Others ~ Selected Correspondence

Hope

Your post, as usual always thoughtfully presented, contained the following statement:

I cannot honestly say that I have always been interested in living in peace and harmony with other human beings – probably only for the latter part of my life.

I nearly perished in a sea of alcohol, anger, depression and sadness which, at the age of 34, made me see the complete untenability of my way of life – the only way of life that I had known up until then. I suppose extremely crude survival instincts kicked in and kicked me in the butt to do something to stop killing myself. Besides, the pain was unbearable. Presented on a silver platter, through the vehicle of AA, spiritual ideals seemed the only way out of the morass that I was in – in fact, at the time, it was the only thing on offer. I went from the personal madness and delusion of the alcoholically insane to the institutionalized madness of religious and spiritual belief. Even after becoming involved with a religious pacifist group I still had my reservations about living in peace and harmony with other human beings. I remember thinking that I could never be a pacifist because I could not vow not to kill another human being. I would kill if I had to. It seemed insane to allow someone to have their way with me or those near to me, without lifting a finger to do anything to stop it.

Over a long period of time, the ridiculousness of living one’s life according to an ideal has hit home. I chuckle to myself during this holiday season when so many wishes and hopes are offered for peace in our world. Wishes and hopes are about as worn-out as all the other useless ideals that humanity has dreamed up. Only the most determined efforts to rid oneself of malice and sorrow are up to snuff. Ideals are a waste of time. One can wish and hope until the cows come home for peace and harmony, pray, sing, troop around singing Xmas carols, but all these collective, feel-good activities pale in comparison with getting down to brass tacks and doing something about it. You are really on your own in doing this work – that doesn’t mean that talking to others, like on this list, is not helpful or advisable, but when it comes right down to it, nobody can do it for you, you have to do it for yourself. If you pay heed to what most other people are doing, you might as well forget it, because most people are running off in the wrong direction. Gary to Peter

Unlike yourself, I cannot say with any degree of certainty that it gives my partner any pleasure to hear the words ‘I love you’ out of my mouth. I have never asked her about it. My dropping of the word ‘love’ as a term of endearment came at a time when I opened up to experiencing the corresponding passions associated with the word.

It has also been this way with other words such as hope and trust, for example. I have gradually found that these words have disappeared from my parlance the more interested I became in examining precisely what I meant when I used these words. For instance, if I meant to say to someone in a letter ‘I hope everything is well with you’, just exactly what was going on? There seemed to be simultaneously a desire to have things be a certain way with this other person, the expectation that they would be that way, and also fear, doubt, and insecurity that they might not be. While the words ‘I hope’ is a common turn of expression, I felt myself to be stymied and chained to the universe of feelings and emotions that they sought to express. In order to free myself from the underlying passions they expressed, dropping the word from conversation seemed a sensible step in the right direction, but by no means the only step. It has been that way with the word ‘love’. Gary to No 38

Disillusionment is a good word for it. I had been disillusioned before I started on my spiritual quest many years ago. I thought that I was happy living a spiritual kind of life and I thought that I had found something enduring, something that would carry me through thick and thin. I seem to recall the feelings that I had at the time – on the one hand there was a profound feeling of satisfaction and gratification, similar to the feelings an addict has when contemplating his/her stash. There was this feeling of being safe and secure in the bosom of these belief systems and religious bodies that I had been attracted to. There also was a childish excitement and wonder at the full range of gods, demigods, spirits, denominations, sects, churches, etc. I felt that there was an unending supply of the goodies that I needed in order to live the good life. If one did not work (and of course it did not) I could always jump ship at the next port and sign on to something new.

But it all wore away so incredibly fast that it made my head spin. After all, although the feelings and emotions were real enough, the entire edifice was illusionary. When the final straw came, it all collapsed like a house of cards. I actually approached actualism and this list with the same feeling of suppressed excitement and wonder that I approached the various spiritual denominations with which I had been identified. And because one has had this practice at being inducted into these lifestyles, one has to undergo a sort of prolonged period of deprogramming, or perhaps I should say one has to deprogram oneself. The difference with actualism is that you are entirely on your own.

You have to be on your own. That doesn’t mean that others can’t be of help or that there isn’t this process of ‘comparing notes’ going on, but you have to go your own way, and to the instinctual entity that inhabits this flesh-and-blood body, that is an extremely frightening proposition.  Gary to Peter

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 loadstone for me personally is the PCE. Have you ever had one? If so, is ‘expectation’ operative? Here is a state totally devoid of any trace of emotion, including any kind of hopeful expectation, anticipation, worry, dismay, etc, etc. Apperception is what I am aiming at. And I think when apperception occurs, there is no such thing as expectation. Expectation seems to derive from one’s identity. And in a PCE, expectation vanishes without a trace. Everything is imbued with a lustre and a brilliancy and everything, even the most mundane of objects, are a source of delight and wonder. In this state, there is seemingly no ‘me’ and no ‘you’. It is most amazing.

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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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