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Selected Correspondence Peter Disassociation and Dissociation
I had meant to respond earlier to this post, but our area was hit with a nasty ice storm, which knocked out power (and internet access) over a large area for most of a week. It did afford the opportunity to experience instinctual fear, as tree limbs came crashing down on the roof repeatedly... that elicited a response that could only be from the lizard section of the brain. It was followed then by the fabricated worry response, which anticipated with dread the next limb. Anyways, it was an interesting (as in the Chinese curse?) observation of the whole range of fear responses. Careful observation will reveal that the worry response emanating from instinctual fear is not fabricated – as in made-up or manufactured – but rather it is directly associated with the automatic instinctual response. The genetically programmed thoughtless instinctual response together with its immediate feeling aftermath, whether it lasts a few minutes or a few hours, are inseparable and any attempts to intellectually separate them can only result in dissociation. In this case, I wasn’t attempting to separate them, it was merely interesting to notice that the total fear package had parts that originated in the genetic program, and parts in the conditioned response. I do have a tendency to ‘divide and conquer’, which happens to be one standard engineering practice ... I know it doesn’t work in these cases. And yet what I was pointing out that in the case of an instinctive fear reaction to physical danger, it makes no sense to divide the reaction into two parts. In my experience of observing the feeling of fear, whenever the feeling of fear kicks in, whether it is in response to an actual danger or an imaginary one, there is no two-part reaction – no discernable first stage and no discernable, fabricated or conditioned, second phase to the feeling. Understood, from a practical sense. There may still be parts of the reaction sequence that could be categorized as ‘innate’ or ‘conditioned’, but it doesn’t pertain to the task at hand. The major task at hand for those with a sincere interest in actualism is to garner the intent to entirely abandon the past and to fully commit to something that is brand new in human history – bringing an end to malice and sorrow in this body, for the sake of this body and every other body. Unless one has this intent, any attempt to utilize the actualism process will only result in even more confusion and consternation about the human condition as one aimlessly observes whilst automatically discriminating the observations in accord with one’s social identity. * It may also be worthwhile considering that the male of the human species has been conditioned by his peers to rationalize his feelings in lieu of deeply experiencing his feelings. The significant understanding for an actualist is that this tendency to rationalize or intellectualize is only social conditioning and, as such, this habitual behaviour can be quite easily abandoned. I hadn’t considered that my gender would play a significant role re dissociation, but what you say makes sense. Generally, males distance themselves from the emotions, while females wallow in them; neither is simply recognizing them with the intent of eliminating them. In a similar vein, the male of the human species, precisely because of their male gender conditioning, could well be philosophically attracted to eliminating the feelings and emotions that are part and parcel of the instinctual passions. Because of this it is vital to remember that actualism is not about eliminating feelings and emotions – a negation that could only lead to sociopathic states – but that actualism is about becoming happy and harmless – a positivity of intent that serves to expose any feelings of malice and sorrow to the bright light of awareness. * Feelings and emotions on the other hand are a different matter – they are not the result of fabricated, conditioned nor taught behaviour. Feelings and emotions are rooted in the instinctual survival passions – an understanding that is vital to understanding the essential nature of the actualism process Interesting point you made about dissociation. If I understand correctly your last statement above, you are suggesting that pigeon-holing the various responses serves to reinforce the identity by defining or creating new components: this is No 38’s genetic response, this is No 38’s conditioned response, etc. Making the identity more complex is of course contrary to the actualist’s work. Well, the first aspect is that your pigeon-holing of feelings seems to be intellectual rather than experiential and, as you would know from your engineering background, there is often a vast dichotomy betwixt theory and practice. Men in particular have been unwittingly taught since very early childhood to suppress, intellectualize or rationalize their feelings and emotions as a way of dissociating from their feelings. In the East, the God-men and monks simply took this taught behaviour to its extreme. Secondly, keeping it simple is anathema to the human psyche – the confusion that arises from the combination of passion and imagination nearly always eclipses any chance of intelligence and common sense operating. The only way I found that I could utterly focus my attention on ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ was to keep it simple – I made this attentiveness my number one passion in life. There are countless examples in human history where individuals have devoted their lives, and their passion, to a single cause and by doing so have contributed mightily to the betterment of their fellow human beings. Richard’s single-minded intent and eventual discovery of a way to bring an end to the insidious influence of the instinctual passions is but one example. * I’ll just offer a comment on the matter of observation as it is relevant to all who have been attracted to Eastern spirituality or Eastern philosophy at some point in their lives. Vineeto and I have often discussed the fundamental differences between the Eastern practice of self-observation and the actualism practice of ‘self’-awareness as well as reflecting upon how difficult it was in the early days to stop being a dissociative observer and start becoming aware of exactly how I am experiencing this moment of being alive. The fundamental difference between the two practices is due to the diametrically opposite intent of each of the practices – the aim of the spiritual practice is to cultivate a dissociated identity in order to avoid feeling the full range of instinctual passions, whereas the aim of actualism is to instigate radical change in order to become happy and harmless in the world-as-it-is, with people as-they-are. Perhaps an example of how the actualism practice of ‘self’-awareness works in practice will serve to make this difference clear –
No philosophical umming and ahhing, no dissociating from unwanted feelings, no remaining aloof, no blaming others and so on – just the simple momentary awareness of the feelings that were preventing me from being happy coupled with an intense yearning to change in order to become actually harmless, come what may. So, the dissociation aspect of the above would be ‘How could anything else or anyone else be more important in her life than me?’, bundling up a nice neat package of your emotions and displacing them on to an external entity. No, your quote is an example of normal ‘self’-centeredness, and I do mean normal, as humans are instinctually programmed to be ‘self’-centred. When I said ‘no dissociating from unwanted feelings’ I meant that I didn’t sit there at the seaside café thinking ‘I’ am feeling furious or ‘my identity’ is feeling furious or wasting my time by asking ‘who’ is feeling furious. I simply acknowledged that I was – in that very moment of being alive – feeling furious. Utterly simple and down-to-earth – no evasion, no dissociation. * As far as dissociative techniques of observation used by spiritual practices, I’ll defer to your knowledge as I don’t have any direct experience with them or their practitioners. My dissociation has been purely of the mundane secular flavour. Yep, I was born a male and brought up to be a man, which was the start of dissociation. Then I allowed myself to be sucked into Eastern religion, which only lead me further away from sensibility and the actual world of the senses. The only reason I mentioned the Eastern practice of being a dissociated observer was that you had previously mentioned that you had found similarity between actualism and the writings and teachings of Bankei.
Of course the good thing is that none of this is set in concrete – all of this is nought but social programming and, as such, can be undone if one so desires. All that is needed to begin the process of undoing this programming is the simple acknowledgement that ‘I, along with everybody else, have got it 180 degrees wrong’. Only then can one stop defending ‘me as I am’ and get started on the job of de-programming. A bit from my journal is relevant –
As you can see, recognizing and abandoning beliefs whilst cultivating a commonsense-only approach to the business of being alive is by no means an impossible task – I always figured that if one human being can do it then others can. Similarly if one man can deliberately dismantle his male conditioning, then other men can too and it also follows that there is no reason why women cannot do the same. All that is required is the pure intent to become happy and harmless. * Or is my identity bullshitting me again? Speaking personally, I never saw any sense at all in splitting ‘me’ and ‘my identity’ into two parts. I had tried that in my spiritual years and saw that it was a wank. Sometimes I use incorrect terminology, all those identities, self’s, me’s, mine, I’s ... I will try to refer to the AF glossary in the future. The intent was something like: Or is my identity attempting to maintain its existence at all costs? I can only suggest re-reading the first piece I posted from my journal again and considering again the utter simplicity of the potent mix of being aware of how I am experiencing this moment of being alive combined with the single-pointed intent to change such that I become as happy and harmless as possible. I can only suggest re-reading the first piece I posted from my journal again and considering again the utter simplicity of the potent mix of being aware of how I am experiencing this moment of being alive combined with the single-pointed intent to change such that I become as happy and harmless as possible. That was one of the original draws of actualism, a bare-bones simple approach. I just have a tendency to drift upwards into the head a bit too easily. As I noted to No 37, this is much too important to risk letting it slip between my fingers. Back to the basics. A single-pointed intent is the only thing that can counter the natural human tendency to drift, waft or waffle, aimlessly go with the flow, compulsively run with the herd or mindlessly rebel against the herd. * You may then find that the simplest, most straight-forward, phrasing of your original question would be ‘am I bullshitting myself again?’ as opposed to ‘is my identity bullshitting me again?’ Common sense would then have it that your second question would be ‘am ‘I’ attempting to maintain ‘my’ existence at all costs?’ because actualism is about ‘self’-immolation and not the physical death of the corporal body called No 38. You might have noticed by now that I make no distinction between I and ‘I’ when I am being a normal human being. I do intellectually understand the distinction – t’is writ large all over the Actual Freedom Trust website – but the only way I, or indeed anybody else, can actually experience this distinction is when ‘I’ am not strutting the stage as it were – when ‘I’ am temporarily in abeyance during a pure consciousness experience. To attempt to split yourself into two parts while remaining an identity is an act of dissociation – vis –
This is the whole thrust of the spiritual search for freedom – split yourself into two identities, become free from ‘I’ as ego and Realize that ‘who’ you really are is ‘me’ as a disembodied soul. The spiritual process is to practice dissociating from ‘I’ as a personal ego, and from the illusion of a grim reality, whilst simultaneously aggrandizing the real ‘me’ until I get to the delusionary state of thinking and feeling I am best mates with some God or other or, in the Eastern tradition, thinking and feeling I am God Himself or Herself. Whilst none of this is a problem – the tradition has been going on for thousands of years – t’would be a pity for someone who is genuinely interested in becoming actually free of malice and sorrow to unwittingly continue on with the age-old habit of dissociation. No 37 recently put the whole issue of dissociation very succinctly –
And on that note, I might leave it at that – it’s so refreshing to hear someone call a spade a spade.
