Actual Freedom
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Some random articles I'm taking from the Actual Freedom site, which I found to be good, there are many other good ones. The site owner isn't Buddhist, but his experience is clearly in line with Buddhism Anatta, and does not hold onto any notions of an Atman-Brahman which is rejected in Buddhism.
Suffice to say, I do not agree with his position that all religions including Buddhism does not go beyond the 'atman-Brahman' experience/realization whether it is the pure objectless I AM or the experience of a dissociative Witness (Thusness Stage 1) up till the unity of of Subject and Object (Thusness Stage 4) which is clearly not what the Buddha taught and has no scriptural basis. This is clearly his misunderstanding of Buddhist teachings and if anyone has any doubts just take a look at Thusness/PasserBy's Seven Stages of Experience on Spiritual Enlightenment or teachings by Buddha such as the Bahiya Sutta, but anyway here are the articles, hope you find it useful:
http://actualfreedom.com.au/richard/articles/abriefpersonalhistory.htm
A Brief Personal History
My questioning of life, the universe and what it is to be a human being had all started in a war-torn country in June 1966 at age nineteen – when there was an identity inhabiting this body complete with a full suite of feelings – and a Buddhist monk killed himself in a most gruesome way. There was I, a callow youth dressed in a jungle-green uniform and with a loaded rifle in my hand, representing the secular way to peace. There was a fellow human being, dressed in religious robes dowsed with petrol and with a cigarette lighter in hand, representing the spiritual way to peace.
I was aghast at what we were both doing ... and I sought to find a third alternative to being either ‘human’ or ‘divine’.
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 humanity – 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.
(Click http://actualfreedom.com.au/richard/articles/june1966.htm to view picture).
This photograph was taken the day after the Buddhist monk physically self-immolated in protest to the war I was engaged in.
What the newly-shaved head indicates (definitely not a common practice for a 19-year-old youth in the sixties generation) is the very aghastness at what we were both doing.
For many years I sought genuine exploration and discovery of what it means to live a fully human life, and in October 1992 I discovered, once and for all, what I was looking for. Since then I have been consistently living an incomparable condition which I choose to call actual freedom – and I use the word ‘actual’ because this freedom is located here in this very world, this actual world of the senses. It is not an affective, cerebral or psychic state of being; it is a physical condition that ensues when one goes beyond Spiritual Enlightenment. In September 1981 I underwent a monumental transformation into an Altered State Of Consciousness which can only be described as Spiritual Enlightenment. I became Enlightened as the result of an earnest and intense process which commenced in the January of that year. At approximately six o’clock on the morning of Sunday the sixth of September 1981, my ‘ego’ disappeared entirely in an edifying moment of awakening to an ‘Absolute Reality’. I lived in the Enlightened State for eleven years, so I have an intimate understanding of the marked difference between Spiritual Enlightenment and actual freedom.
I travelled the country – and overseas to India – meeting with people from all walks of life in an attempt to discover why Spiritual Enlightenment, which has been within the human experience for thousands of years, had not delivered the Peace On Earth it seemed to promise. As the process of becoming Enlightened is an extreme test of one’s mettle, requiring nerves of steel, it seemed that only a rare few humans were destined to become Self-Realised. The question that commanded my attention was why this was so. I was looking beyond the superficial and questioning even the most closely held ideas and beliefs. Was there something more to discover ... something that lay beyond Enlightenment that would usher in the beginning of a genuine possibility of peace for all? Some Masters hinted at and alluded to ‘Going Beyond Enlightenment’ ... yet their Teachings remained exactly the same. Some disciplines suggested that such a condition existed after physical death: when the soul ‘quit the body’. The Hindu Mahasamadhi and Buddhist Parinirvana are two examples of this kind of thought.
Over the eleven years I had numerous experiences of a condition that seemed so extreme that one must surely die to attain to it. To go beyond Enlightenment seemed to be an impossibility whilst still alive and breathing. Then at midday on Friday the thirtieth of October 1992 a curious event occurred, due to my intense conviction that it was imperative that someone evince a final and complete condition that would ‘deliver the goods’ so longed for by humanity for millennia. Just like my ego had dissolved, back in 1981, my ‘soul’ disappeared. I was no longer a ‘Self’ existing for all Eternity and transcending Time and Space. I no longer had a feeling of being – or ‘Being’ – and I could no longer detect the presence of The Absolute. There was no ‘Presence’ at all. Since that date I have continued to live in a condition of complete emancipation and utter autonomy ... the condition is both permanent and actual. This is different from Enlightenment in that it is most definitely substantial: there is no longer a transcendence, for I have neither sorrow nor malice anywhere at all to rise above.
They have vanished entirely, leaving me both blithesome and benign – carefree and harmless – which leads to a most remarkable state of affairs. The chief characteristics of Enlightenment – The Presence of The Absolute, Union with the Divine, Universal Compassion, Love Agapé, Rapturous Bliss, Ineffable Ecstasy, Exalted Euphoria, The Truth, Timelessness, Spacelessness, Immortality, Aloneness, Oneness, Pacifism, Surrender, Trust, Beauty, and Goodness – being redundant in this totally new condition, are no longer extant. Herein lies the unmistakable distinction between this condition, which I call actual freedom and the Enlightened State: I am no longer driven by a Divine Sense Of Mission to bring The Truth, Universal Love and Divine Compassion to the world. I am free to speak with whomsoever is genuinely interested in solving the ‘Mystery of Life’ and becoming totally free of the Human Condition.
Thus, after The Altered State Of Consciousness has manifested itself, the soul is still present as ‘The Self’. No matter how Enlightened or Liberated one may be, an ‘I’ is still in existence ... Timeless maybe, but still an ‘I’, still in the body. The soul, as ‘The Self’, is a psychological entity identifying as being an Enlightened Master. The ego is only half of one’s identity; the other half is the soul. When the ego dies, one has dispelled an illusion – the illusion of a personal self – only to wind up living in a delusion – the delusion of an impersonal Self. To take oneself to be ‘The Self’, the ‘Immortal Soul’, ‘The Supreme’, ‘The Absolute’, or ‘God On Earth’, is nothing short of institutionalised insanity. The delusion must be dispelled in order to be actually free: along with the ‘death of the ego’ there must be a corresponding ‘death of the soul’. Then ‘I’ – the self or ‘The Self’ – do not exist, psychologically speaking, in any way at all. Then the Eternal Present also vanishes – along with all that other capitalised nonsense. Surpassing the Altered State Of Consciousness is the third alternative ... an actual freedom.
Spiritual Enlightenment has been around for some thousands of years ... and there is still no peace on earth. Nowadays I know, experientially, why Enlightenment does not deliver the goods ... and, of course, I now know what does. 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 – 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 life-time 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.
In spite of the fact that every single human being has had at least one pure consciousness experience (PCE) – and usually more – in their lifetime, they somehow can not differentiate between that peak experience of apperception (wherein ‘I’, the thought and felt ‘being’, temporarily quits the scene and the actual world becomes apparent) and their pre-conceived notions that everyday reality is an illusion disguising some metaphysical ‘Greater Reality’. The Glamour and the Glory and the Glitz of the Altered State Of Consciousness has a tenacious grip upon the minds and hearts of a benighted humanity. It is indeed strange, to the point of being bizarre, that so many persons will turn their backs on the purity of the perfection of being here – of being alive – at this moment in time. Here in this actual world, which is where this flesh and blood body is living anyway, is the peace that everyone says they are searching for. All that is required is that one comes to one’s senses – both literally and metaphorically – and spend the rest of one’s life without malice and sorrow. One will then be blithe and benign.
It is, of course, a bold step to forsake lofty thoughts, profound feelings and psychic adumbrations and enter into the actuality of life as a sensate experience. It requires a startling audacity to devote oneself to the task of causing a mutation of consciousness to occur. To have the requisite determination to apply oneself, with the diligence and perseverance born out of pure intent, to the patient dismantling of one’s accrued social identity indicates a strength of purpose unequalled in the annals of history. It is no little thing that one does ... and it has enormous consequences, not only for one’s own well-being, but for humankind as a whole. With an actualism spread like a chain-letter, in the due course of time, global freedom would revolutionise the concept of humanity. It would be a free association of peoples world-wide; a utopian-like loose-knit affiliation of like-minded individuals. One would be a citizen of the world, not of a sovereign state. Countries, with their artificial borders would vanish along with the need for the military. As nationalism would expire, so too would patriotism with all its heroic evils. No police force would be needed anywhere on earth; no locks on the doors, no bars on the windows. Gaols, judges and juries would become a thing of the dreadful past ... terror would stalk its prey no more. People would live together in peace and harmony, happiness and delight. Pollution and its cause – over-population – would be set to rights without effort, as competition would be replaced by cooperation. It would be the stuff of all the pipe-dreams come true.
But none of this matters much when one is already living freely in the actual world. In actual freedom, life is experienced as being perfect as-it-is here on earth. One knows that one is living in a beneficent and benevolent universe – and that is what actually counts. The self-imposed iniquities that ail the people who stubbornly wish to remain denizens of the real world, fail to impinge upon the blitheness and benignity of one who lives in the vast scheme of things. The universe does not force anyone to be happy and harmless, to live in peace and ease, to be free of sorrow and malice. It is a matter of personal choice as to which way one will travel. Human beings, being as they are, will probably continue to tread the ‘tried and true’ paths, little realising that they are the tried and failed ways. There is none so contumacious as a self-righteous soul who is convinced that they know the way to live as revealed in their ancient and revered scriptures ... or in their much-prized secular philosophies and psychologies. So be it.
I live in peace and tranquillity, beholden to none. With no loyalty to bind me, I have nothing to defend. With nothing to defend I have no need to attack. I have no sense of mission to ‘change the world’. I am not driven by mystical forces to evangelise, to proselytise, to convert. If anyone is genuinely interested in finding out what the reason for their existence is, I am only too happy to participate in their enquiry. Nevertheless, I can only help those who wish to be helped in the only way that I can help. I am free to be here in the world as-it-is. Unadorned and unencumbered, I can stand on my own two feet, owing allegiance to no-one and nothing at all. I am supremely content with life as-it-is, for perfection can be found in what others call imperfection ... and I have no desire to change anything. To be here, intimately here in this moment in time, where this actual world is such a marvellous place to be alive in, is a satisfaction and fulfilment unparalleled in the chronicles of antiquity.
Actual intimacy – being here now – does not come from love and compassion, for the affective states of being stem from separation. The illusion of intimacy that love and compassion produces is but a meagre imitation of the direct experience of the actual. In the actual world, ‘I’ as ego, the personality, and ‘me’ as soul, the ‘being’ – both subjectively experienced as one’s identity – have ceased to exist; whereas love and compassion accentuates, endorses and verifies ‘me’ as being real. And while ‘I’ am real, ‘I’ am relative to other similarly afflicted persons; vying for position and status in order to establish ‘my’ credentials ... to verify ‘my’ very existence. To be actually intimate is to be without the separative identity ... and therefore free from the need for love and compassion with their ever un-filled promise of Peace On Earth. There is an actual intimacy between me and everyone and everything ... actual intimacy is a direct experiencing of the other as-they-are. I am having a superb time ... and it is a well-earned superb time, too. Nothing has come without application – apart from serendipitous discoveries because of pure intent – and I am reaping the rewards which are plentiful and deliciously satisfying. Actual intimacy frees one up to a world of factual splendour, based firmly upon sensate and sensual delight. The candid and unabashed sensorial enjoyment of being this body in the world around is such a luscious and immediate experience, that the tantalising but ever-elusive promise of the mystique of love and compassion has faded into the oblivion it deserves.
