# Actual Freedom – Selected Correspondence by Topic

Richard’s Selected Correspondence ## On Faith and Trust RICHARD: Please, whatever you do with me, throw faith, belief, trust and hope right out of the window ... along with doubt, disbelief, distrust and despair. Besides, I am a certified madman! RESPONDENT: No, you have offered a mistaken assumption. Trust can only be based on one’s confidence in one’s ability to discern and appraise. Being doubtful of one’s ability to discern and appraise is already a lack of trust. RICHARD: Unlike you I start from a dictionary definition ... it makes life so much easier. Trust is the ‘faith or conviction in the loyalty, strength, veracity, etc., of a person or thing; reliance on the truth of a statement etc., without examination’ ... and faith is ‘belief, especially without evidence or proof’. * RICHARD: Trust is but the antidote to doubt ... without doubt, where is the need for trust? And, as doubt arises out of insecurity, then your trust is based on – and fuelled by – uncertainty and lack of confidence in your ability to discern and appraise. RESPONDENT: No, you have offered a mistaken assumption. Trust can only be based on one’s confidence in one’s ability to discern and appraise. Being doubtful of one’s ability to discern and appraise is already a lack of trust. RICHARD: Unlike you, I start from a dictionary definition ... it makes life so much easier. Trust is the ‘faith or conviction in the loyalty, strength, veracity, etc., of a person or thing; reliance on the truth of a statement etc., without examination’ ... and faith is ‘belief, especially without evidence or proof’. * RICHARD: Therefore, I will clear up this misunderstanding – and receive your response – before proceeding to the original answer to your query on my resolution of your first question to me at the top of the list of 93 puzzled reservations. This way I will know that we are not going too fast for your comprehension ... RESPONDENT: Thank you for your concern, but as I stated above, the honesty and integrity of the thoughts you offer is now established here, and I am very clear about what I can trust of your offerings. As to the subject matter, you were very clear in your explanation of your perspective, and I indicated this in my last reply. I see no reason to keep from moving on without delay. RICHARD: It is important, is it not, to not take another’s words on trust? RESPONDENT: If one has confidence in their ability to discern and appraise, and observes carefully, trust is a very useful and efficient tool. RICHARD: Yet if one ‘has confidence in their ability to discern and appraise’ then what is the need for a tool that uses faith or conviction in the loyalty, strength, veracity, etc., of a person or thing and reliance on the truth of a statement etc., without examination and, further, to have belief ... especially without evidence or proof? RICHARD: ... my interest lies only in my fellow human being, in this specific instance, becoming freed from a rhetorical device – a ducking-the-question discussional gambit – which has the effect that [quote] ‘all desire and possibility for investigation, learning and change are destroyed’ [endquote]. In short: you are frittering away a vital opportunity. RESPONDENT: Your words here have been taken note of. Throughout my life, cynicism, mistrust (healthy or otherwise) has kept me away from many offerings, systems, groups, etc, for better or worse. It is no doubt the same view at work that I brought to AF. I had come to rely solely upon myself to figure things out. I have come to the conclusion that what you have to offer is worth a look/ see. I have nothing to lose. It is a no risk proposition from my vantage point. RICHARD: This is what a dictionary has to say about cynicism: • ‘cynicism: cynical disposition or quality. • ‘cynical: distrustful or incredulous of human goodness and sincerity. • ‘cynic: one who sarcastically doubts or despises human sincerity and merit. (Oxford Dictionary). RESPONDENT: In short, in the coming days, weeks, months ... I will be exploring in earnest what you have to offer here. I am not immune to an honest sincere helping hand. RICHARD: Whatever you do, do not swing over to trust and/or credulity, and thus gullibility, as such a course of action is decidedly unhealthy ... instead there is nothing more salubrious than a goodly dose of self-administered sincerity to flush the cynicism out of one’s system. This is because naïveté is the closest one can come to innocence (which is where integrity lies) whilst remaining a ‘self’ and sincerity is to key to unlocking this little-used innate capacity ... and it is little-used/ locked-away because in childhood being naïve and being gullible goes hand-in-hand (due to the