Selected Correspondence Peter

In the above circumstances ‘I’ am exposed but unlike others I make the effort to keep the lights on and fully experience it. This is ‘my’ pure intent at this moment.

Just the other day I had a visit from a man who I have known from my spiritual years. I always enjoy chatting with him, and particularly so because he is one of the few people I know from that time who is still actively searching. He even became interested in actualism for a while but he could be said to be a spiritual-experience junky because he had an altered state of consciousness experience and ardently wanted more of the same. As such the proposition that spiritualists are searching 180 degrees in the wrong direction had no appeal to him at all.

He started to talk about a TV documentary he had seen regarding the latest relativistic cosmological theory which proposes that the universe we humans sensately experience is but one of many universes, aka ‘quantum fluctuations’, that could have, or indeed have, arisen from the ‘background quantum vacuum’. Given that I had also seen the program and that this is currently a thread on this mailing list I was interested in chatting with him about the sense he made of relativistic cosmology. In short, I found that he baulked at any attempt to talk about the sense of the notion because he was enamoured with the whole theoretical construct in that it opened up the further possibility of all sorts of further imaginary scenarios.

One aspect of the TV program that I particularly remembered was the on-going discussion amongst the relativistic cosmologists as to why this universe ‘came into being’ and not one of the infinite number of other randomly possible universes that could have ‘come into being’ out of the background quantum gravity. The conclusion that seems to be prevalent is that ‘this universe’ has occurred solely in order that human consciousness could exist – in other words, the cosmologists’ imaginative ‘reasoning’ came to a conclusion that is utterly anthropocentric. At the end of the program one of the scientists related an anecdote where an audience member supposedly interrupted a cosmologist’s lecture and declared that she knew that the universe sat on top of a giant turtle’s back. The cosmologist responded by asking the woman ‘what was the turtle standing on?’, to which she replied ‘you can’t trick me – it’s turtles all the way down’. As the program ended the final image was of a stack of turtles, on top of which sat not the universe but the figure of a human being.

It occurred to me that the ending exemplified the ‘self’-generated obsession that human beings have that consciousness is primary and matter is secondary, so I pursued this line of conversation with my guest for a while. At first he had some difficulty in acknowledging that matter does exist separate from (his) consciousness, then he had difficulty in making a distinction between (his) consciousness and matter. As the conversation moved on it became clear as to why he was having such difficulty. He said he once had a spiritual experience of an ego-less state whereby his own consciousness merged with ‘everything’, as he put it. When I asked him if everything had a capital ‘E’ as in ‘Everything’ he sheepishly acknowledged that it sometimes did – I say ‘sheepishly’ because he knows I am an actualist. His liking for relativistic cosmology – or subjectivistic cosmology as it would be more accurate to call it – was immediately obvious because any metaphysical theorizing that gives credence to the ‘self’-aggrandizing fantasies of ‘self’-centred consciousness would be intuitively appealing.

Given that he had had an experience of an expanded ‘self’ consciousness and indeed was even teaching this to others, it became obvious that it was futile to pursue the topic further so I made us coffee, he bummed the makings of a cigarette from me and we put our feet up for a while. The conversation then turned to the subject of searching for the meaning of life and he made the comment that he had always been driven to make sense of life even as a young boy and that he thought that this was a prime motivation for human beings in general. I agreed with him and said that I had written a book about the sense I had made about the human condition because I thought it might be of interest to others.

As the conversation continued it emerged that what he was interested in was making sense of the possibility of a higher form of consciousness as in an overarching Consciousness that transcends the grim reality of everyday existence. I then said that I had also been attracted to this until a series of events that began with the death of my son and culminated with my meeting Richard led to me abandoning trying to make sense of this ‘self’-centred fantasy and completely reversed my focus to becoming vitally interested in making sense of why the human condition is typified by endless wars, conflicts, arguments, sadness, despair, escapist fantasies, failed hopes and impossible dreams.

Bringing the conversation closer to home I said I wanted to know why I couldn’t live with at least one other person in peace and harmony and that I had used this as the starting point of my investigations into the human condition. We both agreed that there is no more difficult a testing ground than this but he was wary of pursuing the subject further as the very subject appeared to be too close to the bone.

