Actual Freedom

peace
happiness
malice and sorrow

The human search for freedom has been a search for freedom from the rigid shackles of one’s instilled social identity and the search for peace and happiness has been a search for a means of finally bringing an end to both personal and global malice and sorrow.

Human Condition

beliefs and facts
social identity
instinctual passions

evolution
life and death
reality
common knowledge
spiritual science
morals and ethics
male and female

The Human Condition is a common term for the situation that all human beings find themselves in when they emerge as babies. The Human Condition is that set of beliefs, conditionings and instinctual passions that form the habitual and neuro-biological program by which human beings currently operate and have done so, with few significant changes, ever since the emergence of the species.

The Human Condition can be likened to the ‘rules of the game’, defining the parameters and limits of what it is to be a human being that have been established, and embellished, over thousands of years. These rules ‘set in concrete’ both our instinctually-based behaviour patterns as well as the beliefs, morals and ethics that have been passed on from those who were here before us. Thus the gender, family, tribal, spiritual and world views, concepts and attitudes of each and every newly-born human is, without exception pre-established at birth.

The Human Condition is deemed to be a fixed condition, so much so that it is a universally accepted belief that ‘you can’t change human nature’.

Spiritual world

Religions

Altered State of
Consciousness

Spiritual teachers

calenture
delusion
dissociation
authority

Ancient Wisdom

denial
eternity
faith and trust
intuition
life after death
meta-physical
psyche
soul and truth
superstition
therapy

The traditional spiritual solutions

The shamans and priests have commandeered this innate search with the promise of an ultimate peace and happiness in a mythical ‘life-after-death’ should one bow down to and worship a particular God and follow a particular teaching. This seductive promise of immortality for one’s ‘self’ or soul is a powerful lure that is passionately fuelled by the basic fear that underlies the innate survival instinct – the fear of death. The Eastern religions further add the possibility of becoming a God-man whilst on earth – a position of ultimate power and authority over others that is irresistibly appealing for many – and the resulting enslavery inherent in the master-disciple system is the very antithesis of freedom.

The Eastern religious fervour for worshipping mortal men and women as immortal Gods is an affront to intelligence that does nothing but perpetuate human misery, suffering and enslavement to ancient fears and ignorance. Any chance of an actual peace on earth is readily and eagerly forfeited for an imaginary peace after physical death … or, for the rare few, the chance to feel like God-on-earth.

In addition, Eastern spiritual belief has it that human existence on earth is a ‘necessary suffering’ and that ultimate peace and fulfillment lies ‘elsewhere’, after death. With this belief that all this suffering is necessary to human existence firmly habituated on the planet it is no wonder that human suffering and resentment continue to flourish.

Extolling these primitive superstitions and beliefs as great wisdom or even the ‘Truth’ is to actively deny that it is the instinctual passions – both the revered Good and the repressed Bad – that are the root cause of human malice and sorrow. Indulging in the practice of denial and the belief of transcendence only serves to prevent one from undertaking the common sense investigation that can bring an irrevocable end to one’s personal malice and sorrow.

Actualism
Actualist

Science

views of brain function
facts
body

Instinctual passions

fear
aggression
nurture
desire
need to belong

Social identity

morals and ethics
beliefs and emotions

Self

ego and soul
‘I’ and being
imagination
psyche
who am I

The modern scientific empirical discoveries of neuro-biology and genetics, with regard to the human brain and how it functions, have revealed two very fascinating aspects –

1. That the brain is programmable in the same way a computer is programmable. The program is formed by physical connections or pathways between neurons, and this program is mostly formed after birth. These pathways (synapse) are also capable of being changed at any time. The old connection simply ‘dies’ for lack of use and a new one is formed.

2. That the human brain is also pre-programmed, via a genetic code, with a set of base or instinctual operating functions, located in the primitive brain system which causes automatic thoughtless passionate reactions, primarily those of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, to be transmitted via chemical messages to various parts of the body including the neo-cortex. Physiological alterations that could eliminate this crude programming, as a biological adaptation to changed circumstances, are well documented within the animal species.

