To Vineeto: Actualism won’t spread like a chain letter till we ‘actually care’ enough to learn how to observe and examine human instincts without ‘investigating’ them as though they are criminal.

Your comment ‘till we ‘actually care’  enough’ caught my eye as I recently had a wide ranging conversation with someone about the topic of caring and sensitivity. We soon fell to swapping stories about certain events in our lives which proved to be significant in widening our outlook from purely self-centred to including a concern for the antagonism and despair that we both saw as inherent to the human condition. I particularly enjoyed the conversation, not only because my friend was willing to relate his stories but also that it set me thinking about the topic in general. As such I thought it worthwhile to share some of my stories of the significant events that served to set me caring about what is often called the ‘plight of humanity’.

The first event of significance happened to me when I was about 9 or 10 years old. My parents had bought a television for the first time and I developed a habit of sneaking into the living room and watching it with the sound turned down after they had gone to bed. One night, as I sat on the floor in front of the set, a documentary about the Nazi extermination camps came on. For a little boy who had a sheltered life in a ‘fortunate’ country that had never directly experienced a war fought on its territory, the sudden appearance of irrefutable evidence of what human beings were capable of doing to each other was both shocking and appalling. Not a loss of innocence but a loss of ignorance.

The next event of significance was leaving the working class suburbs that I had lived in all my life and heading off to other side of town to go to university. I was then confronted with the inequities of class, privilege, power and wealth that typify every society and again this left a lasting impression. In the middle of my studies at university, I travelled by ship to London to do a practical year in an architect’s office, stopping off in Durban, South Africa. Durban was a wealthy seaside holiday town for Whites during the Apartheid years and I remember seeing a little dark-skinned boy peeking through a gap in the fence of a Whites-only amusement park on the sea-side promenade. Bus stops had shelters for Whites-only and restaurant toilets had signs that said Whites only. Again the extent of man’s inhumanity to man was shockingly evident.

When I eventually got to Europe and travelled around I remember being taken aback not only at how old and ‘set in aspic’ human culture is but also of being aware that literally every square metre of Europe’s soil had been drenched in blood from millennia upon millennia of almost continuous tribal warfare and reigns of terror imposed by autocratic and theocratic regimes.

Travelling overland on my way home to Australia, I left what could loosely be termed ‘civilized Europe’ and travelled through what was largely at the time a dark, feudal, tribal, superstition-ridden land between Europe and Asia to eventually arrive in the mayhem of an over-populated India. Here I was confronted by poverty the likes of which I had never seen before as well as levels of squalor and disease that were mind-numbing. An incident I found particularly disturbing was being confronted in the streets of Madras by children thrusting the leprosy-ridden stumps of what remained of their hands at me, shouting ‘please Saab’ and begging for money.

From Madras I then flew from a poor, unhygienic, unhealthy and over-crowded India to a wealthy, clean, healthy and sparsely populated Australia in a matter of hours … and the sudden contrast was shocking, to say the least. I remember musing for a long time at what seemed the inherent unfairness that I should be born into a position of privilege whilst billions of my fellow human beings were born less privileged than I. In the end the experience had such a profound effect on me that it was one of the reasons that led me not to pursue a materialist life – the other reason being that I had observed first-hand, and experienced first-hand, that accumulation of possessions and wealth with its subsequent power are by no means prerequisites for happiness.

The next significant event in my life was marriage and child-rearing, both of which failed to quell by what was now a underlying discontent – a background sometimes-subtle, sometimes-more-evident feeling of ‘Is this all there is to life?’ In hindsight, it is quite a radical change to leave the childhood family nest and strike off on one’s own into the world at large and discover by trial and error and circumstance that, to put it bluntly, ‘the real world sucks’. And not only that, it was evident to me that everybody else was more or less in the same boat – everybody’s happiness was both conditional and brittle and harmony amongst human beings was surface-deep at best. Again in hindsight, this lack of contentment with materialism meant I was ripe for the next turning point in my life.

The event that instigated this change of course was the collapse of my marriage. I was plunged into a ‘dark-night-of-the-soul’ despair as my world collapsed around me … and lo and behold, I found Spirituality. I say ‘lo and behold’ because finding God is a common occurrence after a dark night of the soul experience, so my experience was in no way as unique or as special as I though t it was at the time. A whole alternative world opened up to me and in my despair fairy tales similar to those I thought to have been weird as a kid suddenly seem to be revelations to me. Of course, my desperation at the time made me blind to the fact that what I had unwittingly fallen into was the honey-trap of religious belief largely because the stories, myths and legends were different to those of the monotheistic religion I was familiar with. At the time however, I was hooked, so much so that I left the real-world behind and plunged into living in a spiritual commune and living the spiritual life.

