Others ~ Selected Correspondence

Ethics and Morals

You didn’t ask me these questions, but you do refer to ‘someone’ (below).

I don’t presume to understand why Richard won’t answer my intended question.

Just because someone hasn’t answered your question yet to your satisfaction doesn’t mean they ‘won’t.’

Could one of you please just let me know if I’m misunderstanding something here? I really don’t get why Richard seemed to be scoffing at me (or something, I don’t get it) about spouting the ‘virtues of materialism’.

He’s not ‘scoffing’ at you. Put it this way – ‘materialism’ is a philosophy or speculation or conjecture about life and the universe from a (self-centred) ‘real’ world point of view – actualism is not a philosophy, speculation, or conjecture.

I mean, what the heck, actualism is a non-spiritual experience (or whatever, no matter what I call actualism I’ll get slammed). I’m not interested in money, women, fame, power or really any of that and yet this ‘materialistic’ label is thumped on me. By materialism I understand as ‘there is no spirit world’ and I leave it at that (I think). Thank you

The main difference is that ‘materialism’ is a belief about the world from a self-centred point of view.

OK someone, could one answer the question please, in the first place which is: this is the MAIN question I have hear that you did not answer. If I’m at work and I have a situation where I have to balance the ‘rights’ or ‘needs’ or ‘wants’ of my staff, the consumers/ residents of the program (the mentally ill), the community, and even another group (the developmentally disabled) then is not a system of cost/benefit analysis (i.e. consenquentialism/ utilitarianism), and some values (like dignity, value of human life, self-determination, justice, etc.) of great help in doing my job? I mean, lets say I have achieved actual freedom (have not of course). This wonderful thing (actual freedom) would not by itself guide me as to the ‘best’ course of action to take with my policy proposal. Nitty gritty, practical stuff, but very complex. So, does actualism allow for cost/benefit analysis (utilitarianism) and value based ethics in order for me to come up with as fair and just of a mental health policy as I can, or does it say ‘who cares, just self-immolate’ Do you get what I’m aiming at? And am I becoming clearer to you?

Actualism certainly doesn’t say ‘who cares, just self-immolate’.

Actualism is also not concerned with morality or ethics – since those are based on emotion. Basically, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are best done away with – replaced by ‘sensible’ and ‘silly.’ That doesn’t mean that ‘right’ is the same as ‘sensible’ and ‘wrong’ is the same as ‘silly.’ It means that ethics no longer has any application whatsoever. Your actions can become more sensible, caring, and down to earth (without ethical analysing) – rather than based on emotion.

Thank you. I know you wrote a lot today, so I expect this answer will be awhile in coming. It is practically important to me.

I’m not sure why you ‘expect’ this answer to be a while in coming. Possibly this expectation has something to do with your idea that Richard won’t answer your question? No 37 to No 66

May I ask ... what have you been doing when asking yourself HAIETMOBA? Looking outward, remembering how perception is in a PCE and trying to prolong apperception as much as possible, then investigating feelings if (and when) they prevent this ... or have you been directing your attention toward your feelings first, on the understanding that apperception would arise naturally from their cessation? Other people?

The reason why this is important to me is because (as some of you might remember) I have had zero success practising the method as I thought it was prescribed here. Paying exclusive attention to my feelings has had really lousy results for me. Instead of causing feelings to dissipate, it was like holding a microphone to an amplifier, creating a screeching, howling feedback loop out of virtually nothing. After that I stopped doing it ‘by the book’ (as I understood it). But maybe I can do it ‘by the book’ after all.

I thought I’d give you some feedback from my own experience. I’ve tried various ways of ‘focussing’ my awareness as the actualist method – everything from trying to keep my attention on this moment and not thinking about the past or future, to making a conscious mental note of each thing I am perceiving or feeling. I’ve wondered whether or not the constant memory of a PCE is essential, tried focussing on sensations, etc. – but they all seem to be distracting to some extent.

I am currently having better success with just letting my attention ‘rest’ – as ‘low as it can go’ within my psyche. I used to watch every arising feeling and try to pick it apart, etc – but now I find that I have investigated almost everything – and I already know where those investigations lead. The only thing has been offering some success now has been to ‘feel my way through it’ – and by that, I don’t mean ‘feel my way to the answer’ – rather, instead of getting caught up in an intellectual investigation or trying to figure out what the ‘truth’ is about whatever I’m investigating, I prefer to let my attention ‘sink into’ whatever I am feeling and just notice how my attention gets bounced around. As I understand it – pure intent is the rudder that keeps me going on the right track – it is the sheer will not to give up no matter what – come what may.

In my experience, it is this willingness to dive ever deeper and deeper into one’s own psyche that begins to dissolve it – the times when I feel that I am making significant progress are those times when there is a noticeable lack of depth to my psyche – in other words, the basement has surfaced and the normal duality of the psyche isn’t as present. To be ‘normal’ is to constantly be on the lookout for the negative aspects of the mind and to control them by avoidance and repression. The actualism method allows those to surface and be looked at matter-of-factly.

So – to sum up, in my experience – it’s not really a question of focussing on feelings or sensations – it is rather allowing feelings to take center stage for as long as they need to be there, until they dissipate and allow a greater sensitivity to emerge. No 37 to No 60

I need a little clarification here. Are you deliberately ‘enhancing the negative’ or do you find that this is a by-product of what you are doing?

I find myself wondering whether you are really getting to the taste of the instinctual passions. The flavour I am getting from your comments here are that there are a lot of ‘shoulds’ and shouldn’ts’ going on on a thought level that are probably a reflection of a suppression process going on. I certainly can relate to having my doubts about the method along the way or wondering am doing it the ‘right way’, even to the extent of ‘what’s the matter with me?’ type questions. But what I have found is that once the taste of the instinctual passions comes, they are so intense, so sudden, and so clear that there is literally no avoiding them or stepping out of the way. This is not at all a conscious process of enhancing the negative feelings. What I am describing comes as a result of first stripping away the layers of beliefs and demolishing one’s social identity. This then leaves the primitive instinctual passions undiluted by societal values, judgements, and morals. One needs to literally sit in these feelings, neither expressing nor suppressing the feelings. The repeated experience of having this happen weakens the psyche – the alien identity that lives it’s parasitic existence in this flesh-and-blood body, and eventually creates the momentum that leads to self-immolation. At least that is the way I presently understand it.

However, realizations can also be a trap – just make sure you don’t get trapped in a trap.

If you have strayed the ‘wide and wondrous path’ it doesn’t sound like you have done so to any greater or lesser degree than anyone else. I consider myself to be a die-hard Actualist. I’ve never wanted to go back or even seriously considered returning from whence I came, not that it would be possible anyway. It is such a fascinating process – there are thrills and chills every step of way, to be sure, ... the roller coaster calms down eventually. Gary to No 37

I’d like to comment on something you said in your recent post to Vineeto on the thread of Suffering. You said, and I am snipping a lot of it out for purposes of brevity...

It is indeed scary to ‘consider removing the moral and ethical safeguards’ and thus expose the instinctual passions. Part of the trepidation for me was in the realization that there is no Divine Purpose uniting humanity, that there is no Divinity of any sort ‘up there’ pulling on the strings to make things work, no gods or goddesses in the heavens looking over our lives, giving life a spurious ‘meaning’, indeed no heaven or hell, no good nor bad. One’s usual ‘moral and ethical safeguards’ are essentially spiritual principles or spiritually derived, and when I began the work of demolishing my spiritual values, it was nevertheless a relatively easy thing, although scary, to move on to the next step, because I had in the PCE an experience of the very best possible. And when more of these experiences occurred, I could kind of get in there, move around, and see what they are about, experience it firsthand. And it is truly striking how much in contrast the PCE is to human beings ‘normal’ experience of what is usually termed ‘reality’.

I am relating to what you are saying because I too considered for a long time what I was doing and was about to do, and I had these questions about the process – it seemed foolhardy and reckless to rush ahead pell-mell and remove the safeguards that were, apparently, keeping ‘me’ on the rails – barely, though, I might add. I was afraid of insanity or, worse, an uncontrolled bloodlust or wanton acts of brutality. I was also warned privately in the strongest terms not to undertake this dangerous enterprise as I would end up ‘insane like Richard’. Yet proceed I did. And I must say I have had very good results.

Where you say that removing the moral and ethical safeguards ‘presumably’ exposes the ‘bare instinctual passions’, I can honestly say that for me there is no ‘presumably’ about it at all. It has been my experience that it is only when I began seriously dismantling and taking apart my ‘moral and ethical codebook’ – a term Vineeto used which I liked- did I experience the bedrock core instinctual passions. It is not enough to say that I felt angry or I experienced aggression, or I had unmitigated experiences of nurture or desire. It is rather hard to explain actually. But without the social identity intervening and interfering with what is going on, I can say that I experienced, at bedrock, the primal aggression that impels human beings to slay each other and even to slay themselves savagely. Yet the dire predictions that I would go insane, and the fears that I would fly off the rails and run amok, did not occur. Quite to the contrary.

Whilst ‘keeping my hands in my pockets’ yet experiencing full-force the primal passions ‘in all their power’, as you term it – I began to have an actual experience of what is spoiling the perfection and purity of this physical universe. I can also honestly say that when the primal passions are experienced, there is no ‘reason’ for them – there is no reason why I (meaning the alien entity inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body) have aggression – it has been programmed into me and every other human being on the face of the earth by blind nature. If I experienced nurture, for instance, there is no need for me to look any further than into this experience and fully experience what it is like, what it feels like, what it does, etc, etc. I don’t know if I am making myself clear on this point.

Let me say it this way: whereas when a person is investigating their affective or emotional experience, something seems to trigger it, you know, it is possible to trace it back to an antecedent, perhaps a belief or a value of some sort- when I have had experienced the primal passions, the investigation seems to have come full circle and there is nothing really between ‘me’ and ‘my’ passions. In other words, as it has been said before on this list, ‘I’ am my emotions and my emotions are ‘me’. I have seen this much, much more clearly during these experiences. Gary to No 38

Recently you had written to Vineeto:

I was wondering about the part where you say ‘This is too serious a business to let down the guard too far’. Because I have found that ‘letting down the guard’ is precisely what is called for in order to investigate one’s identity.

It seems that one’s morals, ethics, values, beliefs, etc. are the ‘guardian at the gate’ so to speak, holding down the base instinctual passions which are ‘me’. Investigating these passions is not possible unless one is willing to ‘get in there’ so to speak and experience a definite taste of the instinctual passions. It seems that keeping one’s guard up might prevent this very experiential examination of base instincts, which is why I wonder what you meant when you stated that this is too serious a business to let one’s guard down. I would re-state the case almost directly the opposite: that this is too serious a case to keep one’s guard up. Clearly, this is where it takes the nerves of steel. Gary to No 38

The system may not be fair on some but whilst human beings continue to nurse malice and sorrow in their bosoms, what passes for peace will ultimately be maintained at the point of a gun.

The longer I practice actualism, the less and less inclined I am to be concerned with what is ‘fair’, both for myself and for others. My conception over the years of what is fair has shifted and changed, but the basic thing is that I am not interested in nursing grievances and harbouring resentment any longer. If I do notice a grievance or a resentment popping up, it only means there is some underlying belief that needs to be examined and demolished. I am sure that to those who march and labour for social justice, my lack of passion to aid those who are hungry or who are oppressed would appear as a dangerous and self-serving form of complacency and co-option by ‘the system’ but I am burned out on feeling righteous indignation over a pet cause and I have seen the disastrous consequences of defending a righteous cause only too clearly. Gary to Vineeto

I scanned my original e-mail to see if a notion of ‘fairness’ had crept into it, but I could not locate any such reference. I have never thought of it as ‘unfair’ that human beings are pre-programmed with a rough-and-ready survival system. I can easily recall in earlier years, however, feeling that life was essentially cruel and unfair. I find now that whenever the thought of something either being ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ creeps into my psyche, I immediately catch myself and look at it. Usually, it is associated with some underlying feeling of resentment. It is also associated with what I consider to be my ‘rights’, whether territorial, personal, or political. Notions of fairness are, I think, ultimately ethical and moral standards and as such reveal the socially inculcated values of the social identity overlying the primitive instinctual ‘self’. There can be no applying of these values to the processes of life. Such would not be scientific thinking. It would be akin to the anthropomorphic view that says it is not ‘fair’ that the lion attacks the gazelle, or that the gnat only lives for a day, or the human being on average 88.5 years or what-have-you.

Agreed. Feelings of unfairness and unjustness fuel the age-old war between good and evil, Right and Wrong. We certainly see this ancient drama being writ large again on the world stage.

Yes. These moments when there is ‘no experience of separation from the physical matter of life’ are occurring more frequently and they are indeed, as you say ‘palpable, vibrant, and alive’.

There is a shift back and forth between the sensuous apperceptive awareness and the ‘normal affective being’. One day this week I was experiencing the most painful sense of alienation, loneliness, and angst, all rolled into one. But the remarkable thing is that the next day these feelings vanished completely and hardly make any sense at all. I would hardly wish to devote my life to whittling away the social identity unless it led to palpable results – which it most decidedly has ... sensuous apperceptive awareness is a most superior mode of functioning. Gary to Peter

As it is, I have decided to throw myself fully into finding another job in social work, instead of doing the scarier thing and the more insecure thing of changing careers.

