In Richard’s rebuttal to my quote of him as evidentiary of his having actual feelings, he has unwittingly provided us with further evidence of his powers of self-delusion. As in some other correspondence I recall seeing on the AF Trust website, he rationalises his language as ‘humour’. This will be recognized by everyone as the old ‘I was only joking’ or ‘Can’t you take a joke?’ defence teenagers and some adults use when they’ve said something hurtful or embarrassing and have been discovered. However, regardless of the words Richard uses to cover or explain his language, no reading-into is required to find real feeling in operation.

What really makes me laugh is seeing these people without malice getting hyper-defensive in the face of some pretty damn funny provocation. I guess they have (...) unresolved malice. If you were at peace you wouldn’t even bother to respond to those challenging religionists, spiritualists, mystics, and metaphysicalists. Why do you add to the noise? What are you defending against?

I don’t know for certain why Richard is so spooked by feeling, but I have already shared my theories. However, I do know that his confusion yields a hazardous approach for persons examining their own feelings. By, at the same time, dismissing feeling and maintaining a pretence of qualitativeness in the so-called sensate-only, Richard is deeply confused and deeply confusing. Feeling cannot be dismissed, only penetrated. And Richard has given us not a short-cut, but a quagmire, substituting denial of feeling for the penetration of its highest aspects, which, with others, subsist as none other than consciousness itself.

So after the change took place in your brain, you are experiencing another world. Or if you like the world in a different way. Not necessarily everybody else is experiencing it this way. So the difference between before the change and now, is due to your brain. If was possible to reverse the process then you should be like before. That means that your brain is creating your world.

Richard, I was wondering the other day, who gives you the right apart of your self to say that you was enlightened? There are as many enlightened types as many teachers are. So first prove to me that you was enlightened and then we can speak about actuality, because if enlightened was in your imagination, so can be actual freedom as well.

Richard, is ‘I’ more cunning than what is left of you – the sensing, body, mind, etc. (can I say ‘non-I’). How does the ‘non-I’ deduce the truth about the ‘I’ being not there? Do you as a person simply just ‘feel’ like, just ‘know somehow’, that I is ‘gone’ (which may do it, I don’t know)?

If the individual alone can claim they have no identity, and uses whatever ‘pretzel logic’ to refute any evidence to the contrary even though in their writings it is evident that they have particular tastes, preferences, & judgements and assess situations all unique to a ‘person’ with an identity!!

For me, actual freedom is breathe the here and now, and let it extend. Holding it, commenting it, expecting it, rejecting it, making choices and priorities, is not at all actual freedom, not true?

There are people on this list who claim that they can become aware of their ‘I’ at the moment it is active, without such a process being present. Richard is such a person ... ... who apparently has gone through some kind of transformation, that has made certain things clear to him. But contrary to me, there is not a constant ‘process’ going on within him, that is a left-over from it, and that renews this insight. It looks like he is talking from an experience of the past, and conclusions that were once drawn that form his present ‘I’, and not from an actually unfolding awareness of ‘I’ at this very moment. These differences make me conclude that Richard ... does not really know what it means to become aware of the ‘I’-thought at the moment it functions, although apparently he was once aware of it.

Richard You still do have a soul and merely the illusion that you had about having one, has been altered into the illusion that you don’t have it anymore; BTW not something to spit on. (...) though the instinctual passions are not active however the instruction code still is extant. Thus in an extreme situation they may become active again. ^Note that is it says *may become* not that they will become^.

I have every reason to believe that you experience life just as you report. And the loss of the ‘entity’ within is crucial to the maintenance of this condition. One could say that the self/SELF disappeared or became so ‘unconscious’ as to be effectively gone. ‘You’ do still seem to maintain qualities that I might describe as ‘self’. It is as if the final remnant of self is identified with a subtle archetype of a ‘saviour’.