Actual Freedom – Mailing List ‘B’ Correspondence

Richard’s Correspondence on Mailing List ‘B’

with Respondent No. 19

Some Of The Topics Covered

spirit – Krishnamurti – reality – actuality – life – integrated self – pleasure and delight – time – feelings – soul – love – environment – food – after-life – ethics – belief – thought – words – peace – Ancient Wisdom of the East – insight – intuition – apperceptive awareness – Greater Reality – drugs – truth – thinker – real/actual and factual

April 06 1998:

RESPONDENT No. 20: In that Krishnamurti was presenting not a philosophy but a commentary on living, notes that are helpful and insightful in terms of the way we live, looking at the way Krishnamurti lived is a valid and legitimate approach to understanding what he was saying. But this must be qualified. For this is valid so long as we also understand that there may be a difference between the man Krishnamurti and what was said, that is, the truth or falsity of what is said is independent of whether the man Krishnamurti lived it.

RESPONDENT: Yes, I agree with you. What Krishnamurti said is independent of the man Krishnamurti This seems to bring forth a duality in a ‘oneness’, but our idea of ‘oneness’ brings about duality just in the thinking of it. In other words, Krishnamurti often said he didn’t know what it was that ‘taught’ or even what it was that occupied his body. Did ‘something’ else occupy K’s body? If he was without self, then what occupied his body was ‘something else’. The fact that he said he wasn’t important at all, but that the teachings were, verifies the fact that he was aware of an ‘otherness’ that was not him. It was his body. He would have been the one to know if there was ‘something else’ or not. (I can hear Richard now!).

RESPONDENT No. 20: Can I suggest to you my read on this: Krishnamurti the man’ is Krishnamurti who is memory, who was and is conditioned, who is thinking, and has this and this to say and has said, and all the rest of it. This otherness is what is there when there is not this conditioning. It is the intelligence that is free of conditioning, and therefore by definition not Krishnamurti. What do you think?

RESPONDENT: Don’t know. Know only what he said. He said he had ‘visitors’ (loosely stated). I take this to mean spirits.

RICHARD: ‘Spirits’ is as good a word as any ... Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti would say that ‘They’ would ‘work on him’ whilst he was ‘away from the body’. Two women would be under strict instructions to ‘stay with the body while he was being worked on’. By ‘worked on’ he meant ‘purified’ ... and in another dimension.

All very esoteric and metaphysical stuff indeed ... in the full mystical sense of the words.

RESPONDENT: He also said he was free of conflict and unconditioned, so much so that he had to make himself remember to eat.

RICHARD: Yes, he was very specific and clear about his state of being. Besides, if he was not living the ‘Teachings’ himself, who was he to preach to others?

Unless he was channelling ... which is how modern day ‘seers’ get out of that dilemma. My position is – of course – that the ‘Teachings’ are unliveable ... and have been for century upon century. The ‘Tried and True’ is the ‘Tried and Failed’.

RESPONDENT: He also said that the other came ‘uninvited’. I guess it’s not really important, for only he could know whether ‘something else’ was in him or not, and then he said he couldn’t know ‘what it was’, but that others (close to him) might figure it out if they put their minds to it.

RICHARD: Except that if one brings the written words of those ‘close to him’ into a discussion on this List, one gets howled down.

Speaking personally, I consider it is all of the utmost importance ... given that he has influenced so many people into thinking in a certain way (and still does so even today).

RESPONDENT: So if he didn’t know, and we don’t know, I don’t guess anybody will ever know, except maybe for the ‘intelligence’. How’s that for knowing ‘not’?

RICHARD: In Australia there is an apt expression: ‘squibbing’ ... which comes from the poor results experienced in a firecracker in which the powder burns with a fizz. Basically it means that the person so named is not applying themselves to the question or task at hand – deliberately – so as to not rock the boat.

Would you say that that is a fair description of ‘how’s that for knowing ‘not’?’

July 12 1998:

RICHARD (to Respondent No. 20): Pure consciousness is where this flesh and blood body can be apperceptively aware of this actual world ... the world as-it-is. And what-it-is is a rather magical play-ground full of pleasure and delight ... and nary a feeling to be found anywhere. Sorrow and malice cease to exist ... one is happy and harmless in character without any effort. Needless to say, the word ‘integration’ is not at all applicable, here.

RESPONDENT: Richard, aren’t your feelings of pleasure and delight integrated into your flesh and blood body?

RICHARD: Nope, not at all. Integral, yes indeed (as in: essential, necessary, indispensable, requisite, basic, fundamental, inherent, intrinsic, innate). But integrated, no way (as in: unite the various parts, join, combine, amalgamate, consolidate, blend, incorporate, coalesce, fuse, merge, intermix, mingle, commingle, assimilate, homogenise, harmonise, mesh, concatenate).

The discussion was about an ‘integrated self’ being whole, actually ... not the innate sensate experience. Viz:

• [Respondent No. 20]: ‘An integrated self is not a self at all, nor is it any of these thought projected pure ideals’.
• [Richard]: ‘Oh yes it is ... otherwise why call it an ‘integrated self’, for example? It is some airy-fairy far-removed from here affective dream-world conjured up through abstinence and sublimation ... the discipline that comes through order and negation. To project a fantasy and yearn to live in it until one becomes it is simply an insult to one’s native intelligence’.

July 13 1998:

RICHARD (to Respondent No. 20): Pure consciousness is where this flesh and blood body can be apperceptively aware of this actual world ... the world as-it-is. And what-it-is is a rather magical play-ground full of pleasure and delight ... and nary a feeling to be found anywhere. Sorrow and malice cease to exist ... one is happy and harmless in character without any effort. Needless to say, the word ‘integration’ is not at all applicable, here.

RESPONDENT: Richard, aren’t your feelings of pleasure and delight integrated into your flesh and blood body?

RICHARD: Nope, not at all. Integral, yes indeed (as in: essential, necessary, indispensable, requisite, basic, fundamental, inherent, intrinsic, innate). But integrated, no way (as in: unite the various parts, join, combine, amalgamate, consolidate, blend, incorporate, coalesce, fuse, merge, intermix, mingle, commingle, assimilate, homogenise, harmonise, mesh, concatenate).

RESPONDENT: Are you saying that pleasure and delight are essential, necessary, and indispensable but not part of the body as in fused, joined, homogenised?

RICHARD: That is right ... pleasure and delight are the senses in operation. And the senses are as innate, inherent and intrinsic as the heart, lungs and liver.

RESPONDENT: I would say it that would be the other way around if one used only these meanings.

RICHARD: I really do not see how.

RESPONDENT: I was not suggesting an integrated self, but an integration as in ‘wholeness’, not fragmented and especially not deluded.

RICHARD: But ‘wholeness’ means the theory or principle of a tendency in nature to form or produce organised wholes which are more than the mere sum of the component units. This is to go beyond the actual into the metaphysical ... and to be metaphysical is to be deluded.

When I say: ‘I am the senses’ I mean just that ... not something more than the sum of the parts. Also, the senses are never fragmented and require no fixing up ... no ‘defragmentation’ is required. It is simply a matter of one coming to one’s senses – both literally and figuratively – and then one is this body being apperceptively aware. ‘Wholeness’ is nothing but a futile attempt to make something out of nothing.

RESPONDENT: Why do you get so nit-picky about the meaning of words and go to dictionaries to try to prove a point?

RICHARD: I get ‘nit-picky’ about the meaning of words because people so dearly love to cover up their ineptitude by using words in a slippery manner. No one, it seems, likes to be pinned down to a clear-cut definition. I also get this a lot in my face-to-face discussions with people here ... they like to ‘keep things open’ or ‘be flexible’ or ‘don’t be so fixed’ or ‘things aren’t black and white’ and so on. I happen to like the English language ... it has upwards of 650,000 words in it and one can clearly communicate with another if a little rigour is applied. However, people like to hide behind words; they like to utter pithy aphorisms like: ‘The Truth is Ineffable’.

It is up to me to make sure that the other understands what I am saying – whether they agree with me or not – because if I assume that they have the same meaning to a word as I do is just plain silly. A dictionary is a handy reference point to establish a meaning ... if we want to give a particular twist or meaning to a word we can ... but we need to know what base we start from. Otherwise anything means whatever we want it too ... and confusion reigns supreme.

Which is the current situation.

July 17 1998:

RESPONDENT No. 33: The following article was recently published in a newsletter for the public unfamiliar with going into the rudimentary elements of programmed/ condition living. I thought that I would make it available to this mailing list for those of you who may find it a matter to quietly ponder, rather than debate. I share it in the spirit of either one investigating the truth or falseness of what’s being conveyed or ignoring it.

RICHARD: Okay, I have ‘quietly pondered’ it ... and I am not going to ‘debate it’. I read it in ‘the spirit that it was shared’ ... I investigated ‘the truth or falseness of what’s being conveyed’. I did not ‘just ignore it’. Now what?

RESPONDENT: A waiting mind is a mind trapped in time.

RICHARD: If you say so ... yet it is not my experience that one is ‘trapped’. Speaking personally, I am happily and securely located inside time ... where else could one be? This universe’s space is infinite and its time is eternal, so it is impossible to be anywhere else but in time and space ... unless one is a mystic, of course. But even then their body is in space and time ... it simply requires remarkable denial to live in an hallucination.

However, waiting in time – whether trapped or freely – was not what I was referring to when I wrote: ‘Now what?’ For do you not find it a rather tricky game being played out here ... one is going to present some text for everyone to read but no-one is permitted to discuss it? Instead, the writer states – in effect – if anyone disagrees with the tone of the text ... just ignore it. Whilst this may seem reasonable – on the surface – the hidden agenda is that the writer is not open to anyone questioning their authoritative words. And I say authoritative because, by writing about something for public consumption, one is setting themselves up to be some kind of an authority (Oxford Dictionary: authority: expert, specialist, professional, master, scholar, adept, pundit) on that subject anyway. If it is not authoritative text – if it is just twaddle – then why bother publishing in the first place? Why not keep one’s thoughts to oneself if one is so afraid of criticism? If one has something to say ... why not boldly say it and then stand back and deal with any critique as it arises?

