I remember when I first came across the radical proposition that each and every human being born was pre-primed with the instinctual passions – chiefly those of fear, aggression, nurture and desire – I questioned whether or not this was a fact in my own experience. I remember very carefully and quite deliberately running through a checklist as it were of items making evaluations based solely on my experience and my own observations, the purpose being to put either a tick in the box, or a cross in the box. Whenever I was undecided I either went looking for more information or, better still, dug deeper into myself in order discover the source and the nature of the instinctual passions.

Some of the items I recall from my checklist –

1. Are non-sentient animals instinctually driven – do they exhibit instinctual fear, aggression, nurture and desire?

2. Are sentient animals other than the human animal instinctually driven – do they exhibit fear, aggression, nurture and desire?

3. Do I empathize with sentient animals fear, aggression, nurture and desire?

4. If so, do I empathise because I am also a feeling animal and as such associate with like feelings in other animals?

5. If so, is it a fact that I, exactly like all other sentient animals, not only exhibit instinctual fear, aggression, nurture and desire but also experienced these instincts as passions – i.e. primal deep-seated emotions.

6. Have I experienced these deep-seated instinctual passions at some stage in my own life – i.e. had I ever been overcome by an irrational fear, had I ever been overwhelmed by an urge to completely obliterate someone or something, had I ever been consumed by jealousy or compelled to copulate, no matter what the consequences and so on?

7. If the answers to the above questions are affirmative, do I lay the blame for my being inflicted by these passions and for my inflicting them upon others on my upbringing – on an imperfect nurturing at childhood – or do I experience these passions as being something deeper, something instinctual?

8. Have I observed the emergence of these instinctual passions as being an inevitable consequence of human animals being feeling beings not only in my own children but in all children beginning in the very first years of childhood and coming to full fruition at puberty?

9. Do any of the religious/ spiritual notions make sense – (a) are all children born innocent only to suffer an inescapable corruption at the hands of others, (b) are all children born sinners, or (c) are all children born pre-primed with a karmic millstone, and finally, if there is a loving God, how could She, He or It be so perverse as to have manifest such a calamity as this?

10. If in my own experience and by my own observations the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire are indeed genetically-encoded does it then not make sense that the way and the means of becoming free from these passions is to become aware of them in action in my daily life, when and as they occur no matter how subtly or how brutally to the point when my intelligence is finally able to be once and for all free of their insidious influence?

11. If so, am I ready and willing to literally devote ‘my’ life to this task and to this end?

This list is by no means exhaustive, but I well remember that the whole question of whether or not the instinctual passions were indeed genetically-encoded by blind nature was crucial to my really beginning to question the ancient yet still prevalent religious/ spiritual notions of the causes of evil in human beings. It was also pivotal in my realizing that, given Richard’s experience that these passions are ‘software’ as opposed to being hardwired, I too had the opportunity to become free of the human condition in toto, should I so desire.

My suggestion is that, provided you are old enough to have experienced puberty, you too have sufficient life experience to be able to make up your own mind on this issue based on your own experience of how ‘you’ yourself tick and your own observations of other animals, be they non-sentient or sentient, rather than having a subjective opinion one way or the other based solely on what others believe to be true or false.

And I still don’t think you have made it clear what doing everything you can to become free means. I was making the point earlier that being attentive to what is going on in me brings me to my senses, rather than ‘me’ getting back to being happy and harmless the state occurred much the way you say in your building analogy below though you seem to be saying that that is the second stage.

And yet what I said in my analogy was that I spent –

‘a good deal of time and effort trying to become good at my profession, a lot of hands-on experience, many trail and error investigations of what worked and didn’t, and an astounding amount of dismantling of the truths and homilies I had been taught’.

I notice that you have taken up the topic of effort with Richard to the point of asking him what I mean by what I say. All I am saying is that in my experience and in the experience of others that I have had the opportunity to directly observe and converse with or read reports of their experience, it takes effort to firstly understand what an actual freedom from the human condition is and what the method to become free involves, secondly that it takes effort to get an unbiased attentiveness up and running such that it becomes effortless, and thirdly that it takes effort to root out and clearly understand the reasons for not being happy and harmless in this moment such that you don’t ever fall into the same trap again in a similar circumstances.

That effort is needed in the first two cases is obvious to me, as I think it may be becoming obvious to you – it was quite natural that at first I misunderstood actualism to be another version of spiritualism and an actual freedom to be equivalent to a spiritual freedom and attentiveness to be synonymous with spiritual awareness for the simple reason that up until now there was only the either/or paradigms of materialism and/or spiritualism on offer.

If I take your current line of questioning to this list at face value, is this not also your experience – that it takes a good deal of effort firstly to understand what is on offer here and secondly to garner the pure intent needed to be a pioneer in this business?

If I simply asked, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’, and did nothing else, would this just lead to a state of dissociation?

Yep.

I would be fascinated to hear what types of practices you do beyond HAIETMOBA, what types of progress you make, if any.

The whole point of asking oneself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ was to overcome my inherent lack of attention as to how I am experiencing this very moment, the only moment I have ever been able to experience being alive, the only moment I can ever experience being alive, and the only moment I will ever experience being alive.

By remembering to ask myself the question, I was for the first time in my life starting to focus my attention on being here and subsequently upon how I am feeling about being here, right now. I recently related it as narrowing the focus of my attention down – firstly to this, my only life, by progressively eliminating any of the spiritual fairy tales of a ‘life’ after death and then to this very moment, the only moment I can actually experience being alive … all by the utterly simple process of remembering to be aware of how I am experiencing this moment.

It is a struggle at first as I, like everybody else, had a lifetime’s ingrained habit to overcome – the habit of wallowing in past memories, daydreaming, tripping off into fantasy worlds, settling for being comfortably numb, indulging in philosophical discussions or concocting future scenarios and then vicariously living them out in my own imagination. But once I got the gist of becoming aware of what was happening in this moment and how I was feeling about what was happening … or not happening if that was the case … in this moment, I soon came to the stage where this awareness became so automatic that I could not turn it off and then I could no longer escape from the fact that this is the only moment that I can experience being alive.