Afterwards I reflected on the vast gulf between his intent and my intent in wanting to make sense of life – his is a search for the True Meaning of consciousness, whereas mine is wanting to experientially understand the malice and sorrow that is inherent to the human condition such that I can become free of it. It seemed to me that while we both were driven by the same motivational impulse to make sense of things, our focus and our intent were indeed poles apart.

This chance meeting appeared to me to encapsulate the differences in intent between an actualist’s search for meaning and the traditional search for meaning, which is why I mentioned it in the context of our discussion as it may be of use to you given your years of being on the spiritual path and your own spiritual experiences.

I have yet to come across anything that contradicts the premise that the basic animal instincts are those of fear, aggression, nurture and desire but I think it is fair to say that these instinctual reactions are most obviously, and disastrously, experienced in the human animal species as the deeply-felt emotions of malice and sorrow.

I remember when Richard read my journal he was interested in what I wrote about fear because he said it was not a major issue for him on his journey out of the human condition. I wrote that I experienced fear as often manifesting itself as doubt and hesitation but that I found the fear associated with radical change could be channelled into the thrill of discovery and the challenge of a pioneering adventure. Since then my experience is that sorrow is the predominant human emotion which an actualist needs to focus upon if he or she is to become free of humanity, simply because it is the passion of sorrow that ultimately binds humanity together.

Becoming free of sorrow is not a one-off event or realization – it requires moment-to-moment attentiveness, developed over time and with practice, to the point of obsessive vigilance.

I remember doing a brief skip through the writings of Freud and others when I first came across actualism. For about a year I did a fair bit of wide ranging reading in order to check out the state of play with regards to both the historic and current understandings of the human condition. I checked out both the spiritual world and real world viewpoints and ended up having to acknowledge Richard’s incomparable expertise in the field – not only intellectually but of equal importance, experientially as well. In hindsight, it was this intellectual checking out for myself, combined with my own success in becoming incrementally more happy and harmless, that served to set my doubts and fears aside.

With regards to Freud and his theories about human consciousness, I find the whole notion of levels of consciousness to be both confusing and esoteric in nature. Rather than considering the human mind as having levels of consciousness, it is far more accurate and down-to-earth to understand that every human mind is inevitably subject to comprehensive social programming overlaying an intrinsic instinctual programming. The social programming can be likened to the operating software program of a computer and the instinctual programming can be likened to the bios program – a level deeper certainly, but still software.

As such, it is the programming of the mind that has deeper levels and not consciousness per se. At its deepest level this programming is species instinctual – every human being is psychologically and psychically bound to the notion of Humanity, which in itself is the psychological and psychic manifestation of the human species. The notion that consciousness itself has levels gives rise to the commonly-held belief that ‘I’ as consciousness have deeper levels which in turn gives rise to the feeling that there is a real ‘me’ lurking somewhere inside and if ‘I’ can only become this real ‘me’, ‘I’ will find freedom and fulfilment, not to mention power and immortality.

You will have no doubt noticed in your own investigations the various levels of programming that the human mind has been subjected to. You will have noticed that as you strip away an outer layer of belief you are more easily able to acknowledge the facts and make sense of a situation. Similarly as you remove the outer layers of social programming you are more able to understand and experience the deeper layers of instinctual programming that have been genetically encoded by blind nature. This basic survival programming of fear, aggression, nurture and desire forms the deeper layers that have been wrongly construed as being deeper layers of consciousness or unconscious layers in some jargon.

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Because actualism is so radically different to anything else that has passed for knowledge and wisdom about human consciousness I eventually gave up looking for the similarities with past thinking so as to concentrate my focus on the differences. This is not to deny the contribution that many human beings have made to the study of human consciousness but actualists are in fact involved in a process that is a radical departure from all that is considered normal, natural, wise, profound, traditional or esoteric.

