Selected Correspondence Peter

Fear

To be honest, actualism still scares me a lot of the time (even after a year). From a normal perspective, some aspects of it really are scary, no two ways about it. But sometimes a momentary glimpse of what lies beyond the human (animal) condition makes those fears and reservations seem quite laughable.

I was recently having a chat with someone who is just starting to become really fascinated with the human condition and how it operates. Our discussion soon turned to one particular aspect of the human condition that was pertinent to him at the moment. It turned out that there was something he was expected to do because it was as a duty that society demanded of him. He said that the first issues that came up were related to what others would think and feel about him if he didn’t do what he was expected to do. We chatted about the fact that what he was discovering was his conscience in action – the collection of morals, ethics and values that have been instilled in him to ensure that he remain a good and fit member of society. He also revealed that he was starting to become aware that there was a layer deeper than this level and it soon became clear as we talked that he was beginning to experience the instinctual passions in action.

He went on to talk about the instinctual compulsion in question, in this case nurture, as the issue related to his being a father. After we had talked about this for a while the subject moved on to fear because this particular issue had been worrying him for while – the worry he was experiencing was in fact the feeling of fear. After we had chatted for a while longer I asked him what had initially made him consider not doing what was both socially expected and instinctually demanded of him. He replied that he had recently come to understand the insidious nature of the human condition (he is an avid reader of Richard’s Journal and as a consequence has learnt a good deal about the human condition in a surprisingly short time), and because of this he finds that to continue doing what he is ‘expected’ to do, just because others expect him to do it, does not sit well with him at all.

As we discussed the issue further we agreed that it was simply a matter of integrity – once one clearly sees that one’s current course of action is not only harmful to oneself but also harmful to others, one’s own integrity impels one to act. It soon turned out that he had in fact already made the decision he was talking about which is why the feelings that he was having had come to the surface. As such, he wasn’t experiencing the pre-decision fears that usually manifest in the form of debilitating doubt, nor the stultifying type of fear that results in the freeze reaction of doing nothing – the ‘rabbit in the headlight’ reaction. Instead he discovered in the course of the conversation that he was experiencing the fear of the consequences of a course of action he had already committed himself to. In the end, he shrugged his shoulders and acknowledged that despite his fears, he was still going to do what his integrity demanded he do.

What particularly interested me in the conversation was that his feeling of fear manifested as what he called ‘worries’ – men being generally less demonstrative of their feelings than women, which means they typically tend to label them as unwanted or undesirable thoughts rather than what they are, unwanted and undesirable feelings – and that it was integrity that caused him to act despite these feelings arising. And the reason I was interested was that what he was saying accorded with my own experience.

His companion had a slightly different story to tell because her newly-found interest in the human condition had brought up feelings of fear in her as well, not as worry so much but as a keeping-her-awake-at-night, heart-felt, fear. She asked me what I did about fear when I first started to be an actualist. I had to think a bit because fear was not a big thing for me at the start of actualism – it was more a question of how long was I prepared to delay breaking with my past and heading off on a new adventure. I told her I soon became aware that fear was simply a feeling that came and went every now again, albeit very strongly at times, and that I had further become aware that it very often arose as a consequence of my having already decided to do something (or not do something) rather than as a precursor to making a decision.

She nodded as though she could relate to what I was saying and then said that the feelings of fear had become less lately and that she was lately more excited by the business of beginning to experientially understand the whys and hows of the human condition in action. Her face lit up as she began to talk about some of the things she had already discovered and freely asked questions about aspects that she had yet to explore. It became apparent to me that she had discovered that fear can readily be transformed into thrill once one begins to do what one only moments before had been experienced as being scary to do.

I won’t go on as the point of this story is not the discussion I was having, nor the particular people involved, but to make the point that you are not alone in the feelings you are having – in fact given the radical nature of actualism, it is only natural and normal to experience such feelings from time to time.

To No 38: Be clear about what you want and what you’re afraid of losing. Fear is always related to not getting what you want or losing what you have or think you have.

Not so. There is the fear of actually getting what you want – the fear of being free of the human condition is the biggest fear of all because deep down one knows it will be the end of ‘me’.

You so sure about that Petey? That it will be the end of ‘you’? Why do I even ask, of course you are sure.

Yep. Whenever I write about the time when I was considering devoting my life to becoming happy and harmless and that it felt as though I was entering a tunnel that had ‘Warning, do not enter here’ written above it and I get no reply other than bluff and bluster, I assume that others may well be being confronted with the biggest fear of their lives – the beginning of the end of ‘me’.

You have been told it will be the end of you and that ending you will solve all your problems.

No. I have experienced the fear of having nothing left to loose other than to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless is.

This whole self-immolation thing seems completely bogus to me and why use that silly misleading term except to carve out some bogus originality for yet another philosopher, philosophy, teacher and teaching. That term mystifies the whole thing and scares people. It’s completely unnecessary imo.

Remaining who you think and feel you are is only an instinctual necessity for those who want to keep their sorrowful feelings and those who want to continue to blame others for the chronic inability of human beings to live together with other human beings in peace and harmony. For those who are sincere in wanting to be happy and harmless, the feeling of fear that they encounter is not at all mystifying, it is felt to be very real – and especially so for those who have been conditioned by religion and spiritual belief to take their selves seriously.

You think what you have written above is the biggest fear? I don’t agree at all. There is no biggest fear. They are all the same and arise from the same source, self-obsessed thought and thinking taken to a neurotic/psychotic level.

I don’t get it.

Why do you persist with trotting out this old thinking about the source of fear when it is has been utterly debunked as being mythology by experiential neurological evidence which proves that fear is an instinctual reaction that produces an affective reaction that kicks in prior to any cognitive assessment being possible. In other words, although imaginative thinking can produce a feeling of fear via secondary feedback circuitry, the primary source of fear has been proved as being a near instantaneous instinctual/ thoughtless reaction that produces an affective/thoughtless response some 13 milliseconds before the signal reaches the neocortex which only then enables the possibility of cognitive awareness and any consequential thinking to operate.

And you don’t have to be a scientist to work this out for yourself. The next time a potentially threatening situation arises, be it driving a car or hearing an unfamiliar noise outside your house at night or whatever – provided you are attentive to how you are experiencing the moment – you will notice that the feeling of fear has already kicked in before you even become cognitively aware of the potential danger. Your foot has already gone to the footbrake and your heart is already pumping faster before you have had a chance to think about what is happening or you are already feeling fearful before you have a chance to even begin to think about what the noise outside could be.

The reason I say ‘I don’t get it’ is that when I talked about feelings of malice and sorrow with Richard and he explained that their source was instinctual, there was an ‘of course’ – it was as if I had known this all along but had spent my life denying or avoiding the fact that I was an instinctually-driven animal. After that I refused to be so silly as to go back to believing Eastern philosophy and religion, all of which is based on denial and avoidance of this simple and self-evident fact.

This fear you are talking about can be grouped in your societal conditioning fears.

All fear can ultimately be sheeted home to the instinctual fear of death. Why do you persist in being so silly as to hold to ancient spiritual beliefs when they have been long disproved and debunked? To me, holding to such beliefs is akin to those fundamental Christians who deny the geological evidence and the fossil record that disproves and debunks the Bible’s fairy stories of a creator God.

You have been taught that ‘you’ need to go. The ‘you’ or ‘me’ has and can have no idea what the hell that means except death and it gets scared about the implications of death. Those implications have all been taught to us.

No. You would know very well from your own life experiences that the fear of death is instinctual and you would also be well aware that the fear of death comes to the forefront of one’s awareness the older one becomes and the closer one comes to death.

