Others ~ Selected Correspondence

Freedom from the Human Condition

If I take a hallucinogen, I cannot see the hallucinogen... I see only the hallucination and I take it for real if I don’t clearly remember the actual. And if the hallucinogen was injected slowly and without my conscious knowledge, I wouldn’t be able to easily realize that that it is a distorted reality. The beliefs are part of ‘me’ and ‘my’ world just as the hallucinogens are... you take it for granted. but attentiveness can dig all these hidden beliefs and once unearthed, the world-view becomes different and one’s behaviour/actions become different. and emotions are the glues that bury these concepts/beliefs to produce the distorted reality. and when this distorted reality is shared by everybody, one doesn’t even suspect anything wrong about it.

The emotions using beliefs produce a uneven terrain that is real world – happy under such and such circumstances, unhappy under these conditions, malice (rightfully!!!?) under such conditions (unfair!!!!), benevolent under such conditions – such conditions under which such a emotional response is valid is the social programming which manifests in the forms of beliefs that can be seen in one’s communications and behaviour. Now take this concept or idea or possibility – one can be happy and harmless in all conditions ... i.e. one can act in any way that makes the most sense ... but one will not feel malicious towards others or unhappy with oneself in any condition. Does this seem to counter the whole social programming? What is the difference between attacking somebody without malice and with malice? When with malice, one feels angry and one’s objective is to attack the other person because one feels angry for a reason... the anger justifies itself and goes out of control and becomes dissociated from the situation and goes overboard (unless other processes kick in!) ... i.e. the situation is an excuse for the raw, animal malice in oneself that is only waiting for a rightful, respectable, acceptable occasion to leak. As opposed to attacking somebody without malice: you will do only the necessary to save yourself from the situation, no more blood than required, or no blood at all...

You might even consider giving what he wants and just minimize suffering for him and everybody... anger doesn’t choose. It acts!

Etc. etc. No 33, 1.8.2005

I came up with this metaphor:

Human Condition (as ‘me’ as well as the other ‘me’) is a river which tries to push you to the left. You are trying to swim against the stream. The more pure intent you have you will go straight and reach the source of the river :). There may be many obstacles and one may get involved in those obstacles in a specialized way... but the general technique of disentangling with the obstacles and the swimming upstream is given by the method (pay attention to the obstacle and work on disentangling it and move on... don’t get sidetracked... keep the intent in mind... sensibility is like swimming). No 75 Swimming Upstream, 15.5.2005

I have seen more than once that a certain part of the ‘me’ withers away once you see that part in others... essentially the same in the humanity. I then see that that part of ‘me’ which I thought was so mine, is actually so everybody’s. This suddenly deflates the ‘me’ and there is freedom from that.

The program that is ‘me’ came about for a reason. And I wonder if the whole mechanism of this whittling away of the ‘me’ itself is an act of intelligence.... it appears to me that the ‘me’ doesn’t drop itself without resulting in wisdom. Take the above instance… by this process, at the end of the journey, I have seen and understood the ‘me’ in totality... I know how I got there, I know how others can get there, I know that I am not superior to others because I am ahead; the way all this whittling away works is so fascinating and it appears that there are not two ways about it… isn’t it great that there is this intelligence operating in this whole thing? Is it a disembodied supra intelligence guiding me? It is this brain figuring the way intelligently out... but then the way out itself seems to have a fantastic design to it... Who designed all this? How did all this come to be this way? Can I imagine it any other way? Suddenly I find myself in the only world that exists and it is peerless... you have no other world to compare. The peerlessness makes most of the conceptual questions redundant and replaces it with sheer wonder... the questions no more need an answer...

They have become an attitude of wonder which can never be answered with anything... as if the wonder becomes a permanent part of oneself.

I don’t want to mean that one loses the quest and curiosity to wonder. That can go on and will go on. it is just that constant backdrop of resentment that is present in the real world is no more; instead there is the constant backdrop of wonder in all this. No 33, 1.7.2005

What appears to be contradictions to me …

‘Nothing can be known with certainty’ – certainly.

‘There is no matter – only sensations produced by ‘brain!’ exist’

‘Quantum Physics for discussions/highest truth... common sense for everyday life’

‘Ancient wisdom for discussion... common sense for everyday life’

I like your observation as it demonstrates to me that you have been doing some down-to-earth thinking.

Indeed... it is delicious... Thanks to you, Vineeto and Richard. Much of it I owe to all the writings that you have done... suddenly something will make sense… suddenly something else will... the ‘me’ will try to spoil... but something will click in spite of that... it is a very interesting process.

In the beginning, I had ‘problems’ with your style and Vineeto’s – I thought you were nitpicking, confrontational etc. So I can see where others are coming from when they attack you. I have since then realized that such feelings were products of my own malicious and sorrowful world-view (which was reacting to being challenged). Now when I read yours or Vineeto’s (Richard was getting a ‘special’ treatment as a ‘Guru’ but now I think of him as an ‘expert’) make 100% sense to me.

The tendency of human beings to indulge in abstract thinking, aka philosophy, is legendary, particularly so amongst the males of the species and it has done nothing but produce a maize of contradictions and a plethora of obscurations as well as endless opportunities for argumentations.

In 1980, John Lennon, a man who had considerable wealth, fame and power, wrote a song for his son and a line from it went: ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’. It strikes me that he could equally well have written ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy philosophizing about it.’

I come from a different background than you and have valued philosophy and have spent enormous time philosophizing as well as reading a lot of philosophies. However, I don’t value them anymore – given that actualism is available. It is a lot of time wasting... I could not have said this a while ago though – I guess my ‘social identity as a philosopher, thinker’ has lost his grounds.

I remember being struck by the inanity of this propensity to philosophize when contemplating my own mortality and I wrote about it in my journal at the time –

In my experience there is nothing like contemplating the inevitability – the 100% certainty – of one’s own death to get one thinking back down-to-earth.

