Others ~ Selected Correspondence

Spiritualism

On a different note, I was wondering why people see the contents of the website to be similar to existing material like Zen/ Buddhism/ Eastern stuff... because I was doing the same for quite some time. Firstly, that everybody has got it wrong is something very big – and such an extreme position is unusual and considered insane. So the emotional response to that is – who does he (Richard) think himself as [as Richard himself has suggested this as the possibility of objection]; but after reading the material and seeing a lot of sense in it – the feeling becomes this is all great, but he is wrong in thinking that this is different. All the differences in the web-site are seen to be linguistic differences. As it is a common belief in the eastern spirituality that all paths/religions are the same stuff in different guise. So actualism/actualfreedom is also the same just bottled differently. [At some point I told myself that I was going to take the risk of being called a fool in admitting that everybody got it wrong – that helped to be rid of the fear (is this fear of stepping out of ’humanity’?) and proceed with the investigation.] And since one is used to the vagueness and ambiguity and the indescribables and the unknowables – never defining unambiguously – no wonder actualism looks the same as anything else – but this apparent similarity does not stand the scrutiny. I found Peter’s foresight very accurate: ../actualism/path2.htm:

I have noticed a tendency for many people to merely want to clip on a bit of Actualism to their Spiritualism, and no doubt this tendency will grow in the coming years. Already many western spiritual teachers have watered down Eastern philosophy and religion to try and make it more ordinary and less supercilious and, as AF increasingly gains a foothold, those very same Spiritualists will deliberately distort it and try and absorb it into their teachings.

This is the very reason that we have set up The Actual Freedom Trust, simply in order that there will be at least one original untainted source of Actualism and Actual Freedom which people can use as a touchstone in a world renowned for duplicity and self-deception. Thus it is possible, as with any new discovery, to see two streams operating. Peter, A Practical Guide for Actualists

This is all great fun! No 33 to Vineeto, 11.5.2003

Simple: I have problems... which will not go away by saying ‘be quiet; quiet mind is noble; ...’ etc. so I understand why I am not being quiet and happy given that this is the only life and why am I wasting it away. Then I get into the psyche and remove the misconceptions and things get better.

I have no clue as to the mental state and No 58’s current intentions: except that he and you are saying the same thing in essence: methods cannot work... words/knowledge rubbish.... yours is similar to JK and his to UGK... yours to arrive at some stillness through negation... his to negate for negation’s sake... No 33 to No 56, 10.2.2004

My own experience was that the entire rotten edifice pretty much came tumbling down like a house of cards in short order once I made the decisive step, which for me was to abandon the Krishnamurti-esque facade of belief, throw in the towel on the K-list, and commence to make the most earnest inquiries into Actualism. I think for quite a time I had done my share of fence-sitting and questioning my beliefs, as well as outspokenly questioning the beliefs of other spiritual adherents (undoubtedly always easier to do than question your own beliefs).

All this fence-sitting was but a preliminary step to falling right off the cliff and abandoning all forms of spiritual belief and embracing the eminent sensibility of Actualism. At first, I thought that Richard’s holding of the great spiritual teachers of history responsible for all the murder and mayhem that had occurred for thousands of years was going a bit too far, for I thought that surely there must be some good in these belief systems by virtue of the fact that so many people routinely signed-on to these spiritual and religious forms. It took me awhile, then, to completely demolish every last vestige of spiritual belief. But once the decisive steps were taken, the rest fell into place very quickly. At this point in time, it is difficult to fathom that I once was so deluded. Gary to Vineeto

I followed avidly Vineeto’s response to your posting of Mr. Morford’s material. While perhaps more strongly worded than I would have put it, I agreed with what she said and do not think that Morford is going far enough in his ‘looking within’. In my spiritual days, I did plenty of ‘looking within’ but it was completely different from the ‘self’-investigations I have undertaken as an Actualist.

In my spiritual days, ‘looking within’ was done to identify my ‘character defects’, cleanse myself of these self-centred habits and traits, so that God’s will (whatever that means) could be more fully accepted and brought in my life. Looking back on it, it was a means of reducing the negative and grasping for the positive, God-identified traits and attributes. And it goes without saying that it was a complete failure, or I wouldn’t be here – I’d still be ‘looking within’.

My attention was attracted to what you said in response to a statement of Mr. Morford’s:

It’s interesting to see the words ‘false patriotism’, with the emphasis on the false. Apparently he believes there must be a version of True Patriotism? It makes me wonder where he says ‘blind faith’, whether he thinks there is a faith that is not blind.