The next event of consequence that occurred was the ending of the Rajneesh empire in the U.S. with the subsequent revelations of despotism, corruption, murder, xenophobia and acts of terrorism. I was shocked at what blind faith en masse can manifest within the human condition – indeed the combination of faith and loyalty has produced some of the most horrendous acts in humanity’s long history of heinous brutalities. After this the order of the day for Rajneesh and Rajneesh’s followers became individual responsibility, which by and large meant an individual faith.

I have described what effect the death of my teenage son had on me in my Journal but that was a seminal event in my life in that it gave my search for freedom both impetus and urgency. I then knew it was up to me as an adult to be able to pass on – by example, not by theory – that it is possible to become free of the torments that typify the human condition.

Within a few months of my son’s death I had an insight one evening which allowed me to clearly see that the spiritual world that I had got myself into was nothing other than ‘Olde Time Religion’ albeit one of the Eastern varieties as opposed to one of the Western versions. It took a few years and a good deal more trial and error experimenting with yet more variations of spirituality before I was finally convinced that any form of metaphysical/spiritual/mystical belief is an impassioned escapist charade perpetuated by the eons-old myth that ‘I’ can survive physical death.

I then found myself at a cusp in my life – I had thoroughly road-tested the two basic alternative life pursuits that were available for a human being, materialism and spiritualism, for many years of my life and found them both to be lacking credibility and sensibility.

As I looked around I found many of my friends taking the middle path of compromise – a foot in both camps as it were. Most of them went back to materialist pursuits, some of them accumulating wealth and power by inculcating yet another unsuspecting generation into Eastern Spiritualism and Mysticism, others turned snake-oil sellers by offering healings, readings and therapies to the many who have a penchant for superstition, whilst the majority became full-time materialists and part-time spiritualists – still talking the talk but having given up walking the walk.

The death of my son had ruled such compromise out for me and the next serendipitous event proved another of life’s major turning points. It proved to be the most significant event because it presented me with the chance to put into action the legacy of caring I had built up from all of the preceding events in my life that had left me with both a burning discontent with the human condition and the impetus to find a way to finally bring an end to the tenacious instinctual grip it imposes upon each and every human being born.

Needless to say you know what that event was so I have no need to go on. I realize that this is rather a long post, but I thought it appropriate that at least someone on this list said something substantive about actually caring.

I, for one, care enough about peace on earth to actually do something about bringing an end to my malice and my sorrow – that’s what I call actually caring.

In the above circumstances ‘I’ am exposed but unlike others I make the effort to keep the lights on and fully experience it. This is ‘my’ pure intent at this moment.

Just the other day I had a visit from a man who I have known from my spiritual years. I always enjoy chatting with him, and particularly so because he is one of the few people I know from that time who is still actively searching. He even became interested in actualism for a while but he could be said to be a spiritual-experience junky because he had an altered state of consciousness experience and ardently wanted more of the same. As such the proposition that spiritualists are searching 180 degrees in the wrong direction had no appeal to him at all.

He started to talk about a TV documentary he had seen regarding the latest relativistic cosmological theory which proposes that the universe we humans sensately experience is but one of many universes, aka ‘quantum fluctuations’, that could have, or indeed have, arisen from the ‘background quantum vacuum’. Given that I had also seen the program and that this is currently a thread on this mailing list I was interested in chatting with him about the sense he made of relativistic cosmology. In short, I found that he baulked at any attempt to talk about the sense of the notion because he was enamoured with the whole theoretical construct in that it opened up the further possibility of all sorts of further imaginary scenarios.

One aspect of the TV program that I particularly remembered was the on-going discussion amongst the relativistic cosmologists as to why this universe ‘came into being’ and not one of the infinite number of other randomly possible universes that could have ‘come into being’ out of the background quantum gravity. The conclusion that seems to be prevalent is that ‘this universe’ has occurred solely in order that human consciousness could exist – in other words, the cosmologists’ imaginative ‘reasoning’ came to a conclusion that is utterly anthropocentric. At the end of the program one of the scientists related an anecdote where an audience member supposedly interrupted a cosmologist’s lecture and declared that she knew that the universe sat on top of a giant turtle’s back. The cosmologist responded by asking the woman ‘what was the turtle standing on?’, to which she replied ‘you can’t trick me – it’s turtles all the way down’. As the program ended the final image was of a stack of turtles, on top of which sat not the universe but the figure of a human being.

It occurred to me that the ending exemplified the ‘self’-generated obsession that human beings have that consciousness is primary and matter is secondary, so I pursued this line of conversation with my guest for a while. At first he had some difficulty in acknowledging that matter does exist separate from (his) consciousness, then he had difficulty in making a distinction between (his) consciousness and matter. As the conversation moved on it became clear as to why he was having such difficulty. He said he once had a spiritual experience of an ego-less state whereby his own consciousness merged with ‘everything’, as he put it. When I asked him if everything had a capital ‘E’ as in ‘Everything’ he sheepishly acknowledged that it sometimes did – I say ‘sheepishly’ because he knows I am an actualist. His liking for relativistic cosmology – or subjectivistic cosmology as it would be more accurate to call it – was immediately obvious because any metaphysical theorizing that gives credence to the ‘self’-aggrandizing fantasies of ‘self’-centred consciousness would be intuitively appealing.

Given that he had had an experience of an expanded ‘self’ consciousness and indeed was even teaching this to others, it became obvious that it was futile to pursue the topic further so I made us coffee, he bummed the makings of a cigarette from me and we put our feet up for a while. The conversation then turned to the subject of searching for the meaning of life and he made the comment that he had always been driven to make sense of life even as a young boy and that he thought that this was a prime motivation for human beings in general. I agreed with him and said that I had written a book about the sense I had made about the human condition because I thought it might be of interest to others.

As the conversation continued it emerged that what he was interested in was making sense of the possibility of a higher form of consciousness as in an overarching Consciousness that transcends the grim reality of everyday existence. I then said that I had also been attracted to this until a series of events that began with the death of my son and culminated with my meeting Richard led to me abandoning trying to make sense of this ‘self’-centred fantasy and completely reversed my focus to becoming vitally interested in making sense of why the human condition is typified by endless wars, conflicts, arguments, sadness, despair, escapist fantasies, failed hopes and impossible dreams.

Bringing the conversation closer to home I said I wanted to know why I couldn’t live with at least one other person in peace and harmony and that I had used this as the starting point of my investigations into the human condition. We both agreed that there is no more difficult a testing ground than this but he was wary of pursuing the subject further as the very subject appeared to be too close to the bone.

Afterwards I reflected on the vast gulf between his intent and my intent in wanting to make sense of life – his is a search for the True Meaning of consciousness, whereas mine is wanting to experientially understand the malice and sorrow that is inherent to the human condition such that I can become free of it. It seemed to me that while we both were driven by the same motivational impulse to make sense of things, our focus and our intent were indeed poles apart.

This chance meeting appeared to me to encapsulate the differences in intent between an actualist’s search for meaning and the traditional search for meaning, which is why I mentioned it in the context of our discussion as it may be of use to you given your years of being on the spiritual path and your own spiritual experiences.

I am well aware of the search for meaning enterprise. This is especially intense during adolescence, many of my classmates and friends were interested in philosophy (Cioran, Nietzsche), psychology, the Great Artists and even bits of eastern spirituality. But I also remember discussing this theme with my then girlfriend after a sex encounter on a roof-top while gazing at the stars. I remember we were aware that after this initial search for meaning and questioning of life, most people get stuck in the petty worries and schemes of everyday living. I remember saying that I will not become one of them, a blasé, never.

As for my situation, I understand your point and your friend interests but they are not part of my current intentions. I’m not regarding PCE as an escape from my day-to-day ‘grey-rose’ work-home-clubs-sleep numb existence (an ASC with a different stamp on it). I’m not searching for an altered poppy-smile state here, my interest is located in living the facts of life day-by-day whatever the cost.

Yep. I have had many pure consciousness experiences that startlingly revealed that the meaning of life is abundantly apparent in the actual world of sensate experiencing and that it is clearly not to be found within the human condition, be it in grim reality or in the fantasy world of a Greater Reality, by whatever name it masquerades as.

And I’m not a half-measure man... I usually go till the end. It’s amazing that this AF stuff is something consistent in whatever direction I explore it, even though afterwards it seems at best insane.

I too was initially attracted by the down-to-earth sensibility of actualism – it simply lays out the facts of what it is to be a human being, points the finger at the root causes of the malice and sorrow inherent within the human condition and offers an utterly simple, and demonstrably obvious, path to becoming free of it. And I can relate to the seemingly insane bit for I would often, after listening to Richard or reading some of his writings and being struck by its consistency and sensibleness, experience my head spinning afterwards as I realized that what he was saying was diametrically opposite to what people believed or imagined to be ‘the Truth’ about the root cause of human belligerence and suffering.

Actualism is like gravity, the closer you get, the harder it is to resist.

Well put. Although it is not obviously the case for everyone who comes across actualism, I can clearly remember ‘not being able to stay away’ when I came across Richard.

