# Actual Freedom – Selected Correspondence by Topic

Richard’s Selected Correspondence ## On Intuition IRENE to Peter: Richard sees that feelings and intuitions are the main-cause for all misery and suffering in the world, and believes that women must be helped to get rid of these unfortunate and malicious tendencies ... and become like him. RICHARD: Why this one-eyed view? Why do you turn these discussions into a woman versus man issue? What is your agenda? I talk equally to man and woman ... men have intuition too (popularly known as ‘gut-feelings’ or ‘hunches’). When tested exhaustively, male intuition was demonstrated to be as unreliable as female intuition ... 50/50 on average (which is the same as guessing). The male clairvoyants – now there is proof that intuition is not the exclusive domain of the female of the species – could not better a 53.4% accuracy. Also ... men have feelings too. It is just that they express them differently to women ... a man knows what another man is feeling. We have discussed these issues before – you and I – and you came to recognise the ‘code’ that men use to convey feelings to each other. It is surprising to see so much recidivism in such a short time. RESPONDENT: ‘The solution lies not in struggle, a propensity of both instinct and intellect, but in an unmoving awareness that allows our full nature to come into view and a third source of understanding to come into play, the intuition’. RICHARD: Speaking personally, I have no intuition whatsoever ... that faculty disappeared in 1992 and I mourn not its departure. Nor have I the imaginative faculty ... I could not form an image if my life depended upon it. RESPONDENT: ‘Please note, I am not talking about the confused notion of intuition that is rampant in new age circles, which is most often a mistaken attempt to return to a dependence on instincts. I am speaking about accessing an innate ‘intelligence’ that is already always functioning in the each of us and the universe as a whole’. RICHARD: There is indeed an ‘innate ‘intelligence’ that is already always functioning in the each of us’ which I consistently call ‘native intelligence’. Its sagacity filters through despite the best attempts of the passions to swamp it with feeling-fed notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ... and is known in the ‘real world’ as ‘commonsense’. Thus ‘commonsense’, when freed of the grip of the instinctual passions, is what I call ‘native intelligence’. There is no ‘Intelligence’ that is running the universe, however. Only the human animal is intelligent. * RESPONDENT: I see the intuition as the key to the proper integration of the intellect and instincts. And I am very clear and pointing out that I am not talking about the common use of the word. Rather, I relate it to an ‘innate intelligence’ that is already always functioning in each of us and the universe. You then quickly point out that you ‘have no intuition whatsoever ...’. RICHARD: Indeed ... the intuitive/ imaginative faculty disappeared when the entire psyche became extinct. RESPONDENT: On exploring your web site it was clear to me that what you call ‘intuition’ is precisely the so called intuition of many new age circles. That was certainly best left behind, but it is not what I am talking about. I suspect what I call ‘intuition’ relates very well to what you call ‘native intelligence’ and we would agree that this sense if mostly distorted as long as the intellect’s capacity to clearly reflect it is diminished by emotional confusions. RICHARD: One’s native intelligence cannot operate and function cleanly and clearly whilst ‘I’ am in there trying to run the show. The nearest thing to what I call native intelligence is known as commonsense in the ‘real world’. Intuition, be it of the NDA variety, or any other variety is affectively-based ... thus you would be relying on the notoriously unreliable feelings to be the arbiter of what is appropriate or inappropriate action. RESPONDENT: I’m not sure even this distorted ‘filtering through’ is what is normally called ‘common sense’ (the term is so poorly applied these days. It is also this faculty, (‘native intelligence’ to you; ‘intuition’ to me) that I am referring to when I speak of one’s ‘sense of responsibility’. RICHARD: I use the phrase native intelligence in the meaning of ‘autochthonous acumen’ or ‘indigenous prudence’ or ‘congenital judicity’. I am meaning a down-to-earth and matter-of-fact practicality ... an innate sensibility. Intuition is not sensible. I have no sense of responsibility whatsoever ... the ‘I’ that was took full responsibility and an action that was not of ‘his’ doing resulted. RESPONDENT: You have intuition but you have placed it in denial. RICHARD: You do seem to know more about me than I do ... yet I have repeatedly written that the intuitive/ imaginative faculty disappeared back in 1992 when the entire psyche vanished concurrent with the deletion of the software program of instinctual passions bestowed at conception by blind nature. And in this ‘computer analogy’ I have also written that there is no ‘Recycle Bin’ to retrieve the program from ... and your advice is: ‘you have placed it in denial’. Now, as some peoples like to re-name their computer’s recycle bin – into ‘trash can’ for example – I have accordingly searched throughout this body for a re-named recycle bin named ‘denial’... wherein you maintain I have placed intuition. Nope ... ‘denial’ does not exist on this flesh and blood hard-drive. RESPONDENT: Surrender and intuition shall return. RICHARD: Hokey-dokey ... whom shall I surrender to? Which of the 1200 gods do you recommend? Which god did you wish to be, back in the days when you started to lose the plot, and which god did you end up being? And what is so crash-hot about intuition anyway? When tested exhaustively, the most intuitive peoples could only muster a 53.4% accuracy rating and all the others 50/50 ... which is the same odds as guess-work. It does seem to me to be a lot of trouble, to ask for the CV’s of all 1200 gods (in order to ascertain which one has the better track-record) and then trustingly surrender just to regain a very unreliable faculty called intuition. Mr. Mohan ‘Rajneesh’ Jain (self-acknowledged to have surrendered), for example, predicted on 2 September 1983 that: • ‘Beginning next year, the world will face 15 years of catastrophic natural and man-made disasters – including nuclear war. Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Bombay all will be destroyed – but the holocaust will not be confined to these major political centres. And unless human consciousness changes totally, man cannot survive. As he is right now, he is already out-dated. There will be floods which have never been known since the time of Noah, along with the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and everything else that is possible through nature. There will be wars which are bound to end in nuclear explosions, hence no ordinary Noah’s Arks are going to save humanity. (Here) we are creating a Noah’s Ark of consciousness, remaining centred exactly in the middle of the cyclone. I say to you that except this there is no other way’. (© ‘The Rajneesh Times’ 1983). My high-school arithmetic tells me that 1983 plus 15 makes 2 September 1998 (last year) the end of his 15 year holocaust. When I watch television I see places like Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Bombay still standing – and still expanding – so I guess there is a giant conspiracy going on and it is old footage being replayed so as to lull me into a false sense of security! But ... so much for ‘divine’ intuition, eh? RESPONDENT: They [feelings] are never the same. RICHARD: Oh, yes they are ... they are tediously repetitious. RESPONDENT: Sometimes they are. Those are the emotions. RICHARD: Not only the emotions ... also the passions and calenture. And from the way you are leaning toward having faith in intuition ... so to is the psychic. It is all the same-same stuff that human beings have fallen prey to for millennia ... with disastrous results. RESPONDENT: They are always new. RICHARD: Oh, no they are not ... they are the same old same old. RESPONDENT: These are the insights. They just come to one ‘out of the blue’. This is what I mean by ‘true feelings’, the sixth sense. You are a firm adherent to the five senses; haven’t you come in contact with the sixth one yet? RICHARD: Yes ... many years ago. You are not talking to a beginner here ... I have already been down that path. The ‘sixth sense’ is where one enters into the psychic world of prescience and clairvoyance and all that stuff. Also notoriously unreliable ... and down-right dangerous into the bargain. RESPONDENT: Don’t you ever just ‘know things’ without any reason or rhyme? Do you listen to this sixth sense? RICHARD: No ... I no longer have it. Intuition (and the imaginative faculty that it is born of) disappeared completely in 1992 when the soul ‘me’ vanished entirely from this body. Thus I know as a fact that it is all born of the affective faculties, as I have had no feelings at all since then. RESPONDENT: For instance, a couple of years ago some numbers came to me, in my ‘feelings’. I knew they were ‘magic’ numbers, but I didn’t know what to do with them ... we don’t have a lottery in Arkansas, and I have no idea how a lottery works anyway ... something to do with numbers. Anyway, we were driving through a state where gambling was legal, and when we sat down to eat, the waitress brought us a card to play keno on. I had a certificate to play the game, but I didn’t know how. It was worth a two dollar bet, so I used all of my numbers, and they came up sequentially on the game board and I won a hundred dollars. (Now I know that if I had played only my numbers, I would have won about $50,000). I new I was wasting the numbers because I just knew (felt) they were worth a lot of money, but I had been carrying them around in my head for a long time, and I was ready to get rid of them. This is not the only instance of ‘feelings’ I have had ... when you just know things that have happened or are going to happen. RICHARD: This is a subject that I have examined with great interest over the years ... it is not something that I have discarded capriciously. These days, when someone sits in my living room and makes these kind of statements – detailing their case-history – I always ask them to remember when their much-treasured intuition did not work ... and eventually they come to see that it works out at about 50/50. As this equals guess-work, they invariably leave much more soberly – and wiser – than when they came in. Intuition cannot survive scrutiny. RESPONDENT No. 25: It is this imaginary self-image which is the agitator of wars (and no doubt the chimpanzee, with its rudimentary self-image-structure, is able to be xenophobic too – though fortunately not to such a twisted and destructive extent as his fellow primate – the human being). RICHARD: This ‘imaginary self-image’ arises intuitively in the instinctual passions themselves (intuitive ‘self’-consciousness’) and is the instinctual passions, at base. As such, the instinctual passions, in conjunction with their intuitive ‘self’-consciousness, are the ‘agitator of wars’. That this intuitive ‘feeling-self’ (‘me’ as soul) has given rise to a narcissistic ‘thinking-self’ (‘I’ as ego) in the human animal only serves to make the wars more deviously contrived than the wars of the chimpanzee. (Richard, List B, No. 25g, 16 May 2001). JAMES: Is intuition innate in the instincts? RICHARD: Intuition is innate in the instinctual passions, yes. It is easily observed that animals not only operate instinctively but suss out other animals, things and situations intuitively ... whereas it is not evident that animals can think (as in observe, reflect, remember, compare, plan and propose considered action). Otherwise they would not languish and/or die-off in droughts and famines and so on. JAMES: Could it be said then that ‘me’ as soul is intuition or that ‘me’ as soul has intuition? In other words is the ‘me’ instincts or is the ‘me’ intuition that arises out of the instincts? RICHARD: The instinctual passions and their ‘sixth sense’ are inseparable: thus it is both the affective feelings and their inherent intuition – both of which animals have – in conjunction with a third factor: recognition (incipient identification). Thus ‘me’ as soul (‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being ... which is ‘being’ itself) arises in the activity of intuitive ‘self’-recognition and/or ‘self’-identification ... which activity, being rooted in the instinctual passions, is affective. Put simply: it is the feeling of being a ‘self’. There is some evidence to indicate that the chimpanzee intuitively recognises itself as being a separate ‘self’ – albeit rudimentary – whereas the monkey does not (it sees its reflected image as being another monkey). Just recently there were reports that dolphins may be able to recognise themselves in a mirror. Concomitant with ‘self’-recognition/‘self’-identification comes the capacity to intuit a similar ‘self’ in others ... with all that inheres in that recognition. JAMES: Does the ‘I’ arise out of intuition also? RICHARD: Not just out of intuition: out of all of the above ... plus thought. ‘I’ as ego is a mental-emotional construct. JAMES: What I am trying to ask is: Is the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ intuition? RICHARD: ‘I’ as ego is mostly experienced as being a thinking-‘self’ (popularly located as being in the head) and is characterised as capable of being insightful; ‘me’ as soul is mostly experienced as being a feeling-‘self’ (popularly located as being in the heart) and is characterised as capable of being intuitive. But it is all an admixture – none of it is as distinct and compartmentalised as detailed above – as all overlap and interpenetrate each other in a composite package. In a word: identity. 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? 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. RESPONDENT: Thank you Richard, could you, please, elucidate ‘this (representative) quote due to its ruminative potential’: [D. Justine J.]: ‘I developed my intuitions to further realms, where things fell in their right places. I did not need to master the whole web site of Richard’. (www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3322135#_19_message_3311485). RICHARD: Sure ... the parenthesised word representative (‘a person or thing which represents or serves as an example for another or others of the same or similar type or classification’) indicates how the appended quote was but one among many which could have been presented that had the potential to fruitfully ruminate on (‘to turn a matter over in the mind; meditate, contemplate or ponder upon; muse over, reflect upon or consider thoughtfully’). As well as that, in my appraisal regarding what was being