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Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List with Correspondent No 23
Hi No 23, In my experience this concept of time appeared to be one of the main ingredients from which my social identity was being generated. To have a concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose. I find it, Peter, kind of surprising that, you don’t find time considered to be a concept. And yet I didn’t say that I ‘don’t find time considered to be a concept’. Human ‘beings’ have a psychological and psychic persona who thinks and feels it exists over time and therefore time is experienced as a psychological and psychic concept. Hence ‘I’ have emotional memories of ‘me’ existing in the past and imaginary fantasies of ‘me’ existing in the future. Whereas, in fact, the only time that can be experienced as an actuality is this very moment. This is not to deny that past moments did not exist or that there will be future moments to then experience but the only moment that you can actually – i.e. sensately – experience is this very moment. Hence, as I said – ‘To have a concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose’. I take it that my invitation to dialogue on that subject is been accepted. The only person thus far I have refused to dialogue with is No 22 and that was because it is impossible to have a dialogue with someone who has convinced himself that he is GOD. Ok. So time you consider to be a concept if not, you could not call it either ‘practical’ nor sensible to have it and even more so you must have one. No. Time is a fact. Past time is a fact, as is future time. But the only time that can be experienced as an actuality is this very moment. Hence, to rephrase what I said – To make a concept out of a fact is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose. But guess what I found for practical, running off to the dictionary in a desperate attempt to stop the spinning.
Which means that anyone who makes a concept out of the fact of time is neither being pragmatic nor sensible, to pick the most relevant meanings. Btw, most accurate perception, Peter, there’s no arguing about this, yet we differ somewhat from opinion as so you might suspect already. Note: as I want to make it clear that reading prima facie or face value for me is as if I wrote that myself and repeat it until it sounds like spoken with a voice of honesty. So ... then it works out like thus: I ‘lose’ you already after the first line. It appears to me if it [to have a concept of time] is not sensible then it must be silly. I must think black-white here because I see no options to differentiate, as you even deny the practical purpose of having firmly integrated in the brain the concept of time. Don’t hang me for this one (you did not say that and neither do I imply you said so); it is just my way for pleading for sensibly because next, you begin pleading for that statement as to be even ‘more’ then silly. It seems as though the confusion is about the meaning of the word ‘concept’. A concept means an idea, a notion, an abstraction, a conceptualization, a conception, a theory. As you can see, a concept is abstract thinking whereas the aim of asking yourself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is to get you out of your head, out of abstract thinking, conceptualizing, theorizing, imagining, and so on, and get you to come to your senses. And you can only sensately experience this moment – you can only hear something in this moment, you can only smell something in this moment, you can only taste something in this moment and so on. Then you bring in your psychological and psychic concept (which made me spin around) and then you jump to hence, ‘‘I’ have emotional memories of ‘me’ existing in the past and imaginary fantasies of ‘me’ existing in the future’ so just to make a wild guess would that mean something like ‘time is a boat on Lala-river’? Okay, I’ll attempt to go along with your terminology. How about – ‘you’ are ‘a boat on a Lala-river’, a river that ‘you’ call ‘your life’. ‘You’ usually spend most of your time either re-running past emotional memories or imagining things that may or may not happen in the future. By doing so, ‘you’ are unable to focus your attentiveness on how you are experiencing this, the only moment you can actually, i.e. sensately – experience being alive. The actualism method is aimed at more and more mooring ‘you’, the ‘boat on Lala-river’, to being here, in this very moment of time. It’s not an easy thing to do at first because ‘you’ are so used to not being here – in fact even the idea of being here, and nowhere else, is at first a frightening business. But what ‘you’ can do is nibble away at all the programming – both social and instinctual – that prevents you, the flesh and blood body called No 23, from being here, firmly moored in the utter safety and perfect stillness of this very moment. ‘To have a concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose’ which I find as a statement a bit too radical. But hey, OK that’s how you tick. It is very common to hear the refrain that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ within the human condition. This understanding that it has all been said and tried before is the cause of a morbid fatalistic despair that feelings of hope never manage to quell. Once I acknowledged that it was obviously useless for me to re-run the old tried and failed solutions it then made sense to me to try something really radical – something that had only been road-tested once before. If that makes me too radical in your eyes, hey, that’s OK with me. I would agree in its ‘phrasing’ though with : ‘Peters concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose’. And yet because I found having a concept of time neither sensible nor serving any practical purpose, I focussed my awareness on how I am experiencing this moment of time – because I realized that this moment is the only moment I can actually experience. As such I no longer have a concept of time, for me time is a simple and obvious fact. So thus I find your sensibility with regard to the following statement ‘the only time that can be experienced as an actuality is this very moment’ questionable. If that means you are leaving the statement open to question, then it sounds good to