Just a couple of my thoughts. Gary to No 38

Conversely, the rug is rather pulled out from under one when it is realized that there is no God in the heavens who loves you. Spiritual belief and superstition have always cornered the market in the human search for peace and happiness, since times immemorial. I doubt that it has ever been otherwise. It is the search for power – probably the ultimate power: immortality itself – snatching victory from the jaws of Death and achieving immortality. The self-aggrandizement at the core of the ASC is the most striking difference between the PCE and ASC. Having had many ASCs in the past, I think I can speak with authority on this. 

I found the link to the newspaper article you mentioned above. For those interested, it is: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/05/27/1022243311156.html. In it, the author, Chris McGillon, states ‘The Dalai Lama seeks to excite the ‘innate spiritual nature’ of people so that they might choose kindness and affection in their relations to others rather than anger, hatred or the temptation to exploit.’

I find interesting what he calls the ‘innate spiritual nature’ of people. If by this he means the primitive instinctual passions operating as a survival program, then indeed I agree with him that this is ‘innate’, in other words, inherited. If, however, he is waxing spiritual himself and declaring that human beings nature is essentially ‘spiritual’ – in other words, the oft-repeated view that we ‘spiritual beings having a human experience’, then I find much in this view to fault. I myself see the ‘spiritual nature’ of humans as consisting in the rough-and-ready primitive instinctual program that human beings are endowed with, that which endows them with a sense of being. The imaginative faculty is then nurtured and primed throughout childhood by the endless recitation of nursery rhymes, fairy tales, horror stories, and other such fictions. Imagination is set on a pedestal in human affairs. One then only imagines a world where peace and harmony prevail among peoples of different stripes. The imaginative, image-making, capability of the human brain, as well as the emotional-affective faculty of human beings is where the ‘innate spiritual nature’ of humans resides. These faculties produce all the various Gods and Goddesses, devils, demi-gods, ghosts, and goblins, as well as the Greater Self, the observing self, the sense that there is something or someone ‘out there’ or ‘up there’ watching me, looking out for me, caring for me, or condemning and damning me.

We involved in Actualism, practising the method, and having learned of Richard’s pioneering discovery, well realize, I think, that the primitive instinctual program, giving rise to one’s ‘spiritual nature’ and other calentures, is not something fixed and invariant, but can be eliminated and is not required in order to function in this world. ‘I’ am indeed redundant.

When it comes right down to it, the whole enculturation and socialization process requires one to ‘put their lives on the line’, and if you are not willing to do that, you in effect are an outcast, or worse, a dangerously seditious enemy of the community. The community is selfish. The community requires that the young put their lives on the line, and this dreary spectacle has been repeated ad nauseum for thousands and thousands of years in every war of territorial conquest and bloodletting since the beginning of recorded time. People like David Suzuki are needed to stir the troops to the call. Gary to Peter

‘Gruebelsucht’. What a great word. But I don’t know how you come up with the umlauts on your program. I’ve never figured out how. Perhaps I need to run another program. Someone once explained it to me, but I still couldn’t figure.

Yes, there does seem to be a lot of back and forth commentary on rather rarefied and intellectualized things on this list. As most of you no doubt know, I was for a while on the K list, and I found myself completely stumped by some of what others were talking about. Some of the writers there seemed to be constitutionally unable to express themselves in simple English. I find, looking back at it now, that a lot of the non-dualism writings have this characteristic. I used to read articles on non-duality, and would think I had grasped a great truth or had some great insight and then a short while later I had not a clue as to what I had just read, nor could I begin to explain it to someone else.

The thing that is different about the actualism writings is that they make sense and are simply practical. There is no more wasting time endlessly talking about ‘what is perception’, ‘what is thought’, etc. That is a great activity if one wishes to retreat from the world of people and events and live in an ivory tower, but that is not how I have chosen to live my life. Gary to Peter

I would like to introduce myself to you and the other members of the list. As I am quite a neophyte to Actual Freedom and the Freedom List, perhaps some comments about how I arrived here are in order. I have for some time been participating in the Listening-l list, a list set up to explore the teachings of J. Krishnamurti. As a participant there, I first made the acquaintance of Richard and had the briefest of correspondence with him.

Some of things that he talked about hit home with me, and a couple of his remarks to me had an impact that lingered on for several months, kind of dormant in my mind, and particularly lately a conviction has been growing that there is a way to find happiness in life through an ending of violence and suffering. The difference now for me is that, whereas previously I would have regarded such a goal as quixotic at the best, now I regard the goal as attainable. Another difference is that I am seeing that happiness now is impossible as long as there is a ‘me’ interfering. ‘I’ will always sabotage whatever meagre supply of happiness I find. However, as I am very new in this enterprise, I have many doubts and objections. Perhaps one of the strongest reservations I have is this: I have been deluded so many times before in searching for ‘the answer’ in spiritual groups, therapy, and ‘self-improvement’ activities, I feel that I am ‘waiting for the left shoe to drop’, to use an expression to point to the experience of being disillusioned.

