Actual Freedom – Mailing List ‘A’ Correspondence

RESPONDENT: You say I have no-longer have any sense of identity whatsoever. This is a contradiction so please explain further.

RICHARD: I use the first person pronoun for convenience ... but it refers to this flesh-and-blood body as being these sense organs seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching and thinking ... minus the ‘I’. Whenever I refer to the psychological entity within the body, I usually use small quotes ... thus: ‘I’. Otherwise I would have to write the above paragraph like this: ‘Over the eleven years this flesh-and-blood body had numerous experiences of a condition that seemed so extreme that this flesh-and-blood body must surely physically die to attain to it. To go beyond Enlightenment seemed to be an impossibility whilst still alive and breathing. Then at midday on Friday, 30 October 1992, a curious event occurred, due to this flesh-and-blood body’s intense conviction that it was imperative that some flesh-and-blood body evince a final and complete condition that would ‘deliver the goods’ so longed for by humanity for millennia. Just like this flesh-and-blood body’s ego had dissolved, back in 1981, this flesh-and-blood body’s ‘soul’ disappeared. This flesh-and-blood body was no longer a ‘Self’ existing for all Eternity and transcending Time and Space. This flesh-and-blood body no longer had a feeling of being – or ‘Being’ – any sense of identity whatsoever had vanished without a trace ... and this flesh-and-blood body could thus no longer detect the presence of The Absolute. There was no ‘Presence’ at all. The identity had generated the entire edifice’.

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RICHARD: Since that date I have continued to live in a condition of complete emancipation and utter autonomy ... the condition is both permanent and actual. This is different to Enlightenment in that it is most definitely substantial: there is no longer a transcendence, for I have neither sorrow nor malice anywhere at all to rise above.

RESPONDENT: To me to transcend is a mystical sounding name for getting over it. If you have got over it there is nothing to get over. How is being over it different to enlightenment other than you not being attached to the names described in enlightenment.

RICHARD: ‘Transcend’ means to rise above, which implies that what you have transcended still exists, only it is beneath you now. This is borne out by the Enlightened Beings, who generally state that they have eliminated the ego and transcended duality ... I have yet to come across any Master who consistently states that they have eliminated duality ... if there any at all who say that.

My experience of being enlightened is that ‘I’, as a soul (the Eternal Self), was sheltered and protected from sorrow and malice by a cocoon of Divine Compassion and Love Agapé ... and my experience was affirmed by what I read in various books, one of which was written by Ms. Pupal Jayakar about Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti wherein she describes how the people around him were not to mention the word ‘evil’ as it would send him ‘shrinking’ – if my memory serves me correct – and he stated that he had always ‘felt protected’ and that ‘there was a repository of ‘Good’ into which the ‘Bad’ was always trying to enter’. Mr. Barry Long is reported to have said: ‘The silver-tongued Devil is Eternal’.

In actual freedom both sorrow and malice are eliminated, along with the ego and the soul. Evil does not exist in the world, it exists only in the human psyche ... eliminate the psyche in its entirety and you have eliminated both Good and Evil. (‘Good’ is a psychic phenomenon created to combat ‘Evil’). As the Enlightened Beings have only transcended duality, they have to cling to ‘The Good’ in order to resist ‘The Bad’. Hence also their pacifism.

RESPONDENT: It sounds like you have got over what has been described to you as enlightenment, you had formed attachment to those ideas to improve yourself, but then you discovered they are only others words describing restrictions on life that are not necessarily useful to impose on yourself.

RICHARD: I did not get over ‘that what had been described to me as enlightenment’ ... I was living it as a reality. I was not ‘attached to those ideas’ ... I was experiencing them twenty four hours a day. I did not discover that ‘they were only other words’ ... they were words accurately describing a reality that I saw that I needed to be free from. Words in themselves are not a problem, for words are a description of something ... and it is that something that is being lived which is trapping you ... not the words. I know that some people (Post-Modernists, for example) re-arrange words and definitions to suit themselves, but the underlying reality remains the problem. Semantics is only a superficial problem, in spite of those who write profound tomes about it as if it were the problem in itself.

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RICHARD: Herein lies the unmistakable distinction between this condition, which I call actual freedom and the Enlightened State: I am no longer driven by a Divine Sense Of Mission to bring The Truth, Universal Love and Divine Compassion to the world. I am free to speak with whomsoever is genuinely interested in solving the ‘Mystery of Life’ and becoming totally free of the Human Condition.

RESPONDENT: This seems to me to be similar to how I came about discovering enlightenment, I discovered the freedom from enlightenment before I discovered it. I used enlightenment as a description of the process of self realisation and not necessarily the particular descriptions given in scriptures. In order to stimulate me in my found sense of freedom I realised that I would have to improve others as well as my self that’s why I try and promote enlightenment, but it is all to easy to see it as another set of restrictions.

RICHARD: Enlightenment is not ‘a description of the process of self realisation’ ... it is self-realisation itself. ‘Self-realisation’ is where ‘I’ realise that ‘I’ am the ‘Self’ ... the ‘Eternal Self’ existing beyond Time and Space, Unborn and Undying. This is a delusion born out of the illusion that ‘I’ exist as an actuality. As the title of this thread says: ‘The Self is not actual’.