me. Whenever I ran one of these questions in my head for a while – and there were many such questions that are thrown up in the process of actualism – I would look for an experiential answer and not an intellectual answer. In other words, I would seek an answer in my own experience and not settle for just agreeing with what someone else said because it sounded good, right, appropriate, groovy or whatever. Hence to make this a little more transparent: What is the discriminating factor/ mechanism by which you are enabled to make a distinction between past and future? Calendars and clocks. Iow, how can you know the difference between what actually happened (emotional memory) and what your imaginary projections are? In order to prise these three separate issues apart, – actual experience, emotional memory and future projections – a practical down-to-earth example may be useful. I will use an example that I have written about in my journal, a time when I was waiting to meet Vineeto –
This is a description of something that actually happened – two people were involved in an event that occurred in a definitive location over a definable period of time in the past. As I have described, at the time this event was happening, ‘I’ had feelings of jealousy raging, and these feelings prevented me from enjoying the sensual delight of what was actually happening at the time. If ‘I’ now had an emotional memory of what happened, ‘I’ would simply be reliving ‘my’ feelings of jealousy in this moment, thereby preventing me from enjoying the sensual delight of being here. By evoking an emotional memory of having been jealous in the past, ‘I’ re-vive the emotion in this moment and thereby run the danger of imagining situations or events to justify ‘my’ feeling jealous now. Given that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’, ‘I’ therefore exist over time – in other words, ‘I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations. So ... this is merely a plea for my sensibility not to say sanity with regard to my ‘In my experience this concept of time appeared to be one of the main ingredients from which my social identity was being generated.’ And I begin to suspect that this perception is rather accurate with regard to the overall make up of any social identity. Indeed, your statement is rather accurate but, if I may suggest, it
would be more accurate to say that ‘I’ as a social and ‘me’ as an instinctual identity can only
experience this moment conceptually and/or affectively. At this point, it is good to remember that there are Ie. ‘I must not be too late at school/ work/ appointment/ the airport’, aso. Or ‘How much am I a going to ask/pay for say 1 hour of service’, aso. Imo, if time is not appropriately conceptualized this brings about stress in the system. And yet you don’t need a concept of time in order not to be late – you simply need a watch and the sense to plan not to be late. Again you don’t need a concept of time to know how much to charge for one hour of service, a watch gives you the time, and market-value usually determines the appropriate rate per hour. And as for stress, having an appropriate concept of time does nothing to eliminate stress because being a thinking ‘I’ and a feeling ‘me’ is inherently a stressful business. Which brings indeed once more to light; the interesting qualities of this way of conversation. So I’ll put my experience as to the concept of time differently.
That’s a reasonable concept, or working hypothesis. I certainly took it that way when came across it in Richard’s writings. For me it made sense, but then I went looking for my own experiential evidence that this was so. Reflective contemplation on issues such as this, combined with a pure intent to be happy and harmless, can lead to a direct, unfettered sensual experience of the actuality of this very moment. Such experiences are known as pure consciousness experiences, whereby ‘I’ and ‘my’ concepts, beliefs, theories, imaginations, feelings and passions are temporarily in abeyance for a brief period.
No. Even as an ‘I’, you don’t have to conclude that there was a past. Whilst ‘you’ have mostly emotional memories of the past, the past did in fact exist and there is ample evidence of the fact. I need look no further than the fact that I have received a number of posts from you all dated and timed, that prove that the flesh and blood body called No 23 typed them out and sent them. Now the entity called ‘No 23’ who first started corresponding on this list is not the same ‘No 23’ who is reading these words for, as I take it from your correspondence, ‘No 23 the spiritualist’ seems to be somewhat weakened. This process is what is meant by demolishing one’s own social identity, as bits of your identity literally fall by the wayside as you begin to replace your beliefs with facts. Again, you don’t need to conclude ‘through inference’ that there is a future yet to come for, barring accident or physical death, you can be reasonably certain that you will awaken tomorrow morning and the day after that, for a number of years yet to come.
No. You can look at a photograph taken of you in the past and that is an image, but it makes no sense at all to deny that there was an actual flesh and blood body called No 23 existing at the time the photo was taken. This type of conceptual thinking, i.e. thinking abstracted from facts and actuality, is common in spiritual circles and can only lead to a ‘me’ who imagines ‘I’ am real and the past, the physical world and other human beings are but an illusion.
Indeed. If you start believing that the world of people things and events is but an image, your feet can literally leave the ground and you can feel as though you are floating. Actualism is about getting your feet back on the ground – a radical proposition, I know.
No. Only this moment is actual for only this moment can be actually, i.e. sensately, experienced. This is not to deny that past moments did not exist or that there will be future moments to then experience. If you do so you start to trip off into imaging all sorts of things, such as feeling yourself to be timeless, which then leads to feelings of being immortal ... and so on. Pretty soon your head is so far in the clouds that you can never get back down to this very earth where we flesh and blood human beings actually live.