trusting and credulous nature which reliance on nurturance evokes). However, with the maturity of self-reliance, in concert with adult sensibilities, it is possible to separate-out the two so as to be able to be naïve once more ... and only naïveté entertains the notion that not only is peace-on-earth possible, in this life-time as this flesh and blood body, but that it is already always existing (meaning it is already just here, right now, as it always has been and always will be). And naïveté ensures pure intent. RESPONDENT: I hope you’ll respond to any honest questions just as you have to my protestations. RICHARD: Sure, but for obvious reasons I cannot possibly respond to each and every e-mail from each and every person – and those peoples currently travelling the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom from the human condition know far more than I do about the nuts and bolts of doing so anyway – plus there are many questions/ responses already available on The Actual Freedom Trust web site. Whilst on this topic: hundreds of people have been poking away at what is on offer, especially since coming onto the internet, trying to find the flaws they are convinced must be there – which is one of the reasons why all correspondence is archived – and this only goes to show how badly people have been sucked in for millennia by the many and varied snake-oil salespersons. I am not at all surprised that people be suspicious. GARY: Richard, I was a little confused by your use of the word ‘confidence’ in a recent post. You had posted a snippet of something you wrote previously in which the following sentence was contained: [quote] ‘... surely, one can have confidence in a universe so grandly complex, so marvellously intricate, so wonderfully excellent’. (page 138, Article 21: ‘It Is Impossible To Combat The Wisdom Of The Real World’; ‘Richard’s Journal’; ©1997 The Actual Freedom Trust). [endquote]. I was wondering about ‘confidence’. From Word Net, I see that confidence has several meanings. The noun ‘confidence’ has 5 senses in WordNet: [quote] 1. assurance, self-assurance, confidence, self-confidence, authority, sureness – (freedom from doubt; belief in yourself and your abilities; ‘his assurance in his superiority did not make him popular’; ‘after that failure he lost his confidence’; ‘she spoke with authority’). 2. confidence – (a feeling of trust (in someone or something); ‘I have confidence in our team’; ‘confidence is always borrowed, never owned’). 3. confidence – (a state of confident hopefulness that events will be favourable; ‘public confidence in the economy’). 4. confidence, trust – (a trustful relationship; ‘he took me into his confidence’; ‘he betrayed their trust’). 5. confidence – (a secret that is confided or entrusted to another; ‘everyone trusted him with their confidences’; ‘the priest could not reveal her confidences’). [endquote]. None of these meanings exactly fits with what you have said elsewhere regarding trust, hope, and feelings. RICHARD: Perhaps this will help? Viz.: • confidence: consciousness of one’s powers or of reliance on one’s circumstances (...) the quality or state of being certain; syn.: assurance (assurance carries a stronger implication of certainty). (©Merriam-Webster). • assurance: the state of being assured (to give confidence to; to make sure or certain; convince; to inform positively; to make certain the coming or attainment of); a being certain in the mind; confidence of mind or manner; easy freedom from self-doubt or uncertainty; something that inspires or tends to inspire confidence. (©Merriam-Webster). • certainty: something that is certain; the quality or state of being certain esp. on the basis of evidence (certainty and certitude are very close, certainty may stress the existence of objective proof: ‘claims that cannot be confirmed with scientific certainty’, while certitude may emphasise a faith in something not needing or not capable of proof: ‘believes with certitude in an afterlife’). (©Merriam-Webster). GARY: The only thing I can see is confidence in it’s sense of No. 1 (above) meaning sureness. One can be sure of a universe so complex and intricate because anyone with a rudimentary knowledge and understanding of science can read of recent discoveries about the nature of the universe and what is revealed of it’s vastness, intricateness, and complexity. I can be sure that these things are there because thousands, perhaps millions, of perceptive people have observed these things first hand. I do not need to climb aboard a space ship and travel throughout the universe to apprehend ‘a universe so grandly complex, so marvellously intricate, so wonderfully excellent’. This information is contained in elementary science texts the world