Because of this it is useful to always keep in mind the experience of pure consciousness when there is no ‘I’ or ‘me’ being conscious, let alone so-called levels of consciousness operating. What is readily apparent in a pure consciousness experience is a singular remarkable experience of consciousness – consciousness being conscious of consciousness – a sensuous awareness of being aware, completely bare of any ‘I’ thinking or ‘me’ feeling whatsoever.

For an actualist, a pure consciousness experience always serves as a touchstone of pure experiencing, a source for personal understanding and a springboard for further investigations.

2. Further, the advancement of animate life from simple to more complex is a result of random circumstances acting on nascent, but animate organisms.

‘Simple to more complex’ is not a description I would use to describe the manifestation of both consciousness and intelligence in the human animal. It is only humans who see these attributes as increased complexity, for humans have a predisposition to always make what is simple into something complex. You do seem to be fixated on randomness as being the only alternative to being premeditated, as in deliberately created, controlled or ordered by Someone or Something.

When you refer to consciousness being separate from matter you are referring to ‘I’, as a disembodied consciousness, looking out through the eyes at the physical world and feeling separate from it? A pure consciousness experience is an experience where this separation simply does not exist for it is evident that ‘I’ am an illusion and my consciousness is a none other than this physical body’s consciousness. Or, to put it succinctly for you, this flesh and blood body is conscious animate life.

However if you really go with this feeling of ‘you’ being a separate disembodied entity and practice dissociation from the physical world, ‘you’ can feel as though you are Real and the outer world can appear unreal or illusionary. I have had a few of these experiences myself but when a God-man confirmed I was ‘on the right track’ I started to seriously doubt the sensibility of my glorious, ‘I am the centre of all existence’, experience. I began to see that becoming a God-man was a poor career choice because I had seen enough of the God-men up close to know that I did not like how they were with their women, I didn’t like their lifestyle, and I didn’t like how they were with their disciples and with each other.

4. Objects have, of them selves, the characteristics revealed by the senses when they are not the subject of sensory perception.

Has this got something to do with that solipsistic nonsense that goes something like ‘if nobody sees a tree falling in the forest, does it really fall?’ I remember walking around the house once and turning around very quickly to see if I could catch some object that was a little slow in appearing to my senses. I gave up pretty quickly as I realized how foolish I was and how totally ‘self’-centred my neurosis was.

5. Consciousness is the result of nascent material processes. Specifically, conscious processes (recognition, memory, logic, spatial awareness, sensory perception, calculation, reaction, response, deduction, induction, communication, awareness, morality, personality etc.) results from the interaction of the material substratum of the brain which is composed of varying chemicals which in and of there own chemical properties, and through and through the same chemical properties, no characteristic of conscious processes can be found.

As I said, humans have a predisposition to always make what is simple into something complex. In a normal person consciousness is what is happening when one is alive and awake. Unconsciousness is what is happening when alive and in deep sleep, concussed or anaesthetized and is epitomized by oblivion.

But I do understand your particular problem. The common interpretation of consciousness is self-consciousness or self-awareness and is epitomized by three faculties – the sensate awareness of what appears to be a separate ‘outer’ world and the cerebral awareness and affective awareness of one’s inner ‘self’. Thus in a normal person, consciousness usually refers to the consciousness of the psychological and psychic entity only. Thus ‘I’ am conscious of ‘me’ only – the normal ‘self’-centeredness of normal people.

It is only in a Pure Consciousness Experience when the psychological and psychic entity’s affective and cerebral dominance is temporarily absent that the extraordinary perfection and purity of the actual is directly and sensately experienced.

Whereas, as you well know, in an Altered State of Consciousness the psychological and psychic entity’s affective and cerebral dominance becomes total and ‘I’ think and feel ‘I’ am absolutely Real and totally disembodied, and what is actual as in physical, tangible and palpable is experienced by ‘me’ as being unreal, dreamlike or illusionary.

6. is the consciousness that you describe as ‘what is happening when one is alive and awake’ the result of nescient material processes? Specifically, does the consciousness that you describe as ‘what is happening when one is alive and awake’ result from the interaction of the material substratum of the brain which is composed of varying chemicals which in and of there own chemical properties, and through and through out the same chemical properties, no characteristic of conscious processes can be found?

This makes about as much sense as asking ‘can you find the characteristics of breathing in the material substratum of the lungs’. The function of the lungs is to breathe air in and out. Similarly, the function of the heart is to pump blood around the body. Similarly, the function of the brain is to be the receptor for the sensory system of the body – in fact the senses are stalks or tentacles of the brain – and one of the brain’s functions is to make sense of this sensory input.

This function of making sense is called thinking and the body’s awareness of itself being alive and wake is called consciousness. I know these facts may be inconceivable to you but they are facts, all of which can be confirmed experimentally and by direct observation.

The process of actualism is aimed at stripping this bodily consciousness free of all of ‘my’ self-centred neuroses and instinctual passions – to eradicate the real but non-actual parasitical alien entity that has taken up residence inside this body, ‘I’ as the thinker and ‘me’ as the feeler. This entity usurps the bodily function of consciousness and claims consciousness for itself – giving rise to the unavoidable and commonly-accepted ‘self’-centred view that ‘I’ am consciousness and ‘I’ am not the body. Actualism is about breaking this stranglehold by undertaking a process aimed at actively diminishing this social and instinctual identity to the point where ‘self’-immolation is the inevitable result

The only way to make sense of what I am saying is to remember a pure consciousness experience where the ‘self’-less functioning of consciousness is made startlingly clear simply because there is no psychological or psychic identity whatsoever to be found.

An understanding of exactly what is consciousness is essential for anyone seeking a genuine freedom from malice and sorrow.

Thus consciousness has three meanings –

In a normal person consciousness is what is happening when one is alive and awake. Unconsciousness is what is happening when alive and in deep sleep, concussed or anaesthetized and is epitomized by oblivion.

The second meaning is the one that is commonly used to describe the awareness of oneself and is epitomized by three faculties ... the sensate, the cerebral and the affective. Thus in a normal person consciousness refers to the consciousness of the psychological and psychic entity only, who we ‘think’ and ‘feel’ we are, as opposed to what we are. It is only in a Pure Consciousness Experience that the psychological and psychic entity’s affective and cerebral dominance is temporarily absent that the extraordinary perfection and purity of the actual is sensately evidenced.

This collective sense of consciousness forms such a strong illusion as to appear real.

Unfortunately the actual evidence of this collective ‘consciousness’ is that it varies from culture to culture and religion to religion and, as such, is merely a socially imbibed and adopted belief system. The collective sense of consciousness is the direct result of the automatic instilling of a culturally appropriate conscience in each group member with its associated values, ethics and morals. This collective consciousness is epitomized by a feeling of belonging to a group and gives rise to such feelings as ‘we are all one’, ‘we are all God’s children’, ‘we are all That’ or other similar platitudes. As is evidenced by the facts of ethnic, territorial, religious and ethical wars these feelings are utterly fanciful and nonsensical.

The over-riding selfishness inevitably proves stronger for those willing to grab for power, and in the spiritual world the most powerful leaders inevitably declare narcissistically that ‘I am the One’, I am God’ or ‘I am That’. For the mere followers, the collective consciousness operates such that one will inevitably surrender one’s will for the supposed ‘good of the whole’, and if ‘push comes to shove’ to willingly and passionately kill and die for the group and its leader. It is this instinctive feeling of a collective consciousness that lies at the very heart of one’s social identity and forever enslaves the individual to a particular group and all human kind to the Human Condition of malice and sorrow.

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The hardware is a two brain system – an ancient instinctual brain that is primary and thoughtless emotional and a newer neo-cortex that is the seat of human intelligence. The software consists of two facets – a social programming that forms one’s social identity and an instinctual survival program that forms one’s instinctual self. Being software, both these programs can be deleted – i.e. although they are felt to be real, cause immense pain and suffering both in oneself and to others one comes in contact with, they can be changed and ultimately deleted.

This deletion of the instilled social and genetically-encoded instinctual programming results in a beneficent clarity of intelligence freed from the insidious influence of the animal passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

The more conditioned the programming, and the more passionate one is about this conditioning, the less intelligence is free to operate.

