Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List

with Correspondent No 38

2.8.2002

Hi,

The common interpretation of the word cult has as a primary characteristic the wielding of power by one or several over a group of others. This power can only exist with the mutual agreement (at some conscious or unconscious level) of both parties to honour the hierarchal arrangement.

There are currently hundreds upon hundreds of self-declared Gurus on the planet, all of whose fame, power, influence and wealth is totally dependant upon the fervour and numbers of their followers. I am not denying that many of these Gurus have the capacity to wield considerable psychic power over their followers but the follower has to be fully compliant and blindly loyal in order for this power to operate. When I was a loyal follower of Mohan Rajneesh his word was God to me, yet when I stopped believing that what he said was the Truth he no longer held any power over me – in other words, I gave him power over me, it was not a matter of mutual agreement.

I stand corrected. It does start with the followers. I think I arrived at that in my last statement (below), but probably should have taken a bit more time to think about my post before hitting send.

This issue does take a bit of ‘getting’, because it has many deeper layers to it and few bother to do more than scrape the surface in trying to understand it. Every child is socially trained to obey mummy and daddy, to follow the leader, to fall into line and so on. This is essential training, very necessary and quite sensible. This training often results in resentment, which can lead to rebellion and anarchy, and then the child needs to be reminded of his or her limits, lest they be punished. Many people continue living their lives rebelling against this essential social training, thinking their rebellion is a necessary and noble action, essential for social change, when in fact it is often little more than senseless riling born of childhood resentments.

It is also very common for many people to seek out a big daddy or big mummy figure in the form of a Guru, Godman, God or Goddess at some stage in their life and, once hooked on the beliefs espoused by the guru, it is very difficult to wean oneself off such a fixation. Not only does abandoning such beliefs evoke feelings of disloyalty, ostracization and the like, but also very intense atavistic feelings of heretical and hellish punishments. There is a deeper layer, of course, which is animal-instinctual in nature and an actualist will usually touch upon this layer fairly early on when daring to take the risk of ceasing to follow the herd and striking off on his or her own path towards autonomy.

I know the issue of authority ran deep with me for a long time at the start of actualism and I seem to recall Gary mentioning it as well. That’s why I spent a bit of time in replying to you in detail – not as a correction to what you said but as further explanation that may trigger even more contemplation. For me, if my memory is accurate, the issue was about leaving home, growing up, standing on my own two feet, taking responsibility, if I can throw in a few catch-phrases that came to mind at that time. Certainly this issue dominated a good deal of the early chapters in my Journal and I did a good deal of thinking about it at the time.

When you say, ‘I stand corrected’, my reply was not meant as a matter of me correcting you as in a normal ‘who is right or who is wrong’ argumentation. I was simply digging down a bit further so as to understand the facts of the matter because I found by my own experience that only by doing so, can you avoid the dangers and pitfalls of the many forms of cultism – both secular and spiritual – that permeate the human condition so as to eventually become free of them.

You also might find the selected correspondence on authority a useful addition.

*

If the players in this game do genuinely follow Richard’s edict about ‘not trusting in another person (thereby inviting betrayal), but evaluating the validity of a claim through reference to one’s experience’, then the argument ends there. I detect no indication of the attempt by the AF veterans to establish a controlling influence over the participants.

Given the human propensity to need someone to be an authority, a Big Daddy figure, the argument about actualism being a cult will no doubt continue long after the supposed cult-leader is dead and burnt.

Speaking personally, as one of the ‘AF veterans’, I look forward to the time when the mailing list has sufficient practicing actualists that the discussions can remain lively, interesting, down-to-earth and on-topic and not be dominated or overwhelmed by objectors or flamers. At this stage retirement is a definitive option.

Isn’t one of the primary functions of this list to educate interested newcomers?

Not as far as I’m concerned. This mailing list is not an internet classroom offering personal tuition in actualism. The website is the primary source of information and it is adequate in itself for anyone sufficiently motivated to become free from the human condition. The mailing list is supplementary and secondary to this information – a forum for actualists and those interested in actualism to mutually discuss and share their experiences about the actualism process.

There will always be objectors or flamers in that group.

Seemingly so, but experience thus far has shown that they come and go … and that increasingly they are not the main event on the list.

Speaking for myself, perhaps my queries could be construed to be aggressive (you be the judge), but it’s just that I consider this work to be of paramount importance, and there’s no time to be wasted beating around the bush. I am not remotely interested in spreading malice on the mailing list, I’m just trying to get the heart of the matter, in my own blundering way.

To even consider heading off in a direction that is diametrically opposed to everything that humanity holds dear is a daunting business and it is bound to stir emotional responses and precipitate cognitive confusions. The process of actualism not only brings into question all of humanity’s dearly held morals, ethics and beliefs but it also stirs up the deepest of the instinctual passions. I do appreciate the difficult nature of many of the topics and discussions on this list for they are of an ilk that is usually avoided, precisely because they can get ‘too close to the bone’, as it were. But throughout, I’ve never detected you as being aggressive at all, something which I do appreciate. I’ve always had a preference for politeness.

