|
Others ~ Selected Correspondence 180 Degrees Opposite (To be seeking spiritual freedom is to be going 180 degrees in the wrong direction)
I was involved in what you would can the ‘initiatic’ tradition for around 8 years. 1) Many (if not all) of the Orthodox Christian initiates (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Palamas, Symeon the New Theologian, Theophan the Recluse, Clement of Alexandria, and all the Church fathers and mothers) believed in ‘actual’ demonic and angelic beings. I’m not sure who is providing you with misleading counter information. Hint: I do know some ‘perenialist’ writers will distort things to fit their ‘vision’. 2) Regardless of your or anyone’s ‘opinion’, at the end of the day there is this: The initiate tradition advocates disassociative practices like personal prayer, liturgical prayer, contemplation on ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’, sitting in silence for prolonged periods, fasting, and asceticism in general. Actualism advocates none of this. It brings non-spiritual attentiveness to one’s moment by moment experience of life. The ‘closest’ actualism comes to any of that is sitting down with a feeling and fully feeling it and then investigating it, but even that is fundamentally different than the above. If after carefully reading all the initiates lives, one can ‘think’ that even one of them had extinguished their ego/soul or social identity/instinctual self, and live in the actual world of the senses only, then one did not read the very clear account in their own words that shows without any doubt that they do not live in the actual world. Living in caves, monasteries, or being a priest involved in the liturgy (i.e. almost all of the ‘initiates’ were monks, hermits, or priests-think about it, No 81), is not a path to the actual. I’ll end with this: actualism is farther away from the ‘initiatic’ tradition than Christianity is from Satanism. Think about it. If you fully understand these paths, then my statement is obvious. Good luck in breaking free from the bondage of your spiritual ‘learning’ and conditioning. No 66 to No 81, 3.4.2005
I did a search of google and aflite and could not find any existing references to this, so I wanted to mention http://www.geocities.com/brianperkins77. It’s a site about ‘empty mind’ experiences and practices of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. The creator of the site (who I emailed telling about actualfreedom.com.au and this mailing list) has several descriptions of his own experiences which sound very much like PCEs, and also there are descriptions of other people who have had experiences at least one of which (http://www.geocities.com/brianperkins77/178bernadetteroberts.htm) could be construed as achieving actual freedom vis: (...) Although much of the material smacks of PCEs turning into ASC’s and then being misrepresented, I know Richard has been looking for someone else living Actual Freedom, so maybe this will be of interest. Just a few words about Bernadette Roberts and Actual Freedom. You related in a recent post that she may be another person in actual freedom and that Richard might be interested. He may have some other interest in her, but certainly not as another person in actual freedom. I say this as one who has studiously read a number of her books multiple times as well as flying out a few years ago to a weekend seminar with her – with plenty of chances to ask questions and ask for clarification. Just a few things you will find that are 180 degrees apart...
Being that Bernadette Roberts really doesn’t have anything new to offer (she is offering centuries old mystical Christianity blended with her own experiences) – and there seems to be nothing ‘ambrosial’ about her current state – I think you will find after further investigation that BR and AF are worlds apart. I think you will also find that what one person or group means by ‘no-self’ can be quite different from what others mean (if they really know what they mean in the first place – since for most it’s borrowed belief anyway.) No 37 to No 21
I have studied UG Krishnamurti, Bernadette Roberts, and Richard’s writings all very closely. I can tell you that what Richard is reporting is not at all the same as UG or Ms. Roberts. In fact, I flew to California a few years ago to a weekend seminar given by Bernadette to observe her closely – what she says, how she speaks, how her experience of the world is... etc. Not only is she far from Richard, but there is some distance (though maybe not as much) from UG as well. It may do well to keep in mind that because someone’s ‘state’ of consciousness might be labelled by ‘enlightenment’ or ‘no-self’ – there appear to be wide varieties of instantiations of such. That is more than obvious. OK, but since I started this particular thread in response to your claim that (according to you)
