Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List

with Correspondent No 7

8.8.1999

Hi,

Following on from your last post, I have been musing about the ‘life’-bit of ‘Life, the universe and what it is to be a human being’. ‘Life’ is one of those words that has many nuances in the English language, and it seemed a useful exercise to dig into the various meanings in order to make sense of what life is. When I came across Richard, one of the first things I did was buy a good dictionary. The meanings of words are so perniferously abused, particularly in spiritual writings and speech, that Richard was most particular in his choice of words and often searched for alternatives to both the normally abused and spiritually abused words. Astoundingly, the accurate meanings of words seems to make no difference to many who read his words – for them, the word ‘non-spiritual’ means ‘a new form of spiritual’ and ‘down-to-earth’ means ‘spiritual life while here on earth’ and ‘actual freedom’ is no different at all from the pseudo ‘spiritual freedom’ of turning away and escaping into a fantasy land.

This is exactly why Alan has said that what he does is read, read, read and for a bit of relaxation, stick his feet up and read a bit more. A superficial reading of Richard’s words will miss the point completely for one will ignore the uncommon words and disabuse the more common words and get stuff-all out of it. When faced with something so radically new, a condition known as cognitive dissonance is evident in most. This is exactly why I have compiled a Glossary of terms on the Web-site and tried to separate the sensible dictionary definitions and interpretations of words used in AF from the hackneyed, non-sensical NDA-jargon and misrepresentations of the Venerated Ones. At the moment I’m going through the glossary again, doing some editing in preparation for the new AF web-site that Richard and Vineeto are busy with. Which brings me back to ‘life’ again, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to both write to you about life and do a bit for the Glossary at the same time.

Life is such a bloody good subject – I would say vitally interesting – and one I remember as literally earth-shaking when I delved into the misconceptions and psittacisms surrounding it. So let’s start with the Oxford Dictionary. I’ll break the definitions into sections dealing with different interpretations of the word, so as to best define the distinctive meanings associated with the word –

life ––

1. a The condition, quality, or fact of being a living organism; the condition that characterizes animals and plants (when alive) and distinguishes them from inanimate matter, being marked by a capacity for growth and development and by continued functional activity; the activities and phenomena by which this is manifested. b Continuance or prolongation of animate existence (as opp. to death). c Animate existence as dependent on sustenance or favourable physical conditions.

2. a Vitality as embodied in an individual person or thing. arch. b Living things and their activity; spec. human presence or activity. Oxford Dictionary

When I read this I immediately thought of the most potent example of life that I have seen, which was an image of the formation of a human foetus.

I’ve written about it in my journal so I’ll post it here –

‘The physical universe is infinite and perfect – the ‘stuff’ of the universe being defined as animal, vegetable and mineral. The ‘energies’ of the universe are purely the physical forces of the universe, regulating the ‘stuff’ of the universe. And I, as a human being, am made of the same stuff as the universe. Undeniably, I am the product of the meeting between a sperm and an egg. I remember once looking at my hand and it was obviously the claw of an animal, and a sexual one at that. I was not here before birth and I will not be here after death. There is nothing ‘inside’ me, this body, or separate from me, to continue after I die. As a physical animal in the physical universe I have made it my aim to be happy and harmless, and the universe did its’ ‘universe thing’ to aid in the creation of the best possible.

I remember pondering this one day while walking along a country road and seeing a tree that had seeded beneath a log. It had bent around the log and then grown out at a steep angle towards the light. It only grew limbs on one side of the trunk so as to maintain its balance and strength. To say there is a God who looks after every tree, giving instructions, is plainly ridiculous. It is a life-force, if you like, but the tree was growing in the best way possible.

Another image that struck me was a film showing the beginning of the formation of a human foetus. It showed the growth in the first days when the main activity is the fervent multiplication and creation of new cells. The cells lined up to form an ever-thickening line which was to be the child’s backbone. As the cells began to form the beginnings of limbs and a head, a sack formed in the chest area, and a pulsing motion could be seen. All in the first few days! Astounding to see, and so extraordinary, that to put a God or anything else in the way was to entirely miss seeing the physical universe in operation. To call life ‘sacred’ is to completely miss the point. Removing God, energies, emotions and feelings is seeing and experiencing the actual world free of a skin or film layered over the top. That I, as this body, am a collection of intelligent cells that forms a whole, which is sensate, mobile, able to think, reflect and communicate with others, and that this whole bundle eventually wears out and dies is so extraordinary, so amazing!’ Peter’s Journal, The universe

3. The cause or source of living; the animating principle; a person who or thing which makes or keeps a thing alive.
4. Energy; liveliness; animation, vivacity, spirit. Oxford Dictionary

