Selected Correspondence Peter

To No 66: You really know how to have yourself on don’t you mate? and the clergy recognised it too. You have all the credentials. Top quality gullible, hypnotizable, narcissistic, brown nosed, copy cat stock. I would not be surprised if you are growing a big ol’ granddaddy beard as we speak. Just like Peter did. Ugh.

I see that it might well be time to set the copycat beard myth straight. I had a full beard some 15 years before I even met Richard and the reason I grew it was that I found it a waste of time to keep mowing my face in order to stop the hair that grew naturally from showing.

I happened to read recently that there was a crusade against beard growing at the beginning of the 20^th century on the basis that beards were unhealthy in that they were a source of the epidemics of disease that regularly cut swathes through the population, in other words, it wasn’t that men chose to shave every day, they kowtowed to social pressures from righteous ‘health’-promoters. It’s fascinating to see much the same thing happening nowadays with regard to cigarette smoking – a fear-fuelled crusade waged against cigarette smoking in ignorance of the actual causes of the many diseases it allegedly causes and to see this crusade continue to be even more strident despite the fact that not only are the actual causes of these diseases are beginning to be discovered but that targeted cures and preventive immunizations have being developed and are already being put in practice.

Just on a more general note as to the thrust of your comment, I always find it somewhat perverse that people discover the AF website, apparently find some attraction in what they read such that they bother to subscribe to this mailing list and then proceed to castigate or lampoon anyone and everyone who follows Richard’s lead, in other words anyone who is putting the method he used to become free of the human condition into practice.

But then again, it’s obvious that humanity at large would have a vested interest in Richard being a never-to-be-repeated freak of nature.

Matter, the stuff of which a thing is made, is commonly classified into three types – animal, vegetable or mineral.

If you asked a biologist, a doctor, a zoologist, a microbiologist, a mother or a teacher whether animal matter is passive, as in inert or inactive, he or she no doubt would look at you askance. That animal matter is ‘not merely passive’ is surely obvious but the extent to which it is not passive is literally breathtaking.

As an example, the smallest unit retaining the fundamental properties of life are cells, the ‘atoms’ of the living world. A single cell is often a complete organism in itself, such as a bacterium or yeast. Other cells, by differentiating in order to acquire specialized functions and cooperating with other specialized cells, become the building blocks of large multicellular organisms as complex as the human being. It would require a sheet of about 10,000 human cells to cover the head of a pin, and each human being is composed of more than 75,000,000,000,000 cells.

As an individual unit the cell is capable of digesting its own nutrients, providing its own energy, and replicating itself, in order to produce succeeding generations. It can be viewed as an enclosed vessel composed of even smaller units that serve as its skin, skeleton, brain, and digestive tract. Within this cell vessel innumerable chemical reactions take place simultaneously, all of them controlled so that they contribute to the sustenance and procreation of the cell. In a multicellular organism cells specialize to perform different functions. In order to do this each cell keeps in constant communication with its neighbours. As it receives nutrients from and expels wastes into its surroundings, it adheres to and cooperates with other cells. Cooperative assemblies of similar cells form tissues, and a cooperation between tissues in turn forms organs, the functional units of an organism.

In other words, the flesh and blood body known as No 32 is a cooperative assembly of cells that has developed from the multiplication of cells produced by the union of a male sex cell and a female sex cell. One day sufficient of these cells will cease to function as living organisms causing the flesh and blood organism known as No 32 to cease to function as a living organism. The dead cells that constitute the organism known as No 32 will then decompose, becoming the minerals of the earth again, and those minerals in turn will to help nourish or form other cells, be they vegetate or animate. The matter that is this planet is in fact in a constant state of being cycled between animal, vegetable and mineral – i.e. matter is ‘not merely passive’. Information on cellular life forms gleaned from Encyclopaedia Britannica

I would like to take the opportunity to post a bit about another set of beliefs that fuels much anger and anxiety within the human condition – those related to health and healing. Whilst these beliefs have never been a major concern for me, I am well aware that beliefs around health issues are central to countless people’s lives.

Many people who believe in so-called ‘alternative medicine’ unquestioningly accept that following restrictive diet regimes, imbibing herbal concoctions, invoking healing spirits or undertaking mystical rituals can not only alleviate and cure illness and disease but can even prevent their onset in the first place. Those who hold to these beliefs invariably expend considerable time, effort and money, not to mention worry and anxiety, in a furtive and futile effort to ward off the evils of potential disease and inevitable death. Most of the current anthology of these beliefs are rooted in, or at least heavily influenced by, Eastern spiritualism and its long mystical traditions of cleansing, purifying and healing both body and soul through fasting, regimented dietary restrictions, imbibing herbs, plants and animal parts deemed to have magical qualities, indulging in mystical rituals and so on. The ancient spiritual roots of these beliefs also mean that the believers necessarily have an associated distrust and hatred of materialism in general and modern medical science in particular.