On the general topic of the mailing list, out of curiosity yesterday I took a ‘core sample’ of the past year’s worth of posts to the topica list. There certainly have been some periods of intense flaming! But I also noted that many of the ‘veterans’ who were active contributors are now mostly quiet. Perhaps for most who live in some measure of actual/virtual freedom, the need to communicate dissipates, leaving only a few dedicated individuals to carry on the educational torch.

The list has a life of its own, as it were – it is completely spontaneous, no-one knows who is going to say what next, what the next topics will be, who will come along next, who will enter, who will exit, who will pop up. We are all, in fact, doing this for the first time. It’s thrilling enough stuff just to be able to have such an unfettered, uncensored discussion in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are, and yet we can all do it anonymously, without fear of reprisal or repercussion from the safety and comfort of our own house/ flat/ whatever, from wherever in the world. There have been several attempts to broach that privacy, but then again nothing in life is without risk.

I often reflect that I have never, and probably will never, meet most of the people I write to on this list, but when I write and when I read, I am talking to a fellow flesh and blood human being about the most intimate aspects of what it is to be a human being. I can say things on this list and write things that I can’t say to most people I meet because they are either not interested or are likely to take offence at such conversation.

As to your reference to ‘the ‘veterans’ who were active contributors are now mostly quiet’, I obviously cannot answer for them. Personally I find it a delight to be able to discuss with others my discoveries about the human condition and how it operates and as a consequence I would find it improbable that other practicing actualists would not want to share their experiences and successes on this list so as to help facilitate the freedom of other fellow human beings. But then again, I cannot know whether the past contributors to the list are still interested in actualism unless they continue to communicate or whether their need to communicate has dissipated because their inquiry into the human condition has ceased.

I don’t quite grasp your last statement.

‘Speaking personally, as one of the ‘AF veterans’, I look forward to the time when the mailing list has sufficient practicing actualists that the discussions can remain lively, interesting, down-to-earth and on-topic and not be dominated or overwhelmed by objectors or flamers. At this stage retirement is a definitive option.’ Peter to No 38, 28.7.2002

I think it could be interpreted one of two ways: Either you are fed up with the present state of affairs,

To the contrary, I find the present state of affairs, with regard to this list, to be excellent – the discussions are generally lively, interesting, down-to-earth and on-topic and the contributions of our resident and visiting Godmen, objectors and flamers are in themselves informative and very often pertinent to the discussions. This mailing list was never meant to be a sheltered workshop or a cave for monks.

… or at some point when the list arrives as a critical mass, you can relinquish some responsibility.

When I first suggested to Richard that he put his writings on a website so as to make his discovery available to all, we discussed ways to make it less personal and more generic. We also discussed the issue of being able to make the information publicly available whilst maintaining the sensibility of living a private life. The idea emerged of establishing the web-site under the name of a legal entity in the form of a trust administered co-operatively by a number of individuals – the idea being that the trust would take responsibility for maintaining a public web-site so as to make the writings freely available world-wide and maintain the integrity of the original actualism writings for as long as necessary. As a founding member of what became the Actual Freedom Trust, I have undertaken that responsibility.

As to my continuing to write on the mailing list, that is a separate and personal issue. Given that I am not yet actually free from the human condition, I still learn a lot from writing on the list. I still enjoy writing on the list and I don’t do so out of a sense of being responsible for others. I have always been willing to share my experience of actualism with anyone interested purely on the basis of passing on experience to others – what they do with it is their business entirely. After all, being able to learn from the trial and error experience of others – both the mistakes and the successes – is one of the essential attributes that separates humans from all the other animals.

But I don’t see that I will be writing on this list for the rest of my life – already my usefulness in talking about the early stages of actualism and the likely issues encountered is questionable as my memory of this time is not as vivid nor as precise as it was. It’s a good thing that I wrote a lot of it down in my Journal and it’s also timely that others are now capable of writing in a way that is far fresher and more immediate.

*

A small group of others who have determined that the method on offer by this person has meaning to them, and they make a conscious choice to lead their lives in a similar fashion. They emulate his ‘philosophy’ and practice his techniques, likely with varying degrees of success. However, they are leading a simulation of the originator’s way (that’s what the word ‘virtual’ means after all), so it is possible that they have suspended some measure of their common sense in order to ‘be like Richard’. I can’t really ascertain that, but if that were the case, then they are dancing around the edges of cult-ness.

Your supposition depends upon your definition of the term ‘common sense’. The common-to-all sense would have it that human beings need to be aggressive in order to survive in the world and that suffering is not only essential but is good for you. On the other hand, to me it is common sense to do all I can to become both happy and harmless.

Perhaps a better way of putting my desire to emulate Richard is that I have abandoned the usual common-to-all-sense and relied on the uncommon-to-all-sense of devoting my life to becoming both happy and harmless. Thus far this sense is indeed uncommon, for I only know of less than a handful of people who have openly declared themselves to be similarly motivated, and I have the good fortune to live with one of them.