I seem to have dissected your poem a bit, but then again I was never a fan of poetic imagination. Actualism ... Let’s make things better. The wonderful thing about actualism is that making things better by having the pure intent to become happy and harmless is entirely your business – it has nothing at all to do with anyone else. And what a relief that is, for your destiny is entirely in your own hands, and who would have it any other way. You have to earn your freedom from the human condition, nobody can magically give it to or bestow it upon you. If someone else could make you free, you would end up beholden to them – be they a God, Goddess, God-man or God-woman – and being beholden to someone or something is not freedom.
Yep. Unless you find out the answers to these questions yourself, you are simply swapping the belief in one authority, (K), for another, (R), which simply leaves you a believer, a doubter, a follower, a dreamer, a philosophiser, an objector, a dissenter, an agreer, a sceptic, a cynic, a fence-sitter or whatever. So ... am I: a believer, a doubter, a follower, a dreamer, a philosophiser, an objector, a dissenter, an agreer, a sceptic, a cynic, a fence-sitter or whatever? Speaking personally, I would say that I have been all these things at some stage and further that I often would glibly flip from being one or other without a thought for the hypocrisy that it involved. It appeared to me that the No 38’ query
needed to be revaluated, as now I see, that possibly the main point here is questioning whether it is possible to influence others. No 38’s initial query related to the matter of ethics vs. sensibility, or to put it another way, idealism vs. pragmatism. The initial reason you raised the point for discussion was that you saw my reply to No 38 as being hypocritical. Your latest revaluation of No 38’s query simply opens up yet another topic of conversation – a diversion that is not at all conducive to either clear thinking or a coherent conversation. One might bring in ethical objections as to how far this influence, if possible is justified/ allowed/ desirable. I’ve chosen to abandon any beliefs, assumptions, aso. With regard to this I say if don’t know whether it is possible or not I choose to think I ‘am’ an influence because otherwise I would put myself and anyone else at the mercy of ‘greater’ forces as currently is advocated that we are by certain world leaders (iow. We cannot do anything as long we think it’s over our hats) and see where it gets from there. The only comment I would make on this diversion is that there are no we’s on this list. Becoming free of the human condition is entirely your own business. * (second) hi update!: <Darwinian- to Quantum-theoretical level> M< y >our<*m< Y >our<*M< Y >our<*m< y > <OUR<* ^note as the exclamation sign might suggest that this is an order I make this note to make it clear that the intention of ! is merely meant to be a ‘strong suggestion’, thus leaving it up to the reader to choose to ‘ignore’ or ‘take notice’. I have no idea what any of this means. Intro – it is not uncommon for me, that I do some reflection on ‘AF-list history’ and I have found that most helpful in getting insight into my own AF-process. I consider the dialogues with actualists, apart from keeping a ‘personal’ diary currently the best way to reap, so to speak, the greatest benefit from this AF-process. Whilst swapping notes with other actualists is no doubt of great benefit it should in no way be considered to be the sum total the process of actualism ... and it seems that you are well aware of the distinction. If I can pre-empt the possibility of yet another version of what is a very simple and very straightforward question – the actualism process of self-investigation begins and ends with the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’, not ‘How are we experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Thus the ‘Byron incident’ for me now is a nice starting point to evaluate progress. As me as I were as to who I am now and who I plan to be. Iow, the identity me while writing this continues to moving (as we all are doing) into the direction of total Selfimobulation, as advocated as to do in applying the actualist method. Now I suspect anyone who might read this knows a good number of ways to have that ‘goal’ achieved much quicker with other methods in, say within less then a day, some very clever ones may even have this ‘fixed’ in a few minutes (given that some preparation at least needs to be done). Given that actualism process is the only thus far devised to facilitate self-immolation and this is the only actualism mailing list, your speculations are just that. From my experience with actualism, anyone who has used the method and has had success with the method would not want to be so selfish as to refrain from swapping and sharing stories about their discoveries on the journey out of the human condition. Realistically (calculating speaking) if one is lucky enough like me to live on the 4th floor, it’s just a simple jump through the window. Ok, I admit that there is the ‘risk’ that it not may result into S.iM but into SM (self mutilation) but there are also higher buildings close to where I live. Yet as I said I’ve chosen to be moderate in this, hence these methods are all not considered to be leisurely applicable thus dismissed as options. end intro] I have never understood the desire for self-mutilation but, then again, there is a lot about the human condition that doesn’t interest me enough to even want to try to understand. Interestingly I yesterday received in a mail message advocating a therapy to cure anger. I found myself after having read the message, ready to wipe the floor with the suggested method called EFT (I don’t know where that stands for). But suddenly I became aware that the message only had been a trigger for my own reaction so ... iow, as I did some quick backtracking as I noticed being triggered. Thus I realized that I was reacting in the ‘idealist modus’. As an actualist, I take it that you took notice of your reaction and gave it a label before you did some quick backtracking, otherwise what you are describing could well be a summary dismissal of an undesirable emotion. This type of summary dismissal is what