The implications of actualism are that one can either assuage this fear of death by latching on to some form or other of imaginary religious/ spiritual/ metaphysical beliefs, live and die as a melancholic and antagonistic materialist or live and die being a happy and harmless actualist. This is not something I have been taught – the facts are now clearly laid out for anyone to see and for anyone to choose whatever alternative they want.

If you never heard of all this philosophy and teaching of the self and that the self is the causes of your troubles and that your self must go or die to fix your problems, then this particular fear would never have come into existence.

Again, not so. It is common to many people when reaching what is termed middle age – when the years remaining to death become less than those that have passed since birth – to begin to seek the meaning of life. The churches used to be full of the middle-aged and older seeking meaning, whereas nowadays they are more likely to be found frequenting therapy groups, yoga and meditation classes and Internet mailing lists.

UG says the body experiences fear for its own protection. When you are looking over the edge of a cliff, some people may walk to the edge and look over fearlessly and others will keep a ‘safe’ distance. Does that mean you or Richard will walk right up to the edge on a windy or windless day? What will you do? What keeps you from the very edge? Fear? Intelligence? Self preservation? How are you splitting up these three and dividing them?

No. Such matters are matters of common sense. Nowadays I am always careful to avoid situations in which I can be either injured or killed, which was not necessarily the case in the years when I was occasionally stirred to do dangerous things in order to break the monotony I used to experience in doing the mundane activities of everyday life.

How will you behave when you come across a dangerous snake on a walk in the wilderness? Will you instinctually jump back? Is that fear?

I haven’t had occasion to come across a dangerous snake in the last few years but I have noticed a few occasions when I have had a reaction to an unexpected noise or an unexpected movement close by. What I noticed was that an instantaneous preparedness to act, or even an instantaneous evasive action, had kicked in before I had a chance to make a reasoned assessment of the situation, but I also noticed that there was no increase in heart rate and no tensing of the muscles as I used to experience when in the past the feeling of fear accompanied the instantaneous thoughtless response to danger. I liked the fact that the feeling of fear did not occur for it was a matter-of-fact confirmation that I was indeed becoming actually free of the instinctual feeling of fear.

Is that the body’s fear that UG is talking about?

No. In the practical example I gave above, it was clear to me that the body itself does not feel fear – ‘I’ feel fear. This does not mean that this body is reckless and fearless when ‘I’ no longer rule the roost – it means that common sense is then free to operate, unimpeded by the brutish and debilitating instinctual passions.

I did have a snake-related incident that is worthwhile recounting because it is also an experiential confirmation that not only do ‘I’ feel fear but also ‘I’ can cause the bodily symptoms that we associate with the feeling of fear even when the body itself is in no danger at all As I was asleep one night I had a dream in which ‘I’ was bitten on the thumb by a very poisonous snake. Immediately there was excruciating pain and the thumb started to discolour and the skin was withering and dying before ‘my’ eyes. I then woke up out of the dream and I could still feel the pain in my finger and I still felt in shock despite the fact that I could see my finger was okay and that I had no bodily signs normally associated with fear. In other words, I experienced psychosomatic symptoms of fear bought on solely by ‘my’ dream.

Maybe he calls it fear and you call it intelligence. A difference in semantics but no difference in actuality, in the movement of the body away from danger.

No. Fear and intelligence are not the same thing at all. Fear is an instinctual passion, whereas intelligence is a function of the human brain. I don’t know whether you have noticed it but instinctual passions inhibit the free operation of intelligence.

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.

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.

The idea of change, or of tackling something new, usually generates a good deal of fear. From this feeling of fear can come doubt, reluctance, inertia, stuckness and so on, but the same feeling can also generate a sense of adventure, thrill, curiosity, fascination, determination and so on.

Several years ago, I experienced the same range of feelings when I gave up drawing with pen on paper on a drawing board and changed to CAD (computer aided drafting). At first I just wanted to muddle along in the old style that I had been taught in my youth, but then one day I realized I might still be drawing for a good many years to come and that, unless I changed to CAD, I would eventually end up a Neanderthal architect. After that came the resistance to starting something new, then came the trials and tribulations of having to throw out all I had learnt in the past about drawing and starting all over again. After a few weeks I found I had to actually get rid of my drawing board so that I fully committed myself to one thing only – learning a whole new way of drawing.

With hindsight, I had to undertake exactly the same process when I stopped being a Neanderthal spiritualist and wanted to become an actualist – the initial resistance, a period of trial and tribulation, the necessity to cut all ties with the past, and finally throwing myself in the deep end and getting on with it. Needless to say the effort, in both cases, has been worth it – but I do acknowledge that the process of change is, in itself, always a challenge.

Whilst the process of change is, in itself, always a challenge … the hardest part of all is making the decision to fully commit yourself to the process.

Just a comment on something you wrote to Vineeto –

At least Peter admits when he is wrong which gives him at least some credibility. You can now have the last say as I am not interested in any further discussion with you. As far as going back to the ‘outer layers’, yes I do that. I wish you would give up on analysing me as you have no idea where I am at. Maybe you can find someone who is spiritual and is a beginner to teach and you can peddle your lies to them. No 16 to Vineeto 29.12.2001

It seems as though you are, yet again, missing the real significance of the role that instinctual fear plays within the human condition. You have quoted from something I wrote –

The core instinctual based emotions of human beings are fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Of these, fear is the most potent and obvious emotion that lies at the root of the Human Condition.’ AF Library, Fear

and have also quoted from something Richard wrote –

Would you say that fear is predominant or underlying the other instincts? That is how I see it but I could be wrong.

Yes, at root fear is the most basic of all the instinctual survival passions ... hence fear rules the world of sentient beings.

What is common to both these statements is the word ‘root’ which can be taken to mean at the bottom of or underlying – the root of plant is a useful working analogy. Given that the passion of fear is ‘at root’ it is therefore at the bottom of or underlying something else that is more apparent and obvious. What is apparent and obvious to all at the surface is what is commonly known as the human condition and the predominant features of the human condition are malice and sorrow.

I made this point quite clearly in the Introduction to Actual Freedom –

The most striking, persistent and enduring attributes of the Human Condition are malice and sorrow – both at a personal level and a global level.

Malice and sorrow in humans are the direct result of the animal instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire ‘in action’.

The range of the Human Condition of malice and sorrow is marked by resentment, frustration, anger, violence and warfare at one end and melancholy, sadness, depression, despair and suicide at the other. Introduction to Actual Freedom, The Human Condition

What should be unambiguous from this is that while fear is the basic, underlying, root passion – to use the full range of descriptive words used in the conversation thus far – it is not the predominant, as in up front, most obvious, most noticeable nor most potent. As such the wording I used when I wrote ‘fear is the most potent and obvious emotion that lies at the root of the Human Condition’ could be misleading and, as such, I will alter it.

When I wrote what I did about fear, I assumed that anyone reading would be interested in the altruistic pursuit of eliminating malice and sorrow from their everyday lives rather than the selfish pursuit of fearlessness. I had no idea at the time the extent to which spiritualists were prepared to deny their own feelings of malice and sorrow in order to hang on to their feelings of superiority and righteousness. But then again, there is no substitute for being outside the spiritual world – as in a pure consciousness experience – to really see the game plan.

I do like it when any anomalies and inaccuracies in my writing come to the surface on this list. I shall amend what I wrote in order to make the distinction more clear. One of the purposes of this mailing list is as a forum to discuss the human condition that we all find ourselves unwittingly trapped in. What we seek to do is discern what are the facts as opposed to what is merely belief, myth, opinion, psittacism, legend and fairy tale.

