Actual Freedom – Selected Correspondence by Topic

RESPONDENT: Hi Richard You write:

Would you say that this experience of yours could have been a hallucinatory state which you interpreted according to the fundamental thrust of your seeking, as is common in dream-emergent states? I realize that the last part (after the ellipses in the above sentence of yours) is a metaphor, but I cannot help but think that the ‘I’ is such an inchoate and slippery entity (or void) that to actually see its essence and non-existence in the way you mention could have been due to your persistent desire to look for it in a particular way over an extended period of time, fuelled partly by a memorable insight already in place that there is no ‘me’ or emotional ‘being’ in actuality.

In other words, I suspect that your realization (in my words), that the ‘I’ am the felt illusory center of the eddy of feelings and passions, might have been already there in some embryonic form, which embryonic realization then enabled you to see it and recognize it with your own eyes (as it were) on that fateful day.

RICHARD: G’day No. 2, So as to put it into perspective: it was a response to being asked how to learn and discover the essence of who ‘I’ am, and not who ‘I’ am in general (social-self + ego-self + soul/ spirit-self), and my anecdotal reply refers to what took place the sixth year (1987) of spiritual enlightenment/ mystical awakenment.

Prior to the penetration deep into ‘myself’ at the core of ‘my’ being (which is ‘being’ itself) there had been no pre-existing model, not even embryonic, of such a nature to have insinuated itself into that gorgeous exposure of ‘my’ glorious essence.

Indeed, the only pre-existing model (per favour my second wife in the period before that penetration) was in the nature of a dot in the centre of a circle; the dot represented essence and the circle was representative of (self-protective) egoic activity.

Because you specifically mention ‘a memorable insight already in place that there is no ‘me’ or emotional ‘being’ in actuality’ it must be stressed that the penetration did not reveal that at all; what lay exposed (as in completely unprotected) was the essence of ‘me’ in all ‘my’ glory ... beautiful, radiant, resplendent and unquestionably worthy of the utmost adoration, worship and veneration. (Hence my lustrous pearl analogy; the eddy analogy is for void, in contrast to thing, as the essence of who ‘I’ am is formless).

Kings and Emperors and Sages and Seers alike tremble at the rare honour bestowed only on a graced few, to prostrate before that sacred effulgence, upon choice revelation of its almighty presence.

For instance:

[Ms. Pupul Jayakar]: ‘... the feeling of presence was overpowering, and soon my voice stopped. Krishnaji turned to me, ‘Do you feel It? I could prostrate to It?’ His body was trembling as he spoke of the presence that listened. ‘Yes, I can prostrate to this, that is here’. Suddenly he turned and left us, walking alone to his room’. (page 364; Jayakar, Pupul: ‘Krishnamurti – A Biography’; Harper & Row; San Francisco; 1986).

Regards, Richard.

P.S.: I had to chuckle where you asked whether it could have been a hallucinatory state as the entire phenomenon is nothing but a massive hallucination – a magnipotent delusion – from the very beginning to its absolute end.

RESPONDENT: Solipsism is one of these ‘reds under the bed’ kind of deals.

RICHARD: As nondualism (aka advaita) is just one of the many and various forms of solipsism which the east has exported to the west/ the west has imported from the east then just what is it, specifically, that occasions you to say that?

RESPONDENT: I thought you must be a masochist when you first went down that path ... but a real masochist could have derived weeks of delight from it.

RICHARD: It has nothing to do with masochism, real or otherwise, and everything to do with fellowship regard. And, by way of example, the following extract from my response to a fellow human being’s request for information/ explanation, on Friday the twenty-fourth of March 2000, should be quite self-explanatory:

• [Richard]: ‘In the West, the nineteenth century was optimistically called the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ (knowledge enlightenment) until Eastern mystics came onto the world stage at the turn of the century with ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ ... busily being hell-bent on returning the burgeoning thoughtful part of humankind to the darkness of fallacy and fancy. Western civilisation, which has struggled to get out of superstition and medieval ignorance, is in danger of slipping back into the supernatural as the Eastern mystical thought and belief that is beginning to have its strangle-hold upon otherwise intelligent people is becoming more widespread.
Prior to the recent influx of Eastern philosophy, if one realised that ‘I am God’, one would have been institutionalised ... and, to some degree, rightly so. One has stepped out of an illusion, only to wind up living in a delusion. However, the trouble with people who discard the god of Christianity and/or Judaism and/or Islam 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 jaded Western mind which is desperately looking for answers that abstract logical speculation and analytic deduction just cannot provide. The Christian and/or Judaic and/or Islamic conditioning actually sets up the situation for a thinking person to be susceptible to the esoteric doctrines of the East.
It is sobering to realise that the intelligentsia of the West are eagerly following the East down the slippery slope of striving to attain to a self-seeking divine immortality ... to the detriment of life on earth. ‘I am That’, for example, is simply another way of saying ‘I am God’ (aka ‘I am The Truth’). At the end of the line there is always a god of some description, lurking in disguise, wreaking its havoc with its ‘Teachings’. I have been to India to see for myself the results of what they claim are tens of thousands of years of devotional spiritual living ... and it is hideous. If it were not for the appalling suffering engendered it would all be highly amusing ... but it is practically and demonstrably deleterious to both individual and communal well-being. That is why one only needs to look at where this devotional spiritual living has been practiced for thousands of years to see how badly it has failed to live up to its implied promise of peace and harmony and prosperity for all. Thus both the spiritual and the secular methods of producing peace on earth have each failed miserably ... it is high time for a third alternative to hove into view; something new that has never been lived before in human history.
Why repeat the mistakes of the past when the results of doing so are plain to view in all cultures?

There were three more responses, of similar ilk, to three more requests for information/ explanation over the next four days ... and then, a scant two months later (Friday the twenty-third of June 2000), the following mass-circulated e-mail arrived in my mail-box:

• [quote] ‘I’ is enlightened. I woke up and woke up ... hmm’. [endquote].

I accessed an appropriate URL and, sure enough, there was indeed one more massively deluded human being strutting the world stage, giving of their bronze age wisdom to a benighted humanity, and (unless something truly remarkable has happened in the meanwhile) is still suckering the gullible into their particular manifestation of a culturally-revered insanity to this very day.

Put simplistically: the reds are not only under the bed they are also in the bed ... sometimes lying right beside you (pun intended).

MARK: I feel very blessed as I start to write to you – blessed to have found someone who seems to me to be speaking the truth unconditionally!! Thank you. My story briefly: I am a ‘seeker’ and have been for 20 or more years and after so long ‘at it’ I can say that it feels as if I have learned or gained just about zero from all the searching and self obsessed introspection. I thought from a very early age that somehow my simple presence on earth should be enough and all else would or should be taken care of .So it seems that my life has consisted of a process of trying this and trying that and then saying ‘well not that’ ... ‘and not’. Along the way I chose to alienate myself from the emphasis on any career or money considerations and now I find myself at 46 yrs of age feeling like a failure in all aspects of life. The past 8 months has been a time of physical ill health, mental depression and questioning of all my beliefs about life and my part in it. I recognise the futility of my beliefs but any real change in my structure seems tediously slow, I get stuck and lost in the mire. I should add that in this recent ‘dark’ period there is an air of ‘pregnancy’ that is somehow encouraging. In short, my mind, during this time runs some (many!!) continuous wobbly beliefs primarily about lack (of money, love, talent, meaning, etc.) about ill health and that my body can and will cause me ‘undeserved’ pain and feels unsafe and at risk of injury, and I also feel often as tho’ I have this animal adrenalised fight or flight mechanism switched on all the time. Richard, I suppose the question that I ask is – what is the most effective way to deconstruct my mumbo jumbo belief system. Thank you for your time and compassionate availability.

