Selected Correspondence Peter

Belief

In hindsight, these investigations I conducted not only confirmed the facticity of what Richard was saying but also confirmed the fallacy of my own beliefs and none more so than 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 triggered memories of past PCEs, but this type of ‘me’-out-of-the-way contemplation when combined with a softly-focussed wonderment of the sensual nature of the universe provide a potentiality that can evoke the onset of a PCE.

One of the techniques you may have come across is the questioning of dearly held beliefs.

Everybody has some core beliefs that serve to prop up their identity and these will vary slightly according to gender, culture, age, vocational training, and so on. Anyone who becomes interested in being happy and harmless will, sooner or later, come smack up against one of these beliefs. Sooner or later one of these beliefs will appear, rather like a boulder, on the path to being happy and harmless. And from observation of others who have been interested in actualism, it is clear that unless this belief is abandoned, willingly and deliberately, then that person will remain essentially unchanged by the process of actualism.

Whilst I do acknowledge that abandoning one’s pet beliefs can be daunting – one’s very identity as a (… fill in the blank space) is at stake – the resulting palpable sense of freedom can oft evoke a pure consciousness experience of the perfection and purity of the infinite and eternal universe. This is what happened to me and I know this is what happened to Vineeto. And the curious thing is that during the process of actualism, I knew what I had to do next, I knew what belief stood in the way of my becoming more happy and more harmless – simply because the issue would not go away.

This is, after all, what this discussion is really about – the nuts and bolts of abandoning belief and superstition in favour of actuality and sensibility.

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Human beings have an obsession with ‘the notion of higher dimensions’ – the belief that the world is subject to the influence of good forces and evil forces is prevalent in every tribe and every culture on the planet. This belief is somewhat understandable considering that it emerged in the days when it was universally believed that the world was three layered – a flat earthy plane full of dangerous animals and dangerous humans, a mystifying heavenly realm above and a mysterious underworld below. Eventually it was empirically observed that the earth was not flat but was spherical and subsequent explorations over centuries proved that this was in fact so. Nowadays photos of earth taken from spacecrafts have subsequently convinced all but the wacky that the earth is not flat.

The next belief to be demolished by empirical observation was the notion that the earth was the centre of the solar system – an empirical observation only made possible by the invention of a mechanical enhancement of our ‘sensory apparatus’ – the telescope. As telescopes got bigger and better, the belief that our galaxy was all there was to the universe – a conviction held in Einstein’s time – was replaced by the discovery that there are in fact countless other galaxies in the universe. The subsequent invention of radio telescopes and the like has meant that we are now able to observe and measure spectrums of the electromagnetic energy of the universe that lay outside the range human eyes can detect.

And yet, despite this long history of scientific discoveries about the extraordinary magic that is the physical universe, the eons-old search for some sort of ‘higher dimension’ or metaphysical energy – the famed spirit-energy of mythology – still persists.

The same long trek from belief and superstition to actuality and wonder can be seen in the discoveries about the creation of animate life. The process of animal reproduction was unknown to early humans and all sorts of beliefs and superstitions flourished in ignorance. Now, thousands of years later, the science of observation and investigation – mightily boosted by the invention of the inverted telescope, the microscope – has revealed the facts to be far more wondrous than the puerile myths dependant upon the belief in supernatural spirit forces.

I could go on tripping through other fields of scientific discovery and endeavour, but you probably have got the gist of what I am saying – human beings will never be free from the fear and hope inherent in superstition if they insist on believing in higher dimensions, supernatural forces, metaphysical realms, divine beings, good and evil spirits and so on – or persist in hoping that one day science will provide the empirical evidence that spiritual belief so tellingly lacks.

Unless someone discovers some substantive empirical evidence to back up a theory, I am also sceptical of many of the suppositions that are presented along with the theory of a plasma universe or an electric universe. But I see these as add-ons to the central thrust of what is presented – an alternative evidence-based explanation for the thus-far empirically observed matter of the universe as opposed to the fashionable creationist explanations of Einsteinian Cosmology.

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This belief is somewhat understandable considering that it emerged in the days when it was universally believed that the world was three layered – a flat earthy plane full of dangerous animals and dangerous humans, a mystifying heavenly realm above and a mysterious underworld below. Eventually it was empirically observed that the earth was not flat but was spherical and subsequent explorations over centuries proved that this was in fact so. Nowadays photos of earth taken from spacecrafts have subsequently convinced all but the wacky that the earth is not flat.

By the same logic, an agnostic would say it is best to keep one’s options open because ‘higher dimensions’ or evidence of creation or other worlds or black holes or singularities or meta-physical forces, or whatever else one chooses to believe in, might well be found to be true after all. This line of reasoning is often used as a last resort by those who can find no evidence to substantiate their belief and fall back on claiming the evidence does exist but it ‘hasn’t been discovered yet’.

I used to think that a lot of beliefs I held didn’t matter or weren’t relevant to actualism, but eventually I discovered the act of holding onto any beliefs only served to keep ‘me’ in existence and therefore kept me hobbled to the human condition of malice and sorrow. In short, if I couldn’t drop a belief I always knew it was something ‘I’ identified with – i.e. that it was part and parcel of ‘me’ as a social or instinctual identity.

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I could go on tripping through other fields of scientific discovery and endeavour, but you probably have got the gist of what I am saying – human beings will never be free from the fear and hope inherent in superstition if they insist on believing in higher dimensions, supernatural forces, metaphysical realms, divine beings, good and evil spirits and so on – or persist in hoping that one day science will provide the empirical evidence that spiritual belief so tellingly lacks.

Maybe you would like to refect on what characteristics of the universe have changed since the beginning of human awareness of the universe? Such reflection might lead you to the conclusion that the characteristics of the universe exist independently of human sensory perception, and are unaffected in any way by human sensory perception.

Anthropocentricity runs deep within the human psyche, manifested in each and every human being as ‘self’-centredness. Contrary to popular belief, the universe was not ‘created’ especially for human beings – the human species is manifestly a species of animate life that has evolved from the matter of the universe. So predominant is anthropocentric belief that early humans, out of ignorance, believed the earth to be the centre of our solar system – a geocentric belief – but it has been discovered over time that the earth is but one of a number of planets that orbit the sun, which is but one sun in a galaxy full of suns, which is but one galaxy in an endless cosmos of countless galaxies.

And yet these physical characteristics of the universe have always been so despite the early beliefs and superstitions that the earth was the centre of the world and that this world must have been created by a Someone or Something.

I don’t know wether you came across the modern ‘Fingers of God’ tabulation – if this didn’t send the alarm bells ringing amongst creationist cosmology as to how geocentric, hence anthropocentric, their observations are then nothing will. http://www.electric-cosmos.org/arp.htm

And yet, despite your disclaimer, you have said previously in this post –

‘The Big Bang theorem is still a theorem as it has not yet passed the test of the scientific method.’

The Big Bang theory is a creationist theory. The Big Bang theory is metaphysical in that it presumes there was a force or energy existing prior to the existence of physical matter and that this non-material force or energy then created the physical matter of the universe. The Big Bang theory is spiritual at root in that ancient spiritual belief was the prior source of all metaphysical science.

And just a note to finish with –

Personally I didn’t try to understand the science of all this too much. Simply contemplating on what would have existed before the universe was supposedly created, what would exist after in supposedly ended and what I would see if I got to the supposed edge of the universe was enough to convince me that the creationist cosmologists were off with the fairies.

