PETER: Hi,

I couldn’t resist commenting on your post –

RESPONDENT: Hi folks Well ... at last, I have finally ‘gotten it’ ... by which I mean, managed to discard the spiritual mumbo jumbo which was stopping me from comprehending Actual Freedom. It took 8 years to build up my great spiritual house of cards, and 2 full years (this Saturday) to knock it down. I just wanted to share that with you because it’s been a real joy the last couple of weeks as comprehension has begun.

PETER: I was reflecting the other day on the fact that unless someone is willing to let go of their past then they are not going to be interested in starting afresh as an actualist. I think I have described it before as rather like holding on to the side of the swimming pool rather than striking out for the other end and Vineeto has recently called it ‘closing the back door’.

A decisive break with the past has to be made for any significant change to happen.

RESPONDENT: In case anyone is interested, it seems taking a 2 week vacation from work was the catalyst. We went up the Sunshine Coast to Noosa, Mooloolaba and Maleny, spending a few days in each place. It was a very relaxing time. My partner and I took about 10 rolls of photos, nurturing a budding interest in photography. We spent our days lazing around, eating and drinking and being merry, taking relaxing walks, swimming, basically living in the moment. After returning home and to work, our home life began to suffer, where previously we hardly ever fought now we were bickering daily, and it was obvious something had changed. I think our expectations were raised after such a pleasant holiday. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking as to what the exact difference is, and how to incorporate it into my life.

To cut a long story short I have decided that it’s Actual Freedom or bust :)

PETER: Taking a holiday or a break from normal life is the traditional way of getting away from it all. After a few days you can get to leave your normal life behind – to get some distance from the usual anxieties, worries, routines, habits and patterns that constitute your ‘life’. At best one can even get to feel blithely carefree and virtually anonymous – almost as if you have left your old identity behind.

I often describe how I live now as ‘being on holiday’ – and more specifically as like the middle fortnight of a 6-week holiday when you get to have left all your real-world worries behind and ‘going back to reality’ is not even on the horizon. The amazing thing is that I have this feeling of being on holiday virtually all of the time, whilst working in the market place, in the world as-it-is with people as-they are. And even more amazing is the fact that this almost constant state of feeling blithely carefree and virtually anonymous is the outcome of my own decision to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless.

I remember when I first met Richard and he re-awakened my longing for peace on earth and harmony with my fellow human beings. At first I thought he was talking about spiritual freedom until it sank in that he was not talking about the spiritual world at all.

One day, as he was describing the utter purity and perfection of the actual world we flesh and blood bodies live in, my memory was jogged and I remembered a time when I had experienced exactly this earthy purity and perfection. I remembered when I had an experience of pure consciousness for a few hours, an experience when ‘I’ did not exist and seemingly never had existed. A few hours when I – this flesh and blood mortal body I – directly experienced the extraordinariness of this physical universe I always lived in but was forever cut off from.

Everything was vibrant and alive, fairytale-like in its magic, ambrosial in its sensuousness. Everything was utterly peaceful and benevolent – I am firmly locked in time, experiencing this world as if for the first time – as it actually is, not as ‘I’ had always feared it was or imagined it was. This world had been under my very nose as it were all the time, but that fellow ‘me’ had to step aside for me, this flesh and blood mortal body me, to be able to experience it.

It was evident that this was paradise for there is nothing missing here in the actual world, nothing wanted for, nothing needed beyond the sensuous pleasures of food and shelter. The very notion of a spirit-world, of searching for a paradise someplace else, or imagining that there is a paradise we go to after physical death was seen for what it is – a massive delusion built upon old beliefs and superstitions of good and evil spirits, meta-physical forces and other-worlds, both above and below.

After remembering this pure consciousness experience I was hooked because I knew, by my own experience, what was on offer if ‘I’ chose to set off on the path to becoming happy and harmless, never to waver from my goal, never to return to normal, never to seen or heard of again, as it were.

The lure of actually becoming free of the human condition then proved irresistible.

RESPONDENT: Ok I apologise for the wordiness of what follows but there is a question buried deep within. The last week or so I have been going for walks around the neighbourhood at lunch time. I have been trying to replicate an experience I had a long time ago ... about 7 years ago, when pursuing spiritual enlightenment, I was walking to uni (a 50 minute walk) and contemplating the idea that I was ‘one with everything’ around me ... one with the tree, one with this passing truck, one with this letterbox, etc.

Well that’s it for now, if anyone can help shed light on the topic I’d really appreciate it thanks!

PETER: With regards to your question about mini-PCEs, minor-PCEs, almost-PCEs and the like, I can’t think of anything to add to my recent comments to No 37 on the subject.

Isn’t it wonderful when you really get it that this is the only moment you can actually experience being alive. Once this really sinks in, you then increasingly start to realize how silly it is to waste this moment of being alive by feeling pissed-off, frustrated, annoyed, resentful, afraid, lonely, separate, worried, melancholic, lacklustre or bored.

Then you really start to become curious about how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and then you realize, all of a sudden, that you have got it – you know what actualism is about because you are doing it. And soon you know the prize at the end of the path because you come to remember having experienced a pure consciousness experience of the utterly benign purity and perfection of the actual world – the actual world that is always right here, ever-only right now, under my very nose whenever ‘I’ am not here.

Then you start to really get it that the whole point of the actualism method is to progressively diminish – via a pragmatic process of de-programming – any feelings of sorrow out of your life so that you can feel more happy about being here. And that even more importantly, you are progressively diminishing, or de-programming, any feelings of malice out of your life so that you can live with your fellow human beings in peace and harmony.

18.12.2002

PETER: I was reflecting the other day on the fact that unless someone is willing to let go of their past then they are not going to be interested in starting afresh as an actualist. I think I have described it before as rather like holding on to the side of the swimming pool rather than striking out for the other end and Vineeto has recently called it ‘closing the back door’.

A decisive break with the past has to be made for any significant change to happen.

RESPONDENT: Yes that has certainly been my experience. This is such a complicated issue though – letting go of everything one holds dear, everything one has been taught to hold dear, everything one has learnt from those around us to hold dear.

PETER: As I remember the early days of actualism the whole issue of self-exploration was daunting rather than complicated. Daunting in that everything that stood in the way of me being happy and harmless had to be examined, but not complicated in that the issue that needed my attention was always what was happening now – in short, being attentive to how I was experiencing this moment of being alive.

Something I wrote about my experience at the time may strike a chord with you –

[Peter]: ... ‘It felt like I was actually re-wiring my brain, and that is exactly was I was doing. I, as a human being had been wired or programmed in a certain way. This wiring consists of the beliefs that had been instilled in me from the time when I was first rewarded for ‘good’, or punished for ‘bad’ behaviour and included the morals, values and ethics that made me a fit member of society.

On top of it, and developing from the age of about seven were the beliefs and traits I would take on and develop as ‘my own’ identity. Underlying all of it were the animal instinctual passions of aggression, fear, nurture and desire that we are born with. I remember lying in bed one night and seeing all of this programming as a huge mountain that loomed over me – vast and impossible to climb. Then I went to sleep, forgot about it, and the next day found I was busy demolishing some particular part of it. It reminded me of how I would deal with fear in my life. I would stop my mind from going off into all the worst possibilities and just do the next thing that needed to be done. Applied to the process I was involved in, it worked well, and if it sometimes didn’t, it just meant waiting for the fear to wear itself out – which it always does – and then getting on with the job.’ Peter’s Journal, Intelligence

RESPONDENT: I think it will be a lot easier when more people have trodden this path so that more ground work can be laid out, to help people with varying perspectives (and there are many) come to terms with what actualism has to offer.

PETER: I did begin to have some insights about the ‘sameness’ and non-uniqueness of human beings even in my spiritual days and again I have written about it my journal –

[Peter]: ... ‘I threw myself into doing groups, but after about three full-on months I realised I was just hearing the same thing again and again. Everybody had the same problems with only very slight variations. Everybody had had a bad childhood, everyone was lonely and sad, and justified it or blamed someone else or some situation for their suffering.

Compared to the last twelve months since meeting Richard, it was a mere ‘scraping of the surface’, an extremely superficial look at the Human Condition. The groups involved a lot of ‘getting it out’, resulting in deep grief and tears, followed by a Rajneesh discourse tape, more tears, and ending in wonderful blissful feelings. The problem was always that the bliss did not last – either someone cut in on you in the food queue or you went home to battle with your lover again.’ Peter’s Journal, Spiritual Search

As you can see, my observation of the human condition is that people’s perspectives are not so many and varied as people would like to believe. This is because every human born is genetically-encoded with the same set of animal survival instincts – a fact that is being increasingly verified and mapped by empirical scientific research. Further, from birth onwards, every human being is inevitably instilled with a set of morals, ethics, values, aims, attitudes and outlooks that have only slight cultural variations.

It is exactly this two-fold programming that both creates and maintains the current human condition – hobbling people to the past and actively preventing the substantive personal changes that need to be made in order for someone to become actually free of the human condition.

As for needing ‘more ground work’ to ‘be laid out’ – there are currently over 4 million words freely available on the Actual Freedom Trust website, all of which challenge the social and instinctual programming that each and every human has been unwittingly subjected to.

RESPONDENT: I was wondering yesterday if it would be possibly to simplify the steps involved into something like a textbook, with exercises in each chapter leading you through the process of investigation. Maybe they could teach this stuff at school? ‘God forbid!’ ;-)

PETER: If you want a textbook, we do have two available.

Reading Richard’s Journal was enough to convince me that Actual Freedom was worthwhile getting off my bum and going for. I hung with reading his Journal for months, going over and over it with a fine-tooth comb – and a dictionary – until I understood and took on board exactly what he was saying, not only about the nature of Actual Freedom but also about the process involved in becoming actually free of malice and sorrow.

One of my objectives in writing my journal was not only to write a personal narrative of the hands-on process of actualism but also to present it in a form that would allow for ease of reference to particular crucial issues that an actualist will invariably have to tackle on the path to becoming free of the human condition. Hence the chapter headings – Death, Living Together, Love, Sex, Spiritual Search, God, Intelligence, Peace, People, Fear, The Universe, Time, and Evolution. In each chapter, I wrote not only of my understanding of the subjects at the time, but also of my own real-life hands-on process of investigation into each issue and then explained the changes the subsequent realizations wrought in my daily living.

Perhaps one day, there may well be others who want to flesh out this information with accounts of their experiences of their own investigations and subsequent life-changing results.

As well as the two journals and the extensive correspondence to the various mailing lists, the website also contains a well-sorted library of topics. Vineeto has spent a good deal of time cataloguing much of the correspondence and articles into sections so that the writings relating to particular issues can be easily sourced and Richard has also referenced a good deal of his writings.

As for teaching this stuff at school, this is the stuff of pipe dreams.

I remember when Richard was putting the finishing touches to his Journal and the idea came to publish it. It soon became obvious from feedback from publishers that they would not touch it with a barge pole because the writing was totally iconoclastic, radically irreverent and completely nonconformist. After all, in many parts of the world heresy is still a criminal felony. As it turned out, it was only due to the availability of do-it-yourself desktop publishing and the relative economy of short runs of modern printing that enabled the journals to be self-published in paperback form. Further, because of the heretical nature of actualism, it is only because the World Wide Web is uncensored that the writings are available and this forum is possible.

As for school curriculum, it is useful to keep in mind that one of their primary roles is to instil in an unsuspecting new generation the passed-on values, morals and ethics of the previous generations. By doing so they maintain the status quo of the human condition and perpetuate its roots in the dim and dark past – including its perpetual overlapping cycles of youthful rebellion and senescent resignation and the fantasy that human existence is essentially a battle twixt Good and Evil.

Actualism is a do-it-yourself, by yourself, business – something only you can do, something you do for this body as well as for every other body. Actualism is not, and can never be, a ‘do-as-I-say’ teaching, a ‘let’s-all-do-it-together’ fantasy, or a ‘will-you-please-do-it-for-me-and-I-will-be-eternally-grateful’ power trip.

Understanding that actualism is a do-it-yourself business – and taking on the challenge – is an act of sincerity.

*

PS: Some links that may help to throw some light on the simplicity of the process of self-investigation –

‘How to Become Free from the Human Condition’ including all related correspondence on the topic.

‘Introduction into Actual Freedom’ and its précis.

Further, I had a conversation with a correspondent about a possible start of the investigation that may be useful – and another conversation about investigating anger.

20.7.2003

PETER: Nice to hear from you. It’s always good to hear of other people’s successes in using the actualism method.

RESPONDENT: Hi all,

I’ve been having a lot of success in dealing with any emotions that come along, but when no emotions are present and I’m very much enjoying this moment of being alive, I’m still very conscious of my sense of self (identity) and my instinctual sex drive.

PETER: In the first phase of actualism – when I was still continuously aware of being a socially-ensnared and instinctually- driven being – I was constantly motivated to be very best ‘I’ could be, to be virtually happy and harmless, i.e. virtually free of malice and sorrow. With this in mind, I continually prodded myself to never settle for second best – to always make the effort to up the ante from feeling good about being here right now, to feeling really good about being here right now, to feeling excellent about being here right now. What this upping the ante did was serve to expose whatever it was that was preventing me from being virtually happy and harmless – those that remained lurking beneath the surface whenever ‘I’ settled for remaining within ‘my’ comfort zone.

RESPONDENT: Although I had one PCE proper, most of the time I seem to be triggering near PCEs where my identity seems not to want to budge and the instinctual passions are waiting in the wings. What I’m wondering is if there are any underpinnings of these two particular things which can be exposed in some way ... are there beliefs I’m not aware of yet, or some other thing to work on that I have missed?

PETER: As I have said before on this list, I personally do not favour using the term near PCE as one is either having a PCE or not – a miss is as good as a mile. I much prefer the term ‘excellence experience’ for those times when I am feeling really excellent about being here. As an actualist, if you have got the hang of feeling good for most of the time, then raise the stakes to wanting to feel excellent all of the time. This simple act is enough in itself to allow whatever impediments remain to your being virtually happy and harmless to emerge in the day-to-day, everyday business of being alive.

RESPONDENT: All of these experiences were triggered by pulling out the rug from under a particular belief or set of beliefs, and when I get to that near PCE state with identity and sex drive intact, it’s troubling being so conscious of their presence in my mind, but not knowing how to investigate them in such a way as to provide the kind of whoosh of results that investigating emotions can achieve.

PETER: I can relate to the ‘whoosh of results’ that you talk about – I had many realizations in the early days of my investigations that were both utterly thrilling and fundamentally life-changing. I did however get to a stage when the work involved in the actualism method produced what seemed to be less dramatic results … but then I noticed, and appreciated, the less drama-filled, more down-to-earth, consequences of setting my sights on being happy and harmless.

Often after doing some work or meeting some people, I would suddenly become aware of the fact that I had not got upset about something that I would have normally got upset about or I had not taken offence about something I would have normally taken offence about. In other words, I could see that the process of actualism was working in that I was not only feeling happier about being here but that I was actually becoming more sensitive to, and caring of, all of my fellow human beings.

The other check I ran upon myself to confirm my progress as to whether I was becoming more unconditionally happy and unreservedly harmless was to conduct a review of the events of the day before I went to sleep at night time. Had I had an excellent day? If not, how long did I wallow in my unhappiness or how long did I hold on to my grievances before I got back on the happy and harmless track again?

As you are probably discovering, it is impossible to investigate the source of one’s misery or the source of one’s annoyances whilst one is firmly in the grip of these feelings for ‘I’ am these feelings in these times – there is no separation or distance possible when ‘I’ am in the grip of either the invidious passions or the beguiling passions. However, as soon as ‘I’ get back to feeling good or feeling excellent – and note that these are felicitous feelings we are talking about – it is then possible to apply some clear thinking in order to find out what triggered me feeling melancholic, aggrieved, vindictive, all-powerful, all-wise and so on.

Once you have firmly set your course to devote your life to becoming happy and harmless, nothing can go ‘wrong’ as it were. The very fact that you are vitally interested in being alive in this world as-it-is with people as-they-are presents you with all the opportunities to investigate whatever it is you need to eliminate whatever stands in the way of achieving your goal.

And, as you have probably already twigged, it is never a ‘what’ that prevents you from being free of malice and sorrow, it is always a ‘who’ – and further, that it is never a ‘somebody else’ who is preventing me from being free, it is always ‘me’.

29.7.2003

RESPONDENT: Thanks for your reply, I can corroborate much of what you have said from my own experience so far, but to avoid making too many educated guesses I’ve got some further questions.

I’ve been having a lot of success in dealing with any emotions that come along, but when no emotions are present and I’m very much enjoying this moment of being alive, I’m still very conscious of my sense of self (identity) and my instinctual sex drive.

PETER: In the first phase of actualism – when I was still continuously aware of being a socially-ensnared and instinctually-driven being – I was constantly motivated to be very best ‘I’ could be, to be virtually happy and harmless, i.e. virtually free of malice and sorrow. With this in mind, I continually prodded myself to never settle for second best – to always make the effort to up the ante from feeling good about being here right now, to feeling really good about being here right now, to feeling excellent about being here right now. What this upping the ante did was serve to expose whatever it was that was preventing me from being virtually happy and harmless – those that remained lurking beneath the surface whenever ‘I’ settled for remaining within ‘my’ comfort zone.

RESPONDENT: OK so if I read you correctly there are not particular categories of insight which need to be explained before they can be discovered … I suppose this is what I am concerned about.

PETER: When I first came across actualism it took me a good deal of time and effort to come to an intellectual understanding of what was on offer. Only when I gave up holding on to my spiritual identity was I able to fully jump into the process of actualism and only after getting a handle on using the method did I start to have experiential understandings of my psyche in action which in turn can that produce life-changing insights.

In my experience there are two aspects to the insights an actualist has on the path to becoming free of the human condition. The first aspect is an intellectual understanding of a particular issue – something that is relatively easy for those of us who are following Richard’s lead because he has written so much about the human condition and how to become free of it. Having an intellectual understanding is a precursor to the most important part of understanding, experiential understanding.

Once I made the decision to become an actualist, I threw myself into increasing my intellectual understanding which meant reading and listening to what Richard has to say on a particular matter and then doing my own thinking and contemplating on the matter. I also found putting my thoughts down into written words was a great aid to clear thinking. I developed the habit of writing down my own understandings in note form as I was contemplating and I also wrote a personal journal and entered into correspondence with other people about actualism.

My experiential understandings came solely as a result of asking myself, each moment again, ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and becoming aware of exactly what it is that is preventing me from being blithe and benign in this moment. The answers that came from the running the question gave me experiential understandings about the human condition in general and about the devious nature of my social identity and the stygian depths of my instinctual identity in particular.

Whenever I experience my psyche in operation as-it-is-happening, it is as if a light is turned on and all of a sudden I can clearly see a facet of my social persona in action or my instinctual passions in operation as they are happening. This clear-eyed awareness has the potential to produce an insight of such intensity that it is life changing – and my sincere intent to become free of the human condition in toto means I can never go back to being the same as I was before.

So, intellectual understanding always comes first – as in ‘Ah, yes, that makes sense’. If you don’t have an intellectual understanding of the over-arching nature of the human condition, then you will have no idea what you are looking for when you ask yourself ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’

Then, provided one makes the decision to devote one’s life to becoming happy and harmless, one moves on to stage two: logging up on-the-job, real-time, experiential understandings of your own psyche in action that can then lead to insights that are both life-changing and identity demolishing.

The most difficult thing to grasp about the actualism method is it’s utter simplicity – and I don’t say that lightly.

RESPONDENT: I have spent the last decade seeking happiness in one form or another, yet it was right here in front of my nose, and I could not see it.

PETER: Yeah. I spent seventeen years trawling the materialistic world seeking happiness and found the whole search for happiness via security, money, status, fame and power decidedly weird. I then spent another seventeen years in the spiritual world and eventually found the whole search for spiritual security, status, fame and power even weirder. Coming across the third alternative was indeed serendipitous.

RESPONDENT: Will particular insights relating to identity, sexual desires, etc prove as elusive as mastering the emotions...

PETER: Maybe it is just your choice of words, but I wouldn’t describe actualism as ‘mastering the emotions’ as this could give the impression that actualism is about suppressing or controlling one’s emotions, which it is not. As you know, in actualism one becomes aware of any feelings, emotions and passions as and when they are happening with the aim of minimizing both the invidious and aggrandizing emotions so as to be able to foster one’s felicitous feelings.

My experience was that once I threw myself totally into the process, insights did not prove elusive, rather they came in direct proportion to the intensity and focus of my investigations.

*

RESPONDENT: Although I had one PCE proper, most of the time I seem to be triggering near PCEs where my identity seems not to want to budge and the instinctual passions are waiting in the wings.

PETER: As I have said before on this list, I personally do not favour using the term near PCE as one is either having a PCE or not – a miss is as good as a mile. I much prefer the term ‘excellence experience’ for those times when I am feeling really excellent about being here.