RICHARD: I am pleased that you have already found something of benefit from The Actual Freedom Web-Site. Where you say: ‘I feel very blessed to have found someone who seems to me to be speaking the truth – unconditionally!!’, you will soon see, if you proceed further, that actualism has nothing to do with ‘The Truth’ and is all about facts and actuality. Ultimately, by going beyond ‘The Truth’ one will find oneself living with total freedom in this world as-it-is with people as-they-are.

You say: ‘I am a seeker and have been for 20 or more years and after so long at it I can say that it feels as if I have learned or gained just about zero’. I presume you are referring to the spiritual search for enlightenment. If so – and as you have ‘gained about zero’ – you may indeed have come across what will provide the break-through that you have been looking for ... or not. Actualism is all about furthering the search to a condition that lies beyond spiritual enlightenment ... and for anything to develop at all, a whole raft of beliefs – masquerading as ‘truths’ – have to be examined. What I have to say is both heretical and iconoclastic ... so it may turn out to be of no use to you at all.

Just so as I am right up-front from the beginning, I like to make my position crystal clear ... although the next few paragraphs are to be found on the Web-Page, you may have missed them amongst all that is written. By repeating them here, I then know that you are familiar with my back ground ... then there is a level playing field from the start. And I write all this in order to share my experience on the whole subject of the Eastern ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’, as it is commonly considered to be the Summum Bonum of human experience. It is not. By being born and raised in the West I was not steeped in the mystical religious tradition of the East and was thus able to escape the trap of centuries of eastern spiritual conditioning by going beyond enlightenment – which turned out to be an Altered State Of Consciousness – into the actuality of being here on earth and now in time as this flesh and blood body.

For many years I sought genuine exploration and discovery of what it means to live a fully human life, and in October 1992 I discovered, once and for all, what I was looking for. Since then I have been consistently living an incomparable condition which I choose to call actual freedom – and I use the word ‘actual’ because this freedom is located here in this very world, this actual world of the senses. It is not an affective, cerebral or psychic state of being; it is a physical condition that ensues when one goes beyond Spiritual Enlightenment.

In September 1981 I underwent a monumental transformation into an Altered State Of Consciousness which can only be described as Spiritual Enlightenment. I became Enlightened as the result of an earnest and intense process which commenced in the January of that year. At approximately six o’clock on the morning of Sunday the sixth of September 1981, my ‘ego’ disappeared entirely in an edifying moment of awakening to an ‘Absolute Reality’. I lived in the Enlightened State for eleven years, so I have an intimate understanding of the marked difference between Spiritual Enlightenment and actual freedom.

Over the eleven years I had numerous experiences of a condition that seemed so extreme that one must surely die to attain to it. To go beyond Enlightenment seemed to be an impossibility whilst still alive and breathing. Then at midday on Friday the thirtieth October 1992 a curious event occurred, due to my intense conviction that it was imperative that someone evince a final and complete condition that would ‘deliver the goods’ so longed for by humanity for millennia. Just like my ego had dissolved, back in 1981, my ‘soul’ disappeared. I was no longer a ‘Self’ existing for all Eternity and transcending Time and Space. I no longer had a feeling of being – or ‘Being’ – and I could no longer detect the presence of The Absolute. There was no ‘Presence’ at all. Since that date I have continued to live in a condition of complete emancipation and utter autonomy ... the condition is both permanent and actual.

This is different from Enlightenment in that it is most definitely substantial: there is no longer a transcendence, for I have neither sorrow nor malice anywhere at all to rise above. They have vanished entirely, leaving me both blithesome and benign – carefree and harmless – which leads to a most remarkable state of affairs. The chief characteristics of Enlightenment – Union with the Divine, Universal Compassion, Love Agapé, Ineffable Bliss, The Truth, Timelessness, Spacelessness, Immortality, Aloneness, Oneness, Pacifism, Surrender, Trust, Beauty, and Goodness – being redundant in this totally new condition, are no longer extant. Herein lies the unmistakable distinction between this condition, which I call actual freedom, and the Enlightened State: I am no longer driven by a Divine Sense Of Mission to bring The Truth, Universal Love and Divine Compassion to the world. I am free to speak with whomsoever is genuinely interested in solving the ‘Mystery of Life’ and becoming totally free of the Human Condition.

So, if you are still with me after digesting the above, I will continue with your E-Mail. You say: ‘I thought from a very early age that somehow my simple presence on earth should be enough and all else would or should be taken care of’. Actually, you are quite correct – apart from the five physical necessities of air, water, food, clothing and shelter – one does not have to do anything at all to live life happily and harmlessly when one is free to be here at this moment in eternal time and this place in infinite space ... when one is free, that is, from malice and sorrow. When the elimination of all animosity and anguish is one’s on-going life-goal, one has taken a giant step towards salubrity and achieving one’s birth-right.

You say: ‘So it seems that my life has consisted of a process of trying this and trying that and then saying ‘well not that, not that’. Along the way I chose to alienate myself from the emphasis on any career or money considerations and now I find myself at 46 yrs of age feeling like a failure in all aspects of life’. A failure, maybe, in the eyes of society at large ... with the culture’s emphasis on success being determined by the status of career achievement and the amount of money one commands control over. But, apart from the physical necessities of life, one needs very little to be successful ... becoming happy and harmless puts paid to all other definitions of success. Speaking personally, I live on a pension in a rented brick-veneer duplex ... and I am the most successful person in the entire world.

RESPONDENT: You don’t care actually, one hoot that I may or may not be defending Krishnamurti. What you really care about is that I’m not accepting your own words as authority.

RICHARD: There are two meanings to the word ‘authority’ and the one that causes all the troubles is the one connected with power. (The power of the authority to enforce obedience; the power of the authority to enforce moral or legal judgements; the power of the authority to command or give the final decision; the power of the authority to control; the power of the authority of a governing body; the power of an authoritative holy book; the power of the authority to inspire belief and so on). The second – less used – meaning is: an expert on a particular subject.

Because I live in an actual freedom twenty four hours a day, I am automatically an expert about what it is like to experience freedom from the Human Condition. I have no power – or powers – whatsoever. It is very simple to be an expert on actual freedom ... one has but to live it and report to others from this on-going experience of being here now. (Expert as in specialist, professional, virtuoso ... or being experienced, proficient, able, accomplished, apt, competent and so on).

I freely acknowledge – and delight in – my expertise on all matters pertaining to actual freedom and spiritual enlightenment. This expertise is drawn out of my personal experience on a day-to-day basis, for the last eighteen years ... twenty four hours a day. If you wish to maintain that this makes me an ‘authority’ as in the spiritual meaning of the word ‘master’ then you are entirely missing the point of all I have said, written and demonstrated. Because those otherwise intelligent ‘Enlightened Beings’ have surrendered their integrity to the psychic Power that lies hidden as the ‘Unmanifest Authority’ behind the scenes. This divine entity can go by many names, most of them obviously a god, but the most pernicious is the one usually described as either ‘The Truth’ or ‘The Absolute’. To have surrendered to ‘that which is sacred’ is the root cause of all the religious wars that have beset this planet since time immemorial. Power is what the ‘authority’ of a guru / master / sage / avatar / messiah / saint is all about. As they have surrendered to an ‘Higher Authority’, everyone else has to slot into the inevitable hierarchy which ensues. And so the battles rage. The hunger for power – or the subservience to it – is the curse of humanity. Curiously enough, the ‘energy’ that this power manifests as – whilst going under many and varied a nomenclature – is what I call Love Agapé.