Here is where we begin to get off the facts of life and into the beliefs about life. There are literally countless beliefs, superstitions, pseudo-scientific theories and the like, that have been trotted out over the millennia to explain why we are here, as human beings, on this planet. The search for the cause, the source, for the beginning, the creation, or the creator, the meaning, the reason for it all, has always obsessed humans, solely because of the fear of being here in the first place and the subsequent resentment at continually feeling an alien in an alien place. This obsession with ‘why we are here’ has fuelled the perennial search for a greater or higher meaning to being here. This ‘search’ inevitably leads to the discovery that there is a Greater and Higher meaning – that there is a ‘person or thing’ (or energy) ‘that makes or keeps a thing alive’. To make this ‘discovery’ is effortless: one needs only slide over into the spiritual world, let go, surrender, close one’s eyes and go in. One enters the spiritual world that exists ethereally and is layered over the actual world. This is the world of animating spirits, Gods and Goddesses, ancient healings and esoteric medicines, divinations and prophecies, energies and auras, folk tales and legends, gurus and shamans, fairies and goblins, sacred sites and cosmic planes, chakras and levels of consciousness, telepathy and spiritualism, visions and entities, ESP and UFO’s, Chi Gong and Feng Shui, somas and souls, mysticism and meditation, rituals and rites, reincarnations and past lives, karmas and dharmas, devils and demons and so on. This whole phantasmagoric ‘other-world’ has been so embellished, so documented, so believed in, and made so substantial in the human psyche as to be convincingly real – and it is no small task to wrench oneself free from the common beliefs and Truths of a spirit world.

One would not bother unless one had a direct experience of the actual world and then one would never settle for the imaginary, the ethereal, the second-rate. One would never settle for ‘right-suffering’, or being ‘grateful’ to some-one or some-thing for ‘life’, when one could eliminate the instinctual source of fear and sorrow that is the very cause of suffering and resentment in the first place. One would never bother with being Here and Now with one’s head stuck in the clouds, searching for True meaning, when one could be here and now in the actual world with one’s feet firmly on the earth, with meaning abundantly and extravagantly apparent everywhere.

5. The animate existence of an individual in respect of its duration; the period from birth to death, from birth to a particular time, or from a particular time to death
6. A being’s, esp. a person’s, animate existence viewed as a possession of which one is deprived by death.
7. a The series of actions and occurrences constituting the history of an individual from birth to death; the course of (human) existence from birth to death. Also (Theol.), either of the two states of human existence separated by death. b A particular manner or course of living. c The active part of human existence; the business and active pleasures of the world. Also, the position of participating in the affairs of the world, of being a recognized member of society. Oxford Dictionary

Which brings us to the definition of a person’s life as in ‘my’ life. I find ‘a person’s animate existence viewed as a possession of which one is deprived by death’ the most telling definition. As human beings, we have no memory of how we got here, we resent being here, we try to make the best of it, we seek an escape from life in the form of redemption or salvation, we desperately fear death and, as old age sets in, passionately hope for life after death. And this little lot of sad, sorry and fearful continuum of emotional memories and reactions, we call having a ‘life’. A person’s life is, in fact, no more than the bundle of emotional memories of the past and emotional-backed anticipations of the future and the whole lot is typified by see-saw swings of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. ‘I’ – as the thinker – desperately seek to keep the instinctual ‘me’ – as the feeler – under control and in check by being good, being loving, being caring, etc. As one’s life progresses this leads to the development of a cunning cynicism that obliterates any naiveté and fosters a continual need for ‘self’-control that actively inhibits one from breaking free from the shackles of one’s social identity. Thus one is fated by nature at conception to be an instinctually-driven being and is then fettered by nurture from birth onwards to be a social identity bound by morals, ethics, values, traditions, and psittacisms and – as Frank Sinatra sang, so bitter sweetly, – ‘That’s life’.

But actualism provides the solution to the Human Condition and ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is the path to the door marked Freedom from the Human Condition. By continuously asking oneself this question, and doing whatever is necessary to substantiate happiness and harmlessness in this moment, one begins to disrupt the continuity of one’s emotional life and weakens its stranglehold and dominance. The exclusive attention paid to this moment of being alive actually reduces the tendency to dwell on past emotional memories or be emotionally occupied with future events. This has the effect of shrinking one’s life to this moment only – which is the only moment I can experience being alive. Thus one gradually eases out from having an emotional life and begins to live this moment, and this moment, and ... The aim is to string more and more of those moments together, and one day you get to lay in bed at night time and say ‘What a perfect day I had!’. And then the aim becomes to string more and more of those days together and you find that you are on a path that frees you from malice and sorrow. And then you find yourself living a Virtual Freedom – ‘virtual’ as in ‘that is so in essence or effect, although not recognized formally, actually’. And then you know that your ‘life’, as you knew it, will never be the same again – in fact, it is soon to end completely and not a trace of the old ‘me’ will be able to surface ... ever again. Virtual Freedom is the first step – ‘self’-extinction the next.

8. A condition of power, activity, or happiness; esp. (chiefly in biblical and religious use) the condition of a person freed from the state of sin equated with spiritual death; salvation; regenerate condition. Oxford Dictionary

The final relevant definition points to attaining a new Life – as in being Born Again or becoming Enlightened or Self-Realized, whereby one takes on a new imaginary identity in an new imaginary life – thus becoming ‘freed’ from the state of sin (or life in the real world). For those not so dedicated to the pursuit of a spiritual New Life there is the more secular version offered by some therapists whereby the aim is to strengthen, en-richen or empower one’s existing ‘life’ such that one wins more than loses, one overcomes adversity, one fights for one’s rights, one becomes better, stronger, more powerful, more self-fulfilled, more self-centred, etc. Both approaches fail to address the fact that human beings are programmed with an instinct to survive that makes fear, aggression, nurture and desire an integral part of the Human Condition. AF is the only approach to the human dilemma that addresses this fact – every other approach, avoids this fundamental fact.