RESPONDENT: OK. I’m still getting the hang of the various states I’m experiencing and how to describe them.

PETER: And the only reason I make such precise distinctions myself is so I can be scrupulously honest with myself about how I am experiencing this moment of being alive.

*

RESPONDENT: What I’m wondering is if there are any underpinnings of these two particular things which can be exposed in some way ... are there beliefs I’m not aware of yet, or some other thing to work on that I have missed?

PETER: As an actualist, if you have got the hang of feeling good for most of the time, then raise the stakes to wanting to feel excellent all of the time. This simple act is enough in itself to allow whatever impediments remain to your being virtually happy and harmless to emerge in the day-to-day, everyday business of being alive.

RESPONDENT: Yes I have been approaching this point lately, getting used to feeling good most of the time, and no longer being satisfied with it … now wanting to take it to the next level.

PETER: I found that I had to raise the stakes myself, despite my own inertia not to do so and despite the fact that I was obviously heading off in a direction that no-one else was heading or was interested in heading.

*

RESPONDENT: All of these experiences were triggered by pulling out the rug from under a particular belief or set of beliefs, and when I get to that near PCE state with identity and sex drive intact, it’s troubling being so conscious of their presence in my mind, but not knowing how to investigate them in such a way as to provide the kind of whoosh of results that investigating emotions can achieve.

PETER: I can relate to the ‘whoosh of results’ that you talk about – I had many realizations in the early days of my investigations that were both utterly thrilling and fundamentally life-changing. I did however get to a stage when the work involved in the actualism method produced what seemed to be less dramatic results … but then I noticed, and appreciated, the less drama-filled, more down-to-earth, consequences of setting my sights on being happy and harmless.

RESPONDENT: This is true. Difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it, though :)

PETER: The squeaky clean thing about actualism is that you can’t explain it to anyone who isn’t interested in becoming actually free of malice and sorrow.

*

PETER: Often after doing some work or meeting some people, I would suddenly become aware of the fact that I had not got upset about something that I would have normally got upset about or I had not taken offence about something I would have normally taken offence about. In other words, I could see that the process of actualism was working in that I was not only feeling happier about being here but that I was actually becoming more sensitive to, and caring of, all of my fellow human beings.

RESPONDENT: I have been finding this in the last fortnight or so ... being less selfish than previously, I seem to have a more genuine interest in the well being of others, while being unattached from the results of any action I may render for their sake.

PETER: I remember thinking early on when I started to become fascinated with how I was experiencing this moment of being alive that I had become completely ‘self’-obsessed and I started to feel I was being selfish by doing so. Then it became apparent that by becoming ‘self’-obsessed I was also becoming aware of the extent of my invidious feelings towards others – be it annoyance, blame, chauvinism, aloofness, contempt, envy, competitiveness, haughtiness, or whatever. By assiduously weeding these feelings out of my interactions with other people, I came to more and more recognize other people as fellow human beings … and genuine care and sincere consideration emerged.

*

PETER: The other check I ran upon myself to confirm my progress as to whether I was becoming more unconditionally happy and unreservedly harmless was to conduct a review of the events of the day before I went to sleep at night time. Had I had an excellent day? If not, how long did I wallow in my unhappiness or how long did I hold on to my grievances before I got back on the happy and harmless track again?

RESPONDENT: This is a good idea. Thank you, I will give it a go :)

PETER: You have to have some way of measuring your own progress and only you can do that because only you can chart the down-to-earth changes that the actualism method is producing.

*

PETER: As you are probably discovering, it is impossible to investigate the source of one’s misery or the source of one’s annoyances whist one is firmly in the grip of these feelings for ‘I’ am these feelings in these times – there is no separation or distance possible when ‘I’ am in the grip of either the invidious passions or the beguiling passions. However, as soon as ‘I’ get back to feeling good or feeling excellent – and note that these are felicitous feelings we are talking about – it is then possible to apply some clear thinking in order to find out what triggered me feeling melancholic, aggrieved, vindictive, all-powerful, all-wise and so on.

Once you have firmly set your course to devote your life to becoming happy and harmless, nothing can go ‘wrong’ as it were. The very fact that you are vitally interested in being alive in this world as-it-is with people as-they-are presents you with all the opportunities to investigate whatever it is you need to eliminate whatever stands in the way of achieving your goal. And, as you have probably already twigged, it is never a ‘what’ that prevents you from being free of malice and sorrow, it is always a ‘who’ – and further, that it is never a ‘somebody else’ who is preventing me from being free, it is always ‘me’.

RESPONDENT: I think I understand ... because of the very nature of actualism (facts instead of beliefs, refusing to ignore one’s problems any longer, etc) the insights will probably continue as long as the sincere investigation does … well until ‘I’ go ‘pop’ :)

PETER: My experience is that they continued apace until I became virtually happy and virtually harmless for 99% of the time, until ‘I’ cleaned myself up as much as ‘I’ possibly could. And only you will know when that happens.

*

PETER: And from your second post on the same thread –

[Respondent]: ‘Will particular insights relating to identity, sexual desires, etc prove as elusive as mastering the emotions...’ [endquote].

RESPONDENT: Since asking this it has become quite obvious what the nature of those two desires is, thanks to your advice. That was definitely the pointer I needed. I think if I hadn’t had that to focus on when examining the nature of desire, it might never have become obvious. Ironically this is one of the things about actualism which is so hard to grasp without putting it in practice … you read it so many times but it doesn’t mean anything just reading it … yet later, in practice, it’s seen as being such a crucial difference to whether one finds success.

That’s also why it’s so hard to communicate the essence of actualism … it must be experienced to be fully understood.

At least, this is how it seems to me.

PETER: Yep. An intellectual-only understanding is a limp squid by itself. Unless you try something out you will never know if it works, how it works and why it works. Similarly, unless a theory is empirically proven to work in practice it remains a hoped-for supposition, unless one’s own beliefs are experientially understood to be nothing more than beliefs they will continue to hold one in their vice-like grip and unless an insight produces a tangible change in one’s life it is merely a ‘self’-indulgent wank.

Contrary to popular belief, Existence does not provide. Unless ‘I’ get of my bum and do something, nothing will happen … and nothing will change.

Nice to chat about such matters.

10.8.2003

RESPONDENT: I have snipped the sections where I did not have any meaningful reply to make.

PETER: I appreciate that. For some reason which is beyond me, some people think that by pedantically dissecting – or deconstructing, to use the currently fashionable word – everything and anything that everyone writes on this list, they are doing something meaningful. From where I sit, all they are doing is avoiding the doing of what is on offer in actualism and wasting the opportunity that this mailing list provides as an aid to their doing.

*

RESPONDENT: I’ve been having a lot of success in dealing with any emotions that come along, but when no emotions are present and I’m very much enjoying this moment of being alive, I’m still very conscious of my sense of self (identity) and my instinctual sex drive.