Most who believe in these ancient mystical healing methods passionately believe that people were healthier in ‘the good old days’ because the revered ancient ones lived a more ‘natural’, in-tune-with-God lifestyle. They doggedly hold to this belief despite the fact that the doubling in life expectancy in the last century was entirely due to the combination of material progress in living standards and the application of modern empirical medical science … and not to the preservation of primitive living standards and the application of ancient healing methods. These beliefs blind the followers to the fact that the application of modern medicines and technology in the last century has saved, improved and lengthened the lives of billions of people due to the almost complete elimination of hygiene related illnesses and infectious diseases across much of the globe.

This stunning progress has meant that an ever-increasing majority of the global population now live longer and healthier lives, which has meant more people becoming susceptible to diseases that naturally occur later in life – diseases such as cancer, organ failure and the like. With this recent focus on treating the diseases of middle and old age in the second half of last century, those who are now living longer and healthier lives are reaping the rewards of human effort and ingenuity. The cure rates of an ever-increasing number of diseases are rising, their death rates are falling and the prevention and elimination of many diseases is now feasible. If one needs more evidence of the shortcomings of ‘natural’ primitive lifestyles and the failure of ancient spiritual healing methods, one only needs to look at the fact that in undeveloped ‘Third World’ countries infant mortality rates are higher, life expectancy is markedly less, illnesses due to dietary deficiencies are commonplace and infectious diseases are still prevalent.

And yet, despite the astounding progress and successes of the last century, faithful believers in ancient spiritual-mystical healing continue to rile against the evils of materialism and modern technology and traditional healers and sellers of snake oil continue to make extravagant and unproven claims for their healing practices and magical potions and the fearful and gullible continue to unquestioningly believe and have faith in their claims.

Many who hold to these ancient healing beliefs do so, not only with fervour and passion, but also with a good deal of hypocrisy. When push comes to shove, most very quickly turn to modern empirical medical science for help whenever accident, illness or disease produces a serious or life-threatening situation. Afterwards they are apt to blithely resume their riling against the very people and technology they had unabashedly turned to in time of need when their ‘alternative medicines’ failed them.

With hardly a blush, they continue their search for the latest fashionable belief, superstition or resurrected old-wives-tale about what diet, what new ‘natural’ product or what new healing process is claimed to prevent or cure what illnesses – a search which only serves to perpetuate their anxiety and stress as well as their anger and resentment. Not only do the believers suffer from having these feelings but the associated hormones produced are known to have detrimental effects on the immune system which only increases the susceptibility for un-healthiness and illness.

This persistence of the beliefs in ancient healing methods only attests to the vice-like grip that ancient tried and failed beliefs have within the human condition – despite their abysmal failure to produce tangible results and notwithstanding their propensity to be harmful, precious few people are willing to completely abandon their favourite pet-beliefs.

The reason I mention this is that ancient spirit-ual beliefs permeate all facets of the human condition and currently none more so than in the fields of health and environment. The feedback thus far from those who have come across actualism indicates that some people think that by simply abandoning their belief in some God or other, or in some Godman or other, they are then free of spiritual belief. Whilst this first step is certainly a useful and beneficent beginning to becoming free of one aspect of the human condition, an actualist needs to dig much, much deeper than this if he or she wants to become genuinely happy and harmless and aspires to become actually free of the human condition.

The constant on-going investigation of one’s own psyche reveals the full extent of the human condition in action and understanding the human condition is the only way to become free of it.

Again these comments are general to the human condition, not personal – I am merely taking the opportunity to write something on an aspect of the human condition that has come to my attention lately.

Another piece I discovered that may help drive a wedge between the spiritual approach and that of the actualist –

Being free of the belief in an after-life, I am now free to actually be here, fully acknowledging the fact that before the sperm hit the egg I wasn’t here, and when this body dies, I die, since I am this body. What else could I be? A walk-in, like Rajneesh? Having no belief in a past or future life enabled me to tackle the issue of my behaviour, my actions, my feelings and emotions, my experiences and, of course, my happiness, right now. I have no second chances at living, this is it, so I have to be the best I can be now. This understanding was crucial in order to be able to fully embrace the responsibility I had to free myself of the psychological and psychic entity that was shackling my enjoyment of life. It didn’t allow me any room for denial, bargaining or accepting a second-rate life. I simply could no longer postpone or avoid. It made the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ so vitally intense to me and meant that the process of becoming free was guaranteed of success. What I understood of the method, briefly, was to make being happy your immediate goal – after all, this is your only moment of being alive that you are able to actually experience. Being happy yesterday is useless and imagining or hoping for it in the future is avoiding the issue. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ was the question to be continuously asked. If you are not happy now, then you have something to look at. The particular feeling or emotion that is causing you not to feel good now, has a source that needs looking at. What particular belief, conditioning or instinct is causing your unhappiness in this moment? Root around layer by layer until it is exposed. As a useful test to apply, once having discovered the cause or the issue, is to question: ‘Is it silly or sensible?’ Does it make sense, is it supported by facts, or is it a belief; does it work? Whatever is preventing my happiness now deserves my total attention and thorough investigation – simply believing the opinions, beliefs and values of other similarly inflicted people is to be gullible in the extreme. It is my life I am living and it is happening now. I then became vitally interested in my happiness for the first time. I was looking within for the problem, not outside. I was also looking within for the solution, not outside. And I was looking to eliminate it, to be free of whatever was causing my unhappiness, such that it would never come back. Finished, gone.

