Richard’s Selected Writings

The genetically inherited passions (such as fear and aggression and nurture and desire) give rise to malice and sorrow. Malice and sorrow are intrinsically connected and constitute what is known as ‘The Human Condition’. The term ‘Human Condition’ is a well-established philosophical term that refers to the situation that all human beings find themselves in when they emerge here as babies. The term refers to the contrary and perverse nature of all peoples of all races and all cultures. There is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in everyone ... all humans have a ‘dark side’ to their nature and a ‘light side’. The battle betwixt ‘Good and Evil’ has raged down through the centuries and it requires constant vigilance lest evil gets the upper hand. Morals and ethics seek to control the wayward self that lurks deep within the human breast ... and some semblance of what is called ‘peace’ prevails for the main. Where morality and ethicality fails to curb the ‘savage beast’, law and order is maintained ... at the point of a gun. The ending of malice and sorrow 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 as this body.

Then the question is: is it possible to be free of the human condition, here on earth, in this life-time, as this flesh and blood body? Which means: How on earth can one live happily and harmlessly in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are whilst one nurses malice and sorrow in one’s bosom?

The late summer sun is virtually overhead so we cast little shadow as we sit, man and woman, halfway along this deserted white beach. We have just met ... about half an hour ago ... was it really only half an hour ... near total strangers ... a chance meeting ... and yet what is this sensation, this so familiar yet so new atmosphere humming around the two of us?

‘I have always wondered whether it is possible for man and woman to live together intimately; in perfect peace and harmony’.

‘It must be possible, surely, if not ...’

‘If not, then human life is nothing but a very sick joke!’

‘I cannot believe that for a moment’.

‘Me neither ... but both would need to be free’.

‘Do you know any couple like that?’

‘No, I cannot say that I do ... definitely not’.

‘For over thirty years I’ve been observing couples ... especially those who are said to be happily married. I’ve always had this fascination, you see’.

‘And?’

‘Well if that is what’s called being happy, then I’ll never get married. The full one hundred percent. That is what I go for’.

‘I want something much, much better. The best’.

‘People don’t like to hear that, do they? I’ve always been called too idealistic ... wishing for the moon ...’

‘I have never been able to understand why people will settle for second-best. Many is the time I have been told that you cannot change human nature ... that this is how it is and that is all there is to it’.

‘Oh ... that one of accepting people as they are?’

‘Yes, that one. That one where we are all supposed to realise that this is how it is to be human ... the ‘Human Condition’, it is called. I cannot accept, for one moment, that humans are fated to forever bicker, squabble, argue and fight – with rare moments of relative peace in between, moments of temporary happiness, snatches of harmony which seem to hold a promise – only to disappear again in a general discontent. This I will not accept’.

‘A promise ... like in the fairy-stories we have all been brought up on. You know, I have always felt cheated: after pages and pages of fury and dread, you are supposed to be content with the last half-page of seeming bliss ... and the promise of ... of what? Of a mere: ‘... and they lived happily ever after’. Nobody ever writes the sequel! That’s my goal in life: to make the sequel possible’.

‘To live the sequel ... yes ... why not ... and every day again’.

Thus in the first couple of hours of having met my companion and I formed an agreement that was to be the basis of the relationship. We were both convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was possible for a free male and female to live together in perfect peace and harmony. There was an agreement made to be scrupulously honest with ourselves and with the other, however stupid and ridiculous it would seem at the time. One has to explore to find out, uncover to discover ... one knows in advance that one will, inevitably, make mistakes from time to time.

One therefore resolves to never hold a grudge, nor to ‘sweep anything under the carpet’. One will not let ‘sleeping dogs lie’, and one understands that it will be trying, at times, but because of the purity of the infinitude of this universe, as experienced in the peak experience, one can tap into a pure intent. That is one’s guiding light, as it were. Overall we have had a lot of fun finding out about ourselves and each other and the ‘Human Condition’. The moment one sees a ‘truth’ for what it is – a belief – one finds that it has already disappeared because of the seeing, leaving nothing behind, except perhaps a vague memory that one once thought like that. The disappeared ‘truth’ seems like a bit of a dream ... was it actual? The next ‘truth’ – because that is how one has learnt to call beliefs – automatically presents itself in the normal course of one’s daily life. One cannot but welcome it, because one’s life becomes clearer and cleaner and more pure. This ‘seeing’ is pure awareness, based upon pure intent born out of the peak experience. It is not an intellectual ‘seeing’, nor is it emotional ... passions play no part in becoming free. Passions are only needed for defending one’s belief in the status-quo. With pure seeing one becomes more and more fascinating, once one has the ‘knack’ of it. Life itself becomes a wondrous experience.

My questioning of life, the universe and what it is to be a human being had all started when I was nineteen years of age. I was in a foreign country, dressed in a jungle-green uniform and carrying a loaded rifle in my hands. This was to be the turning point of my life, for up until then, I was a typical western youth, raised to believe in God, Queen and Country. ‘Humanity’s inhumanity to humankind society’s treatment of its subject citizens was driven home to me, there and then, in a way that left me appalled, horrified, terrified and repulsed to the core of my being with a sick revulsion. I saw that no one knew what was going on and most importantly that no one was ‘in charge’ of the world. There was nobody to ‘save’ the human race ... all gods were but a figment of a feverish imagination. Out of a despairing desperation, which was collectively shared by my fellow humans, I saw and understood that I was as ‘guilty’ as any one else. For in me as is in everyone was both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ... it was that some people were better than others at controlling their ‘dark side’. However, in a war, there is no way anyone can consistently control any longer ... ‘evil’ ran rampart. I saw that fear and aggression and nurture and desire ruled the world ... and that these were instincts one was born with. Thus started my search for freedom from the ‘Human Condition’ ... and my attitude, all those years ago was this:

I was only interested in changing myself fundamentally, radically, completely and utterly.

What humankind has done is to take the instinct-bred ‘I’ as being actual by calling it real. In doing so it creates ‘humanity’, which is as real as the numerous ‘I’s that constitute its ‘being’. Human beings set out to assuage the nasty and pitiful results that all this causes by instilling in each and every baby arriving on earth, in whatever culture, the ‘Human Constitution’. The ‘First Rule’ of this ‘Human Constitution’ states that ‘life on earth is a place of suffering ... and we all pledge to forever venerate that self-same suffering’. Strange goings-on, considering that the human being is well-endowed with a large brain! However, this brain is fully occupied with instinctually derived societal forces. The acculturated mind is a veritable minefield of cherished psittacisms ... the mechanical repetition of previously received ideas or images, reflecting neither apperception nor autonomous reasoning. In other words, there is little or no room for original thought. One needs pure intent, born out of a peak experience, to shatter the strangle-hold that the mythologically-based ‘wisdom’ has on the human mind.

The universe’s inclination is to manifest itself as its best. It can make full use of the brain’s capacity to reach its prime potential; namely, to be able to free oneself from the tyranny of the belief in the ‘Human Constitution’ ... which humans defend to the hilt. This ‘Human Constitution’ is the only purview on life so far – it is adhered to and repeated ad nauseam for ages unto ages – but is poised to become outmoded. If it can vanish in one human being it can likewise perish in another ... and another and another and so on. This is an exciting period to live in. For the first time in human history, it is possible for anyone who applies themselves with sufficient application and diligence – guided by pure intent – to become virtually free, virtually pure, virtually perfect.

It is then highly possible that this person can actualise the ultimate as being the immediate.