The search for meaning amidst the debris of the much-vaunted human hopes and dreams and schemes has come to its timely end. With the end of ‘me’, the distance or separation between ‘me’ and ‘my’ senses – and thus the external world – disappears. To be the senses as a bare awareness is apperception, a pure consciousness experience of the world as-it-is. Because there is no ‘I’ as an observer – a little person inside one’s head – to have sensations, I am the sensations. There is nothing except the series of sensations which happen ... not to ‘me’ but just happening ... moment by moment ... one after another. To be the sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and release. Consequently, I am living in peace and tranquillity; a meaningful peace and tranquillity. Life is intrinsically purposeful, the reason for existence lies openly all around. Being in this very air I live in, I am constantly aware of it; I breathe it in and out; I see it, I hear it, I taste it, I smell it, I touch it, all of the time. It never goes away – nor has it ever been away. ‘I’ was standing in the way of meaning.
This is an actual freedom. It is possible to be actually free, here on earth, as this body, in this life-time.
Appendix No. 1
Description Of Becoming Enlightened
In 1980 I had a peak experience wherein I saw that everything was already perfect as-it-is and that ‘I’, the psychological entity, was standing in the way ... and no-one else was preventing me from achieving the ultimate goal of being a human. In that peak experience I saw ‘myself’. ‘I’ was the end product of society and nothing more. ‘I’ was an emotional construct of all of the beliefs, values, moral, ethics, mores, customs, traditions, doctrines, ideologies and so on. ‘I’ was nothing but an emotional-mental fabrication ... a sense of identity with its conscience. I also saw that ‘I’ was a lost, lonely, frightened – and a very, very cunning – entity. Just as those Christians who are said to be possessed by an evil entity and need to be exorcised, I saw that every human being had been endowed with a social entity ... and it was called being normal. To say that I was amazed rather fails to adequately describe the feeling of relief that after all there was a solution to the human situation here on earth. I was ecstatic.
That proved to be my undoing – as far as actual freedom is concerned. Ecstasy led to euphoria and euphoria led to bliss. In the blissful state I manifested and became Love Agapé which led to an emanation of Divine Compassion for all living beings who were suffering and in sorrow by virtue of the fact that they were ignorant of the Divine Order of things ... for an Absolute had been revealed to me in that Love and Compassion – it was that Love Agapé and Divine Compassion – and I had been chosen to bring this self-same Love and Compassion to earth. I was to go through a process, when I returned to normal, that would result in my being well-prepared to usher in this new age of peace and prosperity to all humankind. As this revelation continued, I saw a new ‘me’ coming into existence ... a grand ‘Me’, a glorious ‘Me’ and a spiritually fulfilling ‘Me’. I was the Saviour Of Humankind!
(As all this was happening, a passing thought occurred to me, which was briefly contemplated ... then banished: Who or what was it that was observing these two ‘me’s – the social ‘me’ and the grand ‘Me’? This trifling question was to be of immense benefit years later when I realised that I was living in a delusion and that there was an actual freedom lying beyond ... but I jump ahead of myself).
Three nights later I had a similar experience and what I had witnessed on the first revelation was confirmed. Then nothing untoward happened for the next five months – this had been in late July 1980 – until on the first day of January in 1981 when I began a ‘process’ that was to last for nine months, culminating in my Divine Awakening on that September morning. The ‘process’ was both prosaic and extraordinary: on the one hand I began undoing all the social conditioning that I had been subject to since birth and on the other hand I generated love for all and sundry. I examined all the social traditions and customs etc., one by one, and released myself from their iron grip. I diminished hate and anger and sadness and loneliness by surrendering to and living in love and oneness ... which is the best that a normal human could do by virtue of the socialisation process. I moved in and out of Sacred States of Heavenly Bliss and Love Agapé and Divine Compassion and immersed myself in the entire ‘process’ with dedication and resolution. I adopted the principle of pacifism (‘turn the other cheek’) and developed Goodness of the highest order. I cleansed and purified myself of all impure thoughts and deeds and worked both hard and industriously in my daily work. I practised honesty and humility in all my interactions with other people and pondered the significance and ramifications of the Divine Order.
I totally believed in and had supreme faith in The Absolute and its ability to bring about the Peace On Earth so long promised. That I was to play the central role in this Divine Plan no longer came as a surprise to me, as I began to realise that I had long yearned to be part of the Salvation Process. I understood that I had to die and be reborn and, consequently, went into a catatonic state that resulted in my being carted off to hospital and kept under intensive care for four hours until I came out of it. I was never to be the same again, as Divinity had been working on me whilst I was catatonic and from that date forward I was permanently in a state of human bliss and love ... I could do no wrong. About six weeks prior to the sixth of September 1981 I had a revelation that I was going to really die this time, not become catatonic again, and that I was to prepare myself for it. I mustered all of my faith and resolution, renewed all of my trust and dedication, and awaited the day. The night before I could hardly maintain myself as a thinking, functioning human being as a blistering hot and cold burning sensation crept up the back of my spine and entered into the base of my neck just under the brain itself. I went to bed in desperation and frustration at my apparent inability to be good enough to carry this ‘process’ through to its supreme conclusion.
The next morning I awoke and all was calm and quiet. Expressing relief at the cessation of the intensifying ‘process’ that had reached an unbearable level the night before, I lay back on my pillows to watch the rising sun (my bedroom faced east) through the large bedroom windows. All of a sudden I was gripped with the realisation that this was the moment! I was going to die! An intense fear raced throughout my body, rising in crescendo until I could scarcely take any more. As it reached a peak of stark terror, I realised that I had nothing to worry about and that I was to go with the ‘process’. In an instant all fear left me and I travelled deep into the depths of my very being. All of a sudden I was sitting bolt upright, laughing, as I realised that this that was IT! was such a simple thing ... all I had to do was die ... and that was the easiest thing in the world to do. Then the thought of leaving my family and friends overwhelmed me and I was thrust back on the bed sobbing. Then I was bolt upright once more laughing my head off ... then I was back on the pillows sobbing my heart out ... upright, laughing ... pillows sobbing ... upright laughing ... pillows sobbing. At the fifth or sixth time something turned over in the base of my brain – in the top of the brain-stem. I likened it to turning over a L.P. record in order to play the other side ... with the vital exception that it would never, ever turn back again.
It was over. I had arrived. I had become Awakened to the Greater Reality. I was Love Agapé and Divine Compassion ... there was no separation between me and The Absolute. I had a Divine Sense of Mission to spread The Word and I embarked on fulfilling my Sacred Duty, gathering some disciples on the way, until 1984. Then I started to question just what I was doing and just what had happened to me. Something seemed to be wrong ... this had all been done before by other Masters and Messiahs, Saints and Sages, Avatars and Saviours, to no avail. In fact, instead of bringing Love and Peace, they had left in their wake much bloodshed and hatred ... and I was one of them! Accordingly I travelled to India to find out for myself exactly what was amiss with this whole Enlightenment business by meeting some of these hallowed Gurus and imbibing the centuries of Eastern Spiritual Tradition for myself, instead of merely reading about it in books.
It was to take me eleven years to get out of this massive delusion I was living in and go beyond it to arrive at where I am today. It was eleven years of coming to terms with the understanding that what I was living was a massive delusion of grandeur ... and that it was what every human being believed in, in some way, shape or form ... but that is another story. Today, I am no longer an Enlightened Master living in an Exalted State of Being ... I am me-as-this-body only, a fellow human being who has no sorrow or malice whatsoever to transcend; hence I am both happy and harmless. I am what I was on that fateful night in 1980 when I asked the question: ‘Who or what was it that was observing these two ‘me’s – the social ‘me’ and the grand ‘Me’?’ I am these sense organs in operation: this seeing is me, this hearing is me, this tasting is me, this touching is me, this smelling is me, and this thinking is me. Whereas ‘I’, the identity, am inside the body: looking out through ‘my’ eyes as if looking out through a window, listening through ‘my’ ears as if they were microphones, tasting through ‘my’ tongue, touching through ‘my’ skin, smelling through ‘my’ nose, and thinking through ‘my’ brain. Of course ‘I’ must feel isolated, alienated, alone and lonely, for ‘I’ am cut off from the magnificence of the actual world ... the world as-it-is ... by ‘my’ very presence.
Any identity whatsoever is a delusion.
Appendix No. 2
Description Of A ‘Glimpse’ Of Actual Freedom
I was coming to the end of a time I went through in an endeavour to purify myself which I call my ‘puritan period’. I retreated altogether from civilisation to a group of uninhabited islands in the tropics off the north-eastern Australian seaboard where I stayed for the best part of three months in total silence, on my own, speaking to no one at all and moving from island to island at whim. I had whittled my worldly possessions down to three sarongs, three shirts, a cooking pot and bowl, a knife and a spoon, a bank book and a pair of nail scissors ... I was homeless, itinerant, celibate, vegan, (no spices; not even salt and pepper), no drugs (no tobacco, no alcohol; not even tea or coffee), no hair cut, no shaving, no washing other than a dip in a river or the ocean. I possessed nothing else anywhere in the world and had cut all family ties ... whatever I could eliminate from my life that was an encumbrance and an attachment, I had let go of. In other words: whatever was traditionally seen as an impediment to freedom I discarded. It was there I finally discovered that it was ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ which was at fault and that I could ‘purify’ myself via these ‘Tried and True’ means until the cows came home ... to no avail.
I was already in an Altered State Of Consciousness (this was in 1985 and my ego had dissolved in 1981) and living in what has been described as the ‘Unknown’. I had had some serious reservations about the validity of this as an ultimate state and had been to India the previous year to see if I could ascertain why. My discoveries there had led me to consider the possibility that Enlightenment was not the final stage, so I was ripe and ready to plunge into the ‘Unknowable’. I was able to experience what lay beyond Enlightenment several times ... the first of these experiences occurred at maybe three in the morning (I had no watch) and was accompanied by a sense of dread the likes of which I had never experienced even in a war-zone – made all the more acute because I had not experienced fear for four years (I was living in a state of Divine Compassion and Love Agapé which protected me from malice and the underlying fear). This dread contained the existential angst of discovering that ‘I’ was nothing but a contingent ‘being’ and that ‘I’ would cease to ‘be’. Then the condition I went on to experience had the character of the ‘Great Beyond’ – which I deliberately put in capitals because that is how it was experienced at the time – and it was of the nature of being ‘That’ which is attained to at physical death when an Enlightened One ‘quits the body’ ... which attainment is known as ‘Mahasamadhi’ (Hinduism) or ‘Parinirvana’ (Buddhism) and so on.
It seemed so extreme that the physical body must surely die for the attainment of it.
