Selected Correspondence Peter

Instinctual Passions

I have a question regarding the role of the passions in actualism. I currently have two conflicting images of what the actualism method entails. One idea involves throwing myself heart and soul into the process of self-immolation, co-opting every aspect of the self in order to direct its passionate energy toward the goal. The other involves living sensibly without much passion until the ‘organs’ of malice and sorrow gradually atrophy like unused muscles.

Which is the better approach?

Rather than offer an intellectual answer perhaps I would refer you to the track record thus far of those who have tried the approaches you outline.

Thus far there have been several people who have come across actualism and have apparently opted for the all-or-nothing method as in ‘throwing myself heart and soul into the process of self-immolation, co-opting every aspect of the self in order to direct its passionate energy toward the goal’ and none have reported success in becoming free of the human condition – on the contrary many continue to be afflicted by the human condition to varying degrees be it by being sorrowful, becoming angry, feeling resentful or of blaming others for standing in the way of their freedom.

By way of contrast the track record of those who manage the sensible approach of doing both at once – being passionate about being free from the human condition by doing whatever they can to become free of malice and sorrow until the moment comes when they become actually free from the human condition – is that all who are doing so report that they have benefited from what is a win-win situation, in that they all report the benefits of living virtually free of the debilitating feelings of malice and sorrow, benefits not only for themselves but benefits for all of their fellow human beings with whom they come in contact with.

Given that you have said you have two conflicting ‘images’ of what the actualism method involves I can only suggest reading further on the AF website and following the conversations on this mailing list as you will find that there has been a good deal written about the down-to-earthness of actualism that will help you make up your own mind as to what it is you want to do.

I recently watched a TV program on animal behaviour in which the instincts of the more primitive animals were described as ‘What can eat me? – what can I eat?’, and added to this was the instinctual program for reproduction. Hence the animal instincts are fear, aggression, nurture and desire. In the human animal, this instinctual program is translated into instinctual passions, emotions and feelings. We hold the feelings derived from our animal passions in high esteem and value them proudly as our greatest possessions – t’is even claimed that these very feelings are what separates us from being animals! Unless we humans are willing enough, daring enough and naïve enough to dig deep to this level beneath belief and eliminate this instinctual programming, we will be forever merely pissing into the wind or being reduced to humbly praying to some fictitious God to bring peace on earth.

I wonder sometimes if the affective, painful emotions that I have eluded to from time to time, for instance, bouts of ‘self’ pity and sorrow, or bouts of resentment, are the death throes of the instinctual ‘self’, ‘me’ raging in all ‘my’ glory, desiring to continue, craving to live, and that ‘I’, on some level, sense my demise and make a desperate grab for attention and succourance.

I would say that what you are discovering is completely normal in that these instinctual passions are at the root of every human psyche. It’s not so much that you stir them up – it’s more that you dare to discover their existence. It’s a fascinating business to take a walk around inside your own psyche.

Since ‘I’ am entirely illusory, all these emotions and feelings that arise from the instinctual part of the brain are similarly illusory (although they are experienced as real enough), and ‘I’ only think and feel in ‘my’ bosom that this death of ‘me’ is going to be a painful passage.

It is good to remember that your feelings are not illusionary in that they are the direct result of various hormonal releases triggered by a rudimentary genetically-encoded program in the primitive mammalian brain that constantly quick-scans the sensory input looking for danger signs. This program grabs hold of the information a split-second before it hits the neo-cortex and subsequently the thinking brain thinks there is a thinking and feeling being inside.

The only way this madness can end is for this thinking-feeling entity to cease operating, i.e. die. There is a thinking/ feeling/ chemical loop operating that gives credence and substance to ‘me’ and the only way to break free of this loop is to break free of it all at once – lest one ends up merely feeling free.

The awareness that the emotional ties or tentacles that you referred to that bind me to humanity are being weakened and demolished has occasionally filled me with an existential dread. I have found myself wondering if this dread, as it seems to be a by-product of the method, is in some way a sure sign that one is utilizing the method to maximal effect?

If you plumb the depths of the human psyche, my experience was that I came across dread, beneath which lay an unspeakably horror-filled hellish realm. I have read that the primitive mammalian brain has its own separate memory capacity and I suspect that such journeys into the depths of one’s psyche tap into primitive atavistic memories genetically-encoded in the mammalian brain’s memory. The other interesting discovery you can make – if you want to, that is – is that not only is there fear and dread, aggression and savagery but there is also sexual predatoriness and an unquenchable lust for power.

What also can be experienced is the flip side of fear and dread – the narcissistic feelings of awe and bliss that gave rise to the famed mythical escapist fairy tales that have been passed down from generation to generation. You can take a walk in these feelings and experience their seductive lure and discover for yourself the instinctual passions that fuel the search for spiritual ‘freedom’ and God-realization.

Investigations and explorations such as these are par for the course of an actualist, but the proof that you are using the method to maximum effect is whether one is becoming more happy and more harmless in one’s everyday life. If these deep impassioned experiences happen on the way, then milk them for all the information you can, and then get back to feeling good or feeling excellent as soon as possible. Only by understanding these experiences for what they are you do you come to realize that these experiences have no significance in themselves – i.e. there is no hidden meaning or ‘message’ to be discovered within the human psyche, as spiritualists believe.

Perhaps, though, the only real thing that shows that the method is working is one’s own quotient of happiness and harmlessness – is one’s stock on the rise, so to speak? Is one increasingly happy and harmless in all one’s affairs?

Having said what I said above, the fact that you are tapping into the instinctual passions is a sign of success because it is only by doing this process of in-depth exploration can one become genuinely happy and harmless. Only by knowing how ‘you’ are instinctually programmed to operate can you break the habitual cycle of automatic unthinking knee-jerk reactions and feelings.

This is where sincerity plays its part – you know if you’re fooling yourself when you notice suppression or denial kick in as soon as a feeling emerges and by becoming aware of this you can then allow the feeling to happen so that you can explore it in action. If this exploration then goes deeper into the underlying passions and instinctual drives you get to discover a bit more about what makes ‘you’ tick deep down inside.

The salient aspects of the process of actualism – and what distinguishes it from spiritual ‘self’-observation and ‘self’-awareness – is that one’s investigations need to be sufficiently deep and sufficiently thorough and sufficiently unfettered by social mores, ethics and morality so as to get to the very bottom of one’s instinctual being. One needs to investigate the nature of evil as well as well as the nature of good in order to make sense of the human condition in toto.

Once this is done sufficiently, and I use the word deliberately for only you will know what is sufficient for you, then a whole new investigation unfolds – an exploration of the sensual delights of the actual world. In the first stage these investigations run parallel but ‘self’-investigation is predominant. But later, as ‘self’-investigation runs out of steam and one becomes virtually happy and harmless – being effortlessly happy and effortlessly harmless 99% of the day – then one’s attention naturally focuses on the fascinating and sensual experience of actuality.