humans have been taught to do both by the teaching of repression in the real world and by the teaching of self-righteousness in the spiritual world. Becoming aware of and labelling feelings and emotions are the first part of the actualism method but then being attentive to ‘feeling the feeling’ or ‘experiencing the emotion’ is vital in order to get an experiential understanding of how ‘you’ tick. So ... I’m currently ‘debugging’ that program as I’m writing, rather then investing any time in returning this message to deliverer with a few ‘corrections’ ‘suggestions’ and ‘Advices’. I refrained from that and took another option which turned out to be the revaluation of the ‘Byron incident’. Note as these words [‘corrections’ ‘suggestions’ and ‘Advices’ aso] now are considered to be ‘loaded’ I’m going carefully and hey! I know what I’m talking about. Also keeping in mind that I received a response to my insertion of [The below conversation twigged me into serious re-evaluation] which conversation was mainly centred around No 38’s Query which in essence was taken as serious yet now is considered to be as ‘not so easy to resolve’. So iow, I’d pretty much be in trouble if I would have re-queried it in the ‘serious’ old fashioned way. So I did not because, that would have put myself under too much stress. As a suggestion, if you are seeking to have a sensible dialogue with me about actualism on this mailing list, perhaps you could use your personal diary to record any diversions and stream-of-consciousness-type introspections. This way it is easier to stick with a single topic and thereby avoid sporadic diversions. I remember when I first started to try and make sense of the human condition and started to become aware of my feelings, my mind would often race off all over the place and the diaries I kept at the time are littered with a jumble of questions and realizations. However, whenever I met Richard I always attempted to stick with one topic and follow that topic through to completion and while this was initially difficult I soon came to value the opportunity to do so. I also came to the realization that ‘sticking with it’ is the only way of coming to my own understanding of the issue as opposed to accepting or believing what someone else is saying. Thus the No 38’s Query has been transcribed into – Am I as an actualist willing/able to be an influence at all? The willing part is being answered affirmative yet the ability is still questioned. The desire to influence others runs deep in the human condition – so deep that it is instinctual, in fact. One only needs to observe the constant fights for dominance that exemplify the social life of our closest genetic cousins, the chimps, to see this fact stripped bare of human social conditioning. It took me a great deal of self-investigation to dig down to this instinctual passion as it operated in me as ‘me’. In real world terms it’s often called the lust for power à la Genghis Khan, Adolph Hitler et al, whereas in spiritual world terms it is evidenced as what could be called the lust to be the next Saviour of the World, à la Rajneesh, J. Krishnamurti, the Dalai Lama, et al. How am I experiencing this moment of being alive? becomes now as How (the anguish of self enquiry can be deleted) simply: Am I experiencing this moment of being alive? If you choose to delete self-investigation out of the question, you completely rule out any opportunity of any experiential understanding of what makes ‘you’ tick. This is nothing but repression by intellectual trickery, a device oft indulged in by the male of the species. The libraries of the world abound with useless philosophical tomes sprouting supposed wisdoms that are devoid of any in-depth understanding of the human condition in toto precisely because they are not founded on a personal experiential understanding of the whys and hows of its operation. [aietmoba] thus the orig. Richard sequence so to speak gets a ‘condensed’ form iow. the focus now is on ‘alive’ which I suggest to become the global message to ‘transmit’. From a neo-cortical point of view that would be the only way to transform humanity at large while still going about the unilateral business of ‘running’ the actualist ‘program’ Yet this way it may become strong enough to ‘infect’ the shell of the ‘social’ identities which currently are ‘in charge’ of ‘leading’ or as Vineeto recently put it rather euphemistically: ‘administering’ the world. And yet actualism is not about changing the world, actualism is about becoming happy and harmless in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. ^note: religion and science have been undergoing a rather significant change yet politics are still essentially rooted in the very old concept of ‘being in power or empowered by’^. Their ‘idealistic programs’ have become a bit too dangerous for all of us now. That is; this ‘freed human intelligence’s opinion. There may be other ‘intelligence’ with a different opinion. Contrary to popular belief, the endemic human malice and sorrow is not the result of failed political or social concepts or programs – malice and sorrow is rooted in the animal instinctual survival passions and further cemented in place by tribal social conditioning. As such, the best that science and religion can do is offer a temporary respite, relief or feeling of succour for the blight of human malice and sorrow. The ending of your malice and sorrow is entirely in your hands and this fact is startlingly evident in a PCE where it is clear that nobody else is standing in the way of you being free – nobody but ‘you’. I am well aware that no human being with its highly evolved yet always-limited brain can claim to KNOW how this universe is working. Even as apperceptively experiencing itself as the universe it is still the interpretation of the human brain. Iow. it never can go beyond its own interpretation. By your statement, you obviously can never remember having had a PCE. Whilst this may appear to be a hindrance to understanding what is meant by being free of the human condition it need not be so for someone who genuinely sets their sights on becoming happy and harmless. Such a person is bound to trigger a PCE by their own pure intent to eliminate all that stands in the way of their becoming