So to answer your question, there is nothing ‘beyond HAIETMOBA’ – bringing one’s attention to how one is experiencing this moment of being alive – focusing one’s attentiveness on this moment of being alive is both the means and the end to an actual freedom from the human condition of malice and sorrow.

I suppose I am very much reminded of Richard’s journal entry (excuse the paraphrase) that it was after six weeks of experientially considering ‘what am I in relation to other people?’ that he achieved actual freedom – rather than HAIETMOBA itself.

If you re-read the passage in question you will find that the reason Richard asked what turned out to be a seminal question (for him) was that Richard, the identity was apparently ‘putting out’ some – dare I say it – vibes to another person such that the other person wanted to become his disciple. It’s not that ‘he’ asked himself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ – it’s that ‘he’ was constantly aware of how ‘he’ was experiencing this moment … so much so that this very awareness ultimately led to ‘his’ demise.

Are you fully committed to achieving an actual freedom?

Of course … I was fully committed the moment I fully devoted my life to becoming happy and harmless.

At the start of the process of actualism the means to becoming free from the human condition is to be as happy and as harmless as one can be in this moment and the end goal is to become actually free form the human condition.

I never separated one from the other at the start because for me they were inseparable.

It looks like there are different modes of me ... sometimes I find that the ‘me’ is not willing to investigate or it is doing a fake job. My question is that can the ‘me’ ever have a goal to be happy and harmless...? It seems to have its own agenda. The present person that is typing this mail doesn’t have any agenda but clearly acknowledge that happy and harmless is a sensible goal to have. But then when there is this inner ‘me’ (a different mode) starts working, it is either spoiling the moment in its worst and in its best, it is trying to conflict with itself in the name of actualism ... distorting everything and just mechanically fighting with its own projection. Was this ever your experience? Vineeto said once (in a mail to No 60?) that she integrated different parts of her ‘self’ in the very beginning.

IOW. can the ‘me’ have a clear purpose of becoming happy and harmless? Or it will be always a lip service and there is some other part of oneself which becomes manifest when the ‘me’ (feeling part) becomes minimized that has to go about it?

My immediate response would be … what better purpose in life but to find the meaning of life?

You might have noticed that I recently had a conversation with No 86 about the fact that by about my mid-twenties I discovered that for me the meaning to life was not to be had in materialism. Finding no meaning there, I was ripe for searching for the meaning of life in spiritualism and after a long and in-depth investigation I eventually found not meaning but non-sense. Then, as you know, I serendipitously came across actualism, which offers a third alternate to both materialism and spiritualism.

I have no idea what your aspirations in life are, let alone your life experiences but what you want to do with your life is ultimately your own decision. I have often looked at others and been amazed at what they choose to do with their lives – for instance I have always been impressed with the single-mindedness and dedication of medical researchers who literally devote their lives to finding a way of eradicating one particular disease from the many that cause illness or even death to the human body. Whilst I admire such endeavours, I never had the interest to do such things.

My interest has always laid in the reasons for the persistent inability of human beings to live together in peace and harmony and it would seem in hindsight that this abiding interest meant that I could not ignore the intrinsic challenge that is at the core of actualism – can I prove by living example that it is possible, in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are, to live with my fellow human beings in utter peace and harmony?

Needless to say the first step I had to take was to get my head out of the clouds and start to become aware of the world as-it-is and people as-they-are … in order to gather sufficient motivation to begin to become aware of ‘me’ as-I-am. The reason I am saying this is that I recently had a conversation with a woman who is just beginning to pay attention to many of the feelings and emotions that she had in the past either glossed over, denied, suppressed, detached from, dis-identified from or attempted to transcend. She was starting to come across some very unpleasant things to say the least but – for whatever reason – she does seem to have both the motivation and the determination needed to push on.

I do realize that I haven’t answered the specific question you raised simply because it is a question that only you can answer. I remember realizing at some stage that nobody can make me happy and harmless – only I can do that. Curiously with this realization came the requisite impetus to really stand on my own two feet for the first time in my life. As I thought about the fact that my happiness and my being harmless is totally in my hands alone I came to understand that this also meant that nobody could make me unhappy or antagonistic – only I can do that.

These series of realizations led on to one of the essential things that I needed to fully understand – that the only person I need to change is me. And when I say fully understand I don’t mean an intellectual understanding, nor do I mean change as in turning away from the world and adopting a cynical attitude to life or cultivating a spiritual goody-two-shoes persona – I mean radically changing as in setting about eradicating ‘I’ as ego as well as ‘me’ as soul.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the psychological and emotional structure of ‘me’. I’ve never been a community minded person, always regarded nationalism, racism, religious affiliations etc as glorified tribalism (at best a joke, at worst, the cause of unspeakable suffering in the world). I thought I was immune to all of that crap. But just lately I’ve realised (with some surprise) that another kind of tribe (the family) is deeply embedded in me. For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to dissolve these webs of entanglement in my mind and emotions. Not walking out on the family, not abandoning friends, but refusing to carry them around with me, refusing to define myself (or others) in terms of our special relationships based on kinship or shared experiences. I’ve never thought of myself as a possessive or clannish person by nature, but it’s all there. This psychic network of family relationships and friendships is a large part of ‘me’.

What you write of reminds me of the time I first really became aware of not being free. I had been on the spiritual path for years but when my teenage son died I experienced that I was ‘bound’, as though I had invisible bands around my chest that I needed to break free of. Having someone so young die seemed such a waste, which made me realize that I also was wasting my life unless I became free of these bands before I died. It was then that I became really serious, as in sincere, about my spiritual search but all I found was that I had been gullible in that I had been suckered into being a religious fanatic, albeit Eastern religion instead of Western religion.