over. RICHARD: Yes, sureness, or surety, provides certainty – which implies reliability – hence confidence. GARY: But applying meanings No’s 2 through 5, it does not make sense to me to talk of having confidence in something. RICHARD: Indeed not ... it is pertinent to realise that dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, and give alternate meanings to a particular word and different dictionaries can give differing meanings than in other dictionaries. Speaking personally, I choose from among the various definitions ascribed to a word the meaning which most closely fits what I am conveying (as I did in the ‘Merriam-Webster’ example further above). GARY: Because elsewhere in your writings you have advised people to abandon trust, hope, and belief as soon as possible. RICHARD: Yes ... I devoted an entire chapter in ‘Richard’s Journal’ to this very topic. For example: • ‘Can humans dispense with faith and trust altogether? It is not set in stone that faith and trust is a must; one can make one’s own way in life without carrying all that baggage of belief that humankind has been burdened with for centuries. What about knowing? With knowing, one has confidence. Confidence and certainty renders faith and trust irrelevant. (...) It is very important to have confidence in one’s own ability to discriminate between current ‘human’ knowledge and what one personally knows from the PCE’s. This will give one that essential optimism and assurance ... it is the ability to plough on regardless of whatever stands in one’s way until one evokes one’s destiny. It is all to do with a certainty ... the solid knowing, born out of the PCE, that it is here for oneself and anyone ... if only one will act upon this sureness. (pages 46 and 48, Article 6, ‘Confidence And Certainty Renders Trust And Faith Irrelevant’, ‘Richard’s Journal’; ©1997 The Actual Freedom Trust). * RICHARD: Yet actualism does not require ‘faith’ ... all one needs is the confidence born of the pure consciousness experience (PCE) and belief, with all its trappings, is no more. I addressed this question, at length, only a week ago on this very mailing list: • [Richard]: ‘The assurance of certainty confers reliability ... and such surety engenders confidence all of its own accord: ‘In order to mutate from the self-centred licentiousness to a self-less sensualism, one must have confidence in the ultimate beneficence of the universe. This confidence – this surety – can be gained from a pure consciousness experience, wherein ‘I’, the psychological entity, [and ‘me’ the psychic entity] temporarily ceases to exist. Life is briefly seen to be already perfect and innocent ... it is a life-changing experience. One is physically experiencing first-hand, albeit momentarily, this actual world – a spontaneously benevolent world – that antedates the normal world. The normal world is commonly known as the real world or reality. (...) ‘I’ can never be here now in this actual world for ‘I’ am an interloper, an alien in psychic possession of the body. ‘I’ do not belong here. All this is impossible to imagine which is why it is essential to be confident that the actual world does exist. This confidence is born out of knowing, which is derived from the PCE, and is an essential ingredient to ensure success. One does not have to generate confidence oneself – as the religions require of one with regard to their blind faith – *the purity of the actual world bestows this confidence upon one*. [emphasis added]. (pages 124-125 , Article 19, ‘War Is The Inevitable Outcome Of Being ‘Human’’, ‘Richard’s Journal’; ©1997 The Actual Freedom Trust). Furthermore, this endowed confidence means that an inevitability sets in. The full content of that e-mail can be accessed here: (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Gary, 26 January 2003). RESPONDENT No. 78: You say that trust is antithetical to the AF method. Yet you say in ‘The Highly Esteemed Compassion Perpetuates Sorrow’ that: [quote] ‘I have the greatest admiration for ‘Richard the identity’: He was willing to self-immolate so that I could be here. He never knew me, but was ***utterly confident*** that the universe knew what it was doing.’ [emphasis added]. So you needed confidence? I have posted the definition of trust below for evidence that you have stated that you had to trust in the universe ... [quote] ‘trust \Trust\, v. i. 1. To have trust; to be credulous; to be won to confidence; to confide. 2. To be confident, as of something future; to hope. 3. To sell or deliver anything in reliance upon a promise of payment; to give credit. To trust in, To trust on, to place confidence in,; to rely on; to depend. ‘Trust in the Lord, and do good.’ –Ps. xxxvii. 3. ‘A priest ... on whom we trust.’ –Chaucer. To trust to or unto, to depend on; to have confidence in; to rely on. (Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.). [Addendum: Never mind – ignore the above question, Richard, I have already understood the answer there. :)] RESPONDENT: No 78, would you mind sharing what ‘I have already understood the answer there’? Richard, I am still interested in your response. RICHARD: Why? I clearly use the word ‘confident’ yet your co-respondent sees fit to look-up the word ‘trust’ in a dictionary – and then posts that definition as being [quote] ‘the evidence’ [endquote] I have stated I had to trust in the universe – as if I had, in fact, said the identity who was inhabiting this flesh and blood body all those years ago was *utterly trustful* that the universe knew what it was doing. Not having access to Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary I can only provide what the Merriam-Webster has to say about the word I actually used: • ‘confident: 1. characterised by assurance; esp. self-reliant [having confidence in and exercising one’s own powers or judgement]; 2. obs. trustful [full of trust], confiding; 3a. full of conviction, certain b. cocksure’. (©Merriam-Webster). Just by-the-by I see that a couple of other dictionaries also say the ‘trustful’ meaning is obsolete: • ‘confident: (obsolete) 1. trustful, confiding’. (Oxford Dictionary). • ‘confident: 4. obsolete confiding; trustful. (American Heritage® Dictionary). Be that as it may ... this is the essence of what to be ‘characterised by assurance’ means to the Merriam-Webster’s compilers: • ‘assurance: (...) the state of being assured [to give confidence to; to make sure or certain; convince; to inform positively; to make certain the coming or attainment of]; a being certain in the mind; confidence of mind or manner; easy freedom from self-doubt or uncertainty; something that inspires or tends to inspire confidence’. (©Merriam-Webster). Here is what certainty (aka ‘an easy freedom from uncertainty’ just above) means to them: • ‘certainty: something that is certain; the quality or state of being certain esp. on the basis of evidence (...) certainty and certitude are very close, certainty may stress the existence of objective proof: ‘claims that cannot be confirmed with scientific certainty’, while certitude may emphasise a faith in something not needing or not capable of proof: ‘believes with certitude in an afterlife’. (©Merriam-Webster). Anyway, dictionary definitions aside, the quote of mine you are enquiring about, at the top of this page, comes from a section of my portion of The Actual Freedom Trust web site entitled ‘Audio-Taped Dialogues’ and the very first conversation in that section is titled ‘Confidence Is Born Out Of Perfection’ ... here is the relevant passage: R: (...) The mind is a fertile breeding ground for fantasies and hallucinations; if one backs it up with hope, trust, belief and faith then anything weird can eventuate. *Instead, make full use of a confidence born out of the peak experience* [a pure consciousness experience]; the surety that comes from a solid knowing ... an irrefutable knowing, not a flight of fancy or some religious epiphany or spiritual visionary occurrence. (...) R: One can experience the ground of one’s being – the basis of ‘me’ – becoming as quicksand. One does not know where to place oneself, orientate oneself, as the very ground beneath becomes as shifting sand. Q(1): I can relate to that. R: This is where one can rely upon this confidence born out of the experience of perfection [the PCE]. Q(1): Sometimes there are things coming in so quickly; sometimes there is so much there, so much happening that there is a ‘Wow!’, there is a ‘This is excellent’. No sooner do I feel I’ve tapped something than the next thing is there to strike me where I think ‘My God what else is going to happen!’ Essentially my mind is operating in a way where I’ve never seen it so clearly. R: This is a prime example of pure intent operating. This engenders a reliability to back up that confidence. One apprehends that, ultimately, nothing can go wrong – in the universal sense, that is. When one knowingly steps onto the path of actual freedom, carried along by the pure intent born of the peak experience [a PCE] ... when one extends oneself for the sake of the best for oneself, for humankind and for the universe, then all will be well. *There is no need for trust whatsoever* ... with its requisite loyalty to a psychic adumbration called The Truth’. Neither is faith and belief to play a part, giving consolation and hope to the metaphysical aspirant. (...). [emphases added]. (Richard, Audio-Taped Dialogues, Confidence Is Born Out Of Perfection). I do not see how I can be more clear than that. RESPONDENT: In the term of