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Selected Correspondence Peter Instinctual Passions
Anyone know why animals don’t have an affective response to music but human babies do? Broadly speaking, all animals who are capable of detecting sound have an instinctual response to sound whereas human animals have, in addition to this instinctual response, a culturally- induced affective response to the specific arrangement of sounds they refer to as ‘music’. As to your specific question, I have heard of farmers who play soothing music to their cows whilst milking, presumably in order to keep them calm during milking. Similarly I have heard of mothers playing soothing music in order to calm their babies and I have even heard that unborn babies still in the womb exhibit what can only be an instinctive response to sound when music is directed at the womb. I don’t have more to add but I am sure you would find that there is a good deal of research done on the subject – as well as a wealth of lore, myth and misinformation of course – most of which is only a mouse click away. I notice that this thread has now moved on to discussing the behaviour, instinctual reactions, emotions and/or feelings of cats and dogs – something I have no interest in at all. What I did however find fascinating in my early years of studying the human condition was the behaviour, the instinctual reactions, emotions and feelings of chimpanzees, given that that particular animal species is often referred to as ‘genetic cousins’ to we human animals. (Homo sapiens and chimps reportedly share some 98% of the same DNA.) The fact that wild chimps exhibit a gamut of emotions that range from blind
homicidal rage at one end of the spectrum to utter despair at the other, that their Recently I came across a book authored by a primate researcher who had studied chimps in the wild for many years. In the book the author explored and documented the most salient aspects of human violence and in doing so detailed the parallels of violence within chimp communities. It turned out that one of his motivations in writing the book was his frustration at social anthropologists and the like who continue to unabashedly lay the blame for human violence on socialization whilst continuing to ignore and deny the evidence that such behaviour is in fact instinctual. One paragraph in particular stood out as what he has to say mirrors the difficulty that most correspondents have on this mailing list in discussing human instinctual passions let alone dare to become self-aware of when and how they operate –
This head-in-the-sand attitude that Ghiglieri talks of is in no way confined to the social sciences. The current ‘new dark age’ is fuelled by an increasingly mindless fervour for all things spiritual, mystical and metaphysical, a fervour that is exemplified by the ascendancy of pantheistic and animistic beliefs that are the very core of the new world-wide religion of Environmentalism. Obviously breaking free of all head-in-the-sand belief is the necessary first step to take before one can be able to freely discuss the pivotal role that the genetically-encoded instinctual passions have in both generating and perpetuating human animosity and anguish. Which, curiously enough, is what actualism is about.
Hi Peter/Vineeto/Richard: Any recommended reading/videos on instinctual passions? I can’t recommend any specific reading material on instinctual passions apart from what is on the AF website but I thought to reply to you anyway. As you would have gathered from my journal, I found some of the research of social psychologists conducted in the 1960’s to be interesting reading and I remember at the time being particularly struck by Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority. The series of experiments were eventually stopped on ethical grounds because they produced such shocking results but there was another experiment conducted where a group of volunteers were split up into two groups, one group playing prison guards, the other prisoners. The experiment had to be stopped after a few days because the supposed role-playing soon became very serious as instinctual behaviour came to the fore – I have lost the reference to the experiment but if you are interested I will try to hunt it down. The only other experiential evidence I found useful was the work of Joseph LeDoux and his team in experimentally determining that the instinctual fear reaction caused a primary instinctual affective reaction which kicked in before the any signal reached the neocortex – that the feeling of fear kicks in before the cognitive awareness of fear kicks in. In other words, feeling is primary, thinking is secondary. This simple experiment puts paid to the myths of ancient Eastern philosophy that has it that thinking gives rise to feelings and if one only stopped thinking then one could stop feeling what one didn’t want to feel. When looking through the general writings of sociology, psychology, psychiatry and neurobiology I have found nothing of substance and relevance apart from these few experiments. It is pertinent to remember that all of the studies, theories and conclusions within the current status quo of the human condition are predicated on instinctual behaviour being necessary for survival and the only possible solution within the human condition is to ensure that the good instincts (nurture and desire) operate such that they can subdue the bad instincts (fear and aggression) – the eons-old view that the human existence is inevitably a perpetual battle between good and evil. Nowhere have I ever I found anyone saying that it is possible to change human nature – as in it is possible to become free of malice and sorrow – what I found were studies, theories and conclusions based on being able to better cope with the excesses of the instinctual passions. I found many people still believing the Tabula Rasa myth and laying the blame for the human malaise on childhood conditioning and childhood trauma, I found others advocating the benefits of ‘Talking Therapy’ despite its century-long failure to produce substantive results, I found that Eastern philosophy has permeated much of psychology and psychiatry such that many theorists and practitioners now advocate meditative therapies based on cultivating a denial of one’s own instinctive malice and sorrow and actively practicing dissociating from the actual world of people, things and events. In short, what I found were fellow human beings trying to work out ways of coping with the human condition – no where did I find people talking about becoming free of the instinctual passions that underscore the human condition, let alone even wondering whether this is possible let alone even considering that this is desirable. Having said what I discovered in my reading, I don’t want to discourage you from doing your own reading for yourself – far from it – and the subjects you read about will be those that are of interest to you on the path. As a tip, I found it useful to start with reading books or articles that give an overview of the subject, preferable those written in terms a layman can understand, and then to get into details if you want to. I did a good deal of my initial research before I had a computer and I went down to the local second-hand book shop and bought about a dozen books covering a range of topics in sociology, psychology, consciousness studies, spirituality, mysticism, cosmology, environmentalism and human biology – in short, the status quo viewpoint of life, the universe and what it is to be a human being. It was a good exercise because what it did was get me thinking for myself again – something I had deliberately neglected to do in my spiritual years. I hindsight this was quite natural because in all spiritual practices one is encouraged not to think for oneself for it is essential that one believes what one is told, that one trusts what one is told, that one has faith in what one is told, and that one feels what one is being told is the truth. I wasn’t going to be that gullible again, which is why I checked out what Richard was saying by myself, for myself and part of doing this was undertaking a clear-eyed investigation of the current status quo views on life, the universe and what it is to be a human being. And this was far from an aimless investigation because what I wanted to do was to determine for myself what were the facts of the matter and what was mere cultural belief, theory, assumption, rumour, disinformation, tradition, folklore, legend or myth. As for videos, any video rental shop is jam-packed with videos whose entertainment value is based on instinctual passions – the horror, thriller and adventure sections cater for those who find entertainment in fear; the drama, action and humour sections cater for those who find entertainment in aggression; the animal and fairy-tale section caters for those who find entertainment in nurture; and the erotic, love story and escapist fantasies sections cater for those who find entertainment in desire. Take your pick. I didn’t bother about renting videos, as all this is available on television anyway, albeit often in a form watered down for general consumption. I found watching the news on television or reading the local newspaper gave me a better insight into the instinctual passions in operation – as a reality and not as a fantasy. We have a history channel on television and I particularly found the first-hand accounts of men who have fought in wars to be amongst the most telling accounts of the horrors of the instinctual passions whenever ‘the thin veneer of civilization’ breaks down – as it has done so regularly amongst all cultures throughout human history. I found this a necessary refocus as I had turned away from the horrors of the human condition in my spiritual years when I had deliberately dissociated from it in my own selfish pursuit of an ‘inner peace’. What I found by allowing myself to become sensitive to the instinctual
passions – as I had been as a teenager – was that I was able to tap into the intent I had in my youth in wanting to
find a way of living with my fellow human beings in peace and harmony … and by doing so I was able to once again get
in touch with the naiveté I once had that this must be possible * But to get back to your question, whilst I found a reading investigation provided an essential intellectual overview of the universality of the instinctual passions, it is no substitute for hands-on knowledge based on my own experiential observations of when, how and why the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire operate in this body and that they are intimately and inexorably intertwined with ‘who’ I think and feel I am. It is one thing to condemn another for being a killer or to philosophize or
theorize about or find excuses as to why human beings kill each other, it is quite another to experience the lust to
obliterate another in oneself and want to be free of it come what may. It is one thing to feel sorrow for others who are
so despairing that they end their own lives or to philosophize or theorize about or find excuses as to why human beings
kill themselves, it is quite another to experience the very same depths of despair in oneself and want to be free of it
come what may. It is one thing to feel sorrow for others who are suffering the heartbreak and pain of nurture or to
philosophize or theorize about or find excuses as to why love inevitably comes hand-in-glove with dependency and
disappointment, it is quite another to experience the very same feelings in oneself and want to be free of them come
what may. It is one thing to feel envy for others who are powerful, rich and famous or to philosophize or theorize about
or find excuses for ‘self’-centred I have got into a bit of a rave about the actualism method again and yet this is something that you seem to have a good grasp on by now … and something which you will know from your recent PCE is the necessary path to an actual freedom from the human condition. But then again what I have written may well be of use to others on the mailing list who are interested in actualism. One of the pleasures I get out of writing to the mailing list is in seeing how I have answered a question at the end of a post. It’s a bit like seeing how the design of a house comes out at the end. I never know at the start what is going to come out at the end, it is always a house for the people I am designing it for but I always keep in mind that different people will no doubt live in it one day so I try to make it the best I can for anyone who might live in it. That’s also how I respond to questions on this list – a specific answer to a specific question but answered in such a way that it may well be useful to all. After all, despite the fact that each human thinks and feels they are a unique ‘being’ – each of us is in fact a fellow human being.
