Actual Freedom – Mailing List ‘C’ Correspondence

July 01 2000:

RESPONDENT No. 6: Richard, I have some questions. 1) Do you see enlightenment as pathological?

RICHARD: Yes, my experience, night and day for eleven years, showed me intimately that it is indeed a morbid condition. In psychiatric terminology it is a dissociative state of being, sometimes known as ‘disassociative identity disorder’, complete with self-important delusions of grandeur and megalomaniacal demands for recognition, adulation, surrender and total obedience ... the ‘contracted ego’ (or ‘self’) has transmogrified into a fully expanded soul (the all-expansive ‘Self’). Generally speaking, all dissociative reactions are attempts to escape from excessive trauma tension and anxiety by separating off parts of personality function from the rest of cognition as an attempt to isolate something that arouses anxiety and gain distance from it. For example, in everyday life, mild and temporary dissociation, sometimes hard to distinguish from repression and isolation, is a relatively common and normal device used to escape from severe emotional stress and anxiety. Temporary episodes of transient estrangement, depersonalisation and derealisation are often experienced by normal persons when they first feel the initial impact of bad news, for instance. Everything suddenly looks strange and different; things seem unnatural and distant; events can be indistinct and vaporous; often the person feels that they themselves are unreal and everything takes on a dream-like quality. Dissociation becomes abnormal when the once mild or transient expedient becomes too intense, lasts too long, or escapes from a person’s control ... and leads to a separation from the surroundings which seriously disturbs object relations. In object estrangement the once familiar world of ordinary objects – the world of people, things and events – seems to have undergone a disturbing and often indescribable change. Thus, just as a traumatised victim of an horrific and terrifying event makes the experience unreal in order to cope with the ordeal, all the Gurus and the God-Men, the Masters and the Messiahs, the Avatars and the Saviours and the Saints and the Sages have desperately done precisely this thing (during what is sometimes called ‘the dark night of the soul’). Mystics have been transmogrifying the real world ‘reality’ into an unreal ‘True Reality’ via the epiphenomenal imaginative/intuitive facility born of the psyche (which is formed by the instinctual passions genetically endowed by blind nature for survival purposes) for millennia. Mysticism in general is a psychotic sickness; a head-in-the-sand escapist ‘solution’ to all the ills of humankind and is otherwise described (in non-psychiatric terminology) as ‘Theodicy’ (a vindication of a god’s and/or goddess’s goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil). The altered state of consciousness known as ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ is nothing more and nothing less than a frantic coping-mechanism that became culturally institutionalised, into being a legitimate and venerated social metaphysics, over thousands and thousands of years.

RESPONDENT No. 6: 2) Do you see enlightenment as necessary step to get to where you are at?

RICHARD: No ... no one else need ever take that route again (and I would not wish upon anyone to have to follow in my footsteps for I had to run the full gamut of existential angst to break through to what lay beyond). I always liken it to the physical adventure that Mr. James Cook undertook to journey to Australia two hundred plus years ago. It took him over a year in a leaky wooden boat with hard tack for food and immense dangers along the way. Nowadays, one can fly to Australia in twenty-seven hours in air-conditioned comfort, eating hygienically prepared food and watching an in-flight movie into the bargain. No one has to go the path of the trail-blazer and forge along in another leaky wooden boat.

RESPONDENT: What a load of old tosh. A read of Ken Wilber’s spectrum of consciousness will set you right.

RICHARD: How on earth could reading his writing ‘set me right’? He cannot even see the dissociative state of being (complete with self-important delusions of grandeur and megalomaniacal demands for recognition, adulation, surrender and total obedience) in Mr. Franklin Jones ... who would arguably have to be the current archetypal example of a ‘contracted ego’ that has transmogrified into a fully expanded ‘Self’.

RESPONDENT: What you say happens in many cases but not all.

RICHARD: Then those ‘cases’ are not enlightened.

RESPONDENT: There is a big distinction to be made. Having experienced a lot of what you talk about myself, i.e. madness and psychosis and been in the company of enlightened individuals there is a great difference.

RICHARD: Indeed there is ... because I am not talking about ‘Bi-Polar Disorder’ but the full-blown delusion (‘I am God’) with its corresponding solipsistic hallucination (‘Only I Exist’).

Editorial note: the respondent had previously informed the Mailing List that they had personally experienced ‘Bi-Polar Disorder’ some years previously.

RESPONDENT: Have you ever been in the company of a truly enlightened being?

RICHARD: Yes – night and day for eleven years – thus I have intimate knowledge ... and enlightenment sucks.

RESPONDENT: They are the antithesis of dissociative.

RICHARD: By the term ‘dissociative’ I do not mean the opposite of relational ... I guess you did not read the ‘load of old tosh’ with both eyes, eh?

Editorial note: the respondent had previously informed the Mailing List that ‘dissociation’ was the opposite of ‘relational’.