Selected Correspondence Peter

When I read of your recent job change, I was wondering how you would go working with young children.

Once I began to get some understanding as to the nature of the human condition I remember passing through some difficult phases in my work and with people I met. Firstly I had to overcome the hurdle of wanting to tell others about my discoveries about how the human condition operates but I soon saw I was falling for that perennial trap of wanting to change others. When this urge subsided, I found myself feeling like an outsider because I no longer believed what everyone else believed and I was increasingly more happy and harmless, in a world awash with sadness, blame, resentment, competition and affront. In hindsight it was really a matter of riding out the storm, keeping my own counsel as to what was going on and accept the fact that actualism means change, that this change requires effort and that change is at times an uncomfortable and disconcerting business.

At the risk of making this post a marathon, there is another story that is relevant to the subject of work as well as the topic of beauty that No. 37 was interested in. As an architect I was trained to consider architecture to be a fine art and consequently great emphasis was placed on aesthetics in my education. The look and feel of a building was considered paramount and its functionality, workability and build-ability were considered secondary.

As a consequence of this teaching, beauty and style became personal issues to be honed, cherished, defended and fought for over the course of one’s career. Because of this many of my interactions with clients became subtle battles of will as I attempted to impose my style and sense of beauty on their building. Despite the fact that I could see that beauty was a subjective value and by no means an absolute and that it was influenced by fashion, location, culture and personality, it took a long time to rid myself of the aesthetic values I had been taught in architecture school.

Last year I found myself designing a house that was completely foreign to what I would normally consider my style and yet I did the job I was paid to do without a glimmer of resentment or frustration? I did the best I could to give the client what she wanted in the way of style and used my experience and knowledge to ensure that she got best practical value for her money. It was a liberating exercise for me, for not only had I broken free of the values imposed by my vocational training but also of the belief that there is an intrinsic and absolute beauty. As there was no conflict at all between the client and myself, everyone won out of the situation.

Last year I found myself designing a house that was completely foreign to what I would normally consider my style and yet I did the job I was paid to do without a glimmer of resentment or frustration. I did the best I could to give the client what she wanted in the way of style and used my experience and knowledge to ensure that she got best practical value for her money. It was a liberating exercise for me, for not only had I broken free of the values imposed by my vocational training but also of the belief that there is an intrinsic and absolute beauty. As there was no conflict at all between the client and myself, everyone won out of the situation.

There is ample evidence that everyone has experienced brief one-off experiences of perfection and purity, where there is no ‘I’ or ‘me’ present to muck things up. These experiences are commonly called peak experiences although Richard has used the more descriptive term pure consciousness experience (PCE) so as to distinguish these brief moments of ‘self’-lessness from the spiritually-polluted, totally-affective, entirely-imaginary altered states of consciousness (ASC) where an aggrandized ‘self’ claims the experience for his or her own glory.

However, my story was not told as a moral or ethical tale or an instance of wisdom such as the psittacism that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. The story I told was a practical example of the actualism method in action and as such the example falls into the reward-for-effort category. I did not miraculously have a temporary experience of being in the flow – what I was talking about was a pragmatic result of some four years of constantly working on eliminating malice and sorrow from my life. I did not set out to become free of beauty, I set out to become happy and harmless and one of the reoccurring times when I was not harmless was in occasional uncomfortable, difficult or even antagonistic interactions with my clients.

What I eventually tracked these feelings down to was that I had been programmed to regard beauty as an absolute value – something that ‘I’ thought and felt was worth fighting for or worth defending. When I saw that this old program stood in the way of harmonious interactions with my fellow human beings, it was clearly time to eradicate it from my life.

The result of this process was not a moral or ethical decision made based on what I should or shouldn’t do, or what was the right thing to do or what was wrong the wrong thing to do, because this would only mean that I was suppressing the feeling – in other words, kidding myself. The end result of this process was the experiential understanding that maintaining this old piece of programming would mean I was not harmless, and because being harmless is my numero uno goal in life, there was no way I could sustain the ideal or the passion-backed feeling of beauty.

The other discovery that happened when the feeling of beauty collapsed was that the feeling of ugliness collapsed along with it and as a consequence even more of the magic of actuality became apparent in my daily life.