• The first discovery accords with the practical experience of being able to radically change one’s social identity – the program instilled since birth that consists of the morals, ethics, values and psittacisms that make up our social identity. A psychological identity that is malleable to radical change can be susceptible to total elimination.

• The second discovery accords with the practical experience of eliminating one’s innate ‘being’ – the emotive source of the instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. The instinctual passions are automatic and psychic in nature, genetically encoded in the primitive or reptilian brain and ‘felt’ in the body due to the resulting chemical surges. This blind and senseless survival program can now be safely deleted for the human species has not only survived … it is now beginning to flourish.

Self-immolation

identity
self
death

body
consciousness
what am I
actual

Given that the instinctual animal ‘self’ in humans has morphed into a sophisticated and cunning psychological and psychic identity that appears to live within the flesh and blood body, it is obvious that the instinctual animal passions can only be eradicated by eliminating both the psychological ‘self’ and the instinctual ‘self’.

The elimination of one’s ‘self’ needs to be total – both ‘who’ you think you are as a social identity and ‘who’ blind nature has programmed you to instinctively feel you are … in spiritual terms, both the ‘ego’ and the ‘soul’. The good news is that with the extinction of who you think and feel you are what you are will emerge – a flesh and blood human being, free of malice and sorrow and free of any metaphysical delusions whatsoever.

Pure Consciousness
Experience

ASC versus PCE
actual
sensuous
sensation

Pure intent

honesty

Everybody has had a PCE sometime in their life where, for a brief period, one magically finds oneself in a ‘self’-less state of sensate-only experiencing and the perfection and purity of the actual world – the fairy-tale like physical universe – becomes stunningly and sensuously apparent.

For an actualist, the pure consciousness experience becomes one’s guiding light and to live that pure experience 24 hrs. a day, every day, becomes one’s unambiguous pure intent. Pure intent is the unequivocal intention to devote one’s life to being the best one can be – to completely and actually eradicate malice and sorrow from one’s life.

Naiveté

innocence
serendipity

Human Condition

environmentalism
humanity

People

peace and harmony
living together, intimacy
happy and harmless

Abandoning these cynical ‘real world’ and ‘spiritual world’ beliefs about human existence is essential if one is to even consider becoming free of the Human Condition. In order to begin the process of changing human nature in oneself, one needs to re-activate and cultivate one’s innate naiveté – the closest one can get to innocence while still remaining a ‘self’.

Many people who have had PCEs are subsequently moved to do something about the Human Condition on the planet and then set about attempting to change others, their partners or ‘society’ at large. What they forget, or ignore, is the fact that they have only briefly experienced this state of personal freedom from malice and sorrow when they themselves were in a ‘self’-less state – in short that the problem is ‘me’ and my passions and not ‘others’ and their passions.

As is evident from the PCE, the only way to evince genuine peace and harmony with one’s fellow human beings is to have no ‘self’ at all – no ‘me’ who feels offended, or who instinctually feels the need to fight with others. To become actually innocent, actually free of all feelings of malice and sorrow, is the key to both finding personal peace and happiness and to be able to live in peace and harmony with one’s fellow human beings.

An Actualist’s guide

‘Self’-awareness

Judgement
Thought
Feelings

The key to freedom from the Human Condition is the unique capacity of the human brain to be aware of its own functioning. Human beings are thus capable of being aware of both what they are thinking and what they are feeling – feelings being ‘my’ emotional-mental interpretation of the instinctual passions in operation. This ability is commonly known as self-awareness. An ongoing attentiveness needs to be actively cultivated and then persistently practiced in order to ensure success.

