Selected Correspondence Peter

An excellent description of the spiritual delusion whereupon a human being becomes a God – the centre of it all, where only You exist and everything and everyone else is but Your creation. This is utter self-centredness, utter self-ishness taken to the extreme of solipsism. One’s personal self is diminished to such an extent that only a grand and glorious Impersonal Self exists.

You see suffering and lechery. Possessiveness and pain. You see great joy and friendship. You see love and selflessness. You see everything and you know that you made it all up for your own benefit. What do you do? How do you participate in all the things around you?

The existential dilemma of all God-men when they find themselves living in a dream-world of their own creation.

In this world of illusion you have only one venue, one method of existence: your actions.

The existential dilemma of all God-men when they find themselves a Divine and Immortal being still trapped within a flesh and blood body on the planet.

How do you act? Which action within all the realm of infinite possibility best expresses the Truth of who you are? You are free. There is no one and nothing else. Just you and a world of vast illusion that you create. What will you do? Will you be destructive? Will you love? Will you hate? Will you be weak? Will you be strong? Will you help the people you see, or crush them like bugs? You can do whatever you want. It is your dream. What will you do? How will you act? Who are you?

It seems that in all the infinite realm of possibility you have only one choice: to be who you are and act according to that Truth.

You nearly had me interested as to what you were going to do in a practical sense, but I see you have settled on the traditional ‘only choice’ – being who you really are i.e. God on earth, and to act according to that truth, i.e. act as if you are a God.

The Gods are so predictable – so impersonal, so Self-indulgent and so demanding of gratitude and adoration ... and equally capable of crushing people who they don’t like or want to dismiss. I have seen this supercilious behaviour in many God-men and Wannabes – it is an appalling arrogance, demeaning of others, malicious in its intent and has done immense harm and suffering to countless followers.

Divine passions are simply normal human passions freed of any sensible consideration, responsibility or moral limitations by a blinding act of delusion. The delusion of Divinity does not eliminate one’s personal malice and sorrow – it merely gives it a perverse God-like twist.

Isn’t the actual so much more remarkable, breathtaking and vital than the imaginary grim fairy tales we have been taught?

There is no ‘Who’ running this universe and no helpless despairing ‘what’ that makes human malice and sorrow an unalterable fate. As is clearly evidenced in a Pure Consciousness Experience, this physical universe is perfect and pure for it is infinite and eternal - there is no outside to this universe and it is always happening now. In a PCE, it is abundantly clear that it is ‘me’ and ‘my’ feelings and passions that stand in the way of this purity and perfection being actualized in this flesh and blood body.

The ending of one’s own malice and sorrow is thus in one’s own hands ... and not in the hands of some imaginary ‘Who’.

Good, hey. It was the best news I had ever heard in my life.

It is not the ‘feelings and passions’ that stand in the way, it is the attachment to them, the ownership/possession of them that hinders us and causes us to say ‘I suffer’ instead of ‘this is suffering’.

By having no attachment, no ‘ownership/possession’ of your feelings and passions, when you feel angry, upset, pissed-off, peeved or annoyed at someone, then do you say it is not ‘me’ who is being angry, ‘this is just anger’. To disclaim your feeling of anger as not being ‘my’ anger may well suit your position, but the fact is you are still being angry at someone and that is malice where I come from. You may equally claim that your feeling of sorrow is not ‘my’ sorrow but it is still a feeling of sorrow, and when you share that sorrow with others you are but an active contributor to human sorrow on the planet.

We are taught this dissociative behaviour from very early childhood when we are rewarded and encouraged to be good and punished and discouraged from being bad. ‘I did good’, ‘I helped’, ‘I looked after ...’ are all claims we willingly make but we quickly find out it is best to say ‘It wasn’t me’, ‘I didn’t do it’, ‘It wasn’t my fault, it was ...’ when we do something bad. We learn to readily claim the good feelings and tender passions as ‘mine’ and quickly learn to disclaim ownership of, or even the very existence of, our bad feelings and savage passions. This social/religious conditioning applies equally to both sexes, to all human beings born in all cultures and instilled in all religious/spiritual morals and ethics.

In Eastern religions and philosophy this practice of suppression and non-attachment has been raised to a high art whereby one can, through assiduous practice, create a whole new, utterly dissociated, identity based solely on feeling Good-ness and God-ness. This process of becoming non-attached to feelings that are not desirable and identifying with the feelings that are considered desirable and are highly valued by our peers can lead to an Altered State of Consciousness whereby a mortal human being imagines and feels himself or herself to be above it all, as in Divine and Immortal.

In this sleight of hand, or more correctly spiritual sleight of mind, ‘me’ and my feelings get off scot-free and nothing actually happens except the whole sorry saga of eastern religion gets another pundit, another propagator, another sage revered for his puerile wisdom and parroted platitudes such as ‘it my is attachment to human suffering that is the problem’.