I use the term ‘common sense’ in exactly the same way as you. I suppose it is a term that is too subjectively defined to be bandied about as freely as I have.

Okay, but whereas you said ‘so it is possible that they have suspended some measure of their common sense in order to ‘be like Richard’, my experience is that I came to my senses when I decided to become actually free ‘like Richard’. I had to stop believing the non-sense I believed about what it is to be a human being – the common-to-all sense – and I had to start taking a clear-eyed look at the facts of what it is to be a human being – the uncommon-to-all-sense. To me this is not suspending ‘some measure of … common sense’ but discovering common sense and putting it into action. If you check back to the passage you originally wrote, you may find your use of the term common sense was the opposite to how I use it when I write.

The only reason I am labouring the point a bit is that I had to work hard to develop a clear-eyed common sense because my thinking was always skewed by the morals and ethics I had been taught as a kid and imbibed in my latter life. My common sense – the free operation of the intelligence that is the hallmark of the human brain – was obscured, if not completely obliterated in many cases, by the beliefs I had unwittingly taken to be truths and it took a good deal of effort and time to eliminate them.

And then there are the feelings that kick in automatically and instinctually before thinking has a chance to operate freely – the feelings that infiltrated my thinking without me even being aware of what was happening. It took persistent attentiveness on my part to become aware of this biological fact but once I got the hang of it, this attentiveness became almost constant and then it was thrilling to be able to observe and sort out how the human condition operates. It then increasingly began to be a pleasure to think, to ponder, to contemplate, to reflect, to understand, to realize, to be able to think things through in order to arrive at the facts of the matter … and to be aware that I was coming to my senses, both literally and figuratively.

That’s what I call common sense.

*

What I do get from this group at times is a tendency to formulate fairly broad responses in quite black and white terms, at times sounding like a party line. Yes, the basic AF tenet is black and white, but I am suspicious of any system that attempts to fit the entire universe into one of two bins. Elemental particles may be black/white, but when you mix a lot of them together, it sure starts to look grey. YMMV.

So, the basic actualism tenet is black and white but ‘this group’ tends to formulate fairly broad responses in quite black and white terms. As part of this ‘group’, I have no trouble at all with making things black and white, bringing issues and beliefs out of the shadows into the light, understanding what were formerly grey areas, calling a spade a spade when appropriate. This is the whole point of actualism – to clearly understand the human condition and how it operates in black and white terms in order to be free of it. If you want murkiness and greyness, not-knowingness and uncertainty, obscuration and ambiguity, then there are a multitude of other forums on the Net whose discussions would better meet your criteria.

I didn’t state that I was pursuing grey-ness. I have no personal interest in ambiguity, that’s why I’m here. I was simply investigating some remaining sticking points, some ‘real’ world scenarios that I’ve been using as litmus tests. Vineeto in her last post to me actually answered most of them to my satisfaction, so my black/white/grey thread is concluded satisfactorily.

I apologize for the presumption on my part. What you said was that you were suspicious of a system that attempts to ‘fit the entire universe into one of two bins.’ I unwittingly leapt to the conclusion that, as you were suspicious of the ‘black and white’ proposition inherent in actualism, you may have still held some lingering fondness for the greyness typified by traditional spiritual teachings of ‘not-knowing’ and ‘not wanting to know’. I was also unaware at the time of writing my response that you had meanwhile concluded this thread to your satisfaction. Sounds good to me.

I do like the written-word communication of mailing lists. Putting things down in black and white presents a way of making things clear, whereas the spoken word always leaves room for greyness and ambiguities, not to mention the usual ‘but you just said … ‘no, I didn’t’, ‘yes, you did’, no, I didn’t’ disputes that commonly arise. By being able to refer back on what was actually said, the process of checking beliefs or convictions against facts becomes simple and straightforward.

*

I remember once pricking up my ears at something Richard said. He said something like ‘Do you really believe that human beings will never find a way to live together in genuine peace and harmony – that there will never be an end to all the wars, rapes, murders, child abuse, domestic violence and corruption that human beings inflict upon each other?’ It sure made me understand how cynical the universal conviction is that there can never be a workable straightforward down-to-earth solution to ending human malice and sorrow.

Interesting... I hadn’t really about the insidiousness of cynicism (and I have it in yards), but it surely must colour everything. Thanks for (yet) another ‘opportunity’.

If I remember rightly, you have been upfront about cynicism on the list before and I appreciate anyone who freely admits to feelings such as these. I remember being quite shocked as to how deeply cynical all of the spiritual teachings were and being stunned at my gullibility in that I had not seen this whilst I was on the spiritual path. The realization helped to show me how my own feelings of self-righteous and moral superiority had blinded me to the dark and sinister underbelly of all spiritual teachings.

*

Nowadays it is not necessary for seekers to spend years on the spiritual path because so much of the spiritual teachings are available on the Net to be read at leisure without the need to become involved in a group or embroiled in a cult. It is also possible to join any one of many spiritual mailing lists in order to assess the effectiveness – or ineffectiveness – of the teachings in producing harmonious and peaceful communities.

