In a PCE it is startlingly evident that the human condition we are born into doesn’t work – it begets either cynical acceptance or fanciful denial as the prime mechanisms of coping with malice and sorrow. It then becomes an imperative to question all the morals, ethics, ideals, theories, ideas, concepts, truths, doctrines and dogmas that have been passed on to us by those who were here before us. Once begun in earnest, this process does not result in endless questioning loops for as one replaces fact with belief one’s confidence grows to the point where one no longer needs to believe others – the very action of believing stops. This is not a meta-physical ‘knowing’ or feeling, but a sensible down-to-earth discovery and acknowledgement of the facts of human existence on earth. From this feet-on-the-ground state of increasing confidence and heightened sensuousness one is then able to step out of the human condition with gay abandon and impunity.

As for ‘cynical disillusioned’, I have had this charge levelled at me countless times.

Below is a typical exchange from the Sannyas mailing list before I was cyber-executed from the list for being too heretical and iconoclastic ... <Snip>

That’s a pretty clear statement. You never thought for one second that the New Man was going to happen and you never thought for one second that peace on earth would ever happen. And you don’t want to talk about or debate about peace on earth. It keeps up the 100% record of Sannyasins who are either in denial or don’t care.

What I find fascinating is a movement that was supposedly altruistic and caring has degenerated into a self-centred social club’ totally lacking in any direction or motive apart from self-fulfilment – both as a group and as individuals. No wonder peace on earth forever remains an unfulfilled dream. Peace on earth is literally sacrificed at the altar of dead God-men.

I won’t reply now in the particular to your email, there is just too much for me to answer at the moment. But a few thoughts. You don’t really know me and yet you constantly relate everything I say to ‘Eastern religion’ This is the Big Lie technique. Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes true. As it happens I have no time for Eastern Religion, the New Age and so called Alternative Therapies, I think your difficulty is that you do not see how this is possible.

I do find it difficult. For me, once I saw that Sannyas was nothing other than Eastern religion, I found it increasingly difficult to maintain my state of denial of what I had got myself into. This practice of denial of the world as-it-is, and the acceptance of ‘me’ as-I-am, is common in Eastern philosophy and religion and I have written of it extensively, particularly in my review of Paul Lowe’s book ‘In Each Moment’ .

You do seem to have some wobbles however, for you have said in a previous post –

‘I ‘think’ if you examine it again you’ll see that those of ‘my’ religion (do I own this religion?)...’

This is a sign of someone who is at least willing to toy with the idea of not denying and maybe beginning to question. But here again you lapse back into defensive mode and retreat even further from questioning and back into even more trenchant denial.

*

I believe that I’ve never (since I was a child) been a believer in anything much. There are many things I don’t know – I’ve no idea what happens when we die and not much interest. I’ve no idea about god or god men and no beliefs around these ideas – again you don’t see how this is possible. I’ll find out one day about death etc, but for the moment it’s irrelevant. The only things I believe in general are those things which I’ve experienced and tried out for myself. If I haven’t tried it out for myself then I don’t know and it’s as simple as that.

‘Not knowing’ is highly venerated in the East – where ignorance is bliss, thinking for oneself and questioning of one’s faith is actively discouraged – for the very reason that facts and common sense are anathema to beliefs and impassioned imagination.

Thus it is that people are encouraged to ignore what the ‘mind-fuckers’ are saying – ‘you are in your head and not your heart’ is a common spiritual put-down. One is encouraged to go by one’s own ‘experience’ by which they mean go by one’s own feelings for the spiritual world is but a world of feeling and imagination.

Also your response was to cut and paste from all over the place only to support your argument and I see that you do not understand some quite simple things that I say. You use the General to legitimate the Particular and as far as I’m concerned this is not on, e.g. ‘Some Jews are very good with money’ becomes ‘all Jews are good with money’ This is why I perceive you as stereotyping so often. Your stereotyping of me is wrong most of the time.

Another furphy.

What about ‘all Jews believe in the Jewish god and are therefore religious people’ – exactly as ‘all Sannyasins believe that Rajneesh was a God-man and are therefore religious people’. At least this example has some relevance to the discussion.

As an aside, I have heard Sannyasins described as New Age Jews which I take it is not that ‘all Sannyasins are good with money’, which is clearly wrong, but it may relate to their small numbers, their fierce isolationism, their feeling of ultimate superiority and their identification as the persecuted one’s.

Whose commandment is it that thou shalt ‘not use the General to legitimate the Particular’? Why are you back in denial when you have already agreed on the value and necessity of sensible judgement –

Personally I find judgement very useful and necessary – how else does one determine what is silly and what is sensible. Spiritual people do it all the time by judging things as good or bad, right or wrong. They simply use Eastern religious and New Dark Age morals and ethics which are but a variation on the Christian ones that many of them rejected or rebelled against in their youth.

Yes, I agree totally ...

And yet here we have another version of ‘thou shalt not judge’. A spiritual person is encouraged not to use the mind, not to sensibly judge – or label, or stereo-type, or ... – instead one is encouraged to practice denial and acceptance, both of which are as judgemental as all get out. These imbibed habits can be tough to break but the rewards are freedom from following yet another psittacism.

When I first came across the possibility of an actual freedom from malice and sorrow I thought it must have been a spiritual thing because only the spiritual people talked of freedom. It took me months until I began to understand that the traditional spiritual path offered a feeling of liberation for one’s spirit or soul before death prior to a final real liberation from earthly suffering after physical death. I see that some people on the list use the expression illusion of ‘self’ and others refer to the illusionary physical world which means what must be REAL is one’s spirit, soul, Self, Atman, Essence, Heart, etc. – a disembodied, non-physical entity. By concentrating on repressing sensible thought, denying the actual world as evidenced by the physical senses, and letting one’s impassioned feelings and imagination run riot a new detached, superior and holy entity is realized.

To get to this state of complete dissociation is for most a very complex and torturous process and only a rare few manage to pull it off completely. The level of denial of the physical world alone requires an extraordinary effort. To regard all that we see, hear, touch, feel, smell, eat and breathe to be illusionary requires a mind-bending act of astounding tortuousness. It is because of the complexity and difficulty involved that most mystics had to renounce the obvious pleasures and delights of the physical world and go off to caves, monasteries, ashrams and lone wanderings and indulge in often bizarre practices such as meditation, yoga, chanting, whirling, special diets, celibacy, etc. in order to strengthen their fantasies.

The ‘self’ (including all its cunning spiritual variations) is an illusion, not the physical, tangible, palpable physical world.