requested of me, that quote (referring as it did to ‘intuitions’ taking precedence over facts and actuality) also best represented the nub of the issue at hand. For instance: • intuit (v.): understand or work out by instinct (e.g.: ‘intuited his real identity’); intuitive (adj.): using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive (e.g.: ‘his intuitive understanding of the readers’ real needs’). ~ (Oxford Dictionary). • intuitive (adj.): 1. of, relating to, or arising from intuition [i.e.: the act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes]; 2. known or perceived through intuition; see synonyms at instinctive [viz.: instinctive, instinctual, intuitive, visceral: these adjectives mean derived from or prompted by a natural tendency or impulse (e.g.: ‘an instinctive fear of snakes’; ‘instinctual behaviour’; ‘an intuitive perception’; ‘visceral revulsion’]. ~ (American Heritage Dictionary). • intuition (n.): instinctive knowing (without the use of rational processes); intuitive feeling: an intuitive understanding of something (e.g.: ‘he had a great feeling for music’); gnosis: intuitive know- ledge of spiritual truths; said to have been possessed by ancient Gnostics; sixth sense: grasping the inner nature of things intuitively. ~ (WordNet 3.0). * Incidentally, that reliance upon ‘developed intuitions’ serves as a possible explanation for why he reacted publicly to my reply (my first and only email to him in 14 months) instead of communicating further about the matter, with those peoples here in Australia who are unmistakably either newly free or fully free (having completed the transitional process), so as to shed some shared experiential light upon what might actually be the case. He does seem to be unaware that, by choosing to not communicate further, he cuts himself off from access to the wealth of information personally gleaned from the other daring pioneers referred to in my emailed response to his request. RESPONDENT: Reading your posts, some questions arose in my mind about the methods you’re using (namely Actualism) and about the aim of these methods (namely PCE). 1. What is the difference between the Pure Consciousness Experience and the state called ‘enlightenment’? I can only see the difference between the methods used and not in the actual state. RICHARD: Basically one is about peace-on-earth as this flesh and blood body and the other is about a bodiless after-death peace. Here is a by no means exhaustive list of the differences: • Spiritualism: The timeless, spaceless and formless realm is real (time and space and form are a dream). • Actualism: Time and space and form are actual (the timeless, spaceless and formless reality is a dream). • Spiritualism: God (by whatever name) is infinite and eternal (boundless and limitless). • Actualism: This physical universe is infinite and eternal (boundless and limitless). • Spiritualism: God (by whatever name) is beginningless and endless (unborn and undying). • Actualism: This physical universe is beginningless and endless (unborn and undying). • Spiritualism: God (by whatever name) is the source of both the universe and human life (consciousness gives rise to matter). • Actualism: This physical universe is the source of human life (matter gives rise to consciousness). • Spiritualism: I am not the body. • Actualism: I am this flesh and blood body only. • Spiritualism: Physical death is not the end: immortality is forever. • Actualism: Physical death is the end, finish: mortality is forever. • Spiritualism: The soul (by whatever name) is real. • Actualism: The soul (by whatever name) is an illusion. • Spiritualism: Peace-on-earth is not possible ... peace can only happen after the body physically dies. • Actualism: Peace-on-earth is possible ... but only as this flesh and blood body. • Spiritualism: Suffering is transcended (via sublimation). • Actualism: Suffering is eliminated (via immolation). • Spiritualism: ‘I’ as ego surrenders and/or dissolves and ‘me’ as soul expands to be God (by whatever name). • Actualism: Both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul are extinguished. • Spiritualism: The ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ become one. • Actualism: Any ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds are an illusion ... only this actual world exists. • Spiritualism: Love and compassion are the antidotes to malice and sorrow. • Actualism: Love and compassion can only exist as long as malice and sorrow exists (both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ become extinct). • Spiritualism: The truth is the key to success and is to be found in the feeling of beauty. • Actualism: The facts are the key to success and are to be found in the physical world. • Spiritualism: Belief, faith, trust and hope are fundamental. • Actualism: Belief, faith, trust and hope play no part whatsoever. • Spiritualism: Intuition, imagination, visualisation, prescience, clairvoyance, telepathy and divination are essential. • Actualism: Intuition, imagination, visualisation, prescience, clairvoyance, telepathy and divination can be dispensed with. • Spiritualism: Inconsistency, contradiction and hypocrisy are central to the spiritual life. • Actualism: An actual freedom is consistent: it is neither contradictory nor hypocritical. • Spiritualism: Submission and dependency (through self-seeking ‘self’-surrender) are the hallmarks of the spiritual path. • Actualism: Autonomy and independence (through altruistic ‘self’-sacrifice) are the hallmarks of the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom. • Spiritualism: Gratitude is essential on the path to the spiritual goal. • Actualism: Gratitude is a hindrance on the path to an actual freedom. • Spiritualism: Humility is essential if one is to be God On Earth. • Actualism: Dignity is both the means to the end and the end in actual freedom. CO-RESPONDENT: No. 53, No. 87 & Nos. 60+98, if you stay and inform the occasional newbie what this is about fast – maybe pointing to some of the earlier correspondence – you would certainly do some people a great service in saving them a lot of what is most precious in their lives – their time. RICHARD: As your [quote] ‘this’ [endquote] refers back to what an intellectualist wrote at the three URL’s you provided ... (Richard, List B, No. 97b, 8 September 2005b). RESPONDENT: I am not an adherent of the doctrine that knowledge is derived from the action of the intellect or pure reason. I am not an intellectualist. RICHARD: (...) Just as a matter of interest ... what is a suitable word for a person of this ilk? Viz.: • [Respondent] (quoting Mr. Rene Guenon): ‘Metaphysics is essentially knowledge of the Universal [the ‘Self’] ... a genuinely transcendent knowledge contains no trace of any ‘phenomenalism’ and is depending only on *pure intellectual intuition*, which alone is pure spirituality’. [bracketed insertion and emphasis in original]. (Tuesday 3/05/2005 10:06 AEST). RESPONDENT: Rene Guenon is a metaphysician par excellence. RICHARD: Okay ... I am only too happy to rephrase what I originally wrote so that it be in accordance with your own nomenclature: • [Co-Respondent]: ‘No. 53, No. 87 & Nos. 60+98, if you stay and inform the occasional newbie what this is about fast – maybe pointing to some of the earlier correspondence – you would certainly do some people a great service in saving them a lot of what is most precious in their lives – their time. • [Richard]: ‘As your [quote] ‘this’ [endquote] refers back to what a metaphysician wrote at the three URL’s you provided – and given that your e-mail title refers to their [quote] ‘legacy’ [endquote] – then what you are exhorting four co-respondents to do (as in your ‘you would certainly do some people a great service’ phrasing) fast is to inform peoples writing to this mailing list for the first time about metaphysics, and maybe pointing to some of the earlier correspondence, so as to save them wasting their time on empiricism ... ‘the doctrine or theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience; that concepts and statements have meaning only in relation to sense-experience’. (Oxford Dictionary). • [Co-Respondent]: ‘It’s very easy to get lost on the website. • [Richard]: ‘Possible translation: it is very easy to get sucked into giving empiricism a try’. [end rephrase]. I am pleased that this matter, at least, has been settled to our mutual satisfaction. RESPONDENT: First I must state that when I use the word brain, I mean the whole organism. The organism, the body is inseparable. The different parts of the body are not joined between them, they are a whole. I can’t perceive a tree for example without eyes but I can’t perceive it without a heart as well. RICHARD: As a body sans heart is a dead body it is but a truism that perception cannot occur without the heart ... yet perception can occur without a range of organs (a lung, a kidney, an eye, an ear, a tongue, a finger, a hand, an arm, a foot, a leg, and so on). Moreover, a tree can indeed be perceived without the eyes – blind people do it all the time all around the world – it only cannot be *visually* perceived without eyes. RESPONDENT: Around us, out there, there is one underlying reality. RICHARD: First, there is no ‘out there’ in actuality – somehow you seem to have overlooked the main point of an actual freedom from the human condition (the absence of identity and its ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds) – and how do you know there is ‘one underlying reality’ anyway as you make it quite clear that ‘we can never know what is out there per se’ (further below)? RESPONDENT: Something like the NOUMENON of Immanuel Kant. RICHARD: Well now, Mr. Immanuel Kant was just plain wrong: there is no ‘NOUMENON’ (an object of purely intellectual intuition, devoid of all phenomenal attributes here in this actual world ... only phenomenon. RESPONDENT: What I was trying to say to you and may be I didn’t express my self well, is that we can never know what is out there per se. RICHARD: Indeed not ... the identity within creates an inner world and pastes its reality as a veneer over this actual world ... it then calls it an outer world and, feeling separate from its own creation, seeks union with it (little realising it is its own creation of course). Yet even those who succeed in this narcissistic enterprise say it is unknowable ... being but a delusion born out of an illusion is it any wonder why? RESPONDENT: Our perception does not identify the outside world as it really is, but the way we are allowed to recognize it, as a consequence of transformations performed by our senses. RICHARD: Where you say ‘the outside world’ again you are speaking of the reality which the identity within creates ... in actuality one does not perceive the world ‘by our senses’ as one is the senses. The whole point of actualism is the direct experience of actuality: as this flesh and blood body only what one is (what not ‘who’) is these eyes seeing, these ears hearing, this tongue tasting, this skin touching and this nose smelling – and no separative identity (no ‘I’/ ‘me’) means no separation – whereas ‘I’/ ‘me’, a psychological/ psychic entity, am inside the body busily creating an inner world and an outer world and looking out through ‘my’ eyes upon ‘my’ outer world as if looking out through a window, listening to ‘my’ outer world through ‘my’ ears as if they were microphones, tasting ‘my’ outer world through ‘my’ tongue, touching ‘my’ outer world through ‘my’ skin and smelling ‘my’ outer world through ‘my’ nose ... plus adding all kinds of emotional/ psychological baggage to what is otherwise the bare sensory experience of the flesh and blood body. This identity (‘I’/ ‘me’) is forever cut-off from the actual ... from the world as-it-is. RESPONDENT: Thus, we transform photons into images, vibrations into sounds and noises and chemical reactions into specific smells and tastes. Actually, the universe is colourless, inodorous, insipid and silent. RICHARD: First of all, did you notice that you left out the sensation of touch (cutaneous perception)? Thus to be consistent you must also say that the universe (the physical world) is not hard or soft; is not smooth or rough; is not squishy or firm; is not vibrating or still; is not wet or dry; is not hot or cold; is not windy or windless ... and so on and so on through the entire range of what tactilely perceived. Second, the universe is only experienced as being colourless by a totally colour-blind person; the universe is only experienced as being inodorous by a totally smell-blind person; the universe is only experienced as being insipid by totally taste-blind person (and a surprising large number of people have some degree of taste-blindness); the universe is only experienced as being silent by a totally deaf person. Third, I have come across this argument many times before ... the first time I heard it was some person saying that the universe was really black and white because it is the human eye which creates colour: to be consistent that person would have to say that the universe is not black and white either as it is rod-shaped receptors in the retina which detect brightness (there are upwards of 130 million of these photosensitive cells in an eye, which detect size, shape, and movement, as well as brightness, whilst it is the cone-shaped receptors which determine colour and fine detail). Do you see where this line of argument leads to? No colour, no brightness (no light and dark/ black and white), no size, no shape, no movement, no detail at all? This argument has similarities to that corny ‘brain in a vat’ idea so beloved of epistemologists ... no universe at all (other than the conveniently disregarded universe the ‘brain in a vat’ is residing in of course). So much for intellectual intuition ... and, lastly, what this argument ignores is that the human animal cannot detect what some other animals can (infrared radiation for example): if the human animal could detect what some other animals can there would be people trying to make the case that the universe is really ... um ... infrared-less as well (not to mention radio-wave-less, x-ray-less, gamma-ray-less and so on). ‘Tis an anthropocentric philosophy and, as such, has no correlation with what is actually happening at all. * RESPONDENT: The funny thing is that we will never be able to know this underlying reality, because even if we look though telescopes or microscopes, always we are obliged to translate signals, always everything will be translate from the brain. RICHARD: Presumably by ‘this underlying reality’ you are referring to Mr. Immanuel Kant’s noumenon (an object of purely intellectual intuition, devoid of all phenomenal attributes ? If so, the reason why it can never be known is because it just does not exist outside of his philosophising. 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. 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