Actual Freedom is the third alternative to the traditional acceptance or the spiritual avoidance of one’s lot in life. What an excellent thing to discover – the chance to actually do something about one’s lot in life – to become happy and harmless.

So, this may have been of interest to you as it relates to your ‘it seems that still there is something that could be called ‘immortality’ in a certain sense of this word’ comment.

Perhaps what I have written will be ‘food for thought’ – which, after all, should be the point of a mailing list devoted to peace and freedom.

3.5.2000

At the end of one of Vineeto’s posts –

I’m getting really lazy lately and just adding P.S’s to the bottom of Vineeto’s posts. I am at present busy writing to another mailing list, involved in learning a new CAD program and supervising a house construction, so life is deliciously full-on.

It sounds to me as though you have a marvellous opportunity presented to you. It is my experience that men can learn a lot about sensuousness from women and that was always my attraction to hang out with women rather than men. Sexual attraction is one part, but they can often be sensual and more down-to-earth than men who tend to be more cerebral and worldly tough.

Of course, this is a generalization but one you might ponder on. I am not suggesting a middle path for I have tried both ‘real’-world male and spiritual SNAG and both were just compromises and social roles. The good fun is to find what is left when all your artificial male-ness is stripped away. Vineeto has pointed to the other crucial aspect in living with someone – the utter futility of attempting to change the other, keeping your side up in the battle of the sexes. Not that it is going to necessarily bring peace and harmony to the relationship but you will be doing the only thing you can do – stopping your part in the traditional battle of the sexes.

What I found was that any change that happened in me often provoked some interesting emotional responses in others around me but it was essential to realize that what I was doing was both for myself and for others around me. After all, my goal was to be happy and harmless no matter what the consequences or reaction of others. The harmless part of happy and harmless always needs equal attention and in this you need to be the judge, not others, and this is where it is crucial to be guided by pure intent gleaned from the PCE. If my intent was pure, then I knew I would do no harm to others in the process. Pure intent ensures that one is ruthlessly and unmitigatingly honest with oneself.

Keep us posted if you like – you are, after all, at the cutting edge of an experiment rare in human history.

31.5.2000

You wrote in response to my mail to No 3 –

To No 3: I always say that I was happy to be a following pioneer in this enterprise for I was able to pick Richard’s brain, as it were, to discover what he had discovered. Thus I didn’t need to explore every alley, every nuance, every belief, every moral, every belief, and every psittacism. I was able to do this intensively over a period of 12 months, and together with reading his journal many times over, this was sufficient to become virtually free of malice and sorrow. I would suggest that your success will be purely dependant on the time and effort put in to the task. The good thing for you is that the amount of information available now has probably increased 20 fold and it is freely and readily available on the web site.

You still make your own investigations – and who would have it any other way – but a wealth of information is available to help you look at these broader details.

As you seem to be discovering, it is impossible to leap straight into investigating emotions without first looking at the broader details of one’s social identity. This is where the AF Library pages and particularly the selected correspondence related to topics are invaluable as you can focus your attention on understanding one particular issue and come to grips with it. Remember we are talking of a practical re-wiring of the human brain.

Our social identity is a way of thinking that has formed synapse connections that mean we automatically think a certain way, exactly as our instinctual passions cause us to automatically feel a certain way.

This rewiring requires persistence, perseverance and repetitive effort – exactly like learning anything new does, except in this case one is unlearning something. Thus one’s success, or not, is exactly proportionate to the amount of time and effort afforded to the task.

I am wondering if what you are talking here about is the investigation of emotions and feelings coming from the social norms by labelling them as sensible or silly? After labelling them, have you experimented by acting against your social norms (Acting against our religious / social conditionings and taboos to investigate the rush of emotions that follows such experiment, for example)? If so, did such action break through the psychological power of the norm and did it give you more encouragement to investigate them more deeply?

I think the first thing to be taken on board about actualism is that it is not about changing the world, it is about changing oneself. The traditional approach of people who see wrong or bad in the world is to join a crusade or revolutionary movement aimed at bringing about some sort of social, political or spiritual change to the world. Hence we have an enormous amount of angst, despair and vitriol generated by well-intentioned groups or movements clashing with other well-intentioned groups or movements, all determined that their way is the best, that they are right, or that theirs is the only way of doing things.

The traditional movements to change the world are passionately fuelled by people’s frustration at not feeling free to do what they want – of having to obey, and feeling straight-jacketed by, society’s morals, ethics and values translated into rules, laws and regulations. Thus one sees on television not only out and out warfare, terrorism, violent protests, etc., but even in so-called peaceful countries, there is a good deal of frustration, aggravation, annoyance and anger directed against the ‘government’ or various organizations for doing wrong thing or not getting it right. In the local community where I live there is an extraordinary amount of conflict, either overt or covert, as to the rights or wrongs of the actions of those with different beliefs or values and at the people employed to uphold the laws of the land.

