Selected Correspondence Peter

Pure Intent

I don’t know who your teacher was, but such so-called wisdoms, or dimwitticisms as I like to call them, are rampant in Eastern spiritual teachings. Such teachings are specifically designed to widen the already existing rift between the ‘me’ as a spirit-like entity and what I am – this flesh and blood body – thereby validating ‘my’ existence as being separate from the corporeal mortal body in which ‘I’ have temporarily taken up residence. Such teachings are meant to encourage the aggrandizing of ‘me’ and ‘my’ ‘self’-centred thoughts and feelings whilst simultaneously denigrating the wonders of the workings of actual flesh and blood bodies as well as the delights of sensate experiencing. Following such teachings is indeed effortless, not only because it is eminently fashionable to do so, but also because all ‘self’-centred activity is instinctual – being ‘self’-centred comes natural to all human beings.

Actualism, on the other hand, requires effort like you have never known effort before –

• First comes the intellectual effort required to make sense of the radical ramifications of Richard’ discovery.

• Second comes the impassioned effort required to acknowledge one’s gullibility in believing in a spirit world, to then abandon one’s real-world cynicism and crank up one’s naiveté and to then make a full-blooded commitment to becoming happy and harmless.

• Third comes the intense effort required to get the actualism method up and running as a constant moment-to-moment attentiveness.

• And finally comes the stubborn effort required to stick at it, through thick and thin, no matter what the consequences.

Becoming happy and harmless is an utterly down-to-earth pursuit and, as with all down-to-earth pursuits, no effort = no result. Or, to put it another way, dreaming is effortless but actual change require actual effort.

If you haven’t already found it, you may find the Introduction to Actualism useful in giving you an overview of what actualism is really about.

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Yes, I do understand, but you do seem to still insist on putting the cart before the horse.

If we can just backtrack to our previous conversation you will notice that you mentioned you were fascinated with intent –

I am fascinated right now with intent ... to use intent in the most fierce way to #1 live in the present more and more ... and #2 to shed the numerous skins of beliefs and identities.

Well, you are on the wrong mailing list if your intent is for ‘#1’ but you are on the right mailing list if your intent is for ‘#2’. You seem to have serendipitously come across a fork in the road – which way you go is solely a matter of your intent. And, as you said, your hands are on the steering wheel.

In the same post, I also made the following comment –

‘Actualism, on the other hand, is about being attentive to how I am experiencing this moment of being alive with the committed aim of doing whatever is needed to become as happy and as harmless as humanly possible.’

The question I would ask is what is your intent – your committed aim – when you ask yourself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’

Why are you asking the question? What is your motivation when you ask the question? Do you have a purpose when you ask the question? What are you looking for when you ask the question? What type of answer are you looking for? What do you do when you come up with an answer?

You might notice that all of these questions are to do with intent.

For an actualist the importance of intent is obvious – if you are practicing a method specifically designed to facilitate your becoming less harmful and more happy, and you have no intent to become less harmful and more happy, then any attempt to be attentive as to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive will be an aimless practice, a meaningless practice, an ineffective practice and a fruitless practice, or to use your words – ‘just a mental thing’.

The question of intent, put plainly, is – ‘what is it that you want to do with the rest of your life?’

3. Intentionally provoked onsets of PCEs –

We now move on from the normal random, hit-and-miss, chance onsets of PCEs into something that is brand-new in human history – PCEs provoked by an actualist’s unswerving intent to become actually free from the human condition of malice and sorrow. Just to make this clear – it is the intent to devote one’s life to the business of becoming happy and harmless that inevitably provokes the onset of a PCE. Any attempt to provoke a PCE without this pure intention will only result in the frustration of failure or a head-in-the-cloud altered state of consciousness.

When an actualist fully commits to the business of becoming free of the human condition – i.e. when he or she decides to make becoming happy and harmless the most important thing in their life – this commitment marks the beginning of a process specifically designed to focus one’s attentiveness to the workings and nature of a human psyche in action, one’s own psyche. This on-going attentiveness to how am I experiencing this moment of being alive in itself generates revelations, realizations and fundamental changes that are the very provocations that guarantee the onset of PCEs.

To use your terminology, if you deliberately, with due forethought, make a total commitment to set about to poke holes in your own ‘constant ‘feeling reality’’, then something’s eventually got to give. And when a hole or crack does appear, then almost seamlessly the pure and perfect actual world of the senses appears if by magic – and as it does you immediately recognize that it is always here, was always here and has always been here. And as you ponder on the nature of a PCE you become aware that a pure consciousness experience only happens when ‘I’ am temporarily in abeyance.