It certainly put postponement in its place and as for avoidance...! And nobody else does it for me – I do it for myself! Peter’s Journal, God

Another program traced the history of medical care and it was fascinating to see the extraordinary changes that have happened in only the last two centuries. The beginning of fighting disease and illness came with increased nutrition and cleanliness. The next advance was in anaesthetics which enabled surgeons to get inside the living body to make repairs. The next advance was in vaccination as prevention and targeting disease with drugs to effect cures. The present century was heralded as being the biological century where scientists will not only prevent and cure but find ways to actually eliminate disease, genetic weaknesses and cellular mutations.

What was most revealing was that this advance has happened so quickly – only a relatively short time ago, the shamans, witchdoctors, blood-letters and snake-oil sellers held sway in the world of healing, with negligible results. Life spans were half those of nowadays, infant mortality common, pestilence and plague endemic and disease was generally attributed to evil spirits and alien energies. The recentness of this scientific medical revolution goes a long way to explaining why the shamans and snake-oil sellers, who are rife so-called alternative medicine, still have such power and influence.

Old habits and ancient fears die very hard.

Another point that comes to mind is that becoming free of the Human Condition is not a dispassionate affair – it is not about stripping one’s ‘self’ of emotions or making sense of the Human Condition such that one becomes a stripped-down clever cool ‘self’. The motivation to get beyond this stage has to be a ‘self’-less concern and consideration for one’s fellow human beings, such as is experienced in a pure consciousness experience. The utter futility and sheer pointlessness of human beings being instinctually driven to battle it out with each other in a fear-driven struggle for survival on this verdant and bountiful planet becomes startlingly evident ... and one is inexorably drawn to do something about the situation. You realize in a pure consciousness experience that the only thing possible to do is to ‘self’-immolate – to rid this flesh and blood body of the entity that is, by its very nature, malicious and sorrowful, that ‘I’ can only be a contributor to violence and suffering on the planet. You realize that this act is the only sensible and practical contribution you can make to peace on earth.

Thus the essential fuel for ‘self’-immolation is altruism – the instinctual passion to sacrifice oneself for the others. This passion has to be activated and cultivated as a burning desire, for it is the only fuel that can get you through when the other passions begin to diminish in Virtual Freedom and comfortable ‘normal’ threatens to set in. Personally, this passion has always proved too strong to sit on for too long – soon I find myself back writing again, sticking my neck out, taking another risk, saying yes to being here and playing this game of being alive.

For an actualist, it is often in these periods when nothing is happening – when ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ produces no drama, no issue, nothing to explore – that one can evince a delight and a joie de vive at being alive here and now as a flesh and blood body, located no where in particular on this paradisiacal planet as it floats in the vastness of space. The most pregnant time for a pure consciousness experience can be when one’s guard is down, when no issue is burning and no fear is arising.

This is the opposite of the spiritual where one is hunting for the passionate experience and an emotional high as one’s prize or one’s due right in life. John Lennon sang ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’. I would see it as ‘life is what is happening now while you are planning for, or waiting for, your next experience’.

Every moment, there is a door available marked ‘actual world’, and it is often most accessible at exactly those moments when there seems to be nothing going on in terms of emotions or worry. The ever-present, physical-only, actual world is ever-peaceful, ever-pure and ever-perfect. There is no fear, no aggression, no good, no bad, no right and no wrong in the actual world.

Then, when you come back from the actual world, to resume being an ‘I’ in the real-world, you recommence the fascinating business of dismantling what you have seen to be in the way of your being happy and harmless.

What I came to see was that any resources I used or possessions I owned I had to pay for which meant I had to work for – i.e. sell my time to someone else in return for money. This realization was a slow dawning but I did have the sense to have a vasectomy after having two children, and soon adopted the quality-not-quantity approach to possessions. After meeting Richard I pushed the envelope a bit more, eventually trading my car for a new-age typewriter and reducing my work hours to a minimum in order to devote myself to the business of actualism as much as possible. Nowadays I find myself living a life of indulgent consumption that borders on hedonism yet at a level that would be easily be possible, sustainable and feasible for all human beings on the planet. To be an actualist is to become an ideal and model citizen of the world.

According to Walsch’s clairvoyant message, violence exists in God’s world because human beings do not live by the golden rules of goodness, love and treating others as we would have them treat us. God also told him that He occasionally sends souls into the world as lessons for us humans in order that we may see the evil that is in each of us. According to Walsch, God said He deliberately sent Mr. Hitler down so that we would know and experience the lowest of lows, the most evil of evils, but that ‘no harm was really done because there is no such thing as death’. Methinks he will have a hard time convincing the Jews that the millions who died was a calculated put-up job by the He-is-All God, that no harm was really done, it was all just a lesson and there is no death. Some forty million humans died in WW2 and God glibly declares ‘I did it’. No wonder some prayers start with – ‘Have mercy on us Lord ...’

In this sick scenario, earthly suffering exists as God’s test for humans and therefore the more one suffers the more God is testing you personally and the more gratitude one should feel towards God. Indeed, so ingrained is this belief that many who suffer deeply pass through a profound ‘dark night of the soul’ whereby the depths of depression can be alleviated by an epiphany, Satori, awakening or re-birth. One’s soul or psychic entity makes an instinctual chemical-fuelled grasp at survival and hallucinatory states result. Thus one sees God, talks to God, sees His Grand Plan, realizes there is no death, etc. and one’s body is swamped with bliss-inducing chemicals. These visions invariably follow cultural, religious and tribal pre-conditioned trends – thus a Hindu sees Krishna, a Christian sees Christ, a Buddhist realizes the world is an illusion, etc. In Walsch’s case a New Age Christian talks to God and also feels Oneness – a New Age Christian message that incorporates the traditional white bearded God in heaven story and tacks on a dash of fashionable Eastern religion.

So we are lead to believe that God has changed His mind of late, as no doubt He is entitled to do, but it does seem to leave those who are faithfully following all of the other messages He sent to earth a little out on a limb. Perhaps this fashionable trendy New Age God watches Oprah and re-writes his script every month or so and sends yet another message down to earth.

In Eastern religions, earthly existence is seen as an endless cycle of rebirth, escaped by only .0001% of the population who manage to see God’s joke and realize that suffering, death and the physical universe is only an illusion. In psychiatric terms they induce, via torturous rituals and the assiduous practice of denial, a mental aberration known as dissociation.

Dissociation – A process, or the resulting condition, in which certain concepts or mental processes are separated from the conscious personality; spec. the state of a person suffering from dissociated personality. Oxford Dictionary

Dissociation is exemplified in Eastern religion and philosophy by the core belief of ‘I am not the body, I am not the mind’ – and the constant repeating of this mantra leads to the inevitable conclusion that ‘I must be spirit-only’. If pursued to its extreme a feeling of Oneness with all other disembodied and non-physical spirits develops, leading to the narcissistic realization that ‘I am All, and All is me’. And for those sufficiently seduced by this delusion, bingo ... the ultimate dissociate state of ‘I am God’ is realized.

The eastern practice of inducing dissociative states or altered states of consciousness does nothing to elevate human suffering and malice. Only by actively rejecting the traditional turning away and squarely facing the issues is it possible to actually change the situation. If it is God’s plan that over 160 million human beings were killed by their fellow human beings and that over 40 million killed themselves in suicides then it’s time to tell God to butt out.

Intelligence, innovation, stubbornness, experimentation, ingenuity, perseverance, intent and altruism have bought an end to the naturally-occurring plagues and diseases that killed millions in past centuries. Human beings put an end to this death and suffering, not some mythical god. The same human intelligence, innovation, stubbornness, experimentation, ingenuity, perseverance, intent and altruism will eventually and inevitably rid this fair planet of the instinctual ‘natural’ sorrow and malice that causes the human species to laud and cherish suffering and indulge in senselessly killing and maiming each other.

Just a news item that I came across on the Net, which further confirms the findings of LeDoux that the amygdala is the source of instinctual fear. This experimentation focused on the memories of fear that can be instilled into an animal during its lifetime. What I find interesting is that the research indicates that these emotional memories are stored in the amygdala, in particular, and not elsewhere in the brain where other memories are stored.

This would seem to give credence to the fact that the primitive brain has its own separate complete set of functioning – its own first access to sensory input, as LeDoux indicates, its own processing ability and its own output causing chemicals to flow directly to the modern brain and to other organs in the body. I have understood that the primitive brain would be the seat of our pre-coded instinctual memories but that it builds an on-going lifelong memory base makes it a powerful and relentless source of fear in particular.

^Note1: I have the last couple of days indeed experienced the ‘Amygdala-effect’; in fact, yesterday night it came to some sort of climax I felt some sort of a cracking at the back of my head next I found myself a bit giggling and I heard myself say ‘this must be the Amygdala’. Now it feels somehow as if the Amygdala is ‘pricked’ up on my spine a bit ET-like, as if indeed I can feel that part in my head. There’s also a bit of muscular activity in my neck, which very much seems to be related to breathing^.

I remember when I first read that Richard reported that the precursory event to becoming free of the human condition was accompanied by a physical sensation at the top of the brain-stem. As I recall, he likened it to the turning over of record on one of those old 50’s record players. This happened when Richard became Enlightened and it subsequently took eleven more years until the process of ‘self’-immolation was complete.

I was curious at the time that the event of becoming free of the human condition appeared to have a physical component as well as the obvious psychological and psychic components – the extinction of the psychological and psychic entity in total. I say ‘appeared to have’ because we only have Richards’s report of the event and no other tangible evidence to support it. Even so, what I made of the report of the physical sensations was that it could have been related to the physical extinguishing of the instinctual animal survival programming – the genetically-encoded programming that gives rise to the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire in the human animal.

Now of course, all this is at best speculation, a working hypothesis until proved as a fact or abandoned as nonsense. But at the time I found the assumption very useful because it set me off on a course that made me open to the possibility that the root cause of my malice and sorrow was utterly non-spiritual and that it was physical in nature – my instinctual survival programming. It made good sense to me that there was a physical cause to human behaviour and this was a breath of fresh air after spending years believing in spiritual esoterica or blaming someone else or something else for my own feelings of malice and sorrow.

My particular interest in the physical origins of the instinctual passions led to Richard writing more on the subject of instinctual passions and to my own attempts to explain their origins in what someone recently described as pseudo-scientific terms.

The reason I am writing this is to give you some background to what you are now terming the ‘Amygdala affect’ – and I like the term, by the way. There is no doubt that on the path to actual freedom many weird and wonderful psychic and psychological events can and do happen and that sometimes there can even be physical sensations that occur. From my experience, these events may well be par for the course but they are neither the main event nor are they a sure sign of anything in particular. The only sign of success on the path to an actual freedom from malice and sorrow is the incremental reduction of feeling malice and sorrow and the subsequent emergence of more and more of the felicitous feelings in everyday life. For a sincere actualist there can be no other measure of success than this.

Consequently I came to see that marking my success in becoming free by the occurrence of physical sensations was akin to a spiritualist marking their success in becoming God by how much their Kundalini was rising or how much their third eye was opening. I also saw that if Richard had said his ankle twitched when he became free there could well be a generation of followers all limping around saying ‘all is going well, I’m nearly there’. As I write I am reminded of the ‘Placebo effect’ wherein a patient does not know whether any improvements are a physical result of the treatment or purely imaginary.

My point is not to take what is written about other people’s experiences as a gospel because believing can lead to all sorts of imaginations. And not to confuse sincerity with humourlessness – it’s essential to be able to laugh at all the weird and wonderful experiences, be they psychological, psychic or physical, which happen on the path to actual freedom.

The last thing an actualist does is take one’s ‘self’ seriously – that’s what the spiritualists do.

Choicelessness and Being Present

‘Go with the feelings, the intuition, not with the mind. That is choicelessness. All that I have said about choicelessness applies to presence as well. Presence is being in this moment with acceptance, including all the facts and disconnecting from them.’ Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A New Way to Live

Put so clearly, choicelessness is a choice made by one’s feelings, a decision solely based on the emotions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Deciding anything this way is guaranteed to produce an utterly selfish and self-centred result or decision, not the best decision, the most appropriate and most sensible. In deciding ‘not with the mind’, the spiritual claim of choicelessness can be best described as thoughtless and senseless, selfish decision making.

As for ‘being present’, it is clear that the Eastern religious philosophy is to ‘choicelessly’ accept and then disconnect from the facts – facts such as the physical body, one’s emotions and thoughts, one’s physical surroundings and other people, the fact of one’s mortality, etc. If being ‘present in this moment’ is so good then why would one want to disconnect from the facts that are evident in this moment. Why would there not be delight in thinking, delight in being conscious and alive as a flesh and blood human being, delight in this paradisiacal planet floating in this wondrous universe?

If this is not the case, in this moment, then why would one not want to do everything possible to evince delight, happiness and harmlessness? Why would one want to continue to practice denial, acceptance and ‘disconnecting’ as the East have done for millennia? The results of these religious practices are readily evident in the present cultures of the East, where poverty, corruption, duplicity, hypocrisy, repression, violence, arrogance and greed abound.

The encouragement is for us to be more present, more aware of what is going on, all the time. The difficulty is this: the mind functions on the premise that it has to think about things and so the mind is identifying and naming everything continuously, registering whether it is safe or threatened. The mind does not see reality, it sees its concept of reality. It sees everything in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate that it has learned from someone else. It labels everything according to other people’s ideas. Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A New Way to Live

This primitive view of the mind directly results from the ancient ignorant view that the mind is the source of evil thoughts and the heart or soul is the source of good feelings. The mind – the functioning brain – is a physical organ in the body that is the central processing unit for an astonishing sensorial input of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste, and it has the ability, unique among the animal species, of being able to think, plan, reflect, communicate and be aware of itself in operation. And this is what Eastern religion would have us ignore! This collecting of living cells that is so complex, so wondrous, so astounding is to be ignored in favour of identifying with the good instinctual passions and imagining oneself so good, so above it all and so disconnected that one believes oneself to be the ‘source’ – God by another name.

There is only now. When you truly realize this and you accept it, you soar. If you realize it and resist it, it is awful, because there is nothing else, there is no point to anything, there is no reason for living, there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. Nothing out there ‘works’. Look one second into the future and there is just desolation. Be unconditional in this moment and you are in the unexplainable state of bliss. Resist in the slightest and you are in hell. <Snip> The Hindus say it can take 80,000 lives to experience it fully, unless you are ready to say, ‘Yes, this is it’. Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A New Way to Live

This piece is particularly revealing for it illustrates that underpinning the feeling of bliss is the feeling of dread. It is not only that one has left the real world – the world ‘out there’ – but one does so out of fear and desperation. The feelings of fear and dread are still there, they are only sublimated by passionately imagining oneself to be in an inner safe sanctuary – ‘here’ in the inner world in fear of the outer, and ‘now’ in denial of the ticking of the clock and the inevitable aging of the body. I like his description very much for it belies the myth that duality ceases in the spiritual world. Good and bad, right and wrong, bliss and dread and God and Evil are, in fact, only emphasized and made more real in the spiritual world, not eliminated.

Thus, a further illusion is built upon an illusion and delusion is the result. To travel the spiritual path in the spiritual world is to move even further away from the actual world – one is then twice removed from the actual world, that which is physical-only, tangible, palpable, benign, free of malice and sorrow, sensately obvious and delightfully rich, pure and perfect, peaceful and harmonious, abundantly apparent, right here, right now.

I presume when you wrote –

‘I remember at one stage it actually became fashionable in ‘spiritual’ Sannyas circles to wish that this was the last life, that enlightenment was necessary if only to stop the endless wheel of suffering that being in the body was meant to be’.

you are referring to ‘sannyas’ as being a disciple of Rajneesh. If you are, then you re-writing history and re-interpreting the central message of Rajneesh’s teaching. Rajneesh’s core teaching, as in all Eastern Religion, is that ‘you’ are not the body, not the thoughts, not the emotions, not the actions. ‘You’ simply have taken up residence in the body and will have an endless round of re-births into earthly suffering and gross form unless ‘you’ can get off the roundabout. The only way to get off the roundabout is Self-realization or Enlightenment. What Rajneesh taught was that we are all ‘only visiting the planet’ and the name of the game on earth is to ensure you get yourself a ticket to ‘somewhere else’ when you die, or else .... His essential message is chiselled in marble in his mausoleum – ‘never born, never died, only visited ...’ – i.e. He was most definitely not the mortal flesh and blood body!

So, to call this a mere ‘fashion’ at one stage, is to demean and belittle the teachings of Rajneesh in no small way. I also find curious the use of the term ‘spiritual’ Sannyas’. Do you use this term derogatorily as a means of distinction from the non-spiritual ‘social’ sannyasins? Does this define seekers from non-seekers, the piously religious from the perpetually rebellious, those who are still looking from those who have merely given up?

I am curious, for you are writing as one who ‘sets the tone’ of what purports to be a ‘Magazine of the Buddhas’ and yet you factually misrepresent and appear to demean the essential message of the Buddhas. Are we perhaps seeing the emergence of yet another new and unique spiritual message?

Ask yourself ‘What am I doing and what am I doing it for?’ This is not the esoteric, ‘Who am I?’ It is a more practical, ‘Who am I in this moment. What is life about for me right now?’ Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A New Way to Live

The difference between the esoteric ‘Who am I?’ and the more practical ‘Who am I in this moment?’ totally escapes me. An actualist asks the question ‘What am I?’ in order to find a practical, down-to-earth answer. Asking the spiritual question ‘Who am I?’ has always, and can only, lead to one answer – ‘I am God’.

Asking the question ‘Who am I in this moment’ leads to such inanities as ‘I am watching my ‘self’ be angry but it is not me being angry – it is only anger happening’. One begins to create a second entity – a ‘me’ who watches an ‘I’ being angry and who then begins to disassociate and disconnect from the bad or negative feelings, emotions and passions.

An actualist remains firmly rooted in the facts that there are only two things in operation in this moment of being alive. There is the actual, physical flesh and blood body me – what I am – inside of which dwells a parasitical entity – the ‘me’ who I think and feel I am. By asking the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ one has the opportunity to discover and investigate, and incrementally eliminate, the alien entity who is causing me, the flesh and blood body, to feel sad, feel lonely, act violently, be cunning, be malicious, say something spiteful, feel resentful, etc. etc. These feelings, emotions and passions are real in that they are ruining my happiness and causing me to be harmful to my fellow human beings. It’s a simple business, nothing complicated.

There is a ‘what’ I am and there is a ‘who’ I am. No need to get your pronouns in a twist and no sense in continuing on with the spiritual deviousness of creating a third ‘I’ as the watcher.

There is a cute little ‘Vineeto diagram’ that says it all.

What was then necessary was to abandon control, and abandon any notions I had of a ‘me’ being aware and simply let awareness happen by itself. This awareness is not ‘me’ being aware for this only serves to keep ‘me’ in existence. This is not an outer intense ‘on-guard’ awareness for this wariness only serves to keep the instinctual ‘me’ in existence as a fearful guarding entity. Naiveté is vital in this stage of the process, but beware of being gullible for the world is still as-it-is and people are still as-they-are – it is only me who is changing. It still necessitates keeping my wits about me and making a few practical adjustments now and again, but the emotions have all but disappeared from what would have been tumultuous events not so long ago.

Thus it is that more and more I can look with soft eyes at a friendly world, let my guard down, relax my defences, give up being in control and I, as this flesh and blood body, can be here in this actual world where I have always been.

Chapt. 10 Far More Than a Machine

Most of us spend our entire lives believing that our bodies, our minds and our emotions form who we are. We have forgotten that we are far more than the automatic machinery with which we have become identified. There is a part of us that is separate from the human machine. It is consciousness. <snip> Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A New Way to Live

The common perception is that ‘I’ am consciousness – as in ‘I’ am who ‘I’ think and feel ‘I’ am.

The spiritual version is to take this illusionary entity, ‘I’ as consciousness, and turn it into a grand entity that is of ‘higher consciousness’ – disassociated from the physical, mortal body, disassociated from sensible thinking, enquiry and questioning, and disassociated from bad emotions, feelings and actions. This cultivating of another entity is formalized in many Eastern Religions by acts of renunciation, taking of vows, turning away from the temptations of the real world, adoption of robes and new names. The taking of Sannyas in Mr. Rajneesh’s religion is a prime example of adopting a new identity that many on this list will recognize.

When a situation arises and you are not 100% present, you will react mechanically, like a computer that has been programmed from the past. Whether you react with a yes or no, this reaction is not originating in the purity of you. It comes from the part that is the robot. When you are present and unconditional with whatever the maximum potential of this moment may be, all the internal and external influences will be there, but they will have no real effect on you. When we stop avoiding and accept our experience, the sensations will be in the body, the mind, and the emotions but they will not be in the place that we will come to know as ourselves. We are beyond those things, yet we cannot make ourselves ‘go’ beyond them. Include the mind, the emotions and the body with acceptance and you are here and beyond them. Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A New Way to Live

This is all good stuff for an actualist! I think the expression is ‘grist for the mill’. And to think the God-men have the gall to claim they are in a ‘self’-less state when it is perfectly obvious that the spiritual process is designed to create another identity – the Self, the real ‘you’, the pure ‘you’, ‘the source’, etc.

His reference to ‘you are here and beyond them’ is a reluctant acknowledgement of the fact that while the spirit remains trapped within the body it has to accept its lot – until a final release when the body dies and then one can really go beyond. This is acknowledged in all Eastern religion whereby Enlightenment is seen as an experience of Nirvana, a prior state before final release into Parinirvana after death.

I have just finished watching a TV documentary about Timothy Leary of ‘turn on, tune in ... and drop out fame’. In the late 1960’s he was at the forefront of experimenting with and publicizing the use of LSD and other chemicals that act to interrupt and temporarily alter the fixed, robotic electro-chemical circuitry in the brain.

A few aspects of the documentary were interesting and none more so than to see a historical documentary where so many of the characters were playing themselves. Many of the main figures of the 60’s psychedelic scene were interviewed for the film and these clips were spliced with old interviews and archival footage. Someone who was now 60 or 70 years old was interviewed, juxtaposed with film of them as 20 or 30 year olds. What was revealing to see was that the naiveté of youth and the well-meaning 60’s aims of peace, love and brown rice for all, had wilted and been replaced by a turning away, a foreboding cynicism, an introverted self-love and a lust for immortality. Two of the central characters who demonstrated this best were Timothy Leary himself and Richard Alpert who is now known as Ram Das.

Both said they had taken LSD hundreds of times and both had developed different interpretations of their experiences. Richard Alpert had a taste of the Divine, an altered state of consciousness, and became a mystic, a spiritual teacher, and a full-on devotee of an Eastern God-man. His experience when in an altered state of consciousness was that he was not the body and not the mind. He described stepping out of illusion of the real world into God-Consciousness. He then talked of Timothy Leary saying ‘he wasn’t into mysticism’.