In actualism it is readily experienced and understood that Love Agapé – which is born out of sorrow – is but a paltry substitute for the over-arching benevolence of the actual world. Similarly, Divine Compassion is seen and known to be a pathetic surrogate for the actual intimacy of direct experiencing ... Love Agapé and Divine Compassion are deep feelings which the psychological or psychic identity within creates in order to sustain itself and perpetuate its self-centred existence. Love is born out of loneliness ... or in the case of the Enlightened Ones, out of Aloneness ... and is touted as being the cure-all for humankind’s failings because it imitates the intimacy of the actual via a feeling of Oneness. The feeling of Oneness creates an erroneous impression that separation is ended ... but the self survives triumphant, only to wreak its havoc in the real world once again. Life can be a grim and glum business in the real world, for separation ceases only when the psychological and psychic entity inside the body – the ego and the soul – is extirpated. In actual freedom there is a universal magnanimity which is so vastly superior to petty forgiveness or pardon that any comparison is worthless.

Actual intimacy – being here now – does not come from love and compassion, for the affective states of being stem from separation. The illusion of intimacy that love and compassion produces is but a meagre imitation of the direct experience of the actual. In the actual world, ‘I’ as ego, the personality, and ‘me’ as soul, the ‘being’ – both subjectively experienced as one’s identity – have ceased to exist; whereas love and compassion accentuates, endorses and verifies ‘me’ as being real. And while ‘I’ am real, ‘I’ am relative to other similarly afflicted persons; vying for position and status in order to establish ‘my’ credentials ... to verify ‘my’ very existence. To be actually intimate is to be without the separative identity ... and therefore free from the need for love and compassion with their ever un-filled promise of Peace On Earth. There is an actual intimacy between me and everyone and everything ... actual intimacy is a direct experiencing of the other as-they-are. I am having a superb time ... and it is a well-earned superb time, too. Nothing has come without application – apart from serendipitous discoveries because of pure intent – and I am reaping the rewards which are plentiful and deliciously satisfying. Actual intimacy frees one up to a world of factual splendour, based firmly upon sensate and sensual delight. The candid and unabashed sensorial enjoyment of being this body in the world around is such a luscious and immediate experience, that the tantalising but ever-elusive promise of the mystique of love and compassion has faded into the oblivion it deserves.

I have no power – or powers – at all, for I have not surrendered to any one or any thing whatsoever. There is no trace of humiliation in me at all.

RESPONDENT: I seem to agree to some extent with No. 5, but not to the extent of being mad with Vineeto. I also do not find anything radical in Richard’s teachings. I already am aware of most of this stuff thanks mainly to Osho and other eastern philosophies .

RICHARD: I am well aware that many people initially get the impression that I am saying the same thing as do those people who are living in an altered state of consciousness known as spiritual enlightenment ... as detailed in Eastern spiritual philosophy. However, an actual freedom from the Human Condition is not an altered state of consciousness (ASC) wherein the identity transmogrifies ... it is an on-going pure consciousness experience (PCE) wherein the identity is annihilated in its totality.

In an ASC the identity shifts its focus, when ‘I’ as ego undergoes an ‘ego-death’, and ‘me’ as soul realises its ‘True Self’ as epitomised in the phrase: ‘I am everything and Everything is Me’. The next step is the realisation that ‘Me’ and ‘God’ (not the god of the churches, temples, mosques and synagogues) are one and the same thing and, as such, one is ‘Unborn and Undying’. Thus, being now ‘Spaceless and Timeless’ one has achieved ‘Divine Immortality’ and one can confidently say – as Mr. Mohan ‘Rajneesh’ Jain did – that one is ‘Never Born, Never Died, Only Visited This Planet’. Eastern mystical philosophy stipulates that the temporal world – the entire material universe – is but an illusion, and only God is real ... God as ‘Pure Being’ (The Brahman, The Buddha, The Tao, The Void, The Whatever) and not the god of the churches, temples, mosques and synagogues. Whereas in the PCE the identity disappears when ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul is expunged, eliminated, extirpated ... as extinct as the dodo but with no skeletal remains.

Then one is this flesh and blood body being apperceptively aware ... what one is (‘what’ not ‘who’) is these sense organs in operation: this seeing is me, this hearing is me, this tasting is me, this touching is me, this smelling is me, and this thinking is me. Whereas ‘I’, the identity, am inside the body: looking out through ‘my’ eyes as if looking out through a window, listening through ‘my’ ears as if they were microphones, tasting through ‘my’ tongue, touching through ‘my’ skin, smelling through ‘my’ nose, and thinking through ‘my’ brain. Of course ‘I’ must feel isolated, alienated, alone and lonely, for ‘I’ am cut off from the magnificence of the world as-it-is (the actual world) by ‘my’ very presence.

RESPONDENT: Richard I think you are an intelligent person, but I don’t think you have the awakening you think you do.

RICHARD: I had already distinctly gained that impression from your previous responses to what I write. May I ask? What has happened to your famed ‘telepathy’ that you have to resort to common or garden thinking when it comes to sussing me out? You have this ability to access ‘the astral universes’ and count ‘all the inhabitants’ there ... yet you ‘think’ that I ‘don’t have the awakening’? Where is the infallible intuition – aka your ‘totally accurate’ feelings and non-interpreted ‘ideas’ – when you need it most? Are you ‘trying to understand using your intellect’ ... and having some difficulty using that moth-balled-for-24-years machinery again to its full effect?

Thinking is such a delightful episodic event.

RESPONDENT: My experience is that almost 100% of awakened people went thru the agency of some teacher or guru, that this is not the sort of thing that can be self-taught. Did you do that?

RICHARD: First ... I am not ‘awakened’ (for although to awake in a dream is to be lucidly dreaming one is still dreaming nevertheless), I am actually free of the human condition. Any ‘awakening’ is still within the human condition.

In 1980 I had a pure consciousness experience (PCE) that lasted for four hours. In that four hours I lived the peace-on-earth that is already always here now ... and I saw that ‘I’ (an emotional-mental construct) was standing in the way of this actual freedom being apparent twenty four hours of the day. In that peak experience I saw ‘myself’ for the social identity that ‘I’ was. ‘I’ was the end product of society and nothing more. ‘I’ was a passionate construct of all of the beliefs, values, morals, ethics, mores, customs, traditions, doctrines, ideologies and so on. ‘I’ was nothing but an fabrication in the psyche ... a social identity which is its conscience. Once I had seen this, I then saw that ‘I’ was a lost, lonely, frightened (and a very, very cunning) psychological entity ... what I later came to know as ‘ego’. Just as those Christians who are said to be possessed by an evil entity and need to be exorcised, I saw that every human being had been endowed with an identity as ego ... and it was called being normal. When ‘I’ saw that this was all ‘I’ was ... I was no longer that. I was me ... this flesh and blood body being apperceptively aware.

This was what ‘I’ had been searching for – for 33 years – and the joke was that ‘I’ had not known that this is what ‘I’ had been searching for! Thus, when I reverted back to normal in the ‘real world’, ‘I’ knew, with the solid and irrefutable certainty of direct experience, that ‘I’ was standing in the way of the actual being apparent ... and ‘I’ had to go – become extinct – and not try to become something ‘better’. That is, ‘I’ just knew that ‘I’ could never, ever become perfect or be perfection. It was flagrantly evident that the only thing ‘I’ could do – the only thing ‘I’ had to do – was die (psychologically and psychically self-immolate) so that the already always existing perfection could become apparent.

By being born and raised in the West I was not steeped in the mystical religious tradition of the East and was thus able to escape the trap of centuries of eastern spiritual conditioning ... I had never heard the words ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘Nirvana’ and so on until 1982 when talking to a man about my breakthrough into freedom via the death of ‘myself’ in September 1981. He listened – he questioned me rigorously until well after midnight – and then declared me to be ‘Enlightened’. I had to ask him what that was, such was my ignorance of all things spiritual. He – being a nine-year spiritual seeker fresh from his latest trip to India – gave me a book to read by someone called Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti. That was to be the beginning of what was to become a long learning curve of all things religious, spiritual, mystical and metaphysical for me. I studied all this because I sought to understand what other peoples had made of such spontaneous experiences and to find out where human endeavour had been going wrong.

I found out where I had been going wrong for eleven years ... self-aggrandisement is so seductive.

RESPONDENT: And if so, who did you learn from? I myself had two teachers, Stephen Gaskin and John Panama. Also, if you are claiming realization, then you should be able to test it in others.

RICHARD: If I may point out? I am not claiming ‘realisation’ ... I am actually free of the human condition. This is an actualisation of the already always existing peace-on-earth ... not a realisation of one’s ideas, one’s inner dreams and hopes. If I may refer you to the following exchange? Viz.:

• [Respondent]: ‘We actually become our ideas, our thoughts are realities in themselves so they cannot be speculated about, they must be realized for their being alive’.

• [Richard]: ‘Are you saying that becoming ‘one with truth’ is the living-out of ‘ideas’? That it is a thought-created reality that one makes come true through being ‘realised’?’

RESPONDENT: I claim to be able to do that as should you be able to. If you can come to the United States, I would be happy to meet with you and you could test me and I you. This may clear up some of the confusion.

RICHARD: I am not interested in ‘testing’ you (or anyone else) ... it is of no concern to me whether you are fully realised or not: spiritual enlightenment sucks. And for as long as you continue to see me in terms of ‘awakening’ or ‘realisation’ or ‘enlightenment’ or any other name for the ‘Tried and True’ you would be wasting your time ... there is no ‘being’ lurking around inside this flesh and blood body to put through the hoops. For example: an awakened ‘Spiritual ‘Teacher’ personally checked me out face-to-face some years ago ... and made me the subject of the nightly discourse, warning the faithful followers that Richard is an example of the dangers on the spiritual path. To wit: Richard is insane. As the ubiquitously called ‘straight’ people (regular society) in the West consider that anyone dabbling in things mystical are the ‘lunatic fringe’ (conveniently ignoring the fact that their ‘God On Earth’ is one of them), I am sure that they must find it quaint that one lunatic would ‘test’ another lunatic and declare him to be insane (thereby implying that the ‘tester’ is not).

Ah ... c’est la vie, I guess.

ALAN: When in an ASC, I had no thought or sense of me, as an individual, but certainly felt I was ‘me’, or rather ‘Me’, with a capital letter – undivided from creation (and the Creator). Having said that, in some recent PCE’s, I have ‘seen’ the attraction of Divine Love and Compassion (and mightily seductive and beautiful it looks too!) and chosen not to pursue that path – but who does the choosing?

RICHARD: A good question ... my suggestion would be that it is one’s native intelligence that does the choosing and not a ‘who’. I say this because it is my experience during eleven years of swanning along in a state of Love Agapé‚ and Divine Compassion, that common-sense would not let the ‘Me’ that I was get away with this solipsistic ‘Timeless and Spaceless’ experience that ‘Me’ was living ... the clock ticked the hours and the sun moved through the sky, for example. I find it so hilarious these days, when reading some master’s discourse on ‘Timelessness’, where they look at their diamond-studded watch and say: ‘Enough for now ... Evening Darshan will be at 6.00 PM’.

ALAN: Writing this, I am having more and more difficulty in differentiating between the two – if I am in an ASC (assuming it to be ‘me’ as ‘being’) how do I know – as stated above, there is no way for ‘me’ to see myself ‘being’. The only yardstick, for me, appears to be whether I am experiencing Divine Love and Compassion – is that the only difference?

RICHARD: Not only Love Agapé‚ and Divine Compassion – they are the obvious yardsticks – but, more importantly: identity. This is why I sent you that description by the young Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti some time ago. Viz.:

• ‘I felt acute pain at the nape of my neck. There was a man mending the road; that man was myself; the pickaxe he held was myself; the very stone which he was breaking up was a part of me; the tender blade of grass was my very being, and the tree beside the man was myself. Just then there was a car passing by at some distance; I was the driver, the engine, and the tyres. I was in everything, or rather everything was in me, inanimate and animate, the mountain, the worm, and all breathing things’. (‘Krishnamurti: The Years Of Awakening’ Mary Lutyens; Avon Books, New York, 1991).

I had numerous experiences of a similar nature myself ... and spent eleven years in an altered state of consciousness. I also had other experiences that I overlooked in favour of these ‘I am everything and Everything is Me’ experiences. If I had not been taken in by delusions of grandeur I would have paid particular notice of experiences like this one:

• [Richard]: I remember the first time I experienced being the senses only during a PCE. There was no identity as ‘I’ thinking or ‘me’ feeling ... simply this body ambling across a grassy field in the early-morning light. A million dew-drenched spider-webs danced a sparkling delight over the verdant vista and a question that had been running for some weeks became experientially answered: without the senses I would not know that I exist as this flesh and blood body. And further to this: I was the senses and the senses were me. With this came an awareness of being conscious – apperception – rather than ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious.

Without any identity (‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul) the distance or separation between ‘me’ and ‘my’ senses – and thus the external world – disappears. To be the senses as a bare awareness is apperception, a pure consciousness experience of the world as-it-is. Because there is no ‘I’ as an observer – a little person inside one’s head – to have sensations, I am the sensations. There is nothing except the series of sensations which happen ... not to ‘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/or ‘me’ was standing in the way of meaning.

When narcissism packs its bags and slinks out of the door ... then I am this physical universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being. As me, this universe can be intelligent ... there is no ‘Intelligence’ behind this universe creating and running the whole show.

ALAN: From what I have read it appears others experience anger, while in an ASC. When I was in what I called an ASC, I could not possibly have experienced annoyance, never mind anger, and I think you said you had not experienced anger since your enlightenment in 1980?

RICHARD: That is correct – inasmuch that full-blown anger never arose – however minor annoyance did ... which is another area where native intelligence made me question enlightenment. I have located the following exchange:

• [Richard]: ‘Just look at all the recorded instances of anger in the many Masters that have paraded their stuff throughout history. Just look at all the religious wars that follow the emergence of any charismatic saviour. Why do you think they all have to advocate pacifism, if they can actually trust their precious state of ‘being’ so much, eh?
• [Konrad]: ‘Right! And that is why I do not follow that course. I am angry at times, and I do not deny it. I deny, however, that enlightenment is a way to end all anger once and for all. I consider that nonsense.
• [Richard]: ‘So do I ... the altered state of consciousness called spiritual enlightenment does not end anger. An actual freedom does, however, which is one of the many reason why it is superior to enlightenment. I may be a lot of things, but I am not silly. I lived enlightenment for eleven years and irritation came up in me four times (once peeved and three time annoyed). These days I do not even get peeved ... and have not done so since 1992.

Now, four times in eleven years may not sound like much ... but it was enough to make me question. Also, there were three or four ‘bleed-throughs’ of fear from the sublimated passions in that period ... the evidence indicating the transcendent nature of the ASC became too much to ignore. I owe a lot to my companion at the time for her persistence in endeavouring to ‘unmask the guru’ (this is her verbatim – and very apt – terminology at the time).

RICHARD: After all, one has been incessantly mortified and forced to be unassuming – ‘don’t get uppity’ or ‘who do you think you are?’ or ‘know your place in life’ – and one has always secretly felt in one’s heart of hearts that one is foreordained for greatness. Narcissism reigns supreme!

ALAN: Interesting this feeling that ‘one is foreordained for greatness’ – I suspect it is pretty universal. But, where does this tie in with ‘there must be something more to life than this?’, which is the memory of the PCE. Perhaps the difference is that even in the ‘enlightened state’, the ‘foreordained greatness’, which you used to be in, you still experienced ‘there must be something more to life than this?’