As a somewhat callow young man aged 20, I went to Europe for the first time and was particularly struck by the fact that literally every square metre of Europe had been soaked in human blood at some stage in history, be it in pre-historic times, the stone age, the iron age, the bronze age, medieval times or modern times, given that World War Two had only ended less than a quarter of a century prior to my visit. Wherever I went I found monuments to some battle or other and remnants of defensive walls and embattlements from all cultures and all epochs and visited field upon field, village upon village, and city upon city where hundreds, thousands and sometimes millions of human beings had either deliberately killed and maimed their fellow human beings or had been deliberately killed and maimed by their fellow human beings. I was also struck by the fact that these same disputes, skirmishes, battles and wars are still being waged all over the planet, either overtly or covertly, and will keep on doing so for no other reason that it is human nature for human beings to keep doing so. Faced by the utter futility of ever being able to do anything about the situation, I, like countless others before and since, learned to turn a blind eye to what I had seen with my own eyes and in doing so desensitised myself from feeling such feelings as sorrow, grief, despair and hopelessness when confronted with the extent of human beings’ perpetual animosity towards other human beings. I don’t know what I am supposed to comment here. It is fact that people are killing people. I have always taken that as a given, an undeniable irrefutable fact that I first became aware of as a ten year old when I first saw photos of piles of corpses from what has become known as the holocaust on my parents black and white TV. Question: Why do they do kill each other? Answer: Because they are subject to the passions. I have since come to know that such killings as the holocaust – an estimated (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm) 4,200,00o to 5,800,000 human beings killed – are in fact but the tip of a very big iceberg indeed in that an estimated 160,000,000 human beings were killed by other human beings in wars alone in the last century and perhaps even more tellingly an estimated 174,000,000 human beings died at the hands of their own autocratic governments in the last century alone. The reason I find the second hemoclysm more telling than the first is that by and large these killings were not the result of disputes over territory and resources, nor were they fuelled by religious convictions but rather most of these killings were the result of what could be described as a deep-seated passion or lust for killing per se. Question: Why are they subject to the passions? In the answer to this question you come up with all these theories (evolution, biological heritage, social conditioning), which, eventually, lead you into an explanatory dead-end street: It is all due to blind nature! The explanation that the passion for killing, for example, is a biological inheritance passed down through the genes that we human animals share with all other animals was traditionally a dead-end street but this no longer the case nowadays. Prior to the discovery that an actual freedom from the instinctual passions of malice and of sorrow is possible, the spiritualists had the meaning-of-life market cornered in that they proposed that life on earth was fundamentally miserable because the 'true' meaning of life was to found ‘elsewhere’, i.e. somewhere other than in the physical world. Materialists were then left with the counter-proposition that there is no such thing as a meaning of life that needs to be sought and found in order to find fulfilment – a position which leaves them espousing various coping mechanisms and ideologies aimed at ‘making the best of reality’. The recent discovery of actualism means there is now a third alternative to the usual either/or alternative of spiritualism vs. materialism and one no longer needs to deny or ignore the fact that human beings are instinctually driven beings – nowadays one has the option of taking a clear-eyed look at this fact and get on with the business of becoming free from the instinctual passions themselves. As always, the ball is in your court to do with this change in circumstance what you want.
To No 60: My point was more about the thought processes involved in the investigation, especially where I reach a dead end. I recall Peter briefly mentioning that Richard was not aware that what he was dealing with were the instinctual passions when he dismantled his identity and explored the instinctual self. When I investigate a feeling I will often wonder at how it fits into the instinctual self. If I didn’t know that what I was dealing with was the instinctual self, I wouldn’t ask that question. Richard was able to carry the process through without that specific knowledge on how the instincts work in our brain. Is understanding that the self is not real the same sort of deal? I thought to comment on your post because either your recollection of what I said is not accurate or I didn’t make myself clear at the time. The point I was making in my comment was that whilst Richard had extensive experiential knowledge of the instinctual passions he did not have a good deal of intellectual knowledge about them. And the reason I made the comment was to emphasize that one doesn’t need to be an intellectual wiz kid in order make sufficient sense of the feelings and passions one is experiencing such that one can understand clearly what it is that is happening and why. To put my comment about Richard in context – in my early days of chatting with him the subject of the deep-seated passions came up. If I can roughly paraphrase the conversation from memory it could well have gone something like this –
I won’t go on as this is a somewhat fanciful attempt at reconstructing a long-lost conversation but it will give you the flavour of the fact that Richard was well aware of what he had discovered and what he was dealing with, it was just that I prompted him to put it into terms that made sense to me. It is good to remember that he was born on a farm and had an intimate knowledge of the animal instinctual passions, whereas I was born in the suburbs of a city and as such was a step removed from such first-hand experience. But the moment Richard said ‘instinctual’ I knew what he meant … and the deep-seated passions he was talking about then made sense to me. Not only had I seen the instinctual passions in action in other animals but I had seen them in action in human animals and more tellingly, I had also experienced them in action in me. I had felt the blind rage of jealousy, I had felt the overwhelming urge to obliterate someone or something, I had experienced the dread of fear, I had felt the over-powering anguish of grief, I had experienced the compulsive lust for power and been besieged by sexual craving. If you have experienced any of these instinctual passions in action then you will have experienced that, whilst the instinctual ‘self’ is not actual – as in not having a physical existence that can be located as a distinct entity existing somewhere inside the flesh and blood human body – it is nevertheless very real in that it is the root of human malice and sorrow. And it doesn’t get more real than that. An intellectual understanding that the ‘self’ is not real is the usual spiritual line of thinking – but the experiential understanding that the instinctual ‘self’ is very real is vital if one aspires to become free of malice and sorrow. I say this because it is impossible to dare to do whatever is necessary to rid oneself of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire if you are in denial of, or are dissociated from, your own instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.
I personally found the whole subject of the instinctual passions to be crucial to my understanding of the actualism process. I came to understand that the whole mythical battle twixt good and evil which infuses all of human thinking and feeling is nothing more than the covert or overt expression of the battle between the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ instinctual passions. Simultaneously I came to understand that the whole spiritual notion that good and evil were the result of good and evil spirits – or for the male of the species, right thinking and wrong thinking – was nothing more than what it is, archaic superstition. These understandings were the final straw that broke the back of my remaining spiritual goody-two-shoes beliefs. This in turn opened the door to my understanding, and then experiencing in a PCE, that all of human malice and sorrow is the result of the ‘self’-centred instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Armed with the knowledge that ‘my’ instinctual passions were the very sustenance of my ‘self’-centred identity I was the able to observe and successively disempower these passions such that I could increasingly become more happy and more benign. I’ve been thinking and asking and reading about this subject lately too. I think we should separate instinct and passion. That is if we take passion to be the equivalent of emotion. Now maybe what we mean by ‘passion’ is ‘strong expression’, but I think it would be better to assume that instincts are something that always tend to express strongly. All animate life forms have certain defensive and offensive instinctive reactions. However as an actualist I am vitally concerned about the instinctual survival passions because they are the source of all human malice and sorrow. In my experience, I would agree that when the instinctual passions really break through and come to the surface, they are the strongest emotions that a human being can experience – when fear turns to dread, when aggression manifests as a lust to obliterate, when nurture turns to self-sacrifice and desire turns to insatiable lusting. However their effects are pervasive in that they are the very motivating force of the human condition of malice and sorrow.
That way we can separate emotion/passion from instinct and get a better look at it. The way I see it at this moment is that instinct is an inherited tendency, something a being is born with, and passion/emotion is something learned after conception. The survival instincts are genetically-encoded in all human beings and are inevitably manifest as instinctual passions in all human beings. Contrary to ancient beliefs, human beings are not born pure and innocent – they are all pre-programmed to feel fear, aggression, nurture and desire and these emotions are usually evident in action in all children by about age 2 –
Instincts are there because it is useful for the survival of the organism to have survival behaviours in place from the start. In a predatory world, survival instincts and the resulting hormonally-produced instinctual passions are essential if a species is to survive. The proposition that actualism presents is that these passions – the source of human malice and sorrow – are now not only utterly redundant, but they actually stand in the way of peace on earth between human beings. The emotions are learned later and coloured by the specific environment and linked to the instincts to better assist the organism’s instinctual expression in the environment in which it finds itself. This is what the therapists and spiritualists would have us believe but it flies in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary. It was a blow to my pride when I discovered that the extent to which holding on to spiritual beliefs involves denial of empirical fact. In the end the only reason I pushed on was that it was even sillier to remain being silly. I’d say only the higher animals have this additional adaptive quality. I think there are many who believe emotions exist only in humans, some who acknowledge their existence in apes and chimps and a few who think other animals experience them. The human species, no longer needing to fear and fight other animals in order to survive, are by and large nowadays left with only each other to fear and fight and they do that with gusto. An estimated 160 million human beings were killed by their fellow human beings in wars in the last century alone, not to mention all the genocides, murders, rapes, assaults, child abuse, domestic violence and so on. The question I asked myself was why would I want to remain an instinctually-driven animal? So we, as humans, have an instinct that incites us to want to belong to the family and the tribe. Previous relations who did not have this instinct did not survive and reproduce as successfully as those who did. We have had some discussions in the past about ‘an instinct to belong’ but that the survival instincts in human beings is species-specific and this specificity manifests itself as a feeling of wanting to belong to the species – a strange longing given that we are all fellow members of the same species. But the main reason for the longing to belong is that ‘me’, the parasitical entity trapped inside this flesh-and-blood body, always feels separate from similar-feeling parasitical entities and always feels isolated from the actual physical world. * So what are emotions: I’d say physical sensations either pleasurable or painful, coupled with a specific constellation of thoughts, resulting in a specific behaviour. An instinct, I would say, is a physical sensation that brings on a specific behaviour. In theory instinctual reactions and instinctual passions can be thought of as being separate in human beings, but in practice they are never separate. An instinctual reaction automatically produces a flow of chemicals designed to prime the body for a fight or flee response and these chemical flows are almost instantaneously ‘felt’ as emotional responses – the heart-pumping, gut-wrenching feeling of fear, the neck-tightening, pulse-racing feeling of aggression, and so on. So it is the thought element of the emotion that is special and it is what allows us to have enormously varied ways of expressing our instincts. In my early days of actualism, whenever I asked myself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ I most often came up with a thought response, in other words I often thought that I was thinking something that I shouldn’t be thinking and all I needed to do was change my thinking and that would be that. I soon discovered that right thinking and wrong thinking was nothing but the morals and ethics and beliefs ‘I’ had taken on board as part and parcel of my social identity and that what I was calling a wrong thought or a bad thought was really a feeling. As an example – sometimes I would come up with an answer that ‘I was just thinking about something that happened a while ago’. A little further probing and I would come up with an answer that ‘I was concerned about something that happened a while ago – did I do the right thing’. A little more probing and I discovered I was anxious about the repercussions, and a little further I discovered that I was feeling fearful of the consequences. What started off as me thinking I was merely thinking, eventually revealed that I was really having a feeling at the time, and a strong one at that. I only say this because it is common that people have a good deal of difficulty in distinguishing between thoughts and feelings, and none more so than the male of the species. I began learning the applicable thought patterns at birth (and probably even before birth). The question is, when do I stop linking learned thought patterns to instinctual drives and if I can link them, can I unlink them, or replace them with new ones? The answer appears to be yes. During the last year I’ve watched my emotions. I’ve felt fear, sadness and resignation and anger and found under it very often the drive to belong – to feel safe in a secure relationship to others. When I ponder this emotion I find that (given my personal situation) I am actually safe and secure in this physical world and will continue to be so regardless of which particular person I associate with. This produces an internal smile, a quiet sensation of happiness. This has allowed me to quickly drop the suffering of rejection and not-belonging and the malice I have felt toward others for excluding me. Since I’m less angry, sad, and resigned my relations with others have become more amicable and productive. I’m happier and more harmless. Great, hey. When you say ‘during the last year I’ve watched my emotions. I’ve felt fear, sadness and resignation and anger ...’ – these aren’t learnt thought patterns, these are feelings that you have become aware of as they are happening, i.e. you have labelled them and felt them as they were happening. If you set your sights on becoming happy and harmless then, by becoming aware of feelings of sadness and animosity as they arise, you can pull the rug out from under these feelings and get back to being happy and harmless again as soon as possible. As you seem to be reporting, this process of continual awareness and disempowerment does produce tangible results. I’ve had feelings of rejection and being misunderstood from responses and non responses on this list. It’s fuel for the fire that can burn away self-importance and a reminder that malice and competitiveness are there to be burned away too. I do acknowledge that writing on this list can sometimes be a challenging business as one gets no support here for one’s dearly-held beliefs, no sustenance for one’s bitter-sweet sadness and no validation of one’s pet animosities. But then again, would you have it any other way? The stakes are high on this list – peace on earth is as high as the stakes get in my neck of the woods.
If you will please excuse the digression from the study format I would like to ask; is it a premise of actualism that emotions are objective states that can be owned and manipulated? Digress away. Personally I find your question both pertinent and incisive. All normal flesh and blood humans born of a fertilized egg are born with a genetically-encoded set of instinctual passions, the main ones being fear, aggression, nurture and desire. These instinctual passions are experienced as deep-seated emotions, overwhelming desires or impulsive urges, and as such are not at all objective, as in unbiased, impartial, neutral, even-handed, equitable, fair, or just. The sole purpose of these blind instinctual passions is to propagate and perpetuate the survival of the species, as they are in any form of animate life. As such, these passions are biased, erratic, irrational, compulsive, self-centred, often uncontrollable, often brutish, often debilitating and are never equitable, fair or just. To put it plainly, humans are often overcome by anger, plunged into despair, consumed by greed, compelled to seek revenge, overwhelmed by fear, driven to procreate and impelled to seek power over others. One does not ‘own’ these passions – they are part and parcel of one’s identity, for these passions form the very core of ‘who’ every instinctual human animal being thinks and feels themselves to be deep-down inside. Thus far the best way to find relief and respite has been to ‘disown’ the undesirable savage passions of fear and aggression and identify only with the desirable tender passions of nurture and desire. However, as both ancient hand current history has clearly evidenced, this practice does not eliminate malice and sorrow – it rather institutionalizes it into a commonly accepted fairytale belief-system of good and evil, Gods and Devils. Up until now human beings have had only two choices – One can remain the social identity one was taught to be since childhood and attempt to suppress, control or manipulate one’s instinctual passions, lusts and drives, making the best of one’s lot in life. If one is sufficiently dissatisfied with this normal existence, or if one is sufficiently appalled by human malice and sorrow, one can deny and dissociate from one’s savage passions and give full reign to one’s tender passions, thereby imagining one’s self to be above and beyond malice and sorrow. This cunning manipulation of the instinctual passions, propagated by the churches, Popes and priests, Godmen and shamans and their eager and willing followers, is an escapist fantasy fuelled by one’s own and other’s impassioned imagination. These spiritual/religious delusions of Grandeur would be an amusing human foible except for the fact that it does stuff all to eliminate the instinctual passions and emotions that are the very cause of human malice and sorrow. Actualism is a new non-spiritual down-to-earth third alternative to remaining normal or becoming spiritual – a tried and tested method aimed at eliminating one’s own malice and sorrow.
... then I came across the suppressed underlying Western-spiritual feelings of guilt and shame that shrouded, inhibited and crippled my common sense investigations of aggression and anger. Yes, that is so. This is precisely what happened on the most recent occasion when I exploded in anger at my partner’s grandson. I immediately felt guilty and ashamed of myself and secluded myself upstairs in my den. After a period of cooling down, I was able to explore and examine what was going on with me that provoked my response. The whole thing still rather mystifies me. While I have discovered some things about ‘me’ through this experience, I still have the sense that I am skating around on the surface of the thing. So, thank you Peter for being willing to explore this in detail with me. I found your replies helpful in that they have given me more grist for the mill. When you write of exploding in anger at your partner’s grandson, I remember a similar instance where I did the same to the son of my partner at the time. We had one son each from previous partners and I became aware of how much more ‘tolerant’ I was of ‘my’ son’s behaviour than ‘her’ son. Now I am clearly able to see that it was because I was instinctually programmed to favour, be biased, turn a blind eye to, defend and be sympathetic towards my ‘own’, i.e. the instinct to nurture my ‘own’ counteracts the usual instinctual reaction of aggression that I felt towards other human beings. The other reaction I became aware of was a feeling of jealousy that I had of the special relationship she had with her son. It was an instinctual bond and therefore was stronger and overrode the relationship that I had with her. There is a good deal of statistical evidence that points to outbreaks of violence towards stepchildren caused either by jealousy or innate intolerance. Looking back it was indeed shocking at the time to have this instinctual anger well up from deep inside me – it was both bewildering as I could not rationally explain it and neither was I quick enough or able to keep a lid on it. It was a prime example of LeDoux’s findings about the quick and dirty response in action, in me. This intensity of instinctual reaction did not happen very often in my life but when it did it was too strong to ignore. It did not matter whether the reaction was an evil thought, a verbal outburst or a physical action (rare in my case as I was a well-bought-up, goody-two-shoes, Spiritual Snag at the time), I could not deny that I was angry. The last time such an uncontrollable outburst of anger happened was about a year before meeting Richard so I had no trouble in remembering and acknowledging that beneath ‘my’ loving persona there lurked a suppressed and controlled crude animal instinctual ‘me’. When offered the possibility of ridding myself of this instinctual aggression once and for all, I leapt at the chance. Your story has reminded me of the fact that it is this acknowledging of aggression in oneself that is the key to wanting to change irrevocably. If one only wants happiness for oneself then that is insufficient motive or intent to get stuck into the business of irrevocably changing oneself. It needs an altruistic motive rather than the mere self-gratification of being happy and that motive is to be actually peaceful – to do no harm to one’s fellow human beings, as in not instinctually feeling aggression towards others, not instinctually feeling sorrow for others, not being blindly driven to nurture others and not being blindly driven to desire power over others.
Over these many years things have become ever clearer. 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. As that process developed what had been our instinct to protect our bodies was carried over into feeling a need to protect the images we had of ourselves. The ego has always been just conditioned thought that formed as a sense of personal identity. This is the old-fashioned out-dated Eastern philosophical view of human existence on earth. The East has always seen the physical world as a dream, an illusion, Samsara, Maya, etc., and thinking was seen as the link to suffering in this dream world. Basically the idea is if you stop thinking about the suffering in the physical world it will go away. By a process of abandoning sensible thought and common sense they attempted to dissociate themselves from this ‘illusion’ by shifting their identity to become a new non-personal identity, yet another illusion. The cause of malice and sorrow is the identity or ‘self’ that dwells within the flesh and blood body. To rearrange this identity by shifting, polishing, making it holy, making it impersonal, making it Real, making it True, or whatever trick is used, is not eliminating it. The human body is instinctually programmed to do anything to survive and the alien psychological and psychic entity in the body, fuelled by the flush of chemicals released from the amygdala will thus do anything to survive. The multitudinous variations of real self, true self, Self, atman, pure being, Godliness, etc. offered up by Eastern religion and philosophy are a testament to cunning ‘self’-survival in action. 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.
As for our ‘essential non-dual nature’, I take it you are talking of the idea that we were born innocent, the ancient Tabula Rasa theory. The spiritual aim is then to return to our natural state of innocence – our true selves as we came into the world and before we were corrupted by evil. This is old-fashioned and out-of-date thinking that requires a blatant denial of modern empirical scientific research on the subject of human genetically encoded instinctual behaviour by Josef LeDoux (http://www.cns.nyu.edu/home/ledoux/overview.html) and others. A sensible clear-eyed observation of the startlingly obvious similarities between human beings behaviour and that of other animals is further evidence of human instinctual behaviour. Most animal studies focus on the similarities of the passions of nurture and desire, but murder, rape, infanticide, warfare, cannibalism, sorrow, despair and suicide have all been documented in our closest genetic cousins, the chimps. Jane Goodall was shocked when discovering and documenting this behaviour and she has since backed away from further research (‘Life and death at Gombe’ Jane Goodall National Geographic May 97 ). Other research on human behaviour that I personally found profoundly revealing were the studies by Stanley Morgan that clearly indicate ordinary human beings’ willingness to inflict pain on their fellow human beings (‘Obedience to Authority’ Stanley Morgan Harper and Row 1975). The results were so disturbing in their revelation of our human nature that any similar studies have been banned as being ‘unethical’. As for our ‘non-dual’, ancient spiritual belief has it that we are a spirit trapped in a physical corporeal body in a physical material world and the only way to transcend this duality was to becomes spirit only, or pure being. This duality is most often expressed as material / spiritual or evil / divine for in ancient times the material world was imagined as evil and the spirit-ual world was felt to be divine. Anyone who has plumbed the depths of their ‘essential non-dual nature’ sees the terror, dread and the diabolical and goes for the divine feelings which does nothing but confirm, sustain and make very REAL the human invention of good and evil. There is no good and evil in the actual world. There are simply human beings who are still driven by their instinctual passions and rather than ditch the lot, they deny the ‘bad’ ones and pump up the ‘good’ ones like all get out. Better to ditch the lot and then one is aware that any ideas of duality, non-duality or even beyond non-duality are but figments of human imagination and not actual. How long will we continue this denial of the central role that genetically-encoded instinctual passions have in causing human malice and sorrow? And how long will people keep turning away from the facts and proudly indulging in utterly ‘self’-ish theories and beliefs? What I did was keep asking questions until all of my beliefs were replaced by substantiated verifiable facts. I would not settle on anything if I only felt something to be right and true or because someone else said it was so. I kept asking myself questions until I removed all doubt from my life. It became obvious that if I had to trust, have faith, believe or hope that something was so then it was not a fact but merely a belief or a feeling. When I came across the radical proposition that there was a third alternative to remaining normal or becoming spiritual I ran with the question: ‘What if there isn’t a God, by whatever name?’ This question can easily lead people into despair and hopelessness but when combined with the question: ‘What if there is a way that I can actually rid myself of malice and sorrow’, a whole new exciting and challenging ball game opens up. A marvellous opportunity is now available for any who are willing to face facts. No longer do we humans have to feel guilt or shame, pray to God for redemption or salvation, seek to escape from evil into an ‘inner’ world of isolation and feeling-only existence, no longer do we have to humble ourselves before God-men. Simply acknowledging the fact that our malice and sorrow results from an instinctual program instilled by blind nature in order to ensure the survival of the species is the first step towards becoming actually free of malice and sorrow. To continue to deny factual empirical evidence is to indulge in denial and this denial actively prevents your chance at experiencing peace on earth in this lifetime. Thanks for your engaging posts. It’s been a pleasure to again have the opportunity to write about my favourite subject. I do realize my posts are long compared to the usual mailing list style, but I do have a lot to say and convey, given the subject matter is so new and radical.
Can the peace and harmony you are experiencing with your partner remain inviolate when all about you the ignorance and suffering of human misery abounds? Firstly, the word ‘ignorance’ is usually used in spiritual terms as meaning ‘those who are ignorant of the Truth’. Spiritual seekers who have the Truth revealed to them feel both specially blessed and humbly grateful to Existence, God or the Guru, for having seen the light, felt God in their heart, etc. From this exalted position, they see others as ignorant – as in following a false Guru or God, having ‘false’ beliefs, being the perpetrators of violence and the cause of suffering in the world. When I abandoned my skewered good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, enlightened vs. ignorant, them and me view of the world, I was able to clearly see the fact that I am one of 6 billion human beings on the planet. When I was born there was little programmed in my brain, in fact, I remember nothing of my first years and my earliest memories are about age four. Before that I was like this computer before the Windows operating system was installed. This fact is confirmed empirically by modern brain scanning equipment. There was, however, a DOS-like base operating program – genetically encoded – and this began to fully kick in about the age of 2 years. This is easily observable in children when fear, aggression, nurture and desire begin to surface, no matter how or where the infant is raised. We are, contrary to ancient belief, not born ‘innocent’ but every human being comes into the world pre-primed with a set of crude animal instincts. With the first signs of the emergence of this instinctual behaviour we all begin to be instilled by our parents and peers with a social identity consisting of morals – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – and ethics – ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – together with a full set of social beliefs and psittacisms. This social identity is instilled essentially to curb the excesses of the instinctual passions and to make one a fit member of society. No one escapes this instinctual and social programming – it is the way-it-is. The recognition and acknowledgement that this simple biological and social programming forms the very substance of ‘who’ we think we are and ‘who’ we feel we are deep down, is in itself immensely liberating. One can then begin the process of gaily abandoning the whole duality of good and evil, resentment and gratitude, and guilt and pride that underpin all the religious beliefs as to why we are here, and why we are the way we are. An essential liberation is from the feeling of sorrow, both from having being born into this world in the first place – ‘life’s a bitch and then you die’ and from feeling sorrow or pity for others – compassion. Compassion literally means suffering together and being free of sorrow means being free of the mutual agreement that human life on earth is ultimately a suffering existence. In the spiritual world compassion is upheld as a virtue as it justifies one’s feeling of superiority by looking down on, or back at, those who are suffering. To be free of sorrow one must be free of the mutually-agreed sorrow that is inherent in the human condition. By becoming free of the feeling of sorrow is it possible to take a clear-eyed look at the world-as-it-is and people as-they-are. Then one is moved to get off one’s bum and do something about the appalling malice and sorrow that is endemic in the human condition. Do you have to ‘ignore’ anything to maintain this state? No. It was only by ceasing to ignore and deny the fact that I was as mad and as bad as everyone else in the world, that I was able to get stuck into doing something about myself. To see that, at the core of my ‘being’, I am an instinctual animal – robotically programmed for fear, aggression, nurture and desire. To explore and plumb these depths and see the dread and despair, the lust for violence and the diabolical was to experience the raw animal passions at ‘my’ core. Most people who have glimpses of this dark side in themselves, as in dark nights of the soul, frantically seek to identify with the supposed good passions and become good, more loving, grateful, humbly superior and God-identified. It was only by ceasing to ignore and deny the animal instinctual passions in me, and abandoning my seductive indulgence in ancient spiritual belief, that I was able to free myself of the instinctual passions and live happy and harmlessly in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. Practicing denial and renunciation leads to rejection of, and disassociation from, the sensuous delight of this actual physical palpable world we live in. It was only when I stopped ignoring facts and stopped indulging in my beliefs and feelings that I could begin to experience the ever-present actual world of sensate delight, purity and perfection. Paradise is here on earth – not in our hearts, nor in heaven.
We can see in our modern world many signs that humans are becoming more and more conscious of the need to reform human characters and solve our problems with dialogue, not violence. Usually we divide our instinctual passions into groupings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and try either to repress or deny the ‘bad’ ones – fear and aggression – while giving full vent and validity to the ‘good’ ones – nurture and desire. Unfortunately the well-meaning attempt to curb fear and aggression by moulding ‘good’ and ‘loving’ citizens has had precious little success as is evidenced by all the wars, murders, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, corruption, loneliness, despair and suicides that are still endemic on the planet. The passions of love and hate, forgiveness and retribution, compassion and selfishness, etc. come inseparably in pairs, as is testified by the continual failure of humans to live together in anything remotely resembling peace and harmony. We still rely on lawyers and laws, courts and jails, police, armies and guns to enforce law and order – a poor substitute for actual peace and harmony. The failure of morals, ethics, values and ideals to bring anything remotely resembling peace to this fair planet is legendary. The currently fashionable ideal of Human Rights serves only to reinforce the rights of various ethnic, religious and territorial groups to firstly, hold conflicting beliefs and then, to fight for those beliefs. Retribution is also highly valued as the right to ‘justice’ and, as such, resentments and grievances between rival groups of humans or individuals are passed down from generation to generation. When appeals to moral and ethical values fail to end human conflicts, temporary ceasefires are maintained at the point of a gun. Whenever conflict erupts again a truce is then renegotiated and a ceasefire reinforced and the whole cycle of suppression, justice and retribution is set in motion yet again. Given the human genetic-heritage of animal instinctual passions, it is a tribute to human perseverance and stubborn will that the species has survived and flourished as well as it has. It is obvious that a new solution needs to be found, for the traditional solution of instilling unliveable ethics, preaching pious morals and maintaining law and order at the point of a gun has clearly failed in the past, is still failing, and always will fail to bring actual peace on earth. The next great challenge for human beings in this time of increasing safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure is to eradicate and eliminate human malice and sorrow. To do this means to actively challenge and confront the ‘mother of all beliefs’ – that ‘you can’t change human nature’. The questions I asked myself were ... ‘why not?’ ... and ‘who said you can’t?’
A friend of mine had his lover leave him for another man. He was heart broken and was talking about how evil his lover had been for leaving him and how bad the other man was for taking her away. I asked him if he loved her? He said he did. I said, then if you love her you only want for her happiness. It became clear that he was not speaking from love, but from insecurity and a feeling of loss that was coming from the ego. He saw the point and changed his perspective and showed her love and understanding. In about a week she came back to him. They are now far more open with each other. Relationships are a very rich field for growth and learning to express more love. My experience with Vineeto is that love and its accompanying roller coaster of deep-seated emotions and feelings is what really prevents actual intimacy – the direct experience of the other. How can two people relate to each other as human beings with this constant churning of deep-seated emotions and feelings? Love is but a failed antidote to fear and loneliness, an attempt to bridge the separateness that inevitably occurs when two lost, lonely, frightened and very, cunning entities attempt to live together. The only solution is to get rid of the fearful and lonely ‘self’ in order to allow the direct intimacy hidden beneath. To get rid of all imagination and belief enables one to experience the wonder of the actual and physical. We have found that living without this emotional burden of love allows us to live together with an ease, comfort, delight and level of consideration that we never thought possible. The Eastern approach of blaming thinking and letting the emotions that arise from the instinctual passions get off scot-free is a process that can only lead to an altered state of consciousness – not peace on earth, in this lifetime. Instinctual passions when freed of any sensible thought and earthy sensuousness results in impassioned delusion, altered states of consciousness and finally, the infliction of theomania. Human beings are unique among the animal species in that we have a large ‘modern’ brain – the neo-cortex – capable of thinking, planning and reflecting which overlays the primitive reptilian brain – the amygdala – the source of the animal instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Recent studies by LeDoux and others empirically confirm that the ‘quick and dirty’ instinctual, passionate responses of the primitive brain are primary and automatically over-ride the thoughtful, considered responses of the neo-cortex. We humans are, in fact, genetically programmed to be driven, consumed or overwhelmed by the animal instinctual passions that give rise to malice and sorrow. Thus, in spite of all our best and well-meaning efforts to keep our malice and sorrow under control, we are but ‘animal’, at our very core. These instinctual passions produce the feelings of love and hate, compassion and sorrow, humility and pride, belonging and loneliness, bliss and dread, etc. The constant tightrope of balancing the extremes of mood swings produced by the chemical flow from the amygdala is exhausting work but to seek solace and succour in a fantasy world of so-called good feelings does nothing to eliminate the instinctual animal passions. The Ancient Ones have got it 180 degrees wrong – it is feelings and emotions arising from the instinctual animal passions that are the problem, not sensible thinking, contemplative reflection or sensate sensuousness. I noticed No 12 is beginning to cotton on to this fact as well, when he said in a recent post to you –
‘Self’-immolation is the only way to eliminate human instinctual malice and sorrow because it brings a permanent irrevocable end to the psychological and psychic reactions caused by the primitive reptilian brain.
Maybe I have it wrong but it looks to me like sorrow comes from fear. For example, if there is a fear of not surviving then there will be sorrow. In other words, isn’t fear underlying the sorrow? The predominant instinctual passions are those of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Although these passions are aspects of a single instinctual genetic program designed solely to ensure the survival of the species they are distinct and separate passions that can be discerned and experienced quite separately and distinctly. Yes, I agree with this. With the predominant instinctual passions being fear, aggression, nurture and desire then isn’t malice and sorrow derived from these passions with fear being the most predominant? My specific question is: Isn’t the instinct of fear underlying (the cause of) malice and sorrow? No. Although fear, aggression, nurture and desire are aspects of a single instinctual genetic program designed solely to ensure the survival of the species they are distinct and separate passions that can be discerned and experienced quite separately and distinctly. As an example, if you are driving a car and become angry that the car in front of you is travelling very slowly, your anger has nothing to do with fear. If you are sitting in a café and hear some music that makes you feel sad, your sorrow has nothing to do with fear. I won’t go on as your own investigations can reveal that fear, aggression, nurture and desire are distinct and separate passions that can be discerned and experienced quite separately and distinctly. A few examples of this –
To remain fixated upon fear as being primary and predominant, even if that is how you experience it now, is to miss out on the opportunity of being aware of, and thus being able to investigate the full range of instinctual passions that are the underlying cause of human malice and sorrow. You may also find that the fascinating business of investigating the full range of instinctual passions in action will divert you from your fixation with the feeling of fear and enable you to turn the fear into the thrill of discovering what you are. Having said all that, I can also relate to your feelings of fear as they would often rack me when I was first confronted by actualism and the enormity of setting off on a path that could only lead to ‘my’ demise. I was however thoroughly fed up with living a second-rate life and I was totally disillusioned with the hypocrisy of the spiritual world so I figured I had nothing left to lose anyway. What I did was set myself some realistic targets – to live with at least one other person in utter peace and harmony and to eliminate both malice and sorrow from my life. Once I had set myself these goals, given myself something practical to do about my lot in life as it were, the feelings of fear became secondary to the adventure of being an actualist and to the satisfaction of the success that ensues.
I’m beginning to read Joseph LeDoux’s books to better understand the relevance of his work on emotion to Actual Freedom. The only relevance that I can ascertain is his experimental confirmation that feeling precedes thought. Besides that – I’m looking at a book by Antonio Damasio – titled ‘Descartes’ Error’. Now I have no well-formed views on what he is saying, but what I’m gathering so far is that Damasio’s work (he looks specifically at the case of Phineas Gage and others with frontal lobe damage) is a confirmation of LeDoux’s work, and in that sense may be of use to actualists. It pays to remember that neither LeDoux nor Damasio are interested in becoming free of the human condition and, as such, they are interested in explaining what is, rather than what is possible. Interestingly enough, Damasio seems to be saying that emotion and feeling is integral to experience as a self (both social and instinctual) – but since he dealt with people with frontal lobe damage, he seems to be saying that loss of self is dangerous and maladaptive. Which is but confirmation of the status quo. So he is trying to correct the ‘Cartesian Error’ that reasoning and cognition is without feeling or emotion – so he is afraid of the idea of a ‘selfless cognition.’ ‘Not at all interested in ‘the idea of a ‘selfless cognition’’ may be a better way of describing it. So, on the one hand he seems to support the actualist affirmation of the instinctual self, yet he also claims that loss of self is disorienting and disturbing. It is useful to consider that an actual freedom from the human condition is not considered normal by the psychological and psychiatric standards applicable to the human condition. But then again, that is to be expected, is it not. The other relevant point to consider is that Richard is not someone who has suffered brain damage but is someone who has managed by his own efforts to rid himself of malice and sorrow – an event that coincided with the extinction of all traces of either a psychological or psychic ‘self’. My hunch is that may be due to the fact that he has studied what he calls ‘secondary emotion’ – that is the processing of the frontal lobe with the functioning of the amygdala still intact. Anyway, this is mostly a pre-formed opinion since I haven’t had sufficient time to mull over the ideas, but I’m wondering if others have read Damasio’s work and what thoughts you might have. I remember several times being hooked in by the experimental work and theories of neuro-scientists and the like, until I remembered that all they are studying is the functioning of the human brain – the hardware if you like – within the current functioning of the human psyche – the software programming if you like. And that, unlike actualists, they have no interest whatsoever in changing the social and instinctual programming that is the very cause of all the misery and mayhem among human beings on the planet.
It was a classic story, common to many. A period of loneliness and depression, an experience of personal loss or grief, a life-changing experience and a life born again as a Saviour – by whatever name, for whatever cause. What was of most interest to me in Goodall’s case was her description of what appeared to be a pure consciousness experience, her after-the-fact interpretation of the experience as a mystical experience and that she then went on to claim the experience as ‘her’ own – as being a personal revelation from God. A human being’s imaginative faculty is carefully nurtured and hurried along in childhood through nursery rhymes, fables, stories of all kinds, and the belief in the supernatural, the mystical, and the otherworldly is the result. It is not surprising, then, that people hurry to interpret a perfection experience in the framework that they are most comfortable with – as a mystical, otherworldly experience, or as a frank communication from God himself. There are several aspects to this tendency. Firstly, there is a long, long tradition of mystical experiences, both in Eastern and Western religions, so much so that to feel oneself to be God, or to feel oneself to be a specially chosen friend of the creator God, is but the status quo. Secondly, given that human experience is universally deemed to be a battle between good and evil, every experience is automatically classified as either good or evil … and a PCE is invariably interpreted as being in the ‘good’ or Godly camp. Underlying this social/historic programming are the instinctual survival passions – passions which are non-existent in a PCE but are given full reign in any altered state of consciousness experience. This means there is a powerful instinctive lure to claim any and all experience as ‘mine’. The reason I point this out is that not only has an actualist to be wary of the spiritual programming that actively encourages the pursuit of altered states of consciousness, but also of the crude instinctive narcissistic drive that has thus far always corrupted the human search for freedom, peace and happiness. In a way, it almost seems that it is exceedingly difficult for a human being to recognize the immediate and actual as exactly what it is, rather than what it is not. I wonder if it would be possible to raise children with an immediate appreciation and delight in what is actually present, something they have innately anyway, with no imaginative fabrication of what is not there. Also innately present in children are the instinctual passions and these passions will always take precedent over any potential for an ‘immediate appreciation and delight in what is actually present’ – in fact, the crude animal survival passions exist to do precisely this. Which is not to say that it makes good sense not to indulge a child’s natural tendency for fantasy and imagination – a tendency that will anyway be fostered by interaction with their peers, despite the wishes and actions of any parent.
^Note1: I have the last couple of days indeed experienced the ‘Amygdala-effect’; in fact, yesterday night it came to some sort of climax I felt some sort of a cracking at the back of my head next I found myself a bit giggling and I heard myself say ‘this must be the Amygdala’. Now it feels somehow as if the Amygdala is ‘pricked’ up on my spine a bit ET-like, as if indeed I can feel that part in my head. There’s also a bit of muscular activity in my neck, which very much seems to be related to breathing^. I remember when I first read that Richard reported that the precursory event to becoming free of the human condition was accompanied by a physical sensation at the top of the brain-stem. As I recall, he likened it to the turning over of record on one of those old 50’s record players. This happened when Richard became Enlightened and it subsequently took eleven more years until the process of ‘self’-immolation was complete. I was curious at the time that the event of becoming free of the human condition appeared to have a physical component as well as the obvious psychological and psychic components – the extinction of the psychological and psychic entity in total. I say ‘appeared to have’ because we only have Richards’s report of the event and no other tangible evidence to support it. Even so, what I made of the report of the physical sensations was that it could have been related to the physical extinguishing of the instinctual animal survival programming – the genetically-encoded programming that gives rise to the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire in the human animal. Now of course, all this is at best speculation, a working hypothesis until proved as a fact or abandoned as nonsense. But at the time I found the assumption very useful because it set me off on a course that made me open to the possibility that the root cause of my malice and sorrow was utterly non-spiritual and that it was physical in nature – my instinctual survival programming. It made good sense to me that there was a physical cause to human behaviour and this was a breath of fresh air after spending years believing in spiritual esoterica or blaming someone else or something else for my own feelings of malice and sorrow. My particular interest in the physical origins of the instinctual passions
led to Richard writing more on the subject of instinctual passions and to The reason I am writing this is to give you some background to what you are now terming the ‘Amygdala affect’ – and I like the term, by the way. There is no doubt that on the path to actual freedom many weird and wonderful psychic and psychological events can and do happen and that sometimes there can even be physical sensations that occur. From my experience, these events may well be par for the course but they are neither the main event nor are they a sure sign of anything in particular. The only sign of success on the path to an actual freedom from malice and sorrow is the incremental reduction of feeling malice and sorrow and the subsequent emergence of more and more of the felicitous feelings in everyday life. For a sincere actualist there can be no other measure of success than this. Consequently I came to see that marking my success in becoming free by the occurrence of physical sensations was akin to a spiritualist marking their success in becoming God by how much their Kundalini was rising or how much their third eye was opening. I also saw that if Richard had said his ankle twitched when he became free there could well be a generation of followers all limping around saying ‘all is going well, I’m nearly there’. As I write I am reminded of the ‘Placebo effect’ wherein a patient does not know whether any improvements are a physical result of the treatment or purely imaginary. My point is not to take what is written about other people’s experiences as a gospel because believing can lead to all sorts of imaginations. And not to confuse sincerity with humourlessness – it’s essential to be able to laugh at all the weird and wonderful experiences, be they psychological, psychic or physical, which happen on the path to actual freedom. The last thing an actualist does is take one’s ‘self’ seriously – that’s what the spiritualists do.
I recently watched a National Geographic television program which I found most interesting in that it presented some facts about the animal instinctual program that were new to me. I thought I would pass on the information, as you may well be interested. National Geographic programs are commonly heavily slanted towards showing the tender passions of animals, emphasizing the cute and cuddly aspects of nurture and desire whilst paying far less attention to the raw and crude ‘what can I eat, what can eat me?’ nature of instinctual aggression and fear. At one stage I was very interested in the studies of instinctual behaviour in chimps – animals with the closest genetic make-up to the human species – and I found much useful information by digging beneath the myths and prejudices. Perhaps the most pertinent similarities between chimps and humans are that the instinctual program in both species is not only species-centred but also self-centred. Because of this similarity in instinctual programming chimps display a range of behaviours almost identical to that of humans – utter self-centredness combined with a species-centred compulsion to propagate and proliferate the species. The very real danger of being attacked and eaten by other animals necessitates safety in numbers with a subsequent need to co-operate with other members of the family/tribe in order to defend territory and attack the territory of other families or tribes. This necessity does not sit well with a constant need to have to compete with other members of the family/tribal structure for food, sexual conquests and power over others. Thus in chimps – as well as humans – sibling rivalry, jealousy, conflict, retribution and anger as well as petulance, remorse, sorrow and dejection are common behaviours, as are habitual outbreaks of war, murder, rape, torture, cannibalism and infanticide. The recent program I watched was about another animal species with social behaviour very similar to chimps and that many uphold to be loving, intelligent, even spiritual beings – dolphins. The program detailed research on what it termed the wild side of dolphins and drew on evidence of an eighteen year long study conducted on dolphins in Western Australia as well as other studies in various locations around the world. Contrary to popular belief the dolphin world is one of almost constant conflict and competition between rival groups or pods, all competing with each other for food, territory and sexual conquest. Changing allegiances are commonplace, either forced or voluntary, for the bigger the pod, the more food can be harvested and the more females can be captured from other pods. Whilst being part of a particular group is necessary for survival, almost constant inter-group rivalry and fights are an on-going consequence. Inter-group behaviour is typified by the constant hassling of females and aggressive fights between males. Commonly two or more males form an alliance in order to capture a female and then take turns guarding the female while the other feeds. The research also indicated a strong suspicion that males kill and eat female dolphin’s young in order to claim her to mate with. Vicious fights, even to the death, between males of the same pod have been also been observed. Dolphins also display unprovoked malicious behaviour, often toying with and torturing their prey before the final kill. They are also one the few species known to kill for sport only – they have been observed torturing and maiming seals, porpoises and other dolphins, eventually leaving their prey crippled or dying but uneaten. Apart from the glaring gulf that exists between popular myth and scientific evidence as to the full range of instinctual animal behaviour, I was particularly struck by several aspects of animal behaviour that are of particular relevance to the human species. Both dolphins and chimps are vulnerable to attacks by other species as well as by members of their own species and are therefore forced to hunt in numbers as well as rely on numbers for their own protection. The offspring of both species require feeding, protection and teaching of survival skills for a period of about 6 years and a family/tribal structure offers the best chance for survival, for both nurtured and nurturer in this period. This safety by numbers strategy by no means fosters harmonious interactions – au contraire, inter-group conflict is often as malicious as group-to-group conflicts. What could be seen initially as a herding or socializing instinct could well be no more than a reluctant fear-driven imperative arising from the necessity to successfully propagate the species. The resulting alliances are more like expedient strategic pacts formed solely to increase the odds of survival. There appears to be no instinctual bonding per se within the group at large, other than a crude necessity to huddle in groups so as to increase the chances of propagating and rearing offspring as well as increase the odds when waging warfare against other members of the species. Observing the instinctual programming of animals is a fascinating business, particularly when this observing is clear-eyed. One starts to see clearly that this instinctual programming in each and every animal species has one purpose and one purpose only – to proliferate that particular species. Observing animal behaviour in other species has the advantage that one can study the instinctual survival program devoid of the layer of socialization that humans have been instilled with. It is not a pleasant business to acknowledge that at core one is but a crude animal – passionately driven by fear, aggression, nurture and desire such that one can never be neither happy nor harmless. But the reward for daring to look with clear eyes at the animal instinctual passions that underpins the human condition is an incremental freedom from malice and sorrow. Thank you for the lengthy post on animal instincts. I wrote the post because I wanted to note down the research into dolphin behaviour before I forgot the details and I thought you would also be interested. It’s essential for an actualist to understand exactly nature of the animal instinctual programming and one of the easiest ways of doing this is to observe how it operates in other animals. While chimpanzees offer the best observation and information – having a reported 96% similar genetic makeup – dolphins are also interesting to observe given that their individual and their group behaviour oft resembles those of the human instinctual animal.
By the way, this survival program is not conditioning endowed by evolution over time – it is genetically encoded as an indivisible package in each and every human being born, i.e. it is not a progressive conditioning, it is an instantaneous condition. The instinctual program is the (human) condition and it is universal to every human being whereas social conditioning is individual in that it has slight cultural and gender variations. I was talking about evolutionary conditioning of a species, not an individual. Yes but the instinctual survival mechanism that gives rise to the instinctual passions (fear, aggression, nurture and desire) is universal to the human species – each and every human being is born with them. The instinctual survival mechanism is not conditioning – ‘evolutionary conditioning’ is something you have made up, it is not a fact. Social conditioning is somewhat individual and slightly varied but the instinctual survival mechanism – that which is the root cause of all human animosity and all human anguish – is universal in that it is genetically-encoded within all the sentient animal species and not just the human animal species. It’s not for nothing that it is said that ‘he fought like a tiger’ or ‘she squealed like a pig’ … or that ‘they acted like sheep’. It’s true to say that the genetic coding is supplied complete to each individual. Oh, good. Can we agree then that the instinctual survival mechanism – that which gives rise to the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire in human beings – ‘is supplied complete’ to each and every member of the human species? Do realize that this is no little thing to agree to because it is completely at odds with all of the spiritual teachings that have it that we are born innocent beings and only corrupted by conditioning or that we are all blank slate souls who have to suffer the trails of being trapped in a corporeal body in an alien physical world? The conditioning, however, takes huge amounts of time and works on species. Well if you can see the sense – and accept the scientific evidence – that the instinctual survival passions are genetically-encoded and as such are ‘supplied complete’ to each and every member of the human species – then can also probably see that conditioning – be it ethnic, racial, social, cultural, religious or whatever – is what happens to each and every human being after birth? Let me put it another way. The instinctual passions are universal to all human beings – there is no difference between the fear a Greek woman feels or the fear a Liberian man feels, there is no difference to the anger a Roman centurion felt to that which a Stone Age girl felt. In other words, whilst there are undoubtedly ethnic, racial, social, cultural and religious differences between these people, the feelings they feel and the passions they are driven by are universal to all human beings. * Chapter XI Memory Habits and the Birth of the ‘I-process’ Page 116:
Not a word to be seen in this quote about the crucial role that the instinctual passions play in both forming and sustaining the parasitical entity that inhabits the flesh and blood body – I wouldn’t expect there to be. I can’t imagine that the writer would list every type of conditioning there is for this brief outline and nor would I expect him to use your particular terminology. Your argument would be more convincing had not the author specifically said that ‘consciousness of self is nothing other than a ‘secondary current’ formed by the ‘accumulation of memory’ and from this process ‘a ‘thinker’ is born’. In other words what he is saying is clearly not what actualism is saying. Why would he, along with all the other Sages and teachers and pundits, waste his time and his words skirting around the edge of the crux of the issue if indeed he did know ‘the crucial role that the instinctual passions play in both forming and sustaining the parasitical entity that inhabits the flesh and blood body’? I think it’s quite right that Actualism stresses the role of genetic inheritance. You have no argument with me on that. Are you clear that what you are agreeing to … because what actualism stresses (that the genetically-encoded instinctual passions are the root cause of human malice and sorrow) is diametrically opposite to all of what all of spiritualism teaches (that human beings are born innocent and only corrupted by conditioning or that we are all born as blank-slate souls who then have to suffer the trails of being trapped in a corporeal body in an alien physical world before a final release ‘when the body dies’). As I said before, this is no little thing to agree to. Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust |