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I am fascinated by the idea that actualism uses some of the basic software elements of the ‘self’ (altruism and desire) and ... hocus-pocus: the ‘self’ vanishes provided there is a connection with the purity of the Universe.

And the only way to test out the idea to see if it works is by becoming an actualist – the catch 22 the most baulk at.

But I also wonder whether desire and altruism also disappear together with fear, nurture, aggression, egoism and narcissism when the process is completed.

I can certainly affirm that all of the instinctual passions and their consequences disappear completely in a PCE, and from my own experience of living in a virtual freedom from the human condition for some 6 years now I can report that, whilst altruism is still a motivating force in my life, the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire have all but become ineffective … and from 7 years of close observation of Richard I can confirm that not a skerrick of them is observable in action in someone who is actually free of the human condition.

What specific desires have you lost along the way, if you can nominate just a few? Desire for me is the most shadowy item in the actualist bookstore.

This is what I wrote about instinctual desire in the The Actual Freedom Trust Glossary –

Desire — 1 The fact or condition of desiring; the feeling that one would derive pleasure or satisfaction from possessing or obtaining something; a longing. 2 sexual appetite, lust. 3 an expressed wish, a request. 4 something desired or longed for. Oxford Dictionary

Desire is the drive to survive – it translates into sexual conquest, power over others, and attaining the necessities of survival such as territory, food, offspring, and the protection of others. Desire is the instinct that drives us to sexual avarice and a blind urge to impregnate, procreate and reproduce ourselves – come what may. The relentless desire to accumulate, amass, covert, dominate, control and obliterate is the direct cause of poverty, corruption, hunger and famine. The Actual Freedom Trust Glossary

Before I became an actualist, I had a good deal of experience of the failure of materialistic pursuits to bring me happiness, let alone allow me to be harmless. The instinctual passion of desire most prominently manifests as the desire for wealth and its associated power over others, the desire for fame and the adulation of others, the ceaseless accumulation of possessions and property always seemed paltry pursuits. Whilst I had previously found these pursuits wanting, as an actualist I have come to experientially understand the brutal and senseless instinctual passions that underpin these desires.

Once I came to experience raw instinctual survival fear and consequential aggression, the deep-seated emotions that arise from instinctual drive began to lose their affective power, so much so that I no longer harbour any moral or ethical objections to material wealth per se. Nowadays I am appreciative of the tangible benefits of the safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure that are the by-products of wealthy societies.

I have also had a good deal of experience of the failure of spiritual pursuits and I have already written about this extensively so I won’t go over the territory again, other than to say that I discovered the spiritual world to be an incestuous cesspool of self-gratification.

The most primal instinctual passion is the desire to procreate – to impregnate or be impregnated, depending on one’s gender. Of all of my investigations into the human instincts this has proved to be one of the most rewarding as not only have I succeeded in disempowering the brutish and senseless sexual drive such that I am now free to enjoy the sensual pleasures of sex but I have also freed others from my sexual predatoriness. In hindsight, the investigation into instinctual sexual desire has been one of the most fruitful aspects of my investigations into the instinctual passions as it has not only opened the door to being able to live in peace and harmony with my partner but it also help attune my senses to the myriad of sensual delights of everyday living.

One desire, however, still remains active and persistent and that is the desire to become actually free of the human condition.

And I’m not sure whether Richard is running on altruistic auto-pilot. For if he’s not on auto-pilot, then what motivates its actions? (based on your own experience of PCEs).

In a PCE, ‘me’ and ‘my’ instinctual passions are temporarily in abeyance. With the whole affective faculty temporarily inoperative, neither selfist nor altruistic feelings are present because everything is experienced as being utterly perfect in the actual world of the senses.

In a PCE, consideration for one’s fellow human beings is an effortless consequence of the total absence of instinctual malice and sorrow. This consideration is effortless in that it is not a product of any moral or ethical requisites whatsoever and nor is it a product of the tender half of the instinctual passions. And further this consideration is not passive in a PCE as one taps into the intrinsic benignity of the universe itself and as such, one literally wishes the best for each and every one of one’s fellow human beings.

My observation is that Richard’s effortless well-meaningness is the inevitable outcome of his being free of the human condition.

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It is possible to start from aggression and egoism and become Alexander the Great or to use nurture and narcissism and become God-on-Earth or to develop egoism and desire and be another Rockefeller or to use desire and narcissism and become a top-model or to strengthen desire and altruism and ...

Yep. It all boils down to intent – ‘what you want to do with your life’ is another way of putting it.

Indeed so, intent is the human freedom of choice.