Within months of becoming interested in actualism it occurred to me that none of humanity’s revered philosophy and venerated spiritual beliefs have any relevance whatsoever to the process of actualism. All philosophy and spiritual belief has its roots in the dim dark fear-ridden past of humanity, from times when human beings had no knowledge at all of the physical processes that create and sustain life in the universe. I remember likening this reverence for the ‘wisdom of the ancient ones’ as digging through the rubbish bin of history in a vain attempt to find some old tried and failed ideal or scheme in order to dust it off, repackage it and give it yet another re-run.

Richard’s discovery makes a total break with the brutal dim dark past of humanity together with its endless re-runs of hackneyed ideals and regurgitated beliefs. It follows that those who aspire to tread the path he has pioneered and aspire to become free of the human condition must also make a complete break from the crippling legacy of the past – to draw a line through it as it were.

As for Socrates, he believed himself to be charged with a mission from his God to make his countrymen aware of their ignorance and of the supreme importance of knowledge of what is good for the soul. When he says ‘know thyself’ the intent of the quest is to find goodness and Godliness – the antithesis of an actualist’s intent to search within the dark corners of his or her psyche in order to expose the full extent of the instinctual being that is ‘me’.

I have never attached a ‘next’ to any of the dimwitticisms of philosophy nor to any of the revered teachings of spiritualism – I simply ruled a line through the lot of it. Then, whenever a belief did pop up, I was able to readily recognize it as yet another of Humanity’s tried and failed beliefs. The work then to be done was to investigate the nature of the belief, find out why the belief failed and didn’t work in practice, to root around until I found the fundamental fallacy in the belief.

As the belief crumbled I continued on with my investigation so as to set about finding out the facts of the matter. By making this effort I didn’t fall into the age-old trap of swapping one belief for another, I replaced belief with fact. In this way I was able to gain the confidence and surety that an understanding of the facts of the matter brings with it, which in turn emboldened me to tackle the next belief that popped up and so on down the line.

The investigation of beliefs is an essential part of the actualism process as it serves to actively demolish one’s social identity – ‘I’ am inevitably scrutinized along with the beliefs ‘I’ hold so dear – and as each belief crumbles so does a piece of my prized social identity.

For a start I prefer to use the expression exploring one’s psyche rather than Socrates’ ‘knowing oneself’ for the reasons I have outlined above. Secondly, the intent to become happy and harmless is something you either have or don’t have. In other words, if you don’t have it you need to uncover and rediscover it by removing what prevents you having intent in the first place. From my observations and discussions with a good many people over my lifetime, I would say that every human being has an innate desire to live with his or her fellow human beings in peace and harmony – it is simply that this intent is buried beneath a world-weary cynicism or, in the case of those who follow Eastern spiritualism, has been deliberately relinquished for the sake of their own personal pursuit of spiritual glory.

The search for peace on earth – the possibility of human beings actually living together in peace and harmony – has always simmered beneath the surface throughout my life. This urge was a prime motivator in my abandoning the real world and immersing myself in spiritual communes for a good many years. The reality of the dream of living in peace in a commune was failure – as it always is and always has been. The reason for this I discovered only later – to live in utter peace and harmony is impossible for two instinctually driven beings let alone a community of instinctually driven beings. After my long experiment in communal living ended I settled for being a lone goody-two-shoes spiritualist only to discover that one day I lost my spiritual cool and got overtly angry with someone. It was a bit of a shock at the time as it made me realize how much ‘I’ needed to be in control in order for ‘me’ to feel superior to those beneath me in the spiritual hierarchy.

When I came across actualism two things made so much sense to me that I was really forced to sit up and take notice.

The first was the simple statement that the animosity and despair that plague the human species is the result of the instinctual passions that each and every human being has been genetically encoded with – not, as is universally believed, due to insufficient goodliness or Godliness in the world. That common sense explanation accorded with my personal experience of a suppressed anger that lay lurking beneath the surface of my prized spiritual identity.

The other simple statement that grabbed my attention was something I read in Richard’s 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.’ Richards Journal, Introduction, pg 5

I took this as a personal challenge because living with a companion in utter peace and harmony was always something I yearned for, and always something I had failed to do. And I knew that if I could live in peace and harmony with one other person it would be the proof that the actualism method worked – the proof that I could actually change.

Along with a lifetime yearning for peace on earth, these two statements served to fire up my intent to become happy and harmless. The understanding that my feelings of animosity and anguish had a physical cause and not a metaphysical cause gave me the intent to abandon my spiritual identity, and the challenge of living with fellow human beings in utter peace and harmony gave me the intent to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless.

The process of becoming happy and harmless involves an exploration of what is happening in my psyche at this very moment – a momentary exploration that was first set in motion by making the effort to form the habit of asking myself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Once I had got rid of my spiritual goody-two-shoes feeling of superiority it was then relatively easy to become aware of any feelings of animosity and resentment as they arose and then to dig in deep down to the core instinct of aggression – the thrill of killing was how I experienced it.

Feelings of melancholy were about the limit of my personal feelings of sadness I became aware of in everyday life, but feeling sad for others was stickier territory that required more exploration. When I came to really dig deep into sorrow itself I came across feelings of despair, and deeper than this I experienced levels of instinctual fear, dread and terror. It felt as though I was literally entering what I can only describe as being a truly hellish realm. The feeling of terror was an unbridled experience of raw instinctual animal fear, the self-same fear that the earliest humans experienced whilst trying to survive in a world full of meat-eating animals looking for something to kill and eat, as well as marauding groups of other humans looking for something to kill, eat or carry off. What I experienced was the very root of ‘my’ fear of death – the animal instinctual fear of survival. It’s amazing what you can discover in your psyche if you are willing to go looking.

I do acknowledge that such an exploration is a daunting prospect for many – I remember the choice to become an actualist was as if I was staring into a dark tunnel form which there was no return, or as if I was about to set off on a path that everyone else had marked ‘Do not go this way’. I guess, in hindsight, the latter was part of the attraction, part of the dare.

For those enabled with the pure intent to become happy and harmless the process of becoming free of the human condition is a thrilling adventure – thrilling rather than fearful provided you resist the temptation to take yourself too seriously. Should you want to get a taste of the nature of these explorations I recommend reading Peter’s Journal as it is thus far the best comprehensive personal account written of the process of becoming virtually free of malice and sorrow.

As you can see, the actualism method of exploring one’s psyche – in vivo, in situ, ad momentum – is totally different in intent, in scope and in intensity to Aristotles ‘self’-serving spiritual admonishment to ‘know thyself’. Becoming an actualist means deliberately making a complete break from the past – in other words stopping believing that there is anything useful to be found in the words of Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Heraclitus, Hume, Kapila, Kant, Nietzsche, Patanjali, Plato, Plotinus, Sartre and co. just as nothing useful is to be found in the so-called sacred words of Buddha, the Dalai Lama, Jesus, Krishnamurti, Lao-tzu, Mahavira, Meher Baba, the Pope, Rajneesh, Rama, Ramana Maharshi and co.

It’s such a grand thing to do, to dare to wipe the slate clean of the past, to dare to stand on your own two feet, to dare to explore, to reveal, to uncover, to demystify, to discover – to dare to discover the facts of the matter of what it is to be a human being.

I highly recommend the journey.

You wrote to No 21 and No 45 making a comment on our recent conversations about the nature of the physical universe.

I took the opportunity of reviewing our dialogue on the subject of the universe and I found no instances that I have an unequivocal stand on the nature of the universe nor that I rejected all questioning.

