Actual Freedom – Selected Correspondence by Topic

As he stood there, with the slowly-setting sun streaming yellow through the wide-open French doors leading out onto the brick-paved patio, he was quite aware that a similar scene had taken place only the day before, plus how he had managed to keep his act together only by the exigency of abruptly vacating the scene, until the barely suppressed anger she had invoked in him had subsided enough to return; he was acutely aware, also, that she had his number and, as far as she was concerned, it was only a matter of time before he too succumbed to the same-old same-old; and as he stood there he was uncomfortably aware that the same anger of yesterday was rising, slowly but inexorably, from the solar plexus up toward the rib-cage diaphragm.

There was no way he was going to suppress it—he’d had a lifetime of the failure of the ‘stiff upper lip’ approach—and he was damn’d if he was going to express it, either (for then this four-foot-eleven female would have triumphed over this six-foot-two male yet again); the vision of having to vacate the scene once more—and again and again off into a sombrely-looming future—was not at all an attractive option, yet, if all else failed, he supposed he could always make the unseemly dash to the door.

Thus he stood there still, despite feeling the anger rising ever upward, through the rib-cage diaphragm, and now suffusing the thoracic region with its all-too-familiar temptation.

And he could see her eyes begin to gleam, even through the wrathful glare which had transfixed him all the while, and he just knew she was zeroing in for the kill; his own anger was mounting, ever-simmering and seething it was brimming at the region of the lower throat by now; her face was flushed with purple, with nostrils quite distended, and spittle flecked her livid lips as her shrilling rose to fever pitch; he had left it too late to beat a hasty retreat and his throat muscles quivered as the brimming anger shimmered and shifted into a pre-shout mode born of old and ... and, wonder of wonders, that oh-so-familiar throat-muscle quivering skipped a beat or two and began to ease!

With a rapidly-mounting amazement and delight, he marvelled at the fact that he had, in some way, neither suppressed nor succumbed and that he had finally freed himself of domination by this four-foot-whatever fleshly package of seething anger and hatred that had usurped the mother of his and her children.

And as the slowly-setting sun streams golden from the west another world entirely hoves into view.

Pristine and pure, ever-fresh and new, peerless perfection permeates all and sundry, without exception, and he knows with a certainty that his life is never going to be the same ever again.

Ain’t life grand! (Richard's Personal Web-page, Peeved Tool-tip). 

Richard (21st of January, 2016):

Bullying in childhood is all-too-common—the identity inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body all those years ago fell victim to the bully-boys and feisty-femmes due in no small degree to being a particularly sensitive feeling-being—incurring all manner of childhood hurts. Yet, even so, anyone who carries those hurt feelings, no matter how deeply felt, over into adulthood (and stubbornly nurses them in their adult bosom) is surely yet to have earned the title ‘mature adult’.

Speaking personally, the feeling-being inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body all those years ago instantaneously rid ‘himself’ of the bulk of those school-age hurts and slights—whilst sitting out in the sunshine one fine morning, putting pencil to paper in order to finally record those dastardly events for posterity, as per a long-held and cherished ambition to do so at length—via seeing-in-a-flash that, as it was simply not possible to ever physically be a child again (and thus juvenilely susceptible to not only those bully-boys and feisty-femmes but any enabling teachers and principals as well), there was absolutely no need whatsoever to continue nursing them as a carryover grudge. It soon became increasingly apparent, thereafter, how those childhood hurts had been vital to the maintenance of the righteous indignation which fuelled ‘his’ plaints of injustice (a.k.a. ‘unfairness’) and, thus, ‘his’ mission to bring justice (a.k.a. ‘fairness’) to the world.

Also, with the dissolution of those childhood hurts the (deeply felt) need for any aggressive tit-for-tat modus vivendi also vanishes—leaving one free to treat all others as fellow human beings rather than as adversaries to gain dominion over.

In biblical terms tit-for-tat is equivalent to the aggressive Old Testament “an eye for an eye” and “a tooth for a tooth” (as contrasted to the pacifistic New Testament “turn the other cheek” injunction).

When the identity inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body in 1981 took ‘his’ first steps on what has become known as the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom from the human condition (i.e., from identity in toto) ‘he’ quickly ascertained that whilst ‘he’ could not stop people giving offence and/or being offensive what ‘he’ could stop was taking offence and/or being retributively offensive as ‘he’ knew of the tit-for-tat nature of the ever-recurring wars between neighbouring tribes in the New Guinea Highlands (what they called “pay-back” warfare) which stretched back millennia in the past such that the specific nature of the initial offence was lost forever in the mists of time.

What ‘he’ also knew of was the archetypal “fightin’ & feudin’ hillbillies” of legendary North American folklore—who also typically knew not of what had started it all back whenever—and the break-up of the modern nation of Yugoslavia is another example of inherited ancestral scores being settled.

Obviously, someone had to ‘break the chain’ of such never-ending tit-for-tat feuding—else the term ‘mature adult’ was bereft of meaning—and ‘he’ could see that only unilateral action would do the trick. Accordingly, ‘he’ conceived of being akin to a sponge—absorbing all the rudeness, all the insults, all the slights (no knee-jerk reactionary rudeness; no retaliatory retorts; no keeping score, even, of past incidences)—and duly ‘wringing it out’, if necessary, from time-to-time were ‘he’ ever to become too full to absorb any more (which latter ploy was, curiously enough, never necessary).

And it worked!

My usage of the word ‘conceived’ in the above “tit-for-tat” passage—specifically, in that illustrative paragraph (“illustrative” as per its ‘being akin to...’ wording) recalling how “not taking offence” was envisioned by the identity in residence circa 1981—is predicated upon what is conveyed by the term ‘Conceptual Art’. Viz.:

• conceptual art (n.): art that is intended to convey an idea or concept to the perceiver and need not involve the creation or appreciation of a traditional art object such as a painting or sculpture. ~ (American Heritage Dictionary).

• conceptual art (n.): art in which the idea or concept presented by the artist is considered more important than the finished product, if any such exists. ~ (Oxford English Dictionary).

Thus the short answer to any query regarding those ‘wringing it out’ words is that the resident identity (who was successfully making a living as a practising artist at that time) viewed it as a figurative ‘wringing it out’ which, as already remarked upon parenthetically, turned out to be not necessary anyway. Nonetheless it may be helpful to expand somewhat upon what that feeling-being was involved in (when 33-34 years of age) and what was going through ‘his’ mind at the time.

First, a brief background sketch: my (now-deceased) first wife had inherited a volatile temper from her father such as to erupt on a near-daily basis (sometimes violently) and, on occasion in the latter years of her marriage, several times a day. Indeed, the fundamental reason for eventually bringing the marriage to an end, after the firstborn scion had matured sufficiently to have left the family home to make his own way in the world, was because of choosing to no longer live in what is nowadays known as ‘an abusive relationship’ (i.e., female-on-male domestic violence).

The two of us had a long-running difference of opinion as to how to deal with moods, in general, and with temper, in particular. I had been raised in the ‘stiff upper-lip’ school of thought (a.k.a. being suppressive of anti-social feelings) while she was of the ‘blow off steam’ variety (a.k.a. being expressive of same) inasmuch she firmly believed that ‘bottling it all up’ was futile, as the ‘cork would pop’ eventually, anyway, and how it was better to ‘let it all out in the moment’ before it could build up into ‘a full head of steam’. As the resident identity back then would tend to lose ‘his’ temper only every four-to-six weeks, or so, on average—usually over something quite trivial, mind you, whilst valiantly tolerating the major issues—and then juvenilely sulk for several days afterwards, because of having succumbed in such a puerile manner yet again, ‘he’ was not inclined to join the ‘let it all out in the moment’ school of thought despite being oft-times urged and constantly provoked to do so.

Consequently, as ‘his’ intent was to imitate the actual, as experienced six months prior in a memorable four-hour pure consciousness experience (PCE), it soon became apparent to ‘him’ that only the third alternative to either suppressing or expressing would do the trick. Upon advising ‘his’ wife of fifteen years standing of the course of action ‘he’ was putting into place—and likening ‘himself’ to being akin to a sponge and soaking up any and all offence given (i.e., by thus not taking offence in the first place ‘he’ would no longer be putting ‘himself’ into the suppression-expression dichotomy) as a descriptive analogy—she of course asked what ‘he’ intended to do upon becoming saturated which, to her mind, was the equivalent of her ‘full head of steam’ analogy.

As the two analogies have no such equivalence—the one stems from taking offence (thereby generating ‘steam’ aplenty) and the other is founded upon not taking offence (which obviates any such generative process)—then the ‘wring it out’ ploy, which ‘he’ conceived of in reply to her query, never eventuated in practice as the amount of offensive language and/or offensive gestures thusly absorbable approaches a near-infinite quantity.

Thus the longer answer to queries regarding those ‘wringing it out’ words is that because ‘he’ was focussed upon not taking offence in the first place—which mostly forestalled having to be either suppressive or expressive—‘his’ conceptualisation did not include any specific way or particular means by which a ‘wring out’ would take place. The quite magical outcome depicted earlier, in “The Power to have me Annoyed, Irritated, Irked, or even Peeved” mouse-hover tool-tip further above, by serendipitously being enabled to neither be suppressive nor expressive after having succumbed once more, despite such focus, was a fortuitous discovery (there being no published praxeological works whatsoever, at the time, for field-tested accounts of what worked to deliver the goods, and instead being drawn ineluctably to ‘his’ destiny by pure intent, resulted in many a disclosure of that ilk occurring as the wide and wondrous path became more and more apparent).

As I have written elsewhere about a preliminary step towards ‘not taking offence in the first place’, without explicitly naming it as such, it may very well be worthwhile to re-present it here. Viz.:

• [Respondent]: “As long as we are alive in this world there are going to be things happen that are unacceptable. These are the things we have to learn to accept. The question I am asking is: Can I accept the unacceptable?”

• [Richard]: Given that people are as-they-are and that the world is as-it-is there are more than a few things which are ‘unacceptable’ (child abuse, rape, murder, torture and so on). What worked for me twenty-odd years ago, as a preliminary step, was to rephrase the question so that it makes sense (rather than vainly apply any of those unliveable ‘unconditional acceptance’ type injunctions):

• Can I emotionally accept that which is intellectually unacceptable?

This way intelligence need not be compromised—intelligence will no longer be crippled. (Richard, List B, No. 39a, August 18, 2001).

Quite frankly, any such ‘unconditional acceptance’ type admonishments are an insult to intelligence (to utilise a cliché) as the bully-boys and feisty-femmes would rule the roost quick smart were all decent peoples worldwide ever to become dumbed-down enough to adopt those (impracticable) pacifistic maxims uttered by anti-life entities only too-willing to sacrifice their host bodies for a noble cause.

*

Before proceeding any further it is important to note that the entire giving offence and/or taking offence phenomenon is a very big deal, in regards to human relations, for the denizens of the ‘real world’—in centuries past potentially-lethal duels would be fought between offendant and offendee (with ‘seconds’ in attendance to ensure agreed-upon rules of engagement were observed) as a means of obtaining the restitution of honour for the offended party—as is also evidenced by the increased incidence of modern-day ‘hate-crimes’ legislation whereby the concept of lèse-majesté , first attested to in the era of the Roman Republic (509-27 BCE), is extended to regular citizens such that the heavy hand of the state (as states typically monopolise violence) can nowadays be called upon to exact retribution on behalf of the offendee.

By way of illustration, as to just how big a deal that giving offence and/or taking offence phenomenon is in the ‘real world’, it might be useful to draw attention (as it may have escaped notice due to extensive media focus directed elsewhere) to how the triggering-event which set off all the subsequent multifaceted sequences of events which, arguably, eventually led to the potentially-historical episodes of el-taḥarrush el-ginsy (a.k.a. sexual molestation and/or harassment of women in public) by a thousand-plus malefactors in the city centre of Köln, Deutschland (a.k.a. Cologne, Germany) on New Year’s Eve 2015-2016, was the public humiliation, on December 17, 2010, of a twenty-six-year-old male street vendor of fruit and vegetables in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, by a forty-five-year-old female municipal official who (allegedly) made a slur against his deceased father, spat at him, slapped him on the face, cast aside his unlicensed produce-barrow and confiscated his weighing scales. According to his mother, ‘It got to him deep inside, it hurt his pride’ (i.e., to be humiliated, publicly, by a female). Viz.:

• The Tragic Life of a Street Vendor (Al Jazeera).

• Slap to a Man’s Pride Set Off Tumult in Tunisia (New York Times).

• Mohamed Bouazizi (Wikipedia).

Thus the identity in situ at the beginning of 1981 went right to the heart of the matter from the get-go. The crux of the issue is that, as each and every identity is a feeling-being at root (i.e., ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’), all identities are hereditarily programmed by blind nature to emotionally-passionally react, instantaneously, to affectively-felt and/or psychically-intuited threats to their existence because, at their very core, it is ‘being’ itself at dire risk (i.e., ‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being is ‘being’ itself).