As such these discussions and investigations on this list are not at all about who is right and who is wrong because we then only fall into the trap that besets all human interactions – what passes for discussion and communication between humans is but a battle of stubborn wills, differing opinions, varying morals, opposing values, contrary attitudes, begrudging compromises, temporary truces, and so on. However for those interested in setting aside their ‘outer layers’ of social conditioning there is a literal goldmine of facts available in the bowels of the AF website.

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

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

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

A pleasure to hear from you again.

I like it that you have questioned what I wrote about fear because as I wrote it I realized that this was somewhat new territory to explore, in that it has not been much written about before. I remember when I wrote the Fear chapter in my Journal that Richard was particularly interested as he said fear was not a particular issue for him. When I wrote the chapter I found myself writing equally about doubt, as fear was also not a major issue for me, but I certainly experienced doubt. In hindsight much of the doubt was related to being a pioneer in this process of actualism – the usual ‘why me?’, ‘is it a con?’, ‘does it work?’, ‘is it possible?’, ‘why hasn’t it been discovered before?’, etc.

What always drove me on, rather than let fear and doubt get in my way, was the pure consciousness experience of purity and perfection of this physical universe that lies beyond the self-centred real world experience we take for normal or the Self-centred spiritual world experience that has traditionally been peddled as the Truth. This pure experience, combined with the down-to-earth sense of what Richard was saying, proved too irresistible a lure to let either fear or doubt hobble me.

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With regard to what I wrote to Gary about fear, I would preface my comments by saying that I often pick up on something he writes and use it as a way of digging in to a particular topic. I often explore the traditional real-world and spiritual-world views and then relate my own experiences with what I have found to work in my experiences with actualism. I appreciate this way of writing because it allows us to mutually explore a particular issue without the usual emotional personal reactions dominating common sense explorations.

This way of mutual investigation is something I have been able to pursue directly with both Richard and Vineeto and I would encourage anyone who is interested to join in the conversations on this list. It’s what is called questioning. It’s such fun to be able to let your hair down and talk to others in this way because the only thing that can happen in my experience is that you challenge yourself – you stick your neck out beyond what you consider ‘safe’ territory.

The very business of actualism is to prick the balloons of belief, to replace the morals of good and bad and the ethics of right and wrong with verifiable facts, and to abandon what is silly and doesn’t work and discover what is common sense and what works. How else to come to an understanding of what is actual but to eliminate that which is not actual?

And surely it goes without saying that this process of understanding what is actual is essential if you ever want to experience actuality.

Just as an aside, you may find it useful to ponder upon the very word ‘actual’ in Actual Freedom – it is abundantly rich with meaning.

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But to get back to the topic of fear – the point I was attempting to make was that I have never challenged fear, as in tackling it or confronting it. I have rarely sought out physically dangerous situations in order to ride the hormonal highs they produce, because the risk of injuring or hurting myself seemed too high a price to pay and I eventually opted for safety. Similarly, I eventually saw that seeking out emotionally confronting situations with others in order to ride the hormonal highs they produce was but a very cheap self-gratifying shot – most usually malice justified as standing up for my supposed rights.

I also spent years on the spiritual path where I sublimated my real-world instinctual fears of survival by immersing myself in the cozy cocoon of spiritual belief with its notions of life-after-death, reincarnation, inner peace, Godliness and a real self. The essential approach of all spiritual and religious belief is to transcend fear by imagining that you truly are an immortal spirit and not a mortal flesh and blood body. The feelings of fearlessness induced by denial, delusion and devotion can even lead to the ritual suicides and sacrifices so common in many religions as one dies to serve God or to gloriously pass into some mythical heavenly realm.

What shook me out of Eastern spirituality was when my Guru died, declaring he was just passing through, and then left yet another religion on the planet in his wake. I realized that even when he was alive he really was just a ‘visitor’ for he was literally ‘out of it’ most of the time. He lived in a dissociated state in an imaginary world entirely of his own making – not in the real world and most definitely not in the actual world of people, things and events. His supposed fearlessness, in common with all God-men and Gurus, was but a con because it was based solely on his own delusion of immortality, omnipresence and omnipotency.

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Given the failure of the gung-ho traditional approaches of avoiding, challenging, denying or sublimating fear, the question remains – what to do about fear? How to eliminate it?

The process of actualism offers a third alternative and it takes its clue from the practical successes of cognitive therapy in reducing or eliminating specific fears. Put very simply, cognitive therapy involves cautiously repeating a situation that usually evokes a fearful feeling and repeatedly observing that, despite the feeling and hormonal rushes, no actual danger ensues. Eventually the event, circumstance or situation can be experienced without the normally associated feeling of fear. Three aspects are relevant to the success of this method – to stop avoiding, to observe and be aware of the feeling as it arises, and to both understand and experience the distinction between the feeling and the actuality of the situation.

Now although cognitive therapy has proved the most effective method of reducing or eliminating specific fears, it is vital to remember that the primary aim of actualism is not to eliminate fear but is to become actually free of malice and sorrow. The elimination of fear is therefore a by-product of this process and not the central focus.

If one’s sole aim in life is to reduce or eliminate fear then cognitive therapy seems to offer the best solution and then you can spend a lifetime slowly ticking off one particular fear after the other. The other way is to take the traditional spiritual path of feeling God-like, God-aligned or God-protected which does not eliminate fear but only produces the delusion of fearlessness in order to suppress or sublimate the underlying feelings of fear.

The only effective way of eliminating instinctual fear is to eliminate the source of psychological and psychic fear – the ‘he’ or ‘she’ who is feeling fear – and that process is actualism. This process can be seen to be similar to cognitive therapy in that it first involves stopping denying or avoiding and then encourages observing and becoming aware of feelings as they arise, and understanding and experiencing the distinction between the feeling and the actuality of the situation. The essential difference between the two processes is scope and depth. In actualism all feelings, both savage and tender, good and bad, desirable and undesirable, are up for scrutiny and one is aiming to dig deep into one’s own psyche so as to eliminate the very source of malice and sorrow – ‘me’ at my core.

So, for an actualist, cultivating an ongoing awareness is the key and the idea of challenging fear, as in tackling it or confronting it by seeking out physically dangerous or emotionally confrontational situations is unnecessary and can well be a diversion from the main issue. For an actualist, being an actualist in a world of materialists and/or spiritualists is already enough of a challenge and the everyday living in the world of people, things and events already always provides sufficient circumstances to investigate all of the range of feelings, emotions and passions that arise. As Gary pointed out, it is the issues that we are avoiding that are critical and therefore actively seeking out new challenges does seem a little pointless.

Just to give you a personal example that may help to illustrate the distinction I am trying to make. When I first came across actualism I had been living by myself for some two years after the ending of a relationship with a woman. When I was confronted by the proposition that ‘if I couldn’t live with one other person in utter peace and harmony, then life on earth was indeed a sick joke’ I was moved to action – I was moved to challenge myself or to put myself in a challenging situation.

To do this I had to act despite the feeling of fear that arose and it took me some weeks to act to rise to the challenge despite the fear and doubt. The initial serendipitous event was coming across actualism, the specific challenge then required that I put myself in a challenging situation and the next serendipitous event was Vineeto saying ‘Yes’ to my proposition. However, for many of my other investigations I was already in challenging situations such as in my work where serendipitous events, meetings and circumstances abounded and thus it required no action on my part to be challenged and tested.