I’ve spent some time lately contemplating this dissociation business, and it has turned out to be fascinating. Your post clarifies a lot for me. My intent was never to distance myself from my identity a la spiritual techniques, but somewhere along the line in my ‘self’-observation, I’ve managed to do just that. You could look at it that you were simply doing what comes naturally – human beings are born with a rudimentary self that is the very core of the ‘self’-centred survival instincts and this ‘me’ at heart is then overlaid with a social identity, an ‘I’ in the head, who is taught by his or her peers that ‘this is the way it is and this is the way it will has always been so this is the way it will always be’. Because of this it is universally agreed that ‘you can’t change human nature’ because it is human nature that makes human beings human. Thus it is that human beings keep raking through the rubbish bin of history – a bin labelled ‘humanity’s failed philosophies and fantasies’ – and keep endlessly re-running them in a vain attempt to find the meaning of life. This morbid fascination with re-running the ‘tried and failed’ simply guarantees that any of the traditional efforts to evince peace on earth between human beings is ultimately fated to fail. Those who can see this are most often reduced to having a cynical view of human existence whereas those who have yet to see or can’t see this persist in trying to impose their own pet ‘failed philosophies and fantasies’ on others. For those who can see the futility of re-running the tried and failed and have not fully succumbed to cynicism there is now a third alternative available. The opportunity has only recently arisen such that those who are sufficiently willing can now abandon the animal survival instincts that are the very root cause of all of the wars, of all of the murders, of all of the rapes, of all of the suicides, of all of the child abuse, of all of the corruption – of all of human malice and all of human sorrow. Of course to do so is an act of daring because by no longer being an instinctually-driven ‘being’ one is literally no longer a part of humanity – no longer a player in the relentlessly competitive battle for survival that human beings are instinctually-driven to wage against each other. With this in mind, it is not at all surprising that you are running on the old human programming, including that of dissociation, for up until a few years ago there was no third alternative available to the traditional grim reality of the battle for survival or the various fantasies that conjure a Greater Reality of some sort. In short, giving yourself a hard time for something that is in no way your fault makes no sense. Now that you have understood the nature of dissociation, you will be able recognize it whenever it is occurring and ‘nip it in the bud’, so that you can get on with the business of investigating what it is that is preventing you from being happy and harmless in this moment of time.
I have several times looked over your last posts to me but have always come to the same conclusion – we have nothing in common to talk about. No? Seems that there were several question related directly to actualism wanting to be answered. With you being a self acknowledge expert in actualism, and the questions being directly related to your area of expertise a common interest is strongly established. What I said is we have nothing in common to talk about. You may have an interest in asking questions but you have already made it quite clear on this list, and unambiguously in this comment you made to No 13, that actualism and No 22-ism have nothing in common –
The full quote reveals that the ‘facts’ you offered are your solipsistic view that material objects, flesh and blood human beings and the physical universe do not exist in fact. No 22 to No 13, 4.5.2001 As you well know, solipsism is the very antithesis of actualism, which may well explain your persistent objections and chameleon-like yet totally transparent attempts to hi-jack the words of actualism for your own purposes. * We are poles apart in that you have apparently retreated so far from the actual world of people, things and events that you think and feel this world to be completely illusionary. If I may please, I suggest you look over the post at least once more and in doing so find a way to change the erroneous conclusion thus far reached. There has never been, nor will there ever be a retreat from actuality. The meaning of the words actual and actualism –
Compared with your version of ‘actual’ taken from the above quote to No 13 –
In other words, you feel and think that what is actual does not exist. – and I use the real meaning of the word actual as opposed to your misappropriation of the word. And yet again, from a post to No 12 –
In other words, you think and feel that human bodies do not actually exist. And very recently –
Given your persistent and perverse persecution of plausible prose and perspicacious perception, I’ll pass on your suggestion that I find a way to change my conclusion that we are poles apart. * You have written thousands of words over several years now and have consistently demonstrated that you have no interest in actuality at all. This is, of course, mistaken thought. The fact is the only interest is in actuality. Perhaps the lack of interest in adopting the conclusions and dualistic metaphysics of ‘actualism’ has been mistaken for non-interest in actuality? Given your misuse of the words actual, actuality and actualism, your comment makes no sense whatsoever. You are not alone in this custom of deliberately misusing words and contriving them to mean something they clearly do not mean, for this is symptomatic of all spiritual teachings. * I can only presume that you are perfectly happy with your life as-it-is, whereas a prerequisite for an interest in actualism is a burning discontent with one’s life as-it-is – both one’s spiritual life and one’s real-world life. You are of course free to fantasize and imagine what ever you wish Good Friend, however, in the instance that there is an interest in what is actual it would be an absolute absurdity for one to go about imagining that ‘I’ am ‘happy with MY life’ as it is or other wise. It may have escaped your attention but I used the word ‘presume’ and made no mention at all of imagining. There is a significant difference between the two words. I also see that my presumption was correct as you go on to say further on in your post that ‘I am the happiness and harmlessness that actualism spends so much brave effort trying to imitate’, which I take it is your way of saying you are perfectly happy as you are. There is happiness as life and that happiness is in no small way associated with the recognition that the fantasy that there is some ‘I’ that is other than life and thus capable of being happy with ‘its life’ is the basis of unhappiness. I am what I am doing (being) and that is all, and that recognition Good Friend is the essence of happiness. Sans the duality of ‘me’ and ‘my life’ the struggle ends, the threats disappear, and the justification for angry, defensive behaviour evaporates. I am happiness Good Friend. As a matter of fact, I am the happiness and harmlessness that actualism spends so much brave effort trying to imitate. You have already posted your recipe for ending malice and sorrow, in other words for becoming happy and harmless –
As I pointed out before, your recipe for bringing an end to malice and sorrow is but a facsimile of the tried and failed spiritual recipe that has been running for thousands of years now, has been arduously practiced by millions if not billions of practitioners and has done nothing but spawn thousands of god-men, god-women and GOD[s] who then do nothing but teach the same twaddle to yet another generation of gullible supplicants. Your recipe can be summarized as follows –
Given point 3 of your recipe, attempting to have a sincere conversation with you is nonsensical because your avowed aim is to ignore, dismiss and deny any information that would cast doubt on you being GOD. Or, to put it another way, your door is not only firmly closed but latched and triple locked. * I can only presume that you are perfectly happy with your life as-it-is, whereas a prerequisite for an interest in actualism is a burning discontent with one’s life as-it-is – both one’s spiritual life and one’s real-world life. As observed before, the dualistic fantasy of ‘me’ and ‘my life’ is the cornerstone of the brave quest/fantasy of actualism. Whereas GOD does not have a life, as in –
Given that you are GOD and ‘omnipotence is the package’, why do you bother publishing your ‘recipe for bringing an end to sexual abuse, rape, child abuse, domestic violence, substance abuse, depression, corruption, despair and suicide...’ – why not simply bring an end to all the malice and sorrow on this planet? Of course if you did, then there would be no malice and sorrow in the world, no need for the antidotal feelings of love and compassion and no need for gods, goddesses or GOD – so I can only assume the reason why you haven’t omnipotently brought an end to malice and sorrow has to do with the very real threat to your identity. Actualism is a newly-emerged actual and active threat to all the imaginary gods, goddesses, gurus and god-men – their days are numbered and they will eventually go the way of the belief that the earth was flat.
My trepidation re AF stems from an aversion to detachment, and while some of the feedback you’ve given me has seemed ‘slippery’, I think I understand enough now to grasp that that is not the case. Spiritualism teaches detachment as in believing ‘I am not the body’ and that ‘who I really am really’ is a disembodied spirit. But following this spirit-ual teaching is to remain forever cut off from the magnificence and purity of the actual world we flesh and blood bodies live in. Actualism is utterly and completely non-spiritual and as such, the actualism method of asking ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is specifically designed to break free of the ingrained habit of dissociating from one’s feelings and detaching from sensual experiencing. I am not asking you to believe me, however your own on-going observations and investigations may well reveal this to be the case. Some spiritual disciplines preach ‘be here now’ forms, but then scurry back to the cave when the going gets tough. The proof for me that the ‘be here now’ preachers were full of pith and wind was that, when they realized they were God, they totally retreated from the world and made their living bludging off others who aspired to learn detachment. AF seems to espouse being fully in the world, warts and all. Actualism is not about being in the real world because, as life-experience reveals, the real world sucks. In the real world some 6 billion human beings currently are involved in an instinctually-driven grim battle for survival. The human yearning for freedom is to seek a way of escaping from this instinctually-based illusion but this search for freedom is still well and truly stuck in the ancient fairy-tale beliefs of escaping to a spirit-ridden world – where good spirits go after ‘their body’ dies. There are no warts such as malice and sorrow in the actual world – there is only purity and perfection. There is no anger in a tree, sadness in a rock, resentment in a coffee cup, feeling of alienation in a cloud – nor is there God in a television set. Actualism espouses abandoning the belief in an imaginary spirit world, stepping out of real world into the actual world and leaving your ‘self’ behind where ‘you’ belong. * While ‘attachment’ is clearly a culprit, the usual Buddhist response of non-attachment, or detachment is 180 degrees out. I see that now. The actual world suggested by AF seems to have the qualities that I had envisioned the Buddhist model to have, but never quite lived up to. The actual world already delivers, and always has delivered, because it exists as an actuality. It is already, always here under our very noses, as it were. The actual world is pure and perfect in its peerless infinitude, whereas the real-world is but an illusionary ‘self’-created nightmare and the spiritual world is but a delusionary ‘self’-imagined dream. It is my experience that even a virtual freedom from the human condition is vastly superior to suffering from the exalted state of Self-realization, God-realization, Buddha-hood or whatever other name is used. * And just to once again draw attention to the difference between actualism and spiritualism – you may have noticed that those who suffer from solipsism would claim there is no flesh and blood finger, (no body), no physical sensation (only affective feeling) and no material object that the finger is touching (matter is illusionary), just ing-ing happening. Solipsism is a condition that happens to those who retreat from the world of people, things and events and become so enamoured with their own thinking and feelings (ing-ing) that they become so totally ‘self’-centred and ‘self’-obsessed that they are compelled to deny the very existence of both their fellow human beings and of matter itself.
You are obviously perfectly at peace as your Self, being one of the fathomless all-mighty God-men within the human condition. As such, you do not even recognize, let alone ‘own’, your fear, anger, doubt, sorrow, frustration, aloofness or ‘above and beyond’ sanctimony. Which is why you prefer to remain within a delusion of your own creation and prefer to ‘not bother with what must be the immensely stressful, frustrating, and quite dirty business of digging out of a hole’. This is incorrect thought. I have existed as fear, doubt and aloofness, although, and this is important, I have never owned what I existed as. This gets a bit silly given that you said above – ‘it can be offered that I have never been malice or sorrow’. Where I come from normal people who have feelings of fear and doubt invariably experience feelings of malice – resentment, frustration, annoyance, anger, etc. – and feelings of sorrow – sadness, melancholy, depression, despair, etc. But I do note your important point that you ‘have never owned’ these feelings – a concise description of being in a dissociated state. I have never been separate from what I exist as to ‘own’ any-thing, though I am Infinitely responsible for what I exist as. ‘Infinitely responsible’, but not humanly responsible, hey? By waving the ‘I am Infinitely responsible’ flag, God-men have literally got away with murder since time immemorial. Being ‘infinitely responsible’ is God-man-speak for ‘I am not responsible for peace on earth because I am not responsible for my malice and sorrow because I have risen above all earthly matters’. In a similar vein, ‘I am Unconditional Love’ is God-man-speak for I am not responsible for peace on earth because I am not responsible for being incapable of living with my fellow human beings in peace and harmony because I have risen above all earthly matters. God-man-speak has intimidated and enthralled, enraptured and ensnared human beings since time immemorial but to an actualist it only speaks of a dissociated cop-out.
A marvellous opportunity is now available for any who are willing to face facts. No longer do we humans have to feel guilt or shame, pray to God for redemption or salvation, seek to escape from evil into an ‘inner’ world of isolation and feeling-only existence, no longer do we have to humble ourselves before God-men. Simply acknowledging the fact that our malice and sorrow results from an instinctual program instilled by blind nature in order to ensure the survival of the species is the first step towards becoming actually free of malice and sorrow. To continue to deny factual empirical evidence is to indulge in denial and this denial actively prevents your chance at experiencing peace on earth in this lifetime. Beautiful. I couldn’t agree more. But ultimately only through seeing the empirical evidence objectively will this statement serve the manifestation of peace and sanity. Methinks seeing things objectively is at the root of Buddhist philosophy. Objectively means –
On the face of it, being objective can sound reasonable until you note the words – ‘disinterestedly, with detachment, dispassionately’. To see things objectively means one has to become an outside observer and not involved which fairly describes the Buddhist philosophy. By cool objective observation, practicing ‘ right concentration and right action’, one lives one’s life in objective detachment and thus transcends desire and suffering. Where I come from, this is dissociation. Give me subjective investigation any day. It does mean facing the facts of the human condition, both of the real world and the spiritual world, but the rewards are palpable, tangible and actual. It was only by getting my head out of the clouds and ‘getting down and getting dirty’, getting stuck into the roots of animal passion that I was able to eliminate them from my life.
The important thing is the relationship we have to our emotions and instinctual passions, if we can see clearly what’s going on inside of us we can eventually (or even suddenly) take full responsibility for our actions and live in a harmless way. Once again it is important that we stop fooling ourselves and dare to see what we’re actually doing. So when you talk about eliminating the instinctual animal passions do you mean that they disappear or that they still exist in our body but that we’re looking at a totally different landscape so to speak. Not only am I talking about the elimination of instinctual passions but the ‘me’ who feels sad, angry, lost, lonely, frightened, etc. If ‘you’ maintain a separate relationship to your emotions this is dissociation for ‘I’ am my passions and my passions are ‘me’ – they are not separate. Likewise if ‘I’ maintain control over ‘my’ emotions it is ‘me’ maintaining control over ‘me’ – a task that requires almost constant vigil and on-guardness. Self-immolation, or the ending of me is the only way to be actually free of ‘my’ instinctual passions for they are one and the same thing.
When you get thru with all of these methodologies of consciousness, you are still left with ‘the witness’... ie, the Soul. The Soul is innocent; it is the ‘experiencer’ of the All That Is. It does not judge, it experiences. So it does not get into the idea of good and bad, there is pleasant experiences and unpleasant experiences, when the Soul decides it has had enough, it withdraws its focus from an area of experience and focuses ‘somewhere’ else to expand its experience of All That Is. This process is called dissociation – an active withdrawal from unpleasant earthly experiences and a total focusing on pleasant ‘other-worldly’ experiences. As I said to No 8, all one is doing is splitting the ‘self’ in two, creating and reinforcing the idea of an earthly, mortal ego-self and a spirit-ual, immortal Soul-self.
Because I see what you see. Even to the unawakened mind it is obvious that some things are worse than others and even the people in government can control the madness to some degree, but far too often they choose not to. How do you think that ‘the people in government can control the madness to some degree’? Are you advocating more police, more armies, more laws? Or should they adopt the Tibetan Buddhist government’s pacifist approach of fleeing to the next country and leaving the people to fend for themselves when madness manifests as invasion by a neighboring country? This is choosing not to ‘control the madness’ in action. How would you go about controlling the madness given that it is all so obvious to you? Of course they are acting from the same illness as every one else. I shouldn’t have to say anything about this, it is all so obvious. Aye. The illness, as you see it, is that most people are un-Enlightened or un-awakened to the Truth. To use your words, the Truth is
Hence the way to cure ‘the illness’ is to stop identifying with human fear, suffering and hatred. This approach does nothing at all to cure the illness but it does offer a way of psychologically distancing oneself from the illness. This approach to dealing with trauma is commonly known as dissociation.
In the case of spiritual Awakening or Enlightenment, the resulting condition is of an altered state of consciousness where certain concepts such as ‘beliefs, images, fear, suffering, hatred, etc., etc.’, are separated from the conscious personality. Thus, the illness continues unabated and untreated but the traumatized victim no longer associates with the symptoms of the illness and no longer believes he or she has the illness. * Again it has nothing to do with feeling. If the teachings you followed didn’t show clearly what is needed to go beyond the instinctual aggression, passions of fear, etc., then you weren’t following an enlightened teacher. What they taught is exactly what you teach – a transcendence of unwanted and undesirable instinctual passions and an increasing disidentifying with them to the point where complete dissociation occurs as in an altered sate of consciousness experience. All teachers in the Eastern spiritual traditions teach the same thing with only minor cultural or fashionable variation to techniques employed and jargon used. I know you insist your teaching is non-spiritual, non-traditional and unique but you have yet to demonstrate that this is so. * Why not? I am awake, I harm nothing or no one. If everyone just lived that simply were would the wars and killing come from? It is true that the mind of the unenlightened is the same mind as the enlightened, except for the enlightened have awakened to a clear direct seeing the fact before our eyes. Okay, let’s look at the facts before our eyes. The Dalai Lama is an avowed Buddhist who would claim that he would harm nothing and no one. He is a pacifist, which meant when someone invaded his country he fled. Now if everyone in the country you lived in was a pacifist it is like hanging out a sign – pleas invade – we won’t stop you. The Dalai Lama, now safe behind the protection of the Indian army is busily trying to get someone else to free his country. Pacifism is an unliveable ideal in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. Do you not rely on the guns of the police and army for the privilege of feeling a pacifist? Would not it be more sensible to tackle the root cause of malice and sorrow – the instinctual animal passions in humans – rather than striding the moral high ground sprouting unliveable ethics that completely ignore the facts before our eyes. The Enlightened not only cop-out from acknowledging any malice in themselves but they also cop-out from acknowledging sorrow in themselves. As you yourself stated Enlightenment means that one no longer identifies with one’s personal suffering but that one feels universal sorrow or compassion for others. This is easily seen in action whereby they continually rile against the unenlightened as the cause of wars and suffering. The excuse for this malevolence is that they feel compassion towards those who have yet to realize that the wars and killing is all a dream – created by their ego – from which they haven’t yet awakened. There has been no one in my life who I let believe I was some high and mighty being because I was awake. I have had a problem with people who have tried to put me on a pedestal for just being awake. If I let them it would just be ego playing another game. Why should people want to put you on a pedestal in the first place? Just what Guru-energy are you radiating? Is it you or your seductive message of dissociation from the symptoms of the animal instinctual passions in operation in humans? Do you find you have to be humble to put them off? Again your actions of putting yourself above Father Dionysus, Otto Kernberg and Ammachi on the mailing list does seem to weaken your case for being an ordinary man. It must be a tricky business getting these balances just right.
