Actual Freedom ~ Frequently Asked Questions

RICHARD: Okay, I will go in the other direction then. Love – both secular and sacred – has been revered as the ‘cure-all’ for just about everything. So why has it not done its job? To understand this, one needs to comprehend that for love to exist at all there must be separation between ‘me’ and the person, the persons, the object or the god that ‘I’ am to love. Not for nothing is the statement ‘Love is a bridge’ promoted abroad for all and sundry to take in. My question is: A ‘bridge’ between what two shores? Who are the two ‘I’s that are separate? Do ‘I’ exist, actually exist? ‘I’ may be real, but am ‘I’ actual? If ‘I’ am an illusion then any ‘bridge’ will only reinforce ‘my’ existence ... my very real existence. If a person is said to be ‘egotistic’ or ‘ego-driven’, then a goodly dose of love is advised to ameliorate the phenomenon. Yet the persona is still in existence ... a loving and lovable persona, of course, but still here. ‘I’ am the ‘spanner in the works’ and to cover my ‘self’ over with a coating of love is to gild the lily. ‘I’ still lurk around, shielded now by love, wreaking my mischief in disguise.

Also, intrinsic to the nature of love is its – always unfulfilled – promise of eternity. One’s life here is here on earth now ... what use is a spurious Eternal Bliss in some conjectured After-Life? Love has produced wars, murders, rapes and aggression since time immemorial ... it staggers me that it still retains its credibility. To kill for ‘Love of Country’ or ‘Love of God’ is surely proof enough for any discerning person. Then there are those ‘Crimes of Passion’ that are brought about by love’s constant companions: possessiveness, jealousy and envy. If these examples are considered too extreme then what about the heartache, the longing, the pining and the yearning that all peoples report as accompanying love’s bliss? This leads to the search for True Love which, supposedly, does not induce these unpleasant characteristics so common to everybody’s experience of love. True Love is simply a fiction ... it is impossible to manifest it here on earth, hence the notion of an After-Life to encompass it. To repeat: Love never delivers on its implied promise. It never has done nor ever will. Its days are numbered, as more and more people are beginning to notice that love itself – not the sensate human body – is failing to live up to its ill-deserved curative reputation again and again.

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RESPONDENT: One who tried and failed to discover Love has said that love has failed.

RICHARD: Oh really? Who was that fool? Was it someone on this List?

RESPONDENT: Someone ... has said that love has failed because hundreds (thousands?) (millions?) of ‘seekers’ have failed to find a certain state they were looking for, which they titled ‘love’. Of course, they did not find love because a self cannot find love.

RICHARD: Then there is not much chance that all the wars and rapes and murders and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides will ever cease then is there? They will go on and on ad infinitum unless these ‘seekers’ can begin to understand that love perpetuates all the ills of humankind and stop seeking what you say is impossible to find (only .000001 of the population reach these lofty heights anyway) and start looking for the cause of the problem rather than being seduced into a band-aid solution that just does not work.

RESPONDENT: They can find actuality, and it is a good bet that in that actuality there will no be love .

RICHARD: I can assure you that there is no love in actuality ... it is more than a ‘good bet’. This is because the soul ‘me’ must expire for actuality to become apparent ... and this soul ‘me’ is love.

RESPONDENT: Because one can neither ‘find’ nor ‘try’ Love. Love comes of its volition, not because one has sought after it.

RICHARD: Yea verily ... and, as I have said before, it has come to only .000001 of the population. Hardly a recipe for success, now, is it?

RESPONDENT: Richard, it is not love that failed, it was the ones looking for love who failed.

RICHARD: How can you possibly know this as a fact? Is this your experience talking ... or just something that you have read somewhere and are parroting for my benefit.

RESPONDENT: Only one who vows that he knows even the unknowable would state that there is no such thing as Love if he himself had looked and failed to find it.

RICHARD: Who is this ‘one’ that you are referring to again? No one called Richard has said that ‘there is no such thing as Love’. Speaking personally, I am on record as saying, over and over again, that Love is a feeling – born out of the affective faculties of the psyche – and is very real. It is not actual, like a human body is, or a tree, or an ashtray, but it is very, very real indeed. Why, it is as real as god is.

RESPONDENT: The fact that this person never found Love doesn’t mean that love was ‘tried’. It has never been tried because it was never found and never will be.

RICHARD: I wonder just who ‘this person’ is? Speaking personally again, for eleven years, when there was no ‘I’ as ego in this body, Love lived on earth as a human being. However, the native intelligence of this body operated well enough to find the Source of Love. Lo and behold! it was ‘me’ as soul ... coyly hiding in the heart and being as humble as all get-out in the hope that it would remain undiscovered. This exposure was the ending of ‘me’ ... and Love disappeared simultaneously. So did the Absolute. Instantaneously, I was here in this actual world ... this ambrosial paradise.