After I ditched the spiritual path, I since done a good deal of practical work in dismantling my social identity – my identity as a father, a lover, a provider, a rational-thinking male, a SNAG, a WASP, a socialist, a pacifist, a creative person, a patriotic Australian, and so on. It’s a big list to go through because I wanted to get rid of – or at least reduce to the most miniscule that ‘I’ possibly could – the affective parts of my social identity such that I could be happy and harmless whilst in the company of my fellow human beings. And if I wasn’t, then I had something to look at, for I then knew that some bit or other of my social identity needed to be discarded.

About 3 years ago I was sitting on a grassy bank near where I live, looking out over the sea early one morning when I had an experience that was somewhat similar to that which I had had all those years before when I stood beside my son’s coffin. This time I experienced that the reason that I was not free was because I was tethered by long tentacles attached to my back, which trailed off into the distance behind me. I remember thinking at the time that these tentacles or strings are what attaches me to Humanity – to no one in particular, but to Humanity itself.

In hindsight – and I am only now trying to make sense of it in order to pass on some information that may be of some use to you – it could be said that the last years of the work I have done in dismantling my social identity has meant that the feeling of not being free has somewhat changed. The feeling of being bound around the chest could be said to be the obvious feeling of being bound and restrained by the rules of society – a feeling that has given rise to the commonly-held feeling that ‘if only I can break free of my social conditioning then ‘I’ am free’.

By the stage of my second experience of not being free I had by-and-large demolished my social conditioning – including the spiritual conditioning that insists that to become free of social conditioning is the meaning of life – which meant I was then able to experience that there is in fact another layer beneath one’s social conditioning that one needs to become free of, and that is the human condition itself. My experience of being tethered to Humanity made it clear that I would not be actually free whilst these invisible emotional tentacles – as in psychic ties – remained.

It also occurred to me at the time that ‘I’ only exist whilst these tentacles exist and if these tentacles disappeared then ‘I’ would cease to exist … because ‘I’, as an affective non-physical being, only exist as a member of an affective ‘big club’ we call Humanity, a ‘club’ that has no existence in actuality. The feeling I had was that if ‘I’ disappeared no-one would mourn ‘my’ passing because no-one would even know ‘I’ had died as ‘I’ have no existence as an actuality.

Again with the hindsight of my own experience, the reason I needed to do the necessary work to become free of my social conditioning – including my spiritual conditioning which was part and parcel of this conditioning – is that I was then able to become virtually free of malice and sorrow. I was then able to clearly see, and experience, that it is the human condition itself that I need to be free of in order that I become actually free of malice and sorrow.

The results of trying to dissolve all of this have been mixed.

Occasionally it feels liberating. Occasionally there’s a sense of guilt associated with disloyalty (and all the rest of the psychological and emotional baggage that goes with it).

I remember trying to tip-toe my way through the minefield of morals and ethics until I found I had to take a good look at whether they were sensible or not, i.e. whether or not they worked in practice. For example, as children we are told by our parents and teachers not to get angry and not to hit other children. If we do then we are told it is wrong and that we are being bad, we are punished in some way and then told to say sorry to whomever we got angry with or whomever we hit. Not only are we made to feel guilty for not being ‘good’ children but the let-off of saying sorry means we then demand of others that they have to forgive us for being angry at them in the first place.

When I started to understand why morals and ethics have been developed, and how they operate in practice, it became clear to me that the only sensible way to become free of them was for me to become free of the instinctual passions that the morals and ethics are designed to stifle and repress in the first place. If I do not get angry when Betty says, or Tom doesn’t do, or when ‘they’ don’t, or when ‘they’ do, or when life is ‘unfair’ and so on, then the compulsion to feel guilty and the need to gratuitously say sorry doesn’t even need to come into play.

Whilst I couldn’t sort these things out as a child – long before I was even capable of making sense of what was happening I was unwittingly programmed to think and feel this way – as a grown-up I now able to do this.

And just another comment that is relevant to the issue of morals and ethics – there is a tendency for some people who have some appreciation of the inherent restrictions of their social conditioning to discard their original moral and ethical conditioning in favour of adopting moral behaviour and ethical stances that are seen by society at large as being immoral and antisocial – thereby fondly imagining that by swapping camps they have somehow freed themselves from their societal conditioning. Many then form affiliations with like-minded ‘outcasts’ in order to feel kinship with others who also feel they have ‘seen the light’ or who ‘know the truth’, or who justify their malice towards others as being ‘honest’, as being ‘real’, as being ‘authentic’, or as being ‘true’ to themselves.

To me it made sense that the only way to actually become free of the binds of morals and ethics is to pull the plug on what they are there to keep a lid on – the savage instinctual passions. If you are harmless towards your fellow human beings then feelings of guilt do not arise and when others try to make you feel guilty their barbs will find nothing to hook on.

And to round the conversation back to your case, in my experience the ‘sense of guilt associated with disloyalty’ was eventually experienced as a diminishing side-effect of increasingly whittling away at my social identity in order that I could become more happy and less harmful towards others.

*

Altered states of consciousness are far more tempting because denial and dissociation are easier options than taking responsibility for actually doing something to bring an end to human malice and sorrow. But when I came across Richard, I had had enough of the duplicity of the spiritual world and I was hooked by Richard’s sincerity and a burning desire to do something meaningful with my life.

I share that burning desire. Life just can’t go on as it has.

For me, once I discovered that reality sucked I was always on the look out for something better. After I found out that the spiritual world was full of charlatans I sat down one day and decided I had nothing left to lose – which is why I used the phrase as a sub-title to my journal. It appears that most people experience that as terrifying to acknowledge – to dare to put all of one’s eggs in one basket, instead of sprinkling them around many baskets – but for me it was thrilling because I was then able to let go of the past and whole-heartedly embrace the changes that are necessary in order to become actually free of malice and sorrow. This is not to say that there weren’t a few wobbles and a few sidetracks but it has been, and still is, a thrilling business to be in.