To present something and say ‘take it or leave it’ is to be so insular as to be hovering close to the point of being self-centred. Especially the superior tone in the comment: ‘For the public unfamiliar with going into the rudimentary elements of programmed and/or conditioned living’. And again in the third paragraph: ‘in city life, one can read body-language – the behaviour people display as a result of stroking each others’ egos’. Are we not fellow human beings who find ourselves here in this world as it was when we arrived ... a mess? And do we not all seek to find a way through this mess ... and share our findings with one another? And if one has ‘got it wrong’ is it not beneficial that someone else will point that out to one? One can benefit from such interaction as much as the other ... we all benefit.

Speaking personally, I make no secret of the fact that I consider that I have discovered the ‘Secret To Life’ and I welcome rigorous and – at times vigorous – discussion and invite people to either agree or disagree ... those who are neutral on the subject will just ignore it anyway. I have been doing this for eighteen years now and have had the full gamut of scorn and derision and ridicule and flattery and gratitude and compliments ... and indifference. But I would not be where I am now if I had kept it all to myself. All those people who over those years pointed out flaws in my then ‘wisdom’ aided me immensely as far as I am concerned.

Obviously, invoking the ghost of Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti works ... he oft-times directed that one not discuss or interpret the ‘Teachings’. I did notice a couple of complimentary posts regarding the article passing the censor unscathed ... what then of critical posts? Nary one to be seen!

C’est la vie, I guess.

July 18 1998:

RESPONDENT: When we go against what we know in our heart and stomach is the wrong thing to do; when we choose to do it anyway, we will suffer the guilt (some may not). It is certainly not a ‘belief’, as you suggest, that I am the initiator of a wrong or right action. It is a fact. How do I know I know it is a fact? I can only know that by listening to the feelings I get when I do it. It is wrong because it ‘feels’ wrong. It is not just something that I have to be told. This is the essence of right and wrong. Are you suggesting that there is no right and wrong, that right and wrong exist only by judgement brought on by conditioning? Surely not!

RICHARD: After all your years of sincere self-investigation are you really going to go on record as saying that feelings are to be relied upon as the final arbiter for living a salubrious and sociable life? Feelings are notoriously unreliable ... people have been living according to their feelings for millennia ... just look at the mess the world is in. Calenture is no better than the conditioned judgement you rightly put aside.

‘Right and Wrong’ is nothing but a socially-conditioned affective and cognitive conscience instilled by well-meaning adults through reward and punishment (love and hate) in a fatally-flawed attempt to control the wayward self that all sentient beings are born with.

July 19 1998: 

RESPONDENT: When we go against what we know in our heart and stomach is the wrong thing to do; when we choose to do it anyway, we will suffer the guilt (some may not). It is certainly not a ‘belief’, as you suggest, that I am the initiator of a wrong or right action. It is a fact. How do I know I know it is a fact? I can only know that by listening to the feelings I get when I do it. It is wrong because it ‘feels’ wrong. It is not just something that I have to be told. This is the essence of right and wrong. Are you suggesting that there is no right and wrong, that right and wrong exist only by judgement brought on by conditioning? Surely not!

RICHARD: After all your years of sincere self-investigation are you really going to go on record as saying that feelings are to be relied upon as the final arbiter for living a salubrious and sociable life? Feelings are notoriously unreliable ... people have been living according to their feelings for millennia ... just look at the mess the world is in. Calenture is no better than the conditioned judgement you rightly put aside. ‘Right and Wrong’ is nothing but a socially-conditioned affective and cognitive conscience instilled by well-meaning adults through reward and punishment (love and hate) in a fatally-flawed attempt to control the wayward self that all sentient beings are born with.

RESPONDENT: Did I really say all that, or did I actually say all that? Actually, I said that when one goes against what one feels is the wrong thing to do, one will feel guilt. I said that it is not a belief that I am the initiator of a ‘wrong’ action or guilt. That is a fact. I actually do it – I do not believe that I do it. It is the feeling that it is wrong that brings on the guilt. If I didn’t feel it to be wrong, there would be no guilt. Then, I went a little further to suggest that there is wrong because it ‘feels’ wrong. ‘Feels’ wrong was put into parentheses because it was meant to be ‘feel’ from the heart, from the real heart, not the actual heart, you know?

RICHARD: Oh yes, I understand only too well that you were referring to ‘the real heart’ ... and therein lies the problem. If something did not ‘feel wrong’ then there would be no guilt feelings, now, would there? I was suggesting that the conversation on guilt would be better served if one examined the underlying cause – the ‘feeling’ of Right and Wrong – rather than the effect ... which is guilt.

RESPONDENT: Excuse me, but I don’t think I said that anything was a ‘final’ arbiter or salubrious, whatever that is, life standard, so please don’t try to put words in my mouth, and, Richard, I am a simple country girl from Arkansas and appreciation of your big words is non-existent.

RICHARD: Dear me, no ... I would not dream of putting words into your mouth. You have enough there already, for you said: ‘this is the essence of right and wrong’ . As essence means: essentially, basically, substantially, fundamentally, (fundamental nature or quality), crucially, (of the greatest or utmost importance), indispensable, vital, necessary, quintessence, substance, crux, heart, soul, life, lifeblood, at heart, kernel, marrow, pith, ... you were clearly saying that feelings are the life standard. Is this not what you meant after all?

Also, salubrious simply means: healthy, health-giving, healthful, beneficial, wholesome, salutary, refreshing. Arbiter means: authority, judge, determiner, controller, director, governor, master. Like yourself, I am but a simple country person ... a boy from a farm in the South-West of Australia. I left state school at fifteen and learned to appreciate the English language as I started to question what others had to say about life, the universe and what it is to be a human being. Keeping my head in the sand (linguistically speaking) would have got me nowhere because they obfuscate through their pedagogy and sophistry.

RESPONDENT: I shot a sparrow when I was small. My mom had bought me a B-B gun, and I aimed at the bird – I didn’t dream that I would hit it, but I did and it dropped dead. That made me feel real bad. I ‘felt’ that it was wrong to take the life of something as beautiful as a bird. No one told me it was wrong. It fact it was quite the ‘right’ thing to do where I lived. Then, once I went squirrel hunting, aimed at a squirrel in a tree, pulled the trigger, and he, too, dropped dead – from a gunshot wound. I felt terribly guilty. I ‘knew’ that it was wrong, and I did it anyway. I suffered the guilt. Yes, Richard, if people lived by the ‘feelings’ in their hearts, souls, the feeling of love for all creatures and the environment, we might not be in the mess we are today. But people have hardened to their true feelings – their feelings of everything.

RICHARD: But people do already live ‘by the feelings in their hearts, souls’ ... that is why the world is in the mess it is in. The most notorious dictator is ruled by feelings.

As for ‘the feeling of love for all creatures’ ... methinks that statement gives pause for reflection. Where do you draw the line on killing? The very fact that one is alive means consuming nutrients ... and staying alive means that something, somewhere, must die in order to supply these nutrients. This is a fact of life ... and the marvellous thing about a fact is that one can not argue with it. One can argue about a belief, an opinion, a theory, an ideal and so on ... but a fact: never. One can deny a fact – pretend that it is not there – but once seen, a fact brings freedom from choice and decision. Most people think and feel that choice implies freedom – having the freedom to choose – but this is not the case. Freedom lies in seeing the obvious, and in seeing the obvious there is no choice, no deliberation, no agonising over the ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ judgement. In the freedom of seeing the fact there is only action.

When it comes to the consumption of nutrients there are many and various beliefs one can hold dearly to. There are people who will not eat red meat at all ... only white meat and fish. Then there are people who will not eat any flesh of warm-blooded animals at all ... only fish and reptiles. Then there are people (vegetarians) who will not eat any meat at all, but will consume eggs and dairy products. Then there are people (vegans) who will eat only vegetables, grain and seed. Then there are people (fruitarians) who will only eat fruit. Then – as we go into myth and fantasy – there are those who live on water and air ... and finally those who live on air only.

As in regards to ‘loving the environment’ : Some vegetarians maintain that as a carrot (for example) does not scream audibly when it is pulled from the ground there is no distress caused by the consumption of vegetables. Yet the carrot indubitably dies slowly by being extracted from its life-support system – the ground is its home – and is this not distressing on some level of a living, growing organism? It all depends upon the level, or degree, of ‘aliveness’ that one ascribes to things. Vegans, for instance, will not consume eggs as this prevents an incipient life from being born. Fruitarians go one step further and say that, as the consumption of carrots prevents them from going to seed and sprouting new life, vegetables are to be eschewed entirely. Then, as the eating of grain and seeds also prevent potential life-forms from growing, they will eat only the flesh of the fruit that surrounds the kernel and plant out the embryo plant-form. (I have been a fruitarian so I know full well what I am speaking of.)

The obvious fact is clearly demonstrated by taking all this to its ultimate consideration. What will one do – as a fruitarian causing no pain or the taking of life of anyone or anything – about those pesky things like mosquitoes, sand-flies, cockroaches, rats, mice and other ‘vermin’ that invade my house? Put up screens? What about outside? Will I slap them dead ... or just shoo them away? What will one do if attacked by a snake, a crocodile, a shark, a lion and so on? Do as the Revered Scriptures say and turn the other cheek? Will I humbly submit to my fate and be mauled severely myself – or even killed – simply because of a religious injunction, a moral scruple, a noble ideal, a virtuous belief, a passionate opinion, a deeply held ethical theory? In other words, have animals and insects been given the right, by some inscrutable god, to do with me whatsoever they wish? Is my survival dependent upon the non-existent benevolence of all those sentient beings that I am not going to cause distress to?

