Just a few observations on your last point that may be useful to consider. The first thing is that very few people are interested in peace on earth. Materialists’ obsessions and desires are focussed on power, money, sex, family, security, busy-ness, complaining, frustration, competitiveness, achievement, etc. Spiritualists’ obsessions and desires are focussed on becoming all-powerful, seeking inner peace, sucking up to God by whatever name and achieving Immortality.

Should someone have a mild interest in actualism then cognitive dissonance initially serves to curtail understanding and if anyone does begin to understand then passionate resistance can set in. As you know, it does take a good deal of stubborn effort to overcome both these hurdles and fully take on actualism.

While freedom from the human condition is available, and has always been available, for every one, it will not be for everyone – particularly in these pioneering days.

Peace on earth is only possible for those who want it desperately enough, and are willing to pay the price – utter and irrevocable change.

Although this post is generally in response to the ‘Actualism and PCEs’ post of 23/01, I have retitled my reply because the general topic does seem to be shifting to actualism in the market place, i.e. the process of becoming free of malice and sorrow, in the world as-it-is, with people as they are.

It is both a fascinating topic, which yet again serves to make a clear distinction between ancient Spiritual freedom and an actual freedom from the human condition in total.

The mailing list I was last writing to had as its discussion topic at one stage ‘how to be in the world but not of it’, which neatly sums up the spiritual approach. I would paraphrase this as ‘how to begrudgingly accept being here while taking every opportunity to be there’. I found the contradictions, sentence to sentence, in all of the contributor’s discussions to be quite bewildering. One moment they would talk of going ‘there’, or going ‘inside’, and the next sentence they would be extolling the virtues of being ‘here’ ... by their very words they were proving that they were not talking about the same place.

Whenever a contributor touched on the horrors of the human condition they would soon indulge in the bitter-sweetness of feeling sorry for those poor ‘ignorant’ people, ennobling their own pity as being superior by labelling it as feeling true compassion. Whenever someone dared to share the reality of their own lives they would be reminded by other group members that they are not in fact human beings but that who they really are is Divine spirits. Whenever someone began to despair of the human condition they were reminded that peace on earth is ultimately impossible and one’s only hope is to seek solace in the hope of an other-worldly paradise. Should anyone begin to question any of the passionate spirit-ual beliefs, or worse still, dare to question the teachings or the teacher, the tribal elders or head Shamans would quickly pull them into line, either by seducing the group member by sweet talk or disciplining them with a loving reminder. If seduction or castigation fail the ultimate threat is of ostracization.

Once you are hooked into the spiritual world, it’s very tough to get out of it.

I think I have wandered slightly off-topic because I began by talking about the diametrically-opposite difference between coming here to the actual world and going ‘there’ to the spiritual world. Just a little story from my spiritual years will illustrate the fact that actualism is 180 degrees different to Spiritualism.

When I was a freshman spiritual disciple of Mohan Rajneesh, I remember being awed when a long-time disciple told me that they had met Rajneesh in person and how, when he looked into His eyes, there was nobody inside – meaning there was no personal self inside His body. I thought it a bit strange at the time because I understood Enlightenment was about being here. But then again, personal Enlightenment was not really on my agenda because I had joined up because I had fallen in love with Rajneesh and we, his Sannyasins, were going to change the world by practically demonstrating to people that we could live together as a community in peace and harmony.

Some ten years later, when I met Rajneesh in person and looked into his eyes, I realized he was not here at all but was really somewhere else. Of course, my experience was that he was not here in the ‘real’ world, but had really gone ‘there’ to the spirit world – but he was definitely so far-out from anything that was going on in the physical world that nothing could bring him back. This impression of far-far-outness, as in being on another planet altogether, was confirmed only months later when he died and the words on his tombstone read – ‘Never born, Never died, Just visited this planet’.

‘Tis strange looking back as to how the intensity of the feeling of love could so blind me that I either ignored, or blatantly denied, the fact that I was the follower of a God-man, that I had simply been suckered by his sweet talk, overwhelmed by the feeling of being loved and belonging to the congregation and enraptured by his psychic cunning into being a faithful goody-two shoes, holier-than-thou, religious believer.

And not only that, my love for the God-man was unconditional – as in totally faithful, totally loyal and totally unquestioning. Unquestioning of his duplicity, contradictions, lies, deception, angry outbursts, his greed and lust for power, his blatant refusal to be responsible for anything he did or said, his running away and abandoning his followers when the going got tough, his secretive sex-life and his manipulation of those close to him for his own ends.

What an utter blind fool I had been, but then again ... once you are hooked into the spiritual world – it’s very tough to get out of.

