Actual Freedom – Mailing List ‘B’ Correspondence

Richard’s Correspondence on Mailing List ‘B’

with Respondent No. 41

Some Of The Topics Covered

semantics – Mr. Alfred Korzybski – Richard’s words – iconoclastic – judgemental – peace – idea of freedom – clean up your act – everybody got it 180 degrees wrong – belief – PCE – Richard’s story – identity – roles – ‘being’

October 02 1999:

RESPONDENT: Richard, Are you familiar with General Semantics? It is the system advanced by Alfred Korzybski that holds that our use of language is not only a reflection of, but also shapes our personal reality, as well as the reality conveyed to those with whom we communicate with.

RICHARD: My use of language is an accurate representation of how the human world really is – the human condition is a reality for 6.0 billion human beings – and to pretend otherwise would be silly. I speak frankly because political correctness is but a gloss covering the underlying truth ... I have regard for my fellow humans and I will not treat them like that. I would suggest that Mr. Alfred Korzybski does not understand human nature if he fondly thinks that it is the use of language that shapes reality ... it is the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire which blind nature bestows on all sentient beings at birth that shapes the reality that 6.0 billion people place over this actual world of sensate delight, peace and freedom.

RESPONDENT: The words you choose (or do they choose themselves?) ...

RICHARD: I choose my words carefully and they are consciously designed for a specific effect.

RESPONDENT: ... to communicate with seem to exhibit a worldview that is beleaguered ...

RICHARD: I do not experience being beleaguered ... even though (except for a handful of people) virtually everyone tells me that I have got it all wrong.

RESPONDENT: ... spiteful ...

RICHARD: I never experience any form of malice ... as I am incapable of taking offence I am free from the horror of revenge.

RESPONDENT: ... presumptuous ...

RICHARD: I do not have to be presumptuous ... I see for myself the fact and it is the fact that dictates.

RESPONDENT: ... condescending ...

RICHARD: I cannot be condescending if I tried for I am in no elevated or otherwise ‘holy’ position. I am a fellow human being sans identity ... yet this way of living is so superior to any other way of being on this verdant planet that it beggars belief. Yet it is actual – as evidenced in a PCE – and is freely available for those who dare to care and care to dare.

RESPONDENT: ... reductive, etc (see posting from No. 40 for ample examples from your writings – Thanks No. 40!).

RICHARD: If you took the time to examine what I write instead of relying upon another’s selection you would find that I also say things like:

