Actual Freedom – The Actual Freedom Mailing List Correspondence

January 11 2005

RESPONDENT: Richard, Peter, and Vineeto, I’d like to inquire something of the three of you. First, what are your respective ages? I’m curious to know. (...) I’m not sure that I’ve encountered any numbers on the website, but I am curious to know. In respect to the fact that I’ve asked an answer of you, I’ll tell you that I’m 19, and also, I’d like to inform everyone that I’m from Alabama in the U.S.A.

RICHARD: I was born in 1947 and am the male progenitor of four (now adult) children and nine grandchildren from my first marriage ... all scattered far and wide, these days, and living their own lives. I am retired and on a pension and my current companion and I are, by choice, childless and will stay so ... enough is enough. I presently live on the most easterly point of the Australian seaboard in a small coastal village called Byron Bay. I am renting a suburban three-bedroom brick duplex about one kilometre from the beach – the ocean is an almost constant back-drop in Byron Bay – and the wee small hours are my favourite time for writing ... I most often wake up at two or three o’clock in the morning and write until the first kookaburras start their laughing-like call from some trees over the back fence. Then I like to sit and sip an early morning coffee, with my feet up on the computer desk, and be with the first blue-grey light coming into the room – through to the first glow of pre-dawn – and then the sunrise itself. I have an affinity for the small-town life as I was born and raised on a remote dairy farm in the south-west of Australia.

Speaking of which, I was born and raised in a normal family, I was educated in a normal state-run school, I took a normal occupation at age fifteen (full-time farming), joined the military at age seventeen, and entered into a normal marriage at nineteen, almost immediately after serving my time in an overseas war, and went on to have a normal family. Although I had about fifty different jobs at odd times during my working life my main occupation, having obtained a tertiary education in the fine arts in my mid-twenties, was as a practicing artist (mainly in ceramics) and a part-time art teacher.

My progenitors were farmers ... pioneer settlers carving a livelihood by hand out of virgin forest (I personally used axes and hand saws to help cut down the trees to make pasture land). As a lad I was involved in the fencing and ploughing and sowing and harvesting; I hunted game in the forest, I helped raise domesticated animals, I tended the gardens and orchards and crops, I assisted in building sheds (barns) and outhouses from forest timber and learned improvisation from the ingenuity required in ‘making do’ with minimal commercial supplies. There was no plumbing; no sewage, no telephone, no electricity ... I went to bed with a candle and to the outdoor latrine with a kerosene lamp. No computer; no television, no videos, no record players, no freezer, no electric kitchen gadgets ... and so on and so on.

A regular rural childhood ... there was no ‘wounded child’ nor any ‘dysfunctional family’ background (beyond the norm that is).

October 17 2005

RESPONDENT: Richard, lately I’ve noticed during my moments of contemplation I trigger some form of ASC. In this ASC, there is an overwhelming silence in my mind; this contrasts heavily to the normal state of functioning I experience wherein songs constantly play through my head. The disturbing part of the experience is this extreme sense of revulsion and absolute disgust in my stomach, literally a sense of wanting to vomit. Furthermore, there is a sense of meaninglessness.

Now, as far as the silence goes, you’ve mentioned somewhere in the correspondence sections about looking into the mirror after the second experience with your brain stem and asking ‘who’ you were without receiving an answer – the answer not even being the ‘silence that speaks louder than words’ but rather being a response to the question ‘what am I?’ (the answer being the body). I would want to equate this silence I experience with the ‘silence that speaks louder than words,’ for the sense of ‘Self’ is still fully apparent in this moments. But did you ever come across the feeling of disgust?

RICHARD: Oh, yes ... the feeling of disgust/ revulsion/ repugnance/repulsion is part and parcel of the attraction/ aversion package of desire – genetically-endowed by virtue of its fitness towards ensuring survival – and is quite primal (a smell, for example, goes directly to the brain-stem) to the point it may very well have been, as is evidenced in single-celled/ simple-celled creatures, the initial nerve reaction upon which the entire nervous system (which includes the brain proper) develops.

In concert with other instinctual passions that hedonic attraction/ aversion discrimination underpins sympathy/ antipathy ... out of which affinity/enmity emerges.

RESPONDENT: The only other experience mentioned on the site anywhere is about experiencing a sense of ‘meaningless and purposelessness’ while using the method, and to recall a PCE at that time. Indeed, the three characteristics are nausea, silence, and meaninglessness.

RICHARD: The apprehension of meaninglessness/ purposelessness can, in itself, induce emotional/ mental nausea upon a resultant grim foreboding – a desolatory (forsaken, dismal, wretched) or bleak presage – ensuing.

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RESPONDENT: I’ve yet to have a ‘significant’ PCE so far, though small ones come here and there. I’m actively breaking down the social identity in an attempt to trigger the ‘significant’ PCE. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the deprogramming from society, which is something I’ve done for some time now even before I encountered the AF website. Now with the organized method of AF, I’m able to seriously get down to business – and what a grand business it is.

RICHARD: Aye ... when one gets a handle on it all it can be such fun (as well as immensely rewarding) finding out what makes one tick.

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RESPONDENT: If nothing else, at least the fact that I’ve triggered any form of ASC means that my social identity has enough of a dent in it for such a thing to happen – a by-product, a landmark, a road sign, if you will. Yet the ASC I mentioned is most certainly worthless in terms of seeking it permanently.

RICHARD: Okay, but do watch out for aversion flipping to its opposite, though, especially via any grim foreboding/ bleak presage, inherent to meaninglessness/ purposelessness, slipping into being a dire foreboding – a minatory (ominous, baleful, menacing) or sinister presage – and thence to an awful foreboding ... a reconciliatory (awing, humbling, reverential) or redemptive presage.

I am, of course, only speaking in such a cautionary manner (and from personal experience) simply because you wrote of not finding much about what you were looking for on The Actual Freedom Trust web site.

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RESPONDENT: Something else extremely intriguing I discovered while going into the instinctual passions was how the further ‘down’ into ‘my’ core I went, the more my senses were flooded with an altered perception of the environment, much like a buzz one gets from drinking, smoking, or getting high.

RICHARD: Yes, the less filtered all experiencing is the more brilliant it all becomes (is).

RESPONDENT: That led me to an interesting idea, that the sense of self in the body is nothing more than a biologically programmed chemical high of the body that simply happens to run full time, usually trapped under innumerable layers of social morals and values.

RICHARD: There is no doubt that identity at root – as a rudimentary feeling ‘being’ (an amorphous affective presence, an inchoate feeler/ incipient intuiter) – can trigger off all manner of chemicals ... yet to conflate cause (a biological programme) and effect (a chemical high) could lead to a treating of the symptoms and not the disease itself.

RESPONDENT: Having understood this, the appeal of having a self severely diminishes.

RICHARD: Sure ... what about the appeal of being a self, though?