I realize that the issue of freedom of choice, aka free will, has been the subject of philosophical debate down through the ages, but as an actualist none of it makes sense to me. Once I started to become aware of the extent to which the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire constantly influenced both my thinking and my actions, the very notion of freedom of choice became almost risible. What I did notice, however, was that there was one constant thread that ran through my life and that was, and still is, an innate caring for my fellow human beings and it is this that has caused me to be uninterested in certain things and events and yet vitally interested in others.

In hindsight, it is not that I have deliberately chosen to do certain things and not do others in my life, it is more like I have not been attracted to certain opportunities that arose and yet have been attracted by other opportunities. And often by the time I discovered that I was attracted by an opportunity, I found that I was already doing it, despite whatever qualms and reservations I may have previously had.

The business of being alive is very simple and becoming an actualist only simplified the business further. I ended up with a single aim that was in total accord with an intent I always had in my life – to be happy as well as being able to live in harmony with my fellow human beings. As such, I didn’t so much make a choice to become an actualist, it was more like not resisting the ‘gravity’, to use your analogy.

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Software (the psyche) can be modified, upgraded, deleted, transferred, shared, etc., you can function in many different ‘modes’ (altered states) but can ‘you’ function with no software at all?

The only answer to this question that is worth its salt is an experiential answer. The very nature of the question itself demands an experiential answer – and that is the dare implicit in actualism.

Do the senses and thoughts of a successful actualist work together in perfect harmony with altruistic intent but with no desire attached to them?

Speaking as an actualist, I found that I had to put wanting to become happy and harmless above every other desire in my life – anything less than a 100% commitment only invites failure.

In my view altruism and egoism are not separate from each other, they are the two faces of the same coin, of the same archetype, like good/bad.

Whilst this may be your view, altruism is not a selfish action, else it is not altruism.

Altruism – Regard for others as a principle of action; unselfishness. Oxford Dictionary

I also know from experience that altruism is an instinctive drive within human beings. When I first heard of my son’s death my first reaction was a gut reaction to swap places with him – to give my life in order that he could live again. This was a visceral gut-reaction and one that is well evidenced as being common to all parents when faced with similar situations. When I came to see the lifeless body in the coffin I again had an altruistic impulse and this time it was to devote my life to find a way to ending the angst that each and every successive generation has to go through in trying to make sense of the human condition we are all unwittingly born into. It was exactly this impulse that eventually lead me to accepting the challenge of following in Richard’s footsteps such that a way will be established for future generations to become free of the malice and sorrow endemic within the human condition.

As with any other archetype, this particular one is made of two opposites, one directed outwards and one inwards. Aggression/Fear and Nurture/Desire may be included in the same category. Altruism is measured by the person who receives it not by the one who gives. If I measure my altruism it may very well be in fact a measure of my disguised egoism (as in spiritual practice). These are my reactions, hope they are only thought reactions.

The altruistic desire to ‘self’-immolate obviously has nothing to do with egoism – it runs far, far deeper than that. Whilst those who have had children would readily relate to the innate human altruistic impulse, this whole enterprise is work in progress and each individual who devotes his or her life to becoming free of malice and sorrow will obviously do so only by accessing their own pure intent to do so. In other words, the ball is in your court.

That’s a good description. From memory, I would say that when I started to become interested in actualism I also had a ‘well-meaning intent’.

Everybody who is interested in actualism starts from where they start, in the situation they are in and with the level of intent that they currently have. In my case, my well-meaning intent was sufficient for me to set myself what I felt to be a realizable goal – to change myself sufficiently such that I could live with at least one person in unreserved peace and harmony. As it turned out it was a pretty radical goal and in order to achieve it I found that I had to continuously raise my level of intent. And by doing so I started to have pure consciousness experiences whereby I came to experientially understand what having a pure intent means.

I can also relate to your example of starting to become acutely aware of the brutish aspects of the human animal instinctual sexual desire. It can be quite disturbing and daunting when one starts to become aware of the ‘dark side’ of one’s human nature and it’s not something that you would deliberately want to do unless you had a very good reason to do so. The very good reason that I had was that I wanted to get rid of everything that stood in the way of me being able to live peacefully and harmoniously with Vineeto in an intimate companionship.

What this intention meant in practice was that not only did I want to be happy but that my being harmless to others became even more important. This over-arching intention to stop causing harm to others meant that I was able to make my way through the maze of beliefs, feelings and passions that stood in the way of this being possible.

I don’t know if that makes sense to you or not, but it did to me when I started to realize that I wanted to become an actualist and it makes even more sense to me now.

As Richard uses the term pure intent, yes.

It is only when one directly experiences the peerless perfection and unimaginable purity of the actual world in a PCE can one make the life-changing decision that this is how one wants to live one’s life – come what may. This come-what-may decision to set in motion a process that will eventually lead to ‘my’ demise requires a purity of intent such that one will never ever again settle for second best.

My experience is that ‘well-meaning intent’ has it roots in the common-to-all pure consciousness experience whereby all human beings feel that they are trapped within the human condition and either accept this as their fate, rile against it, or seek to escape from it. For me the appeal in actualism was, and still is, the opportunity to be free of all of the human condition.

A well-meaning intent has two possible outlets – either secular or spiritual. A brief clear-eyed look at history will reveal that all of the practical advances in human health, safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure have come from well-meaning secular activities and precious little, if any, have come from well-meaning spiritualists. Whilst well-meaning spiritualists aim is provide succour and comfort for ‘the soul’ they have a long history of fiercely resisting the efforts of well-meaning secularists to advance human comfort and eliminate human suffering.

Would I be right in saying that you have a well-meaning intent combined with an uneasiness about settling for second best? In hindsight, it was my uneasiness about settling for second-best that kept me moving on when I kept discovering the flaws in spiritualism – both in the teachers and the teachings.

It sounds as though you already have a similar intent as I had when I first became sincerely interested in actualism and you seem to have grasped the fact that actualism is about being happy and harmless in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are, i.e. that it is, unlike spiritualism, an utterly down-to-earth business.

Once I had grasped this fact – exactly as I do in any other down-to-earth business – I then set myself a long-term goal, to change myself sufficiently such that I could live with at least one person in unreserved peace and harmony. By doing so, I immediately gave direction, purpose and meaning to my well-meaning intent, whereupon I imperceptively moved from thinking about practicing actualism to practicing actualism.

I use the word ‘imperceptively’ here deliberately as it was not as though ‘I’ made a conscious deliberate decision to start practicing actualism, it was more like I found that I had started, despite ‘my’ fears, doubts and objections. In hindsight, all ‘I’ had to do was to get out of the way and allow my well-meaning intent a chance to blossom.

Setting myself a long-term goal was only part of activating pure intent because the process actualism is about being attentive to how I am experiencing this moment. In other words, implicit in the actualism process is the short-term immediate goal of being happy and harmless right now, wherever I happen to be now, doing whatever I happen to be doing now. In this moment-to-moment business, I also discovered that it was useful to set myself a series of short-term goals in order to start breaking a life-time of accrued habits and beliefs. I found that little things were good to start with – not feeling miserable about the weather, not being annoyed about how other people were driving, not being frustrated if the waiter was slow and so on. Everyday life is chock-a-block full of opportunities for me to cease being antagonistic to my fellow human beings and to cease feeling miserable about being here.

Exactly as with learning any new skill, it’s best to start with easier, simple, more basic steps in order to gain the confidence and expertise necessary to tackle the more thorny and stubborn issues.

Once I got rid of the spiritual idea that I had to be grateful to ‘someone’ or ‘something’ for being here, I started to more and more experience a fascination with being attentive to being here, which in turn led to a joie de vivre, which in turn lead to a PCE. And the PCE itself then gave me a goal that was way beyond the goal I had initially set myself – not that it made it redundant in any way but it made my first goal but a stepping stone on the path to becoming actually free of the whole of the human condition.

The tangible qualities of pure intent are that I can never ever settle for anything less than being actually free because I know that to do so is to settle for second best. I experience pure intent as a palpable drive, an obsession with seeing this process through to its inevitable end.

It’s a pleasure. Having been at this business for a good time now I know that the discoveries I have made about the human condition are not unique to me – whilst there are minor variations between social identities, my instinctual identity is generic to the human species and therefore common to all. Having said that I cannot walk your path to freedom for you any more than Richard can walk my path to freedom for me.

The wonderfully exquisite thing about daring to become free of the human condition is that it is a journey only you can make.

Every now and then, I would apply attentiveness externally ... and look around the room ... this was helpful. After this session of reading and applying, I felt a little lighter and more aware ... better than before ... although I felt I could easily loose ground if I allowed determination and resolve to wane. It occurred to me finally that: Actually, it is impossible to genuinely live as a sensate human body if one is still identified as one of the millions of ordinary beings with human instincts and social values and psychological feelings. Just to contemplate the significance of this.

Indeed and it is not as though one can merely disidentify with the rest of humanity – which is the traditional chicanery of creating a seemingly new identity – one needs to cease being a social and instinctual identity altogether. A far bigger job.

It occurred to me also that reflection and contemplation are useless if engaged in without attentiveness.

Yep. The classic instance of this is the practice of sitting in the corner with your eyes closed. By deliberately withdrawing from the world as-it-is and people as they are, one can train oneself to completely cut off all sensory perception and all sorts of dreaming and imagining can result. I have had it that I have imagined myself to be bathed in white light, floating through ether, bathed in golden light, expanding into a void so that I became as big as the void, and so on.

It’s no wonder that for millennia humanity has been seduced to believing and feeling that the meaning of life is not to be found here, in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are.

One needs attentiveness as a feedback guide ... a rope or even signal ... at least I have found that true for me. Without attentiveness ... I feel awash ... and at the full mercy of endless, countless disorienting waves of feelings. With attentiveness ... I can examine these feelings in a backdrop of a physical environment. There is a certain anchoring that attentiveness provides.

It would appear that at some point at the beginning of actualism I abandoned the pursuit of a spiritual meaning of life and made a commitment to being here, in the physical world. Although I can’t remember a particular moment, I suspect with hindsight that it was when I took on the challenge of living with at least one other person in utter peace and harmony – it being the most down-to-earth challenge I could think of taking up at the time.

But whatever situation one finds oneself in, the total commitment to being happy and harmless, here in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are, ensures that one’s attentiveness disempowers any sad or acrimonious feelings whilst simultaneously encouraging the felicitous feelings. When one is virtually free of any sad and acrimonious feelings one’s felicitous feelings produce a fascination with the very business of being here as a flesh and blood human body. This fascination then in turn leads to a sensuous awareness of the splendours of the happenings of this ongoing moment of the infinitude of this wondrous universe.

Speaking personally, I didn’t spend a great deal of time reading Richard’s Journal – the only writing available at the time. Once I got the gist of what he was talking about it was apparent that the only way I could find whether what he was saying was credible was to try the method he used to become free of the human condition to see if it worked. When I did, so much of what he was saying began to make sense to me solely because I was then able to understand experientially what he was saying about the nature of the human condition rather than struggle to understand it intellectually.

And just another comment on the topic of struggling. Since Richard has gone public with his discovery, I have had occasion to observe a number of people who have been interested in actualism but have struggled with the issue of totally committing themselves to becoming happy and harmless. Some have turned away at this stage, others have backed off to a safe distance whilst yet others continue to vacillate and therefore struggle with the issue.

I do realize that making a total commitment to becoming happy and harmless is a daunting challenge. I remember it being like looking into a dark tunnel that I knew if I entered would literally be the end of ‘me’. The tunnel metaphorically represented the entrance to the path that Humanity has deemed ‘not to be travelled under any circumstances’ but I found I had no choice but to do so because I had nothing left to lose but more of the same … and I had tried the same and it ain’t fun.

What I did find, however, was that once I decided to let go of the past, I never looked back for I was from then on fully immersed in being attentive to the business of being here, and that, as you appear to be discovering, is a full-time obsession for an actualist. Fully committing oneself to any challenge is an all-consuming passion and there is no more altruistic a challenge than ridding oneself of malice and sorrow.

For a start I prefer to use the expression exploring one’s psyche rather than Socrates’ ‘knowing oneself’ for the reasons I have outlined above. Secondly, the intent to become happy and harmless is something you either have or don’t have. In other words, if you don’t have it you need to uncover and rediscover it by removing what prevents you having intent in the first place. From my observations and discussions with a good many people over my lifetime, I would say that every human being has an innate desire to live with his or her fellow human beings in peace and harmony – it is simply that this intent is buried beneath a world-weary cynicism or, in the case of those who follow Eastern spiritualism, has been deliberately relinquished for the sake of their own personal pursuit of spiritual glory.

The search for peace on earth – the possibility of human beings actually living together in peace and harmony – has always simmered beneath the surface throughout my life. This urge was a prime motivator in my abandoning the real world and immersing myself in spiritual communes for a good many years. The reality of the dream of living in peace in a commune was failure – as it always is and always has been. The reason for this I discovered only later – to live in utter peace and harmony is impossible for two instinctually driven beings let alone a community of instinctually driven beings. After my long experiment in communal living ended I settled for being a lone goody-two-shoes spiritualist only to discover that one day I lost my spiritual cool and got overtly angry with someone. It was a bit of a shock at the time as it made me realize how much ‘I’ needed to be in control in order for ‘me’ to feel superior to those beneath me in the spiritual hierarchy.

When I came across actualism two things made so much sense to me that I was really forced to sit up and take notice.

The first was the simple statement that the animosity and despair that plague the human species is the result of the instinctual passions that each and every human being has been genetically encoded with – not, as is universally believed, due to insufficient goodliness or Godliness in the world. That common sense explanation accorded with my personal experience of a suppressed anger that lay lurking beneath the surface of my prized spiritual identity.

The other simple statement that grabbed my attention was something I read in Richard’s Journal –

Richard: ‘I started from a basic premise that if man and woman could not live together with nary a bicker – let alone a quarrel – then the universe was indeed a sick joke.’ Richards Journal, Introduction, pg 5

I took this as a personal challenge because living with a companion in utter peace and harmony was always something I yearned for, and always something I had failed to do. And I knew that if I could live in peace and harmony with one other person it would be the proof that the actualism method worked – the proof that I could actually change.

Along with a lifetime yearning for peace on earth, these two statements served to fire up my intent to become happy and harmless. The understanding that my feelings of animosity and anguish had a physical cause and not a metaphysical cause gave me the intent to abandon my spiritual identity, and the challenge of living with fellow human beings in utter peace and harmony gave me the intent to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless.

The process of becoming happy and harmless involves an exploration of what is happening in my psyche at this very moment – a momentary exploration that was first set in motion by making the effort to form the habit of asking myself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Once I had got rid of my spiritual goody-two-shoes feeling of superiority it was then relatively easy to become aware of any feelings of animosity and resentment as they arose and then to dig in deep down to the core instinct of aggression – the thrill of killing was how I experienced it.

Feelings of melancholy were about the limit of my personal feelings of sadness I became aware of in everyday life, but feeling sad for others was stickier territory that required more exploration. When I came to really dig deep into sorrow itself I came across feelings of despair, and deeper than this I experienced levels of instinctual fear, dread and terror. It felt as though I was literally entering what I can only describe as being a truly hellish realm. The feeling of terror was an unbridled experience of raw instinctual animal fear, the self-same fear that the earliest humans experienced whilst trying to survive in a world full of meat-eating animals looking for something to kill and eat, as well as marauding groups of other humans looking for something to kill, eat or carry off. What I experienced was the very root of ‘my’ fear of death – the animal instinctual fear of survival. It’s amazing what you can discover in your psyche if you are willing to go looking.

I do acknowledge that such an exploration is a daunting prospect for many – I remember the choice to become an actualist was as if I was staring into a dark tunnel form which there was no return, or as if I was about to set off on a path that everyone else had marked ‘Do not go this way’. I guess, in hindsight, the latter was part of the attraction, part of the dare.

For those enabled with the pure intent to become happy and harmless the process of becoming free of the human condition is a thrilling adventure – thrilling rather than fearful provided you resist the temptation to take yourself too seriously. Should you want to get a taste of the nature of these explorations I recommend reading Peter’s Journal as it is thus far the best comprehensive personal account written of the process of becoming virtually free of malice and sorrow.

As you can see, the actualism method of exploring one’s psyche – in vivo, in situ, ad momentum – is totally different in intent, in scope and in intensity to Aristotles ‘self’-serving spiritual admonishment to ‘know thyself’. Becoming an actualist means deliberately making a complete break from the past – in other words stopping believing that there is anything useful to be found in the words of Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Heraclitus, Hume, Kapila, Kant, Nietzsche, Patanjali, Plato, Plotinus, Sartre and co. just as nothing useful is to be found in the so-called sacred words of Buddha, the Dalai Lama, Jesus, Krishnamurti, Lao-tzu, Mahavira, Meher Baba, the Pope, Rajneesh, Rama, Ramana Maharshi and co.

It’s such a grand thing to do, to dare to wipe the slate clean of the past, to dare to stand on your own two feet, to dare to explore, to reveal, to uncover, to demystify, to discover – to dare to discover the facts of the matter of what it is to be a human being.

I highly recommend the journey.

Whenever ‘I’ started to claim the glory – i.e. whenever I started to feel I was the Saviour of Mankind – I found that it was good to remember that the ability to think and reflect, to be aware, and to be aware of that awareness is, at core, a function of what I am – this flesh and blood body. By doing so, I avoided the spiritual path trap of feigning a ‘self’-effacing humility whilst sprouting ‘self’-aggrandizing nonsense.

Another approach I found useful was to regard the process of becoming happy and harmless as one of actively freeing the intelligence inherent in the physical brain in this physical body from the mind-numbing constraints of the socially-instilled moral and ethical programming and the debilitating effects of its genetically-encoded archaic-instinctual operating system.

In other words, I gave credit where the credit is due.

The harmless part of the intent to become happy and harmless ensures that one’s intent remains a pure intent – i.e. it ensures that ‘I’ do not lust for fame and glory and seek power over others. One’s pure intent to be happy and harmless is ultimately consolidated in a PCE where it is directly experienced that there is neither the need, nor the compulsive desire, to change the world as-it-is nor to change people as-they-are, for peace on earth always already exists here in the actual world of the senses.

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