If I can add a rider to this post, I do appreciate that you write of your personal experiences and your personal feelings as it means that we can talk about down-to-earth matters. I’ve never been fond of intellectualizing for intellectualizing sake and I eventually found the male habit of philosophizing to be a way of dissociating from the reality of one’s own everyday life (and I say this because I eventually came to understand that this was the reason why I joined in the philosophizing) and yet I now find myself having to respond to posts that are nothing but intellectualizing and philosophizing. I have the choice to ignore them of course but you might have noticed that I do take the opportunity to sprinkle them with some personal anecdotes and some down-to-earth talk that I figure will be of interest to others on this list who are interested in what is happening ‘where the rubber meets the road’.

I noticed you have had a change of heart and the reason I wrote to you was because in your post to Richard you had referred to some things that I had written. If after your explorations of the website you have any questions about putting actualism in practice I would be happy to answer them – it’s my area of expertise.

That’s very gracious of you and it will be much appreciated.

Whilst actualism is a do-it-yourself business, the prime reason for this mailing list is to allow actualists to share their experiences about the business of becoming happy and harmless.

I do have one question as to how to get started. I have been poking around the web site in a fairly haphazard way. Is there a recommended sequence?

Not really. All that needs to be said is said on the front page of Richard’s part of the site and any areas of specific interest you may have are catalogued by topic in the library with related correspondence from both sections of the web-site.

From my experience, poking around is a good way to determine if what is being said is of interest to you. This can be seen as the stage of establishing a prima facie case as to the credibility of what is offered such that you can decide, one way or the other, whether you want to take it on in practice.

If you do decide to set your sights on becoming happy and harmless, then your use of the web-site may then become less haphazard as you can hone in on the particular idiosyncratic issues that are impeding your own happiness or sparking off your own aggravation in your daily life.

Also, a few nights ago after I got off work at 4pm; I may have experienced what is termed a PCE around here. [A term btw, that I had never heard of before coming here, the same for ASC and many others] ... anyways ... just to borrow a few words from this site that seemed to fit the description of that experience were pure, purity, direct, in the sense that a film or veneer had been removed from the world. Its like before there was always a thin film and now it was gone. I was helping my father fix a household appliance in the evening and there was an intimacy with him never before experienced. There was a minimum of the internal dialogue that generally goes on and on. This lasted the whole afternoon and evening, till bed and I woke up like that but then it was finished. That was something different than I had ever felt before.

I would take it from your description that the experience was something that you would like to have more of.

As you read more on the website I can recommend stopping every now and again and deliberately making the effort to recall that experience. By remembering the flavour of that experience you will be more able to access the naiveté necessary to understand what is on offer on the site and you will thus be more able to read what is on offer with the clear eyes that I assume you had during that experience.

When I recalled my first PCE, it became clear to me that the way to get from ‘A’ – being normal – to ‘B’ – having an ongoing direct experience of actuality 24/7 – was that ‘I’ had to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless … and that this commitment had to be so total as to be an all-consuming obsession. I don’t want to gallop ahead too much, but the reason I mention this is to point to the essential link between becoming happy and harmless and becoming free of the human condition – they are one and the same path.

I don’t want to pre-empt your own experiential observations about the sorrowful feelings but in my own investigations I discovered that feelings of malice is more readily discernible than feelings of sorrow. Speaking metaphorically – malice can be experienced as being peaks or flare-ups of emotion, sadness can be experienced as valleys or troughs of emotion, whereas in general the constant plain or milieu of human feelings is one of seriousness and sullenness. The other observation I have made is that sorrow in the form of the feeling of compassion – the compulsion to participate in another’s suffering – is the essential emotion that binds Humanity together, and hence binds ‘me’ to Humanity. Which is why I described sorrow as being a strongest emotional tether to break free of.

I remember one of the things I found telling in my early days of being an actualist was the realization that so much of what human beings regard as entertainment is rooted in malice and sorrow. Be it sad music, love songs or angry music, novels that are historical rehashes of old grievances, romantic novels, action films, video games, soap operas, news reports, competitive sports, and so on. I remember going through my CD collection and being astounded at the bitter-sweet feelings that most of the music engendered – so much so that I soon hustled most of them out the door.

As I said to No 52 in my most recent post to him, it is important to feel the quality of any feelings of malice and sorrow that surface before you nip them in the bud in order that you have an experiential understanding as to how and why the feelings and emotions that arise from the instinctual passions operate. By conducting your investigations in this scientific way, you feel the feelings as and when they are happening which means you neither repress nor dissociate from your feelings, and then get back to feeling good as soon as possible, which means you neither indulge in nor become overwhelmed by your malicious and sorrowful feelings. 

An intellectual understanding of the human condition is one thing – at best you know in theory what to look out for. But if you really want to become free of the human condition there is no other way but fully committing to a hands-on moment-to-moment attentiveness as to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive – which means fully committing to being here as a mortal flesh and body in this world of the senses, with all that this involves.

As for the ‘tall poppy syndrome’, you only need to observe the revolving door of spiritualists who come to this list and head straight for Richard in order to cut him down a peg or two. And it is fascinating to observe how they are so convinced that they, and their ilk, are right – that the meaning of life is somewhere hidden in the ancient mumbo-jumbo of Eastern spirituality – and that we actualists are wrong, so much so that they have not the slightest interest in what is being talked about on this mailing list. They provide a wonderful opportunity to observe first-hand how holding on to any religious or spiritual belief or philosophy actively stifles any possibility of even considering the idea that something new has now been discovered – that it is now possible for any human being, so inclined, to become free of malice and sorrow.

