Actual Freedom ~ Frequently Asked Questions

RESPONDENT: I’m having trouble with this one Richard. Anyone writing here on the list has at the very least retained their instinct to eat and drink. Just as the child instinctually suckles the breast. At this point you will need to explain the distinction. You can reason that to eat is not a debilitating instinct, but with an intact ‘I’, it certainly can result in debilitation.

RICHARD: For sure the infant suckling is an instinct ... but I am not an infant. The stomach secretes a chemical when empty which triggers a receptor in the brain that gives rise to a sensation we non-infants call ‘I am hungry’. Indeed, tests have been done by people who delight in doing these things, wherein the chemical was injected into volunteers who had just eaten a full meal.

The chemical caused them to feel hungry despite their distended stomachs.

RESPONDENT: So then, it’s not the instinct that is debilitating, but the action that proceeds from it. Your I-lessness may provide the freeing you experience, but not by ‘elimination’ of instincts, it appears. In some other way then.

RICHARD: All creatures are born with a rudimentary self that is integral to the instincts that blind nature endows us with. The elimination of self in its entirety is the elimination of those instincts. Instincts are not set in stone, they are only included in the bodily package to give us a start in life. Now that a thinking, reflective brain has developed over the top of the primitive ‘lizard brain’ at the top of the brain-stem where the instincts and basic emotions lie, we can improve upon blind nature as we have done in so many other ways. It is possible to be entirely free from all instinctive impulses ... I have no furious urges, no inherent anger, no impulsive rages, no inveterate hostilities, no evil disposition ... no malicious tendencies whatsoever. I do not need instincts to function and operate in this world of people, things and events ... they may have been necessary in the wild but with a now civilised world they are detrimental to peaceful and harmonious co-existence. The 160,000,000 people killed in wars this century alone testify to this.

So yes, it is the instincts that are debilitating.

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RICHARD: For sure the infant suckling is an instinct ... but I am not an infant. The stomach secretes a chemical when empty which triggers a receptor in the brain that gives rise to a sensation we non-infants call ‘I am hungry’. Indeed, tests have been done by people who delight in doing these things, wherein the chemical was injected into volunteers who had just eaten a full meal. The chemical caused them to feel hungry despite their distended stomachs.

RESPONDENT: This is a bit weak since the chemical/receptor/brain thing may simply be the mechanism for instinctual drives and knowledge of it’s operation does little to support your belief.

RICHARD: Why is it ‘a bit weak’ ? And why do you attempt to belittle exact science by saying it is my ‘belief’ ? It is an established fact – borne out by strict experimentation and duplication – that hunger is not an instinct but a simple chemical activity. ‘Suckling’ is instinctual – and necessary for survival in the early stages of life – but ‘hunger’ is not.

It is all so simple, actually.

GARY: In some respects, to extinguish the in-born, genetically programmed survival responses of the organism to danger seems insane and incredible.

RICHARD: Yes, I have not been sane for years. From the ‘real world’ perspective I am indeed insane ... officially I have a ‘severe psychotic disorder’. It is pertinent to note that 160,000,000 sane human beings have been killed in wars alone this century by their sane fellow human beings. Even so, statistically, the most dangerous place is in a person’s own home ... the ‘stranger-danger’ rule impressed into children is based upon an (approximately) 10% incidence. And law-enforcement agencies dislike a ‘serial-killer’ case because otherwise the vast bulk of their cases are relatively easy to solve: sane relatives and/or sane associates and/or sane colleagues are the immediate suspects.

What price sanity, eh?

RESPONDENT: Richard, lets say hypothetically a stranger had a gun aimed at your face, what sort of thoughts might occur in your mind?

RICHARD: Having been rigorously trained in the military, until the appropriate reflex responses became second-nature, for multiple variations of such contingencies – plus having gone to war as a youth – it can be said with a high degree of confidence that there would be no thoughts occurring at the moment ... there would only be action.

The whole point of such intensive drilling is that (to use a cliché) there is the quick ... and there is the dead.