Whether challenging yourself to radically and irrevocably change – to become actually free – requires a change in circumstances at any stage only you will know, for only you know what you are avoiding.

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For those wondering where or how to start, the basic approach in actualism is to tackle whatever issue bugs you most, whatever is your particular thing that is making you most angry or most sad. Go for whatever of the obvious passions that you want to be free of and then investigate every feeling, belief, moral, ethic or psittacisms that stands in your way on the path to freedom from malice and sorrow.

If you want to be free of malice, then make it the most important thing you are doing when you are doing it. Go about your daily life as you normally do but notice all the times when you are annoyed about something – it might be that it is a rainy cold day, it might be the driver who cuts in on you, it might be something a friend said or something you read or saw on TV. Notice whenever you blame someone for doing something or not doing something. Notice how you talk to other people, what feelings you are having while you talk.

Are you being confrontational to this person, a touch aggressive perhaps? Are you feeling resentful, bitchy, sarcastic, cynical, critical, dismissive, arrogant, above-it-all, scornful, irritated or bitter? Do you often berate yourself or give yourself a hard time?

Do you take out your anger on others? If so – who, when and why? Can you catch yourself doing it and become aware of it while you are doing it?

If you can become this aware then you have found the secret of actualism, for neither the savage nor the tender passions can stand the scrutiny of awareness. In this case, you will have begun the process of becoming free of malice. You will have begun to get ‘the bugger by the throat’. Your malice will noticeably wilt and eventually wither as you become more and more aware of it and all its subtle, and not so subtle, nuances.

Then you can do the same thing with sorrow.

By running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ you start to notice all those times you are feeling melancholic, sad, lacklustre, bored, resentful, cut off, remote, detached, lonely, depressed, burdened, weighed down, resigned, sympathetic, empathic, gloomy, or hoping for a better day. You start to notice how much time you waste being unhappy and not being here.

You then start to notice what things or events trigger these sorrowful feelings. You notice the seduction of wallowing in sad memories and you start to notice the feelings you get when you listen to certain music or watch certain films. The trick is to become aware of the sorrow-full feelings when they are happening, put a label on the feeling and discover when it started and what caused it.

The process of becoming aware of your feelings and becoming aware of how they are preventing you from being happy and from being harmless is the process of actualism.

While the process is simple and straightforward, the very real challenge is to take it on fully – to make becoming happy and harmless the most important thing in your life – numero uno. There is no doubt that fear will arise on occasions but if you set your sights on becoming both happy and harmless you will find that fear, like all of the survival passions, cannot be sustained in the light of awareness.

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Your query particularly related to my use of word ‘ challenging ’ in the following passage –

‘The ruthless challenging, exposing and understanding of these beliefs and instincts actually weakens their influence on my thoughts and behaviour. The process, if followed diligently and obsessively, will ultimately cause them to disappear completely. The idea, of course, being to eliminate the cause of my unhappiness, so that I can experience life at the optimum, now.’

I gave some thought to amending the passage, but decided to leave it as it is for now.

The beliefs and instinctual passions that fuel malice and sorrow in the human species certainly need challenging and eliminating, for how else are human beings ever going to live in peace and harmony? Or more to the point, how else are you going to live with your fellow human beings in peace and harmony? How else are you going to be free of malice and sorrow? How else are you going to be happy and harmless? How else are you going to be free of the Human Condition?

In the process of eliminating your beliefs and instinctual passions you soon discover that the only thing that stands in your way on the path to Actual Freedom is a feeling – the feeling of fear. So ... what to do? If you really want to be totally free of malice and sorrow then you accept the challenge ... and do it anyway.

Actualism is not about avoiding, withdrawing, hiding or suppressing. Actualism is not about becoming a hermit or a monk or a nun. Unless one is fully engaged in the world, unless one is fully prepared to investigate all of the major issues that prevent an actual intimacy with one’s fellow human beings, fundamental change is impossible.

Watching the hang gliders over the cape twigged me to comment on the distinction between challenging fear by undertaking dangerous activities and the process of becoming aware of, identifying, observing and progressively eliminating psychological and psychic fear in action in one’s own psyche. My experience is that these fears do not need to be challenged in order to eliminate them – you simply need only to become aware of fear as it occurs and understand and be aware of the effect they have on you and on your interactions with others.

It is awareness that diminishes, withers and eventually eliminates fear and this fact ensures that one avoids physical danger and avoids deliberately challenging or confronting others in order to temporarily ‘overcome’ a particular fear. The first action only provides a fleeting hormonal rush or high, the second only strengthens an assertive and aggressive ‘self’. As Richard astutely observed, ‘remember to keep your hands in your pockets’ and the added benefit of this approach is that one is then more able to observe the more subtle nuances of emotions that are hidden beneath the more overt and obvious ones.

Again I don’t want to pour cold water on your investigations but there is simply no evidence available that challenging fear eliminates fear. This approach is in the same ilk as expressing emotions rather than suppressing them or cultivating blissful feelings in order to feel fearless – they are tried and failed methods. What, however, does work is to stop running away, stand still and look at the fear, exactly as you do with any other emotion that is driving you. As a suggestion, I would put the emphasis on investigating what it is you are avoiding as you said, for this is the gold mine, rather than seeking new challenges, for this is often but more fuel for the passions.

Besides, it is my experience that being an actualist is enough of a challenge in itself and, without doubt, the most fearful thing one can do is to step out of Humanity – anything else is chicken feed in comparison.

As an actualist you will find yourself doing, or not doing, things that would have elicited reactions of fear in the past and you will find the feeling of fear has either diminished or gone but this is the result of awareness and nothing else. You will also become aware that you do not need to seek out situations, events, circumstances or people in order to be challenged – they will serendipitously come along all by themselves. More and more you become aware that fear, arguably the most powerful of the human emotions, is, after all, only a feeling ... as are all of the other instinctual passions that fuel the psychosis and neurosis of the Human Condition.

What you are saying accords with my own experiences about the feeling of fear. Fear most often manifests itself as differing forms of imaginary dire consequences at different stages in the process of actualism and it may be useful if I attempt to label these fears, based on my experience with the process.

The first fear I encountered was when I came across actualism and began to understand its implications. Again I’ll post a bit from my Journal simply because, being closer to the events, it’s fresher writing–

‘The fear that I faced at the start of this process of ridding myself of a psychic entity, and on the way through was psychic fear – fear that was present in my psyche. It is the very same fear that ruled my every action and thought for most of my life. The: ‘what does that person think of me?’, ‘what am I going to do next?’, ‘what if something goes wrong?’ – the instinct of fear I was born with. The fear we transform into doubt, and more doubt. I remember calling it the ‘what if’ syndrome at some point. In the face of it the most usual reaction is to freeze – not do anything.

I saw it as a bit like when you drive along a country road and a rabbit appears on the road. Blinded by the headlights he freezes, and splat – dead rabbit. The only difference for me when I met Richard was that wobbling around in doubt or freezing in fear meant simply more of the same – prolonging my ‘normal’ life of suffering and confusion. The suffering of knowing that something was seriously wrong in my life but staunchly denying it out of pride, or hoping that the latest guru or belief would work, when deep inside I had already seen it wouldn’t work. The confusion I was in at the time was because I had seen ‘behind the curtain’ of the spiritual world. I had seen the Gurus for what they were, and I had started to see that it was all the same ‘old time religion’. The facts didn’t gel with the beliefs and there was a certain discord; a ‘something’s not quite right’ – not that I knew what it was at the time.