happy and harmless. So ... to set the stage so to speak: ping- pong level 4 defcom off ‘chess mixmode’ quake off <TAN-GO on! I well can imagine to have happened a dialogue the like ‘At the point of a gun’ while sitting at the Byron cafe had not been there, certain influences, so to speak well over my hat, that prevent this from happening. ^note: it is being assumed that the reference to this so-called ‘incident’ rings a bell as to the nature of that conflict is being rooted for the main part in a loyalty conflict, yet if any elaboration is requested I’m willing to go into details^ I’ll pass on the offer as I long ago gave up taking a walk in someone else’s imagination. Thus the header [A New and Non-Spiritual Down-to-Earth Freedom] ‘copied’ from the AF-commercial could well have been the subject of an interesting dialogue. Iow, a coffee table meeting of Emb. actualists having a Down to earth conversation as to the query is the Actual Freedom method an option to the realization of peace on earth this life time for all of us? Bypassing any silliness as to disagreeing about the (f)actuality of the table and/or (f)actuality of the cappuccinos there on whichever viewpoint may taken. But much better than imagining what might have happened in the past ‘if only’, we now are having a conversation at a world-wide cyber coffee table, so-to speak. There is no such thing as missed opportunities in the past, because only this moment is actual and the dialogue is happening as you read these very words – this actuality is beyond imagination because it can only be happening at this very moment. This moment is so immediate that you cannot even begin to imagine what I will say next. Despite the efforts of that ‘little man in the head’ to control what is happening, this moment is always fresh, has never been before and can never be again. Despite the efforts of that ‘little man in the head’, what is actually happening this moment is always impromptu, is always unrehearsed and, as such, is unsurpassable in both its purity and perfection. ^note: as having not received any objections to the way of labelling I have applied I take it as ‘agreed upon’ that these labels, are being used/applied in an accurate/correct way^ I have no idea what you mean by your ‘way of labelling’ but if I were to guess maybe my earlier comment might be relevant –
PS. below I present the ‘<snipped>‘e-message ‘Thought for the day...’, that twigged me into the idealist modus. Thought for the day ... ‘Alone we can do nothing, but together our minds fuse into something whose power is far beyond the power of its separate parts.’ A Course In Miracles By believing messages such as these individual human beings choose to remain ensconced in their spiritual nurseries. By doing so they abdicate their own responsibility of actually doing something about their own malice and sorrow by indulging in the obscurant and duplicitous act of focussing on the malice and sorrow of others. <snip> Now I say ‘Altruism is ‘debugged’ idealism’. Do we choose to evaluate the current Global situation as an actuality, or are we saying, it is neither my concern nor my responsibility nor do I care? The current global situation is an actuality, whether you chose to evaluate it as such or not. Speaking personally I cared, which is why I made becoming both happy and harmless the most important thing in my life. It’s called leading by example as opposed to sticking your head in the sand or wafting along with your head in the clouds. I welcome the felicitous feelings and say goodbye to self inflicted malice and sorrow: I’m checking out of heartbreak hotel. And I look forward to reports of your successes on your journey. An actual peace on earth in this lifetime is the big prize, a prize that is possible for anyone who has the intent, and is prepared to do the work.
At the end of our conversation about hypocrisy you wrote the following – Very good Peter, (sort of basketball as a way of dancing while playing ball ‘disclaimer’) Any negative attribution as to the use of ‘hypocrite/hypocrisy ‘ has as such now been rendered ‘neutral’. Speaking personally, I never rendered the feeling of being a hypocrite neutral, for in order to do so I would then have to be insincere. In my spiritual years, what I did was puff up my feelings of superior righteousness whereby others where the bad guys, others were the problem and so on and these feelings then masked and shielded my hypocrisy to a large extent. Two facts served to shatter my veneer however. One was the failure of yet another relationship and my acknowledgement that I was equally responsible for its failure and the other was an outburst of anger one day that demolished my self-image as a being a peaceful man. Both these incidents nagged me, for it made it obvious that despite my beliefs and fine ideals, I was being insincere and hypocritical, i.e. I was sprouting one thing and doing another. When I came across actualism I was presented with the challenge of doing something practical about my insincerity and hypocrisy and the challenge was to devote my life to becoming actually happy and actually harmless. Thus it is that sincerity – the ending of hypocrisy – is both the starting point of actualism, the driving force on the path and the end of the process of actualism. I strongly recommend cranking up sincerity, not neutralizing it. As an ex-hippie I know what you’re saying about seeking solutions in disregarding the world as is and dream of a better world with peace and flowers and love songs, yet ignoring the intimate interwoveness with all the technical progress that has been made and one’s dependency on that. What I am saying is give up dreaming about peace on earth and start doing something practical about it. As for ‘intimate interwoveness’, you are obviously not talking about human beings whose interactions with each other are anything but intimate. So ... me thinks that you have more or less demonstrated that hypocrisy is in fact a form of self imposed perfectionism with at its core the clinging to the realization of an idealistic utopian goal and one tends to flagellate oneself for feeling not sufficiently living up to that to be realized ideal. What I am saying is that the human search for peace on earth is based on dreams and