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Others ~ Selected Correspondence Psyche, Psychology, Psychiatry
I have come to realize that ‘me’ (be it ‘No 33’ or ‘No 60’ or ‘Peter’ or late Mr. ‘Richard’) is the human condition in toto and just like every cell’s DNA codes the entire human body functionality (every cell can easily replace every cell – with some exceptions) – each ‘me’ is the ‘human condition’. Based on the culture/ society/ group (which is akin to the ‘tissue’/ ‘organ’), the manifested ‘me’ (using selective viewing/ repression) is actually ‘No 33’ or ‘No 60’ or ‘No 87’... but when one uncovers this social programming (which is basically a what should be... rather than what is) one sees the ‘instinctual self’ which contains the story of the 6.million people and more (from the past). ‘I’ could have been anybody... indeed ‘I’ see the whole dark world in me as I remove the layers. The whole psychic web can be traversed without stopping and identifying with parts. Very, very interesting journey indeed. Journey of a lifetime. No 33 to No 60, 8.10.2005
I underwent a ‘process’ during my psychosis as well as now... a wild imagination of some ‘psychic web’. The root drive is some kind of angst and the mind wants to get rid of the angst. I imagine(d?) all kinds of things... all that I have read... Christian theory of suffering... Buddhist... everyday man’s gripes... psychotic’s paranoia, existentialist’s absurdity/ ennui/ angst... Rituals... OCD’s... mental illnesses… all kinds of hatreds... mindless malice... war... violence... rapes... all these flash in my mind (is this what Richard has been saying all along? The root cause of all the ills)... all these flash in my mind as a justification/ reasoning/ solution for this feeling. I feel that all the human solutions were to eradicate this ‘angst’ are ‘tried and true’ but ‘tried and failed’... I am wondering did Richard really do what he claims to have done? Is there a solution to this root cause of suffering and malice? Has he truly found the answer? Has he lived it? Is it really doable by me? And hence by everybody, and hence has he truly discovered the path to freedom, the most wanted solution that has evaded the human kind for millennia? Then, is it true that the paradise on earth is in the horizon as a possibility at least? Isn’t that a stupendous thing if true? Did he pick up similar psychic footprints? What about Peter and Vineeto? Is this psychic web all in my mind and I am only traversing the potential and imagining/ theorizing the history? What is the validity of the passionate imagination I am having? It is all interesting. No 33, 8.10.2005
I posted a quote that was descriptive of the physical sensations that can sometimes accompany radical change –
However it is good to keep in mind that the impression of something physical happening is most likely due to psychosomatic processes, i.e. bodily responses to feelings and imagination. Perfecto! I more than once found the psychosomatic nature... my depression/tiredness is more psychological than bodily.... realizing thus I have more energy and more happiness. There is a mental component of the body which is the ‘owner’ of the body which is probably the closest one gets to body... the ‘feeling’ of the body... the ‘feeler’ itself disguising as the body... which can do lot of tricks as if the body is having problems. Realizing this ends most of the illnesses that are not really there! No 33 to Vineeto, 31.5.2005
Fourth possibility: As we determined earlier that No 60 is No 33, No 66 is No 33, and now ‘No 75’ has the nerve to claim No 33-ness, and No 33 is actually just a creation of one of the actualists, this is then a 3 way, fake dialogue, likely written by ‘Richard’ (and that’s not his ‘real’ name of course). Happy and harmless yet?! Ho-ha! Fed by such suggestions by No 23 as to doubting the existence of personalities existence as it is portrayed, I experienced all kinds of things in my psychosis. I thought Richard was No 23. I mapped No 60, No 32, No 58 and the rest to some real life personalities I knew and my world of bodiless identities derived from the mailing list kept morphing its shape from one to another (anybody seen the Hollywood movie ‘identity’?). However I don’t think I have any multiple personality disorder. I think I went too much into my mind, disconnected from society completely and my only life was list life.... so those cut off bondage links attached themselves to the mailing list. And I lost touch with reality. I promise that I have written only in the names No 33, No 75 and No 71 (R). And fwiw, No 33 is the given name for me and the other two are assumed names. I don’t want to cause any confusion. Funny it may be, I communicated with No 60/No 23 and studied other’s mail writing characteristics closely and have ascertained to my satisfaction that most of the personalities are indeed distinct – it mattered for me because I went to extremes. at some point I thought that mailing list was some experiment setup by one personality say Richard and all the other members exist only for ‘my’ interaction and the interaction is supposed to bring out the hidden stuff in ‘me’ etc. Though things can be viewed that way, I don’t think that is how it is happening. No 33 to No 66, 29.5.2005