To put it into a physical analogy, it was as if I were to gather up my meagre belongings, eradicate all marks of my stay on the island, and paddle away over the horizon, all the while not knowing whence I go ... and vanish without a trace, never to be seen again. As no one on the mainland knew where I was, no one would know where I had gone. In fact, I would become as extinct as the dodo and with no skeletal remains. The autological self by whatever name would cease to ‘be’, there would be no ‘spirit’, no ‘presence’, no ‘being’ at all. This was more than death of the ego, which is a major event by any definition; this was total annihilation. No ego, no soul – no self, no Self – no more Heavenly Rapture, Love Agapé, Divine Bliss and so on. Only oblivion. It was not at all attractive, not at all alluring, not at all desirable ... yet I knew I was going to do it, sooner or later, because it was the ultimate condition and herein lay the secret to the ‘Mystery of Life’.
The ‘death of the ego’ is only for the orthodox-minded people; it is for those who are easily seduced by the Glamour and the Glory and the Glitz of the much-touted Altered State. This is why pure intent is an essential prerequisite to ensure a guaranteed passage through the psychic maze. With pure intent one will not rest until one has gone all the way. One will not be bewitched by the psychic Power and Authority, either. All these allurements are but welcome food for the cunning entity, which wanting only its own survival, readily sublimates itself into The Spirit. With the clarity born of pure intent one can see this play for what it is and move on freely and willingly to what lies at the end of the wide and wondrous path ... the end of ‘being’. With pure intent one will not settle for second best, for it has been seen in the peak experiences that the very best is possible, here on earth. One sees that ‘I’ must disappear entirely. There will be no transcendence, no transmutation, no metamorphosis ... not any of these. For one who goes all the way, no phoenix will exist to arise from the ashes – nothing Metaphysical will remain. There will be no ‘being’ at all. ‘I’ will become extinct.
I use the word extinct deliberately for it carries a definitive meaning. Physically, death is the end of an individual member of the species, whilst extinction is the ending of the species itself. The psychological annihilation of ‘I’ – in its entirety – is the psychological ending of the species known as ‘humanity’. It is the end of ‘being’ and the end of an illusion. It is also the end of ‘Being’ and the end of delusion. The Human Condition, with all its appalling sorrow and malice, can come to an end. All those would-be wise people who state: ‘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, as this body only, can live in that perfect purity twenty-four-hours-a-day. I can live in a state of benignity, which means a kindly and harmless disposition. Life is a sincere and yet playful game and one is then free to enjoy it all, every moment again.
‘Humanity’, which gave birth to ‘me’, is 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 actually an insult to 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.
Ultimate fulfilment lies beyond extinction.
Appendix No. 3
Description Of Becoming Actually Free
In late September 1992 a woman, who had been coming to see me on and off for some time, earnestly asked that she be taken on as a disciple ... she seriously wished me to be her master. I was astounded, for I had been at pains to explain that I was not interested in being anyone’s master, for I considered the entire system of the master-disciple relationship, with its attendant surrender, trust, worship and obedience, to be not only insidious, but pernicious as in regards to another person’s freedom. I declined, of course, yet I had to question just what I was ‘putting out’ to people to precipitate such a request. What was my part in all this? What was I doing – indeed what was I being – to encourage another to consider taking this step? I had been dismantling various aspects of the make-up of the Altered State Of Consciousness that I was living in – a state of Spiritual Enlightenment that I called Absolute Freedom – and had thought myself to be virtually free of all that hocus-pocus that goes on in the name of freedom. I asked myself what turned out to be a seminal question:
‘What am I in relation to other people?’
I asked the question in such a way so that I would not get a carefully thought-out and reasoned answer. I wanted an experiential result – and I kept the question burning in the depths of my psyche, discarding any intellectual answers that inevitably popped-up in the course of the next five or six weeks. It troubled me deeply that I was in such a situation because I seem to be driven by some force to ‘Spread the Word’ and that was never my intention all those years ago when I first had what is known as a ‘Peak Experience’ which initiated my incursion into all matters Spiritual, culminating in the ‘death’ of my ego and catapulting me into this Absolute State. My intent back then had been to cleanse myself of all that is detrimental to personal happiness and interpersonal harmony ... in other words: Peace on earth in my life-time. Instead of that rather simple ambition, I found that I was impelled on an odyssey to be the latest Saviour of Humankind in a long list of Enlightened Beings ... and this imposition did not sit well with me, as they have all failed in their Divine Work. After something like five thousand years of recorded history, humanity is nowhere nearer to Peace On Earth than before. Indeed, instead of the much-touted Love and Peace, much Hatred and Bloodshed has followed in their wake. This abysmal fate is something I wish to avoid repeating, whatever the personal cost in terms of losing this much-prized State Of Being. My diagnosis was simple: if I were driven by some force – no matter how Good that force be – then I am not actually free.
Then in the late afternoon of the day before Friday the thirtieth of of October 1992, whilst out in an abandoned cow-paddock planting tree seedlings, I was struck by the curious fact that at the beginning of my life I had been engaged in chopping down trees to turn the land into cow-pasture. Now the needs of the situation were sharply reversed and so I paused in my task and stood erect, looking about me in this little sub-tropical valley that the ex-dairy farm was nestled in. As I looked I idly mused upon the irony that the change in human needs regarding physical survival had wrought such radical transformation in the attitudes toward the environment during the forty five years I had been upon this planet. In a flash of a moment a vast understanding of the enormity of the Human Condition transfigured my comfortable comprehension of what it was to be an Enlightened Master ... a Self-Realised Being. My entire affective and cognitive configuration – my highly prized state of awareness – was seen at a glance to be nothing more than a passionate mental construct. In other words, my world fell apart.
I entered into a repeat of what I had first experienced on an uninhabited island some seven years previously and nervousness and apprehension mounted to a fear that moved rapidly through terror and horror to the dread that I knew so well from long ago. This was what my seminal question had produced and, turning weak at the knees, I sank to the ground ... to no avail. I could not escape my destiny, for I was situated in a living nightmare of what I swiftly came to see was nothing short of institutionalised insanity. Any altered state of consciousness was a delusion born out of the illusion of self ... but only because of humankind’s ignorance. It is truly dreadful to be trapped in a massive delusion for eleven years, unable to find any way out and knowing that no other human being can help, for the altered state has been held up for millennia as being the Summum Bonum of human existence. All the literature on the subject praised the state of consciousness I was in (Enlightenment, Illumination, Moksha, Samadhi, Satori, Nirvana, Sunyata and so on) and yet I just knew it was a mirage that I was living.
I had no choice but to retire to my bed for a sleepless night of frozen immobility ... which continued throughout the morning of the next day. I knew that I would – I must – proceed, but how could I be right and all those ‘great’ and revered masters be wrong? Who was I, a mere boy from the farm, to set himself up to be the ultimate arbiter of human experience? The agonizing doubt was virtually unbearable ... I would not wish this upon anyone ... I would want no one to follow in my footsteps, for I had to run the full gamut of dread to break through to what lay beyond the deception. I realised, at about nine in the morning, that eleven years ago I had inadvertently surrendered my will to a god ... the ‘Absolute’ that I cunningly considered to be ‘That Which Lay Beyond’ had turned out to be Divinity in disguise. I took myself up the hill into a pine plantation that I particularly favoured as a contemplative place and spent an hour and a half digging deep into my psyche to regain my ‘surrender’ ... to get my autonomy back. With a shaky will somewhat in place I returned to my home and, mounting the verandah steps, collapsed in a heap on the bare boards. Unable to move, to think or to feel I could but lie there as my very soul fell away. It was about midday when the process was over and I came to my senses – both figuratively and literally. For along with the dissolution of my soul, my feelings – my emotions and passions – disappeared, never to return. My psyche disintegrated and the second ‘I’ died ... ‘I’ became extinct.
The Altered State needs to be talked about and exposed for what it is so that nobody need venture up that blind alley ever again. There is another way and another goal. The main trouble with the Altered State is that whilst the ego dissolves, the identity and soul remain intact. No longer identifying as a personal ego-bound identity, one then identifies as an impersonal soul-bound identity – ‘I am That’, ‘I am God’, ‘I am The Supreme’, ‘I am The Absolute’ and so on. This is the delusion, the mirage, the deception ... and it is extremely difficult to see it for oneself, for one is in an august state. This second identity – the second ‘I’ of Mr. Venkataraman Ramana fame – is a difficult one to shake, maybe more difficult than the first; for who is brave enough to voluntarily give up fame and fortune, reverence and worship, status and security? One has to be scrupulously honest with oneself to go all the way and no longer be a someone, a somebody of importance. One faces extinction; ‘I’ will cease to be, there will be no ‘being’ whatsoever, no ‘presence’ at all. It is impossible to imagine, not only the complete and utter cessation of ‘me’ in ‘my’ entirety, but the end of any ‘Ultimate Being’ or ‘Absolute Presence’ in any way, shape or form. It means that no one or no thing is in charge of the universe ... that there is no ‘Ultimate Authority’. It means that all values are but human values, with no absolute values at all to fall back upon. It is impossible for ‘me’ to conceive that without a wayward ‘me’ there is no need for any values whatsoever ... or an ‘Ultimate Authority’.
Thus I find myself here, in the world as-it-is. A vast stillness lies all around, a perfection that is 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 at all is 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 nature of life – who would have it any other way?
I am this infinite and eternal universe experiencing itself as a reflective, sensate human being.
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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 1997-2001 -
http://actualfreedom.com.au/richard/default.htm
This Web Page is for anyone sufficiently motivated to explore into just what constitutes the Human Condition. It is about what one human being searched for in his own life and the discoveries he has made ... and what other peoples have done about ameliorating their present situation. All the articles on these pages should be sufficiently challenging to stimulate, inspire and initiate some preliminary investigation and discussion and, although the articles are specifically of interest to the spiritual aspirant who wishes to further their search into the area that lies beyond enlightenment (and any other form of an altered state of consciousness), the general tone of the text will be of immense appeal to any one interested in all matters pertaining to consciousness studies.
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 – and we set out to discover why this is so. We find sadness, loneliness, sorrow, grief, depression and suicide to be a global incidence – 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 life-time 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 ... because it is indeed possible for any human being to be totally free from the human condition.
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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?
For a start, one needs to fully acknowledge the biological imperative (the instinctual passions) which are the root cause of all the ills of humankind. 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, being based in the instinctual passions, are the primary cause of all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and suicides and the such-like. Malice and sorrow underpin the antidotally generated pacifiers of love and compassion which, if sublimated and transcended, give rise to Love Agapé and Divine Compassion in an altered state of consciousness (ASC) such as ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’. This ‘Tried and True’ solution to all the ills of humankind lies within the ‘Human Condition’ and, as it has had 3,000 to 5,000 years to demonstrate its efficacy, can be discarded as being the ‘Tried and Failed’.
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Gone now are the days of having to assiduously practice humility and pacifism in an ultimately futile attempt to become free by transcending the opposites ... the traditional and narrow path of denial and fantasy, negation and hallucination. A wide and wondrous path of blitheness and gaiety is now available for one who wishes to live in the freedom of the actual world ... because it is very clear, to the discerning intellect, that the ‘Enlightened Beings’ have squandered their heyday. With this modern era’s rapid and comprehensive publication and communications network, none of their gaffes and improprieties elude notice. Anyone who is at all astute will have perceived that they have fallen short of their own standards ... and have failed to deliver the goods so readily pledged to a credulous humanity. For thousands of years they have been promising Peace On Earth – which is nowhere to be found – and a specious immortality in some dubious after-life.