I do not need any more stimulation other than that which inheres from being here. We are all fellow human beings who find ourselves here in the world as it was when we were born. We find war, murder, torture, rape, domestic violence and corruption to be endemic ... we notice that it is intrinsic to the human condition ... we set out to discover why this is so. We find sadness, loneliness, sorrow, grief, depression and suicide to be a global incidence ... and we gather that it is also inherent to the human condition ... and we want to know why. We all report to each other as to the nature of our discoveries for we are all well-meaning and seek to find a way out of this mess that we have landed in. Whether one believes in re-incarnation or not, we are all living this particular life for the very first time, and we wish to make sense of it. It is a challenge and the adventure of a life-time to enquire and to uncover, to seek and to find, to explore and to discover. All this being alive business is actually happening and we are totally involved in living it out ... whether we take the back seat or not, we are all still doing it.

What could be more stimulating than being alive ... and being here doing all this.

RESPONDENT: Nothing is ‘given’ in science even the principles of scientific investigation are under scrutiny in meta-physics. So just what is gravity a wave a particle both? Does it expand at the speed of light? How does this change curvature of space time ... oh wait in a few minutes you say there is no space time. Please clarify these situations for me, I have found the scientific literature so contradictory and theoretical that gravity doesn’t seem to be given at all.

RICHARD: I received a State School education in the fifties when things like gravity were described as a ‘given’. Since then the advances in scientific knowledge in regards waves, particles, space-time continuum, curved space and so on have been theoretical models based on increasingly frantic mathematics – or so I understand it. The search for a ‘Unified Theory Of Everything’ is based upon unifying gravity, electro-magnetism, weak nuclear particles and strong nuclear particles – if my memory serves me correct. If this is the case, then it seems that gravity is still a ‘given’. However, I am willing to be wrong on this, as I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician.

Be that as it may, I mean ‘given’ in the literal sense that when one holds a brick, say, at arm’s length and lets go of it, it always meets the ground with a satisfying thump. This is a fact. Perhaps I should have said ‘fact’ instead of ‘given’. Gravity is a fact. Male and female parts fitting together is a fact ... and what a pleasant fact that is!

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RICHARD: It is the method by which we all came to be here – there is no other way of becoming a human being other than the union of the ova and the spermatozoa.

RESPONDENT: We can clone sheep, how are we so different to them?

RICHARD: There may well come a day when humans are cloned into existence, but until then it is the ova and the spermatozoa. But even if that happens, it does not detract from the fact that male and female parts fit together ... and fit together so well ... and with such pleasure and delight. I find it strange to the point of bizarre, that in order to establish their Peace On Earth, most of the religious / spiritual / mystical / metaphysical paths insist that sex is a no-no. Those that propose celibacy claim that their God/The Truth is more/only accessible if one eschews the other gender. I find this an odd God/The Truth, that is all. Especially as all Gods and Goddesses are fictions anyway ... and ‘The Truth’ is but a fantasy spun out of a delusion that is born out of an illusion.

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RICHARD: Apart from that, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.

RESPONDENT: Oh what scale? Moral ethical humorous?

RICHARD: Humorous.

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RICHARD: We were talking about Immortality – life after death – and the continuation of something, by whatever name, in some metaphysical ‘Timeless and Spaceless’ dimension.

RESPONDENT: By something you seem to be talking about an nonspecifically identified non-thing (i.e. it doesn’t exist in space and time). Perhaps you could tell us your definition of consciousness else I have no-way of knowing what you mean.

RICHARD: My definition of consciousness is: ‘I am these sense organs: this seeing is me, this hearing is me, this tasting is me, this touching is me, this smelling is me, and this thinking is me. Whereas ‘I’, the entity, am inside the body: looking out through ‘my’ eyes as if looking out through a window, listening through ‘my’ ears as if they were microphones, tasting through ‘my’ tongue, touching through ‘my’ skin, smelling through ‘my’ nose, and thinking through ‘my’ brain. Of course ‘I’ must feel isolated, alienated, alone and lonely, for ‘I’ am cut off from the magnificence of the actual world – the world as-it-is’.

The ‘‘something’, by whatever name’, referred to in the above exchange is not consciousness, for that is dependent upon a physical body for its existence. The ‘something’ is variously called ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘atman’, ‘skandhas’, ‘Real Self’, ‘Higher Self’, ‘True Self’ and so on. It is a metaphysical entity that is believed to exist beyond space and time and before birth and after death. Some people call it ‘Consciousness’ (with a capital ‘C’ to denote Divinity) thus confusing the issue. Any belief in a ‘something’ independent of this body being alive and breathing is clearly a projection of the ‘I’ ... the psychological entity that has a real – sometimes very real – existence inside the body. But that entity – the self – is not actual. Thus it requires belief ... and as I remarked in another post, etymologically, the word believe means: ‘fervently wish to be true’.

It has nothing at all to do with facts and actuality.