There are ample opportunities for a present-day seeker to check out for themselves the followers of almost any spiritual teaching, to assess the quality, range and tone of discussions and by doing so make your own assessment as to whether or not the followers are living the teachings and if they are, what effect it has on their daily lives.

Given the doubts you have raised in this post about actualism being a cult and your, I can only suggest that you take a clear-eyed look at spiritualism as it works in practice in order that you can move on from doubt to making an assessment one way or the other. The important thing about asking questions and having doubts is to find definitive workable answers and nowadays the Net makes it much easier than having to troop off to the East as was needed in the old days. As I remember it, living in doubt and not-knowing is the pits.

There is such a joy to be had in devoting yourself to something one hundred percent.

I have no doubts about the ‘cult of AF’. There is absolutely no evidence to that suggestion. I’ve looked at spiritualism and I reject it categorically. Your point about the purpose of questioning/doubting is well taken. Also, I do recognize the importance of commitment and intent to any of this work. While I can browse my way through a world’s worth of information, at the end of the day, the plain old hard work still must be done.

My misconception appears to have come from reading your words and taking them at face value. You said, among other things –

However, they are leading a simulation of the originator’s way (that’s what the word ‘virtual’ means after all), so it is possible that they have suspended some measure of their common sense in order to ‘be like Richard’. I can’t really ascertain that, but if that were the case, then they are dancing around the edges of cult-ness.

When you say ‘however ... it is possible …’ and ‘I can’t really ascertain that, but if …’, that to me means you have doubt, i.e. you are not sure, not confident, or it is not your experience. In other words, to me, what you wrote expressed that you had doubts, which is why I responded as I did.

Perhaps this is an example that throws some light on the feedback I sometimes get – that I am putting words into the mouths of correspondents that they didn’t say or that I am misinterpreting what they say. I am not saying I always get things right but I can only respond to the words someone says.

The other example that comes to mind – although it has nothing to do with this current conversation – are correspondents who say things like ‘I agree, but …’ which to me means there is not a mutual agreement as to the facticity of what is being said but that very often the correspondent is objecting to the proposition being offered by saying ‘but’. In this case, what can often happen is that the correspondent will ‘dig their heals in’ and begin a standoff of principle as to ‘who’s right and who’s wrong’. Such reactions usually prevent any common sense discussion and further investigation as to what are the facts of the matter and the resulting feedback is that of me ‘being aggressive’ or ‘being confrontational’ or ‘always wanting to be right’.

You may have noticed this tendency is common to many discussions – I know it was one that plagued all of my conversations and interactions until I came to see it in action and worked to break the habit. What I realized was happening was that I was emotionally defending my beliefs and convictions, very often without thinking about what I was defending at all. When what ‘I’ said or felt to be right or true was questioned or contradicted ‘I’ immediately felt threatened, the defence and/or attack mode automatically kicked in, and any chance at sensible conversation flew out the window.

Sometimes, in a vain effort to keep the peace, I would feign to agree with the other outwardly whilst covertly holding on to the conviction of my rightness, thereby ensuring the truce so gained was nothing but a temporary lull in my ongoing battle with others. The only thing I found that worked to end this cycle of conflict and ceasefire was to make the effort to establish what were the facts of the matter so that my common sense was able to operate in lieu of ‘my’ automatic emotional reactions of defending ‘my’ beliefs and convictions.

This process is what is meant by questioning beliefs and replacing them with facts – this is the actualism process in a nutshell and the resulting common sense discussions on this list illustrates why and how it works in practice. Peace and harmony between human beings is possible.

Nice to chat again,

15.10.2002

Just some comments that came to mind when I read your recent post to No 23 –

Whilst in theory these aspects should co-exist quite happily, the spanner in the works, so to speak, is the fact that human beings are first and foremost emotional beings, and quite proud of being so. Therefore the ‘data stored in our brain that recalls a previous perception/sensation of the universe, and our predictions of how the universe may be sensed tomorrow’ always has a pre-eminent, and pre-dominant, ‘self’-centred emotional aspect.

As a distinct and separate psychological and psychic ‘self’ inevitably develops in early childhood in all human beings, so do emotional memories of past events and our emotional expectations and wariness of future events. These emotional memories and expectations build up over time, giving the rudimentary animal ‘self’ a passionate feeling-backed conviction of existing over time – of having, and living, a distinct and separate ‘life’ of its (as in his or hers) own.

Because of this quirk of nature, this entity thinks and feels itself to be separate from the flesh and blood body and thinks and feels itself to be alien to the actual world. Thus ‘I’ can never be happy because I always feel separate and alien, which in turn means ‘I’ can never be harmless. People who have had an experience of deeply feeling this separation and alienation have to date grasped for the traditional lifebuoy – the feelings of Oneness and Unity provoked by believing the spiritual teachings.

