Selected Correspondence Peter

How to Become Free from the Human Condition

Which brings me back to people-as-they-are – (a feeble attempt to round this rave back to some semblance of order). Whenever Vineeto and I talk or write of becoming free of the Human Condition, we are often seen (judged?) as being judgemental or attacking and not tolerant or respectful of the other’s position. In considering this, the only sense I make of it is that we are threatening in that we are putting into practice the concept that one can become free of the Human Condition – i.e. how human beings think, feel, believe and imagine themselves to be and how they are instinctually programmed by blind nature to function. Now any sensible investigation of the Human Condition involves observation, investigation, comparison, contemplation, consideration and judgement. One has to come to a conclusion as to what is silly and what is sensible, otherwise the whole exercise is merely intellectual wanking. Having made a judgement as to what is best, then action is required – one is compelled to action, unless one wants to settle for second-best – but that’s another story. So no bleatings of ‘you’re being judgemental’ will work with me – it’s a furphy that’s been bandied around since morals and ethics were first chiselled in stone and devised to silence the sensible. ‘Judge ye not’ is a platitude invented by God-men and other charlatans in order that no one would question the rest of their inane platitudes. It is one of many dimwitticisms, passed off as Guru-wisdom, that have no other meaning or purpose than to keep their followers and disciples under control, humble, grateful, loyal and above all non-thinking.

But if anyone wants to remain as they are, second-rate, rooted in the past, or off in la-la land, then fine. Somewhere there is a Peter or a Vineeto who might appreciate a bit of ‘judgemental’ straight talking, a first hand account about becoming free of the Human Condition, what it’s like to challenge all beliefs, what it’s like to leave one’s ‘self’ behind. I strongly recommend being judgemental – making a judgement, an evaluation, a discernment, a decision, a finding, an appraisal, an assessment, a conclusion. At the very least one practices thinking, at best it may provoke action, at worst you may be inaccurate and need to re-assess. This is the process of learning called trial and error. One simply proceeds to what is sensible and what works, and one finds one has discovered a fact. And one can rely on a fact. It takes a little practice but eventually ‘you’ become redundant in the game as the facts start to speak for themselves.

I have a question regarding the role of the passions in actualism. I currently have two conflicting images of what the actualism method entails. One idea involves throwing myself heart and soul into the process of self-immolation, co-opting every aspect of the self in order to direct its passionate energy toward the goal. The other involves living sensibly without much passion until the ‘organs’ of malice and sorrow gradually atrophy like unused muscles.

Which is the better approach?

Rather than offer an intellectual answer perhaps I would refer you to the track record thus far of those who have tried the approaches you outline.

Thus far there have been several people who have come across actualism and have apparently opted for the all-or-nothing method as in ‘throwing myself heart and soul into the process of self-immolation, co-opting every aspect of the self in order to direct its passionate energy toward the goal’ and none have reported success in becoming free of the human condition – on the contrary many continue to be afflicted by the human condition to varying degrees be it by being sorrowful, becoming angry, feeling resentful or of blaming others for standing in the way of their freedom.

By way of contrast the track record of those who manage the sensible approach of doing both at once – being passionate about being free from the human condition by doing whatever they can to become free of malice and sorrow until the moment comes when they become actually free from the human condition – is that all who are doing so report that they have benefited from what is a win-win situation, in that they all report the benefits of living virtually free of the debilitating feelings of malice and sorrow, benefits not only for themselves but benefits for all of their fellow human beings with whom they come in contact with.

Given that you have said you have two conflicting ‘images’ of what the actualism method involves I can only suggest reading further on the AF website and following the conversations on this mailing list as you will find that there has been a good deal written about the down-to-earthness of actualism that will help you make up your own mind as to what it is you want to do.

Indeed. History is littered with the bodies of those who were foolish enough to question the belief of others. Whereas actualism is utterly safe, because the only beliefs you need to question to become free of the human condition are your own.

It sounds as though you have got the gist of what is on offer in the process of actualism.

Actualism involves much more than a ‘shift in perception’, it involves the deliberate dismantling of one’s social and instinctual identity, a process which will not only bring about a change in your thoughts and feelings but also your actions. Whilst questioning and challenging the beliefs of others is by no means a safe and sensible thing to do, questioning your own beliefs is safe in that the only thing you are doing is diminishing your own miserable and malicious ‘self’. This process is utterly safe because ‘you’ are in control of the extent and pace of the process of your own ‘self’-investigation – only ‘you’ can challenge your own beliefs, no one else can.

You can escape your fate and become the master of your own destiny – the experience of actualism is that no one is standing in the way of you becoming free of the human condition.

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There have been some examples of spiritualists who even manage to absorb some of actualism into their spiritual beliefs and some have even started to teach their own personal hodgepodge version of actualism to others. What they don’t realize is that they stand out like dog’s balls because they come across in the vein of spiritual teachers – seeking power and authority by questioning and probing the beliefs of others while blithely never daring to question their own beliefs. The reason they don’t dare question their own beliefs, as you put it so well, is that ‘Once one questions beliefs to this sort of extent, it’s a one way street’.

I do recommend spending some time dipping into the spiritual teachings that have lead you up the garden path in past years. I found by deliberately doing this, I learnt a good deal about what makes ‘me’ tick and came to understand exactly what is seductive about spiritual teachings. I also learnt how deeply rooted spirit-ridden beliefs are within the human psyche and how they fit hand in glove with both our social identity and our instinctual identity. Dismissing beliefs or swapping beliefs is not the same as investigating and demolishing beliefs.

Exactly as in my building work, it was not enough to know that something failed – I needed to also know why it failed so I wouldn’t repeat the same mistake again.