I can relate to reading things several times over. When I first came across Richard, he had just purchased a computer in order to be able to word process his journal and print it out. As the editing was finished, I had a copy of his journal as sheets printed on his inkjet printer in a loose-leaf binder and this was added to with several of the later chapters as they were produced. I have a distinct memory of sitting down with the journal and spending hours going over and over a 4 or 5 sentence paragraph, trying to understand exactly what it was that he was saying. In hindsight, this now sounds somewhat extreme but overcoming cognitive dissonance is the lot of everyone who attempts to ‘wrap their mind around’ something new.

This will become less of an impediment over time as more and more people from different backgrounds and different life-experiences write about the process of actualism. Not only will there be an increased variety of ways of saying the same thing but also there will be an increased confidence and comradery that comes from the knowledge that other fellow human beings are daring to tread the same never-trod-before path.

Yep. I can relate to that one as well. I found it quite amazing to discover that ‘I’ ran on automatic almost all of the time – so much so that there was no possibility of being aware of how I was experiencing being alive. Great slabs of the day would pass by without me remembering to be aware of whether or not I was enjoying being alive or not. Even if I did remember, I often found it difficult to accurately describe how I was experiencing this moment, as I would usually come up with an intellectual response such as ‘I am concerned about …’, rather than the more explicit feeling response such as ‘I am feeling anxious’ or ‘I am feeling scared about …’.

It is good to remember that being constantly aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive is not a natural thing – after all, ‘I’ have so dominated the stage, for as long as I can remember, that glimpses of ‘self’-awareness only occurred rarely and erratically. It takes a good deal of conscious effort to establish asking the question until it becomes habitual and it takes a good deal of stubborn intent until it becomes a constant automatic silent question each moment again.

Because of these quite natural difficulties, beware of beating yourself up when you miss out asking the question because the very moment you become aware that you haven’t been aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive, you are right back on track again.

What you are experientially discovering are the morals and ethics that have been instilled into you by your parents and peers – ‘It is not good to feel angry’, ‘It is not right to feel jealous’, ‘Why can’t you be quite like your brother’, ‘If you don’t stop doing that I’ll …’ and so on. The imposition of morals and ethics is a necessary process in every child’s development given that every child is by nature a passionately driven being, which means that your awareness of when, how and why these morals and ethics operate is yet another experiential discovery of the universal nature of the human condition. Name them and feel them as they are happening but don’t judge them, for it is vital to remember that what you are starting to become aware of is the instinctual passions themselves and these passions are universal – in no way uniquely personal.

The awareness of one’s own morals and ethics is a big hurdle to negotiate as they form a goodly part of one’s social identity. If one allows oneself to get stuck here, there is no way to discover the further layers of one’s identity that lay lurking beneath – that which is often referred to as the dark side of human nature. You will have noticed the essential piece of advice that Richard has offered when you allow yourself to start to feel the dark and invidious feelings – keep your hands firmly in your pockets – meaning don’t act on these feelings, simply become aware of them as they are happening.

The brutish survival instincts were an essential component of the predacious phase of the evolution of animate life on this planet and you will come recognize that they are not only redundant but you will also experience that these very passions ultimately stand in the way of you being able to live with your fellow human beings in peace and harmony.

Persistence rewarded, hey

Another hint that was passed on to me that I found useful was to remember not to take yourself too seriously. This is the trick to turn fear into excitement – and excitement is having fun. Excitement is a felicitous feeling when excitement is the thrill of becoming more happy and more harmless.

Again I can relate. For me the most fear I encountered was prior to deciding to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless. After that the fear turned into the excitement of the thrill of discovery – and there is lots to discover.

Well, for a start there is no evidence to the contrary. Richard himself has done a good deal of trolling through the writings of others and all he has ever found is evidence of people who have experienced a spiritual freedom of the soul and not an actual freedom from the soul. I have also satisfied myself that this is so by my own investigations – I remember at one stage realizing that not only was Richard the only one who was actually free of the human condition, he was also the only genuine atheist on the planet.

In other words I take it as a reasonable assumption of fact because there is, thus far, not a skerrick of empirical evidence to the contrary.

Contrary to popular belief, speculations such as ‘maybes’ or ‘what ifs’ are not empirical evidence – no matter how many speculations or how many speculators there are.

I don’t know whether your reference to ‘a culture eons ago’ refers to the widely-held notion that there was somehow a Golden Age or that at sometime, somewhere on the planet, there existed a peaceful tribe of uncorrupted innocents. If so, there is no evidence that supports this notion in any way – the archaeological and anthropological evidence is that all tribes and all cultures were deeply fear-ridden, dominated by superstition, enraptured in mythology, fiercely territorial, and so on. I fail to see such tribes and cultures as being fertile ground for someone to be able to take the time and make the effort to become free of malice and sorrow.

The other notion – that maybe someone became free of the human condition and kept it to his self or her self – has been floated before but it is my experience that this theory lacks any credibility – simply because the intent needed to become free of the human condition is pure in that one does it not only for this body but for ever other body. Or to put it another way, the very process of wanting to become harmless is motivated by a genuine concern and caring for all of one’s fellow human beings and this alone makes the idea of keeping the discovery of an actual freedom to oneself a red herring.

I remember that I could not but write my journal in order to tell others that the actualism method worked in that it produced down-to-earth results – that it was possible to live with a companion in utter peace and harmony and that it was possible to be virtually free of malice and sorrow. To imagine that one could keep an actual freedom to oneself beggars belief.

While on this topic, I’ll just add a note of sensible caution. In my early days of being an actualist I was so enthused that I would often talk about actualism to people who were not interested in anything else but battling it out in the real-world or who were so convinced their spiritual beliefs were right that they could not even conceive that what I was saying had nothing at all to do with spiritualism. I soon discovered that it pays to be prudent as to whom, where and when it is appropriate to discuss the discovery of an actual freedom from the human condition.

