I would be greatly edified if you would heed Blueberry's plea.

Calling something "Non-spiritual" doesn't make it not a religion.

And calling something 'religious' makes it so? You said "the LWer concludes that this message amounts to religious spam or close to that." And I responded with a question "what is the factual basis for such a conclusion?". Don't you think it would be a much more fruitful discussion if we sticked to the facts instead of intuitions/impressions/guesses/probabilities?

Human cognitive biases and other issues make it almost impossible for humans to judge anything about our own cognitive structures.

Yet what I originally claimed is a rather simple and obvious fact, based on common sense and experience, about bucketing our experience into sensations, thoughts and feelings, and not "judging about our cognitive structures". There really is nothing to our experience outside sensations, thoughts and feelings.

And to claim that t there are no experiments needed is to essentially adopt an anti-scientific viewpoint.

Indeed there can be no experiments to verify the nature of subjective experience. Experiments can only arrive at the physical correlates (such as nerve pathways), but never at the subjective content itself. In the level of brain, it all comes down to neurons; yet, when we say "I sense ..." or "I think ..." or "I feel ..." we are distinctly referring to sensations, thoughts and feelings.

As to the difference between "enlightenment" and "actual freedom" I don't see one.

The very passage you are responding to contains this: "not enlightement (where feelings are still in existent)" implying that in an actual freedom, feelings are non-existent. It is beyond me how you failed to see that.

Please don't feed the trolls!

[..] there is a magical mental state that fixes every problem that evolution baked into the brain over hundreds of millions of years

Yes, not "every problem" but specifically sorrow and malice (sorrow and malice are both feelings anchored on the sense of identity). The word "sensuosity" should come to one's mind.

the only people who have ever successfully achieved this mental state in all of human history are the devoted followers of a particular charismatic leader who doesn't believe in last names.

Unless there is evidence to the contrary, the only people free of the identity's grip (and the feelings) is Richard and a few others mentioned here.

As for "charismatic leader" and "devoted followers" (phrases pertaining to religio-spiritual systems/cults) - Richard is a fellow human being promulgating his discovery. Think of Actualism as in tourism (not the -ism of philosophy/religion/spirituality).

If you wish to distinguish yourself from people who are promoting cults, you need to not sound like someone promoting a cult.

As this is a straw man (there is no cult here to promote), I'll pass.

There are two issues here. One is whether Actual Freedom's approach produces the claimed effects and whether those effects actually improve people's lives, and the other is whether it's a cult. There's a minor question of whether Actual Freedom is the only path to get those effects.

I don't think it sounds all that much like a cult-- they aren't asking for money, they aren't asking for devotion to a leader, and they're saying they have a simple method of getting access to an intrinsic ability.

Whether it's as absolutely true as they say is a harder question, though it might improve quality of life without working all the time. Whether it's safe is a harder question-- it sounds like a sort of self-modification which is would be very hard to reverse.

Whether no other system produces comparable results is unknowable.

...than you would get from, say, flipping through a compilation of remarks by the Dalai Lama.

Just an FYI, but modern technology now allows instant access to a stream of such remarks. The Dalai Lama is on Facebook.

I would be greatly edified if you would heed Blueberry's plea.

Hi - I will respond briefly to the various points you raised further below, but first:

What is the value of such a person - to the world, to the readers of this website?

It seems that my post was not written carefully, and led some to mistake it for religious spam. I've been visiting LW for a while, and practicing actualism (AF) for more than year. The value of the AF method (not person) personally to me is increased well-being / light-heartedness / carefreeness without having to believe in a God or some other metaphysical concept. I have virtually no belief system; Actualism is an -ism like tour-ism, not the -ism in philosophy. That said, the value to the reader of this forum focused on human rationality is of course a challenge (food for thought) to our widely held perception about feelings/emotions (eg: life without feelings is barren and sterile) and, even more, their relationship to all the sorrow and malice which forms the basis for many scientific endeavours; studies related to stress, for instance.

It is quite simple: in a PCE, one's sense of identity and feelings temporarily vanish, leaving only sensations and thoughts, thereby paving wave for a magical sensuosity that is engendered by everyday events.

Now onto your specific points:

one may reasonably question the judgment of "Richard" when he says that he thinks he is the first in history to achieve his particular flavor of liberation. This really is a mark against his wisdom. He would be far more plausible if he was saying, what I have was probably achieved by some of the many figures who came before me

The reason he doesn't say "what I have was probably achieved by others before me" is simply that his experience is different. If you go through his personal history article, he writes about his several-month reading of all peoples experiences before arriving at the conclusion that his experience is unique. And for the rest of us, it shouldn't be difficult to understand as in an Actual Freedom - feelings are non-existent (everyone who've had a PCE confirms this), whereas in any form of spiritual Enlightenment known to us, feelings not only continue to exist but often transmorgify into the divine feelings of Love/Compassion. In the CRO, you will find several discussion related to this titled "Actualism is not new" and "The actualism method is not unique".

I will start by comparing him to U.G. Krishnamurti. [...] Richard seems to say that many of the forms of higher truth or deeper reality that have been associated with spirituality are phantoms

Yes, phantom as in "something apparently sensed but having no physical reality". Precisely, what he is saying is that - the states of mind experienced by Enlightened people are fuelled by instinctual passions / feelings, and as such have no basis on the actual/physical world. Even though hormonal/chemical substances are actual, the feelings they give rise to are considered to be non-actual (emergent phenomena would be another way to put it, but with the added factor of 'imagination' to it).

Richard does say that achieving his particular state of purged consciousness is a universalizable formula for almost perpetual peace of mind.

Purged of the identity and feelings. In other words, a Pure Consciousness Experience. Those who have not had a PCE, can think it of as a sensuous delight.

As for 'universalizable formuala', the method promulgated by Richard and other actually free people is indeed repeatable (verifyable on one's own) and thus satisfies the scientific method.

You say "Richard gets a minus for overrating the value of his product". If a PCE results in 24x7 sensuous delight marked by no sorrow/malice (as feelings no longer arise), how could it be anything but enabling perpetual (until the death of the body) peace of mind?

Richard has admirers rather than skeptics around him - no-one who is going to tell him anything different.

Have you read the CRO page? If so, you wouldn't be making this remark. There were (and still are) far too many objections during the time he promulgated his method (10 years).

Is [what Richard says] anything greater than you would get from, say, flipping through a compilation of remarks by the Dalai Lama

As already mentioned, spiritual attainments ends in a delusion (Love/Compassion) and never uproots the root of sorrow/malice itself. Attained Zen Buddhist, for instance, are known to get sorrowful -- spirituality transcends suffering (in a metaphysical realm, perhaps), but never eliminates it.

What Richard is saying is that one can completely (100%) eradicate the root the all misery/mayhem of the world.

Does the private happiness of that person (Richard) stem from factors like [...]

If I may interject - Richard's happiness does not stem from the factors you mention below. It is a 24x7 sensuous delight (marked by no affective feelings) not dependent on any life situation.

(i) they're old and have given up on many of the things that both please and torment a younger person, like sexuality, and

Richard, and other actually free people, have not given up on the various physical pleasures/comforts of life. You may want to read his journal entry on sex.

[...] (ii) they have some special material and social arrangement (like living on a commune with a few devoted friends and admirers who handle many of the practicalities of daily life and liaising with the outside world) which is not readily imitated by the suffering masses!

Until recently Richard was living alone. He have had companions; mingles with people ... does things that normal human beings do.

If you're interested, may I suggest two articles: 180 Degress Opposite briefly mentions the various differences from spirituality, and Attentiveness and Sensuousnesds and Appercetiveness describes the quality of the condition of PCE/AF.