RICHARD: No, not ‘something more to life than this’ ... the prevailing feeling was that Life was completed and Death contained the next. The over-riding flavour of the ASC is being charged to carry out the ‘Sacred Mission’ commission ... and I often pondered: ‘Then what?’ (given that ‘Me’ would succeed where all others had failed ... when vanity meets conceit the resultant exaltation supplants sensibility). The pervasive impression was that not only the earth but the entire cosmos would pass away when the last person ‘came through’ ... it was all but a set-up so that we humans could realise who we really were. The next obvious question was again: ‘Then what?’ This is where there was no answer ... it was ‘Unknowable’ and would not become obvious/be revealed until after physical death. There was this whole question of ‘The Absolute’ ... even in the Enlightenment State there is still an unqualified and irreducible ‘Otherness’ – an unbridgeable gulf because of the body – even in Union and Oneness. It is this inviolate distance that preserves ‘The Sacred’ as being ‘Unknowable’ ... because there is the body.

RESPONDENT: I wonder Richard, was your meeting with the contemporary spiritual master in the lush seaside environment, which appears as reported to be on the level of a monologue originating in the mind we habitually call yours, an example of actual intimacy.

RICHARD: In an actual freedom, intimacy is not dependent upon the cooperation of the other. I experience an actual intimacy – a direct experiencing of the other – twenty four hours of the day irrespective of the other’s interest in themselves, in life and in their fellow human being’s suffering. It is an estimable condition to be in. Also, I do not suffer fools gladly – having been one myself for eleven years – and anyone living the altered state of consciousness known as spiritual enlightenment knows in their heart of hearts that they are wanking. They merely lack the intestinal fortitude to go all the way into extinction ... and so all the animosity and anguish continues. And thus, because they have feet of clay, the tide of human suffering rolls on unto the next century.

RESPONDENT: Yet, in its very verbosity, and impenetrable cohesion and monologueness, leaves me with the feeling that meeting this Richard in the actual reality of his idyllic seaside village would be a bit like being fucked by an actual steam train?

RICHARD: Only if you were an ‘Awakened Teacher’ who was actively propagating those ‘Tried and True’ psittacisms called ‘Teachings’ that perpetuate all the wars and rapes and murders and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicide for ever and a day. You would indubitably be stopped short in your tracks ... those well-worn tracks leading from illusion to delusion. Eastern mystical philosophy is an extremely complex and complicated metaphysics that does nothing to eliminate identity – both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul – and in fact, if one were to apply his eastern-derived religious and spiritual system, one’s self would be endorsed, enhanced, glorified and rewarded for staying in existence. If it were not for all the mayhem and misery, it would be entertainingly amusing ... for the self does not exist in actuality. All this monstrous behaviour is about something fictitious. The self – and the Self – are only psychological and psychic entities ... phantasms in mundane reality and in a super-charged Reality. It is all much ado about nothing. However, it is no laughing matter ... it is far too serious when appalling suffering is concerned. It behoves one to put aside the selfish ego-driven and soul-ridden will to survive and look again at what exactly is occurring. One will no longer be entranced by the bewitching promises proffered so alluringly by these self-appointed guardians of virtue and morality ... all self-serving, mind you. It is a must that one establish one’s integrity and set about ridding oneself of any psychological and psychic entity whatsoever.

For there is nothing harmless about this divinity – this is a very self-centred and self-seeking approach to life on earth – something that all metaphysical peoples are guilty of. The quest to secure one’s Immortality is unambiguously selfish ... peace-on-earth is readily sacrificed for the supposed continuation of the imagined soul after physical death. So much for their humanitarian ideals of peace, goodness, altruism, philanthropy and humaneness. All Religious and Spiritual and Mystical Quests amount to nothing more than a self-centred urge to perpetuate oneself for ever and a day. All Religious and Spiritual and Mystical Leaders fall foul of this existential dilemma. They pay lip-service to the notion of self-sacrifice – weeping crocodile tears at noble martyrdom – whilst selfishly pursuing the Eternal After-Life. The root cause of all the ills of humankind can be sheeted home to this single, basic fact: the overriding importance of the survival of ‘self’. All this gets played out in the human psyche ... and not in this actual world. For those rare few who succeed, their reward for narcissism is bliss, ecstasy, euphoria, love, compassion, beauty, truth and a few other glittering baubles ... which also only have an existence in the human psyche. But they do not get a ‘blithesome actuality’, for they are driven to ‘save the world’ and to ‘set mankind free’. Nor do they get an actual freedom from the Human Condition ... and certainly not peace-on-earth.

RICHARD: I can freely say that I, as I am today, did nothing to become free of the Human Condition. It was ‘I’ that did all the work ... ‘I’ self-immolated. And I am very pleased that ‘I’ did that. I am not proud because I did nothing to earn commendation ... it was ‘I’ that made this possible. Consequently I find myself here, in the world as-it-is, as this flesh and blood body. A vast stillness lies all around, a perfection that is abounding with purity. Beneficence, an active kindness, overflows in all directions, imbuing everything with unimaginable fairytale-like quality. For me to be able to be here at all is a blessing that only ‘I’ could grant, because nobody else could do it for me. I am full of admiration for the ‘me’ that dared to do such a thing. I owe all that I experience now to ‘me’. I salute ‘my’ audacity. And what an adventure it was ... and still is. These are the wondrous workings of the exquisite quality of life – who would have it any other way? Thus I find myself to be this infinite and perfect physical universe experiencing itself as a sensate, reflective human being.

RESPONDENT: Very beautiful. I mean it. I can sense it ... ‘vast stillness lies all around, a perfection that is abounding with purity’; ‘Beneficence, an active kindness, overflows in all directions’. Yet, again ... this to me is how I understand enlightenment to be.

RICHARD: This description (‘a vast stillness lies all around, a perfection that is abounding with purity; beneficence, an active kindness, overflows in all directions’) could very well be a description of the Enlightened State Of Being, yes. Religiosity, spirituality, mysticality and metaphysicality in general does not have the corner on descriptive phrases ... what these words describe has no copyright.

RESPONDENT: I (unlike you), do not understand enlightenment to be an altered state of consciousness.

RICHARD: This is not only my classification ... I am following the generally accepted convention around the world.

RESPONDENT: I understand enlightenment to be the state where nothing is in the way of ‘this infinite and perfect physical universe experiencing itself as a sensate, reflective human being’.

RICHARD: I would be pleased if you could refer me to your sources – I would be delighted to meet such a person – as I have never read any Enlightened Being describing themselves this way ... they say that it is they who are infinite.

RESPONDENT: Richard, are we just having linguistic issues here.

RICHARD: No.

RESPONDENT: Or are you just wanting so very much to be the only one who has entered the ‘adventure’.

RICHARD: As I said (above) I would be delighted to meet another person who experiences this as I do ... it would be such fun comparing notes.

RESPONDENT: Or am I still missing something here?

RICHARD: Yes ... enlightenment is when ‘I’ as ego dies and ‘me’ as soul transmogrifies into the ‘Eternal Self’ or ‘Original Face’ or ‘Buddha Mind’ ... or some-such identity. This identity (that I am calling ‘me’ as soul for convenience) is the ‘consciousness’ which reincarnates until liberation and then one has freed themselves from the cycle of birth and death and rebirth. It is ‘me’ as soul that makes this world of people, things and events into a grim and glum reality ... and causes one to seek the ultimate state in a metaphysical realm.

Whereas, when ‘me’ as soul likewise dies ... the ultimate is here at this place in infinite space, now at this moment in eternal time. It is this physical universe that is infinite and eternal ... not me. I am mortal.