The simple test as to what is actual is to place a peg on the nose, place some Gaffer tape firmly across the mouth and wait 10 minutes. As you rip the tape from your mouth and gasp for breath you will have an experiential understanding of what is actual and what is illusionary.

When I had my altered states of consciousness experiences I couldn’t quite pull off the denial of the physical bit. Something always made me suss about the need for renunciation, the isolationism, the elitism, the head-in-the-cloud feelings. The grand and glorious feelings were sure seductive but thankfully I held on to my doubts and my common sense and didn’t trust my feelings.

The spiritual view is that ‘I’ as the thinker is the issue and then one is extolled to actively encourage ‘me’ as the feeler to run rampant. My experience when I started to run with the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ was that it was feelings which continually and relentlessly emerged as my experiencing. Thus ‘I’ needed to feel grateful for being here in order to transcend the underlying feeling of resentment at having to be here at all, and ‘I’ needed to feel love in order to bridge the gulf that ‘I’ as an alien entity feel between ‘me’ and other human beings. ‘I’ feel compassion for others as a way of being able to indulge my own feelings of sorrow and ‘I’ feel indignant when someone else suffers injustice as ‘I’ really like a good fight. ‘I’ am ever fearful of what others think of me or feel about me, ‘I’ am ever on guard, ‘I’ am ever ready to defend myself against having ‘my’ feelings hurt. ‘My’ ploys are many in the battle with others – confrontation, withdrawal, snide remarks, denial, a bit of undermining, a bit of cutting down to size, a bit of a whinge to someone else – ‘I’ can be as cunning as all get-out in these battles, if need be.

‘I’ readily believed in the spiritual beliefs and wallowed in the blissful feelings as a welcome escape from everyday reality and the promise of an after-life was poetry to ‘my’ ears and salve to ‘my’ heart. ‘I’ felt deep-down that there was no hope for Humanity and no hope for me, and from these feelings were born a desperate belief in an after-life as an escape from the despair of life on earth. The list goes on and on as ‘I’ fight it out for survival with others in a grim world, and ‘I’ will ultimately do anything to stay in existence. ‘I’ am rotten to the core – the combination of animal instinctual passions and an ability to think and reflect make the human animal not only malicious but cunningly malicious. This lethal combination allows the human species not only to wage wars, inflict genocide, rape, murder, torture and pillage to a scale unprecedented in any other animal species but allows for the psychic warfare and power battles, blatant denial, fantasy escapes, corruption, deception and deceit that is endemic in all human interactions.

It soon became obvious to me that freedom from being an identity – social and animal-instinctual – was the only way to get free of this constant emotional churning and the constant selfishness of indulging in denial and fantasy escapism.

I recently wrote an article for the local ‘Magazine of the Buddhas’ entitled ‘Austradamus’s New Millennium Predictions’. You may remember I posted it to the list a while ago. It was a lampoon of the spiritual world and spiritual beliefs and they not only published the story it but said they liked it a lot. In the same issue the editor wrote an article which caught my eye, so much so that I was moved to write to him.

It is such a classic case of spiritual denial and/or ignorance that I thought it worthwhile to post the relevant piece together with my comment to the author.

Excerpt from the article from the ‘Magazine of the Buddhas’ –

A thousand orgasms a year for a thousand years!

‘Sounds a wonderful millennium wish doesn’t it. Gets you all squishy just thinking about it doesn’t it! Is that steam I see? Actually someone commented that they’d rather not be around for that long, and it got me wondering. Is there really any place more interesting, more fun, than here in the body?

Personally, when I’m feeling good, I mean really fucking good, I have no interest at all in being beyond the body. I really enjoy all the bodily things, feelings, emotions, thoughts, actions. 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 is meant to be. I wonder if perhaps this subtle rejection of the body is a hindrance to realization, enlightenment itself. It actually feels a bit Christian to me, and we all know what that means! No passing ‘GO’! I mean really, isn’t the body where everything takes place, the temple in which ‘life’ happens, the vehicle through which ecstasy, sex, wafts of coffee sailing the morning breeze, frangipani adorning the evening air, music that seduces, teases or releases passion, concepts become actual, ice-cream, the sun-sets that enrapture, love, how all the things enter our consciousness, how we become aware of them?

So my own wish for me in this millennium, is to be at such peace with who I am in the world and with myself, I am utterly happy to stick around for another millennium. (even if it means a thousand orgasms a year).’ <Snip>

Excerpt from my letter to the author –

‘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?

*

As you can see, this type of NDA writing represents a classic denial of the essential spiritual message and, I suspect, an attempt to ‘clip-on’ a wee bit of actualism completely misrepresented as ‘isn’t it fun to be in the body!! ... when you are feeling really fucking good’ (And if you’re not feeling good, you can always sneak into a Satsang or do a group which usually picks you up again for a while.) Ho, Hum.

I watched a TV discussion program last evening where the topic was good and evil in human beings. There were four people, a journalist, a lawyer, an academic whose field of study was the Holocaust and another academic involved in behavioural studies. Not one of the people thought that they were evil, or could do an evil act. The journalist accused the government and leaders for being evil, the lawyer thought we should look within for moral and ethical guidance, the academic studying the Holocaust blamed the Nazis for the genocide and thought the Milgram experiments irrelevant to the situation and the other academic looked forward to the time when we would identify the gene of benevolence. All were in denial that they were personally capable of evil actions and all denied that humans are born with a passion for anger and violence.

It reminded me that denial is not exclusive to Eastern religion and philosophy. But to make denial into a virtuous ethic, and further to make acceptance into a pious moral, is to make ‘self’-centeredness and ‘self’-righteousness into a religion. The Western religions tend to be monotheist, with one creationist, fire and brimstone, loving God, whereas Eastern Religions are much more appealing for they proffer the chance for you to feel you are that God or, in extreme cases of delusion, to become that God. And yet people keep insisting that spirituality is not a religion.

Another cute observation came from a TV program called ‘Spirituality in Hollywood’ in which a musician made the comment that religion is about choosing between heaven and hell, whereas spirituality is for those who have been to hell.

I was recently watching a TV program on a group undertaking a spiritual pilgrimage and a woman involved was interviewed. She was asked about the experience and she said that some things ‘bothered’ her – the crowds, her treatment as a woman, etc. – but she said ‘I’m not going to let it bother me’. A simple everyday statement of stoic denial and repression, but she also obviously had a passionate investment, for this was for her a profound spiritual experience and she was determined to let nothing spoil it for her. I remembered back to my spiritual times when I actively practiced to cut off from all things that were upsetting, ‘bothering’ or worrying. One was meant not to be bothered, to be above these petty concerns, one was not meant to have doubts about the teaching, or the teacher, or the organization for one was taught and extolled to have faith, loyalty and trust.

