Selected Correspondence Peter

Just the other day I had a visit from a man who I have known from my spiritual years. <snipped>

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.

*

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.

As an actualist, I always put the aim to be harmless towards my fellow human beings first and my aim for happiness second, because it is impossible for me be happy unless I am harmless. For anyone who is sincere about peace on earth it is essential to put becoming harmless first … and then increased happiness invariably follows. In the case in point, if one stops being sarcastic, as in expressing bitter or wounding remarks to others, then one has more chance of being happy … which in turn means that one has less reason to feel cynical …which in turn means one is less prone to be sarcastic and so on … until both cynicism and sarcasm eventually disappear as if by magic. It’s a fascinating business to see, and experientially understand, how feelings are interlinked, how they produce an endless cycle of ups and downs, how there is a continuous tendency to wound and then feel wounded, how there is a seesaw sequence of excitement and boredom … and so on.

It’s not so much that I want more of that type of experience, as much as I don’t want the pain, sorrow, depression. It’s more important for me to get rid of the negative than to seek the positive. Eliminating the negative is positive enough for me.

I can see why you have been attracted to U.G. Krishnamurti. He eliminated what he saw as the negative aspects of spiritualism and ended up in some type of permanent nihilistic state. Aiming to get rid of the negative was never enough for me because I had a positive aim – to find the meaning of life.

What meaning could be found?

Aren’t you looking for the meaning of life or are you content with your life as-it-is?

I remember when I left home and school, I was bewildered by what could be termed the mainstream of life. I remember wondering to myself – is having a wife, two kids and two cars the meaning of life? The same thing happened when I left the materialistic world and threw myself into the spiritual world. I remember wondering to myself – is becoming an Enlightened Guru and having my ‘money for nothing and my chicks for free’ the meaning of life?

Neither meaning stacked up as far as I was concerned.

If there is any must it not be found in the moment to moment living? If not there, then where?

The phrase moment to moment living implies ‘me’ having a ‘life’ that starts at birth and continues as an unchanging feeling-fed continuity until death.

If ‘I’ seek meaning for ‘my’ life then narcissism can be the only result – and the long history of the famed spiritual search attests to this fact. If ‘I’ simply reject the traditional meanings of life then meaninglessness aka nihilism can be the only result and this seems to be where U.G. Krishnamurti has ended up.

The meaning to life is not to be found in the feeling-fed continuity ‘I’ call ‘my life’, for a PCE confirms that the meaning of life is to be found only when ‘I’ exit the stage as it were.

Yeah sure it’s ‘me’ or ‘you’ having a life until death. What else could possibly be having the life? You will probably say it’s the flesh and blood body ... fine ... that is me or you , no?

I wasn’t making an intellectual comment, I was making a pragmatic comment as to ‘who’ people think and feel they are. Normal experience has it that ‘I’ am an entity who looks out through the eyes of ‘my’ body in order to see whatever is happening outside, who listens to sounds through the ears of ‘my’ body in order to hear what is happening outside and so on. Everybody has a feeling of being an alien entity isolated from or cut of from the outside world – this is the primal feelings of loneliness and alienation that everybody feels and vainly attempts to assuage. This is the basis of spiritual belief – the belief that ‘who’ I really am is a spirit-ual being, i.e. a non-corporeal spirit, temporarily residing in a mortal flesh and blood body and thus capable of living on after the death of the mortal flesh and blood body.

It seems to me that your ‘life is immortal’ idea should be written as ‘Life is Immortal’, which is a common spiritual / religious belief. An actualist takes ‘life’ to be what it means factually. At present it is the 30th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, the first of a series of seven expeditions to the barren, life-less surface of the moon. So boring a desert, in fact, that by the sixth mission the astronauts were reduced to hitting golf balls to see how far they went and doing wheelies in a dune buggy they had taken with them. By the time a geologist went on the seventh mission he was able to confirm what was already known – there is no life on the moon. No carbon-based life forms of any description were evident.