PETER: In the first phase of actualism – when I was still continuously aware of being a socially-ensnared and instinctually-driven being – I was constantly motivated to be very best ‘I’ could be, to be virtually happy and harmless, i.e. virtually free of malice and sorrow. With this in mind, I continually prodded myself to never settle for second best – to always make the effort to up the ante from feeling good about being here right now, to feeling really good about being here right now, to feeling excellent about being here right now. What this upping the ante did was serve to expose whatever it was that was preventing me from being virtually happy and harmless – those that remained lurking beneath the surface whenever ‘I’ settled for remaining within ‘my’ comfort zone.

RESPONDENT: I am happy to report some success using this method of continual prodding, even when already feeling good ... investigating, investigating, investigating and finding that there are still things there, even if only the strong sense of the identity, then starting to contemplate what my identity is.

Two days ago this caused a PCE which lasted a good two hours, and I was able to bring it back when I felt my sense of self returning by further contemplating ... in particular on that occasion I was struck by the fact that my work colleagues in their interactions with me, have a concept of who they think I am, when in fact I am just this body. With my identity present I can recognise the idea intellectually but it does not strike me like it did during the PCE.

A most enjoyable experience, rather eye opening, and best of all it made it clear that any time I’m not in a PCE there’s something to work on, and the direction in which I need to head is more obvious now.

PETER: Yes. Whenever you notice that you are not feeling happy about being here in the world as-it-is, or whenever you notice you are feeling annoyed by people as-they-are, then there is work to do. Label the feeling as precisely as you can, feel the feeling and get back to feeling good as quickly as you can. Then – after the emotional storm has passed – make your investigations as to what triggered your feeling sad or feeling annoyed, why the feeling was triggered, and what you need to do to change if you are to prevent such invidious feelings from being triggered in similar situations. I found it useless to try and make any sense of what is going on whilst in the grip of a feeling or emotion because sense is nowhere to found whilst in the grip of passion.

However when you notice you are feeling good there is equally vital work to be done and that is to crank up your felicitous feelings – your joie de vie if you like – about being here in this moment of time in the cornucopia that his verdant planet actually is.

Whilst both of these aspects of the work of an actualist are of equal importance, it is imperative that one puts the cart before the horse – the commitment to being happy and harmless means that one is then committed to investigating and eliminating anything that stands in the way of fulfilling that commitment.

RESPONDENT: I did find that after about two hours of the PCE I started experiencing a kind of fatigue, whereby I did not really want to keep in the PCE anymore … perhaps it was growing uncomfortable in some way. I have felt this before also. Have you any experience with this?

PETER: A PCE is, and can only ever be, a temporary experience, because one’s ‘self’ is only in temporary abeyance. One’s psychological/psychic ‘self’ is such a substantive entity that it inevitably returns to strut centre stage and I have experienced this returning as being somewhat like the weight of gravity or the subtle re-emergence of a veil over the pristine clarity of the actual world.

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RESPONDENT: OK so if I read you correctly there are not particular categories of insight which need to be explained before they can be discovered … I suppose this is what I am concerned about.

PETER: When I first came across actualism it took me a good deal of time and effort to come to an intellectual understanding of what was on offer. Only when I gave up holding on to my spiritual identity was I able to fully jump into the process of actualism and only after getting a handle on using the method did I start to have experiential understandings of my psyche in action which in turn can that produce life-changing insights.

RESPONDENT: I found an old discussion of mine with Gary where I talked about my strong spiritual beliefs at the time. Now I see things the way he did when replying to me. Funny because I cannot even remember why it was so hard to grasp originally.

PETER: Yep. I would often look back and wonder why I had got so upset about something or other at the time, or why I had been so stubbornly holding on to a belief, or why I had taken a moral stance about a particular issue. It eventually became clear to me that ‘I’ was no longer that same person I was then because that part of my identity that felt the need to feel that way at that time was no longer in existence – I have described it as ‘Peter the spiritual disciple’, or ‘Peter the architect’, or ‘Peter the father’, or ‘Peter the goody-two-shoes’ no longer exists.

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PETER: In my experience there are two aspects to the insights an actualist has on the path to becoming free of the human condition. The first aspect is an intellectual understanding of a particular issue – something that is relatively easy for those of us who are following Richard’s lead because he has written so much about the human condition and how to become free of it. Having an intellectual understanding is a precursor to the most important part of understanding, experiential understanding.

RESPONDENT: I can confirm this from my experience also.

PETER: I don’t see how it can be otherwise as the same two stages apply universally to any new endeavour that anyone undertakes.

Having said that, the confirmation of others always adds to the sum total of experiences that give confidence to those who strike out on a new endeavour.

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RESPONDENT: Will particular insights relating to identity, sexual desires, etc prove as elusive as mastering the emotions...

PETER: Maybe it is just your choice of words, but I wouldn’t describe the actualism method as ‘mastering the emotions’ as this could give the impression that actualism is about suppressing or controlling one’s emotions, which it is not. As you know, in actualism one becomes aware of any feelings, emotions and passions as and when they are happening with the aim of minimizing both the invidious and aggrandizing emotions so as to be able to foster one’s felicitous feelings.

My experience was that once I threw myself totally into the process, insights did not prove elusive, rather they came in direct proportion to the intensity and focus of my investigations.

RESPONDENT: Yes you are right, the phrase ‘mastering the emotions’ can imply having emotions under control, though it was not my intention in this case. Since writing the above these things have become clearer. Sometimes a pointer in the right direction can sure help speed things along.

PETER: Many a time I thought I had understood a particular issue or topic only to have to readjust my thinking as new information came along or another aspect of the issue or topic was revealed. Whilst this can be disconcerting for anyone who stubbornly holds that they already know, for an actualist such changes in one’s own mindset are the very thrill of the process.

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RESPONDENT: All of these experiences were triggered by pulling out the rug from under a particular belief or set of beliefs, and when I get to that near PCE state with identity and sex drive intact, it’s troubling being so conscious of their presence in my mind, but not knowing how to investigate them in such a way as to provide the kind of whoosh of results that investigating emotions can achieve.

PETER: I can relate to the ‘whoosh of results’ that you talk about – I had many realizations in the early days of my investigations that were both utterly thrilling and fundamentally life-changing. I did however get to a stage when the work involved in the actualism method produced what seemed to be less dramatic results … but then I noticed, and appreciated, the less drama-filled, more down-to-earth, consequences of setting my sights on being happy and harmless.

RESPONDENT: This is true. Difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it, though :)

PETER: The squeaky clean thing about actualism is that you can’t explain it to anyone who isn’t interested in becoming actually free of malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: Or even explain it to someone who isn’t aware of malice and sorrow in their lives – which is probably the majority. I had to really become aware of it before I could see the need to do something about it.

PETER: Actualism will have no appeal whatsoever to those who are in denial that they have malicious or sorrowful feelings. One has to freely admit that one has a problem, or is a part of the problem, before one is ready and willing to do something about it.

I wrote specifically about an incident where I lost my cool and became angry in my spiritual years. It was one of the many events in my life that continually spurred me on to find a way of actually ridding myself of anger. And two years after that my search paid off – I found actualism.

Good, hey.

10.8.2005

RESPONDENT to Richard: Thank you for your response. After reading No 59’s commentary and starting to pay attention to your exchanges with No 86, I had grown concerned that might be making a categorical statement on a topic which, as far as I understand, can only be theoretical. My concern is not so great having read your response to my previous email, eg from your unwillingness to be drawn into a theoretical discussion, and your statement of an entirely different gist to the one I was interpreting from your diary. But in the quote below, you have stated that it was an experiential determination, which I am interested in exploring if you are willing.

• [No. 90] ‘Lots of people have existed who left no trace of their existence. Lots of them. As they were all humans like you (to the extent that you are a human) and me, I assume they were all capable of being actually free of the human condition, like you and me.
• [Richard] ‘Whether they were capable or not is beside the point ... the point is that, *as experientially determined by the identity inhabiting this flesh and blood body all those years ago* (and verified for as far as is possible to ascertain by regular research), no flesh and blood body either living or dead prior to 1992 has ever been actually free of the human condition’. [emphasis added]. ( Respondent to Richard 9.8.2005).

PETER: I thought to make a comment on what seems to be a reoccurring theme on this mailing list – the fourth word on the first page of the Actual Freedom website. Given that the first two words are ‘Actual Freedom’ followed by ‘A new and non-spiritual, down-to earth freedom’ the word that many people seem to object to is the word ‘new’.

When I first came across Richard I quite naturally associated what he was saying with what I had known before – after all the human condition has an inherent duality, either the meaning of life is to be found in material pursuits or the meaning of life is to be found in spiritual pursuits. After a few months of listening and reading however, I eventually twigged to the fact that what Richard was talking about was diametrically opposite to what all of the spiritual teachers were teaching and the world that Richard was living in was diametrically opposite to the imaginary world that all of the revered Enlightened Beings felt themselves to be living in.

Previously to meeting Richard I had spent 17 years on the spiritual path and was no novice to the spiritual world. My experience wasn’t merely intellectual – my experience was lived experience – I had after all turned my back on the real world and had fully immersed myself in the spiritual world, even to the point of wearing the robes and living in spiritual communes. The experience of meeting and talking with Richard was 180 degrees opposite to the meetings and discussions I had with any of the spiritual teachers or revered masters I had met in my spiritual years – no psychic power plays, no pompous air of superiority and/or feigned humility, on the contrary, a genuine willingness and an ability to provide clear and consistent answers to any questions I raised and above all, an utter down-to-earthness that was refreshing to say the least.

So to sum up, at this stage I had the intellectual understanding that actualism was utterly non-spiritual – one only needs to read what Richard writes and take the words at face value to establish this as a prima face case – but I also had first hand experience that there was not a skerrick of spiritualism in Richard himself and I suspect that the video conversations will enable others to make their own judgement as to the latter point. The point I am making is that even before I recalled having had a pure consciousness experience I had satisfied myself that an actual freedom from the human condition was indeed non-spiritual, which in turn meant that it was brand new – there being no evidence whatsoever of it ever having being a lived experience in any of spiritual teachings, any of the ancient folklores or any of the secular consciousness studies.

One of the most telling experiences that actualism – the method by which Richard became actually free from the human condition – is brand new to human experience were the psychic ‘warning signs’ I had when deciding to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless. I have written about it before but it was as though I was entering a dark tunnel that had a big warning sign saying ‘DO NOT ENTER HERE’ written over it. I knew that entering this path would be the end of ‘me’ and I also knew this was a path that only Richard had trodden before – although by a somewhat circuitous route. This experience is diametrically opposite to the entry to the spiritual path with its welcoming sign, its feel good seductive lure, the welcoming arms of others, the feeling of belonging and of being specially chosen, not to mention the promise of the fame and the glory of Self-aggrandizement awaiting at the other end.

The other experiential evidence I had of the fact that actualism is diametrically opposite to spiritualism is that not only were there psychic warning signs about doing something so radical as devoting my life to becoming happy and harmless but that there were also actual and psychic (as in emotionally-transmitted) warnings from those who had a vested interest in spiritualism telling me not to go down this path under any circumstances. Not only did I have a few direct warnings from teachers and practitioners of spiritualism but I also had a few psychic visitations whilst sleeping warning me off my intended course of action. The other issue that I had to contend with at the time was the very real issue that spiritualists have a long and gory history of dealing with and disposing of heretics in most gruesome ways, in other words the psychic vibes I perceived had the backing of very real acts of retribution should I dare to openly turn my back on spiritualism and be so bold as to blithely head off in the opposite direction.

All of the events I am recalling happened fairly early on and my recollection of a substantial pure consciousness experience that I had some 10 years earlier combined with PCEs I had subsequent to taking up actualism meant that the psychic warning experiences soon became weaker and weaker – my experience is that once you set off on the actualism path with gusto, the fears that you first encounter are rapidly overcome by the thrill and excitement of the many discoveries that soon unfold.

One event that happened about 3 or 4 years ago again confronted me with the fact that nobody but Richard – ‘Richard’ the identity, not Richard the flesh and blood body sans identity – had ever become actually free of the human condition. I awoke one morning amazed to find myself in the fairy-tale like perfection that this actual world is and it being so early I headed off for a stroll down to the beach. In the early dawning light I sat down on a grassy bank overlooking the ocean and all of a sudden realized that if ‘I’ were to die it would literally be like disappearing over the horizon, never ever to be seen or heard of again – in short, ‘I’ would go into oblivion and not only that but no one would miss ‘me’. I then became aware that there were tentacles holding ‘me’ back from doing so and that these tentacles were the many psychic tentacles that bound ‘me’ to Humanity at large. This experience once again confirmed for me that actualism is brand new to human experience because such an oblivion is not only the end of ‘me’ as a ‘being’ but it also means the end of the eons-old world-wide fantasy of ‘me’ as a spiritual ‘Being’.

Well that’s about it. I just thought to pass on my experience that it is possible for an identity to experientially know that an actual freedom from the human condition is brand new to human experience. Any identity who explores the human psyche deeply enough can experience not only the psychic barriers and warning signs that have no doubt prevented others from treading this path before but ‘he’ or ‘she’ can also verify for themselves that, despite the fact that everybody has had glimpses of the perfection and purity of the actual world, there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone prior to Richard has managed to become actually free from the human condition in toto.

Experiential information about the human psyche can only be had by observing the human psyche in action, in oneself, as one’s ‘self’ – which is precisely what the actualism method involves.

The trick to being able to make such observations is to dare to go beyond the psychic warnings that attempt to deter you from doing so – after all, it stands to reason that you can’t study something that you are scared to look at.

13.8.2005

RESPONDENT: I thought No 59’s points were pretty much on the money in the post to which you are replying here. I never got the impression in his post that he was attempting to dissuade anyone from devoting their lives to happiness and harmlessness. In the past, I’ll agree he has done so. But in this case it appears a belief of yours about No 59’s intentions has got in the way of your reading his email. Obviously that’s something only you can know and investigate. I suggest you take another look.

PETER: Rather than telling me what you think and feel (as in ‘got the impression’) about No 59’s intentions, could you provide evidence (as in the written words) to back your claim that ‘it appears a belief of yours about No 59’s intentions has got in the way of your reading his email’.

