Actual Freedom – The Actual Freedom Mailing List Correspondence

March 10 2004

RESPONDENT: Hello, new to the Actual Freedom Trust site, and just beginning to work my way through it, but would just like to ask a preliminary question, below.

RICHARD: Welcome to The Actual Freedom Trust mailing list ... as I happened to be at the computer attending to a back-log of correspondence when your e-mail came in I will respond now otherwise it could be a while before I do.

Incidentally, the e-mail address for the mailing list is: actualfreedom@topica.com

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RESPONDENT No 64: The universe itself does not distinguish between the physical and the metaphysical.

RICHARD: As there is no ‘the metaphysical’ in actuality this is hardly surprising.

RESPONDENT No 64: The universe contains physical things, and some of these physical things (eg. human bodies) give rise to metaphysical entities (eg. minds, souls, ‘selves’).

RICHARD: There is nothing metaphysical about minds ... a mind is a human brain in action in a human skull. As for ‘souls’ and ‘selves’: each and every human being is genetically endowed, at conception, with instinctual passions (such as fear and aggression and nurture and desire) for rough and ready survival reasons ... which passions automatically form themselves, in a process somewhat analogous to an eddy or a vortex forming itself *as* swirling water or air, into an amorphous feeling being, an inchoate intuitive presence, popularly known as a ‘self’ or a ‘soul’ (or ‘spirit’) in the human animal, within the flesh and blood body. More than a few human beings, taking themselves to truly be this eddying ‘being’, this vortical ‘presence’, rather than the flesh and blood body they actually are, imaginatively/intuitively manifest/realise all manner of destinies for that affective phantasm (the eddy or vortex, as it were, which is the instinctual passions in motion) in all manner of metaphysical dimensions inhabited by all manner of affective deities ... a deeply-felt divine and/or sacred being/presence of some description which/who is the timeless and spaceless and formless source or origin of the universe and/or universes.

RESPONDENT: This vortex, then, gives rise to the second ‘I’ in Ramana’s ‘I-I’ formulation, if I’m understanding the site at all?

RICHARD: No ... it is the vortex itself (sometimes known as one’s ‘original face’ in Zen Buddhism).

April 15 2004

RICHARD: ... an ‘undivided consciousness’ means there is, literally, no observer and the observed (aka subject and object) – the observer is the observed (aka ‘Tat Tvam Asi’/ ‘Thou Art That’) – wherein there is only observation (aka witnessing). In a word: solipsism.

RESPONDENT: Would you please elaborate on the vital difference between such witnessing and the sensory ‘experience’ of the actualist? And is the mystical nature of the Witness, a la spirituality, its imputation of a non-material ‘essence’?

RICHARD: First of all, there is no ‘the Witness’ in the state of undivided consciousness ... there is only witnessing (aka observation) because the witness (aka the observer) is the witnessed (aka the observed).

Unless, of course, by ‘the Witness’ you mean God/ Goddess or Truth or Being and so on ... in which case another way of saying that is ‘I am everything and everything is Me’ (not the ego-‘I’, though, but the second ‘I’ of Mr. Venkataraman Aiyer aka Ramana fame) or ‘I am That’.

The vital difference between that and the sensory experiencing here in this actual world – as evidenced in a pure consciousness experience (PCE) – is that, as this flesh and blood body only (sans identity in toto), one is not what is being sensorially experienced ... one is the experiencing of what is happening.

To put that another way: as this flesh and blood body only one is the senses.