Selected Correspondence Peter

Hope

I remember when I first met Richard I joked to him that he should have a sign above the door that says – ‘Abandon hope – all who enter here’. I was fortunately ready to abandon hope (and trust) that following the traditional methods could ever make me happy and harmless. I had seen too much of the hypocrisy, power-plays, corruption, deception and duplicity in all religious and spiritual worlds. The utterly ‘self’-ish search for immortality that has forever plagued human beings must be clearly seen for what it is – narcissism in the extreme.

Reading and practicing is a good combination.

As in most matters of any value.

And yet when it comes to the search for freedom, most people never bother to read the source material that their particular belief or faith is based on, they do not bother to recognize, let alone address any anomalies or inconsistencies in the teachings and never question why these beliefs and faiths have always failed to deliver their promises despite the fact that millions upon millions of people have arduously and diligently attempted to put them into practice. I can certainly remember how gullible I was in my spiritual years – the shamans of old demanded faith, hope, trust and unequivocal loyalty of their followers in order to silence dissent and to nip in the bud any outbreaks of questioning the teacher and the teachings. There is a vast difference between gullibly accepting the imaginary dreams of the spiritualism and sincerely investigating the down-to-this-earth pragmatism of actualism.

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I have appreciated your sincerity in our communications – it is an essential attribute that will stand you in good stead in your future reading and practicing.

I saw an interview the other day with that doyen of therapy, Woody Allen, where he was asked whether therapy had helped him in his life and even he dismissed it as being of not much use. From what he said in the interview he seems to have now slipped into a stoic resignation or a begrudging acceptance of his lot in life – a condition that is common to many men of his age.

It’s good to find out and recognize when a door is the wrong door, when a revered wisdom has obviously failed and to eventually abandon hope that any of the old ways will bring peace and happiness. I remember once saying that actualism should have a sign on the door saying ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ and by that I meant the hope that the traditional long- tried and always-failed methods would somehow, sometime, miraculously deliver the goods. When I recognized and acknowledged to myself that everything I had tried so far had failed to provide happiness and peace, I was then ready to try out something radically new.

I hope you find what you look for. All I could ever offer would just be more Promises and Options.

Yeah, I know.

Well as I type away the world is busy celebrating the birthday of a man who most probably did not even exist and who supposedly died 2,000 years ago and rose into the heavenly realms to sit at the side of his father, God. The overwhelming worldwide popularity of this Christian event does say something of the pre-eminence of the Anglo-Saxon tribes that are currently driving the technology and information revolution. But what I found most interesting were the reviews of the last century and the previews of the next. Predominant were the fears that emerged about technological progress, and the few commentators that were hesitantly optimistic for the future always couched their comments in terms of hope. When the situation is desperate and hopeless, humans always have to revert to hope, prayer and faith.

I just watched His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, ‘the Grand Lama, formerly the chief pontiff and governmental ruler of Tibet’ (Macquarie Dictionary), being interviewed and he was asked about the possibility of an end to war and violence in the new millennium. He said that as the world ‘got smaller’ then we would see that we are all one people and that, ‘like it or not’, we would have to be more compassionate and tolerant towards each other. He went on to say that, of course, ‘there will still be conflicts’ but this should be the ‘century of dialogue’. Here is a man who preaches non-violence, yet firmly believes that one cannot change human nature. It is understandable for the concept of human suffering-on-earth is intrinsic and central to the Buddhist religion. Eliminate suffering and violence – no need for religious beliefs, therefore no mythical reincarnation for Grand Lamas. Not only Lama unemployment, but Lama mortality as well. A genuine case of endangered species.

It’s amazing to sit in my living room watching the frantic cranking up of hope in the face of despair. This current era of world-wide instant communication and access to information makes a global study of the Human Condition ‘in action’ so simple and so easy. The failure of belief, morals and ethics to bring an end to human malice and sorrow is transparently evident, as is the human passion for malice and sorrow.