The first thing is the business of finding out the facts of the human condition we find ourselves born in to, as opposed to what we have been told is the truth about the human condition. What we have come to believe and commonly accept as the truth is what has been passed on to each and every human being from their parents and peers ... who got it from their parents and peers ... who got it from their parents and peers ... stretching back into the dark mists of time. Our bondage to the human condition can be summed up as –

‘This is the way it is, because this is the way it is, because this is the way it has always been and this is the way it will always be’.

In order to become free of the human condition it is essential to laboriously crack through these shackles – the beliefs, morals, ethics, values, viewpoints and psittacisms that bond humans to a life of essential suffering and heart-wrenching misery. The easiest and most direct method to do this is to read the Actual Freedom Trust website and confirm what is written by your own life experiences and your own investigations. The method I used to confirm that what Richard was saying about the human condition was factual and sensible was to read, watch TV and browse the internet for further information. This process of finding the facts does involve a fair bit of work and investigation. One needs to check many sources, look for contradictions, be very wary of the source of the material and the bias of the authors or presenters, seek out the data behind the conclusions others are making, etc. Initially I ran a little game whereby I simply assumed that I, and everyone else, had got it wrong and looked for why and where – this way the investigation became exciting and thrilling – not daunting and fearful. Pretty soon I was able to confirm that I and everyone else had got it wrong – I had been searching for freedom and meaning 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

As I re-read what I wrote to you I was reminded of something you wrote recently –

This desperation that I talk about comes out of my life experience. Everyone I know has been affected by war and violence. Nobody has escaped the carnage, at least nobody I know. I myself have been both victimized by violence and prone to violence myself in the past.

I don’t want to leave the impression that dispelling belief and unearthing facts is an intellectual exercise based upon reading and discerning what others have discovered. The quickest, most direct and most effective way of determining what is fact, i.e. what works and what doesn’t work, is by your own life experiences. By the time mid-life comes around, most people have had sufficient life experiences to already know what doesn’t work and only if there is still some doubt about a particularly sticky issue do you need to investigate further. As an example, I needed only to draw on my own life experiences and my observations of others around me to know that love does not work, and never can work, to negate malice or sorrow. This is why I wrote my journal in the style I did, including many examples of my life experiences and my inevitable failures to find peace and happiness, both in the real world and the spiritual world.

The other kind of investigation is by deliberately setting out to make sense of a vexing issue, as we did in our recent conversation about intelligence vs. instinctual passion. In this type of investigation you root around and dig up all the information, data and observations you can and balance those against the currently accepted viewpoints and beliefs that others have about the subject, and then you eventually come to find an answer – to come to an understanding of the facts of the situation. Vineeto and I have spent many, many hours mulling over issues relevant to the human condition with no disagreement or disharmony simply because we were searching for the facts – something that is clearly evident, obvious and indisputable.

I don’t know if you have ever had children or had the opportunity to closely observe a baby’s development from birth to toddler. If so, you would have seen the gradual emergence of what could best be described as an independent will. The infant changes from being a pliant demander of food and comfort to showing signs of aggressive behaviour, fear of people, likes and dislikes, moodiness, stubbornness and the classic temper tantrums. All this is the sign of an emergence of an instinctual ‘self’ and this stage marks the beginning of the parent’s carrot and stick approach to teaching the infant what is right and good, and what is wrong and bad, behaviour. The infant is taught an appropriate social code of ethics and morals by a combination of reward and punishment in order that the infant can eventually learn appropriate behaviour to make him or her a fit, able and good member of society. Thus it is that the instinctual ‘self’ we are born with is overlaid with a social identity consisting of the morals, ethics, values, psittacisms and beliefs of our peers. I know this genetic programming and social programming very well for I have parented two children and have observed identical behaviour in all children and parents I have come across.

This programming is common to each and every infant born into the world. No-one escapes this genetic and social programming that eventually makes up ‘who’ we think and feel we are – an instinctual ‘self’ overlaid with a social identity.

The instinctual ‘self’ is located in the primitive brain, commonly known as the reptilian brain, and the associated instinctual are animal in nature and very crude and brutish in operation – and when push comes to shove, readily able to override any common sense or moral and ethical considerations.

Thus, despite the myth of ancient wisdom, we humans are not born ‘innocent’ and then corrupted by our peers and evils of the material world. Nor are we eternal spirits who forget ‘who’ we really are when loaded into a foetus and born into a material world with the task of remembering ‘who’ we really are – an immortal spirit – and when we do become ‘who we really are’, we seek to tell others that they should remember that they too are eternal spirits who ...

The facts about ‘who’ we think we are, and ‘who we feel we are deep down inside, is deeply abhorrent to spiritual seekers, for it reveals that freedom, peace and happiness can only be found by abandoning all of the notions of ancient wisdom, tuning one’s backs on one’s precious spiritual achievements and dismantling one’s prized spiritual identity – something few will dare to do for the lot of a pioneer is a daunting one to say the least.

