Selected Correspondence Peter

How to Become Free from the Human Condition

For those wondering where or how to start, the basic approach in actualism is to tackle whatever issue bugs you most, whatever is your particular thing that is making you most angry or most sad. Go for whatever of the obvious passions that you want to be free of and then investigate every feeling, belief, moral, ethic or psittacisms that stands in your way on the path to freedom from malice and sorrow.

If you want to be free of malice, then make it the most important thing you are doing when you are doing it. Go about your daily life as you normally do but notice all the times when you are annoyed about something – it might be that it is a rainy cold day, it might be the driver who cuts in on you, it might be something a friend said or something you read or saw on TV. Notice whenever you blame someone for doing something or not doing something. Notice how you talk to other people, what feelings you are having while you talk.

Are you being confrontational to this person, a touch aggressive perhaps? Are you feeling resentful, bitchy, sarcastic, cynical, critical, dismissive, arrogant, above-it-all, scornful, irritated or bitter? Do you often berate yourself or give yourself a hard time?

Do you take out your anger on others? If so – who, when and why? Can you catch yourself doing it and become aware of it while you are doing it?

If you can become this aware then you have found the secret of actualism, for neither the savage nor the tender passions can stand the scrutiny of awareness. In this case, you will have begun the process of becoming free of malice. You will have begun to get ‘the bugger by the throat’. Your malice will noticeably wilt and eventually wither as you become more and more aware of it and all its subtle, and not so subtle, nuances.

Then you can do the same thing with sorrow.

By running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ you start to notice all those times you are feeling melancholic, sad, lacklustre, bored, resentful, cut off, remote, detached, lonely, depressed, burdened, weighed down, resigned, sympathetic, empathic, gloomy, or hoping for a better day. You start to notice how much time you waste being unhappy and not being here.

You then start to notice what things or events trigger these sorrowful feelings. You notice the seduction of wallowing in sad memories and you start to notice the feelings you get when you listen to certain music or watch certain films. The trick is to become aware of the sorrow-full feelings when they are happening, put a label on the feeling and discover when it started and what caused it.

The process of becoming aware of your feelings and becoming aware of how they are preventing you from being happy and from being harmless is the process of actualism.

While the process is simple and straightforward, the very real challenge is to take it on fully – to make becoming happy and harmless the most important thing in your life – numero uno. There is no doubt that fear will arise on occasions but if you set your sights on becoming both happy and harmless you will find that fear, like all of the survival passions, cannot be sustained in the light of awareness.

The ruthless challenging, exposing and understanding of these beliefs and instincts actually weakens their influence on my thoughts and behaviour. The process, if followed diligently and obsessively, will ultimately cause them to disappear completely. The idea, of course, being to eliminate the cause of my unhappiness, so that I can experience life at the optimum, now.

The answer is neither yes nor no. The purpose of the actualism process is firstly to stop avoiding, denying, suppressing or attempting to transcend one’s own ‘self’-centred instinctual survival passions. The process of becoming aware of these passions in action in your own psyche then leads to you being able to be ‘desensitised’ to these passions, as in ‘Reduce or eliminate the sensitivity of a person to a neurosis, phobia, etc.)’ Oxford Dictionary. You are then no longer prone to be paralysed by fear, overcome by anger, engulfed by nurture or driven by desire – you can become then virtually free of the instinctual passions – virtually happy and harmless.

But the precursor to becoming desensitised is to remove the impediments to becoming sensitive to, and therefore aware of, one’s own fear, anger, nurture and desire in action in one’s own psyche. This first stage is only possible for those who have become free of being enamoured, awed and encumbered by spiritual/religious beliefs, values, ethics and morals – there are no short-cuts to Actual Freedom.

Speaking from experience, I found two major impediments to becoming aware of and labelling my feelings as they arose – my social identity with all my real-world Christian beliefs, morals and ethics and my layered-on-top Eastern spiritual identity with yet another set of beliefs, morals and ethics. Being born a male in a Christian society meant that I was taught to suppress my feelings and being born-again into Eastern religion meant denying my unwanted feelings and solely identifying with goodness and Godliness. What I soon discovered in actualism was that it is impossible to become aware of, let alone label, my fear and aggression while maintaining my spiritual identity of being a holier-than-thou goody-two-shoes.

At one time I did consider that Krishnamurti-ism was a particularly onerous conditioning, as it does seem a very cerebral, detached, feeling-denying-and-suppressing philosophy-religion. But then again, the followers of Rajneeshism, a very emotive, devotional, feeling-expressing philosophy-religion, are seemingly equally unable to be aware of, label and be conscious of their own feelings of malice and sorrow. Whatever nature of spiritual/religious conditioning you have – be it Eastern, Western, Eastern layered on Western, repressive, expressive, devotional, Self-devotional, monotheistic or pantheistic – is irrelevant, because it is impossible to be aware of what is actually happening in the physical corporeal world if you have your head stuck in the clouds in the imaginary spirit-ual world.

If I read you right, you have set yourself a goal in life – to feel good or feel excellent – and then you are investigating whatever stands in the way of your goal. If you started off feeling really good and suddenly noticed as you put your feet up at lunchtime that you have lost it and are feeling a bit low, then put a name on the feeling – say annoyed – and then trace back and remember when you came off feeling good and why. If it was something someone said, have a root around and discover why you became annoyed.

What button was pushed – was it pride, was it guilt, was it your manliness, was it some moral view you held that was offended? When you have milked the event or incident for what it was worth and discovered a bit about yourself and what makes ‘you’ tick, then you get back to feeling good or you even crank up a bit of feeling excellent at having been aware of how you were experiencing that particular moment of being alive and had made some discoveries about yourself.

It is impossible to tackle all the emotions at once, as you said, for this can only be an intellectual-only approach. By all means read and intellectually understand but it is the putting into practice of the method that produces actual change – and the putting into practice of the method means one step at a time. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is a one step at a time approach – one feeling, one moment – right now.

The other discovery you seem to have made is that is vitally important is to set yourself a benchmark for how you want to feel or experience this moment. If your benchmark is ‘normal’ or average or so-so, then running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ will mostly produce a meaningless answer of ‘normal’, average or so-so. By setting a benchmark of feeling good or feeling excellent, then mostly the question will produce at least a not-so-good or below the benchmark average. Then it is easier to be aware of your feeling at the time and much more likely to be able to name it.

I like what you have written, for many people seem to have difficulties in remembering a PCE to uphold as their benchmark whereas everyone can remember feeling excellent and thus be easily able to set this feeling as their benchmark. Perhaps it was a particularly carefree time, a particularly sensual experience, a time of particular joie de vie. Then you use this as your benchmark and aim to keep your head above water for as long as you can and when you become aware that you are sinking or have sunk, then you find out the cause and get back to as close to your benchmark as you can.