Thus it was that I actively practiced denial and transcendence – new tricks to add to the denial and repression of ‘bothersome’ feelings and emotions that I had been taught as a child. Transcendence is such a wonderfully seductive option, for one gets to swan along, literally with one’s head in the clouds, literally above it all. The real world problems of money, relationship, corruption and greed, and the feelings of anger, sorrow and melancholy were still around but ‘I’ was not part of it. The ‘real’ world became a tolerable nuisance – I was not going to let it bother me – the new spiritual ‘me’.

*

So prolific is denial in the Human Condition that it deserves a bit more rooting around to find the real source of it. As you well know, the most prevalent self-defence mechanism evident in any correspondence we have had about the Human Condition, is one of breathtaking denial. This is the dominant response to any attempted slightly in-depth discussion or exchange, be it with Richard, Vineeto or myself. This denial is what moved me off my bum to dig in to Paul Lowe’s book, and further investigate the denial that is enshrined in the teachings of Eastern religion and philosophy. A useful exercise in itself, and great fun to do, but the response to such uncovering of the lies, trickery and deceptions of the spiritual path is inevitably one of even more denial. ‘So what’, ‘it’s got nothing to do with me’, ‘I’m not on the spiritual path’, ‘My Guru tells the Truth’, ‘it’s about the feeling around the Gurus not the facts’ are typical responses. There have been countless times when I have said to someone what a relief it is to have abandoned the spiritual world and the spiritual person I have been talking to say they agree and nod their head. Two recent examples was a woman who had just arrived in town after being in the Himalayas meditating for 3 years, the other who had just produced a magazine attacking the members of his sect for not being loyal to his spiritual master. And yet both denied they were spiritual in any way! Whenever religions are exposed for the puerile nonsense they are it’s always someone else’s religion, or the person is not part of a religion, or they simply slink away.

This denial is so common a response that I now regard it as par for the course. Ah, here comes the denial phase and anyone initially interested disappears over the hill with their tails between their legs. Richard has found a few hard-nosed spiritual teachers and spiritual intellectuals – those with the most investment – who have stuck around to defend their beliefs but their defence gets sillier and sillier as time goes on and more beliefs are debunked as more facts are presented.

But, of course, there is something deeper beneath this façade of denial. One of the major barriers is pride. To admit one is merely following a fashionable belief, mouthing a psittacism, senselessly following the herd, being the marionette who one was taught to be, and robotically behaving exactly how one’s peers demand, is a crushing blow, particularly to the proudly humble spiritual devotee. The other factor that operates to reinforce denial, as you have noted, is the desperate need to belong to the group and the spiritual believers form a very large, safe and increasingly popular group in humanity.

So I see pride and fear operating and these were certainly issues that I had to tackle in acknowledging the failure of the spiritual path to deliver anything remotely resembling freedom, peace and happiness. Digging a little deeper is to get to the core of one’s being and to come across one’s essential nature – the instinctual self. Richard uses the phrase ‘lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning’ to describe the psychological and psychic entity that ‘I’ am. Lost, lonely and frightened are qualities that many will admit to, and it is indeed the tacit acknowledgement of this that brings many people to the spiritual path in the first place. These qualities also provide the fuel for many to give the spiritual path 100% effort.

The very, very cunning quality of the self ensures that many people will gleefully and gullibly accept the spiritual teachings, deny the existence of the physical world, deny that they are a mortal flesh and blood, believe in their own immortality and fully indulge in the fantasy delusion that they are indeed God-on-earth. This is an act of utter selfishness, cunningly disguised as a noble sacrifice to a ‘higher cause’, yet exposed for the fraud it is when the few who succeed become Gods-on-earth, Saints, Masters, revered teachers and the like – to be feted, worshipped, adored, flattered and fawned by one’s fellow human beings.

The very, very cunning nature of the self is evident in the real world as hypocrisy, corruption, deceit, lies and denial. In spite of the constant pleas and extolling to obey society’s moral and ethical standards, human beings, when push comes to shove, inevitably revert to natural behaviour. Natural behaviour is instinctual behaviour – genetically programmed to ensure the survival of the species. The human species has been endowed with a self-survival program that almost inevitably over-rides the consideration of the survival of the group. Each human is instilled with a distinct individual self which is embellished by the ability to think and reflect into a substantive entity, an identity of psychological and psychic substance – ‘who’ we think and feel we are. It is obvious over time bargains and deals were done between groups of humans, be they biological family groups and/or tribal groups, and these eventually became formalized into particular sets of moral and ethical rules. These rules, instilled to ensure the group’s survival, became paramount over the genetically encoded, essentially individually selfish, survival program. This explanation of the human instinctual program accounts for the ongoing failure of human beings to live together in anything remotely resembling peace and harmony. An understanding of the instinctual passions in action also reveals the spiritual search for self-discovery and self-realization as nothing other than an instinctually-driven attempt at self-aggrandizement and a lust for personal psychic power over others.

If you feel tense about what I write then that is easy – delete my posts and don’t read them.

All of the spiritual people I know have the same approach to the Human Condition as it is manifest in the world – turn off the TV, turn away and tune ‘inside’. It doesn’t make it go away, but you can pretend it isn’t happening or that it has got nothing to do with you. I used to do the same thing in my spiritual years but I was challenged by the simple statement that ‘if I couldn’t live with at least one other person in utter peace and harmony then human life on earth was indeed a sick joke’. So I turned on the TV, questioned the facticity of all of my social/spiritual beliefs and began an intensive investigation of my own psyche to find the source of my instinctual passions. Things like why do I lust after power, why do I get angry, why do I get sad, why do I feel lonely, why am I jealous, why do I feel like an alien, why am I constantly fearful, etc.

As for ‘bull-in-the-china-shop’, I am well aware that what I am saying is rattling the door of the church while all inside are busy retreating even further ‘inside’. I know there is a sign on the door that says, ‘Shush, we are busy sitting in thoughtless silence, raising the consciousness of the world on to a higher plane’. I write on the assumption that there may be someone inside the church who has some doubts and is ready and willing to consider a third alternative.