RESPONDENT: Both Peter and Richard have said they could still defend themselves quite easily if attacked on the street. Where does that ‘force’ or ‘power’ required come from since it’s not ‘aggression’?

RICHARD: The straightforward necessity of acting appropriate to the situation and the circumstance ... if someone attacks somebody they are knowingly initiating a course of action contrary to the legal laws and the social protocol and can rightfully expect whatever consequences which may ensue as a result of their actions.

RESPONDENT: I guess I’m searching for some distinction between the feeling of aggression and forcefulness. Also between passionate excitement and enthusiasm and actual being fully engaged.

RICHARD: Perhaps a personal anecdote will throw some light upon the subject of being fully engaged: some years ago whilst in a supermarket my wife and I had a pack stolen from the shopping trolley we were using when our backs were turned; I saw a young man disappearing along the aisle with our pack and on out through the turnstile; I went off after him at a brisk pace, negotiated the turnstile easily, and moved out through the self-opening doors; there was an ornamental garden between me and the car-park wherein off in the distance the young man could be seen heading away; I cleared the garden in one leap – seeing each and every plant and flower in detail as I sailed over it – and soon caught up to him as, glancing over his shoulder and seeing me coming, he headed for a crowded mall to the left ... and eventually regained the pack without a fight or even any display of intimidation. Upon returning to the supermarket I passed by the garden, through the pathway provided, and noticed by its width that I would not ordinarily be able to leap over it ... necessity provides all the calorific energy required.

He was a big, muscular young man such that I would not wish to enter into a ring with as I would be bound to come off second-best in any such organised sport. He knew that he had crossed the line in regards to the legal laws and social protocol and fully expected to pay the price for his actions ... his bluff and bluster collapsed like a leaky balloon when confronted in the mall with the straightforward request for the return of property not belonging to him.

Interestingly enough I was not even breathing heavily.

RESPONDENT No. 33: And you too, whatever extirpations and such that you have gone through in your life, must be enjoying the occasional flutter in your heart that creative anxiety produces. Isn’t it so?

RICHARD: No ... there is no fear here in this actual world where I live – there is no fear in a flower, a tree, an ashtray, an armchair, a rock – not even disquietude, uneasiness, nervousness or apprehension, let alone anxiety, angst, fear, terror, horror or dread.

RESPONDENT: If someone breaks into your house at night, if someone kidnaps your wife, if a sudden economical change takes your pension from you ... I hope none of these actually ever happens to you, but if they did how would you feel? How would you re-act?

RICHARD: The burglary question I can answer from direct experience ... someone broke into my house at 3.00 AM about six months ago. How did I feel? I did not feel anything. How did I re-act? There was no need of reaction ... I did the obvious in this day and age: I first rang the police and then rang the 24 hour credit-card hotline. The police arrived at the door just as a neighbour was calling to report a similar break-in ... all-in-all there were nine houses broken into that night. The felon has been apprehended.

I have been robbed before ... about six years ago (given the human condition this is all par for the course): that time I was in a position to give chase and recover my possessions from the offender. How did I feel? I did not feel anything. How did I re-act? There was no need of reaction ... there was only action: I had all the energy to hand as was appropriate for the situation.

The kidnapping question I can answer from indirect experience ... my wife, my constant companion night and day for eleven years, was ‘kidnapped’ by love some four years ago and packed her bags and moved out of my life. How did I feel? I did not feel anything. How did I re-act? There was no reaction ... I do not ‘own’ anyone: she is her own person and lives her life as she sees fit. Also, there are no guarantees in life regarding another person: everybody is but a missed heart-beat or two away from death; any fellow human being can disappear out of one’s life at any given moment ... and does.

The economic question I can answer from personal experience ... I lived an alternative life-style in the latter half of the ‘seventies: growing my own food and so on ... being as self-sufficient as possible. Then, for nearly five years, in a time I call my ‘puritan period’, I was – more or less as time went by – homeless, itinerant, celibate, vegan ... I eventually whittled my worldly possessions down to three sarongs, three shirts, a cooking pot and bowl, a knife and a spoon, a hair brush and a pair of nail scissors. Thus I know I can live simply in a physical sense as well.

It may be useful for me to explain that not only do I have no feelings about these scenarios you mention, but I have none about any more you might propose. I do not experience affective feelings per se because I do not have any anywhere in this body at all ... this body lost that faculty entirely when ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul became extinct. Thus, to use the jargon, no one can ‘press my buttons’ as I do not have any buttons – nor any feelings under them – to be activated. Literally I feel nothing at all. Even when, say, watching a magnificent sunrise where some lofty clouds are shot through with splendid rays of golden light, transforming the morning sky into a blaze of glory ... I feel nothing at all. These eyes seeing it delight in the array of colour, and this brain contemplating its visual splendour can revel in the wonder of it all ... but I cannot feel the beauty of it in the emotional and passionate sense of the word feel.

Just as when a person becomes physically blind all their other senses are heightened, so too is it when all affective feelings vanish entirely. This body is simply brimming with sense organs which celebrate in their own sensuous and sensual delight. Visually everything is intense, vivid and brilliant ... sensuously everything is dynamic, vital and scintillating with actuality ... sensuality is a matter-of-fact actualness. Everything is endowed with a purity that far exceeds the greatest or most profound feeling of beauty ... and an intimacy that surpasses the highest or deepest feeling of love possible. An actual intimacy is the direct experience of the pristine actuality of people, things and events, unmediated by any ‘I’/‘me’ whatsoever.

Fear is the barrier to being intimate ... yet fear is the doorway into intimacy.

RESPONDENT: Related to this (the link between ‘the inner’ and ‘the outer’), is it possible for someone who is actually free, happy and harmless, to freely, happily and harmlessly punch someone in the face?

RICHARD: First and foremost, as there is no ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in actuality there is nothing here in this actual world to have any such linkage.

Second, to be actually free from the human condition is to be sans the affective faculty/identity in toto.

Third, the happiness and harmlessness referred to on The Actual Freedom Trust web site is the total absence of malice and sorrow.

Fourth, to freely punch a fellow human being in the face is to utilise physical force non-prejudiciously.

Fifth, to happily punch a fellow human being in the face is to utilise physical force without sorrow.

Sixth, to harmlessly punch a fellow human being in the face is to utilise physical force without malice.

Thus your query can look something like this when spelled-out in full:

• [example only]: ‘With no ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ to have any linkage, is it possible for somebody sans the affective faculty/identity in toto, with no malice and sorrow extant whatsoever, to non-prejudiciously, non-maliciously and non-sorrowfully, use physical force on a fellow human being? [end example].

In a word ... yes.

RESPONDENT: I mean I’m talking ‘in context’ here – not just through malice, but to protect someone, or something like that.

RICHARD: Perhaps if I were to put it this way? One does not become actually free from the human condition in order to be beaten to a pulp by someone – anyone – who chooses to let themselves continue being run by blind nature’s instinctual survival passions.

RESPONDENT: I don’t think that [being totally without any feelings] is anything to ascribe to.

RICHARD: If peace-on-earth, in this lifetime, as this flesh and blood body is not something that you would aspire to then that is your choice. At least we both now know where you stand.

RESPONDENT: Just one last question (or two), Richard: If you see your mother hit by a Mac truck and her flesh and blood body smashed all over the pavement, you feel nothing? If your six year old daughter is brutally raped and murdered, you feel nothing? If you catch you wife making out on the couch with your best friend, you feel nothing? If your house burns down and you lose all of your possessions, you feel nothing? The world up around you is burning up, you feel nothing?

RICHARD: These are all hypothetical questions yet even so I can answer assuredly: there would be no feelings at all. It may be of interest to you that I have been asked questions of this nature before and you might like to access the following link: .

In case you do not access the URL it may be useful for me to explain that not only do I have no feelings about these scenarios you mention, but I have none about any more you might propose. I do not experience affective feelings per se because I do not have any anywhere in this body at all ... this body lost that faculty entirely when ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul became extinct. Thus, to use the jargon, no one can ‘press my buttons’ as I do not have any buttons – nor any feelings under them – to be activated. Literally I feel nothing at all. Even when, say, watching a magnificent sunrise where some lofty clouds are shot through with splendid rays of golden light, transforming the morning sky into a blaze of glory ... I feel nothing at all. These eyes seeing it delight in the array of colour, and this brain contemplating its visual splendour can revel in the wonder of it all ... but I cannot feel the beauty of it in the emotional and passionate sense of the word feel.

Just as when a person becomes physically blind all their other senses are heightened, so too is it when all affective feelings vanish entirely. This body is simply brimming with sense organs which celebrate in their own sensuous and sensual delight. Visually everything is intense, vivid and brilliant ... sensuously everything is dynamic, vital and scintillating with actuality ... sensuality is a matter-of-fact actualness. Everything is endowed with a purity that far exceeds the greatest or most profound feeling of beauty ... and an intimacy that surpasses the highest or deepest feeling of love possible.

An actual intimacy is the direct experience of the pristine actuality of people, things and events, unmediated by any ‘I’/‘me’ whatsoever.

RICHARD: Is it not possible to be totally rid of fear – for those who dare to care and care to dare – for then one has complete dignity, as only a freed human being has, for the remainder of their life? And is this not a blessing?

RESPONDENT: As far as I am concerned, I am not there, at least not yet. I have my fair share of fears, trepidations, and anxieties. And since I am the proverbial world, I guess the world has its share of fears, trepidations and anxieties. I don’t know if it is possible to be free of fears and anxieties, or even desirable. Some amount of fear and anxiety may even be necessary for efficient performance. For example, my job entails good teaching, doing quality research, and contributing positively to my school by way of service. I do get anxious about my performance and that anxiety provides me energy to improve my performance. If I were to become complacent, I might let things slip by. So, let me make this distinction and see where it takes our discussion: there are two types of fears (probably anxiety is a better word) – (a) positive and (b) negative. Positive anxiety helps us focus on the job at hand and provides energy to solve problems. Negative anxiety, on the other hand, is distracting and wasteful. For example, if I merely worry about my performance at job, not do anything to improve my performance, and let anxiety get the upper hand, then I will be in a downward spiral – anxiety – diminished performance – more anxiety ... and so on. I was talking to one person who I thought was free of anxieties and mentioned my mental tendencies. His response was interesting: he told me that he too goes through similar phases, and uses his anxiety creatively. Krishnamurti himself is known to be giving a lot of attention to details before his public meetings – asking people to sit on the dais where he would sit and making sure that he would be visible and audible to his audience from everywhere. I think without some amount of (positive) anxiety, excellence may not be achieved. So, it is possible that what nature has programmed in us – the surge of adrenalin on occasions – has a purpose even in the modern times where we are not faced with fight-or-flight situations that you mention. Makes sense, at least a little?

RICHARD: You have written a well considered evaluation of the usefulness of fear in one’s life [and] you enquire whether these points make sense ... or at least a little sense. Indeed it does make sense – and more than just a little – inasmuch as you have convinced me that I need to have fear in my life.

RESPONDENT: Interesting that I ended up convincing you of the need to have fear, despite all my tentativeness that you so correctly picked out. May I ask, why did you get convinced that one ought to have some fear (anxiety) from time to time?

RICHARD: We have had numerous discussions, you and I, going back a year or so on various aspects of the human condition ... fear being an aspect that featured prominently for a few posts. I have consistently proposed the utter necessity of a total and complete absence of fear (and all of the instinctual passions) if there is to be peace-on-earth. During that exchange you posted an account of your experiential situation in a then-recent car crash (‘in that fraction of a second when the other car hit mine, there was no thought, no fear, no anything’ ) to which I responded in full ... yet here you are writing a well considered evaluation of the usefulness of fear in one’s life as if that event had either never happened or had not shown you anything of value.

So I ran the question: what if you are correct and I am in error? I arranged your exposition sequentially and sat back with it on the screen:

I listened.

*

RICHARD: Do you have any suggestions as to how I should go about this [getting fear into my life]?

RESPONDENT: Well, some of it is easy. You travelled to India. I am sure you must have experienced some anxiety while crossing roads there.

RICHARD: No ... I was a living exemplar of fatalism during my six months there (which is what I advise anyone contemplating the full experience of India).

RESPONDENT: When you write these posts, don’t you make an effort to write correctly and creatively?

RICHARD: No, it happens effortlessly ... when I start a sentence I have no means of knowing in advance what will transpire, let alone how it will end. All I need to know is the theme and the subject matter unfolds of its own accord. I do have a reliable and repeatable format and style, which has developed over the years, so it is not an ad hoc or chaotic meandering.

It is all very easy.

RESPONDENT: That effort, I would surmise, comes from a sense of anxiety – do I make sense? Have I chosen appropriate words? Can I improve my post?

RICHARD: Writing is such a delight – even though I am a two-finger typist – and the fingers ripple across the keyboard: given the theme the words always make sense. When I read-through the draft it is a cinch to choose the right words – I have upwards of 650,000 words at my command – and correct the typos. I never send it straight away ... and when I come back to it a read-through, as with another’s eyes, makes obvious how it can be improved (if it needs improving).

RESPONDENT: I don’t know about your personal life. Do you date? Cook?

RICHARD: Neither ... I am a fifty three year old male, the progenitor of four adult children and eight grandchildren from my first marriage ... all now scattered far and wide and living their own lives. My companion and I are, by choice, childless and will stay so ... enough is enough. I currently live on the most easterly point of the Australian seaboard in a small village called Byron Bay. I rent a suburban three-bedroom brick duplex one kilometre from the beach – the ocean is an almost constant back-drop in Byron Bay – and the wee small hours are my favourite time for writing ... I most often wake up at two or three o’clock in the morning and write until the first kookaburras start their laughing-like call from some trees over the back fence. Then I like to sit and sip an early morning coffee, with my feet up on the computer desk, and be with the first blue-grey light coming into the room ... through to the first glow of pre-dawn ... and then the sunrise itself.

I have a colour TV and VCR in the lounge room and two computers in what was the dining area: I stroll into the village centre for a bite to eat at the local restaurants and sup the froth off a cappuccino at one of the numerous sidewalk cafés several times a week ... and generally lead what could be called a quiet domestic life-style. I have an affinity for the small-town life as I was born and raised on a dairy farm in the south-west of Australia. I had a normal birth and upbringing. I went to a standard state school and took a regular job at fifteen and then volunteered for a six-year stint in the Military at seventeen. I went into a commonplace marriage at nineteen and had an average family and although I worked at many jobs throughout my life, my main career was as a practicing artist ... although I am also a qualified art teacher.

I am retired and living on a hard-won pension and instead of pottering around in the garden I am currently pottering around the internet.

RESPONDENT: In both of these activities, some anxiety, in my opinion, is inevitable: am I conducting myself correctly in her presence?

RICHARD: I simply am what I am as this flesh and blood body – I am unable to pretend to be otherwise – and anyone who spends time with me is attracted to that ... else they go away (there are those who have).

RESPONDENT: Will the love making be glorious? etc.

RICHARD: Love does not feature in my life ... thus sexual congress is always excellent.

RESPONDENT: Similarly, cooking: I would bet that without some anxiety about the outcome of what we cook, results would be rather bland.

RICHARD: I either eat out or order in.

RESPONDENT: I would suggest that without some positive anxiety, life would be too insipid.

RICHARD: When I go to bed at night I have had a perfect day ... and I know that I will wake up to yet another day of perfection. This has been going on, day-after-day, for years now ... it is so ‘normal’ that I take it for granted that there is only perfection.

RESPONDENT: And you too, whatever extirpations and such that you have gone through in your life, must be enjoying the occasional flutter in your heart that creative anxiety produces. Isn’t it so?

RICHARD: No ... there is no fear here in this actual world where I live – there is no fear in a flower, a tree, an ashtray, an armchair, a rock – not even disquietude, uneasiness, nervousness or apprehension, let alone anxiety, angst, fear, terror, horror or dread.

What am I to do?

RICHARD: Yet all sentient beings are a product of nature. Nature endows all sentient beings with the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire, right? You are suggesting that this nature might be better of scrapping human beings for some other ‘less aggressive’ being. Yet it was nature that made human beings aggressive in the first place. Do you see the circular nature of what you are saying?

RESPONDENT: I am not so sure. Fright is the intelligent response to danger.

RICHARD: Not so ... fright is the instinctual reaction to danger. You are still believing that instincts are intelligent. Instincts are killing people.

RESPONDENT: Fright is what keeps one alive in very dangerous places.

RICHARD: Aye ... that is why all sentient beings – and not plants – are endowed by blind nature with fear and aggression and nurture and desire ... it is called the survival instinct. However, the very thing that ensures survival of the species – and any species will do as far as blind nature is concerned – is killing people. Now, blind nature does not care about that ... but we humans do. The question is: shall we improve on blind nature, in this respect, just as we have already improved on nature so much in the areas of technology, animal breeding and plant cultivation, for instance. There is no reason why we can not continue this fine work of overcoming the limitations imposed by blind nature and eliminate sorrow and malice from ourselves. Then – and only then – will we have global peace-on-earth.

RESPONDENT: It is resistance to fright that paralyses one with fear through conceptual separation.

RICHARD: Not so ... what paralyses is that fear produces a ‘fight or flight’ instinct and the muscles are charged with adrenaline ready for either action. However, it is up to you to make the decision whether to advance or flee ... and it is indecision that causes the muscles to lock tight. It is a classic example of panic ... two conflicting choices cancelling each other out creates freezing up. You will find this in any psychiatric text-book.

RESPONDENT: Fear is seen here as the result of thought projecting a future occurrence through an image. Fear is only experienced by a divided consciousness. I do not see that plants or animals experience fear in the way we do. (In this sense I don’t think that ‘consider the lilies’ fits your ‘the tried and true’ refrain.)

RICHARD: Plants do not experience fear ... only sentient beings do. Animals are sentient beings and are run by fear and aggression and nurture and desire. Comparing flora to fauna – that humans should live the way lilies live – is a good example of the silliness of the ‘Tried and True’ wisdom.

RESPONDENT: Plants are sentient beings. The fact is self-evident.

RICHARD: So it is self-evident that plants are capable of perception by the senses, eh? They have that which has sensation or feeling, do they? They are that what feels or is capable of feeling, you say? That they are having the power or function of sensation and are characterised by the exercise of the senses. (The word ‘sentient’ comes from the Latin ‘sentire’ which means ‘feel’ from the Latin ‘sensus’ meaning ‘faculty of feeling’, ‘sensibility’, ‘mode of feeling’ and thus ‘perception’).

RESPONDENT: Consider: if a man falls in a field, and there is no tree to hear him, does he make a sound?

RICHARD: May I ask? Are you on medication?

RESPONDENT: I would like to ask you something about the universe and our world and our instinctual passions. Humans have survived and are beginning to flourish. In our world. But what about other planets, if there are other civilizations. If people would leave in a utopia without instinctual passions, in peace, and an alien powerful instinct-driven race would attack our planet, we won’t have any military to defend ourselves as a first defence.

I understand that what I’m saying is the survival projection of survival of the species and the fear to examine passions. But isn’t there any validity to this question, as the big scheme picture might not be just the humanity, animals and this planets, but other planets and other raging species? Thanks for your time.

RICHARD: The nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is over forty trillion kilometres away and the US space shuttle, which travels at about eight kilometres per second, would take a hundred and sixty thousand years to reach it. The fastest spacecraft to date (Helios II), which set a speed record of seventy kilometres per second, would take eighteen thousand years to travel that distance ... far, far beyond the lifespan of both the crew and the craft.

Also, if there were to be a planet hospitable to life-forms orbiting that star, and if an alien species were to be inhabiting that hypothetical planet, and if that hypothetical species inhabiting that hypothetical planet were to be of the opinion that planet earth was worth attacking, then the ‘alien condition’ (to coin a phrase) would render any such interstellar voyage of aggression and domination untenable as they would be at each other’s hypothetical throats long before they arrived.

Indeed, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to long-distance human space travel is the human condition itself (as is evidenced by wintering over in the Antarctica for instance).

As for the intergalactic voyages so ubiquitous in the sci-fi genre: the nearest major galaxy (the Andromeda galaxy) is located at a distance of two million light-years away and, as a light-year is about nine and a half trillion kilometres in length, one does not even have to do the maths in order to gain sufficient comprehension of the sheer impracticability of any voyage of that magnitude.

Incidentally, if there were to be an alien species sufficiently advanced technologically to have developed a super-fast means of transport then their weaponry would be so far in advance of the current human arsenal anyway that it is pointless to even contemplate any such scenario as needing to continue being a [quote] ‘raging species’ [endquote] in order to defend planet earth from any such hypothetical attack.

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P.S.: You may find the following helpful.

• [Mr. Donald Scott]: ‘It is very difficult, if not impossible, for us to relate conceptually to how far something is from us when we are told its distance is, say 14 light years. We know that is a long way – but HOW long?

In his ‘Celestial Handbook’, Robert Burnham, Jr. presents a model that offers us a way to get an intuitive feel for some of these tremendous distances. The distance from the Sun to Earth is called an Astronomical Unit (AU); it is approximately 93 million miles. The model is based on the coincidental fact that the number of inches in a statute mile is approximately equal to the number of astronomical units in one light year. So, in our model, we sketch the orbit of the Earth around the Sun as a circle, two inches in diameter. That sets the scale of the model. One light year is one mile in the model.

The Sun is approximately 880,000 miles in diameter. In the model that scales to 880,000/93,000,000 = 0.009 inches; (Approximately 1/100 of an inch in diameter). A very fine pencil point is needed to place it at the centre of the (one inch radius) circle that represents the Earth’s orbit.

In this model, Pluto is an invisibly small speck approximately three and a half feet from the Sun. All the other planets follow almost circular paths inside of this 3.5 foot orbit. If a person is quite tall, he or she may just be able to spread their hands far enough apart to encompass the orbit of this outer planet. That is the size of our model of our solar system. We can just about hold it in our extended arms.

The nearest star to us is over four light-years away.

In our model, a light year is scaled down to one mile. So the nearest star to us is four and a half MILES away in our model. So when we model our Sun and the nearest star to us, we have two specks of dust, each 1/100 inch in diameter, four and a half miles apart from one another. And this is in a moderately densely packed arm of our galaxy!

To quote Burnham, ‘All the stars are, on the average, as far from each other as the nearest ones are from us. Imagine, then, several hundred billion stars scattered throughout space, each one another Sun, each one separated by a distance of several light years (several miles in our model) from its nearest neighbour. Comprehend, if you can, the almost terrifying isolation of any one star in space’ because each star is the size of a speck of dust, about 1/100 inch in diameter – and is miles from its nearest neighbour.

When viewing a photographic image of a galaxy or globular star cluster, we must remember that the stars that make up those objects are not as close together as they appear. A bright star will ‘bloom’ on a photographic plate or CCD chip. Remember the two specks of dust, miles apart.

Even in our model, the collection of stars that makes up our Milky Way galaxy is about one hundred thousand miles in diameter. This is surrounded by many hundreds of thousand of miles of empty space, before we get to the next galaxy. And on a larger scale, we find that galaxies seem to be found in groups – galaxy clusters. On this gigantic scale even our model fails to give us an intuitive feeling for the vastness of those distances’. (https://web.archive.org/web/20050206042450/http://electric-cosmos.org/localspace.htm).

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