(It is a genetic hangover from long-ago ancestral eras already many millions of years old when sapience emerged around hundred millennia ago—as a boy, a youth, a young man, hunting game in the wild plus interacting daily with domesticated animals, revealed to me how they relied as much, if not more, on what was known generically as a ‘sixth sense’ as upon an acute sense of smell, alert hearing and keen eyesight in order to evade predation—which has become a liability, for modern-day humankind, rather than the asset it once was).

Now, because the pure consciousness experience (PCE)—where ‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being is in abeyance (unlike an altered state of consciousness (ASC) where ‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being reigns supreme as ‘Being’ itself) for the duration—experientially demonstrates how each and every identity has no existence whatsoever in actuality then any such offensiveness (previously experienced as affective and/or psychic threats to ‘my’ existence and/or to ‘my’ very ‘being’) loses its existential sting and/or no longer has its dire effect.

Indeed, all the rudeness, all the insults, all the slights, and etcetera, soon become rather exquisite aids in ferreting-out any aspects of ‘me’ which have eluded exposure through hands-on inspection up till then (hence my parenthetical remark about the metaphorical ‘wringing it out’ ploy not being necessary, in practice, and my further above observation regarding the absorbability of offensive language and/or offensive gestures being nigh-on infinite in regards quantity).

Incidentally, the reason why the nursery-doggerel ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me’ was largely ineffectual in childhood is because truisms such as that do not take into account the affective vibes and psychic currents—transmitted instantaneously via the psychic web connecting all feeling-beings regardless of spatial extension—which are part-and-parcel of the very act of giving offence and/or being offensive and the vital element in the entire giving offence and/or taking offence phenomenon which bedevils life in the ‘real world’.

As I have oft-times said, it is the psychic web where the real power-play takes place. Howsoever, once the practice of not taking offence becomes habituated even the most virulent affective and/or psychic power-play—being thereby recognised for what it is—can thus be weathered with relative ease.

Ha! ... being alive is such a fascinating adventure. (Richard's Personal Web-page, Tit-for-Tat Tool-tip).

I have touched upon this elsewhere:

• [Richard]: ‘There is no ‘chaos’ and ‘order’ as a ‘sub-stratum of the universe’ ... they are but human inventions and do not exist in actuality. The same applies to fairness/ unfairness, justice/ injustice and any other human concepts that, whilst being useful for human-to-human interaction, are futility in action when applied to the universe. Male logic is as useless as female intuition when it comes to being free: the everyday reality of the ‘real-world’ is a veneer ‘I’ paste over the top of the pristine actual world by ‘my’ very being ... and ‘being’ is the savage/tender instinctual passions (giving rise to feelings of malice/love and sorrow/ compassion etc., with the resultant concepts of bad/good and evil/god and so on) which cripples intelligence by invariably producing dualistic concepts.
‘Tis all a fantasy ... feelings rule in the human world’. (Richard, List B, No. 33c, 3 August 2000).

(Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 66, 27 April 2005a).

RESPONDENT: When I feel righteously angry I consciously want to go back to ‘feeling good’, but since I feel justified in my anger, it feels good to be angry, making it difficult to get back to ‘feeling good’.

RICHARD: One of the major issues the identity inhabiting this flesh and blood body all those years ago attended to very early in the piece was the indignation – ‘anger excited by a sense of wrong, or by injustice, wickedness, or misconduct; righteous anger’ (Oxford Dictionary) – which had dogged him from almost as early as ‘he’ could remember (‘he’ was often moved to indignancy because of injustice/ unfairness whilst still in grade school for instance) as righteousness, being oh-so-readily justifiable, is such an insidious feeling.

(Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 79, 9 February 2005).

RESPONDENT: Another trivial question: what happens when someone pinches you very hard?

RICHARD: As nobody has ever pinched me very hard, over the thirteen years of being apparent 24/7, I cannot answer your query.

RESPONDENT: Is my guess wrong that you would say: ‘it hurts, but I feel no pain’ ...

RICHARD: Perhaps this may be of assistance:

• [Co-Respondent]: ‘Pain and anguish are part of life.
• [Richard]: ‘Hmm ... it is helpful to draw a distinction betwixt physical pain and emotional and mental pain. Physical pain is essential, else one could be sitting on a hot-plate and not know that one’s bum was on fire until one saw the smoke rising. Emotional and mental pain (which is what I indicated by using ‘animosity and anguish’) are totally unnecessary’.

And even more explicitly:

• [Richard]: ‘There is physical pleasure and pain (bodily pain is essential else one could be sitting on a hot-plate, for example, and not know that one’s bum was on fire until one saw the smoke rising) ... it is the affective pleasure and pain which has no existence here in this actual world’.

RESPONDENT: ... and that you would defend yourself, if the pinch does not stop, thanks to the uninhibited functioning of the ratiocinative process?

RICHARD: It is a freed intelligence, and not just uninhibited ratiocination (the action or process of reasoning), which ensures an appropriate-to-the-situation-and-circumstances defence when attacked.

RESPONDENT: Richard, you have written that it took three weeks for you to rid yourself of anger.

RICHARD: You are, presumably, referring to the following text:

• [Richard]: ‘Speaking personally, the first thing I did in 1981 was to put an end to anger once and for all ... then I was freed enough to live in virtual freedom. It took me about three weeks and I have never experienced anger since then. The first step was to say ‘YES’ to being here on earth, for I located and identified that basic resentment that all people that I have spoken to have. To wit: ‘I didn’t ask to be born!’ This is why remembering a PCE is so important for success for it shows one, first hand, that freedom is already always here ... now. With the memory of that crystal-clear perfection held firmly in mind ... that basic resentment goes. Then it is a relatively easy task to eliminate anger forever. One does this by neither expressing or repressing anger when an event happens that would previously trigger an outbreak.
Anger is thus put into a bind ... and the third alternative hoves into view’.

RESPONDENT: Can you please sketch what you did in that time?

RICHARD: Sure ... as I was able to locate and identify that basic resentment which all people I had spoken to have – to wit: ‘I didn’t ask to be born!’ – the first thing I did was to unconditionally say !YES! to being here on earth. Remembering the pure consciousness experiences (PCE’s) I had experienced was vitally important for success because they showed me, first hand, that an actual freedom from the human condition is already always just here ... right now. With the memory of that crystal-clear perfection held firmly in mind that basic resentment went, of course, never to return again. Then it was a relatively easy task to eliminate anger forever. I did this by neither expressing or repressing anger whenever an event happened that would previously trigger an outbreak.
Anger was thus put into a bind ... and the third alternative would hove into view.

RESPONDENT: Were you analysing, reflecting on all possible situations in which anger arises?

RICHARD: No ... it was an at-the-moment riddance.

RESPONDENT: Or were you angry at something and tried to observe it deeply?

RICHARD: No ... the instant the anger would have otherwise arisen there was the delicious experience of it being stillborn.

RESPONDENT: Were you making yourself mad by thinking about various situations and through self-observation and reasoning and attentiveness eradicated it?

RICHARD: No ... as there were more than enough situations anyway there was no need to fabricate any.

RESPONDENT: Were you isolated at this point or did this exercise with your partner?

RICHARD: Even though I was married at the time – I was a normal family man, with a wife and four children to support and a house-mortgage to pay off and a car on hire-purchase, running my own business and working twelve-fourteen hour days six-seven days a week – I was essentially on my own in the whole enterprise ... my then wife, although initially intrigued and interested for herself in what I was engaged in, lapsed back into normalcy within a few months.

As a matter of related interest ... one of the most persistent forms of anger is indignation (or righteous anger/justifiable anger): it can be eradicated rather simply by the realisation that its raison d’être – a guardian against injustice, unjustness, unfairness, inequality (partiality, discrimination, and so on) – is as much a human invention as those concepts it defends ... justice, justness, fairness, equality (impartiality, indiscrimination, and so on).

I have touched upon this elsewhere:

• [Richard]: ‘There is no ‘chaos’ and ‘order’ as a ‘sub-stratum of the universe’ ... they are but human inventions and do not exist in actuality. The same applies to fairness/ unfairness, justice/ injustice and any other human concepts that, whilst being useful for human-to-human interaction, are futility in action when applied to the universe. Male logic is as useless as female intuition when it comes to being free: the everyday reality of the ‘real-world’ is a veneer ‘I’ paste over the top of the pristine actual world by ‘my’ very being ... and ‘being’ is the savage/ tender instinctual passions (giving rise to feelings of malice/love and sorrow/compassion etc., with the resultant concepts of bad/good and evil/god and so on) which cripples intelligence by invariably producing dualistic concepts.
‘Tis all a fantasy ... feelings rule in the human world’.

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).

RESPONDENT: I have a question for anyone kind enough to answer. How do I relate to someone who has physically harmed me? Who wishes to harm me again?

RICHARD: Unless it is a sociopathic stranger prowling the streets taking any victim at random, the physical harm one receives is invoked by the way one feels about one’s assailant ... whether one’s feelings are acted upon in behaviour or not.

And controlling one’s attitude towards them does nothing to stop the other picking up on one’s vibes (to use a 60’s term). If one has the slightest trace of malice or sorrow toward the other, the prevailing wisdom is to be loving or compassionate ... yet it does not work in practice. This is because there is a psychic connection between humans who have feelings.

Modifying one’s negative feelings toward the other by coating them with positive feelings may fool some people for some of the time. Usually, however, one is only fooling oneself, because the positive is born out of the negative. Without the negative feelings there are no positive feelings. No feelings at all means one is happy and harmless and the other leaves one alone ... which does away with the need for that dubious remedy of pacifism (non-violence).

Until one is interested enough with the workings of one’s psyche to dig deep into one’s feelings – into the core of one’s being – and uncover the root of all malice and sorrow, one has no choice but to apply the ‘Tried and True’ remedies again and again ... and fail and fail, again and again.

The pertinent question to ask oneself is: ‘Why do I have the need to relate to anyone at all?’

IRENE to Peter: Life without feelings is indeed barren and sterile.

RICHARD: I am living such a rich, full, sparkling, vital and magical life for the twenty four hours of every day ... and all without the affective faculty. Where do you get your information from about the barrenness and sterility of life without feeling?

IRENE to Peter: Freeing myself from aggression and fear didn’t come about by covering them over (...) my aggression and fear that I had not wanted to look at yet, would come out in my attitude and sharp remarks from time to time (...) I am so pleased with what I’ve done (...) I couldn’t have envisaged this particular outcome ever.

RICHARD: You see, here you do some kind of sleight-of-hand ... you condemn me for not having these basic feelings whilst proclaiming to be free of them yourself. Perhaps the clue lies in your not mentioning the other basic feelings – nurture and desire – in the above sentence. Just get rid of the ‘bad’ feelings and hang onto the ‘good’ ones, eh?

IRENE to Peter: There is life after the basic feelings of aggression and fear, they don’t have to dominate forever!

RICHARD: Here is confusion with the word ‘dominate’ ... have you freed yourself from aggression and fear or not? If you have ... why condemn me for doing so? If you have not ... why do you give the impression that you have?

IRENE to Peter: By ‘authentic’ I do not mean the natural instincts we are all born with. They become only active in a physical or deeply emotional threat to your well-being.

RICHARD: Aye ... and thus 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 will continue for ever and a day. So, are you now saying that you are not free from these basic – these natural – instincts after all? What does ‘there is life after the basic feelings of fear and aggression’ mean then?

IRENE to Peter: Wherever I am I am at peace (...) I now find myself living what my very first peak-experience showed me to be my destiny (...) I am a fully human being with all my feeling-faculties and instincts intact.

RICHARD: Once again confusion ... all your ‘feeling-faculties and instincts intact’ . Yet you are simultaneously ‘free from aggression and fear’ ... which are basic instincts. As they will become active in ‘a physical or deeply emotional threat to your well-being’ then what have you done towards achieving peace-on-earth?

Editorial note: They did indeed become active: only four days later Irene wrote the following to Vineeto: ‘No other person than you has been able to make me so livid and repulsed, for a long, long time, Vineeto.’

IRENE to Peter: As an authentic being I am not afraid of others, nor of myself, because I have nothing to hide or to cover up any more, or to be afraid or ashamed of (...) I certainly feel and have the capacity to feel intact.

RICHARD: Yet to not be ‘afraid’ or not to be ‘ashamed’ are feelings, are they not? Are you selective about what feelings to retain and what feelings to eliminate?

RESPONDENT: Each individual is different.

RICHARD: In what way different? Everyone has the same blue-print ... human beings are all born with the same basic instincts like fear and aggression and nurture and desire and, no matter which culture one was socialised into being a member of, all peoples throughout the world thus have the same emotions and passions. There is no difference between English anger and forbearance and American anger and forbearance and African anger and forbearance and so on. Or love and hatred, enmity and alliance, jealousy and tolerance ... whatever the emotion or passion may be, they all have a global incidence. The same applies to cerebral activity like imagination, conceptualisation, hypothesising, believing and so forth. Once again, ubiquitous in its occurrence. As for psychic phenomena like prescience, clairvoyance, telepathy, divination ... a world-wide correspondence that is almost uncanny in its similitude. There is no actual difference – other than superficialities – betwixt one and the other.