It will become obvious, as one reads on, that the whole thrust of humanity’s wisdom – polluted as it is by belief, faith, trust, hope and an uneasy certitude – has been going horribly wrong. Wars, murders, tortures, rapes, sadness, loneliness, grief, depression, suicide and corruption have been the odious result of such practices for far too long to persevere in giving credence to the fantasies and hallucinations that pass for sagacity in the real world. Fuelled by an emotional imagination, human beings down through the centuries have given voice to their passionate dreams and nightmares, with abominable consequences. All of humanity’s sublime feeling and profound thought has been a purview predicated upon doom and gloom regarding life here on this fair earth. The Summum Bonum of all the many and varied disciplines – be it philosophy or psychology, physics or metaphysics, cosmology or sociology, theology or spirituality – has been to sanction the protracted doctrinal assumption that a god, by whatever name, is in charge of the universe.
This god goes under a many and a varied disguise: The Truth, The Absolute, The Supreme, The Source, The Origin, The Greatest, The Sublime, The Essence, The Most High, The Highest Good, The Self, The Higher Self, The True Self, The Soul, The Over-Soul, The Divine Presence, The Tao, The Breath Of Life, The Greater Reality, The Ground Of Being, Cosmic Consciousness, Mind, Intelligence, Existence, Spirit, Presence, Being, Nirvana, Satori, Samadhi, Thatness, Suchness, Isness ... and so on and so on. As impressive as all these titles may be, yet one must ask: how come, after 3,000 to 5,000 years of a recorded history, of the Gurus and the God-Men, the Masters and the Messiahs, the Avatars and the Saviours and the Saints and the Sages hawking their ‘Divine Solution’ to all and sundry, there is still as much misery and mayhem as back then? When one sincerely questions the ‘Teachers’, the ‘Teachings’ and the ‘Source’ of the ‘Teachings’ one will indubitably unearth this salient point:
Despite all their rhetoric, peace-on-earth is not actually on their agenda.
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I invite anyone to make a critical examination of all the words I advance so as to ascertain if they be intrinsically self-explanatory ... and if they are all 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 (which personal experiencing is the only proof worthy of the name). 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 ASC. Then ‘I’ as ego – sublimated and transcended as ‘me’ as soul – manifest as a god or a goddess (‘The Truth’ by any name) and preach unliveable doctrines based upon their belief that they are ‘not the body’.
Doctrines like acceptance, pacifism and unconditional love, for example.
In my investigations into life, the universe and what it is to be a human being living in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are I first started by examining thought, thoughts and thinking ... then very soon moved on to examining feelings (first the emotions and then the deeper feelings). When I dug down into these passions and calentures (into the core of ‘my’ being then into ‘being’ itself) I stumbled across the instincts ... and found the origin of not only the affective faculty but the psyche itself. I found ‘me’ at the core of ‘being’ ... which is the instinctual rudimentary animal self common to all sentient beings (otherwise mistakenly known as the ‘original face’ and is what gives rise to the feeling of ‘oneness’ with all other sentient beings). It is a very, very ancient genetic memory ... but hoariness does not make it automatically wise, however, despite desperate belief to the contrary.
Being a ‘self’ is because the only way into this world of people, things and events is via the human spermatozoa fertilising the human ova ... thus every human being is endowed, by blind nature, with the basic instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire. Thus ‘I’ am the end-point of myriads of survivors passing on their genes. ‘I’ am the product of the ‘success story’ of blind nature’s fear and aggression and nurture and desire. Being born of the biologically inherited instincts genetically encoded in the germ cells of the spermatozoa and the ova, ‘I’ am – genetically – umpteen tens 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.
In other words: ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’ and ‘I’ am aggression and aggression is ‘me’ and ‘I’ am nurture and nurture is ‘me’ and ‘I’ am desire and desire is ‘me’.
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The instinctual passions are the very energy source of the rudimentary animal self ... the base consciousness of ‘self’ and ‘other’ that all sentient beings have. The human animal – with its unique ability to be aware of its own death – transforms this ‘reptilian brain’ rudimentary core of ‘being’ (an animal ‘self’) into being a feeling ‘me’ (as soul in the heart) and the ‘feeler’ then infiltrates into thought to become the ‘thinker’ ... a thinking ‘I’ (as ego in the head). No other animal can do this. That this process is aided and abetted by the human beings who were already on this planet when one was born – which is conditioning and programming and is part and parcel of the socialising process – is but the tip of the iceberg and not the main issue at all. All the different types of conditioning are well-meant endeavours by countless peoples over countless aeons to seek to curb the instinctual passions. Now, while most people paddle around on the surface and re-arrange the conditioning to ease their lot somewhat, some people – seeking to be free of all human conditioning – fondly imagine that by putting on a face-mask and snorkel that they have gone deep-sea diving with a scuba outfit ... deep into the human condition.
They have not ... they have gone deep only into the human conditioning. When they tip upon the instincts – which are both savage (fear and aggression) and tender (nurture and desire) – they grab for the tender (the ‘good’ side) and blow them up all out of proportion. If they succeed in this self-aggrandising hallucination they start talking twaddle dressed up as sagacity such as: ‘There is a good that knows no evil’ or ‘There is a love that knows no opposite’ or ‘There is a compassion that sorrow has never touched’ and so on. Which means that the ‘Enlightened Beings’ advise dissociation (wherein painful reality is transformed into a bad dream) as being the most effective means to deal with all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides and the such-like. Just as a traumatised victim of an horrific and terrifying event makes the experience unreal in order to cope with the ordeal, the ‘Enlightened Beings’ have desperately done precisely this thing ... during what is sometimes called ‘the dark night of the soul’.
This is because it takes nerves of steel to don such an aqua-lung and plunge deep in the stygian depths of the human psyche ... it is not for the faint of heart or the weak of knee. This is because past the human conditioning is the human condition itself ... that which caused the conditioning in the first place. To end this condition, the deletion of blind nature’s software package which gave rise to the rudimentary animal ‘self’ is required. This is the elimination of ‘me’ at the core of ‘being’.
The complete and utter extinction of ‘being’ is the end to all the ills of humankind.
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Thus the single root cause of all the mayhem and misery that epitomises the human condition 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 ... is to be an alien in an alien world.
Becoming free of the human condition is a physiological occurrence, centred at the nape of the neck (the top of the brain-stem/base of the brain), wherein the ‘lizard-brain’ mutates out of its primeval state ... but if this mutation is not allowed its completion one becomes enlightened. To become spiritually free the ego-self (‘I’ as ego) must die/dissolve ... all genuinely enlightened beings point to a single edifying moment of awakening (with a variety of descriptions) wherein the personal self (or ‘being’) transmogrifies into the impersonal self or ‘being’ (or non-self) ... and which ‘being’ (often capitalised as ‘Being’) exists timelessly, spacelessly and formlessly. To become actually free the soul-self (‘me’ as soul) must also die/dissolve ... the total extirpation of ‘being’ (and thus ‘Being’) itself.
So far in human history one has had only two choices: being human or being divine. Given that there has only been one alternative to being worldly – being otherworldly – one had to become divine to escape from the Human Condition. Thus the ego had to dissolve. Yet the deeper identity – the soul, the spirit, the being – remained intact only to wreak its havoc once again ... now disguised as ‘The Self’. Once one sees that the ‘Tried and True’ is the ‘Tried and Failed’ one easily recognises today’s third alternative: actual freedom ... and it outstrips any Altered State Of Consciousness. A new way to live life on this verdant planet has been discovered which eliminates the need to humble oneself in a degrading surrender and servitude to some imagined deity. It is now possible to live freely in this newly emerging post-spiritual epoch, attaining full and mature use of one’s innate faculties ... and easily superseding all of the revered saints and sages. Actual freedom is a tried and tested way of being here in the world as it actually is ... stripped of the veneer of reality that is super-imposed by the psychological and psychic entity within the body. This entity is the feeling of identity that inhibits any freedom and sabotages every well-meant endeavour.
In actual freedom one finds that the need for the ‘Ultimate Reality’ has vanished along with the ego and soul ... the ‘self’ and the ‘Self’.
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Obviously, the physical cause necessitates a physical solution (the extinction of the instinctual ‘being’ itself) and this altruistic ‘self’-sacrifice will not eventuate unless the temporary absence or abeyance of the physically inherited cause (a genetically inherited instinctual animal ‘self’) which created the problem of the human condition is intimately experienced, remembered and activated. This peak experience of one’s potentiality is known as a pure consciousness experience (PCE) and is essential to the process of freeing oneself from one’s fate and attaining to one’s destiny. The first and most important step is to remember a PCE (everybody that I have spoken to at length over the last nineteen years – everybody – has had at least one) and thus start thinking for oneself (although most people cannot initially remember a PCE and may need a lot of prompting to retrieve it from their memory). Then each next step becomes obvious of its own accord in one’s daily life as one goes about one’s normal business in the market place. The pure intent born out of the PCE actively works on eliminating the animal ‘self’ bestowed by blind nature each moment again.
One begins by incrementally purging oneself of the social identity that has been overlaid – from conception to the present day – over the innate self. With cheerful diligence and application born out of pure intent, one whittles away at the persistent social identity, abandoning the desire for unity, until one arrives at a virtual freedom. In virtual freedom one is ninety nine percent free and the other one percent causes very little trouble – if any – and with virtual freedom operating in every human being there could be a virtual global peace-on-earth. Howsoever that may be, the day of destiny ultimately dawns wherein one is catapulted into actual freedom ... one has escaped one’s fate and universal peace and tranquillity emerges. Being free from malice and sorrow, innocence and benignity are one’s constant condition. In the consummate perfection of the purity which endlessly wells in the utter stillness of the infinitude of this material universe, one is this very actual universe experiencing itself in all its magnificence as a sensate and reflective human being.
It is essential for success to grasp the fact that this is one’s only moment of being alive. The past, although it did happen, is not actual now. The future, though it will happen, is not actual now. Only now is actual. Yesterday’s happiness and harmlessness does not mean a thing if one is miserable and malicious now ... and a hoped-for happiness and harmlessness tomorrow is to but waste this moment of being alive in waiting. All one gets by waiting is more waiting. Thus any ‘change’ can only happen now. The jumping in point is always here ... it is at this moment in time and this place in space. Thus, if one misses it this time around, hey presto ... one has another chance immediately. Life is excellent at providing opportunities like this.
There is a wide and wondrous path to actual freedom: One asks oneself, each moment again, ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’?
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This can give rise to apperception. Apperception is the outcome of the exclusive attention paid to being alive right here just now. Apperception is to be the senses as a bare awareness, a pure consciousness experience (PCE) of the world as-it-is, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself. Apperception is an awareness of consciousness. It is not ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious; it is the mind’s awareness of itself. Which means that attentiveness and sensuousness will facilitate what the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom is on about: a virtual freedom wherein the ‘good’ feelings – the affectionate and desirable emotions and passions (those that are loving and trusting) are minimised along with the ‘bad’ feelings – the hostile and invidious emotions and passions (those that are hateful and fearful) – so that one is free to feel well, feel happy and feel perfect for 99% of the time. If one deactivates the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and activates the felicitous feelings (happiness, delight, joie de vivre, bonhomie and so on) with this freed-up affective energy, in conjunction with sensuousness (delectation, enjoyment, appreciation, relish, zest, gusto and so on), then the ensuing sense of amazement, marvel and wonder can result in apperceptiveness (unmediated perception).