I’ll then assess the evidence but until then I’ll go by the words No 59 has written in his latest post … taking into account the multitude of similar words written not only to myself but to others who have shown interest in becoming happy and harmless, his own stated intent in writing on this mailing list and his own stated philosophy about the non-possibility, but more to the point non-desirability, of becoming happy and harmless.

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PETER: It’s a particularly delicious rainy winter day here, which presents a good opportunity to get back to the topic that was originally under discussion – psychic vibes. I’ve noticed that a lot of people have difficulty in understanding psychic vibes mainly because they attempt to intellectually understand how such vibes operate rather than *feel* how such vibes operate in action in their daily life.

As I write this it does seem somewhat too obvious to have to say it but much of human communication is done via affective feelings and this is so because human beings are at core feeling beings. To observe how human beings communicate via feelings is quite straightforward – if someone is feeling sad then that person conveys their feeling of sadness to other people in various ways, be it by the tone of voice, by appearance of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, by body posture and so on. The other person, tuned by experience to takes notice of these signs, then feels the same feelings as the other person and a mutual communication is established on the somewhat fickle basis that they both are apparently feeling the same thing. The same form of feeling-communication can also operate amongst a group of people – if everyone is apparently feeling the same feeling at the same time then a feeling of camaraderie based on mutually-shared feeling of sadness operates.

However, when one begins to become a bit more aware of one’s own feelings in such situations, it becomes obvious that when one meets someone who is feeling sad about a personal loss, one is automatically twigged to remember a similar loss of one’s own in order to have a similar feeling to the other person – to sympathize as in suffer-with. What is interesting to take note of is that whilst the feeling of sadness is similar for both, they are more often than not both feeling sad about quite different issues.

One can see that the very same thing operates with regard to feelings of anger and resentment – if someone is feeling angry and resentful then that person conveys their feeling of anger and resentment to other people in various ways be it by the tone of voice, by appearance of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, by body posture and so on. The other person, tuned by experience to takes notice of these signs then feels the same feelings as the other person and a mutual communication is established on the basis that they both feeling the same thing. The same thing operates amongst a group of people – if everyone feels the same feeling about the same issue at the same time then a feeling of camaraderie based on mutually-shared feelings of anger and resentment (most usually towards other human beings) operates.

When I first started to become aware of how these affective feelings operate (both mine and others) in my daily life I was astounded at how my interactions with fellow human beings were indeed feeling interactions. I also started to become aware of the fact that these feeling communications could be both transmitted and received without any verbal communication whatsoever. I became aware of the fact that I could detect the mood (the feeling that someone was feeling and transmitting) the moment they walked in the door, even before they opened their mouth and said anything. I then became aware of the fact that I also invariably transmitted my own feelings to others in exactly the same way – the experiential understanding that I along with the rest of humanity am a feeling being – which in turn led me to acknowledge that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’.

Once an ongoing awareness revealed how all human beings communicate by overtly transmitting and receiving feelings the next thing that I became aware of were the less obvious means of affective-feeling communications – communication via psychic vibes or psychic currents. Quite often the stronger the feelings are that the person is feeling and the more they want to keep their feelings hidden from others, the more likely it is that they will transmit their feelings via invisible psychic currents. I say invisible because in these cases there are quite often no obvious clues to be had in the tone of voice or appearance or body language and so on as to what the other is feeling – and in some cases the other may not even be aware of having the feeling themselves. But the feeling is there nevertheless and because the feeling is there as an undercurrent as it were, the feeling will most likely be received only as an undercurrent.

This undercurrent of psychic vibes is murky business indeed as it most often operates at an unconsciousness level, i.e. it operates underneath the ‘radar’ of normal awareness. It is also murky in that is one can never be sure what the other is feeling by reading the overt signs, which means that one has to revert to guesswork as to what the other is really feeling. Once I became aware of this I saw the utter futility of attempting to know with certainty what any other person was actually feeling at any time so I eventually gave up this ingrained, instinctual and automatic habit – the habit of having one’s psychic radar always ‘on’ as a method of ‘self’-defence against likely predators, in this case all of one’s fellow human beings. This in turn helped me focus my attentiveness exclusively on my own feelings – what I was feeling right now in this moment and what feelings I was either overtly or covertly transmitting to others.

I do acknowledge that it is somewhat difficult for people to really get in touch with their feelings in order to be able to see how feelings operate – how they are transmitted, how they are received, the pivotal role they play in human communication, the overt affective feelings, the covert psychic undercurrents, what triggers various feelings into operation and so on. I know that I had difficulty at first in getting in touch with my feelings, the primary reason being that we human beings are taught that expressing certain feelings is ‘bad’ and we are taught that it is best to repress such feelings by either keeping a lid on them and/or not paying attention to them. A little introspection however revealed that it was not that I didn’t have these feelings, it was simply that I had repressed them, tucked them away, very often so much so that I wasn’t even aware that I was indeed having the feelings at all. I also found that my years on the spiritual path reinforced my notion of being a good person in that I was given licence by the belief inherent in all spiritual teachings that ‘I’ was good and it was ‘others’ who were evil combined with the feeling-fed conviction that ‘I’ had a special insight of the truth and it was others who were ignorant.

I’ll leave it there as this is getting a trifle long, but the main point I am attempting to make is that the only way you can understand how psychic vibes operate is to firstly get in touch with your feelings and then observe how you invariably continuously transmit these feelings to others as well as to feel the feelings that you invariably pick up from others and then observe the manner in which you receive these feelings from others and how these feelings then trigger off feelings in you.

Or to put it another way, it makes no sense to intellectualize about feelings, one needs to feel feelings in order to observe how they operate in action.

15.8.2005

RESPONDENT: Hi folks, I was initially going to ask this just of Peter it equally applies to any who are willing to reply, and who consider themselves in a state of virtual freedom. How is virtual freedom going for you? Do you still find yourself making much progress these days despite 99% perfection?

PETER: I remember some 9 years ago designing and building a house for a client on the beachfront of the small country town I live in. The owner was well pleased with the job and invited myself and all the other workmen on the job to a barbeque meal in the courtyard of the finished house. As I looked around I was struck by the fact of what a good job it had been – nobody had been injured on the job, everybody had been promptly paid for their efforts, everybody had enjoyed working on the job, the client was well satisfied and the house worked very well as a holiday house. I was also struck by the fact that the success of the job was largely due to my putting into practice all of things that I had discovered by trial and error to be the essential priorities in the process of building – basically that the worksite be as safe as possible such that nobody is injured, that everybody gets paid for their work and that working on the job was an enjoyable experience, i.e. that the people employed are interested in doing what they do.

I was well pleased, as was everyone else at the gathering that night, not only because the end product was admirable but because the hour-to-hour process of building the house had been enjoyable for all involved. What came to mind was ‘this is as good as it gets’ and as I reflected on this afterwards it became clear to me that I had come to the end of the road with building houses – there was no more to learn, no more to discover, nothing more to put into practice – all I was confronted with in continuing on was ‘more of the same’. It had taken me twenty five years to get to this stage and getting there involved unlearning a good deal of what I had been taught at school, a lot of trials and many errors, a persistence in not mindlessly following the latest fashion or falling into line with the ways of others and a constant desire to always see the bigger picture as it were … and yet a few years later I found myself retiring from active building work and focussed on the more leisurely activity of design work.

The reason I am relating this experience is that I find it analogous to my experiences in the next pursuit I undertook after retiring from building work – wanting to become actually free from the human condition. At the start I found the whole issue personally confrontational to say the least, not to mention an utterly audacious proposition. Despite this I found myself inexorably drawn into making being happy and happy and harmless the most important thing in my life. Once I did this my previous comfortably numb life was literally turned upside down as I began to become aware of dark feelings that were lurking inside, of my hypocritical ‘good’ persona that I presented to others and ultimately of the fact that, deep down, inside ‘I’ was as mad, as bad and as sad as the rest of humanity.

The first years of throwing myself head long into actualism were, in hindsight, tumultuous indeed because ‘I’ was ultimately on my own in my trial and error efforts – exactly as I had been when I left the comfort and security of my parents’ nest and struck out for myself by myself into the world at large, only this time I was leaving the ‘comfort and security’ of the biggest of all ‘nests’ – humanity itself. I won’t go into more detail about these early years as I have written of them in my journal, but like all journeys and all explorations eventually one comes to an end point … in the same way as my life as a builder did.

RESPONDENT: I would be fascinated to hear what types of practices you do beyond HAIETMOBA, what types of progress you make, if any.

PETER: The whole point of asking oneself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ was to overcome my inherent lack of attention as to how I am experiencing this very moment, the only moment I have ever been able to experience being alive, the only moment I can ever experience being alive, and the only moment I will ever experience being alive.

By remembering to ask myself the question, I was for the first time in my life starting to focus my attention on being here and subsequently upon how I am feeling about being here, right now. I recently related it as narrowing the focus of my attention down – firstly to this, my only life, by progressively eliminating any of the spiritual fairy tales of a ‘life’ after death and then to this very moment, the only moment I can actually experience being alive … all by the utterly simple process of remembering to be aware of how I am experiencing this moment.

It is a struggle at first as I, like everybody else, had a lifetime’s ingrained habit to overcome – the habit of wallowing in past memories, daydreaming, tripping off into fantasy worlds, settling for being comfortably numb, indulging in philosophical discussions or concocting future scenarios and then vicariously living them out in my own imagination. But once I got the gist of becoming aware of what was happening in this moment and how I was feeling about what was happening … or not happening if that was the case … in this moment, I soon came to the stage where this awareness became so automatic that I could not turn it off and then I could no longer escape from the fact that this is the only moment that I can experience being alive.

So to answer your question, there is nothing ‘beyond HAIETMOBA’ – bringing one’s attention to how one is experiencing this moment of being alive – focusing one’s attentiveness on this moment of being alive is both the means and the end to an actual freedom from the human condition of malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: I suppose I am very much reminded of Richard’s journal entry (excuse the paraphrase) that it was after six weeks of experientially considering ‘what am I in relation to other people?’ that he achieved actual freedom – rather than HAIETMOBA itself.

PETER: If you re-read the passage in question you will find that the reason Richard asked what turned out to be a seminal question (for him) was that Richard, the identity was apparently ‘putting out’ some – dare I say it – vibes to another person such that the other person wanted to become his disciple. It’s not that ‘he’ asked himself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ – it’s that ‘he’ was constantly aware of how ‘he’ was experiencing this moment … so much so that this very awareness ultimately led to ‘his’ demise.

RESPONDENT: Are you fully committed to achieving an actual freedom?

PETER: Of course … I was fully committed the moment I fully devoted my life to becoming happy and harmless.

At the start of the process of actualism the means to becoming free from the human condition is to be as happy and as harmless as one can be in this moment and the end goal is to become actually free form the human condition.

I never separated one from the other at the start because for me they were inseparable.

RESPONDENT: I have not fully committed to achieving an actual freedom yet. But I have fully committed to achieving a virtual freedom at least.

PETER: Is not a full commitment to a partial success by definition only a partial commitment to total success, and if this is the case surely the best outcome would only be partial success? Whilst partial success is not be sneezed at in that you do get to live a life that is way, way beyond normal human expectations anyway, I personally set my sights higher than that right at the start.

RESPONDENT: Many people have pointed out the fact that no one but Richard has achieved an actual freedom yet – but I think they fail to realise (1) that virtual freedom must be pretty damn pleasant anyway and (2) fully committing to an actual freedom means going beyond a lot of fear, no doubt moments of raw unadulterated fear but also a subtle lingering fear.

PETER: If I had taken heed of the naysayers and had settled for forever remaining an instinctual ‘being’, I would never had had the gall to set off down the path to becoming actually free of the human condition which, in hindsight, means I would never have become virtually free.

RESPONDENT: I expect there could be a lingering hesitation for anyone who achieves a virtual freedom. I mean let’s face it, a virtual freedom is probably like having one’s cake and eating it too... a position usually considered too good to be true.

PETER: Indeed. But what I have more and more discovered is that, whilst prior to becoming an actualist ‘I’ was constantly anywhere but here and anywhen but now, I now find that the ongoing attentiveness I found so hard to get going at first has now becomes so effortlessly automatic that there is no escaping the fact that this is the only moment I can experience. This has lately led to glimpses of what I call the ‘end’ joke – that I have unwittingly been a player in a game, a very real game and an instinctually vicious game, but a game nevertheless and that only by coming to my senses can I be free of ‘being’.

As you would know, having glimpses and having realizations is one thing, actualizing them is another.

RESPONDENT: Furthermore, it’s no one else’s business whether one is hesitating, and the sad fact is that there are people on this list just looking for ammunition to continue attacking actualism. But from one practitioner to another, I am curious how it’s going for you.

PETER: One of the first things I learned as an actualist is that other people’s business is their business and the only business I need be concerned about is my business because the only person I can change, and indeed need to change, is me – if I really want to become free of the human condition of malice and sorrow that is.

20.8.2005

RESPONDENT: Thanks for your reply. I was going to ask how it’s going for you but then I expanded that and now it is a separate topic I have posted rather than introducing a putative red herring. But my replies are below.

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RESPONDENT to Richard: Thank you for your response. After reading No 59’s commentary and starting to pay attention to your exchanges with No 86, I had grown concerned that might be making a categorical statement on a topic which, as far as I understand, can only be theoretical. My concern is not so great having read your response to my previous email, eg from your unwillingness to be drawn into a theoretical discussion, and your statement of an entirely different gist to the one I was interpreting from your diary. But in the quote below, you have stated that it was an experiential determination, which I am interested in exploring if you are willing.

• [No. 90] ‘Lots of people have existed who left no trace of their existence. Lots of them. As they were all humans like you (to the extent that you are a human) and me, I assume they were all capable of being actually free of the human condition, like you and me.
• [Richard] ‘Whether they were capable or not is beside the point ... the point is that, *as experientially determined by the identity inhabiting this flesh and blood body all those years ago* (and verified for as far as is possible to ascertain by regular research), no flesh and blood body either living or dead prior to 1992 has ever been actually free of the human condition’. [emphasis added]. ( Respondent to Richard 9.8.2005).