There is a healthy dose of scepticism at this point, a not wanting to take the whole thing hook-line-and-sinker. I guess I am saying that, whereas I thought I was willing to take the plunge unreservedly, there is a hesitation, a wait and see approach. And perhaps that is as it should be. But I want to forge on with this. One example of this is writing this post.

My usual approach is to reticently test the waters before jumping in on a list such as this. I am excited to have this opportunity to ‘compare notes’ with others that are going through this, and so I am jumping right in there.

Another thing that has happened to me is that I have a seemingly new clarity about certain issues in my life. I am able to see, in a new way, how ‘I’ have been standing in the way of experiencing happiness and joy both for myself and others around me. One of the things I am looking at now is just how miserable I have been for a very long, long time. This stark realization came recently after I went through a period of being a very, very ‘unhappy camper’, being filled with fears, anger, etc. It struck me after reading your recent posting that this is an important realization.

The blindingly obvious, in this case, has been the realization of the extent of my unhappiness and misery. Along with this, I am questioning so-called spiritual values that I have had for a long time. For quite a while, I have embraced a variant of Gnosticism, believing that the world we see is an illusion, and that I actually exist in a timeless realm, in other words, somewhere else other than where I am right now. The logical extension of this has been the experience that I don’t want to be here, that this world is not my home and I really exist somewhere else. The tenacity with which I have held on to these ideas is truly amazing, but as you have pointed out we are dealing with centuries of social and religious conditioning, so they are not easily discarded. This questioning of the spiritual beliefs that I have maintained is something entirely new for me, because I have rigorously maintained these beliefs in the face of evidence that they were making me quite unhappy and ineffective. It is exciting to be questioning these things but a bit disconcerting too. However, I can see that others have been on this path for quite a while ahead of me, so I am taking some courage from that fact.

It is also a stunner to realize that this deep questioning and examination of out-moded spiritual beliefs is dismantling my social identity, that it is part and parcel of this demolition work. This work leads to examining the other end of the duality: the tender instincts of nurture and desire. I have historically been focused on fear and aggression, but both sides of the equation need to be thoroughly explored. Gary to Peter

Welcome to the list. Your introduction post stimulated me to think about the beginning of my interest in actualism, and the inception of my participation on this list. I thought a few words might be in order.

When I first encountered Richard’s writings while I was participating in the Krishnamurti Listening-L forum, something about them made me stand up and take notice. Here, for a change, was a clear enunciation of the root causes of malice and sorrow in the primitive animal instincts, instincts which we human beings share in common with other sentient creatures. But besides being just an exceptionally clear explication of the fundamental causes of malice and sorrow, here was a concrete, practical explanation of and method by which something could be done about it. At that time, my interest in the writings of Krishnamurti, which had reached a devotional pitch, had already begun to wane. I cannot really say what was the cause of my disenchantment with this Enlightened figure, but the cracks in the structure began to appear, and once they began, there was no stopping them. I was increasingly unable to understand what other people on the list were talking about – it sounded like so much spiritual mumbo-jumbo. The last straw seemed to be when, in discourse with one die-hard follower of Krishnamurti and contemporary Listening-L participant, I was being pressed into the mould of a cultic conformity. Had the cracks not appeared at an earlier juncture, the break would not have been so sudden.

In a collateral recent post, Peter described what often precedes an investigation into actualism. He said:

‘A common thread was a dissatisfaction with the pseudo peace of the spiritual world – the sham of the talk and feelings of ‘we are all one’ vs. the actuality of the selfishness, divisiveness and isolationism of all religious/ spiritual fantasies.’ Peter to Gary, 9.4.2001

That is certainly true in my case. There was increasing dissatisfaction with the conformity of religious/spiritual belief, and with the smugness of many believers, including myself. There were also revealing glimpses into the pandemonium within religions and cults, although I could not at the time quite connect that belief was the cause of this interpersonal conflict and fractiousness. I continued to listen...and I continued to learn. When I approached this list, I was still hanging on to the tattered remnants of a belief system based on hope, trust, devotion, and belief. Some of the things that were said on this list grated me. While I truly wanted to find a way to end malice and sorrow, I mistakenly thought I might also be able, at the same time, to hold on to my spiritual convictions. Continued reading of actualism literature and discussion with others effectively continued the demolition job on whatever few remaining beliefs I had in the ‘power of prayer’, the leadings and teaching of Divine figures (including, and in my case, especially Jesus Christ), and the whole host of nonsensical and fantastical metaphysical beliefs and fantasies that pass for the New Age stable of ‘spiritualities’.

