MARK: I have become completely hooked on the de-construction of ‘myself’ as I see so clearly at this stage that said entity is the sole cause of every ill that exists in my or any human’s existence. This new ‘view that is dawning in my life is so different to any change that has come to my life previously as it is not a construct that is being added to ‘me’, but has resulted from a deliberate investigation of self and its motivations and modus operandi and is a personal reduction not a personal growth paradigm. In light of these investigations the self and the parts that make it up are seen in the true light of a PCE and its incumbent pure intent which is the experience of this body stripped of the human construct and the original soft ware that blind nature imbues all species with. I look at my view of life today as compared to my view 8 months ago and so much has changed. What started out to be what I described as the hardest year of my life has become the most refreshing change I have ever experienced. I would say I am a considerably cleaned up self at this stage.

GARY: 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:

PETER: 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.

GARY: 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. 29.11.2000

PETER: The process of actualism happens in two consecutive stages – firstly a period of deliberate active dismantling of one’s social and instinctual identity such that you diminish this identity to the point where you are virtually free of malice and sorrow. This reasonable stable plateau is known as Virtual Freedom, whereby one is happy and harmless for 99.9% of the time. Virtual Freedom, with the bulk of the active work having largely been done, is a period of becoming accustomed to living in increasingly long periods of near self’-lessness. In this stage, apart from a few remaining issues and investigations, one’s social and instinctual identity, or ‘self’ – who I think and feel I am – has increasingly nothing left to do but to get out of the road. Eventually the ‘self’ becomes so thin and ethereal as to be understood, recognized and eventually unequivocally experienced as being non-substantial, i.e. non-actual.

GARY: In terms of my own process, and this should be pretty clear from what I write here, I am going through the initial phase of ‘deliberate active dismantling’ of the identity. This is still a fairly stormy period for me, with many ups and downs along the road. In this respect, it seems like little has changed. I have periods, sometimes lasting part of the day or most of a day, of ‘self’-less experiences, but then it seems like the malicious, resentful entity comes back in spades, even stronger the next time. Yesterday I actually felt quite depressed and discouraged by the end of the day – my partner and I were both in a terrible state- I being quite miserable, and she feeling very sick and tired out. She ended up balling her eyes out – I ended up ‘nurturing’ her – and then we both had an enormous laugh at the ridiculous state both of us were in. After that, things lightened up a bit.

PETER: There are three alternatives to dealing with one’s lot in life, i.e. being born with genetically encoded animal instinctual passions and being ensnared by one’s own social identity into forever remaining within the flock. Within Humanity there are only two alternatives – to remain normal and begrudgingly accept one’s lot, always feeling resentful, or to become spiritual and dwell in the world of fantasy, always in denial. There is now a third alternative – step out of the real world and into the actual world and leave your ‘self’ behind.

GARY to Peter: I seem to be in the stage right now where I am reaping the rewards of practicing the method of actualism. Yesterday, for instance, I did experience first some irritation and then some anger. It was a rather uncomfortable experience. But the interesting thing is that I realized how seldom and how rare it is for me to experience this uncomfortable emotional state. I was interested to learn when this had all started, what had triggered it, and why I was apparently so down on myself. I made a rather stupid error at work, but actually the feeling of irritation had started some time before that. The ego kind of takes over first, and I start pouring responsibilities on myself, expecting myself to be perfect, and then KAPOW! ... irritation and anger. It is fascinating and interesting to see this process at work and it tells me where I get off track and what I can do about it. And, yes, the advice to ‘keep one’s hands in one’s pockets’ is invaluable, as the feeling of anger and irritation is so malignant and so deadly it is apt to spill over in interactions with other people if one is not careful of it. Also, I wanted to say that any kind of off-colour emotional experience of this sort is evidence of ‘me’ – all traceable to the sense of identity. One can find one’s identity writ large across any emotional experiences of this type. What I have found is that any emotions all boil down to one’s identity. It’s like Vineeto said in another post recently: ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ If there is any fuss, it is always about ‘me’ – that I am this type of person, or I must be treated this way by others, so on and so forth. Richard’s discovery that the Human Condition is typified by being an identity is a major groundbreaking discovery. I’ve never run across anyone anywhere saying it in quite this way with such radical implications. Eliminate the identity in toto and there is no more pain, no more suffering, no more malice and sorrow, and no more need to go off half-cocked into delusory spiritual and metaphysical realms. 21.4.2001