Now, delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all ... and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now. Then one is no longer intuitively making sense of life ... the delicious wonder of it all drives any such instinctive meaning away. Such luscious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté – the nourishing of which is essential if fascination in it all is to occur – and the charm of life itself easily engages dedication to peace-on-earth. Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is ... and one is the experiencing of what is happening.
But refrain from possessing it and making it your own ... or else ‘twill vanish as softly as it appeared.
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The day finally dawns when something irrevocable happens inside the skull. In an ecstatic moment of being present, ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul expire. ‘I’ the personality and ‘me’ the being ceases to exist, permanently. There is a sensation inside the top of the brain-stem that is experienced as a physical ‘turning over’ of some kind ... something that can never, ever, turn back. Something irrevocable happens and everything is different, somehow, although everything stays the same physically ... with the outstanding exception of a perfection and purity permeating all and everything.
Something has changed, although it is as if nothing has happened ... except that the entire world is a magical fairy-tale-like playground full of incredible joy and delight that is never-ending. ‘My’ demise was as fictitious as ‘my’ apparent presence. I have always been here, I realise, it was that ‘I’ only imagined that ‘I’ existed. It was all an emotional play in a fertile imagination ... which was, however, fuelled by an actual hormonal substance triggered off from within the brain-stem because of the instinctual passions bestowed by blind nature. Thus the psyche – the entire affective faculty born of the instincts itself – is wiped out forever and one is finally what one actually is: this thinking and reflective flesh-and-blood body simply brimming with sense organs, delighting in this very sensual world of actual experience.
Thus the search for meaning amidst the debris of the much-vaunted human hopes and dreams and schemes comes to its timely end. With the end of both ‘I’ and ‘me’, the distance or separation between both ‘I’ and ‘me’ and the sense organs – and thus the external world – disappears. To be living as the senses is to live a clean and clear and pure awareness – apperception – a pure consciousness experience of the world as-it-is. Because there is no ‘I’ as a thinker (a little person inside one’s head) or a ‘me’ as a feeler (a little person in one’s heart) – to have sensations happen to them, one is the sensations. The entire affective faculty vanishes ... blind nature’s software package of instinctual passions is deleted.
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Then there is nothing except the series of sensations which happen ... not happening to an ‘I’ or a ‘me’ but just happening ... moment by moment ... one after another. To live life as these sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and magic. One is living in peace and tranquillity; a meaningful peace and tranquillity. Life is intrinsically purposeful, the reason for existence lies openly all around. It never goes away – nor has it ever been away – it was just that ‘I’/‘me’ was standing in the way of the meaning of life being apparent. Now the universe is experiencing itself in all its magnificence as an apperceptive human being. Life is not a vale of tears; peace-on-earth is an actual freedom from the human condition; it is indeed possible to be actually free, here on earth, as this body, in this life-time.
To seek and to find; to explore and uncover; to investigate and discover ... these actions are the very stuff of life! -
http://actualfreedom.com.au/richard/articles/attentivenesssensuousnessapperceptiveness.htm
Attentiveness and Sensuousness and Apperceptiveness
What The Words Are And What The Words Are Not
Apperceptiveness is a word describing a condition which happens of its own accord and attentiveness depicts an activity that one vitalises with remarkable verve and vivacity which activates the quality that the word sensuousness specifies. What exactly they are will become clearer as one goes along ... and it is important to note that this is not a matter of ‘a communion of what lies behind the concepts’. This is because ‘communion’ is of the affective faculty – and feeling-words are devised as the representative symbols of levels in the ‘inner world’ – and communion emotes those identities and realities with which expressive feelings deal. The word attentiveness articulates a cognitive probity and sensuousness is a word indicating a pre-emotional fidelity and the word apperceptiveness denotes a pre-identification integrity – they are not shackled to irrational intuition and logical imagination or prescient revelation – and describe this actual sensational environment ... the world of the senses. Sensuousness and apperceptiveness of themselves are the actuality ascertained with the attentiveness which gives rise to delineation ... thus the words that follow are simply a report of the experience of actuality.
So, it is important to understand that whilst everything written here is both descriptive and prescriptive – thus it is going to make rational sense – the quality and condition will always remain inaccessible to insight, illation and divination ... it is inconceivable, unimaginable and unbelievable. Needless to say, attentiveness and sensuousness can be experienced – rather easily – and along with apperceptiveness they can be adequately described, provided one keeps in mind that the words are not feeling-fingers ‘pointing at the moon’ ... they are never allusions to that ineffable ‘thing-in-itself’ of mystical tradition. In fact, attentiveness and sensuousness are subtle processes that one is using at this very moment whilst reading these words. Also, although the experience of the actual world authenticated apperceptively lies prior to the feelings and thus before the identification, this fact does not make one primitive ... quite the obverse.
The actualism method called ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ that was first put into action in 1981 is a potent method specifically aimed at experiencing a condition of uninterrupted apperception ... which means that the peace-on-earth that is already always here – now – will become apparent.
What Attentiveness And Sensuousness
And Apperceptiveness Are
When one first becomes aware of something, there is a fleeting instant of the clean perception of sensum just before one recognises the percept (the mental product or result of perception) and also before one identifies with all the feeling memories associated with its qualia (the qualities pertaining to the properties of the form) and this ‘raw sense-datum’ stage of sensational perception is a direct experience of the actual. Clear perception is in that instant where one converges one’s eyes or ears or nose or tongue or skin on the thing. It is that moment just before one focuses one’s feeling-memory on the object. It is the split-second just as one affectively subjectifies it ... which is just prior to clamping down on it viscerally and segregating it from the rest of pure, conscious existence. Pure perception takes place sensitively just before one starts feeling the percept – and thus thinking about it affectively – which takes place just before one’s feeling-fed mind says: ‘It’s a man’ or: ‘It’s a woman’ or: ‘It’s a steak-burger’ or: ‘It’s a tofu-burger’ ... with all that is implied in this identification and the ramifications that stem from that. This fluid, soft-focused moment of bare awareness, which is not learned, has never been learned, and never will be learned, could be called an aesthetically sensual regardfulness or a consummate sensorial discernibleness or an exquisitely sensuous heedfulness ... in a word: apperceptiveness.
(Dictionary Definition: ‘apperceptive’ (a.) of or pertaining to apperception (the mind’s perception of itself). Thus: ‘apperceptiveness’ (n.): the condition or quality of being apperceptive; also: ‘apperceptively’ (adv.): the experience of being apperceptive and: ‘apperceptivity’: (n.): the capacity to be apperceptive).
In that brief scintillating instant of bare awareness, that twinkling sensorium-moment of consciousness being conscious of being consciousness, one apperceives a thing as a nothing-in-particular that is being naught but what-it-is coming from nowhen and going nowhere at all. Apperceptiveness is very much like what one sees with one’s peripheral vision as opposed to the intent focus of normal or central vision. One experiences a smoothly flowing moment of clear experiencing where one is interlocked with the rest of actuality, not separate from it. This moment of soft, ungathered sensuosity – apperceptiveness – contains a vast understanding, an utter cognisance, that is lost as soon as one adjusts one’s mind to accommodate the feeling-tone ... and subverts the crystal-clear objectivity into an ontological ‘being’ ... a connotative ‘thing-in-itself’. In the process of ordinary perception, the apperceptiveness step is so fleeting as to be usually unobservable. One has developed the habit of squandering one’s attention on all the remaining steps: feeling the percept, emotionally recognising the qualia, zealously adopting the perception and getting involved in a long string of representative feeling-notions about it. When the original moment of apperceptiveness is rapidly passed over it is the purpose of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ to accustom one to prolong that moment of apperceptiveness – a sensuous awareness bereft of feeling content – so that uninterrupted apperception can eventuate.
(Dictionary Definition: ‘sensuous’ (a.): Of, derived from, or affecting the senses aesthetically rather than sensually; readily affected by the senses, keenly responsive to the pleasures of sensation. Also, indicative of a sensuous temperament. Apparently first used by Mr. John Milton, to avoid certain associations of the existing word ‘sensual’. Thus: ‘sensuousness’ (n.): the quality of being sensuous; also: ‘sensuously’ (adv.): the experience of being sensuous; and: ‘sensuosity’ (n.): the capability of being sensuous).
To enable apperceptiveness to haply occur it is essential to allow a reflective attention – attentiveness – to one’s psychological and psychic world. It is impossible for one to intelligently observe what is going on within if one does not at the same time acknowledge the occurrence of one’s various feeling-tones with attentiveness. This is especially true with the hostile and invidious emotions and passions (those that are hateful and fearful). In order to observe one’s own fear, for instance, one must admit to the fact that one is afraid. Nor can one examine one’s own depression, for another example, without acknowledging it fully. The same is true for irritation and agitation and frustration and all those other uncomfortable emotional and passionate moods. One cannot examine something fully if one is busy denying its existence. Whatever feeling one may be having, a fascinated attention – attentiveness – freely divulges it ... it is looking with discernibleness. All affective feelings are – quite simply – an hereditary occurrence, an inborn factor to be acutely aware of. No pride, no shame, nothing personal at stake ... what is there, is naturally there. There is no clinging to the affectionate and desirable emotions and passions (those that are loving and trusting) and no fleeing from the hostile and invidious, either (those that are hateful and fearful). A contemplative attention views all feelings as commensurate – nothing is suppressed and nothing is expressed – as attentiveness does not play favourites.
(Dictionary Definition: ‘attentive’: Steadily applying one’s mind or energies; intent, heedful, assiduously alert, aware, watchful. Thus: ‘attentiveness’ (n.): the quality of applying the mind, consideration, thought; also: ‘attentional’ (a.): of or pertaining to the mental faculty of attention, giving heed, noticing; and: ‘attentively’ (adv.); experiencing intently, heedfully, observantly).
Attentiveness gets not infatuated with the good feelings nor sidesteps the bad as attentiveness is a non-feeling awareness; a sensuous attention. Attentiveness is not sentimental susceptibility for it does not get involved with affection or empathy or get hung up on mercurial imaginations and capricious intuitions or ephemeral auguries. Attentiveness does not register feelings and compare the validity of experience according to it ‘feeling right’ or ‘feeling wrong’. Attentiveness is an aesthetic alertness that takes place with minimised reference to self. With attentiveness one sees the internal world with blameless references to concepts like ‘my’ or ‘mine’. Suppose there is a feeling of sadness. Ordinary consciousness would say, ‘I am sad’. Using attentiveness, one heedfully notices the feeling as a natural feeling – ‘There is human sadness’ – thus one does not tack on that possessive personal concept of ‘I’ or ‘me’ ... for one is already possessed. Attentiveness is the observance of the basic nature of each arising feeling; it is observing all the inner world – emotional, passionate and calentural – which is whatever is presently taking place in the affective faculty. Attentiveness is seeing how any feeling makes ‘me’ tick – and how ‘I’ react to it – with the perspicacity of seeing how it affects others as well. In attentiveness, there is an unbiased observing of the constant showing-up of the ‘reality’ within and is examining the feelings arising one after the other ... and such attentiveness is the ending of its grip. Please note that last point: in attentiveness, there is an observance of the ‘reality’ within, and such attention is the end of its embrace ... finish.
Here lies apperception.
The Where And When Of Attentiveness
And Sensuousness And Apperceptiveness
Apperceptiveness is current-time awareness in that it takes place now at this moment in time and here at this place in space. Apperceptiveness is the felicitous observance of what is happening right now, at this very moment. Apperceptiveness stays forever current, surging perpetually on the crest of the ongoing wave of this moment in eternal time. Apperceptiveness is goal-less awareness for one does not strain for results ...one is no longer having to accomplish anything. When one is apperceptive, one experiences actuality at this moment in time in whatever form it takes; thus there is nothing to be achieved. In apperceptiveness there is only pure conscious experience of the awareness of change at this moment that never goes away. Apperceptiveness is observing the moving flow of experience and enjoying things as they are changing ... in full appreciation of being here and participating in this happenstance. Apperceptiveness is seeing the birth, growth, and maturation of all phenomena ... and it is seeing all phenomena age, decay and die. Apperceptiveness is its own attentiveness moment by moment, continuously ... one is the experiencing of the doing of this moment of being alive. Apperceptiveness stops one from adding anything to perception, or subtracting something from it: one does not enhance anything for one does not emphasise anything. One is free to observe exactly what is here – now – without distortion.
Apperceptiveness is sensuous awareness of only what is currently occurring and in precisely the way it is happening now – there is neither tolerance nor intolerance – with no acceptance or prejudice. Apperceptiveness is non-predictive observation in that it is this ability of the mind to regard experience without fault-finding feelings. With this ability, one sees things without assumption or opprobrium ... and one is surprised by everything being extraordinarily ordinary. In apperceptiveness everything is in equipoise and one’s interest in things is for them to be exactly as they are in their actual condition. One does not have to estimate or establish ... one totally acknowledges with delight. Apperceptiveness is a dispassionate discernibleness that does not take sides nor get hung up in what is apperceived ... it is a sensitive fascination. Apperceptiveness is the observation of everything occurring as for the first time. Apperceptiveness is possible because of attentiveness ... which is not analysis that is based on emotional and passionate recollection. Apperceptiveness is the immediate sensitive discernment of whatever is happening without the medium of feeling – it comes before the feeling-tones in the perceptual process – and thought may or may not be operating. If one is futilely attempting a reverie of yesterday’s sensorial delight, that is feeling-thought memorialising the moment gone by. When one then becomes aware that one is remembering yesterday’s experience, that is attentiveness.
The actualist who is allowing attentiveness is concerned with the habitual superimposition of the inner ‘reality’ onto the world of people, things and events. It is there in all peoples, but in actualism, one’s field of study is one’s own feelings, one’s own perceptions, one’s own thoughts and one’s own experience. In actualism, one is one’s own guinea-pig because attentiveness is participatory observation ... the actualist is both participant and experimenter at one and the same time. If one examines one’s emotions attentively one is feeling them at that very same moment – attentiveness is not just an intellectual awareness – for it is an existential experiencing. Attentiveness is objective – it is the wakeful experience of life – but it is not inconsiderate or uncaring ... it is an alert participation in the ongoing process of living. The ‘reality’ within has an enormous fund of information containing the reflection of the human condition and an examination of this material leads to an actual freedom. Attentiveness is extremely difficult to apply as a discipline – not because it is complex – but because it is too simple and open. This is because apperceptiveness is a non-feeling function and one can feel for its presence all day long and one will never come across it – one can never feel what it is – as it is a living experience.
Sensuousness is the wondrous awareness of the marvel of being here now at this moment in time and this place in space. Attentiveness is the fascination of the reflective contemplation that this moment is one’s only moment of being alive – and one is never alive at any other time than now. Wherever one is ... now ... one is always here ... now ... even if one starts walking over to ‘there’ ... now ... along the way to ‘there’ ... now ... one is always here ... now ... and when one arrives ‘there’ ... now ... it too is here ... now. Thus attentiveness is an attraction to the fact that one is always here – and it is already now – and as one is already here and it is always now then one has arrived before one starts. This delicious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté (which is the closest one can get to innocence) the nourishing of which is essential if the charm of it all is to occur. The potent combination of attentiveness – fascinated reflective contemplation – and sensuousness produces apperception, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself. One is intimately aware that this physical space of this universe is infinite and its time is eternal ... thus the infinitude of this very material universe has no beginning and no ending and therefore no middle. There are no edges to this universe, which means that there is no centre, either. We are all coming from nowhere and are not going anywhere for there is nowhere to come from nor anywhere to go too. We are nowhere in particular ... which means we are anywhere at all. In the infinitude of the universe one finds oneself to be already here, and as it is always now, one can not get away from this place in space and this moment in time. By being here as-this-body one finds that this moment in time has no duration as in now and then – because the immediate is the ultimate – and that this place in space has no distance as in here and there – for the relative is the absolute.
In other words: One is already here as it is always now.
The Who And How of Attentiveness And
Sensuousness And Apperceptiveness
The intent is you will become happy and harmless. The intent is you will be free of sorrow and malice. The intent is you will become blithesome and benign. The intent is you will be free of fear and aggression. The intent is you will become carefree and considerate. The intent is you will be free from nurture and desire. The intent is you will become gay and benevolent. The intent is you will be free of anguish and animosity. The intent is that, by being free of the Human Condition you will experience peace-on-earth, in this life-time, as this body ... as is evidenced in the PCE. An actualist’s intent is a pure intent and discovering how to blend this pure intent – via attentiveness – into one’s conscious life is the process that places one on the wide and wondrous path to actual freedom ... this path is a virtual freedom. Uncovering how to prolong the condition of virtual freedom – via attentiveness and sensuousness – is still another process. These are felicitous processes, however, and they are well worth the effort for attentiveness and sensuousness are central to virtual freedom and the key to the whole condition. Attentiveness and sensuousness are both the goal of actualism and the means to that end: one reaches apperceptiveness by being ever more sensuous and one activates sensuousness by being ever more attentive ... and one activates attentiveness by no longer ‘feeling good’.
Attentiveness reminds one to apply one’s sensuousness to the pertinent situation at the opportune time and to implement surely the appropriate amount of activity needed to do the job. When this vitality is judiciously applied, one stays constantly in a condition of virtual freedom. As long as this condition of virtual freedom is maintained, those feeling-states called ‘moods’ cannot arise for there is no anguish or animosity – virtually no malice or misery – when attentiveness is present. Nevertheless, one is still ‘human’ and to be ‘human’ is to err ... and most people are very ‘human’ and err repeatedly. Despite pure intent, the actualist lets their attentiveness slip now and then and one finds oneself stuck in some unfortunate – but normal – ‘human’ failure. It is attentiveness that notices that change ... and it is attentiveness that reminds one to apply the pure intent required to pull oneself out. Slipping into ‘normal’ happens over and over, but the frequency decreases with the assimilation of the fact that the absence of anguish and animosity in one’s moment-to-moment experience allows one’s daily life to be peaceful and harmonious way beyond normal ‘human’ expectations. Once attentiveness has exposed those affective defilements, sensuousness provides a more considerate and carefree condition ... one is happy and harmless for ninety-nine percent of the time. It is attentiveness which notices the change from ‘normal’ into happiness and harmlessness, and which reminds the actualist to maintain the pure intent needed to keep one blithe and benign ... and which allows apperception to freely happen.
Apperceptiveness makes possible salubrity and sagacity. Deeply buried in the psyche, there lies an intuitive mechanism which accepts what the heart perceives as beautiful and loving experiences and rejects those experiences which are perceived as ugly and hateful. This mechanism gives rise to those states of being which one is alert to avoid ... states like rapture, euphoria, ecstasy and bliss. One chooses to avoid narcissistic spiritual entanglements, not because they are diabolical in the normal sense of the word, but because they keep malice and sorrow subliminally alive; because they take the mind over and capture the attention completely; because they keep going round and round in atavistic circles of calenture; and because they seal one off from this living actuality. Grandiose spiritual involvements cannot arise when apperceptiveness is in action. Apperception is its own attentiveness to current time actuality, and therefore, directly antithetical to the dazzled state of mind which characterises mystification. It is only when one lets one’s attentiveness slip that the deep mechanisms of one’s heart takes over – grasping, clinging and arrogating – then megalomania emerges and obscures one’s awareness. If one is too busy with self-aggrandisement, one ignores that such a change is taking place as a vainglorious deification of one’s inadequate earthly state of ‘being’. While an unaware person will continue in this state indefinitely, a competent actualist will soon realise what is happening. It is attentiveness that notices any grandiose change; it is attentiveness that remembers the warnings received; and it is attentiveness that focuses one’s sensuousness so that the confusion fades away. And it is attentiveness that then intends to maintain sensuousness indefinitely so that the narcissism cannot arise again.
Attentiveness and sensuousness are the specific antitoxins for indulgences ... they are both the cure and the preventive measure. Fully developed sensuous attention is a condition of total non-grandiosity and utter absence of longing for anything in any ‘other-world’. If one can maintain this condition, no other method is needed to keep oneself free of obstructions and to achieve freedom from the human condition via apperceptiveness. Apperception is non-identity awareness that sees things clearly and cleanly and purely ... beyond the level of feelings and ‘being’ itself. The clear and clean and pure awareness of apperceptiveness is a total certainty and complete absence of doubt that manifests itself primarily as a constant and unwavering fascination which never flags and never turns away. The pure and unstained lustrous awareness of apperceptiveness is not only devoid of affective indulgences, it lays bare their very mechanism by having had them eliminated coincidental to the self-immolation of identity in toto. Apperceptiveness is the absence of the heart-felt corruption of the mind. The result is a brain which remains unstained and invulnerable, completely unaffected by the ‘ups and downs’ of life.
It is ambrosial, to say the least.
The Why And What of Attentiveness
And Sensuousness And Apperceptiveness
The activity of attentiveness reminds one of why one is doing this: in actualism, one puts one’s attention on being here ... now. When feelings cause one’s awareness to wander from actualism’s focus, it is attentiveness that reminds one that one’s mind is being manipulated ... and why one is doing this happening called being alive. It is attentiveness that brings one back to the object of actualism: apperception. Apperceptiveness is a very actual goal and those who seek to actualise the pure consciousness experience (PCE) may be activating attentiveness for a period of months or even years. The human habit of getting stuck in feelings dates back to the dawn of human history – thus the habit will hang on in the most tenacious manner – and the only way through it all is to be equally persistent and diligent in the activation of constant attentiveness. Awareness occurs without the delay of an internal feeling-dialogue ... repeated activation of attentiveness in actualism establishes this function as a cognitive habit which then carries on automatically for the rest of one’s ‘human’ life. A sincere actualist is attentive to feelings all the time, day in, day out, whether active or resting; whether in association or on one’s own; whether there is thinking as well as perceiving or not. When attentiveness is actual, one will notice when one becomes stuck in one’s feeling patterns; it is that very noticing which allows one to back out of the feeling process and free oneself from it. Sensuousness returns one’s attention to its proper focus: if one is actualising a virtual freedom at that moment, then one’s focus will be the actual object of actualism. If one is not in virtual freedom, one’s focus will be just a straight-forward application of matter-of-fact attention itself, just a simple noticing of whatever comes up without getting possessively involved: ‘Ah, this feeling ... what is it ... where is it ... where did it come from ... what is it made up of ... what is it connected to ...?’. Virtual freedom re-establishes itself easily by the attentiveness that it has not been current. As soon as one is aware that one has not been attentive then one is experiencing sensuousness in virtual freedom ... and thence: Apperceptiveness.