I am not an Enlightened Master sitting in an exalted position ... and what a relief that is. I am a fellow human being, who happens to live in a condition of perfection and purity, offering my experience to whomsoever is interested. We are all fellow human beings who find ourselves here in the world as it was when we were born. We find war, murder, torture, rape, domestic violence and corruption to be endemic ... we notice that it is intrinsic to the ‘Human Condition’ ... we set out to discover why this is so. We find sadness, loneliness, sorrow, grief, depression and suicide to be a global incidence ... and we gather that it is also inherent to the ‘Human Condition’ ... and we want to know why. We all report to each other as to the nature of our discoveries for we are all well-meaning and seek to find a way out of this mess that we have landed in. Whether one believes in re-incarnation or not, we are all living this particular life for the very first time, and we wish to make sense of it. It is a challenge and the adventure of a lifetime to enquire and to uncover, to seek and to find, to explore and to discover. All this being alive business is actually happening and we are totally involved in living it out ... whether we take the back seat or not, we are all still doing it.

I, for one, am not taking the back seat.

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 and 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 ‘human nature’ that is said ‘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 gave rise to a brain pattern known as ‘the mind’. In here the ‘instinct for survival’ becomes the ‘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 ‘will to survive’ with moralistic injunctions – derived from the Divine ‘Being’s Teachings – to no avail. The Teachings were 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’; Divinely inspired self-flagellations ... the list goes 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 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 psychological ‘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 dis-empower 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. And it delivers here and now.

War is over ... if you want it.

The third alternative – actual freedom – is not an Ineffable State. Unlike The Altered State, it can be easily and adequately described in unambiguous terms. All is plain to view, nothing is hidden. Nothing is Unknowable. There is no Mystery any longer. The secret to life is solved. In actualism, a person sees all that is religious or spiritual or mystical for the superstitious metaphysical anachronism that it is ... it all belongs to the best that those within the ‘Human Condition’ can aspire to. To be actually free is to be completely free from the ‘Human Condition’ in all its entirety. Free from The Good as well as from The Bad; from Love as well as Hate; from Beauty as well as Ugly; from The True as well as The False; from God as well as Evil ... from any thing Diabolical or Divine at all. To be actually free is to be free, at last, to be ordinary. To be this flesh and blood body. To be mortal. To be without the need for any inhibiting surrender to that Highest Authority with its Absolute Power.

I experience the universe as being here now in all its benignity. The world of people, things and events is no longer at a distance. Without the defences of the identity I can stand proud, as I do not need to maintain myself as ‘someone’ in particular with relation to others. An unusual anonymity has freed me from the ‘normal’ responsibility and onerous task of sustaining ‘myself’. A marked absence of severity has replaced the need for Moral Guidance and Spiritual Discipline, for I am already always harmless. I have never been harmed, psychologically, nor have I ever known sorrow. The identity, ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul, can best be described as either a psychological or psychic parasite living inside the body. In a valiant and understandable attempt to solve the plight of humankind, ‘I’ cease identifying as the ego and identify as the soul ... a shift in consciousness which manifests Love Agapé and Divine Compassion. Unfortunately for its success, Love Agapé and Divine Compassion have their roots in sorrow and malice and therefore cannot provide the ultimate solution: freedom from anguish and animosity.

Compassion actually perpetuates sorrow, and love perpetuates malice, for sorrow and malice are the essential progenitors of Love Agapé and Divine Compassion.

When one sees the connection between the discord inside one and the discord in society; when one realises that one’s own condition is the ‘Human Condition’; then one understands, actually understands, that ‘I’ am ‘society’ and ‘society’ is ‘me’. ‘I’ live in the head as ego and in the heart as soul and one needs to go to the very root of ‘me’ as a rudimentary self to effect change in ‘society’ ... for ‘I’ am no different from ‘society’. It is the ‘Human Condition’ which has created the ‘Human Constitution’ with its instinctual fear and aggression and nurture and desire ... this is the genesis of malice and sorrow. And humans set about eagerly to change this animosity and anguish, fiddling with bits and pieces in a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to ameliorate the ‘Human Constitution’. This is not to decry the advances made in the civilising process ... but to expect to fundamentally change human beings by changing the ‘Human Constitution’ is to invite disappointment. As long as one remains a social identity one creates and perpetuates this mess, this sorry lot that is the ‘Human Constitution’. There is only one person who can effect change in oneself – nobody else can do it for one – and the process can start now. Indeed, it must begin now, for this is one’s life one is living ... the only life one has. To procrastinate is to perpetuate all the suffering and wretchedness that has beset humankind since time immemorial.

To actually see the enormous suffering ... the massive confusion and untold misery that there is in the ‘Human Condition’ ... places radical accountability upon each and every person to do something now. It is to no avail to hope for some Divine solution for the Sacred has had tens of thousands of years to fix things up ... and it has not happened. As being Holy has not worked it is up to oneself to fix oneself up. Be alive – completely alive – as this moment in eternal time and this place in infinite space is happening. It requires a startling audacity to evince what is possible ... to dare to live life fully. If I can do it then anyone can. I was not someone special ... I had an ordinary birth and upbringing. I went to an ordinary school and took an ordinary job. I went into an ordinary marriage and had an ordinary family. All one gains by waiting for some God to step in is yet more waiting. Is not the evidence of thousands of years of people being on one’s own sufficient to demonstrate that one must do it oneself?

Reach out and extend oneself ... live like one has never lived before.

All those would-be wise people who state smugly: ‘You can’t change human nature’ are, fortunately, wrong. Because it is possible for ‘me’ to become extinct, thereby releasing the body from the ‘being’ within, I can walk freely in the world as-it-is ... this actual world. I am living in this clean and clear and perfect purity twenty-four-hours-a-day. I live in a state of benignity, which means a kindly and harmless disposition. Life is a playful game and I am free to enjoy it all, every moment again.

‘Humanity’, which gave birth to ‘me’, was being sustained by ‘me’ remaining as a ‘being’. ‘I’ am forever fettered by the ‘Human Condition’. The species known as ‘humanity’ has searched for an Ultimate Fulfilment within the arena of the ‘Human Condition’ for all of history. Such a search is endless and futile, for it is a search within an illusion. Only further illusions – further states of ‘being’ – can be found there ... or delusions. Becoming Divine is a delusion ... a state of ‘Being’ that is an insult to one’s native intelligence. ‘I’ will never find the ultimate fulfilment for ‘I’ am standing in the way of the ‘Mystery of Life’ being revealed. There is no way out, ‘I’ am doomed. ‘I’ must, inevitably, cease to ‘be’. Instead of bemoaning ‘my’ fate and vainly searching for an escape, ‘I’ can see ‘myself’ for what ‘I’ am. This seeing is the beginning of the ending of ‘me’. The extinction of ‘me’ is the ultimate sacrifice ‘I’ can make to ensure the possibility of peace-on-earth for not only me but for all humankind.

I find myself here, in the world as-it-is. A vast stillness lies all around, abounding with purity. Beneficence, an active kindness, overflows in all directions, imbuing everything with unimaginable fairytale-like quality. For me to be able to be here now at all was a blessing that only ‘I’ could grant, because nobody else could do it for me. I am full of admiration for the ‘me’ that dared to do such a thing. I owe all that I experience now to ‘me’. I salute ‘my’ audacity. And what an adventure it was ... and still is. These are the wondrous workings of the exquisite quality of life ... who would have it any other way?

Ultimate fulfilment lies beyond extinction.

RETURN TO RICHARD’S SELECTED WRITING INDEX

RICHARD’S HOME PAGE

The Third Alternative

(Peace On Earth In This Life Time As This Flesh And Blood Body)

Here is an actual freedom from the Human Condition, surpassing Spiritual Enlightenment and any other Altered State Of Consciousness, and challenging all philosophy, psychiatry, metaphysics (including quantum physics with its mystic cosmogony), anthropology, sociology ... and any religion along with its paranormal theology. Discarding all of the beliefs that have held humankind in thralldom for aeons, the way has now been discovered that cuts through the ‘Tried and True’ and enables anyone to be, for the first time, a fully free and autonomous individual living in utter peace and tranquillity, beholden to no-one.

Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust 1997