To anyone interested, I have a few questions on the distinctions actualism makes on the psychic world. First, does the actualist understanding of the psychic world differ any from a modern medical/psychological standpoint? They both discount religious and spiritual explanations, but does actualism provide anymore concrete knowledge about how phenomena in the psychic world works? According to Richard, in actual freedom or the PCE – it is evident and obvious that the ‘self’ and all it’s illusions and hallucinations and imaginations are just that – illusions, hallucinations and imaginations. You can include psychic phenomena with that too. I have not read any extensive descriptions of psychic phenomena on the actual freedom page. Nor will you. If you do – that person is not an actualist. Even a search on the internet shows that there is not any definite study on the psychic world- most of it remains unexplained. I’m not sure what you mean here by ‘definite.’ If you mean that there has been no study that has definitively ‘proven’ the existence of psychic phenomena, then I’m sure you are correct, but if you mean there has been no well-controlled, rigorous study of ‘psi’ then you should investigate the literature. On the pro side – some of the best (currently) may be Dean Radin, Fred Alan Wolf, Charles Tart, Ian Stevenson, Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, etc. On the negative side – Martin Gardner, Paul Kurtz, Susan Blackmore, Ray Hyman, Michael Shermer, James Randi, etc. H.J. Irwin presents a ‘balanced’ view, which appears sometimes as agnostic. Of course there are many more – these are just some that I’m familiar with. I was raised Roman Catholic, and am familiar with the belief in miracles, possessions, active interference by both god and the devil. I see how quickly people will try to attribute their good luck to god, and immediately offer praise, citing every little good turn as a miracle. But, some of the more historical miracles and other unexplained events, religious and non-religious, are strange- of course they are not tested or verifiable. Are all of them to be discounted as psychic hallucinations? Is there a form of group psychic hallucinations? I suppose that is for you to decide, but in a world without God or supernatural happenings what else could they be? It’s possible to find the face of God, Jesus, or the Virgin Mary in the clouds, the bark of a tree, or even a tortilla for all to see – but that doesn’t make it a supernatural event. No 37 to No 53
Recently Peter wrote to you, responding to a post of yours, which occurred last year. I found myself puzzling over what you said in a particular paragraph of that post. You said: On the contrary this ability to interact with the ‘psychic web’ may well be the opportunity to tap into any emotion (or instinctive reaction) to experience it learn from it and neutralize its harmful aspect, next feeding this neutralized energy back to the web this may cause a momentary flash of awareness; i.o.w. it may raise the consciousness of that particular ‘social circle’ in which one is resonating. In order not to pick over the carcass of a long-dead e-mail, I would appreciate some clarification from you as to whether you still hold with these views or not. Given that this post is rather dated at this point, you may have changed your opinion of these matters. There is indeed a ‘psychic web’ connecting all human beings, and it is most obvious when interacting with people in the social environment. This web consists of the ebb and flow of emotional feelings, as well as the easily observed ‘vibes’ that people get from one another. The thing that I find confusing about what you are saying in this passage is how a person can both interact with this ‘psychic web’ yet do so from some position of being immune from the emotional currents. Not only that, but you intimate that it is possible for a person to learn from their emotions, and once having learned from their emotions, pass on this learning in some sort of mysterious process which you dub ‘neutralizing’ the harmful aspect of the emotions. The reason I ask you about this is that I find it to be so contrary to what I myself have experienced that I wonder if I may have missed something. It seems to me that the ability to tap into the ‘psychic web’ is an innate ability of all human beings, since all human beings are innately endowed with emotions, imagination, and are connected to other peoples via this intangible but nevertheless present cord of emotion from birth through to the grave. But then to say that a person could neutralize the harmful aspects of emotions and then pass this on to other people, it strikes me that the only thing that could then be passed on to a person is the emotion, only this emotion would be cleansed or purged of the harmful elements. I am afraid that it is all a bit unclear to me what you are saying here. The main thing that I have learned about emotions during the time that I have been practicing Actualism is that they are a complete liability. Whether the emotions experienced are the so-called positive emotions like love, trust, faith, etc., or the so-called negative/invidious emotions of anger, rage, jealousy, etc. and the like, they are still emotions and as such they are what prevents the ongoing experience of the actual world. If one only ‘neutralizes’ the so-called harmful aspect of emotions, essentially what one is stuck with is still an emotion, only this time it is the apparent helpful aspect of emotional life. I think Peter has fundamentally hit the nail on the head when he describes this process as an accurate description of the self-aggrandizement at the heart of spirituality. To want to eliminate the harmful emotions yet hang on to the positive emotions is what spirituality and spiritual teaching and teachers aim at. Then there are the lessons taught by therapies of various sorts, whether psychotherapy or any of the modern variants such as the numerous New Age therapies. Taking psychological therapies as a starting point, as I am best acquainted with what they are both able to offer and what their critical limitations are, I would say that the lesson of therapy is to ‘control’ and ‘regulate’ one’s emotions through a process of reasoning and ‘self-control’. This is accomplished in most talk-therapies by discharging the energy of dammed