• [Richard]: ‘My writing is both heretical and iconoclastic ... a fact that I make no apology for. The wars and rapes and murders and tortures and corruptions and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides that afflict this globe are far too serious a matter to deal with for me to spend time in mincing words. The Divine ‘Beings’ have been peddling their snake oil for centuries to no avail. Their time has come to either put up or shut up ... how much longer than these thousands of years do peoples need to further test the efficaciousness of their failed Divine Message?’
• [Richard]: ‘I have no problem about speaking frankly. 160,000,000 peoples have been killed by their fellow human beings this century in wars alone ... that is what ‘harmful’ looks like. I have never made a secret of what is involved in conducting an honest investigation into the human psyche ... it is a situation which calls for a rigorous and vigorous appraisal of the Human Condition. Only a robust discussion will winkle out that which is causing all the animosity and anguish that characterises the human species as being in a parlous state. The 160,000,000 deaths points to the fact that we cannot afford to pussy-foot around in our best parlour manner of polite interest in what motivates the other. Human beings are noted for the horrific suffering that they are capable of inflicting upon one another ... about every conceivable atrocity imaginable has been tried at some place in the world and at some time in history. And yet you see the above exchange as ‘harmful’? Are you vitally interested in eliminating malice and sorrow and, becoming thus happy and harmless, living in peace and harmony for the remainder of your life? If so, then we may have a genuine discussion’.
• [Richard]: ‘If you see that a ‘confronting manner can be harmful to another emotionally’ and is a factor to take into consideration in one’s dealings with others ... then why can you not see that feelings are the root cause of all the ills of humankind? Other people’s precious feelings do not rule me. Respect for another’s feelings ultimately means respect for physical force, for if one upsets another’s feelings sufficiently, they will become violent. Thus, through violence, people’s precious feelings rule the world ... and look at the mess it is in’.
• [Richard]: ‘What did you expect when you first wrote to me? Platitudes? That is ... re-hashes of the ‘Tried and True’? (Respondent 26a, No.07)
• [Richard]: ‘I am not talking of having to suppress the intent to harm – being a pacifist practising non-violence – I am talking of not even having the intent at all ... ever. The reason why I am not harmful 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, in what is popularly called the ‘reptilian brain’, have under-gone a radical mutation’.
• [Richard]: ‘You have to be grasping at straws if you can see acrimony in any of my words ... I am having so much fun here at the keyboard. I use an exclamation mark, for example, for what it is designed for: it is for surprise – or emphasis – and does not indicate a bitter, caustic, harsh, acidic, virulent, spiteful, vitriolic or venomous attitude at all. If you are referring to a phrase like ‘This is silly’ or ‘This is stupid’ and so on it is because what the other is writing is patently silly or stupid or whatever. This is called being honest ... up-front, frank, open and straight-forward, down-to-earth and matter-of-fact. I do not suffer fools gladly ... if someone is so foolish as to think that by entering into a discussion with me with an adversarial attitude – and thus turning it into a debate and then an argument – to defend the status-quo so that their ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul can stay intact ... they will find themselves being progressively driven into a corner of their own making. I am relentless where it comes to dismantling the Human Condition. 160,000,000 people have been killed in wars this century alone. I write trenchantly, saliently ... this is me being authentic’.
• [Richard]: ‘Speaking personally, as I have been writing on the Internet for over a year now, I have honed my talents as a wordsmith with particular verve and vivacity as virtually everyone who wrote objected to being happy and harmless. In my first week of having my Web-Page up and running someone wrote in ‘questioning’ what I had to say. The writer quickly turned it into a debate and ‘questioned’ me as to my statement ‘I have no desire to argue’. So I wrote back: ‘I said that I have no desire to argue ... and I still have no desire to do so. But you seem bent upon having an argument, so I am obliging you. We can stop it at any time you wish and have a meaningful and fruitful discussion ... if you want it. I have no desire to argue for my experience has shown me that argumentation and disputation lead nowhere constructive ... as this current spate of correspondence betwixt you and me is amply demonstrating. But ‘having no desire to do so’ does not mean that I will not. It just means that I would prefer not to. The English language is quite clear and specific, when one gets into the subtleties of it’.

RESPONDENT: These views seem contrary to the idea of freedom, actualised or otherwise.

RICHARD: Ahh ... therein lies the nub of the problem: ‘the idea of freedom’ is a far cry from the actuality of freedom. If you have an ‘idea of freedom’ – and set out to achieve that – then you will wind up being a self-righteous prude, for the ‘idea’ is not what the actual is. Whereas I know where I am at and where I came from and how I got here and I can write meaningfully, trenchantly, direct and to the point. As no one else, as far as I have been able to ascertain in eighteen years of scouring the books and travelling overseas, has become actually free of the human condition, then there is no precedent or example that you can use to judge me by.

RESPONDENT: Is this indicative of the Actual Freedom that you write about?

RICHARD: No ... what you see being written here on this Mailing List is my response to dogma and doctrine. If each and every person were to be happy and harmless (free from the human condition) you would never see me write like I currently do.

RESPONDENT: As you are the spokesman for Actual Freedom, it would appear so.

RICHARD: In an ‘idea’ of freedom, people are into altering behavioural patterns (rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic) whereas what I speak of is the elimination of that which causes the aberrant behaviour in the first place. As pacifists and their ilk (those who live the doctrine of non-violence) do not eliminate the source of aberrant behaviour ... then they have to imitate the actual ease of an actual freedom from the human condition by making a big splash about their ‘goodie-goodie’ behaviour. To put it simply – and in a way that might just convey it to you – this what I speak of is somewhat indicated by what is possibly the only passage in the Christian’s Holy Scriptures worthy of note. Vis.:

• ‘He and/or she that looketh upon a woman and/or man with lust in their heart has already committed adultery’.

Which means: clean up your act on the ‘inside’ and the ‘outer’ actions are free to be appropriate to the circumstances. This applies to all anti-social behaviour ... not just a minor thing like sex outside of marriage. Things like all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and suicides, to give but a small yet very representative example.

If someone were to bop me on the nose I am free to bop them back.

October 07 1999:

RESPONDENT: Richard, Are you familiar with General Semantics? It is the system advanced by Alfred Korzybski that holds that our use of language is not only a reflection of, but also shapes our personal reality, as well as the reality conveyed to those with whom we communicate with.

RICHARD: My use of language is an accurate representation of how the human world really is – the human condition is a reality for 6.0 billion human beings – and to pretend otherwise would be silly. I speak frankly because political correctness is but a gloss covering the underlying truth ... I have regard for my fellow humans and I will not treat them like that. I would suggest that Mr. Alfred Korzybski does not understand human nature if he fondly thinks that it is the use of language that shapes reality ... it is the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire which blind nature bestows on all sentient beings at birth that shapes the reality that 6.0 billion people place over this actual world of sensate delight, peace and freedom.

RESPONDENT: Are you saying that language does not shape reality? For most of us, language is the predominance of reality!

RICHARD: Language certainly cultivates and refines the reality that one’s identity automatically pastes as a veneer over the pristine actuality of the physical world of people, things and events ... but it is the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire which blind nature bestows on all sentient beings at birth that creates the reality known as ‘normal’.

RESPONDENT: I would suggest that our instinctual passions [emotions] are a catalyst for our actions, but in many cases thought/language serves as the catalyst for the emotions.

RICHARD: Yes ... so long as you are not suggesting that ‘thought/language’ creates the ‘instinctual passions [emotions]’.

*

RESPONDENT: The words you choose (or do they choose themselves?) ...

RICHARD: I choose my words carefully and they are consciously designed for a specific effect.

RESPONDENT: ... to communicate with seem to exhibit a worldview that is beleaguered ...

RICHARD: I do not experience being beleaguered ... even though (except for a handful of people) virtually everyone tells me that I have got it all wrong.

RESPONDENT: OK, let us examine what you said above from a General Semantics perspective: ‘I do not experience being beleaguered ...’ This was well stated: you are not beleaguered, you do not ‘experience being beleaguered’. Well put.

RICHARD: Yes ... but bearing in mind that, for most of the time when I report my experience and explain myself in the context of past and current human experience, mostly people do besiege me (as in ‘attack’, ‘accuse’, ‘ridicule’ and so on) ... which peoples are defending the status-quo. But I do not experience being beleaguered. Anyway, running the gauntlet of peer review always happens when someone comes out with something new and serves to weed out anything invalid – that which cannot stand the test of fire, so to speak – and, as such, is beneficial.

Needless to say, I am no wimp (meek and mild) and although I have no desire to argue, I can give as good as I get if the occasion warrants.

RESPONDENT: ... ‘even though (except for a handful of people) virtually everyone tells me that I have got it all wrong’. This statement is very imprecise, and leaves room for misinterpretation, hence a distortion. What do you mean by ‘virtually everyone’? All of humanity? All on this list? All that you meet and whom speak to you?

RICHARD: Okay ... to be precise, it is not only 99.9% of the people whom I interact with face-to-face or via the written word, but includes virtually everyone living and dead. I am well aware, that for anyone listening whose psyche is still in place, there is a psychic dimension wherein myriads of atavistic ‘voices’ are insistently whispering ‘wrong, wrong, wrong’. Mostly people experience this as being that they ‘intuitively know’ that Richard has ‘got it wrong’ or that a ‘still, quiet voice silently speaks the truth within’ and so on.

RESPONDENT: Your statement could be read as: ‘I do not experience being beleaguered, even though [all of humanity] [everyone I meet] [everyone on this list] tells me that I have got it wrong’. Do you see what I am saying? Even if your words were confined to the people with which you have corresponded with on the list, I have seen a lot of people question you about your claims, but I would hardly say that they have all told you that you ‘have got it wrong’. Even though you made a statement that you are not beleaguered, the undercurrent of the statement says otherwise. Didn’t you write once that you are a firm believer in communicating with precision?

RICHARD: I do like to be as clear as it is possible to be in communicating ... yet many of the words in any dictionary have two or more meanings ascribed to them. I generally like to explain which significance I am giving to that word, if that particular connotation is not readily apparent from the context of the sentence or paragraph or the subject being discussed, so as to obviate misunderstanding. Given the controversial nature of the topic, misunderstanding (through cognitive dissonance) is inevitable.

As what I am living is unnatural it is predictable that it be received as me having ‘got it wrong’... and what you call the ‘undercurrent of that statement’ conveys this.

*

RESPONDENT: [The words you choose seem to exhibit a worldview that is] spiteful, presumptuous, condescending, reductive, etc (see posting from No. 40 for ample examples from your writings – Thanks No. 40!).

RICHARD: If you took the time to examine what I write instead of relying upon another’s selection you would find that I also say things like <clipped for brevity>.

RESPONDENT: To be fair, I did a somewhat superficial review of some of the correspondences you have had with ‘B’ list-members, to find examples of spite, presumption, etc and did not find any that were clearly so. My disbelief of you or anyone claiming to be enlightened, or beyond, seems to have clouded my perception. There may have been examples there, but I did not, in my limited investigation, find any. I apologize for speaking without basis.

RICHARD: Okay ... and where you say ‘my disbelief of you or anyone claiming ...’ it is vital to make sure that one never swings to belief so as to counteract this leaning. I do not want any one to merely believe me. I stress to people how vital it is that they see for themselves. If they were so foolish as to believe me then the most they would end up in is living in a dream state and thus miss out on the actual. I do not wish this fate upon anyone ... I like my fellow human beings. What one can do is make a critical examination of all the words I advance so as to ascertain if they be intrinsically self-explanatory ... and only when they are seen to be inherently consistent with what is being spoken about, then the facts speak for themselves. Then one will have reason to remember a pure conscious experience (PCE), which all peoples I have spoken to at length have had, and thus verify by direct experience the facticity of what is written.

The PCE occurs globally ... across cultures and down through the ages irregardless of gender, race or age. However, it is usually interpreted according to cultural beliefs – created and reinforced by the persistence of identity – and devolves into an altered state of consciousness (ASC). Then ‘I’ as ego – sublimated and transcended as ‘me’ as soul – manifest as ‘pure being’ (a god or a goddess or that which is ‘timeless and spaceless and formless’) which is ‘unborn and undying’ or ‘deathless’ and so on.

I am mortal.

October 07 1999:

RESPONDENT: Richard, I don’t know if you are subscribed to the list or not, but I would appreciate your input on the posting [regarding identification].

RICHARD: I was born in Australia, of an English/Scottish Hong Kong-born father and an English/English Australia-born mother. With this British background, I was enculturated into believing that I was, literally, an Australian citizen ... but with British blood. Now, blood is blood ... there is no such ‘thing’ as an ‘Australian’, an ‘American’, a ‘German’, a ‘Japanese’ and so on. Thus the wars and the suicides – the blood shed and the tears shed – are precipitated because of the absurdity of identification ... is not all this acculturation ridiculous! However, as an infant, a child, a youth and then a man, I was so programmed as to be unable to discriminate fact from fiction. I had no terms of reference that I could use as a standard to determine which was which, as every single human being on this planet was not simply a flesh and blood body ... but similarly conditioned into being an ‘ethnic’ human being.

Thus I bought the whole package. Hook, line and sinker.

As I slowly started to unravel the mess that humankind was deeply mired in by unravelling it in me, I discovered a second layer under ‘my’ acculturated ethnicity ... ‘I’ was brainwashed into being a ‘man’ and not simply a flesh and blood male body. Under the enculturated layers lies a further identity ... the genetically-inherited animal ‘self’. It took me years and years of exploration and discovery to find out that ‘I’ was a ‘me’ – a ‘being’ – and not simply a flesh and blood body. By identification as ‘me’, a psychological/psychic entity was able to ‘possess’ this body. It is not unlike those Christians who are said to be possessed by an evil entity and require exorcism. Only this ‘possession’ was called being normal. Therefore, every human being is thus possessed by an ‘alien entity’ ... I discovered that a ‘walk-in’ was in control of this body and that this ‘walk-in’ was ‘me’.

So, superficially there is a composite conditioned social identity that encompasses:

1. A vocational identity as ‘employee’/‘employer’, ‘worker’/‘pensioner’, ‘junior/‘senior’ and so on.
2. A national identity as ‘English’, ‘American’, ‘Australian’ and etcetera.
3. A racial identity as ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘brown’ or whatever.
4. A religious/spiritual identity as a ‘Hindu’, a ‘Muslim’, a ‘Christian’, a ‘Buddhist’ ad infinitum.
5. A ideological identity as a ‘Capitalist’, a ‘Communist’, a ‘Monarchist’, a ‘Fascist’ and etcetera.
6. A political identity as a ‘Democrat’, a ‘Tory’, a ‘Republican’, a ‘Liberal’ and all the rest.
7. A family identity as ‘son’/‘daughter’, ‘brother’/‘sister’, ‘father’/‘mother’ and the whole raft of relatives.
8. A gender identity as ‘boy’/‘girl’, ‘man’/‘woman’.

These are related to roles, rank, positions, station, status, class, age, gender ... the whole organisation of hierarchical structure and control. But behind all that – underlying all socialised classifications – is the persistent feeling of being an identity inhabiting the body: an affective ‘entity’ as in a deep, abiding and profound feeling of being an occupant, a tenant, a squatter or a phantom hiding behind a façade, a mask, a persona; as a subjective emotional psychological ‘self’ and/or a passionate psychic ‘being’ (‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul) inhabiting the psyche; a deep feeling of being a ‘spirit’; a consciousness of the immanence of ‘presence’ (which exists immortally); an awareness of being an autological ‘being’ ... the realisation of ‘Being’ itself. In other words: everything you think, feel and instinctually know yourself to be.

A person’s deepest feeling of ‘being’ – the real ‘me’ – is evidenced when one says: ‘But what about me, nobody loves me for me’. For a woman it may be: ‘You only want me for my body ... and not for me’. For a man it may be: ‘You only want me for my money ... and not for me’. For a child it may be: ‘You only want to be my friend because of my toys (or sweets or whatever)’. That deep feeling of ‘me’ – that ‘being’ itself – is at the core of identity. It arises out of the basic instincts that blind nature endowed all human beings with as a rough and ready ‘soft-ware’ package to make a start in life. These instincts – mainly fear and aggression and nurture and desire – appear as a rudimentary self common to all sentient beings. This is why it is felt to be one’s ‘Original Face’ – to use the Zen terminology – when one accesses it in religious and/or spiritual and/or mystical meditation practices and disciplines. This is the source of ‘we are all one’, because ‘we’ are all the same-same blind instinctual self that stretches back beyond the dawn of human memory. It is a very, very ancient genetic memory.

Hoariness does not make it automatically wise, however, despite desperate belief to the contrary.


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