RESPONDENT: I have looked under just as many rocks as you, Richard, but the rocks I have looked under were the rocks of the self ... it is not there. If it’s not under my individual rock, it certainly isn’t under other’s rocks, either – the holy, enlightened men whom you have read and remember with such conformity to correctness.

RICHARD: Then if ‘the holy, enlightened men’ have never lived as Love then who has? Or are you – like another person – now saying that Love has never been on earth yet?

RESPONDENT: Love is not anywhere to be found. It is a game of hide and seek where Love is the only player.

RICHARD: This must be so frustrating for you.

RESPONDENT: A relationship without love seems so empty, why be together if there is no love?

RICHARD: As your question – ‘why be together if there is no love’ – is predicated upon both a surmise (being together without love seems so empty) and its implied assumption (being together with love will be so full) it would surely be to your advantage to find out, before formulating a query out of it, whether either that surmisal or its implied assumption have any basis in fact.

Be that as it may ... here is a radical notion: were there to be no emptiness in the first place there would not be any need for love to (assumedly) make being together so full.

RESPONDENT: Why stay committed to one person?

RICHARD: As your follow-up query, about steadfastness in pairing with only one mate, stems from a question based upon a presupposed emptiness, needing love to make it so full, it is a forgone conclusion that it would be rather pointless to stay committed to being together with one person where there is no love (not that polygamy, also without love, would make one iota of difference to such emptiness, though).

Howsoever, were there not any need for love, to (assumedly) make being together so full, then staying committed to one person would take on a whole new light.

RESPONDENT: If you are unconditional happy and pleased, why hold on to something?

RICHARD: As to correlate a commitment to being together monogamously with holding on to something is to attribute a clinging onto, a grasping for, or an attachment to that, it would surely be to your advantage to find out, before formulating a query out of it, whether your attribution has any basis in fact.

For it certainly it stands to reason, if nothing else, that were there to be unconditional happiness and pleasaunce there could not be an attachment to conditional happiness and pleasaunce (as in there being nothing essential for salubrity in the committed monogamous association to hold on to).

RESPONDENT: A comparison between a relationship with love and a relationship with ‘actual freedom’, would be appreciated.

RICHARD: Okay ... first and foremost I am assuming you mean the word in a way more or less similar to this:

• ‘relationship: a connection, an association, spec. an emotional (esp. sexual) association between two people’ (Oxford Dictionary).

As a relationship is *specifically* described as being an emotional association between two people – as in an affective connection, union, bond (as in ‘the bonds of friendship’) or tie (as in ‘family ties’) – it confuses the issue somewhat to call being together monogamously with another, when actually free from the human condition, ‘a relationship’ ... indeed, in the first edition of ‘Richard’s Journal’, where I used that very word (albeit as a modern-day substitute for the word ‘marriage’), it caused enough confusion for some readers as to occasion my replacement of it with the term ‘an association’ when preparing the second edition.

Having said all that ... there actually is no comparison between a relationship (either with or without love) and an association where there is an actual freedom from the human condition because the former, being within the human condition, is essentially an association with another identity whereas the latter is an association with another flesh and blood body.

The need for a relationship with love is an urge for an affectuous connection based upon separation ... an identity is alone and/or lonely and longs for the union that is evidenced in a loving relationship. When identity in toto (both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul/spirit) become extinct there is no need – and no capacity – for such unity as there is no separation: the expression ‘life is a movement in relationship’ applies only to a psychological and/or psychic entity who wants the feeling of oneness – a synthetic intimacy per favour the bridge of love – which manifests the deception that separation has ended.

And if human relationship does not produce the desired result, then one will project a god or a goddess – a ‘super-friend’ not dissimilar to the imaginary playmates of childhood – to love and be loved by.

The ridiculous part in all this is that we are fellow human beings anyway (like species recognise like species) and to seek to impose relationship (either with or without love) over the top of fellowship is, as someone once said in another context, like painting red ink on a red rose ... a garish redundancy.

RESPONDENT: I guess the most common and accepted reason why people commit to each other is because they feel attraction to the person and want to give himself/herself to the other person, what reason if you are ‘free’?

RICHARD: Quite simply: it is both a delight and a privilege being together.

To explain: to be with/live with the one person who, out of over 3.0+ billion such peoples, wants to spend their most irreplaceable commodity (their time) being with me/living with me, twenty four hours a day/seven days a week, for the remainder of their life is something special as it is, so to speak, putting one’s money where one’s mouth is big time (hence ‘privilege’) ... and the delight is, of course, in the day-to-day enjoyment and appreciation of being with/living with such a person.

Ain’t life grand!

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