From this modern, clear-eyed, empirical understanding of the source of human malice and sorrow it is readily apparent that freedom, peace and happiness is only possible when both one’s social identity and one’s instinctual ‘self’ – both ego and soul – are eradicated from the flesh and blood body.

Well, on the planet at the moment there are evidently over 2,000 active religions, each with a different story about ‘Who’ did it, and the current New Dark Age has seen a fashionable revival of many ancient beliefs and theories and the creation of quite a few new ones. The spiritual world offers a potpourri of Gods, Goddesses, spirits, Demons, Energies, aliens, Forces, stories, reasons, explanations, theories and beliefs as to the existence of Good and Evil on the planet. It is curious to note that all the explanations put the praise or blame on a ‘Who’, a Higher Power, with the exception of the Eastern Religions who tend to blame a ‘what’, as in Mr. Buddha’s first Noble Truth – ‘life is fundamentally disappointment and suffering’.

The ineludible answer to your question is far more extraordinary and amazing than any of the fairy stories that humans have concocted over millennia.

In at least one solar system, this astonishing universe has manifested an event of no little significance, by providing a fresh opportunity for carbon-based life-forms to emerge out of itself ... and thus matter became animate matter. This shimmeringly blue verdant planet exudes a humid and nutrient-rich atmosphere that is the primordial womb of the only life that is so far known to exist in the universe. The circumstances on earth were ripe for the chemical processes that gave rise to the cellular structures of a prolific vegetate life and for amoeba to form, grow, combine and recombine to develop into extraordinary and bizarre variations of animate life and to begin the inevitable progression towards conscious animate life. So abundant and luxuriant is carbon-based life on the planet that it is estimated that there are currently between 2 and 4.5 million individual animal and plant species on the planet.

The multiplicity of organisms that has developed and redeveloped has done so through the biological feed-back mechanism of the primal creature’s involuntary response to environmental dictates. Their ‘life-successful’ reactions are genetically encoded as automated survival instincts. The human species, the most sophisticated of life forms, the only intelligent animal species on Earth, capable of thinking, planning and reflecting, and of being conscious of their own thoughts and actions, represents the pinnacle of the emergence and development of carbon-based life forms known in the universe.

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

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

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

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

Every human being born into this world has a pre-programmed instinctual ‘self’ that is fully developed by about age two. This instinctual ‘self’ is epitomized by the instinctual passions of fear, aggression nurture and desire, an automatic operating program instilled to ensure the propagation and survival of the species. The rudimentary animal instinctual ‘self’ or instinctual identity we are born with is then overlaid with a social identity, instilled since birth by our peers. This social identity consists of the morals and ethics that have been drilled into us from the time when we were first rewarded for ‘good’ and ‘right’ behaviour and punished for ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour. We are thus taught to emphasize and highly value the ‘tender’ instinctual passions and repress and control the ‘savage’ passions. Our social identity is also made of our beliefs, prime among them being an atavistic belief in Gods, spirits, other-worlds and an on-going life after death for ‘me’, as spirit.

Spiritual freedom is not a ‘self’-less state, as is sometimes claimed, but a shift in identity from self to Self or personal self to Impersonal Self or from mortal spirit to Divine Spirit.

A freedom from the instinctual passions requires the elimination of all identity – both the overlaid social identity implanted as a ‘controller’ of the rampant passions and the instinctual identity, which is the very source of the instinctual animal passions.

I really appreciate your approach of questioning EVERYTHING, even the sacred spiritual traditions, gurus and all. I think it’s absolutely ESSENTIAL for everybody to be very adventurous and bold in their investigation of life to avoid getting trapped in conformity and dependence etc.

Yes, indeed. Anyone sufficiently adventurous and bold enough in their investigations as to how to become free from the human condition of malice and sorrow would naturally want to investigate and become free of every aspect of the human condition and not remain trapped in any illusion, belief, imagination or impassioned feeling, no matter how seductive.

The Human Condition is that set of beliefs, conditionings and instincts that forms the habitual and neuro-biological program by which human beings currently operate and have done so, with few significant changes, ever since the first recorded civilizations. It can be likened to the ‘rules of the game’, defining the parameters and limits of what it is to be a human being that have been established and embellished, over tens of thousands of years. These rules ‘set in concrete’ both our instinct-based behaviour and the overlaying beliefs that form our gender, tribal, spirit-ual and world concepts.

Thus it is established that ‘we are the way we are, because this is the way we are’ and further – ‘this is the way we will always be, because this is the way we have always been’ – simply translated as ‘You can’t change Human Nature’. Bitter experience of continuous failure to curb instinctual animal fear and aggression, combined with the continual failure of morals, ethics and ideals has beget either cynical acceptance or fanciful spiritual belief as the prime mechanisms of coping with the Human Condition.