I can only paraphrase what others told me when I joined this list: that to seriously take on actualism as a method for bringing to an end malice and sorrow, one needs to demolish and eliminate one’s spiritual values. At first, this involves determined investigation into one’s spirituality. For me personally, this involved questioning my belief in prayer, my devotion to the supposed ‘Son of God’, my sense of being on a mission which involved spreading God’s Divine Love throughout the world, and the credence I had put in various Holy Scriptures, including some popular supposedly ‘channelled’ works from disembodied entities. Not surprisingly perhaps, some of the first posts on this list when I joined had to do with the belief in these disembodied entities.

Like a hammer, this list and the writings of the people on this list, continued to pound away at the spiritual edifice I had built up over the years. But the interesting thing is that, once weakened, the entire structure came toppling down so suddenly and so completely. There were two things that I experienced following my abandonment of spirituality and religion. One the one hand there was an enormous sense of freedom and relief to finally be rid of all the absurd rituals and routines, the self-delusion and clouded judgement, and to be finally able to see clearly without the blinders of belief. But I will not underestimate the daunting nature of this venture, because the other thing I experienced was a fear of Divine Punishment or eternal damnation. Religious conditioning had left me with a fear of striking out on my own and an inner fear that, should I abandon God, I would suffer the torments of hell. Notwithstanding that a very tumultuous and painful period of my life coincided with a period of militant atheism, I was afraid that I was going from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak.

I well remember the period of time after I chucked belief in God, Jesus Christ, religion, and even Alcoholics Anonymous. There was quite a bit of fear, a dread fear of the consequences. I was afraid I would go right off the rails. I also had the fear that I was losing my mind, a fear that I had had at previous periods of my life. Further correspondence with others on this list, reading about the actualist method of investigating fear, probing into my own fears and dread, and taking the approach of sitting in these fears and experiencing them, neither suppressing nor expressing them – all this work culminated in a full-blown PCE (Pure Consciousness Experience). There have been other PCEs along the way, and many, many days in which I am bothered by nothing in particular – no stormy emotions are troubling my mind and ‘heart’, and my physical surroundings have taken on a vibrant, pulsating, rich quality.

I do not need the pacifier of religious/spiritual belief any more. Interestingly, while shopping for a desk chair in the office supply outlet yesterday, I ran into a woman who was a member of a religious group I once belonged to. I said ‘hello’, chatted briefly, exchanged pleasantries, yet felt no feeling of aversion or regret. She stated that the group ‘missed me’ and that she must return some religious text to me – I said ‘Don’t worry about it’, goodbye, and was on my way. I am glad to be rid of all the foolishness of religion and spirituality, glad to be rid of all the ridiculous and absurd dogmas, doctrines, and rituals. I can count in a hundred ways how the demolishment of my spiritual values and spiritual beliefs have left me free to be here now. I can only highly recommend an active investigation into one’s own religious and spiritual beliefs ... it may well be the end of fantasy and delusion, and the emergence of the Actual world of this vibrant, living, and eternal physical universe. Gary to No 24

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

Alan....

Questioning ‘spiritual’ beliefs is one of the more exciting things about this right now.

I think it is getting somewhat easier. The belief that there is a God, or Goddesses, or a spirit world beyond the actual physical world as seen by the eyes, heard by the ears, or felt through touch is ancient, deeply imbedded in the psyche. It seems clear from modern archaeological excavations, that the belief in a spiritual realm paralleled human evolution, probably since the very beginning. It appears to be part and parcel of the Human Condition. It seems to me that to be questioning these beliefs is treading on ‘sacred’ ground, a place where few dare to tread, at least I have dared to tread. At a previous time in my life, I was a dedicated atheist, actually a refreshing thing, now that I think about it. But I went through a period of questioning that. Since it was coincident with my active alcohol and drug addiction, and since I was on a suicide course at the time, I figured I had nothing to lose by adopting spiritual beliefs and turning my life over to a Higher Power. Now, on the other end of things, I am seeing that the belief in the Higher Power has not delivered the goods in terms of freeing me from malice and sorrow and that I’ve got quite a bit of work to do to clean that mess up. One can be sober and miserable too... Now I am not so quick to pray when I am in a situation in which I feel doubt and fear and my first inclination, most times, is to look into it, investigate it, rather than resignedly accepting it. I am beginning to prefer using my common sense and intelligence to deal with what comes up rather than sitting on my posterior-part in fairy-tale land waiting for divine guidance. Gary to Alan