ideals that have been run and re-run by billions of people for millennia and they don’t work. These dreams and ideals are based on ancient spiritual concepts and beliefs – fairy tales in fact – that has it that the physical world is underpinned by a spirit-ual world, a world populated by good spirits and evil spirits. Thus the human battle for survival is believed to be a noble battle between Good and Evil – a wretched nonsense that has held and still holds mankind enthralled. To flagellate yourself for not living up to the morals, ideals and beliefs that are part and parcel of this puerile scenario makes no sense if you want to become free of the madness of the human condition. What I did was use my feeling of being a hypocrite trapped within a hypocritical-ridden humanity to re-spark my sincerity to actually do something practical about peace on earth. Because of the fact that such an ideal is based on the imposing of impossible demands, as well upon oneself as upon the world, this idealism has as a main prerequisite a very, very big ‘if only but’. Thus is the idealist readily to be known, to reside in the domain of (Spiritual) La-la-land safely to stay there while putting out a strong message for a need of supporters, and blaming others for the failure of that realization of his imagined ‘perfect world’ yet never gets down and dirty and begins to change her/himself. Thus holding on to a claim of feeling hypocrite if ‘I’ do or don’t ... is a nice excuse to stay in the comfort zone of being together with other hypocrites who all say I can only change myself if ... Yep, you got it. But deep down, everyone knows this is a perfect world, for everyone has had a brief glimpse of that perfection at some time in their lives. These are usually glimpses in childhood or sometimes in latter-life, often induced by a sudden shock, drugs, serendipitous circumstances or in certain self-less, peace-filled situations that are known as nature experiences. These brief pure consciousness experiences are experiences that fuel the human search for freedom – they provide the knowledge that there has to be something better than normal life and there has to something better than spiritual life. Yet these self-less pure consciousness experiences have been corrupted into self-aggrandizing narcissistic experiences of feeling ‘I am child of a God’ or even ‘I am God’. This corruption is fuelled by the spiritual belief in a life after physical death that is in turn driven by the instinctual fear of death – a potent mixture that can only lead to delusionary states of consciousness. This is why an actualist needs a pure intent, an intent to question everything that stands in the way of becoming actually free of the human condition, especially all of spiritual beliefs. A pure intent means one aims for purity and perfection – for a genuine peace on earth in this lifetime – and that one will never settle for second-best. This is why sincerity is both the starting point of actualism, the driving force on the path and the end of the process of actualism.
Your hobby is doing some test driving/road testing with this thing that has only be tested out once. So ... it’s good to keep your eyes on the road and hands on the wheel, because nerves of steel are highly recommended and you seem to have them. I, on the other hand, am still deeply involved with the testing of my program [patafok vers. 0.1 (still betha< bugfix idia.-hypocr.-subroutine>)], so that is quite an effortful job and also very rewarding, so I’m not complaining. Yet I have not so much time to study a lot actualism on the site but the e-interaction is found to be a ‘very challenging and interesting alternative’. As I said in the last post, whilst swapping notes with other actualists is no doubt of great benefit it should in no way be considered to be the sum total of the process of actualism ... and it seems that you are well aware of the distinction. Also as I have allowed myself once to be deluded to trust, and as faith haveth no eyes to see ... neither trust nor faith is whereby I go now. Having tread the boards on the spiritual stage for some 17 years before I came across actualism, I can relate to giving up on trust and faith. I also found that I had to abandon the cynicism that I had developed in my other-worldly spiritual search about the possibility of there ever being peace on earth. So ... [Pr(d)elude: No 23: (Speaking in a sort of metaphorically, so not imaginary poetic way): Be it at first the sensation of spinning, next it became floating and now while picking up speed, it has become sort of water skiing or hover crafting because this is ‘virtual ecstasy’ a 3d simulation game still running in the ‘environment’ of La-la river, but possibly setting off for la-la space, because, above me is the wondrous La-la-sky as indeed I must be in la-la land (that’s Holland 4 me right now). I wonder ... am I perhaps on Planet La-la here? Most certainly not on Planet Doom anymore so ... You are (assumed to be located) in Auz (as an Emb.EVF) merrily humming the actualist tune [haietmoba] be it in a flat voice or more or less melodically, while keeping on intently swinging your inquiry hammer, to knock down the walls of – and thus demolishing the house of the social identity, where the hypocritical *I* still comfortably resides cloaked in honesty and over cloaked by god knows what but so to speak is still alive and kicking’. End Prelude.] To repeat my previous suggestion – perhaps you could use your personal diary to record any diversions and stream-of-consciousness-type introspections. This way it is easier to stick with a single topic and thereby avoid sporadic diversions. [BTW I know you have the oxford dictionary I don’t have that so I have pasted a few cuts from Atomica, I say it is information as scientifically safe thus Agreed to be correct according to the below entities/ corporations/ institutes/ organisations/ enterprises namely: The Columbia Electronic Encyclopaedia Copyright © 1999, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.] [intro: I say you have the hypothesis (I’m not going to say viewpoint; too metaphysical concept) that time is a fact and I must say you have done admirable work to clarify why that is so for you. I haha... have the hypothesis that time