The very base of the ‘rules of the game’ that encodes and enshrines the Human Condition is what is known as Ancient Wisdom – that set of beliefs, myths, morals, ethics and psittacisms that has been passed on from generation to generation and venerated as the inviolate essence of what it is to be human. In the days of the ancients, the manifestations of instinctual fear and aggression were seen as being caused by evil spirits possessing the body and were appeased or exorcised by reverence, worship or sacrifice to the good spirits or Gods. There was no knowledge or understanding of the role that instincts play in human behaviour, as there is today.

The childhood imposition, by enticement or discipline, of a tribal role or social identity was a survival necessity both for the group and individual. Nowadays this same social conditioning can clearly be seen as creating and perpetuating the separate, distinct war-mongering groups of the past, be they ethnic, territorial or religious based. Thus, the Human Condition is built upon an archaic and inane set of ethics, morals, beliefs and false assumptions that have no relevance at all in this modern world. No wonder there is no solution to the human dilemma of malice and sorrow, given that we fervently insist on looking for a solution within the Human Condition – and then base our search for solutions on the wisdom and knowledge of our primordial ancestors.

The only way to become free from the Human Condition is to facilitate and actualize an end to both one’s social identity and one’s instinctual based primordial ‘self’. The elimination of the ‘identity’ in its entirety is simultaneously the demise of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ within oneself. Then ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ vanish forever along with the dissolution of the psyche itself ... that is the only place where they can live in. Because there is neither good nor evil in the actual world of sensual delight – where I live as this flesh and blood body – one lives freely in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are, actually free of the Human Condition of malice and sorrow.

Just a brief note to your comment on the Otto Kernberg article –

The more easily understood description for this would be one’s social identity. ‘Who’ you are programmed to think you are by your parents, peers and the tribal group you grow up in.

This is a persuasive theoretical framework. All possible observations are accounted for, in this theory. However when one asks, what is the core function that an individual comes with, in the first place? – the answer lies in biology (?).

The core function is a set of survival instincts, the main one’s being fear, aggression, nurture and desire. These are blind nature’s somewhat clumsy software program, genetically encoded in every human being so as to ensure the survival of the species. This core function is our instinctual self – ‘who’ we feel we are, deep down inside. This is the other half of our identity.

The modern challenge is to free ourselves of both of these programs – both social and instinctual. To do this we have to push beyond the traditions of the past, for they have failed to address the elimination of the instinctual passions. Traditionally the ancients ones regarded the instinctual passions as bad spirits and Evil, hence the spirit-ual search is to transcend or rise above these spirits and become one with the good spirits and God.

Surely we can do better than that?

I have been musing yet again on the question of denial and what I wrote to you the other day –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Eastern religion, the path to ‘become more than mere human’ means the path to feeling Divine and Immortal – nothing more and nothing less. The spiritual path has traditionally seduced those seeking genuine peace, freedom and happiness into an imaginary psychic spirit-ual world – even further removed from actuality. Each new spiritual/ religious group that emerges on the scene does nothing but reinforce and contribute to the plethora of competing religions which has caused unimaginable suffering, conflicts, recriminations, persecutions, vitriolic conflicts and religious wars that are ever ongoing.

As for not rejecting ‘one’s humanity’ – the most treasured attribute of ‘humanity’ is that we are proud of being feeling beings. These same cherished feelings we share in common with our closest genetic cousins, the chimps. Thus human affective feelings are firmly based upon the instinctual animal passions, the main ones being fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Despite our trumpeting and championing the tender qualities of love and compassion, the most striking, persistent and enduring attributes of the human condition are malice and sorrow – both at a personal level and a global level.

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.

The history of Humanity, both past and present, is essentially a history of continuous warfare between various tribal groups on the basis of territorial disputes, religious and ethical differences or acts of retribution.

Human malice is much more vindictive and vicious than the innate aggression obvious in other animal species due to human inventiveness, cunning. Furthermore in the human animal much hatred, bigotry and spite is also passed down from generation to generation as a social conditioning that is layered on top of our instinctual animal passion for aggression.

There is no evidence that human malice is abating – quite the contrary. This last century has been the bloodiest and most savage to date. To call the brief periods of ceasefire that occur between human wars and conflicts ‘peace’ is to completely misuse the word. Introduction to Actual Freedom, the Human Condition

The other major feature of the Human Condition is the underlying feelings of sorrow and despair that continually threatens to overwhelm human beings. As humans, we are all subject to physical dangers, ill-health, accidents, earthquakes, floods, fires, etc. which can cause loss and pain. But to have to , and to actively indulge in, emotional suffering additional to these hardships is to compound the situation to such an extent that the resulting feelings are usually far worse than dealing with the facts of the situation.