In fact if you recall, our most recent dialogue on the subject began when I wrote to you pointing to a scientific theory that questioned the current fusion/gravitational model of the physical universe. The very reason I did so was because I like it when theories I took to be fact are brought into question and I particularly liked this new theory because much of what I read made sense to me – albeit that I have what could be called a layman’s knowledge about such matters. I fail to see this as ‘an unequivocal stand on the nature of the universe …’

As for rejecting all questioning, when I re-read our discussions I could not find anywhere where I had rejected your questions – rather I found that I had addressed all of the points you raised and answered all of your questions, very often supplementing my answers with quotes from scientists who do not hold to the creationist model of the physical universe.

For example –

At this point I do acknowledge that my common sense tells me that the universe is likely infinite in both time and space, but that is more opinion than scientific fact.

Perhaps, in the interest of getting to the root of this issue, you would like to post the scientific facts that provide evidence that the universe is not ‘infinite in both time and space’. Then we can put them on the table and see if they make sense or not.

Just as a point of interest, you will have noticed I am not alone in questioning the common popular theories in cosmology. You will have noticed that I have previously posted some comments made by Hannes Alfvén, astrophysicist and joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 in which he questioned not only the methodology but the substance of the scientific rationale for a finite created universe with a beginning and end. Peter to No 38, 22.2.2003

Rather than rejecting all questioning, I actively question the plethora of theories of those scientists who propose that the physical universe was created out of nothing, or evolved out of nothing, is either expanding or contacting and will eventually disappear or somehow cease to exist. I have heard it often said that the empirical evidence that the universe is not infinite and is not eternal will be found someday, but until this happens the creationist theories about the universe remain but theories that should be subject to questioning – and the beliefs in other-than-physical worlds remain but spirit-ual beliefs that should be subject to questioning.

Whilst this may appear to you to be ‘an unequivocal stand’, for me as an actualist, it simply made sense to question all of the cosmologist’s creationist models of the universe as well as all of the spiritualist’s beliefs in a Creator, by whatever name … and to keep doing so until I discovered the facts of the matter. To settle for a state of ‘not knowing’ was simply not good enough.

I have previously made clear the reason that an actualist needs to question these theories and beliefs –

I ask this in all sincerity, and I’m not arguing the physical nature of the universe, nor its perfection and purity, just how it is pertinent to the matter at hand.

Anyone who holds to an anthropocentric view of the universe and holds on to spiritual and/or creationist theories about the nature of the universe will, by the very nature of these ‘self’-centred and ‘self’-perpetuating views and beliefs, remain locked out from the pure consciousness experience of the perfection and purity of the infinite and eternal universe.

It is as pertinent as that. Peter to No 38, 14.2.2003

Or to put it another way, it is impossible devote one’s life to becoming happy and harmless in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are – to put all of one’s eggs in one basket – if you cling to any beliefs that the physical world is other-than-it-is – infinite and eternal – or if you cling to any beliefs that human beings are other-than-what-they-are – corporeal and mortal.

One of the techniques you may have come across is the questioning of dearly held beliefs. <snip> This is, after all, what this discussion is really about – the nuts and bolts of abandoning belief and superstition in favour of actuality and sensibility.

To choose to not believe that the universe is finite or infinite is but to remain an agnostic – a person who is uncertain and non-committal about a particular issue. An agnostic is not someone who is free of belief; an agnostic is someone who remains open to belief, who keeps his or her options open, who has a bet each way.

On the other hand, an actualist is someone who recognizes the necessity of becoming free from being a believer in the much-vaunted wisdom of humanity if one is to become free of the human condition and the way to become free from beliefs is to replace one’s beliefs with obvious and irrefutable facts thereby depriving ‘the believer’ from sustenance.

I do realize that ‘not-knowing’ is highly valued in the spiritual world, but an actualist is vitally interested in life, the universe and what it is to be a human being and as such makes exploring, investigating and ‘finding-out’ his or her prime mission in life.

Yes. Self-judgement, self-condemnation, self-deprivation, self-flagellation and the like are the consequences of the moral teachings arising from religious/spiritual programming that is inflicted upon every child from every culture. Through no fault of our own we are taught to believe that self-imposed moral judgements are essential to keep the lid on our instinctual passions. The belief in morals is essential to cling to within the human condition but an actualist needs to set his or her sights higher – the very process of eliminating of malice and sorrow makes the self-righteous morals and unliveable ethics of the real-world obsolete and redundant.

Whereas it is my experience, and the experience of all of the practicing actualists on this list, that it takes stubborn effort – and a certain amount of intestinal fortitude – firstly to become aware of, and secondly to abandon all of the beliefs, hopes, dreams, wishes, morals and ethics that make up ‘me’. This programming does not take effort to sustain, it is ‘self ‘-sustaining by its very nature. This programming is ‘who’ I think and feel I am and as such it obviously it takes effort to remove.

Yeah. Once I started to divest myself of my old beliefs I was astounded at how gullible I had been. Once I understood this, it made no sense whatsoever to accept any new beliefs at all. This is when I started to become fascinated with the business of abandoning belief and relying only on fact.

And each time I dared to question one of my cherished beliefs, I experienced all sorts of fears and anxieties – including the bodily sensations that accompany them.

No. In the context of the actualism method, I am talking about the active side.

It’s easy to stay a believer – to remain as you are is to be passive. To assimilate a new set of beliefs is to be passive.

To change requires you to be active, i.e. it effort and action. To abandon belief and rely only on fact requires you to be active.

Maybe we could agree that it takes a voluntary effort to overcome an involuntary inertia.

Personally I find nothing positive at all about any belief, be they old beliefs or new beliefs.

Beliefs have been the bane of humanity since time immemorial. If you see actualism as being a new belief then you seem to be missing the whole point of what is on offer in actualism. The very thing that attracted me to actualism is that the process made sense – actualism is rooted in fact. The very process involves abandoning the uncertainties of belief, trust, faith and hope in favour of relying on the certainty and surety of matters of fact, common sense and down-to-earth sensate awareness.

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This programming doesn’t create a division – such that when it is removed I feel union – this programming is the very substance of ‘me’. Only when this programming is incrementally removed does one realize the penalty one paid for being a believer – provided one is sincere in one’s efforts what results is an incremental and tangible down-to-earth freedom, not a feeling of union.

As for interpreting and implying, I only go by what you have written and, given that we are talking about the actualism method in practice, I always relate what you are saying to my own experience as a practicing actualist. What I read you are saying is –

‘being a believer is the constant effort and stress and strain’

and

‘Nevertheless, if I try to form a new belief or hope though – I notice it takes effort – first to push away my doubt and to accept the new belief – so that there is a mental straining involved – which creates painful sensations in the body – whether it be tension in the neck, shoulders, and head – or tightness in the stomach or whatever.’

Taking your words at face value I can relate to what you are saying. When I first became interested in actualism, I began to become aware of, and actively questioned, ‘who’ I thought and felt I was. As I did so ‘I’ started to feel the stresses and strains involved in being ‘me’ and, more importantly, the stresses and strains that being ‘me’ invariably imposed on others – most noticeable those closest to me.

In the course of becoming aware of ‘me’ in action, feelings of fear and anxiety also came up at the thought of changing – of abandoning ‘a particular belief, trust, hope, etc.’ that was dear to me. Whilst I found I didn’t like what I was discovering about ‘me’, the thought of doing something about it was daunting and the feelings that arose were alarming.

It felt as though I was between a rock and a hard place and the dilemma wouldn’t go away, nor could I run away from it – I was damned if ‘I’ didn’t take up the challenge and yet ‘I’ was doomed if I did. I remember immediately after the first decisive act of change – when I let go of my first cherished belief – that the relief was palpable and the feeling of freedom tangible, so much so that it made the abandoning of my next belief somewhat less daunting – and so on down the long line of beliefs.