Great, It is so rare for a spiritual seeker to acknowledge this simple fact. All the spiritual teachings are in complete denial of the instinctual passions imprinted by blind nature on human beings. They, in fact, teach the theory of ‘you are not the body and you are not the mind’ so as to turn away from this simple fact. Thousands of years ago these instinctual passions were seen as good spirits and bad spirits that ‘invaded’ the body but for us to continue to follow this philosophy and belief-system is to defy intelligence. As for debate, that is what this list is about – words, discussions, facts, view points, experiences. There is no sitting in silence, energies, ‘you know what I mean’, ‘I feel you are ...’ etc, nor is there any philosophy or need to believe, trust or surrender. The trick is to see that what we are debating or discussing is the Human Condition – the state we humans find ourselves in on the planet. It is not a question of right or wrong or even true or false – given the spiritual corruption of the word true, as in Truth (that which cannot be spoken of) – because it is nought but a feeling, albeit a Grand Feeling. We talk of the facts of what it is to be a human being as opposed to the ancient spiritual ‘wisdom’ and mutually-agreed social beliefs. As such, when I write, I always present the facts ‘on the table’, and then it is completely up to the other what they do with the facts. This can have the effect of a seemingly confrontational debate, but who would have it any other way. It is not only your peace we are talking of, but peace on earth. The stakes are enormous and ‘treading softly’ or being ‘meek and mild’ is seen for what it is in the face of 160,000,000 million killed in wars this century alone. It is time to end this madness – so write on, write on.

This first process had two components – an intellectual understanding such that the fact of being a human being made sense, and this involved a rigorous, challenging, exciting and revealing investigation into the Human Condition and its bedrock of Ancient Wisdom. This is essentially the understanding of the non-spiritual nature of Actual Freedom. The second component was the practical day to day stuff (and what else is there anyway?) of what it is to be a human being – the theory into practice if you like. The experience that Actual Freedom is not a philosophy, not a theory, but a down-to-earth experience as a flesh and blood body. Peter to Richard, 25.2.1999

Just to clarify my post. Up until now the only path to freedom has been a spiritual path to a spiritual freedom – the traditional path of denial, renunciation and transcendence leading to an Altered State of Consciousness known as Enlightenment. The path leads to There – another dimension, a metaphysical realm.

The aim of the path to Actual Freedom is to come here to the actual world. The actual world is that which is evidenced and apparent in the PCE or peak experience and that is where the path to Actual Freedom leads. The actual world is the world as-it-is, stripped of the veneer of reality or Reality that the ‘self’ or ‘Self’ layers over it.

Curiously, this world of imagination is not only confined to the spiritual world but is also rampant in all scientific communities as is evidenced by the meta-physical ruminations of theoretical physics, pure mathematics, psychology, anthropology, psychology, astronomy, etc. Various attempts have been made to escape from or to crack through the stranglehold this imaginary psychic construct has over humanity but all have failed (up until now). This capacity for imagination is imbibed with mother’s milk – the first stories we are taught to understand and the first view we have is the ‘other-world’ of fairy stories, romance, heroism, good and evil – all totally imaginary and having no relevance to the physical world of people, things and events in which we live.

We are in fact inducted into believing the imaginary world is primary and to regard the physical, actual world is secondary. This primary imaginary world includes both a ‘real’ world-view and its associated ‘spiritual’ world-view, neither of which are actual. This obsession with imagination offers a continuing haven of denial of what is actual in our lives and prevents us from getting up off our bums, or up from our lotus position, and taking the necessary action that will lead to the eventual elimination of malice and sorrow from this fair planet.

Actual Freedom is, after all, a new, down-to-earth, non-spiritual freedom.

New as in never been discovered before.

Down-to-earth as in able to be comfortably, effortlessly and easily livable by anyone in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are. Non-spiritual in that it is both self-less and Self-less – it is most definitely not an Altered State of Consciousness based on earthly denial and heavenly transcendence.

Freedom as in free of the Human Condition of malice and sorrow – an actual and demonstrative freedom from instinctually-driven passions of fear and aggression, as opposed to the delusion of a spirit-ual freedom, based on Ancient Wisdom’s fairy-tale-battles of good and evil, Gods and Demons.

I was talking to Vineeto last night and we were reflecting on some of the ‘rough’ and bewildering times when we wondered what we had let ourselves in for. The ‘Why can’t I just settle for being normal again?’ or ‘Why didn’t I just settle for the comfort and feel-good times of spiritual denial of facts rather than the fear that arises from exposing beliefs?’ But there was a burning discontentment that wouldn’t allow each of us to settle for second best. And what an adventure!

M. Rajneesh –

‘[Idealism] goes on saying to you, ‘Do something—improve yourself. Do something – change yourself. Do something – become perfect.’ It appeals to the ego. Idealism belongs to the world of the ego. It appeals to the ego that you can be more perfect than you are; in fact you should be more perfect than you are. My message to humanity is a new man. Less than that won’t do. Not something modified, not something continuous with the past, but utterly discontinuous. The first thing to be understood: you ARE perfect. If somebody says to you that you have to become perfect, he is the enemy – beware of him! Escape from him as soon as possible. Don’t let him poison your being. Don’t let him destroy you. He may have been destroyed by others; now he is doing the same to you. He himself may be a victim. Have compassion on him, but don’t allow him to destroy you.’ Osho: Philosophia Perennis

‘You ARE perfect’ is the delusion of the spiritual view-point. The spiritual world is in complete denial of the modern discoveries of the fact that we are not ‘perfect’ – that we have an in-built instinctual survival program of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that inevitably causes us to live in fear and to be aggressive. It is this fact that prevents peace on earth, not the failure to live the – unliveable – spiritual ideal that if only we ‘all follow one God and one God only’ and then all will be magically okay, one day, in the future. When I finally stopped deluding myself that this insanity was going to bring peace to earth, and when I stopped being dishonest with myself in believing that I was ‘already perfect’, was I able to do something about becoming actually perfect.

*

Remember above, he says

‘you have been told to repress, to reject, to deny many parts of your natural being’

and then he follows with –

‘I have been fighting in the universities, ‘Why don’t you teach about Socrates? Why don’t you teach about Chuang Tzu? Why don’t you teach about Bodhidharma...?’ These are the right side of consciousness. And teaching about the wrong kind of people gives you an idea that it is perfectly good if you are wrong. If you are going slowly to be a Genghis Khan it is perfectly right. You are not doing something new, man has always been doing this. We have to sort out history, cut out all those wrong people and protect our children from being conditioned that man has been involved in nothing but war, fighting, competition, greed. We should teach our children not what has been but what can be – not the past, but the future.’

What he is clearly proposing is repression, rejection, and denial of the facts of history. Is this not ‘right and wrong’, ‘good and bad’, Buddhas and Tyrants, Gods and Devils? Is this His solution? What a fairy tale, what a massive delusion. It almost sounds like Christian morality to me but when one digs a bit deeper the morality of the East and that of the West are little different.