I was talking to a man yesterday who was reeling from the news that his ex-wife, a woman who is quite dependent on, was diagnosed with cancer. He is naturally shocked, trying to digest this news, and was obviously experiencing a great deal of anger. At one point he said ‘Life is not fair’, something no doubt many of us have experienced in moments of great loss or crisis. Then, he said ‘There’s got to be a better place than this’. I thought, to myself, ‘No, there isn’t’, but didn’t say what I was thinking. It seemed that in this statement of his was summarized a point of view common to spiritual and religious followers, and perhaps much of humanity in general. In the past, I might have nodded approval to this statement, but this time I did not. It hit me all of a sudden that the belief that ‘there’s a better place than this’ causes and contributes to a lot of malice and sorrow. In other words, if I place my hope in a ‘better place than this’, in an afterlife, after death (which is what I assumed he was talking about), then I am going to be incapable of investigating into and examining the things that are making me desperately unhappy with life now as-it-is. It seems to me that it is all a big escape to believe in an afterlife, an all too ‘human’ condition. Perhaps there is a ‘better place than this’ but it is not in some imaginary afterlife or Heaven peopled with Gods, saints and gurus. It is right here and right now when ‘I’, with all my beliefs, values, expectations of how things should be, and the instinctual passions come to an end. There is indeed a better place than this. Gary to Peter

In a recent post to No. 5, I told of my addiction and treatment for it in 1985. Both before and after treatment, I attended AA. Particularly in the years immediately following treatment, I was a zealous AA member. In recent years, and particularly since having a good relationship with a woman and setting up house together, I have slacked off on my attendance of meetings. Now, in fact, I am deeply questioning the methodology of AA and the meetings and people themselves. I don’t mean openly questioning, as in dialogue with others or argumentation. I mean questioning to myself the spiritual values and identity that I adopted in my active years in AA. I have found it increasingly difficult when I do attend AA meetings. I usually attend once or twice during the week in the town where I work as a social worker. When people get to the part, as they inevitably do, where they relate what God has done for them or praise God in gratitude for getting them sober, I can scarcely relate. I can relate in the sense of having made these grateful proclamations myself many times in the past, but I no longer feel that way. I feel at times that I am in the midst of a Christian Revival meeting, with people getting up on the soapbox to praise the Lord and exhort other believers to do the same. This feeling has intensified in me since finding out about actualism and particularly since I have deliberately exerted myself to understanding and jettisoning spiritual values, practices, and beliefs. I feel the methodology of AA is all wrong. I know my AA friends would probably tell me I am heading for a drunk (which I seriously don’t believe to be the case), and that I have got it all wrong.

*

I still intend to attend AA but I feel I have parted ways with many of the things, which I used to give head-nodding approval to, mainly the ‘spiritual’ part of the program. I also do not seem to have as much of a desire for affiliation, the need to ‘rub elbows’ with people, as I used to have. All of this amounts to either a kind of self-imposed exile or an ostracization from something that I used to consider as essential to continued life and happiness as food and air. I am not sure any more. When I do attend meetings, I enjoy hearing people talk about how their lives have changed for the better with continued sobriety, as has mine. And I also like to hear what people are finding out about living in this world in peace and harmony with others and themselves, but I chafe when they start talking about so-called spiritual things, what Richard has dubbed ‘passionate fantasies and imaginative hallucinations’. The founders of AA, like many human beings, held all kinds of fanciful ideas about things spiritual, attending séances, revivals, etc, etc. I can certainly relate to that kind of delusion. At one time, I was firmly convinced that I could communicate with dead spirits myself!

I have noticed something else of late. It is my perception that the individuals who are the most outwardly ‘spiritual’, professing to be led by a Master or to have a direct connection with a ‘Higher Power’ also seem to be the people who are the most desperately unhappy, grieved, and/or malicious. This does not always hold up in every instance. And I am not trying to make myself out to be superior to ‘spiritual’ people, because I have walked in the same tracks on the same road. But I think that the more deluded one is by the Tried and Failed teachings of the God-men and gurus, the more unhappy one is, in general. And unhappiness always shows its face in one way or another. Gary

Yes, I think you are right on with that one. I do see the tendency to take on actualism as some kind of new belief system, and perhaps the tendency is so strong when one has only just begun to examine their pre-existing belief system.

Part of what I see is wanting to hide behind a new belief, adopt new teachers to replace the old, a new dependency to replace the old hero worship. It is very subtle and insidious. In this scheme of things, the intent to become happy and carefree becomes an ideal to be sought after, and the funniest thing is that I think I must conform to the image of being happy and carefree, when in fact there are those ‘undercurrents of malice and sorrow’ which are such fertile grounds for investigation.

One of the things that I have done for a very long time is pray. I used to pray on my knees but came to the understanding that it is silly to prostrate myself to a God whom I could only conceive of as being Loving and not requiring prostrate submission. But I continued to pray, and it has been an almost automatic habit, something that I do when I awake, on the ride to work, at work, praying for guidance, etc. I still feel the impulse to pray, as it is largely a matter of habit. But it also a form of fear: praying out of a sense of insufficiency, praying because one is confused and does not know what to do, etc. I think it is going to be very difficult to give up this habit, but as I begin to give it up, I sense that the fear which the habit hid can be more deeply investigated. I know it is silly but I feel a fear to give it up, a childish fear that God is going to be angry at me for doing this and I will be punished.

I continue to feel the excitement at being on the threshold of something new, something uncharted, vast and open. I am being careful not to dive right in trying to take on examination of fear and aggression. I am slowing down somewhat in my approach and taking time to examine the spiritual values and beliefs which I have cultivated for so long. I appreciate your advice to read your Journal, and I shall. Gary to Peter

It seems that people on a religious and/or (these words are interchangeable) spiritual path are always caught up in their feeling of uniqueness or different-ness from ordinary ‘worldly’ people. When I was into the spiritual lifestyle, I always had a sense of mission or a feeling of being special compared to the average heathens around me. Take most Christian people, for instance, with their ingrained persecution complex – it seems to me that they are always looking to be persecuted by others, and are rarely cognizant of their self-righteous, pious attitude towards ‘non-believers’ and their downright persecutory attitude towards others who are not members of their little coterie. The whole thrust of Christianity is the conversion of others to their belief system, not to mention the unspeakable horrors that have been perpetrated in the name of carrying forward God’s word. And this is true of other religions as well. I appreciate particularly, Peter, your discernment of the lure of Eastern religions to the ordinary Western mind, and the fact that many do not consider these to be religions peddling their snake oil in another form different from the old-time religions. People think there is something chic about being a Buddhist. I myself really had too much, for instance, of a supervisor quoting to me the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism like I was some waif in need of redemption. I found it high time to speak my mind about it rather continuing to be spoon-fed the watered down version of these Eastern ‘Truths’. The superciliousness of some people I know who have been seduced by the Eastern religions is quite amazing. Such people really think they have something to say and they hide behind their teachings of the Buddha and pass them off on others as the truth revealed. I am taking this opportunity to rant a bit, and I think I will continue with this most healthy activity for a while longer. I am sick to the core of all the ridiculous and fantastical beliefs that are passed off as ‘Truth’ to the unsuspecting. I am sick of the God-men and God-women, those who have need of a Master, sick of their disciples and adherents, sick of the whole rotten mess. The world will be much better off when these religions atrophy, wither and die off for lack of support.

Of course, I am not holding my breath until this happens. I see plenty of ‘lambs to the slaughter’ around me in the people I work with. Phew! It feels good to rant! Gary to Peter

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.

You, Peter, have had a very unique and extremely revealing look at the whole process of a religion forming from the ground up. You have seen firsthand the violence connected with religious life and the stupid posturings of the Enlightened Ones. Your turning away from the spiritual rat race and where you are at in life now should be extremely valuable to those who are disillusioned too with the Glory and Glitz of Enlightenment. I too saw the shenanigans that religious people, including myself formerly, get up to, and had enough. I jumped ship from the Quakers and jumped right on the Krishnamurti bandwagon, and the whole process repeated itself. I was naturally aghast when the whole thing repeated itself. My spiritual pride would not allow me to admit that I had been so wrong about many things.

Actual Freedom and autonomy has to be earned by stubborn and persistent effort – it is not granted by grace to the meek and mild.

Yet religious doctrine preaches that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’. Meekness is an outward form of behaviour that religious people adopt, but they are just as violent in their ‘heart’ because the ‘heart’ (not the pumping organ in our chests) is the seat of our emotional life and the savage and tender passions hold sway there. To be spiritual is really, I think, to be lazy. You pray to God for deliverance and redemption. You actually think that someone or something else can clean up the mess that human beings, that you, have made of the world. This approach is all totally wrong. I have to clean up the mess myself through stubborn and persistent effort. It is not going to be done for me by some Divine Being or God Incarnate. I need to put on my hip boots and wade right into that smelly mess head on and take a good long look at what it is about for myself. Gary to Peter

The town where I and Peter, Vineeto, Richard and Grace live is full of cars with bumper stickers that say things like ‘The Goddess Is Dancing’, ‘Truth Is’, ‘Thou Art That’ and so on; so I have this plan to make actual freedom bumper stickers that say things like ‘I am not’, and, my favourite, ‘I want to be reborn as worm’s poo’. With the funds raised from the sale of the bumper stickers we could open a plot shop where we sell second hand plots, recycled lost plots, plots handed in voluntarily by actualists. This could be the beginning of an empire!!! You – being head disciple and all – I thought I’d run it by you first and see what you thought.