Actualism, as you know, is about tackling the root cause of the problem rather than tweaking the symptoms. Once one intellectually grasps the fact that all human malice and sorrow stems from the feelings of separation and alienation that are intrinsic to being a thinking and feeling instinctual ‘being’, the next stage is to acknowledge one has a problem – that one is neither happy nor harmless. You put it this way in a post about 3 weeks ago –

Despite all the good work I had done in self-observation, it all boiled down to the simple inescapable truth: I was unhappy and angry, and no amount of psychological analysis was going to make it go away. This is where the sheer intent to change that comes into play. No 38 to Vineeto 24.9.02

My experience at this stage was that I was faced with a decision the likes of which I had not faced before, for I knew if I devoted my life to becoming happy and harmless then that would be the end of ‘me’, the root cause of the problem.

By devoting one’s life to becoming happy and harmless, one then automatically becomes committed to becoming aware of all of the invidious feelings as well as the self-aggrandizing feelings as and when they occur. This purity of intent and whole-hearted commitment means that no stone will be left unturned in investigating one’s own psyche in action, be it the outer layer of one’s social identity or the primordial depths of one’s instinctual being.

However, as I remember it, in the early days I would often get sucked back into my normal ways of doing things, absorbed with the lives of others, instinctually reverting to the blame-others game. It takes considerable effort and ongoing attentiveness to break old in-grained habits, to stop repressing feelings, to stop shoving things under the carpet. But in the end the successes I had encouraged me to dare to investigate all of the beliefs and passions that stood in the way of my feeling felicitous – no matter how disconcerting the process … and no matter what changes would result from the process.

Which leads me on to another comment in your post to No 23 –

My experience is that the only way I ever understood something fully was by the trial and error doing of it. Thinking about what to do and how to do it were the first steps, but then plunging in and doing it was essential to know if what I thought was the right way worked in practice. With hindsight that is what I did in the first year of actualism – I tested out Richard’s observations about the human condition by making my own investigations of my own psyche in action.

But where I tend to differ with what you are saying is that I did demand an understanding from my investigations – and not only an intellectual understanding but an experiential understanding. What I found was that each understanding became like a stepping-stone on the path to becoming happy and harmless. Each understanding of what made ‘me’ tick, of what prevented me from being happy and what stood in the way of me being harmless, allowed me to more and more freely delight at being here, doing this business of being alive.

After some 15 months of success with this process of ‘self’-investigation, I took some time off work, bought a computer and sat down and wrote down the understandings I had come to in the form of a journal. This is how I started –

‘As I sit on the balcony of our small flat contemplating life, I am moved to start writing my story. The urge has been welling in me over the last few months, so I’m now making a start. There is now ample time, given that I have all but retired, to reflect on the sense I have made of life.

Indeed, that has been the innate drive in my life: to make sense of this mad world that I found myself living in. The insanities of endless wars, conflict, arguments, sadness, despair, failed hopes and dreams seems endemic. And worse still, as I gradually forced myself to admit, I was as mad, and as bad, as everyone else.’ Peter’s Journal, Introduction

As you can see, understanding or making sense was crucial for me in the process of actualism. This did take time and effort and in the early days of ‘self’-investigation so much was ‘on the table’ that often it felt like all I could do was put one foot in front of the other. If I read you right, this is what you mean when you say –

‘… so the most judicious plan is to just keep plowing away, and stop demanding understanding’. And, I asked myself if any sort of rationalization or justification (positive or negative re AF) was going to affect my determination to apply the method... the answer was no, so I’d better give up on some of the wanking.’

This way understanding will come by the trial and error method of doing it and this will eventually produce an experiential understanding rather than an intellectual-only understanding. Once you are into the trial and error phase of investigation and experimentation then it’s a hands on business and then life-changing changes invariably come from abandoning that which doesn’t work and pursuing that which brings success.

So when you say ‘I don’t think I’m going to ‘get’ those answers until I’ve ‘arrived’, you may well find that ‘getting’ the answers as an experiential understanding is what will bring the life-changing changes necessary for you to become free of the human condition.

That was a bit long winded but you have probably got the gist of what I am saying. The process of actualism brings incremental success in the way of experiential understandings, which invariably lead to tangible changes.

Give me a good solid experiential understanding of what works and what doesn’t work over a belief, a hunch, a theory or a hope any day.

19.10.2002

Hi Gary & No 38,

I’d just like to add my comment to your discussion about relationships.

Gary:  I think I also experienced a momentary feeling of pity for my partner whose expressions of ‘love’ to me are usually not reciprocated, perhaps in they are in tender expressions of caring but certainly not in word, as I never speak the ‘love’ word anymore. I think there was an irrational belief operating in me at the time that went something like this: ‘What kind of partner are you after all – you should be telling your partner that you love her’.