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That ‘religion is the greatest obstacle’ is a spiritual-world psittacism often trotted out by spiritualists in order to separate their own spiritual-religious practices from that of the herd.

It takes a good nose to sniff out spiritualism precisely because of its chameleon-like character. As your investigations proceed you may well be surprised at the extent of its almost complete infiltration into every aspect of Western society. I know I was.

I certainly discriminated between spirituality and religion for some 17 years. I gave up both real-world materialism and religion for spiritual communes and Eastern spirituality. For me at the time, there was a world of difference between religion and spirituality, they were chalk and cheese. For 17 years I experienced that there were only two alternatives until I happened upon actualism. What I discovered was that I could not just throw away a lifetime of conditioning overnight but that it took a great deal of meticulous effort and a constant attentiveness to become aware of how insidious this programming was such that I could weed it out.

I would assume as more is written and published debunking the myths of spirituality that it may be easier for future generations to see through the myths and legends of spirituality, but at the moment spirituality is the predominant influence in all human social programming. Human beings have come to accept that their instinctual ‘self’ or ‘being’ is a soul or spirit that has a life independent of the physical body and can even survive the death of the corporeal body. Because of this all-consuming belief the only way out of spirituality is the extinction of the soul – the ending of ‘being’ and the becoming of what you are – a mortal flesh and blood body.

It is one thing to read about other people’s discoveries and other people’s debunking of spiritualism and to agree with them, it is another to deliberately set off on a path that leads to ‘self’-immolation. Because of this, an actualist has to make their own investigations into the insidious nature of spiritual teachings and the influence of spiritualism on their own thinking and feeling so as to incrementally free themselves of all spiritual beliefs, concepts and feelings.

I always liked Richard’s description that people desperately put on rose-coloured glasses when looking at the real world, seeking relief in the feelings of gratitude, ‘higher consciousness’, beauty, goodness, love and compassion. In order to do this, they start with a view of the world as-it-is based on wearing grey-coloured glasses – the real world being a fearful place of resentment, ‘unconsciousness’, ugliness, evil, alienation and suffering. The solution is to dare to undertake a process that involves removing both the rose-coloured glasses and the grey-coloured glasses, and to see the actual world for what it is – perfect, pure, sensually abundant, benevolent and delightful. One then sees clearly that one’s social and spiritual / religious conditionings and beliefs actively conspire to paint and perpetuate a grim worldview. One then sets to, with gay abandon, on the path of exploring, investigating, scrutinizing, understanding, and eventually eliminating all that is not factual and actual. The act of doing so eliminates one’s social identity – one wipes one’s slate perfectly clean of all beliefs, morals, ethics and psittacisms. What one then discovers – hidden underneath – is one’s biological heritage – the primitive animal instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

Just a note, a bit of musing. I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the experiences of ego death that have been described to date as we know that an Altered State of Consciousness was the inevitable result – even in Richard’s case in 1981. It was some 11 years before he experienced the second-stage – a soul-death, if you like. In all cases to date the experience of psychological death have been passionate experiences of Love, Divinity, Timelessness, Unity, Oneness and Bliss. The sole evidence of psychic death was accompanied by a sense of dread as this imaginary alter-ego, or super ego crumbled.

What we are aiming for is neither passionate calenture leading to awe, Eternal Union and Heaven, nor psychological despair leading to dread, Eternal Oblivion and Hell. The aim of psychological and psychic death is to come to the actual – here and now. As such, the experience of this death of me will be, or should I say, I assume will be, a sensate experience – physically orgasmic in nature, exactly as physical death will be as the senses close down. The connection between sex and death is very strong and many of my PCEs have resulted from the very physical sex act and the resulting orgasmic experiences bringing me right here to the actual world of the senses.

‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is dangerously effective in relentlessly bringing one to one’s senses as both the cerebral and affective perceptions – ‘my’ perceptions as a social identity and instinctual being – fade into insignificance. Not only do they fade but they are experienced in everyday life of virtual freedom as illusionary, i.e. experienced not intellectually dismissed as in the spiritual deceit of ‘I am already perfect, all I have to do is realise it!’ My answer to these people is – ‘do you, in your imagined perfection, live in peace and harmony with another person?’ ‘Do you get sad, melancholic, peeved, irritated, upset, bored, etc.?’

One is constantly confronted with the experiential fact that the actual is far more extraordinary and magical than anything felt in feelings or imagined in thought – it is, after all, actual and all happening this very moment. This very actual-ness – as in experienced by the senses i.e. physical, and not merely passive, as in happening this very moment – will be the death of ‘me’.

And the death of ‘me’ will be a sensate experience accompanied by the last of the cerebral and affective ‘flame-outs’.

I’m quite willing to get back to the main event ... actualizing peace on earth :o)

If I can just reiterate that I am not stymieing objections, doubts or questions – far from it. What I am saying is to be wary of not losing sight of the bigger picture on offer whilst making your investigations. The way to stay focussed is to have an aim or purpose to one’s investigations and for an actualist this aim is to become unconditionally happy and unconditionally harmless.

I used to spend days, weeks or months nutting out some particular issue or other until the ‘Ah! Yes’ clicked in and the issue was resolved such that it didn’t come back any more. Once I had an issue running I would not let up until it was resolved completely, not only intellectually but also experientially. I did this by becoming attentive to my emotional reactions to the issue – be they annoyance, frustration, angst, sorrow, indifference, apathy, acceptance, or whatever. This attentiveness inexorably led to an in-depth investigation and exposure of my precious morals, ethics, opinions and beliefs contiguous to the issue – which then allowed me to become aware of the animal instinctual passions that lay in stealth beneath my ‘self’-serving veneer of ‘goodness’.

When I finally came to clearly understand the facts of a particular issue – both intellectually and experientially – my normal ‘self’-centred reactions, objections, worries, feelings and passions about the issue disappeared such that I was more able to be happy and harmless more of the time – which in turn meant that I had more time to be more able to appreciate and savour the delights of being here in the world as-it-is with people as they are.

There is no better business than actualizing peace on earth.

What you are saying relates to something I said in my previous post –

‘When the PCE fades and ‘I’ resume centre stage as it were, ‘I’ then have something to do – resume the business of becoming aware of, and then experientially investigating the veracity of all the beliefs and the nature of all the passions that give substance to both these real-world and spiritual world realities.’

This ‘resuming the business’ equally applies whenever a period of feeling good or feeling excellent fades – it is important to become aware of and then experientially investigate exactly when and why feelings such ‘alienation, loneliness and angst’ returned to centre stage as it were. What was it that triggered off these feelings – was it something someone said, or didn’t say? What particular event or incident happened or what anticipated event or incident didn’t happen?

This combination of self-awareness and self-investigation is essential if you are to make sense of how ‘you’ tick. Unless you make sense of how and why you have reverted back to the normal human default programming of feeling malicious or sorrowful, then similar events or incidents will inevitably produce the same results – a rapid decent from feeling good or feeling excellent back into feeling peeved, annoyed, melancholic, sad, frightened, lost, lonely and so on.

I particularly like the way Vineeto recently described this investigative process. She said this process of de-programming as akin to changing the default settings in a computer program by searching for the ‘option box’ in order to take the ‘tick’ out of the default setting. It is this default programming setting – both the socially-instilled programming and the genetically-encoded instinctual programming – that automatically causes human beings to get angry or sad whenever particular incidents or events occur, threaten to occur or are imagined to occur.

Unless one makes the effort to take the ‘tick’ out of the ‘box’, the human default setting of malice and sorrow runs automatically – regardless of normal efforts to ignore it or suppress it, or the spiritual efforts to sublimate it or transcend it. This is the practical down-to-earth business of actualism – a step-by-step deprogramming. And, of course, if you miss a chance or don’t quite get it the first or second time, life is excellent at providing another opportunity.

I am always somewhat surprised that so few people seem to stop to spend the time to do a bit of stocktaking and re-evaluating as to what they have done and where they are headed. Many of my generation had both the opportunity and time to think about the ‘meaning of life’ and many indeed did begin searching for something better than grim reality and something less shonky and self-indulgent than Olde Time Religion.

Unfortunately, most followed fashion and found Eastern religion and that sucked the very life out of them. By becoming believers in Truth, they have become as morally-superior and as intellectually-disingenuous as the countless generations before them who surrendered their will to a mythical God in exchange for a front row seat in an imaginary afterlife. And I can only say this because I too went down that path for a good many years.

And the only reason I stopped being a follower and a believer was that I took the time to do some stocktaking and re-evaluating of my life – and I didn’t like what I saw, so I determined to change. Better to make such evaluations now – even if it involves contemplating lying on your deathbed – and make the necessary changes now rather than end up dying in sad regret of never having fully lived.

And in order for any stocktaking to take place, one needs firstly to be sufficiently discontent with one’s own stock in life.

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Who else but you is going to interpret the events of your life and who else but you is going to determine what meaning it should have? There is no one better qualified, or more vitally interested, than you to decide what to do with your life. I know, for me, it was glaringly obvious that if I wanted to become free of the human condition in toto, then the doing of it was up to ‘me’.

Given that the ‘narrative ‘I’ construct’ is in fact the life you are leading now, the question remains – what do you want to do with the rest of your life. I know when I came across actualism I had little trouble in reliably assessing that I was far from being free of malice and sorrow and as such the challenge implicit in actualism to devote my life to becoming actually happy and harmless proved irresistible.

My experience is that the only way I ever understood something fully was by the trial and error doing of it. Thinking about what to do and how to do it were the first steps, but then plunging in and doing it was essential to know if what I thought was the right way worked in practice. With hindsight that is what I did in the first year of actualism – I tested out Richard’s observations about the human condition by making my own investigations of my own psyche in action.

But where I tend to differ with what you are saying is that I did demand an understanding from my investigations – and not only an intellectual understanding but an experiential understanding. What I found was that each understanding became like a stepping-stone on the path to becoming happy and harmless. Each understanding of what made ‘me’ tick, of what prevented me from being happy and what stood in the way of me being harmless, allowed me to more and more freely delight at being here, doing this business of being alive.

After some 15 months of success with this process of ‘self’-investigation, I took some time off work, bought a computer and sat down and wrote down the understandings I had come to in the form of a journal. This is how I started –

‘As I sit on the balcony balcony of our small flat contemplating life, I am moved to start writing my story. The urge has been welling in me over the last few months, so I’m now making a start. There is now ample time, given that I have all but retired, to reflect on the sense I have made of life.

Indeed, that has been the innate drive in my life: to make sense of this mad world that I found myself living in. The insanity of endless wars, conflict, arguments, sadness, despair, failed hopes and dreams seems endemic. And worse still, as I gradually forced myself to admit, I was as mad, and as bad, as everyone else.’ Peter’s Journal, Forword

As you can see, understanding or making sense was crucial for me in the process of actualism. This did take time and effort and in the early days of ‘self’-investigation so much was ‘on the table’ that often it felt like all I could do was put one foot in front of the other. If I read you right, this is what you mean when you say –

‘… so the most judicious plan is to just keep ploughing away, and stop demanding understanding’. And, I asked myself if any sort of rationalization or justification (positive or negative re AF) was going to affect my determination to apply the method... the answer was no, so I’d better give up on some of the wanking.’

This way understanding will come by the trial and error method of doing it and this will eventually produce an experiential understanding rather than an intellectual-only understanding. Once you are into the trial and error phase of investigation and experimentation then it’s a hands on business and then life-changing changes invariably come from abandoning that which doesn’t work and pursuing that which brings success.

So when you say ‘I don’t think I’m going to ‘get’ those answers until I’ve ‘arrived’, you may well find that ‘getting’ the answers as an experiential understanding is what will bring the life-changing changes necessary for you to become free of the human condition.

That was a bit long winded but you have probably got the gist of what I am saying. The process of actualism brings incremental success in the way of experiential understandings, which invariably lead to tangible changes.

Give me a good solid experiential understanding of what works and what doesn’t work over a belief, a hunch, a theory or a hope any day.

Taking into consideration that you said previously – ‘occasionally, I will have some very successful days where things are getting clearer’, I suggest that it might be useful to reflect as to whether this increased clarity came about from effortlessness or from thinking – utilizing the brains capacity for attentiveness, sensual perception, sensible evaluation and contemplative reflection. I only say this because it is fashionable in many circles to denigrate the astounding ability of the human animal to be able to think and reflect and to venerate all sorts of affective experiences and imagination. Perhaps I can put it this way – when I ask myself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ I am asking a question and to come up with an answer requires thinking, aka mental effort.

When you say ‘it seems the trick is finding that place where everything happens effortlessly’, I assume from the thread of this conversation that you are talking about getting to the stage where the actualism process is happening effortlessly – an effortless constant sensual attentiveness as to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive. If this assumption is right then I would point out that you have previously said –

‘but lately, I’ve been more determined – basically tired of slipping back to the normal and fearing what consequences following this thing through might bring.’

If I take your words at face value, they confirm my own experience that it takes determination, i.e.

‘The definite direction or motivation of the mind or will towards an object or end’, Oxford Dictionary1998

to eventually get to the stage where a sensual attentiveness becomes effortless. In short, getting from the stage of being interested in actualism to the stage where the process is operating automatically and effortlessly requires effort – there is no other trick to it.

If I can refer to a recent comment No 62 made on the list – if you want to become actually free of malice and sorrow, nobody ‘pushes’ but you, nobody does it for you, nobody can do it for you, and it needs not only to be on your agenda but it needs to be number one on your agenda.

And isn’t it great to find out these things for yourself – to discover that your own freedom is exclusively in your own hands.

Given that have said you welcome feedback, I’ll just round off with a comment on – ‘it seems that mental effort automatically implies a division we experience as ‘self’’. If I read you right, this supposition seems to be a hangover from Eastern religious belief wherein the ‘self’ is believed to be a thinking-self or ego-self only and a spurious feeling of freedom is gained by abandoning common sense thinking in an attempt to become a feeling-self only.

As you know by now this is old archaic thinking – superstition based on ignorance of fact and empirical observation. To suppose that one can become free of being a psychological and psychic ‘self’ without ‘mental effort’ does not make sense. After all, ‘who’ you think you are is the result of thousands of years of cultural and social programming and ‘who’ you feel you are is the end result of billions of years of the genetically-sequenced struggle for survival of life on this planet. To become free of all of this programming in order for intelligence to be freed from these brutish instinctual passions is no easy task – to abandon thinking in favour of feeling is to forsake this task in favour of ‘self’-preservation.

Having said that I can relate to what you are saying as I remember my early days of actualism when I thought that when I was feeling good or feeling excellent then I was ‘being here’ but when I was feeling angry, annoyed, frustrated, worried, sad or so on then I was ‘not being here’. As I began my investigations and ponderings about the nature of the human condition, I also thought I was not ‘being here’ if I was busy nutting out some issue or other, i.e. if I was busy thinking rather than sensately experiencing this moment of being alive.

This idea of mine eventually lost credence as I started to become fascinated with, and subsequently began to enjoy, the process of thinking about the human condition and investigating how my psyche was programmed to function. The realization that really blew it out of the water, however, was the experiential realization in a PCE that it is always now and I am always here – I can never be anywhere else but here and I can never actually experience anytime other than now. It follows that if I am busy thinking now then that is what I am doing now, exactly as I am thinking now while typing these words and exactly as you are thinking now reading these words. This leads to the fact that I am often thinking – not always obviously – but to think that I am not here because I am thinking makes no sense at all.

What I am saying can be confirmed by observation of what is happening whilst in a pure consciousness experience. In this temporary experience of ‘self’-defection the ability to think and reflect is neither absent nor is it inflamed by passion and imagination. In a PCE the ability to think and reflect is unfettered by beliefs, morals and ethics and is freed from both the savage and tender survival passions. A PCE confirms that who ‘I’ think and feel I am is a chimera, an illusion, someone and something that has no substance, someone and something that is not material, not flesh and blood. Who ‘I’ think and feel I am is not actual like the ‘stuff’ of the universe – be it the vacuum of the spaces between the swirls and lumps of matter in the infinitude of the universe or the play of the clouds across this earthly sky, the air that touches your skin, the warmth of the sun, the scent of a flower, the plastic of a computer keyboard or these fingers typing these words.

In a PCE, I experience the actuality of all of this matter. In a PCE, I experience an actual world, existing in fact, sensately experienced as being so alive, so vibrant and so immediate that my identity as a ‘being’ temporarily disappears. With ‘me’ no longer here to rule the roost, as it where, a palpable freedom exists for I experience what I actually am for a period of time – a mortal flesh and blood human being, bristling with sense organs, able to think, reflect, contemplate and communicate as well as being able to be aware that I am aware. In fact, what I am is the very ‘stuff’ of this universe temporarily formed as this flesh and blood body and capable of being aware of this awareness. Or to put it as Richard puts it – ‘what I am is this universe experiencing itself as a flesh and blood human being’.

In a PCE – provided you resists the atavistic temptation to start swooning in rapture at the beauty of it all or indulging in ‘self’-aggrandizing fantasies – you can readily discern that the only reason you are experiencing the sensual delight and utter peacefulness of the actual world is because ‘you’ have temporarily left the stage. From this experiential realization a pure intent can arise to devote one’s life to the task of becoming happy and harmless – to actively dismantle my ‘self’, to dare to question the veracity of ‘my’ precious beliefs, to want to really come to understand both the nature and the source of the peripheral feelings of ‘self’ and sense of ‘being’ and to not stop until the process is finished and the very source of ‘me’, ‘me’ as a feeling ‘being’, is permanently eliminated, expunged.

Then, when the PCE wanes and you return to being ‘normal’ again, back in normal everyday reality, ‘you’ find yourself with something to do. ‘You’ then have a reason for being, a life goal, a task, a job, and a fascinating one at that. And I can vouch that there is no more fascinating and rewarding thing you can do with your life than to devote your life to the task of becoming happy and harmless for this is the path to actual freedom.

Maybe a little clarification can help here. I’m certainly not saying that one could do the actualism process ‘effortlessly’ or that it doesn’t take effort. More specifically, my observation is about seeing how the emotional effort of belief, hope, trust, etc creates a division where ‘I’ identify with the ‘good’ and try to ignore the ‘bad.’ This kind of mental effort is normally an indication that ‘I’ am hanging on to a wish, dream, hope, or self-image.

Whereas it is my experience, and the experience of all of the practicing actualists on this list, that it takes stubborn effort – and a certain amount of intestinal fortitude – firstly to become aware of, and secondly to abandon all of the beliefs, hopes, dreams, wishes, morals and ethics that make up ‘me’. This programming does not take effort to sustain, it is ‘self’-sustaining by its very nature. This programming is ‘who’ I think and feel I am and as such it obviously it takes effort to remove.

This programming doesn’t create a division – such that when it is removed I feel union – this programming is the very substance of ‘me’. Only when this programming is incrementally removed does one realize the penalty one paid for being a believer – provided one is sincere in one’s efforts what results is an incremental and tangible down-to-earth freedom, not a feeling of union.

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No 62: It’s inquiry until dissolution. Humpty Dumpty was ‘pushed’ in other words. It was not on his agenda. (see also )

I’ve been doing some thinking about your post and what you said about your change in focus lately. I’ll just repost the relevant piece to remind you of what you said –

The more I thought about what you said, the more I could relate to it. It’s like what I have heard Richard describe as if ‘bringing yourself to the very outer layer of your eyeballs’ and I liked the description so much I have also used it myself. I can also remember describing this shift of focus or of attentiveness as ‘like stopping hiding behind the curtains and bringing yourself to the very front of the stage’. And no doubt other people will have other ways of describing this process of becoming less ‘self’-obsessed and more interested in, and aware of, what is happening ‘outside’, as you describe it.

I have just found this piece from my journal that is relevant –

‘I used a technique that Richard suggested which was invaluable, and that was to pretend or try to mimic the peak experience of being in the actual world when back in ‘everyday’ moments. I described it at the time as pushing myself as far as possible to the surface of the eyes – to be purely my senses. This means definitely not creating a watcher or Self’ with a different set of morals and beliefs – usually vastly superior to that which is being watched – but simply practising to establish a direct connection between the senses and the actual world. It is 180 degrees the opposite of the spiritual ‘awareness’, which is to focus on some blissful, still or peaceful space inside. The aim was to bring myself out of my inner world of the psyche into the actual world of my senses – to become fully engaged in the actual world. It takes constant effort and vigilance at the start not to be sucked back into misery and sorrow, not to resort to malice.’ Peter’s Journal Intelligence

I found it interesting that I had to dig around in my memory to fully relate to what you were saying and on reflection I can see that this is not something I have to consciously make the effort to do now – I have become so accustomed to it that it has become second-nature now. But I do remember that it took constant stubborn effort at the time and I would find myself constantly falling back into not being here for long periods of time. This is not some easy thing we are talking of doing here – it is radically switching one’s focus 180 degrees from normal – ‘inside’, exclusive and ‘self’-centred – to not-normal –‘outside’, inclusive and unconditional.

I went through a brief period of berating myself for falling back ‘inside’ until I realized that this was completely natural – the result of how ‘I’ have been programmed to think, feel and operate. I also came to realize that these periods of going back to normal – feeling bored, lacklustre, ‘out of it’, annoyed, melancholic, sad, fearful, and so on, were rich fields, tangible examples of my psyche in operation, ready and ripe for immediate investigation and exploration.

Whenever I became aware that I had ‘not been here’ for a while, I immediately wanted to know why, what caused me to revert to normal? Then I would deliberately make an investigation of how my psyche had operated in that time – and the investigation was quite fresh because I could remember the event that triggered the feeling or emotion, I could often still feel the effects of the emotion, I could remember it taking over as it were. I have describe these investigations as periods of ‘self’-obsession – a deliberate and scientific obsession identical to that which a scientist, investigator or explorer has when he or she really wants to get to the bottom of something, once and for all.

Sometimes these investigations would go very intensely for days, other times they would stew on the ‘back burner’ for months, sometimes the answer came easily, other times deep-sea diving was necessary, plunging into very dark, forbidding and forbidden places in my psyche. Then when the source was uncovered, the matter resolved, the answer found and the programming eliminated, it was back to feeling good, feeling really good or even feeling excellent. Whilst these explorations seem daunting at first, soon they take on a thrilling fascination and then even the explorations, no matter how daunting, become the very stuff of life itself. Then you find you’re really cooking – as if your life really has meaning for the first time.

I think that about covers the ground of what I wanted to say. No doubt I have said all this before anyway, but I always enjoy talking afresh about this stuff, because we are pioneering this business of actualism and any tips or hints we can pass on to each other makes the job easier. I call it ‘trampling the long grass on the path’ – you have to trample your own grass for yourself but in doing so it inevitably makes the path easier for others to follow.

I appreciate that. For some reason which is beyond me, some people think that by pedantically dissecting – or deconstructing, to use the currently fashionable word – everything and anything that everyone writes on this list, they are doing something meaningful. From where I sit, all they are doing is avoiding the doing of what is on offer in actualism and wasting the opportunity that this mailing list provides as an aid to their doing.

*

In the first phase of the actualism process – when I was still continuously aware of being a socially-ensnared and instinctually-driven being – I was constantly motivated to be very best ‘I’ could be, to be virtually happy and harmless, i.e. virtually free of malice and sorrow. With this in mind, I continually prodded myself to never settle for second best – to always make the effort to up the ante from feeling good about being here right now, to feeling really good about being here right now, to feeling excellent about being here right now. What this upping the ante did was serve to expose whatever it was that was preventing me from being virtually happy and harmless – those that remained lurking beneath the surface whenever ‘I’ settled for remaining within ‘my’ comfort zone.

Yes. Whenever you notice that you are not feeling happy about being here in the world as-it-is, or whenever you notice you are feeling annoyed by people as-they-are, then there is work to do. Label the feeling as precisely as you can, feel the feeling and get back to feeling good as quickly as you can. Then – after the emotional storm has passed – make your investigations as to what triggered your feeling sad or feeling annoyed, why the feeling was triggered, and what you need to do to change if you are to prevent such invidious feelings from being triggered in similar situations. I found it useless to try and make any sense of what is going on whilst in the grip of a feeling or emotion because sense is nowhere to found whilst in the grip of passion.

However when you notice you are feeling good there is equally vital work to be done and that is to crank up your felicitous feelings – your joie de vie if you like – about being here in this moment of time in the cornucopia that his verdant planet actually is.

Whilst both of these aspects of the work of an actualist are of equal importance, it is imperative that one puts the cart before the horse – the commitment to being happy and harmless means that one is then committed to investigating and eliminating anything that stands in the way of fulfilling that commitment.

*

I can relate to the ‘whoosh of results’ that you talk about – I had many realizations in the early days of my investigations that were both utterly thrilling and fundamentally life-changing. I did however get to a stage when the work involved in the actualism process produced what seemed to be less dramatic results … but then I noticed, and appreciated, the less drama-filled, more down-to-earth, consequences of setting my sights on being happy and harmless.

The squeaky clean thing about actualism is that you can’t explain it to anyone who isn’t interested in becoming actually free of malice and sorrow.

Actualism will have no appeal whatsoever to those who are in denial that they have malicious or sorrowful feelings. One has to freely admit that one has a problem, or is a part of the problem, before one is ready and willing to do something about it.

I wrote specifically about an incident where I lost my cool and became angry in my spiritual years. It was one of the many events in my life that continually spurred me on to find a way of actually ridding myself of anger. And two years after that my search paid off – I found actualism.

Good, hey.

Careful observation will reveal that the worry response emanating from instinctual fear is not fabricated – as in made-up or manufactured – but rather it is directly associated with the automatic instinctual response. The genetically programmed thoughtless instinctual response together with its immediate feeling aftermath, whether it lasts a few minutes or a few hours, are inseparable and any attempts to intellectually separate them can only result in dissociation.

I’ll just offer a comment on the matter of observation as it is relevant to all who have been attracted to Eastern spirituality or Eastern philosophy at some point in their lives. Vineeto and I have often discussed the fundamental differences between the Eastern practice of self-observation and the actualism practice of ‘self’-awareness as well as reflecting upon how difficult it was in the early days to stop being a dissociative observer and start becoming aware of exactly how I am experiencing this moment of being alive.

The fundamental difference between the two practices is due to the diametrically opposite intent of each of the practices – the aim of the spiritual practice is to cultivate a dissociated identity in order to avoid feeling the full range of instinctual passions, whereas the aim of actualism is to instigate radical change in order to become happy and harmless in the world-as-it-is, with people as-they-are.

Perhaps an example of how the actualism practice of ‘self’-awareness works in practice will serve to make this difference clear –

‘The final straw came as I waited to meet her one evening and she was late. As the time ticked away, so my mind raced away, and after about thirty minutes I was furious. How could she be late? How could anything else or anyone else be more important in her life than me? As my fury built and built, as my mind churned over countless possibilities as to why she was late, suddenly I began to see the stupidity of it all. Here I was, comfortably sitting at a seaside café, drink in hand, looking at a spectacular sunset on a warm summer’s evening. I’m involved in the adventure of a lifetime, I’ve found out more about what it is to be a human being in the last months than I have in a lifetime, there is this wonderful woman in my life – and I’m being neurotic because she is thirty minutes late! Gradually I came out of it and was able to be where I was, delighting in the balmy evening air and the gaiety of the scene as the last of the beach-goers drifted home. When Vineeto arrived she apologised for being late, and I explained what had happened to me. We had a beach walk, dinner at a nearby restaurant, and tootled home to bed.

Over the next few days something continued to nag me. Why was it that this relationship seemed to be going off the rails? Why were there increasingly misunderstandings, petty conflicts and difficulties? Why was I becoming more and more obsessed about what Vineeto was doing when we weren’t together, and what she was thinking about when we were together? Over the next days I contemplated on what was wrong and suddenly it dawned on me that I was battling her and trying to force my opinions on her. Further, I realised that I had been jealous, possessive, demanding and obsessive with her. And, most appallingly, I saw how when the impossible demands of love are not fulfilled then it can all so quickly turn to disappointment, resentment and eventually hate. It had got to the stage where it was obvious to me that unless I changed my behaviour this relationship was heading exactly the same way as all my previous ones – doomed to failure. This was my last chance and I was watching it wilt away ... and I was actively causing it to happen. At this point I wasn’t interested so much in why I was acting this way, I realised I had to stop!

Armed with the conviction of the blindingly obvious, I confronted Vineeto with the news. I told her I was simply going to stop battling her and acting the way I had been. I remember her response as somewhat bewildered and unbelieving, but then again I knew that at least I had to stop the torment in me. What happened in the ensuing week was quite remarkable. I found that the strength of my intention made me able to completely drop this destructive behaviour. Somehow I knew this was the only course of action I could take to make this relationship work and I knew it was my last chance. If I was going to beat this thing I had to do it now!

A wonderful calmness came over me; no longer was I thinking about Vineeto when we were apart, and when I was with her I was no longer suspicious, doubtful, impatient or moody. I began to accept her as she was. I was no longer driven to change her. This then brought a corresponding ease in myself for I was able just to be me. After all, the only person I can change is me and I was working on exactly that. In the end I had to assume that Vineeto was with me because she wanted to be with me, as simple as that.’ Peter’s Journal, Love

No philosophical umming and ahhing, no dissociating from unwanted feelings, no remaining aloof, no blaming others and so on – just the simple momentary awareness of the feelings that were preventing me from being happy coupled with an intense yearning to change in order to become actually harmless, come what may.

In hindsight, these investigations I conducted not only confirmed the facticity of what Richard was saying but also confirmed the fallacy of my own beliefs and none more so than my understanding of the universe. Contemplating the physical nature of the universe – as distinct from investigating and contemplating the nature of ‘my’ psyche – can not only triggered memories of past PCEs, but this type of ‘me’-out-of-the-way contemplation when combined with a softly-focussed wonderment of the sensual nature of the universe provide a potentiality that can evoke the onset of a PCE.

One of the techniques you may have come across is the questioning of dearly held beliefs.

Everybody has some core beliefs that serve to prop up their identity and these will vary slightly according to gender, culture, age, vocational training, and so on. Anyone who becomes interested in being happy and harmless will, sooner or later, come smack up against one of these beliefs. Sooner or later one of these beliefs will appear, rather like a boulder, on the path to being happy and harmless. And from observation of others who have been interested in actualism, it is clear that unless this belief is abandoned, willingly and deliberately, then that person will remain essentially unchanged by the process of actualism.

Whilst I do acknowledge that abandoning one’s pet beliefs can be daunting – one’s very identity as a (… fill in the blank space) is at stake – the resulting palpable sense of freedom can oft evoke a pure consciousness experience of the perfection and purity of the infinite and eternal universe. This is what happened to me and I know this is what happened to Vineeto. And the curious thing is that during the process of actualism, I knew what I had to do next, I knew what belief stood in the way of my becoming more happy and more harmless – simply because the issue would not go away.

This is, after all, what this discussion is really about – the nuts and bolts of abandoning belief and superstition in favour of actuality and sensibility.

I notice you ended your last post with ‘any comments are heartily welcomed’ so I’ll take up the invitation to respond as many of your comments correspond with my experiences of the actualism process.

A shortcut to actual freedom may well be the consideration that my body likewise everybody (all fellow beings so to speak) is made out of the same stuff the universe is made of.

The above I wrote a few days ago and indeed as I’d finished writing it and reread it I was quite satisfied and more or less eager to share it, nevertheless I withheld it thinking; ‘if I re-read next time and it I still will find it worthy then I may post it.’ It appeared to be sensible to have taken some time, because how fragile is the experience of living in a Virtual Freedom. It’s all so obvious when writing this in the comfort of my own room yet, indeed these last couple of days I found myself dragged into a swamp of feelings when I had to do some necessary socializing with people in the ‘real’ world.

I can well relate to what you are saying as I had many such realizations in the early stages of actualism. I used to keep a little notebook and write them down and they would often come tumbling one after the other as I realized what Richard was saying made sense and sometimes I could even directly experience the sensibility by myself. The realizations were as though a clear light went on in my head as opposed to the spiritual insights I had in the past which felt like a tug on my heartstrings. These realizations felt more like a crack in the door was opening up to the wonders and delights of the physical world I was actually living in.

I remember being particularly fascinated by the physical process as to how every human being gets to be here in this physical world – a sperm fertilizing an egg triggering the growth of the foetus in a woman’s womb. I also remember being fascinated by the sight of my hand and seeing it for the first time as the claw of an animal. I remember being astounded at the non-sense of the fantasies of there being an ‘outside’ to this infinite universe or that there could be a beginning or an end to this eternal universe.

I won’t go on, as you seem to be discovering for yourself that a down-to-earth reflective contemplation on matters such as these can lead to wonder and amazement at the actuality of being here – of being fully involved in doing this business we call being alive, right here, right now, in the world as-it-is.

The sucking force of the human condition of malice and sorrow is exceedingly strong, as I find time after time. Apparently ‘me’ having been in recess seems to very cleverly having been hiding only to come back on stage as if never been away. It seems to only take one moment of being of ‘guard’ and back I find myself, ‘fighting’ the grim survival battle just like everybody. The main purpose of that game that everybody seems to have is to pretend oneself to feel reasonable happy as opposed to feel more or less miserable either deluding the others or oneself or both parties.

Then something interesting happened I ‘settled’ for less and only ‘choose’ to call the alleged (yet not even visible) guilty ones a bunch of mother F*ckers thus feeling that justice had been done. Funnily I kept up with that opinion for quite some time. It was only when I read and contemplated the fragment of Vineeto’s latest post –

If ‘what is felt be true’, be it a belief, moral, ethic, or psittacism, is not examined and replaced by fact and common sense and if the particular feeling itself is not investigated and traced to its source, the same-same feeling will arise again and again in similar situations because the identity of the ‘feeler’ itself has not been dismantled and thus remains unchanged. Vineeto to No 33, 13.8.2002

Thus the sub-identities seem to ‘frame’ the instinctual passions and I have not yet found how to eliminate those passions.

Just a comment on your feeling ‘kind of schizophrenic’ and your feeling that ‘in proceeding with the AF-process some new sort of identity is being created’. I can relate to what you are saying and I have even written of the experience –

‘I also also reached a stage where I felt torn apart, as though there were two of me inside. One who believed in the spiritual world – the world of spirits – and was hanging on to it for dear life, and the other me that was simply this body with its physical senses, a delicious calmness and a sense of wellbeing that had replaced the neurosis and swirling roller-coaster of emotions. I was split apart, and it felt like past and future – the person I had been and the ‘whatever I was becoming’ – as layers were falling off me.

But despite all the facts I was still reluctant to completely let go of God. And the reason was becoming glaringly obvious to me, not just a theoretical understanding. I knew what it meant by now. Believing in God, or some Thing, or some Energy meant that I had always abdicated the responsibility of how I was as a human being and therefore would never take the necessary steps to fix myself up. I trusted or hoped that someone or something else would do it one day. If there was no God, then the responsibility was mine. Nobody can fix me up but me. Of course!

The feeling of being a split person then became apparent and useful. I knew that the trouble lay in the psychological and psychic entity – that bundle of beliefs and instincts that I was born with, and that was passed on to me by other equally malicious and sorrowful members of the tribe. Handed on well-meaningly of course, but this passing-on is just a perpetuation of the ancient and primitive ways. Realising this, I was able to firmly identify this entity as not me, but an intruder. I had always tried to avoid Richard’s astute comment that ‘a mature adult is really lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning’. But once I could identify the source of all the trouble, this ‘mature adult’ entity inside me, I knew it would only be a matter of time before it disappeared. I had the ‘bugger by the throat’ was how I put it at the time.

It became a process of re-wiring my brain – untangling the beliefs to replace the crazed and muddled circuitry with facts and common sense. ‘Silly and sensible’ replaced ‘right and wrong’, ‘good and bad’. An ease and calmness began to pervade everything, as I no longer had to keep up an effort to maintain appearances or fulfil any expectations of society or God. I remember being so relieved at not having to maintain an identity any more – it had been such a load for so long! Now there was simply no room for God in my life, no need for any authority of any sort – in short no need to believe in anything at all – no need to ‘fervently wish something to be true’, despite the facts to the contrary.’ Peter’s Journal, God

Also, with the benefit of hindsight, Vineeto and I produced a diagram that may be useful to consider. In it you will see that there is no new identity created in the process of actualism but ‘what’ you are incrementally emerges as it is freed from the dominance of ‘who’ you think and feel you are.

The only thing you have to be wary of on the path to freedom is the powerful impulse to become yet another saviour of mankind and this is precisely why a pure intent plays such a crucial role in actualism.

I am glad that I have been supplied with a working theory yet nobody but Richard has become actual free like him so, we are still in the stage of experimenting, even Vineeto and Peter (some 4/5 years on the job now) may have identities that might have gone in recess.

The stage I really liked was when the working theory of actualism brought practical results in reducing the amount of time I wasted in feeling malicious or sorrowful, which in turn meant I was able to crank up my joie de vie and delight in being here. Then I knew by experience that the working theory worked as a practical down-to-earth method in eliminating my malice and sorrow.

If a working theory can’t be put into practice and doesn’t produce tangible results then it is, by definition, an unworkable theory.

And not until it is actually proven that Actual Freedom is possible for more then one person, Richards case is still unique and so it could be that he is a ‘freak’ of nature (no insult intended) as ‘his being catapulted into an Actual Freedom’ happened spontaneously.

Again, I can speak from experience. When I first came across Richard there were several other people who were interested in actualism at the time but they dropped out for one reason or another. This left me on my own, as it were, and this made me realize that it didn’t matter what others did or didn’t do – my freedom was my business entirely, it wasn’t dependant on others becoming free and nor was anyone else stopping me from becoming free.

The other thing I realized early on in discussion with Richard was that while the event of becoming free from the human condition in toto ‘happened spontaneously’, the event itself was the result of years of attentiveness combined with a persistent and stubborn investigation of the nature of the human condition. The actualism method of an ongoing attentiveness to this moment of being alive can be summarized in one sentence – ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ but sorting out why you are wasting this moment thinking and feeling you are ‘who’ you are rather than being ‘what’ you are does take time and effort.

But then again, that is what you have written about in your post when you said –

The sucking force of the human condition of malice and sorrow is exceedingly strong, as I find time after time.

I particularly liked your descriptions of your awareness of your feelings and your understanding of how they are programmed to operate. To put it into computer terminology, you have to understand the default setting of your social and instinctual programming in order to be able to change the default settings. And, as you also seem to be discovering, feelings of malice, anger, righteousness, blame, resentment and the like are the obvious firsts to look at for anyone who wants to be both happy and harmless.

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