up emotions in the therapist’s office. In more progressive therapy, such as Cognitive Behavioural therapy, one learns to recognize one’s distorted thinking and dispel negative emotional states by a process of learning to recognize how one’s irrational beliefs perpetuate negative and self-destructive actions. But even with CBT, I find the focus to be on eliminating the worst excesses of emotion whilst hanging on to one’s emotional life in a more measured, ‘appropriate’ and normal manner. Actualism is radically different from these approaches as the aim is self-immolation: the radical extirpation of one’s rudimentary sense of being root and branch. There can be no question of interacting with any ‘psychic web’ unless one’s identity is fully intact. Apperception occurs when ‘I’ cease to be, as temporarily occurs in the PCE. In virtual freedom, one lives virtually all the time free from being a hostage to one’s own as well as other people’s emotional state. One then has nothing of a psychic nature to feed to other people, as there is no psyche in existence. Gary to No 23
No 4: The link you provided is a good start though I was looking for a list of more subtle feelings. I guess I will have to prepare my own list as No 35 has suggested. For me, while it is easy (comparatively) to label and handle obvious feelings like anger, malice, compassion, hope, I find it more difficult to label not-so-apparent feelings. These feelings create a neither-happy-nor-sad kind of state. I remember you talked of dullness in one of your mails. But I find that this dullness or boredom is not the same every time it happens and it happens very frequently. I too have this difficulty. There seems to be so many variations to these feeling. What one thinks, what is the object, what is the situation, what goes on in the body, and self-observation seems to add a subtle twist to the originally started feeling... Through my own work, I have found that a lot of what I called self-observation was actually self-analysis. A feeling arises, I detect it, label it, then immediately start analysing it. There’s a subtle difference between this analysis process and the ruthless ferreting out of its source. While analysis (psycho, etc.) has had its value in the past, now it just gets in the way as it typically is a process that is predicated on and defined by the very set of rules an actualist is trying to eliminate. No 38 to No 33
I would be curious to know if there was anything in your background which impelled you to be a daring adventurer, you know, something you could point to, perhaps in your childhood or early adult years which, in a formative sense, led you to where you are now? Not really. In behavioural study fields there seems to be, at last, the beginnings of a shift away from the traditional belief that the early years of parental care are the primary influence in the development of a social identity and a move towards recognizing the far greater influence of peers. This is perhaps the beginning of a move away from the mystical/ spiritual roots of psychology and sociology, à la Freud and Jung, towards a more pragmatic empirical approach. 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. My Encyclopaedia Britannica had this to say about these later revisions:
I hope you don’t mind my musings about Freud. He is of interest to me only as it bears on our conversation and your statement about the mystical/spiritual roots of psychology and sociology. Incidentally, Freud apparently considered the instincts to be fixed and unalterable. I found this interpretation of Freud’s drive theory in a textbook entitled ‘Psychoanalytic-Marxism’ (1993), by the author Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, a text-book I used in one of my social work courses:
A psychology which regards human instinctual life as fixed and invariant, impossible to eliminate, can only be more of the same old Tried and Failed. Psychoanalysis, quite evidently, is a failed approach to solving human problems. An age that so enthusiastically embraced Freudianism was also an age that spawned new horrors of total warfare and genocide. If, as Freud apparently believed, the instincts cannot be eliminated, the only hope for humanity is to learn to live with these instincts and seek ‘integration’ of these conflicting drives and drive representations. That human beings have so evidently failed to learn to live with these instincts is clear. Freud, like so many others approaching their own death and demise, apparently became rather spiritual and mystical himself, by positing a Nirvana ‘principle’ and Thanatos. * 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
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. When I first came across actualism and was confronted with the proposition that it was brand new and seemingly never been discovered before, I went off finding out for myself what was being offered in the spiritual world and what had been discovered in psychology, sociology, neurobiology, anthropology, etc. What I discovered was that the spiritual world has forever promised but can never ever deliver, and that all empirical research into the human condition is hampered and restricted by these very same spiritual/ religious ethics, morality and beliefs. There are occasional references in spiritual teachings to a ‘state beyond enlightenment’ but no reports of anyone, apart from Richard, having broken free of the illusion of freedom and become actually free. Similarly, in psychology, psychiatry and behavioural studies, there have been many brave attempts to lift the veil of belief and superstition and the current drive for biological/ genetic cures and fixes provides ample evidence of this. Yet common sense is rarely found – and even rarely used – for the researchers and practitioners remain firmly hobbled by spiritualism. And yet, the writings of actualism – the presentation of the facts of what it is to be a human being – is unabashedly based on the efforts, explorations and discoveries of many people, or as Richard puts it, he has stood on the shoulders of many who have gone before. An actual freedom from the human condition – an end to malice and sorrow – has been sought by many human beings for millennia, and many invaluable practical discoveries and contributions have been made. It has always been the case that this search has been hijacked by spiritual/ religious belief and superstition, and has always been hobbled by the atavistic fear of hell and damnation – up until now, that is. 