One other piece of sensible piece of advice I gave myself came from my time of exploring the dark underbelly of piety and morality – and that was to ‘never goad a fanatic’. I do like the leisure and the pleasure of being able to report my successes and share my experiences in using the actualism method here on this list from the safety and comfort of my own lounge room.

Speaking for myself, t’is always a pleasure.

I’ve been having a lot of success in dealing with any emotions that come along, but when no emotions are present and I’m very much enjoying this moment of being alive, I’m still very conscious of my sense of self (identity) and my instinctual sex drive.

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.

When I first came across actualism it took me a good deal of time and effort to come to an intellectual understanding of what was on offer. Only when I gave up holding on to my spiritual identity was I able to fully jump into the process of actualism and only after getting a handle on using the method did I start to have experiential understandings of my psyche in action which in turn can that produce life-changing insights.

In my experience there are two aspects to the insights an actualist has on the path to becoming free of the human condition. The first aspect is an intellectual understanding of a particular issue – something that is relatively easy for those of us who are following Richard’s lead because he has written so much about the human condition and how to become free of it. Having an intellectual understanding is a precursor to the most important part of understanding, experiential understanding.

Once I made the decision to become an actualist, I threw myself into increasing my intellectual understanding which meant reading and listening to what Richard has to say on a particular matter and then doing my own thinking and contemplating on the matter. I also found putting my thoughts down into written words was a great aid to clear thinking. I developed the habit of writing down my own understandings in note form as I was contemplating and I also wrote a personal journal and entered into correspondence with other people about actualism.

My experiential understandings came solely as a result of asking myself, each moment again, ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and becoming aware of exactly what it is that is preventing me from being blithe and benign in this moment. The answers that came from the running the question gave me experiential understandings about the human condition in general and about the devious nature of my social identity and the stygian depths of my instinctual identity in particular.

Whenever I experience my psyche in operation as-it-is-happening, it is as if a light is turned on and all of a sudden I can clearly see a facet of my social persona in action or my instinctual passions in operation as they are happening. This clear-eyed awareness has the potential to produce an insight of such intensity that it is life changing – and my pure intent to become free of the human condition in toto means I can never go back to being the same as I was before.

So, intellectual understanding always comes first – as in ‘Ah, yes, that makes sense’. If you don’t have an intellectual understanding of the over-arching nature of the human condition, then you will have no idea what you are looking for when you ask yourself ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’

Then, provided one makes the decision to devote one’s life to becoming happy and harmless, one moves on to stage two: logging up on-the-job, real-time, experiential understandings of your own psyche in action that can then lead to insights that are both life-changing and identity demolishing.

The most difficult thing to grasp about the actualism method is it’s utter simplicity – and I don’t say that lightly.

Yeah. I spent seventeen years trawling the materialistic world seeking happiness and found the whole search for happiness via security, money, status, fame and power decidedly weird. I then spent another seventeen years in the spiritual world and eventually found the whole search for spiritual security, status, fame and power even weirder. Coming across the third alternative was indeed serendipitous.

Maybe it is just your choice of words, but I wouldn’t describe the actualism process as ‘mastering the emotions’ as this could give the impression that actualism is about suppressing or controlling one’s emotions, which it is not. As you know, in the actualism process one becomes aware of any feelings, emotions and passions as and when they are happening with the aim of minimizing both the invidious and aggrandizing emotions so as to be able to foster one’s felicitous feelings.

My experience was that once I threw myself totally into the process, insights did not prove elusive, rather they came in direct proportion to the intensity and focus of my investigations.

*

As I have said before on this list, I personally do not favour using the term near PCE as one is either having a PCE or not – a miss is as good as a mile. I much prefer the term ‘excellence experience’ for those times when I am feeling really excellent about being here.

And the only reason I make such precise distinctions myself is so I can be scrupulously honest with myself about how I am experiencing this moment of being alive.

*

As an actualist, if you have got the hang of feeling good for most of the time, then raise the stakes to wanting to feel excellent all of the time. This simple act is enough in itself to allow whatever impediments remain to your being virtually happy and harmless to emerge in the day-to-day, everyday business of being alive.

I found that I had to raise the stakes myself, despite my own inertia not to do so and despite the fact that I was obviously heading off in a direction that no-one else was heading or was interested in heading.

*

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.

*

Often after doing some work or meeting some people, I would suddenly become aware of the fact that I had not got upset about something that I would have normally got upset about or I had not taken offence about something I would have normally taken offence about. In other words, I could see that the process of actualism was working in that I was not only feeling happier about being here but that I was actually becoming more sensitive to, and caring of, all of my fellow human beings.

I remember thinking early on when I started to become fascinated with how I was experiencing this moment of being alive that I had become completely ‘self’-obsessed and I started to feel I was being selfish by doing so. Then it became apparent that by becoming ‘self’-obsessed I was also becoming aware of the extent of my invidious feelings towards others – be it annoyance, blame, chauvinism, aloofness, contempt, envy, competitiveness, haughtiness, or whatever. By assiduously weeding these feelings out of my interactions with other people, I came to more and more recognize other people as fellow human beings … and genuine care and sincere consideration emerged.

*

The other check I ran upon myself to confirm my progress as to whether I was becoming more unconditionally happy and unreservedly harmless was to conduct a review of the events of the day before I went to sleep at night time. Had I had an excellent day? If not, how long did I wallow in my unhappiness or how long did I hold on to my grievances before I got back on the happy and harmless track again?

You have to have some way of measuring your own progress and only you can do that because only you can chart the down-to-earth changes that the actualism process is producing.

*

As you are probably discovering, it is impossible to investigate the source of one’s misery or the source of one’s annoyances whilst one is firmly in the grip of these feelings for ‘I’ am these feelings in these times – there is no separation or distance possible when ‘I’ am in the grip of either the invidious passions or the beguiling passions. However, as soon as ‘I’ get back to feeling good or feeling excellent – and note that these are felicitous feelings we are talking about – it is then possible to apply some clear thinking in order to find out what triggered me feeling melancholic, aggrieved, vindictive, all-powerful, all-wise and so on.