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

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

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

Ancient spiritual belief has it that we are born innocent and corrupted by evil since birth. This is known as the Tabula Rasa theory. Thus, those who achieve a spiritual freedom claim to be living in a ‘natural state’ for their evil has been transcended by achieving a state of Godliness. And yet there is ample evidence that the practice of renunciation and transcendence has failed to eliminate the instinctual passions in any of the so-called Holy men.

We humans who live in the twenty first century now know that every human being is born with genetically-encoded animal instinctual passions of fear aggression, nurture and desire – i.e. there is no such thing as ‘natural innocence’. It is a myth.

Again there is ample evidence that spiritual belief is chock-full of comparison and judgement such as the spiritualists who claim their way is the only way, or my Guru is the only Guru or my truth is the Absolute Truth or ‘I know it is so because it is so’. ‘ Innocent beingness ’ is an illusionary state, fuelled by passionate belief and superstition, and requiring continuous faith, trust and hope to sustain it in the face of the overwhelming evidence of its failure to ‘deliver the goods’ – peace on earth.

Alan ...

Well done! A site up and running so soon. It’s so good to see in writing someone else’s experience of the turmoil that erupts in one’s stable and safe belief systems when one begins the process of dismantling the psychological within. I tried to relate your experiences to my own and fully understood the bewilderment as I often felt I was digging the very ground out from underneath me. Dismantling and eliminating everything I held dear to me. I remember well scouring around all the writings, wisdoms and truths of Humanity desperately trying to find something to hold on to. At least something that made sense. But in the end I saw that everyone had got it 180 degrees wrong. There was indeed nothing of the Human Condition – be it values, ethics, morals, ideals, hopes, faiths or beliefs – that had any worth at all, quite the contrary. And as each crumbled the earth would appear to shudder – great realizations or slow dawnings would happen, usually accompanied by: ‘How could I have been So Stupid’ or ‘How come no one has seen this before ?’

It was one of those moments that forced me to do something about myself, for I was one of those 5.8 billion people. It was exactly one of those moments that forced me to do something about being able to live with a woman in peace and harmony. To prove it was possible.

No longer was it then sensible to relentlessly pursue that which has failed for billions of people for thousands of years. Hope, faith and trust, when they fail, turn inevitably to despair, doubt and suspicion. I put my stock in confidence, certainty and a good deal of bloody-mindedness to try something different and the results are beyond my wildest dreams! First, I made it the most important task in my life. Second, I realised that nobody could do it but me. Then I simply had to ride out the fear that arose from changing my behaviour – from actually eradicating part of myself. To live without the emotions and feelings of love defies all that we hold dear, but the facts are that love always fails, always ends in misery and suffering, or at best in compromise and bondage. Love is, after all, a well-meaning but doomed attempt to cover up the maliciousness and sorrow that is at the core of the Human Condition. Peter’s Journal, Love

What I ‘saw’ is that the actual world is perfect, pure, infinite and eternal – it is just that we humans are inflicted with a soft-ware program called the Human Condition. It is made up of nothing more than beliefs and instinctual emotions, and, being software, we can delete them if we really want to. This deletion allows an incremental emergence of what is factual, what is actual, as evidenced by the senses and one’s own apperceptive awareness. The experiencing of the perfection and purity of the actual world as experienced in the PCE is essential as this provides the ‘pure’ in the pure intent. Having experienced the actual one then will be better prepared to avoid the power-crazed state of Enlightenment.

This again gets pretty silly. Given that you don’t accept the dictionary definition for the word disciple, maybe before we go further down this blind alley, we could see what you mean by the word question.

Question – seek, inquire: I What is inquired (about). 1 A sentence worded or expressed in a form such as to elicit information from a person; inquiry. 2 The interrogative statement of a point to be investigated; a problem, a difficulty; a doubt; gen. a matter forming or capable of forming the basis of a problem. Also, a matter or concern depending on or involving a specified condition or thing. II The action of inquiring. 3 The stating or investigation of a problem; inquiry into a matter; the expression of some doubt; discussion of a doubtful point. 4 The action of questioning a person; the fact of being questioned; judicial examination; interrogation. Oxford Dictionary

Now from the above definition, for you to question you have to have a problem, a difficulty, a doubt, a matter or concern to be inquired into, a doubtful point – and you clearly have none of these prerequisites. You are obviously very happy and proud to be a disciple of a spiritual Master – full stop. Beginning and end of questioning. You have no doubts, no problem, no concern, so there can be no questioning. The very act of being a disciple prevents questioning. Having trust, faith, hope and belief are the antidote to doubt, problems and concern. You already have your answer to your doubt and he is called Rajneesh.