I did not set out to become free of beauty, I set out to become happy and harmless ... <snip> The other discovery that happened when the feeling of beauty collapsed was that the feeling of ugliness collapsed along with it and as a consequence even more of the magic of actuality became apparent in my daily life.

I don’t, for if I appreciated beauty there would be an equal part of the world of people, things and events that I disparaged, loathed and hated for being ugly. What I discovered was that by affectively classifying things as beautiful or ugly, I automatically missed out on the opportunity of clearly seeing the actuality of this peerless universe. The other aspect that I discovered early on in the process of actualism was that desperately holding on to any of the morals, ethics or values I had been taught to be truths only prevented me from experientially understanding the full scope of the human condition and how it operates in this flesh and blood body.

The whole process of eliminating the affective division of beauty/ugliness from my life started with an intellectual understanding and proceeded experientially as I became aware of how certain aspects of my feelings and emotions interfered with me being happy and harmless. From memory, the first and most obvious aspect was the common-to-all habit of classifying the weather as beautiful or terrible. I quickly saw how my mood was influenced by ‘my’ liking or disliking a fact. This meant that if I woke up in the morning and didn’t like the weather, I had started the day feeling grumpy. It took me only a few days of being aware of these habitual feelings to see how senseless it was to rile against a fact and how it prevented me from being happy and harmless because a grumpy person can never be harmless.

When I was in Europe in my twenties I visited a number of galleries and saw an eclectic cross section of what is regarded as great art. What stands out in my memory was visiting the Louvre, I think it was, and being impressed by Monet’s huge painting of waterlilies on a pond. I was fascinated that what looked up close to be a mess of paint became at a distance a delightful image of a lily pond full of light and colour. The other memory is of visiting the Van Gough gallery in Amsterdam and looking at his note books and seeing the amount of sketches and studies that went into what appeared to be the spontaneous paintings hanging in the gallery proper. I also remember that much of the old art looked old – it was dark, stiff, formal and often religious in subject matter. I could only guess that my reaction now would be as it was at first seeing.

The deep-seated belief that the ignorance of the formative, preoperational years of childhood is an innate innocence is what fuels the whole fanciful notion that nurture is the panacea for instinctual malice and sorrow, and that ‘proper’ nurture can even prevent their onset. Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the faith that nurture can assuage or overcome malice and sorrow is seen as inviolate within the human condition. Like all belief and faith, it only has legs for want of a new and effective workable alternative’.

As I understand it, you have been trained as a social worker and core to this training would be the belief that nurture is the panacea for malice and sorrow. As such, it is no wonder you find it a remarkably persistent notion. I know that it has taken me a long time to prise apart the beliefs and passions that were instilled in me as part of my training in architecture.

I was taught that there was a higher spiritual good in architecture – that ‘good’ architecture could nourish the soul, raise the spirits and make the world a better place. The instilling of these beliefs and passions formed the backbone of my identity as an architect and gave ‘my’ work a higher, nobler meaning. This meant that not only did I bring ‘my’ demands and expectations, worries and anxieties to my work and to all interactions with others through my work, but also a good deal of self-righteousness. Not only did ‘I’ always come first, but ‘I’ always knew better and ‘I’ was always right – whereas everyone else came second, never understood and were always wrong. It was a recipe that invariably led to conflict at worst or begrudging compromises at best.

As I began to realize how much these instilled beliefs and passions prevented me from being happy while working and caused me to be in conflict with others while working, I began the procedure of investigating the nature of them every time that I became aware of these beliefs and passions in action. This being aware of the tell-tale signs of holding a belief dear to your bosom reveals reactions ranging from feeling personally affronted or defensive if your belief is questioned, to denying, dissociating from or obscuring any facts that contradict or make your precious deary-held belief a non-sense.

When I finally traced the passions evoked by my work back to my training, I could see that all vocational training is spiked with beliefs that would have us fighting for the good in the battle over evil – be they a social worker combating the evils of society, an architect combating the evils of bad design or a doctor fighting the evils of death and disease. A PCE finally revealed the fact that my identity as an architect was made up of a mishmash of ‘my’ instilled beliefs and ‘my’ personal passions and to be able to do my work when free of this identity is to be unconditionally happy and effortlessly harmless.

So I wouldn’t be at all concerned that you find yourself falling back to the notion ‘that if these children only had enough love, everything would be all right’. Because of your vocational training you have had the belief that nurture is the cure-all for the ills of humanity doubly reinforced, as it were. You have had an extra layer of belief laid on top of what everyone else believes, in a similar way that I had another layer of beliefs about beauty instilled into me. I found that after a good deal of investigation I was able to identify ‘my’ belief as being nothing else but a belief in that it had no basis in fact … and then I ‘had the bugger by the throat’ as it were. Then it was only a matter of being attentive as to when and how the belief manifested itself. Each instant of awareness threw more light on the belief and its associated passions, enabling me to dig a little deeper into my psyche and discover its workings.

For me this 360-degrees awareness that results from actualism has two salient aspects.

The first is that in the process of actualism a heightened 360-degree sensate awareness increasingly emerges as a sensual enjoyment of this physical paradisiacal planet and this happens serendipitously as malice, sorrow and resentment disappears from one’s life. As this happens one only needs to be wary of being seduced by feelings of beauty, awe, gratitude and narcissism that give rise to delusions of Grandeur.

The second aspect is of equal importance and that is a 360-degree awareness that becomes inclusive of and considerate of one’s fellow human beings as opposed to the normal ‘self’-centred awareness that is instinctually exclusive and is the basis of feelings of greed, suspicion, fear, blame and animosity. As this happens one only needs to be wary of being seduced by feelings of love, compassion, saviourhood, and narcissism that give rise to the fantasy of Oneness.

However none of what I describe comes without effort. It takes compulsive effort and obsessive enthusiasm to eliminate all of the social and instinctual programming that conspires to prevent a bare 360-degrees awareness from being possible. It’s a tough business to abandon all one holds dear and start to stand on one’s own two feet.

Okay, my comment would be that it is one thing to have these realizations and it is another to act upon them such that one can be become free of this human spirit. The human spirit is epitomized by emotional suffering, a grim instinctual endless battle for survival, an eternal battle betwixt Good and Evil spirits, a search for beauty and poignancy in the face of revulsion and hopelessness, and an endless despairing and a continual turning away.

What twigged me to action was one particular PCE where it was obvious to me that ‘I’ was one of the 6 billion people engaged in this horrendous instinctual battle for survival, and to hove-to in some quiet backwater and blame others for the appalling violence endemic in the species was no longer good enough. I saw clearly that nothing less than a total freedom from my social and instinctual programming would free me from complicity. The total extinction of ‘me’ as a social/ spiritual identity and an instinctual/ animal being was the only freedom possible.

I am going to do a bit of cut and paste as I have discovered a piece in the glossary which relates to the issues of sense, sensitivity and desensitising. I wrote it at the time when I was actively digging into these issues in order to understand them and I seem to have covered much of the very ground we are now discussing.

sense —

1. Faculty of perception or sensation. Any of the bodily faculties, esp. sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch (the five senses), by which humans and animals are able to perceive external objects and stimuli. The faculties of perception as negated by sleep or unconsciousness.
2. Natural soundness of judgement, practical wisdom or intelligence, common sense.
3. sensus faculty or mode of feeling, thought, meaning, feel, perceive by the senses. Meaning, signification. Emotional sensibility or consciousness of something; regretful, grateful, or sympathetic appreciation or recognition. A mental faculty as opp. to a bodily one.
4. An opinion, view, or judgement held or formed by a group of people or (formed) by an individual, the prevailing view of a group etc. Oxford Dictionary As can be seen from the definitions the word sense has two distinct meanings (a, b and c, d), but in the emotional turmoil of real life, or the fantasy meta-physical world of spiritual life, the distinction is rarely, if ever, discerned. Oxford Dictionary

As can be seen from the definitions the word sense has two distinct meanings (a, b and c, d), but in the emotional turmoil of real life, or the fantasy meta-physical world of spiritual life, the distinction is rarely, if ever, discerned.