How to Become Free

Happy and Harmless

Here
Now

Affective Feelings

anger and malice
authority
beauty
compassion
denial
doubt
evil
hope
humility
love and trust
pride and guilt
sorrow

People

Fear

The essential method is to undertake a total investigation into anything that is preventing one from being happy and harmless now – after all, if one’s aim is to be happy then one needs to be happy now, not at some time in the future, nor some time in the past. This moment is, after all, the only moment I can experience being happy.

It is vital to explore and investigate the affective feelings and emotions that arise from the instinctual animal passions – both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ – for the secret to being actually free of malice and sorrow lies in this very exploration. It is essential to understand and fully comprehend that one’s feelings and emotions are part and parcel of the Human Condition and not a personal fault, failure, stigma or ‘evil’. Fear, aggression, nurture and desire are innate passions that every human being is programmed with by blind nature.

There is a third alternative in investigating affective feelings, emotions and instinctual passions and it involves neither repressing nor expressing – the traditional either/or approach. This alternative approach requires breaking the habit of either expressing or repressing feelings, emotions and passions. Clearly seeing what one is doing to others by expressing, or attempting to suppress, anger is surely sufficient to stop if one’s intent is to become harmless. This observing and investigating – neither suppressing or expressing – has the added advantage of both getting men fully into their feelings for the first time in their life and getting women to examine their feelings, one by one, instead of being run by a basketful of them all at once.

The method soon presents success incrementally, as freedom from beliefs and instinctual passions is indeed a freedom that results in increased peace and harmony for oneself and in one’s relating with one’s fellow human beings. The method does bring up fear and resistance, because one is dismantling one’s very ‘self’, those very beliefs and passions one holds so dearly.

180 degrees opposite

Contemplation

Intelligence
Common Sense
Judgement

Meditation

Awareness
Delusion
Who am I – God

The vowed aim of meditation is to escape from the world, transcend the ego and ‘become’ the soul – an imaginary and delusionary shifting of one’s identity from mortal to Immortal, from animal to Divine. Whereas the whole point of the process of actualism is to be aware of, identify, investigate and eliminate both one’s social and one’s instinctual identity – both ego and soul – for both are the source of one’s malice and sorrow. The goal is to become actually happy and harmless, on earth, in this very lifetime.

An actualist’s naiveté and pure intent, firmly based on the purity and perfection evident in the Pure Consciousness Experience, will ensure that one avoids the instinctual lust for the power of feeling oneself to be God as well as the seductive lure of being worshipped as such by others.

Social identity

belief

dreams
faith and trust
feeling
imagination
intuition
logic
materialism
male and female
morals and ethics
psyche
reality
religion
sex
spiritual
truth

fact

common sense
judgement
intelligence
rationality
sensate and sensible
thought

One’s social identity is the conglomerate of all the beliefs, morals, ethics, values, principles and psittacisms that each of us have been programmed with since birth. It is only when one has substantially eliminated or deleted this programming that one can clearly look at, and sensibly investigate, the core instinctual being hidden beneath. This is a crucial step on the path to Actual Freedom and it is both radical and iconoclastic.

The elimination of one’s social identity requires the replacement of society’s moral and ethical arbitrary judgments of good and bad and right and wrong with an open-eyed evaluation and intelligent assessment based on what is sensible and what is silly. This step can only be undertaken with the pure intent gleaned from the Pure Consciousness Experience – an experience of the purity, perfection and innate benign disposition evident in a ‘self’-less state. This gives one the confidence and surety to venture beyond the limits of what is normally considered to be safe, sensible and sane.

The other essential work that is needed to dis-empower one’s social identity is that the beliefs and psittacisms one has been instilled with in childhood, or has later co-opted as one’s own, need to be replaced with observable and verifiable facts.

A fact is obvious; it is out in the open, freely available for all to see. To believe something to be true is to accept on trust that it is so. A fact does not have to be accepted on trust – a fact is candidly so. A fact is patently true, manifestly clear. A fact is what is ascertained sensately and thus demonstrably true. If you are to become free of believing you need to rely on fact – the verifiable, objective actuality – as a touchstone to test the sensibility of whatever ‘truth’ one suspects to be a belief.