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. Yep. Once anyone accepts that that ‘you can’t change human nature’ there are only two alternatives – stay normal and instinctually battle it out for survival in grim reality or turn away from reality and enter into an inner imaginary greater Reality of one’s own making. 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. * From what I understand about the current research into memories, it appears we are only capable of remembering the last time we remembered an event and we do not necessarily have an accurate recall of the event itself. It is a bit like accessing the last current updated file on your computer and the older ones fade away or get lost or deleted in the mists of time. Many studies have been done which throw doubt on the accuracy of memory recall in criminal cases and point to the susceptibility of memory recall to influence by the interrogators. Similarly, some doubts are beginning to be expressed about the accuracy of many childhood memories and their susceptibility to influence by therapists, guides, psychiatrists etc. Interesting you should mention because I was just watching a program on the brain and one of the things they were covering was memory. They were doing some experiments with memory and they were showing the unreliability of memory and the tendency of the mind to mix up memories of some past event and memories of stimuli subsequently introduced that were extremely similar to the original event. Gary to Peter
Many professions or occupations have an idealistic impassioned undercurrent. I was trained as an architect and was imbued with the notion that good and pure architecture can ennoble the human spirit and thus change the world. I recently saw a comment in an architectural magazine that said ‘architecture challenges the belief that things were better in the old days’. The amazing thing is that now that I have stripped away all the emotion, passion and belief that surrounds my work it becomes the pragmatic, practical business that it is. I still do the best I can to design a building that suits the locality, the particular site, the owners needs, that is value for money and that looks good. I now do the same job, but it is totally different because there is no ‘me’ to stuff up the enjoyment of doing it or to battle others to do it ‘my’ way, as though ‘my creativity’ was of paramount importance. I agree that there is a great deal of idealism in the professions. There was a lot of hopeful idealism and optimism for me when I went into social work. Idealism is part of the whole acculturation process of taking on the belief system, values, and ethical practices of a profession. The new recruit is expected to dress, talk, think, etc. the way other practitioners of the profession dress, talk, and think. Various professions differ in their tolerance for deviance. The social work profession seems to tolerate, within the limits of what is ethical, a great deal of deviance (after all, they’ve kept me on!). Lately, my ardour for social work has died down quite a bit. Just yesterday, I was thinking on the way home that I would like to work for the Post Office delivering mail. I have also had thoughts of quitting my job and getting a non-professional job, say, pushing carts at the local market. These musings are usually interrupted by realisations of what seem to be the practical difficulties involved and the immediate diminution of my wages, benefits and prestige. I also am concerned about the scorn, derision, and censure I may encounter from family and friends over taking a ‘lesser’ job, so I know I am dealing with an issue of ‘my’ identity here. With increasing frequency, as I put into practice what we are talking about on this list, I get the impression that I am working my way out of a job with my chosen profession. There is also the undercurrent of excitement of new possibilities opening up, a whole wondrous world of things to do, places to go, and experiences to have. But that is just how it is for me. There are no rules, or rights and wrongs in actualism – others may find they want to change jobs or do something different. It is the same with my decision to find a companion to prove that I could live with at least one other person in peace and harmony as a starting point to test out whether the process worked or not. Others may prefer to live by themselves, others will be happy to not change their existing circumstances; others may even change partners, or whatever. I may be getting ready for a job change or even a whole change of career. I think I am going to need some help in this. There are vocational specialists available to help people determine what they are best suited to do. There is a local Career Center with a lot of information about up and coming careers and how to train for them. I am seriously questioning whether I am best suited to do the kind of work I am presently engaged in. Perhaps something of a more detailed and technical nature, maybe having to do with computers, may be more appealing. Gary to Peter Web page designed by The Actual Freedom Trust |