Leary’s interest remained with the brain and thinking and he believed his ‘soul’ was located in his brain, to use his words. In his last years this thought became such an obsession that he arranged for his head to be cut off after his pre-arranged death and for it to be frozen in order that his ‘soul-brain’ could be revived at some future date. It’s such a bizarre tale and I still wonder if the film of his frozen head was genuine or a hoax. Certainly in his interviews he was convinced that his soul-brain was capable of mental immortality. Unlike his spiritual contemporaries, in his altered state of consciousness he didn’t identify with who he felt he was, his affective feelings, but he identified with who he thought he was, his nonsensical thoughts. What both Alpert and Leary shared in common with all other human beings was that they desperately maintained their true self to be a disembodied alien identity. One felt he was a soul-heart, while the other thought he was a soul-brain – anything other than a mortal flesh and blood body, a cellular arrangement of finite life span.

I was curious as to how Leary had managed to put such an eccentric twist to his altered state of consciousness experiences until he recalled a story from his childhood and his memory of his grandfather’s advice – ‘Don’t be like everybody else’. While he was alive, he was exactly like everyone else who has experienced the infinitude of the physical universe in that he instinctually seized the experience for himself and sought to contrive to become that experience – to be immortal, timeless, eternal and ... disembodied. And despite his frozen head being in a glass jar in a freezer somewhere he has ended up just like everyone else – dead. Same old story, just with yet another bizarre tale to add to the long, long history of human beings inane search for immortality.

The animal survival instincts, embellished into a psychological and psychic fear of death at the core of human beings, has produced a glut of fantastic fairy stories, fervent beliefs, grotesque rituals, weird altered states of consciousness – all of them passionately fuelled by a desperate and futile urge for immortality.

So, the essential question that arises from this post is ... ‘Is there life after death for Timothy Leary’s head or is he nothing but a dead head?’

Vineeto suggested that maybe he was simply a head of his times.

It’s so good to question and investigate the Human Condition – it’s such fun once you get past the point where fear holds you back. When nothing becomes too sacred to question or investigate.

During my spiritual years I dutifully followed most of the dietary beliefs and social mores associated with New Dark Age spiritualism. I dutifully became a vegetarian during these years, as this was the expected norm in the group I was involved with. However, as I became free of spiritual belief, I also became free of the need to blindly follow the herd. I quickly resumed meat eating as I personally find it the most flavoursome way of getting protein and I also developed a connoisseur’s delight in fresh brewed coffee. There is a general poo-poohing of coffee-drinking in the local NDA community and much hype about its health consequences. Given that coffee drinking is so wide-spread in so many countries in the world with no discernable health consequences as opposed to non-coffee drinking populations, I have put the general anti-coffee drinking hype into the not-proven, scare-mongering myth category. Coffee drinking then becomes a personal preference because I enjoy the taste of good coffee and I have no adverse reactions to caffeine. I have sometimes noticed a rush after a particularly excellent cup, but then again, I sometimes get a similar rush from a particularly good piece of fish, duck, ham, fruit, etc., not to mention the sensual pleasure of sex. Perhaps this rush could be classified as a brief sensory overload as it is physically based and not emotionally based.

The whole area of distinguishing and separating emotional reactions and the associated chemical reactions from peak sensate experiences and bountiful sensual enjoyment is a fascinating field of exploration. To experience this change of focus of your awareness from ‘self’-centred affective-chemical to pure sensate-sensual will become more and more interesting as you eliminate more of the normal emotional reactions that act to distort, pervert and obscure the sensual delight of the world we actually live in. As more and more of ‘me’, the spoiler, is progressively eliminated, I began to increasingly directly experience the paradisaical nature of this planet we humans live on. The local supermarket becomes a cornucopia of taste with delicious things to eat, almost jumping off the shelves at me. I swim through the air when walking downtown – sometimes moist and heavy with tropical scents, sometimes brisk, sparkling and effervescent. My flat is a comfortable cave, so chock a block full of comfort and pleasure that it alone satisfies all of my needs.

The very things, objects, implements, appliances and electronic toys become fascinating things – the matter of the universe. Everything on this planet is fashioned from the animal, vegetable or mineral of this planet. Nothing is experienced as alien or unnatural, separate from or different than me, this flesh and blood body. This flesh and blood body is, in fact, animate matter of this planet. I am an earthling, created from the joining of a sperm and an egg of other earthlings, grown and sustained by consuming animal, vegetable and mineral matter of this very same planet. What I am, however, is not only animate matter, as in animal, but what I am is conscious animate matter, bristling with sensory receptors, which also allows me to not only experience the rich lingering mouth-filling flavour of a fresh brewed cup of coffee ... but to thoroughly enjoy the sensuousness of it.

And to think I was socially and instinctually conditioned to constantly complain about, and even resent, being here and that I once believed in the traditional sop to this conditioning by constantly being grateful to some God-man or non-existent mythical God, force or energy ... It does seem more than a little strange that I once believed all this crap.

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