One could easily substitute any number of words in the place of ‘partner’ such as ‘son’, ‘daughter’, ‘friend’, ‘coworker’, etc. The irrational belief that I ‘should’ be expressing love to these people caused me to feel momentary sadness, regret, and guilt. Gary to No 46, 4.10.2002

No 38: I had found myself in a very similar position a while back, and it provided plenty of (painful) opportunity for observation. I think I came out of it with increased clarity, but one question still remains:

Unlike Vineeto/Peter, I am not in a relationship with that level of shared determination and application. We do, however have a certain degree of caring for each other. It does give her pleasure to hear the word ‘love’ come out of my mouth towards her. Is it not reasonable to provide her that pleasure on occasion? Is it likely that we have been working through the whole concept of ‘love’, and as it slowly releases its iron grip, it is being reduced to merely a word? And in withholding this pleasure to others, we are hanging on to our concept of ‘love’?

I thought it might be useful to this particular discussion to explain my initial interest in actualism and how and why I came to be living with Vineeto. Although I have told the story in my Journal, most people who have read the story manage to misunderstand, misinterpret or re-interpret it.

When I first came across Richard I spent a good deal of time checking out the sensibility of his story, as well as checking out whether he lived what he talked. I eventually got to the stage where the story made sense and, unlike those I had followed on the spiritual path, it was clear to me that he lived what he talked. As I found myself becoming more and more interested in actualism I found myself faced with a dilemma. How best to road-test actualism in order to find out if the method worked in practice?

Previous to this time I had been full-on on the spiritual path, was not in a relationship, had lived in shared houses for several years and had spent the last year living alone. It was in this latter monk-like period that I gradually lost my grip on reality and had a substantial Satori experience – a glimpse of what enlightenment would be like. It occurred to me that if I continued to live alone then it would be very easy to treat actualism as a philosophy or a belief and the danger was that I would go tripping off into all sorts of fantasies as I had done in my spiritual period.

However, as I have said often before, what really challenged me was Richard’s comment in the Introduction to his Journal –

‘I started from a basic premise that if man and woman could not live together with nary a bicker – let alone a quarrel – then the universe was indeed a sick joke.’

There was such a blindingly obvious sensibility to this statement that I decided that this too would be my starting point in actualism.

In making this decision, I knew I would be testing actualism not only in an utterly down-to-earth arena – one-on-one male-female relationship – but one that Eastern spiritualism failed to address. The appeal of this method of testing actualism was that, whilst I knew from experience I could very happily live by myself, I preferred to live with a companion. I had always wanted to understand the nature of the odious gender divide and I had always wanted to be free from sexual inhibitions as well as instinctive sexual predatoriness. Deep-down I knew that if I wanted to be happy and harmless in the world-as-it, with people as-they-are, then the big issues in life had to be tackled and understood – not dismissed, denied or avoided. And one of the really big issues was man and woman living together in utter peace and harmony.

So it could be said that my deliberately finding a companion with whom to road-test the actualism method only meant I was catching up to where you guys started – faced with the challenge of living with at least one other person in utter peace and harmony. From feedback over the years, it is clear that many people have misunderstood the nature of this challenge. It is not about waiting for, or demanding, that the other person changes – that they become happy and harmless in order that you can be. Nor is it about waiting for some like-minded person to come magically wandering into your life in order for you to change.

Everybody who comes across actualism starts from where they are now, in the life circumstances they find themselves in. If you are already with a companion, then that is where you start, if you are alone, that is where you start. No matter what age, culture, gender, life experience or life circumstances – if you want to become happy and harmless in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are, then right now is always the time to start and right here is the place to start.

This is not to say that you may not want to change your life circumstances in order to make life easier – contrary to popular belief there is no virtue in suffering – or that you may want to take on an adventure or a challenge of some sort. But no matter what an actualist’s life circumstances are, his or her main priority in life will always be to be happy and harmless right now.

I do remember that I spent a lot of time comparing my life experience and life circumstances with Richard’s. Eventually I came to see that making such comparisons was a red herring because my life experiences and life circumstances are what has happened as a fact and what is happening now as a fact. The only salient thing that stood out in Richard’s stories of his time before he became actually free was his whole-hearted intent and stubborn persistence to explore every avenue of his psyche in his quest to become actually free from the human condition – to leave no stone unturned, as it were.

Just to add another thought to the discussion that might be relevant. The last century has seen a remarkable revolution in women redefining their traditional social/gender roles and this seems to have left many men bemused about their own social/gender role. Whilst many women are now refusing to play the role of slave in their relationships, men generally seem reluctant to dare to take the same step.

My own experience is that this social/gender programming, both the male and female, needed to be scrupulously examined in order that I could become free of the effects of both. These investigations were an oft-confronting business because there is a lot of darkness hidden beneath the generally well-meant goodness – however the tangible rewards far exceed the unfulfilled and fickle promise of love.

By putting becoming happy and harmless as a higher priority to hanging on to the mores, habits and hopes of a traditional man-woman relationship, I am now able to relate to women as fellow human beings and not members of the ‘opposite sex’ – not only the woman I choose to live with, but all women.