It’s a fascinating business to start to get in touch with one’s feelings as they are happening. This is what the actualism process is about.

I am always somewhat surprised that so few people seem to stop to spend the time to do a bit of stocktaking and re-evaluating as to what they have done and where they are headed. Many of my generation had both the opportunity and time to think about the ‘meaning of life’ and many indeed did begin searching for something better than grim reality and something less shonky and self-indulgent than Olde Time Religion.

Unfortunately, most followed fashion and found Eastern religion and that sucked the very life out of them. By becoming believers in Truth, they have become as morally-superior and as intellectually-disingenuous as the countless generations before them who surrendered their will to a mythical God in exchange for a front row seat in an imaginary afterlife. And I can only say this because I too went down that path for a good many years.

And the only reason I stopped being a follower and a believer was that I took the time to do some stocktaking and re-evaluating of my life – and I didn’t like what I saw, so I determined to change. Better to make such evaluations now – even if it involves contemplating lying on your deathbed – and make the necessary changes now rather than end up dying in sad regret of never having fully lived.

Who else but you is going to interpret the events of your life and who else but you is going to determine what meaning it should have? There is no one better qualified, or more vitally interested, than you to decide what to do with your life.

I know, for me, it was glaringly obvious that if I wanted to become free of the human condition in toto, then the doing of it was up to ‘me’.

Need I say how much this believe is intimately interconnected and interwoven with ‘issues’ like ‘loyalty conflicts’, ‘separation anxiety’, a fair amount of ‘paranoia thinking/feeling’ ‘cult behaviour’ and ‘brainwashing’ just to mention some of those issues that make Rajneeshism as a part of ones conditioning process extremely hard and sometimes even painful to investigate. It took me many months to enable myself to even acknowledge the fact that I was a believer and hence to admit to myself that I was caught in an extremely powerful illusion.

It’s a very tough business to admit that not only are you wrong by others’ standards but that you have been made to feel a fool as well. What pushed me over the brink was a momentary glimpse that the reason that there is not peace on earth between human beings is that everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong. I had a glimpse that everyone, including me, was looking to the past for solutions, desperately running round in circles picking over the debris and flotsam of ancient beliefs and wisdom. This set me up for a two-prong approach of questioning my own beliefs based on past ‘wisdoms’ whilst simultaneously investigating the sensibility of actualism – the direction no-one had dared to look before Richard’s investigations.

Personally, I found disloyalty to be one of the toughest feelings to face but, in the end, I had to admit it does make sense to desert a sinking ship. I do also remember the process of questioning and investigating my spiritual beliefs to be ‘extremely hard and sometimes even painful’ but I have no emotional memories or scars remaining from the time. One of the amazing things about beliefs is that they require effort to maintain and defend and once you stop believing you immediately feel a palpable sense of freedom from having to keep up the effort of maintaining and defending your belief.

And yet you didn’t hesitate to write to the list taking sides in the Lomborg vs. Schneider case. This is what you said about Lomborg and his book –

To me it looks like pseudo science is likely to become now the alternative for new Age Babble. This kind of stuff seems to be all geared to keep people having faith in their future and comfortably allow themselves to distort/ ignore/ deny any facts that are counterproductive as to sustain in their fantasy that a better world is coming soon or at least it is not as bad as they thought it were, thus food for the social identity to vigorously grow. Authors the like Mr Lomborg are suspected of making profit of the gullible believing wishful thinking crowd. His followers are likely, rather then investigating the facts for themselves, to hold their faith in ‘would be experts’ the like ie. the pseudo spiritual crap of ‘ Mr Redfields (the celestial promise)’.

That’s a reasonable clear and unequivocal statement as to your position and yet in this post you now seem to see some merit in taking a contrary position, even to the point of paraphrasing what I wrote. And then you propose to wait for some imaginary genuine ‘actualist environmental team’ who then would presumably tell you what is appropriate for an ‘actualist’ to think and feel about the matter. So much for doing the work of finding out for yourself what is mere belief and what is substantive fact.

Having just said you will leave it to the genuine ‘experts’, you then come back with your affective opinions on the subject, i.e. feeling confident and optimistic rather than insecure and pessimistic.

It was exactly because I found myself swaying back and forth between these feelings whenever I listened to the environmental debate that I took the time and made the effort to find out for myself. Or to put it another way, I discovered it is impossible to be happy and harmless in the world as-it-is if I continuously waxed and waned between feeling good about the world as-it-is and feeling depressed about the world as-it-is.

As you seem to be sliding off the topic somewhat here, I will take the opportunity to say something on the matter of ‘experts’ – something that is relevant to the whole issue of investigating beliefs and making the effort to determine the facts for yourself.

I had a formal education in the field of architecture, a job that supposedly straddles art and science. As such, I was taught various principles, beliefs and information in both science and art, all based on various expertise garnered over generations of writings and teachings. It was only after many years of practice that I came to understand that the hallowed principles I was taught were no more than a hotch-potch of fashionable beliefs and personal convictions, that the impassioned beliefs were idealistic, impractical and unworkable and that sensible action was very often either ignored in practice because matters of principle or personal belief were always given far more credence.

I also began to gather some first hand knowledge of the so-called experts in the field by reading, observation and direct evaluation of some of their work. I came to understand that those who garnered the most fame and trumpeted the most wisdom were not those who were expert in their fields, i.e. who were best at what they were doing. Many of the famous architects repeatedly built buildings with serious design and construction faults. Many were scornful of clients and peers who dared to point to the contradictions between their self-proclaimed genius and the flaws in the results of their genius when put into practice. Because of this life experience I developed a scepticism about automatically believing in experts – scepticism as in ‘doubt as to the truth of some assertion or apparent fact’ as opposed to cynicism as in ‘ostentatious contempt’ (Oxford Dictionary).

Another observation about experts is that they usually have gained name and fame in one particular field of endeavour only and this limited focus very often results in what can best be described as a fervent myopia. The acclaim and inflated sense of self-worth that their expertise brings is often accompanied by games of bluff and bluster amongst experts themselves as well as a supercilious attitude should their expertise be questioned, especially by mere lay people. The myths surrounding expertise are not only apparent in the real-world but are also glaringly evident in the spiritual world. When I started to become aware of the shortcomings and foibles of experts, I began to see that a layperson could very often make better sense of something than a so-called expert who had a passionate personal investment in the issue.

In a similar vein, by my own experience in my own work, I came to understand that the hands-on pragmatist almost always knew far more about the workings of something than an ivory tower teacher. As an example of this, I once watched a reporter interviewing a scientist who was doing field tests of pollution levels around cotton fields. He was asked by the interviewer what he had found and he said that it was important to realize that the levels he was measuring were in the order of 1 part suspected-pollutant per 1,000,000 parts of soil and that at these microscopic levels it was nigh on impossible to distinguish between naturally occurring conditions or cotton farming influenced conditions. Now while this incident can be dismissed as anecdotal, it served to make me sceptical about the strident claims of environmentalists, wary about the gap between theoretical science and empirical science and more alert to the media’s role in spreading doom and gloom.

I do acknowledge that it takes a bit of gall to question the revered and famed experts of humanity, but if you want to become actually free of human condition this is what needs to be done.

Despite your hunch, I was not at the meeting and nor was Vineeto. Nil out of two for hunches. Hunches, intuitions, instinctual guesses, gut feelings, speculations, sixth senses and the like have been scientifically tested to be no better or no worse than flipping a coin to decide whether something is true or false, right or wrong, silly or sensible – 50/50 or thereabouts.