I thought I would respond to a theme you were pursuing with Alan and relate it to my experiences lately. I seem to be having a good dig down deep into the instincts in the last months. My post to No. 5 was about exploring aggression at an instinctual level and, no doubt, I could shuffle around a lot more exploring the emotions that arise from these instincts, but another aspect of my instinctual program is beginning to fascinate me. It relates to your comment to Alan –

If anything, ‘I’ came from ‘back there’ in the biological hereditary and very earthy past (hence all the atavistic fears when one starts to break free from all the cultural mores). Richard, List AF, Alan

The genetically programmed instincts one is born with are located in the primitive brain or amygdala and consist in part as a hard-wired quick response mechanism that pumps the body and brain with chemicals as a reaction to any perceived danger. The amygdala also has its own independent memory section that is evidenced as an emotional memory as distinct from one’s cognitive memory.

A bit from LeDoux will confirm the scientific evidence of this independent (unconscious is the term he uses) memory.

‘A fundamental assumption in this work is that the brain has multiple memory systems, each devoted to different kinds of memory functions. For traumatic memory, two systems are particularly important. For example, if you return to the scene of an accident, you will be reminded of the accident and will remember where you were going, who you were with, and other details about the experience. These are explicit (conscious) memories mediated by the hippocampus and other aspects of the temporal lobe memory system. In addition, your blood pressure and heart rate may rise, you may begin to sweat, and your muscles may tighten up. These are implicit (unconscious) memories mediated by the amygdala and its neural connections. They are memories in the sense that they cause your body to respond in a particular way as a result of past experiences. The conscious memory of the past experience and the physiological responses elicited thus reflect the operation of two separate memory systems that operate in parallel. <snip>

Only by taking these systems apart in the brain have neuroscientists been able to figure out that these are different kinds of memory, rather than one memory with multiple forms of expression. <snip> Learning and responding to stimuli that warn of danger involves neural pathways that send information about the outside world to the amygdala, which determines the significance of the stimulus and triggers emotional responses, like freezing or fleeing, as well changes in the inner workings of the body’s organs and glands. <snip>

The implication of these findings is that early on (perhaps since dinosaurs ruled the earth, or even before) evolution hit upon a way of wiring the brain to produce responses that are likely to keep the organism alive in dangerous situations. The solution was so effective that it has not been messed with much, and works pretty much the same in rats and people, as well as many if not all other vertebrate animals. Evolution seems to have gone with an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ rule when it comes to the fear system of the brain.’ (LeDoux Lab., Centre for Neural Science, New York University)

So, in investigating one’s instinctual self – which is programmed into the amygdala – one is not only investigating the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, one inevitably encounters the instinctual ‘memory’ as well. LeDoux’s studies are seemingly primarily concerned with the emotional memories imprinted on to the amygdala’s memory since birth. Thus we have imprinted the traumatic incidents in life since birth and those fears instilled in us, largely by our parents, in the very early years before the development of our cognitive memory. There is also scientific evidence that the foetus is influenced by the flow of chemicals via the placenta which would allow for a pre-birth encoding of emotions.

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.

I particularly remember when I first came across spiritual teachings, the mythology and poetry that alluded to this ‘inner’ world seemed to strike a deep cord with me – the tales of Ancient Wisdom ‘connected’ with this deep (unconscious) level which was a connection with the instinctual memory in the amygdala. I had ‘found’ someone who had the answers, was in touch with the Source, knew the meaning of life, the truth – I had come Home. I began a journey into the inner world of good feelings, made real by the ability to enhance the chemical flow of nurture and desire and dampen, suppress or ignore the feelings of aggression and fear. I was literally leaving the real world behind and seeking solace and succour in the spiritual world. I was thus forfeiting any chance of breaking free of my instinctual passions, in total, for a selfish bid for personal bliss and a permanent place in an imaginary ‘other world’ composed solely of chemically-supported blissful feelings.

Secondly, the other faculty I see as essentially pre-coded is an instinctual need to ‘belong’ to the herd – the herding instinct, as Vineeto puts it. It might seem banal and obvious given that humans, as a species, have perennially needed to maintain, at very least, a family grouping in order to ensure the survival of the species. Given that the human infant is helpless for such a long time compared with most other species, the immediate family group was the basic minimum need, and the chance of survival was considerably increased with larger and stronger groupings. This is an instinctual program that over-rides the individual’s own survival instincts for one is ultimately programmed to ensure survival of the species – not one’s own, as in self-preservation. Given that these involve more sophisticated programming than mere instantaneous ‘fight and flight’ reactions they must be encoded in the genetic memory of the amygdala, passed on from ‘way back there’, in the mists of time.

This instinct, implanted by blind nature to ensure the survival of the species, pumps the body with chemicals that induce the feeling of fear whenever one is straying too far away from the herd, abandoning other members of the family or group or being on one’s own. I remember particularly, in my early twenties, travelling across Europe and the Middle East on my way home from London and arriving at the border with Iran. I was turned away at an isolated border post as I didn’t have a visa and I was struck with a deep sense of panic, a feeling of utter loneliness. Looking back, it was as though I had gone too far striking off on my own and had hit the limit. This feeling of loneliness was to haunt me for many years – the image of becoming a lonely old man on a park bench, outcast and abandoned. It coincidentally was to prove one of the images that made me leap into the spiritual world with such gusto. I was to lose this fear later in life but living alone was always accompanied by a bitter-sweet feeling of loneliness. My major period of living alone was also the period when I began to have spiritual experiences, Satoris and an experience of Altered States of Consciousness aka Enlightenment.

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

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

3. ... I see that I am malicious and sorrowful at the core of my being and seek to eliminate that. I saw that I was willing to die or kill for my beliefs or instinctually when I ‘felt’ my survival was at stake.

For a start, I don’t see you being malicious and sorrowful at the core of your being. It’s your defence of this core of your being that lashes out when triggered, justified by your mistaken beliefs and interpretations of yourself and of women. Ignoring them means that you cannot ever rely on yourself and must therefore rely on another or others to keep you under control. This dependence on others for your own survival comes at a price: you must sacrifice, compromise your integrity in order to be safe and kill or die for the survival of your group.

Yes, we are all wired with a survival instinct, a will to survive, that consists of feelings of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Rather than treat the symptoms with therapy, morality, ethics or transcendence I have chosen the path of eliminating the disease – to actively pursue the elimination of the animal in me. Sure it’s radical, but I and countless others over the centuries, have diligently pursued the other solutions to no avail. Besides, it is such a fascinating adventure to participate in at my time of life. I’ve done all the normal things very well, investigated them all, so I’m trying something different now. It does mean I’m on my own, but then again I always was. The curious thing is that I no longer ‘feel’ lost, lonely or frightened on my own or have the need to ‘feel’ part of a group to survive. My interactions with all I meet are therefore not driven by animal survival instincts. It’s so good to be rid of bad feelings and the need to maintain the good one’s in order to keep it together. The bad feelings are hard wired in us (fear and aggression) and up until now the idea of abandoning the Good, Right, Sacred or Holy has been absurd. These feelings – and the point of a gun – are all that has held it all together to get us to our present state of development as a species.