To be conscious beings, aware of our emotional suffering is held as the distinction between us and the rest of the animal world. As such, sorrow, sadness and despair are accepted as an integral unchangeable part of the Human Condition. Indeed emotional suffering is even lauded as a noble trait. To suffer rightly or deeply is held in high esteem and often evokes a bitter-sweet feeling. Compassion and empathy – our compulsion to emotional suffer others’ emotional sorrow – are also universally held in high esteem for the solace and bitter-sweet feelings evoked.

Human sorrow is based on the feelings of separation, loneliness, fear, helplessness, despair and dread and many people know only too well the sorrowful spiral downwards from melancholy to sadness, depression, despair and eventually to suicidal feelings. Introduction to Actual Freedom, the Human Condition

In order to be free of malice and sorrow we need to reject this perverse view as to what it is to be human – this overwhelming concept of a forever-suffering Humanity, instinctually and blindly driven to battle it out in grim and senseless and battle for survival, no matter how safe, comfortable, leisurable or pleasurable our lives become.

To do so, we need a radical new approach that goes far further than the mere transcendence of the ‘bad’ savage instinctual passions and selfishly pumping up the ‘good’ tender ones for this does not do the job. We each need to conduct a personal on-going investigation of the instinctual passions as they manifest moment to moment such that we are able to actuate a permanent irrevocable change in our behaviour towards our fellow human beings.

Few spiritual believers are prepared to make a deep investigation of their feelings, emotions and instinctual passions for they see that if they dare to question the spiritual ‘good’ feelings they will simply end up back in the ‘real’ world from which they have been desperately trying to escape. Some see that to question spiritual beliefs is to go towards the devil or evil while others see it as ending up in a sort of robotic catatonic state of non-feeling. What belies these fears is the PCE where the purity, perfection and benevolence of the actual world becomes magically apparent as having been here all the time ... if only ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul were not present to act as spoiler.

The incremental transition from being an emotional, feeling self to the free functioning of apperception and sensuous delight requires a pure intent firmly based on the peak experience. Ridding oneself of the emotions arising from the instinctual passions is a shocking concept to human beings, an anathema to what we regard as our very human-ness. But therein lies the secret to becoming actually free from the human condition for those courageous enough to face the illusionary demons and dragons, and the objections of others, on the way.

Peace on earth does not lie beyond ego-death – the shift of identity from a personal self to the delusion of an impersonal self – as we now well know from examining the lives of the Enlightened Ones. Peace on earth lies beyond both psychological and psychic death – the extinction of both ego and soul, to use the common spiritual terms. It is something that many spiritual people know, including the Enlightened Ones, but few are willing to broach the topic for fear of losing their psychic power over others.

Thanks for your post, No 11. It is vital to examine these matters and, as you can see from the mailing list, few people are even willing to discuss these matters at any depth for fear of raising doubts about their faith and for fear of other’s reaction within the group.

‘Political correctness’ is also rampant here – a leading judge made a joke at a dinner party last week, along the lines of ‘someone made great advances in the legal profession after having three transplant operations – he was given the breasts of a lesbian, the penis of a black man and the buttocks of a gay man’. I thought it quite amusing, but such is the power of the three lobbies he ‘insulted’ that he is likely to lose his job. The military are also engaged in peace keeping operations, which do not amount to ‘war’. If bombing the shit out of someone and firing dozens of cruise missiles (costing in excess of a million dollars each) is not ‘war’, I’d like to know what is.

I used to think that there was a solution for Humanity’s ills, that if only ... I would watch TV or participate in the typical male conversations about what was right or wrong with the world, what needed to be done. Now it is apparent that Humanity is terminally ill – finished, kaput, stuffed, going around in circles, revolution after revolution, cycle after cycle, old wound after old wound festering to the surface again. It’s time to abandon ship – to have the courage to stand on one’s own two feet as it were while being sensible enough to keep one’s hands in one’s pockets and one’s ‘opinions’ to oneself. Except if you find someone who is interested in freedom, and then it is hard to stop raving ...

I always thought what a marvellous time it was to be right in the middle of the formation of a religion when in my spiritual days and now I get to see the beginnings (or continuation) of a war on TV. Such fascinating times to be alive – to see the cultural identities we have been imbibed with, to see the religious myths, to see the Human Condition as a totality.

Just a note to you about nothing in particular. Good to read your posts. I am at present writing a bit on the Glossary for our web-site and wrote a piece on imagination which I thought I’d post off as it explains a bit about how, and why, we are as we are – ie. inflicted with such a pervasive belief that it is not only impossible but somehow ‘wrong’ to be happy. I recently observed a 1 year old baby for a few hours and it particularly struck me that her brain was still in a very formative stage. She had started to get some basic senses sorted out a bit – co-ordination, eating, touching and handling things, recognition, mobility, etc., but walking, talking, communicating, reflecting, contemplating, etc. were still to come. It was a bit like a computer yet to be programmed with the full software – only a few basic functions just working but yet to have a full input of data and as such incapable of any useful independent functioning. I wondered exactly what information she would receive in the coming years until she was able to leave the shelter and protection of her family and emerge into the world as an independent human. It became very apparent that what she was already being programmed with was an imaginary view of the world, rather than an actual view.

So here’s my bit on imagination – <see glossary >

So, when things get a bit rough, or a bit strange, or a bit weird, it is just that we are ‘wiping’ the computer back to the hard disk and wondering like hell whether we can keep operating. Well, experience shows that the whole system runs so, so, so much better without imagination, without beliefs, and without emotions. It is a bit of a weird thing to do because ‘you’ are, in fact, nothing other than this program that has been installed. It is all you have known yourself to be – except in the PCE, of course, when the programmed ‘you’ has a little glitch and crashes and Bingo – you, as flesh and blood body free of fear, aggression, malice and sorrow emerge for a peek into the actual world.

And all we are trying to do is dismantle the program installed in the brain that essentially says nothing more than ‘It is Impossible to be Happy and Harmless’. There is a lot of fine print, subtle nuances and silly nonsense but that is the core message of the installed program. What a cheeky delight to prove everyone wrong ...

But it is obvious from a study of animals that certain actions and behaviour patterns are not taught after birth but must be genetically pre-programmed in the instinctual memory. The reaching for, finding and suckling the nipple in mammals, the waddle to the ocean of baby turtles, the unlearned migration patterns of birds, etc. There are multitudinous examples of non-cognitive animals who exhibit quite sophisticated behaviour and ‘knowledge’ that is not learnt but must solely be due to a pre-coded memory that is genetically inherited.

Given that the human animal is the most advanced of the primates, it does beg the question as to how much pre-memory is genetically programmed in the human amygdala and therefore ‘set in the flesh’, as it were. Two of these pre-codings are vital in understanding the human psyche –‘who’ one thinks and feels one is.

Firstly, there is most obviously an instinctual sense of self-recognition, a faculty we share with our closet genetic cousins – apes and chimps both recognize ‘themselves’ in a mirror. This instinctual primal ‘self’ is made more sophisticated in humans, for the cognitive neo-cortex (the ‘conscious’ to use LeDoux’s term) is only capable of detecting the chemical flows of the amygdala (non-cognitive and ‘unconscious’), and these are ‘felt’ as basic passions or emotions and interpreted as feelings – ‘my’ feelings. Thus, we ‘feel’ this genetic instinctual programming to be ‘me’ at my core. This program thus gives every human being an instinctual self which is translated into a ‘real’ self that is both psychic – LeDoux’s ‘unconscious’ made obvious and real by the ensuing flow of chemicals from the amygdala – and psychological – interpreted as thoughts by the modern cognitive brain. (The modern brain is also taught much after birth – one’s social identity – but I’m interested in the deeper level at this stage.)

This explains that the spiritual journey ‘in’ is thus a journey to find one’s instinctual self – one’s roots, one’s original face, the Source, etc. If, on this inner journey, one ignores or denies the passions of aggression and fear and concentrates one’s attention on the passions of nurture and desire, one can shift one’s identity from the psychological thinking neo cortex – the ‘ego’ to use their term – and ‘become’, or associate with, or identify with, the good feelings of nurture and desire. This is a seductive and self-gratifying journey, for one is actively promoting the flow of chemicals that give rise to the good, pleasant, warm, light-headed, heart-full and ultimately ecstatic feelings. These flow of chemicals overwhelm the neo-cortex to such an extent that they become one’s primary experience, and the input of the physical world as perceived by the senses and the clear-thinking ability of the cognitive modern brain are both subjugated – or ‘transcended’ to use their term. One then ‘feels’ one has found one’s original ‘self’, which one has of course, though t’is all but a fantasy of one’s imagination.

Surely it’s time to consider a new non-spiritual, down-to earth, approach to becoming free of the human condition of malice and sorrow?

Could you simplify your question? I cannot tell whether you are seriously interested in ‘becoming free of the human condition of malice and sorrow’ or whether you are already convinced it is impossible.

My question was not a rhetorical one but a sincere question asked in a forum that promotes open dialogue and discussion. From my teenage years, as I gradually emerged from the sheltered existence of school and family, I was shocked to discover a world where people fought and killed each other with ruthless efficiency. One of my earliest shocking memories was seeing films of the aftermath of the WW2 concentration camps. This seemed like some dark evil history as I was living in a country largely free of overt violence. Later, my university days were gradually to fill with a wonderful optimism and naiveté as the sixties’ youth revolution gathered momentum. We were going to change the world! Socialism, peace on earth, love, sexual freedom, environmentalism – anything was possible to have or to change. From these heady days I developed a burgeoning interest in finding freedom, peace and happiness.

I marched to stop the Vietnam war, I poster-pasted to save the forests, I grooved to the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park in London, I hung around in Amsterdam, I travelled to the East, I became politically and socially concerned and involved. Remember John Lennon singing ‘Imagine’ or ‘Give Peace a Chance’, or watching Woodstock? We were going to change the world! And then it all started to fade a bit – and I gradually got lost in the ‘real world’, the daily business of wife, two kids and two cars. And then, when that comfortably-numb world crashed, I went through my ‘dark night of the soul’, and I was off to the East with thousands of others on the spiritual path, seduced and fired up by the promise of a New Man, Peace, Love, Utopia and an end to my personal suffering. I’ve thought about those times recently – what happened to the passion, the enthusiasm of those times?

In fact, the whole of the peace revolution of the sixties was simply sucked into the mystery, confusion and ‘mindlessness’ of the Eastern religions. The famed ‘spiritual path’, the Western pursuit and belief in Eastern religion and philosophy, has failed to deliver anything remotely resembling freedom, peace and happiness to humanity. Now that I look back it has failed because there was nothing new, different or original in it at all.

How could the solution lie in the well-tried so-called wisdom of the past? There would have been peace and happiness in the world by now if it worked – it has had at least 3,500 years to prove itself. As Ken Wilber wrote in an issue of What Is Enlightenment of the success of Eastern religion –

‘Even if we say there were only one billion Chinese over the course of its history (an extremely low estimate), that still means that only one thousand out of one billion had graduated into an authentic, transformative spirituality. For those of you without a calculator, that’s 0.0000001 of the total population.’

(For those with a calculator it is 0.000001 of the total population). This is a stunning figure to contemplate upon.

When I realized that I had simply moved from rejecting Western religious belief as meaningless fairy tale in my youth only to have landed myself in an Eastern religion in my middle years I was shocked. When I realized that millions upon millions upon millions of believers, meditators, devotees, monks and nuns had assiduously trod the spiritual path for thousands upon thousands of years in the East with so little result I was devastated. Eastern religious practice succeeds only in producing an elitist lineage of transcended God-men who then perpetuate their ancient stories, myths and fables to the next generation of gullible believers. I know the system well for I was a gullible believer for some 17 years and was dangerously close to becoming a God-man myself before the warning bells rang and my common sense reasserted itself. As I dug deeper in to spiritual belief I discovered that peace on earth is not even on the agenda of Eastern religions – life on earth is meant to be a suffering existence and it is an endless cycle of misery – it is deemed to be a necessary, essential and unchangeable part of some greater cosmic plan. This ‘necessary suffering’ is the human condition of malice and sorrow and includes all the wars, murders, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, despair and suicide.

Being vitally interested in peace on earth, I decided to question spirituality, the belief in God and the idea of life after death – to dare to question the sacred teachings.

As for ‘or whether you are already convinced it is impossible (to become free of the human condition of malice and sorrow)’ –

It is impossible to bring an end to human malice and sorrow whilst remaining trapped within the human condition and this includes being trapped within any of the multitudinous spiritual belief-systems or mind-sets. Surely 3,500 years of belief, trust faith and hope in Gods, Goddesses, Spirits, Sources, Higher Selfs, Essences, Creators, Doomsdays, Good and Evil, is long enough to declare that the experiment has failed.

Currently some 6 billion human beings are involved in a grim and desperate instinct-driven battle for survival on this planet. The human condition 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.

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

Which is why I asked the question for anybody who is interested in peace on earth, in this lifetime –

‘Surely it’s time to consider a new non-spiritual, down-to earth, approach to becoming free of the human condition of malice and sorrow?’

To do this, sincere seekers of freedom, peace and happiness would have to break through the sacred ceiling that traps them within the human condition. This daring to question the sacred and taking action to break free of ancient beliefs in Gods, God-men and Spirits is analogous to the pioneering women who have had to break through the glass ceiling of religious, social, moral and ethical restraints that bound them to the woodstove and the washing line.

Does that make the question ‘Surely it’s time to consider...’ clearer to you and do you understand why I was moved to ask it of myself? I did say to No 1 that this was a radical proposition, but spirituality (a belief in God, by whatever name) has had 3,5000 years to deliver the goods and has lamentably failed. There must be something that works and the evidence that peace on earth is possible is startlingly obvious in a pure consciousness experience when the ‘self’ – both as ego and as soul, both as thinker and feeler – is temporarily absent. The pure consciousness experience clearly indicates that peace on earth, an actual end to malice and sorrow, lies in total self-extinction, both ego and soul, not an ego death only, as in an altered state of consciousness.

To actualize peace on earth, one first needs to break through the sacred ceiling.

Firstly I am not finding an alternative to spirituality – I have found the alternative to spirituality which is why I can write with authority both about this new alternative and of the failings of the spiritual path. I know both very well indeed, from an experiential understanding, not an intellectual observation. I can only go by what you write to this list, and while you say you would not be here on this list if you were not fully aware of ‘the futility of continuing to play those (spiritual?) games’, you also post large chunks of wisdom from a channelled dis-embodied imaginary being who presumable resides in a mythical other-world. As such, I take what you post at face value and you appear to be at the stage of being in the spiritual camp, and testing the waters of actualism to see whether you are going to investigate further. You may well also be having glimpses, that to pursue actualism will be the end of No 8, as she is now. I could well be wrong, but this is what happened to me.

When I came across Richard I already had considerable motives for wanting to be free of the Human Condition, not the least of which was that I wanted to get rid of malice and sorrow from my life. One of the first steps towards doing this was to acknowledge that I did indeed harbour thoughts/ feelings of anger, irritation, blame, exasperation, frustration, resentment, impatience, antagonism, etc. on one hand and sadness, melancholy, loneliness, unhappiness, discontent, etc. on the other.

It’s a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous where the initial step in a cure for alcoholism is to admit you are an alcoholic. It is exactly the same with actualism. The initial step in eliminating the animal instinctual passions is to admit to their existence and to experience them in action in oneself. This is not as easy as it appears for we have been taught to deny them, repress them, control them or, in Eastern religious practice, transcend them. This is exactly the purpose of running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ – to become aware of the beliefs, morals, and ethics that prevent this experiential investigation, so that one is then able to get down to the core instinctual being that is the very source of the instinctual passions.

When you say you are feeling as though you are being ostracized or declared malicious or sorrowful – what I did was acknowledge, despite my years of feeling special on the spiritual path, that I was simply an average human being and therefore, deep down, a malicious and sorrowful one. I found this acknowledgement a great blow to my spiritual pride of course, but when combined with the tantalizing lure that I could do something about the situation, I found I could not help but jump in.

As for this list, it’s simply the best forum on the planet and an ideal adjunct to and testing ground for the process of eliminating the ‘me’ who is blindly programmed to fight or flee, feel offended or seek revenge, etc. It’s the best thing since sliced bread.

It soon became obvious that only by leaving behind what didn’t work, or what was a compromise, or what was a bondage, was I able to allow something better to become apparent. Or to put it bluntly – no change means no change.

The other thing I would like to say is that I have only a working knowledge of the human condition and the instinctual passions – it is by no means exhaustive and it is thin on scholarly substance. I tend to operate on the ‘I only need to know what I need to know to get the job at hand done’, so my investigations most usually only applied to what was relevant to me. I have no idea at all as wether what I am saying has any direct relevance to the person I am writing to. I have no insight ability as to how someone else’s psyche operates, what they are particularly thinking or feeling. As such, what I write is more generic – thus far the cumulative result of a handful of actualists’ self-inquiries and experiences – but it stands the test of scrutiny if one observes the broad operation of the human condition.

The study of one’s instinctual reactions is something totally new and unlike anything else I have encountered before. The instinctual basis of human behaviour is a much-neglected area of investigation, virtually untouched by modern psychology and other disciplines. But then, we are approaching it in ourselves, not as an academic matter but as a practical area of investigation, as the instincts underlie so much of human functioning that there is no possibility of realizing peace on earth without digging into them. I appreciate what you are saying in this passage because you are only sharing what you have learned for yourself, with no attempt to say it has direct relevance to anyone else. Then, the question remains: does one’s own investigation into their psyche have any relevance at all to other human beings?

If ‘I’ am humanity, and humanity is ‘me’, how generalizable are the insights and realizations that I have gotten from my own ‘self’-investigations? A little? A lot? If, for instance, I think I have gained some insights into how the instinct of fear operates in my own psyche, can I then generalize to any degree about how fear operates in other human beings? Perhaps one can only be an expert about their own life, and if needs be tell others what their own experience is, but leave it to the other to decide whether this observation or input is valid for them (?)

The basic underlying operating system of all human beings is identical, we all come with an identical genetically-encoded survival program, we all run on the same BIOS, as it were. The only minor variations that occur are in the overlaying operating system – the culturally variable program that constitutes our social identity. Once you begin to eliminate the overlaying operating system program the underlying instinctual program is very basic, very crude and common to all human beings.

My comments on my limited knowledge related more to the variations and foibles of various social programming, whereas my knowledge and understanding of the instinctual operating program is, at present, second to one.

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