Any questioning of Rajneesh would involve questioning your disciplehood and you have ruled that out of court, so I think I might have saved us both a few KB’s on our monthly bill.

What a grand thing to journey out of sadness and fear, spite and envy, deception and confusion – to more and more experience the sensate delights of this very actual world, happening right now. The only way that such a journey is possible is because one is eliminating all that is in the way of experiencing what is actual – the process is one of elimination, not of building a new belief or concept about how to be, how to cope or how to escape from the world as-it-is and people as-they-are. As such, each step on the path is a factual step, a sincere investigation, a fact replacing a belief, with more and more happy and harmless moments replacing fearful, sad or angry ones. One would not proceed ‘where few have gone before’ without a glimpse of the paradise that this actual world is – a Pure Consciousness Experience. It is not enough to rely on others’ stories, for then it is only yet another belief, and with belief comes doubt, hand in hand, and the subsequent need for trust, hope, and faith. Merely adopting another belief will not instil the necessary pure intent to guide one through the maze of one’s own psyche.

The spiritual path eternally promises, dreams and offers hope but it never has, and never can, deliver peace on earth. Actualism delivers the dream of peace that many humans sincerely seek and puts it into practice, but only for those willing to head in the opposite direction to the ‘Tried and Failed’. My friend who said I was living what Rajneesh taught was half-right in that I am living beyond the wildest dreams of Humanity. But I only do that because I abandoned the hackneyed spiritual Wisdom based on denial and ignorance, ‘back-tracked’ all the way out of the spiritual world and set off down the path of intrepid investigation in pursuit of common sense. The path that is 180 degrees in the opposite direction to that which every one else follows. The path that everyone says don’t go on or you will end up irresponsible, evil, insane, and a traitor to Humanity to boot! That is the meaning of everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong.

A conversation I had with a woman the other day seemed to typify the New Dark Age spiritual view of the world, so I’ll start with that. She was a woman probably in her mid forties, had been educated and bought up in a wealthy, stable western country and was studying part time for an arts degree at university. She has a teenage daughter and lives in a nearby country town. The conversation got on to the wonders of computers, but she was critical of the difficulties in using them. Rebuffing my enthusiasm for the current information-technology revolution that is currently in full swing, she proclaimed that she didn’t like it that her daughter watched television and that everything was becoming ‘Americanized’. When I stated that I liked the fact that the global wide access to information made the world less insular and isolated she said she didn’t want it all to be the same, for people to be all the same – she thought it was good that we held on to our traditions and differences. When I pointed out that we fought over these differences, be they religious, moral, ethical or traditional territorial, she seemed a little stunned. When I said I had found John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ inspirational in my youth – a world with no heaven or hell, nothing to kill or die for and no religion too, all the people living life in peace.

She said it was a nice idea, but ...

She is but typical of a generation that held high ideals, hopes and aspirations to change the world, but as life takes its toll and the disappointments of life set in, she now imbibes ‘traditional’ values in her daughter, exactly as her mother would have done to her. She sees Globalization as a threat to individuality, she sees the spread of one language throughout the world as a threat, she sees the spread of instant world-wide communication and the astounding access to information as a threat. The conversation petered out, but if we had gone on, she would have held all the common beliefs that the world-as-it-is is an awful place and getting worse by the year. She would have offered up the Global Warming Theory – the theory that human habitation, ‘progress’ and pollution will give rise to a dramatic climate change. She would have ignored the fact that it is but a theory that there could be a problem, based on what appears to be a new event – the hole in the ozone layer – based on what is assumed to have happened in the past – based on past suspected climate changes and in spite of any previous knowledge of the condition of ozone layer. The G.W. theorists then fervently propound worst-case scenarios as to what may happen in the future, and very quickly the whole theory has become a fact. There is a stifled debate in the scientific community as to the validity of this theory, seemingly only championed by those whose reputations or jobs are not intimately at stake, but it receives little media publicity.