3.11.2002

A somewhat belated response to your post –

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However, as I remember it, in the early days I would often get sucked back into my normal ways of doing things, absorbed with the lives of others, instinctually reverting to the blame-others game. It takes considerable effort and ongoing attentiveness to break old in-grained habits, to stop repressing feelings, to stop shoving things under the carpet. But in the end the successes I had encouraged me to dare to investigate all of the beliefs and passions that stood in the way of my feeling felicitous – no matter how disconcerting the process … and no matter what changes would result from the process.

It’s good to remember that of the hundreds who have been offered the chance of testing a method to become happy and harmless thus far only the proverbial handful have taken up the challenge. I was reminded the other day of an acquaintance who once asked me what actualism was about. When I told her it was about eliminating malice and sorrow from your life, she thought about it for a bit and then said ‘But I like feeling sad, it’s a nice feeling and I like being angry – I have needed to fight in my life to get to where I am.’ So, not only is the task you have set yourself a big one – it is, at this stage in human history, a very rare one.

As for starting ‘anew every moment’, feeling happy and being harmless is not like a bank account – in fact, observation will reveal that this is the only moment you can feel happy and be harmless. If you miss out, then there is something to check out, to investigate. Then, as quick as you can, get back to cranking up the felicitous feelings.

You are not doing anything ‘wrong’ by missing out. Noticing that you are ‘missing out’ and then discovering why you are ‘missing out’ – be it that you were feeling detached, lacklustre, sad, anxious, annoyed, aggrieved or whatever – is the real work inherent in being an actualist.

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My experience is that the only way I ever understood something fully was by the trial and error doing of it. Thinking about what to do and how to do it were the first steps, but then plunging in and doing it was essential to know if what I thought was the right way worked in practice. With hindsight that is what I did in the first year of actualism – I tested out Richard’s observations about the human condition by making my own investigations of my own psyche in action.

But where I tend to differ with what you are saying is that I did demand an understanding from my investigations – and not only an intellectual understanding but an experiential understanding. What I found was that each understanding became like a stepping-stone on the path to becoming happy and harmless. Each understanding of what made ‘me’ tick, of what prevented me from being happy and what stood in the way of me being harmless, allowed me to more and more freely delight at being here, doing this business of being alive. <snip>

I don’t know about Jungian types but the male of the human species does have a well-earned reputation, and a long history, for abstract intellectualization – it’s not for nothing that men are said to be ‘in their heads’ whilst women are ‘in their hearts’. In exploring the different gender programming with Vineeto I discovered that, broadly speaking, men tend to indulge in philosophy, intellectualization and rationalization whilst women tend to wallow in psychology, drama and dreams.

Abstract intellectualization can only lead to philosophies, beliefs, dreams and theories about how things were, could be, should be or would be. Abstract intellectualization is the opposite to the down-to-earth reflective contemplation that an actualist uses in order to make sense of what it is to be a human being, here and now in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are.

Actualism requires a radical shift not only in one’s attention and focus but in the very manner of using one’s ‘grey matter’ as you put it. Because the shift is so radical, it does take a stubborn intent to stay on track, as it were. Whenever you notice you ‘tend to ‘drift’ off to an abstractly intellectual place’ then that in itself is an excellent awareness and understanding. Whenever you become aware of falling into old habits and programs and manage to break free, pat yourself on the back and then get on with the business of being here.

As to the business side of being here – I was a bit late with my response because I have been head down and tail up lately drawing for money rather than writing for leisure and pleasure. Whilst human beings in the past sustained themselves by hunting and gathering which then developed into hoarding and plundering, by and large, we are now all traders of sorts, be it time, goods or services. I do my hunting and gathering in an air-conditioned supermarket and the only thing I have to do to survive is to ensure that when I put my plastic card into the machine outside the bank that it spits out enough money to pay for my food, clothes and shelter plus whatever toys I like playing with. This means that I need to trade my time for money – the least money I need to survive, the least work I need to do, the more time I have free for leisure and pleasure or for ‘learning to do nothing really well’.

When I came to live in this area, I found a good many of my spiritual friends were busy buying houses and big new 4-wheel drive cars. I made a living by building houses for some of these people and I did consider whether I should put my nose to the grindstone and save and borrow in order to get my own house and land. I was accustomed at the time to spending all of my spare money, or ‘disposable income’, as it’s known nowadays, on chasing Gurus, so I saw wanting to be rich and secure as contrary to my goal of wanting to be free.

The other thing was that I estimated I would need to totally devote about 4 years of my life to saving enough money for a deposit for a house and then I would have to pay a mortgage (interest on home loan) payment each week which would be then more than I now paid in rent. It just didn’t make sense to me to have to work more just in order to ‘own’ something when I can work less by renting something equally as good. Whilst this is clearly an example of personal choice, relative to my own circumstances, it is however a down-to-earth example of how questioning common beliefs and applying common sense often leads to solutions that are not ‘normal’ by societal conventions.