RESPONDENT: Richard, I would like to follow up something with you. In the previous series of exchanges between us, I focused on your article about your meeting with a contemporary ‘guru’. I had some issues and I raised them with you. I would like to go now, right back to the beginning. What I would like to know is how much of the article was reporting actual conversation between you and Guru X, and how much was your reflection on that conversation. That distinction is not clear to me. As I read the article it is not clear where actual reality ends and where your reflection begins. As you read the article is it perhaps clear to you what was said and what was thought? One possibility is that all the words in the article were spoken between the two of you. Is that the case? Each and every word? I need to know this so that I can get a handle on the facts. I love facts and in fact you are influencing me greatly to honour the efficacy and joy of living in a factual world. Thank you for that.

RICHARD: The article is expressive prose designed to convey the silliness of the central point essential to the maintenance of the Enlightened State Of Being: ‘He who says he knows does not know’ ... or as I put it: ‘Ignorance is bliss’. As such, it is in no way a verbatim transcript of the spoken conversation – there are some transcripts of taped conversations on my Web Page – and is not intended to be ... what is verbatim is the five article headings. The vast majority of the article is me pontificating about the hidden under-belly of divinity ... the diabolical.

It would take far too long for me to go through it sentence by sentence and delineate what was actually spoken and what is lyrical prose. I guess that a general rule of thumb would be that wherever there is a ‘He said’ or a ‘I said’ then that would be actual.

I freely acknowledge that my writing is flowery – which is a polite way of saying ‘convoluted and over-ornamental’ as an editor once explained to me – but that is an idiosyncrasy that brings me great delight. I make no apologies for an extravagant exuberance with words ... I am conveying the lavish exhilaration of life itself.

RESPONDENT: Then, one big question arises. This is your attitude to Rajneesh.

RICHARD: I am not attacking Mr. Mohan ‘Rajneesh’ Jain per se ... it is the Altered State Of Consciousness called ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ that is the issue. I use quotes from any Guru or God-Man to demonstrate my point. I am doing a relentless exposé on all ‘Awakened Teachers’, on their ‘Holy Teachings’ ... and the ‘Sacred Source’ of their ‘Ancient Wisdom’ (that which the finger is pointing to). In actualism all of the previous world-views – human’s understandings of ‘humanity’ – are seen to be erroneous. Especially erroneous are the metaphysical solutions to the plight of ‘humanity’ ... however long such solutions may have been held in awe, venerated and viewed as being the ‘Eternal Truth’. The solutions – ‘The Truth’, ‘The Good’, ‘Love Agapé’, ‘Divine Compassion’ and so on – that these ‘Blessed Ones’ have brought into the world are all the more insidious because no one, it seems, dares to question them. Nobody, it appears, equates the resultant problems, that these ‘Gods On Earth’ have managed to produce, with the solutions. And the resultant problems are horrific: Religious Wars, for example, have beset this planet for thousands of years ... for about as long as these Masters and Messiahs, Avatars and Redeemers, Saviours and Sages, Priests and Prophets, Saints and Shamans and have been around, in fact, peddling their perverted delusions.

RESPONDENT: This is your understanding about Rajneesh.

RICHARD: Of course it is my understanding ... I do not get my information carved in stone tablets from on high. I can think for myself.

RESPONDENT: A very still self is a self that is not.

RICHARD: If it is a self that is not, then there is no way it can be described as a ‘very, very, still self’.

RESPONDENT: You knew what I meant.

RICHARD: I know very well what you meant. You meant what you wrote: ‘a very, very still self’ . Look, if you do want Love (Spiritual Enlightenment) and not go all the way to an actual freedom, then being still is not going to do the trick. This is because not only can you not find Love ... Love does not come to you, either. The way it works is that when you become love then Love is You. Here is how to be Love:

1. First, look deep within yourself, past the emotions, into the deeper feelings – the core of your being – for there you will find intense human love.
2. Identify totally as this love – live it as being it fully every moment of your day – and surrender your will to existence itself.
3. Your identity as ‘me’ as soul will transmogrify itself into the Absolute.
4. You will then realise that this is your True Self ... the ‘Me’ that exists for all Eternity.
5. You will then be Love.

It is quite easy, really.

RICHARD: Maybe – just maybe – you have been sucked in badly.

RESPONDENT: And maybe, just maybe, I have not. Have you thought that you may be sucked into a self-invented crusade of ‘let’s pay daddy Krishnamurti back for making me feel insecure’?

RICHARD: Why does working toward a fellow human being’s individual peace-on-earth – which would lead to global peace – have to be a ‘self-invented crusade of let’s pay daddy Krishnamurti back for making me feel insecure’ ? Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti never made me feel insecure ... enlightenment was something spontaneously seen and understood without any prior spiritual knowledge whatsoever for me. I had never heard the words ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘Nirvana’ and so on until 1982 when talking to a man about my breakthrough into freedom via the death of ‘myself’ in September 1981. He listened – he questioned me rigorously until well after midnight – and then solemnly declared me to be ‘Enlightened’. I had to ask him what that was, such was my ignorance of all things spiritual. He – being a nine-year spiritual seeker fresh from his latest trip to India – gave me a book to read by someone called Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti. That was to be the beginning of what was to become a long learning curve of all things religious, spiritual, mystical and metaphysical for me. I studied all this because I sought to understand what other peoples had made of such spontaneous experiences and to find out where human endeavour had been going wrong. I thus found out via personal experience where I had been going wrong for eleven years ... self-aggrandisement – as in ‘I AM love’ – is so seductive.

It has been – and still is – a great trip.

RESPONDENT: And now you want to say that YOU have done it, right?

RICHARD: Yes. I lived as that ‘supreme intelligence’ (only I called it ‘The Absolute’) for eleven years. Then – seeing the delusion – I went beyond the state of being called enlightenment into a condition I choose to call actual freedom. I call it ‘actual’ because it is physical and not metaphysical ... ‘being’ itself is extinguished.

RESPONDENT: There are also hundreds of others who all say they’ve ‘done it’ also. Are you sure YOU aren’t interpreting him in your mind according to what you think he meant – as you are accusing me of?

RICHARD: I am sure ... I lived enlightenment for eleven years and had plenty of time to examine it from the inside. I also studied what many, many others had written and listened to audio tapes and watched video tapes. I lived the actual freedom that lies beyond spiritual enlightenment for five years before going public. I could not be more sure.

RESPONDENT: Has it occurred to you that what you see in his quote may reflect what you believe, just as others may see in it what they believe?

RICHARD: Oh yes ... it occurred to me for eleven years that we had all got it wrong. Now I know.

RESPONDENT: Are the words really self-explanatory?

RICHARD: Yes ... the word ‘coffee-cup’, for example, refers to that small container that coffee is drunk out of. The word ‘here’ literally means ‘this physical place in space’ – unless one is a mystic – and the word ‘now’ literally means ‘this moment in time’ ... unless one is spiritual. The word ‘intelligence’ literally means ‘the human brain thinking and reflecting’ ... unless one is enlightened.

RESPONDENT: You do not see that YOU have created the idea of ‘mystical values’ and are imposing that on the words of another.

RICHARD: I have done nothing of the sort. It is well-known that these are mystical values both in Eastern mysticism and Western mysticism ... can we lift the level of discussion a trifle?

RESPONDENT: You are good at that, very good at it: Defining another through your own ideas, then accusing them of being what you have defined them as.

RICHARD: You are attempting to defend the indefensible here by resorting to an undergraduate debating trick. It is well-known that ‘truth or reality or bliss or God or beauty or love’ are revered mystical values.

RESPONDENT: As far as I am concerned, you are entitled to assess me in any way you wish. If you see Krishnamurti in what I say, that is your affair. I’m not here to justify anything to you. I’m here to hold an intelligent discussion which keeps getting thwarted by your obsession with Krishnamurti and your attempt to denounce him through me.

RICHARD: Not so ... I am denouncing the altered state of consciousness called spiritual enlightenment ... Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti just happens to be the exponent of this state most people on this Mailing List are familiar with. If this was a Mr. Barry Long Mailing List I would be using his quotes to demonstrate my points.

RESPONDENT: You have absolutely no means to know the state of mind of ‘Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti’ nor anyone else.

RICHARD: I have indeed ... I lived enlightenment for eleven years. Like recognises like.

RESPONDENT: You have defined ‘enlightenment’ according to some notion you have that people are caught up in ‘altered states of consciousness’, and are suggesting that because you have defined their experiences through your own definition, that they must, indeed, have fallen short of your own ‘enlightened’ definition of their experiences.

RICHARD: Not so ... enlightenment is an altered state of consciousness that is reasonably consistent in its characteristics around the world irregardless of race, age or gender. There are cultural variations, of course, but they are differences in degree and not kind. I can usually recognise where someone talks from their own on-going experience of enlightenment and not from book-learning. It is not my definition ... there is a generally accepted criteria.

RESPONDENT: And worse, you refuse to see this action as projection. It might even be wishful thinking. You have imposed your own beliefs onto what you have read by others and have convinced yourself that you know what was their state of mind. To me, that is self-deception at its worst.

RICHARD: My word, you do go on ... do you not have any confidence in your ability to discriminate between a genuinely enlightened person and a charlatan?

RESPONDENT: You simply cannot define the reality of others according to what you think you see and, from there, what you think they saw.

RICHARD: Are you trying to say that you are no judge of character? How on earth do you operate and function in the world? Of course you evaluate ... this is New Age nonsense.

RESPONDENT: You may be just as deluded as you think they are.

RICHARD: No ... but I was for eleven years.

RESPONDENT: Is enlightenment a ‘self’-ish desire? Isn’t to be enlightened also a rational to be prejudice of others – a promotion of ‘self’?

RICHARD: Yes, it is self-aggrandisement ... narcissism to the hilt. Unitary perception means: ‘I am everything and everything is Me’ ... which is easily translated as ‘I am God’. Before the recent influx of Eastern religious and spiritual thought and belief into the West, such delusional beliefs found one being institutionalised. Nowadays such a person is considered by main-stream society to be belonging to the ‘Lunatic Fringe’. Of course, they conveniently overlook the fact that their God – Mr. Yeshua the Nazarene – was one of them.

RESPONDENT: An unitary perception is an observance of oneself as an integral ... one is the world, the universe ... in time and movement.

RICHARD: It rather depends upon whether you mean by ‘integral’ either ‘essential to completeness’ or ‘lacking nothing essential’. As the universe does not need you to be complete, so I am assuming you mean that you are ‘lacking nothing essential’.

RESPONDENT: This is not a perception of being one with the universe, an egotistical delusion, (where ‘I am everything and everything is Me’ ... which is easily translated as ‘I am God’) but rather integral.

RICHARD: If this is indeed the case, why do you write the exact same thing as being your condition in your first sentence? Viz.: ‘one is the world, the universe’ . Take that notion a few short solipsistic steps further and you will be proclaiming yourself like Mr. Franklin Jones, for example. It is a slippery slope to embark upon, this ‘unitary perception’ business.

RESPONDENT: One is of the puzzle, therefore one is the puzzle, one is not separate from the puzzle. Can one know ‘the puzzle’, ‘the painting’, when one is part of it? (Painting is the better metaphor for the scenery is in constant change.)

RICHARD: Oh good ... you are meaning that you are part of the whole and not the whole itself. I take it that you mean ‘integral’ as in the ‘integrity’ commonly referred to in psychology when they speak of a ‘well-adjusted personality’ as being that of one who has integrated all the conflicting demands of self and society into a healthy ego.

If so, then no ... one can never know the puzzle, the painting.

RESPONDENT: My perception that one only perceives ‘knowing’ when in a perception of a separation. Where the observer is the observed, the experiencer the experienced ... there is an unitary perception that is only of observation and listening – not in proclamation, definition, or determination that comes in the separate.

RICHARD: Whoops, we are back to unitary perception again. Where the ‘observer is the observed’ and the ‘experiencer is the experienced’ you are standing on that slippery slope into solipsism once again. You are saying, in effect, that the truly wise person is the one who says: ‘I do not know’.

This type of thinking has been going on for centuries.

RESPONDENT: Those who need an answer need a saviour, need a tangible God or substitute agent of denial and safety.

RICHARD: Unless one needs an answer with all of one’s being – it is that urgent – one will never live fully. One will never be here at this moment in time and this place in space. One will never be free from the Human Condition. One will never live this peace-on-earth that is already always here.

One needs to know like one has never needed to know before.

RICHARD: Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti clearly stated that love is not an emotion or sentiment. It is not ... it is passion. In fact he repeatedly stressed passion as being essential ... and passion is an affective state. [quote] ‘Love is compassion, passion. Passion for everything’. [end quote]. Any state of being is an affective state ... that is what a ‘state of being’ means. It is not sensate or cognitive, so that only leaves the affective ... unless you want to suggest that it was the esoteric, the psychic, the occult, as being what he was referring to.

RESPONDENT: It is hidden from the perspective of thought. Is that esoteric or occult?

RICHARD: If it is affective, intuitive ... yes; if it is sensate, apperceptive ... no.

RESPONDENT: The opening of the heart is part of it, as the affective is closer to pure being.

RICHARD: It is not ‘closer to’ ... it is pure being. When the ‘I’ as ego dissolves, one’s sense of identity makes a quantum leap from the head to the heart. This is to realise ‘pure being’ ... an oceanic sense of beatitude.

RESPONDENT: This is not a new discovery. It has been found to be what is by many others.

RICHARD: I could not agree more. Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti – the latest in a long line of saviours – was living in the metaphysical world whereas I live in the actual world. To become enlightened is to find a solution to the ills of humankind in a metaphysical dimension, and like all solutions found there, it does not work here on earth in this physical dimension. The Masters and Messiahs, the Saints and the Sages, the Avatars and the Saviours have had thousands of years to demonstrate the efficacy of their ‘Message’, their ‘Teachings’. There is still as much suffering now as there was then. The ‘Tried and True’ is the ‘Tried and Failed’. Unless this fact is thoroughly grasped, you will read anything I write in the same context as spiritual enlightenment and will be seen as merely more of the same old stuff.

It is not enlightenment that I am speaking of ... it is all about going beyond enlightenment into the actuality of being here on this very physical planet that is meandering about in a very actual universe. Not only must the ego dissolve (like his did) but the soul must die as well (which his did not).

Then one is here in this actual world – not the real world that five point eight billion people are living in – but the actual world that is accessible only when ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul become extinct.

RICHARD: For who is the observer that is busy being the observed? As ‘the observer is the observed’ is usually described with words like ‘unitary perception’ or ‘at one with everything’ , then it is an affective response ... a feeling of ‘being’. Who is this being? Not ‘I’ in the head as ego – for ‘choiceless awareness’ is indeed an egoless state – but ‘me’ in the heart.

RESPONDENT: This is your interpretation, but not at all what Krishnamurti said. Where does he speak of a ‘me’ in the heart? If there is a me that is apart feeling, the perception is not unitary.

RICHARD: We keep coming back to this sticking point again and again, unfortunately. I know full well that Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti never spoke of a ‘me’ residing in the heart ... he was obviously so engrossed in being holistic that he did not comprehend that holism – or oneness, wholeness – comes out of shifting identification to the affective.

As holism is the belief that the universe, and especially living nature, is correctly seen in terms of interacting wholes (as of living organisms) that are more than the mere sum of elementary particles, I would sincerely question what this something ‘more’ is. I would suggest that it is a projection of the ‘me’ in the heart into something non-physical, thus creating the impression that there is no ‘me’ there.

Then this ‘me’ would be as holistic as all get-out in the hope that no one would notice it sitting there – disguised as oneness – and still wreaking its mischief while waiting for physical death to release it into its true home beyond time and space ... for all eternity.

An ex-follower of Mr. Mohan ‘Rajneesh’ Jain wrote to me recently:

• ‘I remember when Rajneesh died, we selected a piece of marble and got an Indian stone mason in to chisel on it, ‘Never Born, Never Died, Only Visited This Planet ...’, as his epitaph on his tomb. He had dictated it to his secretary some months previously. It seemed curious for me at the time, because I had thought I had understood that the whole point of the spiritual search was the dissolution of the ‘self’. And here Rajneesh was proclaiming that he was only a visitor anyway, and even left a little hint that maybe he was somewhere else’.

RICHARD: The main trouble with enlightenment is that whilst the identity as ego dissolves, the identity as soul remains intact. No longer identifying as a personal ego-bound identity, one then identifies as an impersonal soul-bound identity ... ‘I am That’ or ‘I am God’ or ‘I am The Supreme’ or ‘I am The Absolute’ or ‘I am The Buddha’ and so on. This is the delusion, the mirage, the deception.

RESPONDENT: If there is someone that is enlightened that is duality is it not? The ‘someone’ is but image. Is an image enlightened?

RICHARD: Oh yes ... but let us make sure that we do not fall into that ‘it is only an image therefore nothing has to happen’ intellectual trap, eh? An enlightened person definitely has dissolved their ego.

RESPONDENT: See the circular nature of what is asserted? A person (ego) dissolves the ego and becomes enlightened. It may be that there is conditioning that has dissolved but there never was anyone apart from that conditioning to act upon it and proudly claim ‘I’ am free or enlightened. That idea of becoming is self-image, i.e.: ego.

RICHARD: Yet enlightened people have had something happen that sets them apart from the normal person ... and they say it is an ego-death. Why do you read Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti? Certainly not because he was your Mr. Normal now is it? It is because he was an enlightened man. He underwent an ego-death in 1922 ... all enlightened people can point to a single edifying moment – a date – when their ego died. Why is there all this quibbling about it? Until this fact is understood, then there is no purpose served in proceeding any further with a discussion.

The ‘ego-death’ that they speak of is the factor that sets them apart from normal people. This is not under dispute. What I am saying is that the death of ‘I’ as ego is to but go half-way ... the other half of the identity is ‘me’ as soul. When ‘me’ as soul like-wise dies ... then here is an actual freedom. No identity whatsoever.

RESPONDENT: If that occurs, ‘you’ are not. Everything is part of the formless.

RICHARD: When only the ‘I’ as ego dies ... then everything is ‘part of the formless’ , yes. It is called being enlightened. In fact, .000001 of the population have gone half-way into an actual freedom here on earth just like this. They then disseminate their wisdom for gullible aspirants to be persuaded to do like-wise. And so all the wars and rapes and murders and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicide go on for ever and a day.

RESPONDENT: I do not know many people who can claim, even arguably, to have had a true transformative experience with Love Agape and Divine Compassion. So I wonder if these are truly ‘tried and failed’.

RICHARD: Some enterprising person did a head count last year and came up with an estimate of 0.0000001 of the population. The ‘Tried and True’ has had at least 5,000 years of recorded history and maybe 50,000 years of prehistory to deliver the goods so glibly promised ... that is quite a dismal track record. There is just as much animosity and anguish now as ’way back then ... how long would a less glamorous experiment get to run its course before being discarded for a different model?

RESPONDENT: Well, I don’t have any idea how many people have actually experienced this. I have no reason to believe or doubt your number of 0.00001 percent.

RICHARD: It was Mr. Ken Wilber (writing in Mr. Andrew Cohen’s ‘What is Enlightenment’ magazine) who claimed, with some pride, that only about a thousand Enlightened Ones had emerged from 2,500 years of devout effort by millions of Buddhist monks. His estimate was, therefore, 0.0000001 of the population. Whilst the exact figure will never be known (even the 0.0000001 of the population argue amongst themselves as to which one of them is the bee’s knees or not) it seemed to me to be a reasonable approximation to take as a working hypothesis. Whatever the figure, it is a very, very small percentage ... hence it is useless as being a practical way to achieve peace on earth.

RESPONDENT: Furthermore, the people who did experience that may be having a grand time.

RICHARD: Aye ... being enlightened is indeed a ‘grand time’ – this I would not dispute – but I am, as I have always been, only interested in peace on earth.

RESPONDENT: Maybe everyone picks their own level, and you literally live in a different world depending on the level on which you choose to live.

RICHARD: Speaking personally, I choose peace-on-earth over every other consideration.

RESPONDENT: I don’t know. You claim you do know – so how do you know?

RICHARD: Because (a) I was normal for 34 years ... and it is the pits; and because (b) I was abnormal for 11 years ... and it sucks. To explain briefly: in 1981, ‘I’ as ego went beyond normal (ego death) resulting in the abnormal state; in 1992 ‘me’ as soul went beyond abnormal (soul death) resulting in the third alternative ... which I choose to call an actual freedom.

RESPONDENT No. 9: Who is it that determines that only 1 in 10 million becomes enlightened?

RICHARD: I would say what it rather than ‘who’ determines it ... and it is possibly a genetic predisposition. Just like schizophrenia, for example, it has something to do with the ability of the individual’s brain to hallucinate. The cultural milieu and environmental pressures would also come into play ... family tensions and so on. Plus the general insanity of the Human Condition.

RESPONDENT: I would also ask, ‘How do we know that about 0.0000001 or so of the population have become enlightened?

RICHARD: Some enterprising individual did a head count – I do not have his name to hand at the moment – but I could get it for you if you really want it. An associate of mine found it on the Internet somewhere ... on the Mr Andrew Cohen site, if I remember. The next time I see him I will ask him who and where exactly he got it from.

RESPONDENT: If we go by standard terminology of ‘enlightenment’ do we know that there are a number of entities who live in oblivion and not revealing their ‘enlightened’ nature?

RICHARD: By ‘standard terminology’ they would not qualify as being fully enlightened ... for it is deemed selfishness to sit in ‘Lotus Land’ and do nothing about the plight of one’s fellow human beings.

RESPONDENT: The question as to what is the nature of the existential ground will not be answered through debate.

RICHARD: Speaking personally, the nature of ‘the existential ground’ was experienced night and day for eleven years ... and I prattled on throughout this period about ‘not knowing’ and ‘that which is, is unknowable’ and ‘cease becoming and start being’ and ‘being is timeless and deathless’ and so on and so on.

RESPONDENT: The experiencing here is that authentic mind is impersonal and not of the body or brain.

RICHARD: I do not doubt that you are experiencing it ... and you report experiencing accurately. Indeed the experiencing of this ‘existential ground’ does not appear to be of the ‘body or brain’ ... yet without the flesh and blood body called No. 12 there would be no experiencing of that which is ‘impersonal’!

RESPONDENT: It is not touched by thought and hence it has no opposite.

RICHARD: Indeed ... when a would-be mystic tips upon the instincts – which are both savage (fear and aggression) and tender (nurture and desire) – one grabs for the tender (the ‘good’ side) and blows them up all out of proportion. If one succeeds in this self-aggrandising hallucination – epitomised by self-deprecating humility – one starts talking twaddle dressed up as sagacity such as: ‘There is a good that knows no evil’ or ‘There is a love that knows no opposite’ or ‘There is a compassion that sorrow has never touched’ and so on. It is a dream state born out of ‘being’.