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I think there is no doubt that the human species is an endangered species but not from external threat, nor from any ‘environmental’ disaster or earth resources’ depletion, but from the simple fact that human beings cannot live together in anything remotely resembling peace and harmony. As a practicalist, when I came across Richard, I chose to disprove the logic of Ancient Wisdom that you can’t change Human Nature. Otherwise a human existence of perpetual malice and sorrow is indeed a sick joke. I saw in a PCE that the universe is too magnificent, too grand, too perfect and too pure for me to continue to be sorrowful and malicious. So I set out to change the only thing that was wrong – as in silly and senseless – and that was a ‘me’ inside this flesh and blood body.

As for ‘endangered species’, I realized I was not alone in this exercise of seeking peace on earth. It is an almost universal hope and wish, but everyone looks to others to bring it about, to actualize it. Peace on earth is already here, of course, and only you can find it for yourself. A bit from my journal –

It is our fellow human beings, the practical scientists, chemists, engineers, explorers and the like that have given we humans very useful things. The Gurus, philosophers, theoretical scientists and the like have given us nothing but theories, beliefs, concepts, ideas, scenarios, dreams, nightmares, hope and hopelessness. As I began to abandon the spiritual world, I serendipitously discovered someone who had abandoned Enlightenment and had worked out a ruthlessly effective empirical method for eliminating one’s social identity and all of one’s instinctual passions. Give me something that works over an ideal or a theory any day.

You’re quite a fundamentalist yourself, Peter. Now you ditch theoretical science and philosophy! I must say that you’re doing very well in taking YOUR position at least. Nobody can accuse you of not standing up for your views.

An actualist is a more accurate term, for it is not ‘me’ taking a position but the facts speaking for themselves. You could add pragmatist to the description but I’ll leave the word fundamentalist for the religious crowd.

The problem I found with believing others’ theories and ideals was that they are changeable over time as more factual evidence became available, or as fashioned changed. Further theories and ideals are culturally and spiritually influenced and the many variations only open up rich avenues of conflict, confusion, fantasy and fear, hope and hopelessness. Believing theories merely added more fuel to the fire of my instinctual passions, imaginations, dreams and nightmares – which is why I eventually abandoned the very act of believing.

Give me a fact any day.

This capacity for imagination is imbibed with mother’s milk – the first stories we are told and the first view we have is of an ‘other-world’ of fairy stories, fictionary romance, heroism, tales of good and evil – all totally imaginary and having no relevance to the physical, actual world of people, things and events in which we live.

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

No limit. Let’s hope for judgments based on good discrimination.

What do you need to hope for? You’re making the judgements and all you need to do is decide what is good and what is bad according to your terms of reference. But I do appreciate your dilemma. Throughout the spiritual world, moderators all have the same problem in how far do they allow their faith to be questioned before imposing discrimination. It’s usually a delicate balancing act unless the perceived threat becomes significant, in which case, more draconian measures are needed which can then lead down the path of repression, conflict, hostility, retribution, vengeance etc. ...

Judgements based on sensible discrimination as in reviewing the facts and considering what works is very straightforward but in the spiritual world making ‘judgments based on good discrimination’ is indeed a tricky business.

It is unfortunate that this mailing list is not willing to question all that is illusionary for that is the key to an actual freedom. The ages-old spiritual idea of Good and Evil needs to be questioned in its totality for the impassioned mind-game of transcending Evil in order to find God is on its last legs. It may well whimper on for a few hundred years, sustained by a few renunciate fundamentalists, but fear-driven spiritual belief has less and less relevance in these times of increasing knowledge, safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure.

It’s time for a new, non-spiritual down-to-earth freedom from the human condition of malice and sorrow.