The separation feeds the ego by making the ‘I’ into what is important instead of the choice of how we act as to whether suffering is increased or decreased.

The whole approach of Eastern religion, and Buddhism in particular, is that being here on the planet is essential suffering and the quicker you can get out of being here the better. Thus the shamans and God-men have always isolated themselves from the suffering of the world and closeted themselves away in monasteries, ashrams, Sanghas and the like. They then practiced turning inwards and separating from their own feelings of sorrow and solely identified with their good feelings and feelings of Godliness and Holiness. These beliefs and practices have never, and will never, eliminate suffering in the world, but those higher beings who have separated and detached themselves get to feel a lot better than those in the market place.

This act of separation was particularly evident in theocratic Buddhist Tibet where every family sent a son to the monastery to become a monk. The lamas and monks lived in splendid palaces surrounded by gold, silver and the finest of artworks, practiced their teachings, meditated and said their prayers, all supported and paid for by the rest of the ‘suffering’ population. The country had no army – one quarter of the population were busy praying for salvation and peace – so when the Chinese walked over the border, the Lamas fled, taking the gold with them and leaving the defenceless common folk who had suffered in supporting the Lamas to now suffer at the hands of their new masters.

The men of God have always been ‘above’ suffering, the priests have always bludged off others, the moral spiritual high ground has always been the safest ground because one can always blame someone else or something else for one’s own malice and sorrow rather than look at it in oneself.

The churches have forever blamed human suffering on bad spirits, evil, the Devil, money, materialism, empirical science, technological progress, the unaware, the unawake, the non-believers, the heathens, etc – anything but dare to admit that humans are blindly driven by self-survival instincts and passions.

These instinctual passions, humanity’s precious feelings, are the empirical source of malice and sorrow in human beings, and a way has now been pioneered to eliminate them. The churches, Gurus, shamans and God-men will all rile against this discovery for centuries to come, but the end result is inevitable – the ancient fantasies of good and evil, the Devil and God will eventually fade and die out to be replaced by a new non-instinctive-animal species of humans who no longer battle, feud and kill each other in a grim, senseless instinctual battle of survival, or pompously declare they are ‘above it all’ and are too busy praying for ‘inner peace’ to be at all bothered about what is going on ‘outside’.

When we choose to act to alleviate suffering whether it be our own or someone else’s everyone’s lot is improved.

I am talking of the elimination of suffering, not detaching from suffering so to alleviate one’s suffering as in reduce, lessen, diminish, relieve, ease, or palliate. All the churches and religions have been offering to alleviate the suffering of the poor, the flock, the sinners, the unawake, etc. for millennia, yet in the last century alone over 160 million humans died at the hands of other humans in wars and an estimated 40 million people killed themselves in suicides. It is clearly time for the pious head-in-the-clouds alleviators to stop practicing non-attachment from their own suffering and come down-to-earth and address the real cause of suffering within themselves.

I am well aware that this present generation of seekers of freedom, peace and happiness have already personally invested too heavily in Eastern spiritualism to consider turning around 180 degrees and head in the other direction but there will be some who care enough about peace on earth to get up out of their lotus positions and begin the business of making a real difference.

It is curious that the present fascination with Eastern religion was born out of the 60’s peace movement but has now degenerated over the decades into the utterly selfish pursuit of personal bliss and Fulfilment. When this thoughtless self-indulgent spiritual fascination wanes, the next generation of seekers will find something different on offer for them to get their teeth into – an ending to human malice and sorrow, peace on earth.

What is the one immutable thing no being can deny? Easy ... one’s existence.

If you are talking about your physical existence as a flesh and blood human being, then I would agree. I have no trouble agreeing with you because you and I are having this conversation – you know, real fingers tapping on real keyboards, real pixels appearing on real screens. Now ‘who’ you think and feel you are is another thing – you claim that your existence is ethereal, spirit only, non-material, Self-centred and ‘immutable’ as in absolute, unchallengeable, supreme. Sounds awfully like a delusion of Grandeur to me.

If Freedom means anything, it means I am the sole responsible party for my existence, as well as, my only accurate historian.

Are you saying that you are the sole responsible party that caused the sperm to impregnate the egg that grew to be the flesh and blood body called No. 12? If so, you truly are laying claim to being a creator being – the sole creator of your own existence.

Further, you are your own historian, as in creating your own history. In psychological terms this is the definition of delusion – the creation of an illusion ‘innocent beingness’ from an illusion – the social/psychological and instinctual/psychic ‘self’.

Therefore all ideas ‘about’ existence and my personal being are under my own authority to claim or discard according to whether I determine they are ‘workable’ in my reality.

In other words, you are creating your own reality, or your own truth.

Freedom has nothing to do with ‘consensus’, it has to do with personal volition.

Are you saying Freedom is your personal volition – as in desire or choice – to create your own ‘ideas ‘about’ existence and your personal being?’

For any being to return to true freedom, that being must have the courage to jump out of the ‘herd’ and be honest enough to face everything that would restrict them in determining the meaning and experience of that freedom.

From where I stand in the actual world, I see two herds – those who suffer in the grim reality of the ‘real’ world and those who imagine and feel themselves to be above it all because they choose to believe in and create their own Greater Reality in accordance with Bronze Age religious/ spiritual beliefs and superstitions.

I am Still a Being of Light composition having a human experience, and no amount of well-formed phrases can change my birthplace. It is not wise to tell people that what they Know of themselves is faulty.

Indeed, even now on the planet people are being killed for daring to question the spiritual beliefs of others. The good thing about the Net is that punishment for daring to question and face everything is limited to flaming, cyber-censorship or cyber-execution.

Until one has developed full trust in the Love of All That Is, one has no real knowing on a conscious practical level, they remain in the 3/4 dimensional worlds of ‘faith and belief’.

For example, I can move, at will, to any ‘location’ I so choose, dissolving and recombining these atoms and molecules into any form I choose, now that’s the freedom I talking about. Practical Freedom 101.

Excellent news. Then I can stop replying to your posts and you can ‘recombine’ on my porch and we can have an in-depth discussion about life on earth, as-it-is with people as-they-are. And you can tell me more about your ‘ideas about existence and your personal being’, ‘true freedom’, and about your own personal ‘reality’.

From where I stand in the actual world it is those who have suffer from an Altered State of Consciousness such that they believe themselves to be Saviours of mankind that have led ‘herds’ of followers to think and feel that they are the Chosen Ones and believe in an ‘other-worldly’ freedom and peace. This man-made delusion is the basis of all religious and spiritual belief and the cause of all the religious conflicts, wars, retributions, persecutions and vilifications.

It’s time to dare to question everything ...

The perennial quandary for human beings is that ‘who’ they think and feel they are is an alien entity trapped ‘inside’ in a flesh and blood body. Thus ‘I’ look out at the world through the eyes, ‘I’ touch with the hands, ‘I’ hear through the ears, ‘I’ smell with the nose. Being an alien psychological and psychic entity is the very cause of feeling lost, lonely, and frightened and forever cut off from the physical actual world. To retreat totally ‘inside’ in search of the real ‘me’, and the true meaning of life, is to become even further isolated from the sensual delights of the actual world. Those who succeed come to experience the outer world as a dream-like illusion and eventually create their own inner reality. No 12 described this process very well and others on this list have alluded to it. This process of total psychological withdrawal is known as dissociation.

As for no words to describe this inner peace that passeth understanding – to the contrary, there have been billions of words, metaphors, poetry, songs, sonnets, books, texts, teachings, scriptures, scrolls, parchments, etc. for thousands of years in hundreds of different languages and cultures.

Well, this is a bit of a loose, late night ramble but I’m enjoying writing on ‘home turf’, so to speak. We have the list-writing on our web-site, as you know, and the next exercise is to sort it by topics so as to make it more useful and convenient for anyone who is interested. It was interesting to look back at the objections that we came across. I stated early on in the correspondence that I had begun the spiritual path with the ideal of peace of mind for me and the ideal of peace on earth. I was howled down for this and it soon became obvious that for those remaining in the group that love for the Master was the only remaining ideal that anyone could cling to, all else had failed. When push comes to shove – love for the Master (or God) is wheeled out as the fall back position, Never Ever to be questioned. To the point of being willing to sacrifice one’s life for, or kill for, although few would admit to it. It all seems to boil down to a desperate need to belong to some group or other, to believe in some higher authority, some better life somewhere else – anywhere but here, now, as this flesh and blood body only.

The other thing that was very evident was the total lack of interest in discussions about peace on earth. Total self-interest, remoteness and detachment to the point of cynicism and beyond were apparent, which took me aback on occasions. The creation of the ‘watcher’, in psychiatric terms is called dis-association, when one is willing to kill or do a criminal act without any feelings what-so-ever. The revelations of Zen at War reveal this to an appalling extent. It was an eye opener for me.

It became so glaringly obvious that not only is there no solution to the human dilemma within the spiritual world, but that no one even imagines there is. It is completely and utterly a selfish undertaking. Beneath the noble poetic rhetoric lies self-interest, cynicism and hypocrisy which rivals any in the real world. There is none so self-righteous as the man or woman of God.

So, life is bloody excellent here – a small but significant wedge is being driven in the door of the spiritual temples and an enormous door is swinging opening to the actual world of sensibility and sensate experiencing for human beings.

And the prize is not only peace and freedom for oneself, but .... peace on earth.

To make the point very clear, let’s look at another quote from Rajneesh describing his Enlightenment experience –

‘In that explosion the old man of yesteryear died. This new man is absolutely new. The man who was walking on the path is dead and is no more. There is no story after that explosion, there are no events after it. After the explosion there is only void. Since that night I have never been in the body. I am hovering around it.’ Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

Doesn’t really sound like a man who is flesh and blood body only. In fact, it sounds as though he is experiencing a state where He has his head in the clouds and is no longer associated with his flesh and blood body – an imaginary state of ‘leaving the cycle of karma’ and being Immortal. Does it not also make you wonder how this man claims to be herenow when

‘Since that night I have never been in the body. I am hovering around it.’ Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

This is not a description of someone who is a flesh and blood body only but a description of someone who has completely and utterly identified with his Spirit, Soul, Atman, Buddha Nature or whatever other name one calls the psychic entity that dwells within the physical body. This is a description of a man suffering from a mental state of delusion – an Altered State of Consciousness, whereby he ‘thinks’ and ‘feels’ he is God, immortal and divine. Let’s dig a little deeper and see the extent of his delusion. Again a quote from the man 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.’ 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. Miki 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.

Another quote from the Master of deceit –

‘In all the Eastern traditions, before a person starts learning no-mind, there are techniques and much emphasis that he should stop being negative, because if you once attain to no-mind and your trend remains negative, you can become a dangerous force. Before the no-mind is attained, one should become absolutely positive. That is the whole difference between white and black magic.

Black magic is nothing more than when a man has accumulated thought energy without throwing out his negativity beforehand. And white magic is nothing more than when a man has attained too much thought energy, and has based his total being on a positive attitude. The same energy with negativity becomes black; the same energy with positivity becomes white.’ Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

Interesting first part that clearly points to the emphasis on ‘good’ feelings as opposed to ‘bad’ feelings. I think many people think we make up a story about Eastern mysticism and the dross it is but here it is unambiguously stated. He further introduces a bit of ‘wisdom about black magic that again relates to good and evil spirits or ‘energy’ to use the more modern terminology for spirits. Of course Mr. Rajneesh represents white magic personified. This drivel could not be further from Actual Freedom and the PCE – it is, as we continually state, 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

Awareness = ‘I’

We seem to have numerous ‘I’s. There is the I of ‘I want’, the I of ‘I wrote a letter’, the I of ‘I am a psychiatrist’ or ‘I am thinking’. But there is another I that is basic, that underlies desires, activities and physical characteristics. A Deikman, Awareness = ‘I’

So, very quickly we have located the psychological ‘I’, and he defines it well. It is beyond ‘desire’, and I assume he means physical desires such as food, warmth, comfort and sex (and hot showers), beyond ‘activities’ like going for a walk, shopping, having a chat or typing a letter, and beyond ‘physical characteristics’ such as the sensately evidenced, solid, verifiable, factual, active, vibrant, tangible, see-able, feel-able, smell-able, hear-able, down-to-earth, sensual, actual world, here in space and now in time. Beyond people, things and events.

Note also the disassociation from the process of thinking, as in: ‘I’ am not my thoughts. This is to completely negate what the brain does as its business. The brain thinks, just as heart pumps blood and the liver ‘livers’ (or filters the body’s wastes or whatever it does). What absolute nonsense to deny the brain and its functioning. Basically, the human body is a walking brain and sense organs. In fact, the brain and the sense organs are one – the eyes are the seeing stalks of the brain, the ears are hearing cones of the brain, the nose is the sniffing snout, the mouth its taster and the skin its direct interface as in touch and feel. The brain and body are one and part of the brain’s job is to think and reflect. It is the sole function that distinguishes the human animal from the rest of sentient beings. How do you deny all that and shut it all down?

By sitting in the corner with your eyes closed, of course, and then go into your feelings and imagination.

Introspection and Subjectivity

When we use introspection to search for the origin of our subjectivity, we find that the search for ‘I’ leaves the customary aspects of personhood behind and takes us closer and closer to awareness, per se. A Deikman, Awareness = ‘I’

So, we have an introspective search going on – a looking inwards for the real ‘me’. We leave the rotten old ‘me’ behind and the physical, mortal body and the real world . and go off looking ‘inside’ in a search for the origin. And we come closer to awareness per se; in other words, not an awareness of something but awareness itself. This act of being aware – awareness itself – takes precedent over and supersedes the customary aspects of personhood – such as mortality, sexuality, fear, aggression, sorrow, malice, resentment, growing old, etc.

If this process of introspective observation is carried to its conclusion, even the background sense of core subjective self disappears into awareness. Thus, if we proceed phenomenologically, we find that the ‘I’ is identical to awareness: ‘I’ = awareness. A Deikman, Awareness = ‘I’

Thus, as one carries this process on to its conclusion, any personal sense of self disappears as the new ‘I’ becomes the watcher of the other ‘I’ – the one who is selfish, self-obsessed and neurotic, and this new watcher has got nothing to do with the flesh and blood body and its sensate experience, instinctual passions and fears. One proceeds phenomenologically as in ‘the method of reduction whereby all factual knowledge and reasoned assumptions about a phenomenon are set aside so that pure intuition of its essence may be analyzed.’ ... Oxford Dictionary.

Thus ‘proceeding phenomenologically’ is to abandon facts and common sense and opt for pure intuition and as such we opt out of the real world of people, things and events and we become the awareness of these phenomena. Thus ‘I’ am not my feelings, ‘I’ am not my thoughts, ‘I’ am not my body, ‘I’ have nothing to do with the real world – ‘I’ am awareness only.

All this does nothing but more strongly confirm that ‘I’ am a disembodied entity who has taken up residency in this flesh and blood body. At its most basic this new stripped-down ‘I’ is really just the awareness of what is going on around me. Thus, the real world appears as an illusion or a picture show that ‘I’ am watching, initially from inside this body, but then even this bodily phenomena disappears into awareness itself. Thus ‘I’ = awareness = nothing at all to do with the real world of people things and events and most definitely nothing to do with this flesh and blood body. Complete and utter dis-association is the result.

Awareness

Awareness is something apart from, and different from, all that of which we are aware: thoughts, emotions, images, sensations, desires and memory. Awareness is the ground in which the mind’s contents manifest themselves; they appear in it and disappear once again. A Deikman, Awareness = ‘I’

The Professor goes on to confirm this being ‘apart from’ and being ‘different from’. This new ‘I’ ‘is apart from, and different from,’ anything the other ‘I’ thinks, feels, senses, sees, touches, remembers, desires, worries about, etc. It’s a pretty cosy little set-up, especially if one keeps one’s eyes closed and withdraws from the senses. Desires like sex have always proved a tough hurdle for the inner journeyers, and going out into the real world can often be a trial, particularly in the early days of cultivating this new ‘me’. The new, basic ‘I’ is the ‘ground’ in which all the mind’s contents appear – the thinking, reflecting and the brain’s sensory inputs that directly experience the physical world. Thus ‘I’ am neither my brain nor my body. This new ‘I’ is basic, prior and becoming more and more ‘real’, in direct proportion to the emphasis and kudos it is given.

When I first came upon the spiritual path I remember practicing being here and being centred and focused, but my relationships still failed, I still got pissed off, annoyed, melancholic, irritated and occasionally angry. Later I got into Vipassana meditation and then the ‘food queue syndrome’ kicked in – blissful sittings that eventually ended, which meant returning to the real world populated by ‘un-meditative’ people. This approach did nothing to address the primary, central role that instinctually-sourced feelings and passions have in producing malice and sorrow. But I don’t want to get into a right and wrong discussion with you – I just went with the facts and what worked and what didn’t work. For me that meant focusing on feelings with the intent of eliminating malice and sorrow.

Your approach is to focus less and less on feelings. I fail to see how the instinctual passions are going ‘to dissolve gradually in the due course of time’. It hasn’t happened over the 3,500 years of recorded spiritual history, in fact, quite the contrary has occurred. The instinctual passions have been co-opted into appalling battles between good and evil and as for ‘‘I’ will gradually dissolve’ – history has it that when this method of disassociation is practiced, ‘I’ become Self-realized – for the few, or ‘I’ become self-centred, self-satisfied, humble, grateful – for the many.

When I talk of a sensible, sensate only experience I talk of it at the end of some 2 years of intensive effort aimed at eliminating the debilitating effects of having a social identity and having an instinctual self. I am talking of an experience whereby I have so totally and thoroughly changed myself to the point where feelings and instincts play no role in my life.

From my investigations and experiences it is obvious that ‘who’ I think and feel I am – ‘me’ at the core – encompasses both a deep-set feeling of separateness from others and the world as perceived by the senses as well as a deep-set feeling of needing to ‘belong’.

This over-arching feeling of separateness – of being a ‘separate self’, who is forever yearning to ‘belong’ – is the root cause of sorrow in me and the all encompassing ‘ocean’ of human sorrow in the world.

The tradition approaches to these conflicting feelings has been either –

1. to make the best of one’s lot in life, promoting the good feelings and chemical flows as much as possible, being a good and moral real-world citizen, or

2. to throw one’s lot completely into the fanciful spirit-ual world, practicing ‘right-thinking’, ‘good-dreaming’ and ‘blissful feeling’. This transcending of the real world is a dis-association from the world-as-it-is. It involves identifying oneself with the instinctual passions of nurture and desire – the soul – and also satisfies the need to ‘belong’ with feelings of ‘Union’ and ‘Oneness’. It’s a very powerful instinctual lure, given substance and credence by the chemicals that flow from the amygdala. Most importantly, it not only maintains the instinctual self in existence but it also enhances it – ‘I’ become noble, grand, all-encompassing, all-powerful, rising above the world-as-it-is and people as-they-are – in short, Divine and Immortal.

Thankfully I’m pursuing a third alternative, which is the total elimination of my ‘self’ in total – the whole of the amygdala’s instinctual programming that gives rise to the animal passions. The startle quick-scan function of the amygdala still operates but the chemical surges that give rise to the emotions of fear, anger, nurture and desire have almost ceased to be of influence. I am left with a lot of shifting sensations in the head, neck, heart and belly that tell me something chemically is still happening but these very rarely translate into emotions or reactions.

I recently saw an interview with Neale Donald Walsch, the author of a book entitled ‘Conversations with God’. It has been a best-seller in USA for some time and has appeal to both Western and Eastern religious believers. He offered a syrupy message spoken to him from the real God whose message was He-is-All, We-are-All-One and love is all there is. The He-is-All scenario means that He is the God of all the religions, people and all the belief-systems. Walsch is now setting off on a mission to convince the world’s believers that he has been talking to their God lately and that He has recently updated and modified His story, just a wee bit. For the We-are-all-One scenario he uses the words Oneness and Source thus appealing to the Eastern religious pursuers of altered states of consciousness. It’s a cunning concoction that fails, like all the other fairy-tale beliefs, to address the perplexing on-going issue of human malice and suffering – the salient features of the human condition on earth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Hey.

P.S. Just as a bit of an aside. One of the latest God-men to hit the circuit calls himself Maitreya Ishwara and he was a follower of Mohan Rajneesh for many years. He is putting out the story that the collapse of Rajneesh’s Utopian city Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, USA was God’s will and all the suffering, pain and recrimination was pre-ordained. Same old perverse fairy story – human suffering is all part of God’s plan.

Chapter one. In the Beginning Are the Words

‘Source is unexplainable, yet it has been given many names. It has been called the Tao, the Hidden Harmony, ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’, ‘the Kingdom of God’. This is the way the mind interprets it in order to share it. When we let go of all forms identification with time and space, with knowing, with the need for safety, security and predictability, there is a disappearance, which means there is no identification with what we call the ‘self’. Then there is no self as we know it and the mind cannot understand that. I call this state the unformed. The source is the unformed. <Snip> Then from this state we create form according to our desires, although we usually do not recognize them as desires. <Snip> We are not aware we are doing this, but we are holding this reality as we know it by identifying it as such. If we did not do that, we would go to the source, which is life in an unformed state. Each person is that state of the unformed, not a part of that state. Many of the eastern philosophies express the idea that everything in existence is created from this unformed state, from the whole, and the whole remains intact and undiminished. Each person is not part of existence, each person is existence <Snip> ... is the whole and is the source. The game in this dimension is to have a direct experience of source. Once this is realized, the struggle is over – nothing is ever serious again; life becomes fun, a series of events to experience and savour deeply. We are not here to understand or control life, but to be present and enjoy the maximum potential of each moment, just as it is. Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A new Way to Live

It is obvious that ‘ordinary spirituality’ includes dropping the common convention of using capital letters to denote reverence to the Divine spirit or energy that is believed to be the origin of the physical universe. The Oxford Dictionary defines source as –

Source –– ‘The derivation of a material thing; a place or thing from which something material is obtained or originates; the originating cause of a physical agency.’ Oxford Dictionary

Interestingly the source of this passionate belief in an originating source of the physical universe is also defined –

‘A person who or thing which is the chief or prime cause of a specified condition, quality, emotion, etc.’ Oxford Dictionary

Thus it is that those who believe in a source are themselves the very source of perpetuating and maintaining the idea of a source , energy, God, Mother Earth, Grandmother Universe or whatever other puerile nonsense is offered up. In this sense, Mr. Lowe himself could be seen as the source of the belief in a source, energy, God, Mother Earth, Grandmother Universe, etc. – a mere figment of his passionate imagination for there is no factual evidence to support this belief beyond what he and countless others feel to be the truth.

The pertinent question is: how do otherwise seemingly intelligent people get to a state where they so totally believe in ‘the source’ and passionately feel or experience ‘the source’ that they believe themselves to be ‘the source’? Paul, in fact, describes the process reasonably well.

‘When we let go of all forms identification with time and space, with knowing, with the need for safety, security and predictability, there is a disappearance, which means there is no identification with what we call the ‘self’. Then there is no self as we know it.’ Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A New Way to Live

What he describes is a process of dis-association not only with the ‘real’ world but also with the actual, physical, material world of time and space. This dis-association with what is evidenced by the bodily senses, combined with a dis-identification with one’s psychological ‘self’ leads to the imaginary creation of a new self or identity whereupon one feels that one ‘is existence <Snip> ... is the whole and is the source’. In honest, forthright spirituality this is spoken and written of as transcending self to become ‘Self’. In ordinary spirituality this apparently becomes a transcendence from ‘self’ to ‘source’. As for – ‘I call this state the unformed. The source is the unformed.’ – the idea of a source is so ancient and primitive it would be better said that the source is the un-informed rather than unformed.

All this traditional belief is understandable, for up until now the seeker has had only two choices. Either to remain ‘normal’ in the ‘real’ world, or to attempt to feel one is divine in the ‘spiritual’ world. In the spiritual world ‘the game in this dimension is to have a direct experience of source’ which, as we know, is then to swoon around pretending one is above it all and immortal to boot.

‘Once this is realized , the struggle is over – nothing is ever serious again; life becomes fun, a series of events to experience and savour deeply.’ Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A new Way to Live

To do this as a flesh and blood human being on this planet is to turn away from the very physical, very real fact of the ongoing malice and sorrow that exemplifies the Human Condition. It is an act of utter selfishness, an act of self-aggrandizement, born of ancient ignorance and passionately fuelled by the ‘self’s’ will to survive – at all costs.

Transcendence is not a self-less state, transcendence is a delusion and a cop-out. Seeking the ‘source’ that underlies or underpins the actual physical universe is but a search by the psychological and psychic entity for a place to feel at ‘home’, and a place where to go to after ‘the body dies’. The ‘maximum potential’ that inevitably results from the search for the ‘expansion of human consciousness’ is to end up believing and feeling oneself to be the ‘source’ of it all, for to be the ‘source’ is as BIG and EXPANDED as humans can imagine themselves to be.

It is only by the patient, stubborn and persistent elimination of all belief, indeed the very act of believing, that one can arrive at the magic, perfection and purity of what is actual. When both ego and soul, both who we think and feel we are, is made to disappear. When belief, imagination and impassioned feelings are made to disappear. This is the ‘maximum potential’ of intelligence – that unique faculty of human beings which separates us as a species from the other animals – to be actually free of the Human Condition, in total.

One only needs to dare to relentlessly pursue the process of actively re-wiring one’s brain to free oneself of all illusion – only then will what is actual be evident as an on-going experience – while awake and until death.

Next of the fresh and unique re-interpretations are ‘Choicelessness and Being Present’.

But, enough for now. The day is cloudy and deliciously cool and the time is perfect for a stroll downtown.

I do like being firmly in space and time, not a ‘let go of all forms identification with time and space’. It’s what being here and now is all about.

When something pleasant happens and you feel good, it is not the circumstances that make you feel that way. When the event takes place you say ‘yes’ – you expand and make yourself available to what is. The acceptance and the expansion produce the good feelings. When something unpleasant or unexpected happens, you say no to what is happening, and that contraction, not the incident itself, produces the bad feeling. It is never the event, but how you are with the event that creates your experience. Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A new Way to Live

This is not a theoretical, philosophical critique. It is vitally important for an actualist to understand precisely what is being said and to determine whether one is falling into the trap of denial and transcendence.

The trap goes like this –

When a good event happens then you accept it and practice an expansion of the good feelings. When an unpleasant event happens you feel bad but it is then you who are creating the bad feeling by not expanding yourself. To do this you need to deny that the event is causing the feeling and practice expanding, or ‘rising above’ the bad feeling. Thus you practice disassociation from any unpleasant events and the resulting bad feelings until you identify as someone who has transcended bad feelings and become a person who only has good feelings. This is ‘self’-aggrandizement – 180 degrees opposite to ‘self’-immolation.

You are the one who knows you have a body, a mind and emotions. You are in a highly unstable vehicle. It gets set off by illogical things. It can get upset about the same thing again and again for its entire life. It never seems to learn. It is as though it has an allergy and when somebody says something it gets upset. No one was hurt, no one has damaged it; it just did not want to hear what was said, so it gets upset. It is not you who is upset. Your mind heard something and created a reaction in the body and the emotions. The essential you is the one who can watch the reaction. However, you forgot to watch, you get caught up in it and you think you are angry. You are not angry. The body, mind and emotions have become disturbed, chemicals have been released and there is nothing you can do about it. Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A new Way to Live

Denial and disassociation abound.

What about saying – I am a highly unstable person. I get set off by illogical things. I can get upset about the same thing again and again for my entire life. I never seem to learn. Etc. An honest, simple, straightforward assessment of the situation one finds oneself in, no avoidance, no denial, no being a watcher, no cunning sideways shift.

It is only by not denying one’s feelings and actions and by not disassociating from them that one can begin to do something about them.

Only if you want to, of course.

Anything created out of the will, out of contraction and control, never produces an enduring sense of satisfaction and contentment. Rather, your meditation can be in each moment, being as sensitive and choiceless as possible. When you are present, you can sense a demand coming up in you because you can feel yourself contracting, you can feel the tension inside you. Catch it as early as you possible and then ask ‘Now what am I demanding or resisting?’ and just be there with it. Give yourself the experiment of going for your maximum potential with love and sensitivity, without demand or control. See if you can invite what you would most like in each moment and allow it to emerge without interference. Paul Lowe, In Each Moment – A new Way to Live

Ah, the last sentence makes a mockery of the advice offered in the previous ones. Surely inviting ‘what you most like’ is nothing other than making a judgement or choice as to what you like or don’t like and ‘inviting’ is but a soppy word for demand. When you say ‘allow it to emerge without interference’ I would remind you that you have also said directly above that the method you applied was ‘when I have gone unconscious, saying, ‘Oh – slipped up there,’ and beginning anew’ which sounds very much like making a judgement or choice, deciding not to ‘be there with it’ and interfering such that you immediately get back control in order that you can feel transcendent or at your ‘maximum potential’.

The phrase ‘going for your maximum potential with love and sensitivity’ is worthy of comment for so many utterly selfish actions and so much malicious manipulation of others is done in the name of love that it beggars description. Practicing dis-association from one’s fellow human beings and dressing it in the name of love and sensitivity is a but a sleazy and smaltzy attempt to avoid the traditional increased loneliness and alienation that transcendence brings with it.

The enormous gap between what is written and said by spiritual people and what is practiced and realized in action is due to the blindness induced by self-centred spiritual belief.

To believe anything is to ignore, and be ignorant of, facts and sensibility. To passionately believe is to deliberately choose to ignore and be proud of being ignorant of facts and sensibility – a dangerous and volatile mix that readily leads to delusion and fanaticism.

It’s so good to get into the meat of the matter and sort out what it is that these ‘non-spiritual’ spiritual people are saying, where the contradictions, lies, anomalies, confusions, seductions, misinterpretations, twists, deceptions, illusions and delusions are. The transcribed words of Mr. Rajneesh, that most prolific of God-men, are a testimony to contradiction, deceit and deception – so much so that he was forced to make a Divine virtue out of the fact.

Shamans are magicians of the emotions, imagination and the psychic world, and their tricks, stories, tales and methods have been passed down from generation to generation. It is no easy or small thing to demolish the Eastern variety of religious belief – cunningness and slight of hand abounds. Even the use of the word spiritual has been slyly adopted to imply it is non-religious belief. Paul is now trying to imply a non-spirituality for his ‘ordinary spirituality’ but we actualists shall have that phrase back, thank you.

This is such a good exercise and such good fun.

All pain, suffering and aggression comes from the mistaken identification that we are ONLY the body, thought and feeling.

... and once one realizes this mistake then one can dis-identify and dissociate from one’s own pain, suffering and aggression and identify as a bodiless spirit that is immortal, and therefore ‘above’ it all.

Generally speaking, all dissociative reactions are attempts to escape from excessive trauma tension and anxiety by separating off parts of one’s personality function from the rest of cognition as an attempt to isolate something that arouses anxiety and thus gain distance from it. For example, in everyday life, mild and temporary dissociation, sometimes hard to distinguish from repression and isolation, is a relatively common and normal device used to escape from severe emotional stress and anxiety. Temporary episodes of transient estrangement, de-personalization and de-realization are often experienced by normal persons when they first feel the initial impact of bad news, for instance.

Everything suddenly looks strange and different; things seem unnatural and distant; events can be indistinct and vaporous; often the person feels that they themselves are unreal and everything takes on a dream-like quality. Dissociation becomes abnormal when the once mild or transient expedient becomes too intense, lasts too long, or escapes from a person’s control ... and leads to a separation from the surroundings which seriously disturbs object relations.

In object estrangement the once familiar world of ordinary objects – the world of people, things and events – seems to have undergone a disturbing and often indescribable change. Thus, just as a traumatized victim of an horrific and terrifying event makes the experience unreal in order to cope with the ordeal, all the Gurus and the God-Men, the Masters and the Messiahs, the Avatars and the Saviours and the Saints and the Sages have desperately done precisely this thing (during what is sometimes called ‘the dark night of the soul’). Mystics have been transmogrifying the real world ‘reality’ into an unreal ‘True Reality’ via the epiphenomenal imaginative/intuitive facility born of the psyche (which is formed by the instinctual passions genetically endowed by blind nature for survival purposes) for millennia.

Mysticism in general is a psychotic sickness; a head-in-the-sand escapist ‘solution’ to all the ills of humankind and is otherwise described (in non-psychiatric terminology) as ‘Theodicy’ (a vindication of a god’s and/or goddess’s goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil). The altered state of consciousness known as ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ is nothing more and nothing less than a frantic coping-mechanism that became culturally institutionalized, into being a legitimate and venerated social metaphysics, over thousands and thousands of years.

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