GARY: Thank you for the lengthy post on animal instincts. You wrote, in part, and I’m snipping most of the post to zero in on one particular part:

PETER: This safety by numbers strategy by no means fosters harmonious interactions – au contraire, inter-group conflict is often as malicious as group-to-group conflicts. What could be seen initially as a herding or socializing instinct could well be no more than a reluctant fear-driven imperative arising from the necessity to successfully propagate the species.

The resulting alliances are more like expedient strategic pacts formed solely to increase the odds of survival. There appears to be no instinctual bonding per se within the group at large, other than a crude necessity to huddle in groups so as to increase the chances of propagating and rearing offspring as well as increase the odds when waging warfare against other members of the species.

GARY: This part here got me to thinking about the whole process of identification. As I have been focusing my awareness on how I am experiencing the present moment of being alive, I am sometimes aware of the movement of my thoughts and feelings in the direction of forming some sort of identification with other human beings. I think a very rudimentary form of instinctual programming is going on when this occurs. The lost, lonely, frightened entity that is ‘me’ – the self that is ‘Gary’- seeks this safety in numbers and attaches himself to all manner of groups, movements, ‘friendships’, and identifications with others. There are many, many layers to this identification process (ethnic identity, tribal identity, family identities, etc.) but I think what you have eloquently pointed out in your post is the biological imperative at work – the evolutionary advantage, perhaps, to identification – the propagation of the genetic material and the survival of the species.

I was sitting in a staff meeting yesterday afternoon, one of the rare times when the entire staff in the whole building gets together for a training, and I was sitting there looking at the other people and in my mind I was thinking about the whole issue of ‘fitting in’, where, if anyplace, I fit in. Or, don’t fit in, as the case may be. And I found myself looking at another man and thinking ‘Yes, I like him. I’m a lot like him’. And there was this process of identification with that other individual going on and it occurred to me that the whole thing was a bit absurd, you know.

Why does one identify to begin with? This is an extremely important question that I encountered in the actualism writings, a question originally posed by Richard, but one that I have often asked myself. And I have not encountered this question anywhere else, because seemingly no one wants to examine it at depth.

So I think there is this bonding or forming alliances process going on all the time with human beings and, like the animals you cite, these alliances shift and change with the shifting winds. And there is this importance that people place on ‘relationships’ with others. Whereas, the longer I am at this actualism thing the more my experience is one of freeing myself from this process of identification, freeing myself from this whole absurd business of identifying with others, and really for the first time in my life looking into what is actually going on in this business of identification. It is interesting to see how the socialization process unfolds and how society is constructed, but from a very early age we are taught that we are social creatures and that we ‘need’ other people, and that ‘no man is an island’.

I am finding this traditional wisdom to not be the case and I am finding that I ‘need’ other people less and less, but then that is considered pathological, according to the wisdom of humanity, and people who don’t need friends, or who don’t need to belong to a group, or a religion, or a social club or something are judged to be oddball loners or disgruntled misanthropes. A short while ago I found myself wondering whether I have ‘schizoid personality disorder’ and it was an unsettling experience because it was like being a college student again and reading the abnormal psychology text and wondering if you fit into these categories or not, you know, and it dawned on me that this too was a process of identification where I was judging my behaviour as either ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It is possible to live completely freely, completely autonomously, and in harmony with one’s fellow humans, but one must necessarily examine one’s identifications rigorously. They are part of the whole instinctual package needing deletion. 4.1.2002

PETER: In the same vein, the prime minister of the country where I live recently announced a new initiative to promote harmony within the 200 odd ethnic groups that live in this country and suggested as part of this initiative that people should ‘celebrate their differences’. It obviously never occurred to him, or those who wrote his speech, that it is precisely because people cling to their differences – their old cultural, social and ethnic conditioning – that there is ethnic conflict and disharmony in the first place. In the case of your observation, the idea that encouraging people to continually air their grievances towards each other can achieve peace and harmony in the workplace makes no sense at all.