In 1999 the challenge now is to break free of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that are the very source of malice and sorrow. For many on the planet, life is no longer a grim business of survival and the very survival instinct, once vital to ensure the very survival of the species, now prevents us from being happy and harmless.

For me, this fact was easy to see in operation. No matter that I had comfort, security, shelter, food – I knew that I was actually neither happy nor harmless for, when ‘push came to shove’, the instinctual passions of fear and aggression would still surface at any time. Thus denial no longer became an option, and I deliberately abandoned the spiritual to avoid the traditional turning away to a fantasy world. Only then was I able to be in a position to focus my awareness on the essential and primary cause of my sorrow and malice – my social identity and my instinctual sense of ‘self’.

In my time on the Sannyas list, there was a total denial that the dream of a New Man had failed, even to the point of denying the dream existed in the first place, despite the fact that it is well documented and still trumpeted as His dream. The main theme to emerge was the need to belong to the Sannyas social club, and the good feelings that ensued.

The failure of the collective dream was further evidenced by the emerging ‘individual connections’ to Rajneesh – every man and woman in it for themselves and ‘free’ to imagine and dream what they wanted to dream. Thus feelings and imagination run riot, in complete denial of facts and sensible awareness.

There is a lot of denial, ignorance and deliberate misinformation regarding emotions and feelings in spiritual teachings. One God-man, describing himself as a Western Master, even declares that love is not a feeling but it is a sensation, in a desperate attempt to validate what he teaches as ‘true’ love. He is merely reinforcing the common belief that the good feelings are ‘natural’, ie. a sign from God, and the bad feelings are evil – he preaches that sex is the Devil. Feelings are indeed natural – instilled by ‘blind’ nature – but that does not mean that we have to forever suffer their consequences. A local therapist proudly trumpets on her poster offering a group on Anger, that ‘anger is natural’ – her ‘solution’ is to somehow ‘transform’ anger into love and compassion. The proof that feelings are ‘natural’ is that they are felt in the body as sensations and, no matter what you do you can’t get rid of them. Denying, transforming, transcending and expressing have all been tried and all have failed.

Let’s dig a little deeper and see the extent of his delusion. Again a quote from Mr. Rajneesh himself –

‘No-thinking is a must if you want to be completely freed from sin, freed from crime, freed from all that goes around you—and that is the meaning of a Buddha. A Buddha is a person who lives without the mind; then he is not responsible. That’s why in the East we say that he never accumulates karma; he never accumulates any entanglements for the future. He lives, he walks, he moves, he eats, he talks, he is doing many things, so he must accumulate karma, because karma means activity. But in the East it is said even if a Buddha kills, he will not accumulate karma. Why? And you, even if you don’t kill, you will accumulate karma. Why? It is simple: whatsoever Buddha is doing, he is doing without any mind in it. He is spontaneous, it is not activity. He is not thinking about it, it happens. He is not the doer. He moves like an emptiness. He has no mind for it, he was not thinking to do it. But if the existence allows it to happen, he allows it to happen. He has no more the ego to resist; no more the ego to do. That is the meaning of being empty and a no-self: just being a non-being, anatta , no-selfness. Then you accumulate nothing; then you are not responsible for anything that goes on around you; then you transcend.’ Osho, Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

Cute Hey. With a leap of imagination he is no longer responsible for his actions even to the point of killing. He becomes quite literally ‘above’ the mundane, the ordinary, the laws, the earthly, the sensate. One leaves the wheel of suffering, or earthly existence and transcends. This ‘lofty perch’ of the God-man has relevance in the Sannyas world as to his denial of any wrong doing in Rajneeshpuram – not that the American law courts believed him. No. 14 will recognize the dis-association of Rajneesh from any of his actions as identical to the position taken by Zen warriors in the ritual slaughter of 300,000 Chinese at Nanking – enthusiastically supported by the Buddhist Masters. In case you are confused about the word ‘transcend’, Mr Oxford’s definition is –

‘transcend – climb over, surmount. Go beyond or exceed the limits of (something immaterial); esp. be beyond the range or grasp of (human experience, reason, belief, etc.). Be above and independent of; (esp. of God) exist apart from the limitations of (the material universe) Ascend, go up, rise’. Oxford Dictionary

Indeed Mr. Rajneesh has transcended the ego – he has clearly become an ego-maniac in that he thinks and feels himself to be God. An ego transcended gives full reign to the soul – the ‘feelings’ – and delusion is the obvious result.

I watched a television interview with Douglas Adams – the author of the ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’. I pricked up my ears when he said that the major issue that human beings are presently facing was the ‘battle between instincts and intelligence’. But within a few sentences he was proclaiming the popularist belief that ‘our survival is threatened by our instinctual behaviour in that we are wiping out endangered species and that only intelligent action will save us’. Not a word about our instinctual behaviour towards each other, such as war, rape, torture, genocide, murder ... let alone despair, depression, loneliness, suicide ...

There are enough nuclear weapons on the planet to kill everyone several times over, and yet humans are vitally concerned about the plight of the snowy, white-pawed, ring-tailed, arctic plover!! Thank goodness Brontosaurus-Rex is extinct, or our shopping trips would be life and death affairs as they were in the ‘good-old’ days. And it would be a tough call to have to put a radio-collar on a Bronti ...

Yet another report was on the current genocide in Kazoo, where a behavioural scientist who had been documenting murder, rape, war and genocide in apes was interviewed, and he hinted that humans may well have the same instinctual drives. Immediately another ‘expert’ was interviewed and he stated categorically that it was the leaders who were responsible for the genocide and not the vast majority of ‘good’ people. It was simply an ‘aberration’ and not indicative of human behaviour in general.

Both programs served to remind me, yet again, of the vast extent of denial that obscures the facing of the facts – we are animal by instinct, and those instincts of fear aggression, nurture and desire are wired into us all, unavoidably, at conception.

So, the facts about instincts can, and will, be denied, avoided, ignored or twisted by those unwilling to face the facts and set about changing themselves. It is only those who acknowledge that they feel malicious, murderous, revengeful, resentful, sad, depressed, lonely, despairing, etc., – and want to do something about it – who will be interested in Actual Freedom.

Now that the neuro-biological scientific evidence is becoming available, it will be up to each of us what we do with it – whether we continue to ignore or escape from it, or get up off our bums and do something.

Another TV program I watched reported on the fire bombing of Dresden and other German cities during the war. Vast areas of these cities were turned into raging firestorms of such intensity that people were sucked off their feet into the inferno, and babies were ripped from their mothers’ arms. This was a deliberate policy of revenge for the German bombing of English cities. Civilians were deliberately targeted. The Americans similarly incinerated Tokyo, causing more deaths than both atomic bombs combined. Of some 50 million killed in the Second World War, 30 million were women and children.

When the Americans saw the German concentration camps after the Second World War, they put hundreds of thousands of German soldiers in open fields – in winter – and surrounded them with barbed wire. They then fed them below minimum survival rations and slowly starved or froze thousands of them to death over the winter. To increase the torture they backed open truckloads of food up to the perimeter fence and left them there to rot. They were the ‘good guys’ and the other side had to be punished for their wrongs!

What we call justice is, after all, nothing more than revenge and retribution. An eye for an eye! Such is the appalling extent of malice and sorrow in this world.

The way I learned to cope was to stick my head in the sand, not watch TV or not want to know anything about it – a denial of the facts and that perverse human attitude that it was others who acted this way, not me. Becoming spiritual was a further denial in that I regarded the outer world as an illusion and the inner spiritual world as ‘real’. To get ‘out of it’ in any way possible was the aim, be it drugs, alcohol, Prozac or bliss, meditation, becoming a ‘watcher’ or, if you hit the ‘million to one jackpot’, Enlightenment. Anything was welcome to avoid feeling and acknowledging the malice and suffering. What I eventually found was that by looking it squarely in the face and not avoiding it I was forced to do something about it in myself.’

I got to musing a bit more about the reaction to my Journal, and to Richard’s Journal, and wondered at the lack of reaction evident in most. I remembered back to my first reading of Richard’s Journal and what my reactions were at the time.

Firstly, what he was saying made sense – it was obvious to me that everyone has got it wrong; everyone knows that because fear and aggression in the form of sorrow and malice are endemic on the planet. It took a bit of digging into both Richard’s writings and those of the Gurus to understand that what he was saying was brand spanking new and a quantum leap in the opposite direction to the spiritual. When a Guru says ‘everyone has got it wrong’, what he means is ‘everyone else has got it wrong and only I have got it Right, for I am the messenger of the Divine’. This shallow Guru-bashing then is passed off as ‘the real Truth, the only Path’, whereas what can initially appear as the Wisdom of the God-man is no more than his particular condemnation of the religions of other God-men. Merely to claim that others have got it wrong while blindly ignoring their own role in the on-going tragedy is both ignorance and denial, but then again, if one feels oneself to be God, one is undeniably deluded and absolutely blinded to any common sense.

It is well worth re-posting an ancient Buddhist text that Richard sourced and posted recently to another list in order to see exactly what is on offer in Buddhism.

The ‘Mahasatipatthana Sutta (The Great Frames of Reference) Digha Nikaya 22, elaborates on the practice of mindfulness meditation with a more detailed exposition of [D. Mental Qualities 5] in the Satipatthana Sutta.

‘And thus it is written that a monk shall sit in the corner with his eyes closed, withdraw from the world of sensual, sensate pleasure, stick his head in the clouds and dream of nirvana – anywhere but here and anyplace but now’ – a simplified stripped down version of Buddhism for the intellectually challenged. Ah! Nothing like a bit of Guru-bashing, and none better to take on than the undisputed King of Denial and Withdrawal. Is there nothing sacred to an actualist? No. Both the good feelings that arise from the supposed good instincts and the spiritual search for immortality that arises from the core survival instinct have to be questioned, examined, dissected and scrutinized in order to weaken their insidious influence on our lives. It took Richard ten times as long to rid himself of these good feelings as it took him to eliminate the bad ones. It is essential to tackle the whole of the instinctual programming – no half measures will work.

Just as a bit of an aside, I recently read a newspaper article by a clinical psychologist decrying happiness as an aim in life and saying it was causing all sorts of problems. He said that what people should seek is fulfilment. He was totally vague about what this fulfilment was and threw in a few fashionable psittacisms about creativity, spirituality and a few demeaning comments about money and career pursuits. From the tone of his article I gathered that many of his clients were suffering from depression because of the futility of seeking happiness, and no wonder. They are trying to go against nature and are both ill equipped and ill advised in their pursuit by the likes of clinical psychologists and spiritual pundits. The Gurus’ ignorance is understandable in that scientific progress has outstripped Ancient Ignorance but the denial of instinctual programming in psychological studies and teachings is a bit more bewildering. The scientific study of instinctual behaviour broaches the areas of ethics, sails in the face of morals and runs aground on the old hoary one of ‘you can’t change human nature’. Those who dare to push the limits, such as the current researchers in genetics, are deemed to be ‘meddling in God’s work’. If there is a God then he/she/it is a very cruel sadistic bastard from what I see on TV, and it is clearly time to ‘meddle’ in order to put an end to human suffering on the planet.

As a human on the planet, at this time, we clearly see that much of the essential explorations have been undertaken in order to provide comfort, shelter, food and safety from wild animals and that the next major exploration and effort will be to end ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. Many people are still seeking excitement, fame, meaning and a sense of purpose by physical exploring and adventure pursuits but it has got a bit ridiculous such that it comes as no surprise to hear of someone being the first to hop all the way to the north pole or being the first woman to circumnavigate the globe the wrong way in a bath tub. Many people are now devoting there lives to helping wild animals survive, having abandoned the post-WW2 hope of peace on earth for humans. The focus has shifted to the fashionable ‘saving the earth’ rather than saving the human species.

An actualist is one who devotes his or her life to actualizing peace on earth in the only way possible and gets to have the adventure of a lifetime on the way. It is the most significant thing one can do with one’s life – one’s ‘three score and ten’ of existence as a human being.

I wanted to take the opportunity to write a bit more about morals and ethics being the ‘guardian at the gate’ that prevents ‘good’ people from firstly acknowledging their ‘dark’ side and secondly prevents the necessary clear-eyed investigation that can bring about the elimination of the instinctual passions.

I think we can take it as given – at least for those who have taken the time to read sufficiently to grasp what Actual Freedom is about – that those in the spiritual world indulge in a complete denial of the savage instinctual passions by labeling them evil. The current fashion for Eastern spirituality is based upon the Tabula Rasa theory whereby humans are born innocent and then corrupted by the inherent evils of society and earthly and bodily desires. The traditional Eastern approach was to practice renunciation, meditation, asceticism and celibacy in order to turn away from the material world and the so-called ‘evils of the flesh’. Then aim to dissociate from the feelings thereby transcending them to become a new holier personality who is then, by definition, above evil.

I thought it might be useful to look at instinctual aggression and see what the state of play is within the human condition. It is a topic that spiritual people are unwilling to look at for they are usually so identified with being pious, feeling self-righteous and being so proud of their sanctimonious achievements as to be totally unaware of their myopic viewpoint. Some New Dark Age spiritual teachings integrate cathartic exercises as a way of expressing anger and hostility in the belief that catharsis is effective in reducing aggressive behaviour in spite of the many studies that provide evidence that catharsis encourages and reinforces angry and hostile behaviour rather than reduces it. But, apart from paying a bit of nominal lip-service to the more modern concepts of societal conditioning, the Ancient Wisdom of all spiritual teachings is firmly rooted in the belief that instinctual aggression was a result of being overcome by evil spirits.

The instinctual programming of the amygdala or primitive brain includes a primitive animal self that is most highly developed in the primates. This self in relationship to other members of the species is most evident in apes and chimps and leads us to see in them human behaviour at a less sophisticated level of operation. Fear, aggression, nurture and desire are seen operating unimpeded by developed intelligence, which simply translates to apes and chimps being less cunning and less efficient in killing than the human animal. We think them cute when they display instinctual nurture but are in denial of the mounting evidence of rape, murder, infanticide and war in chimps and apes that are the result of instinctual fear, aggression and desire.

I encourage you to make the journey into your feelings rather than ‘focusing on them less and less’. Actualism is most definitely not a new theory about having no feelings, or that feelings are bad – men have played that game for centuries, whether it be hiding in caves, practicing celibacy, by intellectual wanking or indulging in rationalism. Denial, repression and controlling emotions has failed to work. Indulging, expressing and emotive therapizing has also failed to work.

There is a third alternative for the sincerely curious adventurer.

Just as an aside, while I think of it, I once chatted to a man who had just been newly inducted into the spiritual world and we got to chatting about sex. He proclaimed to me that he now had a freer attitude to sex and was not only with his partner but with other women as well. He said sex had never been better as he now felt he was making love to all women when he had sex. It was ‘universal woman’ whom he made love to – the archetypical woman. It suddenly dawned on me that this Tantric-like practice was nothing more than a fantasy escape from the actuality of having sex with the particular flesh and blood woman he was in bed with at the time. In the ‘real’ world men and woman invariably revert to fantasies to maintain an interest after the initial instinctual attraction wanes, and Tantra is simply the spiritual version of these fantasies. Of course, it is a ‘higher’ and more ‘noble’ fantasy, but it is nothing more than an escape from the reality of sex. It is demeaning to the partner one is with as he or she is not the flesh and blood body person but is reduced to a figment of one’s own fantasy world – and then they have the audacity to term this fantasy ‘being intimate’. All the ‘action’ and ‘intimacy’ goes on only in one’s head. One literally goes into cuckoo-land – all in denial of the shameful, guilt-ridden reality of the sexual instinct in action. It is all about feeling and has nought to do with the luscious sensuality of the sensate sensuous experiencing of innocent sexual play.

For me, it was such an adventure to get to the bottom of the stifling mystery, the conspiracy of silence, the moralistic mumbo-jumbo and beliefs that actively prohibit free sexual enjoyment and a direct intimacy between any couple, be they normal or spiritually inclined.

*

That was quite a loop, so I’d better get back to ‘sensate experiencing’, which was the starting point of this post. You have probably seen the new ‘180 degrees diagram’ by now, so you will have a picture to expand on the multitudinous words describing and articulating the difference between spiritual and actual. One of the many things that the spiritual path fails to address is human sexuality and sensuality. Denial of the instinctual sexual passions is rife – after all we are talking of the ‘wisdom’ of cave-men – and sublimation as the principle of celibacy is common. For the less-evolved, moralistic control, as in Tantric practices or ‘love’-making, is practiced but is considered a lesser path. Ignorance, superstition and fear are intrinsic to both normal and spiritual understanding of sex, human reproduction and sexual pleasure.

The spiritual view is that ‘I’ as the thinker is the issue and then actively encourage ‘I’ as the feeler to run rampant. My experience when I started to run with the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ was that it was feelings that continually and relentlessly emerged as my experiencing. Thus ‘I’ needed to feel grateful for being here in order to transcend the underlying feeling of resentment at having to be here at all, and ‘I’ needed to feel love in order to bridge the gulf that ‘I’ as an alien entity feel exists between ‘me’ and other human beings. ‘I’ feel compassion for others as a way of being able to indulge my own feelings of sorrow and ‘I’ feel indignant when someone else suffers injustice as ‘I’ really like a good fight. ‘I’ am ever fearful of what others think of me or feel about me, ‘I’ am ever on guard, ‘I’ am ever ready to defend myself against having ‘my’ feelings hurt. ‘My’ ploys are many in the battle with others – confrontation, withdrawal, snide remarks, denial, a bit of undermining, a bit of cutting down to size, a bit of a whinge to someone else – ‘I’ can be as cunning as all get-out in these battles, if need be.

‘I’ readily believed in the spiritual beliefs and wallowed in the blissful feelings as a welcome escape from everyday reality and the promise of an after-life was poetry to ‘my’ ears and salve to ‘my’ heart. ‘I’ felt deep-down that there was no hope for Humanity and no hope for me, and from these feelings were born a desperate belief in an after-life as an escape from the despair of life on earth. The list goes on and on as ‘I’ fight it out for survival with others in a grim world, and ‘I’ will ultimately do anything to stay in existence. ‘I’ am rotten to the core – the combination of animal instinctual passions and an ability to think and reflect make the human animal not only malicious but cunningly malicious. This lethal combination allows the human species not only to wage wars, inflict genocide, rape, murder, torture and pillage to a scale unprecedented in any other animal species but allows for the psychic warfare and power battles, blatant denial, fantasy escapes, corruption, deception and deceit that is endemic in all human interactions.

It soon became obvious that freedom from being an identity – social and animal-instinctual – was the only way to get free of this constant emotional churning and the constant selfishness of indulging in denial and escapism.

There has been an ongoing denial, repression and cover-up about the role of the animal instinctual passions that has been actively instilled in each human being as an integral part of our social conditioning. This conditioning takes the form of spiritual beliefs, morals, ethics and psittacisms that are designed to make us ‘good’ citizens, do the ‘right’ thing and keep our instinctual passions ‘under control’. Unless this social identity is firmly tackled and eliminated it is impossible to even begin ‘feeling and experiencing’ the instinctual passions in operation, let alone begin the investigation necessary to evince their extinction in oneself.