I recognize the approach. It’s the very same one you used in your Lomborg vs. Schneider debate. First flip, go with the status quo, believe Schneider. Second throw, consider status quo view might be wrong. Third throw ... ‘just forget it’ and wait for the ‘actualism experts’ to decide what you should think and feel about the world as-it-is.

I can do better than that. If you go to http://uk.cambridge.org/economics/lomborg/sample.htm you will find a sample chapter available for free online and if you use your browser search engine you will no doubt find a good many more reactions and attitudes to the book, both positive and negative.

The only reason I found issues such as this important was when I found myself stirred to anger or overcome by gloom by what the so-called experts were saying. Then it became obvious that I needed to dig into the matter a bit, not to become an expert per se but to make sense of the issue – to sort out belief from fact, myth from reality, learning from experience and passion from sensibility.

The reason I posted the recommendation is that the book is an excellent primer for anyone who finds themselves wasting this moment of being alive by being angry or sad about what the environmentalists are saying ... and wants to become free of these feelings.

As to [Only genuine ‘experts’ will be able to act on the facts in such a way that the workout can be called beneficial, iow, that’s where actualism comes in – an environmental team will at least need to be able to acknowledge the sensibility of the ‘HAIETMOBA’ sequence and willingness to test the vitality of it.] I rephrase: [Only genuine ‘experts’ will be able to act on the facts in such a way that the workout can be called beneficial] leaving it up to anyone for him/herself as to decide what is to be called ‘genuine’ experts with regard to environmental issues.

Which only means that you not only need to decide who to believe but you also have to determine whether the person you believe is merely a specialist in the field or is a ‘genuine’ expert in the field. The way most people do this is to believe he or she who is most famous or he or she who has the most letters after their name, i.e. the most book learning. Which means you are back to following the herd, flipping a coin or following your gut feelings – back taking sides in one of the many conflicts that rage within the human condition.

I recognize that it is hard work to investigate your beliefs and that it is much easier to stay who you think and feel you are. It may not be satisfactory but at least it is familiar. It certainly is not freedom but then you can always take up a cause and blame someone else for keeping you from being free. The other traditional alternative is to dissociate from the battles in the world by feeling self-righteous as in ‘above it all’ but this hypocrisy didn’t sit at all well with me.

I remember the first time I really ‘got it’ about the role that beliefs play in making ‘me’ as a social identity. The following is an excerpt from my journal describing the event –

‘The last time I met my older son was interesting, as I was able to see quite clearly that here was a young adult with little experience in life, and yet he was so opinionated. He was mostly repeating what he had heard from others and he took it to be true – actual.

Given that some of his opinions and values were really my past beliefs, I was able to see – quite shockingly – that ‘who’ we are consists of nothing more than the opinions and beliefs of others. I thought then of how I had been at that age – trying to make sense of life and grabbing on to anything that seemed to make sense or had appeal. So what ‘I’ as a social identity was made of  was nothing more than the opinions and beliefs of others – my father’s and those of my father’s generation, which in turn came from their fathers, and so on, back into the dim dark ages of the cave-men and cave-women.

This particular experience spurred me on to find out the facts of things, rather than simply believing others. I was determined to find out for myself, to explore, to try something new; anything to break this stranglehold on me. No longer would I trust the opinions of others, no matter how hallowed or learned, sacred or dear to me they appeared. It was to prove a wonderfully freeing experience. The intellectual ‘Giants of Humanity’ became just some guys (usually dead) with a particular opinion, belief or idea, but all of it just another version of the same old stuff. And the famed and holy ‘God-men’ became charlatans, masters of hypnotism, spells, spirits, double talk, and mystical drivel, all with a direct lineage to the witchdoctors of the primitive cavemen.’ Peter’s Journal, People

As a child we are taught to believe what our parents, teachers and peers tell us – there is no other way to learn. In order to become free of these beliefs it is essential to learn how to think for yourself because this is something we have not been taught to do – we have been taught to believe, we haven’t been taught to think.

I remember when I first read Richard’s Journal that I found a lot of his writing quite difficult and dense, if I can use that word to describe writing. There seemed to be so much packed into it that was difficult to read let alone understand. It wasn’t only his use of words that stretched my vocabulary and often sent me scurrying for a dictionary. It was that every sentence needed scrutiny and thinking about so I could ascertain exactly what he meant. And then what he meant needed a good deal of contemplating on – sometimes for days and even weeks before the penny dropped.

I don’t know if you know the expression but it is a good description of having a realization about something. I would at first develop an intellectual understanding about something he wrote and after a period of contemplation a realization would happen – an Ahhh ... – almost as if a penny dropped into the slot machine. A realization is as though a fog has lifted or a light suddenly goes on in a dim room. A realization is when a belief implodes and clarity, based on a rock-solid understanding and acknowledgement of a fact, suddenly occurs.

Spiritual people also have realizations but a spiritual realization happens when an old belief is seen as false and calenture, the desperate clutching on to a new belief, occurs. It is important for an actualist to discern this difference lest he or she seizes upon the realization of a fact and start taking it to be a sign of ‘my’ wisdom rather than understanding the realization for what it is – the collapse of ‘my’ belief and thinking freed of the burden of belief. I don’t want to put a damper on enthusiasm here because such realizations are thrilling and uplifting, but if you can keep your feet on the ground while being thrilled and uplifted you are more likely to want to do the work needed to have more realizations rather than rest on your laurels thinking you ‘know’ it all.

The other thing I wanted to say about reading Richard’s Journal was that at some point – and I can’t remember when but I suspect it was after a few of these realizations – I became aware that I had been skipping over the first sections of each chapter and concentrating on intellectually understanding the last sections of each chapter. As I started to really read the first sections of each chapter with the same attentiveness I had read the last sections, I suddenly realized that these were descriptions of how somebody who was free of the human condition experienced this actual world we all live in. I was startled to realize that these were descriptions of pure consciousness experiences except this was somebody’s on-going permanent experience.

I know I have said this many times before but there is a gold-mine to be had in Richard’s descriptions of ‘self’-less, ordinary, down-to-earth living because this is the carrot for an actualist, this living can be every human being’s destiny. I only write this because maybe this is what you got of reading Richard’s description of his conversation with a spiritual teacher. And I say maybe, because I don’t know – I can only relate what you are reporting to my own experiences when I first started to dig into actualism and began to try to understand what was on offer and started to have realizations.

I remember it as both exciting and turbulent and I soon came to understand a realization – when a belief implodes and clarity, based on a rock-solid understanding and acknowledgement of a fact – was only the start. For an actualist, it is never enough to know something – it must be implemented and put into practice such that a palpable and irrevocable change occurs in my life.

Whenever this happens it is as though a bit of ‘me’ has fallen off and I feel lighter, less burdened and more free. More able to feel felicitous feelings and I have less reason or inclination to feel malicious or sorrowful. Because the realizations are based on the discovery of fact and not on ‘my’ adoption of a self-serving belief, ‘I’ cannot claim any credit – although ‘I’ am wont to try. You will recognize this propensity when it comes, it’s the Saviour of Mankind syndrome. But to be forewarned is to be forearmed, and provided you heed the warnings and use your realizations to fuel your fascination with how you are experiencing this moment of being alive, ’tis a grand adventure.

Well that was a bit of rave again, but I do enjoy writing about the process of actualism. It is so simple, which I know puts a lot of people off because the human tendency is to like obscuration, mystification, confusion, distraction, complication and vagueness. This is why it takes such an effort to become attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive but the rewards for making the effort is freedom – the down-to-earth freedom that Richard describes in his journal.