Once you have firmly set your course to devote your life to becoming happy and harmless, nothing can go ‘wrong’ as it were. The very fact that you are vitally interested in being alive in this world as-it-is with people as-they-are presents you with all the opportunities to investigate whatever it is you need to eliminate whatever stands in the way of achieving your goal.

And, as you have probably already twigged, it is never a ‘what’ that prevents you from being free of malice and sorrow, it is always a ‘who’ – and further, that it is never a ‘somebody else’ who is preventing me from being free, it is always ‘me’.

My experience is that they continued apace until I became virtually happy and virtually harmless for 99% of the time, until ‘I’ cleaned myself up as much as ‘I’ possibly could. And only you will know when that happens.

*

And from your second post on the same thread –

‘Will particular insights relating to identity, sexual desires, etc prove as elusive as mastering the emotions...’

Yep. An intellectual-only understanding is a limp squid by itself. Unless you try something out you will never know if it works, how it works and why it works. Similarly, unless a theory is empirically proven to work in practice it remains a hoped-for supposition, unless one’s own beliefs are experientially understood to be nothing more than beliefs they will continue to hold one in their vice-like grip and unless an insight produces a tangible change in one’s life it is merely a ‘self’-indulgent wank.

Contrary to popular belief, Existence does not provide. Unless ‘I’ get of my bum and do something, nothing will happen … and nothing will change.

There are ample opportunities for a present-day seeker to check out for themselves the followers of almost any spiritual teaching, to assess the quality, range and tone of discussions and by doing so make your own assessment as to whether or not the followers are living the teachings and if they are, what effect it has on their daily lives.

Given the doubts you have raised in this post about actualism being a cult and your, I can only suggest that you take a clear-eyed look at spiritualism as it works in practice in order that you can move on from doubt to making an assessment one way or the other. The important thing about asking questions and having doubts is to find definitive workable answers and nowadays the Net makes it much easier than having to troop off to the East as was needed in the old days. As I remember it, living in doubt and not-knowing is the pits.

There is such a joy to be had in devoting yourself to something one hundred percent.

I have no doubts about the ‘cult of AF’. There is absolutely no evidence to that suggestion. I’ve looked at spiritualism and I reject it categorically. Your point about the purpose of questioning/doubting is well taken. Also, I do recognize the importance of commitment and intent to any of this work. While I can browse my way through a world’s worth of information, at the end of the day, the plain old hard work still must be done.

My misconception appears to have come from reading your words and taking them at face value. You said, among other things –

However, they are leading a simulation of the originator’s way (that’s what the word ‘virtual’ means after all), so it is possible that they have suspended some measure of their common sense in order to ‘be like Richard’. I can’t really ascertain that, but if that were the case, then they are dancing around the edges of cult-ness.

When you say ‘however ... it is possible …’ and ‘I can’t really ascertain that, but if …’, that to me means you have doubt, i.e. you are not sure, not confident, or it is not your experience. In other words, to me, what you wrote expressed that you had doubts, which is why I responded as I did.

Perhaps this is an example that throws some light on the feedback I sometimes get – that I am putting words into the mouths of correspondents that they didn’t say or that I am misinterpreting what they say. I am not saying I always get things right but I can only respond to the words someone says.

The other example that comes to mind – although it has nothing to do with this current conversation – are correspondents who say things like ‘I agree, but …’ which to me means there is not a mutual agreement as to the facticity of what is being said but that very often the correspondent is objecting to the proposition being offered by saying ‘but’. In this case, what can often happen is that the correspondent will ‘dig their heals in’ and begin a standoff of principle as to ‘who’s right and who’s wrong’. Such reactions usually prevent any common sense discussion and further investigation as to what are the facts of the matter and the resulting feedback is that of me ‘being aggressive’ or ‘being confrontational’ or ‘always wanting to be right’.

You may have noticed this tendency is common to many discussions – I know it was one that plagued all of my conversations and interactions until I came to see it in action and worked to break the habit. What I realized was happening was that I was emotionally defending my beliefs and convictions, very often without thinking about what I was defending at all. When what ‘I’ said or felt to be right or true was questioned or contradicted ‘I’ immediately felt threatened, the defence and/or attack mode automatically kicked in, and any chance at sensible conversation flew out the window.

Sometimes, in a vain effort to keep the peace, I would feign to agree with the other outwardly whilst covertly holding on to the conviction of my rightness, thereby ensuring the truce so gained was nothing but a temporary lull in my ongoing battle with others. The only thing I found that worked to end this cycle of conflict and ceasefire was to make the effort to establish what were the facts of the matter so that my common sense was able to operate in lieu of ‘my’ automatic emotional reactions of defending ‘my’ beliefs and convictions.

This process is what is meant by questioning beliefs and replacing them with facts – this is the actualism process in a nutshell and the resulting common sense discussions on this list illustrates why and how it works in practice. Peace and harmony between human beings is possible.

Yet for the sensible part I have come to think that sometimes one perhaps must risk to go outside the comfort zone thus I’m all to happy that Vineeto has had the courage to have done so, as for me the ‘Byron incident’ has been a great eye opener.

If the ‘Byron incident’ has been an eye opener for you I would suggest it is because you ‘have taken ample time to think about it’ and not because anything Vineeto did or didn’t do. Daily life is rich with incidents that stir feelings of annoyance or anger, remorse or sadness, many people can ‘push one’s buttons’ and many events can trigger emotional memories of past hurts – the question is how to get out of being ensnared in this cycle of ups and downs, thoughtless reactions and unconscious impulses. For you the ‘Byron incident’ has obviously been one of those events that has stirred you emotionally and you have apparently been able to discover much about your beliefs and how ‘you’ tick simply by taking ample time to think about it.