Many, many people who see ‘rotten’ in the world, turn to a personal search for freedom, peace and happiness and turn to the spiritual path. Thus they shackle themselves with spiritual metaphysical beliefs – the current fashion being Eastern religious belief. They then adopt the Eastern version of what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong and off they go into ancient belief, superstition, imagination and fantasy.

It is fascinating to see the convoluted and twisted moral and ethical arguments that rage on the planet, combined with the convoluted and twisted forms of denial of the existence of instinctual animal passions in humans.

And to see, so clearly, that there are no moral or ethical solutions to the Human Condition but that they are, in fact, part of the problem.

This seems to be a very basic formula, but knowing that the mind can only deal in division and loves to split and then reassemble the pieces of the fractured wholeness back into what appears to be something ‘new’, there is some sense that we could be playing the same old, never-ending game again here.

Indeed, there is a plethora of claims made for a new spirituality, a new way, an ordinary spirituality, the real Truth, a third way, a middle path etc. In my spiritual years I remained loyal and faithful to one teacher for most of my time but when he died I saw the inevitable fragmenting and formaldehyding of the religion so I moved on to others who all claimed to have unique new insights and revelations. I never quite managed to replicate the love affair I had with my first teacher which, in hindsight, was very useful. I was more able to clearly look at what the others were saying and offering and I eventually came to see that they all parroted versions of that old seductive message – there is life after death and we are just ‘passing through’ before we go to a better place ‘somewhere else’. Sweet music and sweet poetry for the soul. The more one soaks up this message, the less one becomes interested in, and involved in, life on earth, where we flesh and blood humans actually live.

What I saw was that I was playing the same old denial, renunciation and transcendence game that has been played – with undoubted sincerity, conviction and intensity – by billions of my fellow human beings for millennium. That’s why I went for something new and radical – to cut to the quick of the problem –’me’ (as ‘self’ or ‘Self’).

‘I’ am an illusion, not the physical material palpable world.

*

Do you have to ‘ignore’ anything to maintain this state?

No. It was only by ceasing to ignore and deny the fact that I was as mad and as bad as everyone else in the world, that I was able to get stuck into doing something about myself. To see that, at the core of my ‘being’, I am an instinctual animal – robotically programmed for fear, aggression, nurture and desire. To explore and plumb these depths and see the dread and despair, the lust for violence and the diabolical was to experience the raw animal passions at ‘my’ core. Most people who have glimpses of this dark side in themselves, as in dark nights of the soul, frantically seek to identify with the supposed good passions and become good, more loving, grateful, humbly superior and God-identified. It was only by ceasing to ignore and deny the animal instinctual passions in me, and abandoning my seductive indulgence in ancient spiritual belief, that I was able to free myself of the instinctual passions and live happy and harmlessly in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. Practicing denial and renunciation leads to rejection of, and disassociation from, the sensuous delight of this actual physical palpable world we live in.

It was only when I stopped ignoring facts and stopped indulging in my beliefs and feelings that I could begin to experience the ever-present actual world of sensate delight, purity and perfection.

Paradise is here on earth – not in our hearts, nor in heaven.

*

I would like to hear more about the dynamics of your alternative. How does it ‘work’?

As I have indicated, the first step is to fully take on board the modern discoveries that ‘who’ we think we are and ‘who’ we feel we are is nothing other than a social identity overlaying an instinctual identity – and that both are nothing more than operating programs in our brain.

This alien identity, or ‘self’, stands in the way of the already existing purity and perfection of the actual world becoming apparent and this is made startlingly clear in the ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience or peak experience.

From this experience one is clearly able to identify this alien entity as the source of one’s malice and sorrow, and one merrily sets in motion the process that will lead to living the pure consciousness experience, 24 hrs. a day, every day.

The first step is to actively demolish the first layer, one’s social identity – all the beliefs, morals, ethics and psittacisms that each of us have been programmed with since birth. In my case it was Peter the son, Peter the man, Peter the father, Peter the spiritual believer, Peter the good, Peter the bad, Peter the builder, etc, etc. It is only when I had substantially eliminated or deleted this program that I could clearly look at, and sensibly investigate, the core instinctual being that is ‘me’.

This second stage is where all seekers, up to now, have been seduced into denial of the ‘bad’ instinctual passions of fear and aggression and attempted to transcend them in order to develop a new spiritual identity based on the ‘good’ passions. It takes pure intent to avoid this atavistic seduction and instinctual grasp for survival (nurture) and self-aggrandizement (desire) and to dig deep to actively eliminate the insidious robotic influence that the instinctual passions have on one’s actions and thinking.

No, you are still confused about what I said. It is the ‘passion for liberation of the human spirit’ – the fervent belief in an eternal, timeless, spaceless i.e. immortal spirit – that compounds and actively contributes to malice and sorrow on earth. Religion, be it Eastern or Western, actively contributes to this carnage as is evidenced by the countless religious wars, persecutions, recriminations, repressions, ostracizations, denials, retributions, perversions and conflicts that are ever ongoing ... Eastern religion is particularly insidious for it deliberately promotes the practice of turning away and withdrawing from the physical world of people, things and events where we human beings actually live to a spirit-ual, meta-physical world, to an ‘inner’ private isolated world of furtive imagination and impassioned feelings.

I have a vital interest to end the ‘passion for a liberation of the human spirit’ – manifest as the search for enlightenment – for it stands in the way of peace on earth.

*

So No 2, I am vitally interested in ‘becoming free of the human condition of malice and sorrow’. Becoming free of the human condition of malice and sorrow is to actualize peace on earth, in this lifetime, as this flesh and blood body. It is impossible to become free of instinctual malice and sorrow whilst remaining trapped within the human condition, either battling it out in a grim world ‘normal’ reality or by escaping into an imaginary delusionary Greater Reality by practicing disassociation via denial and transcendence. In the spiritual world, any chance of an actual peace on earth is readily and eagerly forfeited for an imaginary peace after physical death ... or, for the rare few, the chance to become God-on-earth.

‘Letting everything be as it is’ is practicing acceptance of ‘me’ as I am, thus ensuring that nothing of substance will change. The spiritual ‘paying attention’, as a meditation, is to practice denial of things as they are and encourage a transcendence whereby one rises above the mundane and physical. One denies one is a mortal flesh and blood human being and aspires to become a Divine – and therefore immortal – spirit only. Thus ‘I am not the body’ and ‘I am not the mind’ become mantras of denial for the true spiritual believer. As you say, one tries to go beyond, or rise above, the world as-it-is.

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