Actual Freedom ~ Frequently Asked Questions

Richard, reading through your correspondence on the Krishnamurti list I have come across something that I cannot grasp. [Correspondent No. 12]: ‘If the many are reduced to one, what is the one reduced to?’ [Richard]: ‘When it is understood that the one is the epitome of the many and that ‘I’ am the ‘many’ and the ‘many’ is ‘me’ ... ‘I’ self-immolate at the core of ‘being’. Then I am this material universe’s infinitude experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being. A desirable side-effect is peace-on-earth’. What does it mean, when you say ‘I’ am the ‘many’ and the ‘many’ is ‘me’? There was another quote in your correspondence with Alan, where you said: ‘Being born of the biologically inherited instincts genetically encoded in the germ cells of the spermatozoa and the ova, ‘I’ am – genetically – umpteen hundreds 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’. I have taken it simply that ‘me’, my instinctual programming, is as much part of my DNA as it has been the case in every human being on the planet since ‘the beginning of time’.

Does anybody else describe ‘Enlightenment’ as a turning over in the brain stem? Can one feel other’s feelings? Thoughts? From a distance? What do you mean by saying ‘all beings are connected’?

Oh I found the concept of the peasant mentality really awesome actuality. I hadn’t heard anybody else put it that way before. Let me try to formulate it properly.
The idea is that sometime before today, it wasn’t the case that everything was owned. Like when America was uncolonized, you could just get in a wagon, ride west for however long, then stake out a territory and start farming it. But nowadays, everything is already owned. Everything is walled-off and fenced-off. When you are born you own nothing, and everything else is already owned. Those owners want to make you work for it, like you have to earn your keep, earn your right to live. If you do, then they give you some of the stuff they already own. If you work really hard, you get more stuff. If you are really corrupt then you can become an owner too, but still only by playing their game.
This is the ‘peasant mentality’ – that you have to work to earn the right to live. That because you work, you deserve something. But really in a state of nature nothing is owned, you can just go wherever and do whatever you want. So the fact that everything is owned is artificial. Maybe uncolonized America was a bad example, maybe a better example is before civilization.
I think that’s what Richard meant by peasant mentality, and he said how a while back he recognized this and decided not to play into it anymore, not to play the game that the owners have set up before you were even born.

[Richard]: Here is an account of when it first struck home to the identity inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body, all those years ago, that no one was in charge of the world.