Apperceptiveness has its own distinct ambience in consciousness: it has a flavour – a magical, crystal-clear, scintillating flavour – whereas feelings are heady, magisterial and grandiloquent by comparison ... finicky and phantasmal and flighty and fantastical. Yet these are but descriptive words and one’s own action will show one the difference ... then one will probably come up with one’s own words and the words used here will become superfluous. Action is the thing as apperception is a living actuality that adds nothing to perception nor subtracts anything – it distorts not at all – and sees things as they actually are. One can apperceive prime characteristics that actual freedom factually shows. In psychiatric terms, for example, these are called:
1. ‘depersonalisation’ (selflessness ... the absence of an entity that is called ego and Soul or self and Self).
2. ‘alexithymia’ (the absence of the affective faculty ... no emotions, passions or calentures whatsoever).
3. ‘derealisation’ (the condition of having lost one’s grip on reality ... the ‘real world’ is nowhere to be found).
4. ‘anhedonia’ (the inability to affectively feel pleasure ... no hormonal secretions means hedonism is not possible).
The characteristics of actual freedom are not present in actualism as dogmas demanding hopeful belief with its blind faith and trusting surrender. The actualist knows that these facts are self-evident from the PCE and are available to anyone who cares to investigate in a sincere way. Attentiveness is the method of investigation and apperceptiveness has the capacity to reveal the factual character of actuality ... all the while freely accessible to any human being’s sensuous observation. With this degree of inspection, one sees the following factors: (a) it is ‘me’ in ‘my’ totality that is standing in the way of the already always existing perfection here on earth; (b) all feelings are inherently flawed and are narcissistic by nature; (c) every other-worldly truth is, in the end, unable to bring about peace-on-earth; (d) there are actually no entities that are unborn and undying, timeless and spaceless, birthless and deathless, formless and ceaseless, immortal and immutable.
The activity of attentiveness is not unlike a magnifying glass in that one can actually see directly those realities which are at best theoretical constructs to the unconscious feeling process. Attentiveness is at one and the same time both sensuous attention itself and the function of reminding one to pay sensuous attention if one has ceased to do so ... one notices one’s own lack of attentiveness; and that noticing itself is a result of attentiveness. Emotive thought pastes feelings over one’s experience, loads one down with ideals and dreams and schemes, immerses one in a churning vortex of hopes and worries, fears and fantasies. When sensuously attentive, one does not play that game. When one is aware exactly what arises in the heart, then one is attentive to the next thing. It is really very simple: attentiveness actually sees the illusory nature of everything that is felt. It sees the transitory and delusory nature of every ideal and dream and scheme and – seeing the inherently unsatisfactory nature of all feeling beings – it sees that there is no sense grabbing onto any of these passing feelings as peace and harmony cannot be found that way. Attentiveness sees the inherent selfishness of all ‘being’ in that it sees the way that human beings have arbitrarily selected a certain bundle of tender feelings, chopped them off from the rest of the surging flow of savage feelings and then realised themselves as unitive and enduring entities swimming in the ‘Ocean Of Oneness’. Attentiveness actually sees these things ... it does not feel them out, it sees them for what they are. Attentiveness is a process, but it does not have to take place in steps for it can also be a direct seeing that occurs as a totality: when it is fully developed, attentiveness understands those factors detailed above intimately and without the intervening medium of irrational intuition and imaginative logic or prescient revelation. Attentiveness is sensuous attention and sensuousness enables the experiencing of things without distorting feelings ... whilst seeing the world of people, things and events as-it-is is apperception.
The condition of apperception sees things as they actually are ... in apperception lies only salubrity and sagacity. Apperception is the clear and direct experiencing of being here at this place in infinite space now at this moment in eternal time – sans identity and its feeling-fed realities – and it is a wordless appreciation of being able to be here now ... of being alive and awake on this verdant planet. One will not instantly attain freedom (an actual freedom from the human condition) as a result of one’s first moment of apperceptiveness. One comes upon this condition that is germane to actual freedom – consciousness being conscious of being consciousness – again and again until an inevitability sets in ... which precipitates an oft-times alarming but always thrilling momentum that will result in total self-immolation. The characteristics already detailed (‘depersonalisation’, ‘alexithymia’, ‘derealisation’, ‘anhedonia’) are the result of expressing actual freedom in the psychiatric models of the human condition – which reflects the ‘human’ struggle to understand this fundamentally simple process called consciousness – and are inherently arbitrary in that they do not exist as separate items. The extinction of identity in its totality with its ensuing loss of reality coupled with the inability to affectively feel pleasure along with the ending of the feeling faculty all takes place in the space of a few glorious moments. Peace-on-earth is the certain result because it is already here. Living in this on-going peace-on-earth one is always blithe and carefree, even if one is doing nothing. Doing something – and that includes thinking – is a bonus on top of this never-ending ambrosial perfection of the eternal infinity of this material universe ... which infinitude is already always here.
One is this universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being.
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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 1997-2001 -
Everybody has had a pure consciousness experience sometime in their life where, for a brief period, one magically finds oneself in a �self�-less state of sensate-only experiencing and the perfection and purity of the actual world � the fairy-tale like physical universe � becomes stunningly and sensuously apparent.
The pure consciousness experience offers a glimpse or window out from the �real� world everyone is born into (and therefore assumes to be all there is), and one suddenly finds oneself in the unimaginable, magical, fairytale-like actual world.
A pure consciousness experience is a temporary, �self�-less and sensuous experience of the perfection and purity of the actual universe. A PCE offers a glimpse or window out from the �real� world everyone is born into (and therefore assumes to be all there is), and one suddenly finds oneself in the unimaginable, magical, fairytale-like actual world.
For a brief period, there is no �self� as a mediator, interpreter, censor or spoiler. All is directly evidenced by the physical senses to be pure, perfect, delightful. One�s intelligence is freed of any emotions and affective feelings � thinking becomes benign, clear and concise � free of malice and sorrow. The already-existing innate purity and perfection that becomes stunningly apparent in this �self�-less state instantly renders redundant the need for any morals, ethics or any kind of �self�-control. With awareness and intelligence operating totally freed from the Human Condition, �I� can then be clearly seen for what �I� am � a parasitical identity who is the source of �my� own suffering and �my� own malice.
This physical universe is clearly seen to be already perfect and it is obvious that it is only what goes on in human heads and hearts � the Human Condition, manifest in each of us as a personal �self� � that is the cause of the appalling human malice and sorrow. It is also clear that the affective instinctual passions � the loves and loyalties, the impulses and urges as well as the ideals and beliefs that human beings are willing to fight and kill for, or to suffer and die for � are the root cause of human malice and sorrow. One�s own �self�-inflicted problems lie in the very feelings and emotions that arise from the animal instinctual passions � and the PCE experientially confirms this fact.
For an actualist, the pure consciousness experience becomes one�s guiding light and to live that pure experience 24 hrs. a day, every day, becomes one�s pure intent.
The Pure Consciousness Experience leads to the cultivation and activation of �
From the experience and the memory of the purity and perfection experienced in the �self�-less state of the pure consciousness experience one can glean pure intent. Pure intent is the unequivocal intention to devote one�s life to being the best one can be � to completely and actually eradicate malice and sorrow from one�s life.
With pure intent as one�s guideline one will not settle for any �ego�-less Altered State of Consciousness. One will settle for nothing less than living the �self�-less pure consciousness experience of actual purity and perfection, 24 hrs. a day, every day.
By the time one reaches adulthood one has a fully developed sense of �real�-world cynicism. This attitude to life on earth is fuelled by societal spiritual and religious beliefs that life on earth is meant to be a suffering existence and that ultimate peace and happiness is only possible after physical death in a mythical after-life.
This view is further reinforced and strengthened by the commonly-held ancient belief that children are born �innocent� and are corrupted by �evil� or �wrong thinking� since birth. These beliefs combine to form the unanimous view that �life�s a bitch�, and �you can�t change Human Nature� � the deeply cynical concepts that underpin the Human Condition.
Abandoning these cynical �real world� and �spiritual world� beliefs about human existence is essential if one is to even consider becoming free of the Human Condition. In order to begin the process of changing human nature in oneself, one needs to re-activate and cultivate one�s innate naivet� � the closest one can get to innocence while still remaining a �self�.
In the pure consciousness experience the direct experience of the purity and perfection of the actual world becomes suddenly apparent and �who� one was literally moments before magically fades away as though a distant and discordant memory. One�s fears and battles, troubles and worries, anger and sadness disappear along with one�s very persona, for the PCE is a �self�-less state. In the PCE it becomes inconceivable that human beings could be malicious to each other to the point of waging war and sorrowful to the point of suicide whilst living on this delightful, bountiful, paradisiacal planet.
Many people who have had PCEs are subsequently moved to do something about the Human Condition on the planet and then set about attempting to change others, their partners or �society� at large. What they forget, or ignore, is the fact that they have only briefly experienced this state of personal freedom from malice and sorrow when they themselves were in a �self�-less state � in short that the problem is �me� and my passions and not �others� and their passions.
The world already abounds with over 6 billion people all busy trying to change each other according to their own insights, beliefs, whims, morals or ethics � an exercise in utter futility that does nothing but further contribute to human malice and sorrow. It is vital to the process of becoming free of the Human Condition that one fully and utterly comprehends that the only person one needs to change, and indeed can change, is oneself.
Continually attempting to change others or demanding that others change is but to fight, battle and seek power over others and when these attempts inevitably fail, disappointment, resentment and anger arise. The perpetual failure of men and women to live together in equity, peace and harmony is a poignant proof of this instinctual emotional pattern in action.
As is evident from the PCE, the only way to evince genuine peace and harmony with one�s fellow human beings is to have no �self� at all � no �me� who feels offended, or who instinctually feels the need to fight with others. To become actually innocent, actually free of all feelings of malice and sorrow, is the means to both finding personal peace and happiness and to be able to live in peace and harmony with one�s fellow human beings.
� The Actual Freedom Trust 1999
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There is an unofficial mailing list for Actual Freedom.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/actualfreedom/
Are you willing to test your belief - "[Richard's] experience is clearly in line with Buddhism Anatta" - in front of scrutinizing logic and sincere appraisal?
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I have already looked through Richard's objections on Buddhism last month and found that he has a very warped and mistaken view about Buddhism, though he happened to have ripped off articles from Buddhist teachers (I'm not talking about Alan Watts which he later admitted after being questioned, but also Bhante Gunaratana and probably others).
As my friend Thusness told me, there can be two reasons for claiming exclusivity: either he is trying to emphasize the uniqueness of AF, or he is genuinely misguided by certain Buddhist teachers who aren't there yet and hence thinking the true experience of Anatta is not found in Buddhism. So I wonder if you are willing to test your belief that the AF realisation is truly exclusive to AF-ers and that Richard is the first to have realised this in the world? (Not that I am very bothered or concerned about this, anyway)
Anyway not that there is anything wrong claiming exclusive realisation IF there is truly no one before that has taught the same things. For example, the Buddha himself claimed to exclusively hold the teaching to freedom and distinguished himself from all other Hindu religions of his days that only reach the Atman-Brahman realisation which is already well written in the ancient Upanishads and Vedas. Buddha however rejected their authority. (and by the way before it is well known that before his enlightenment he had gone to many Hindu teachers and reached formless absorptions/jhanas [infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, and neither perception nor non-perception] or what AF would called "Altered States of Consciousness" but realised them as not being the way to liberation and gave up those practices. the way to liberation is by being aware of our sensate reality as it is and realising that there never was a self within or a dissociated observer apart from the flow of sensations). As I posted an excerpt from AccessToInsight a month ago:
Cula-sihanada Sutta (MN 11) -- The Shorter Discourse on the Lion's Roar {M i 63} [Ñanamoli Thera and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans.]. The Buddha declares that only through practicing in accord with the Dhamma can Awakening be realized. His teaching is distinguished from those of other religions and philosophies through its unique rejection of all doctrines of self. [BB]
...............
The Buddha teaches:
1. Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was living at Savatthi in Jeta's Grove, Anathapindika's Park. There he addressed the bhikkhus thus: "Bhikkhus." -- "Venerable sir," they replied. The Blessed One said this:
2. "Bhikkhus, only here is there a recluse, only here a second recluse, only here a third recluse, only here a fourth recluse. The doctrines of others are devoid[*p.64] of recluses: that is how you should rightly roar your lion's roar.[1]
3. "It is possible, bhikkhus, that wanderers of other sects might ask: 'But on the strength of what (argument) or with the support of what (authority) do the venerable ones say thus?' Wanderers of other sects who ask thus may be answered in this way: 'Friends, four things have been declared to us by the Blessed One who knows and sees, accomplished and fully enlightened; on seeing these in ourselves we say thus: "Only here is there a recluse, only here a second recluse, only here a third recluse, only here a fourth recluse. The doctrines of others are devoid of recluses." What are the four? We have confidence in the Teacher, we have confidence in the Dhamma, we have fulfilled the precepts, and our companions in the Dhamma are dear and agreeable to us whether they are layfolk or those gone forth. These are the four things declared to us by the Blessed One who knows and sees, accomplished and fully enlightened, on seeing which in ourselves we say as we do.'
4. "It is possible, bhikkhus, that wanderers of other sects might say thus: 'Friends, we too have confidence in the Teacher, that is, in our Teacher; we too have confidence in the Dhamma, that is, in our Dhamma; we too have fulfilled the precepts, that is, our precepts; our companions in the Dhamma are dear and agreeable to us too whether they are layfolk or those gone forth. What is the distinction here, friends, what is the variance, what is the difference between you and us?'
5. "Wanderers of other sects who ask thus may be answered in this way: 'How then, friends, is the goal one or many?' Answering rightly, the wanderers of other sects would answer thus: 'Friends, the goal is one, not many.'[2] -- 'But, friends, is that goal for one affected by lust or free from lust?' Answering rightly, the wanderers of other sects would answer thus: 'Friends, that goal is for one free from lust, not for one affected by lust.' -- 'But, friends, is that goal for one affected by hate or free from hate?' Answering rightly, they would answer: 'Friends, that goal is for one free from hate, not for one affected by hate.' -- 'But, friends, is that goal for one affected by delusion or free from delusion?' Answering rightly, they would answer: 'Friends, that goal is for one free from delusion, not for one affected by delusion.' -- 'But, friends, is that goal for one affected by craving or free from craving?'[*p.65] Answering rightly, they would answer: 'Friends, that goal is for one free from craving, not for one affected by craving.' -- 'But, friends, is that goal for one affected by clinging or free from clinging?' Answering rightly, they would answer: 'Friends, that goal is for one free from clinging, not for one affected by clinging.' -- 'But, friends, is that goal for one who has vision or for one without vision?' Answering rightly, they would answer: 'Friends, that goal is for one with vision, not for one without vision.' -- 'But, friends, is that goal for one who favors and opposes, or for one who does not favor and oppose?' Answering rightly, they would answer: 'Friends, that goal is for one who does not favor and oppose, not for one who favors and opposes.'[3] -- 'But, friends is that goal for one who delights in and enjoys proliferation, or for one who does not delight in and enjoy proliferation?' Answering rightly, they would answer: 'Friends, that goal is for one who does not delight in and enjoy proliferation, not for one who delights in and enjoys proliferation.'[4]
6. "Bhikkhus, there are these two views: the view of being and the view of non-being. Any recluses or brahmans who rely on the view of being, adopt the view of being, accept the view of being, are opposed to the view of non-being. Any recluses or brahmans who rely on the view of non-being, adopt the view of non-being, accept the view of non-being, are opposed to the view of being.[5]
7. "Any recluses or brahmans who do not understand as they actually are the origin, the disappearance, the gratification, the danger and the escape[6] in the case of these two views are affected by lust, affected by hate, affected by delusion, affected by craving, affected by clinging, without vision, given to favoring and opposing, and they delight in and enjoy proliferation. They are not freed from birth, aging and death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair; they are not freed from suffering, I say.
8. "Any recluses or brahmans who understand as they actually are the origin, the disappearance, the gratification, the danger and the escape in the case of these two views are without lust, without hate, without delusion, without craving, without clinging, with vision, not given to favoring and opposing, and they do not delight in and enjoy proliferation. They are freed from birth, aging and death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair; they are freed from suffering, I say.[*p.66]
9. "Bhikkhus, there are these four kinds of clinging. What four? Clinging to sensual pleasures, clinging to views, clinging to rules and observances, and clinging to a doctrine of self.
10. "Though certain recluses and brahmans claim to propound the full understanding of all kinds of clinging, they do not completely describe the full understanding of all kinds of clinging.[7] They describe the full understanding of clinging to sensual pleasures without describing the full understanding of clinging to views, clinging to rules and observances, and clinging to a doctrine of self. Why is that? Those good recluses and brahmans do not understand these three instances of clinging as they actually are. Therefore, though they claim to propound the full understanding of all kinds of clinging, they describe only the full understanding of clinging to sensual pleasures without describing the full understanding of clinging to views, clinging to rules and observances, and clinging to a doctrine of self.
(continued in the page)
http://www.kktanhp.com/Theravada%20Buddhism.htm
Anatta Doctrine
This is the most unique feature of Buddhism. It is not found in any other religion in the world. Buddha formulated this doctrine and gave ample reasons to support it. In all the other religions there exists a Soul or a Self or Atman in humans. This is a permanent, unchanging, everlasting essence or entity in man. In some religions, this soul will end up in heaven or hell eternally after death. In Hinduism the Atman after many life times of purification will finally unite with God or Brahman. This Self or soul is the thinker of thoughts, feeler of sensations and receiver of rewards and punishments. Buddhism reckons that this soul is the cause of all evils and misdeeds because of the selfishness of ‘me’ and ‘mine’. Selfishness leads to all other defilements like hatred, ill will, conceit and pride.
Buddha explained that each individual is composed of five constituents: body, feeling, perception, mental factors (habitual tendencies) and consciousness. At birth these five constituents propel the karmic forces to form an individual in this life. At death, the five constituents break up to leave the forces in the spirit world during which no individual is in existence. In a subsequent birth these five separate constituents will reform another individual according to the karma accrued by that individual in his past life. So the theory goes: in life these five constituents are inconstant, forever changing and are impermanent. When impermanent the individual composing of the five constituents is consistently suffering. These five constituents being ever changing have no organizing principle or soul or permanent essence apart from the constituents. This is the rationale of the anatta doctrine.
Buddha said that man psychologically invented the idea of God and Soul for self-protection and self-preservation. God is supposed to protect man for safety and security. For self-preservation, man conceives of a Soul or Atman, which will live eternally. All other religions cling on to these entities of God and Soul due to selfish motives. Buddha argued that these ideas are false and deep-rooted conjured in the minds of the Brahmins. After his enlightenment he postulated two theories to counter the concept of God and Atman. These are the Five Aggregates and the Conditioned Genesis.
Man is composed of the Five Aggregates, which are 1) the body, 2) feelings, 3) perception 4) mental tendencies and 5) consciousness. Try as hard as one may, one can find no essence or a Self or an Atman in any of these constituents. He also emphasized that there is no other essence or substance outside these five constituents. These conditioned and ever changing constituents are subjected to suffering---dukkha.
The Conditioned Genesis (Paticca-samuppada) is relative and interdependent.
The principle of this doctrine is given in these four lines:
When this is, that is
This arising, that arises
When this is not, that is not
This ceasing, that ceases.
This doctrine is encapsulated by twelve links:
1. Through ignorance are conditioned volitional actions or kamma-formations.
2. Through volitional actions is conditioned consciousness.
3. Through consciousness are conditioned mental and physical phenomena.
4. Through mental and physical and mental phenomena are conditioned six faculties.
5. Through the six faculties is conditioned (sensorial and mental) contact.
6. Through (sensorial and mental) contact is conditioned sensation.
7. Through sensation is conditioned desire.
8. Through desire is conditioned clinging.
9. Through clinging is conditioned the process of becoming.
10. Through the process of becoming is conditioned birth.
11. Through birth are conditioned dukkha, illness, old age, lamentation, pain and
12. Decay and Death.
(continued in page)
And here is what Ch'an Master Sheng-yen (who passed away recently) taught and a very good description of 'Thusness's Stage 5' (the Buddhist No-Self):
http://ddmba.org/pages/practice/meditation/three-stages-of-chan-meditation.php
Stage 3: From the large "I" to no "I"
When one reaches the height of the second stage, he realizes that the concept of the "I" does not exist. But he has only abandoned the small "I" and has not negated the concept of basic substance or the existence of God; you may call it Truth, the one and only God, the Almighty, the Unchanging Principle, or even the Buddha of Buddhism. If you think that it is real, then you are still in the realm of the big "I" and have not left the sphere of philosophy and religion.
...When you are in the second stage, although you feel that the ‘I’ does not exist, the basic substance of the universe, or the Supreme Truth, still exists. Although you recognise that all the different phenomena are the extension of this basic substance or Supreme Truth, yet there still exists the opposition of basic substance versus external phenomena...
...One who has entered Ch’an does not see basic substance and phenomena as two things standing in opposition to each other. They cannot even be illustrated as being the back and palm of a hand. This is because phenomena themselves are basic substance, and apart from phenomena there is no basic substance to be found. The reality of basic substance exists right in the unreality of phenomena, which change ceaselessly and have no constant form. This is the Truth....Although in the Anatta aspect AF is certainly similar to Buddhism, I still find the insight on Dependent Origination (Thusness Stage 6) missing in AF articles.
BTW thanks for the link (nice forum, I happened to have posted there before). My internet was down this morning, I'll get the link up at my blog.