Maybe this is where I’m still questioning your doctrine; can we be ABSOLUTELY convinced that we can rely on the so called facts ... I mean psychology, biology and other sciences investigating the human body and mind haven’t been known to be that exact this far. I agree that these findings are MORE likely to qualify as a ‘truth’ or ‘facts’.

Given that a simple definition of a fact is that it is something that can be verified by seeing, touching, hearing, smelling or tasting and that it demonstratively so to anyone. For instance, the computer monitor you are watching and these words on the monitor are facts. This may seem simplistic but many meta-physically inclined people have trouble with even this level of sensibility. The other definition of a fact is that it should work, and this should be able to be demonstrated, replicated and substantiated by repeatable experiments. This eliminates belief, trust, faith, hope, conviction, intuition and doubt from any investigation for one always has fact as a reliable touchstone.

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

My conviction is that it is only about extraordinary individuals, regardless of what tradition (spiritual or non-spiritual) that one comes from.

What comes from the spiritual extraordinary beings such as Mr. Jesus of Nazareth and Mr. Siddhartha Gautama, to name but two of the many, are shaky mythical stories of their lives and character, a set of unliveable morals and ethics and an idea of human existence on this planet that is firmly rooted in ancient superstition and ignorance. We have dismissed the old views of the earth being flat, that women are full of little people that pop out every now again for some strange reason, that the planets are gods in the sky, that good spirits do battle with evil spirits in the cosmos, etc. And yet we still desperately cling to the concepts of a spirit-ual world in whatever image, a God by whatever name, and an ongoing life after death, in whatever form. We now know that we humans come from the meeting of a sperm and an egg, and after at least 3,500 years of spiritual belief, trust, faith and hope there is still no empirical evidence of an ‘other’ world apart from this physical, actual universe.

Any of the traditional stories, teachings or wisdoms coming from the extraordinary ancient spiritual ones still require faith, trust and hope for us to believe the stories to be true.

Non-spiritual is another matter. While the spiritualists have been busy sitting with their heads in the clouds in their churches, monasteries and ashrams other human beings have been getting on with the practical down-to-earth business of making life on earth more safe, comfortable, leisureable and pleasurable for human beings. Actualism is firmly in the latter category, for it is all about eliminating malice and sorrow in oneself. The next step in human progress is both obvious and urgent ... actualizing peace on earth.

Many teachers report a feeling of hopelessness and frustration at their pupils not ‘getting it’. I always thought they were being compassionate until I woke up to the fact that they were displaying the very human qualities of anger and frustration – something I had assumed they had transcended. Since then I have found many mentions of the fact that Enlightenment does not mean the elimination of malice and sorrow – it means the transcendence of human qualities – as in ‘ existing apart from, and not subject to the limitations of, the material universe’. As such the truly Enlightened Ones feel sorrow – manifest and disguised as Divine compassion – and malice – manifest and disguised as Divine Anger.

Are you implying there is such a thing as a personal fact or a belief that is an impersonal belief? To avoid confusion and aid communication I like to keep to simple dictionary definitions of words.

A fact is a fact, it stands on its own – it is neither personal nor impersonal and it requires neither faith, trust or hope for it to be so.

Beliefs are always personal and are usually said to be real if other people share the same belief. The more people who believe the more real the belief appears to be and is often claimed to be a truth or Truth in spiritual terms. However, even if everyone believes something to be true it doesn’t make it a fact.

Long ago everyone believed the earth was the centre of the cosmos and the sun went around the earth, but now we know it was just a belief based on the limited viewpoint of at the time. It took nearly 400 years for the Pope to finally acknowledge only in the last decade that the Bible was wrong.

Long ago everyone believed that humans were born innocent and corrupted by evil in this world but we now know this was just a belief based on an idea that the world was populated by good and evil spirits. It may well take 400 years for Eastern religion to acknowledge that Mr. Buddha and the other Ancients were wrong.

