONDENT: Out of the ectoplasm of the beast come many forms, including those of apparent beauty and sweetness. They are there for the purpose of seduction and enslavement. This is difficult for people to see.

RICHARD: Yes ... I have been endeavouring to point out to people for some time now that bloodshed and hatred inevitably follows in the wake of the latest charismatic Saviour and Avatar, Messiah and Master, Guru and God-Man who brings Love Agapé and Divine Compassion to a benighted humanity. Quite possibly as many – if not more – people have been killed in religious wars as in territorial wars or ideological wars. Love is such an obviously dangerous passion to have that it amazes me that it is revered so. The seductive nature of the beauty of love and the sweetness of compassion is but a thin veneer over a murky morass ... The Divine needs The Diabolical to underpin its entire structure.

It is all built upon the shifting sands of the instinctual fear and aggression and nurture and desire that all humans are born with ... which is blind nature’s way of perpetuating the species. Energised by the ‘will to survive’ that grew out of the survival instinct, the fear and aggression and nurture and desire are transformed through socialisation into awe and dread – among other things – which are part and parcel of the identity. With awe comes veneration, reverence, homage, worship, respect and deference. With dread comes dismay, consternation, trepidation, terror, horror, repugnance and a dire sense of foreboding. One’s sense of identity is largely made up of feelings – emotions and passions – and the vast majority of the feelings that one supports are not created by oneself; they were assimilated with the mother’s milk and added to thereupon up to the present day. They are atavistic feelings, put into the child with reward and punishment – love and hate – and added to as an adult with the post mortem carrot and stick – awe and dread. They are all designed to strike fear into the heart of the would-be individual, eliciting submission, obedience, acquiescence and conformity out of the contumacious and perverse self. The graceless outcome of this bizarre creation of a divinity was the aberrant transmogrification of the instinctual fear and aggression and nurture and desire into a demoniacal monster that made necessary the antithetical god for its very control.

Stupefied and stultified by centuries of conditioning, it is no wonder that the modern person still seeks recourse from the ‘wisdom of old’. In spite of the huge leaps in understanding gained by scientific discoveries on the nature of the brain, the genetic structure, the hormonal activity and many, many other fields of expertise ... still the ‘tried and true’ practices are invariably put into place when it comes to controlling human nature. The identity, ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul, can best be described as a psychological and psychic parasite living inside the body. In a valiant and understandable attempt to solve the plight of humankind, ‘I’ cease identifying as the ego and identify as the soul ... a shift in consciousness which manifests Love Agapé and Divine Compassion. Unfortunately for its success, Love Agapé is born out of malice and is dependent upon hatred to sustain itself ... and therefore can not provide the ultimate solution: freedom from animosity. So too with Divine Compassion – which has its roots in sorrow – and is unable to provide freedom from anguish. Love and compassion actually perpetuate malice and sorrow, for these are their essential progenitors. Nevertheless, there is an apparently endless supply of willing souls prepared to apply the time-honoured methods of remedying the human situation. ‘I’ obligingly surrender in order to receive ‘my’ rightful dividend.

PETER: As a somewhat callow young man aged 20, I went to Europe for the first time and was particularly struck by the fact that literally every square metre of Europe had been soaked in human blood at some stage in history, be it in pre-historic times, the stone age, the iron age, the bronze age, medieval times or modern times, given that World War Two had only ended less than a quarter of a century prior to my visit. Wherever I went I found monuments to some battle or other and remnants of defensive walls and embattlements from all cultures and all epochs and visited field upon field, village upon village, and city upon city where hundreds, thousands and sometimes millions of human beings had either deliberately killed and maimed their fellow human beings or had been deliberately killed and maimed by their fellow human beings. I was also struck by the fact that these same disputes, skirmishes, battles and wars are still being waged all over the planet, either overtly or covertly, and will keep on doing so for no other reason that it is human nature for human beings to keep doing so. Faced by the utter futility of ever being able to do anything about the situation, I, like countless others before and since, learned to turn a blind eye to what I had seen with my own eyes and in doing so desensitised myself from feeling such feelings as sorrow, grief, despair and hopelessness when confronted with the extent of human beings’ perpetual animosity towards other human beings.

RESPONDENT: I don’t know what I am supposed to comment here. It is fact that people are killing people.

PETER: I have always taken that as a given, an undeniable irrefutable fact that I first became aware of as a ten year old when I first saw photos of piles of corpses from what has become known as the holocaust on my parents black and white TV.

RESPONDENT: Question: Why do they do kill each other? Answer: Because they are subject to the passions.

PETER: I have since come to know that such killings as the holocaust – an estimated 4,200,00o to 5,800,000 human beings killed (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm) – are in fact but the tip of a very big iceberg indeed in that an estimated 160,000,000 human beings were killed by other human beings in wars alone in the last century and perhaps even more tellingly an estimated 174,000,000 human beings died at the hands of their own autocratic governments in the last century alone. The reason I find the second hemoclysm more telling than the first is that by and large these killings were not the result of disputes over territory and resources, nor were they fuelled by religious convictions but rather most of these killings were the result of what could be described as a deep-seated passion or lust for killing per se.

RESPONDENT: Question: Why are they subject to the passions? In the answer to this question you come up with all these theories (evolution, biological heritage, social conditioning), which, eventually, lead you into an explanatory dead-end street: It is all due to blind nature!

PETER: The explanation that the passion for killing, for example, is a biological inheritance passed down through the genes that we human animals share with all other animals was traditionally a dead-end street but this no longer the case nowadays.

Prior to the discovery that an actual freedom from the instinctual passions of malice and of sorrow is possible, the spiritualists had the meaning-of-life market cornered in that they proposed that life on earth was fundamentally miserable because the ‘true’ meaning of life was to found ‘elsewhere’, i.e. somewhere other than in the physical world. Materialists were then left with the counter-proposition that there is no such thing as a meaning of life that needs to be sought and found in order to find fulfilment – a position which leaves them espousing various coping mechanisms and ideologies aimed at ‘making the best of reality’.

The recent discovery of actualism means there is now a third alternative to the usual either/or alternative of spiritualism vs. materialism and one no longer needs to deny or ignore the fact that human beings are instinctually driven beings – nowadays one has the option of taking a clear-eyed look at this fact and get on with the business of becoming free from the instinctual passions themselves.

As always, the ball is in your court to do with this change in circumstance what you want.

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