So when I met Richard I found myself saying ‘I’ll give this a try, and I’ll make it the most important thing in my life’. That, as I look back, was my innate intelligence operating – the ‘if it doesn’t work, throw it out and find something that does’ or ‘don’t just freeze in the headlights’. Common sense, really. It wasn’t courage – it was common sense.’ Peter’s Journal ... Fear Chapter

The next fear I encountered was the fear associated when actively dismantling my social identity. The fear was that if I no longer believed what everyone else believed, if I no longer valued society’s morals and ethics, if I no longer thought and felt how I had been taught to think and feel, then I would certainly be punished and ostracized. What I soon came to realize was that the moment I stopped trying to change other people by pointing out where their beliefs were wrong, no longer did I provoke defensive or offensive responses from others – no longer did I feel punished or ostracized. This also meant that increasingly I had little in common with my friends because I no longer shared their beliefs and also I no longer empathized with their misery and I no longer supported their malice towards others. Very quickly my former friendships mutually dissolved, as there was no longer any emotional bond or need for support on my part. As my social identity dissolved so did my fears of the dire consequences of punishment and ostracization.

There is also an atavistic component to this fear. Atavistic fears are those that are passed on over countless generations either as spoken or unspoken taboos that hint at horrific consequences should one dare to stray too far from the accepted norm. Many of these relate to retribution and revenge by the Gods and spirits or horrendous acts of torture wrought by the shamans and priests for heretics and those possessed by evil spirits. Often these fears would occur in dreams at night-time or when stirring the wrath of some God-man on a mailing list. Provided you keep your wits about you and don’t goad a fanatic, investigating these fears can be great fun because these fears are eventually seen to consist of the same pith-less wind as the shamans and God-men themselves.

The next fear I encountered was the fear associated when actively dismantling my instinctual being. These feelings of fear run deep for they are genetically-encoded instinctual reactions programmed into the very cells of my body. The almost constant on-guard-ness that produces the instantaneous fight or flight reactions in all animals is ultimately ‘self’-centred in human beings who are all imbued with an instinctual self. As such, any threat to this instinctual self – ‘me’ at my core – produces deep-seated and rudimentary instinctual feelings of fear. The only way I have ever dealt with these was to sit them out when they came – even if they do tend to rock your socks on occasions. These feelings can be so strong that they literally bruise the body. But I always found myself having breakfast the next day wondering at the intensity of animal instinctual survival program.

All of these fears – the socially instilled fears, the atavistically imbibed fears and the instinctually rooted fears – cannot be dispelled by investigation or understanding alone for the only way they can be really experienced as being non-factual is to continue pursuing actualism in spite of them. This experiential discovery that fear is only a feeling and not a fact then gives an actualist the confidence to dare to take the next obvious action and investigation thereby dispelling the next obvious fear.

All these fears eventually fade away for want of fuel and the marvellous thing is, as you become more happy and harmless, other people become less fearful of and less aggressive towards you, which only serves to dispel the feeling of fear even more.

The basic fear is that of survival. Careful observation is necessary to understand and experience that fear is only a feeling – ‘my’ fear of ‘my’ survival. Once I started to observe the feeling of fear in action I was able to separate out appropriate sensible action from ‘my’ feelings of fear or doubt. I began to see that, in fact, I had always survived despite many changes of jobs, relationships, lifestyle, religious belief, opinions, viewpoints, places of living, etc. I always had enough food, I always had shelter, I always managed in all the changes of circumstances.

Not that Existence provided, but I always responded to serendipitous opportunities or always took appropriate action or made a choice that was appropriate. In hindsight, I always moved on from what didn’t work and inexorably sought that which did. Always the dream of perfection and purity drove me on – not to live it as a dream but as a down-to-earth actuality, here and now. This search was a hit and miss affair, inevitably based on trial and error, and it invariably involved considerable effort and produced radical changes – but it was always fuelled by a stubborn refusal to settle for anything less than best.

Most people rile against change and fiercely resist it, for they feel they have no control over their lives. They yearn for a cotton-wool secure life and then resent their ‘self’-imposed constraints. They wistfully imagine that the past was better and desperately hope that the good fairy will come and make their future better – all the while ignoring the fact that they are already here, already doing the fascinating business of being a human being, in this the only moment they can experience

It is only ‘me’, ‘my’ life and ‘my’ worries and fears that continually conspire to pull me away from being here – dragging me off to ‘some time’ other than now, an imaginary future or past, or to a ‘somewhere’ else other than here, either immersed in grim reality or escaping into an imaginary fairy-tale spiritual La La land.

Being here is a thrilling business, not knowing what is going to happen next, what I will be writing next, let alone what I will be doing later. The only constant is that when later happens, it will be now and now has always been safe, and always will be safe.

There is no fear in the actual world.

What I found essential was to always remember how far I had come, how much better my life was since I first started to focus my awareness on ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Sometimes I would lose the plot but whenever I met other people, be they ‘spiritual’ or ‘normal’, I was reminded I no longer complained about the weather, I no longer got angry at others, I no longer put down other people, I no longer bitched about life or blamed other people for how or what I was feeling, etc.

The trick was to remember my down-to-earth successes whenever doubt started to set in, to crank up my YES to being here. It is almost as though one needs a blackboard with successes written on it, and you make a habit of wheeling it every now and then so as to make a calm dispassionate review of your successes in becoming happy and harmless. In short, pat yourself on the back regularly.

The other way I had of looking at the process I was undertaking was that it was as though I was cleaning out dark dirty cupboards and once it was thoroughly cleaned out I could put a label on it saying ‘finished, well-done’. If I hadn’t finished with that issue or a worry came up or a feeling re-emerged then I had something more to look in that cupboard, but I wouldn’t beat myself up because I had missed understanding something completely.

Getting down on myself, despairing or getting angry at myself is nothing but the aggressive instinct turned in on myself, a perversity that I had seen crippling so many people in my life that I simply refused to go down that path. Whenever I felt the slippery down-hill slide starting, I quickly went back to acknowledging and experiencing my successes – feeling good or feeling excellent, reaping the rewards of my efforts.

This business of becoming free of the human condition already feels tough enough at times but to beat yourself up for not succeeding simply means yet another moment of potential happiness and harmlessness has been squandered in ‘self’-indulgence. And again, this is not denial, because the next real thing to investigate, the next real issue to investigate, will come swanning in by itself.

In the market place, unlike the Monastery, Sangha or ‘inner’ cave, there is an ample supply of normal events and normal people to test one’s happiness and harmlessness.

*

The only way to dispel comparison on the path to Actual Freedom is to do the best you can do. If this best is free of malice and sorrow, if this best is done with integrity, then whatever is done is simply the best in the circumstances. It is a bit weird when you get to the stage when you lose this ‘self’-measure of comparison with others for I find I now have no standard other than my own integrity. Believing in society’s hypocritical goods and bads, opinionated rights and wrongs, yearning for praise and cowering before criticism all gradually disappear and then it is as if there is nothing to hold on to – no external reference for ‘me’ in comparison to others. This stage can be unnerving and daunting and it is mightily reassuring that the sun comes up every morning, no matter what was going on in my head or my heart.

If becoming free of malice and sorrow was easy someone would have done it before, Richard and the few hundred or so who have read of it would have all jumped at the opportunity. Pioneering isn’t easy but it sure is a grand adventure.

*

The basic fear is that of survival. Careful observation is necessary to understand and experience that fear is only a feeling – ‘my’ fear of ‘my’ survival. Once I started to observe the feeling of fear in action I was able to separate out appropriate sensible action from ‘my’ feelings of fear or doubt. I began to see that, in fact, I had always survived despite many changes of jobs, relationships, lifestyle, religious belief, opinions, viewpoints, places of living, etc. I always had enough food, I always had shelter, I always managed in all the changes of circumstances.

Eventually I saw that my physical survival depended upon the ATM machine continuing to spit out enough printed pieces of paper when I put a plastic card into it for me to be able to afford to pay for food, clothing and shelter. Anything in excess to this basic requirement was then available to buy toys for leisure and pleasure. Thus, my only job was to ensure that the numbers on my receipt remained within sensible limits given the ebb and flow of expenditure.

Fear is widely regarded as the most potent feature of the instinctual survival program – the genetic program that is the primary operating system of all animals, including the human animal. The rudimentary survival instinct of animals is sometimes referred to as the ‘fight and flight’ response, often summed up in the phrase ‘what can I eat, what can eat me?’

Traditional methods of attempting to assuage the fear of survival inherent within the human condition include seeking safety in numbers by clinging to family and tribal members, seeking security by hoarding money, possessions and assets or seeking power and control over others, either covertly or overtly. The other traditional methods of counteracting instinctual fear involves dissociating from the feeling of fear by seeking succour and comfort in any of the multitudinous spiritual and religious beliefs, be it the fantasy of having a Big-Daddy God as a personal friend and protector, sustaining a belief in life after death and the immortality of one’s soul or spirit, or imagining oneself to be at-one-with God or even God Himself/Herself/Itself.

And, as you say, there may well be medications that can help those who suffer chronically from fear, but I have no experience or knowledge of this, so I can’t make comment on this approach.

Dissociation Psychiatry . A process, or the resulting condition, in which certain concepts or mental processes are separated from the conscious personality. … Oxford Dictionary

Dissociation is a syndrome in which one or a group of mental processes are split off, or dissociated, from the rest of the psychic apparatus so that their function is lost, altered, or impaired. Dissociative symptoms have often been regarded as the mental counterparts of the physical symptoms displayed in conversion disorders. Since the dissociation may be an unconscious mental attempt to protect the individual from threatening impulses or emotions that are repressed, the conversion into physical symptoms and the dissociation of mental processes can be seen as related defence mechanisms arising in response to emotional conflict. In dissociative disorders there is a sudden, temporary alteration in the person’s consciousness, sense of identity, or motor behaviour. … Encyclopaedia Britannica

It is important to note that actualism, unlike spiritualism, is not about coping with, assuaging or transcending fear – actualism is about becoming both happy and harmless. This may well explain why your question has not been answered to your satisfaction – the emphasis in actualism is solely on becoming both happy and harmless – not in feeling fearless, all-powerful and immortal as in spiritualism. Actualism is a new and unique approach to becoming free from the human condition in that involves progressively eradicating the root cause of human malice and sorrow – the total package of the ‘self’-centred instinctual survival passions.

When I first came across actualism and was confronted with the proposition of abandoning the spiritual path and devoting my life to becoming happy and harmless, I remember seeing it as looking into a dark tunnel. I knew the journey to becoming happy and harmless would be the end of ‘me’ – hence the dark tunnel. But at the same time I also understood that the only thing that was preventing me from starting on the path to an actual freedom was a feeling – the feeling of fear. This is the same for anyone who sets off on a journey into the unknown – what initially stands in the way of beginning the journey is fear, but once they actually start the journey the thrill of the adventure takes over.

My experience is that if you really want to become free of the human condition in toto, it is important not to let fear stop you – fear is, after all, only a feeling.

As I said, actualism has nothing to do with practicing dissociation. Dissociating from feelings when they get too raw or too potent is a common psychological reaction and it is well-documented that in some cases this reaction can be so severe that altered states of consciousness can result, either partial or permanent. Of course, in the spiritual tradition dissociation is lauded as the panacea to grim reality and is actively practiced by many people – one simply imagines there is an alternative non-physical spirit-only world, a Greater Reality, and then feels oneself to be living in this world, thereby dissociating from grim reality. With practice, one can even start to feel ‘At-One-With’ this Greater Reality or even be convinced solipsistically that one ‘Is’ that Greater Reality – leading to such twaddle as ‘I am God’ and ‘God is me’, or ‘I am the Universe’ and ‘the Universe is me’ and so on.

Then ‘the observer is the observed’ – which is what J. Krishnamurti was talking about. Spiritualists do take their ‘selfs’ very, very seriously.

I’ve often contemplated on the fact that, in my father’s time, anyone who went around declaring they were God, by whatever name, would have been confined in a mental institution. Nowadays, with the current fashion for Eastern religion, the world is littered with people who say they are God, or God-realized, and yet rather than be incarcerated they are venerated.

As an actualist, you start to take your ‘self’ not so seriously and then you start to see the bizarreness and black humour inherent in the human condition.

*

So, when I was speaking about the observer and the observed, I was meaning it this way: When I look at my fear, then there is duality. Me (the observer) looking at fear (the observed).

This means ‘you’ (the observer) are separating yourself from your feeling of fear (the observed). You have created this duality by creating a new superior-feeling identity (the observer).

Then me being different from fear, I try to do something about this fear. To end it, to exprime it, etc.

If you investigate Eastern spiritual teachings a bit, you will find that what they are talking about is transcending fear – as in rising above – and not in ending fear. Nowhere do the ancient teachings talk about eliminating fear because this can only be done if the self-centred instinctual passions are eliminated in toto.

This is what actualism brings to the table and it is brand new in human history – a scientific investigative process that results in freedom from the instinctual passions as distinct from a mystical dissociative freedom from the fears of being here in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are.

When I stated that the observer is the observed, then I was meaning that I and the fear are the same thing. There are not two different things.

And yet only two sentences before you said ‘Then me being different from fear, I try to do something about this fear’. Either you believe you are different from fear or you believe you and fear are the same thing – to have a bet each way only leaves you confused. In the actualism process you find the facts of the matter for yourself by your own investigations which saves the confusion and uncertainty of having to rely on believing what others tell you is the Truth.

Actually I was meaning the opposite of dissociation. When I say I am afraid then dissociation takes place.

You have just totally redefined dissociation to mean exactly the opposite it does in psychiatric terms.

Dissociation Psychiatry . A process, or the resulting condition, in which certain concepts or mental processes are separated from the conscious personality. … Oxford Dictionary

When you say ‘I am afraid’ then there is no distance between ‘you’ and fear – ‘you’ and the feeling are one and the same thing. You acknowledge the fact that there is no difference between ‘you’ and the feeling of fear.

On the other hand, when you say ‘When I look at my fear, then there is duality. Me (the observer) looking at fear (the observed)’ then you have separated yourself from your feeling of fear. You have dissociated from your feeling of fear by inventing a new identity – the one who observes fear but is separate from the feeling.

The actualism process of self-investigation involves neither denying, repressing or dissociating from any feelings that may arise in this very moment, nor does it involve indulging in, expressing or associating with any of those feelings. This enables the actualism process to be an unbiased scientific in-depth investigation of one’s own psyche, a process aimed at promoting the felicitous feelings and eliminating the so-called good and bad feelings, i.e. those that are the invidious and self-aggrandizing.

For more reading on the subject of dissociation: ‘The professor and ‘I’, Notes on Awareness (../actualism/peter/generalcorrespondence/professor.htm ) . You can also find more correspondence on the subject of dissociation in the library (../library/topics/dissociation.htm )

If it is possible not to disassociate the I from the fear in the moment this thing we call fear arise, then I think that there is only fear and no one I, ONE SELF TO BE AFRAID.

In spiritual teachings it is commonly said that ‘I’ am not my feelings’ – they come and go – but ‘I’ (the watcher) remain as a constant. What is usually ignored in this scenario is that ‘I’ (the watcher) gleefully associate with the good and loving feelings whilst disingenuously dissociate from the bad and evil feelings.

Just as an aside, you might find the ‘Book Review’ on the AF web site to be interesting reading as it makes plain the deceit and hypocrisy inherent in all spiritual teachings. (../actualism/peter/review-lowe.htm )

If I understand that I and fear are one composite phenomenon, then there is nothing that I can do about it.

You can’t do anything about it if you believe what the spiritual teachers tell you. If you are willing to abandon your spiritual beliefs then you can make your own investigations of your own psyche in operation so as to determine for yourself the facts of the matter. Of course you have to want to change, in order to change.

So there is no action from the self to do something. And then might be that the self is eliminated all together.

I don’t know whether you have noticed or not, but if you don’t do some action or other, then nothing happens. God doesn’t make your breakfast, press the buttons on your remote control or earn the money for your food and shelter. Why then should you imagine that a God, by whatever name, is going to magically change your life circumstances and free you from your feelings of fear, antagonism, sorrow, angst, etc.

Because seems to me that the self is coming into being through psychological action. Like identification for example.

Yes. Spiritual teachings do teach dis-identification as being the panacea to unwanted or undesirable feelings. ‘‘I’ am not my feelings’ and ‘‘I’ am not my body’ are commonly heard spiritual psittacisms.

Then there is only fear and what can I do? Nothing.

There is something you can do about it but your own belief has already ruled that out – ‘there is no action from the self to do something’.

Then I think there is no problem.

If you dissociate from your unwanted or undesirable feelings, and dis-identify from the ‘Dimitris’ who occasionally gets fearful, annoyed, sad, lonely, etc. – then there is no problem.

Speaking personally, I tried the spiritual approach for some 17 years before I finally admitted the effort of trying to dissociate from my feelings of animosity and sadness had made me neither happy nor harmless. Admitting failure finally opened the way to try out something new – to head off in the opposite direction from the well-worn spiritual path.

The problem arises when the dissociation takes place and I say I AM AFRAID.

Again you are redefining the word dissociation to mean the exact opposite it is taken to mean as a psychiatric term.

That means of course that I must not name it as fear.

This seems to be common Krishnamurti moral – ‘Thou shall not name thou feelings’. You may not be aware of the fact that Richard wrote extensively on a Krishnamurti mailing list for some four years. Eventually a few Krishnamurtiites started to talk about their feelings although most were such faithful followers and had so repressed their feelings that they could not bring themselves to say words such as fear, anger and depression – let alone bring themselves to acknowledge that they had these feelings from time to time.

The word creates the dissociation, because is the I who says this is fear. Then the I is different from fear.

I am reminded of the icon that nicely sums up Eastern Religion – three monkeys sitting in a row, ‘See no evil’, ‘Hear no evil’, ‘Speak no evil’. In modern times this translates as ‘Don’t watch television’, ‘Don’t listen to common sense’ and ‘Deny your own anger and blame everyone else for the violence in the world’.

I never believed in higher selves and gods and all these nonsense. I mean I was not meaning identification with god universe etc.

And yet, by what you write, you believe every thing that that old Indian God-man, J. Krishnamurti, spoke the Truth.

Again, the ‘Book Review’ will throw more light on the subject of Guru worshipping.

I was not speaking about enlightenment. I never was able even to understand what that means. Can be any hallucination and illusion.

And yet, by what you write, you are a firm believer in the teachings of Eastern religion – the teachings which say that it is possible for a man to become God-realized, aka Enlightened, on earth before entering into Heaven, aka Nirvana. To believe in the teachings is to actively participate in the delusion.

Can you also please when you find time to tell me what is the mind? And the difference between the mind and brain?

So as not to divert from the subject at hand, might I suggest reading the ‘Introduction to Actual Freedom’ as it paints a broad picture of the human condition and explains the process of how to become free of it. (../introduction/index.htm ) You will find that it makes clear distinctions between passion and intelligence, imagination and common sense, belief and fact and meekly accepting your lot in life as opposed to doing something about it.

By what you write you seem to believe that the physical world does not exist – that all you see is purely your own creation, an imagination, not actual. As to why, after all this belief, ‘you’ – the small ‘s’ self or concept of self, still exist, I can only suggest that either you have doubts about your belief or that you have not gone far enough in really truly believing you are the creator of the world. In other words, you have not yet realized you are the Creator.

Personally, I would take this as a good sign in that it means that you still have some common sense operating.

No. The belief in a creator God is based on ancient fears, superstitions and fairy tales that come from a time when humans believed the world was populated by good and evil spirits, Gods and Demons.

Things have moved on somewhat since then to the stage where nowadays there are a handful of people who don’t believe this fear-ridden nonsense any more. And not only don’t they believe in the ancient fears and superstitions, they have found a down-to-earth method of eliminating malice and sorrow from their lives.

No. The instinctual survival passions give rise to a personal, separate identity that is both a thinking and a feeling identity. This identity, ‘who’ you think and feel you are, is real in that it causes all flesh and blood human bodies to not only suffer but to inflict suffering on others – the ‘fight or flight’ response in action.

What you are pointing to is the fact that the psychological and psychic entity that dwells within each human flesh and blood body has three ways to experience the world – cerebrally, affectively and sensately. In the spiritual world, primary emphasis is placed on affective experience – feelings, emotions and the tender instinctual passions – while common sense thinking and actual sensate experience are actively denigrated. By solely identifying with one’s feelings and passions, a potpourri of psychological imaginations and psychic experiences are available to the spiritual seeker, the nature of which will be dependent upon the culture and religious tradition one is immersed in. These traditional psychic experiences, visions, transmissions and the like, are atavistic in nature – so ancient and so deeply ingrained as to be overwhelmingly convincing

Someone else wrote to me from the mailing list talking of psychic experiences, and I will post my reply as it relevant to your experience –

I would hazard a guess that you are picking up on the psychic ‘energy’, or ‘vibes’, of others in these situations. I have had many similar situations whilst in groups and there is an overwhelming surge of chemicals that emanates when one feels safe and assured in the company of others. There is an instinctual gratitude that one feels protected, sheltered, included, wanted, loved. This can even manifest itself as a deep feeling of ‘coming home’, of having found one’s true self and having found one’s true friends. Collectively, this is discernible as a fierce group loyalty and a feeling of ‘we are the chosen ones’. The opposite feeling, when picking up on the psychic energy of others, is to feel isolated, an outsider, under suspicion, unwanted and unloved. These feelings, however, are usually quickly dismissed for they lead down the path of loneliness, sorrow, depression and despair. Many people simply hang around in spiritual groups for the feel-good psychic energy rather than risk abandoning the group entirely for that would mean having to face and deal with the unwanted or undesirable emotions.

When exploring emotions and feelings it is quite extraordinary to discover how much of what we think and feel is influenced by others. The bottom line that always drove me into this investigation was the evidence of the harm this collective psychic energy can manifest in the world. Mass hysteria, be it for good or evil, has produced some of the most horrendous acts of violence and brutality – all committed by normally peace-loving people who are overcome with the extreme passion generated by what is known as a group high.

The psychological and psychic entity within us is driven by the body’s survival program to be psychically on-guard, continually searching for who is friend to love and who is foe to hate, but even with friends our suspicion, intuition or gut feelings will never let us drop our guard completely.

Thus, actual intimacy with other human beings can only occur in a ‘self’-less state, either temporarily in a PCE, or permanently in actual freedom. Peter’s Correspondence, List B, No 10

The psychic world of communication between people is a fascinating, bizarre and bewildering phenomenon that acts to bind human beings into fearful groups, forever in competition with other groups on the basis of imaginary morality of good and evil and arbitrary values of right and wrong. This form of psychic radar, communication, intuition, transmission, or whatever other name, while appearing very real to those indulging in it, is not actual.

As for ‘and if the experience is Real then to deny it is an expression of fear’ – all these experiences are indeed very real, and sometimes very Real, but they are not actual. The only thing that traps people in this psychic spiritual world is fear of their deep-seated fears. Rather than dare to explore these psychic fears and our dark side, the traditional path has been one of transcendence into the psychic world of good, God and Light.

Given that the animal survival instinct is genetically-encoded in our brain, our underlying primal emotion in any situation is fear, both psychological and psychic. The only way to eliminate fear is to investigate it experientially in order to trace its roots and understand it’s functioning. As Joseph LeDoux, a leading scientist currently mapping the instinctual functions in the human brain, says –

‘The things that make rats and people afraid are very different, but the way the brain deals with danger appears to be similar. We can, as a result, learn quite a lot about how emotional situations are detected and responded to by the human brain through studies of other animals.

Obviously, this is not the whole story of an emotion, especially not in humans. Once the fear system detects and starts responding to danger, a brain like the human brain, with its enormous capacity for thinking, reasoning, and just plain musing, will begin to assess what is going on and try to figure out what to do about it. This is when the feeling of fear enters the picture. But in order to be consciously fearful you have to have a sufficiently complex kind of brain, one that can be aware of its own activities. The point is that the so-called fear system of the brain is very old, evolutionarily speaking, and it is very likely that it was designed before the brain was capable of experiencing what we humans refer to as ‘fear’ in our own lives. If this is true, then the best way to understand how the fear system works is not to chase the elusive brain mechanisms of fearful feelings, but instead is to study the underlying neural systems that evolved as behavioral solutions to problems of survival. This is not to say that fear and other conscious emotions are not important, or that they should not be studied. They are important, but in order to understand them we may need to step back from their superficial expression in our own conscious experiences and dig deeper into how the brain works when we have these experiences.’ Le Doux Lab. Centre for Neural Science. New York University. EMOTION, MEMORY, AND THE BRAIN: What the Lab Does and Why We Do It.

As can be seen, it is only by being afraid of fear that we fail to deeply investigate fear at its instinctual roots, which is why we remained trapped in our inner psychological and psychic worlds, unable to be here in the actual physical world of sensual delight.

Be foolish, gullible, silly and extremely naive in ‘real-world’ terms for you are actually doing what is foolish, gullible, silly and extremely naive in real-world terms – not to mention ‘spiritual-world’ terms – you are becoming free of the Human Condition. One needs to be naive to believe it is possible in the first place, but as one gets into it and finds one’s naïveté‚ supported by facts and incremental success (ie. finding that it works). This then produces confidence which then grows into surety, then an obsession takes over, naïveté‚ blossoms, and a benevolent inevitability ensues.

For me naïveté‚ was absolutely essential to counter any fear that arises. With pure intent as a golden chord, as Richard saw it, and naïveté‚ as a constant companion, becoming free of the Human Condition of malice and sorrow is inevitable. It would be foolish to think otherwise.

The way I see it – ie. I am just reporting what I see and experience – is that by living in Virtual Freedom for an appropriate amount of time one has noticeably less feelings and passions operating. The instinctual emotions – fear, aggression, nurture and desire are less substantial, less evident, dis-used, atrophied, almost fizzed out. Thus the final act of self-immolation is seen for what it is – an imminent inevitably, a soon-to-happen fact. And, as we know from the continual experience of Virtual Freedom, it is silly to fear a fact – it just spoils your day, or your moment. In the light of bare awareness, or apperceptive thought, fear is experienced more as a bodily sensation rather than as ‘my’ fear.

So let me repeat, this is not to deny the fact of self-immolation, it is to put it in its perspective, freed of the greater part of ‘my’ affectation, fear – and Virtual Freedom does that very job. What it also means is that anyone who is sincerely willing to get to a point of a continuos Virtual Freedom for a substantial period of time can then become Actually Free. It would then be available for anyone. One would not need to be special, a freak, a fanatic, a genius – it could be anyone... The other definitely not-to-be-overlooked advantage is that the instinctual passionate grab for survival that occurs with self-immolation is weakened in proportion to the reduction of the instinctual passions.

Universal life, Oneness includes all dimensions of being, to try denying anything is to live in fear of it ... including your emotions.

I see you have reduced your position about peace on earth to a simple one-line statement. I do appreciate you clarifying your position.

By the term ‘Universal life, Oneness’ you are no doubt referring to a universal force, energy or unifying feeling – i.e. God by another name.

By the term ‘all dimensions of being’ you are no doubt referring to ‘all that is’ on the planet – including all the wars, rapes, murders, tortures, conflicts, poverty, tyranny, corruption, religious persecution, sadness, depression and suicides.

By the term ‘to try denying anything is to live in fear of it’ you are espousing the Eastern religious and philosophical view of acceptance of all that is. I don’t know if you have been to the East but this attitude of acceptance is typified by a shrug of the shoulders, a wobble of the head or a vague waving of the arms to indicate a helplessness at being able to do anything about one’s lot in life or to change anything. Acceptance runs deep in the East and includes the hapless and helpless concept of re-incarnation in an endless cycle of earthly suffering.

Your stated position about peace on earth can be summarized as – God is everything and we therefore should accept everything as it is and not try and change anything. What everyone misses when they take on Eastern belief is that this act of acceptance of the way things are includes denying that we humans are able do anything to change the way things are.

Acceptance always comes hand in glove with denial of the possibility of changing the way things are.

And as you said – ‘to try denying anything is to live in fear of it’. The fear of change runs deep in humans particularly when it involves radical and fundamental change. To accept all the wars, rapes, murders, tortures, conflicts, poverty, tyranny, corruption, religious persecution, sadness, depression and suicides as simply the way things are and thus deny the possibility that peace on earth is possible is a deeply cynical outlook on life.

A constant theme in your posts is your use of the statement that to ‘deny anything is to live in fear of it’. What got me off my bum and my head out of the clouds was that I stopped denying the fact that I was as mad and as bad as everyone else on the planet.

• As mad as everybody else because, despite my seeing religion as silly in my youth, I ended up in a religion in my middle age as an escape from the ‘real’ world. New Age spirituality was cunningly disguised as an altruistic movement in those days but when the altruism faded, as it inevitably does in religious movements, I came to see pursuing Enlightenment as an utterly selfish attempt at self-aggrandizement.
• As bad as everybody else because I could no longer deny that I got angry, resentful, pissed-off, jealous, peeved, sad, melancholy, etc. In other words despite my good intentions and spiritual practice and ideals, I was malicious and sorrowful, exactly as everyone else.

By taking this fully on board it became glaringly obvious to me that only a complete, utter and radical change would bring me peace on earth in this lifetime and the only thing stopping me was fear. And, as you know, complete utter and radical change is ‘self’-immolation and not the usual finding solace and succour in religious belief and spiritual experiences.

It’s enough to put the wind up anyone, really, but the rewards are commensurate with the fear faced, for actual peace on earth lies beyond psychological and psychic death.

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