Now you are introducing the notion of a false belief. Are you implying there are false beliefs and true beliefs and that your belief is true? To believe means to ‘fervently wish to be true’. The action of believing is to emotionally imagine, or fervently wish, something to be real that is not actual – actual as in tangible, corporeal, material, definitive, present, obvious, evident, current, substantial, physical and palpable. A belief is an assumption, a notion, a proposition, an idea that requires faith, trust or hope to be sustained in the face of doubt, uncertainty and lack of factual evidence. Whereas a fact is a fact, demonstratively evident to all that it is actual and/or that it works.

Many beliefs are masqueraded as ‘truths’ or are merely accepted as facts in lieu of any serious scrutiny, or are protected by the blatant and stubborn refusal to question the facticity of that which is ‘dearly held’ to be true.

How long will we continue this denial of the central role that genetically-encoded instinctual passions have in causing human malice and sorrow?

And how long will people keep turning away from the facts and proudly indulging in utterly ‘self’-ish theories and beliefs?

What I did was keep asking questions until all of my beliefs were replaced by substantiated verifiable facts. I would not settle on anything if I only felt something to be right and true or because someone else said it was so. I kept asking myself questions until I removed all doubt from my life. It became obvious that if I had to trust, have faith, believe or hope that something was so then it was not a fact but merely a belief or a feeling. When I came across the radical proposition that there was a third alternative to remaining normal or becoming spiritual I ran with the question: ‘What if there isn’t a God, by whatever name?’

This question can easily lead people into despair and hopelessness but when combined with the question: ‘What if there is a way that I can actually rid myself of malice and sorrow’, a whole new exciting and challenging ball game opens up.

My radical proposition is that all the facts point to the unmitigated failure of this ‘ great human adventure ’ that has been on-going for thousands of years. T’is but a tragic human struggle betwixt good and evil based upon a fervent belief in a higher ‘spirit-world’ that is above and beyond the earthly ‘mud’. There is no good or evil in the actual world – it exists only in the heads and hearts of human beings

Should we humans give the ‘great human adventure’ of following the spiritual teachings another millennium to deliver the goods? Perhaps two ...? Should we wait for Christ to come back, Maitreya to finally appear or for everyone on the planet to become magically enlightened? How long are we willing to continue with this ‘great human adventure’? The New Dark Age has now been superseded by the Next Age in some countries, so do we mark that bit of the adventure as a failure or do we look forward, with hope, that the Next Age will bring peace on earth?

Again do you have a time frame for this to happen? Human malice and sorrow has been on-going, and despite all the good intentions, prayers, consciousness-raising, trust, faith, hope and belief the last century was the bloodiest to date. Given that at least 160 million human beings died in wars in the last century and at least 40 million human beings killed themselves in suicides, that means at least 200 million children born this century will meet a similar fate.

I recently saw an interview with a monk who said that the first question he was going to ask God was ‘how come there is so much pain and suffering?’ Given that God is a fantasy the question to ask is ‘Why am I malicious and sorrowful ... and what can I do about it?’

By fixed ideas I presume you mean the fact that after 3,500 years of belief, trust, faith and hope in Gods, Goddesses, Spirits, Sources, Higher Selfs, Essences, Creators, Doomsdays, Good and Evil, we are still merely praying for peace on earth, while indulging in the fantasy that the only ‘true’ peace possible is after physical death. The human condition on earth is typified by malice and sorrow and the man-made idyllic antidotes of love and compassion have failed to stem the carnage. It is well-documented that the last century was the bloodiest to date – over 160 million human beings died at the hands of their fellow human beings and over 40 million people killed themselves in suicides – and there is no end in sight. Religion, be it Eastern or Western, actively contributes to this carnage as is evidenced by the countless religious wars, persecutions, recriminations, repressions, ostracizations, denials, retributions, perversions and conflicts that are ever ongoing ... Eastern religion is particularly insidious for it deliberately promotes the practice of turning away and withdrawing from the physical world of people, things and events where we human beings actually live to a spirit-ual, meta-physical world, to an ‘inner’ private isolated world of furtive imagination and impassioned feelings. These are not fixed ideas, these are facts.

Peace on earth is ultimately sacrificed by the utterly selfish pursuit of immortality for one’s soul – ‘who’ one feels one is as opposed to what one actually is, a mortal flesh and blood human being.

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