Actual Freedom – Audio-Taped Dialogues

Q(1): You have often said: ‘Let the moment live you’. Is this the same as when you say: ‘I am doing what is happening’?

Q: Yes, fall into tune with the moment ... this moment is living everything, including me. You see that you don’t have to do it any more – you don’t have to maintain yourself. That’s such a relief: not to have to maintain yourself ... then everything comes easily. You just ... happen! I am happening to talk, we are happening to be sitting here, [Laughter] we are just all happening.

R: Yes, I do not have to beat my heart or breathe my breath. I do not fill my bladder – it fills of itself.

Q(2): The other night when you asked me: ‘Who’s behind the actor?’; last night I thought about that and all of a sudden I was conscious of my breathing – I felt my breathing. It struck me that I wasn’t doing it.

Q: It is happening of itself. We are being breathed. Breathing happens of itself ... all these things are just happening.

Q(1): So there is absolutely no ‘Power’ there, you say?

R: No. No ‘Power’ at all.

Q(1): I was thinking about the esoteric – the magic stuff, the cosmic stuff ... and all the astrology and so on. I thought of crystals ... healing ... power ... powers. I am thinking: there is no ‘Power’ or powers where Richard is. Richard is here. Here where the moment is happening. There is no power here. Right? Now there is all these things that people are doing ... is it because they attribute power to it?

R: That is right.

Q(1): Crystals ... that is energy ... energy, power ... it is all the same. Now, in actuality, power does not exist?

R: Power and powers only live in the human psyche – it is all psychic stuff. That is how people control each other and themselves; power is control.

Q(1): What about the earth? Does She have power?

R: Interesting association ... ‘She’? The earth is an ‘it’. It has physical forces – electro-magnetic fields, for example, but it does not have any psychic power, no. None whatsoever. A tree does not have any psychic power, a flower doesn’t ... this coffee table doesn’t. Only human beings – with an identity and a self – have psychic powers.

Q: Human beings have attributed psychic powers to imaginary gods behind the volcanoes, behind the cyclones, behind the thunderstorms ... ‘Thor’, for instance, is the God Of Thunder. People have taken natural events, that simply are part and parcel of this earth happening the way it does, and put some psychic stuff on top of it.

R: You may be well advised to seriously question whether crystals have any powers of healing ... other than what people project into them. It is all so cute, actually.

Q(2): People talk about ‘energies’.

Q: It’s all a matter of self-hypnosis, self-indulgence. If you feel good after using psychic healing you will attribute it to some force. But if you have appendicitis a crystal will not take it away. Only a surgeon can do that. Crystals don’t have any power ... except for making you feel good if you believe in them.

Q(1): What about colour? That has the power to affect you.

R: It only affects those who are into that. ‘Colour can affect your moods’, they say. You have to be able to have moods in order to be affected. If you do not have any moods whatsoever it matters not what colour you wear. It is not going to affect anything – you have got to have moods in order to be influenced.

Q(1): So you are free to just enjoy colour for what it is?

R: Yes, colour for me is a delight to the eye.

Q(1): That just wipes every esoteric thing out!

Q: It’s a waste of time and money.

R: I have had some fun with it: I have gone to a couple of clairvoyants, tarot readers and such like, and they spent their time telling me about my problems! I do not have any, but they talked solemnly about difficulties I will encounter and overcome ... and so forth. It is all quite amusing. I consider the classic example lies in astrology. As far as I am concerned, the single-most important event in my life – a matter of earth-shaking importance – happened on Father’s Day in 1981. Absolutely nothing astrological is indicated for six o’clock in the morning of that day.

Q: Yes, there is nothing for that day ... the sixth of September 1981.

R: If the stars do influence a person – ‘you are going to travel’ or ‘you are going to meet a woman’ or ‘you are going to meet a man’ – if they talk about those kind of things, surely they would discover something so radical a mutation, so fundamentally transforming, as what happened on that date. You would think the stars would have some influence on that, surely! But: not a thing.

Q(2): What about acupuncture? That’s to do with chi energies, isn’t it?

R: Personally I do not use acupuncture, homeopathy, flower remedies ... for me it is a waste of time.

Q(1): What about herbs?

R: I am more happy to go direct to the chemist. Researchers have sorted them all out and synthesised what is in the herbs. Live herbs – or dried herbs – are imprecise. It depends upon the growing season, climatic conditions, environmental factors and so forth, for the strength of the herb. There are many incidences of people taking herbs and finding them too strong – or too weak – for their illness ... with deleterious effects. Chemists are precise and one can be assured of the correct dosage. I have nothing against herbs per se, of course they have medicinal properties; it is just that the whole business is imprecise and it is easy to over-dose or under-dose.

Western medicine is not perfect, but it is not as bad as those people who object to it make it out to be. What I find interesting is that those rich people who live in countries like China or India who get some particular disease have this remarkable habit of flying to the US or the UK to get the best medicine, the best surgery that Western medicine can provide. They know that that is where they can find a cure. I find that quite indicative. They do not rely upon the traditional healing of their own country – that ‘healing’ that is so revered by those reactionary and disgruntled persons brought up in this land of plenty.

Q: The entire ‘healing’ business is the opium of the middle class. It is a luxury that they can get into ... until they are seriously ill. Then they take antibiotics or modern surgery with alacrity.

R: It is all to do with being an identity. An identity will ‘heal’ anything in order to take attention away from itself. An identity lives in mortal fear of being found out for the usurper it is ... not to mention the ‘self’. An identity will talk about ‘dropping the ego’, for example; yet if successful in this enterprise, it will identify as being ‘The Self’ ... or ‘The Absolute’, or ‘I am That’, or ‘I am God’ ... or ‘Whatever’. The identity is still flourishing and the wars, the rapes, the murders, the tortures and the corruption still goes on as it has been for thousands and thousands of years. To go into ‘healing energies’ and ‘personal growth’ and ‘spiritual paths’ is to fiddle with the levers and controls within the human condition.

It requires a radical departure from the norm, from the orthodox. There can be peace on earth – and one can live in universal peace now – by attending to the root cause of all the ills that have beset humankind since time immemorial. Apart from a genuine medical complaint, ‘I’ am the sole cause of all the ills – and I do not just mean petty psychosomatic maladies – I mean the basic, the fundamental originator of all the inequities and infirmities and decrepitudes that have plagued all human beings for aeons ... and still continue to do so. Instead of worrying about things like all of these natural remedies being better than the synthesised medicines or vice versa, let us uncover and uproot the parasite within.

Then intelligence can operate unimpeded, allowing one to make up one’s own mind about the optimum course to take in one’s daily life. I would not want to set down rules about medicines, remedies – or whatever – for all and sundry. Some things are a matter of personal taste.

But one can stop a lot of the nonsense that passes for sagacity.