RESPONDENT: Yes, the anger itself may be same, but when it gets manifested in an individual it takes different forms for example violence, repression, sorrow etc. So what makes anger to take different forms ? I think it is the individual (which is nothing but a complex of feeling, beliefs, instincts etc.).

RICHARD: Are you saying that anger takes on 6.0 billion different forms? There are slight variations according to cultural conditioning and one’s personal upbringing, but the disparity is minuscule ... the manifestation of anger has a remarkable correspondence globally. This is beneficial news ... it will help you to cease taking it all so personally. It is the human condition that is to blame ... not the flesh and blood body called No. 4.

ALAN: We have also discussed the ‘vibes’, which some people may have and whether it is possible for another to sense them. I presume you consider these to fall within the realm of psychic powers?

RICHARD: No, emotional ‘vibes’ are fairly obvious as in you can feel another’s fear, anger, love and so on when in physical proximity. Whereas psychic ‘currents’ span distance instantly. This is where the power play really happens between sentient beings ... vibe violence and verbal abuse and physical aggression are the outcome of psychic power-tripping and not the source. The same applies to the ‘good’ side ... loving vibes and affectionate words and physical caresses are control measures – power-play – and originate in the psyche as psychic currents.

ALAN: While not 100% convinced, my view is that these do not exist, other than in the form of subtle body language.

RICHARD: Body language plays a part, yes, and tone of voice and so on ... but there is an undercurrent as is evidenced when sitting in silence with another whilst not facing each other. There is an ‘atmosphere’ as is expressed in ‘the air was so thick that you could cut it with a knife’.

RESPONDENT: [Rajneesh]: ‘Very difficult to accept it, because you have been conditioned for centuries. You have been given ideals and you go on comparing with ideals. You say, ‘How can I be perfect? – I still have anger in me. How can I be perfect? – I still have sex in me. How can I be perfect? – I still have violence in me. How can I be perfect?’ You are comparing. Comparison is the disease, the very illness’.

RICHARD: Methinks it is anger, violence and so on that is the disease, the illness ... not comparison. Without comparison there would be no basis for appraisal and decision-making.

RESPONDENT: [Rajneesh]: ‘You are you. If anger is there, what can you do? You have to accept it’.

RICHARD: For the first thirty four years of my life, I too had this attitude ... then I stopped ‘accepting it’ and changed myself radically, completely, totally and utterly. As a result, there is no anger whatsoever in me ... and has not been for years and tears.

RESPONDENT: [Rajneesh]: ‘If you try first to be beyond anger and then live, you will never live. Listen to me. Accept the anger and live. And I tell you – by living, the anger will disappear’.

RICHARD: Yet Mr. Mohan ‘Rajneesh’ Jain has been observed to be angry from time-to-time ... so what is his advice worth?

RESPONDENT: This is really heavy stuff.

RICHARD: Aye ... it is. So is all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides that they have helped perpetuate for 3,000 to 5,000 years.

RESPONDENT: I don’t have time. But am I correct in saying that you are asserting that even the gurus and god men are prone to violence and anger and yet they are excused and worshipped? Let me hear your response to this.

RICHARD: Yes, I am stating that loud and clear.

RICHARD: You are born with aggression – and fear – and that biological fact has zilch to do with it being ‘thought that is a danger here’ . Which means: How on earth can I live happily and harmlessly in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are whilst I nurse malice and sorrow in my bosom?

RESPONDENT No. 31: Yes. This is a fundamental question. Our enquiry starts here. But there is a BELIEF that one is nursing malice and sorrow.

RICHARD: If I may point out? It is a fact. You were born with aggression and fear.

RESPONDENT No. 31: Why are we not looking beyond that? We first have to look into these beliefs.

RICHARD: May I ask? Why are you avoiding the fact? You were born with aggression and fear.

RESPONDENT No. 31: I would suggest to keep things simple and converse innocently like a small child.

RICHARD: Small children are not innocent ... they are born with aggression and fear. Understanding human nature is as simple as understanding this fact. Life is not complicated.

RESPONDENT: Again here, Richard, you authoritatively make a statement that has no basis in fact. A child is NOT born with aggression and fear.

RICHARD: This borrowed ‘Tabula Rasa’ (‘clean slate’) philosophy of yours has had a long innings in human history ... and is currently making a come-back in NDA circles as: ‘We are all born Little Buddhas’. The continued belief in this theory – in the face of the empirical evidence of the past 30 odd years demonstrating genetic inheritance – requires avoiding the biological fact. Just by putting the word ‘NOT’ in capitals does not miraculously turn a creed into a fact.

RESPONDENT: Those are learned traits.

RICHARD: I had a woman telling me a few weeks ago that boys are born with aggression and little girl babies are not ... and that girls learnt aggression from men (she had to explain ‘bitchiness’ somehow) and that it was men who had to change so that there would be peace on earth. Now you are telling me that fear and aggression are ‘learned traits’ and the question that immediately springs to mind is: learned from who? Because if fear and aggression are passed on non-genetically from generation to generation (parent to child) then what caused fear and aggression in the first sentient beings to emerge on this planet way back whenever.

In other words: who started it all?

RESPONDENT: Obviously, you were not a very observant parent or grandparent.

RICHARD: I not only ‘observed’ my biological children from birth onward, I actively participated in finding out about myself, life, the universe and what it is to be a human being through intimate interaction at the grass-roots level of association ... bonding, nurturing and protecting. Indeed, I was a single parent for a formative period of my biological daughters’ upbringing ... and one cannot get closer than that. Infants and children are not as happy and harmless and benevolent and carefree as is so often made out to be the case ... and have never been so. They have malice and sorrow firmly embedded in them, for one is born with instinctual fear and aggression. Just watch a one month old baby bellowing its distress at being alone; just watch a one year old pinching its sibling in spite for taking its toy; just watch a two year old stamping its foot in a temper tantrum; just watch a three year old child fighting with its peers for supremacy. In the interests of having a sincere dialogue, I must ask: where in all this is the fabulous ‘Tabula Rasa’? The imposition of social mores – moral virtues, ethical values, honourable principles, decent scruples and the like – are essential to curb the instinct-born spiteful anger and vicious hatred that are part and parcel of the essential traits of being ‘human’.

To achieve a truly ‘clean slate’, something entirely new must come into existence. All peoples must cease being ‘human’. To change ‘Human Nature’, they must give-up, voluntarily, their cherished identity ... the rudimentary animal self they were born with.

RESPONDENT: Humans are born with a central nervous system for responding to the environment. Fear and aggression are learned traits as a result of the environment.

RICHARD: By ‘environment’ you can only mean the world about ... the world of what you call ‘Mother Nature’. Thus you are saying that fear and aggression are leaned from a ‘kind and benevolent’ Mother Nature? That is, fear and aggression is learned from ‘she’ who is giving, protective, quiet, wild and beautiful’, eh?

But okay ... I will have it your way, then. You are right and Richard is wrong. The question that immediately springs to mind is: how are you going to unlearn these traits that are learned as a result of ‘responding to the environment’ ? Which means: what is your plan? What success have you had? Have you unlearned all these learned traits yet? Or is all this that you write merely theory?

You see, in my ignorance I naively thought that these traits were genetically inherited and so I deleted them like the software they were. Consequently I never get sad or lonely or sorrowful or grief-stricken; I never get angry or hateful or furious or filled with rage. Therefore I never have to become affectionate or compassionate or loving to compensate; I never have to gaze longingly at the stars ... yearning for a bodiless peace.

I discovered the already always existing peace-on-earth ... how naïve of me.

RESPONDENT: At what expense? Madness?

RICHARD: Uh oh ... I gain the distinct impression that you are getting yourself ready to trot out the line that you do not have to look at the instinctual passions (and will instead waste your time endlessly unlearning those traits that you claim are only learned as a result of ‘responding to the environment’ ) because you have nothing to gain from Richard sharing his experience with you ... because he has what is officially classified as a severe mental disorder. Which means: what can a madman have to say to a normal sane person that is of value, eh?

Yet 160,000,000 human beings were killed by normal sane people in wars this century – peoples like yourself – and they do know what they are doing ... do they not?

RESPONDENT: Call me a dewy-eyed optimist, but I truly believe that people are generally good.

RICHARD: Yet believing something to be true – even ‘truly believing’ something to be true – does nothing to alter a fact. It helps to ignore the fact, gloss over the fact, but the fact never goes away. A fact simply sits there making your beliefs look silly by its very existence.

All sentient beings are born with survival instincts ... that is what makes people instinctively ‘pick up a weapon with the intent to kill another’.

RESPONDENT: Flawed perhaps, but for the most part good.

RICHARD: I do see that, for the most, most people mean well – peoples generally are well-intentioned – it is just that, for all their best intentions, they are hog-tied by the instinctual passions bestowed by blind nature. No one is to blame.

RESPONDENT: A lot of the trouble in this world is caused by inequity, where basic needs are not met.

RICHARD: It is simple to check as to whether this theory of yours is valid or not: the incidence of domestic violence and child abuse (war at home is a difference in degree and not of kind) knows no distinction betwixt working class or middle class or upper class in any culture. And in the affluent technologically-advanced societies, where every material need is met with a degree of superfluity that staggers the imagination, ‘a lot of trouble’ is as rampant as in the less-technological societies where ‘basic needs are not met’ .

So, physical violence between human beings is not solved by every material need being met. Inequity is not the root cause of physical violence.

RESPONDENT: Solve the problems of inequity in the world, and although you will not solve all of the problems of mankind, you will go a long way towards breaking the cycle of violence.

RICHARD: But as the ‘the cycle of violence’ has not abated one jot in the material-rich countries, where is the evidence to substantiate your theory?

RESPONDENT: So, is the violence and anger gone?

RICHARD: Yep. Because there is no good or evil in the actual world of sensual delight one then lives freely in the magical paradise, which this verdant earth floating in the infinitude of the universe, actually is. Being here at this moment in time and this place in space is to be living in a fairy-tale-like ambience that is never-ending. And you ask: ‘Is the violence and anger gone?’ May I ask in return if – by declaring the body to be illusory – has the violence and anger gone for you?

RESPONDENT: Hell, no. You understand, kangaroo?

RICHARD: I do understand, only too well. Also, you have such a sophisticated turn of expression ... such that would leave school children gasping with envy. What would your epithet for me be if my E-Mail address was ‘The Antarctic’ ... which is the only continent on earth to have no resident animals?

RESPONDENT: As you know, all species are genetically programmed to ‘share’ themselves in the interest of their survival.

RICHARD: Aye ... there was an article in a newspaper some months ago announcing the preliminary discovery of a place in the brain which – when stimulated by electrodes – produced an oceanic feeling of oneness. The scientists concerned have speculated that it is the instinctually-programmed socialising faculty ... it promotes communalism. The popular press has dubbed this place in the brain as the ‘God Spot’. I watch with interest for further developments.

RESPONDENT: There aggressiveness is a factor of that compassion.

RICHARD: Aggression is a survival instinct that blind nature endows upon all sentient beings.

RESPONDENT: That is compassion at the physiological, programmed level.

RICHARD: Not so ... compassion arises out of sorrow. Sorrow is because ‘you’ are – by ‘your’ very nature – forever cut-off from the magnificence of being here now at this moment in eternal time and this place in infinite space. That is, ‘you’ cannot know the purity of the perfection of the infinitude of this very material universe. This is called, in the jargon, separation. Because of this separation, ‘you’ desire union ... oneness, wholeness and so on. In a word: Love Agapé. How to come upon this divine love?

RESPONDENT: If you have any valid insights, then get on with discussing them.

RICHARD: I have much to say ... and I have said it and still do say it. You, however, arbitrarily dismissed some of it in one and a half sentences when writing to another. Vis.:

• [Respondent]: ‘The word emotion is anathema to those who have accepted the belief that ... ... emotion is a hold over from our animal background. And that it prevents observation’.

Now, there are those who hold the ‘Tabular Rasa’ philosophy – only at the expense of ignoring biology and denying that the human animal is an animal – and maintain that all the ills of humankind are the result of conditioning. Yet they cannot successfully answer the conundrum they thus create: who conditioned the first sentient beings to emerge on this planet? (There was even one woman who told me recently that girl-babies are born without aggression ... and that men put aggression into them). Yet I ask people to not only look at emotions ... I stress the entire affective faculty. That is: emotion, passion and calenture. What does No. 4 have to say about passion? Vis.:

• [Respondent]: ‘To be ‘righteous’ is to life rightly, from truth, from awareness. I will bring passion to everything I do because I cannot allow society to inhibit the flow of energy as love which is what I AM’.

Now, the word ‘calenture’ is an incredibly useful word as it describes the delirious passion needed to manifest the delusion that:

There is a God ... and:

I am that God.

RESPONDENT: Richard, I agree with the above. To me you are very clear until you get to this instinct part – to me it’s fuzzy. Can you clarify?

RICHARD: I most certainly can ... it is rather simple, actually. But what is required is that one first acknowledges that this physical body and this physical world and this physical universe are actual. Actual as in tangible, corporeal, material, substantial, palpable. It requires that one comes to one’s senses – both figuratively and literally – and cease trying to understand life, the universe and what it is to be a human being through religious or spiritual eyes. This is not a metaphysical matter ... it is very, very earthy.

Those people, who have dedicated large parts of their waking hours devoted to the particular type of physical research that painstakingly looks into these matters, have located at least four basic emotions in what is variously called the ‘primitive brain’ or the ‘lizard brain’ or the ‘reptilian brain’, which is located at the top of the brain-stem of all sentient creatures. This is regardless of whether the creature has a developed ‘bigger brain’ – like the human cerebral cortex – over the top of it or not. These basic passions are fear and aggression and nurture and desire ... there are more but scientists tend to disagree about matters scientific according to what school or discipline they are working in. After all, they are fallible, ego-ridden and soul-bound human beings trapped in the human condition like everybody else, and are seeking to find a way through all this mess that we humans are born into via the scientific method.

Experiments with electronic probes on either reptiles – not having a bigger brain – or mammals – having a bigger brain – have demonstrated repeatedly that by touching various locatable areas of this ‘reptilian brain’, these emotions can be triggered at command. Thus the hapless animal will switch from trembling fear to rabid desire in the twinkling of an eye ... merely by applying the electrode to another area. Similarly, nurturing can be abruptly replaced by aggression ... again by moving the electrode. This has been demonstrated again and again with predictable results. Thus it is a fact.

So, beginning with a fact and not a premise, we can reliably ascertain that these instincts are what we are born with. Consequently, all sentient beings have, at the very least, a rudimentary sense of ‘self’ and ‘other’ ... and I am not suggesting for a moment that any reptile or mammal has an ‘I’ or a ‘me’. I mean it in the sense that an animal displays behaviour that indicates that there is an awareness of its physical form as being separate from the form of the world about ... which a tree, for example, does not display. This has been tested with monkeys, for instance, where a mirror is placed in the cage and the monkey first looks behind the mirror to find the – apparently there – ‘other’ monkey. After a while, an understanding that is observable dawns upon the luckless creature ... and it starts pulling faces at itself and otherwise enjoying the clearly demonstrable fun that comes as a result of the monkey knowing that it is its own reflection it is looking at. In other words: a sense of self.

With the hormonal power of the feelings engendered, one feels that a ‘me’ exists ... generally felt to be somewhere in the region of the heart. This is the ‘me’ that I consistently call the soul ... for convenience. This feeling – and feelings are so powerful that they can override intelligence – makes one think that an ‘I’ exists ... generally located in the head. This ‘I’, which for convenience I consistently call the ego, comes to realise that it is the spanner in the works when it comes to the ever-pressing matter of peaceful co-existence with other members of its species. ‘I’, realising (thinking) that ‘I’ am but an illusion in the mind, realise (feel) that ‘my’ true identity is to be found in those prior existent feelings (Zen Buddhism’s ‘Original Face’) and can, by dint of great endeavour, dissolve and become ‘Me’.

This ‘Me’ – usually capitalised to indicate divinity – experiences an oceanic feeling of oneness and unity with all of creation. This gives rise to the popular notion in the East: ‘I am everything and everything is Me’. The West has something similar: ‘I am That I am’ ... but this appellation is reserved for ‘God Men’ who are conveniently long-dead. 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 is that they do not realise that by turning to the Eastern spirituality they have effectively jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Eastern spirituality is religion ... merely in a different form to what people in the West have been raised to believe in. Eastern philosophy sounds so convincing to the Western mind that is desperately looking for answers. The Christian conditioning actually sets up the situation for a thinking person to be susceptible to the 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. ‘Centre-less Being’, for example, is simply the Eastern term for ‘God’; thus any wisdom designated ‘Unitary Awareness’ translates easily as ‘God’s Word’ ... in Western terminology. At the end of the line there is always a god of some description, lurking in disguise, wreaking its havoc with its ‘Teachings’. Have you ever been to India to see for yourself the results of what they claim are tens of thousands of years of devotional spiritual living? I have, and it is hideous. If it were not for the appalling suffering engendered it would all be highly amusing.

Of course, it is possible to be actually free of the human condition ... but it is 180 degrees in the opposite direction to the ‘tried and true’.

RICHARD: I would suggest setting anything that stands in the way of peace on earth on the agenda for exploration, examination and discovery.

RESPONDENT: I would suggest that we place peace with ourselves first, for without that no peace on earth will ever happen. We, given our selfish petty minds destroy ourselves first then the destruction of others becomes easy. It is out of our own violence that the collective violence is born.

RICHARD: I am proposing, from my own direct experience, that it is out of the instinctual passions of fear and aggression that the individual violence is born. The collective violence is but individuals gathering together for support so as to be as big – if not bigger – than the collection of individuals that they are fighting.

RESPONDENT: What causes our own personal violence towards ourselves?

RICHARD: The instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire ... which give rise to malice and sorrow and thence all the other cultivated feelings and emotions are the result of socialisation. What do you propose as being the cause of ‘our own personal violence towards ourselves’?

RESPONDENT: The fact that we as a child (before the age of four) gave ourselves up and became robots rather than humans.

RICHARD: Okay ... why do all peoples (6.0 billion living and perhaps 4.0 billion that have lived) ‘give themselves up’ at such a young age? Is this the result of physical causes (genetic inheritance) or metaphysical causes (like the Christian ‘born in sin’ or the Buddhist ‘born of samsara’ and so on)? Such a mass result must have a mass cause (and not be each very young infant’s personal failing) surely?

RESPONDENT: Now we are just people, which is 3 million years (miles) away for reality, that of being Human.

RICHARD: Okay, ‘just people’ are characterised by malice and sorrow (affective drives and impulses) ... what is ‘being Human’ characterised by (what is the character of Love and/or Truth and/or Intelligence)? And perhaps a more useful answer than what Love and/or Truth and/or Intelligence are not, this time?

What are they?

RESPONDENT: If there is sadness or anger or whatever, it is included in the field of perception and examined with great interest as ‘what is’ reveals itself. See what I mean?

RICHARD: Yes, indeed I do. This is the essence of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ The past – although being actual whilst it was happening – is not actual now. The future – although it will be actual when it happen – is not actual now. Only this moment is actual. If I am not happy and harmless here and now, then I am wasting this precious moment of being alive. Yesterday’s remembered happiness and harmlessness means nothing if one is not happy and harmless here and now ... and the same applies to tomorrow’s anticipated happiness and harmlessness.

If one is not happy and harmless now, then one has something to look at to discover why not ... and one keeps on looking until one is back on track. Being ‘on track’ means a general sense of well-being ... a grumpy person has no chance whatsoever of becoming free. Once one has established this base, one up-levels the ‘feeling happy and harmless’ experience to ‘feeling the sheer perfection of being alive here and now’. It is possible to experience this for ninety-nine percent of the time ... and the other one percent provides very little trouble. I call this a virtual freedom. Virtual freedom far exceeds normal human expectations anyway, so if nothing else happened one would be light years ahead of normal.

Virtual freedom is the essential springboard into an actual freedom. Through reflective thought and fascinated contemplation of the fact that one is already always here, one finds oneself stepping into the actual world of sensual delight ... leaving one’s ‘self’ behind in the ‘real’ world where it belongs. Fear – existential angst at finding oneself to be the contingent ‘being’ one always suspected oneself to be – is both the barrier and the way to freedom. Always included in fear is a thrilling aspect, and by focussing upon this and not fear itself, an energy gathers momentum which does the trick for one (thrilling as in a exciting sensation through the body, stirring, stimulating, electrifying, rousing, moving, gripping, hair-raising, riveting, joyful, pleasing. throbbing, trembling, tremulous, quivering, shivering, fluttering, shuddering and vibrating).

‘I’ cannot set ‘myself’ free ... but ‘I’ can set in motion a process that will lead to ‘my’ eventual demise.

RESPONDENT: Images come and go freely without abiding so they are no problem.

RICHARD: Good grief ... this is the trite comment I get on an almost daily basis here in Byron Bay, Australia (held by some to be the NDA ‘Mecca’). They say things like ‘anger comes and goes, or ‘sadness comes and goes’ and so on. They ‘merely observe’ the ‘rising and falling’ of feelings, images ... and the vicious, murderous impulses to blot the other person right out of existence!

But ... okay then ... No 12’s images ‘come and go freely’ ... they are ‘not a problem’ ... and neither are all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and suicides, eh?

RESPONDENT: Why deny that they arise (when they obviously do) and boast that I am without image?

RICHARD: Mainly because there is no identity whatsoever for them to ‘arise’ from ... why should the sharing of how this salubrious living came about, with my fellow human beings, have to be dismissed as ‘boasting’ ?

Is it not something worth boasting about? Let us, by all means, turn this dialogue into a competition – No 12 versus Richard – and see who wins the contest: defending the spiritual title is:

• [No. 12]: ‘Images come and go freely without abiding so they are no problem’.

And the upstart challenging the title is:

• [Richard]: ‘The identity in its totality is extinct, so there are no images to either ‘come and abide’ or to ‘come and go freely’ ... so there is no way that, in a tight situation, the images that used to ‘come and go freely’ will jump up and take hold until ‘I’ have smashed the other’s face into obliteration (or whatever)’ .

Do you really want to turn this dialogue into a competition?

RICHARD: I am somewhat intrigued by your statement in another post that Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti constantly espoused this point of view. Viz.:

• [Konrad] ‘This is especially true, if you realise, that the thought that controls the body is in essence a ‘what’ that believes to be a ‘who’. A point J. Krishnamurti has made continuously’.

Perhaps you could find the time to post a few quotes of Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti where he explicitly states that you are a not a ‘who’ and that what you are is only this body being conscious.

KONRAD: He never did explicitly.

RICHARD: Good ... I have never seen it explicitly stated either ... so my guess is that you made it up.

KONRAD: However, it follows from his observation, that we are not persons who are bothered with anger we must try to get rid of, but we ARE this anger. Therefore, if we try to get rid of anger, it is anger that tries to get rid of anger. It is also implied in his statement, that there are only thoughts and insights. It can also be seen from the fact, that he refers to himself as ‘the speaker’.

RICHARD: I read through this response three times and for the life of me I cannot see how any of it ‘follows’ at all. If you are anger ... then you are a ‘who’. If you try to get rid of anger it is a ‘who’ trying to get rid of a ‘who’. And where you say ‘there are only thoughts and insights’ then you are referring to a ‘who’ again by the use of the word ‘only’. As for ‘the speaker’ ... that is a substitute title for ‘mystical teacher’, not a description of a flesh and blood body.

RESPONDENT No. 34: And be responsible (as No. 14 says), or transcend fragmentation (the same). I wonder if you agree.

RICHARD: You may stop wondering ... I do not agree. Nobody is responsible for being born with the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire ... it is nothing but a rather clumsy software package genetically inherited by all sentient beings as a rough and ready start to life. If No. 14 wishes to self-aggrandise himself by taking an obviously ineffective ‘infinite responsibility’ for what the blind forces of nature have produced ... then that is his business. And if you wish to be equally ineffective in making apparent the already always existing peace-on-earth by ‘transcending fragmentation (the same)’ then that is your business.

RESPONDENT No. 12: Why isn’t it clear that any ideation of self-mastery (e.g. belief that ‘I’ am free of conditioning or ‘I’ am infinitely responsible or ‘I’ have transformed myself and this change is permanent or that ‘I’ have taken on the blind forces of nature and brought them to an end in this flesh and blood body) is self-aggrandizement, thought praising itself for purported accomplishments?

RESPONDENT: If the ego is so big that it cannot see the vastness of itself, it can believe it responsible for any and everything and get away with that delusion, don’t you think?

RICHARD: Yes, it requires repeated injections of commonsense to penetrate the chinks in the otherwise inviolable bastions of ‘Goodness’ that protects, nourishes and sustains the infinitely expanded identity. As this ‘Reservoir of Goodness’ shields the apotheosised identity from ‘Evil’ – and the physical world is believed ‘evil’ as in the ‘temptation of the senses’ meaning – then commonsense has its work cut out to even make a dent.

The outcome? When commonsense is labelled ‘worldly’ – and the gullible seeker buys this shrewdness – then the ‘Ancient Wisdom’ propagated by the ‘Bodiless Ones’ reigns supreme. Then they can declare ‘Ultimate Responsibility’ – whatever that means – and even weep crocodile tears of Divine Compassion for the suffering of humanity. Because in the ‘real world’, when a Government Minister, for example, is caught ‘in flagrante delicto’ he and/or she ‘takes responsibility’ and resigns, at the very least, and pines away ... if suicide be not an option; in the Military Forces, not too long ago, when a Ranking Officer committed an unpardonable sin he ‘took responsibility’ by ritual disembowelment or shooting himself or whatever (‘the buck stops here’). But when a Guru or God-Man – whose ‘Ancient Wisdom’ initiated the morals in the first place that cause these outrageous suicides – displays anger (or any other human trait) it is said to be ‘Divine Anger’ (or any other Divine Trait) and is indicative of the fragile and elusive link between ‘Purusha’ and ‘Prakriti’ (consciousness and nature) and known by some as being ‘Sacred Schizophrenia’.

For example: ‘Two birds, inseparable companions, are perched on the same tree; one eats the sweet fruit and the other looks on without eating’. (Rig Veda I.164.20). This vision, deemed to be meaningful, is duplicated in Mundaka Upanishad (I.III.1) and in Shvetashvatara Upanishad (IV.6). In the same way as the two birds are inseparable, a human being is not thought complete and whole without both the aspect of ‘Prakriti’ (which experiences the domain of time and space and form) and the aspect of ‘Purusha’ (which is timeless and spaceless and formless). Mr. Ishvarakrishna (compiler of ‘Samkhyakarika) pointed out: ‘Purusha without Prakriti is lame and Prakriti without Purusha is blind’. Thus a Guru or God-Man’s ‘Spiritual Essence’ is counter-poised with their ‘Basic Nature’ ... which is the human condition: ‘The Saint is the sinner; the Sinner is the saint’ or ‘Emptiness is form; Form is emptiness’ or ‘I am Everything and everything is Me’ ... and so on and so on.

Similarly, when Mr. Yeshua the Nazarene got angry and cursed the out-of-season fig tree for not bearing fruit, he is excused by apologists as not being ‘In The Spirit’ ... taking ‘Ultimate Responsibility’ means absolutely zilch when you are god ... but it sure sounds good to the desperate believer. Why, even Mr. Ken Wilbur can write pages of meaningless justifications for the Guru’s and the God-Men’s failure to eliminate ‘Basic Nature’ rather than merely transcending it ... and that failure is the only place where ‘Ultimate Responsibility’ has any meaning. Perhaps Mr. Christopher Calder’s attitude sums up why these antics are condoned:

• ‘My answer is that the ego is an integral part of the structure of the human brain. It is not simply psychological, it is physical and hard wired into our neural pathways. It is a self-defence, self-survival mechanism that cannot be destroyed unless the body dies. If you are a bodiless soul you do not need self-defence and you do not need an ego. That is why I agree with author and teacher Huston Smith when he says he believes no man attached to this mortal coil can achieve the ultimate transcendence. You first have to physically die and when the last coil is broken you are totally free. I believe the ego steps aside and becomes less of a problem for most enlightened men but it is never totally destroyed as long as you have a physical body. It would be wonderful to believe that enlightened men were perfect in every way. That would make life simpler and sweeter but it would be fiction, not fact’. Christopher Calder: www.clipper.net/~calder/Osho.html.

In other words: they are saying that it is not possible to be free from the human condition, here on earth, in this life-time, as this flesh and blood body. And is it no wonder ... after all, the Buddhist’s ‘Ancient Wisdom’ extols ‘Parinirvana’ and the Hindus ‘Ancient Wisdom’ exalts ‘Mahasamadhi’ and the Christians inscribe R. I. P. on their tombstones and so on and so on ... on unto the after-death ‘Ultimate Freedom’. After all, the ‘Ancient Wisdom’ propagated by the ‘Bodiless Ones’ reigns supreme here on earth.

The ending of all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides requires the ending of malice and sorrow ... which involves getting one’s head out of the clouds – and beyond – and coming down-to-earth where the flesh and blood bodies called human beings actually live.

Obviously, the solution to all the ills of humankind can only be found here in space and now in time.

RESPONDENT: Can an insight, one moment of insight, have an effect here? Does this not call for something that is from moment to moment, ongoing.

RICHARD: Yes, indeed it can. One fundamental moment of insight can alter the entire course of one’s life wherein becoming free of the Human Condition is no longer a matter of choice – it is an irresistible pull. And, yes, then there is something that is from moment to moment, ongoing. I choose to call this something: ‘Pure Intent’. Pure intent is a palpable life-force; an actually occurring stream of benevolence and benignity that originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of this physical universe. One can bring about a benediction from that perfection and purity, which is the essential character of the universe, by contacting and cultivating one’s original state of naiveté. Naiveté is that intimate aspect of oneself that is the nearest approximation that one can have of actual innocence – there is no innocence so long as there is a self – and constant awareness of naive intimacy results in a continuing benediction. This blessing allows a connection to be made between oneself and the perfection and purity.

This connection is what I call pure intent. Pure intent endows one with the ability to operate and function safely in society without the incumbent social identity with its ever-vigilant conscience. Thus reliably rendered virtually innocent and relatively harmless by the benefaction of the perfection and purity, one can begin to dismantle the now-redundant social identity. Pure intent is not to be confused with being a ‘do-gooder’, or being full of ‘righteousness’, or being ‘moralistic’. Pure intent is the quality that encompasses what morals and ethics aspire to but never reach. ‘Good’ fails to reach its desired goal because it opposes ‘Bad’ ... the fight between Good and Evil has raged for centuries. Pure intent enables one to be liberated from both Good and Evil.

Pure intent renders morality redundant ... which is good news, as morality – although well-meant – never works successfully. Morality seeks to control; pure intent eliminates the need for control. With pure intent operating twenty-four-hours-a-day in one’s life, one can safely get out from being under control without going off the rails. One is then able to be virtually free from the resentment, the guilt, the remorse, and all the other factors which are the hall-mark of a wayward self under control.

Pure intent is the highway to this utter freedom, to one’s destiny ... and it is a wide and wondrous path.

RESPONDENT: For example, let us take the subject of anger. Will an insight dispel it?

RICHARD: Yes, if the insight is actualised.

RESPONDENT: And let us take the subject of the self, the psychological reactions that come forth when someone insults us, the search to be something, the becoming. Is that dispelled?

RICHARD: There are too many subjects mixed up in one sentence. May I separate them?

1. ‘The psychological reactions that come forth when someone insults us, is that dispelled?’

Yes, if the insight is actualised.

2. ‘Let us take the subject of the self ... the search to be something, is that dispelled?’

The search to ‘be something’ is dispelled, yes ... but the search to not ‘be’ is intensified. One can pay intense attention – single minded attention – to one’s insight. This unwavering attention, without mincing words, amounts to an obsession; for how can a person possibly allow themselves to be discontented and disturbing when this world is such a marvellous place to be in? One can intensify the search to the point of addiction ... then, and only then, there is some guarantee of success.

What a shame, what a pity ... no, what a sin it is to be disconsolate and disagreeable when this world is so glorious. To be here, intimately here as this body only, is a satisfaction and fulfilment unparalleled in the annals of history.

3. ‘And let us take the subject of the self, the becoming. Is that dispelled?’

Ah! Herein lies the rub ... ‘becoming’ what? Becoming an enlightened ‘Self’? One can cease ‘becoming’ and start ‘being’, but that is to stop half-way.

To go all the way, one ceases ‘being’ at all.

RICHARD: There is that truism that states: ‘We are all unique’. I say ‘truism’ deliberately, for I am immediately reminded of that scene in ‘The Life Of Brian’ where Brian addresses the crowd saying: ‘You are all individuals’. The crowd roars back in unison: ‘We are all individuals’. Down the back a lone voice cries out: ‘I’m not!’

Of course, the Monty Python crew were making a social comment, when they wrote that scene, about the conditioned identity of the average citizen when it comes to following a spiritual leader, but one can consider whether it holds well for humankind at large. Human beings are all born with the same basic instincts and, no matter which culture one was socialised into being a member of, all peoples throughout the world have the same emotions and passions. Anger and forbearance, for instance, is anger and forbearance wherever it lives. There is no difference between English anger and forbearance and American anger and forbearance and African anger and forbearance and so on. Or love and hatred, enmity and alliance, jealousy and tolerance ... whatever the emotion or passion may be, they all have a global incidence.

RESPONDENT: What I am interested is in that you say anger disappeared for you after 3 weeks.

RICHARD: You are, presumably, referring to the following text:

• [Richard]: ‘Speaking personally, the first thing I did in 1981 was to put an end to anger once and for all ... then I was freed enough to live in virtual freedom. It took me about three weeks and I have never experienced anger since then. The first step was to say ‘YES’ to being here on earth, for I located and identified that basic resentment that all people that I have spoken to have. To wit: ‘I didn’t ask to be born!’ This is why remembering a PCE is so important for success for it shows one, first hand, that freedom is already always here ... now. With the memory of that crystal-clear perfection held firmly in mind ... that basic resentment goes. Then it is a relatively easy task to eliminate anger forever. One does this by neither expressing or repressing anger when an event happens that would previously trigger an outbreak.
Anger is thus put into a bind ... and the third alternative hooves into view’.

RESPONDENT: So this time period or rather the culmination of it in, say, that last moment in that 3rd week is what interests/puzzles me. Was it one final time of doing above (your quote above) and then it just never came back again?

RICHARD: Yes ... it is not all that difficult to break a habit once the very reason for its existence, its underlying cause, is exposed in the bright light of awareness.

RESPONDENT: Ok. If I understand correctly from that paragraph, your reason for getting angry was ‘I didn’t ask to be born’?

RICHARD: No, the very reason, the underlying cause, for the existence of anger amongst the whole suite of affective feelings was the basic resentment at having to be alive in the first place (as expressed in popular phrases such as ‘I didn’t ask to be born!’ and ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die!’ and so forth) ... whereas the reason, the trigger, for getting angry varied according to a range of situations and circumstances.

Here is what some dictionaries have to say about the word ‘resentment’:

• ‘resentment: an indignant sense of injury or insult received or perceived, a sense of grievance; (a feeling of) ill will, bitterness, or anger against a person or thing; spec. a negative attitude towards society or authority arising, often unconsciously, from aggressive envy and hostility, frustrated by a feeling of inferiority or impotence’. (Oxford Dictionary).
• ‘resentment: a feeling of indignant displeasure or persistent ill will at something regarded as a wrong, insult, or injury [offence implies hurt displeasure; resentment suggests a longer lasting indignation or smouldering ill will]’. (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary).
• ‘resentment: indignation [righteous anger at something wrongful, unjust, or evil] or ill will felt as a result of a real or imagined grievance; indignant smouldering anger generated by a sense of grievance’. (American Heritage® Dictionary).

RESPONDENT: My reasons seem to be different ...

RICHARD: If I may interject? Do you not see there is a distinction between me saying ‘the very reason for its existence ...’ (as in the underlying cause of anger itself) and you saying ‘my reasons ...’ (as in the triggers for getting angry)?

RESPONDENT: ... stuff like righteous anger or other person feeling superior and acting cocky and insulting/ castigating/ ignoring me, my point of view opposed, etc., or I feeling superior to the other and doing the same.

RICHARD: Sure, there is a whole rage of reasons for getting angry (which vary according to different situations and circumstances) ... maybe the following will be of assistance in regards righteous anger (aka indignation):

• [Richard]: ‘One of the major issues the identity inhabiting this flesh and blood body all those years ago attended to very early in the piece was the indignation – ‘anger excited by a sense of wrong, or by injustice, wickedness, or misconduct; righteous anger’ (Oxford Dictionary) – which had dogged him from almost as early as ‘he’ could remember (‘he’ was often moved to indignancy because of injustice/ unfairness whilst still in grade school for instance) as righteousness, being oh-so-readily justifiable, is such an insidious feeling’. 

• [Richard]: ‘... one of the most persistent forms of anger is indignation (or righteous anger/justifiable anger): it can be eradicated rather simply by the realisation that its raison d’être – a guardian against injustice, unjustness, unfairness, inequality (partiality, discrimination, and so on) – is as much a human invention as those concepts it defends ... justice, justness, fairness, equality (impartiality, indiscrimination, and so on).
I have touched upon this elsewhere: 

• [Richard]: ‘There is no ‘chaos’ and ‘order’ as a ‘sub-stratum of the universe’ ... they are but human inventions and do not exist in actuality. The same applies to fairness/ unfairness, justice/injustice and any other human concepts that, whilst being useful for human-to-human interaction, are futility in action when applied to the universe. Male logic is as useless as female intuition when it comes to being free: the everyday reality of the ‘real-world’ is a veneer ‘I’ paste over the top of the pristine actual world by ‘my’ very being ... and ‘being’ is the savage/ tender instinctual passions (giving rise to feelings of malice/love and sorrow/ compassion etc., with the resultant concepts of bad/ good and evil/ god and so on) which cripples intelligence by invariably producing dualistic concepts. ‘Tis all a fantasy ... feelings rule in the human world’..

Put simply: nature is neither fair nor just – a volcanic eruption (for just one instance) does not discriminate between who or what it obliterates/destroys – and thus coupled with the basic resentment at having to be alive in the first place is the further grievance that life is inequitable /iniquitous.

RICHARD: Yet I never asked for an apology for ‘the ‘boneheaded’ comment’ ... and both respect and disrespect are like water off a duck’s back to me anyway.

RESPONDENT: If someone spit on you and slapped you in the face and wished potential death to you ... would it be any different to them hugging you and caressing your face while they wear a warm smile?

RICHARD: Presuming that the spitting, slapping and death-wishing behaviour is what the word ‘disrespect’ educed for you, and the hugging, caressing and smiling behaviour is what the word ‘respect’ similarly educed, then they are indeed different (which is the whole point of the prefix ‘-dis’ in any word) ... yet there would be no difference in regard to the feeling which occasioned both behaviours being like water off a duck’s back to me.

There are no affections here in this actual world.

RESPONDENT: Of course it would, you would be aware of the exact value and potential for how much your life is in danger at that moment ...

RICHARD: Here you have moved from referring to the feelings which occasioned the behaviour – respect/disrespect – and are referring to the behaviour itself.

RESPONDENT: ... (no feelings included, lucky duck) ...

RICHARD: I do realise you may very well be making an associative pun (from the ‘water off a duck’s back’ phrase) yet even so the total absence of feelings in this flesh and blood body has nothing whatsoever to do with luck.

RESPONDENT: ... but would you care about a possible and probable potential death?

RICHARD: I have over a decade’s experience of interacting with people replete with feelings and am well aware they can cause them to do all manner of things – up to and including possible and probable homicide – and thus always take into consideration that their rationality can be cast aside in an instant.

RESPONDENT: If your arms were free to move, you wouldn’t punch back as it is useless because the force behind a punch is determined by the survival instincts and aggressive motivations right?

RICHARD: Wrong.

RESPONDENT: Does this mean the sport of boxing or a friendly spar now and again is out of the pick?

RICHARD: I have no interest whatsoever in hitting my fellow human being in the name of sport or friendliness.

RESPONDENT: When I feel righteously angry I consciously want to go back to ‘feeling good’, but since I feel justified in my anger, it feels good to be angry, making it difficult to get back to ‘feeling good’.

RICHARD: One of the major issues the identity inhabiting this flesh and blood body all those years ago attended to very early in the piece was the indignation – ‘anger excited by a sense of wrong, or by injustice, wickedness, or misconduct; righteous anger’ (Oxford Dictionary) – which had dogged him from almost as early as ‘he’ could remember (‘he’ was often moved to indignancy because of injustice/unfairness whilst still in grade school for instance) as righteousness, being oh-so-readily justifiable, is such an insidious feeling.

RESPONDENT: To me, corrupt has always meant, by definition, being evil. But how do I see this anger as corrupt when I accept that there is no good and evil?

RICHARD: Just for starters: try seeing how the (readily justifiable) righteous anger, with all its feel-good virtuosity, precludes one from enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive – the only moment one is ever alive – through being as happy and as harmless as is humanly possible via felicitously/ innocuously feeling good (rather than virtuously feeling good) ... instead of seeing righteousness as corrupt (and therefore, by a definition, evil) which depravity is further complicated by choosing to accept there is no good and evil even though the real-world, the world that maybe 6.0 billion peoples live in, is rife with it.

RESPONDENT: Most things that are corrupt can be seen as survival strategies, which means they could be seen as neither good or evil.

RICHARD: Indeed they could ... yet it is undeniable that maybe 6.0 billion peoples nurse malice and sorrow – and thus the antidotal pacifiers love and compassion – in their bosom.

RESPONDENT: How can I make myself see corruption when I don’t see things as good or evil?

RICHARD: Perhaps if I were to put it this way? Now that you have neatly solved the existential dilemma which has bothered theologians/ metaphysicians for centuries (simply by redefining good and evil out of existence) ... where are you at?

Here is a clue:

• [Respondent]: ‘... I feel righteously angry (...).

RESPONDENT: One other point: If you were in the situation of looking after little kids again, I’m presuming that you would have no difficulty shouting at them if they are being naughty.

RICHARD: I can speak clearly and firmly, lowering the tone and raising the pitch as appropriate, when interacting with any of my fellow human beings – and not just with the younger ones – who continue to not comply with the legal laws or not observe the social protocols even after being reminded of the sensibility of doing so ... if that is what you mean.

RESPONDENT: As this would be seen to many as anger, how would you differentiate?

RICHARD: Hmm ... it would appear that what I described (above) is not what you mean.

RESPONDENT: Could you smack their bottoms if necessary?

RICHARD: There are times when physical force/restraint is necessary with any of my fellow human beings – and not just with the younger ones – as the human condition is endemic per favour blind nature’s survival package of instinctual passions (such as fear and aggression and nurture and desire) ... no one is exempt.

RESPONDENT: Are you saying that its possible to be stern and forceful without being angry?

RICHARD: Indeed so ... to actually be harmless (be free of malice) means one does not have to pretend to be harmless (be a pacifist).

RESPONDENT: (My experience says yes – unless I am deluding myself).

RICHARD: You are not deluding yourself ... and, not all that surprisingly, interacting sans anger is far more effective anyway (especially in the long-term).

RESPONDENT: Or would you not ever shout at the kids?

RICHARD: Where the voice of reason has no effect (when a fellow human being is in the grip of a passion for example) or where the situation calls for instant effect (when a fellow human being is in danger for instance) speaking clearly and firmly, lowering the tone and raising the pitch as appropriate, is the only sensible course of action with any of my fellow human beings ... and not just with the younger ones.

RESPONDENT: (If you say never shout at the kids, I will find this more unbelievable than the belief in a supreme being!! ;).

RICHARD: Ha ... if one cannot stay one step ahead of recalcitrant children one does not deserve the title ‘mature adult’.

RESPONDENT: If they give you one injection of adrenaline, will you be able to control your angriness?

RICHARD: What ‘angriness’ are you talking off? There is neither anger nor anguish in this flesh and blood body ... do you really take an actual freedom from the human condition to be a suppression, or even a repression, of the affective feelings?

Just for the record, however, when I have a dental injection to anaesthetise the jaw I always make sure the dentist uses a procaine mixture which does not contain adrenaline, which most such mixtures do, because its effect is psychotropic (just as caffeine, a chemical cousin to cocaine, is).

RESPONDENT: I’d be interested in hearing whether Richard and the others here in virtual freedom still experience rushes of adrenaline.

RICHARD: I do not experience rushes of adrenaline.

RESPONDENT: The question comes from the realization that one is ridding oneself from ‘aggression’ in any form.

RICHARD: Yes ... there is a difference, however, between the violence born of the instinctual passion of aggression and the judicious use of physical force/restraint when the situation and circumstance leaves no other option.

RESPONDENT: Now, the aggression found in sport and exercise and much play is many times malicious. It doesn’t seem to me that it must be malicious though. Wrestling with my kid or throwing a football around and running around the backyard is great fun. But I still wonder whether the adrenaline rush is affective. It certainly feels delightful, and much ‘purer’ than emotion. Also related to this curiosity is ‘excitement’ and ‘enthusiasm’. Though an adrenaline rush, excitement, enthusiasm, etc. are certainly often based upon the passions and emotions – must they always be?

RICHARD: I am no expert on the properties of adrenaline – and it being so long ago I can barely remember its effects anyway – so suffice is it to say that the magical perfection of the purity of the actual leaves all other forms of pseudo-aliveness for dead.

In the infinitude of this fairy-tale-like actual world, with its sensuous quality of magical perfection and purity, everything and everyone has a lustre, a brilliance, a vividness, an intensity and a marvellous, wondrous, scintillating vitality that makes everything alive and sparkling ... even the very earth beneath one’s feet. The rocks, the concrete buildings, a piece of paper ... literally everything is as if it were alive (a rock is not, of course, alive as humans are, or as animals are, or as trees are). This ‘aliveness’ is the very actuality of all existence ... the actualness of everything and everyone.

We do not live in an inert universe.

RESPONDENT: Both Peter and Richard have said they could still defend themselves quite easily if attacked on the street. Where does that ‘force’ or ‘power’ required come from since it’s not ‘aggression’?

RICHARD: The straightforward necessity of acting appropriate to the situation and the circumstance ... if someone attacks somebody they are knowingly initiating a course of action contrary to the legal laws and the social protocol and can rightfully expect whatever consequences which may ensue as a result of their actions.

RESPONDENT: I guess I’m searching for some distinction between the feeling of aggression and forcefulness. Also between passionate excitement and enthusiasm and actual being fully engaged.

RICHARD: Perhaps a personal anecdote will throw some light upon the subject of being fully engaged: some years ago whilst in a supermarket my wife and I had a pack stolen from the shopping trolley we were using when our backs were turned; I saw a young man disappearing along the aisle with our pack and on out through the turnstile; I went off after him at a brisk pace, negotiated the turnstile easily, and moved out through the self-opening doors; there was an ornamental garden between me and the car-park wherein off in the distance the young man could be seen heading away; I cleared the garden in one leap – seeing each and every plant and flower in detail as I sailed over it – and soon caught up to him as, glancing over his shoulder and seeing me coming, he headed for a crowded mall to the left ... and eventually regained the pack without a fight or even any display of intimidation. Upon returning to the supermarket I passed by the garden, through the pathway provided, and noticed by its width that I would not ordinarily be able to leap over it ... necessity provides all the calorific energy required.

He was a big, muscular young man such that I would not wish to enter into a ring with as I would be bound to come off second-best in any such organised sport. He knew that he had crossed the line in regards to the legal laws and social protocol and fully expected to pay the price for his actions ... his bluff and bluster collapsed like a leaky balloon when confronted in the mall with the straightforward request for the return of property not belonging to him.

Interestingly enough I was not even breathing heavily.

RESPONDENT: It is this fanatical drive of yours to prove K ‘wrong’ and you ‘right’ that throws such a cloud over your own ‘would be ‘teachings’.’ This constant barrage of attacks on K shows that you have an almost desperate need to be the only one on Earth to know what you know. I’m not saying that ‘know’ isn’t true, but it is quite ‘suspicious’ because of your mean-ness.

RICHARD: ‘Tis no wonder there is very little questioning of these basic issues ... just look at the response when somebody does so (‘fanatical drive’ and ‘would be ‘teachings’’ and ‘constant barrage of attacks’ and ‘an almost desperate need’ and ‘mean-ness’).

RESPONDENT: For example, the evidence you offer above to prove K’s litigious nature in the lawsuit over his own writings reveals that you will jump on what you see as any opportunity to prove that your are something he was not, i.e., free from anger.

RICHARD: If you look again at what I wrote you will see that I was asking a question which could very well elucidate, for some astute person, the distinction between the ideal and the reality ... what is your objection to such genuine questioning based upon?

RESPONDENT: Oh, cut the crap, Richard. On top of everything else, such statements show what a hypocrite you are and reduce your writing to just gossip. The implication that K was an angry man is implicit in your statement of a pretend question.

RICHARD: I asked the question because of the nature of what I was responding to. Vis.:

• [No. 33]: ‘That is the toughest part: to look within. Anger in X, Y, or Z is *the same anger that expresses itself everywhere else*’. [emphasis added].

Generally speaking, the anger that the various saints, sages and seers have come out with from time to time has been designated as ‘Divine Anger’, for example, and I was allowing the possibility that any anger displayed by Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti may have thus been exempt from the normal or garden variety.

Specifically written into the question is, basically, that there is the ideal (sitting together as two friends under a tree discussing matters) and there is the reality (taking out several lawsuits to obtain legal possession of a former associate’s documents: of course there is implicit in the question that anger was involved ... it is anger that clouds clarity.

Which is why I suggested that you look again at what I wrote because the issue I was addressing is the distinction between the ideal (under a tree) and the reality (a litigious relationship) and the distinction between the ideal (having eradicated anger) and the reality (of pacifistically sitting out a war). I was drawing a parallel by providing an example to demonstrate the issue in action in real-life ... and a pacifist is a person who changes their behaviour in lieu of eradicating the anger (or aggression, hatred and etcetera) which causes the behaviour in the first place.

As law and order is everywhere maintained at the point of a gun a person that is free of malice and sorrow can both utilise physical force/ restraint (be involved in a war) and take out lawsuits (be involved in litigation) where clearly applicable ... there is no difference in kind between the physical force used in a war and the physical force used in a court-case.

Lastly, what is indeed ‘hypocritical’ is advising others to do what one has not done oneself. Vis.:

• [No. 42]: ‘K, when asked during WWII to condemn the enemy, *always advised the questioners to look into themselves and eradicate anger there*. Not many people listened’. [emphasis added].

And it is the ‘not many people listened’ statement which is the telling comment ... Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti did not listen to his own ‘Teachings’. But, then again, he oft-times distanced himself from the ‘Teachings’ ... as do the many and varied saints, sages and seers (popularly phrased as do not look at the finger but look at what the finger is pointing to).

Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti made it very clear where his peace lay ... the ‘answer’ to all the ills of humankind is not to be found in the world:

• [quote]: ‘I have found the answer to all this [violence], not in the world but away from it’. (page 94, ‘Krishnamurti – His Life And Death’; Mary Lutyens; Avon Books: New York 1991).

Eastern spirituality is fundamentally all about avoiding re-birth ... not about peace-on-earth.

RICHARD: ‘My’ extinction was the ending of not only fear, but of all of the affective faculties. Extinction releases one into actuality ... and this actual world is ambrosial, to say the least.

RESPONDENT: Do you experience emotions, for example anger at injustice? If not, why not?

RICHARD: No, I experience no emotions. Literally, I have no feelings – emotions and passions – whatsoever ... and have not had for five years. And ‘anger at injustice’ invariably leads to revenge ... it is an emotional inevitability no matter how well one can control oneself. No judge on earth is truly impartial. Even the Christian/Judaic God is a vengeful god!

*

RESPONDENT: You have stated you have no anger, which is good if it is true.

RICHARD: Not just no anger ... no sadness as well (not to mention all the other malicious and sorrowful feelings, passions, impulses and urges). And it is not ‘good’ ... it is salubrious. It means peace-on-earth, as this body, in this life-time. This is an actual freedom I am living and writing about ... not some self-righteous preening.

RESPONDENT: Again, do you live in ways that would be considered to fall into the immoral category as they are commonly known?

RICHARD: What do you mean by ‘considered to fall into the immoral category as they are commonly known’ ... are you not the person who has absolute values handed down from high? Because the ‘commonly known’ values vary from culture to culture ... are you asking if I have any relative values, then? That is, are you asking if I observe the social protocol of whatever culture is currently dominant? Are you asking me if I comply with the legal laws of whatever country I am living in at the time?

Seeing that each particular country lubricates its social interactions with its own cultural proprieties – and enforces its legal laws at the point of a gun – if I wish to have a trouble-free social life I would be a fool if I did not. One of the benefits of being free of the human condition is that no restrictions are irksome ... which means no incipient rebellion to have to deal with.

This is a truly remarkable freedom.

*

RESPONDENT: Only if it is the right kind of freedom.

RICHARD: Goodness me ... I long ago abandoned ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ because far too many of my fellow human beings have been killed because of what is ‘right’ ... or savagely punished because they were ‘wrong’. It is far better – and much more understandable – to appraise one’s feelings, thoughts and actions as being either ‘silly’ or ‘sensible’. It is simply silly to drive on the wrong side of the road, for example, because of the obvious danger to one’s own life and limb and to others ... not ‘wrong’ with all its judgemental condemnations of one’s implicit wickedness and badness. It is sensible to find out why one is driven to perform socially unacceptable acts, for instance, rather than to refrain from committing these deeds because such restraint is the ‘right’ thing to do. Because ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are emotive words loaded with reward and punishment connotations – which is poor motivation for salubrious action anyway – then one has dignity for the first time in one’s life.

So, the question is: Is an actual freedom a silly freedom ... or a sensible freedom?

It is a freedom well worth living indeed, for in actual freedom lies not only an actual peace but an actual innocence. One is pure innocence personified, for one is literally free from sin and guilt. One is untouched by evil; no malice or sorrow exists anywhere in this body. One is utterly innocent ... innocence, that much abused word, can come to its full flowering and one is easily able to be freely ingenuous – noble in character – without any effort at all. The integrity of an actual freedom is so unlike the strictures of morality – whereupon the psychological and psychic identity within the body struggles in vain to resemble the purity of the actual – inasmuch as probity is bestowed gratuitously. One can live unequivocally, endowed with an actual gracefulness and dignity, in a magical wonderland. To thus live candidly, in arrant innocence, is a remarkable condition of excellence. This alternate freedom has never before been discovered anywhere in the history of humankind ... the most one could aspire to in order to transcend the ‘human realm’ was the much-touted ‘Divine Realm’, which has always brought bloodshed and suffering in its wake. This is because an imitation innocence was produced by the transformed identity now being humble ... it never was and never will be the genuine article. However, the way is now clear for that most longed for global peace-on-earth to happen. Because it is possible in one human being, the possibility exists for it to be replicated in another ... and another ... and another ... and so on. And the crux of its success is innocence.

None of the supposed ‘innocence of children’ comes anywhere near to the matchless purity of the innocence of the actual. Nor does the assumed ‘innocence’ in the status generously but wrongly attributed to those old men, women and children classified as ‘innocent victims of war’; for these ‘victims’ are all guilty of instinctive anger and vicious urges themselves. As much as one might be sensitively considerate about their suffering, they cannot be labelled as innocent whilst they remain being ‘human’. They are not to blame: nobody is born innocent, all humans are already ‘guilty’ at conception. Fear and aggression and nurture and desire are built into the Human Condition ... this is the very human nature that is so often said as an excuse: ‘This is just human nature and human nature cannot be changed’. These intrinsic urges and drives are known as the ‘instinct for survival’.

This ‘instinct for survival’ is an animal necessity to ensure the blind continuation of the species. It served the human animal well until the emergence of the cerebral cortex brain, situated over the top of the primitive animal brain ... the ‘reptilian brain’. This thinking, reflective brain – corrupted by affective feelings – gave rise to a brain pattern known as ‘the mind’. In here the ‘instinct for survival’ becomes the passion-driven ‘will to survive’. Thus the biologically necessary blind instinctual patterns spilled over into the psychological arena ... with disastrous results. For five thousand years or more, human beings have been struggling to overcome the emotion-laden ‘will to survive’ with moralistic injunctions – derived from any Divine Being’ s ‘Teachings’ – to no avail. The ‘Teachings’ were – and are – fatally flawed. Although well-meant, they were abysmally improper. They have led to many appalling absurdities such as institutionalised human sacrifices to numerous gods; exalted martyrdoms for futile ideals; honourable deaths through valour in wars; emotional sufferings whilst contemplating the torments of hells; inspired self-flagellations ... the list goes on and on. The culpability for these preposterous catastrophes must be laid squarely at the feet of those highly revered but sadly deluded Divine Beings. Their futile ‘Teachings’ are but inimical fulminations ... ignorant railings against the neuro-biology of the Human Condition.

The time has come, with the world population as large and as cosmopolitan as it is, to discard the passionate and emotional ‘will to survive’ – with all its biologically-based inherited savagery – and move on to a new paradigm. This paradigm I call actualism, which works to disempower the instinctual passions one is encumbered with by blind nature at birth. One can come upon an actual freedom – the third alternative – which is the actuality that delivers the goods so long yearned for: peace-on-earth, as this body, in this life-time. And it delivers it now in this moment in eternal time and here at this place in infinite space, for it is already always here ... now.

It is yours for the choosing.

RESPONDENT: I did not think you would be doing those obvious evils.

RICHARD: I am not only talking of not doing these things, I am talking of not even having to suppress thinking these kind of thoughts at all ... ever. The reason why I am not impulsively thinking these thoughts is that in an actual freedom I have no furious urges, no instinctive anger, no impulsive rages, no inveterate hostilities, no evil disposition ... no malicious or sorrowful tendencies whatsoever. The blind animal instinctual passions, which some neuro-scientists have tentatively located toward the top of the brain-stem in what is popularly called the ‘reptilian brain’, have under-gone a radical mutation. I am free to be me as-I-am; benign and benevolent and beneficial in character. I am able to be a model citizen, fulfilling all the intentions of the idealistic and unattainable moral strictures of ‘The Good’: being humane, being philanthropic, being altruistic, being magnanimous, being considerate and so on. All this is achieved in a manner ‘I’ could never foresee, for it comes effortlessly and spontaneously, doing away with the necessity for virtue completely.

RESPONDENT: I chose some more subtle ones.

RICHARD: If I may point out? They are not ‘more subtle’ at all ... they are an obvious and easy target for any well-meaning zealot who wishes to make people feel guilty in order to get them the feel remorse. Then – if successful – with remorse comes repentance which, if one sufficiently humiliates oneself under the guise of humility, your imaginatively haughty god will graciously forgive ... and the cunning penitent gets off scot-free with all their basic instinctual passions – epitomised by sorrow and malice – intact. Thus ‘I’ survive only to wreak ‘my’ havoc once again.

RICHARD: However, the way is now clear for that most longed for global peace-on-earth to happen. Because it is possible in one human being, the possibility exists for it to be replicated in another ... and another ... and another ... and so on. And the crux of its success is innocence.

None of the supposed ‘innocence of children’ comes anywhere near to the matchless purity of the innocence of the actual. Nor does the assumed ‘innocence’ in the status generously but wrongly attributed to those old men, women and children classified as ‘innocent victims of war’; for these ‘victims’ are all guilty of instinctive anger and vicious urges themselves. As much as one might be sensitively considerate about their suffering, they cannot be labelled as innocent whilst they remain being ‘human’. They are not to blame: nobody is born innocent, all humans are already ‘guilty’ at conception. Fear and aggression and nurture and desire are built into the Human Condition ... this is the very human nature that is so often said as an excuse: ‘This is just human nature and human nature cannot be changed’. These intrinsic urges and drives are known as the ‘instinct for survival’.

RESPONDENT: It is much more than the ‘instinct for survival’. It is the nature of what seeks to survive.

RICHARD: The ‘nature of what seeks to survive’ is indeed the survival instinct. What on earth are you talking about?

RESPONDENT: We seek not only to survive but to be more than we are.

RICHARD: It is the ‘seeking to survive’ that prevents one from being what you call ‘more than we are’ . When ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul sacrifices itself psychologically and psychically ... then the freedom that is already always here becomes apparent.

RESPONDENT: Not only does man want to survive and conquer but he wants to be number one.

RICHARD: Indeed ... (and woman too). May I ask? Do you want to not only fail and be conquered but be number ... um ... bottom-of-the-list into the bargain?

RESPONDENT: His ‘natural’ or animal state, that you refer to, puts him in a state of conflict, unlike the animals. The animal has anger or fear, kills, fights or runs and returns to rest or goes to sleep in peace.

RICHARD: Being born and raised on a farm, and having a life-long interest in animals, I have been able to observe over time that, by and large, animals generally do not rest or sleep ‘in peace’ ... they are constantly on the alert, vigilant, scanning for attack. Some, like ducks for example, ‘sleep’ half of the brain at a time. Apart from bears and the such-like in hibernation (oblivion) it is not very restful being an animal.

RESPONDENT: Afterwards, there is no conflict for the animal. He settles down quickly and returns shortly to a relaxed state. The animal does not retain haunting memories that put him in a state of conflict. He has only done what all animals do, and there is nothing else he can do, nor should there be.

RICHARD: Okay ... animals are not aware of what they do: I have seen cats toying with a mouse in a manner that can only be dubbed cruel; I have seen cows ‘spooked’ and then stampede, in what must be described as hysteria, trampling their young as they do so; I have seen stallions displaying what can only be labelled aggression; I have seen dogs acting in a way that can only be called pining; I have seen blackbirds playing ‘catch’ with slowly-dying crickets; I have watched many animals exhibiting what must be specified as fear ... and so on. Only recently a television programme was aired here on chimpanzees about studies made over many, many years of them in their native habitat and I was able to see civil war, robbery, rage, infanticide, cannibalism, grief, group ostracism ... and so on. It is easily discerned by those with the eyes to see that animals are not aware of their actions ... let alone the instinctual passions that drive them.

As I have already remarked: as animals cannot think they are not intelligent.

RESPONDENT: If a man does the same thing the animal does, he is full of conflict and needs outside support to escape from the reality of what he had done in order to achieve a state of equilibrium and rest.

RICHARD: What ‘outside support’ would that be?

RESPONDENT: This is nothing like the animal that inherits a genetic and instinctual way of life with no possibility of any kind of choice in the lifestyle he leads.

RICHARD: Indeed ... only intelligence (the amazing ability to think, reflect, compare, evaluate and implement considered action for benevolent reasons) will enable the first animal in the earth’s history to begin the process of being free of the instinctual passions.

RESPONDENT: To find peace in the animal state means to be at peace with fear or anger ... killing or rape.

RICHARD: Not so ... peace-on-earth only becomes apparent at the eradication of ‘fear or anger’ and all the rest ... not some chicken-hearted appeasement policy.

RESPONDENT: There is nothing there that would dictate compassion or consideration for our fellow humans.

RICHARD: To be compassionate is to keep the sorrow alive ... where there is no sorrow there is no compassion required.

RESPONDENT: The strong survive and the weak die. That is the law of the jungle.

RICHARD: Not so ... it is the fittest that survive: ‘survival of the fittest’ does not necessarily mean (as it is popularly misunderstood) that ‘the strong’ (most muscular) always survive. It means ‘the most fitted to the ever-changing environment’ (those who adapt) get to pass on their genes. If the most muscular are too dumb to twig to this very pertinent fact they will slowly disappear of the face of the planet over the countless millions of years that it is going to take via the trial and error process of blind nature. One can speed up this tedious natural process in one’s own lifetime and become free ... now. Of course one will, of necessity, have to relinquish the narcissistic desire to be the next manifestation of that ‘Supreme Intelligence’ (aka ‘God On Earth’) ... which means that humility must be discarded along with all those other selfish feelings.

Such as ‘saving one’s immortal soul’.

RESPONDENT: What is this truly existing ego that is fact other than an image or an idea?

RICHARD: It is the cause of 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 ... that is what it is.

RESPONDENT: You suggested that there some truly existing ‘me’ other than an image. Action based on misconception can cause what is suggested. What is a proof of a real ‘me’?

RICHARD: Your anger that ‘comes and goes’ for starters?

RESPONDENT: Observing something that comes and goes is just something that comes and goes. It does not mean there is some ongoing truly existing ‘me’ that is a cause of anger.

RICHARD: What causes the seeming anger in this appearance of a body called No. 22 then?

RESPONDENT: What is its basis?

RICHARD: Its basis is the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire that blind nature endows on all sentient beings at birth.

RESPONDENT: Again, those are the fruit of misconception and cannot be a basis of some truly existing ‘me’.

RICHARD: When you watch footage of World War Two (or any other war) do you fondly imagine that all that bloodshed is caused by a fear and aggression that results from a ‘misconception’ that there is some ‘truly existing ‘me’ other than ‘a mirage’?

RESPONDENT: I would suggest observing the mind in action instead of movies.

RICHARD: Why would I follow your advice? This ‘observing the mind in action’ has not stopped the seeming anger in the apparent body called No. 22. now has it?

RESPONDENT: Action based on the belief in there being some true centre or self does not necessarily mean there is such a thing.

RICHARD: Not so ... in fact any action based on the belief that there is no ‘true centre or self’ to self-immolate will 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.

RESPONDENT: Listen again to your logic. The widespread suffering that you point to is not caused by a belief in the lack of a ‘me’. There is no such common belief. The root is the common belief in some true division, self, centre or independent ‘me’. A lake mirage is not dispelled by adding a belief in no lake. It is merely seeing that what was thought to be true, isn’t.

RICHARD: As anger still ‘comes and goes’ in the body called No. 22 then you are living proof that the ‘lake mirage’ is not dispelled by ‘merely seeing that what was thought to be true isn’t’ as you so quaintly insist (above).

RESPONDENT: Again, the apparent anger coming and going, is not a proof of a truly existing ‘me’. It is only anger coming and going. That anger may be based on an assumption of a truly existing ‘me’, but that still does not mean there is some truly existing ‘me’ that is angry.

RICHARD: You say ‘maybe based on the assumption’ ... is it or is it not? Can you ever make a committed statement without hedging it about with all kind of conditions?

*

RESPONDENT: Observing something that comes and goes is just something that comes and goes. It does not mean there is some ongoing truly existing ‘me’ that is a cause of anger.

RICHARD: What causes the seeming anger in this appearance of a body called No. 22 then?

RESPONDENT: Speaking from memory, it is merely the habitual misconception of there being some actual separation, some truly independent thing.

RICHARD: And when was the last imputed time this seeming anger came and went in the not truly existing body called No. 22? In other words, when did this apparently existing ‘me’ in the not truly independent body called No. 22 habitually misconceive that there was some ‘actual separation’ and some ‘truly independent thing’ ? Secondly, how often does this ‘habitual misconception’ occur in any imputed year for this not truly-existing body called No. 22?

You see ... I want to know how reliable this is as a solution to 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 example: in the middle of hand-to-hand combat, with an enemy, a spouse, a child and so on, how likely is it that a person might all of a sudden remember and say something like: ‘Golly gosh, here I go again ... I am habitually misconceiving that there is some actual separation again and I am once more imputing that there is a ‘me’ in a truly existing thing and this dratted seeming anger has come again making me try to actually bash one of my fellow human beings into a bloody pulp in a seeming rage?’ Do you then take some time out – run up the white flag for a bit – and sit down cross-legged meditating until this ‘habitual misconceiving’ ceases and the seeming anger then goes ... as easily as it came? And then how do you persuade the not-truly existing other – whose seeming anger has been aroused by your seeming anger and is now manifesting actual violence all over your apparent body in retaliation for your forgetfulness – to do like-wise ... given that you ‘habitually misconceive’ from time-to-time.

Also, this memory that you are plainly speaking from (you did not say ‘seeming’ memory) ... do I take it that it is actual then?

RESPONDENT: It is the same habitual misconception that imputes a someone that can eliminate a ‘me’ or a ‘me’ that can be eliminated or that can attain freedom from a ‘me’.

RICHARD: Not so, I live on a different planet to you ... it is called ‘Planet Earth’. People here call a spade a spade ... it is a lot more simple that way.

RICHARD: You are very quick to re-state your conclusion here ... are you of the ‘Tabula Rasa’ school of philosophy?

RESPONDENT: I don’t know.

RICHARD: Do you want to know? Are sentient beings born a ‘clean slate’ or not? Is this not an important issue? What is the point of building an elaborate hypothesis if the premise it is based on is erroneous? There has been much research into this growing science in these last few years.

RESPONDENT: Actually, it is the reaction: ‘I was afraid and I don’t like it ...’ that creates the self.

RICHARD: Okay then: why was ‘I afraid’ in the first place (before the thought ‘I don’t like it’)? Are you saying that to be fearful (purely fearful) is to be selfless?

RESPONDENT: ‘I afraid’ is also a response of the memory.

RICHARD: Okay then: why is there fear in the first place (before the ‘I afraid’ that is ‘also the response of memory’ which comes before ‘I don’t like it’ which you say creates the self)? Are you saying that to be fearful (purely fearful) is to be selfless?

RESPONDENT: In the moment of pure fear, there is no fear.

RICHARD: Are you also going to say: ‘in the moment of pure malice, there is no malice’; ‘in the moment of pure abhorrence, there is no abhorrence’; ‘in the moment of pure acerbity, there is no acerbity’; ‘in the moment of pure acrimony, there is no acrimony’; ‘in the moment of pure aggression, there is no aggression’; ‘in the moment of pure anger, there is no anger’; ‘in the moment of pure animosity, there is no animosity’; ‘in the moment of pure antagonism, there is no antagonism’; ‘in the moment of pure antipathy, there is no antipathy’; ‘in the moment of pure aversion, there is no aversion; ‘in the moment of pure bellicosity, there is no bellicosity’; ‘in the moment of pure belligerence, there is no belligerence’; ‘in the moment of pure bitchiness, there is no bitchiness’; ‘in the moment of pure cantankerousness, there is no cantankerousness’; ‘in the moment of pure bitterness, there is no bitterness’; ‘in the moment of pure cattiness, there is no cattiness’; ‘in the moment of pure despisal, there is no despisal’; ‘in the moment of pure detestation, there is no detestation’; ‘in the moment of pure disgust, there is no ‘disgust; ‘in the moment of pure enmity, there is no enmity’; ‘in the moment of pure envy, there is no envy’; ‘in the moment of pure evil, there is no evil’; ‘in the moment of pure hate, there is no hate’; ‘in the moment of pure hostility, there is no hostility’; ‘in the moment of pure loathing, there is no loathing’; ‘in the moment of pure moodiness, there is no moodiness; ‘in the moment of pure rancour, there is no rancour’; ‘in the moment of pure repugnance, there is no repugnance; ‘in the moment of pure spitefulness, there is no spite’; ‘in the moment of pure vengefulness, there is no vengeance; ‘in the moment of pure wrath, there is no wrath’ and so on and so on?

RESPONDENT: Everything else is wishful thinking, in my opinion.

RICHARD: And where would the human race be without ‘wishful thinking’, eh? Still sitting in a cave, dressed in animal skins and gnawing on a brontosaurus bone? In investigating my nature I am investigating human nature (the human condition) ... and one is one’s own ‘guinea-pig’ because such an investigation is participatory observation ... the ‘investigator’ is both participant and experimenter at one and the same time

Why not approach it this way: as I am a human being – and being born and raised in what is called the normal way – after allowing for idiosyncrasies any study of one’s own psyche is a study of the human psyche? Therefore, any verifiably common discoveries are valid for all peoples, given due allowance for gender, racial and era variance. Through face-to-face interaction and through reading and watching media it is entirely reasonable to deduce that that the three ways of experiencing the world of people, things and events (sensate, cerebral and affective) is common to all human beings. And, essentially, there is no difference between English malice and sorrow and African malice and sorrow and Indian malice and sorrow and so on and so on.

(I use the generally accepted convention of ‘malice’ and ‘sorrow’ as delineated by most religions and/or philosophies, that fall under the umbrella term ‘The Human Condition’, purely for convenience. In Christianity, for example, the word ‘suffering’ means the same affective feelings as the word ‘sorrow’ does. Similarly, the ‘Golden Rule’ (found in all religions) known in English as ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ points to the feelings covered under the catch-all word ‘malice’. Basically, ‘malice’ is what one does to others (resentment, anger, hatred, rage, sadism and so on) and ‘sorrow’ (sadness, loneliness, melancholy, grief, masochism and so on) is what one does to oneself ... as a broad generalisation).

Speaking personally, in my investigations I first started by examining thought, thoughts and thinking ... then very soon moved on to examining feelings (first the emotions and then the deeper feelings). When I dug down into these passions (into the core of ‘my’ being then into ‘being’ itself) I stumbled across the instincts ... and found the origin of not only the affective faculty but the psyche itself. I found ‘me’ at the core of ‘being’ ... which is the instinctual rudimentary animal self common to all sentient beings (which ‘original face’ is what gives rise to the feeling of ‘oneness’ with all other sentient beings). This is a very ancient genetic memory; being born of the biologically inherited instincts genetically encoded in the germ cells of the spermatozoa and the ova, ‘I’ am – genetically – umpteen tens of thousands of years old ... ‘my’ origins are lost in the mists of pre-history. ‘I’ am so anciently old that ‘I’ may well have always existed ... carried along on the reproductive cell-line, over countless millennia, from generation to generation. And ‘I’ am thus passed on into an inconceivably open-ended and hereditably transmissible future.

Hence: ‘I’ am ‘humanity’ and ‘humanity’ is ‘me’.

RESPONDENT: And I investigate that mess not to improve the world, or bring peace-on-earth, but because I don’t like this mess that I am in. It is too disturbing, too annoying, and wasteful.

RICHARD: Hokey-dokey ... but through your interactions with other peoples – and especially on Mailing Lists such as this – do you not find that other people, more or less, do not ‘like this mess that they are in’ because ‘it is too disturbing, too annoying, and wasteful’ also? What makes you think that you are so special? In other words, whether you like it or not, any investigation you do into yourself is going to be of benefit to ‘the world’ and will be moving towards ‘peace-on-earth’ anyway. Why not acknowledge the fact and give your investigation the impetus it deserves?

Much more productive than arguing over ‘selfishness’ versus ‘unselfishness’, eh?

RESPONDENT: Self-immolation is another separate fact?

RICHARD: Yes ... it requires a rather curious decision to be made: a decision the likes of which has never been made before nor will ever be made again. It is a once-in-a-lifetime determination and takes some considerable preparation because ‘I’, the aggressive psychological entity and ‘me’, the frightened psychic entity will both vanish forever. After ‘my’ close friend’s ‘divine madness’ began to unfold in its inevitable course through ‘parousia’, the first thing ‘I’ did, in January 1981, was to put an end to anger once and for all ... then ‘I’ was freed enough to live in an ad hoc virtual freedom. It took ‘me’ about three weeks and I have never experienced anger since then. The first and crucial step was to say ‘YES’ to being here on earth, for ‘I’ located and identified that basic resentment that all people that I have spoken to have. To wit: ‘I didn’t ask to be born!’

This is why remembering a PCE is so important for success for it shows one, first hand, that freedom is already always here ... now. With the memory of that crystal-clear perfection held firmly in mind, that basic resentment vanishes forever, and then it is a relatively easy task to eliminate anger once and for all. One does this by neither expressing or repressing anger when an event happens that would previously trigger an outbreak. Anger is thus put into a bind, and the third alternative hooves into view, dispensing with the hostility that is a large part of ‘I’ the aggressive psychological entity, and gently ushering in an increasing ease and generosity of character. With this growing magnanimity, one becomes more and more anonymous, more and more selflessly motivated. With this expanding altruism one becomes less and less self-centred, less and less egocentric ... the humanitarian ideals of peace, kindness, caring, benevolence and humaneness become more and more evident as an actuality.

CO-RESPONDENT: Richard, lets say hypothetically a stranger had a gun aimed at your face, what sort of thoughts might occur in your mind?

RICHARD: Having been rigorously trained in the military, until the appropriate reflex responses became second-nature, for multiple variations of such contingencies – plus having gone to war as a youth – it can be said with a high degree of confidence that there would be no thoughts occurring at the moment ... there would only be action. The whole point of such intensive drilling is that (to use a cliché) there is the quick ... and there is the dead.

RESPONDENT: Hey Richard! What a gem this is! :-)

RICHARD: The same, or similar, intensive training of reflex responses applies in many fields ... driving a vehicle, for example, where events can occur faster than thought is initially capable of dealing with them.

RESPONDENT: And I got to laugh, a few years back I was over this house with about a dozen or so folks all standing around in the living room. And this lamp across the room started to fall off this table, and I hurled myself across the room and caught the damn thing in mid-air. And everyone’s going whooaaaa, how’d you do that? :-) And I joked and said, I’m trained for this kind of stuff, I raised 4 kids. :-)

RICHARD: Ha ... as I also raised four children, back when I was a parent, I can certainly relate to that.

RESPONDENT: Well that explains it! :-)

RICHARD: I did not become a father until after I came back from war (and the rigorous military training, for multiple variations of such contingencies whereupon the appropriate reflex responses having become second-nature could mean the difference between life and death, was prior to that) ... besides which I was driving vehicles, for example, long before even that (being born and raised on a farm I was in control of machinery from a very early age).

The basic reflex response (aka the startle effect) which sentient beings are born with is what is known as the freeze-flight-fight mechanism ... none of which are always necessarily appropriate.