A bit I wrote at the time of seeing the futility of attempting to rebel against or change the way the world is –

In my life I have been involved in many revolutionary movements and I had many ideals about changing things. In some thirty years of adult life, I have been involved and concerned with movements for peace; for environmental, political, social and spiritual change. And I have come to see all of them as revolutionary – in other words, going around in circles. I remember watching a TV program about the Hungarian uprising and those that fought and died for freedom. Some twenty years later the Russians simply walked out anyway. I participated in a spiritual revolution with a living Guru deriding the past traditions and the idea of religions only to see him eventually form his very own Religion and become part of the traditional religious warring campus. And the so-called ‘New Age’ of today is really nothing but a return to the Dark Age of spirits, omens, divination, witches and shamans.

And so it has been going on for millennia ... round and round in circles ... revolution after revolution. It is so good to be free of that nonsense and to have found a process that is evolutionary, that actually works. A process that is easy, simple, uncomplicated, describable, direct, and that produces both instant results and an assured evolutionary change for me – becoming actually free of malice and sorrow. It is now possible to change Human Nature. Undoubtedly the human brain has been responsible for amazing technological advances and I have been witness to so many of them in my brief lifetime. As a child I helped my father deliver bread by horse and cart; we had no telephone or television. I learnt mathematics with a slide rule and went to Europe by ship as a 20-year-old. So the achievements of Cro Magnon are indeed extraordinary but obviously we are still trapped by the primitive behaviour patterns and emotional responses of our ancestors, the very people whose ‘Wisdom’ we hold in awe and reverence. And nowadays the more ancient, the greater the wisdom is thought to be.

We are still cavemen and women with their same primitive beliefs and instincts, but now we live in comfort and, in most cases, safety. Our knowledge of the physical world, and access to and ability to process information, has resulted in an astounding quantum leap forward that has largely occurred this century. These times bear no resemblance to the times of Plato, Socrates or Buddha and, as such, their values and opinions have absolutely no relevance now.

It then became blindingly obvious to me that the past could hold no solutions. And all the revolutions trying to find ‘new’ solutions to violence and misery are simply re-runs of the past failed attempts, doomed to run their cycles of failure. In Richard’s words: ‘The tried and true is nothing but the tried and failed.’ And the excuse that the solutions are right and it’s just the people who are at fault I now see for what it is: just another excuse and a debilitating one at that.

It is understandable that when Cro was in his cave, it was essential for his survival that he fought and killed the others of his species for his territory, his food, his women and his children. When a sufficient group gathered together, tribal laws, customs and authority needed to be established. The sun, moon, stars and elements would have been held in fear and awe. As such they were talked to, appeased, soothed and worshipped. I would guess that the concept of God(s) with their subsequent wrath and benevolence was soon introduced to give power to the shamans and witches. But in my life the facts are that I haven’t found it necessary to fight for food, to capture and rape women, to protect my children by using violence, to be part of one group for protection and to fight another group for territory, food or sport.

This behaviour is simply becoming redundant in most parts of the world now.

In my life I simply exchange a bit of time, working for someone else, for some tokens called money, which I then exchange to rent a comfortable flat, for food, clothes, and the surprising little else I actually need to enjoy life. My hunting and harvesting is done with a trolley in the local air-conditioned supermarket and takes me thirty minutes a week. Humans, at least where I live, have organized an amazingly effective administrative, legal and commercial system that, combined with my sensible actions, serves to provide a safe and wonderfully comfortable life for me.

Every pleasure I need in life is located in this flat or within walking distance.

So much pleasure that Vineeto and I sometimes have to run a little schedule to decide which pleasure next – sex, food, play on the computer, watch some TV, a walk...? One has to be wary of ‘pleasure stress’ when this actual world of delight and physical pleasure is revealed. Hedonism really – and the word has such a bad press in the real world of suffering! This is not to deny that I could be confronted with danger or indeed ill health at some time, but then I will just respond appropriately at the time. It is truly amazing that I now actually experience the planet as a safe and delightful place in which to live, while all around live in fear and aggression. Peter’s Journal, Evolution

So back to your question –

‘Have you experimented by acting against your social norms (acting against our religious / social conditionings and taboos to investigate the rush of emotions that follows such experiment, for example)? If so, did such action break through the psychological power of the norm and did it give you more encouragement to investigate them more deeply?’

What I find now is that silly and sensible replaces good and bad, right and wrong and as such, it is very sensible to obey the laws of the land – the freedom and change is fundamental and internal, not conditional on the external. The aim is freedom from malice and sorrow, in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are. Put into practice, this means that if you are not happy now because of some belief, moral or ethical value you hold, if you are upset because of the way someone else is, or if you are miffed or angry about some situation you can do nothing about, then you have something to look at in your own psyche. If there is some sensible action to be taken to change one’s circumstances then one can make it in a sensible, harmless and appropriate manner.

A bit of digging in and changing oneself rather than looking outside and blaming others or the circumstances is required.

Many people pay lip service to the idea that the only person you can change is yourself, but when, and if, the penny drops, your life will never be the same again. For me this realization proved the starting point to really beginning to change. I won’t post it here but you will find my story of this realization in the ‘Living Together’ chapter of my journal and Vineeto has written about it in ‘A Bit of Vineeto’.

Becoming free of ‘religious / social conditioning and taboos’ is a process that brings to the surface much fear for one is literally dismantling a large part of one’s identity and stepping out of humanity, so it is sensible to be cautious as to what you say to others and what you do during this process. Much passion can be uncovered and much turmoil can result as the firm and familiar ground beneath one’s feet seems to shake and eventually disappears. Each success brings a tangible, palpable and heady freedom.

Our social identity was instilled in us in childhood in order to curb and control the emerging instinctual savage passions arising from the animal fear-aggression reaction genetically encoded in our ancient brain structure. With the knowledge gained from the pure consciousness experience and the relentless application of common sense – the silly and sensible judgement – you are capable of reducing the effects of the instinctual passions in your life such that you are able to become happy and harmless 99% of the time. Unless you are willing to strip away and reduce this outer secondary layer of identity you will never be able to investigate and experience both the savage and tender instinctual passions that form the deeper primary instinctual self.

5.7.2000

Hi No 18 and No 7,

Just to join in with my two bob’s worth on watching. I coined a couple of terms that I found useful to me and that tended to cut through my spiritual teachings and give me a more down-to-earth approach to the running of the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ One was that I became ‘self’-obsessed for the first time in my life and the second was that this obsession had a purpose and a meaning and that was as a psychic ‘search and destroy’ mission.

A bit that I wrote describing my path to virtual freedom may be of use –

‘A curious thing began to happen when I contemplated on what it is to be a human being, when I pondered the Human Condition, when I became ‘self’-obsessed. Soon everything that I did, every action, every word, every thought, was analyzed in terms of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Then I was able to identify, to sort out, and finally to eliminate the lost, lonely, frightened, and very cunning entity that was the cause of malice and sorrow within me. This is definitely not meditation, it is 180° degrees opposite. This is being fully occupied in the world of people, things and events: not retreating or hiding from it. The whole point of the exercise is to identify and eliminate that identity – a sort of a psychic ‘search and destroy’ mission, if you like – and the eventual result is to become happy and harmless. The point of meditation on the other hand is to merely ignore and ‘rise above’ the behaviour in question: to transcend it, as they say. Transcending, per definition, is to ‘go above and beyond’, which is really ‘Above and Beyond’, as we all know.

The other essential difference is that Richard’s method concentrates all of the attention on this moment in time, this actual moment now. The whole emphasis is on how am I experiencing myself NOW? This has the effect of eliminating the future as something to worry about, and the inevitable postponement that it brings. The ‘there’s always tomorrow’, ‘one day I will...’, or the spiritual ‘in my next lifetime’ are simply a cop out. By bringing my attention to the fact that this is my only moment of being alive, and that if I was happy ten minutes ago and I’m not happy now, the fact is: I’m not happy now. So what is the cause, the source? I don’t deny that I didn’t have a goal and that this goal was in the future – to be happy and harmless 24hrs. a day, every day. However, my immediate aim was to be happy now, in this very moment of being alive! But it does take time to work through each of the beliefs and instincts, to thoroughly investigate them. I always considered it a nonsense to delude myself with spiritual belief that I was already Enlightened, ‘That’ or perfect, when I knew exactly how I was inside and how I acted. It always seemed as though I was kidding myself that I was all right when, if I was honest with myself, I knew I wasn’t.’ Peter’s Journal, Time

Another piece I discovered that may help drive a wedge between the spiritual approach and that of the actualist –

‘Being free of the belief in an after-life, I am now free to actually be here, fully acknowledging the fact that before the sperm hit the egg I wasn’t here, and when this body dies, I die, since I am this body. What else could I be? A walk-in, like Rajneesh? Having no belief in a past or future life enabled me to tackle the issue of my behaviour, my actions, my feelings and emotions, my experiences and, of course, my happiness, right now. I have no second chances at living, this is it, so I have to be the best I can be now. This understanding was crucial in order to be able to fully embrace the responsibility I had to free myself of the psychological and psychic entity that was shackling my enjoyment of life. It didn’t allow me any room for denial, bargaining or accepting a second-rate life. I simply could no longer postpone or avoid. It made the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ so vitally intense to me and meant that the process of becoming free was guaranteed of success. What I understood of the method, briefly, was to make being happy your immediate goal – after all, this is your only moment of being alive that you are able to actually experience. Being happy yesterday is useless and imagining or hoping for it in the future is avoiding the issue. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ was the question to be continuously asked. If you are not happy now, then you have something to look at. The particular feeling or emotion that is causing you not to feel good now, has a source that needs looking at. What particular belief, conditioning or instinct is causing your unhappiness in this moment? Root around layer by layer until it is exposed. As a useful test to apply, once having discovered the cause or the issue, is to question: ‘Is it silly or sensible?’ Does it make sense, is it supported by facts, or is it a belief; does it work? Whatever is preventing my happiness now deserves my total attention and thorough investigation – simply believing the opinions, beliefs and values of other similarly inflicted people is to be gullible in the extreme. It is my life I am living and it is happening now. I then became vitally interested in my happiness for the first time. I was looking within for the problem, not outside. I was also looking within for the solution, not outside. And I was looking to eliminate it, to be free of whatever was causing my unhappiness, such that it would never come back. Finished, gone.

It certainly put postponement in its place and as for avoidance...! And nobody else does it for me – I do it for myself!’ Peter’s Journal, God

Ah! Just found another bit that describes the difference between the passive act of being a watcher and the active act and intent of being an actualist – 180 degrees opposite. How more radically different can one get from self-aggrandizement on one hand and self-immolation on the other?

‘Simultaneously I proceeded to investigate with Richard all things religious and spiritual. What became apparent was that he was no spiritual Master who’s ‘Energy’ created blissful feelings. There were no discourses, no spiritual practices, no meditation – just a frank and open discussion ranging over all facets of the Human Condition. What these investigations started to reveal was confrontational to the very core of ‘who’ I thought and felt I was, because I was one of those human beings suffering from the Human Condition. Every time we would talk about something that I took as ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘real’, I was challenged to look at it afresh. Was this just something I had heard or read and assumed to be a truth – or was it that I simply believed or wished it to be true? Was it silly or sensible? What were the facts of the situation? What was my actual experience about this?

My mind would sometimes go into a sort of gridlock, unable and unwilling to withstand what it took as an assault. Rightly so, because the very ‘I’ who I thought and felt I was, was being found out as made up of nothing more than the beliefs of others, society’s conditioning and a set of primitive animal instincts! It was both exciting and terrifying at the same time as I found myself questioning all that I held to be true.

I was conducting an investigation into my very own psyche – how extraordinary!

Often it all felt too much as yet another wave of fear swept over me, but three things kept me going. One was the memory of the purity and perfection of the peak experience I had had some ten years previously – and I was beginning to have similar experiences again, little reminders of my goal. The second was my intent. I wanted to live as I had experienced living the peak experience. I had arranged my life in such a way that I could devote almost the whole of my time to this investigation, whether being with Richard and Devika, Vineeto, or taking the time to contemplate by myself. I was also reading prolifically to investigate what was the current wisdom on a wide range of subjects relating to the Human Condition. I soon found myself obsessed, so fascinating was it to discover, for myself, exactly what it is to be a human being. Therapy had been like fiddling with the parts, rearranging the furniture to suit the particular beliefs of the therapist. Here I was taking the whole package apart – stripping away and delving deeper than I ever had before. It occurred to me that no wonder nearly everyone else who had come across Richard had run for the hills!

The third thing that kept me going was confidence. What gave me the confidence to continue was my experience that this method actually worked. Every time I looked into a belief and saw that it was only a belief, not a fact, it would soon be demonstrated in my life that I was free of it. I was indeed becoming free, actually, bit by bit – my life was indeed ‘getting better all the time’ (as the Beatles sang). This progress made the spiritual years seem like kindergarten. My relationship with Vineeto had rapidly gone past the point of previous failures and was sailing into untroubled waters. Despite the occasional fear attacks, I was experiencing life as happier, less neurotic, less emotional and much stiller. It actually worked as it went – and, magically, the next thing to look at popped up at the right time. Always the aim is to be happy now, not in some future time. Of course as this succeeded, I simply raised the stakes – what about experiencing life as perfect for twenty-four hours a day, every day? Thrilling stuff indeed! Peter’s Journal, God

Well that’s it for me for now. I just wanted to post my experiences about awareness, to point out the differences of the spiritual approach and the actualist approach and report my successes. I found the only way to start something new was to drop all ideas that I had taken on board before and this is why I personally coined a couple of practical terms that had nothing to do with previous terms I had been accustomed to.

27.7.2000

It would depend on who thought they won and who felt they lost ...

7.9.2000

It is important to make a clear distinction as to what are physical laws – empirically measurable, clearly demonstrable and readily repeatable – and what is mere theory, postulation or assumption. I find it most telling that the clocks of the worldwide satellite navigation system were programmed according to Newtonian laws and not according to Mr. Einstein’s theory that suggests time somehow varies relative to the velocity of the clock itself.

Similarly, all of the space exploration uses Newtonian physical laws and not Einstein’s esoteric theory.

A scientific theory ain’t a physical law – a theory is speculation or conjecture. AF Library, Spiritual Scientists, Einstein

I have read that Einstein’s theory has had many proofs over the last 80 years but, from what I can determine, the proofs offered relate to explaining phenomena that may relate to the original supposition, rather than providing empirical repeatable down-to-earth evidence that Einstein’s theory is a law that relates to the actual physical world. Whenever a scientist or engineer wants to do something practical, as opposed to theoretical, intellectual or mystical, they invariably revert to the laws, constraints and dictates that govern the physical universe and do not even consider the meta-physical theories. Whenever I had read anything of quantum physics, quantum mechanics, quantum cosmology, etc. in the past, I soon became bewildered and confused until I eventually realized that what they were saying had no relationship to common sense for they were not talking of the actual physical world.

Mr. Einstein himself is quoted as saying –

‘The skeptic will say: ‘It may well be true that this system of equations is reasonable from a logical standpoint. But this does not prove that it corresponds to nature’. You are right, dear sceptic. Experience alone can decide on truth. Yet we have achieved something if we have succeeded in formulating a meaningful and precise equation. The derivation, from the questions, of conclusions which can be confronted with experience will require painstaking efforts and probably new mathematical methods.’ – Albert Einstein April 1950. Quotation from Scientific American April 2000

I find it telling that, according to Mr. Einstein, a sceptic is one who questions why relativity and quantum theory does not correspond to nature, i.e. the behaviour and actions of things we can see, touch, feel, smell and taste.

No. 7, I have no interest in things metaphysical or theories about the extreme limits of measurability in the macro or micro ends of the physical world. Science has perennially pushed back the boundaries of our knowledge of both the small and the big, forever searching for a finite limit, an edge or a Complete Understanding. Lacking anything of substance to measure, for the theoretical scientists don’t work in real world laboratories, they rely purely on theories, imagination and mathematical equations and computer calculations. Their position is clearly analogous to the mystic or shaman, and indeed most of the theories of the last century borrow heavily from Eastern mysticism – theories of other worlds, uncertainty, non-determinism, the observers effect on material objects, solipsism, etc.

But, for what it is worth, here is my take on Mr. Einstein’s theory.

The central tenet of his theory is the unequivocal statement that the speed of light is constant, no matter what. As far as I can ascertain, this tenet is held to be the case no matter what medium it passes through and this constancy is held to be completely uninfluenced by the effects of any other objects or forces.

To quote from: Einstein A life in Science

It is this constancy of the speed of light that leads to all the non-commonsensical predictions of Einstein’s theory, that a moving ruler shrinks and gets heavier, while a moving clock runs slow.

Similarly, time in our world is a shadow of an extension in four-dimensional spacetime. But because of the minus sign in front of the ct in the equations, the faster a clock moves, the more spread out its ‘shadow’ becomes, so that time runs more slowly, and if the clock could move at the speed of light, then time, as measured by the clock, would stand still.

None of these effects show up in any significant way until an object is moving, relative to the observer, at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. Since the speed of light is so large – 300 million metres a second – the effects never show up in everyday life, which is why they do not seem to be common sense. One second in the time dimension is equivalent to 300 million metres (actually, minus 300 million metres) in any of the three length dimensions, so space and time only have an exactly equal footing when you are moving at 300 million metres a second – at the speed of light – and their equivalence only begins to show up for things moving at a respectably large fraction of that speed. by Michael White and John Gribbin Simon and Schyuster 1993

I always find it amazing that humans revere a theory whose effects no human can directly experience because humans cannot move at the speed of light because it is held to be impossible to do so by the very same theory. Does this not mean that the theory has no relevance at all to human experience in the physical world in which we live? Does this not ring a bell? Is this not the same with all metaphysical/spiritual theories?

But, to address your comments about the experimental proof of the theory by observation of short-lived particles. Again a quote from the same source as above –

The simplest way to see this is in terms of the behaviour of particles called muons, which are created high in the atmosphere of the Earth by the impact of cosmic rays from space. Muons move at a speed very close to the speed of light. But they are also very short-lived particles, and soon (in a couple of microseconds) decay into other kinds of particle. By measuring the number of muons found at high altitudes, using instruments on an un-crewed balloon, and comparing this number with the number of muons arriving at the ground, physicists find (the experiment was first carried out in 1941) that although the lifetime of a muon is too short, according to clocks here on Earth, for them to get through to the ground, in fact most of them do penetrate the atmosphere. The explanation is that time runs slower for the muons, because they are travelling at nearly the speed of light, and therefore they do have time to reach the ground before they decay. This experiment really has been carried out. It confirms that moving clocks run slow, that moving objects contract, and that any observers moving at constant velocity are entitled to regard themselves as at rest. by Michael White and John Gribbin Simon and Schyuster 1993

And yet, I find it telling that when a clock orbiting the earth in a satellite used for precision navigation, the same calculated effects of this theory have been ignored. Does this not raise some serious doubts as to why these theories and explanatory proofs are not used in the empirical world of people things and events?

There are many more experimental confirmations of the special theory, but we will mention just one. It turns out, from Einstein’s equations, that an object travelling at less than the speed of light can never be given enough energy to make it accelerate to the speed of light (let alone to go any faster). You never can run alongside a beam of light at the same speed, and so the puzzle of how the waves would look if you rode with them does not arise. Instead, the more energy you put into a moving object, the faster it will go, but the extra speed it picks up is always less than the amount needed to take it past the speed of light. As you put more and more energy into a moving object, such as the particles that physicists whiz around in accelerators like the ones at CERN, in Geneva, the less each extra bit of energy increases the speed of the object. You get less return (in the form of extra speed) for the same investment (in the form of extra energy). But the extra energy must go somewhere, and the equations tell us that it goes into the mass of the particle, which goes a little bit faster but gets a lot heavier as it continues to accelerate and gets near the speed of light. <Snip>

Again, this effect has been measured, directly, in countless experiments at particle accelerators around the world. by Michael White and John Gribbin Simon and Schyuster 1993

I watched a TV program about the work at Cern and was particularly unimpressed, or sceptical as Mr. Einstein would have it, as to the common sense of the gulf between what was actually observable and measurable and what was extrapolated as an explanation. I came to understand that the use of massive computing power was increasingly needed in the micro dimension as the mathematical equations become increasingly complex. In fact, it was obvious they weren’t trying to understand, or make sense, of what they were observing, they were trying to find justification for their theories from their observations, which is a completely different scenario. The theories derived from increasingly tortured mathematical formulas were primary, the actual observations were secondary. In fact, many of their suppositions were about speculative particles, energies, or whatever, that had never been observed and may never be observable. Does not all this postulating have a familiar ring about it?

To move on further into the realms of quantum supposition and theory, again from the same source –

Before we leave the special theory, though, we want to clear up one puzzle, which worries very many people when they first meet it. It is sometimes called the ‘twins paradox’, although it isn’t really a paradox at all.

It goes like this. Suppose you have a twin sister, exactly the same age as yourself. While you stay at home, here on Earth, your intrepid sister flies off in a spaceship, at a speed that is a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. After a while, she turns the spaceship around, and flies back. During the flight, her clocks must run slow, relative to your clocks here on Earth. She must, according to Einstein’s theory, age less than you have. But if she can say that she was at rest, and you were the one doing the moving, she will say that your clocks were running slow. You predict that your sister has aged less on her journey than if she stayed at home, while she says you must have aged less. Each twin predicts that the other one is younger!

The resolution of the ‘paradox’ lies in the fact that your twin had to turn her ship around in order to come home. She changed the direction she was moving in, not just through space but through spacetime. If she had kept on travelling in a straight line through space at a constant speed, she would have been travelling in a straight line through spacetime and both of you would indeed have been entitled to argue that the other twin was the younger one. But there would have been no paradox, since under those circumstances you could never again stand side by side and compare notes.

By coming back home, however, your twin has not kept to a straight-line journey through spacetime. Your own ‘journey’ is indeed a straight line, because you always travel at the same velocity, but in order to get back to you she has to travel around two sides of a triangle in four-dimensional spacetime.

In the familiar three-dimensional world, the distance from one point to another in a straight line is always less than the distance between the same two points along the other two sides of a triangle. The same is true of the distance part of your sister’s journey – she has indeed travelled more kilometres than you have. But this is not the whole story. Because of that minus sign in front of the ct in the equations of special relativity, the time difference between two points in space-time is always less if you go around the two sides of the triangle, instead of following the straightest possible line from one point to the other. The extra distance travelled by your sister is exactly balanced by the smaller time her journey takes, so that you and she both ‘use’ the same amount of spacetime and both start out and end up in the same place at the same time. So your twin sister who has been on the journey really is younger than you are when she comes home.

It may not be common sense, but at least you can see that there is a difference between the two journeys through spacetime, one in a straight line and the other round two sides of a triangle. And, again, this prediction of the special theory has actually been tested, using extremely accurate timepieces called atomic clocks, flown around the world on jet airliners and compared with identical stay-at-home clocks in their return to the laboratory (such tests were carried out for the first time in 1971). Even though the effect is tiny for journeys at such low speeds, compared with c , the clocks are accurate enough to measure the difference, which exactly matches the predictions of relativity theory. by Michael White and John Gribbin Simon and Schyuster 1993

Again I do find it curious that the clocks in satellites moving at several hundred times faster than an airline, for years not hours, are evidently not compensated to allow for this experimental difference attributed to Einstein’s theory. There are two unrelated fields of science – the pure theoreticians and the empiricist engineer scientists, exactly as in the field of ontology there are two unrelated approaches – the metaphysical, spiritualists and the down-to-earth actualists.

And just to round up the horses into the coral, I’ll end with another piece on quantum theory from the Encyclopedia Britannica –

Although atomic energies can be sharply defined, the positions of the electrons within the atom cannot be, quantum mechanics giving only the probability for the electrons to have certain locations. This is a consequence of the feature that distinguishes quantum theory from all other approaches to physics, the indeterminacy (or uncertainty) principle of Werner Heisenberg. As was explained earlier in the article, this principle holds that measuring a particle’s position with increasing precision necessarily increases the uncertainty as to the particle’s momentum, and conversely. The ultimate degree of uncertainty is controlled by the magnitude of Planck’s constant, which is so small as to have no apparent effects except in the world of microstructures. In the latter case, however, because both a particle’s position and its velocity or momentum must be known precisely at some instant in order to predict its future history, quantum theory precludes such certain prediction and thus escapes determinism. Encyclopedia Britannica

Thus, quantum theory has an inbuilt ‘indeterminancy (or uncertainty) principle’ which means it forever ‘escapes determinism’, as in –

‘determine : conclude from reasoning or investigation, deduce; fix or decide causally, decide on, select, choose; definitely locate, identify, or establish the nature of; ascertain exactly’ Oxford Dictionary.

No wonder I have no interest in quantum theory. Trying to have a sensible down-to-earth discussion about Einstein’s theory is analogous to talking to someone who passionately believes in the existence of God, and then insists you should prove He/She/It doesn’t exist.

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