is a concept and of course I seem to stubbornly hold on to that. So: Peter: [I seem to have dissected your poem a bit, but then again I was never a fan of poetic imagination.] as to [I seem to have dissected] I say :this is more then obvious; you not only ‘seem to have’ dissected it, you actually did dissect it (I’m not saying analysed though). And it seems ... clearly to have been done on ‘purpose’. I’d even say the fact is ... the poem has been dissected, so there is no arguing about that. As to [dissected your poem a bit] I say: well that depends how you define ‘a bit’ in this context I’d even say you dissected it completely and imo. it has been done in a way that I find admirable accurate, and what’s even more ... not only you dissected it, in fact you have, also say; taken a fair space to fill in your comments as to [I was never a fan of poetic imagination] I say: that’s a matter of taste. And hey, possibly because you are an architect, it could be that this is how ... you perhaps tick, as to [a fan of poetic imagination] I hesitate to even call it poetry anymore, so let alone imaginary poetry. Also my assumption [I take it that you’ll enjoy this little poetic eruption] that you would appreciate it as a poem appeared to be false so ...this assumption I have found to be too assumptive and you have demonstrated that this ‘assumptiveness’ is a fact. Thus as to [I take it that you’ll enjoy this little poetic eruption] I withdraw that assumption. So that leaves us with [Given that this is more or less from a Darwinian perspective] as ‘given’ was clearly also incorrect as it is related to the assumptive quality of the phrase as a whole it is rendered nought as well as ‘more or less’ I restate [Given that this is more or less from a Darwinian perspective] into this [This is from a Darwinian perspective.] So, iow. I claim [time is a concept] which was in fact the essence of ‘ground Zero’, to be correct from Darwinian perspective. As you have not objected to this [Darwinian perspective.] I assume (Ok it’s muddy waters, but lets say I take it that you silently agree upon that), your claim is: [Time is not a concept but a fact] end intro] [intermezzo so to find some common ground here let’s see if this [concept-vs- fact]-issue can be reconsidered as ie. –
Or, if we were having this discussion at a coffee table, you could just as easily ask the following questions –
I have learnt by experience to bale out when conversations get to this point. * And yet because I found having a concept of time neither sensible nor serving any practical purpose, I focussed my awareness on how I am experiencing this moment of time – because I realized that this moment is the only moment I can actually experience. As such I no longer have a concept of time, for me time is a simple and obvious fact. So thus I find your sensibility with regard to the following statement ‘the only time that can be experienced as an actuality is this very moment’ questionable. If that means you are leaving the statement open to question, then it sounds good to me. Whenever I ran one of these questions in my head for a while – and there were many such questions that are thrown up in the process of actualism – I would look for an experiential answer and not an intellectual answer. In other words, I would seek an answer in my own experience and not settle for just agreeing with what someone else said because it sounded good, right, appropriate, groovy or whatever. Agreed so ... is the question? [is this very moment’ the only time that can be experienced as an actuality?] where moment as time reference is considered as non conceptual and either future and/or past are concepts or facts. I tend to say they are both as well concepts as facts (given that we apply the above Atomical definitions) so that would make my time-experience is a conceptualized fact. So the (f)actuality of time is conceptual. Can for the flesh-body time only be a concept? As I said, I have learnt by experience to bale out when conversations get to this point. * Hence to make this a little more transparent: What is the discriminating factor/ mechanism by which you are enabled to make a distinction between past and future? Calendars and clocks. Yet you would not be able to use them sensibly had time not been firmly been integrated as a concept in your system. No. I was taught how to tell what time of the day it is by looking at the hands of a clock at school. Quite straightforward stuff, like when the little hand points at three and the big hand points at twelve it is 3 o’clock. The same thing with days in the week and months in the year. Nothing conceptual about knowing what time it is at all, it’s all down-to-earth. * Iow, how can you know the difference between what actually happened (emotional memory) and what your imaginary projections are? In order to prise these three separate issues apart, – actual experience, emotional memory and future projections – a practical down-to-earth example may be useful. I will use an example that I have written about in my journal, a time when I was waiting to meet Vineeto – <story snipped> As I have described, at the time this event was happening, ‘I’ had feelings of jealousy raging, and these feelings prevented me from enjoying the sensual delight of what was actually happening at the time. If ‘I’ now had an emotional memory of what happened, ‘I’ would simply be reliving ‘my’ feelings of jealousy in this moment, thereby preventing me from enjoying the sensual delight of being here. By evoking an emotional memory of having been jealous in the past, ‘I’ re-vive the emotion in this moment and thereby run the danger of imagining situations or events to justify ‘my’ feeling jealous now. Given that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’, ‘I’ therefore exist over time – in other words, ‘I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations. [I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations.] Ok given that now is the only moment you can experience any reference to future or past (ability to discriminate) can only be arrived upon as a factual instance by appliance of time as a concept (a measure tool) hence I say the discriminating mechanism is the ability to conceptualize time. A memory of a past event is not a