Actual Freedom ~ Frequently Asked Questions

How does one function in reality, if not in the first person. I can grasp the minimising of the ego, but it’s total annihilation would lead to one being unable to function within the matrix of this life, whatever one perceives that to be, illusion or otherwise, surely? I have met many ‘enlightened’ beings, but I have yet to meet one completely devoid of an ego. Could you expand on ‘of precisely the same nature that the ‘I’ that used to live in this body all those years ago’, please? I am intrigued. Please explain, how is this possible? (and please don’t take this as a confrontation, it’s not, but you’re bending my wee brain.)

I wonder what it means to be the first to find something when there is no identity to do the finding. And if you have no identity what replaces it? After all you still have memories of what your flesh and blood body has done, do you not? Is this not in itself a form of identity? Is this newness not simply the newness of experiencing life as-it-is?

When you call something nonsensical ‘who’ is assessing whether something makes sense or not. Doesn’t that imply some identity whether you want to label it as one or not? When you say life is ‘perfect’ that also is an assessment of a situation. ‘Who’ is assessing that life is perfect? This is not meant in an argumentative fashion. From my level of understanding for someone to do this it means some identity is in place whether the party chooses to acknowledge it or not!

Richard, if I were to knock-knock on your brain there will be no-one to answer, let alone your heart?

You also claim that there is ‘a flesh and blood body being apperceptively aware’. Is not that bodily apperceptive awareness, your identity? Identity is ‘the state or fact of remaining the same one, as under varying aspects or conditions’, ‘the condition of being oneself or itself, and not another’ (Macquarie, 2^nd ed.). Are you claiming that there is nothing that remains the same (in you) as (your) sense and reflective experience changes? Surely there are patterns associated with your reflectivity. You tend to reflect on things in a certain way, and I have a different tendency. Does not that tendency define your identity? Or do you have no such tendency?