In another thread Richard has made it clear about how death takes away the ‘grimness’ or ‘seriousness’ out of living... thus ended my ‘seriousness’ to some extent :).

All the philosophies are filled with contradictions... they are not liveable, practicable at all. They are good only for idle talk. Which is okay, if there is not so much suffering. No 75 to Peter, 11.5.2005

Hello,

I decided to comment on your post because I saw many similarities between your daughter and myself some years back. Although I was fortunately unsuccessful in my attempt to take my own life away, I still remember what I went through and so do my parents. However, as I never finished, or was never finished by, the last step…my parents never knew the likes of your grief. But I have seen enough to wish it upon no one.

I also sincerely wish your daughter had not had to go through with it, and I also wish you had never felt the resulting pain because of it, and that is why I commit myself entirely to the purpose of doing something about it.

My grandmother has seen many people come and go, nevertheless she keeps ticking and quite well I may add, all because of her faith. She needs to believe that she will be reunited with her loved ones once she dies since the very foundation of her life has been built on love and loving others. She is undoubtedly the most devoted Catholic I have ever met and it is this faith that gives ‘zest’ to her life. She will always help when she can and when she can’t she’ll pray for ‘that’ someone/thing else to; altruism at it’s real worldly and spiritual best.

Now, could you ever see my grandmother as a practicing Actualist? If your reply was no, then it is probably obvious for you why. She does not want anything to do with it … she could if she would but she wont; there are too many and too valuable interests at risk. That’s why I think the most successful people with Actualism are those who honestly realize they ‘have nothing else to lose’. Something my father said to me the other day about Actualism ‘…it would mean that the last 48 years of my life have been an illusion.’ So of course, out of pride, he cares not one bit for it. See, despite all of my grandmother’s prayers, love and support and my father’s love, romantic mysticism and cleverness … I came to the conclusion that anything after death, including nothing, had to be better than life. So I attempted suicide … and that was where I believed my peace was to be found.

Having a wonderful loving family, and friends, will not end the human condition. Hoping for an afterlife will not end the human condition. Believing that there is no solution will not end the human condition. Conforming to anything within the human condition will most definitely not end the human condition. My grandmother, as well as my father, both have the best of intentions … yet they are unintentionally perpetuating the human condition, thus contributing to it, and so are you and I.

Without feeling guilty it is plain for me to see, now more than ever, that I am responsible – along with every other of my species – for the misery and chaos, which interferes with actuality.

So is it not just incredible that both you and I have stumbled – a good word to use from my experience – across something that says, and ultimately proves, that it is possible not only to stop suffering but start enjoying life as well? And that it assures you do everything and the only thing possible that will eventually and permanently – if due course is to be had – end further suicides like the one you experienced with your daughter.

Even if I were a strong objector against Actualism, soon I would come to realize the silliness of my protests, because in the end it is no longer a matter of who is the cleverest, or most passionate, but of who cares the most.

All the best to you. No 47 to No 52

I wonder if you meant to say,

‘If you yourself are (NOT?) dissatisfied with the Human Condition, how can you jump to the assumption that everyone else is?

Did you mean if I am NOT dissatisfied with the Human Condition, how can I jump to the assumption that everyone else is dissatisfied? My insertion of the word ‘NOT’ to make sense of your question. If you don’t want the word ‘not’ inserted, then I don’t really understand your question. If that is what you meant – then I should clarify that I am quite dissatisfied with the Human Condition – which is why I’m hanging around. But this doesn’t mean that its all or merely ‘doom and gloom.’’

OK. You said in the original post that you were dissatisfied with the HC. Simple enough. But isn’t it then an assumption then to say ‘So, yes, we are all dissatisfied with the ‘human condition’?’

That’s all – that’s my question. Let’s take it the other way: let’s say that you are not dissatisfied with the human condition. Does it make sense to say that everyone else in the world is not dissatisfied with the HC too?

I personally do not think that I can automatically assume that every human being on the face of the earth is dissatisfied, or conversely dissatisfied, with their lot. Since I have participated on this list, I have not seen people beating a path to find out how to be happy and harmless. I see far more ingenious arguments, objections, and downright slash attacks on the method towards becoming happy and harmless.

You say that you are quite dissatisfied with the Human Condition. Good. So am I. Yet you go on to say that it is not all or merely ‘doom and gloom’. This made me think of the phenomenon of war, something that typifies the human condition. People have been fussing, feuding and fighting since the dawn of time. Many people enjoy, indeed exult, in killing their fellow human beings and devising ever new, more destructive means to do so. From people I know who have participated in wars, I have found out that a war is not always ‘doom and gloom’, as you termed it.

It is often long periods of boredom, tedium, preparation, a lot of sitting around waiting for something to happen. So, it is certainly not all doom and gloom. Yet 100,000 million human beings have been killed in wars in the last hundred years, not to mention the untold suffering, disruption, torture, rape, etc, etc that have occurred and are occurring now as we speak.

So since, in the same manner, war is ‘not all or merely doom and gloom’ does it make sense to participate in it, support it, fuel it, and so forth? I think you will have to perhaps humour me a bit here, as I am trying to make a point and I am using warfare to illustrate my point in connection with what you have said about the Human Condition. Maybe you will think this bit about war is out of context with what you said originally, but I don’t think so.

And I must also say that, on the whole, I have found the information on the Actual Freedom website and Richard’s website to be a far more balanced presentation of the Human Condition than what you portray it to be. I have not gotten the impression from what has been said in all the many hundreds of thousands of words that the HC is all or merely ‘doom and gloom’. Such would be a slanted and unbalanced presentation. There is joy as well as pathos in the Human Condition (I am speaking personally here). And there is cruelty, brutality, suffering, and crushing injustice in major doses. Speaking personally, if the HC were a cake-walk, I would not be here either. But it is not a cake-walk, and some things in life happened to me to get me to this point of questioning it all and talking with other human beings to find a way out of it. Completely out of it. Pull the rip cord – take the jump. Not just settle for rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. You can do that of course if you want, it’s your business. I think this would be what is meant by saying adding Actualism as a clip-on to your belief system.

Yes, felicity is present in the Human Condition. But would you want to just settle for occasional felicitous moments, or the direct experiencing (at least while this flesh and blood body is still alive) of the purity and benignity of this perfect universe on a 24/7 basis?

Why settle for crumbs when you can have the whole cake and eat it too? Gary to No 37

There is a terrific weight of conditioning and learning making up the socially inculcated social identity, not to mention hundreds of thousands of years of life on earth contributing to the strength of instinctual passions, genetically inherited by all creatures.

This is not so easily sloughed off, as I have found out up to this point. It takes much determined effort to investigate the nature and substance of these re-occurring feelings and emotions, yes. But with enough determined investigation, they seem to melt away of their own once one turns their full awareness to them. It is well worth the time and effort spent investigating these things, even if at the time it seems like a joy-killer – actually the feelings and passions being investigated are the joy-killers, not the other way around.

The experience of stress is interesting in itself. What seems to cause stress often is nothing other than having competing demands to perform complicated tasks within limited time constraints. When I have ‘stress’, I feel that I am being pulled in too many directions at once and hence am not effective. Or, ‘stress’ can be the smoke screen for other feelings and emotions -anger, annoyance, frustration, etc. All these things seem to be involved. I have devoted some attention over the years to becoming more detail-oriented and organized. I think this helps reduce the stress of being overwhelmed with details. So I think there are sometimes task demands that get involved with stress, particularly job stress. Then the sensible thing seems to be to prioritize, organize, and such, and if one cannot do these things, one needs to learn to do so. And there are the emotional aspects of stress, such as eliminating anger, frustration, etc. Another sensible thing to do seems to be, when one is experiencing stress, break it down into what one is actually experiencing – is it anger, frustration, boredom, exhaustion? Name it, first of all, look at it, examine what is happening, and use the silly-sensible comparison in order to determine what is the next most sensible thing to do.

The longer I am at this, the more I realize that the past is irrelevant to living in peace and harmony with other human beings. There is always this going back to the past – one’s past history, one’s tribe with their mores and traditions, the ‘lessons’ of the past, etc. The past has taught us nothing about living in peace and harmony and reliance on the past is reliance on the ‘Tried and Failed’. Something completely, totally new is needed. ‘I’ am the result of all these past influences. ‘I’ am what is preventing peace and harmony on earth from being realized.

Breaking free from the past is indeed frightening, but the rewards are legion. There is no contentment within the Human Condition. The search for peace whilst living in the Human Condition is like a dog chasing its tail. One tries and tries but never gets there.

‘There’ is ‘here’, right under our noses, when ‘I’ with my cares and woes, loves and hates, dreams and hopes, ideals and schemes, plans and goals, is not. There is nothing else to compare with being here now in this present moment of being alive. It is so simple, in a way quite ordinary, but definitely an incomparable experience. Gary to Peter

The current world crisis is tremendously fertile ground for one’s own ‘self’-investigations, I agree. One sees the Human Condition is action in the most extravagant ways possible. One sees full-fledged savagery in action and one can, unless one is completely self-immolated, feel the tug of these emotions and feelings in one’s own heart. Yet whilst practicing actualism, I have found that my emotional life is curiously attenuated. The only discernible emotional reaction, and I am not even sure that it was an emotional reaction, to the news of the World Trade Centre collapse was that the hairs on the back of my neck stood up for a few seconds. I have felt none of the horror, shock, resentment, desire for revenge and retaliation. Surprise yes.

There has been a recognition of the fear too that is sweeping humanity at present time as the hostilities are about to commence. It is fear that binds ‘me’ to humanity, indeed, that makes ‘me’ a human being, and it is fear, along with the other savage passions and tender passions that is making life on this otherwise fair planet a living hell. But it seems that everybody else has gone off in the wrong direction looking for a completely wrong reason for the mess that humanity is in.

Meanwhile, life from here has not changed in any significant respect. There is no fear in the lovely fall foliage, nor in the lovely sun-dappled and dew-dropped grass on the lawn. There is no fear in the hills that surround us, nor in the cool breeze that gently caresses my cheeks as I make my way yet again to the car for the ride to get breakfast this morning. The hills will still be here after ‘I’ am gone. As ‘I’ am doomed to extinction anyway, why not make the best of it right now? Gary to Peter

If ‘I’ am humanity, and humanity is ‘me’, how generalizable are the insights and realizations that I have gotten from my own ‘self’-investigations? A little? A lot?

Recent reports on the human genome project I found interesting. In recent news coverage, it was announced that human beings share almost completely identical genes.

In other words, there is much, much less variation genetically among and between human beings than previously believed. The startling finding of genetic uniformity among human beings is making the concept of race, at least on the genetic level, outdated. Notwithstanding one’s personal findings through one’s active self-investigations, I think this finding from the genome project lends credence to what we are saying about humans sharing an identical genetically encoded survival program.

Similar to what you wrote about not wanting to be an emotional cripple or an emotional crippler have been my own discoveries of the total despair at being a human being and living in the Human Condition. If one tries to make the best of life whilst living within the human condition, one will have only momentary reprieves from sadness and despair, fright and sorrow, pain and suffering. Given that one is dismantling the overlying social identity, with its instilled values, ethics, and morality, one will experience at rock bottom the intensity of the feelings and passions that emanate from the core instinctual passions – fear, aggression, nurture, and desire. In my experience, these instinctual passions arise quite unbidden, and further fuel the intent to find the third option – elimination of the instinctual passion that causes pain and suffering. Gary to Peter

The very act of observing, questioning into, uncovering, and investigating ‘who one is’ is indeed a radical step to take with far-reaching consequences. It is often easy to overlook this. Your words of encouragement here I would do well to remember at those most difficult times when investigating a particularly deeply entrenched emotion, attitude, or value. Yes, we are trained growing up and later not to think for ourselves and above all else not to question ‘normality’. When one sees the barbarity and insanity that has passed for ‘normal behaviour’ one has definitely taken a confident step on the road to being free from the whole stinking, rotten mess that is the Human Condition.