being logic, your statements are not inconsistency. But that a statement is logically consistent is one thing and that a statement is existentially true is another thing. So the point is whether I can trust your statements or not. RICHARD: To ‘trust’ someone – anyone at all – is to invite betrayal ... to ‘trust’ someone is to impose a demand upon them that they may not be able to live up to (or want to) and I never do that. I have had no use for ‘trust’ at all: to ‘trust’ is to attract deception. Etymologically, ‘trust’ – a covenant with ‘The Truth’ – is in the same category as faith – loyalty to ‘The Truth’ – and both are aligned with belief. Belief means fervently wishing to be true. There is not much difference between ‘trust’ and faith ... as a generalisation perhaps ‘trust’ is used more in spiritual circles, whereas faith is more aligned with the religious. ‘Trust’ seems to have more solid connotations than faith – to the spiritual aspirant, who scorns religion and all its trappings – yet, essentially they amount to the same. They all give rise to hope. Hope, the antidote to despair, is what most people live on. Living in hope – having faith or trusting – is a poor substitute for the living purity of the perfection of the actual. Hope sets one up for disappointment time and again ... and all it is, is the antidote for despair. All trusting, believing, hoping and having faith and certitude are but the antidotes to distrust, disbelief, despair, doubt or suspicion. I advise people not to believe, trust, hope or have faith and build a certitude ... I urge people to find out for themselves. Look upon what I have to say – and other actualists – to see if there is enough evidence for a prima facie case. This means that one listens with both ears and examines one’s own psyche – which is the human psyche – and discovers whether the words accord with the facts or not ... a fact is distinct from a ‘truth’. A belief – cunningly disguised as a truth – is not a fact. A fact is apparent, there can be no confusion or argumentation about a fact. By its very nature a belief is not factually true ... otherwise it would not need to be believed to be true. A fact is obvious, freely available for all to see as being correct. To believe something to be true is to accept on trust that it is so. A fact does not have to be accepted on trust ... a fact is candidly so. A fact is patently true, manifestly clear. A fact has actual verity, whereas a belief requires synthetic credence. One of the ways of ascertaining whether a ‘truth’ is a belief or a fact is that a belief demands loyalty; you give allegiance to it and to the group that espouses it. And look for passion ... the passionate involvement required to maintain the synthetic credibility of whatever is believed in, or what one has faith in, or what one trusts and what one hopes for or has certitude about. It is impossible to dispassionately believe, dispassionately have faith, dispassionately trust or dispassionately have hope or certitude. Anyone who claims otherwise does not understand the experiential reality lying under those words. I am consistently urging not only the discarding of all beliefs, but to examine and discard the very action of believing itself. I only present a refutation to a particular belief in order that a person may come to see, not only how silly it is, but how dangerous it is to believe at all. I would not want anyone to stop believing in immortality, for example, and start believing in death as oblivion ... that would be to swap one belief for another and the action of believing remains intact. Where the action of believing remains intact, the ‘believer’ – the ‘I’ – is supported, affirmed, verified and perpetuated. This is the primary danger of beliefs. ‘I’ am, to a large part, an emotional ‘being’ ... ‘I’ am, to a large part, made up of beliefs, values, principles, ideals, theories, traditions, customs, mores and so on. Belief is an emotion-backed thought ... and not sensible thought at that. Personally, I never believed or trusted that it was possible; nor did I have hope or faith or certitude, for such an action of believing, trusting, hoping and having faith and certitude perpetuates the believer, the truster, the hoper and the faithful certifier. On the contrary, I could no longer believe that it was not possible ... which is a different action entirely. I stopped the activity of believing, period. The mind is a fertile breeding ground for fantasies and hallucinations; if one backs it up with trust, faith, belief, hope and certitude then anything weird can eventuate. Instead, make full use of a confidence born out of the apperception that occurs in a pure consciousness experience (PCE); the surety that comes from a solid knowing ... an irrefutable knowing, not a flight of fancy from some religious epiphany or spiritual vision or mystical revelation or any metaphysical occurrence. One thus has the courage of one’s convictions – which is the certainty born out of the solid knowing as evidenced in a PCE – and can thus develop a superb assurance and a wondrous optimism. Therefore nothing can stand in one’s way in this, the adventure of a life-time. RESPONDENT: You said that there is an insight which is not knowledge: ‘When one has an insight into an aspect of the Human Condition, there is action ... and this action is the actualising of the experience so that one’s personality is changed, irrevocably’. Can we look a little closer at this? RICHARD: We surely can. The insight reveals what conceptual thinking was unable to arrive at by the use of – sometimes laborious – sequential thought. An insight is direct seeing, unmediated by a ‘thinker’ ... and when the moment of insight is over, then the fun begins. Because one must start from where one is at and move towards what the insight disclosed. However, one has had the insight, and the insight galvanises one into matter-of-fact thought instead of merely conceptual thought. Thinking is still linear, of course, but one now has the advantage of being able to see the obvious. Seeing the obvious relieves one from believing, trusting, hoping and having faith. There is now a confidence, born out of the certainty of the insight, that enables one to actualise the insight in one’s daily life ... and this actualisation means that one’s personality is changed, irrevocably. (This is a potential sticking point, incidentally, for people want to be free without having to change ... but that is another topic). It is this confidence that effects actual change, for there is an impelling movement of actualisation ... being pulled from ahead ... which is what comes from the choiceless action that ensues with being activated from the insight. This is qualitatively different from a propelling movement ... being pushed from behind ... which is what comes from the disciplined action that eventuates with being motivated by conceptual thought. There is always a smidgen or two of doubt in conceptual thought, you see. RICHARD: I am sure that anyone else who has read what I have written understands that this seeing is a goal to be achieved by eliminating both the ego and the soul – the ‘self’ and the ‘Self’. (Richard, List A, No. 4, No. 06). RESPONDENT: Huh? RICHARD: Huh indeed ... after all, I did write: ‘Anybody else who has read what I have written understands’. Obviously you have not read it. That is okay, it is just that that subject is a different thread, that is all. Which explains why you wrote: [Respondent]: ‘In my opinion, the root cause is faithlessness, so all the effort we can muster is wasted energy’ in response to my post. Viz.: ‘I have written consistently about the intense level of patience, perseverance, application and diligence required in eliminating the root cause of all the wars, the murders, the tortures, the rapes, the domestic violence, the corruptions, the sadness, the loneliness, the sorrows, the depressions and the suicides ... ad infinitum’. The root cause is not faithlessness because faith falls into the same category as trust, hope and belief. I have had no use for faith at all: to have faith is to invite deception. It is the same with expectations ... to have expectations is to set yourself up for disappointment again and again. Etymologically, faith – loyalty to ‘The Truth’ – is in the same category as trust – a covenant with ‘The Truth’ – and both are aligned with belief. Belief means fervently wishing to be true. There is not much difference ... perhaps trust is used more in spiritual circles, whereas faith and belief are more aligned with the religious ... as a generalisation. Trust seems to have more solid connotations than faith – to the spiritual aspirant, who scorns religion and all its trappings – yet, essentially they amount to the same. They all give rise to hope. Hope, the antidote to despair, is what most people live on. Living in hope – having faith or trusting that ‘The Truth’ will bring release – is a poor substitute for the living purity of the perfection of the actual. The mind is a fertile breeding ground for fantasies and hallucinations; if one backs it up with faith, trust, belief and hope then anything weird can eventuate. Instead, make full use of a confidence born out of the apperception that can occur in an unadulterated peak experience; the surety that comes from a solid knowing ... an irrefutable knowing, not a flight of fancy from some religious epiphany or spiritual vision or mystical revelation ... or any metaphysical occurrence. RESPONDENT: Time