As for people being ‘hardened to their true feelings – their feelings of everything’ ... what then about germs, bacteria, bacillus, microbes, pathogens, phages, viruses and so on? Are they not entitled to remain alive and pain free? If one takes medication for disease, one is – possibly painfully – killing off the microscopic creatures that one’s body is the host too. Some religions – the Jain religion in India, for example – has its devout members wearing gauze over their nose and mouths to prevent insects from flying in and they even carry small brooms to sweep the path as they walk so that they will not accidentally step on some creature. It can really get out of hand. For instance, small-pox has been eradicated from the world by scientists as a means of saving countless human lives ... is this somehow ‘Wrong’? What is ‘Right’ in regards to what I do in order to stay alive? If I do none of these things then I will be causing pain and suffering to myself – and I am a sentient being too. It is an impossible scenario, when pursued to its ultimate conclusion.

And then there is the matter of one’s fellow human beings. Some of them – in fact at times a lot of them – are desirous of invading the country that one is living peacefully in, with the avowed intent of killing, torturing, raping, pillaging and subjugating oneself and one’s fellow citizens. If one holds a strong and passionate belief in not causing any pain and suffering to other sentient beings then one must be more than a fruitarian ... one must be a pacifist as well. This amounts to hanging out a sign – if everybody else in the country one lives in adopts this specific belief – which says, in effect: ‘Please feel free to invade us, we will not fight back, for we hold firmly to the principle of not causing pain and suffering to any sentient being whatsoever’ (the Tibetan situation is a particular case in point.) Thus anarchy would rule the world – all because of a belief system handed down by the Saints and the Sages, the Messiahs and the Avatars, the Redeemers and the Saviours, the Prophets and the Priests, century after century.

All this is predicated upon there being an enduring ‘I’ that is going to survive the death of the body and go on into the paradisiacal After-Life that is ‘my’ post-mortem reward for being a ‘good’ person during ‘my’ sojourn on this planet earth. It is ‘I’ who is the ‘believer’, it is ‘I’ who will cause this flesh-and-blood body to go into all manner of contorted and convoluted emotion-backed thoughts as to what is ‘Right’ and what is ‘Wrong’, what is ‘Good’ and what is ‘Bad’. If it were not for the serious consequences of all this passionate dreaming it would be immensely humorous, for ‘I’ am not actual ... ‘I’ am an illusion. And any grand ‘I’ that supposedly survives death by being ‘Timeless and Spaceless’, ‘Unborn and Undying’, ‘Immortal and Eternal’ am but a delusion born out of that illusion. Thus any After-Life is a fantasy spun out of a delusion born out of an illusion ... as I am so fond of saying.

When ‘I’ am no longer extant there is no ‘believer’ inside the mind and heart to have any beliefs or disbeliefs. As there is no ‘believer’, there is no ‘I’ to be harmful ... and one is harmless only when one has eliminated malice – what is commonly called evil – from oneself in its entirety. That is, the ‘dark side’ of human nature which requires the maintenance of a ‘good side’ to eternally combat it. By doing the ‘impossible’ – everybody tells me that you can’t change human nature – then one is automatically harmless ... which does not mean abstaining from killing. It means that no act is malicious, spiteful, hateful, revengeful and so on. It is a most estimable condition to be in. One is then free to kill or not kill something or someone, as the circumstances require. Eating meat, for example, is an act of freedom, based upon purely practical considerations such as the taste bud’s predilection, or the body’s ability to digest the food eaten, or meeting the standards of hygiene necessary for the preservation of decaying flesh, or the availability of sufficient resources on this planet to provide the acreage necessary to support the conversion of vegetation into animal protein. It has nothing whatsoever with sparing sentient beings any distress.

Thus ‘Right and Wrong’ is nothing but a socially-conditioned affective and cognitive conscience instilled by well-meaning adults through reward and punishment (love and hate) in a fatally-flawed attempt to control the wayward self that all sentient beings are born with. The ‘feeling of love for all creatures and the environment’ is born out of holding on to a belief system that is impossible to live ... as all belief systems are. I am not trying to persuade anyone to eat meat or not eat meat ... I leave it entirely up to the individual as to what they do regarding what they eat. It is the belief about ‘loving all creatures and the environment’ that is insidious, for this is how you are manipulated by those who seek to control you ... they are effectively beating you with a psychological stick. And the particularly crafty way they go about it is that they get you to do the beating to yourself. Such self-abasement is the hall-mark of any religious humility ... a brow-beaten soul earns its way into some god’s good graces by self-castigating acts of redemption.

Holding fervently to any belief is a sure sign that there is a wayward ‘I’ that needs to be controlled.

RESPONDENT: Hey, but it is nice to hear from you again, actually.

RICHARD: Likewise ... I appreciate being able to converse with you on these matters, genuinely.

July 20 1998: 

RESPONDENT No. 20: [Re: The Goose In The Bottle]. For freedom is in the intelligence of discovery of how to break that bottle.

RICHARD: What bottle?

RESPONDENT: The bottle of human suffering and misery, you goose.

RICHARD: Yet all human suffering and misery, whilst being very real, is not actual ... which is why I asked: What bottle?

RESPONDENT: The goose and the bottle are one – one and the same.

RICHARD: Never a truer word spoken in jest.

July 20 1998: 

RICHARD: It is the belief about ‘loving all creatures and the environment’ that is insidious, for this is how you are manipulated by those who seek to control you.

RESPONDENT: I agree with you that belief is insidious. We ARE the beliefs. We like the control of the belief, for then we can just ‘kick’ back and live by what we ‘believe’, think, and the most insidious of these beliefs is the belief in our own knowledge. It is on the soft, comforting pillow of knowledge that we lay our heads, hearts, feelings.

RICHARD: From the way you write the rest of your post, it does not sound all that comforting to me.

RESPONDENT: I have no belief in my feelings .

RICHARD: If you say so ... if I were you I would re-examine this statement, however.

RESPONDENT: They are what they are, from moment to moment.

RICHARD: Just what does that mean: ‘they are what they are’? It sounds like a platitude to me. Anyway, feelings are downright destructive: 160,000,000 million people killed in wars this century alone, according to the most recent estimate I have heard.

RESPONDENT: They are never the same.

RICHARD: Oh, yes they are ... they are tediously repetitious.

RESPONDENT: They are always new.

RICHARD: Oh, no they are not ... they are the same old same old.

RESPONDENT: It takes a lot of patience; a lot of love and care; and an absence of judgement to live through the feelings. I don’t mean living ‘through’ feelings, but without attachment to the feelings.

RICHARD: Who is the person that is ‘without attachment to the feelings’? And even if that were possible, which it is not as feelings are the core of ‘my’ being, would it not be easier to dispense with them altogether?

RESPONDENT: I cannot fathom, Richard, a living human being devoid of feelings.

RICHARD: Then what does being ‘without attachment to the feelings’ mean to you then?

RESPONDENT: Your letter to me was full of the anguish of thought. It is thought that harbours the feelings. To be without thought, the idea, the word, the verbalisation, the psychological ‘me’, is, in my opinion, the state of creation.

RICHARD: ‘State of creation’? But this universe already always is ... what is there to be created or in a ‘state of creation’? Fantasies?

RESPONDENT: You can not relate what is beyond the thought, verbalisation, Richard, for what is ‘there’, ‘where’ there is no thought, ‘where’ the mind has emptied its contents has never been before and it will never be again. Seeing with a totally still brain, with no thought whatsoever present in the mind, is a totally different dimension.

RICHARD: Yes, I know ... it is called the ‘True Reality’ among many other names. It cannot be maintained for the twenty four hours of the day, everyday. It is like ‘True Love’ ... it never lasts.

RESPONDENT: In that dimension, there would not be ‘right or wrong’, nor guilt or pain or pleasure, for that has all been ‘left behind’, dissolved through thought understanding and abandoning the structure which it has built.

RICHARD: You seem to know a lot about it ... is this coming out of your on-going experience as you sit here writing this? Or is this speculation, based on reading Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti?

RESPONDENT: What is ‘there’ when thought is not? It cannot be described. Words are way too insufficient, inadequate; it’s even laughable to think that they could touch it, that dimension.

RICHARD: Yes. ‘The Truth’ is by its very nature ‘Ineffable’, for it is nothing but an hallucination. Tell me something that I do not already know.

RESPONDENT: I have one foot in that dimension; one foot in this dimension. I am a divided soul, a fragmented human being. In this state there is thought, there is pain, there is suffering, there is pleasure, there is food (lots of it). What can ‘I’ do? I do not have PCE nor any other method to relieve me from this divided plane. I have no belief in you, in what you say, nor any other living soul. I can only go by what I feel, what I know, not someone else. I am here, doing what I do, standing under the pressure of what is, the actual, the deep feelings within my soul. Is there ‘wrong’ on this plane of existence. I see it every day. Maybe ‘wrong’ is not the right word. Perhaps pain is a better word. The word pain might also be used in place of the word guilt. What am ‘I’ without any word? ‘I’ am not. Life is a mystery.

RICHARD: Life in the real world is a mystery – and a ‘pain’ as you point out – but the real world is not the actual world.

*

RICHARD: Thought is perhaps the most useful tool ever to emerge on this planet ... and you castigate it like all the enlightened beings do.

RESPONDENT: Thought is a useful tool, but who is using that tool?

RICHARD: The ‘thinker’ uses thought ... the ‘thinker’ is the ego ‘I’ that arises from the soul ‘me’ that is born of the rudimentary self that all sentient beings are born with when blind nature equips one with the basic survival instincts of fear and aggression and nurture and desire.

RESPONDENT: Thought is using itself to build upon what it already knows, and what is it that it knows? More of what it has already known ... not talking about technology, but the never ending circle of thought. If I’m not mistaken, this is what Krishnamurti said that not one single person had done – put an end to the thought process.

RICHARD: In the diaries he kept about his day-to-day consciousness, Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti describes – when going on an evening walk at Rishi Valley – how for the entire duration of that walk ‘there was no thoughts – not a single thought entered the brain’ (or words to that effect as I do not have the book to hand). When I read this back in 1984 I wondered just what was happening for the other twenty three and a half hours of the day ... if this state was so extraordinary that he felt compelled to comment on it in his diaries. Another passage in those diaries describes him sitting on a veranda in Saanen (if I remember correctly) meditating ... and again thought stopped and ‘the otherness’ was able to come into his consciousness ‘for half an hour by the clock’ (or words to that effect). Again I ask: what was happening with regards to thought, for the other twenty three hours and thirty minutes of the day, if this was something out of the ordinary?