We are taught to take on these beliefs, morals, ethics, and feelings through a combination of reward and punishment. Many of the hurts one has experienced in life, particularly in childhood, come from the brutalizing process of enculturation and socialization by which one’s authentic experience is nearly completely eradicated and one is pressured and coerced to follow the herd, to become another fine upstanding citizen of one’s nation or country, all to willing to sacrifice one’s body and one’s life for yet another unliveable ideal.

I’m patting Peter. Just to explain what was going on: I was experiencing for several days (this is now, oh, about two weeks ago) a rather intense fear and dread the likes of which I have not had for quite some time. It all seemed to be centred around work and somehow tied into the supervisor incident. A couple of times I awoke in the morning with my mind racing, experiencing considerable anger and resentment (also related to the fear) and also a palpable sense of foreboding that something terrible was going to happen to me (loss of my job, loss of my relationship, insanity and being locked up were some of the specific fears I had). I was helped considerably by my reading, at the time, of the writings about fear on the Actual Freedom website and some of Richard’s correspondence.

I gradually began to piece together what was happening to me and to see what a radical step I had taken to begin to undo this social and instinctual programming. The fear diminished greatly in the course of one day and I had a PCE which lasted about 30 minutes which was a very beautiful experience. I was interested to experiment a little and see if I could go a little further with the experience, go a little deeper as it were, but no sooner did ‘I’ resolve to go further into it than I had the sense of wanting to back off of it and retreat back from it. So there is this back and forth process going on with me, on the one hand of wanting to go further towards self-immolation, and on the other hand of wanting to retreat back to the safe and familiar, well-worn, trodden paths of Humanity. It was a curious experience: the fleetingness of the PCE, how quickly it is gone, and ‘I’ return. As soon as ‘I’ thought ‘I’ was going to do something with the experience, it was gone. I am finding it helpful, as was pointed out in Richard’s writing on Fear, to see that ‘I’ am fear, that actually there is no separation between ‘me’ and fear, fear and ‘me’ are one and the same. Gary to Peter

I am glad that you wrote me with your observations. I have similar insights into the working of ‘my’ condition, and I am amazed quite often at the things I find. I also find that I am frequently amazed at the goings-on of those about me ... there is the ‘clear-eyed’ seeing of the human condition, yes ... and there is something else ... there is a shaking of the head in amazement at the monumental stupidity of remaining ‘human’. I can only call it stupidity, but I am probably being too judgemental, for if people do not know there is another way, they can hardly be called stupid. Perhaps what I am amazed at is my own ‘stupidity’, the foolishness of my own cooption in the same mess that plagues the rest of humanity, which I am freeing myself from now. Why tread the same weary paths, when something totally new has emerged for the first time on the human stage? Gary to Peter

It’s fascinating, yet it is dreadful, isn’t it? War and preparation for war, particularly in the computer age, is so impersonal. Aggression in human beings is instinctual but it is also socially programmed and conditioned. One of the things that occurred to me in reading this is that mock combat is engaged in by animals, for instance, in whitetail bucks (which I have had a lot of experience pursuing through the forests). Whitetail bucks ‘attack’ tree branches and battle with them in the same way they battle with other rival bucks in competition for territory and the sexually receptive does in heat. This is so obviously patterned instinctual behaviour. Do we regard mock combat in humans, playing video games with depictions of combat, as instinctual or socially programmed? Perhaps it is both. Whatever it is, it is programmed nonetheless and the program can be eliminated.

The Gulf War saw the emergence of ‘smart bombs’ by which the enemy could supposedly be wiped out by a neat and clean surgical strike. The carnage could then be graphically displayed on pretty charts and blow ups of the operation in press briefing rooms for the TV audience’s satisfaction. The whole horrible, ghastly element of war and the destruction of other human beings is removed from one, reducing it to a point value or something resembling a soccer match. I have been reading a book about World War 1. There is a fantastical element to these world conflagrations, of which we have seen two in the last century. It is hard to understand the forces that would impel so many ordinary people to destroy other people the way they did and still do. The level of carnage and butchery involved in the trenches of France was beyond comprehension. I must admit too that there is a level of fascination for me with it all. Perhaps reading about it all is a vicarious satisfaction of aggressive instincts (?) It is clear that people are fascinated by violence and violent death. Anyone, at least in this country, can turn on the TV and see plenty of murders, beatings, etc and ad nauseam.

I wonder, however, what happens when playing video games and engaging in computer mock combat and ‘lock-ons’ fail to satisfy people’s blood lust. Then they want the real thing. There is something ritualistic about not only warfare but also sporting competitions. British troops going to the attack ‘over the top’ in WW1 kicked a rugby ball over to the opposing trench, almost like the whole thing is a big game. I discerned a long time ago the violence involved in sports – in high school I was a football player and the coaches were extremely brutal and abusive. Football practices were very much like military boot camp, the mentality was much the same. I could see where sporting competition directly correlates to military training and war. There is a very thin line between the two.

Yes, I think this is true. People do not connect their religious/spiritual beliefs to conflict between peoples and conflict between religions. Religious people can be quite violent, as I found out in my time with the Quakers. Group members often maligned the beliefs of other religious sects, maintaining a sense of superiority, and there were plenty of squabbles within the sect between people with different beliefs and outlooks. It all seemed to me to be a battle for supremacy, and I got sick of it. I saw my own ridiculous efforts to ‘keep the peace’ or ally myself with other factions, often feeling caught in the middle. At other times, I tried, by hook or crook, to impose my beliefs on others in my own bid for supremacy. Despite the Quakerly religious admonition to adhere to a non-violent way of life, conflict within the sect seemed rife. Eventually something, probably the desire to be free of it all, tugged at me so strongly, that I quit and never went back. Gary to Peter

I find it interesting that in actualism, we not only seek but we find. Psychic and psychological self-immolation is a final resting place where the contradictory and conflicting drives and instincts are not only stilled but eliminated totally, along with every last vestige of the alien psychological entity taking up residence in this flesh-and-blood body. Freud may have been a psychological and psychic adventurer (he regarded himself as such), but he stopped short, like so many before him. ‘Integration’ and cure ala Freud is a complacent resignation to living within the Human Condition, a kind of fiddling with the controls.

Our age, and particularly our parent’s generation, was enormously influenced by psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalysis. I myself received costly and long-term analytic therapy when younger. Psychoanalysis, and it’s successors like Object Relations and Ego Psychology, maintained the view that the very first few years of life are of enormous impact in determining what occurs subsequently in later life. Lately, I have been questioning this view. I find that remembrances and understandings that I have of what happened in my childhood years have gone into and, in some way, been incorporated into an image of myself that I have being a certain way. In this way, I think sometimes that my understandings of childhood events have contributed to a mythology and identity that I have of myself, that they have gone into ‘who’ I think I am, not what I am – a flesh-and-blood body sensately and apperceptively aware. Thus, they are part and parcel of ‘my’ memories, why I think ‘I’ behave the way I do, etc, etc. We have long stressed here on this list that one need not go so far back in time to uncover that which is impeding being happy and harmless in the present moment. The goal is being happy and harmless, not endlessly rehashing doubtful analyses of childhood happenings. Gary to Peter

I notice that I have a particular tendency to berate myself for feeling or displaying anger. This was undoubtedly conditioned into me with such parental admonitions as ‘Don’t you get angry with me, buster!’ Other people I come into contact with seem so uninhibited in their way of venting their spleen, of showing anger or making a big show of how angry they are. I often chuckle to myself because ‘I’ am not like that. But it is interesting, isn’t it, to stand back and realize how completely arbitrary this social conditioning is? I don’t know if ‘arbitrary’ is the right word for it. I mean, ‘I’ could just as easily be some other way based on what I was taught growing up, what values I imbibed from the elders and the tribe.

From time to time, in the past, I have had sharp, angry reactions to things that have happened, like protecting my turf at work. It has been a long time since I have had this type of reaction. These angry reactions were quite unpleasant to me and actually fuelled my search for a way to eliminate them. I would perceive that I was being taken advantage of, would assert ‘my rights’, and become quite angry and insistent. These reactions were so lightning fast that I am convinced an instinctual reaction had been triggered, because it seemed that any attempt to reason out the feeling and try to be more sensible about it was impossible. I think this instinctual anger and aggression is very destructive. It is this that is spreading mayhem throughout the world. A complete elimination of the instincts is much to be favoured, but one cannot pick and choose: I cannot, say, get rid of anger but hold on to fear – similarly, I cannot get rid of aggression yet hold on to nurture. The whole kit and caboodle has to go. But again, I have to be careful here: ‘I’ cannot get rid of anger, because ‘I’ am anger. But I can dig into it, investigate these feelings and emotions intensively when they come up, turn it over and over and become intimately familiar with the morphology of anger, intimately familiar with the morphology of fear. And there is the remembrance of the PCE as the guiding light – the sure knowledge that the best is not only possible but right at hand, never far away. Gary to Peter

At first, I puzzled over why you would see Freud as having mystical/ spiritual roots. While the case is clear with Jung, Freud always struck me as decidedly non-spiritual. But as I mused over this matter and looked into it a little, I see you may be right. Freud was the originator of Drive Theory. What was new and radical about Freud’s theories was primarily the importance they gave to the unconscious and instincts, primarily the sex and aggressive drives and instincts. While I am no Freudian, I thought I detected in some of the actualism writings some slight Freudian influence, particularly the explanation of how ethics, morals, and socially inculcated and programmed values are designed to keep the savage instincts at bay, and thus place the instinct-driven individual at some opposition to society. Apparently, in his later years, Freud revised and refined his drive theory with the addition of some spiritual sounding stuff.

There is a matter I am a bit confused on. It is this: if one rejects all belief in spirituality and religion, rejects all belief in a metaphysical realm or an immortal soul, then that makes one an atheist, does it not? Richard has said that he is a dyed-in-the-wool (words mine) atheist. I feel that I am an atheist now too. Yet atheism is a belief, is it not? If belief, any belief, is the problem, then what good does it do to discard one system of belief and pick up another? It seems that by saying one is an atheist, one is adopting a sort of identity all over again, discarding one identity and taking up another. This is sort of the same conundrum that I have with actualism. If one takes it up as a sort of banner or identity to hide behind, then one is not eliminating the identity and discovering the actual, one is adopting it as a ‘clip-on’ to one’s belief system, as you have said. So, I’m not sure where that leaves one. Is one an atheist or not? Does it matter? Maybe this issue is not important. While I do not belief in God or Truth, I see plenty of evidence of the foothold these beliefs have in my psyche. Just for instance, the word ‘God’ slips out in my speech once in awhile, as in saying ‘For God’s sake’, ‘God Almighty’, etc, etc. I am wondering what it is about the psyche of human beings that inclines them toward belief in a spiritual or supernatural realm. It just occurred to me as I was writing this that, of course, there is a direct correlation between the psyche and God. If one regards oneself as a psyche, that one’s psyche has a substantiality and enduring nature, then one is identifying oneself as a being. It is a short and rather natural jump to worship and reverence of a supernatural Being, a Creator God or Gods.

If one is living in the actual, if one has a continuous and direct experience of the actual, then one is accused of being deluded, being insane. Sometimes such a person is regarded as being extremely dangerous, extremely subversive. For some reason, one who is gay and blithesome is a great threat to people who live in Reality. Such a one either becomes the but of jokes, scorned by so-called normal people, or dismissed as a lunatic. One of the basic reasons for this is that one who is actually free cannot be controlled by the herd. It occurs to me in this context to comment on the similarity between standard medical questioning and psychiatric interviewing for diagnosis and the techniques developed by Inquisitors during the Spanish Inquisition. Both are a narrow search for deviancy from the norm. The discovery of this deviancy by the questioner or interviewer lends credence or reality to the diagnosis which then becomes a static way of describing a living, breathing human being. People carry these diagnoses throughout their life. The diagnoses are assumed to have an independent reality and verifiability that often they do not, as revealed by research that shows an amazing lack of concordance between the diagnoses arrived at by independent interviewers.

Much of psychiatry, psychology, and social work are really very conservative activities, concerned with dealing with extreme aberrations and returning the patient or client to ‘normality’ as soon as possible. As most social work students soon find out, much of their practice as social workers is going to be concerned with social control issues. As a social worker, you become a representative of so-called ‘normal’ society to your clients. You embody the time-honoured ethics, values, and mores of the greater society, the society that subsidizes you by giving you employment. Were you not to represent these mores and values, you would not long find yourself employed in the field. Mental health work, I find, is extremely controlling and paternalistic. I have often been amazed at how condescending mental health workers, including myself, are towards their clients. While I can think of worse ways to make a living, there is a great deal about it that I am dissatisfied with. In the paragraph you wrote above, I think you have hit on why these activities do not work – they attempt to return the suffering client or patient to the pattern of normality valued by the society, the same pattern of normality that has produced the causalities in the first place. It is like treating war neuroses behind the lines in a tidy field hospital and then immediately returning your cured charges to the front lines. Changing the pattern of society, as the social engineers and politicians would have us do, would not work because we are that pattern. We are violent. We are aggressive. We are fearful and acquisitive, etc, etc. Gary to Peter

There is something that I have been realizing recently and, while it may seem to be rather obvious to some, I thought I would comment on it here while it is still fresh in my mind. In your next post to me (which I have not yet got around to responding to), you made the following observation:

We don’t live in caves and hunt like animals anymore, we just instinctually act as if we do because that is the way we have been programmed to act.

Recently it occurred to me that is exactly what happens to make life such a grim business. I was musing on why human beings are in such psychological and psychic warfare with each other, something you also commented on in the previous post. I was wondering why I feel so much strain each day, strain to do the ‘right thing’, to accomplish, to ‘succeed’. Life, which can be so enjoyable, so free and easy, under other circumstances, ordinarily becomes for ‘me’ a grim battle to survive. There is a striving and a strain introduced into the whole business of life which is really totally unnecessary. On the days that I go to work, I ordinarily feel this strain as a constant undercurrent to my activities. I am constantly weighting my actions, thinking about what I ‘should’ be doing, and how what I am actually doing is measuring up to this internal standard of what I ‘should’ be doing. I am sure this sounds quite neurotic, but perhaps some readers here may identity with this. And I really think what it amounts to is that there is this unceasing instinctual battle going on which causes one to never be quite satisfied, to always being struggling, striving, accomplishing, etc.

Sometimes I stop and look around me at other human beings scurrying around, always in a hurry to get somewhere, always driven on by some force, whether it be economic, social, or whatever. So many people so obviously unhappy with their lives. And I am unhappy with my life if I persist in living out my life as this ceaseless struggle, this constant battle. I guess what I am trying to point to is the striving and the strain introduced into life when the instincts are operative. Then fear rules the roost, rather than intelligence and sensibility. Gary to Peter

If one person could become free from the Human Condition, maybe, just maybe, I can too. I have had to determine for myself if what Richard is talking about is indeed the genuine article, no small task for one living in the Human Condition. Not having met him, nor the rest of you, I can only determine this through the written words in the books, the writings, and on this list. In a recent post I expressed my doubts about it all, and also the fear that the words seemingly inspired. One other sense that I had, which I have from time to time, is that the whole thing is an elaborate hoax. At one time, I (early on I think) I even imagined Richard laughing his ass off at me, a damn fool, buying his pitch. This is, I think, an indication that one is approaching the Actual Freedom writings on the basis of trust and faith , rather than simply whether they make sense or not. At this later point, it is difficult for me to understand the state of mind of those who think that Richard is forcing them to adopt his ‘viewpoint’ (which it is not), because it has never been my experience that he is forcing anyone to do anything. If one wishes to remain miserable, sorrowful, and malicious, then that is the end of the matter. But for those who are vitally interested in an Actual Freedom from the Human Condition, he, and the others on this list for that matter too, are more than accommodating in his/their writings. One cannot approach Actual Freedom on the basis of faith and trust, but that is probably exactly what spiritual seekers will do, imagining this to be some kind of cult or new religion. Since the spiritual search is all about faith and trust, with spiritual seekers eagerly lapping up the most absurd notions spoon fed to them by the God-men and God women, it is not surprising that spiritual seekers will impose their background of belief on Actual Freedom, turning it into some kind of religion, or turn Richard into some kind of Guru. Gary to Peter

That is the commonly accepted view. I am reminded in this connection, however, that in school we were taught the same thing about the Kaiser and German militarism in the First World War. I recently was browsing a book in the book store about WW1 wherein the author developed the interesting thesis that the English were actually responsible for the start of the war in that they consistently provoked the Germans and their allies and deliberately and with malicious intent engaged in the kind of sabre-rattling and expansionist policies that goaded on the war, with the resultant bloodshed. This is quite the opposite from the usual view. Actually, I would say that since every human being inherited the blind instincts that nature genetically endowed all sentient creatures with as a rough and ready software package for survival, that all the human beings that lived at that time were responsible for the war and what happened in the war, that would include the pacifists, the isolationists, the politicians, the priests and ministers, rabbis, gurus, and every sane, normal human being living on the globe at the time. Maybe that seems to be going a bit too far? What do you think?

... a species that gets to the stage of MAD is not intelligent, it is a species driven by senseless passion. To bring a permanent end to this MAD-ness would undoubtedly be a triumph of intelligence over blind passion.

And because ‘I’ live in fear, indeed ‘I’ am fear, my intelligence is hamstrung by the instinctual passions and cannot therefore operate freely. To me, mad and afraid go together – it is exceedingly difficult for me to tell where fear starts, leaves off, and MAD begins. I have noticed at times in the past while driving that when a careless driver swerves into my path, there is the first instantaneous burst of movement to avoid the danger and then, sometimes, this is followed a bit later by an angry reaction (‘You f...ing jerk, watch where you’re going’). So the anger seems to come a bit later. Sometimes too the fear comes a little later. I don’t know if that makes any sense – maybe it is just my labelling of the fear or anger that comes later and not the emotion itself, but at least what I explained above seems like what happens. Often though, there is the instantaneous reaction to avoid the danger and no anger, no fear. I much prefer it that way. Gary to Peter

Sometimes I get disappointed writing because I think I have nothing original to say. I berate myself because I see that my writing is just a rehash of what others are saying, and I seem to only blend and combine ideas that I get elsewhere. Sometimes I compare myself to others and come out short. Richard is obviously a very intelligent man and has an easy command of the language. You also write well and particularly in your recent posts your writing is crisp and clear. I think I also write well and I have had people compliment me on things that I have written. As for berating myself, I am sure it does not do much good or any good at all and it is something else for me to look at. In the real world, the Land of Lament, there is a heavy emphasis on developing ‘self’-esteem, which is a sense of pride for one’s competencies, strengths, and achievements. Conversely, there is a lack of ‘self’-esteem, or what people call ‘low self-esteem’, as evidenced by an extremely critical attitude towards oneself or berating oneself for lack of achievement and inner worth. I am coming to see that Humanity, the society, and the community needs a steady supply of people with ‘self’-esteem. In short, Society needs a steady supply of human beings who are ‘selves’ who either have ‘self-esteem or who don’t and want to have it. In this way, society and the community shape and mould the individual according to it’s selfish demands, and it demands ‘self’sacrifice because it is ultimately selfish, like the individual self. So this ‘self’-beratement, the flip side of the coin from ‘self’esteem, is evidence of ‘me’ struggling to stay in existence. It is ‘me’ as the parasitic entity flexing its muscles and attempting to maintain its’ foothold on this flesh and blood body. And as Vineeto recently pointed out, ‘I’ am redundant. In fact, ‘I’ am doomed.

*

I used to believe that ‘we are spiritual beings having a human experience’. Now I see that we are human beings having very, very real human experiences. And it sucks. The only way out of this besides either getting permanently stoned out of your mind, committing suicide, or following the traditional path of spiritual Enlightenment, is to discover the actual. And as it has been said many times before, the actual is right here right under our noses 100% of the time. Given what you have said about the intertwinement of the normal Real world and the Spiritual World, it would seem that the Real world and the Spiritual World are synonymous, and that ‘normal’ people are ‘spiritual’ and do subscribe to ‘spiritual values’. I used to wonder what was meant by the phrase ‘spiritual values’, and now I see that what is meant is Faith, Trust, Hope, Belief. These are all spiritual beliefs and values and these are things that valued, from what I can tell, by every human being that I have encountered. I have yet to encounter a human being that would tell you to abandon Hope. Gary to Peter

At first I thought there might be a misunderstanding of what I was saying but now I don’t think so. I was saying that the emotional reactions that are occurring in the body and the subjective experience of the emotion ‘seem real’, and maybe it was a poor choice of words. They are real enough – emotions can be studied, they can be observed by studying heart rate, galvanic skin response, etc. They have observable consequences.

Then there are the hormonal and neuronal mechanisms involved in fright, anger, etc. So they are undoubtedly real. But by saying ‘seems real’, perhaps I conveyed the wrong message, because I distinctly remember being in that delusionary spiritual state, often telling myself things like ‘I’m in Heaven right now. None of this is really happening’ or ‘I rest in God’s Love. I am only Love. All else is not really happening’. These delusionary dissociative states are a denial of the reality of emotions, emotional reactions, and their associated destructive consequences in the real world of people and world events. What I meant to convey is that emotions are not actual, and one can find that out by remembering any Pure Consciousness Experiences they may have had – these are experiences of the actual. So, one has to be very careful, I think, not to be sucked into the delusionary state of denying emotions and the consequences that emotions have wrought in the world as it is while realizing that the emotions and passions are superimposed over and prevent a direct experiencing of the actual. Gary to Peter

The human social identity is rooted in comparison to others – we are taught by reward and punishment to conform to society’s standards – to be ‘good like Johnny or Betty’, ‘not to be bad like Tom or Sally’. As children our performance and behaviour is constantly ranked and rated at home and school in comparison to others as we are imbibed with a social conscience. Conformity and mediocrity become our role models and we have only two choices – either to humbly acquiesce or blindly rebel.

Humanity rewards conformity and punishes rebellion, giving rise to endless cycles of endemic necessary suffering and senseless necessary struggle. The only way out of this mess is to become autonomous – to break free of the shackles that continually hobble us to comparing ourselves to others who are similarly afflicted by the human condition. I found the only way to do this was to do it – thinking about it, worrying about it, or fearing the consequences of freedom only wasted even more time.

Had I not been so keen to compare myself with others, I doubt the situation at work would have as seriously upset my equilibrium as it did. In any event, one’s ‘equilibrium’ is extremely precarious: most people seem to react rather violently to even minor changes in their circumstances. The whole recent situation at work got me in touch with my fear of failure, and I even felt that I had failed at actualism. I don’t think I have expressed this before, but I have feared that I was a failure at that which I am most interested in – peace and harmony with those around me. I also think in some respects I am afraid to practice actualism because I am afraid I will end up bereft of companionship, home, sanity, income, and comfort. I think very subtly I have had the attitude: ‘So, this is what it all has gotten you – now you’ve lost your job and embarrassed yourself – see what you get!’ Sometimes it gets so scary I wish I could turn tail and run back to the ‘safety’ of the Human Condition. Actually, thinking about it, I suppose I could if I really wanted.

So, Peter, I think I am finding the doing part very difficult. I seem to be spinning my wheels a lot fearing the consequences.

*

What I have come to see in my writing is that my experience is typical to all, in that I am a flesh and blood human being born into the human condition exactly like everyone else, and therefore my experience in becoming free of the human condition will be relevant to all. The usefulness of our conversations is that we on this list are the very first to be taking the direct route to an actual freedom from the human condition. The usefulness of anyone interested in writing about their own process is that a breadth of experiences will be recorded and made freely available on the web-site for anyone who is interested – for those who are doing it now and for those who will inevitably follow.

Yes, I think I can see that my behaviour, which I am prone to severely castigate myself for, was little different than most people in a similar situation. When one’s ass is on the line, one can see many people kick into instinctually malicious, fearful, or aggressive behaviours. I think I am little different in this respect. Continued practice of actualism probably resulted in a situation where I was able to stand up for myself and assert my autonomy rather than remaining miserable and bringing my job home with me. Sometimes the best thing you can do is cut your losses, chalk it all up, and move on to something new. Often when I work on posts such as this, I can feel the fresh flush of excitement to be on the leading edge of something of monumental importance to the human species. It is something entirely new, and we are the ones who are actually doing it right now. Although I may occasionally stumble and fall on the way, each of these ‘setbacks’ is pregnant with information about ‘me’ and presents the opportunity to see for myself just what we are talking about when we talk about the Human Condition. Gary to Peter

And what you mention here: ‘to seek solace in the hope of an other-worldly paradise’, in other words, the despisal of life on earth, the despisal of being a human being, the hatred of this flesh-and-blood body and other flesh-and-blood bodies and even this physical universe has been a spur to violence and mayhem for countless hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, we have the priest blessing the battleship, the minister exhorting the troops massed for battle, and the dying words of millions ‘I am going to a better place than this’. If these examples seem too extreme, one need only consider that the logical outcome of the view that ‘peace on earth is ultimately impossible’ is the very destruction of life on earth. But spiritual people and spiritual leaders are more cunning than that, and they will make a great show of being concerned about peace – thus, spiritual people will have ‘prayer-ins’ for peace, involve themselves in peace movements, lobbying against defence expenditures, marches for peace, etc. All these collective activities make people feel that they are doing something to bring about peace on earth, but the upshot of it all is that the root cause of war and violence has not been uncovered and addressed – the Human Condition. Not to mention the fact of the violence inherent in these so-called ‘peaceful’ activities.

I can well relate to your period of discipleship and the bizarreness of your complete immersion in the spiritual community. While perhaps I did not go to some of the extremes that you did, I can easily relate to the emotion of devotion, and unquestioning obedience of the Master, and the complete suspension of intelligent and critical thinking that goes along with being a religious and spiritual follower. And one can well see, given the reverence with which spiritual figures are treated, how Jonestowns and Wacos are possible, no...not only possible, but almost inevitable. The descent into madness begins, I think, when one ties their fate with another – the spiritual leader – one develops a love for, an admiration of the one leading the spiritual community, and the die is cast when Cupid strikes his arrow into the heart because this type of love and veneration is lethal ... witness the many object lessons that the long and bloody history of religion have to show us. To tie one’s fate to any other human being is to be deluded...and peace on earth can scarcely come to one so deluded. It may seem like I am bashing spirituality, but it is like a breath of fresh air to be free from all the ridiculous beliefs and practices which characterize the spiritual world. I still, at times, cannot believe my own complete foolishness in being sucked into it all, and I sometimes cannot believe that it was actually me that believed in all those nonsensical propositions. It is a wonderful experience – being free from the spiritual world, realizing that one need not suspend their own native intelligence for the sake of the apparent security of religious/spiritual practice. I still am rather overjoyed that I am free from all of that.

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Yes, this works very well. I have become much more aware, it seems, of cynicism, something that you have mentioned several times in recent posts. I sometimes find myself becoming quite cynical when observing the state of the world and ‘human nature’. For instance, watching the television news last night there was a brief spot on the Oklahoma City bombings. A small shrine was recently dedicated to victims of the ‘worst case of domestic terrorism the US has ever seen’. The news story mentioned that Timothy Vey, the convicted terrorist, is scheduled to be executed in May. Quite a few of the people whose loved ones were killed in the bombing have petitioned to be allowed to watch the execution. The state of Texas is even going to install close-circuit cameras so that they can watch the killer in his moment of death. Some of the victims’ families opined that they wish he would suffer more a more hideous and agonizing death so they can rejoice in his suffering, as they themselves have suffered through his deeds. Watching this story, I am astounded by the degree of the vengeful, retributive ‘eye for an eye’ mentality that exists in the world, and I can sometimes feel it hardening into cynicism, a definite form of unhappiness and sorrow that debilitates one and spoils the present moment. ‘What kind of world do we live in?’ is a question I often ask.

However, morbidity and cynicism over the state of humankind seems to be the very same mistake every one else is making, since it is wasting the precious purity of this eternal moment. Only this vital moment in time exists, and it is senseless to waste it in worry, anger, cynicism, or fear. Only continual and unrelenting awareness will reveal those states of mind and feelings which interfere with this priceless moment, so that one can get back to being happy and harmless.

Yes, I have noticed this too. These emotions, when one is in the throes of them, seem to suck everything into them. Since practicing actualism, I have noticed that my emotions seem to be much more intense when I experience them, but definitely more short-lived. I am able to get back to being happy and harmless much more quickly. I noticed this happening yesterday – I was aware of feeling worried, and morbidly preoccupied – gloomy in fact. A moment’s reflection revealed when the state had started, the associated thoughts, what it felt like, and what is was doing to me. I simply concluded that it was silly to be feeling that way and spoiling a beautiful day, and I found myself getting back to being happy in relatively short order. Gary to Peter

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