GARY: It is much the same in the US, a multi-ethnic society as is Australia. There is the same ‘celebrate diversity’ theme trotted out again and again as a means of promoting ‘tolerance’ for others of a different stripe ethnically or racially. Yet only because there is disharmony, hatred, intolerance, greed, aggression, expansionism, etc is there this need to promulgate the antidotal tolerance, love, and compassion for others different.

Differences are a simple fact of life for biological creatures. Biologically, we seem to share much more in common as human beings than we have different. Social differences are also apparent, whether differences in customs, mores, ethical practices, etc. I think it is not so much differences that are the root cause of hatred, intolerance, warfare and strife but identity in any form. It is the instinctual passions that form the rudimentary sense of identity in sentient creatures that are the root cause of our inability to get along with each other and live in peace and harmony. Once the root cause of the problem is eliminated, along with it go any sense of being unique, different from others, as well as any need to defend worn-out ideals, beliefs, truisms, and political, social, or religious systems of thought. The actualist’s solution to conflict and disharmony is self-immolation – the elimination of all that stands in the way of living with other human beings in peace and harmony. It is the end of ‘me’. With the end of ‘me’, there is no need to be defensive or even on my guard against possible encroachments. Gone too is any sense of insult and every form of grievance. Because any kind of identity for human beings seems to be a breeding ground for resentment and grievance, I think.

Every ethnic, religious or racial group has had its own nasty tale of historical grievances – every group has had its own dreary history of being discriminated against. Even so-called ‘dominant’ groups in society today were once in a position to be discriminated against and discriminated against others in their turn.

There recently was a retrospective of the Roots program of the 1970s on TV. I remember watching this back in those days. There was the interest at that time for people, particularly Americans, to find out their ‘roots’, and there was a proliferation of the uncovering or the discovering of ‘who I am’ as one’s ethnic identity. In any event, I was struck while watching the program by the anger of the people they were interviewing as they talked about their reactions to the program. There was this universal feeling of rage and anger among people they interviewed, this abhorrence of slavery, the realization that they were themselves descended from slaves and that these horrors were perpetrated against their own ancestors. But I was particularly struck by the anger, and it seemed to me that it makes no sense to be angry about these things because if one is angry and holds a grievance, then sooner or later that feeling is going to be expressed, it must be expressed, in some sort of action against others. If one is angry, then one essentially feels that someone is to blame for these horrors. In my personal experience, anger must always have a target. It always comes out one way or another.

It seemed as I listened to the anger of these people on the program, many the descendants of slaves, that the same sense of outrage, grievance, and resentment was unleashing itself afresh on those who are held to be responsible. I realize that I am on a bit shaky ground here as the issue of race is an extremely complicated one and an extremely volatile one to discuss in a public forum. But in a sense I am not really talking about race, although the topic does touch on the issue of race, but I am talking about identity. One identifies as a black person, or a white person, or a person of Italian ancestry, Polish ancestry, or what have you. One identifies as a member of a ‘dominant’ group in society, or as an oppressed person, a minority. Actualism is about the demolishment of all kinds of identity, and it is this that people find so difficult to stomach, because people really cling to these identities, even to the death.

One need only open one’s eyes, look around the world at what is happening, to see the havoc that identity is causing. 1.2.2002

RESPONDENT No. 32: I notice a recurring theme for me that takes me away from happiness and well-being seems to be when I feel physically crowded, excessively warm, + certain noises (i.e. car alarms, certain people’s voices). I notice I am tense, uncomfortable and feel very aggressive & violent. I don’t notice any beliefs or thought streams outside of wanting the interference to stop. I’m always ripe for an upset when I’m overtired. I really don’t know what beliefs are present outside of the world shouldn’t be like this. Any comments welcome.

GARY: It seems to me that you are well on your way to investigating what stands in the way of perfection.

I can well relate to what you write as I have had these experiences myself many times. I find it interesting what pushes me to become ‘overtired’, as you say and I think the condition of ‘overtiredness’ results in many unhappy consequences oftentimes, including aggression, anger, moodiness, etc. Speaking personally, the overtiredness results from my social identity, that part of ‘me’ that relates to my ambitions, my aspirations, my ‘work ethic’, my compulsive need to be busy, etc, etc. The further I delve into the social identity, the more I run into beliefs and ideals that ‘I’ try to live by, like ‘You’ve got to keep your nose to the grindstone’ or ‘You’ve got to work hard and be a success’ and other like statements. These inner beliefs sometimes almost take the form of parental admonitions to do such and so. I can almost hear my parents saying these things inside my head sometimes.

To give a personal example, when I am tired, often I just want to be left alone and I tend to isolate myself. But a more basic question is why am I pushing myself to get into this state of being overtired in the first place? Many people, including myself, have very busy jobs where there are almost constant demands on ‘my’ time and ‘my’ attention. I find that there is a part of me that craves this constant busyness but there is a downside too in terms of exhaustion, moodiness, and other negative states, what most people call ‘stress’ or ‘burnout’.

I can add to the states that you mentioned – like feeling physically crowded, certain noises, certain temperatures, etc- that sometimes I feel uncomfortable with people coming up behind me: I sometimes feel cornered, especially when I think that people are sneaking up on me.

I think these are basically emotional reactions that stem from the primitive survival mechanism of the human creature, in this case ‘me’. I think the old ‘flight or fight’ survival instincts are being triggered, sometimes by emotional memories. It may not be an actual conscious memory of something but it may be non-verbal. I think for instance my uncomfortableness with other people touching me has to do with the emotional memory system pertaining to physical touch. Many people, including myself, were touched in some very hurtful ways, and all these experiences are in the emotional memory centre and can be triggered by things, which seem to have no connection to what is going on in the present moment.

I think the important thing to realize is that these are emotional reactions, and as such they can be investigated and pumped further for information about yourself and how you react emotionally and what makes you tick. We have often talked on this list about the difference between ignoring or suppressing an emotional experience and experiencing one’s emotions and feelings. With further practice and dedication to the method of actualism, these reactions clearly diminish in strength and intensity.

In short, what I am trying to say is that, in my experience, there is always a primitive ‘self’ behind emotional reactions, and this is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, and it requires the ‘nerves of steel’ to stick with your investigations into the instincts. Obviously you have to find ways of dealing with feeling ‘very aggressive and violent’, as you put it in your own words.

When that happens to me, I have to examine very closely what is actually happening in the situation. When I look into it further, I find that there is no actual threat to ‘my’ survival, I only think or imagine that I am threatened. Strong emotions of fear and aggression really cloud a person’s judgement of what is really happening in any given situation.

Given that there is no real threat, I may have to find other ways of dealing with these emotions and feelings. A hot bubble bath might help or a walk in the woods. Anything to keep you from reacting in a knee-jerk manner to the upset of the moment and getting back to being happy and harmless as soon as you can should work just fine. Of course, some things that I used to do are not helpful at all, like sedating myself with chemicals or praying and hoping for relief. Often though just the simple realization that there is something that is taking me away from enjoying the present moment and that that ‘something’ is in me and is ‘who’ I think I am, but that this ‘me’ is not what I am. Nobody can change that but me.

Nobody is getting in the way of my happiness and harmlessness but ‘me’ and this is where I crank up my pure intent to be free forever from the pernicious identity that inhabits this flesh and blood body. 9.5.2002

RESPONDENT No. 46 (P/V): The religious or spiritual ways are for the preservation of species, no more, as they say the solution to be happy is in a master (a big strong dominant ape or a God, an imagination of a strong ape), to be a master, or after death, or in an hypnotic state of mind called samadhi or ecstasy; at last they justify themselves by unending contradictory affirmations. Politics and dictatorial system have always been fond of same kind of ‘reasoning’ (communism, nazism, fascism, Maoism, etc), they are all against the individuals, as the religious and spiritual systems are (be happy in being impersonal!!).The individual is the great danger for the group systems (from family to society), because he persists to think and see he has no interest to be appreciated, recognized and loved. He is only interested by truth and facts.

GARY: When you say ‘the individual’, you might consider defining that term more thoroughly.

The way I think of the individual is that he or she is the direct product of group systems, starting first with the family, then society at large as first experienced in the community, nation, and then world. You however are not using the term thusly. The trouble that I have with saying ‘the individual’ is that, in reality, there is no such thing as an individual. There are ‘unique’ individuals down through history, to be sure, but most of these sung or unsung cultural heroes have nevertheless been greatly influenced or are even products of their cultures. They may have been considered daring individuals precisely because they stepped outside of or deliberately defied prevailing social customs and mores. But show me one of these people who were free from the common instinctual heritage of the human species. In Actual Freedom I think we are talking about something radically different from any kind of Individualism – we are talking about eliminating the crude survival program sourced in the primitive parts of the brain. This goes way beyond being an individual, I would posit. I don’t mean to adopt a chiding tone in my comments here – I think there is an important point to consider and I would appreciate your comments on ‘the individual’. 23.9.2002

RESPONDENT No. 27: May I jump in for a moment? <snipped from Peter Re: Dissociation>

Respondent No. 28: Or is my identity bullshitting me again?

Peter:  Speaking personally, I never saw any sense at all in splitting ‘me’ and ‘my identity’ into two parts. I had tried that in my spiritual years and saw that it was a wank.

Respondent No. 28: Sometimes I use incorrect terminology, all those identities, self’s, me’s, mine, I’s... I will try to refer to the AG glossary in the future. The intent was something like:

Or is my identity attempting to maintain its existence at all costs?

RESPONDENT No. 27: No. 28, the problem isn’t ‘terminology’. I can’t speak for Peter – but it appears that what he is pointing out is that you are using the words ‘my identity’ – which implies two. Who does the identity belong to – if not to ‘me?’ If so, then you’ve got ‘me’ and ‘my identity’ which makes two. ‘I’ don’t ‘have’ an identity – ‘I’ am an identity. Unfortunately, you’ve only succeeded in continuing to divide ‘me’ into two parts. When you see that – you will stop asking whether ‘my identity’ is trying to maintain its existence at all costs. ‘My identity’ is nothing but an imaginary construct. All you have to do is look for yourself – no-one else can do it for you – not even an actualist. 20.4.2003

GARY: Hello No 60...

A few days ago, you wrote to No 25:

Among other things, you touched on the subject of nurture. You said:

Respondent No. 60: ‘Nurture is the big problem for me. If ‘I’ permanently self-immolate, it is not just ‘me’ who goes. I take a big chunk of other people’s identity with me.’

GARY: I found these comments interesting and was wondering if you would be willing to expand a bit on what you have found about nurture. Chiefly what you mean by taking other people’s identities with you. I would welcome the opportunity of comparing notes with you on this nurture thing. 26.2.2004

*

RESPONDENT No. 60: Hi Gary. Sure thing. Probably won’t be able to write as much or as clearly as I’d like to (lack of nicotine affects me badly), but I’ll do my best. On second thoughts, a lot of this stuff is covered by some private correspondence between me and No. 30 a couple of weeks back. Since there’s nothing too ‘private’ about either me or No. 30 here, I might as well post it.

GARY: What I see here is that there are two psyches interacting, two human beings with identities forming and re-forming images of one another. You started with the question ‘Who are No. 30 and No. 60?’. In other words, who are the identities? I would say No. 30 and No. 60 are who they think they are in their head and who they feel they are in their hearts.

I think I tend to see identities as being grounded or established in one’s instinctual programming, and later added onto throughout life through one’s experiences, conditioning, etc. One’s rough and ready instinctual program has been formed through aeons of evolution and has essentially not changed in millions of years. In other words, one’s instinctual heritage is established before birth and genetically endowed. I would not tend to agree with your statement that there are a multitude of participants to the dialogue. Only two – two human beings with well-formed identities. I also wonder what you mean where you state ‘No. 60 as he is’ and ‘No. 30 as he is’. Do you mean No. 60 and No. 30 sans identity? Do you mean No. 60 and No. 30 as flesh-and-blood bodies?

To what do you refer here?

RESPONDENT No. 60: In real life I think there are several (probably two or three) more levels of indirection, depending on how intelligent / neurotic / empathetic / deranged we are ;-) The only two actualities are No. 30 and No. 60, and there is no guarantee that the true nature of No. 30 and No. 60 are known to anyone, including No. 30 and No. 60 themselves. We have only images (impressions), and images of images, distributed between two minds.

GARY: This part here is a bit fuzzy to me. You say that the only two actualities are No. 30 and No. 60, and that the ‘true nature’ of No. 30 and No. 60 may not be known to anyone. That leaves open the question what is a human beings ‘true nature’. There is a great deal more to human interaction than just images and images of images. There is evocation of emotional reactions, sharing of emotional feelings, etc. When one speaks of a human beings ‘true nature’ one could be referring to any number of things. If you believe in a soul, then you are talking about the soul or spirit.

It leaves the door open to a metaphysical explanation of ‘being’.

RESPONDENT No. 60: If I remember rightly, your posting a few weeks back seemed to be angling toward the idea that we partially create each other. At least, that is the way I interpreted it based on my own reflections. In isolation we do not need a social identity (and yet we still have No. 60’s image of No. 60, and No. 30’s image of No. 30 because, even when we are not directly engaged in socialising, we still spend a lot of our time imagining ourselves in social scenarios). Together we generate these identities in the form of images of self and other, images of other’s image of self, images of self’s image of other, and so on.

GARY: Again, I think you leaning a bit heavily on the image-making faculty of human beings. Perhaps there is a reason for this. I would say that one does not ‘need’ a social identity in any sense of the word, either in isolation or in interaction with other human beings. The only ‘need’ that I see for a social identity is to assuage the deep and abiding sense of loneliness and separation that is at the heart of one’s instinctual identity. A social identity is maintained either in isolation or in interaction with others because it is founded on the root animal instincts. (I know this probably sounds like standard Actualist stock-in trade but I really do think it is so).

RESPONDENT No. 60: Understanding each other is tortuously complex; our brains/minds have pretty effective ways for dealing with this complexity, but the potential for error is enormous. So let’s see how clever or deluded (or both!) these mirror neurons really are ... When No. 60 sees a message from No. 30, No. 60 has certain expectations. Those expectations reveal something of No. 60’s image of No. 30. No. 60 expects to read a message from a person whose public persona is polite, reasonable and friendly. He expects to read a message that always has at least some constructive content, i.e. content that is intended to further his own understanding, to help another understand something more clearly, or to seek greater mutual understanding by exploring a topic intelligently. Over time, No. 60 forms in his mind an impression that, to him, represents No. 30. That impression is of a person who has all the basic qualities of a generic human being, but the idiosyncratic features that make him ‘No. 30’ to ‘No. 60’ are: a person who wants to understand, and wants to help others understand the issues; a person who is deeply interested in (and at times very excited by) the possibilities he is discovering, and wants to help others to share them, or at least be able to share them, not hampered by misunderstanding; a person who has his fair human share of egoic motivations but is mainly motivated by the urge to get to the bottom of things for mutual benefit after many years of seeking without very much success. Thus, No. 60 helps to ‘create’ ‘No. 30’ by responding to the ‘No. 30’ that No. 60 imagines No. 30 presents of himself ;-)

GARY: I think it might be more accurate to say that the psychic web is based on far more than mere images. The psychic web, formed through the aeons of physical evolution, is founded on lower brain structures that make us as human beings exquisitely in tune with the emotions and feelings of other human beings. There is also a psychic web between humans and animals. A dog, for instance, has an outstanding ability to pick up on human emotion. This is so, I understand, because they share remarkably similar limbic systems in their brains.

RESPONDENT No. 60: In a nutshell, I think/ feel/ sense/ intuit we both understand that we are both people who are capable of understanding complex issues, not just the factual ones but the interpersonal ones too; and we have established a rapport that allows us to investigate these issues with mutual respect, liking, and an interesting mixture of affinity and complementarity. (If complementarity isn’t a word, it should be, and it is now).

GARY: Would it be stretching the point to say that a trust has developed between you and No. 30? Is there a feeling of trust?

RESPONDENT No. 60: So, to get around to your question: what I feel in your message is based on the guess that my mental/emotional simulation of our actual relationship is at least similar to your mental/ emotional simulation of it. It is vastly more complicated than this in reality though.

GARY: When you say actual relationship – to what do you refer?

RESPONDENT No. 60: One of the interesting questions for me revolves around the distinction between ‘actual’ and ‘real’ or ‘virtual’. I’m well aware of how actualists distinguish between them and emphasise the ‘actual’ to the exclusion of the ‘virtual’. There are at least two ways of looking at the relationship between ‘actual’ and ‘real’. Is the relationship between two people a pure fiction, a figment of both people’s imaginations based on instinctive mechanisms? YES!

GARY: I would put it this way – and perhaps you would not find fault with this: a relationship between two people is real in the sense that it is grounded in the psyche of the two individuals involved. In this sense, it is not a fiction, as it has a life in the minds and hearts of the individuals concerned. While it primarily resides in the affective faculty, being ‘feeling’ based, it does not exist in the actual world. I would not say that it is merely a figment of one’s imagination that it exists, as I previously maintained that it consists of far more than images and images of images.

RESPONDENT No. 60: Or is the recognition of the ‘virtuality’ of the relationship the only way of seeing a holistic ‘reality’ that is not present, and cannot be detected, at the ‘actual’ level because it simply does not ‘reside’ there? Again, YES! These are not exclusive ORs. (NOTE GARY – those remarks are the crux of it; they are the key to the way I feel about identities).

GARY: OK. A ‘relationship’ does not exist in the actual world. Yet the real world is nothing but relationships. Relationships are not fictitious in the sense that they really exist in the minds and hearts of the people who are party to the relationships. It would be like saying that all emotions are fictitious. Emotions are real in the sense that they can be measured scientifically, they can be explained, they can be felt. But they are not actual.

(...)

RESPONDENT No. 60: It is my opinion that social identities are not the sole possession of any one individual. They are shared. They are not ‘actual’, but they are ‘real’. The ‘reality’ of a person’s social identity depends on how accurately and fully it is understood and reciprocated by the other.

GARY: Sometimes what is neglected and ridiculed grows stronger. There are quite a few identities that are founded on nothing more than a sense of having been neglected and ridiculed. Certain personality traits and core passions relate to one’s basic fears and aversions. Sometimes these formative experiences stem from neglect, what is called abandonment, and ridicule or criticism.

I think the reality of a person’s social identity – to them, to the person carrying that social identity – depends on the strength of their belief that it must be maintained and that it is necessary. It may or may not be reciprocated by others. One’s group provides the validation and the support however, and...yes...it is then reciprocated, affirmed by others. By taking on the identity of the group, one gets the goodies associated with being a member of the particular group.

RESPONDENT No. 60: In my personal life, there are two people whose social identity would be severely damaged if certain aspects of it which only I can perceive, affirm and reciprocate were to be taken away. Of these two I am concerned mostly about my companion. This sounds egotistical but I don’t mean it that way at all. It is not that I see me as special; it is that only I can see and understand what is most special and unique in her. It is the very essence of who she thinks she ‘really’ is. It’s all very well for me to decide that selves/souls are a worthless fiction, but can I take something from her that she does not want to lose?

GARY: In your companion’s case, does her social identity really depend on whether or not you affirm her identity?

RESPONDENT No. 60: That’s one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is the one I mentioned to No. 25, and I can’t really be more clear about it than I already have been. I have trouble coming to terms with the idea of enjoying the feeling OF someone (sensate enjoyment of their body) without feeling anything (or, more precisely, without being able to feel anything) FOR them.

GARY: Precisely. Forming relationships, bonding with others, becoming attached to others...the foundation of one’s psyche...is the world over the glue that holds society together. It is the Human Condition, if you will. If you really care about somebody, would you support their identity?

RESPONDENT No. 60: This is ‘real world’ thinking and feeling. When a PCE occurs, this whole line of thinking disappears. It happened today as a matter of fact, albeit very briefly. Here’s an entry from my journal today (unedited):

GARY: Yes. In a PCE, the whole house of cards collapses. 28.2.2004

Actualism Homepage