I also examined the writings of other enlightened persons and found that there was quite a lot of ‘thought process’ going on thank you very much. Thought had not stopped at all ... it was that thinking operated differently without an ‘I’ as ego in there messing with the thought process.

RESPONDENT: Would intelligence operate in/as the organism if the field were cleared of thought? What would that intelligence do to solve the world’s problems?

RICHARD: As this has never happened for the twenty four hours of a day in any person at all it is only speculation. But if such a phenomenon occurred globally – that is 5.8 billion people having ended thought – then trains would not run on time, for example, if at all. Methinks chaos would result.

Also, the way you are using the word ‘intelligence’ – coupled with your propensity to quote Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti who valued ‘the otherness’ entering into his consciousness – I suggest that this statement of yours comes remarkably close to that scriptural injunction: ‘not my will but Thy Will Oh Lord’.

RESPONDENT: As it stands now, thought is concerned only about itself – its satisfaction, its understanding, its ‘busyness’. I know I am concerned only with what effects me, personally ... that is, thought is, whether it’s my job, my joy, my salvation, my money, my state’s money, my children, my knowledge, ‘my’ as the world, the world of thought. What would happen if all of this operation of thought stopped? No one knows, and that question is not important at all.

RICHARD: Indeed no one knows and indeed ‘that question is not important at all’ as it is pure speculation. Nevertheless you are very busy with it ... this is apparently the legacy left by Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti, who never had ‘this operation of thought stop’ in himself for more than half-an-hour or so on some days anyway.

RESPONDENT: The only thing one can do is understand how one (thought) operates. Any discussion of what is there (intelligence, love, truth, actuality, fairy tale existence, etc.) is certainly not ‘it’ and never will be it.

RICHARD: Are you still talking to me (Richard) or generally? I am on record as saying: ‘For the vast majority of one’s time, there is no thoughts running at all ... none whatsoever. If thought is needed for a particular situation, it swings smoothly into action and effortlessly does its thing. All the while there is an apperceptive awareness of being here ... of being alive at this moment in time and this place in space. No words occur in the brain – other than when necessary – for it is a wordless appreciation of being able to be here now. Consequently, one is always blithe and carefree, even if one is doing nothing. Doing something – and that includes thinking – is a bonus of happiness and pleasure on top of this on-going ambrosial experience of being alive and awake and here on this verdant earth now’.

This is my on-going experience for twenty four hours of the day ... and has been like this since 1992. This is indeed ‘it’ (as you put it) and it has been – and is – remarkably easy for me to ‘understand how one (thought) operates’. This is not speculation or idle reverie ... this is actual observation of an on-going condition.

RESPONDENT: It is our job to understand ourselves as thought. No one else is going to do it. There are few ‘Krishnamurti’, ‘know thyself’ people in this world who might be able to do what he suggested ... ‘end thought’. The only reason we would want to end (psychological) thought is because we see that it does not work. It cannot understand love, God, or whatever you want to call what is there when thought is not, if anything. Would there be any problems if thought stopped? Let one do it and find out.

RICHARD: That is quite humorous ... if you did do it and then came on this List to describe what it was like it is guaranteed that others would write back saying that you only believe that you have ended thought or that you only think that you have ended thought ... or whatever. They would ask you how you are knowing what words to type ... you would have to say that God is operating through you ... or you would ... gosh ... you might as well give up now!

RESPONDENT: Yes, Richard, I was aware of the anguish of thought in your post. Thought is anguished because it can go no further than where it can go – its limit. That anguishes it very much. Thought is anguish when it functions without intelligence. Thought is not that intelligence. It is/was not ‘your’ thought that I was ‘condemning’ (the word ‘condemn’ was yours) which you responded to thus: ‘A recent post of mine received the supposedly well-considered condemnation that it was: ‘full of the anguish of thought’’. No matter how you cut it, Richard, thought is limited, and that includes ‘your’ thought ... all thought. Its limitedness is its anguish. It can not solve the riddle of life, for it is not of life ... it is of time; and life, the freedom of life, is outside of time. That is the reality, the actuality, and the truth.

RICHARD: Yea verily ... but it is yourself that you are describing, not me. I am never ‘full of the anguish of thought’ because there is no ‘thinker’ inside this flesh and blood body. Also, there is no ‘feeler’ to feel anguish, anyway ... so it has to be your anguish. My post simply described the impossibility of living a belief system thoroughly ... if this caused you anguish than you may be well-advised to examine any belief system you may be inadvertently still carrying.

*

RICHARD: Of course it does not ‘take away from the truth’. This is because ‘the truth’ is not actual ... therefore it can be whatever one thinks that one feels it to be. Feelings are notoriously unreliable in determining facticity.

RESPONDENT: Actually, I don’t have problem with the words ‘truth’, ‘reality’ and ‘actual’. They are rather quite interchangeable. I don’t know why you nit-pick the difference.

RICHARD: As you have asked this question several times before – and I have answered it several times before – I do wonder at the point of answering it again. Nevertheless, it is easy to copy and paste:

• [Respondent]: ‘Why do you get so nit-picky about the meaning of words and go to dictionaries to try to prove a point?

• [Richard]: ‘I get ‘nit-picky’ about the meaning of words because people so dearly love to cover up their ineptitude by using words in a slippery manner. No one, it seems, likes to be pinned down to a clear-cut definition. I also get this a lot in my face-to-face discussions with people here ... they like to ‘keep things open’ or ‘be flexible’ or ‘don’t be so fixed’ or ‘things aren’t black and white’ and so on. I happen to like the English language ... it has upwards of 650,000 words in it and one can clearly communicate with another if a little rigour is applied. However, people like to hide behind words; they like to utter pithy aphorisms like: ‘The Truth is Ineffable’. It is up to me to make sure that the other understands what I am saying – whether they agree with me or not – because if I assume that they have the same meaning to a word as I do is just plain silly. A dictionary is a handy reference point to establish a meaning ... if we want to give a particular twist or meaning to a word we can ... but we need to know what base we start from. Otherwise anything means whatever we want it too ... and confusion reigns supreme’.

And ‘confusion’ is the current situation.

RESPONDENT: Real means having no imaginary part.

RICHARD: If only it did. Then I would be able to use it freely, instead of having to nit-pick by using ‘actual’ ... and having to give my definition of it rather than the dictionary definition.

RESPONDENT: Actual means factual.

RICHARD: Yes ... if by ‘factual’ you mean what is ascertained sensately and thus demonstrably true.

RESPONDENT: Truth means ‘what is’.

RICHARD: Again ... if only it did mean what is actual. ‘What is’ – a phrase Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti used a lot – means different things to different people. For some it is a surrogate phrase for ‘Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’.

RESPONDENT: Truth does not mean that whatever one thinks is the truth. That is totally ridiculous.

RICHARD: Actually I wrote: ‘therefore it can be whatever one thinks that one feels it to be’. This is because people rely upon feelings to be the final arbiter of truth ... and feelings are notoriously unreliable in ascertaining facticity. Your whole tirade against thought is nothing but an attempt to avoid looking at your feelings.

RESPONDENT: One is separate from reality because in reality there is no psychological time. ‘I’ do not exist in reality. In actuality, we function in time. Verbalisation is time. Thought is time. In reality, verbalisation, the word, naming, does not exist unless it is necessary for it to function. The truth is ‘what is’, and whatever one thinks will not change that. If one is deceiving oneself about what is truth, the truth of the matter is that one is deceiving oneself, but that fact does not make the deceit truth. That deceit is totally thought. Let’s not enter into word games but try to get to the reality behind the words.

RICHARD: Sure can ... the ‘reality behind the words’ is that ‘I’ will do anything to stay in existence. After all, ‘I’ have been charged by blind nature to survive at any cost with the powerful instinct for survival. Thus ‘I’ will blame thought so as to distract attention away from the real culprit ... ‘I’ the ‘thinker’. When the attention becomes too great I the ‘thinker – ego ‘I’ – can disappear ... only to reappear as ‘me’ in the heart. Of course ‘I’ will be as humble as all get-out in the hope that no one will notice that ‘I’ am still in existence. A loving self is still a self, nevertheless. This is why no one will examine their feelings with the scrutiny they apply to their thoughts.

RESPONDENT: You have proven, Richard, that you are far superior in your knowledge to all of the tried and true ways of seeking whatever it was that you were/are seeking. You have made the point that ‘your’ knowledge is superior to other knowledge. I would not argue with you in the least, for, fortunately, I never became involved in all of the Eastern methods of which you are so knowledgeable.

RICHARD: Dream on ... your posts give me the impression that you revere Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti and his words are as icons to you. Thus I would venture to guess that you are immersed in Eastern Mysticism up to the neck without realising it ... like a lot of other Westerners.

RESPONDENT: Therefore, I have neither gained nor lost anything.

RICHARD: If you say so ... but if I were you I would question that assumption.

RESPONDENT: If you are so opposed to all of the ‘ways’ that don’t work, why are you so anxious to reveal your knowledge of them? Why not forget them?

RICHARD: I am not anxious at all. I am having a lot of fun ... and I reveal my knowledge of them because we are fellow human beings.

RESPONDENT: All of those ways that did not work seem to have dropped you off in a strange place.

RICHARD: Yes, it is very strange indeed. Here is peace-on-earth ... it exists in this actual world. There is an actual world that lies under one’s very nose ... I interact with the same people, things and events that you do, yet it is as if I am in another dimension altogether. There is no good or evil here where I live. I live in a veritable paradise ... this very earth I live on is so vastly superior to any fabled Arcadian Utopia that it would be impossible to believe if I was not living it twenty four hours a day ... and for the last five years. It is so perfectly pure and clear here that there is no need for Love or Compassion or Bliss or Euphoria or Ecstasy or Truth or Goodness or Beauty or Oneness or Unity or Wholeness or ... or any of those baubles. They all pale into pathetic insignificance ... and I lived them for eleven years.