It is important to also take on board the fact that it is impossible to provoke the onset of a PCE if one is feeling grumpy, resentful, annoyed, frustrated or sad – or, to put it another way, if ‘I’ and ‘my’ moods are busy strutting the stage then ‘I’ am actively preventing the possibility of the onset of a PCE. The reason I mention this is that it makes clear once again that the intent and commitment to become happy and harmless are essential ingredients if one is to aspire to intentionally provoking the onset of a PCE.

The PCEs an actualist intentionally provokes are the experiential evidence that there in fact exists a third alternative world to the human created-worlds – the instinctually grim reality and the impassioned fantasy of a Greater Reality – and that this alternative is the purity and perfection of the actual world, the world of the senses. PCEs are potent opportunities for a practicing actualist to observe the persistent and perverse nature of the human condition because one is briefly free of its grip as well as being delicious occasions for delighting in the sensual cornucopia of this lush and verdant planet all we fellow human beings live on. Such PCEs serve as touchstones for an actualist, for when the PCE fades and ‘my’ ‘self’-centred reality returns, ‘I’ then know the precise nature and the scope of the business to be done in order to become actually free from the human condition of malice and sorrow.

As a footnote to this section, I would like to make comment on the seemingly fashionable ‘wisdom’ of some Eastern spiritual teachings – the wisdom of disregarding the need for commitment, rejecting any methodology and scorning the idea that any work needs to do be done or indeed can be done in order to achieve the goal of a permanent altered state of consciousness aka Enlightenment or Self-realization. From my reading and from my own experience, such teachings are disingenuous at best since all who have achieved the Exalted State have obviously done so by being singularly committed to diligently using a method specifically designed not only to intentionally provoke ASCs but also to lead to the possibility of a permanent ASC.

In my own case I had a substantive ASC towards the end of my spiritual years that was intentionally provoked by the diligent practice of dissociation. On the face of it, it would seem that those who teach that commitment, methodology and hard work are not required for success have a vested self-interest in maintaining their own hard-won position at the top of the spiritual hierarchy. Needless to say, the reason I have mentioned this is that anyone who holds to the Eastern wisdom of disregarding the need for commitment, rejecting any methodology and scorning the idea that any work needs to do be done will find the actualism process is not for them.

4. Intentionally allowed onsets of a PCE –

As an actualist moves to the stage where he or she becomes virtually free of malice and sorrow the circumstances that allow a PCE to be intentionally provoked are more and more diminished. This is so because it is the early revelations, realizations and fundamental changes bought about by the actualism process – those that are the most tumultuous and dramatic – that are the most likely to provoke the onset of PCEs. When one becomes virtually free of malice and sorrow then the invidious feelings are reduced to such an extent that one is effortlessly and unconditionally happy and harmless for 99% of the time – a change which results in a perceptible change of direction over time.

One now no longer aspires to become free of the invidious aspects of a ‘constant ‘feeling reality’’ because the intensive work of becoming aware of, exploring and investigating the malevolent and sorrowful feelings is by and large done. Rather than being interested in, and being busy with, the business of breaking free from the grip of grim reality, a virtually free actualist is able to more and more delight in being here in this place in space in this moment of time, no matter what he or she is doing or not doing – in short he or she then becomes more interested in, and more capable of, intentionally allowing the onset of a PCE.

It is appropriate to again wave a warning flag at this point. Although spontaneous unintentional PCEs can happen in the early period of the actualism process, given the appropriate set of circumstances, most often the onset of PCEs in this stage are intentionally provoked by the actualism process itself. It therefore follows that to expect to intentionally allow the onset of a PCE whilst still in the grip of malice and sorrow, or whilst remaining the unwitting victim of one’s own mood swings, is to guarantee disappointment and failure.

Well that’s about it from me. The answer to your question was a long one, but the question needed a detailed response in order to cover the various ways that a PCE can occur. If you have followed the gist of my response, then number three will be where your interest will lie and number four will be something to look forward to when the initial work of becoming virtually happy and harmless is done.

Speaking from experience, I was hardly capable of any sustained clear thinking before I learnt to distinguish and separate thinking from my feelings and beliefs. It took an enormous amount of effort to get rid of the programming that prevents clear thinking from happening.

The first hurdle is the problem of cognitive dissonance – the total inability of a pre-programmed brain to even consider, let alone understand, that there might be an experience of freedom that is actual and sensual and not spiritual and affective. It was only because I remembered that I had had such an experience, that I knew that actual freedom lay completely outside of my spiritual beliefs and preconceptions.

Again speaking personally, I was desperately driven to start changing myself because I saw that the real-world sucked and the spiritual world was a wank. I’ve written about my motivations for taking up actualism before, so I won’t go into them here, but my urge to be free was, and is, a passionate one, not a ‘may as well’.

I recently watched a TV documentary about the last days of John Lennon. At the end of the program they showed a section of Central Park that had been set aside as a John Lennon ‘peace park’. The central focus of the park was a big plaque with the word ‘Imagine’ written on it. Presumably people go to the park, look at the plaque and imagine peace on earth. If there was an actualist peace park, it would have a plaque which said ‘are you ready to do something practical about peace on earth?’

I like it that you wrote of your experience and that it brought up so many questions for you. My advice and experience, for what its worth, is to make it your business to seek answers to these questions – not just intellectually but experientially.

The experience of the 5 years since the actualism method has been made available to all has demonstrated that the intent or impetus to investigate the dark side of the human condition – the instinctual passions of fear and aggression – has to come solely from the readers’ own insights based on their own lived experiences. Without this intent or self-motivation, any attempt to have a free and unfettered discussion about the full extent of the human condition can only result in instinctually-defensive reactions such as apathy, denial, resentment, disassociation, resistance or even outright hostility coming to the fore.

Only by understanding the human condition in toto – and experiencing how it is programmed to operate in you – can you become free of it.

Yep, you got it. But deep down, everyone knows this is a perfect world, for everyone has had a brief glimpse of that perfection at some time in their lives. These are usually glimpses in childhood or sometimes in latter-life, often induced by a sudden shock, drugs, serendipitous circumstances or in certain self-less, peace-filled situations that are known as nature experiences. These brief pure consciousness experiences are experiences that fuel the human search for freedom – they provide the knowledge that there has to be something better than normal life and there has to something better than spiritual life.

Yet these self-less pure consciousness experiences have been corrupted into self-aggrandizing narcissistic experiences of feeling ‘I am child of a God’ or even ‘I am God’. This corruption is fuelled by the spiritual belief in a life after physical death that is in turn driven by the instinctual fear of death – a potent mixture that can only lead to delusionary states of consciousness.

This is why an actualist needs a pure intent, an intent to question everything that stands in the way of becoming actually free of the human condition, especially all of spiritual beliefs. A pure intent means one aims for purity and perfection – for a genuine peace on earth in this lifetime – and that one will never settle for second-best.

This is why sincerity is both the starting point of actualism, the driving force on the path and the end of the process of actualism.

Good to discuss with you these matters. I think the operative word here is pure, as I have discovered. The PCE offers a glimpse or window out from the ‘real’ world everyone is born into (and therefore assumes this to be all there is), and suddenly one finds oneself in the unimaginable actual fairytale-like physical universe. My experience was that each time this occurred I was increasingly able to feel comfortable, at ease, as this new ‘me’ – this flesh and blood body. And every time these glimpses had a different experience to them as I explored carefully the actual physical universe that ‘I’ had normally perceived (like every other human being) to be a place of sadness, fear and aggression. Initially the contrast between the actual, benign, safe, and delightful, and the imaginary world of churning emotions, raging hormones and consuming passions is so startling that the memory is either buried or the experience appears wondrous and awesome. With a pure intent operating to want to live the experience of the PCE every moment, 24 hrs. every day I was able to use the time when I wasn’t actually here living the PCE to root around in the Human Condition – to investigate, discuss, read, think and contemplate on all those instinctual urges and social Truths, Wisdoms and accepted beliefs that made up the particular psychological and psychic entity that dwelled in me and which had taken ‘me’ over. No wonder humans feel alien on the planet.

Virtual Freedom is available for everyone and anyone who has the pure intent to be happy and harmless. If someone is not willing to make that level of ‘self’ sacrifice then any interest in an Actual Freedom would remain a purely cerebral exercise. That is what I meant by ‘two stages’ – you sort out what it is to be a human being – delve into the Human Condition and then you put what you discover into practice. If it is not put into practice demonstratively then one is fooling oneself – as is common practice on the spiritual path. An immediate aim for a Virtual Freedom will ensure one of pure intent – any gross grubbiness, power plays or self deception will become painfully obvious to oneself and others.

To Richard: I think that the point is that this state is not irreversible – unless there is a pure intent and a desire to evince the best possible one could waver. Pure intent is such a simple term I sometimes find it strange that people have difficulty with it. It simply means I will be the best I can, and if one has had a peak experience then the best is glaringly obvious. Peter to Richard, 25.2.1999

Yeah, well, it is something I have had difficulty with and I am still not sure. Richard has described it as ‘Pure intent is a palpable life-force; an actually occurring stream of benignity that originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe. It is no longer a matter of choice ... it is an irresistible pull.’ and ‘Pure intent is the connection between the intimate aspect of oneself, that one usually keeps hidden away for fear of seeming foolish, and the purity of the peak experience.’ Now, while I understand both of these statements – and writing and reading this, maybe I have just ‘got’ what pure intent is – it is my innate and non-affective connection to the purity and perfection as seen in the PCE. It is what ‘obliges’ me to continue, to keep going in the face of all the fears and provides the courage to ‘break from the herd’. I know what is possible and ‘pure intent’ will not let me ignore it. How does that sound?

Those who follow, as opposed to those who first discover, have a decidedly easier time of things. There is no doubt one does this thing of becoming free of the Human Condition oneself but Richard has laid such a wonderful word-strewn path that one would need to be a fool to diverge from it, or try to invent ‘new’ problems or new ‘sub’-paths. One keeps one’s wits about oneself, of course – the way I did that was to check out the facts for myself. One doesn’t ‘blindly’ follow, a little reading, or a scoot around the Net, quickly enables one to discern and confirm the facts as opposed to the commonly held ‘truth’ or belief about something. The proof of anything is – does it work?

The only trap is that one can end up Enlightened and this is now easily avoidable as Enlightenment is such a second-rate, foolish, inane and childish delusion that it defies intelligent consideration as an option to Actual Freedom.

By keeping one’s aspirations and goals immediate and mundane as opposed to eternal and celestial, success is guaranteed – one edges inevitably and perceptively closer to one’s destiny and has a heck of a time on the way. The immediate is the focus, here, now, in the world as-it-is. The sincere and honest tackling of the beliefs that make up one’s social identity will lob one firmly and delightfully in a Virtual Freedom whereby one is happy and harmless 99% of the time. And don’t forget the harmless bit, for one can’t be happy without being harmless.

My experience of the ‘the doing of best’, if I understand you right, may be the equivalent of what I described in my journal as mimicking the perfection and purity of the actual world, as best ‘I’ could. Yet I was always very conscious that this mimicking was just that – ‘me’ mimicking what is actual. I was always careful not to deceive myself that this was a ‘self’-less perfection for I had seen enough of the spiritual con-men strutting and posing their Divineness while being nothing other than an instinctual human being ‘off stage’, as it were.

Nonetheless I found it a useful approach for one needs to do all one can to seek perfection and purity whilst maintaining a pure intent – and that means an intent uncorrupted and unsullied by any notions of spirituality whatsoever. As such, this approach will only lead to a Virtual Freedom from the Human Condition if one has first thoroughly investigated and eliminated one’s spiritual and social conditionings and beliefs. If not, ‘ the doing of best ’ is yet another religious/spiritual wank.

Of course, one has glimpses of this ‘self’-less state in the PCE, when for a period ‘who I am’ exits the stage, or is temporarily absent, but ‘what I am’ can only be totally free when ‘who I am’ ceases to exist permanently. ‘Who I am’ is capable of resurrection or fighting back at any stage – indeed it is passionately driven to do anything possible to survive – including selling off Grandmother if need be – which is where the middle line of the diagram comes into play. This is a simple representation of the wide and wondrous path to Actual Freedom – from naiveté to Actual Freedom. We have started the line with naiveté, for it surely requires naiveté to not only consider that an actual freedom from the Human Condition is possible, but that you, personally, are the one who can do it. To fly in the face of the Wisdom of the Ancients – ‘to go where no man has gone before’ in Star Trek terms, as I put it in my Journal. I conveniently ignored Richard in my dramatization as I figured that the next pioneers were plotting a brand new course – avoiding the instinctual seduction of the Rock of Enlightenment that had dashed the efforts of all before. The other point about naiveté is that the spiritually cynical and the worldly cunning, by their very attitude, exclude themselves from the adventure, and this has been evidenced by the many who have met Richard, or read a bit about AF, and turned away.

For those willing to consider the possibility of an actual freedom, the next step is to garnish a pure intent – an intent to make it something one is willing to dedicate one’s life to and a purity such that one will settle for nothing less than the purity and perfection so obviously experienced in a Pure Consciousness Experience. If it is possible for a brief time it must be possible as a permanent state – purity and perfection is possible as a flesh and blood human being, it requires one’s pure intent to become a ‘self’ consuming passion in life.

What was obvious at the time was that it is the physical universe that is always present, eternal, infinite, pure and perfect – exquisitely and pristinely so. And that I, this flesh and blood body, is the intelligent bit that goes ‘Wow! – how extraordinary’. And I am the universe experiencing itself as a flesh and blood human being.

It is for this that I would willingly sacrifice my grubby ‘self’ for – no matter how ‘cleaned up’, no matter how good Virtual Freedom is, there is no comparison. For this ‘I’ will depart the scene and nothing else. This is what Enlightenment merely mimics, as a feeling, but with such appalling consequences of narcissism and Self-aggrandizement. The Enlightened Ones had and have feet of clay – to claim to ‘Be the Universe itself’ is an insanity on a incredulous scale and makes clear that whole business of God and God-men is nothing more than institutionalized insanity.

It is only with a pure intent and a firm down-to-earth experience of Virtual Freedom – a period of coming to one’s senses both literally and figuratively – that it is possible to avoid the seduction and instinctual pull towards self-aggrandizement that Enlightenment offers. I would suspect that those who have stood at the door marked Enlightenment would gladly sacrifice their ‘normal’ mortal identity for the Glamour, Glory and Glitz of feeling like God. Similarly, as I experienced the infinitude, purity and perfection of the physical universe happening – the Actual World – ‘I’ gladly and willingly self-immolate for that perfection and purity to be evident as me, this flesh and blood body. I firmly experienced it as my destiny – an actual freedom from the Human Condition.

This PCE has confirmed for me that Actual Freedom as the only game to play in town. As I watch the sacrifices of countless people who fight for ‘freedom’ of their particular group, suffer themselves for the ‘betterment’ of others, who blindly sacrifice all in a vain attempt at ‘betterment’ for Humanity, this sacrifice is so much more sensible and valuable. And it seems to require no special heroics, no super-human qualities. It is but the inevitable and welcome consequence of pure intent and a refusal to settle for second best. Let’s face it, the mountains have all been climbed, the continents discovered, technological discoveries, while still amazing, are a crowded field and awash with meta-physics. The human search for the beginning of time or the edge of the universe are as futile as the search for God. Wherever I looked the field was crowded – the chance of making a contribution, dwindling. The next challenge facing the human species is to rid ourselves of malice and sorrow – and a few days ago I glimpsed the ‘mountain top’ of the challenge. Of course, as I come off the peak experience I also realise the mountain top is here under my very nose, on earth at this moment – so I use the words ‘mountain top’ with a touch of poetic licence. So, after the PCE, it is obvious that my destiny lies beyond psychological and psychic self-immolation, that this event will be a definitive and decisive moment, that it is willingly and eagerly anticipated ... and that Enlightenment will be avoided. So, far from being an ‘unfair’ or ‘perverse’ exercise to cause a self-immolation or psychic death, it is the most exciting, amazing, wondrous, extraordinary journey possible for a human to make – a journey into one’s own psyche ... to the very end.

If you want to be happy and harmless then nobody does it but you.

It seems to me that this inquiry is done by the self without regard for the self almost like jumping off a cliff. It is amazing how after having gathered enough information about the woes of self, the self then in its own pathetic way attempts to dismantle itself. I think though this is the point where attention plays an important role. I am finding this curiosity-lead attention to be most liberating.

We are attempting to develop a consistent ‘story’ and terminology in describing the path to Actual Freedom not as a philosophy or another ‘ism’, but to attempt to clearly communicate our experiences to each other – to swap stories and experiences on the basis of a commonly understood language. As such the ‘curiosity-lead attention’ may well be what I was describing above as the combination of pure intent and apperceptive awareness. If your curiosity includes an investigation of the myths and beliefs of Ancient Wisdom – the foundation of the spiritual world – then a sensible, sensate experiencing will become more and more apparent. One finds oneself engaged in the thrilling business of actively dismantling one’s own psychological and psychic entity – doing what every one warns you not to do, or says is impossible to do.

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Once the decision is made to devote oneself to being happy and harmless one simply ‘weathers the storm’, both in the ‘inner’ maelstrom that is often evident as one dismantles the beliefs that form one’s social identity and frees oneself from the instinctual passions, and in the reactions of one’s fellow human beings to the radical course you are taking. It’s all just a storm in a tea cup, or a bit of mental and emotional drama that is but par for the course.

Well, the weather forecast is for smooth sailing. You never can trust those forecasts though.

I was talking to Vineeto last night and we were reflecting on some of the ‘rough’ and bewildering times when we wondered what we had let ourselves in for. The ‘Why can’t I just settle for being normal again?’ or ‘Why didn’t I just settle for the comfort and feel-good times of spiritual denial of facts rather than the fear that arises from exposing beliefs?’ But there was a burning discontentment that wouldn’t allow each of us to settle for second best. And what an adventure!

That’s where pure intent comes in – you can lift your head up out of what may seem a very convincing and real drama and remember the goal, what all the hard work is really about.

I wrote a piece on Perfection for the Glossary of our web-site which I think may be useful to put the business of being a human being in 1999 in perspective – perfection ... <snipped for space>

Just an additional point to this perfection. It is apparent in the absence of a judgmental emotional self. So I am more interested in the assertion that this world is not perfect or that I am not perfect that is more butter for the bread.

I wrote a bit in my journal that may be relevant to what you are talking of. It was at a time when I was busy with investigating love – its promise and its failure.

... ‘During this time, I remember driving up the escarpment that encircles the lush semi-tropical coastal plain where I live. I stopped and looked out at the edge of the greenery, where a seemingly endless ribbon of white sand neatly bordered it from the azure ocean. Overhead great mounds of fluffy white clouds sailed by in the blue of the sky. Right in the foreground stood a group of majestic pines towering some thirty meters tall. I was struck by the vastness, the stillness and the perfection of this planet, the extraordinariness of it all, but ... and the ‘but’ are human beings! Human beings who persist in fighting and killing each other and can’t live together in peace and harmony.

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

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

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

And the only way ‘out’ – to actually become free – was to do it, despite these values, ethics and morals that bound me to Humanity’s perpetual suffering and fighting. Once one begins to break these bonds and ties, to actualize one’s own freedom, one discovers that one has been instinctually programmed to be a member of the species, and to break with Humanity – the emotional-backed concept that binds the species together – necessitates an extinction of the these instincts in operation in this flesh and blood body. The ending of ‘my’ connection to Humanity is the ending of ‘me’.

So, even in the first weeks after reading Richard’s Journal, I knew what the consequences of my actions would be if I gave the path to Actual Freedom a ‘go’. But I had had enough experience to not get into the trap of believing what others said merely because it sounded ‘right’ – so I wanted some practical proof that Actual Freedom worked. In the beginning of the Richard’s Journal are the chapters on living together in peace and harmony, ending the battle of the sexes and unravelling the mystique of sex, and this is what I decided I would ‘cut my teeth on’ – to see if this would work. I simply acknowledged that what I, and every body else, had been doing didn’t work and would never work, and decided to actually try something new. Not just read, study and understand, but put it into practice and see if it worked. To see if I could live with one other person in peace and harmony and get to the bottom of the mess of human sexuality. Actualism is not a cerebral pastime nor a feeling-based escape from ‘reality’ – it is a full blooded commitment to expunging the alien entity within this flesh and blood body that prevents one being the universe experiencing itself as a human being. Anything less is chicken shit.

But to get back to the point – which is what you are going to do with your life? For me, when it became obvious that the ‘spiritual path’ was nothing other than following the path of Eastern Religion, and that this life I am living now is the only one I get to live, it helped to bring my focus to the question of how am I experiencing this moment of being alive, here on earth, right now. It meant I had run out of excuses to blame others or go on saying ‘why can’t people just get on with each other, why can’t people live together in peace and harmony?’ It became clear that if I couldn’t do it myself then it was a clear case of put up or shut up. There was, of course, a third alternative – for me to prove it was possible. To tackle the greatest adventure ever undertaken by human beings – to consciously self-immolate as an entity inside this flesh and blood body – to cause a mutation such that the primitive brain and its instinctual animal survival program are made redundant.

Well I’ve spent enough time reading the site to know that my letter will be blocked by Richard’s ego as No. 4’s was or replied to ‘predictably’ with Richard’s usual over excited egotistical arrogance, feigned harmlessness, cut and paste laziness and of course those impressive ‘big words’ that make him look like an inconsiderate idiot. Then one of his parrots will come to their guru’s defence using his cloned vocabulary and corrupted aggro attitude. Yet after all this ridiculous ‘get out’ my question is; why do none of you have the intelligence to work out why the list only gets 2 letters a day! Why does it not dawn on your thick skulls how alienating your exaggerated attitudes are and why on earth is Richard trotting out a may listening-l post? To keep something already dead, alive and wanking???

Well, it does look as though the spiritualists are circling the wagons with the latest ‘observer’ waving that hoary old flag – ‘If only we would love each other ...’.

I am curious as to what brought you to this list – was it just for a bit of flaming? Vineeto and I went on to the Sannyas mailing list a few months ago, to see if there were perhaps others who may be dissatisfied with the spiritual path and eventually got cyber-executed for daring to question Rajneesh. As an ‘ex’ I was wanting to let others know there is now, for the first time, an alternative available to the spiritual ‘freedom’ offered by Eastern Religions. A few people did come across to the Actual Freedom List but apparently none are sufficiently interested to take the jump out of the spiritual world. In my experience, it does take a burning discontent with life as-it-is, and I wonder if that applies to you. This discontent can take different forms – for me, one of the discontents was the continual failure of my ‘love’ relationships and a desire to free myself from sexual inhibitions, instinctual compulsiveness and ignorance. Another factor was, having had children, there was nothing I knew that I could pass on to them – I was confused, bewildered, bedevilled ... and definitely not free! I had no answers.

I use the word sincere deliberately as I think it is this sincerity that you confuse with a lack of sense of humour.

Sincerity is questioning and at the same time not being attached to anything and taking everything lightly. When you KNOW there is no attachment and nobody can destroy what you KNOW. I can make fun of Osho because even though I am grateful to him I do not take him seriously).

Sincerity in questioning is to genuinely question to the point that one finds a factual answer, even if this answer shatters all that you believed and held dear.

To question and not seek an experiential answer such that will change your life is a total waste of time, and mere wanking.

And to set limits, or stop the process at the first sign of fear, or offence, or doubt, is insincere.

And to remain unattached is to be disinterested and ensures that the questioning remains a cerebral concept rather than active, vital and on-going to the point where an answer in terms of a clear, obvious and direct conclusion. Should the aim and intent of this questioning be to become happy and harmless, one then is sincerely forced to do something to actualise the result of the questioning.

One is then forced – out of sincerity – to do something that one would not normally do – change one’s behaviour – actually demolish or eliminate a bit of ones own ‘self’ that one holds so dear.

The other benefit of continuously asking yourself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is that if your intent is to become happy and harmless then one is irrevocably forced to consider the ‘ripples’ one’s feelings, moods, words and actions have on others as this too effects one’s own happiness.

Someone wrote the other day saying: ‘is this all you offer? – I do this all the time, and it is what the spiritual people teach anyway’. All you are is anti-Osho and I’m pissed that this is all you offer.’

No, the ‘offering’ is 180 degrees different to the spiritual.

Just a reply to your observations about us, what we are saying, and how we are saying it.

What doesn’t seem to be understood by Peter and Vineeto is that we all go, and we cannot go otherwise, in our own direction and pace.

On the contrary, I understand this as a common belief, both in the ‘normal’ world and the ‘spiritual’ world. In the normal world it comes in the form of ‘who do you think you are’ or you ‘go with the flow’ or ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’. In the spiritual world it is enshrined in ‘Existence provides’ It is God’s will’ or WE are all Enlightened, we just don’t know it’ or ‘everything’s perfect anyway ...’

I had it very strongly and I was shocked out of it, firstly the death of my son aged 13, shortly followed by the death of the spiritual master that I followed. I then had a sense of urgency, such that I made becoming free my priority in life – and I wanted to be free, on this earth, in this lifetime. I found it increasingly difficult to believe in an afterlife or a God after the both deaths. I then simply put the ‘foot on the accelerator’ – I gave up waiting for Godot.

But I firmly acknowledge that while the perfection and purity of the actual world is ever-present, under our very noses, it will not be everyone who is interested to discover and experience it.

And fair enough too – we are, after all, becoming freer in a modern society. We now have access to a lot more information about life and, as such, are more free and able to decide for ourselves how we wish to live our lives.

The other thing that is startlingly obvious in a PCE is that amidst this always present perfection and purity of the actual world, the human species battle it out with each other to the point of waging horrendous wars, resent having to be here at all and are generally miserable to the point of depression.

When I met Richard I decided to devote my life to the eradication of the Human Condition within me. I wanted to live the experience of the PCE – the self-less state of purity and perfection – 24hrs. a day every day. So, I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck into the doing of it. It was so liberating to be able to do something about myself and my behaviour and not allow myself to be blindly led, not to believe what others told me was true, not to merely do what everyone else was doing simply because everyone else was doing it, not to keep doing things that didn’t work and not to be automatically driven and run by my instinctual passions. To become incrementally free of the Human Condition. The amazing thing about the doing of becoming actually free from malice and sorrow is that one becomes more happy and more harmless on the way. And one literally comes to one’s senses such that the senses do become heightened, one thinks less neurotic thoughts and feels less passionately driven by one’s instinctual drives. It is a win, win and more win situation on the path to actual freedom.

Now I only want 24 hour Actual Freedom.

Well, roll up your sleeves – there’s plenty to do! You are talking about ‘changing Human Nature’, but the best thing is – you only have to change yourself and nobody else. Changing everyone else is what most people aim for – a physical impossibility.

Changing only you is eminently achievable – and scientifically verified as possible. It is possible to re-program one’s own brain from all the social programming and it is possible to evince a mutational adaptation to eliminate the instinctual passions.

In my experience there is yet another quality which may well be as important, if not more important, than altruism in evincing self-immolation. This quality is integrity –

‘the condition of having no part or element taken away or lacking; undivided state; completeness. 2 The condition of not being marred or violated; unimpaired or uncorrupted condition; original state; soundness. 3a Freedom from moral corruption; innocence, sinlessness. b Soundness of moral principle; the character of uncorrupted virtue; uprightness, honesty, sincerity’ ... Oxford Dictionary .

Having experienced this integrity of innocence, benevolence and undividedness in pure consciousness experiences it then becomes a prime motivation to experience it 24 hrs. a day, every day. The absence of conflict, confusion, deceit and duplicity – the absence of both the social and instinctual entity that are in constant battle has to be experienced to be understood. One cannot understand it unless one experiences it although it certainly helps if one is prepared to risk rocking one’s boat. By digging into one’s self one is certainly much, much more likely to induce a pure consciousness experience. By doing nothing, one gets nothing in return. Unless one investigates, one never finds out. Unless one changes, one stays the same. Unless one is motivated by integrity then one will remain a very, very cunning entity either fighting it out in the ‘real’ world or travelling on the spiritual path of self-discovery seeking self-satisfaction and self-aggrandizement.

Being guided by integrity or being guided by pure intent, to use Richard’s term, ensures that I will not deceive myself, that I will be honest with myself, that I will not settle for second best – that I will not stop until I live the pure consciousness experience, 24 hrs a day every day, until I am irrevocably free of the Human Condition.

Ah well. It was a bit of a rave again. I am trying to put into words my thoughts and experiences of the direct path to Actual freedom as opposed to Richard’s experience of travelling through the dementia of Enlightenment and out the other side. At the moment of self-immolation the instinctual and traditional urge to become a Saviour kicked in and it took him some 11 years to rid himself of the delusion. For ‘me’ there will be no fame, glory, glamour or glitz – simply extinction. T’is no wonder that denial is so endemic and integrity so scarce.

But for those willing to launch themselves on the path to Actual freedom the incremental rewards are such that one is driven on by success, integrity and naiveté. It does take a wee touch of courage to ditch the familiar old programming from the brain, to wipe the hard drive clean of all the old rotten corrupted programming but, as is evident in the pure consciousness experience, an actual freedom from the human condition in total is the inevitable result.

The last observation relates to the so-called festive season of Christmas that has recently come and gone. A conversation I recently had with someone about Christmas reminded me that even when I was a normal person in the real-world, i.e. well before I took on Eastern religious beliefs, I clearly saw the folly of the Christian ‘season of peace and goodwill’. Even then, I knew enough about on-going history of animosity and bloodshed between the various religious factions on the planet to know that when followers of one of the Christians sects pray for peace on earth they are really praying that everybody else become Christians like them in order that their own particular version of ‘peace on earth’ could prevail.

The clear seeing of this hypocrisy meant that I could not take part in the so-called celebrations of Christmas without feeling a hypocrite, and being a hypocrite, myself. Sincerity meant that I stopped partaking in the sham and also that I stopped keeping up the pretence with my children, for to do so would only be aiding and abetting in the perpetuation of eons-old religious beliefs, myths and fantasies.

The fervent passions and hopes of those who look to the heavens and pray for peace does nothing but shroud the facts as to why there has never been, and can never be, peace on earth between socially-indoctrinated and instinctually-driven human ‘beings’.

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