The first two definitions point to a practical, pragmatic view or sense, such that a tree is a tree, the universe is infinite, when you die you die, the sky is blue, and this is the only moment you can experience being alive. The world, as perceived by the body’s senses, the ‘stalks’ of the brain, is a physical one only. The physical senses of the brain allow us the sensual feel of touch (the skin of another), the aromatic delight of smell (a frangipani at dusk), the complexity of sight (colour, light, movement, depth, focus), the variety, intensity and layering of sounds and tastes. Further, the human brain has an awareness of this sensorial input and can think, reflect and communicate with others. The brain, when freed of the dominance of ‘self’-centred feeling and thought and the chemical based instinctual passions, is able to function with startling clarity and common sense and the faculty of apperception – the mind’s ability to perceive itself – comes to the fore. This sensate-only experience is known as a Pure Consciousness Experience – a temporary state of ‘self’-lessness.

The ability of the brain to function sensibly – as in definition (b) – is essential for the individual and collective functioning of human beings and is seen in operation in the superb objects, systems and in operation of services, communication, trade, transport, etc. in the world.

The second pair of definitions points to a different scenario, a different perception of the universe. This definition alludes to an emotional, feeling and cerebral (thought) perception of the world – the perception of the psychological and psychic entity within the flesh and blood body. With the continual operation of instinctual feelings of fear, aggression, nurture and desire combined with one’s social identity of morals, ethics and values, one is forever ‘feeling’ or ‘thinking’ one’s way in any place, at any time and with all other people. As such, we are continually psychically afraid of the world. We tend, when operating in a psychic-instinctual mode, to see everything as though coated in sorrow or malice. Our only relief is to add a coating of beauty, ‘spirituality’ or gratitude in order to make our perception a tolerable one. But one can never ever make any sense of the world this way, for it is all seen and experienced as either a ghastly nightmare, or a beautiful dream, depending on one’s feelings or thoughts at the time. As a social identity we are instilled with a perception of the world alluded to in definition (d). We are thus bound to having a moral or ethical interpretation or perception of things, people or events – relentlessly evaluating everything as good or bad, right or wrong.

The consequences of the human brain functioning under the influence of instinctual passions, emotions, feelings, nightmares and dreams is most clearly seen in all the wars, rapes, murders, tortures, corruption, depression, suicides, etc. that continually plague Humanity.

The consequences of the human brain functioning under the influence of socially instilled morals, ethics, principles, values and psittacisms is most clearly seen in all ethnic conflicts, religious persecutions, ethical disputes, fights for rights, demands for justice and retribution, etc. that are used as a justification to indulge in war, rape, murder, torture, etc.

There is now a practical down-to-earth solution, such that will bring an end to this madness. When actually freed of a psychic and ‘self’-oriented affective and cerebral sensing of the world – the ‘who’ one thinks one is and the ‘who’ one feels oneself to be – one can’t do anything other than perceive the world directly, sensately, sensuously and sensibly. To experience the physical universe without the emotions of fear and aggression is to continually delight and wonder in amazement at it all. One at last comes to one’s senses, both figuratively and literally. AF Glossary

I always liked Richard’s description that people desperately put on rose-coloured glasses when looking at the real world, seeking relief in the feelings of gratitude, ‘higher consciousness’, beauty, goodness, love and compassion. In order to do this, they start with a view of the world as-it-is based on wearing grey-coloured glasses – the real world being a fearful place of resentment, ‘unconsciousness’, ugliness, evil, alienation and suffering. The solution is to dare to undertake a process that involves removing both the rose-coloured glasses and the grey-coloured glasses, and to see the actual world for what it is – perfect, pure, sensually abundant, benevolent and delightful. One then sees clearly that one’s social and spiritual / religious conditionings and beliefs actively conspire to paint and perpetuate a grim worldview. One then sets to, with gay abandon, on the path of exploring, investigating, scrutinizing, understanding, and eventually eliminating all that is not factual and actual. The act of doing so eliminates one’s social identity – one wipes one’s slate perfectly clean of all beliefs, morals, ethics and psittacisms. What one then discovers – hidden underneath – is one’s biological heritage – the primitive animal instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

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