I have just read about 20 messages in a row having been off-line and I can’t remember if it was you or Peter that spoke of comparing life now to life before coming to one’s senses, and I harked back to my last year or so of my life in the spiritual paradigm (which you are so lucky or whatever to have avoided, such is it’s sickly sweet and insidious nature) and at how I felt at that time. Now I can see plainly it was pure conflict – I mean literally all out war inside of ‘my being’. It was a war of conflicting beliefs (big surprise) that I had ‘taken on board’, all your normal social conditioning, 25 years of spiritual conditioning in 3 or 4 flavours, a liberal helping of new age, shamanism, channelling... I was so ‘open’ I would believe anything. The result was a state where I would have sudden rushes of pure panic for no apparent reason (like I just remembered I’d left someone’s baby on the bus, is how I would describe it). The corresponding doubt that comes with that much firmly held belief is, of course, an unfortunate legacy of a life so lived, and I was paying dearly in terms of personal peace for living in such ‘surrendered’ way. I find that looking back from here, now – though there have certainly been some dark times and deep and searching ventures into the psyche – to experience life with a genuine naivety that makes something like having a cup of coffee or a hot shower such an absolute and fulfilling delight ... it is so far removed from ‘me’ nine or so months ago as to seem impossible – what a trick shot the human self has been, huh! Mark to Alan

I was talking to someone the other day, a spiritual seeker who paid to go and ‘just be’ with a spiritual master who has recently drawn large crowds in the town where I live. I asked her what she got from being around this person, to which she replied that she felt ‘totally accepted’ and that she was perfect just as she is. I asked her if her life felt like she is perfect just as she is, and she said no, that she still felt ‘pretty fucked up’. I reported that I could not see the point of spending $700 and travelling 1000 kilometres to spend a week around someone feeling warm and fuzzy in a rarefied atmosphere, and to sit silently and not change anything when one was really feeling inner turmoil most of the time in daily life.

So we chatted for a while and touched on the Actual Freedom Trust and she said she hoped I would not end up in another cult with another ‘funny’ name referring to my past as a Sannyassin (2 n’s or 2 s’s, I never can remember that). I chuckled albeit to myself as I thought of some actualist’s names ... I would be Mark-me absent, Vineeto would be renamed Finito, Peter would become Peter-out and Grace could become Grace-ful departure. Mark

Maybe that is in part what I am going through with this fear that I am experiencing – fear of the consequences of being actually free. At this point, however, it does not feel like it is ‘too much’ for me, but there are times when I wonder if I can handle anymore. But I have the sense that it is too late to turn back and that I cannot turn back anymore. I have made major progress recently by severing my ties to AA and the spiritual program of AA.

I can see now that I was straddling the line. It became more and more difficult and even downright impossible to maintain an affiliation with an organization with an avowed spiritual purpose. I was not being honest with myself by thinking that I could occasionally attend meetings ‘for support’ yet remain aloof from the evangelizing and propaganda. More and more, I felt like an impostor. Religious indoctrination is very subtle. It permeates 12 Step organizations like AA. It even permeates social work, as I am finding out. When you begin to jettison spiritual values, you find that you don’t have much in common with spiritual people anymore. To question them about this is to often incur their considerable wrath, as they regard as heresy any meaningful attempt to look into the stranglehold that spiritual, mystical, and religious thinking has in these areas.

It seems that people on a religious and/or (these words are interchangeable) spiritual path are always caught up in their feeling of uniqueness or different-ness from ordinary ‘worldly’ people. When I was into the spiritual lifestyle, I always had a sense of mission or a feeling of being special compared to the average heathens around me.

Take most Christian people, for instance, with their ingrained persecution complex – it seems to me that they are always looking to be persecuted by others, and are rarely cognizant of their self-righteous, pious attitude towards ‘non-believers’ and their downright persecutory attitude towards others who are not members of their little coterie. Gary to Peter

I had a long talk with my partner, explaining that I am no longer attending AA and my reasons for not doing so. It was an opportunity to explain the things that I am doing and the changes that are occurring. I found that she understood exactly why I no longer wish to attend AA and why I feel that to continue to do so is holding me down. She said that she honestly could never see me drinking again. She never knew me when I was drinking and taking drugs, we having met while I was already off drugs and alcohol. AA is an exclusive club, but I never saw that before because I wanted to belong to a club; I felt I needed it.