Good on ya. It sounds as if your stubborn perseverance is bringing rewards.

The rewards of actualism are beyond belief for they are down-to-earth and actual.

This is why it is important when running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ to trace the feeling back to the incident that triggered the feeling of sadness, melancholy, anger, frustration or whatever. Quite often a feeling can hang around for days, weeks or even months, totally ruining your happiness and benevolence in this, the only moment you can experience.

Again that blackboard with successes written on the top, or however you want to see it, is invaluable. The bottom line is always if I stuffed up yesterday, or if I have been lost in some worry or overcome by some emotion, it was in the past – finished, gone. The success is that you have now discovered it and you can get back to feeling good or feeling excellent again. The trick is not to get down on yourself otherwise you are again missing out on experiencing this moment, the only moment you can experience of being alive, to the optimum.

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If the triggering event was too far in the past to remember I didn’t bother trying to trace it because I would only be dredging through the garbage bin of the past looking for any old excuse or justification for my feeling angry and sad now. But if I could peg the feeling or emotion to some recent triggering event it was like finding gold because I was able to see the direct cause and effect relationship between feelings and behaviour. This discovery of cause and effect is the experiential understanding that ‘my’ precious feelings, while not actual, do give rise to effects that are very, very real.

With practice this process will eventually result in an almost instantaneous linking between triggering event and automatic emotional reaction – at this point, as I am fond of saying, it is really as if you have got this bugger – my self’ – by the throat. You get to see the emotional reactions kick in as they are happening and this ‘there it is again’ awareness weakens their stranglehold and enables intelligent appropriate reaction to overcome blind passion. If one particular reaction keeps returning again and again then this awareness in itself, when combined with integrity, will eventually goad you to actual change.

It is of no use at all to beat yourself up if you miss the onset of a debilitating emotion or feeling and fall into the pits for hours or even days or feel pissed off at someone for hours or even days. The important thing is that you become aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and if it is not optimum, get out of it, get back to feeling good and then crank it up to being excellent if you can.

Another chance will always come along, a fresh opportunity for investigation and discovery – in the meantime, log up the hours, days, weeks and months of feeling good or feeling excellent, always being as harmless as possible. If you beat yourself up, the buggers who insist you remain sad and second-rate, are only winning.

Emotions have a curious quality in that they colour and distort not only what is happening now but they also colour and distort what has happened recently. If sadness overwhelms us it seems as though our whole life has been miserable, if anger arises it seems as though it has always been there. This was hard to discern in myself initially but it was obvious whenever I talked to Vineeto in one of our end-of-day chats. Sometimes she would say I have been feeling, say lacklustre, all day. I would ask her if she felt that when we were down in the village at the coffee shop and she would say ‘not then’. I would ask her how she was at work and she would say she was into her work and enjoying it. Eventually it emerged that the feeling had only recently emerged or had only briefly occurred but that it now felt as though it had been there all day.

This is why it is vital to chock up success – driving to work, fine, feeling good – morning at work, one flash of annoyance because of ... soon back to feeling fine – lunchtime, feeling excellent – etc. It is equally as important when running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ to acknowledge that you are feeling fine, good or excellent as it is to acknowledge that you are feeling lacklustre, bored or annoyed.

You just said above that you have not ‘sat down and looked at your hand and contemplated upon the amazing physicality of it’. You seem to have no interest at all in a practical matter-of-fact observation – the very core of the method of actualism.

*Mind the keyboard ...*

No 22, we are at last cutting to the quick of what the actualism process is really about – by default of course.

By what you write it is your own interest that is paramount – ‘It is (my) interest that results in practical matter of fact observation’. This type of self-interest is born out of spiritual teachings that encourage the cultivation of an ‘I’ as an observer or watcher or witnesser. As such, what is being observed or watched becomes secondary or irrelevant and of such little concern to ‘me’ that it can even appear to be illusionary or appears to only exist when I am interested in it or observing it. This practice, as you may know, can lead to a solipsistic state where ‘there is only I’ or even to a state where you think and feel that you, personally, create all that exists.

For an actualist, practical matter-of-fact observation is what it is. Objects that can be seen, touched, smelt or heard are taken to be actual – existing in fact. Events observed as happening are taken to have actually happened or be actually happening such as my fingers typing these words – and the words appearing on the screen – existing in fact. Human beings whom I meet and communicate with are taken to be actual flesh and blood human beings – fellow human beings, as in being of the same generic species. There is no room for denial, obscuration or deception in this type of down-to-earth, matter-of-fact observation.

When you apply this very same matter-of-fact observation to your own actions, thoughts and feelings by running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ the results can be stunning, to say the least. If this self-observation is undertaken with integrity and honesty, all sorts of murky and mucky things can be found in the closet of one’s psyche, prime amongst them being repressed feelings of fear, malice and sorrow. For an actualist, this is grist for the mill, for these self-centred and self-sustaining feelings and passions are what he or she is seeking to find in order to eliminate them – in order for there to be peace on earth, as this flesh and blood body, in this lifetime.

As Gary has recently observed, the discovery that these feelings – no matter how real, repulsive, ugly, unwanted or undesirable – are only feelings and are not actual, as in physical existing, and as such they can be eliminated. Actualism is not a process for the faint-hearted but the rewards are immeasurable and actual – an irrevocable end to malice and sorrow in this flesh and blood body.

This is why it is important when running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ to trace the feeling back to the incident that triggered the feeling of sadness, melancholy, anger, frustration or whatever. Quite often a feeling can hang around for days, weeks or even months, totally ruining your happiness and benevolence in this, the only moment you can experience.

If the triggering event was too far in the past to remember I didn’t bother trying to trace it because I would only be dredging through the garbage bin of the past looking for any old excuse or justification for my feeling angry and sad now. But if I could peg the feeling or emotion to some recent triggering event it was like finding gold because I was able to see the direct cause and effect relationship between feelings and behaviour. This discovery of cause and effect is the experiential understanding that ‘my’ precious feelings, while not actual, do give rise to effects that are very, very real.

With practice this process will eventually result in an almost instantaneous linking between triggering event and automatic emotional reaction – at this point, as I am fond of saying, it is really as if you have got this bugger – my self’ – by the throat. You get to see the emotional reactions kick in as they are happening and this ‘there it is again’ awareness weakens their stranglehold and enables intelligent appropriate reaction to overcome blind passion. If one particular reaction keeps returning again and again then this awareness in itself, when combined with integrity, will eventually goad you to actual change.

It is of no use at all to beat yourself up if you miss the onset of a debilitating emotion or feeling and fall into the pits for hours or even days or feel pissed off at someone for hours or even days. The important thing is that you become aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and if it is not optimum, get out of it, get back to feeling good and then crank it up to being excellent if you can.

Another chance will always come along, a fresh opportunity for investigation and discovery – in the meantime, log up the hours, days, weeks and months of feeling good or feeling excellent, always being as harmless as possible. If you beat yourself up, the buggers who insist you remain sad and second-rate, are only winning.

The similarities seem to be in the fact that both are pragmatic approaches and both address the issue of one’s immediate anxieties, emotions and behaviour in the world of people, things and events. The aim of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is to reign in the excesses of emotions so as to return the patient to normal – i.e. normally aggressive and normally sad. The aim of actualism is to eliminate the whole psychological and psychic structure – ‘who’ I think I am and ‘who’ I instinctually feel I am, as opposed to what I am – so as to completely eradicate the root cause of malice and sorrow. I know little about how cognitive therapy is used and applied by the hands-on practitioners in the field but this more practical approach to therapy does seem to be having more success than the previous approaches based on moral and ethical reconditioning, emotive expression, self-acceptance, self-love, shamanism and mysticism, chemical restraints, etc.

In order to explore the differences between the method of actualism and cognitive behavioural therapy, not only in intent but also in the processes, I have accessed a brief summary of CBT from the Net.

Cognitive therapy is a widely used form of psychotherapy that focuses on changing dysfunctional cognitions (thoughts), emotions, and behavior. Cognitive therapy is based on the theory that individuals with depression, anxiety, and other emotional disorders have maladaptive patterns of information processing and related behavioral difficulties.

One of the primary targets of cognitive therapy is the identification of negative or distorted automatic thoughts. These cognitions are the relatively autonomous thoughts that occur rapidly while an individual is in the midst of a particular situation or is recalling significant events from the past. Source ... info@mindstreet.com

‘Negative or distorted automatic thoughts ’ is simply another way of saying feelings and emotions. Close and constant observation will reveal that feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts. Thinking, when freed of the automatic influence of the emotions that arise from one’s instinctual passions, is a benign functional activity. Eastern religion and mysticism has always laid the blame of evil on thinking per se, while giving full vent to the so-called good emotions to run wild, unrestrained by any sense whatsoever. It would appear that CBT adopts a similar stance and lays the ills of the patient at the door of wrong thinking. It is inappropriate in the real world to question the instinctual passions themselves, for human beings hold their passions dearly to their bosoms, stubbornly and deliberately maintaining their blindness to the fact that these passions are none other than savage and brutal animal survival passions.

Just a note about the feelings and emotions that one notices by running the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’

Many men in particular, because of their gender programming, have great difficulties in getting in touch with their feelings. As this is generally the case, then it may be useful to begin with observing what you are thinking in this moment of being alive. If you describe your thinking as a bit dull for instance, it may be that you are feeling lackluster. If you are thinking about what someone said or didn’t say to you, it may well be that you feel annoyed which is a mild form of anger. If you are thinking that someone has wronged you, then it is useful to label and identify the feeling that is happening in that moment – be it resentment, indignance, righteousness, envy, etc.

For women this process of investigation is identical, but given that they have usually been taught to identify more strongly with their emotions, their difficulty can be in sorting through a bewildering array of unrestrained input. Again, momentary awareness is the first thing – to catch the feeling while it is happening – and then to label the feeling is the next step. Then complete the investigation by finding the cause, the trigger, of the feeling or emotion that is ruining, clouding or standing in the way of you feeling good right now. This awareness is an experiential awareness of how ‘you’, as an entity, have been programmed to react to the world of people, things and events. This is 180 degrees different to practicing spiritual awareness, which is to either accept, ignore or deny one’s reactions to the world of people things and events and retreat into an inner world of one’s own imagination. Spiritual awareness leads to the ‘self’-centred psychotic states of dissociation or the more extreme state of solipsism whereas the actualism method is an ongoing self-investigation that breaks the stranglehold the psychological and psychic entity, eventually leading to a ‘self’-less pure consciousness.

Patients with depression and anxiety have many more negative or fearful automatic thoughts than control subjects, and these distorted cognitions stimulate painful emotional reactions. In addition, negative automatic thoughts can be associated with behaviors (e.g., helplessness, withdrawal, or avoidance) that make the problem worse. In depression or anxiety disorders, there is often a ‘vicious cycle’ of dysfunctional cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. info@mindstreet.com

Again we have ‘negative or fearful automatic thoughts’ or ‘distorted cognitions’ that ‘stimulate painful emotional reactions’, as though it is wrong thinking that causes emotional suffering. It’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse but then again, CBT is concerned about treating and reducing the symptoms and not about acknowledging the source of emotional suffering, let alone finding a permanent cure.

Automatic thoughts are frequently based on faulty logic or errors in reasoning. Cognitive therapy is directed, in part, at helping patients recognize and change these cognitive errors (sometimes called cognitive distortions). Some of the commonly described cognitive errors include: all or nothing thinking, personalization, ignoring the evidence, and overgeneralization. In cognitive therapy, patients are usually taught how to detect cognitive errors and to use this skill in developing a more rational style of thinking. info@mindstreet.com

What initially twigged my interest in CBT was a television program, which showed a patient being treated for agoraphobia. The treatment was very matter-of-fact and not at all esoteric or airy-fairy. The patient, at her own pace, was allowed to experientially discover for herself that her psychological and psychic fear was nothing other than a feeling, i.e. while it may have felt very real it was not a fact. By becoming aware of her fear, labeling it, discussing it, and thinking about it she was gradually able to desensitize herself to its influence. In her case the fear was not eliminated but it was reduced to tolerable levels such that she could function reasonably normally. Another patient had a fear of a particular insect and by increasingly prolonged contact he was able to become desensitized to the fear, thus replacing the feeling of fear with the fact that he was not being hurt. I don’t see this as a triumph of rational thinking over irrational thinking, I see this as a triumph of fact over feeling.

Another focus of cognitive therapy is on underlying schemas. These cognitive structures are thought to be the templates, or basic rules, for interpreting information from the environment. Schemas (sometimes termed core beliefs) can be either adaptive or maladaptive. Cognitive therapists assist patients in modifying problematic schemas.

Generally, cognitive therapy for dysfunctional schemas is more complex and demanding than therapeutic work with automatic thoughts. info@mindstreet.com

This is where terminology tends to be confusing. ‘Templates, or basic rules, for interpreting information from the environment’ or ‘core beliefs’ seems to be referring to our instinctual ‘self’-centred survival programming. If so, these are not beliefs, this is a genetically-encoded neural program. This is where all therapy comes up against a brick wall and any ‘modifications’ can only be fiddling with the controls, or rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Cognitive therapy also includes a number of behavioral interventions such as activity scheduling and graded task assignments. These procedures are used to reverse behavioral pathology and to influence cognitive functioning. info@mindstreet.com

Breaking ingrained habits was another of the features of CBT that made sense to me.

The relationship between cognition and behavior is considered to be a ‘two way street.’ If behavior improves, there is usually a salutatory effect on cognition. In a similar manner, cognitive changes can lead to behavioral gains. Thus, cognitive therapists often combine cognitive and behavioral techniques in clinical practice. info@mindstreet.com

Are they saying that success breeds success? If the success is tangible, then confidence grows which leads to a change in behaviour that happens almost without one noticing it.

The results described are of course much different. CBT aims to help people with severe psychological problems, depression, panic attacks or phobias, to overcome their problems and then to be able to act as normal people in the society. info@mindstreet.com

Is this a disclaimer? Obviously the successes are limited but the success of such a pragmatic down-to-earth approach to therapy can be seen as more evidence of ‘the good sense of actualism’, as No 13 put it. I know in the early days it was this good sense that lead me to establish a prima facie case in favour of actualism.

May I suggest that running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ will put you in touch with your ‘self’ and then you will find that ‘self’ is not a concept but a reality – it is none other than ‘who’ you think and instinctually feel you are. You may well discover that it is ‘he’ who is running and ruining your life and standing in the way of perfection and purity.

I have just realized I have assumed from your name that you are male and that was why I commented about feelings most commonly being expressed as emotion-backed thoughts. Anyway, for either sex it is useful to be aware that our feelings are most often cunningly disguised as, or described as, thoughts – unless you are overcome with rage, gripped by fear, overwhelmed by nurture or beset by desire, in which case the feelings are obvious as the chemical surges are so intense.

Well enough for now, it’s dinner time. I just wanted to say hello, reply to your comment about CBT and to have a bit of a dig around in that field.

Yep. This taking ‘a long, hard look at just what I think and feel about the whole matter of ...’ is an integral part of the business of actualism.

What we have been taught to be true needs to be re-visited and thought about, what we have been seduced into believing needs to be taken apart and replaced by facts – in short, every belief, truth and psittacism needs to be placed on the table for examination. Then we can get beyond who is right and who is wrong, what is good and what is bad and we can examine what are the facts of the situation. This form of investigation bypasses ‘me’ as a social identity – ‘my’ morals, ‘my’ ethics, ‘my’ values, ‘my’ viewpoint, etc.

This continual action of bypassing or undermining ‘me’ as a social identity eventually weakens and diminishes this identity, allowing even more of my psyche to be investigated, even more deeply. As I wrote to you recently we are doing the business of actualism right here, right now. Exactly as you examine your reactions and feelings as to what is on the table for examination, so do I. If nothing is twigged, well and good. If something is twigged, then I have something to look at, something to investigate. It’s all good stuff, very enjoyable and most enthralling as it is happening right now.

Yep. I remember well the feelings that welled up in me when I first read Richard’s writings but the excitement of discovery eventually overcame ‘my’ reluctance at being exposed and ‘my’ defensiveness. Soon I twigged to the fact that actualism is a voyage of discovery and freedom and the only person who stands in the way of beginning, continuing and completing this journey is ‘me’.

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According to this definition of intelligence human beings have been very intelligent in developing and making weapons. There were three great wars in the last 100 years on the planet, WW1. WW2 and the Cold War.

Yep. The important thing is not who is wrong and who is right in any search for the facts – for I certainly make no claim to infallibility. The important thing is to get to the root of the problem – the morals, ethics, values and beliefs that give substance to ‘me’ as a good and valued member of society, i.e. my social identity. If you can break through this outer crust then you get the chance to investigate the inner crust – ‘me’ as an instinctual animal replete with a full set of blind utterly ‘self’-ish instinctual survival passions.

Your description is also very clear as to what happens when you run the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ with pure intent. The answer in your case was ‘I am being defensive’, as in ‘I am feeling fearful’. Having honestly acknowledged the how bit and given it a label, curiosity led you on to discover what it was that caused this feeling and why? The only way running this question will have any effect at all, is if it is used as a method of ‘self’-examination and discovery – it beats any spiritual mantra or traditional therapy by a country mile.

Most spiritual afflictionados arrogantly dismiss, avoid, misinterpret or deliberately distort the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ as though they have ‘been there and done that’, whereas most have not even begun to examine the workings of their own psyche. I know this well from personal experience – I had barely scraped the surface when I began the process of actualism. Spiritual ‘questioning’ is nothing more than pitifully questioning the supposed ignorance of others, while simultaneously hiding behind the conviction of one’s own self-importance and moral superiority.

As for making and using weapons I would concur with you that it is a necessary activity within the passionate human condition, but this expediency does not necessarily make it an intelligent activity. When silly and sensible replace right and wrong and instinctual passion is eliminated you are free to decide what is an appropriate reaction to the particular situation. Life is simple, only ‘I’ make it complicated.

Yep. And the traditional solution has been to ignore what is going on, blame others for it or vainly rile against it and attempt to change others in accordance with my beliefs . I came to see that to think I could change the human condition in others was an act of futile egomania, particularly when millions have tried and billions have fought it out with each other as to which is the right way.

Actualism is about freedom from the human condition – not changing the human condition in others.

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I am not making a moral or ethical stance in this – it was common sense that Germany and Japan had to be resisted.

I just brought the whole issue of who is responsible for all the wars conflicts, acrimony, suffering and pious high-mindedness back to me and my feelings. If I got angry how could I blame others for getting angry? If I could be overcome by a murderous rage, as in wishing another obliterated, feeling jealousy, wanting revenge or wishing retribution or justice, how could I blame others for having the same feelings or even acting on them? If I was feeling sanctimoniously superior, how could I blame others who hypocritically took the moral high-ground while preaching that others were to blame for the ills of humanity. How could I remain a follower of a spiritual Guru while condemning others for belonging to spiritual/religious groups who fought each other over which sanctimonious viewpoint or self-righteous group was right and which was wrong? And the one that really challenged me personally was – if I couldn’t live with other human beings in peace and harmony, how could I blame others for not being able to do so? In other words, the only way there is going to be peace on earth is for me to prove it is possible.

As I wrote in my journal –

Some people seem to not even get to this stage of recognising that the problem is inside themselves and not elsewhere. I had always assumed that anyone on the spiritual search had this basic understanding, and that was why they were searching. I am astounded at the number of seekers who still blame other people or events for their own unhappiness. So the first thing was to recognise that I suffered from an ailment, a dis-ease, called the Human Condition – the core of which is malice and sorrow. Peter’s Journal, Intelligence

Integrity is key to sheeting home the ills of humanity to ‘me’, for ‘I’ am humanity and humanity is ‘me’.

A method may be useful to a certain point but then one has to fly on one’s own.

What method are you talking about, what results have you achieved, what difficulties did you encounter? Are you saying you personally are beyond the ‘certain point’ where a method is useful? If so, when did this happen and can you describe flying ‘on one’s own’? This is valuable information to share with others on this list if it is substantiated by personal experience and experiential evidence.

Well, given that this mailing list is devoted to peace on earth and the personal eradication of malice and sorrow, I suggest we limit a discussion on methods to that particular aim. Actualism is a proven method whereby one can eliminate one’s personal malice and sorrow – i.e. become actually happy and actually harmless. I know of no other method which offers this potential, let alone even points in this direction. Certainly none of the ancient Eastern spiritual methods do – they are specifically designed for one purpose only – to retreat from the real world, and the actual world, and to lead the practitioner to self-aggrandizement, as in God-realization.

Are you saying there are other methods possible that will lead to peace on earth? Have you discovered something else other than the traditional spiritual methods?

Not really, and I fail to see the relevance. Competent car drivers are thick on the ground where I live, but there is a dearth of any people who are happy and harmless, as is clearly evidenced by the inability of even two people to live together in utter peace and harmony, let alone any group or community anywhere in the world. Becoming free of malice and sorrow is patently a far more difficult exercise than learning to driven a car, otherwise there would be peace on earth by now.

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What method are you talking about, what results have you achieved,

Perhaps a few practical examples, relating to specific incidents, would serve to communicate what you mean. As you have reported them, your results do appear a bit woolly and nebulous and could be read as an exercise in ‘self’-improvement and not ‘self’-immolation.

I spent years on the spiritual path becoming more holy and more superior, ‘being in the world, but not of it’, etc., so I know the ethereal nature of the spiritual path very well. The reason I wrote my journal was both to explain the falsehoods and failures of the spiritual path and to trumpet the practical, down-to-earth benefits of pursuing actualism. As such, one of the core themes of the Journal was my success in finally being able to live with at least one other person in peace and harmony, certainly the most difficult of task for any human being to accomplish, be they normal or spiritual. It is these practical, very pragmatic examples of ‘improvement’ that give authenticity to what otherwise can be misinterpreted as nice-sounding wordiness or misconstrued as another rehashed form of spiritualism.

Spiritualism only offers the feeling of ‘we are all one’, while in fact each Guru, and his or her followers, are separate and competitive. Spiritualism only offers the feeling of harmlessness while in fact actualizing peace on earth is not on any spiritual agenda. Spiritualism only offers the feeling of happiness, but only if one goes ‘inside’ and dissociates from the world of people, things and events. An actualist, however, is vitally interested in actualizing happiness and harmlessness and not just imagining it as a fickle and illusionary inner feeling or ‘realizing’ it as an aggrandized altered state of consciousness.

For an actualist the proof that the method works is to be found by a demonstrable lack of malice and sorrow in the robust and fully committed living in the world of people, things and events. Do I get pissed off at other drivers when driving? Do I get moody around my partner? Am I 100% committed to living with my partner? Am I avoiding intimacy? Am I affected by the weather? Do I bitch about, or blame, other people for my moods and emotions? Am I affected by other people’s moods? What makes me angry and why? An actualist looks for pragmatic answers and practical evidence of change – not as an inner feeling but as a demonstrable fact.

Alan said it well recently when he was involved with setting up his computer system in his new house. Despite all the protocols and pit-falls, networks and nuisances, set-ups and setbacks, he found that he accomplished the task without the usual anger and frustration that would have been present had he not been practicing actualism for a goodly time.

Why do you imagine that you will become virtually free of ‘purpose’ before you are actually free of malice and sorrow, assuming that this is your purpose? It does sound a bit like the spiritual practice of acceptance to me.

Why do you imagine you will be virtually free of ‘method’ before you are actually free of malice and sorrow, assuming the method is what makes you virtually free of malice and sorrow? It does sound a bit like Van Morrison’s ‘No Guru, no method, no teacher’ popular spiritualism to me.

As for improving until you are virtually free of ‘myself’, you would have to provide some personal anecdotal evidence of both the inevitable turmoil that the process of becoming virtually free produces and of the tangible down-to-earth successes it produces, otherwise it sounds a bit like the usual spiritual delusion to me.

Spiritualism has a long, long tradition of ambiguous wordiness solely devoted to promulgating ‘self’-indulgent feelings, imaginary states and ever-promised but never-delivered outcomes. T’would be a waste to miss the opportunity that the actualism method offers by remaining ensnared in this archaic tradition of double-speak.

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What method are you talking about, what results have you achieved, what difficulties did you encounter?

Perhaps you could elaborate a bit on just one of the full gamut. The only value in a communication such as this is to be as specific and clear as possible, both for you and for others on the list. Then we can exchange experiences, swap stories and proffer any information that may be useful in becoming free of the debilitating effects of malice and sorrow, as fellow human beings and not as competitors.

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Are you saying you personally are beyond the ‘certain point’ where a method is useful?

Indeed the grass does grow by itself as the spiritual dimwitticism goes, but it does not mow itself. That requires a human body and a lawn mower. When a spiritualist talks of doing something that feels as though it is happening by itself, it is only because they have retreated inside into a feeling world and are dissociated from the event itself. This is why spiritual people have to do things ‘meditatively’, which means they have to go on an inner retreat in order to feel peace and harmony. In a PCE, the doing of something, or the doing of nothing, is such a sensate, sensual experience that it can be accurately said that what he or she is, is the experience of what is happening. This is what is meant by pure consciousness.

My experience, both in my normal and spiritual lives, was that it was quite easy to feel good while mowing the lawn – provided the mower started easily, of course. It was often something I really enjoyed but there were many, many things I did not enjoy, many times I was melancholic, many times I was annoyed, many times I fought and battled.

Your comment about the grand historical newsworthy events witnessed on TV may be related to my comments in the post about the appalling lack of anything even remotely resembling peace on earth. If so, my writing about the broader, less myopic, aspects of the Human Condition in operation, happening right now even as I write, all over the planet, obviously did not strike you as more significant than your own ‘ extraordinary and perfect’ ‘little happenings ’. This does sound a bit like spiritual ‘self’-centredness to me.

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Are you saying you personally are beyond the ‘certain point’ where a method is useful? If so, when did this happen and can you describe flying ‘on one’s own’? This is valuable information to share with others on this list if it is substantiated by personal experience and experiential evidence.

Perhaps you could offer a more emotionally-challenging occasion than lawn mowing where you moved beyond the ‘certain point’ where a method is useful? What about an occasion where you would normally have got upset, pissed off, sad or moody and you suddenly found that it didn’t happen as it usually does? In that case surely one would have even more reason to see the method as useful for one would want more of this happiness and one would want to be even more harmless towards one’s fellow human beings. You would be brimming with success at using the method and eager and willing for even more success.

You also said in your post to Gary –

I think I am reinforcing my ego/soul by believing ‘I’ am the doer of the happening moment ... from experience this can degenerate into further problems.

Yet, this same ‘I’ am the doer of the happening moment is the only substantial evidence that you offer in reply to my question for evidence of being beyond a ‘certain point’ where a method is useful. In the light of this previous statement perhaps you could offer other evidence.

As for your phrase ‘without a ‘me’ operating a No 13 identity’, this does seem to leave the door open to the possibility that there is a ‘me’ operating another identity ... maybe a Grand identity this time?

There are no rights and wrongs in the process of becoming free of the Human Condition. There are only opportunities for observation of your automatic programmed reactions to the people, things and events of the actual world. These periods of experiencing sensory pleasures are ideal times to indulge in a bit of unrelated musing and contemplating on life, the universe and what it is to be a human being. Valuable insights can emerge from these timeouts from the busi-ness of life. The most valuable tools I utilize for investigations are my couch, the computer and the TV, and the most valuable times are often my walk down town, having breakfast and sexual play.

And should I drift off into being ‘comfortably numb’, something would serendipitously occur to jolt me out of it and I’d be off again, busy with some aspect of the human condition, some belief, some feeling that arose ...

Becoming free of the human condition means what it means. To step out of Humanity is to no longer be a member of any exclusive club, to hold no truths as sacred or holy, to cherish no beliefs, to have no precious feelings, to nurse no malice or sorrow in one’s bosom.

Once it sinks in that you are not unique you start to see that you just been infected with the human condition via social conditioning and genetic propensity. Then you start to become a student of the human condition – you make an experiential study of feelings and emotions as they come up, you take a good look at all of Humanity’s ancient beliefs and wisdoms, you also look at Humanity’s ideals, values, morals and ethics in terms of ‘are they silly or sensible and do they work in practical terms’.

You start off by being interested in the human condition, then you find yourself becoming curious, then a fascination grows which can eventually become an obsession. Soon you find this curiosity about the human condition runs almost constantly in the background as a sensual attentiveness and an investigative awareness – a wordless ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?

Just a comment on something you wrote to Richard –

Ok; thank you; I will pass it by my B.S. filter a few times; the initial scan suggested edibility; and ... as they say... I will sleep on it.

You may well find that you are operating the old obsolete model of B.S. filter that was developed several millennia ago by the priests and shamans. That particular model only works by scanning for B.S. externally and not internally and the end result of using it over a prolonged period of time is that one ends up believing that everyone else is emanating B.S. and not ‘you’, the operator.

No 22 described what can happen when using this external-only scanning B.S. filter in his how-to-become-GOD method –

1. Recognize and acknowledge that One (you) is absolutely, unquestionably and infinitely responsible for every aspect of the behaviour called ‘insert ‘your’ name here’.
2. If the above does not feel correct and honest, do not stop until it does
3. Remove from your thoughts, vocabulary, action, library, computer hard drive, floppy disk, daily routine, social interaction and behaviour in general, ANY information that promotes, assures, attests, re-enforces, claims, or otherwise communicates in any form that 1. is not true. No 22 to Peter 19.7.2001

You may notice that the first premise is that the operator ‘called ‘insert your name here’, is upheld to be absolutely and unquestionably all-empowered – i.e. under no circumstances to be the subject to B.S. scanning at all. The second point is a warning to the operator that if there is any stray B.S. – such as feelings of incorrectness and dishonesty – picked up by inadvertently pointing the B.S. scanner in the wrong direction, you should immediately dismiss these readings as false and keep pointing the B.S. filter outwards. The third point is then to claim that everything anyone else says is B.S., only you know the Truth, only you think rightly, and finally, only you exist as an absolutely and unquestionably all-empowered being, aka GOD.

Although No. 22’s case is a somewhat extreme case whereupon he now imagines that no-one else but him exists, either as a physicality or as a personality, the use of the external-only scanning B.S. filter can only serve to make the operator more self-centred, more self-righteous, more supercilious, more blaming of others, more aggressive, more Superior, etc.

What many people miss on this mailing list is the fact that there is now a new model of B.S. detector available, one that is not based on the old spiritual, ‘the operator is always pure and clean’ model. This model is specifically designed for internal scanning only, i.e. it is precisely configured to allow the operator to constantly monitor his or her own operation and performance against certain criteria, in this case happiness and harmlessness.

By initially setting the dial to the minimum requirement of feeling good, the scanner will serve to pick up any glitches in the operator’s programming that throw up such things as feeling annoyed, feeling glum, feeling angry, feeling arrogant, feeling malicious , feeling separate, feeling blissed out, etc. The operator can then investigate his or her programming faults, sort out the glitches and quickly get back to feeling good. Sometimes the first investigation doesn’t fix the problem but with perseverance and diligence you can eventually get to the bottom of what the problem is precisely and why it keeps recurring such that you can eliminate that particular glitch altogether.

Then as you get better at scanning with this new model, internal-scanning, B.S. detector you can crank the dial up even further to set it at a minimum of feeling really good or feeling excellent and continue to monitor your operating system for anything that interrupts this new level of optimum operation. Nothing can escape this constant monitoring and scanning provided one is scrupulously honest with oneself – but why would one want to fool oneself if one’s prime aim in life was to eliminate every skerrick of malice and every skerrick of sorrow from me, this flesh and blood body.

This ‘self’-scanner is brand new on the market and has only been road tested by a handful of people thus far but the reported results are stunning to say the least. There is however, and quite understandably, a lot of opposition from owner-operators and salesmen of the old external-scanning model. Countless people have invested a lot of time and money in it over the millennia but the old model’s limitations are becoming painfully obvious as more of it’s failings are becoming public knowledge – it does nothing but produce a whole herd of supercilious operators all of them claiming that everyone else is talking B.S., while only they Know the Truth, that they are the Greatest, that they personally are One with God, that they are GOD, etc.

What is now readily apparent in this emerging post-spiritual era is that any version of the ancient, been around since Moses and Buddha, external-scanning model is well and truly passed its use-by-date.

Like it or not, rile against it or ignore it – what is on offer on this mailing list, and on the AF website, is a new ‘self’-scanning detector specifically designed to eliminate malice and sorrow from the operator’s own socially imbibed and genetically encoded instinctual programming. The new ‘self’-scanning method is deceptively simple –

ask yourself, each moment again, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’

What I would do in the early days was then start worrying that nothing was happening or I started to miss the excitement of another discovery and ‘I’ would then be back in full control.

The other night I was laying on the couch doing nothing and it struck me that I was happy for no particular reason at all. I was simply happy to be aware of being here. I reflected that I was well content with all the effort I had made to remove the impediments that stood in the way of this unconditional happiness and how ruthlessly simple the actualism method is in removing these impediments.

One simply needs to become aware of when one is not happy and ask oneself why? Find out the reason, question whether it is really worthwhile being unhappy for and if not, chuck it overboard. Similarly, if you find yourself being annoyed or angry – ask yourself why? Find out the reason, question whether it is really worthwhile being unhappy for and if not, chuck it overboard.

As for cheating, I remember feeling as though I was a traitor because I wasn’t playing the game that everyone else was – I wasn’t fighting for my rights, I wasn’t blaming others, I wasn’t joining in conversations about how tough life was, I wasn’t sympathising when someone else was complaining about something or someone. At these times it was often as though I had stepped out the door temporarily and was able to see the vast scheme of things – being able to see the non-sense of human beings still wilfully engaged in a psychological and psychic, grim instinctual battle for survival.

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As such, it took a while to get the knack of stretching out my times of feeling good because I was constantly on the alert for feelings of anger, frustration, resentment, sadness, guilt, etc. – which is exactly as it should be in the early days of actualism.

But if there is nothing going on as it were, no particular burning issue that you are avoiding or that has just arisen and needs looking at, then it is as equally important to begin to revel in feeling good, to start to wallow in feeling excellent in order to switch over to marvelling at the wonder of it all. The next thing to investigate will come wandering in the door by itself, or may even become apparent from reading on the website or on this mailing list.

Whatever pulls you away from feeling good, have a good look at, note it down, and get back to feeling good as soon as possible. Later, when you have time for a bit of contemplating, you can mull it over to get to the bottom of it. This way you don’t repress your feelings, nor do you express them, you become aware of them in action and then you conduct your own investigation, as only you can.

It is always a particular pleasure to write to someone who is genuinely interested in becoming free of malice and sorrow. It is no small thing to be a pioneer in finally ridding this fair planet of the animosity and despair that has exemplified the human condition since time immemorial.

In this emerging post-spiritual era, actualism is the only game to play in town.

Before I reply to your post I would like to make a comment on something you wrote to Gary recently –

To Gary – If ‘I’ exists in any given moment which is a likely scenario, then it is likely that ‘I’ will be involved in any conscious decision and action. I think that is where the self has to agree to its own demise or even temporary absence.

Spot on.

Many people seem to have trouble with the proposition that ‘I’ can, consciously and with forethought, set upon a course of action that will lead to ‘my’ demise. And yet many of these same people have absolutely no problem with the traditional Eastern philosophy that ‘I’ can, consciously and with forethought, set upon a course of ‘right’ thinking, in the case of Buddhists and neo-Buddhists, that will lead to ‘my’ aggrandizement. It is the same ‘I’ who has the motivation, who does the work – it is simply a matter of a different direction, a different intent and a different result.

It’s no small thing to get over this hurdle of supposedly ‘not-doing’ because it is a crippling legacy of one’s spiritual beliefs. All of the Masters, Sages, Gurus and Prophets have peddled the same nonsense that Transformation or Salvation is only achievable by the will or grace of God. This is despite the fact that their own attainment was achieved by their own stubborn efforts whereas it was only the final climatic event that resulted in an enduring Altered State of Consciousness that was not of their own doing – thus seemingly granted by the will or grace of God. The God-men propagate the idea of God’s will purely out of self-interest because they happen to be the God to whom you should surrender your will to.

If you take believing and following the wisdom of God-men out of the business of freedom and if you take the belief in God out of the business of discovering what it is to be a human being, what you are left with is discovering the meaning of life by your own efforts – aided and abetted by the innate predisposition of this infinite and eternal physical universe to manifest purity and perfection. The search for freedom, peace and happiness really begins in earnest when one frees oneself from all spiritual/religious belief and this is why the sense of freedom is palpable when this stage occurs. Finally one is able to begin to stand on one’s own feet and walk taller in the world.

To Gary – Am ‘I’ running the question knowing full well that it means that ‘I’ will eventually expire? I would say the implications of that is realised more the longer the question is on going. I guess what I’m saying is that ‘I’ am probably initially, somewhat seduced into continuing with running the question.

The bottom line seduction in actualism is ‘Do you want to be happy and harmless, in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are?’ This quite simple, direct and uncomplicated proposition is seemingly incomprehensible to those who have been taught to believe that this is not possible under the proverbial Grand Scheme of Things. It takes a good deal of courage to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that underpins the belief in a GST – that human existence on earth is essentially a suffering existence and that this suffering is an essential part of the GST. The belief in a GST, in whatever form it takes, dooms human beings to remain collective puppets forever tethered by imaginary strings to some higher entity, energy or disembodied Intelligence.

Once there is a crack in the door of this belief the question then becomes who or what is standing in the way of me becoming happy and harmless? This is where the seduction really comes in to play because running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ will not only provide the experiential answer to who or what is standing in the way of me becoming happy and harmless but it will simultaneously serve to begin to remove the impediments that prevent me from being happy and harmless.

The astounding thing with this method is you can do it anytime, anywhere. You can do it first thing in the morning, whilst having breakfast, driving to work, at work, driving home, at home, while watching TV, last thing at night, while talking with people, while alone, whilst busy and whilst doing nothing. It’s totally free, it cost nothing, it requires no club membership, it requires no belief , trust faith or hope. It’s something you do by yourself, for yourself and for those around you, for a happy and harmless person is pleasurable company – even if some do find it a wee bit disconcerting.

As you said, the longer the question is ongoing, the more you get to realize that there is only one ‘who’ who is standing in the road of me being happy and harmless. You start to get glimpses that this ‘who’ is not, as is commonly believed, someone else who is preventing me from being happy and harmless right now but it is actually ‘me’.

Once you begin to really get a grip on the fact that it is only ‘me’ who is ruining my only chance of being happy in this moment, you simultaneously begin to break the ingrained habit of blaming others and being angry at others for seemingly causing me to be unhappy ... and by doing so you then begin to become more and more harmless towards others.

And as you have more and more tangible success with running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ you soon discover that, despite ‘my’ fears, ‘I’ am happily agreeing to ‘my’ demise – which is what you referring to in your comment to Gary.

This innate strength of one’s ‘being’ is not to be underestimated and an actualist needs to both understand and experience this strength if one is to ever become free of its clutches. The toughest of the passions to escape from are those that humanity holds most dear – the tender passions, and it is these bleeding heartstrings that can either suck you back into the real-world or catapult you into spiritual aggrandizement. To put it plainly, the desire to love or be loved is powerful stuff and when love fails to bring sufficient fulfilment in the real-world there is always the seductive lure of narcissism – Self-Love.

I had many experiences and realizations on the path – they are par for the course – but they always occurred perfectly in time on time, never too soon and never too late. Once you make the effort to get the process really rolling it gathers its own momentum as one’s attentiveness does its job – bringing previously hidden issues to the surface one by one. As this momentum gathers, the dare is not to put your foot on the brakes, as it were.

The next issue to tackle is always easy to spot – it is always the one that is literally in your face, in this moment. As such, it has to be acted on immediately – there is no time for rehearsals in being here, doing what is happening. Actualism is about throwing out the script that your parents and peers wrote as to ‘who’ you should be and how you should act and then breaking free of one’s instinctual animal heritage that is the very cause of one’s malicious and sorrowful feelings and actions.

Thus the fear that arises in the process of actualism can be likened to stage fright – or feeling like you are on shaky ground – as you begin to feel the thrill of the business of being here without a script. I remember many a time being concerned that I was ‘losing the plot’ but it would soon disappear when I remembered that the plot within the human condition includes resentment, frustration, anger, violence, avarice, greed, corruption, loneliness, sadness, despair and suicide. Then I remembered that my aim in actualism was to break free of the straightjacket of living a pre-scripted life in a pre-determined manner – in short, I wanted to lose the plot.

At the end of your last post to No 15 you wrote ‘Thank goodness there is now an alternative to this impassioned madness.’ I’ve heard plenty of criticism in your posts but I have yet to hear what this ‘alternative’ is. Could you please clarify this grey area for me?

I listed some pre-requisites for anyone to be interested in this third alternative in a recent post to No 14, but perhaps the most significant requirement is a burning discontent with your life as-it-is. For me, this discontent meant I could not stop searching for freedom, peace and happiness – no matter what. When I had finally run the gamut of the spiritual world, I could only acknowledge that success on the spiritual path meant I was becoming more isolationist, I found myself blaming others for faults and attributes I could no longer ignore in myself, I was turning away from the possibility of an intimate one-to-one companionship and I was abandoning the hope of getting to the bottom of my failure to uninhibitedly enjoy sexual play.

When I finally saw the utter selfishness of wanting the power of God-realization for myself, it was such a blow that it was enough incentive to look elsewhere. What attracted me to this third alternative was that it meant I could bring an end to malice and sorrow in me – as opposed to spiritual transcendence and ‘self’-gratification. That it would be possible to become actually free of the human condition, here in this actual palpable sensual world – as opposed to a spurious spiritual freedom in a non -tangible, feeling-only imaginary world

A brief summary of the method to achieve this freedom –

The key to freedom from the Human Condition is the unique capacity of the human brain to be aware of its own functioning. Human beings are thus capable of being aware of both what they are thinking and what they are feeling – the instinctual passions in operation. This ability is commonly known as self-awareness.

In recent decades, this capacity to be aware of our instinctually sourced feelings has been complemented by the scientific studies of the neuro-biology of the human brain that are heralding the beginning of an empirical understanding of the genetically-encoded instinctual passions. These scientific studies, firmly based on empirical observations, make nonsense of the traditional denial of the existence of instinctual animal passions in humans and the ancient belief that we are born ‘innocent’.

‘Self’-awareness is possible in human beings in that we have the ability to develop and cultivate an awareness of both the feelings arising from our social conditioning of beliefs, morals and ethics one has been instilled with since birth and the feelings and emotions that result from the chemical surges of the instinctual passions in operation. What one is ultimately attempting to do is to achieve a pure ‘self’-less state and this involves observing, investigating and eliminating ‘who’ one thinks one is and ‘who’ one feels oneself to be – a radical procedure, to say the least.

This particular aspect of awareness is not a natural phenomenon, nor one practiced on any of the traditional spiritual paths, and needs to be actively cultivated and persistently practiced in order to ensure success. As such, one needs to proceed with a bloody-minded persistence the likes of which one has not mustered before. To do so, one needs firstly to establish a simple, unswerving and primary aim in life – a pure intent to become happy and harmless, as one experiences in a pure consciousness experience, for 24 hrs. a day, every day.

The method of becoming happy and harmless, 24 hrs. a day, every day, is both devastatingly simple and ruthlessly efficient. One needs to continually ask oneself the question ... ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ ...

The continuous asking of this question is the key to cultivating and developing ‘self’-awareness but it does require persistence and perseverance in order to ensure success. The essential method is to undertake a total investigation into anything that is preventing one from being happy and harmless now – after all, if one’s aim is to be happy then one needs to be happy now, not at some time in the future, nor some time in the past. The question to ask oneself is – ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ This moment is, after all, the only moment I can experience being happy.

Any emotion such as anger, frustration or boredom that is preventing my happiness now, has to be traced back to its cause – the exact incident, thought, expectation or disappointment. At the root of this emotion is inevitably found a socially-instilled moral, ethic or belief or a crude instinctual passion. This very action of awareness, investigation and understanding of these morals, ethics, beliefs and the animal instincts ‘in action’ and how they prevent one from being happy and harmless actually weakens their influence on one’s thoughts and behaviour. The process, if followed diligently and obsessively, will ultimately cause them to disappear completely. The idea of undertaking this process being, of course, to eliminate the cause of one’s unhappiness, or the cause of making others unhappy, so that one can experience life at the optimum, now. If one is happy now, then good. One can then ‘raise the bar’ to feeling very good, then excellent, then ... perfect.

The method soon presents success incrementally, as freedom from beliefs and instinctual passions is indeed a freedom that results in increased peace and harmony for oneself and in one’s relating with one’s fellow human beings. The method does bring up fear and resistance, because one is dismantling one’s very ‘self’, those very beliefs and passions one holds so dearly.

It sounds so simple, but very few people are even willing to take a small step along the way. Most people would seemingly like their life to be better, but faced with the prospect of actually having to do something themselves, or having to change the way they are, they soon sneak away, only to re-run the old ancient ‘tried and failed’ methods.

Of course, the major fear is that it will work and ‘I’ will ‘be’ no more.

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Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

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