The first thing is the business of finding out the facts of the human condition we find ourselves born in to, as opposed to what we have been told is the truth about the human condition. What we have come to believe and commonly accept as the truth is what has been passed on to each and every human being from their parents and peers ... who got it from their parents and peers ... who got it from their parents and peers ... stretching back into the dark mists of time. Our bondage to the human condition can be summed up as –

‘This is the way it is, because this is the way it is, because this is the way it has always been and this is the way it will always be’.

In order to become free of the human condition it is essential to laboriously crack through these shackles – the beliefs, morals, ethics, values, viewpoints and psittacisms that bond humans to a life of essential suffering and heart-wrenching misery. The easiest and most direct method to do this is to read the AF web-site and confirm what is written by your own life experiences and your own investigations. The method I used to confirm that what Richard was saying about the human condition was factual and sensible was to read, watch TV and browse the internet for further information. This process of finding the facts does involve a fair bit of work and investigation. One needs to check many sources, look for contradictions, be very wary of the source of the material and the bias of the authors or presenters, seek out the data behind the conclusions others are making, etc. Initially I ran a little game whereby I simply assumed that I, and everyone else, had got it wrong and looked for why and where – this way the investigation became exciting and thrilling – not daunting and fearful. Pretty soon I was able to confirm that I and everyone else had got it wrong – I had been searching for freedom and meaning 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

As I re-read what I wrote to you I was reminded of something you wrote recently –

This desperation that I talk about comes out of my life experience. Everyone I know has been affected by war and violence. Nobody has escaped the carnage, at least nobody I know. I myself have been both victimized by violence and prone to violence myself in the past.

I don’t want to leave the impression that dispelling belief and unearthing facts is an intellectual exercise based upon reading and discerning what others have discovered. The quickest, most direct and most effective way of determining what is fact, i.e. what works and what doesn’t work, is by your own life experiences. By the time mid-life comes around, most people have had sufficient life experiences to already know what doesn’t work and only if there is still some doubt about a particularly sticky issue do you need to investigate further. As an example, I needed only to draw on my own life experiences and my observations of others around me to know that love does not work, and never can work, to negate malice or sorrow. This is why I wrote my journal in the style I did, including many examples of my life experiences and my inevitable failures to find peace and happiness, both in the real world and the spiritual world.

The other kind of investigation is by deliberately setting out to make sense of a vexing issue, as we did in our recent conversation about intelligence vs. instinctual passion. In this type of investigation you root around and dig up all the information, data and observations you can and balance those against the currently accepted viewpoints and beliefs that others have about the subject, and then you eventually come to find an answer – to come to an understanding of the facts of the situation. Vineeto and I have spent many, many hours mulling over issues relevant to the human condition with no disagreement or disharmony simply because we were searching for the facts – something that is clearly evident, obvious and indisputable.

Yes indeed. This alone is enough to send anyone tap dancing across the floor, particularly if it is a passing milestone on the way to becoming free of both the spiritual world and the real world.

I remember the feeling of freedom from spiritual belief as being very tangible – I walked taller in the world, as it were, my integrity restored. I remember thinking afterwards – what was all the fuss about? Why did I find it so difficult?

In hindsight, there were in fact two intertwined difficulties. One was ‘my’ passions involved in maintaining my beliefs – mainly pride and loyalty – and these passions then conspired to prevent me from clearly understanding what was on offer in actualism, a condition known as cognitive dissonance. My brain had been programmed so completely to accept that there were only two alternatives to human existence – grim reality and a Greater Reality – so much so that it was almost impossible to conceive that peace and freedom lay where no one had dared to look before. Right here, right now, on earth.

But the nagging explanation – ‘that everyone, up to now, has got it 180 degrees wrong’ – made such sense to me and explained so much of what was obviously senseless within the human condition, that I was inexorably drawn to investigate further.

Taking no position = The ending of all fixed ideas and defensiveness.

This sounds as though it is the advice of someone who doesn’t want you to make your mind up about anything. This theory is not applied in the world of practical things and events. We humans take many positions. Where we work, where we live, who we live with, what we wear, what we eat, what we want to believe and what we chose not to, what car we drive, what computer program we use, etc. And yet, when it comes to the most vital questions as to human existence, the universe and what it is to be a human being, we are extolled by the Wise Ones to abandon taking a position? Should Galileo not have taken a position, should Columbus have never left Spain, should Pasteur not have taken a position, should Darwin not have taken a position, should LeDoux not take a position? Why should you not take a position about your life?

In the spiritual world taking a position in support of a belief is deemed highly desirable and is rewarded and welcomed by other like-minded believers, but taking a position based on facts and empirical scientific evidence has always been roundly condemned by the church, for facts are anathema to believers. All of the great leaps forward that have increased human safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure have been resisted by spiritual believers and it is only when empiricism broke from the church in the Middle Ages that intelligence began to hold sway over fear-ridden superstition and arcane belief.

Should you take a position based on fact and discard belief you too will run the gauntlet of scorn, derision and ostracization for that is the price to pay for walking upright and free in the world; but the rewards are far in excess of the spiritual ideals for they are actual, tangible, palpable and ever-present. Once you get a taste of what is actual, any synthetic feeling is seen as a paltry second-best.

Not knowing: To acknowledge the fact that there still is very much that our human minds can’t grasp and that we might never comprehend fully. To be open for the unthinkable possibility.

This physical universe is infinite – as big as it gets – and eternal – without a beginning or end – so it is inconceivable that humans will ever know all there is to know. Already the published discoveries are so much more than is possible for any one person to know. Even in one field of science or practical endeavour the amount of study, research and papers published would exceed the capacity of any one person to comprehend, let alone absorb.

But 3,500 years on from the ancient Wise Ones we do know that praying to God, or believing in and surrendering to God-men, has not brought peace to earth, quite the contrary.

Up until now spiritual teachings have been impossible to question openly and sensibly for they were jealously guarded by the priests and their fervent followers, and even then to abandon belief would have meant going back to a God-less existence in the ‘real’ world, bereft of any hope. Thus it is that people usually swap beliefs – Western for Eastern, Heavenly God for Mother Earth, etc. – rather than stop believing in God by whatever name.

Thanks to the Internet we can now conduct our own independent research as to the facticity of Ancient Wisdom and trace it back to its original teachings, we can compare the many Truths on offer and stop the game of pretending that not knowing is a sign of wisdom rather than of stubborn ignorance. There is simply no excuse for not knowing what the Truth is, and when this is discovered each of us is then capable of taking a position as to whether to keep believing in it or abandoning it.

We humans now have enough information at our fingertips to stop ‘not knowing’ and begin to know about life, the universe and what it is to be a human being. This knowledge, when combined with the experiential knowledge of the human potentiality as experienced in a pure consciousness experience, is the key to freedom from the human condition.

‘To be open for the unthinkable possibility’ usually means to be open to God, by whatever name, or ‘to be open’ to all sorts of spurious meta-physical theories, such as space-time continuums, dark matter, black holes, cyclic time, time reversing universes, parallel universe, etc.

These qualities/values can be very useful when investigating in a serious manner. I don’t think they contradict with empirical studies either, they could be used when formulating theses and in theoretical science for example. They might not be that useful in every execution of a study in the laboratory, then it’s of course our rational ‘side’ of our minds that are good at structuring and comparison that rule.

It is our fellow human beings, the practical scientists, chemists, engineers, explorers and the like that have given we humans very useful things. The Gurus, philosophers, theoretical scientists and the like have given us nothing but theories, beliefs, concepts, ideas, scenarios, dreams, nightmares, hope and hopelessness.

As I began to abandon the spiritual world, I serendipitously discovered someone who had abandoned Enlightenment and had worked out a ruthlessly effective empirical method for eliminating one’s social identity and all of one’s instinctual passions. Give me something that works over an ideal or a theory any day.

Don’t you think that these qualities actually could help in experiencing the PCE? If one is going to be able to perceive life directly as it really is instead of trying to force reality upon us (ASC) I think that we have tremendous use of humility and openness.

If one begins by feeling humble and then goes searching for an experience of something other than grim reality, I suspect one will end up finding a Greater Reality to feel humble to and feelings of gratitude will come sweeping in. By being ‘open for the unthinkable possibility’ any form of impassioned imagination is possible.

However, if your search is for purity and perfection and you keep whittling away at your beliefs, then one day while wistfully contemplating and softly relaxing, you might notice a sensuous delight, a vibrancy in things around you, a perfection and purity, a silence and infinitude beyond imagination. But be careful not to seize the experience as yours or you will feel the chest swell and the head swoon and in will flood passionate imagination to replace actual delight.

Even though life is factual, both you and I know that there are some obstacles that prevent us from living life as it is, our instinctual programming for one.

Because your existence as a flesh and blood body is factual the obstacles that prevent you from being happy and harmless have a factual grounding. The spiritual seekers who went before us were right about one thing – ‘who’ we think we are is illusionary. They dared not question ‘who’ they felt they were deep down inside, for to consider eliminating that was death itself – extinction, not transcendence. To challenge this instinctual self is to release a cocktail of chemicals producing fear and dread or, if salvation is imagined, ecstasy and euphoria. The Enlightened ones chose ecstasy and euphoria and their miraculous salvation drives them to be saviours of mankind. Thus is born yet another God-man and yet another religion if he musters enough followers by his charismatic Presence.

Both ‘who’ you think you are and ‘who’ you feel you are the obstacles that prevent you from being happy and harmless but we all know that from the peak experiences we have had. I found it was simply a matter of having the courage and dignity to stop denying that knowing.

I think there is great subtlety to these matters and therefore I think it is very essential to be open and not try to control life in anyway. I mean, doesn’t self-immolation imply that we’re able to give up ALL our limiting ideas about life and ourselves in a sense so that we can live the actuality of life. You said that a PCE can often be drug related and that also implies that we need to let go of ourselves and let life really show itself.

I see nothing subtle about the animal instinctual passions in humans when our normal methods of controlling them break down. Unless this fundamental genetic programming is addressed in our search for freedom, peace and happiness, any attempts to let go of control will end up as in the traditional delusions generated by the ‘good’ instinctual passions running amok.

One needs to dismantle one’s social identity – all the beliefs, morals and ethics that have been instilled in us since birth, and then take a clear-eyed look at the instinctual passions in operation in ourselves – both the tender passions and the fierce passions – in order to become actually free of the human condition.

In a God-steeped, superstition-ridden Humanity, atheism is universally regarded as denial or disbelief –

Atheist – A person who denies or disbelieves the existence of God or gods. A person who denies God morally; a godless person. Oxford Dictionary

Thus by this definition, the existence of God or gods is held to be true, as in factual, and an atheist is someone who denies or disbelieves this truth. The waters get even murkier if we check out the definition of belief –

Belief – Trust, confidence; faith. (by in, of a person or thing.) Trust in God; religious faith; acceptance of any received theology. Mental acceptance of a statement, fact, doctrine, thing, etc. as true or existing. Oxford Dictionary

So according to Humanity’s definition, an atheist is someone who is in denial of a truth or someone who has no trust, confidence, faith or mental acceptance of a universally-accepted truth.

Yet the fact is there is no God, nor are there gods – the whole notion of a spiritual world is but a elaborate and fear-ridden escapist fairy tale, passed on from generation to generation to explain the evil they will encounter in the world and pre-prepare them with the tradition escapist fantasy.

To understand this fully takes an enormous amount of de-programming, and I remember only last year clearly realizing with a jolt that the belief in God and gods was not only nonsense but puerile nonsense, as in nothing other than a childish fairy tale of the ilk of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Goblins and the like.

None at all, for holding any belief is nonsensical. I remember even as a teenager in a Christian society the idea of a white-bearded God sitting on a cloud and overseeing all this was pretty silly to me. And as for sending his Son down so he could do a few miracles, start a Religion, be nailed to a cross, and after a few days go back up to sit alongside Dad and see how it works out ...! I remember thinking, if there was a God, how come he made the mess in the first place, and if he was responsible for this mess, why the hell didn’t he just come down and sort it out. Despite this early discarding of one belief some 25 years later I was shocked one night to discover I had merely taken another –

‘One night in discourse, suddenly the absurdity of worshipping an empty chair on a podium, with thousands of other people all dressed in white robes, struck me like a thunderbolt. As I looked around, I had a brief flash of some sort of spiritual ‘Klu Klux Klan’. ‘Has my life really come to this?’ – I remember thinking. It was never to be the same again for me, although the final parting was to take a while. It also became increasingly evident that I was actually witnessing the formation of a Religion. Rajneesh had put the organization in place before he died, but one further incident made it crystal clear.

I was sitting at a dining table in the ashram one day with a few friends, and a newcomer came and sat with us. He had never seen Rajneesh alive and began to question us about the Ranch, what ‘He’ was like, etc. As I sat and listened to our responses, I realized how varied and different they were, even when we talked about the same event. It struck me that this is exactly how the myths and legends grow, as exaggeration and imagination abound. In fifty years’ time nobody will be alive who knew him as a living person, and then it’s really open slather for the myths of Divinity to run riot.’ Peter’s Journal, Spiritual Search

Only if you are ‘someone who denies or disbelieves the existence of God or gods’ and then you are clearly taking an anti stance, involved in belief disputes, claiming you are right and others are wrong, etc. To stop being a believer, only to become a disbeliever, is still to be an identity, as you rightly point out. The only way to step out of this cycle is to discover what is factual and to discard what is merely belief. The eventual aim of this investigation is to cease the habitual and ingrained act of believing – of being a believer. This process does take time, effort, incessant enquiry and an unparalleled degree of integrity, patience and perseverance. To imbibe and learn something while young is an automatic process – the process of unlearning is another ball game entirely.

A bit I wrote at the time I was pondering similar issues may be relevant to this discussion –

‘Well, why is Enlightenment just for the ‘chosen few’, and why - when it happens to someone - is he or she worshipped and revered like some God? Is it that it is such a miracle to get Enlightened in the first place that we bestow divinity on them, and then curry favour with them and worship them in the hope that it might rub off on us? I posed these and many other questions, as I tried to see what actual good had come out of a system that had been followed by billions of people, for thousands of years. Buddhism has been in existence for at least 2500 years and Hinduism supposedly twice as long. I was looking for evidence and facts – not hopes or beliefs.

The case for the defence was definitely not looking good, but I still found myself defending at least something of the spiritual and hanging on grimly. Surely there was a ‘Something’ else? Was it possible that I, and everyone else on earth up until now, had got it wrong and that only Richard was right? I had been reading widely throughout this time to check out the facts of what Richard was saying and what I found was astounding. I found that the whole of philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, astronomy, physics, indeed all of man’s knowledge, and wisdom is based on an underlying assumption of a ‘something more’ than the physical universe. A belief in the meta-physical permeates all human thinking and wisdom. If one eliminated this assumption or belief the whole lot comes crashing down like those card stacks I used to make as a kid. Then it all started to make sense to me, to fit the facts – everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong – everyone!

There has been no actual evidence or facts after thousands of years to support the belief that there is a God or a Something else. The cry in the churches, temples, ashrams and satsang halls is still one of trust, faith and hope to maintain the belief in a Something else. It was as though I was able to begin to see through the whole charade and fantasy of the spirit-ual world – to be able to see things from another perspective. It was like a mist or a veil clearing. It was then that I realized that Richard was the only atheist I had met and seemingly the only one that has ever been’. Peter’s Journal, God

The last realization came when I fully understood and directly experienced that there is no God, or gods, in a PCE and that Richard experienced this as an ongoing permanent experience. Then atheism is neither a belief nor a disbelief, but an acknowledgement of fact.

I noticed that I started to bring the terms actualism and actualist to the forefront of my writings recently and this coincided with realizing that actualism is now firmly launched in the world as a third alternative and is spread by word of mouth, it has already developed a life of its own as interest, controversy and debate is growing exponentially.

There have already been many objections of the petty put-down of ‘isms’ type usually based on the chronic human obsession with either blindly following authority or angrily rebelling against authority.

ism – A form of doctrine, theory, or practice having, or claiming to have, a distinctive character or relationship. Oxford Dictionary

So from this definition, actualism is a form of practice having a distinctive character – as in being neither materialism nor spiritualism but something new in human experience. It is neither doctrine nor theory but a practice, as in utilizing a method or undertaking a process.

I find it most useful to use the label actualist as a reminder that what I am practicing has a distinctive character – it is unusual, not common, different, extraordinary, rare. This is not a chest-puffing, identity-bloating exercise but a simple statement of fact. I am not a materialist, I am not a spiritualist, I am neither a believer nor am I a disbeliever – I am an actualist, should I ever be asked for a label, which is not very often.

It is only by asking questions like these with the intent to find answers, firstly as an understanding and then experientially, that you can make your own discoveries. Actualism is a process that is specifically designed to facilitate an ongoing investigation into your own psyche. This is why actualism is not a belief, doctrine or theory and anyone treating it as such is missing out on the opportunity of their lifetime to discover what is actual in a world awash with beliefs, doctrines, theories, ideologies, truths, faiths, opinions, viewpoints and dimwitascisms.

What are significant questions, beliefs, passions and potential stumbling blocks for you will vary from what were mine or others’ only because of differing social programming and life experiences. The Library section of the web-site is specifically aimed at cataloguing a range of questions and discussions by topic and issue as an aid for anyone daring enough to question their cherished beliefs.

As for ‘what it is about the psyche of human beings that inclines them toward belief in a spiritual or supernatural realm’, most people seem to miss the fact that ‘I’ am a psychological and psychic entity or spirit, and as such desperately believe in the fairy tales of a spiritual world, or a world in which spirits dwell. It is interesting to note that this belief in a spirit-ual world most usually gets stronger and more impassioned the closer the person is to the end of their life.

Before I took on actualism I too held on tightly to what I perceived to be the truth of my life until I began to discover I had been sold a dummy. ‘My’ beliefs were beliefs, totally unfounded in fact, i.e. ‘I’ lived in la la land, my ethics were unliveable, i.e. ‘I’ was a wanker, my morals were subjective and very flexible, i.e. ‘I’ was a hypocrite and my values were imbibed from others, i.e. ‘I’ was a fraud. Having largely got rid of this person who made my life and others around him a constant emotional turmoil, I now find that I can disagree with others who dearly cling to their beliefs, ethics, morals and values, without being emotionally affected myself. The only way that this is possible is for me to be free of malice and sorrow – to have no axe to grind, no truth to maintain, no belief to defend – in short to have no ‘me’ to take offence or be offensive.

Richard asked himself – ‘can I emotionally accept that which is intellectually unacceptable?’ If you pursue such a question ruthlessly you will eventually discover that the only solution is to eliminate the passionate being inside ‘who’ endlessly has to practice tolerance in order to reconcile the vehemently conflicting views of others, ‘who’ endlessly needs to crank up love to rise above deep-seated resentment and hatred, ‘who’ has to continuously be good in order to rise above the perceived evil of others.

Being a social and instinctual being is ultimately a wearying and stressful business and even the blessed-out God-men look forward to physical death as an ultimate relief from the effort of being a Being.

What is on offer on this list is an end of being.

As I was finishing writing a reply to your question, you then posted the following to No 22 –

From the way you have announced your intention as to how you intend to pursue this conversation it is clear that posting the response I have written will only elicit your pre-prepared rebuttal, so I have ditched my response to your question.

These type of it’s-only-your-belief exchanges only leads to the usual ‘my belief is better than, or more true than, your belief’ battles, or the ‘I have a right to my beliefs’ offended response, or the pre-conditional ‘I will respect your beliefs as long as you respect mine’ or the duplicitous ‘I will be tolerant of your beliefs as long as you are tolerant of my beliefs ... but if you’re not tolerant, look out!’

If you want to play poker, t’is best not to reveal your hand before the other plays his.

*

Speaking personally, it’s so good to be free of belief. It is essential to understand that to become actually free, one needs to become free from the very act of believing ... otherwise one only ends up believing that one is free. This is the very crux of Richard’s trailblazing discovery – that there is actual freedom from the human condition available which lies beyond the Self-centred feeling of freedom that is typified by an altered state of consciousness. The problem for spiritual seekers who have had an altered state of consciousness experience, or Satori, is that they jealousy guard their secret – the secret being that they have been specially chosen by God to receive His or Her message or to be a ‘hollow bamboo’ through which the energy of He or She or It flows.

It is not easy to abandon spiritual belief because most people see the only alternative as going back to grim reality, back to the real-world. This is most definitely not what is being offered in actualism. What is on offer is a road-tested practical method of becoming free of the instinctual passions that are very the cause of all human malice and sorrow. This way one doesn’t need to change the world, nor hide from the world, nor continually have to stoke up the feeling of being free. This way one avoids the calenture of stepping out of the real world reality and becoming God-like, God-realized or God-aligned – the traditional trap that has sabotaged all the previous well-meaning efforts to find actual freedom, peace and happiness.

I noticed in the first of your posts that I quoted you also said –

‘Richard’s insights are amazing and since I have absorbed and understood and activated their essence (as perceived by me), I find more and more ability in me to be free – as I am.’

I can only suggest that you read Richard’s descriptions of becoming free of the institutionalized insanity of Enlightenment and take his words literally – at face value – rather than as you perceive them to mean. By doing so, you may begin to understand and comprehend what is on offer on this mailing list – an actual down-to-earth freedom in the world-as-it-is, with people as-they-are, which lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction from the spiritual feeling of freedom in an imaginary other-than-physical world.

I fully acknowledge that breaking free of spiritual belief is not an easy thing to do. Actualism seems like madness, which it is from a real-world perspective. Actualism feels like going completely in the wrong direction, which it is from a spiritual-world perspective. My attitude at the start was that I had checked out both worlds thoroughly and neither cut the muster – nowhere was genuine peace and harmony to be found in either world.

I just figured I had nothing left to lose by checking out something brand-new.

I had better stop here because I can write all night singing the benefits of actualism – a naive enthusiasm and joie de vivre that has often been scornfully dismissed as the proselytising of a disciple or the parroting of a clone. Personally, I have no problem at all in being a happy and harmless clone – it sure beats the hell out of being normally human or becoming spiritually divine.

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