Yesterday I stepped into the AA club in the town where I work to speak for awhile with a client who works there. I have not been back there for quite awhile. I felt apprehensive about going in there. It felt a bit like walking into the Lion’s Den. AA is so spiritual, through and through, and it is impossible for me now to conform to any kind of spiritual viewpoint. It is interesting that in the United States, our state courts and appeals courts have consistently upheld the legal finding that AA is a religious organization and that to force people to attend AA, as is frequently done with people who are prison inmates or on probation in the legal system, violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of our Constitution (pertaining to the separation between church and state) and is hence unconstitutional. Yet attendance at AA is the sacred cow of our alcoholism and drug treatment system. There is little or nothing else on offer here but the spiritual Pablum of the 12-step programs.

My experience of religious and spiritual groups was just that it was more of the same-same in human affairs and interactions: in other words, the same people vying for position and power, the same coercion by the group on how to think and behave, the same dynamics of leader-follower, etc. I don’t know now what I thought would be different. Religion promises but does not deliver. I wanted at one point to immerse myself in a monastery where my life would be moulded and controlled for me by others.

The process in the religious/ spiritual world of subjecting oneself to a Power or Powers and the earthly representatives of that power has its’ analogy in the work world with its’ hierarchy and office politics.

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I am pretty clear about religion being founded on fear. What I have observed in myself is that any inclination to reach beyond what is palpable and physical into some imaginary realm or seek Divine help, in other words, any religious element arising in the mind is always related to an underlying fear. One can easily observe fear and what goes on with it in one’s life. What is not entirely clear to me is that identity in any form has been causing all the mischief in the human world down through the ages. Of course, it follows that identity is founded on the instincts, the rudimentary sense of being. But there is something about it that I cannot quite make the connection. I think I shall have to continue to investigate this ‘to death’, so to speak, in order to see it more clearly. It would follow from this that whenever there is conflict with other human beings, and I don’t mean a mere difference of opinion or different way of looking at things, but an active sense of being at each other’s throats, identity and instinct must be behind it.

These are fascinating opportunities to investigate into in order to understand what makes one tick as human being. Recently, we had an election in the USA, and the results of that election are being hotly debated and legally challenged by the political aspirants. The entire thing seems so volatile to me. Passions are running high here. There were clips on the television of Republicans storming the polling places where the votes were being recounted. Again in all this we come back to the powder keg of passionate feeling, whether it be political loyalties or for a particular religion or sect. it is all productive of misery and mayhem. One is wise to side-step passionate feeling in any form.

I am not sure it all comes down to defending religious beliefs. I am not anti-religion. I do not want to be anti anything. Were I to take up a militant atheism that gets at the throats of religious people, it would be having another axe to grind, I would be committing the same mistake the religious folks do. It is belief, spurred by the sense of identity and being, and that in turn is related to instincts, that seems to be the culprit.

Anything that human beings latch on to with ‘religious’ devotion is a potential source of warfare and violence, and that is true of political parties, nationalism (obviously), race, gender, etc., etc. It all seems to boil down again to identity, that sense of ‘me’, that this is ‘me’ and that is ‘you’. People sugar-coat and cover up this underlying sense of separation through religious beliefs and injunctions, particularly the ‘we are all one’ feeling. But anything that people feel passionately about is productive of disorder, separation, and in its’ worst manifestation, overt violence. Gary to Peter

Yes, this is true. In hindsight, I would say my (what I later dubbed as) ‘spiritual awakenings’ were really exceptional periods of clarity, with the return of sensibility and sanity. Addiction results in such debased acts of anti-social and destructive behaviour, that without the protective haze induced by drugs, the addict is literally on the verge of suicide. The experience is so powerful that it is no surprise that people reach out to what is on offer as an alternative. Additionally, it is no surprise that people forgo their common sense and dive right into a spiritual lifestyle because it offers what drugs so handsomely promised but failed to deliver. The desire for drugs stems from the same instinctual basis that other addictions do. This is becoming clearer and clearer to me. No wonder that addicts, once newly recovering, are so susceptible to a host of replacement addictions – food, sex, caffeine, work, etc., etc. – the underling problem, of course, is the desire to grab for more of what we already have, never being satisfied with the simple pleasures of life. There is also considerable self-aggrandizement at work. Gary to Vineeto

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