Humanity

social identity
instinctual passions

Human Condition

malice
sorrow
fear
psyche

Altruism

What am I

facts
intelligence
sense

When one digs deep into one’s instinctual ‘self’ one encounters the raw unfettered instinctual passions, mainly those of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and when one does this one needs to ‘ride out the storm’ of chemical-induced fears and fantasies that are invariably stirred up. Also in the experiential  investigation of the instinctual passions one inevitably encounters the instinctual archaic ‘memory’ imprinted in the primitive brain itself, a memory that stretches back to the very beginnings of the human species itself.

However, these fascinating experiences and discoveries leave no emotional scars and soon one is back on the wide and wondrous path to actual freedom …

Virtual Freedom

Actualism
actual
pure intent
perfection

here and now
benevolence
Hedonism

apperception
delight
excellence experience
happy and harmless
harmony
humour
mind
naiveté
peace
sensuousness
serendipity

The path to Actual Freedom delivers the goods – one progressively eliminates the impediments to one’s happiness and harmlessness incrementally and, as such, one has incremental success. One continually raises the bar to allow more of the perfection and purity of the actual world to become apparent and obvious in one’s life. This process, if undertaken with a pure intent, will inevitably lead to a virtual freedom.

When one is virtual free from malice and sorrow one goes to bed at night time having had a 99% perfect day, knowing tomorrow will be equally perfect. In virtual freedom the immediate and the actual becomes one’s focus as this is, after all, the only moment I can experience of being alive.

Virtual Freedom is a readily obtainable, realistic goal available for anyone – and is an essential step on the path to Actual Freedom. Whilst an actual freedom from malice and sorrow is the goal, the end and the means are the same – one needs to do whatever it takes to be both happy and harmless this very moment.  Unless one is willing to contemplate a virtual happiness and harmlessness, to be virtually free of malice and sorrow, 99% of the time – then one might as well forget the whole business. If someone is not willing to make this level of ‘self’-sacrifice then any interest in an Actual Freedom would remain a purely cerebral exercise, wishful thinking and a useless self-deception.

Virtual Freedom is available for everyone, and anyone, who has a pure intent to be happy and harmless. As the senses are freed from the clutches of the emotions and passions a veritable smorgasbord of sensual delight becomes readily apparent and one lives in a state of almost constant near-peak experience.

Self-immolation

real
actual

One is then left with a final moment, to ...

Step out of the real world into this actual world ...
And leave your ‘self’ behind where ‘you’ belong ...

Actual Freedom

actual
apperception
benevolence
delight
infinitude
innocence
peace
perfection
sensuousness
time
universe

Richard: The day finally dawns when something irrevocable happens inside the skull. In an ecstatic moment of being present, ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul expire ... the entire identity ceases to exist, permanently. There is a sensation inside the top of the brain-stem that is experienced as a physical ‘turning over’ of some kind ... something that can never, ever, turn back.

Something immutable occurs and everything is different, somehow, although everything stays the same physically ... with the outstanding exception of a perfection and a purity permeating all and everything. Something has changed, although it is as if nothing has happened ... except that the entire world is a magical fairy-tale-like playground full of incredible joy and a delight that is never-ending.

‘My’ demise was as fictitious as ‘my’ apparent presence. I have always been here, I realize, it was that ‘I’ only imagined that ‘I’ existed. It was all an emotional play in a fertile imagination ... which was, however, fuelled by an actual hormonal substance triggered off from within the brain-stem because of the instinctual passions bestowed by blind nature. Thus the psyche – the entire affective faculty born of the instincts itself – is wiped out forever and one is finally what one actually is ... this thoughtful flesh-and-blood body simply brimming with sense organs, delighting in this sensuous world of actual experience.

I am this very material universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being.