This boundless, infinite, eternal, perfect and pure physical universe has materially manifested and evolved luxuriant and abundant carbon-based life on this planet. The human species, the most sophisticated of life forms, capable of thinking, planning and reflecting, represents the pinnacle of the emergence and development of life, as we know it, in the universe. The human body is a marvellous organism whose chief characteristic, apart from intelligence is an ability to be conscious of itself in operation. Given that each human being is born with an instinctual ‘self’ overlaid since birth with a further layer of social identity this consciousness is a ‘self’-consciousness. Thus a consciousness of ‘who’ I think and ‘who’ I feel I am is constantly predominant and the bare consciousness of the flesh-and-blood-body only gets a peek in during a pure consciousness experience when the ‘self’ is temporarily absent.

The fact that both intelligence and consciousness arise from matter is far, far more of a miracle than the common fairy tale that ‘it’s all the work of some Higher Power’ or the delusion that this infinite, eternal, pure and perfect universe is ‘my’ personal Reality or ‘My’ personal creation.

Human history has been a constant struggle for intelligence and common sense to break free of the grip of fear, superstition, mysticism and the wrath of spiritualists. The human condition is still firmly in the grip of ancient wisdom and religious belief and the anguish, despair, conflict and bloodshed this causes beggars description.

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Everyone believes it is impossible for intelligence and consciousness to have evolved from matter for to acknowledge this would be the ending of any spiritual/religious belief. This fact also means that both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as spirit/soul are but illusionary fabrications and the real me is this flesh and blood body only. Faced with this information which ‘I’ take to be an appalling threat to ‘my’ very existence, ‘I’ frantically seek to deny it and desperately imagine a way out of being here in the material world.

There is an alternative to this fantasy of denial and escapism that is fuelled by ‘my’ fear of exposure and ‘my’ fear of death and that is to deliberately embark upon a process that will eventuate in ‘self’-immolation – to experience a psychological and psychic death of my ‘self’ before physical death and thus become what I am – this flesh and blood body only.

Everybody has experienced a totally ‘self’-less state sometime in their life and these experiences are known as Pure Consciousness Experiences, nature experiences or Jamais Vu experiences. These are all pure experiences, where for a brief period of time, there is no ‘I’ as thinker or ‘me’ as feeler present, but there is a direct sensate-only experience of the actual world in which we live. This actual world is experienced as vibrantly alive, pure, perfect and effervescent in its immediacy. So encompassing is this direct experience, it is as though one has entered another dimension, or as though a veil has been lifted on all that one usually sees, hears, touches and smells, and one is experiencing the familiar in a new and astounding way. It is as though one has been previously living in a ‘self’-created dream and one experiences, as a flesh and blood body brimming with sense organs, the vivacious physicality and infinitude of this infinite and eternal universe. One’s senses are heightened, one’s thinking clear and one’s consciousness is unpolluted by any affective feelings whatsoever, be they ‘savage’ as in fear and aggression or ‘tender’ as in love, gratitude or compassion.

In these ‘self’-less pure experiences, one is the universe experiencing itself as a flesh and blood human being.

Given that a PCE, or peak experience as it sometimes referred to, can often be induced by drugs or traumatic experiences that alter the brain’s chemical balance it would indicate that the onset of a PCE is neuro-biological phenomena. This is confirmed by the fact that modern neuro-biological research by Joseph LeDoux and others are beginning to trace emotions such as fear to the automatic reaction of the primitive brain. The amygdala in particular is being identified as the source that activates a flow of chemicals in the body as an automatic fight or flight response in the face of danger. This instinctual chemical flow reaches the neo-cortex or modern cognitive brain a split second later and is interpreted by the alien entity as psychological and/or psychic fear. In the PCE, it would seem that this pathway from the ancient instinctual brain to the modern cognitive brain no longer functions, i.e. it is temporarily blocked. The modern brain, thus freed from its instinctual ‘self’-centred passion-producing companion, the primitive brain (amygdala), is able to operate freely with a pure consciousness.