Of course there are many more layers and aspects of societal beliefs and programs about money but underscoring all of it is the primal animal survival instinct – ‘what can I eat, what can eat me?’ Investigating these beliefs and peeling away these layers of conditioning about money – money being the modern means of survival – is a fascinating business. And the rewards are tremendous – the progressive diminishing of worry and stress, more free time for leisure and pleasure and, curiously, a corresponding diminishing of the fear about ‘what can eat me?’ Less fear about ‘what can eat me’ means in practice a progressive diminishing of suspicion and competition and more ease and comfort in relating to all of my fellow human beings.

Well, that’s it for me. Nice to chat again.

6.2.2003

Just thought I’d write to you about something I came across recently that I thought might be of interest to you. But before I start I would like to preface my remarks so that you might have an inkling as to why I found the particular piece of information so fascinating and also why it is relevant to the process of actualism.

When I first came across Richard, I very carefully listened to what he had to say about life, the universe and what it is to be a human being. While some of what he said made sense – much of it jarred with what I had been taught to be the truth. Given that I had been so gullible in my spiritual years – my faith was indeed blind, as is all faith, in that it managed to completely blind me to the glaring gulf between ‘the talk’ and ‘the walk’ of spiritual belief, both in myself and in the revered teachers and Masters – I was determined not to go down that road again, ever.

Although it took a while, I soon came to take Richard’s observation that the human condition is epitomized by malice and sorrow as a given – the global-wide evidence is overwhelming, whilst the evidence of the predominance of feelings of malice and sorrow on a personal level is somewhat disconcerting when initially acknowledged and unmistakeably observed in operation in oneself, and as one’s ‘self’. I also had a strong flash of realization when I first met Richard and he said ‘everybody’s got it 180 degrees wrong’ – the realization that everybody, including me, had been trolling through the garbage bin of history’s tried-and-failed philosophies, beliefs and theories, dusting them off for recycling, denying their shortcomings and ignoring their failure to elicit anything remotely resembling peace on earth between human beings. This brief flash of realization was sufficient to embolden me to consider abandoning my life as-it-was and embarking on a course that no one else had trod but Richard.

The other thing I did in this initial period was to conduct my own investigation as to whether what Richard was saying about actualism being brand new in human history was a fact. I deliberately re-read many of the spiritual books I had in order to see if anywhere they were teaching the patently obvious path of doing all you can to become happy and harmless such that one can become free of the human condition of malice and sorrow. Needless to say, all I found were teachings aimed at ‘self’-aggrandizement – the exact opposite to ‘self’-immolation.

I then delved into reading up on philosophy, psychology, sociology and science in general in order to see what they were busy investigating and what solutions they were offering. I was astounded to discover that all of human knowledge and investigation is predicated upon, and therefore straight-jacketed by, the conviction that it is impossible to change human nature. As I read on, the reason for this became more and more obvious – the core spiritual/religious belief that earthly life is essentially suffering so pervades all of human thinking that it is inconceivable that this ain’t necessarily so.

As part of my investigation I also delved into theoretical physics and cosmology in order to ascertain whether any evidence had emerged that contradicted Richard’s experience that the physical universe is eternal and infinite. That it had no beginning, can only be actually experienced in this moment of time and has no end, that it has no centre, no ‘holes’ or edges to it other than imaginary ones – and therefore there is no ‘outside’ to it. Reading a few books and scouting around a bit was enough for me to ascertain that, while all sorts of fanciful theories and spurious evidence abounds in theoretical physics and speculative cosmology, no empirical evidence has been found to contradict what Richard says and what everyone has directly experienced in a PCE sometime in their life – that the universe is infinite and eternal and hence peerless both in its perfection and purity.

What did amaze me at the time was how much Eastern philosophy and spiritual belief had permeated into science. As a practicing actualist I have since come to understand that the human condition is inherently awash with spiritual belief and can clearly see that the current fashion for Eastern polytheistic belief is popular only in that it offers an apparent freedom from the constraints of monotheistic dogma. So much am I out of the spiritual world, that I am now amazed that I had been amazed about how much of scientific theory is awash with spiritualism and mysticism. But, then again, the process of actualism is about becoming free of belief – all belief.

In hindsight, these investigations I conducted not only confirmed the facticity of what Richard was saying but also confirmed the fallacy of many of my own beliefs and none more so than in my understanding of the universe. Contemplating the physical nature of the universe – as distinct from investigating and contemplating the nature of ‘my’ psyche – can not only trigger memories of past PCEs, but this type of ‘me’-out-of-the-way contemplation when combined with softly-focussed wonderment of the sensual nature of the universe provides a potentiality that can evoke the onset of a PCE.

Talking about contemplating the physical nature of the universe brings me to the point of my letter, which is to post a couple of links I thought you might be interested in. I don’t want to comment specifically on the subject matter of the links, as I would not want to pre-empt you from drawing your own conclusions as to whether the explanations offered make more sense than do the currently-fashionable theories and long-held beliefs about the physical nature of the universe – so I’ll leave it at that.

http://www.holoscience.com/eu/eu.htm and http://www.electric-cosmos.org/

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust