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Selected Correspondence Peter How to Become Free from the Human Condition
I don’t want to ‘get over’ sorrow just to have it come back again. Is one in a sense subjecting oneself to these bouts of emotion? Am I on the wrong track? Are these ‘pity parties’ totally unnecessary or is there some intrinsic value to going through these experiences? What does one need to do to finally and irrevocably break free from these ‘automatic/instinctual predispositions’? I have a sense that your answer is going to be to get back to being happy and harmless just as soon as one can ... which would be a splendid answer ... but I’ll let you answer this yourself. Taking your questions one at a time –
No. The process of actualism is firstly to demolish the outer layer of one’s identity – one’s social conditioning. This social conditioning that each and every human being is inevitably subject to since birth is a two pronged habituation aimed at taming the brute instinctual passions via suppression and repression and encouraging the tender passions via praise and glorification. An actualist’s sincere investigations will reveal that both aspects of this conditioning comprise a moral and ethical straightjacket, a puppet-like existence which one either submits to, riles against or embraces by opting for seductive lure of self-glorification. For an actualist the seeing of, and the direct experiencing of, the inherent failure of this social conditioning is the ending of his or her social identity. This ending happens progressively as one’s instilled morals, ethics and values are questioned and investigated and what is revealed underneath is what this social conditioning was specifically designed to hide – the fact that human beings are instinctually driven animals. Thus, as you say, one is in a sense subjecting oneself to bouts of emotions beginning with the feelings and emotions triggered by one’s own social identity – feelings such as moral indignation, self-righteousness, prudishness and the like – and ending with the underlying instinctual drives and passions that give substance to one’s instinctual being. This direct experiencing is an essential component of dismantling one’s social and instinctual identity and while at times the journey may seem daunting, the rewards are inestimable. As you indicated, as the bouts subside – which they invariably do – you are left with a fascinated awareness of having been aware of experiencing your own psyche in action. You have experienced ‘you’ in action for a brief period – neither suppressed nor repressed, neither glorified nor condemned. My only other comment is that you never get more than you can handle because you set your own pace, you reap your own rewards and, by the very nature of your intent to become free of malice and sorrow, you have tapped into a palpable stream of benignity and betterment that is intrinsic to the physical universe. In short, nothing can go wrong provided your intent is pure. Another little reminder I used to run was that whatever went on in my head or heart in the day, I would go to sleep at night-time and find myself having breakfast the next morning, yet again. Then I was reminded that actualism is really about being here in this moment in time, in this place in space, and that the thrilling process of actualism, with all of its explorations and dramas, is what enabled this to happen more and more as ‘I’, the interloper, became thinner and less substantial.
You won’t get a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer from me about what is essentially your business. If it is working and brings tangible results then it works and only you can be the judge of whether you are getting tangible results. What I would do whenever I got a bout of the doubts, was try to remember the Peter who was before I became an actualist. What did he get upset about, what did he worry about, what made him angry, what made him sad and so on? I would then check how I was now and what tangible progress had been made towards my goal of becoming actually free of the human condition. There was obviously a beginning to your own track, you know your own progress by comparison with ‘who’ you were at the start and you know the nature of the end of the track from your own PCE, so only you can answer your question.
It is vitally important to be aware of whatever feelings, emotions or passions one is experiencing without indulging in the inherited habit of suppressing or repressing or expressing or morally judging the experience. How else to find out what makes ‘me’ tick – and all the other ‘me’s on the planet as well? How else to fully understand the human condition than by direct personal hands-on experience? What I found was that I first needed to stop judging these emotional experiences as being right or wrong, good or bad, in order to be able to understand by direct experience and observation not only the debilitating effects of the emotion or passion but also how they actively prevent me from being here. So, to get back to the comment of mine about sorrow –
There is nothing at all to be gained by indulging in or wallowing in sorrow but if the feeling comes along by itself or is triggered by some event such as listening to music or watching the news then make the effort to check it out while it is happening. There is no more valuable attentiveness than this for an actualist, for you are literally discovering and experiencing what it is that makes ‘you’ tick.
You keep doing what works to make you free from the feelings, emotions and passions that are the root cause of malice and sorrow. The discovery that something works in practice brings an overweening confidence that enables you to then tap into the genetically-promulgated propensity for betterment that is inherent in the very cellular structures of animate life in the actual world. And as you seem to be discovering the only thing that can break the stranglehold of ‘automatic/instinctual predispositions’ is the cultivation of an on-going fascinated awareness.
Yep, get back to being happy and harmless just as soon as you can – but with the essential proviso that you be interested enough, and attentive enough, to learn whatever you can from these emotional experiences. If you milk these experiences for information then you can learn from them – if you indulge and wallow in them then you are but indulging and wallowing in the human condition. It is vital that you dip into these experiences as deeply as possible in order to learn as much as possible about how the human psyche operates because then you are learning what it is that is both the substance and driving force for the human condition in toto. I could go on but I had better rope this post in. I’ll just end on a reminder that to be an actualist is to set off on a course that is diametrically opposed to all of humanity’s so-called wisdom. Whilst there is an inherent carefree simplicity to living free of the human condition that you would have experienced in a PCE, becoming actually free of the human condition requires stubborn perseverance and consummate patience. My experience is that it is a mightily good thing that the process of becoming free works incrementally because the experience that the process works – i.e. produces tangible results – is what ultimately provides both the incentive and the confidence to go all the way.
I was literally at a crossroad in my life when I came across actualism. The choice was both simple and clear. Do I stay on the spiritual path despite my misgivings, despite my doubt, despite the obvious failings and flaws I had seen and experienced? Turning back completely to the real-world was not an option for I had abandoned grim reality years before going off on the spiritual path. And the comfortably numb, Sunday-only type of spirituality never sat well with me – that half-half, foot in each camp, existence typified by such psittacisms as ‘be in the world but not of it’ or ‘take your meditation into the market place’. So I decided that the best thing to do was adopt a not-knowing position and I sat and very attentively listened to what Richard was saying, read and re-read his journal and correspondence in order to understand what actualism was. I became sufficiently curious as to what was on offer to twist my mind around from being defensive of the traditional path and asked myself the question – what if Richard is right and everyone else, up until now, has got it wrong? What if there isn’t really a spirit-ual world? What if it is all a gigantic imaginary construct – born of ancient myths, legends and fairy stories and given credence by the universal capacity of human beings to indulge in passionate imagination? What if the venerated state of Enlightenment really is narcissism run amok – a massive delusion? From the point of view of ‘who’ I was back then when I came across actualism, it required me to ‘suspend disbelief’ to even consider these questions, because I was so convinced that what I, and everyone else on the planet, believed to be true was the truth, a fact, and not a belief. How could the much-vaunted Wisdom of the Ages not be a fact? This ages-old wisdom has it that there are two dimensions to the world we live in – the material and the spiritual. Thus the ancients believed that there is the real earthly world and there is a spiritual world, i.e. the world we human beings live in is dualistic by its very nature. There is life here on earth and then there is life after death. There is good fighting evil and there is right opposed to wrong. There are human bodies but there are also human spirits or souls inside these bodies. This scenario has it that a human being has only two fundamental choices – make the best of grim reality or believe in a Greater Reality. How could I dare to question this world-view when everybody, but everybody, held this world-view? But the more I thought about it and the more I remained open to the possibility that everybody, collectively, has got it wrong, the more it explained why peace on earth between human beings would never ever eventuate. I began to see something I had seen as a teenager – the basic flaw in all religious/spiritual belief is whose God is the only right and true God and/or which scriptures or teachings are really, really the Truth. I began to see that my continuing to hold on to any other-worldly beliefs meant that I would never be able to be free from the human condition – I would always be stuck with having to uphold and defend my beliefs while being reluctantly tolerant of the beliefs of others. I began to see that a ‘reluctant tolerance’ of others and their beliefs was the best that human beings could ever hope for as a substitute for a genuine unfettered peace on earth. I began to see that to remain embroiled in my own selfish search for an inner peace or to believe in a God or God-man who personally granted me the reward of a peace after death in return for my abiding faith and unquestioning loyalty was but to conspire in maintaining the status quo. I began to see the madness of this two-world view and I began to see that I had been socially conditioned to believe that ‘this was the way it is because this is the way it has always been so this is the way it will always be’. I also began to see that we humans, being an animal species, are genetically programmed by blind nature to instinctually fight it out with each other simply in order that the strongest and most brutish will survive – come what may. This type of clear-eyed seeing can only occur when ‘I’, with all of my myopic self-centred thoughts and genetically-encoded self-ish feelings, briefly step aside and let thinking happen by itself. These seeings or realizations can build incrementally until a brief spontaneous collapse of the whole construct of one’s ‘self’-centred thinking and feeling can occur. Provided ‘I’ don’t immediately leap in and claim this clear thinking and direct sensate experiencing as ‘mine’, then a pure-conscious, sensate-only experience of the paradisiacal actual world we human beings live in can occur. Richard has coined the term pure consciousness experience, or PCE, for this brief experience of self-lessness in order to make a clear distinction between this pure pristine experience and the spiritual/religious narcissistic Self-centred experience when ‘I’ claim the experience as ‘mine’. It is this pure consciousness experience, or PCE, that then becomes an actualist’s own touchstone for the work that needs to be done when the temporary experience abates. The information gleaned from a PCE is invaluable but by no means precious, because the experience is available to everybody and anybody, there being ample evidence that everybody has had at least one PCE at some stage in their life. The common, universal mistake thus far has been to regard these experiences as precious – most usually as a personal sign from some divine entity or life-force especially for ‘me’, typified by the expression the ‘Chosen Ones’ or the feeling ‘I am the One’. It is only by demolishing his or her own spiritual beliefs that an actualist can become sufficiently aware and capable so as to not make a PCE precious or personal. In a pure consciousness experience, thinking happens by itself, unimpeded by ‘me’, and the world we humans all live in can be clearly experienced and understood for what it is – meaning is unambiguously perceptible in the bountiful pristine sensuousness of the non-inertness of the physical universe. In a PCE, a temporary experience of being free from the human condition, it is clearly seen that it is only ‘I’ who stand in the way of the meaning of life becoming apparent. There is clearly no place for ‘me’ in the pure and perfect actual physical world for ‘I’, by my very ethereal, non-physical nature, am forever doomed to be an alien, an outsider forever seeking to feel connected to this physical-only world. ‘I’ am also fated to feel an alien from other similarly alien entities and the best ‘I’ can conjure up is a need-felt feeling of love for some or a grandiose feeling of Union with some mythical Whole – none of which can ever satisfy ‘my’ insatiable craving. The work to be done in a PCE is to root around while clear thinking is happening so as to re-wire one’s brain from the previously entrenched pattern of thoughtless belief. Equally important is to delight in the pure and perfect sensuousness of a PCE so as to fully understand that, while the experience is indeed other-worldly from the world of grim reality, the PCE is in fact a direct sensate-only experience of this actual physical world we humans live in and have always lived in. It is vital to remember and experience that an actual freedom is not only non-spiritual but it is down-to-earth. It is the very down-to-earth sensuousness experienced in a PCE that prevents an actualist from being sucked into self-delusion or suckered into self-aggrandizement. The information gleaned from a PCE – clear thinking coupled with the magic of sensuous non-affective experiencing – afterwards serves as a touchstone, both as a guiding light and an anchor, throughout the oft alarming and disconcerting process of ‘self’-immolation. In a pure consciousness experience it is readily apparent that peace on earth already exists and has always existed – it is only ‘me’ who stands in the way. In a PCE, it is clearly seen that ‘I’ am but a social construct, the sum total of all that I have been taught to believe by my parents and peers – which in turn was passed on to them by those who were here on the planet before them, and so on, back into the dark mists of time. It is also clearly seen that ‘I’ have also been programmed by blind nature to instinctually fight for ‘my’ survival, come what may. This program is chemical in nature – all of ‘my’ passions and precious feelings are but the result of the flow of hormonal substances through this flesh and blood body, which are then inevitably interpreted as a feeling instinctual ‘me’. This ‘me’ is no ordinary chimera, for its roots lies deep within and its elimination requires far, far more than a mere change of identity – it requires the extinction of all of one’s instinctual identity. This instinctual identity is brute animal in nature and its elimination requires nerves of steel lest one does only half the job and falls for the traditional instinctual trap of transcending the savage beast so as to become a Divine and all-Loving Being. This is why it is vitally important for an actualist to steadfastly and diligently go about his or her own moment-to-moment, day-to-day, in-the-market-place, business of unearthing and demolishing all skerrick of imbibed belief as well as experientially investigating the direct cause-and-effect role that the instinctual passions have in generating malice and sorrow in one’s own psyche. It is a thrilling investigation that requires only one method – the on-going investigation of one’s own psyche in action. The method is devastatingly simple and ruthlessly efficient – you ask yourself the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Both the social ‘I’ and the instinctual ‘me’ will be incrementally exposed to the bright light of awareness and, as one’s awareness becomes increasingly freed from ‘my’ demands and ‘my’ cunning, one can eventually become virtually free of all of one’s social conditioning and virtually free of all of one’s instinctual passions that are the root cause of one’s malice and sorrow. Unless one is willing and eager to make this level of ‘self’-sacrifice then ‘self’-immolation will remain forever an other-worldly escapist dream. One will yearn to be actually free but one shall have not done the day-to-day, get down and get dirty, work to have earned it. But I’ve progressed too far down the track because I started off talking about being at the crossroads – at the very start, as it were. All of this process I have described can only happen if someone who serendipitously comes across actualism is ready and willing to ‘suspend disbelief’ as it were – to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, everybody has got it wrong. That – through no fault of anyone’s – I have been ‘sold a dummy’, spun a tale, led up the garden path, been hoodwinked, and that – through no fault of mine – I believed it, fell for it hook, line and sinker. The dummy, or falsehood, being that mother of all beliefs – ‘You can’t change human nature’. When I thought about this dimwitticism I began to question ‘Why not?’ ‘Who said so?’ Why can’t I change?’ ‘Why can’t I become free of malice and sorrow?’ ‘Who or what is stopping me?’ ‘Why can’t I become free of the human condition – in toto?’ There was an intrinsic dare in actualism that ultimately proved irresistible.
Or, perhaps it is another of ‘my’ tricks – an apathetic way of attempting to continue ‘my’ existence? Perhaps it is a necessary next step in the process – as Peter wrote to Gary –
What I wrote to Gary may appear to be contradictory to what I have just said above but I will attempt to throw a bit more light on what I think is going on. The path to virtual freedom is clearly high adventure – the decision to start at all is daunting, the on-going discoveries intimidating, tumultuous and disconcerting, to say the least. Oft times it feels as if one is losing all bearings, all sense and all direction, which is exactly what is happening, as most of one’s cherished beliefs and values are shattered and most of one’s past familiar persona is deliberately demolished. One often feels as though one is being torn apart as everything safe and familiar is thrown into question – by one’s very own questioning. Eventually the more crass and obvious aspects of one’s social identity and the more strident and gross expressions of one’s instinctual passions are eliminated such that one is virtually happy and harmless. Feeling good is an almost constant state – no more does melancholy and sadness have a lasting grip, nor does irritation or anger have any staying power. One is then free from the more insidious passions and thus more ready and able to investigate the underlying stygian nature of the human condition. In my case this included my Christian conditioning that lay un-investigated beneath my later-in-life Eastern religious conditioning, the precise nature of the tender passions that we humans hold so dearly and the last remnants of my social identity that I held most dear. Feeling excellent eventually became ‘my’ normal experiencing and I was able to go to bed at night knowing the next day would be perfect – as perfect as possible while remaining a ‘self’. This stage is typified by clarity of thinking and a continual state of almost-bare awareness. Increasingly I was able to see that it is only the human condition in general, and experience that it is ‘me’ in particular, that stands in the way of peace on earth. Then one finds oneself left with no choice – to mark time is to waste time, to turn back is impossible if one has done one’s homework with sufficient thoroughness – so one gaily abandons all that is considered reasonable, safe and sane and ploughs on regardless. One raises the bar from feeling excellent and one begins to marvel in wonder and amazement and unquestioningly sets off towards one’s destiny, realizing that ‘I’ can never prepare myself for what lays ahead, for what lays ahead will not be of ‘my’ doing. As such, the reference in my post to Gary that ‘I am no longer a practicing actualist’ referred to ‘me’ having nothing left of significance to investigate – the process of ‘self’ investigation must come to an end at some stage. This was made clear to me when Gary was more able to freshly describe the atavistic fears that inevitably arise in questioning one’s own spiritual/religious beliefs, simply because he is at that stage of his own ‘self’-investigation. Which is why I also said for me – ‘it is the end of an era, the end of one extraordinary adventure and the beginning of another’ I hope that makes what I was saying a bit clearer. It is easier to report happenings and events in hindsight, a bit riskier to try and assess what is happening while it is happening, but all that can happen by taking the risk is that I stuff up. Which I obviously did to some extent ...because here I am writing again. But hey ... as they say, ‘who’ is perfect? Certainly not ‘me’.
I’m not one for books of Revelation either, nor doom and gloom, but any child these days knows that the physical, material world in which we are living is collapsing because of mankind’s lack of consideration for the environment. Are you sure that you yourself are not imagining that Paul so definitely divides the human condition from the devastating state nature is now in? Sure, he gives our beliefs way too much credit, but could radical actualism go the same route and go into denial about the very real effects man’s imagining brain is capable of. Children don’t ‘know’ this from some innate sense of wisdom or foresight born of innocence – they have it drilled and drummed into them by teachers, media, parents etc. In the last few decades environmental studies have formed an essential part of all school curriculums for all ages. Not only is it often taught as a separate subject in many cases, environmental issues dominate economics, science, politics, engineering, social sciences, entertainment, media, etc. Every child who receives a modern Western education is taught from a very early age that the material, physical world in which they live is either collapsing or is in imminent danger of collapsing and that human beings are at fault. My school days were in the late 50’s and early 60’s and environmental theory hadn’t been invented then. The major fear at that time was the Cold War and the threat of nuclear devastation, but doom and gloom predictions weren’t taught as part of the school curriculum as is case with the teachings of environmental doom and gloom. What children know is what children are taught. Thus what we think we know or take for granted is, almost without exception, what we have been taught by our parents, teachers and peers. We take this information to be true, as in factual, whereas an extraordinary amount of it is theory, fashion, belief, concept, current idea, old wives tales, psittacisms, prejudiced view, etc. One only needs to consider what the school curriculum would have been like a century ago and consider how much of it would be relevant today, how much our world view has changed and yet how much of the past we desperately cling to. However, what we have been taught as truisms forms the very substance of our social identity – ‘who’ we think we are. One’s social identity is the conglomerate of all the beliefs, morals, ethics, values, principles and psittacisms that each of us has been programmed with since birth. Unless this programming in the brain is questioned and sorted into silly and sensible and old redundant neural connections severed and new ones formed, one remains a victim of one’s social identity – whereas an actualist’s avowed aim is freedom from being this identity that has been imposed upon this flesh and blood body. Therefore it is vital that all one’s beliefs, morals, ethics, principles and psittacisms be questioned and reviewed. This is the practical business of an actualist, this is the very down-to-earth pragmatic work to be done. It is an uncomfortable, tedious, seemingly-pedantic, fear-provoking process that people are very reluctant to undertake for you are quite literally dismantling a very large part of your ‘self’. Most of this information is programmed into us at the early years but quite a lot of what we hold dearest is what we have adopted later in life as we ‘moved with the times’. Environmental belief and Eastern religious belief were two that I adopted later in my life, and as such, I found them relatively easier to question for they were a bit like the layers of clothing I had swapped during my adult life as fashions and times changed. So, the first thing to be aware of is that you are doing the very business of dismantling your social identity by questioning and challenging your dearly held beliefs. The second thing is that they don’t magically disappear by themselves. It requires stubborn effort to dig in and question and you will find much resistance, wariness, hesitancy and objection in yourself to devoting the necessary time and effort required. The third thing is that it is something you have to do yourself to the point that the ‘penny drops’ for you, otherwise you are back with simply swapping beliefs or adopting another belief – a useless enterprise that will do nothing to free you from the human condition. Actualism is not a philosophy – it is a down-to-earth practical method that can enable you to become free from the human condition. * Excerpt from book review cont. –
But it’s gone beyond theory now and into actuality? The proof of our misuse of thought is collapsing this very environment and the physical actuality of that, confronts us everyday. Mankind’s erroneous theories have bolted and cannot be contained by merely shutting the gate afterwards, and haughtily looking down our actual nose at mankind’s silly imaginings. The imagination is a force to be reckoned with, it can manoeuvre arms and legs into all sorts of mischief. It has wrought life threatening havoc on this planet! Okay, before I get into detail, it may be useful to look at how it is possible to ascertain what is fact and what is theory, postulation, concept, commonly agreed, belief, assumption, psittacism, speculation, feeling, intuition, imagination, myth, wisdom, real or true. The first step would be to at least entertain the idea that the notion you have about something may not be factually correct. It would be good to put one’s real-world and spiritual-world cynicism aside and crank up a bit of naïve curiosity at this stage, even if you have to pretend an innocence, a not knowing when you ‘really do know’... To do so would be a blow to one’s pride and the way I dealt with that was to turn it on its head and say that I would be really silly to continue believing something that was not factual. The next obstacle is the moral and ethical stance I have – if I think it is ‘right’ or ‘good’ to believe this particular issue then I will not even bother to investigate it. Again, I refused to let arbitrary moral or ethical judgements stand in the way of wanting to know the facts for that would be silly and beneath my dignity as a supposedly intelligent, supposedly autonomous, supposedly free human being. So, you crank up a bit of naïve curiosity, clear the decks of pride, morals and ethics and you are ready to take a clear-eyed look at the particular issue. I can offer a few clues as to ascertaining facts based on my experience which may be useful. This is bound to end up a long post but you seem to be a reader which is a very good thing for someone interested in an actualism. I am putting in words a process I have done so many times it has become automatic, so it is best to regard this as a schematic outline rather than a fixed approach. But I do see a few elements common to any investigation –
So, taking a deep breath, we plunge into Environmentalism, using the above outline as a touchstone. I’ll try and keep on track but, in fact, all these elements tend to overlap, as one makes an investigation into a particular issue that may run from hours to weeks to months, or even years in some cases.
It is interesting to look back on the process and the stages I went through in investigating feelings, emotions and instinctual passions. With each emotion I investigated it was always an essential first step to investigate the goods and bads, the rights and wrongs, and all the things I had been told and thus assumed to be true – my beliefs. I know we keep flogging this aspect but unless one undertakes this process any investigation will be superficial and offer only a temporary relief of the symptoms without ever tackling the underlying cause of the instinctual passions. What I am suggesting is to be alert to the feelings that arise from one’s instilled morals, ethics, beliefs and values, for these are the first line of ‘self’ defence that needs to be tackled. This is where labelling and making sense of the feelings and emotions is vital for then you can make sense of the apparently arbitrary and chaotic jumble that arises. A point that comes to mind. The apparent chaos is possibly what happens when ‘my’ feelings momentarily loose their meaning and one seems to be floundering. Resolve at this point certainly is necessary if one is not to immediately fall back into feelings. A good point to remember is that there are three ways human beings can experience the world – affectively by feeling, cerebrally by philosophical-type thinking and sensately by direct, momentary sensate involvement. The psychic and psychological entity has no option but to experience the world affectively and cerebrally. We humans are instinctually programmed to feel our way in the world by means of an animal instinctual survival program, the predominant one being fear. As such, when no fear arises, when no excitement is happening, when there is nothing to worry about, ‘I’ feel bored, lost, floundering, meaningless, useless, scared, etc. But you, as the flesh and blood body called No 3, need to have more and more time free of this alien bugger who insists on running the show, causing nuisance, raising objections, being emotional, worrying, etc. This ‘down-time’ is also condemned by society for one is taught to be useful, to contribute, to be creative, that your ‘life’ needs to have a meaning and a purpose. For an actualist, it is often in these periods when nothing is happening – when ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ produces no drama, no issue, nothing to explore – that one can evince a delight and a joie de vive at being alive here and now as a flesh and blood body, located no where in particular on this paradisiacal planet as it floats in the vastness of space. The most pregnant time for a pure consciousness experience can be when one’s guard is down, when no issue is burning and no fear is arising. This is the opposite of the spiritual where one is hunting for the passionate experience and an emotional high as one’s prize or one’s due right in life. John Lennon sang ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’. I would see it as ‘life is what is happening now while you are planning for, or waiting for, your next experience’. Every moment, there is a door available marked ‘actual world’, and it is often most accessible at exactly those moments when there seems to be nothing going on in terms of emotions or worry. The ever-present, physical-only, actual world is ever-peaceful, ever-pure and ever-perfect. There is no fear, no aggression, no good, no bad, no right and no wrong in the actual world. Then, when you come back from the actual world, to resume being an ‘I’ in the real-world, you recommence the fascinating business of dismantling what you have seen to be in the way of your being happy and harmless. * This rewiring requires persistence, perseverance and repetitive effort – exactly like learning anything new does, except in this case one is unlearning something. Thus one’s success, or not, is exactly proportionate to the amount of time and effort afforded to the task. Aye, not only that, it is progressive, as in I can continue with ‘How am I...’ where I left off. Good, Hey.
I would like to hear more about the dynamics of your alternative. How does it ‘work’? As I have indicated, the first step is to fully take on board the modern discoveries that ‘who’ we think we are and ‘who’ we feel we are is nothing other than a social identity overlaying an instinctual identity – and that both are nothing more than operating programs in our brain. This alien identity, or ‘self’, stands in the way of the already existing purity and perfection of the actual world becoming apparent and this is made startlingly clear in the ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience or peak experience. From this experience one is clearly able to identify this alien entity as the source of one’s malice and sorrow, and one merrily sets in motion the process that will lead to living the pure consciousness experience, 24 hrs. a day, every day. The first step is to actively demolish the first layer, one’s social identity – all the beliefs, morals, ethics and psittacisms that each of us have been programmed with since birth. In my case it was Peter the son, Peter the man, Peter the father, Peter the spiritual believer, Peter the good, Peter the bad, Peter the builder, etc, etc. It is only when I had substantially eliminated or deleted this program that I could clearly look at, and sensibly investigate, the core instinctual being that is ‘me’. This second stage is where all seekers, up to now, have been seduced into denial of the ‘bad’ instinctual passions of fear and aggression and attempted to transcend them in order to develop a new spiritual identity based on the ‘good’ passions. It takes pure intent to avoid this atavistic seduction and instinctual grasp for survival (nurture) and self-aggrandizement (desire) and to dig deep to actively eliminate the insidious robotic influence that the instinctual passions have on one’s actions and thinking. Finally the day comes when the whole program becomes so shaky and so nebulous that it crashes as one sees and experiences the fact that ‘who’ I am is nothing other than an illusion, given substance and credence by the chemical surges from the ancient instinctual brain. This de-programming works exactly like the delete button on your computer. As you see something being redundant, preventing you from being happy now, or causing you to make someone else unhappy – delete! If it comes back again, see what it is, name the feeling, root around, see if you can function without it, delete it and empty the recycle bin this time. And get back as quick as you can to the sensate, sensual enjoyment of this moment of being alive. Each deletion and subsequent tangible freedom from malice and sorrow gives you the confidence to delete a bit more and soon you find yourself actively searching through each experience to see what is preventing you from being happy and harmless here, now, in this only moment you can be alive. ‘Self’-immolation is such an adventure ... and such fun. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Thus a freedom from the human condition is ‘The state of not being affected by (a defect, disavantage, etc.), exemption’, from the human condition. Given that the salient attributes of the human condition are malice and sorrow, a more pragmatic definition is an actual freedom from malice and sorrow. Much confusion arises for the seeker of freedom, peace and happiness for the word freedom traditionally means something quite different. In spiritual terms, freedom means an escape from, or release from, something undesirable – life as-it-is, in the world as-it-is, right here and right now – and the discovery of, or realization of, a more desirable somewhere else – being ‘present’ in the spiritual world, anyplace but here and anytime but now. I am having a correspondence with an awakened spiritual teacher at the moment that well illustrates this difference –
There seems to be a very deep-set misunderstanding that arises even from the running of the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ for the traditional approach would be – am ‘I’ feeling safe and comfortable ‘inside’ this body despite what is happening in the rock-solid world ‘out there’? This approach to the question merely perpetuates the self as an entity that is separate from the actual world, it does nothing to actively demolish and break down the barriers that prevents one as a mortal flesh and blood body being fully immersed in and engaged in the business of doing what is happening, right here and now in the physical, rock-solid actual world. This actual freedom is 180 degrees opposite to the spiritual freedom which is the escape from being here, right now in this the only moment one can experience being alive. An exchange I recently had with another correspondent illustrates a further aspect of spiritual belief about the actual physical world where we flesh and blood humans actually live –
Again this exchange illustrates that actualism lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to spiritualism. I don’t seek an escape from being here, now in the actual world – I seek to break free from all that prevents me from being here. In the case above, to do this means breaking free of the spiritual belief that material comfort is the cause of our misery – a deeply cynical and perverse view of life on earth that merely perpetuates human suffering. We were chatting the other day about the marked difference between being here, doing what is happening and the feeling of not being here that can cause a frustration with life as-it-is. The frustration with life as-it-is, right here and now, most often causes a passionate desire to be somewhere else which serves only to prevent one from being here. For an actualist, any period of time spent not being here is clearly a waste of time. Any time spent being bored, angry, pissed off, feeling sad, lack luster, annoyed, etc. is time wasted time lost from fully living this the only moment one can experience being alive. All of these ‘time-offs’ have to be explored and investigated and understood so as to prevent the same old ‘time-outs’ occurring in the future. It takes a bit of practice and a lot of effort and attention as to ‘how’ am I experiencing this moment of being alive, but pretty soon one gets the hang of it. Soon one finds that a switch has been made from being resentful at having to be here to resenting and wanting to eliminate whatever it is that prevents one from being here. Being a bit lazy, I’ll post another bit from a recent correspondence that illustrates this point –
There is a world of difference from the spiritual freedom of feeling that one is here, and actually being here. It does take a bloody-mindedness to continually break from the habit of lazing back into commonly held beliefs and resentments about the impossibility of life being easy in this actual world. The only way to do this is to actively investigate and understand all of the beliefs, morals, ethics, psittacisms, feelings and passions that actively conspire to prevent one’s freedom. Of course, given that these dearly-held attributes are all that ‘I’ am made of, this process is actually a process of ‘self’-immolation which is why it lacks popular appeal and is stubbornly refuted and objected to by spiritual escapists. Just a post-script to add some clarity about being here as it applies during the process to becoming actually free from the human condition. At the beginning of the process the difference between the pure consciousness experience and normal life is so extreme that the PCE clearly is experienced as being another world. Given that ‘who one is’ is a fully developed psychological and psychic entity living in a psychological and psychic construct of real-world and spiritual world beliefs, the self-less experience of the actual world has to appear other-worldly when one returns to normal. The marked similarity between the actual world and the real world is the physicality of both, whereas the vast difference between the actual world and the spiritual world is the physicality of the actual world and the ethereality of the spiritual world. This difference gives one the clue to where purity and perfection really lie – in the self-less state, and not in the self-realized state. With this knowledge as one’s touchstone one then sets about the business of actively demolishing one’s self, and this process, if undertaken with pure intent, means that each time one experiences a PCE the marked and startling difference between the experience and normal is reduced in proportion to the work done in the mean time. This can initially be quite disconcerting for what one sets out to do was to go ‘there’ – to the world experienced in the PCE whereas what one in fact is experiencing is the diminishing of one’s self to the point where one is coming here to the actual world and to this actual moment. It’s cute stuff and absolutely fascinating to experience. I experienced it as a half-way point – a sort of turning around 180 degrees from wanting to escape from here to there to wanting to be here. This is a literal tearing away from humanity, from both grim reality and escapist Reality. Then, as I said to No 8 –
Good Hey
On my way to cash & carry this morning I was continuing to contemplate the realisation which I had about a fortnight ago – ‘I’ was all that was standing in the way of peace on earth. I suddenly realised (‘got’) that ‘I’ had to go in ‘my’ entirety to achieve actual freedom. Not almost all of ‘me’, not 99%, not just the beliefs, but every single smidgen of the personality which considered itself to be Alan. The ‘not 99%’ bit twigged me, as I take it the 99% comment relates to my last post to you where I used the phrase in connection to Virtual Freedom. ‘This process, if undertaken with a pure intent, will inevitably lead to a state of Virtual Freedom. One then goes to bed in the evening knowing that one has had a perfect day, and knowing that tomorrow, without doubt, will also be a perfect day. Unless one is willing to contemplate being happy and harmless, free of malice and sorrow, 99% of the time – then forget the whole business.’ While it is both fascinating and intriguing to contemplate upon an Actual Freedom – what would it be like, how would it be, etc. – it must always remain unknowable to ‘me’ as I am now. The only thing ‘I’ can actually do to facilitate an actual freedom from malice and sorrow is to get myself to a state of Virtual Freedom as rapidly as possible. This involves ridding myself of my social identity and instinctual-based sense of ‘self’ as much as is ‘humanly’ possible. To get to the 99% stage is what ‘I’ can do to facilitate ‘my’ demise. There is work to be done and plenty of it, for continual perfect days are well beyond normal human expectations anyway – for one becomes virtually happy and harmless, 24 hrs a day, every day. Depression, sadness, loneliness, boredom, resentment, anger, animosity, annoyance become but vague memories as ‘I’ become less and less substantial, less of the one who is experiencing, less of the one who is controlling, less of the one who is thinking and feeling. Apperception, naiveté and sensate experience replace confusion, doubt, fear and alienation. The other facet to the path to Actual Freedom – to the 99% stage – is that realisations are clearly seen for what they are, sudden and dramatic flashes or glimpses of a belief exposed as merely fictitious and not factual. These realisation have a feeling ‘high’ associated with it, as a sense of liberation and startling clarity is affectively interpreted and experienced. While extremely useful and ‘par for the course’, as beliefs are exposed and eliminated, it is what one does with the realization, what action or change is evinced, that is important and significant, not the realization itself, per se. One needs to be aware of realisation addiction, to put it bluntly, as one can spend an inordinate amount of time and effort looking or waiting for them and as such ‘not being here’. They are but curiosities and will eventually subside – to have had their day, exactly as will the rest of impassioned feelings and irrational imagination, if peace is one’s aim. A personal peace in the world-as-it-is, with people as-they-are, that is.
Virtual Freedom is available for everyone and anyone who has the pure intent to be happy and harmless. If someone is not willing to make that level of ‘self’ sacrifice then any interest in an Actual Freedom would remain a purely cerebral exercise. That is what I meant by ‘two stages’ – you sort out what it is to be a human being – delve into the Human Condition and then you put what you discover into practice. If it is not put into practice demonstratively then one is fooling oneself – as is common practice on the spiritual path. An immediate aim for a Virtual Freedom will ensure one of pure intent – any gross grubbiness, power plays or self deception will become painfully obvious to oneself and others. Given the perfection and purity of the physical universe and its propensity to evolve to the best possible, it is no mere coincidence that a journal outlining the simplicity and down-to-earthness of Virtual Freedom is now available as a companion volume to Richard’s Journal. To ignore the obvious, the simple, the direct, the immediate in favour of always contemplating the future is to commit the mistakes of the past ‘tried and failed’ approaches. Not that there isn’t a future goal – Actual Freedom – but the practical and down-to-earth first essential step is the obtaining of and living in Virtual Freedom for a substantial period. The establishing of a base camp if you like. One of the vital points about Virtual Freedom is that it gives one a realistic down-to-earth achievable aim. Virtual Freedom is an obtainable, realistic goal available for anyone – and is an essential step on the path to Actual Freedom. It seems to me that the traditional path has always put the Goal off into the future – some day I will, or maybe it will happen, or it’s too difficult, or ... With the firm knowledge that a Virtual Freedom is readily obtainable, the immediate and the actual becomes the focus, as this is, after all, the only moment I can experience of being alive – so if I’m not happy now then I have something to look at. Unlike the spiritual where one has only a ‘far off’ goal with a 0.0001% chance of success of achieving a permanent ASC, the path to Actual Freedom delivers the goods – one eliminates the impediments to one’s happiness incrementally and as such one has incremental success. The immediate and realistic aim being to get to the point where one goes to bed at night having had a perfect day and knowing tomorrow will be equally perfect. The ‘bar gets raised’ and tomorrow may well turn out to be even more perfect. This is not to deny that Actual Freedom is not the eventual aim – but ‘I’ have to do it and this is the way to do it. What ‘I’ can do is to become virtually free. This is 180 degrees opposite to the spiritual path where going ‘There’ is the only goal and consequently one withdraws from any thoughts of happiness now, and certainly any mundane considerations such as being harmless, being in the world as-it-is, living with one’s companion in peace, harmony and equity, being sensible, questioning beliefs and investigating the facts, etc.
Awhile ago I wrote to you of an extensive study done documenting our ‘natural’ human propensity for inflicting suffering on others. I am interested to hear what you made of the study and what your conclusions are. Yes I am aware of this propensity in me. Before I felt I was into debate in this mailing list. I don’t like debate. It’s a kind of fighting by using words to me. And the reason why I felt I was into debate is my fear that maybe I am defeated, maybe I am wrong. So I was inflicting this my fear on others here. Great. It is so rare for a spiritual seeker to acknowledge this simple fact. All the spiritual teachings are in complete denial of the instinctual passions imprinted by blind nature on human beings. They, in fact, teach the theory of ‘you are not the body and you are not the mind’ so as to turn away from this simple fact. Thousands of years ago these instinctual passions were seen as good spirits and bad spirits that ‘invaded’ the body but for us to continue to follow this philosophy and belief-system is to defy intelligence. As for debate, that is what this list is about – words, discussions, facts, view points, experiences. There is no sitting in silence, energies, ‘you know what I mean’, ‘I feel you are ...’ etc, nor is there any philosophy or need to believe, trust or surrender. The trick is to see that what we are debating or discussing is the Human Condition – the state we humans find ourselves in on the planet. It is not a question of right or wrong or even true or false – given the spiritual corruption of the word true, as in Truth (that which cannot be spoken of) – because it is nought but a feeling, albeit a Grand Feeling. We talk of the facts of what it is to be a human being as opposed to the ancient spiritual ‘wisdom’ and mutually-agreed social beliefs. As such, when I write, I always present the facts ‘on the table’, and then it is completely up to the other what they do with the facts. This can have the effect of a seemingly confrontational debate, but who would have it any other way. It is not only your peace we are talking of, but peace on earth. The stakes are enormous and ‘treading softly’ or being ‘meek and mild’ is seen for what it is in the face of 160,000,000 million killed in wars this century alone. It is time to end this madness – so write on, write on.
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. When I came across Richard, one of the first things I did was buy a good dictionary. The meanings of words are so perniferously abused, particularly in spiritual writings and speech, that Richard was most particular in his choice of words and often searched for alternatives to both the normally abused and spiritually abused words. Astoundingly, the accurate meanings of words seems to make no difference to many who read his words – for them, the word ‘non-spiritual’ means ‘a new form of spiritual’ and ‘down-to-earth’ means ‘spiritual life while here on earth’ and ‘actual freedom’ is no different at all from the pseudo ‘spiritual freedom’ of turning away and escaping into a fantasy land. This is exactly why Alan has said that what he does is read, read, read and for a bit of relaxation, stick his feet up and read a bit more. A superficial reading of Richard’s words will miss the point completely for one will ignore the uncommon words and disabuse the more common words and get stuff-all out of it. When faced with something so radically new, a condition known as cognitive dissonance is evident in most. This is exactly why I have compiled a Glossary of terms on the Web-site and tried to separate the sensible dictionary definitions and interpretations of words used in AF from the hackneyed, non-sensical NDA-jargon and misrepresentations of the Venerated Ones. 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.
But actualism provides the solution to the Human Condition and ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is the path to the door marked Freedom from the Human Condition. By continuously asking oneself this question, and doing whatever is necessary to substantiate happiness and harmlessness in this moment, one begins to disrupt the continuity of one’s emotional life and weakens its stranglehold and dominance. The exclusive attention paid to this moment of being alive actually reduces the tendency to dwell on past emotional memories or be emotionally occupied with future events. This has the effect of shrinking one’s life to this moment only – which is the only moment I can experience being alive. Thus one gradually eases out from having an emotional life and begins to live this moment, and this moment, and ... The aim is to string more and more of those moments together, and one day you get to lay in bed at night time and say ‘What a perfect day I had!’. And then the aim becomes to string more and more of those days together and you find that you are on a path that frees you from malice and sorrow. And then you find yourself living a Virtual Freedom – ‘virtual’ as in ‘that is so in essence or effect, although not recognized formally, actually’. And then you know that your ‘life’, as you knew it, will never be the same again – in fact, it is soon to end completely and not a trace of the old ‘me’ will be able to surface ... ever again. Virtual Freedom is the first step – ‘self’-extinction the next.
Just to set the record straight ;-). At this point I find it neither necessary nor desirable to respond in a personal way (meaning addressing any members <finding them either supporting or not supporting the worldview currently presented as ACTUALISM>). The basic goal and purpose to establish (becoming happy and harmless while living a life in which there is no denial whatsoever of any bodily functions or qualities attributed to what is generally referred to as the human body) has been agreed upon as to be possible beneficial. If I may point out something both from my own experience of spiritual years, and from observing others, that may be relevant. If you run the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and come up with the answer ‘I am being angry right now’ or ‘I am feeling sad right now’ then you have something to investigate. If, however, you adopt the spiritual approach of ‘there is anger arising (in my body)’ or dissociate from the anger by asking ‘who is being angry right now?’ – as though it was someone else but you being angry – then you are indulging in the spiritual practice of denial and cultivating a new, holier than thou, dissociated identity. The simplicity of running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ with sincerity is not an easy exercise, but for someone who dissociates from their feelings it is impossible.
Just to make sure that you do know what I’m getting at. I was talking about the physical disability of being tired or say fatigued and its effect on the ability to be aware. When I am tired the mind is dull and lacks the ability to discern the tricks of ‘me’. It may be appropriate that I am writing this now because I walked down town for a haircut today, had breakfast about 12 in a café and Vineeto picked me up and we went shopping at the local nursery for some plants. We wandered up and down the pathways oohing an aahing as the selection available was almost as extensive as range of foods available from the local supermarket. We took our time purely for the delight of seeing a mere fraction of the extraordinary ways that life has manifest itself on this bountiful planet. Eventually we had a box full of the plants that took our fancy and tootled off home where we immediately launched into several hours of gardening. Now, in the early evening I am typing a post to you with that delicious sensation of tiredness after physical exercise and the satisfaction of getting one’s hands in the soil. The answer to the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ right now is deliciously tired and immensely satisfied with life. We have closed the curtains in the flat and are in what we call ‘night mode’, the lights are soft, two keyboards are clicking away and there is still the remnants of coffee taste in my mouth – the linger of coffee, as it is called. A wonderfully descriptive word, linger... Just to pass on a little bit of information and experience, it is useful to make a distinction between real-world alertness or on-guardness, spiritual awareness and contemplative attentiveness. I remember sometimes meeting Richard and he was just waking up from an afternoon nap or was just idly lazing around or gazing at nothing in particular and it was obvious that he was not being alert in the wide awake, taking particular notice, thinking something in particular sense that is usually meant by being alert. He called it ‘mind in neutral’ – a time of not thinking anything in particular, and not seeing anything in particular that you put a label on or a name to – a ‘gazing with soft eyes’, to use another Richard term. I came to understand that these times of utter ease and peacefulness, of a softy delicious awareness of the delight of being alive as a flesh and blood body can be entry points into being aware of the utter purity and perfection of the actual world we live in. This is when a bare awareness can happen, not a ‘me’ being aware or ‘me’ being alert. If I can remember back to the start of ‘my’ process, it often felt as though I was on alert all of the time as issue after issue or feeling after feeling would come rushing in. It was sometimes very chaotic, most often bewildering and certainly disorienting in the early months. But often out of this very chaos came melt-downs, as it were, where PCEs would sometimes happen out of the intensity of my discoveries or explorations. I have described this initial period of actualism as becoming ‘self’ obsessed – my attentiveness was solely focussed on what ‘I’ was experiencing – whilst carefully driving, banging in nails or doing whatever other things I was doing at the time. If I could make a distinction that may be useful – I was alert to what I was doing but I was increasingly becoming aware of how I was experiencing this moment. I know this could be labelled as nitpicking, to use a term that has crept into the list lately, but there is a distinction that is useful to discuss. What I came to discover was that sometimes the answer to the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ might well be that I am deliciously tired and immensely satisfied with life ... in fact, I am feeling excellent right now. 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. 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. Peter’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. |