The whole area of ethics and professional ethical conduct has arisen greatly over the past decade or so as a way of regulating the conduct of professionals such as social workers, teachers, doctors, etc, etc, and keeping them from acting in harmful ways to their clients and the public. When there is an ethical dilemma, say some aspect of self-interest conflicts with one of the ethical precepts of the profession, one is expected to know something about how to handle the situation or else one leaves oneself open to being sanctioned or, in the worst case scenario, sued or expelled from the profession. I remember a couple of times in my last job directly refusing to obey advice given to me by my supervisor because I felt it violated an ethical code of conduct. For instance, one case involved being asked to violate a client’s confidentiality. One can’t afford to suspend one’s critical thought in such situations. But some of the situations get pretty sticky and the answers are not outlined in black-and-white. Even the experts in the field are sometimes divided in their advice on how to handle these situations. Gary to No 13

Many of the professions are founded on compassion and concern for others.

Compassion is a trap, and one needs to be aware of this emotion when one is experiencing it lest one get caught up the emotions and be oblivious to the requirements of the situation. I think the point I am trying to make here is that the professions are often idealistically based, and professional ideals are a smokescreen for self-interest.

We touched on this point earlier. Drawing the line between professional behaviour and self-interest is not always an easy thing to do. Because I would say that professional interest is often the same as self-interest. When there is a concurrence between profession and self-interest, the choice is easy to make. When there is not, the door is open to doing exploitative and unprofessional things. Compassion is condescending.

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I doubt whether Social Work is unique in this regard. But these are often ideals that don’t measure up to the reality of the work.

That is a very good point. Given the extent to which human beings are idealistic, perhaps it would be well to examine why. We have talked at other times on this list of the difference between the real, the spiritual, and the actual. And this difference between the ideal, the real, and the actual is very similar to that discussion. Because there seem to be two poles in existence: there is the ideal, and there is the reality. Then there is the actual. The ideal would not exist were it not for the reality. The ideal of Compassion is founded on, and inextricably linked to, the reality of suffering. Suffering is the raison d’être, as it were, of suffering and sorrow. Then there is the third alternative, which is an actual freedom from both of these. Not a mere transcendence, but a freedom from both of the opposites. Both suffering and compassion are emotions, which I know some will deny, but to me, they are emotional, passionate responses. And as emotions, they are not intelligent. Nor are they sensible. Nothing but continual awareness will do.

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Certainly it sounds like in your teaching job you found yourself in a situation where you were mistreating others and being mistreated in turn, although the organization supposedly valued fair play, tolerance, etc.

Yes, and then ‘fair play’ and ‘tolerance’ coerced and bullied are not fair play and tolerance, are they? In the workplace I inhabited recently, one of the communal values was compassion towards others. But I observed some people being remarkably non-compassionate. Humans get attached to the ideal, it makes them feel good, but there is always the dark side lurking in the shadows. Gary to No 13

Personally, I don’t see why we can’t get rid of ‘expectation’ too while we’re at it. I put expectations in the same category as hope, trust, wishes, dreams, anticipations, etc. As an old cohort used to say ‘Having an expectation is about the same thing as having a resentment’, and I tend to agree. I am not saying just do whatever you like. If I have an appointment at work, I don’t sit around ‘expecting’ the person to show up. I tend to go on to the next thing I need to do until they either show up or don’t.

Normal human relationships seem to be filled with ‘expectations’ which greatly complicate the picture.

The reason that I reacted the way I did to your use of the word ‘expectation’ is that it conjures up for me the basic raison d’être for standards and codes of conduct: they are designed as a way of keeping wayward human nature in check. Were it not for the instinctual passions and affective feelings, there would be no need of them in the first place. I am heartily thankful, however, that I live in a community and country with not only standards of conduct but the means of enforcing and guaranteeing the compliance of those of who would usurp the ‘peaceful’ rule of order by their antisocial actions and behaviours. So I agree with you that there need to be standards, yes. At the present stage, I would not have it otherwise.

The trouble with standards, however, is that while they do a tolerably good job at keeping wayward human nature under check most of the time, there are periodic and explosive outbreaks of the instinctual passions, as in warfare, conflict and strife of various types. While most of the time human societies function in a ‘peaceful’, stable steady-state, conflict and strife are more the rule than the exception to the rule.

Another trouble with standards is this: were there not standards in Nazi Germany? Were there not standards in the Roman Empire, when they massacred people in the arena as a form of high entertainment? Were there not community standards in evidence here too? Where do we draw the line? Cannot standards and consequences for breaking the standards too be brutal and uncompromising? Why in the evolution of human societies does this happen time and time again? It is happening now again, is it not?

Sorry to talk like a lawyer. I realize I am asking leading questions.

When I said getting rid of expectations, I meant via self-immolation, by which the instinctual entity that inhabits this flesh and blood body is eliminated forever, thus rendering ‘expectations’ redundant. Gary to No 37

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