concept of a memory of a past event – it is a memory of a past event. Similarly the reasonable anticipation of a future event, say that I am going to get up in the morning and have breakfast, is an anticipation – not a concept of a reasonable anticipation. To make a concept out of something is to make an idea, a notion, an abstraction, an hypothesis, a theory or an image out of it. Iow long as I can label an experience as past (memories) this discriminating mechanism is the very labelling of the experience. Otherwise there would be only experience. And the only moment you can actually experience is this very moment that you are reading these words. You don’t need to have a concept about this experience. You read the words on the screen and they mean something to you. Reading is a sensory experience, it is not a concept. The computer screen is an object made of the stuff of this planet we humans live on, it is not a concept. And the only moment you can actually experience all this is this very moment. If you are sensually experiencing this moment, there is simply no room for conceptualisations or abstractions, let alone past emotional memories or future fearful imaginations. * I may have images of the past or the future yet these are nothing more than then the activity of my brain ie memories. No. You can look at a photograph taken of you in the past and that is an image, but it makes no sense at all to deny that there was an actual flesh and blood body called No 23 existing at the time the photo was taken. This type of conceptual thinking, i.e. thinking abstracted from facts and actuality, is common in spiritual circles and can only lead to a ‘me’ who imagines ‘I’ am real and the past, the physical world and other human beings are but an illusion. So overtime there is not happening disembodiment? No. Spiritual people believe they are disembodied spirits as is typified by statements such as ‘I am not the body’ or ‘I left my body the other day’. When meditating one day, I had an out-of-body experience but such experiences are what is known as hallucinations or figments of the imagination. * So ... now seems to be this floating experience in between past and future yet, it all happens HERE. Indeed. If you start believing that the world of people things and events is but an image, your feet can literally leave the ground and you can feel as though you are floating. Actualism is about getting your feet back on the ground – a radical proposition, I know. [now seems to be] not [now is]. And yet this moment is the only moment you can actually experience. If I may suggest, the only way to know how you experience this moment is to become attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of time – which is precisely the purpose of the actualism method – ask yourself each moment again ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’. At first it takes a good deal of effort for you will find that you have made a habit of wasted a lot of moments by dwelling in past emotional memories, worrying about future events or being angry at someone or feeling sad about something. As you get the knack of it you get this wasted time down to a minimum and you learn to crank up feeling good about being here. With sufficiently stubborn effort the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ becomes wordless and your attentiveness comes to the forefront for the first time in your life. Only by stubbornly and diligently practicing attentiveness can what ‘seems to be’ happening become the direct sensual experience of what ‘is now’ actually happening. The actualism method is unremitting in its efficiency and simplicity, which is why some people take the safe route and make a philosophy out of actualism rather than use the method themselves. * One of the major difficulties for newcomers to actualism is that they think there is something new to learn in actualism – something they can add on to what they have already learnt. This is quite understandable because all that human beings think and feel to be true or ‘the truth’ has been learnt from someone else. The tendency therefore is to see actualism as something new to learn, a new form of wisdom to be clipped-on or melded in to their existing belief, a new and superior philosophy than the one they had before, a new set of rules and regulations as to how to live one’s life, a convenient excuse for continuing to suppress emotions and feelings, a clever mask for sublimating undesirable emotions and feelings, a catchy concept to strut around and teach others, and so on. While there is no doubt that even a little of the down-to-earth sensibleness that is the hallmark of the writings of actualists is of benefit for those who have had their head in the clouds for years, to consider actualism as something new to learn is to miss the whole point of actualism. The actualism process is in fact all about unlearning – unlearning everything you have been taught to be right, true, wise, and sane. Actualism is about unlearning of all of your social and instinctual programming, the very programming that serves to incarcerate you within the human condition. Becoming free of the human condition involves unlearning and deleting all of your social programming that you have been taught by your parents and peers – in other words, you yourself actively demolish your own social identity. As this unlearning progresses you then start to become aware of the instinctual passions that lie suppressed or sublimated beneath this layer of social programming. You are then free to be attentive to the automatic-instinctual passionate impulses of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and the very act of attentiveness enables you to eventually break the stranglehold that these habitual reactions have over you. All of this is an unlearning, or de-learning, process – an incremental methodical procedure of deleting all you have been taught to be true and all you instinctually feel to be right – it is not at all about learning something new. You can’t learn actualism, nor can you teach actualism to anyone else – unlearning is a do-it-yourself business. Nobody can do it for you, or to you – you have to want to do it for yourself.
Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust |
