Actual Freedom – Selected Correspondence by Topic

RESPONDENT: Check this forum out: The Illusion of Enlightenment: (http://lightgate.net/illusion/enlightenment.mv).

RICHARD: I visited the forum – I back-tracked through all the posts submitted from the very beginning – then went through the other forum you brought to my attention some time back ... searching through the archives for wherever the moderator’s name appeared. I then explored, at random, different aspects of the entire ‘Light Mind’ Web-Site that all these forum subsist under. It would appear to be the cyber-space equivalent of a social club for aging ex-devotees of Mr. Franklin Jones (going by the lubricated cosiness displayed in the member’s ‘get-together’ photo-shoot section).

RESPONDENT: Interesting stuff.

RICHARD: Yes, it is interesting to read what peoples do when mysticality has not produced the goods as promised. More often than not, after about twelve or so years without success on the self-realisation path, the typical spiritual aspirant has a tendency towards hopelessness, despair and cynicism ... then an anarchistic nihilism is often the only intellectually acceptable substitute for the gullible belief, fervent faith, uncritical trust and heart-felt hope that their credulous certitude was comprised of. Or else such ‘spiritual burn-out’ oft-times results in a zealous resurgence of one’s culturally-sanctioned religion ... the internet has many ‘anti-cult’ pages which are very, very popular.

RESPONDENT: The sentiments expressed by the moderator are very similar to where I found myself until about a year ago. Had seen through the hype and ultimate hollowness of enlightenment, yet had not begun to see that the ‘self’ is a physically arising structure and the Truth, the spiritual dimensions of self, and Reality are spin offs of the self’s immortality project.

RICHARD: Ha ... I like that expression: ‘the self’s immortality project’ ... and what an importunate ‘project’ it is, eh?

RESPONDENT: For these people the tried and true is tried and failed, but the core self is still seen as transmortal, rather than mortal.

RICHARD: For all their disaffected pessimism, they cannot help themselves ... I notice that they continue to post quotes from Awakened Masters to validate their various substitute solutions. I often say that if one persistently proposes a metaphysical cause one will stubbornly seek a metaphysical solution ... such as ‘secular mysticism’ (whatever that means). And so all the suffering goes on and on ... which is why peoples persistently choosing for the metaphysical origin of ‘self’ in the face of all the biological evidence is a subject that interests me greatly. There is a discussion currently happening, on another Mailing List I have written extensively to in the past, regarding human aggression and animal aggression wherein the animal state is somehow deemed to be ‘innocent’ (animals cannot think).

Nevertheless, the twentieth century may very well come to be seen historically as a water-shed ... the dawning of the dissolution of the ‘Savage Ages’.

RESPONDENT: My understanding was not that God and I were separate, but that God/I was a continuum of limited/limitless, mortal, immortal, spirit, matter. The ego I was none other than the God the ego was supposedly contracting away from.

RICHARD: In spiritual enlightenment the ‘contracted self’ grandiosely inflates like all get-out and becomes the ‘expansive self’ ... capitalised as ‘The Self’ by whatever name. Mr. Franklin Jones’ teaching is basically Hinduism ... and India itself is a living example of the abject failure of thousands of years of devotional spiritual living. To idolise, adulate and worship one’s fellow human being is patently pathetic ... it is all oh-so-obvious once one sees it in action; their very own words blatantly say it all ... and so eloquently. Viz.:

• Mr. Franklin Jones: ‘I am here in my lifetime to change the course of human history ... no one on earth has this Mission, this Intention. No one! ...This Work is not your business. I am just telling you that I am in my mood, and it is going to start. I have had enough ... now it begins. Let all beings be purified. Let them all come to me in the lifetime of this body. Yes. It is going to be wonderful. It is going to be terrible. I believe that before this body dies, all mankind will acknowledge me. I am about to make my move, and the terror will pass. It will be much less terrible than you would have realized otherwise. If I did not come, the earth would be destroyed. You prayed for the millennium and the Judgment. I am here. Let it begin ... we have about twenty years ... it will not necessarily be easy after those twenty years, but the first twenty years are very critical. Very. And it is going to be very difficult. Very ... Let us submit to the terrible ordeal that will serve all humanity, all five billion of those slugs who know nothing of me and who must find me out, who must find me out. I Am the One Who has been expected’. (New Year 1984).

Speaking personally, this ‘slug’ stopped waiting for [insert whatever name here] nineteen years ago and got off his backside and applied the DIY method. The much longed-for golden age has finally been ushered in ... and it is being done by the peoples concerned. There was no need for a ‘Supernatural Agency’ all along. The human condition is such that it can readily respond to the self-help solution; the ability is within the human character to fix things up for itself. The intervention of some ‘Paranormal Paramour’ is never going to happen anyway, for there is no such creature. Human beings are on their own, free to manage their own affairs as they see fit. Whenever one thinks about it, would one have it any other way? If that fictitious ‘Almighty Creature’ were to come sweeping in on a cloud, blowing trumpets and putting everything to rights, would not one feel cheated? Would not one question why human beings had to wait so long upon the capricious whim of some self-righteous God or Goddess who could have acted long ago?

It is all nonsense, upon sober reflection!

RESPONDENT: There is a large tolerance for your own pain and suffering, not because you are too stupid to notice it, but because the tried and true methods for relieving your separation and suffering are just another set of power games.

RICHARD: Yes, power is the nub of the issue ... specifically psychic power.

RESPONDENT: The worst power games I’ve been involved in, that is for sure.

RICHARD: This is because, in order to become enlightened, one surrenders to the ‘Supreme Power’ that lies ever-unmanifest behind the throne ... ‘not my will O Lord but Thy Will’. Subsequently, the disciple surrenders in turn to the ‘living embodiment’ and the hierarchy unfolds unto its now-predictable outcome. All the while the devotee energy-base is growing through proselytism and conversion (the living disciples are the source of the deity’s power), the master is battling it out in the psychic dimension (the struggle betwixt ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ has raged on throughout the millennia) ... whilst the gods and goddesses (the unmanifest power) fight for supremacy among themselves. The more disciples the more powerful the god or goddess ... and when the last living person believing in a particular deity dies that ‘immortal’ deity dies too. Thus the deity needs the master (as a channel for its fuel supply) as much as the master needs the deity (as a means of salvation from this ‘vale of tears’)... and the master needs the disciple (to appease the deity’s insatiable demands) as much as the disciple needs the master (to obviate personal amenability). Although very, very real for the participants (or rather the protagonists) none of the entire shemozzle is actual: if it were not for all the hurt and hurting engendered it would be immensely hilarious ... it being but a product of the intuitive/ imaginative facility born of the instinctual survival patterns.

It took me eleven years to extricate myself from the whole sick and sorry mess ... I have no power or powers whatsoever.

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’).

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?

RESPONDENT: I am confused here. You do not deny the facts. But why then undertake this ‘esoteric’ journey to nothingness? Is it because of going beyond facts due to boredom?

RICHARD: ‘Due to boredom’, eh? That is actually quite humorous ... maybe it is as good a motive as any!

No, it is not a case of going beyond facts ... going beyond fiction, more like. Shall I put it this way? The enlightened masters state – quite correctly – that normal people are living in an illusion ... right? This means that every-day reality is a dream, a figment of the imagination ... the real world is not what it appears to be. Okay, so far?

So, they say, it is possible to ‘wake up’ from this dream and realise who you really are ... As Mr. Ventkataraman Aiyer (aka Ramana) says: ‘There are two ‘I’s ... the self and The Self’. Realise that you are ‘The Self’ – existing for all eternity – and you will have realised your ‘True Nature’ ... you will be residing in the ‘Greater Reality’. This ‘Reality’ – by whatever name – I discovered to be a delusion born out of the illusion of everyday reality. And it is all to do with the persistence of identity.

‘I’ – as ego – dissolve and one transfers one’s identity, via a quantum leap, into being ‘Me’ ... by whatever name. ‘I’ survive, triumphant now, for ‘I’ am one with everything and everyone. ‘I’ manifest Love Agapé and Divine Compassion and tout ‘The Truth’ all around the world to a suffering humanity. Some are so deluded – Mr. Franklin Jones, for example – that the ‘I am everything and everything is Me’ Oceanic feeling of Oneness and Unity translates as: ‘I am God’, or ‘I am The Supreme Being’ or whatever ‘Being’ one may name it (capitalisation is nearly always important, you will notice).

RICHARD: Mostly, however, the Eastern mystical ‘terms of reference’ allow for full realisation of one’s Divine identity.

ALAN: This still does not explain why some become such extremes. What do you think differs Franklin Jones from a Buddha or a Barry Long, or any others? Is it just ‘terms of reference’?

RICHARD: If the only examples of massive self-delusion were the likes of Mr. Mervin Irani (aka Meher Baba), for instance, then it could be put down to ‘terms of reference’ in that he and his brethren are immersed in a culture that supports that purview. Mr. Franklin Jones, however, being born and raised in a milieu that does not/did not allow for deification demonstrates that the motivation lies deeper ... deep within the Human Condition. I refer to the psychic realm, of course ... an area that you have some demurral about.

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RICHARD: Mr. Franklin Jones, however, being born and raised in a milieu that does not/did not allow for deification demonstrates that the motivation lies deeper ... deep within the Human Condition. I refer to the psychic realm, of course ... an area that you have some demurral about.

ALAN: From the little I know of Franklin Jones, he has become more and more extreme with time. A friend of mine knew him and was quite a follower, when he was living in a flat in London. Perhaps it is his subsequent study of eastern spiritualism, which has caused his current view that he is god personified?

RICHARD: He certainly studied eastern spiritualism ... and his studies confirmed what he had known all his life: that he was an Avatar (a God-Man not a Man-God). He was born as ‘The Bright’, according to his own autobiography, and knew that he was God until three of four years old (I am writing this from memory) whereupon he ‘forgot’ who he was so that he would have to ‘struggle’ for his divinity like any other person ... so as to show the way. He was not forced to take birth because of Karma but freely took on a human form out of compassion for suffering humankind. His autobiography ‘At The Knee Of Listening’ is a revealing read about the mentality of a messiah.

There is a lot of ‘knowledge’ contained in the human psyche.