and space are perceivable and have measurable limits and boundaries. RICHARD: Oh? Pray tell me then, as you have perceived and measured both time and space, just how big the universe is ... and how long it has been here and how much longer will it be? Also, just where do you perceive the boundaries of the universe’s space are located ... and what lies beyond it? And just when do you perceive that the limits of the universe’s time are located ... and what was here when it was not? And please, do not tell me ‘nothing’ is or was – which is what you did before when you were rattling on about ‘timelessness’ and ‘spacelessness’ – as if it means something profoundly real. You cannot conceive of a ‘nothing’ unless you acknowledge the actuality of a ‘something’ first to contrast it against ... and you say that the ‘something’ – time and space – are an illusion. And last, but not least, how do you perceive and measure the limits and boundaries of an illusion? Who did you say cannot think clearly? RESPONDENT: I still say you cannot think clearly. What you have adopted as the actual universe is the product of the scientist’s speculation. RICHARD: Not so ... most of the scientific speculation these days is about a universe (with boundaries) expanding out of a ‘Big Bang’ some twelve to fifteen billion years ago. Before that, they theorise, time and space either did not exist or were contained in a particle so dense that it had to expand. They hypothesise that this expansion will go on for another ten to fourteen billion years and then there will be a ‘Big Crunch’. They think that this mathematically derived cosmogony is cosmology ... such is their religious-like faith in ‘The Truth’ of mathematics. (Indeed I watched one world-renowned mathematician solemnly saying to the television cameras that ‘God must be a mathematician’ ... it is a wonder that he and his wheelchair were not zapped on the spot with a bolt from above!). RESPONDENT: You just don’t understand about conditioning, do you Richard? How long does it take an infant to be conditioned?? Maybe a minute? Maybe a year? Maybe a second? RICHARD: Why are you asking me? It is your theory – you say that I am wrong and that you are right – yet you do not know what to say to back your statement. And as for ‘maybe a second’ ... ye gods, your theory becomes fantasy. RESPONDENT: Krishnamurti talked 60 plus years about freeing oneself from the entanglement of conditioning. Krishnamurti said that he was never conditioned, and that he did not know why that was the case. His mind remained ‘vacant’. RICHARD: And you believe him? Despite all the documentation to the contrary? Ah, well ... such is faith, I guess. RESPONDENT: As far as PCE’s I would say that although they may describe a ‘state of being’ when Richard was extinct, ‘Richard afterwards ‘re-incarnates’ and then this image-making ‘Richard’ becomes attached to his image (filtered memory) of that (PCE). RICHARD: First, a PCE is not a description ... it is a direct experience that obviates believing, having faith or trusting. Secondly an actual freedom from the human condition is not a ‘state of being’ because ‘being’ is extirpated ... it is an ASC that is a ‘State Of Being’. Thirdly, the word ‘extinct’ means as dead as the dodo but with no skeletal remains – there is no phoenix to arise from the ashes here – thus there is no ‘entity’ to ‘afterwards re-incarnate’’ in order to be an ‘image-making ‘Richard’’ that fulfils your grade-school expectations of becoming ‘attached to his image (filtered memory) of that (PCE)’. RICHARD: Does this not stretch one’s credulity somewhat? RESPONDENT: It’s not about credulity, but intuition and faith. RICHARD: What is the difference between ‘credulity’ and ‘intuition and faith’ ... according to you? • [Dictionary Definition]: ‘credulity: belief, faith, trust; readiness to believe’. • [Dictionary Definition]: ‘faith: confidence, belief, reliance, especially without evidence or proof; spiritual apprehension of divine truth or intangible realities’. • [Dictionary Definition]: ‘intuition: spiritual insight or perception; instantaneous spiritual communication without the intervention of reasoning’. Because, when one intuitively knows who ‘I’ really am (as in ‘I am the Self’, the second ‘I’ as explicated by Mr. Venkataraman Aiyer aka Ramana) one is living in an apotheosised field of consciousness where one has the power of attaining to direct metaphysical knowledge without evident sensible thought and rational inference ... which indicates credulity stretched to the max: a readiness to believe, to have faith and trust, that ‘The Truth’ is genuine, authentic, bona fide, valid, legitimate. RETURN TO RICHARD’S SELECTED CORRESPONDENCE 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