# Actual Freedom ~ Frequently Flogged Misconceptions Frequently Flogged Misconceptions ## There is No Such Thing as Blind Nature RESPONDENT: Let us stay aware that the ‘instinctual’ passions also include all human possibility – including the awakening of a totally different way of meeting life. RICHARD: Ah ... so you are not living the actual, I see. RESPONDENT: The mindset that looks down on instinct and posits a way of being beyond them is creating a wholly unnecessary division in which the innate intelligence of the instinct is unacknowledged and the karmic results of conditioning and choice are (falsely) pinned on ‘instinct’. RICHARD: Except what you call the ‘innate intelligence of the instincts’ is busily killing people ... 160,000,000 million in wars this century alone. As for ‘karmic results’ ... I do not need to believe in that Eastern mystical twaddle. RESPONDENT: Finally, there is no such thing as ‘blind’ Nature. RICHARD: Nature is blind inasmuch as it does not care two-hoots about you or me. It is only concerned with the survival of the species ... and any species will do as far as nature is concerned. Therefore it is blind. There is no such thing as ‘Mother Nature’ outside of sentimental human imagination. Nature is indeed ‘red in tooth and claw’. RESPONDENT: Nature exists as us, and if we do not see that nature is not blind through the multitude of ‘outer’ evidence, we cannot deny that nature sees through us (though perhaps far too myopically). RICHARD: Hmm ... look, if you think it is important for me to understand this sentence then perhaps you could re-write it in a way that makes sense? Does this ‘Nature’ need to visit an optometrist? You did claim (above) that nature has an ‘innate intelligence’ yet now you are saying it is ‘myopic’ ... and I cannot comprehend how a ‘myopic intelligence’ is going to set one free of the Human Condition. Do you actually know ... or are you making this up as you write? RESPONDENT: Is the universe you live in a dead mechanism, or are you a coextensive expression of the living/conscious universe? RICHARD: I am not sure whether you have read many of my posts, but my oft-repeated refrain is: ‘I am this material universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being ... as me the universe is intelligent’. To be here at this place in infinite space and this moment in infinite time is to be living the perfection of this infinitude as purity personified. RESPONDENT: Is ‘biologically-based, inherited savagery’ shared by trees and butterflies? Is there not also biologically inherited gentleness and intelligence? RICHARD: Aye, you will find this explanation in the post that you snipped the opening quote above off ... you will see the word ‘tender’ in there. Viz.: • [Richard]: ‘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. 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. For the deletion of the software package is the extinction of ‘me’ at the core of ‘being’. That is, ‘being’ itself expires. The reward for so doing is immeasurable, however. (Richard, List B, No. 21, 18 October 1998) RESPONDENT: Isn’t the savage, brutal, wild tooth and claw view of nature a bit narrow minded? Isn’t it the projection of the fears of the divided from its source mentality? RICHARD: No. It is that an individual freedom from the human condition could lead to a global freedom from the human condition. It is possible for a chain-reaction effect to ripple through all the peoples who inhabit this planet; imbuing the populace with peace and prosperity. And this freedom from the human condition 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. 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. No longer need people lament the futility of trying to escape from the folly of the ‘Human Condition’. Never again would fear rule the earth; terror would stalk its prey no more ... and another 160,000,000 human beings would not be killed in wars by their fellow human next century. But even if global peace was a long time coming – as is most probable due to stubbornly recalcitrant identities – the most appealing aspect of actual freedom is its instant bestowal of universal peace upon the individual daring enough to go all the way. RESPONDENT: Are you saying that by painting a gloomy picture of the universe (‘blind tooth and red claw nature’) we will coerce people into telepathic transformation? RICHARD: Firstly, I am not ‘painting’ a ‘gloomy picture’ of anything at all ... let alone ‘the universe’ . If you find the expression ‘nature is red in tooth and claw’ to be ‘a gloomy picture’ then that is how you feel about a factual description of blind nature which, until space-exploration is such that blind nature is found elsewhere in the universe, has only emerged on this planet. Secondly, I am not interested in ‘coercing’ anyone (it is a matter of personal choice whether one becomes happy and harmless or not) and certainly not by ‘telepathic transformation’. There being no intuitive/imaginative faculties extant in this flesh and blood body there are no prescient abilities. RESPONDENT: Isn’t it fear of Death which biases that whole view? RICHARD: You do seem to be unaware as to whom you write this conceptualised picture of death and nature to. At age seventeen I volunteered for the military and was vigorously and rigorously trained, by the best-trained killers that this country could produce, to kill my fellow human being with nine different weapons (including rifle, pistol, machine pistol, machine gun, hand-grenades, booby-traps, bayonet and knife. I am a fully qualified state-trained killer ... and I served my time in a war that is infamous in twentieth-century western history. I know the nature of killing and death ... and I know the nature of human beings. RESPONDENT: That is being trained to see death as losing. RICHARD: No ... it is called protecting one’s kith and kin. It is so that your wife or daughter or sister or mother or grandmother does not get beaten, raped and killed, for example. Would you stand by and dumbly watch these painful events ... all the while reassuring her not to see it as losing? RESPONDENT: My father died unexpectedly when I was 13. My friend and I tried to revive him with CPR as he lay on the floor of his bedroom. It seems our experiences with death have led to divergent understandings of Life/Death. I would never have considered being a professional killer (military man) even before that experience. RICHARD: So you rely upon others to do the dirty work of protecting you and your ilk, eh? Which means (that apart from eating your fellow human) you consciously practise non-violence? Actual Freedom Homepage
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