Following on from your last post, I have been musing about the ‘life’-bit of ‘Life, the universe and what it is to be a human being’. ‘Life’ is one of those words that has many nuances in the English language, and it seemed a useful exercise to dig into the various meanings in order to make sense of what life is.

At the moment I’m going through the glossary again, doing some editing in preparation for the new AF web-site that Richard and Vineeto are busy with. Which brings me back to ‘life’ again, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to both write to you about life and do a bit for the Glossary at the same time.

Life is such a bloody good subject – I would say vitally interesting – and one I remember as literally earth-shaking when I delved into the misconceptions and psittacisms surrounding it. So let’s start with the Oxford Dictionary. I’ll break the definitions into sections dealing with different interpretations of the word, so as to best define the distinctive meanings associated with the word – <see glossary: life>

Life was meant to be easy, friendly, comfortable, peaceful, harmonious, ever-changing, fresh each moment, direct and obvious –

And so it is.

Ah yes, but you are speaking ‘as a quiet light to those who are seeking a way out of the darkness they find themselves in’.

I have lived in, scoured around and investigated both the world of ‘darkness’ and the world of ‘light’ and have found both to be illusions.

There is no ‘darkness’ when sorrow and malice are eliminated and then the spiritual world of ‘light’ is clearly seen for the delusion it is – a well-meaning attempt to escape the ‘feeling of darkness’ with the ‘feeling of light’.

So, it’s time to gaily abandon the ancient fairy stories.

Now we humans can ‘go for the jugular’ – eliminate malice and sorrow and then one discovers the actual world, the physical universe, infinite and eternal, happening this very moment.

Almost all killing is a passionate affair, unless one practices dis-association, and then it simply becomes a mindless affair.

If one is willing to die as a self-sacrifice, hoping for some mythical after-life paradise, it makes eminent sense to sacrifice one’s ‘self’ for peace in this paradise, on earth, here, now.

And again, so what? The world is the way it is, and nobody learns anything from anyone else.

And yet we take the Ancients literally at their word – believing everything they are supposed to have said, fervently ‘learning’ away. Our total learning has come from the Ancient Ones, merely regurgitated by the current generation of priests and Gurus.

For me, it was serendipitous to have come across Richard and learn all I could from a man who had been Enlightened and seen through the delusion it is. Who refused to stop until he had unravelled the Human Condition in its entirety. Who refused to accept that the world is the way it is and that it will always be that way – that you can’t change Human Nature. ‘Why not?’ was the question he asked. Not a trace of Ancient Wisdom. Not a trace of surrender. No sitting at the feet. No trusting. No blindly following. No believing.

It is all from experience. Life is to be lived, not thought about.

What an appalling scenario. If one doesn’t think for oneself one just ends up following and believing everyone else. The ability to think and reflect is the essential ability of the human species. To think otherwise is to be gullible in the extreme.

A mystery to be lived, were Osho’s words, I remember.

To the mystic, life has to always remain a mystery, for what they peddle is mystical, imaginary and ethereal. They, in fact, vehemently oppose any attempt to make sense of life, to apply intelligent and reflective thought on the subject. They actively discourage looking at the facts and instead encourage belief, fantasy, imagination and intuitive feeling.

To an actualist, the solving of the mystery is the journey and adventure of a lifetime. The actual world that one emerges into far exceeds any imaginary and ethereal mystical realms.

In a certain sense Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life. Alan Watts

It is another of those poems that clearly point to the spiritual path as being a feeling path to an ‘inner world’. One becomes a ‘watcher’, ‘feeling’ one’s way in the world and as such is cut off from the direct sensate experience of the actual world that is ever-present – under our very noses.

To ‘feel’ life is not the same as fully living life, exactly as ‘thinking’ about life is not the same as fully living life. To be actually here is to be here in this moment of time, which is the only moment one can experience anyway.

To be actually here is to be in this place which is no-where in particular in the infinitude of the physical universe.

Coming from no-where and having no-where to go, we find ourselves here in this moment in time, in this place in space.

To be here is to be the universe experiencing itself as a human being.

My own hurts tell me a lot. I learn from them a lot.

It is often said we grow and learn from our suffering. My experience is that this is in the same category as ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy’, ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die’ No wonder we humans think it is inconceivable to be happy and harmless. I just decided, after I met Richard to raise the bar, set my sights beyond the normal limits. To break free of the shackles. And I found the only restriction was fear. There are no demons in the actual world and therefore there are no need for Gods. Cute, Hey.

And then life is perfect, easy, comfortable, delightful, carefree – and you get to do things, meet people, eat good food, have sex, etc. as a bonus on top of being alive.

Just a note to reassure myself that I can still write. I have been busy re-inventing myself, yet again – this time as a CAD architect and not a pen and paper architect. I have been learning a Computer Aided Drafting program for the past fortnight and it’s an amazing process. What was a familiar hands-on craft for me, now becomes a mouse-clicking computer operation. In the first learning stage, what would take me ten minutes to draw by drawing board took me ten hours by computer. After 2 weeks the ratio is down from 1 to 60 to 1 to 10 so I am well pleased. In a few months I can see myself being productive time-wise and I will be a cyber age architect rather than an industrial age architect.

Initially, I had some resistance to changing – at age 51 who wants to go back to kindergarten again, and I could well have struggled through in old-style until the pension kicked in. But I figured I had the computer and what the heck. It is so easy to miss the opportunity to move and change. It is an amazing and thorough change because none of my drawing manual skills are applicable, CAD is a totally different process. When I was considering buying a program I talked to an architect friend who said he went through 12 months of hell learning and obviously was still suffering from the experience. For me, the fascination of doing the same thing totally differently – reinventing my profession – was the prevailing experience. What can I do and how does it work?

I was reminded as I undertook this change how difficult it is for many people to change.

Some people are tempted to some form of change in their lives, some rebel against their upbringing, some swap religious beliefs, some swap partners, some move countries, some change jobs, etc. These forced changes are usually knee-jerk, emotion-driven reactions to particular circumstances, are painful transitions, and are very rarely fundamentally life changing. Much of the old patterns and habits are retained with the new partner, job, country or religious belief. The essential set-in-concrete personality they have formed by puberty remains intact and unchanged, the only difference being that any residual naiveté is replaced by a deep cynicism at having to cope with change or conform to changing societal restrictions. No wonder the option of escaping even further into an inner world of denial and imagination is so attractive to these people.

I was recently watching a TV program on a group undertaking a spiritual pilgrimage and a woman involved was interviewed. She was asked about the experience and she said that some things ‘bothered’ her – the crowds, her treatment as a woman, etc. – but she said ‘I’m not going to let it bother me’. A simple everyday statement of stoic denial and repression, but she also obviously had a passionate investment, for this was for her a profound spiritual experience and she was determined to let nothing spoil it for her. I remembered back to my spiritual times when I actively practiced to cut off from all things that were upsetting, ‘bothering’ or worrying. One was meant not to be bothered, to be above these petty concerns, one was not meant to have doubts about the teaching, or the teacher, or the organization for one was taught and extolled to have faith, loyalty and trust.

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

Three and a half years ago I was faced with the opportunity of fully abandoning the real world and, armed with a stunning Satori experience, I was about to fully enter the spiritual world but doubt and common sense prevented me. Then I met Richard who offered a simple solution to the problem of ‘being bothered by things’. By applying a simple method it is possible to eliminate ‘being bothered’ – be it anger, sorrow, melancholy, being blindly and instinctually driven to non-sensical actions, feeling bound by societal restrictions, morals, ethics and beliefs, etc. In short, to become actually free of the Human Condition, in total. The price to be paid is total and irrevocable change – ‘self’-immolation – but the lure of an adventure off the beaten, well-worn, track was irresistible. The other attraction was that this was not a philosophy, as in theory, nor a feel-good, head in the clouds, transcendence but a down-to-earth practical way of living, free of malice and sorrow, in the actual world, as-it-is, with people as-they-are.

Which brings me back to change and my current phase of changing yet again. Change becomes infectious after a while. One needs only to try a bit and test out the consequences. When the sky doesn’t fall in, when one’s worst fears are not realized, when life gets even better, one starts to get the hang of it. Pretty soon one is not even initiating change – one is simply not resisting what is happening. Then one finds one is doing what is happening, free of fear and then you find a whole new world opening up – the actual world. In this world, ‘I’ and ‘me’ are increasingly seen as a phantom, an illusion, an echo of the past that will soon have had its day for it has no strength, no validity, no actuality.

The starting point was ‘who’ I was at the start of this process needed the incentive, the initiative, the burning discontent to consider the need to change irrevocably and then the courage to overcome the fear of change. Nowadays change, as in my current swap from industrial age architect to cyber age architect is still challenging and at times difficult but it is neither fearful nor resented – quite the contrary.

A lot of fear-ridden nonsense is written and spoken about change, particularly in these New Dark Ages. It is fascinating to have seen what has happened to those youths of the Sixties who trumpeted change and revolution and who now desperately cling to ancient spiritual belief and trot out the morals, ethics and psittacism of Long Dead Masters, be they Eastern or Western. They have dutifully fulfilled their societal role of instilling unliveable failed morals and ethics in their children and the Human Condition is yet again perpetuated.

Fear indeed rules the human world and, as a consequence, intelligence action is constantly hobbled. T’is so good to be free of the shackles of instinctual fear.

So, that’s what I have been doing for a while now and will probably be doing for a few months more. It became obvious to me that if I was to continue doing architectural work, then I was going to do it well – which means being up-to-date and not lagging behind like a Neanderthal.

We are coming off high summer here and the nights are a touch cooler. The sub-tropics offer such a wonderful climate. The warm air contains such moisture that my skin continuously feels as though it is moistened with oil and the tropical scents seem to permeate everywhere. At night we have all the windows open and the scents of night jasmine and frangipani waft in through the screens. The sensuous experience of the perfection of life is ever-present and abundant. We often stroll down through the village in early evening to sit overlooking the ocean and stop on the way back to have a cup of coffee and watch the activities of the locals and holiday makers.

I do find it astounding that human beings, for fear of change, for a belief in God by whatever name and a stubborn pride in their animal instinctual passions continue to wallow in malice and sorrow and fight it out with each other in a grim battle of survival.

It was only then that life started to show where the real problems were and what could be done about them. I will try to condense what I have come to see in as few words as I can. After my first awakening/ satori/ enlightenment it was clear that life was one. That some how all the seeing of separate parts was a trick of the thinking mind. This left me with a deep love for all being, but it also brought up more questions. It had turned my life inside out.

When you say ‘it was clear that life was one’ you must be referring to a feeling that life was one. As I look about me I see that there are 6 billion human beings on the planet all battling it out in a grim instinctual battle for survival. And this same battle has been going on for millennia while half the world thinks that suffering is God’s way of testing us and violence is the work of the Devil, and the other half keeps insisting it is all an illusion.

The fact that over 160,000,000 human beings have been killed by their fellow human beings in wars in the last century alone, that over 40,000,000 humans killed themselves in suicides and that over 1,000,000,000 human beings were affected by warfare belies you feeling that ‘life is one’. These are flesh and blood human beings, not illusionary and not ‘a trick of the thinking mind’. And much of the killing was done in the name of love, be it earthly or Divine.

As for straying too far from the business at hand, I do note that you have ardently, consistently and repeatedly rejected conducting any ‘self’-questioning of this type, so I fail to see how you can stray from a course you have yet to even consider beginning to undertake.

The course is to complete the advice ‘I thoroughly recommend the study of actualism’, and there with determine the truth of the worldview (a comprehensive view of the world and human life) being called actualism. At this point, in completing the advice ‘I thoroughly recommend the study of actualism’ and following the advice at the actualism website, there has been no ‘... ‘self’-questioning of this type’ or any type. However, the process of the universe giving rise to the circumstances that resulted in inanimate matter becoming animate matter has been presented, and is now being questioned to assure a clear understanding of the posits of the worldview called actualism. We will of course discuss what you describe as ‘... ‘self’-questioning of this type’ or any type, when it is encountered in the sequence recommended by the text of the AF Website.

You do flutter around a bit. This new question obviously refers to my previous comment –

As for your own posit – ‘through the utterly chance arrangement of random material substance, a resulting circumstance of the same significance as every other resulting circumstance that appeared’ – this does sound a bit like that dismal materialist-nihilist view that human beings are but randomly produced scum infecting a randomly produced planet in a random event called the universe ... or something like that.

I see you are back with your obsession as to how or why animate life was created and no doubt, what or who created it. I have already replied that indulging in such philosophical, metaphysical or spirit-ual postulations about an event that, by all the available evidence, initially occurred billions of years ago is of zilch interest to an actualist. You can posit away to your hearts content as you chose, but it does nothing to alter the fact that ‘an event of no little significance’ happened ... and is happening.

Diverting to something I wrote in my Journal about this type of questioning may be of relevance to someone interested in actualism –

During my investigations into death over this last year, I have become aware that the most shocking thing for human beings is that we are able to contemplate our own death. It is amazing that, of all the animals on the planet, only we human beings, with our ability to think and reflect, know that we have a limited life span and, further, that we could die at any time. We know this, we can talk about it, think about it and reflect upon the fact. We see other people and animals die, and we see our bodies aging and dying. We know that death is an inevitable fact. This is the fact of the situation, but we have avoided this fact largely by making ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘What happens after death?’ into great religious, philosophical and scientific questions.

Indeed, for many humans the pursuit of the answer to these meaningless questions is deemed to be the very meaning of life. The Search for what happens after life becomes the point of life and the Search is endless. One is forever on the Path, one never ‘arrives’, for the real meaning to the mystery is only evident in the after-life. The meaning is the after-life. That always seemed some sort of perversity to me. All that the religious and spiritual Teachings and Wisdoms have offered us is that they point to life-after-death – that’s where it is really at! ‘When you die, then you can really live!’

I have read the work of some researchers who have studied the responses of people with terminal illnesses and they have documented people’s reactions in the face of death. Broadly, those reactions are seen progressively as denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It seems to me that since we all know we suffer from a terminal illness called ‘growing old’, at the end of which comes death, human beings actually live their lives in one, if not all, of the above psychological states at one time or another. Denial of the fact of death is to believe in a Heaven, a place where we go to after death.

This is common to all religions, with the Eastern religions adding the belief of reincarnation to somewhat muddy the water. Enlightenment, an Altered State of Consciousness, is a denial of death in the sense that the Gurus believe themselves to be in a state of Immortality and Timelessness – a delusion that they are beyond death. In denying the fact that the body dies and rots, they claim the body is but an illusion. ‘I am not the body’ is a common belief and myth. They identity completely with the Soul, Self, Atman or whatever – a separate entity from the physical body that lives on and cheats death. Thus, even the Enlightened Ones have their place to go to after death – the various Eastern versions of Heaven.

Added to the denial of death, the denial of life’s sensual pleasures, sex, comfort and leisure is entrenched in all the religions. In fact, suffering and sacrifice are deemed great virtues in both religion and spirituality. The curious thing I was to discover about the spiritual path was that at the core of the teachings, exactly like in the Western religions, lies the desire to achieve a ‘state of immortality’, and I had not seen it while on the ‘path’.  Peter’s Journal, Death

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