# Actual Freedom – Selected Writings from Richard's Journal

Richard’s Selected Writings on ## Altered States Of Consciousness 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 6th 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. <...> The chief characteristics of Enlightenment: Union with the Divine, Universal Compassion, Love Agapé, Ineffable Bliss, 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 psychic 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 or psychically 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. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Foreword Now ‘my’ moment had come. In the late afternoon of the day before Friday 30th 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 psychic construct. In other words, my world fell apart. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Appendix Three It is extremely pleasant to be wandering along my way with nary a care in the world, for I have been living in an Altered State Of Consciousness for five years now … and my life is fabulously beautiful in every respect. I call this Altered State that I am living in Absolute Freedom for, although resembling Spiritual Enlightenment in many respects, there is something that is not quite identical to what I have read of others in such a State … and observed in them in my travels overseas. I also call it Absolute Freedom because there is definitely a metaphysical Absolute in all this – as distinct from the temporal relative – that is ever-present, and this State immediately imbued me with Love Agapé and Universal Compassion for all sentient beings. Since then, because of my intense urge to evince and demonstrate whatever was possible for this universe to manifest, I have been looking into both Universal Compassion and Love Agapé to see what they are made up off. I have been busy with these matters 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 pure consciousness experience (PCE). This peak experience initiated my incursion into all matters Metaphysical, culminating in the ‘death’ of my ego and catapulting me into this Divine State of Perfect Bliss. 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 our life-time. Instead of that rather simple ambition, I find that I am impelled on an odyssey to be the latest Saviour of Humankind in a long list of Enlightened ‘Beings’ … and this imposition does 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 Compassion, 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 is simple: If I am driven by some force – no matter how Good that force be – then I am not actually free. I spent the winter of last year living in silence and isolation on an uninhabited island off the tropical coast far to the north of here considering these matters - without coming to any definite conclusion - but experiencing a possibility of something else. I am presently living in this little seaside village attending what is known as a Satsang Retreat – being in the presence of a Realised ‘Being’ from overseas – to ascertain just where it is going wrong. My plan is to head north to the islands again for the winter, once this episode is over, and resolve this dilemma once and for all. Something is seriously incorrect about the Enlightened State, and I am determined to discover just what that is. Exactly how this will all eventuate I am none too sure … but I have supreme confidence in my ability to plumb the depths of ‘Being’ to root out anything that should not be there. I am ready and willing for whatever it takes to resolve or dissolve whatever stands in the way of genuine peace-on-earth for anyone and everyone. Obviously something totally new has to come into existence, and I have already had some intimations of what that could be. Hence my investigation into the make-up of Love Agapé and Universal Compassion, as they seem to be the ‘guardians at the gate’, as it were. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Article One As I sit here now, I am well-pleased with life, the universe and with being a human being. I see that extracting myself from the Altered State Of Consciousness and finding out an alternative way of living, outside of any psychic consciousness at all, is the optimal choice, a freely selected way to live no matter how macabre and gruesome this transition phase is proceeding. I am experiencing it as an act of clear intelligence and sensible wisdom. I am utterly confident; it is the confidence which easily helped ‘me’ in those moments of guilt and panic about having wanted to dissolve the Altered State Of Consciousness and this current period of existential angst following the disintegration of the psyche. I am experiencing life from the vantage point of being a totally fascinated person … and a fascinated person is someone who can be extremely interesting to be with for those who dare. I do not experience myself to be the traitor I may appear to be in those other people’s eyes for no longer agreeing with their borrowed ‘wisdom’. This actual freedom is what is of the utmost importance. What a great privilege I have given myself to go this way … it is all so self-evidently excellent. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Article Nine 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 social 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. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Appendix One 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 long-playing 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. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Appendix One 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. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Appendix Two The actual is not to be confused with The Truth. The Enlightened Masters, who have lost their egos - and insist it to be the only way to live the Supreme Reality - are a good example of knowing The Truth, and declaring it to be the ultimate ‘wisdom’. They identify as being The Supreme, The Absolute - or some other name for God - that floats mysteriously in Ineffable Bliss above it all in some far-out delusion of metaphysical Greater Reality called The Ultimate or The Void, and so on. They hope to be delivered from being incarnated in another body at physical death … such is their disdain - if not a contempt - for this amazing physical body. They propose some Other-Worldly domain – some After-Life such as Parinirvana, Mahasamadhi, Paradise, Heaven or Whatever – into which they will go. This is a belief invented some thousands of years ago and repeated, with variations upon the theme, throughout the ages without ever being properly questioned. They have lost their ego, but they still have an identity as self or ‘being’ … now spelt with a capital – Self or ‘Being’ – to denote Divinity. Those who do not ascribe a Transcendental Self to the Divine State Of Consciousness talk of Pure ‘Being’ or Pure ‘Spirit’. It is the belief in ‘me’, the identity as Self or Soul or Spirit, as being what I actually am which is at fault. I am not an identity ... I am me as-I-am. It is when the identity as ego or self or as Self or Soul has usurped me that all the troubles begin. All those fantasies, those psychic projections – the Other-World Identities and Realities – stem from this single error. ‘I’ am not actual. When it is seen as a fact that ‘I’ am an identity as an ego or soul - self or Self - something profound occurs: ‘I’, no longer taken to be me as-I-am, disappear. Whereupon, finally I am me as this flesh and blood body only. When I am me as-I-am, there is no distance between me and the actual world of people, things and events ... all is open to view. I have arrived at my destiny. I see that losing the ego was not enough; the soul had to go as well. The identity, either that psychological or psychic entity within, is a composite of ego and soul. As a generalisation ‘I’, as ego, am located in the head and ‘me’, as soul, am located in the heart. To lose only half of the identity is to strengthen the identification that was self or soul as being some Metaphysical entity … an impersonal Self or Soul …a Spirit of some kind or another. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Article Ten Being me is not to be confused with any Religious, Spiritual and Mystical State Of Consciousness or any other Altered State Of Consciousness ... always spelled with a capital to denote Divinity. To become ‘Me’, the Divine ‘Being’, one must surrender; be it to a God, a Supreme, an Absolute or Whatever. This surrender is epitomised in the scriptural injunction ‘Not my will but Thy Will’. One surrenders one’s will and permits Divinity, in whatever form, to take responsibility for one’s life. Nobody seems to realise that this is a second surrender, because one is currently already in a state of surrender … it is called being ‘normal’, being ‘human’. One has to take one’s will back from the decrees of the real world, to which one has already surrendered, not surrender it yet again! The guiding principle to bear in mind is never, ever surrender. Not to anyone or anything at any time or anywhere. The ego and soul can disappear, never to reappear again, but this is not achieved through surrender. It is achieved through seeing just exactly what I am and just who ‘I’ is. Then will, no longer ego-driven or soul-ridden, can operate freely. The operation of will, freed of the encumbrance of identity, is called intelligence. To be me as-I-am is to be intelligent. It is not necessary to have a high I.Q. to be intelligent ... simply be me as this flesh and blood body. The moment I saw the imprisonment, the aloneness, the corruption and the perversion within ‘myself’ and within every group ‘I’ have belonged to – and the price ‘I’ had paid in keeping all that is actual of me secret – the choice to remain an identity was no longer an option. I dissolved the Altered State Of Consciousness I was living in … I came to my senses. Of course I was going to be me as this body. Being me as-I-am was my destiny. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Article Ten It is really important to understand about the soul ... getting into feelings like this – ‘perfect’ feelings – leaves one in imminent danger of the seductive snare of Love and Beauty, and, conveniently ignoring their opposites, becoming enlightened, or at least illuminated. ‘Me’ – that sense of ‘being’ that I call the soul – sugar coats itself with Love and Compassion and Beauty and Truth and swans along in a state of Blissful Euphoria. Thus one then goes off into some mystical State of Being in some metaphysical world and misses out on the clean and clear perfection of this actual world. It is very, very difficult to get out of the enlightened state and go ‘beyond it’ into this actual world of the senses. I found out for myself how difficult it was ... I lived enlightenment for eleven years … the same as the ‘Tried and True’ teachings that all the Saints and the Sages, the Messiahs and the Masters, the Avatars and the Saviours and the Gurus and the God-men have been touting as being the cure-all for the ill of humankind for millennia. I found these solutions to be the ‘Tried and Failed’. I found that, in an altered state of consciousness such as spiritual enlightenment which results when the ego dissolves, the sense of identity does a quantum leap from the head to the heart. One realises oneself as being ‘Me’ at the core of ‘my’ being ... one becomes ‘pure being’. The resultant oceanic state of unitary perception – called by some choiceless awareness – creates the delusion that the illusion of self is ended. There is an on-going experience of oneness and wholeness which expresses itself as: ‘I am everything and everything is Me’. For those who go all the way into this delusion, they realise that ‘I am The Self’ or ‘ I am The Buddha’ or ‘I am God’. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Appendix Four I am the universe’s experience of itself as a sensate and reflective human being. I am not Spaceless, I am perennially here; this moment is not Timeless, it is perpetually now. I have no need for such a paltry surrogate as Immortality ... Immortality pales into insignificance compared to the magnitude of experiencing myself being here now, each moment again, fresh and new and pristine. Nothing that ‘I’ experienced many years ago when ‘I’ explored the Divine Realm can equal the magnificence of being here now in this actual world. Actual freedom far exceeds any Religious Illumination, Spiritual Enlightenment, Mystical Union or any other Metaphysical Altered State Of Consciousness. I do not identify as being God On Earth, or any of that deluded nonsense … I have no identity whatsoever. I am free to be me; me as I actually am. I am free to be practical, straight-forward and down-to-earth. I am free of any guile, any hypocrisy, any duplicity, any cupidity ... any corruption at all. I am free to live in this magical wonderland that is the actual world. Innocence prevails only where time has no duration and space has no locality ... and as this moment and place has no actual measure, it is ever-new. Likewise, I am ever-new, therefore I can never be tainted; ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ can find no foothold in me. Consequently I am benign in character and cannot maliciously harm anyone or anything. Richard’s Journal, 1997, Article Twenty-Seven RETURN TO RICHARD’S SELECTED WRITING INDEX RICHARD’S HOME PAGE The Third Alternative (Peace On Earth In This Life Time As This Flesh And Blood Body) Here is an actual freedom from the Human Condition, surpassing Spiritual Enlightenment and any other Altered State Of Consciousness, and challenging all philosophy, psychiatry, metaphysics (including quantum physics with its mystic cosmogony), anthropology, sociology ... and any religion along with its paranormal theology. Discarding all of the beliefs that have held humankind in thralldom for aeons, the way has now been discovered that cuts through the ‘Tried and True’ and enables anyone to be, for the first time, a fully free and autonomous individual living in utter peace and tranquillity, beholden to no-one. Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997- . All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer and Use Restrictions and Guarantee of Authenticity