It is only possible to eliminate the good when one has eliminated the bad and the bad is a biological and neurological problem located in the primitive lizard brain. But you know all this and have experienced many times a ‘disconnection’ from fear and aggression that is apparent in the peak experience when all is obviously benign, perfect, pure and pristine – with not a skerrick of fear or aggression apparent anywhere.

Then it occurred to me that I have not been experiencing life at all. What I was doing is the feeling which is generated after the experiencing. And experience can be done only in this moment. You can’t experience the moment just passed by.

It is interesting that you say that you have been experiencing life as ‘the feeling which is generated after the experiencing.’ Modern scientific experiments, of the type LeDoux is conducting, all point to feeling being the first and foremost experience. The instinctual physical reaction has been measured at 12 milliseconds, the instinctual emotional reaction – when the hormones flow – is slower at 25 milliseconds, and the sensible sensate reaction (if it happens at all) is far slower as it cannot operate while the hormone-generated feelings are still in action. A bit from the Instinct section of the Library will help to explain this.

Some of these things are still nice social events... a good reason to see old friends, that’s it...

In my time on the Sannyas list, there was a total denial that the dream of a New Man had failed, even to the point of denying the dream existed in the first place, despite the fact that it is well documented and still trumpeted as His dream. The main theme to emerge was the need to belong to the Sannyas social club, and the good feelings that ensued. The failure of the collective dream was further evidenced by the emerging ‘individual connections’ to Rajneesh – every man and woman in it for themselves and ‘free’ to imagine and dream what they wanted to dream. Thus feelings and imagination run riot, in complete denial of facts and sensible awareness.

At source, this desperate need to belong, come-what-may, is an instinctually driven need, for in the past the security and support of a group was indeed very necessary for survival. In this modern world, this need to belong now threatens the very survival of the species as ethnic, religious and ethical groups battle it out for supremacy and power. An actual freedom, by definition, is a freedom from this need to belong to a group that has strangled any attempts at finding peace on earth.

Mr. Rajneesh – ‘Up to now, humanity has been schizophrenic – because you have been told to repress, to reject, to deny, many parts of your natural being. And by rejecting them, by denying them, you cannot destroy them – they simply go underground. They go on functioning from your unconscious; they become really more dangerous. Man is an organic whole. And all that god has given to man has to be used; nothing has to be denied. Man can become an orchestra; all that is needed is the art of creating a harmony within oneself.’

You can see he has a problem here because he believes that God has made man ‘an organic whole’ so there is no chance of eliminating the instinctually programmed malice and sorrow. He has to propose transcending it, or rising above it. It’s the same old Ancient Wisdom from the Dark Ages.

Long time, no read. I’m wrestling with some questions about religion. I can understand the facts that are against any form of religion = (belief). I know God = religion = war, separation and all that comes with it. I know on a personal basis that religion (belief) feeling guilty, taboos, = struggle and loss of freedom. Intellectually I do understand that any kind of religion doesn’t work. That also means no religion, no god to believe in. But I wonder where a figure like Jesus does or doesn’t fit in. What is the message? How about the bible? Is there nothing true about it? Are there only fairytales in it? I mean is there nothing practical to get from. Or was it at that moment the best that one could get. I hope you know what I mean.

As you know we have been having a lot of correspondence about the animal instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire lately on the list, and the fact that scientists are making the first discoveries to plot the source of instinctual feelings and behaviour in the human brain. For a fair while now attempts have been made to study human behaviour and get to the roots of both fear and aggression, and a particular study that shook me up was done by Stanley Milgram – it’s in the Peace chapter of my journal. <snip>

A year after writing this, the same issue is coming home to me again as I find that, after 2 years of ‘cleaning myself’ up – digging deep into my psyche and exploring the roots of fear and aggression, it is blatantly obvious that there is nothing that can be done, within the Human Condition, to eliminate malice and sorrow. No matter how good, moral, ethical or well intentioned the individual or group attempts to be, the instincts will always win out. There have been billions of people who have prayed for peace, attempted to live moral and good lives but peace on earth is still no closer to happening.

Peace on earth is an impossibility while human beings are instinctually driven to fight each other.

The clearly unworkable, unliveable and unsuccessful reliance on morals and ethics to bring peace on earth – let alone within tribal groups, families or couples – can surely now be abandoned as a failure. Of course, one would not want to venture off and begin to question the ‘good’ if one had no evidence that there was something better, and that evidence is the Pure Consciousness Experience. One of the prime qualities of the ‘self’-less state of the PCE is the fairy-tale like purity and perfection of the actual world, and the quality of a human being in a PCE is one of innocence – there is a total absence of instinctual fear and aggression. This is the innocence much sought after on the spiritual path but what one ends up with is feeling Good or becoming Divine – a perversion and human corruption of the actual state of innocence. A synthetic, fragile, supposed innocence that does nothing to tackle the inbuilt programming of fear and aggression in the amygdala – the ‘primitive brain’ within humans.

What is our collective will? Do we even have one?

The collective will of the species is a will to survive as a species. Blind nature wires each species with an instinctual response mechanism in order to perpetuate the particular species. It is a very clumsy package and in many species it actually conspires, making survival difficult. The migratory patterns of many birds and animals are such as to cause the futile death of many. For humans these instinctual responses are fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

Fear and aggression are necessary to attack and defend against other animals that would kill or eat us. In the human species this includes to attack and defend against other humans in competition for territory, food, mating partners, etc.

Nurture is essentially the instinct to procreate, provide for, protect and pass on any knowledge, customs, morals, ethics and beliefs to the next generation.

Desire is the drive to survive – it translates into sexual conquest, power over others, and attaining the necessities of survival such as territory, food, offspring, and the protection of others. Played out by 5.8 billion humans these instinctual patterns combined with tribal conditioning results in the Human Condition as we see it in operation on the planet. This is what we humans agree we are, and we further believe that you can’t change human nature. So we all agree that we can’t change ourselves, so no one dares to try.

It is now possible to become free of the collective will. But it does take the courage to stand on one’s own two feet, to stop believing what others tell you as truths and start looking at facts. Then one discovers and sensately experiences the delight, ease, magic and perfection of the physical universe.

*

This is what we get if we decide that ‘survival of the fittest’ is the name of the game, though very few will survive.

We don’t casually decide that ‘survival of the fittest’ is the name of the game, we are instinctually driven. It is wired in us in what is commonly known as the Lizard brain, the seat of our instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Unless one faced this fact one either spends one’s life trying to be good or chasing some Altered State of Consciousness wherein one became ‘not the body’. Head in the sand or heart in the clouds?

What I was interested in was the willingness to kill – the instinct of aggression. This instinct is often triggered by fear, but has been implanted in humans to ensure that the offspring are protected sufficiently to ensure the survival of the species. Having had 2 children, one of whom died at an early age, I know the powerful urge to give my life as a sacrifice to ensure my offspring’s survival. It is this ‘blind’ instinct in me that I was interested in investigating, understanding and eliminating. Such that I would never again blindly kill, or be killed, for ‘love’ of country or ‘love’ of God. To free myself of malice.

Now, with only one small comment and a reservation, I could say that I have had the same interests.

My comment would be, the willingness to kill stems from two different sources, either to catch food, or to defend oneself from one’s enemies, the first I would consider (in today’s terms) the greed for acquisition, and second is still defence (or fear). I would associate aggression more with the first of the two, and what happened on the Ranch was more of the second sort.

Firstly, the human species, as a whole, is ‘pre-wired’ with the instincts of fear aggression, nurture and desire. The source of this programming is in the primitive or ‘Lizard’ brain. The instinct of aggression is well documented, studied and acknowledged in our closest genetic species, chimpanzees and apes. ‘Ethical’ considerations have inhibited studies in humans such as the Milgram experiments, but ‘Blind Freddie’ would have to acknowledge that we humans have the same primitive instinct of aggression. It is acted out in many situations on the planet, even as I type these words, when the urges well up to become uncontrollable, whenever emotion overcomes reason or control.

It is easily recognizable in each of us as a feeling. The feeling of wanting to hurt someone, the feeling of wanting Justice done, the feeling of wanting to kill someone. This feeling is the sure pointer to the instinct of aggression in operation within us. Any one of a number of things can trigger this instinct to come into play – physical danger, threat of loss of territory or possessions, jealousy, revenge, etc. Moreover the instinct is often activated without any obvious cause, it is then simply the impulsive aggressive drive in operation. This is then played out, sometimes physically, as in physical violence, power, domination, subjugation, repression, etc – sometimes verbally in argument, snide comments, sarcasm, innuendo, gossip, etc. – or more often covertly as withdrawal, psychic vibes, psychic power, psychic manipulation, etc.

The Ranch was a passionate mix of them all, with the added grand psychic and physical power-play between two groups, with Rajneesh and his followers taking on the Christian God and his followers.

Because the first is an attribute of the more successful of our species it is still, in most forms, respected in our society, while the second is more condemned as it is an attribute of weakness. (I speak more in relative terms, rather than absolutes, yes, there are exceptions).

My reservation is with the last sentence. I would associate malice with wanting to cause harm without regard to the above causes of aggression (I.e. neither for acquisition not defence) but simply from a desire to hurt another. Why? Well, most likely to improve one’s self image.

No, aggression, as well as fear, nurture and desire is ‘hard-wired’ into all of us, but given that it is only a ‘program’ in the brain, it can be deleted, eliminated. The solution is both radical and ruthlessly effective. Eliminate the feelings, emotions and instinctual passions that are the very cause. The psychological and psychic entity has to self-immolate in order to free us of malice and sorrow. Merely to attempt to ‘transcend’ the programming by giving full reign to the imagination and feelings of good and God in order to battle the bad and Evil, has never been a solution and never will be.

‘Tis but a fairy-story, a wished-for imaginary solution to what is a practical problem.

Of course, freeing yourself from malice is an excellent objective, but I would differentiate it from the two basic causes of aggression.

You are confusing what are the triggers and symptoms of aggression with what is the cause. There is only one cause of aggression in human beings and that is the instinctual programming of Blind Nature, instilled only to ensure the survival of the species. Freeing yourself from malice is not only an excellent objective it is now an obtainable, realistic, practical and realizable objective. It does, however, involve ‘self’-immolation, which is not the fashionable, feel-good, fantasy type of thing that appeals to many.

I thought I would join in on your conversation with Vineeto about instinctual passions. I haven’t written much on the list lately as I have been penning a ‘brief introduction to Actual Freedom’. It’s a picture and word presentation done in PowerPoint and the current idea is to use it as an introduction to a CD version of the AF web-site that we hope to have available early in the new year. Vineeto is currently working on converting it into html for the Web site so she will probably be fully involved for a few weeks and not writing for a while.

So, on to the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire –

It is not a matter of having an ‘intimate’ relationship with one’s instincts, but to acknowledge, feel and experience that ‘I’ am my instinctual passions, nothing else. ‘I’ am rotten to the very core.

Over the last few years I have become an anonymous nobody and what you have said here about seeing the instinctual passions as ‘me’, all of ‘me’ does shine some light on the matter. The part about acknowledging, feeling and experiencing that ‘I’ am my instinctual passions, nothing else and that I am rotten to the very core is where I feel that I am at right now. Intellectually I see that this is so but I am just not feeling and experiencing it right now.

And from a previous post –

Although I have been working on beliefs and emotions for a long time this area of instincts is new to me so I don’t know exactly where I’m at with it.

From the ‘introduction’ I have been working on I did a brief summary of the animal instinctual passions as evidenced in human beings. I am sure you can relate to many of these facets of the instincts ‘in action’ in your own life. The Human Condition of malice and sorrow that is obvious in human beings collectively – 160,000,0000 killed in wars this century and an estimated 40,000,000 suicides worldwide this century – is a universal condition that no individual human being escapes. We are all born with a genetically-encoded set of instinctual passions that are fully developed by the age of about 2 years when the first signs of fear, aggression, nurture and desire become obvious in every infants behaviour. What is so appallingly evident global-wide is potentially in each of us, should we submit to, or be overwhelmed by, the instinctual animal passions. From the introduction –

Fear hobbles us with a desperate need to belong to a group, to cling to the past, to hang on to whatever we hold ‘dear’ to ourselves, to resist change, to fear death and consequently to desperately seek immortality. Fear drives us to seek power over others or to support the powerful in return for their protection.

Aggression causes us to fight for our territory, our possessions, our ‘rights’, our family and our treasured beliefs – seeking power over others. At core, we love to fight or see others fighting..

Nurture causes us to care, comfort and protect but also leads to dependency, empathy, pity, blind sacrifice for others and needless heroism. Women are programmed to reproduce the species and men are programmed to provide for, and protect, the offspring – a blind and relentless instinctual drive.

Desire relentlessly drives us to needless sexual reproduction and sexual hunting, senseless avarice, corruption and insatiable greed for possessions and power.

There has been an ongoing denial, repression and cover-up about the role of the animal instinctual passions that has been actively instilled in each human being as an integral part of our social conditioning. This conditioning takes the form of spiritual beliefs, morals, ethics and psittacisms that are designed to make us ‘good’ citizens, do the ‘right’ thing and keep our instinctual passions ‘under control’. Unless this social identity is firmly tackled and eliminated it is impossible to even begin feeling and experiencing the instinctual passions in operation, let alone begin the investigation necessary to evince their extinction in oneself.

Many, many people who see ‘rotten’ in the world, turn to a personal search for freedom, peace and happiness and turn to the spiritual path. Thus they shackle themselves with spiritual metaphysical beliefs – the current fashion being Eastern religious belief. They then adopt the Eastern version of what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong and off they go into ancient belief, superstition, imagination and fantasy. From the ‘Introduction to Actual Freedom’ –

‘Eastern spiritual belief has it that human existence on earth is a ‘necessary suffering’ and that ultimate peace and fulfillment lies ‘elsewhere’, after death. This ‘necessary suffering’ is in fact the Human Condition of malice and sorrow and includes war, murder, rape, torture, domestic violence, corruption, despair and suicide. With this belief that all this suffering is necessary to human existence firmly habituated on the planet it is no wonder that human suffering and resentment continue to flourish.’ Introduction to Actual Freedom, Spiritual Solutions 3

Of course, the Eastern religions also believe that one is born ‘innocent’ and only corrupted by ‘evil’ thoughts and that ‘right’ thinking will lead to a state of Divine purity! Unless one back-tracks out of all this nonsense, one has no chance of undertaking the common sense investigation necessary to re-wire one’s brain – to reprogram what society and blind nature has programmed your brain to think and feel to be real, true or the Truth.

Maybe a bit I wrote at the time I was undertaking this very process of reprogramming will be useful to the discussion. Actual Freedom is not a philosophy or a theory – it offers a practical, down-to-earth method that is life changing and ‘self’-eliminating.

‘What I understood of the method, briefly, was to make being happy your immediate goal – after all, this is your only moment of being alive that you are able to actually experience. Being happy yesterday is useless and imagining or hoping for it in the future is avoiding the issue . ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ was the question to be continuously asked. If you are not happy now, then you have something to look at. The particular feeling or emotion that is causing you not to feel good now, has a source that needs looking at. What particular belief, conditioning or instinct is causing your unhappiness in this moment? Root around layer by layer until it is exposed. As a useful test to apply, once having discovered the cause or the issue, is to question: ‘Is it silly or sensible?’ Does it make sense, is it supported by facts, or is it a belief; does it work? Whatever is preventing my happiness now deserves my total attention and thorough investigation – simply believing the opinions, beliefs and values of other similarly inflicted people is to be gullible in the extreme. It is my life I am living and it is happening now. I then became vitally interested in my happiness for the first time. I was looking within for the problem, not outside. I was also looking within for the solution, not outside. And I was looking to eliminate it, to be free of whatever was causing my unhappiness, such that it would never come back. Finished, gone.

It certainly put postponement in its place and as for avoidance...! And nobody else does it for me – I do it for myself!

What Richard was saying was daunting, bewildering, a complete reversal of all I had understood up until then! But a few things appealed: he was saying that if you make your goal in life to be happy and harmless then you will succeed given sufficient intent. Then it is possible for a man and woman to live together in peace and harmony, and then peace on the planet will be possible. Well, since the spiritual path had sort of petered out and was leading in ever-confusing circles, I thought what the hell! The alternative was to go back to ‘comfortable and numb’ again (which was actually uncomfortable and tortured underneath), so I decided to plough on.

Being a practical man I went out and found a woman to try out the living-together theory. Simultaneously I proceeded to investigate with Richard all things religious and spiritual. What became apparent was that he was no spiritual Master whose ‘Energy’ created blissful feelings. There were no discourses, no spiritual practices, no meditation – just a frank and open discussion ranging over all facets of the Human Condition. What these investigations started to reveal was confrontational to the very core of ‘who’ I thought I was, because I was one of those human beings suffering from the Human Condition. Every time we would talk about something that I took as ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘real’, I was challenged to look at it afresh. Was this just something I had heard or read and assumed to be a truth – or was it that I simply believed or wished it to be true? Was it silly or sensible? What were the facts of the situation? What was my actual experience about this?

My mind would sometimes go into a sort of gridlock, unable and unwilling to withstand what it took as an assault. Rightly so, because the very ‘I’ who I thought I was, was being found out as made up of nothing more than the beliefs of others, society’s conditioning and a set of primitive animal instincts! It was both exciting and terrifying at the same time as I found myself questioning all that I held to be true. I was conducting an investigation into my very own psyche – how extraordinary!

Often it all felt too much as yet another wave of fear swept over me, but three things kept me going. One was the memory of the purity and perfection of the peak experience I had had some ten years previously – and I was beginning to have similar experiences again, little reminders of my goal. The second was my intent. I wanted to live as I had experienced living the peak experience. I had arranged my life in such a way that I could devote almost the whole of my time to this investigation, whether being with Richard, Vineeto, or taking the time to contemplate by myself. I was also reading prolifically to investigate what was the current ‘wisdom’ on a wide range of subjects relating to the Human Condition. I soon found myself obsessed, so fascinating was it to discover, for myself, exactly what it is to be a human being. Therapy had been like fiddling with the parts, rearranging the furniture to suit the particular beliefs of the therapist. Here I was taking the whole package apart – stripping away and delving deeper than I ever had before. It occurred to me that no wonder nearly everyone else who had come across Richard had run for the hills!

The third thing that kept me going was confidence. What gave me the confidence to continue was my experience that this method actually worked. Every time I looked into a belief and saw that it was only a belief, not a fact, it would soon be demonstrated in my life that I was free of it. I was indeed becoming free, actually, bit by bit – my life was indeed ‘getting better all the time’ (as the Beatles sang). This progress made the spiritual years seem like kindergarten. My relationship with Vineeto had rapidly gone past the point of previous failures and was sailing into untroubled waters. Despite the occasional fear attacks, I was experiencing life as happier, less neurotic, less emotional and much stiller. It actually worked as it went – and, magically, the next thing to look at popped up at the right time. Always the aim is to be happy now, not in some future time. Of course as this succeeded, I simply raised the stakes – what about experiencing life as perfect for twenty-four hours a day, every day? Thrilling stuff indeed!’ Peter’s Journal, God

It is such an amazing process to re-program one’s own brain – to actively demolish ‘who’ you think and feel you are.

What is so appallingly evident global-wide is potentially in each of us, should we submit to, or be overwhelmed by, the instinctual animal passions. From the introduction –

Fear hobbles us with a desperate need to belong to a group, to cling to the past, to hang on to whatever we hold ‘dear’ to ourselves, to fervently resist change, to fear death and consequently to desperately believe in a life-after-death. Fear impels us to seek power over others or to mindlessly support the powerful in return for their protection.

Aggression compels us to fight for our territory, our possessions, our family, our ‘rights’ and our treasured beliefs and values – indeed life is seen as a struggle in which one needs to fight in order to survive. At core, we love to fight or to see others fighting. Introduction to Actual Freedom, The Animal Instincts

I am still amazed at how blindingly obvious all of this is. And yet the evidence is there shouting at us every time one picks up a newspaper, or turns on the TV. Only yesterday, there was a (yet another) demonstration here. Supposedly peaceful, with participants singing ‘peace songs’, while marching, it took only a handful to change most of the participants from beings exuding ‘love’ to instinctual animals attacking police and property, with hatred and malice. It still overwhelms me when I contemplate that all of the wars, murders, suicides, rapes, child abuse etc. are absolutely unnecessary and solely caused by the human condition.

What has twigged me to write was the fact that you posted back the ‘bad’ or ‘savage’ instinctual passions, while making no comment on the good’ or ‘tender’ passions. Something nagged me a bit and, as I thought about it, I realized two things.

In the Introduction I have just put together a good deal of it dealt with the failure of human being’s well-meaning attempts to end violence and stop warfare. The traditional solutions of instilling social morals, ethics and values and maintaining law and order and the traditional spiritual solution of denial and transcendence have both failed to bring peace to the world. Thus both the good and God have failed to bring an end to human malice and sorrow – always have and always will.

The traditional way we are taught to deal with instinctual passions is to emphasize and highly value the ‘good’ instinctual passions while repressing and controlling the ‘bad’ ones. The spiritual way is to enhance the ‘good’ emotions via imagination while denying the ‘bad’ emotions via sublimation. The third alternative is to neither express nor repress and see what happens. Pretty soon some little feeling will creep in and bingo! .... one has something to do, something to investigate, something to name, something to discover.

The thing that I have found over the course of my investigations, in writing and talking and lately with the Introduction that it is the notion of good and bad, right and wrong, belief and fact that have to be tackled first if humans are to get a grip on the core of the instinctual passions. Already the Evolutionary Psychologists are trumpeting the good instinctual passions as the solution to tackle the bad instinctual passions – so much for any sense coming out of academia.

The other fact I find telling is that it took Richard months to tackle the bad and evil, yet years to tackle the good and Divine.

Personally I found that my social conditioning as to what it was to be a man, to be a good member of Society, to do the ‘right’ thing, to play my expected role as husband and father was to be as though I had ‘shackles’ on – I yearned to be break free of these shackles. One can see this in youthful rebellion in operation in each generation, yet when marriage or parenthood sets in it’s a quick revert to type. One then does one’s expected duty and then one merely parrots to the next generation what was parroted to us. When my ‘normal’ world view collapsed it was off to the ‘spiritual’ world – out of the frying pan into the fire.

So, just another plug for that other set of instinctual passions that are so glamorized and glorified, that Humanity puts such trust, faith and hope in .....

Desire relentlessly drives us to needless sexual reproduction and sexual hunting, senseless avarice, unceasing ambition, inevitable corruption, an insatiable greed for possessions and a lust for fame and power.

Nurture causes us to care, comfort and protect but also leads to dependency, empathy, pity, resentment, senseless sacrifice for others and needless heroism. Women are programmed to reproduce the species and men are programmed to provide for, and protect, the offspring – a blind and unremitting instinctual drive. Introduction to Actual Freedom, The Animal Instincts

Of course, on the path to Actual Freedom one cannot ditch feelings by simply deciding to do so. As such, until one is actually free from the instinctual passions, one will have feelings so one aims at the felicitous feelings. However, given one’s intention to become both happy and harmless one will inevitably be confronted with investigating human beings’ ancient attraction and fascinating fixation with the ‘good’ as well as the devious deceptiveness of the ‘good’ in operation as part of one’s ‘self’.

I’ll wrap this up with something Richard found the other day that says a lot about the Human Condition. I remember writing once of the Human Condition – ‘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’.

But this little story illustrates it really well ...

‘Consider a cage containing five apes: in the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as it touches the stairs, spray all of the apes with cold water.

Because that’s the way they’ve always done it and that’s the way it’s always been around here.’

Apropos the experiment you talk about: there were many others that demonstrated this as well and from memory I thought it was done in the early seventies not the swinging sixties. It didn’t shock me at all when I read about it, (and no I haven’t been desensitized to violence) it has always seemed as if most people are happy to comply.

The original experiments were done from 1960–63 at Yale University and the source of the posted descriptions was from ‘Obedience to Authority’ by Stanley Morgan, Harpers. 1974. I see you use the words ‘most people’ without making any comment about yourself, and seem to not be interested as to why people are so ‘happy to comply’.

When I read of this study I was not in the slightest concerned with what most people would do, I was concerned about me and what inner compulsion drives me to violence. Authority then became only one factor and explained my willingness to kill to defend my beliefs – and the beloved God-man – in Rajneeshpuram. This was a ‘what-if’ situation for I was not there at the end of the Ranch and Rajneesh fled before any blood was shed, but I did ask myself the question and was shocked at my honest answer. But merely obeying others or defending beliefs, does not account for the willingness, indeed eagerness, of human beings to be malicious.

Since the 1960’s there has been an emergence – albeit tentatively – of an empirical understanding of the genetically-encoded animal instinctual passions in human beings. These scientific studies, firmly based on empirical observations, make nonsense of the traditional denial that instinctual animal passions exist in humans and of the ancient belief that we are born ‘innocent’. The modern scientific empirical discoveries of neuro-biology and genetics, with regard to the human brain and how it functions, have revealed two very fascinating aspects –

1. That the brain is programmable in the same way a computer is programmable. The program is formed by physical connections or pathways between neurons, and this program is mostly formed after birth. These pathways (synapse) are also capable of being changed at any time. The old connection simply ‘dies’ for lack of use and a new one is formed.

2. That the human brain is also pre-programmed, via a genetic code, with a set of base or instinctual operating functions, located in the primitive brain system which causes automatic thoughtless passionate reactions, primarily those of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, to be transmitted via chemical messages to various parts of the body including the neo-cortex. Physiological alterations that could eliminate this crude programming, as a biological adaptation to changed circumstances, are well documented within the animal species.

• The first discovery accords with the practical experience of being able to radically change one’s social identity – the program instilled since birth that consists of the morals, ethics, values and psittacisms that make up our social identity. It stands to reason that a psychological identity that is malleable to radical change is also susceptible to total elimination.

• The second discovery accords with the practical possibility of eliminating one’s very ‘being’ – the emotive source of the instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. This blind and senseless survival program is now well and truly redundant for many human beings and can now be safely deleted, for the human species has not only survived … it is now beginning to flourish. Introduction to Actual Freedom, Actual Freedom 1

There is a dare in Actual Freedom that sends most people scurrying for cover, for very few are interested in radical and permanent change.

I am very interested in your comment that ‘there were many others that demonstrated this as well’ for I haven’t come across any other experiments. If you can remember any specific studies, can you let me know? Although this particular experiment was repeated many times, in the end it was declared unethical and any similar research was frowned upon. This restriction on human behavioural research represents denial of facts in action, but given the Galileo precedent, this denial usually only lasts for a few hundred years before common sense eventually prevails as the empirical evidence becomes widely accepted. It was left to this current Pope to begrudgingly give the earth the right to orbit around the sun. And one doesn’t hear much of the Flat Earth Society after the stunning photos of earth were taken by the Apollo astronauts.

A similar begrudging process of on-going denial will happen with the empirical evidence that human beings are genetically-encoded with the animal instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

It is this hundreds-of-years time span from initial publication to begrudging acceptance that I find most interesting. In fact, I understand that the theory that the earth may revolve around the sun had been around about 2000 years ago, was mathematically calculated by Copernicus in 1543, and then empirically confirmed by Galileo’s observations in 1613. If one takes this process from initial thought to empirical proof to final Papal approval of the earth’s behaviour, then the time span is in millennia, not centuries. In the case of acknowledging animal instinctual passions in human beings, we are looking at a time span of maybe one hundred years from theory to the current emergence of empirical neuro-biological evidence – given, of course, that everybody conveniently ignores the blatantly obvious behavioural evidence of all the wars, murders, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, corruption, loneliness, despair and suicides that are endemic on the planet.

What is apparent to me is that peace on earth will be a long time coming and many, many human beings will miss the bus. And that the spiritually-inclined will do everything in their power to deny the existence of instinctual animal passions in human beings for without the mythical belief in ‘bad’ and Evil, there is no need for the mythical belief in ‘good’ and God.

It is good not to have missed the bus as it passed by.

The survival instincts are not ‘conditioning’ – they are a genetically-encoded program that automatic responds to input producing almost instantaneous robotic bodily reactions. In human beings these bodily reactions cause chemicals to flood the thinking and reflective neo-cortex and thus become passionate reactions or deep-seated emotions. The instinctual reactions are thus psychological and psychic reactions in human beings.

Fear hobbles us with a desperate need to belong to a group, to cling to the past, to hang on to whatever we hold ‘dear’ to ourselves, to resist change, to fear death and consequently to desperately believe in a life-after-death. Fear impels us to seek power over others or to mindlessly support the powerful in return for their protection.

Aggression compels us to fight for our territory, our possessions, our family, our ‘rights’ and our treasured beliefs and values – striving for power over others. At core, we love to fight or to see others fighting.

Nurture causes us to care, comfort and protect but also leads to dependency, empathy, pity, resentment, senseless sacrifice for others and needless heroism. Women are programmed to reproduce the species and men are programmed to provide for, and protect, the offspring – a blind and unremitting instinctual drive.

Desire relentlessly drives us to needless sexual reproduction and sexual hunting, senseless avarice, inevitable corruption and insatiable greed for possessions and power.

These instinctual animal passions in humans are not ‘feeling a need to protect the images we had of ourselves’, they automatically operate to protect both body and self and unless they are eliminated they will continue to run amok and forever act to spoil our peace and happiness.

That is the definition of conditioning.

Well, let’s look have a look at what your previously stated definition of conditioning and see if we see any similarities –

‘I agree with this, except I don’t see the ego as a development of the brain, but a phantom in the mind brought about by conditioning’

Just to remind you that you also said elsewhere that ‘The ego has always been just conditioned thought’ and from this it is clear that your definition of conditioning is not something that is a ‘genetically-encoded program that automatic responds to input producing almost instantaneous robotic bodily reactions’. The animal instinctual passions programmed in human beings are something very real. They are the very cause of human malice and suffering. To call them ‘a phantom in the mind’ is to call all ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ that these instinctual animal passions cause a phantom of the mind.

To regard the genetically-encoded animal instinctual passions as a phantom in the mind is the old-fashioned out-dated Eastern philosophical view of human existence on earth that comes from the ancient superstitious belief in spirits – hence the very world spiritual.

‘Most of what causes suffering is unreal’.

What I am saying is that there is now solid empirical scientific evidence that confirms what we see with our very eyes and can confirm in our own experience, if we are sufficiently aware – that human malice and sorrow is the direct result of our instinctual animal passions in operation. This is a shocking thing to realize, let alone acknowledge, and one only does so with the firm knowledge that it is possible to eradicate them otherwise one stares into a black hole of terror and dread. This is where the pure consciousness experience is invaluable as it provides the proof that it is not only possible, but utterly essential, to eradicate all of these instinctual passions in order to actualize peace on earth.

‘What I was wanting to say in that post was that from a classical physics perspective we could never find the real cause of this ego image’.

You are also on record as saying ‘But if any science can find it, (the truth) it will come by way of the ‘theoretical mystical science’’ – a further indication of your denial that the instinctual passions are real and genetically-encoded i.e. physical. You go even further into denial and insist that the source of ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ is meta-physical – ‘a phantom in the mind’. Vis:

I have seen that it isn’t so much that we are acting from our animal instinctual conditioning as it is what took place as we developed the ability to abstract life into words, pictures, concepts, etc. <Snip> The ego has always been just conditioned thought that formed as a sense of personal identity.

Here you make a cautious but clear distinction between ‘animal instinctual conditioning’ and your meta-physical, mystical view of the cause of ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’.

Well said, Peter. I have said that the instinctual animal part of us is at the root of the ego fear.

Whereas I said ... ‘We are each instilled with an instinctual animal ‘self’ that is the very core of the self-survival program.  <Snip> ... this primitive ‘self’ is made more complex in human beings by our ability to think and reflect and, as such, we have a more elaborated ‘self’ consisting of ‘who’ we think ourselves to be and ‘who’ we feel ourselves to be’. <Snip> ... i.e. both the ego and the soul’. ‘Ego fear’ makes no sense. Fear is an instinctual passion that we share in common with many other animals and, as such, is a deep-seated emotion, not a thought.

That as the human brain evolved and saw itself as a separate being it carried over the instinctual need to protect the body into feeling the need to protect this false sense of self.

It is only the human self that cunningly divides itself into a false, unwanted mortal self and a real desirable immortal self. The self is one entity consisting of who we think and feel we are. To split one’s self into two is to create a duality of false and Real, bad and good or Evil and God.

I guess I haven’t made this clear. We are really in agreement on this.

Despite your insistence we are not in agreement at all. What I am saying is that the root cause of human malice and sorrow are the instinctual passions. To tackle half of the problem just leads to a soul cut loose from any common sense whatsoever, so much so, that the world is increasingly full of people who insist that they are God-on-earth.

I’ve just been pointing out that the ego is a phantom and has no reality in itself. I have found that as the phantom is seen through the instinctual processes change.

But you will not question whether the other half of your self is equally illusionary. If the ego is illusionary, why can you not entertain the idea that the soul may well be illusionary as well?

As for the ‘instinctual processes change’, all evidence of the Enlightened state is that fear and aggression are sublimated but not eliminated – as you would know – and nurture and desire are given full, uninhibited reign such that people feel Divine Love and even God-realized.

Certainly we are driven by our instincts to a degree but that doesn’t mean that we need to surrender to our instincts. I think that that is what you are implying in a way.

Quite the opposite, in fact. The grand experiment of suppressing the savage instinctual passions by the carrot of instilling ‘good’ morals and ‘right’ ethics and the stick of imposing and enforcing regulations and laws has clearly failed, and will continue to fail, to actualize peace on earth. The current fashionable notion of transcending the savage instinctual passions while giving full reign to, and indulging in, the tender passions, has clearly failed as it has done for millennia in the East.

What is now available, for anyone sufficiently interested and motivated, is a method whereby they can eliminate these redundant instinctual survival passions, thereby actualizing peace on earth for themselves and freeing one’s fellow human beings of the burden these passions impose on others.

This is important, how to eliminate these ‘instinctual survival passions’? This is where I’m getting stuck, I think. You mean that repressing the ‘negative’ instincts and indulging in ‘good morals etc’ is the spiritual predicament and what we need is to free us from ALL survival passions, good and bad, and in doing so we’re released from our ‘instinctual cage’. So I suppose the outcome of this would be that we aren’t creating suffering for ourselves and others through our ignorance anymore. Is that it? When we see actuality there’s no need to for pretence anymore ...?

It is not a matter of ignorance. This is the spiritual concept whereby we are born innocent and then corrupted by ignorance (or evil, in the more fundamental traditions) and it is only when we discover the truth or Truth do we become free of ignorance ... or evil.

By the time one reaches adulthood one has a fully developed sense of ‘real’-world cynicism. This attitude to life is fuelled by the universal spiritual belief that life on earth is meant to be a suffering existence and that ultimate peace and happiness is only possible after physical death in a mythical after-life. This view is further reinforced and strengthened by the commonly-held ancient belief that children are born innocent and are corrupted by ‘evil’ or ‘wrong thinking’ since birth. These beliefs combine to form the unanimous views that ‘life’s a bitch’, and ‘you can’t change Human Nature’ – the deeply cynical concepts that underpin the Human Condition.

Abandoning these cynical ‘real world’ and ‘spiritual world’ beliefs about human existence is essential if one is to even consider becoming free of the Human Condition. In order to begin the process of changing human nature in oneself., one needs to re-activate and cultivate one’s innate naiveté – the closest one can get to actual innocence while still remaining a ‘self’. The PCE – a human state where malice and sorrow are temporarily absent – is the factual evidence that actual innocence in human beings is possible.

In the PCE, the direct experience of the purity and perfection of the actual world becomes suddenly apparent and ‘who’ one was literally moments before falls away as though a distant and discordant memory. One’s fears and battles, troubles and worries, anger and sadness disappear along with one’s very persona, for the PCE is a ‘self’-less state. In the PCE it becomes inconceivable that human beings could be malicious to each other to the point of waging war and sorrowful to the point of suicide whilst living on this delightful, bountiful, paradisiacal planet. Introduction to Actual Freedom, Actual Freedom 2

The understanding that we are born the way we are and are fated to be ‘who’ we think and feel we are is enormously liberating in itself. No longer do we need to feel guilty for the way we are, no longer to we need to pray to God or grovel before God-men, no longer are we helpless victims, no longer do we need to feel resentful at having to be here in the first place.

The fact is we are here and the challenge then becomes how to fully embrace being here.

The first quote, while a beautiful statement of an ideal that many of us hold, is only hypothesis. The latter statement, which some may label cynical, is rooted in direct or secondary observation, and so has a weight we cannot ignore.

What I did, once I observed that the Gurus and revered sages were still subject to the full range of human emotions, i.e. fear, aggression, nurture and desire, was to turn my awareness on my ‘self’, and my predisposition for ‘self’-aggrandizement, in order to facilitate the ending of ‘me’ and ‘my’ associated blind instinctual passions.

My experience is more in accord with the second choice that No. 14 gave: ‘Or are they free to not act in reaction to them? Free to choose their actions (or stillness)...’ Even the most powerful of emotions derived from the ego/ self preservation, can be overridden. Think of the Buddhists who self-immolate.

An impassioned entity will do anything to survive – even kill the body it thinks and feels it lives in. Religious belief in Gods and an afterlife have meant that human beings have readily sacrificed their lives defending their beliefs or fighting for their God against Heathens from other tribes. In many religions it is taught that this sacrifice or martyrdom guarantees that one’s soul goes directly to heaven. Eastern religion takes this a stage further with the concept of spiritual suicide whereby the practitioner deliberately dies – or ‘kills the body’ – so as to transcend into a higher realm. These acts of killing other human beings, or committing suicide, are in fact instinctual passions in action – they are fuelled by a deep sorrow at having to be here at all, a desperate belief in the overarching power of God and the seductive lure of a life after death.

I can think of no more graphic and senseless passionate illustration of not wanting to be here and wanting to go ‘somewhere else’ than a Buddhist monk pouring petrol over himself ... and lighting a match.

What is the relationship between ego and willpower?

The instinctual ‘self’ every human being is born with is pre-programmed with a set of defence and propagation instincts, namely fear, aggression, nurture and desire, which form a primary and automatic impulse and in most cases deep-seated emotions override the supposed free will of ‘who’ we think and feel we are. In spiritual practice one surrenders one’s will to a higher force, placing one’s life in gloried service to God – thus ‘it is not my will but Thy will’. For someone like Ramesh Balsekar this means that if he kills another human being it is perfectly okay ... for it is ‘God’s will’. By surrendering their will to God many people literally get away with murder.

Surrendering one’s will to God is a cop-out that instantly allows one off-the-hook from even acknowledging that one has instinctual passions – let alone begin investigating them, let alone consider eliminating them.

Between willpower and pride?

Any entity, either normal or spiritual, is instinctually and socially imbued with both willpower and pride. On the spiritual path one is encouraged to surrender one’s will to God and to cultivate one’s humility. There are none so proud than those who have humbly surrendered their will to God for they stand on the side of Good, Truth, Right and the Almighty, by whatever name.

I think that this can be very tricky to talk about. In the ‘Ego’ issue of WIE it was pointed out that there are at least two ways to think about the ego. If we are talking about the ‘self-organizing’ principle. That sense of self that allows us to act in the world, to walk, to talk, etc.

Well, then an argument can be made for that being natural.

It is very clear from observing the rest of the animate world that a self, or more correctly, a social and instinctual self, is not at all necessary to ‘ act in the world ’. All animals are automatically programmed to act and do whatever tasks are necessary to survive and flourish. Animals hunt, eat, sleep, fight, mate and reproduce without any ego, or self, at all. The only exception being chimpanzees, our closest genetic cousins, who share 99% of human genes and who have an instinctual self corresponding with the human instinctual self.

But if we are speaking about pride, self-infatuation or that image of self-importance that allows human beings to literally destroy other people, other forms of life and the very world in which we live and then to rationalize these actions.

Of all the animals, chimpanzees exhibit emotional-instinctual behaviour closest to humans but have none of the human capabilities and advantages of being able to think, plan, reflect and communicate. Rape, murder, warfare, cannibalism, infanticide, jealousy, grief, sorrow, anger, possessiveness and selfish cunning have all been documented in chimpanzee behaviour. Of course, chimps don’t have the ability to rationalize these emotions and actions, it is entirely normal for them.

Only human beings are capable of rationalizing these actions and instinctual passion as being the result of Evil or ‘wrong’ thinking and thus stubbornly ignore the fact that their behaviour and emotions are the result of exactly the same genetically-encoded instinctual passions as is evident in chimpanzees.

If that is part of the natural order of all things ... then maybe we would all be better off being a little more unnatural.

Exactly my point.

It is time for human beings to stop being ‘natural’, or frantically trying to be Super Natural, and get stuck into doing something completely unnatural – ridding themselves of their social identity and instinctual self such that they become totally free of malice and sorrow.

The first essential step in this process is to stop blindly following the socially-instilled, and universally believed, escapist fantasy of praying to mythical Gods, or trying to become Gods.

Regardless of what we define as natural or unnatural, it seems to me that it is of crucial importance how we are living in the world. I don’t see any reason that a human being would ever want to participate in destructive actions even if they are natural.

Nobody ‘wants’ to participate in destructive actions – we are all programmed with an instinctual survival and propagation program that is primary, automatic and ruthless efficient in nature. Human beings with their ability to think about and be aware of their own mortality, have turned this program into psychological and psychological ‘self’-centred will to survive. Thus, not only are we programmed with instinctual passions, we will do anything to hold on to them for they are an integral part of ‘me’, the psychological and psychic entity that is ‘who’ I think I am and ‘who’ I instinctively feel myself to be.

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