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.
It was about 8 years later after looking ever deeper into it that I awoke one morning and from the time the eyes opened until they closed in sleep that night there took place a complete transformation of what was left of this being. The ego was dead, there was no god to take its place. It was clear that the very words we use to communicate were a symptom of an underlying illness of misidentification. That we had evolved in such a way as to turn everything into abstractions and rarely, if ever, saw what was real before our eyes. To regard that which is physical, tangible, palpable, visible, touchable, smellable, eatable, hearable as an illusion is a trick of the impassioned mind that requires enormous effort. In the East this effort requires the torturous abandonment of sensible thinking and common sense – giving rise to the term ego death and the emergence of what could well be termed soulism – a feeling-only state of delusion. The lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning psychological and psychic entity that is the self becomes the Self – cunningly feeling Oneness, Wholeness, Timeless and Spaceless. The Eastern pursuit of ‘Ego-death’ has proven to be a very tragic delusion, for one becomes completely dissociated from what is actual as evidenced by the senses. This means that one renounces the world, both real and actual and begins a process of turning away, turning in, letting go, withdrawing, disidentifying and finally complete dissociation aka Enlightenment. The reason I use the word tragic is that spiritual seekers – many of whom began the spiritual search to find a way to bring about peace on earth – have now been seduced into turning away from the endemic malice and sorrow in the physical world we human beings live in and now regard it as illusionary, not real. They regard the spiritual world as REAL, the normal world as a nightmare to be avoided and the actual physical world as a dream created in their own minds. The question I ran for a long time is ‘Has everyone got it 180 degrees wrong?’ The fact that all these theories of human existence on earth were cooked up thousands of years ago was the beginning of my doubts. The other thing I found as I contemplated on the question was that it started to explain an awful lot of things about why the spiritual path that didn’t work. I do not regard the above as illusion. I totally enjoy all the wonder of this world. Again a look at what you have said on this list might help clarify your position on what it is you sensately experience with your eyes, ears, smell, touch and taste and how you see all the fighting and suffering in the world–
So, you see all the fighting and suffering in the world as madness that we are dreaming and not as an illusion. Is this not the difference between seeing something as a dream and seeing something as an illusion splitting hairs? Do not both descriptions point to the fact that you regard the madness as unreal – i.e. not actual?
Again you clearly say that you see we are living in a dream.
Now you indicate that we ‘turn everything into abstractions’, yet another word that indicates that our perception of the world, prior to awakening, is unreal as in dreamlike/abstract.
Again, prior to awakening, you had developed ‘the ability to abstract life’ – which presumable includes ‘all the wars, all hatred, all suffering’ – into ‘words pictures and concepts, etc.’. This abstraction is the result of the ego – as personal identity, as our image we have of ourselves or just conditioned thought – and when the ego disappears and we awaken, ‘all the wars, hatred and suffering’ are seen to be the result of the abstraction of our conditioned thought. This torturous explanation as to the reasons for human malice and sorrow leaves me lost for words – a rare occurrence, indeed.
So we can add ‘surface images’ to dreamlike and abstract as words used to describe the pre-awakened perception of the world, but you don’t regard it as an illusion. Hmmmm. As for ‘I totally enjoy all the wonder of this world’ you have also posted –
What you describe doesn’t seem to be an unconditional enjoyment and wonder. The main condition you place on your enjoyment is that you regard all ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ as being just the result of a process of ‘conditioned thought’ – i.e. a dream/ abstraction/ surface image that merely goes on in the brain. This sounds awfully like dissociation to me.
There had been within this being a very subtle sense that this was all somewhat spiritual. Then about a month ago the last vestige of that feeling fell through. It was like another deeper Satori only this time it destroyed even that subtle sense of otherness. We are just life taking place. It is so profound and yet so very very simple. No one becomes enlightened. There is no one there to become enlightened. It is all a wonderful mystery, that shall always remain a mystery. It is joy beyond any thing the mind can conceive of and yet it is as simple as pure sound. There are no Godmen or gods. There is just THIS. It is far more than any words can ever express, yet it is the nothing that is everything, yet never a thing. Get simple. What you are describing is the process of dissociation from the ‘real’ world and its miseries and violence. Unfortunately one also dissociates even further from the actual physical world thus going even further away from the chance of peace on earth, in this lifetime as this flesh and blood body. What I am saying seems pretty simple to me but I live in the actual world and not the spiritual 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 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. Which is why I asked the question for anybody who is interested in peace on earth, in this lifetime –
To do this, sincere seekers of freedom, peace and happiness would have to break through the sacred ceiling that traps them within the human condition. This daring to question the sacred and taking action to break free of ancient beliefs in Gods, God-men and Spirits is analogous to the pioneering women who have had to break through the glass ceiling of religious, social, moral and ethical restraints that bound them to the woodstove and the washing line.
One of which is the impeccable law of karma. When I was at the angry stage of criticizing, (and trying to understand) the gross inequities here, the most extreme in most people’s eyes being such as child starvation, and the various examples you made, I was willing to do everything and anything to ‘know’. Why did you stop seeking an answer and settle for the traditional ancient Bronze Age wisdom? I couldn’t reconcile the beauty and perfection at the atomic, and cosmic level, with the apparent ‘stuff ups’ within the human situation. I now realize that to blame the recent crash of the Concorde on ‘the law of gravity’ is extremely limited. I am saying the suffering you talk of is simply a result of the consequences of each individual’s own action. So, are you saying everyone killed in the Concorde crash was killed as the result of karma? Karma, from the Oxford Dictionary –
– is directly translatable as God’s will. If you are evil, you get punished, if you are good you get to go to Heaven or Mahaparinirvana or the Further Shore. Why are some children born badly malformed, for example. You can take the chaos theory if you choose, or absorb the higher understanding. Well, according to your higher understanding they must be born deformed because of the law of karma. Given that they are born malformed, they presumable got their bad karma from something they did in a previous life. This higher understanding only adds an even more perverse twist to Mr. Buddha’s central tenant, the first of his Noble Truths, – ‘life is fundamentally disappointment and suffering’. Not only do you suffer once, you get to do it again and again and again and if you’re really bad you get to be re-born malformed, or get to die in a plane crash. We all ultimately do (that answers your Self-ish comment). WE ALL ULTIMATELY GET THERE. ... unless we stuff up, become a disbeliever, or do something really bad and then get to be re-born malformed or die in yet another plane crash. With this sort of a horrendous scenario running it is no wonder people desperately want to ‘get there’ ... and out of having to be here, on earth. To quote another of ‘Their’ songs. ‘The long and winding road’. To believe in karma is to believe in an endless, torturous road with no hope other than getting there – to a meta-physical ‘other-world’. Thus a spiritual seeker eagerly forfeits any chance of peace on earth for the utterly ‘self’-ish pursuit of an eternal peace after physical death. I totally associated with your views and how you expressed them. I’m flabbergasted. You have managed to sidestep everything I have said by claiming a higher understanding and a higher moral position. You stated –
– thereby implying that you have graduated, while I remain at undergraduate level. This is not associating with the facts I have presented at all – this is saying they don’t apply to you because you have risen above them. The same ‘miracle of life’, (laws), that illuminated my anger, also gave me the answers. To most, this just doesn’t make sense. They ‘k-NO-W’ of many that didn’t make it, and some that have no hope. They don’t yet K-now that the law of karma and reincarnation are aspects of the same law. Well, given you passionately believe that it is all God’s will I guess it is your way of justifying the appalling malice and sorrow that result from our genetically encoded instinctual passions. You say the ‘miracle of life’ – God by another name – illuminated your anger in order that you could see it is all God’s will. So God created your anger and then illuminated it, to show you His power in order that you have a Higher Understanding. This only makes sense if you are into circular thinking predicated upon a false premise and can see no further than a ‘self’-centred or ‘Self’-centred viewpoint of the physical universe. A ‘self’-less view of the vibrant pure and perfect actuality of the physical universe only happens in a pure consciousness experience and not in an affective ‘Self’-centred experience such as an epiphany, Satori or a similar Altered State of Consciousness. Peter’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. |