There can never be peace in the real world. The reality of the real world is an illusion. The Reality of the Mystical World is a delusion.

RESPONDENT: Everyday I watch thought, the more I realise its limits, i.e., thought realises its thorough inadequateness to do anything ... and we are not talking technology. When ‘I’ and the thought come together; when the observer is the observed; when the ‘time’ separating the self and the duality ceases, what is ‘there’, when time is not?

RICHARD: A massive delusion, of course.

RESPONDENT: No one can answer that. That is what Krishnamurti says may ‘come to you’. You cannot go to it. I’m not saying I believe him; I’m not saying that I don’t believe him. I’m just saying what he said, emphasising a point.

RICHARD: And what ‘point’ might that be ... that you are gullible? Have you ever been to India to see for yourself the results of what they claim are tens of thousands of years of ‘That’ coming to you? I have, and it is hideous ... and it is also sobering to realise that the intelligentsia of the West are eagerly following them down the slippery slope of striving to attain to a self-seeking ‘otherness’ ... to the detriment of life on earth. ‘Otherness’ is simply Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s term for ‘The Absolute’ ... which is another word for ‘Brahman’ (the Hindu ‘Ground Of Being’). Thus any designated ‘Intelligence’ translates easily as ‘God’s Word’. The trouble with people who discard the god of Christianity is that they do not realise that by turning to the Eastern spirituality they have effectively jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Eastern spirituality is religion ... merely in a different form to what people in the West have been raised to believe in. Eastern philosophy sounds so convincing to the Western mind that is desperately looking for answers. The Christian conditioning actually sets up the situation for a thinking person to be susceptible to the insidious doctrines of the East. At the end of the line there is always a god of some description, lurking in disguise, wreaking its havoc with its ‘Teachings’.

If it were not for the appalling suffering engendered it would all be highly amusing.

RESPONDENT: I do know how tricky thought can be/is. In its attempts to understand ‘all’, it can convince itself that almost anything is real. Thought is not real, but it is actual, actually thought. Only when thought does not function (other than as it has to) will we know what is ‘here’/ ‘there’/‘transformed’, etc. Thought is made up of time – past, present and imagined future, and thought (time) can never enter into or know what is not of thought. By ‘know’, I mean experience – in actuality.

RICHARD: It is the ‘thinker’ that is not actual. It is the ‘thinker’ that is made up of a remembered past, a specious present and an imagined future. It is the ‘thinker’ that can never enter into the magnificence of this moment in time and this place in space.

RESPONDENT: Intelligence does not use thought to try and prove that it knows more than everybody else. It doesn’t act like a fighting cock all strutting and prancing around ready to attack its opponent.

RICHARD: No, indeed not. This ‘Intelligence’ is being as humble as all get-out in the hope that no one will twig to the fact that it is only ‘I’ in disguise.

RESPONDENT: This ‘cocky’ attitude somewhat present in some posts only reveals some philosophers wanting to do the battle of thought.

RICHARD: Are you still talking to me (Richard) or are you speaking generally? I have more than merely ‘a cocky attitude’ ... my cockiness is actual and comes from an inestimable success. And I am not battling thought here, but rather bashing away at beliefs ... which are emotion-backed thoughts. No one wants to examine their feelings.

RESPONDENT: I do not think this sort of display of thought is ever going to solve anguish.

RICHARD: What will, then? Examining beliefs, perhaps? And thus examining feelings? Anguish is a feeling, after all.

RESPONDENT: Is this list merely something to enjoy, pass the time of day, or is it a serious effort to understand and end the problematic child, thought?

RICHARD: I, for one, thoroughly enjoy this List, yes. It is indeed a pleasant pastime, yes. It is not a ‘serious effort’, no. And last, but not least, thought is not a ‘problematic child’ it is the ‘thinker’ that is the problem ... and the ‘feeler’.

RESPONDENT: Humbly and respectfully submitted.

RICHARD: Why ‘humbly and respectfully’? Why is there a need for this abject humiliation?

There is no god to be in awe of or to fear ... here in this actual world of sensual delight.

July 21 1998:

RICHARD: It is the belief about ‘loving all creatures and the environment’ that is insidious, for this is how you are manipulated by those who seek to control you.

RESPONDENT: I agree with you that belief is insidious. We ARE the beliefs. We like the control of the belief, for then we can just ‘kick’ back and live by what we ‘believe’, think, and the most insidious of these beliefs is the belief in our own knowledge. It is on the soft, comforting pillow of knowledge that we lay our heads, hearts, feelings.

RICHARD: From the way you write the rest of your post, it does not sound all that comforting to me.

RESPONDENT: I have no belief in my feelings.

RICHARD: If you say so ... if I were you I would re-examine this statement, however.

RESPONDENT: These are ‘actual’. There are feelings of ‘sadness’; ‘pleasure’, the labels, but these are actually emotions, not feelings.

RICHARD: The word ‘feelings’ covers the whole gamut of the affective faculties: emotions, passions and calenture (and the word ‘calenture’ is deliberately used because it means a feverish, burning and zealous ardour that results in delirium and hallucinations).

RESPONDENT: By feelings I – mean something ‘deeper’ than thought, than emotion ... something connected to something more real ... like insight.

RICHARD: ‘More real’? Are there gradations of reality? It must be a hassle trying to determine what is more or less real ... I am glad that I stick to facts and actuality. A fact is obvious ... never ‘more or less’ a fact. Actuality is self-evident ... there is no need to ascertain if some thing is more or less actual.

And an insight is seeing the fact ... direct seeing. It is not a feeling ... be it ‘deep’ or otherwise. You are interchanging ‘insight’ (awareness, discernment, understanding, penetration, acumen, perspicacity, discrimination) with ‘intuition’ (sixth sense, divination, presentiment, clairvoyance, second sight, extrasensory perception, instinct). And intuition has a poor track record for veracity. The best that intuition has ever done when tested exactly is a 53.4% accuracy ... which is only marginally above guess-work anyway (and that was the best result ... the rest are 50/50).

RESPONDENT: By ‘no belief in them’, I mean that they do not offer security, do not offer something from which I derive comfort, are not something lasting.

RICHARD: Then why defend them so? The only thing that offers ‘security’ is ceasing to exist as an ego ‘I’ and a soul ‘me’; the only thing that offers ‘comfort’ is the utter safety of being here now; the only thing that is lasting is the infinitude of this physical universe ... and by ‘infinitude’ I am referring to being where this moment in eternal time and this place in infinite space intersect. In the jargon it is called: ‘being here now’ ... only I mean it as this flesh and blood body and not as some ‘Immortal Self’.

RESPONDENT: They are what they are, from moment to moment.

RICHARD: Just what does that mean: ‘they are what they are’ ? It sounds like a platitude to me. Anyway, feelings are downright destructive: 160,000,000 million people killed in wars this century alone, according to the most recent estimate I have heard.

RESPONDENT: They are never the same.

RICHARD: Oh, yes they are ... they are tediously repetitious.

RESPONDENT: Sometimes they are. Those are the emotions.

RICHARD: Not only the emotions ... also the passions and calenture. And from the way you are leaning toward having faith in intuition ... so to is the psychic. It is all the same-same stuff that human beings have fallen prey to for millennia ... with disastrous results.

RESPONDENT: They are always new.

RICHARD: Oh, no they are not ... they are the same old same old.

RESPONDENT: These are the insights. They just come to one ‘out of the blue’. This is what I mean by ‘true feelings’, the sixth sense. You are a firm adherent to the five senses; haven’t you come in contact with the sixth one yet?

RICHARD: Yes ... many years ago. You are not talking to a beginner here ... I have already been down that path. The ‘sixth sense’ is where one enters into the psychic world of prescience and clairvoyance and all that stuff. Also notoriously unreliable ... and down-right dangerous into the bargain.

RESPONDENT: Don’t you ever just ‘know things’ without any reason or rhyme? Do you listen to this sixth sense?

RICHARD: No ... I no longer have it. Intuition (and the imaginative faculty that it is born of) disappeared completely in 1992 when the soul ‘me’ vanished entirely from this body. Thus I know as a fact that it is all born of the affective faculties, as I have had no feelings at all since then.

RESPONDENT: For instance, a couple of years ago some numbers came to me, in my ‘feelings’. I knew they were ‘magic’ numbers, but I didn’t know what to do with them ... we don’t have a lottery in Arkansas, and I have no idea how a lottery works anyway ... something to do with numbers. Anyway, we were driving through a state where gambling was legal, and when we sat down to eat, the waitress brought us a card to play keno on. I had a certificate to play the game, but I didn’t know how. It was worth a two dollar bet, so I used all of my numbers, and they came up sequentially on the game board and I won a hundred dollars. (Now I know that if I had played only my numbers, I would have won about $50,000). I new I was wasting the numbers because I just knew (felt) they were worth a lot of money, but I had been carrying them around in my head for a long time, and I was ready to get rid of them. This is not the only instance of ‘feelings’ I have had ... when you just know things that have happened or are going to happen.

RICHARD: This is a subject that I have examined with great interest over the years ... it is not something that I have discarded capriciously. These days, when someone sits in my living room and makes these kind of statements – detailing their case-history – I always ask them to remember when their much-treasured intuition did not work ... and eventually they come to see that it works out at about 50/50. As this equals guess-work, they invariably leave much more soberly – and wiser – than when they came in. Intuition cannot survive scrutiny.

RESPONDENT: Over the years I learned not to listen to this 6th sense. It was always uncomfortable for me being around people because I could ‘feel’ what they were feeling. That was no fun, and when I was younger I couldn’t differentiate between who was feeling what. I thought the feelings were mine, and they weren’t.

RICHARD: Yes ... this is the psychic connection between normal human beings and it is born of the affective faculties. In particular: fear. Hence group highs can turn into mob riots, as fear is an unstable affective state.

RESPONDENT: So by feelings, Richard, I mean something more than the feelings that cause wars and hunger and great disparities, emotions.

RICHARD: Not so ... these are the very feelings that ‘cause wars and hunger and great disparities’. Maybe a case may be made that they are not emotions ... but they are certainly passions and calenture. Added to the psychic dimension, they are a volatile mixture.

RESPONDENT: It takes a lot of patience; a lot of love and care; and an absence of judgement to live through the feelings. I don’t mean living ‘through’ feelings, but without attachment to the feelings.

RICHARD: Who is the person that is ‘without attachment to the feelings’?

RESPONDENT: And who would be the one to dispense with them?

RICHARD: You are not Jewish, by any chance, are you ... answering a question with a counter-question? Yet I find it easy to answer, nevertheless: The ego ‘I’ can self-immolate psychologically. The soul ‘me’ can self-immolate psychically. Psychological and psychic self-immolation is the only sensible sacrifice that ‘I’ and ‘me’ can make in order to reveal perfection. Life is bursting with meaning when ‘I’ and ‘me’ are no longer present to mess things up. ‘I’ and ‘me’ stand in the way of that purity being apparent. ‘My’ presence prohibits perfection being evident. ‘I’ and ‘me’ prevent the very meaning to life, which ‘I’ and ‘me’ are searching for, from coming into plain view. The main trouble is that ‘I’ and ‘me’ wish to remain in existence to savour the meaning; ‘I’ and ‘me’ mistakenly think that meaning is the product of the mind and the heart. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Apperceptive awareness makes self-immolation possible.

Then the search for meaning amidst the debris of the much-vaunted human hopes and dreams and schemes has come to its timely end. With the end of ‘I’ and ‘me’, the distance or separation between ‘I’ and ‘me’ and ‘my’ senses – and thus the external world – disappears. To be the senses as a bare awareness is apperception, a pure consciousness experience (PCE) of the world as-it-is. Because there is no ‘I’ as an observer – a little person inside one’s head – or ‘me’ as a feeler – a little person inside one’s heart – to have sensations, I am the sensations. There is nothing except the series of sensations which happen ... not to ‘I’ or ‘me’ but just happening ... moment by moment ... one after another. To be these sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and release. Consequently, I am living in peace and tranquillity; a meaningful peace and tranquillity. Life is intrinsically purposeful, the reason for existence lies openly all around. Being this very air I live in, I am constantly aware of it as I breathe it in and out; I see it, I hear it, I taste it, I smell it, I touch it, all of the time. It never goes away ... nor has it ever been away. ‘I’ and ‘me’ were standing in the way of meaning.

So, again: ‘Who is the person that is ‘without attachment to the feelings’?

*

RICHARD: And even if that were possible, which it is not as feelings are the core of ‘my’ being, would it not be easier to dispense with them altogether?

RESPONDENT: If they are there, they are just there, like a wart on a toad or the sound on the song.

RICHARD: Here is that platitude again ... and thus all the wars and rapes and murders and domestic violence and child abuse and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides remain extant. Oh, this is not a genuine investigation into life, the universe and what it is to be a human being at all. This is just a numb and dumb acceptance of blind nature’s package of basic survival instincts.

RESPONDENT: They are deeper than the superficial ‘me’.

RICHARD: Agreed ... if by the superficial ‘me’ you are referring to ‘I’ the ‘thinker’.

RESPONDENT: They are a connection with something beyond thought.

RICHARD: Yes indeed ... they are a connection with ‘me’ at the core of ‘being’. This much-prized thoughtless ‘being’ is itself the very origin of the problem.

RESPONDENT: They are sometimes beyond any ‘me’, and they are actual.

RICHARD: ‘Sometimes’? ‘Actual’? Perhaps you typed that sentence rather hastily?

RESPONDENT: I cannot fathom, Richard, a living human being devoid of feelings.

RICHARD: Then what does being ‘without attachment to the feelings’ mean to you then?

RESPONDENT: It means not hanging on to them, remembering them, placing something of value on them, counting on them, and so on.

RICHARD: Yet all that you have written above points to the opposite ... you write as if you do hang on to them, remember them, value them highly and rather count on them than not.

RESPONDENT: Non-attachment just means letting them go, forgetting them.

RICHARD: You might as well dispense with them altogether then, would you not say? Saves all that work trying not to be affected ... again and again ad infinitum.

RESPONDENT: For me to say that these feelings are not real would be to be a non-feeling human, a non actual human.

RICHARD: Which is why people will not do the only obvious thing to live in peace and harmony on this verdant planet ... they do not contemplate ceasing to be ‘human’. And to be human is to be malicious and sorrowful ... with only moments of gladness ... snatches of happiness ... glimpses of harmony ... and rare moments of peace.

RESPONDENT: And don’t tell me, Richard, that you don’t have feelings; I’d just bet you probably have all kinds of them.

RICHARD: I know your theory sounds good to you ... but other humans – some of whom who are downright suspicious of me – have been unable to detect anything at all despite the closest observation possible. There are other people here in my daily life who observe me closely – very closely – for all of the waking hours of the day. This kind of scrutiny has been going on for eighteen years now ... and has been fruitless as in regards to finding a fault for the last five years. No-one has been able to observe a discrepancy between what I say about myself and what they see in my behaviour. No one has been able to observe any trace of a feeling – an emotion or a passion or calenture – in me since 1992. I have been examined by two accredited psychiatrists (and by one of them every three months for more than three years) and found to have alexithymia – amongst other detailed psychiatric findings – which means no affective faculties whatsoever. Also, a psychologist has been following my condition at three-weekly intervals since March 1994 ... and he says that I may very well be the evolutionary break-through that humankind has been waiting for, for centuries.

You are, of course, welcome to come and see for yourself. Until then you just have to take my word for it ... or the word of a man who has observed me closely since January 1997 and has written about it. His writing may be found on his Web Site under ‘Peter’s Journal’.

RESPONDENT: Your letter to me was full of the anguish of thought. It is thought that harbours the feelings. To be without thought, the idea, the word, the verbalisation, the psychological ‘me’, is, in my opinion, the state of creation.

RICHARD: ‘State of creation’? But this universe already always is ... what is there to be created or in a ‘state of creation’? Fantasies?

RESPONDENT: The universe is in a state of creation. It is not ‘already always is’.

RICHARD: This physical universe’s space is infinite and its time is eternal ... which means that it has always been here and always will be. Thus it has no limits whatsoever ... which means that it does not have to be created for it already is.

RESPONDENT: The word ‘already’ implies ‘prior to something’, something prior to a past, present or future, and certainly creation is not ‘already’, in any kind of time.

RICHARD: Hmm ... what I mean by using the word ‘already’ is that one does not have to wait for the perfection of the infinitude of this physical universe to happen as it is already here now. Thus it needs no ‘creation’ because it is already ... and it always is, always has been and always will be. Where else do you place eternity? Before your birth and after your death? That is to be self-centred ... eternity is here now for it is already here.

RESPONDENT: When all time, psychological time, the ‘me’, is not present (and the ‘me’ is made up completely of time).

RICHARD: ‘Psychological time’ is made up of feelings ... emotions, passions and calenture. The affective faculties are the spanner in the works of memory. ‘I’ am emotion-backed thoughts and ‘me’ is instinct-bred feelings. Talk about confusion ... add a pinch of those psychic adumbrations and there you are ... totally confused.

RESPONDENT: There is indeed a state of living that, as you say in inimitable words, is so ‘superior’ to anything else that it is a veritable paradise. That delight has been seen.

RICHARD: There is no gain to be had from taking my words and using them to describe the delights of your Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti-derived state of being as if they were one and the same with actuality. They are different ... his state is enlightenment and actual freedom is a condition beyond enlightenment. I know that they are different and so do you ... it must be thus or else what are all your objections to my condition about?

RESPONDENT: That is creation, being creation. It is the leading edge of the universe, expanding, growing, being ... creating.

RICHARD: Only if you are still waiting for it to happen. When ‘me’ as soul is not – as well as the demise of ‘I’ as ego – there is no longer any need for ‘expanding, growing, being ... creating’. The enlightened masters all stopped their journey short and lived in the ‘Unknown’ ... and admired the ‘Unknowable’ from there. It is possible to live the ‘Unknowable’ twenty four hours a day ... provided ‘me’ as soul self-immolates. This, however, means more than death. It means extinction ... no more immortality.

RESPONDENT: That is what I call the ‘real’. That is what Krishnamurti called ‘reality’.

RICHARD: Yes, I know ... it is also called the ‘Greater Reality’ amongst other things. I lived in it – as a soul ‘me’ – for eleven years.

RESPONDENT: This brings to my mind Krishnamurti’s quote (which I had on my computer before it was struck by lightening and which I was rather attached to sending on), and I will attempt to remember: ‘Life is an empty canvas. You can paint on it whatever you like. That is your freedom’. The implications of ‘that freedom’ are enormous, don’t you think?

RICHARD: Yes, the implications are that delusion and hallucination can – and do – reign supreme. It is not freedom ... it is licence.

RESPONDENT: Freedom! Ah, just what does it mean?

RICHARD: Is this a rhetorical question or do you not actually know. You certainly write as if you do!

RESPONDENT: Freedom from the self, the thinker, no?

RICHARD: No ... freedom from any identity whatsoever.

RESPONDENT: You say it is also freedom from the soul, and I don’t know no thing about no soul.

RICHARD: But you do know ... there is no need to be so coy. Or are you being disingenuous? For only a few paragraphs further down this page you wax eloquent about your soul ... allow me to copy and paste some of it here for your benefit:

• [Respondent]: ‘I am here, doing what I do, standing under the pressure of what is, the actual, the deep feelings within my soul’.

RESPONDENT: So we won’t get into that again.

RICHARD: That is okay by me.

RESPONDENT: I think that it’s just a further label you have stuck on the ‘self’.

RICHARD: Oh ... so you do want to get into it then. Okay ... it is not ‘just a further label Richard has stuck on the ‘self’’ for it is the enlightened masters who promote the notion that the soul is the ‘Real Self’ and that the dissolution of ‘I’ as ego and realise one’s ‘True Nature’ is all one has to do to fix up the ills of humankind. It is any sense of identity whatsoever that is the root cause of all misery and mayhem ... so I merely use the convention that they have already established and point out that their soul is the other half of their identity.

RESPONDENT: You can not relate what is beyond the thought, verbalisation, Richard, for what is ‘there’, ‘where’ there is no thought, ‘where’ the mind has emptied its contents has never been before and it will never be again. Seeing with a totally still brain, with no thought whatsoever present in the mind, is a totally different dimension.

RICHARD: Yes, I know ... it is called the ‘True Reality’ among many other names. It cannot be maintained for the twenty four hours of the day, everyday. It is like ‘True Love’ ... it never lasts.

RESPONDENT: And ‘your’ actuality lasts 24 hours?

RICHARD: Yes, the entire twenty four hours of every day ... and this has been the case since 1992.

RESPONDENT: Did you take one many too acid trips and fail to come back?

RICHARD: No ... if it were that easy then hippies all over the world would be living in this ambrosial paradise that becomes apparent when malice and sorrow vanish forever.

RESPONDENT: Even Krishnamurti knew the effects of LSD and other hallucinogens; that they could catapult one into another dimension, but that would be a dependency on an artificial means.

RICHARD: I have not used any psylocibin (the only hallucinogenic I have ever used) for eighteen years now ... and then I only used it five times. Hardly a dependency, I would say. Try another tack ... as you seem to want to discredit me somehow or another.

RESPONDENT: I took a few trips myself, but they waned in a major way compared to ones experience of the true glimpse of creation. Nothing lasts.

RICHARD: This moment in time and this place in space lasts ... one is already always here now.

RESPONDENT: If it does, it is immediately old.

RICHARD: Not so ... this moment in time and this place in space is always new ... ever-fresh.

RESPONDENT: Creation has never happened before and will never happen again. It is not already.

RICHARD: Where is it then?

RESPONDENT: It can only be experienced, not by an experiencer, but as something that cannot even begin to be described. Something indeed glorious.

RICHARD: Yes, it is self-aggrandisement taken to the extreme expansion of being beyond time and space. Such amplified narcissism is glorious, I know. Nevertheless, with your predilection for the Teachings that ‘came through’ Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti, when you say ‘creation’ I would assume you mean it in the sense he used it:

• [quote] ‘The origin is nameless; the origin is absolutely quiet ... Creation is something that is most holy, that’s the most sacred thing in life ...’ [end quote].

RESPONDENT: In that dimension, there would not be ‘right or wrong’, nor guilt or pain or pleasure, for that has all been ‘left behind’, dissolved through thought understanding and abandoning the structure which it has built.

RICHARD: You seem to know a lot about it ... is this coming out of your on-going experience as you sit here writing this? Or is this speculation, based on reading Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti?

RESPONDENT: What is ‘there’ when thought is not? It cannot be described. Words are way too insufficient, inadequate; it’s even laughable to think that they could touch it, that dimension.

RICHARD: Yes. ‘The Truth’ is by its very nature ‘Ineffable’, for it is nothing but an hallucination. Tell me something that I do not already know.

RESPONDENT: I have one foot in that dimension; one foot in this dimension. I am a divided soul, a fragmented human being. In this state there is thought, there is pain, there is suffering, there is pleasure, there is food (lots of it). What can ‘I’ do? I do not have PCE nor any other method to relieve me from this divided plane. I have no belief in you, in what you say, nor any other living soul. I can only go by what I feel, what I know, not someone else. I am here, doing what I do, standing under the pressure of what is, the actual, the deep feelings within my soul. Is there ‘wrong’ on this plane of existence. I see it every day. Maybe ‘wrong’ is not the right word. Perhaps pain is a better word. The word pain might also be used in place of the word guilt. What am ‘I’ without any word? ‘I’ am not. Life is a mystery.

RICHARD: Life in the real world is a mystery – and a ‘pain’ as you point out – but the real world is not the actual world.

RESPONDENT: Life in the actual world is not a mystery – it is actually what is happening – but the actual world is not the real world ... the creation ... the ‘world’ beyond/without the thought/human mind.

RICHARD: And thank goodness for that!

RESPONDENT: Is it not possible, Richard, that there is indeed a reality of another dimension which you have never seen or have any inkling of?

RICHARD: Oh, indeed ... the capacity for the human mind – fuelled by passionate longing – is almost infinite in its variety of hallucinations. I have heard of most of them, however, for I made a study of it when I realised that I was living in one myself.

*

RICHARD: Thought is perhaps the most useful tool ever to emerge on this planet ... and you castigate it like all the enlightened beings do.

RESPONDENT: Thought is a useful tool, but who is using that tool?

RICHARD: The ‘thinker’ uses thought ... the ‘thinker’ is the ego ‘I’ that arises from the soul ‘me’ that is born of the rudimentary self that all sentient beings are born with when blind nature equips one with the basic survival instincts of fear and aggression and nurture and desire.

RESPONDENT: Thought is using itself to build upon what it already knows, and what is it that it knows? More of what it has already known ... not talking about technology, but the never ending circle of thought. If I’m not mistaken, this is what Krishnamurti said that not one single person had done – put an end to the thought process.

RICHARD: In the diaries he kept about his day-to-day consciousness, Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti describes – when going on an evening walk at Rishi Valley – how for the entire duration of that walk ‘there was no thoughts – not a single thought entered the brain’ (or words to that effect as I do not have the book to hand). When I read this back in 1984 I wondered just what was happening for the other twenty three and a half hours of the day ... if this state was so extraordinary that he felt compelled to comment on it in his diaries. Another passage in those diaries describes him sitting on a veranda in Saanen (if I remember correctly) meditating ... and again thought stopped and ‘the otherness’ was able to come into his consciousness ‘for half an hour by the clock’ (or words to that effect). Again I ask: what was happening with regards to thought, for the other twenty three hours and thirty minutes of the day, if this was something out of the ordinary?

I also examined the writings of other enlightened persons and found that there was quite a lot of ‘thought process’ going on thank you very much. Thought had not stopped at all ... it was that thinking operated differently without an ‘I’ as ego in there messing with the thought process.

RESPONDENT: Would intelligence operate in/as the organism if the field were cleared of thought? What would that intelligence do to solve the world’s problems?

RICHARD: As this has never happened for the twenty four hours of a day in any person at all it is only speculation. But if such a phenomenon occurred globally – that is 5.8 billion people having ended thought – then trains would not run on time, for example, if at all. Methinks chaos would result.

RESPONDENT: As no one has ever tried it, how could one know, be sure, that this is so. See, you are still using thought to imagine what would happen if thought (as the thinker) stopped – a pretty good indication that your ‘thinker’ is still intact.

RICHARD: Not even a good try ... we have written before (about two months ago) about the impossibility of operating and functioning without thought and memory. Do you actually want to find out about this ... or engage in a silliness competition? I do not mind either way, for I do enjoy being facetious.

RESPONDENT: Don’t any of you see what Krishnamurti was talking about when he talked about ‘changing the world’, ending thought? He was talking about ‘ones’ world, not 5.8 billion people. Five point eight billion people are just splintered figments and fragments which I know nothing about. What Krishnamurti talked about was our liberation, yours and mine – not theirs. It is for me. It is for you. It is for whoever wants it. He made that perfectly clear. Certainly, 5.7999999 billion people don’t want transformation; have never heard of Krishnamurti; don’t give a hoot about Krishnamurti, or knowing themselves as they actually are (and we know all the adjectives), so do you think for one instant I concern myself for what might happen to the ‘rest’ of the world if I died to thought? ‘I’ am the world. Freedom from the ‘world’ is my glory, and I don’t mean ‘mine’. I mean ‘my’ in the sense of having to have words to convey a thought (until the telepathic communications network becomes better honed).

RICHARD: Wow! What a mouthful ... yet it says a lot. Does it not read incredibly selfish to you? It does to me.

*

RICHARD: Also, the way you are using the word ‘intelligence’ – coupled with your propensity to quote Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti who valued ‘the otherness’ entering into his consciousness – I suggest that this statement of yours comes remarkably close to that scriptural injunction: ‘not my will but Thy Will Oh Lord’.

RESPONDENT: Yes, Richard, I guess you could say that. But if we were to give up our ‘will’, die, there would not be a ‘me’ to know, would there?

RICHARD: Yes, there would be ... a grand ‘me’ being adulated and revered by sycophants and wannabes.

RESPONDENT: What would be ‘there’, if ‘I’ were not there functioning, huh??

RICHARD: A surrendered soul obeying a higher power ... and bringing much misery and mayhem to an already suffering humanity. It is the ‘Tried and True’ ... which is none other than the tried and failed.

RESPONDENT: There would be no separation from me and ‘The Lord’.

RICHARD: Yes, you have just said it. Eastern spirituality and mysticism is a religion, when all is said and done.

RESPONDENT: God is the leading edge of the universe, and that leading edge is the creation of the universe. (That’s my definition of God, in case any one wants to know.)

RICHARD: It matters not how you define your god ... it is still god by any name. And so the human tide of suffering rolls on down through the ages and into the twenty-first century.

RESPONDENT: Actually, I have another: ‘Love is your mother. Wisdom is your father. God is both your mother and your father’.

RICHARD: Only for those too immature to grow up and stand on their own two feet.

RESPONDENT: In my opinion, love and wisdom are not something that is already there ... it is creation ... outside of any time and any time words.

RICHARD: Yes, I know ... ‘Timeless and Spaceless’ ... ‘Unborn and Undying’ ... ‘The Ground Of Being’ ... and so on. Eastern mysticism, in other words.

RESPONDENT: As it stands now, thought is concerned only about itself – its satisfaction, its understanding, its ‘busyness’. I know I am concerned only with what effects me, personally ... that is, thought is, whether it’s my job, my joy, my salvation, my money, my state’s money, my children, my knowledge, ‘my’ as the world, the world of thought. What would happen if all of this operation of thought stopped? No one knows, and that question is not important at all.

RICHARD: Indeed no one knows and indeed ‘that question is not important at all’ as it is pure speculation. Nevertheless you are very busy with it ... this is apparently the legacy left by Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti, who never had ‘this operation of thought stop’ in himself for more than half-an-hour or so on some days anyway.

RESPONDENT: Yes, because it is another thought asking.

RICHARD: Not so ... it is knowledge born out of eleven years of experiencing this timeless state for twenty four hours of every one of those days. I know it well, experientially.

RESPONDENT: Even the asking has to stop to know the answer, and only then there is no answer because there is no question. That is creation .

RICHARD: Yea verily ... it is a thoughtless state. Much anguish and animosity has been perpetuated because those rare few people who attained to it stopped asking questions.

RESPONDENT: The only thing one can do is understand how one (thought) operates. Any discussion of what is there (intelligence, love, truth, actuality, fairy tale existence, etc.) is certainly not ‘it’ and never will be it.

RICHARD: Are you still talking to me (Richard) or generally? I am on record as saying: ‘For the vast majority of one’s time, there is no thoughts running at all ... none whatsoever. If thought is needed for a particular situation, it swings smoothly into action and effortlessly does its thing. All the while there is an apperceptive awareness of being here ... of being alive at this moment in time and this place in space. No words occur in the brain – other than when necessary – for it is a wordless appreciation of being able to be here now. Consequently, one is always blithe and carefree, even if one is doing nothing. Doing something – and that includes thinking – is a bonus of happiness and pleasure on top of this on-going ambrosial experience of being alive and awake and here on this verdant earth now’.

This is my on-going experience for twenty four hours of the day ... and has been like this since 1992. This is indeed ‘it’ (as you put it) and it has been – and is – remarkably easy for me to ‘understand how one (thought) operates’. This is not speculation or idle reverie ... this is actual observation of an on-going condition.

RESPONDENT: It is our job to understand ourselves as thought. No one else is going to do it. There are few ‘Krishnamurti’, ‘know thyself’ people in this world who might be able to do what he suggested ... ‘end thought’. The only reason we would want to end (psychological) thought is because we see that it does not work. It cannot understand love, God, or whatever you want to call what is there when thought is not, if anything. Would there be any problems if thought stopped? Let one do it and find out.

RICHARD: That is quite humorous ... if you did do it and then came on this List to describe what it was like it is guaranteed that others would write back saying that you only believe that you have ended thought or that you only think that you have ended thought ... or whatever. They would ask you how you are knowing what words to type ... you would have to say that God is operating through you ... or you would ... gosh ... you might as well give up now!

*

RESPONDENT: Yes, Richard, I was aware of the anguish of thought in your post. Thought is anguished because it can go no further than where it can go – its limit. That anguishes it very much. Thought is anguish when it functions without intelligence. Thought is not that intelligence. It is/was not ‘your’ thought that I was ‘condemning’ (the word ‘condemn’ was yours) which you responded to thus: ‘A recent post of mine received the supposedly well-considered condemnation that it was: ‘full of the anguish of thought’’. No matter how you cut it, Richard, thought is limited, and that includes ‘your’ thought ... all thought. Its limitedness is its anguish. It can not solve the riddle of life, for it is not of life ... it is of time; and life, the freedom of life, is outside of time. That is the reality, the actuality, and the truth.

RICHARD: Yea verily ... but it is yourself that you are describing, not me. I am never ‘full of the anguish of thought’ because there is no ‘thinker’ inside this flesh and blood body. Also, there is no ‘feeler’ to feel anguish, anyway ... so it has to be your anguish. My post simply described the impossibility of living a belief system thoroughly ... if this caused you anguish than you may be well-advised to examine any belief system you may be inadvertently still carrying.

RESPONDENT: Any knowledge I may be inadvertently still carrying around would be a belief system. What is ‘it’ that is describing the bliss and all of the ways of spirituality that don’t work? It is memory, Richard.

RICHARD: Yes, memory is operating just fine, thank you very much. I do not have to pretend to have lost my memory like Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti did ... and have to obfuscate like he had to when it was pointed out to him that he could remember events of his past.

RESPONDENT: Memory IS the self, the ego, the ‘me’, the thinker.

RICHARD: Not so ... it is the affective faculties that carries the illusion of an enduring self over psychological time.

RESPONDENT: I saw between the lines of your post, Richard, I ‘felt’ the anguish of thought.

RICHARD: This is not the first time that you have attempted to read me ... and you failed just as spectacularly back then.

RESPONDENT: And it was not just ‘your’ thought. It was just the anguish of thought that I saw, felt – mine, yours, the world of thought.

RICHARD: I can only repeat: ‘my post simply described the impossibility of living a belief system thoroughly’. And as a belief is an emotion-backed thought, then it is the world of feelings. After all anguish is a feeling.

*

RICHARD: Of course it does not ‘take away from the truth’. This is because ‘the truth’ is not actual ... therefore it can be whatever one thinks that one feels it to be. Feelings are notoriously unreliable in determining facticity.

RESPONDENT: Actually, I don’t have problem with the words ‘truth’, ‘reality’ and ‘actual’. They are rather quite interchangeable. I don’t know why you nit-pick the difference.

RICHARD: As you have asked this question several times before – and I have answered it several times before – I do wonder at the point of answering it again. Nevertheless, it is easy to copy and paste:

• [Respondent]: ‘Why do you get so nit-picky about the meaning of words and go to dictionaries to try to prove a point?

• [Richard]: ‘I get ‘nit-picky’ about the meaning of words because people so dearly love to cover up their ineptitude by using words in a slippery manner. No one, it seems, likes to be pinned down to a clear-cut definition. I also get this a lot in my face-to-face discussions with people here ... they like to ‘keep things open’ or ‘be flexible’ or ‘don’t be so fixed’ or ‘things aren’t black and white’ and so on. I happen to like the English language ... it has upwards of 650,000 words in it and one can clearly communicate with another if a little rigour is applied. However, people like to hide behind words; they like to utter pithy aphorisms like: ‘The Truth is Ineffable’. It is up to me to make sure that the other understands what I am saying – whether they agree with me or not – because if I assume that they have the same meaning to a word as I do is just plain silly. A dictionary is a handy reference point to establish a meaning ... if we want to give a particular twist or meaning to a word we can ... but we need to know what base we start from. Otherwise anything means whatever we want it too ... and confusion reigns supreme’.

And ‘confusion’ the current situation.

RESPONDENT: Who is copying and pasting everything that has gone before and enjoying the hell out of it?

RICHARD: This flesh and blood body being alive and awake with all its senses operating – including thought when necessary – and a keen sense of humour when observing the ridiculous and ludicrous.

RESPONDENT: Obviously, the thinker.

RICHARD: Why ‘obviously’? It is you that you are describing ... not me. You have fallen foul of judging another’s condition through your own state of being ... and it does not work too accurately that way.

RESPONDENT: How about erasing EVERY thing from your computer? How about never remembering what another said? How about forgetting all of your knowledge? What have you then? You have nothing, right?

RICHARD: That is so right ... ‘nothing’ . You would not be able to operate and function in this world of people, things and events ... and you know it. This is that silliness competition running here.

RESPONDENT: The thinker, the ego, the self, is all of that knowledge. Without it, what are you, Richard? That is the end of the ego, when there is not one smidgen of memory left ... that is creation.

RICHARD: No ‘knowledge’? No ‘memory’? This is so silly.

RESPONDENT: Yes, I see where you are coming from with your use of ‘actual’ being ‘more’ real than ‘real’.

RICHARD: Not so ... I have discarded the word ‘real’ long ago when used in reference to the sensate world ... back when people told me that their god was real. Actual is actual ... it is not more or less anything. It is what is here now that is actual. Forget ‘real’ or ‘more real’ if you wish to understand life, the universe and what it is to be a human being.

RESPONDENT: I use the word ‘actual’ for sensate, physical occurrences, and that includes thought. And you see nothing that is not physical ... physical in the sense that it is within the expedience of the body’s five senses. Is this correct?

RICHARD: Correct. Except that – with no ‘I’ or ‘me’ – it is not the reality-encrusted actual of the real world. It is pristine and pure here. Immaculate.

RESPONDENT: Does the ‘thinker’ fall within your definition of ‘actual?

RICHARD: No.

RESPONDENT: Then, I use the word ‘real’ for understanding what is deeper than actual.

RICHARD: There is nothing ‘deeper than actual’ ... except delusion, fantasy and hallucination.

RESPONDENT: Like the thinker, who is not real at all, but a time delayed reaction that does actually exist in ones head. Nit, nit, nit.

RICHARD: Not a ‘time delayed reaction’ ... an emotive ‘being’.

RESPONDENT: Real means having no imaginary part.

RICHARD: If only it did. Then I would be able to use it freely, instead of having to ‘nit-pick’ by using ‘actual’ ... and having to give my definition of it rather than the dictionary definition.

RESPONDENT: Yes, I understand, but does your definition of ‘the actual’ make it real?

RICHARD: No ... never.

RESPONDENT: Actual means factual.

RICHARD: Yes ... if by ‘factual’ you mean what is ascertained sensately and thus demonstrably true.

RESPONDENT: Does this include the ‘sixth’ sense?

RICHARD: No way.

RESPONDENT: Truth means ‘what is’.

RICHARD: Again ... if only it did mean what is actual. ‘What is’ – a phrase Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti used a lot – means different things to different people. For some it is a surrogate phrase for ‘Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’.

RESPONDENT: Truth does not mean that whatever one thinks is the truth. That is totally ridiculous.

RICHARD: Actually I wrote: ‘therefore it can be whatever one thinks that one feels it to be’.

RESPONDENT: That is too a fine a distinction for me to discern.

RICHARD: It is not all that too fine a distinction if one examines it a little further. Feelings come first in any normal real-world action or reaction, and then thought jumps on the band-wagon and justifies it ... or condemns it. Examine your feelings with the same scrutiny that you have been giving to thoughts and you will see what I am getting at. Feelings – being instinctually derived – are primary.

Thought comes later ... even if a nano-second later.


CORRESPONDENT No. 19 (Part Three)

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The Third Alternative

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