The physical senses – the stalks of the brain – are similarly freed of the ever-fearful guard duty that is imposed on the modern brain by the instinctual primitive brain. This freedom from chemical assault results in a startling sensate-only experience of the actual world that is best described as sensuous delight. It is as though colours are far more vibrant, sounds far louder, tastes more flavoursome, touch more sensual, smells more fragrant and everything is experienced as vibrant and not merely passive.

In the PCE, the experience of ‘self’-lessness, the lack of any instinctual passion, the clarity of thought and reflection and the heightened physical senses all accord with the neo-cortex being freed from the insidious influence of the animal instinctual reptilian brain. How this happens physically in a PCE is, to my knowledge, yet to be mapped by empirical science but there is clear evidence that a permanent disconnection has been deliberately induced by at least one person and is being deliberately induced by a handful of others.

This is, of course, a clinical scientific description only and the process cannot be separated from its psychological and psychic ramifications and, as such, the term ‘self’-immolation is a more evocatively accurate term to describe this process.

The inducing of a permanent state of pure consciousness experiencing is pioneering stuff at this stage, brand new and never been tried before in human history ... but the time is right and the experiment is well under way.

Yes, No. 6 wrote that I was trying hard to make people upset and angry and I mentioned that I had exactly the same feelings when I was immersed in the spiritual world and started to question my own beliefs. I also explained that these feelings and passions are instinctually sourced.

It is exactly because we humans have the ability to think and reflect that the instinctual passions can infiltrate our thinking and be experienced as feelings. In fact, a feeling is an emotional-backed thought. As such, we humans are automatically programmed for self-defence that we turn into a passion of ‘self’-defence. Thus we feel attacked when our beliefs are questioned for these beliefs form an integral part of ‘who’ we think and feel we are. We feel personally attacked for our social identity as a spiritual person is being questioned – thus the automatic ‘self’-survival instincts kick in.

Humans beings are unique among the animal species in that we instinctually react not only to physical danger but when ‘we’ feel either psychologically or psychically threatened, which is nearly all the time. The only psychological and psychic security we find is feeling secure within a group of like-minded people. The planet is full of these groups of humans all huddling together, defending themselves or attacking others, either overtly or covertly – currently some 6 billion people are involved in a grim and desperate battle for survival.

But this instinctual and habitual fearful behaviour is redundant in these modern times and those who are daring enough and willing enough to rid themselves of the instinctual passions will find themselves able to walk upright with impunity on this paradisiacal planet.

As for your second point – ‘something that is the pinnacle of human consciousness and the most precious discovery anyone can realize’. Do you mean Eastern Enlightenment or spirituality in general? Either way, are you saying that all human beings should still believe in, and follow the wisdom of, those on the planet thousands of years ago who claim to have discovered the Truth about human existence on the planet? That what they discovered we should still hold to be sacred and inviolate? That despite the fact that human beings still slaughter each other in horrendous wars over which Truth is the only, true, real or right Truth, we should accept that the current human condition of malice and sorrow represents the pinnacle of human consciousness? That peace on earth is not possible?

I do understand the wonderful feelings and deep emotions that well up when one hears the Truth spoken by some God-man or woman, the blissful states that can be experienced and the altered states of consciousness that can be induced for I have experienced the full gamut over a period of 17 years. But the central message of the Truth – there is life after death and we are just ‘passing through’ before we go to a better place ‘somewhere else’ – is a fairy tale. When I was on the spiritual path it was the best on offer for it pointed to being able to achieve release or freedom for one’s self or soul while on earth, not in heaven. At least it offered succour and a chance to feel good.

But things have moved on, particularly in the last century, and a momentous breakthrough has been made in this last decade that makes the ancient search for a freedom for one’s spirit utterly second-rate. Many, many humans have attempted to break the stranglehold that ancient belief and mysticism has always held over the human search for freedom, peace and happiness and, the time being right, it has finally happened.

I was struck with the same reaction as you when I first came across this third alternative but, as I had some doubts about the spiritual path anyway, I was prepared to investigate further to see if what was proposed made sense.

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