– has it also become ‘more than obvious’ that UG and BR are not of the same variety as an actual freedom? I can only disagree. May I ask on what grounds? * Thanks, but I already own her books. Do you also realize that she is a practicing Catholic that believes that Jesus is the saviour of humanity, as well as believing in ‘heaven’ and purgatory? AND that ‘Christ’ and the ‘Eucharist’ are keys to understanding her experience. Her clues are very telling to me without resorting to believing in those. She herself admitted that when there is no self, there is no god also. It is not for her that there is ‘no god’ when ‘there is no self’. Here experience of God is what vanished, not her belief in God. She has characterized her sharing of her ‘experiences’ as ‘for the glory of God’, so it is not at all in question whether or not she believes in God. Richard would say that it is not possible for him to believe in God, since such a thing would require the ability to imagine, yet it is still possible for Bernadette Roberts to believe and preach that God exists, etc. Though maybe she calls this godhead she does this (and many others symbolic similes) because that is her mode of expressing. When we talk of understanding one’s background etc. here is good example how the no-self exp. can be veiled (by Christianity) still being valid. It might be helpful to hear just a bit of how she describes her own ‘experience’. First, she would not claim that she is using a ‘mode’ of expressing – she would say that she is speaking the truth – not simply a ‘mode’ of expressing. To strip her claims of what you are calling her ‘mode’ is to not take seriously what she says. Another clue can be found in the fact that BR describes her experience of the world as ‘flat’. In other words, people and things appear to her almost as if they were cardboard cut-outs, like a 2 dimensional scene in a play – except everything is like that – which is a clue to recognizing her ‘state’ as dissociation. Richard says he recognizes such experiencing from the time he spent ‘enlightened’. The world is now experienced in full 3D according to his reports. Also, BR, not unlike UG has represented her transition to ‘no-self’ as something of a ‘calamity’ as well – saying that she wouldn’t ‘wish it on a dog’. Upon clarification, she did state not that her state of consciousness is undesirable, but the transition from her mystical union with God to ‘no-self’. Richard does describe some disorienting symptoms that occurred when he became actually free, but states explicitly that the event is wonderful, glorious – in fact, unimaginably so. * This topic is, in fact, not ‘so vast’ at all. I don’t know much about Richard’s familiarity with Bernadette Roberts, but I do know that he has read UG quite closely. UG would the better candidate of the two that might be ‘closer’ to what Richard is reporting as Bernadette Roberts is still quite religious and one does not have to wander far into her reports to see that it is a far cry from what Richard reports. But upon close inspection, UG will also be seen to be far, far, away. Could you show some blatant discrepancies? I have been doing so. Here are a few more –
* A good starting point to think about this is the fact that Richard recommends self-immolation, resulting in a persistent, irreversible PCE – which is the final accomplishment, the ‘meaning of life.’ Whereas UG does not recommend pursuing his state of consciousness and refers to it as a ‘calamity.’ No small difference there. I listed below some quotes which are just a bit of all, but as you said you already read all. Well, I did not say I have ‘read all’. I said I studied them closely. I think they are very clear, rational and helpful and come from empirical experience. What is unacceptable for instance about them? Perhaps you, Richard, could make comments where you see the fundamental differences? About affective system: The affective system, Roberts says, is the cause of all suffering. Out of it arises all fear, anxiety, and psychological suffering. It would follow, she suggests, that those who have lost the affective system, are free of psychological disorders and would have no reason to seek professional help, and that is why the psychiatric literature has no description of those who have gone beyond the self. Among the questions that arise is the concern that the lack of an affective system might lead to lives that are cold, detached, robot-like. Roberts says that one has to live the no-self life to understand it. She says, ‘All that need be said is that it is a dynamic, intense state of taking care of whatever arises in the now-moment. It is a continuous waking state in which the physical organism remains sensitive, responsive, and totally unimpaired. When fully adjusted to the dimension of no-self, nothing is found to be missing or wanting. It is only in the encounter with other selves that a self or affective system is a reminder of what *was*.’ She says that one of the reasons people cannot imagine life without an affective system is that few grasp the whole picture of what the affective system is. It is not merely the extremes of love and hate. It is personal energy and will, and these giving rise to all desire, and these desires or expectations colouring our world, our thoughts and perceptions, our experiences, our spiritual experiences of love, bliss, lights, visions, sounds, ecstasies, etc. It is all the self, the affective system. It is who we are fooled into believing who we are. So when the affective system, our psychological familiarity, our spiritual feeling, our desires, our self, falls away, what is left to serve as a standard? There are no standards, no values, from the perspective of the no-self. The no-self needs no values. It is already in the now moment. There are no options to consider, no standards to consult. The no-self is so empty that it is empty of love, bliss and joy, and empty of hate, sadness and evil. It is in the now moment. The practice of virtue is absent. Virtue is simply present. The bottom line is that the will, which is the core of the affective system, disappears, and it was will that had put virtue and vice into motion in the first place. This was Roberts’ major discovery about the self: ‘that its very nucleus is the will or volitional faculty.’ When the affective system first falls away, it is the will that abruptly goes, and later the emotions and feelings. Other interesting: ‘For the most part it rarely occurs to anyone that the human sensory system can function without consciousness. Usually people believe it is the other way around – namely, that consciousness can function without the senses. This latter belief, however, is based on the notion that consciousness is eternal or an immortal soul perhaps, but in truth, matters are actually the reverse. Man, like the animal, can function without consciousness, but neither man nor animal can function without the senses...’ <snipped more quotes from Bernadette Roberts> Just a few comments: First, BR makes out the problem of self as a problem of consciousness – the tendency to objectify or reify. This is the typical stance of ‘thought’ is the problem. She also describes empirical reality as ‘empty and meaningless’ – yet a direct experiencing of actuality is neither empty nor meaningless – rather it is magical. UG and BR both make out the ‘problem’ – as in why normal people don’t ‘experience’ the world the way they do as being the structure of experience – that experiencing requires an experiencer – get rid of the experiencer and you no longer have experiencing – just some sort of meaningless sensation. This is far, far away from what Richard and other actualists are describing. Experience continues, yet is pure and unmediated by an emotion based ‘self’. Possibly a way to cut right to the essential part of all of this is that both UG and BR are in some sense solipsists. Other people and things are like ‘cardboard cut-outs’ in their ‘flat’ world, and there is no ‘other’ for them because they themselves do not exist as separate entities. And all of this is directly opposite to actualism. You could say that mysticism pursues the subjective to the vanishing point of the self – everything becomes subjectivity. In other words, ‘I’ envelope the world to the point where the distinction between subject and object no longer makes sense and the objective is ‘sucked into’ the subjective with no distinction between the two. Actualists pursue objectivity to the vanishing point of the self – ‘I’ become so whittled down that eventually the distinction between the objective and the subjective collapses, but this time it is the objective that replaces the subjective – everything becomes (as it already is) objective – factual. No 37 to No 61(R)
The whole point of actualism is to be happy and harmless in the world as-it-is – i.e. not to rant and rave about how bad the world is and not to fluctuate between being angry or sad at one’s lot in life. If you want to change your lot then you change it. Similarly the whole point of actualism is to be happy and harmless with people as-they-are – i.e. not to rant and rave about how bad people are and not to fluctuate between being angry or sad at the human condition. If you want to become free of the human condition then you set about irrevocably changing yourself. Once you get the gist that actualism is about going down the road never travelled before in human history you start to realize the full implications of the fact that everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong. One then starts to see the folly of the human condition in toto and the envy, umbrage and criticism of others still ensnared by the old ways can be easily and clearly seen for what it is. Yes, I think it has never been done before but now it is and I want to be in on it in a front seat. It means the end of ‘me’ and nothing but experiencing the 24hour a day perfection and purity of this physical universe, all while doing what one usually does, whether it be working, driving, tending a garden, going to meetings, whatever. The virtually free state or the PCE is at once an extraordinary and ordinary experience ... I don’t know if you know what I mean about ‘ordinary’. I don’t mean ordinary in the sense of dull or mundane, it is certainly not that. But I mean ordinary in comparison to the ecstatic Altered States of Consciousness. As it is a purely sensory experience, completely devoid of emotional content, it can be part and parcel of one’s ordinary sensory experiencing of life in general. It is something that everyone has experienced before and may be potentially experiencing as soon as they focus their awareness on attention and sensuousness. It is indeed something that is right here and right now. One needn’t go off to some monastery or trooping off to Byron Bay to make a pilgrimage to visit Richard to begin to experience this pure sensuous quality of life. It is right here right now. One becomes progressively more and more practiced in identifying what it is that is standing in the way of experiencing this perfection all the time, 24 hours a day. Gary to Peter
In hindsight, there were in fact two intertwined difficulties. One was ‘my’ passions involved in maintaining my beliefs – mainly pride and loyalty – and these passions then conspired to prevent me from clearly understanding what was on offer in actualism, a condition known as cognitive dissonance. My brain had been programmed so completely to accept that there were only two alternatives to human existence – grim reality and a Greater Reality – so much so that it was almost impossible to conceive that peace and freedom lay where no one had dared to look before. Right here, right now, on earth. I never clearly conceived that there were only two alternatives to human existence, until I was introduced to the third. Now it makes sense but I never thought of it that way before. The underlying passions, whether they be fear, confusion, dread, terror, etc, that fuel spiritual belief are laid bare and exposed when one chucks their spiritual beliefs. So much so that the underlying feelings that made up the reason for the beliefs in the first place are experienced much more directly and intimately than before. Now they are out in the open where you can get at them, so to speak. And there is nothing else to do, and nowhere to go but to pick up the tools and dig into them. The solution offered by spiritual approaches – life on the basis of faith, belief, and trust – are a sop to the anxiety, horror, and despair of living in the grim reality of normal human existence. They do work, in the limited sense that they make people feel better – they are tranquillisers that calm the feelings and ‘sooth the soul’. I think it is only when one sees very clearly that they do not alleviate malice and sorrow, but just cover it up, that one begins to look around for an alternative – then it becomes plain that they don’t work – not that they really did to begin with. But the nagging explanation – ‘that everyone, up to now, has got it 180 degrees wrong’ – made such sense to me and explained so much of what was obviously senseless within the human condition, that I was inexorably drawn to investigate further. And I would add ‘that everyone, up to now, including myself, has got it 180 degrees wrong’. I am astounded by just how wrong I have gotten it. And like you, I am drawn to find a way out of this senseless mess that is the Human Condition. I am getting to the point of realizing the utter futility of living the rest of my life in the Human Condition, but ‘I’ am still putting up the fight for ‘my’ life. It is common wisdom that suffering is good for you, you get stronger from suffering, that you grow and learn by suffering, etc. By experiencing the bitter-sweet lure of feeling sad, by observing it in action in your life and sufficiently investigating the roots of sorrow and depression, you eventually come to realize that all you get from suffering is more suffering. The feeling of sorrow is a seemingly bottomless pit leading only to utter despair where the only way out of a living hell seems to be suicide. Personally I see no point in suffering. Having said that I see no point in it does not mean, however, that I am free from it. I have experienced, since I quit my job, ‘utter despair’ on a number of occasions. I have investigated into these feelings but I can’t say I understand them fully or comprehensively. If there is a ‘bitter-sweet lure of feeling sad’, I am not sure what it is. Perhaps it just confirms that there is a ‘me’ there. I know that I sometimes punish myself terribly. It has happened a couple of times recently, within the last week or so, that I was suffering so from anxiety and depression – I felt I could not bear it any more. I remained in the state of awareness, questioning myself about the feelings and emotions, and telling myself that it was utterly futile to be suffering like this. A couple of times a curious thing happened: all of a sudden I was free from the crushing emotions I had had. It was so sudden and it seemed like nothing that ‘I’ had done to bring this about. The anxious and depressed feelings simply abated and went away, to be followed by a wonderful feeling of relief. This has happened a couple of times, so I know that the process of awareness and ‘self’-investigation works, but there is definitely nothing easy or comfortable about it. It seems that it is the light of awareness that shines away the gloomy feelings and gloomy moods and not anything that I have done. On one occasion, the feelings dissipated so completely and so suddenly that I found myself hardly recognizing that it had happened. And when I did reflect on what had happened, I was astounded by it. Gary to Peter
I always find it fascinating to think that I will never meet many of the people who write on this list face to face and that it is unnecessary. What needs to be conveyed about actualism and Actual Freedom can be conveyed by words alone. This fact in itself demolishes any Guru/disciple nonsense and the cosy insular-group syndrome. That way anyone who wants to gets to stand on his or her own two feet, any success is your own, earned by your efforts, and this fact then gives you the assuredness and confidence to proceed even further on the path to freedom. This is another way in which actualism and the Actual Freedom mailing list differs from a lot of the other things out there. It is indeed ‘a loose affiliation of peoples’. It is not a support group, a ‘self-help’ group, a recovery group or any such thing. There is no need to see the other people or talk to them face-to-face. It seems to be a more ‘pull yourself up by the boot-straps’ approach which is not dependent on face-to-face interaction in order to work. Were there someone close by who participates on this list, I might be tempted to go see them and ‘compare notes’. I find the things we talk about on this list fascinating, and I myself am in another cycle of intense absorption and fascination with the world around me. I am pulling out of a recent down cycle and can feel the thrill of being alive at this place in time and space again. Gary to Peter
So what do think that all the recorded experiences (all... all... including oral traditions that got written up later... so much isn’t? this ‘all’ spans centuries, spans cultures!!!! Isn’t it something?) do not indicate that there exists a person with such-and-such? It’s not a such-and-such that interests me. If you are talking about the grand mystic tradition, the words of the sages, etc, it all seems to me to be an extremely refined extremely strange version of the same sickness everyone suffers from. I wouldn’t say ‘illusion’ because it is experientially real (I’ve experienced it), but it is, for me, a delusion. A big fancy robed-up lovey-dovey tripped-out red herring. I was not talking about mystic experiences I was asking what does it mean that Richard’s experience is not matched by a whole set of recorded writings (let us put an approximate size: 1 million pages of recorded experiences so far). Why has it evaded all those who wrote so far? Good question. Don’t know. Maybe trying to come up with some answer to this question will help towards the actual question? * Isn’t it already a huge thing, an enormous thing? It’s a huge experience and a huge claim, but it doesn’t really help me. Doesn’t it help you to think: let us put approximate numbers here 1 million people over 3,000 years who wrote 1 million pages who have been so popular and worshipped as to have probably 4 billion believers currently and 100 billion believers so far – have no mention of matching experience as Richard’s what does this mean? It would seem to suggest that there is something which actually works, which is actually real. But whether that is so or not I cannot yet say for sure. What would be required for you to say that for sure? * Perhaps that throws a little doubt on your possibility of some tribesman having found something? What throws a little doubt? See above * a) there is no indication in all the recorded history of human beings anything close to a ‘computer’ or an ‘internet’; so is it possible that a tribesman built a computer to match the modern Pentium? I guess you cannot refute this that it is not possible I can’t prove it is not so, but I cannot prove anything. I can demonstrate it to my satisfaction though. Where are you with being able to satisfactorily demonstrate that there has been none before Richard who shares his condition? * b) there is no indication in all the recorded history prior to 1900 that Mt. Everest was captured/ _fill_in_any_modern_achievement_here, so what does it say? What can we conclude about the existence of _fill_in_any_modern_achievement by a tribesman 20/10 centuries ago? Well, I don’t know what you are trying to say here really. Like I say nothing can be proved. But things can be demonstrated to my satisfaction to be true. Like, I don’t know, the existence of Burundi. I am quite confident if I took a plane to this place that I would end up there. How does the existence of Burundi which cannot be proved compare with non-existence of a tribesman which cannot be proved as well? Hint:
do you agree to b)? All I am saying is that in order to know that a remote tribesman did not become actually free (or climb Everest or whatever) one needs a kind of knowledge which I do not have access to, another way of ‘demonstrating’. Richard SEEMS to have access to this knowledge, at least as far as knowing the experience of people remote in space and time. I don’t think he has psychic powers... as far as I see he has psychic experiences and recorded history... and from this he has come to this conclusion. His psychic footprints is only about recorded psychic experience of others... this is my understanding. How else can it be? His inner journey corresponded to the recordings of the enlightened masters... he refers to this as ‘psychic footprints’... it was in accordance of something that is outside... what is outside? only what enlightened people said, what the books say, what other’s experiences say... there is nothing ‘psychic’ in actuality anyway. This is how I make sense of it! That is my entire point. I await Richard’s comments, should he have any, to clear up whether he does in fact know that x remote tribesman was definitely not actually free, and whether the way he knows this is currently out of my experience. I assume that he does and it is, I think he does only as he has knowledge of his psyche by following it through to the complete dissolution and having read all the accounts of another. It is like you go discover a new continent and to find out if anybody has been there before... you read all the texts and see that none matches the present territory’s descriptions. And conclude that this continent is new to human history... simple. And everybody keeps giving importance to the fact that he is claiming to be first... instead of newness of the continent.... okay, let us say 10 people before have discovered it… So what... still it is generally not known and available for the whole world... so let us make use of it. But then here comes the catch: if you don’t see that it is new, you can get lost in the myriad second rate islands on the way in your journey and settle for them. So! and if he declines to comment further I’ll take that as read and put it in the ‘case pending’ file. I don’t think you will be able to resolve this case if you cannot already resolve it based on what has been written by him already... but I may be wrong. No 33 to No 85, 14.7.2005 Design ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. |