Once you have got the knack for milking these events for information about your beliefs, your morals, ethics, and so on, you can start to use this skill to not let the debilitating feelings such as annoyance or anger, remorse or sadness fester for so long. Once you become aware of the feelings happening you can nip them in the bud and then spend some time thinking about what triggered the feeling in the first place and then find out why you had the feeling you had. The more practiced you become at being attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive, the quicker this investigative process can become and the more able you are to foster the felicitous feelings.

Just the other day I had something that triggered annoyance in me and it was quite startling because it has been so long since I have felt annoyed about anything. Usually I always feel excellent lately and feeling annoyed was such a contrast that I was able to be aware of the feeling precisely as it was happening. This instantaneous awareness prevented me from reacting to, or blaming, the person who triggered my feeling of annoyance and I was soon back to feeling excellent again. The incident related to what I considered to be an unnecessary demand made by an approvals officer who was vetting some of my architectural work. It was one of those issues that fit into the category of ‘can I emotionally accept that which is intellectually unacceptable?’ That’s another way of saying ‘can I not be annoyed when I come across something that, or someone who, is blatantly silly?’

Which brings me back to your investigations about the ‘Byron incident’ and your story about rebelling against the Humaniversity. My reaction to the approvals officer was similarly one of rebellion – a sense of injustice, a feeling of being hard done by, inwardly riling against what I felt to be pettiness. As soon as the feeling came on, I remembered what a futile waste such acts of rebellion are, how they result in conflict and discord and how such reactions only serve to keep me trapped within the human condition – a compulsive ‘battler’ in the grim psychological and psychic game of survival that is the human condition.

This perpetual battling against the world as-it-is and people as-they-are is born out of the animal instinct to survive in a hostile ‘what can I eat, what can eat me?’ world. From this genetically-endowed ‘self’-centred program comes the instinctual passions of fear of, and aggression towards, the world as-it-is and people as-they-are. Because of these instinctual passions all human beings have an innate inability to recognize and treat their fellow human beings for what actually are – fellow human beings. The only way to eradicate this ‘self’-centred program is the extinction of ‘self’, the end of ‘being’, and then the instinctual- affective programming collapses for want of a ‘driver’ – to use a computer analogy.

I remember recently that you called me a dreamer to which I demurred. Upon reflection, I can see where you were coming from because I refused to let go of the dream of peace on earth, so much so that I leapt at the opportunity that actualism offers to turn my dream into an actuality. In a similar vein, I always had a rebel streak in me, which I also refused to let go of by accepting second best. What I did was use this trait, not to rebel against Humanity as is common, but to do something really revolutionary – to become free of humanity, in toto. I remember thinking when I wrote my Journal that it would appeal to those rebels who were discontent with their life – not those whose identity was that of an angry rebel riling against some authority or other.

Well that was a bit of a rave, but I liked what you wrote about your discoveries. It is good to see someone making the effort and devoting the time to investigating their own beliefs and exploring their own passions. It’s good to hear of you beginning to ‘push the envelope’ a bit further and starting to reap the rewards for daring to do so.

Given that passionately holding on to one’s own historical cultural, religious and social differences only causes disharmony, intolerance, hatred, greed, aggression and competition – in short, malicious feelings – it behoves anyone interested in becoming happy and harmless to set about diligently and painstakingly dismantling his or her social identity. It is not that an actualist retreats from the world of people, things and events – quite the opposite in fact. An actualist devotes his or her life to being happy and harmless in the world-as-it-is with people as-they-are and discovers en-route – by cultivating an on-going attentiveness – that his or her social identity is the first layer of identity that stands in the way of actualizing this aim.

If I may, I will put what you are saying another way that may be more pertinent for those who are reading but who are yet to begin the process of actualism.

The first thing an actualist does is to make becoming happy and harmless one’s burning ambition and single-pointed aim in life. This of course means that he or she aims to progressively eliminate any feelings of malice and sorrow from their life. Now despite the fact that the root cause of malice and sorrow are the genetically encoded animal survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, he or she will soon discover in their investigations that it is the defence of their own social identity that initially triggers most of their feelings of malice and sorrow.

To reiterate, an actualist experientially discovers that the ingrained habit of defending the beliefs, morals, ethics, values and psittacisms that he or she has been taught to be truths is what initially gives rise to his or her malicious and sorrowful feelings and thus becomes aware that it is this outer layer of identity that needs to be demolished first.

The only way to undertake this process of actually demolish one’s social identity, and not take it on as a theory or an intellectual understanding, is to make being happy and harmless one’s burning ambition in life. Unless one does that, there is insufficient motive to move beyond an intellectual-only interest and no impetus to become aware of, investigate and question the feelings that arise from being a social identity.

As a social identity – an impassioned member of a racial, religious, spiritual, ethnic, national or gender group – one is not only obliged to believe what everyone else in the group believes and to feel what everyone else in the group feels but one is also compelled to carry the burdens of anger, resentment sorrow and grief from all the other members of the group, including the long-dead ones. The desire for retribution and the lust for revenge for past wrongs and hurts inflicted on long-dead members of the group is passed on from generation to generation, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly. Thus, one’s social identity literally starts with the mother’s milk.

This fact can be readily seen in the historic foundations for many of today’s disharmonies, discords, conflicts and wars. Many conflicts are rooted in conflicts that happened hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. As if this was not madness enough, many of these conflicts are purely mythical – they either never happened or they have been so embellished and distorted in the on-telling of the story that it is now impossible to discern what is fact from what is fiction.

To vainly look for rights and wrongs, goods and bads in this endless tale of mayhem and misery – the cherished Humanity – is an utterly futile exercise. The only practical contribution anyone can make towards ending this madness is to divest himself or herself of all of the cherished beliefs and associated feelings that causes him or her to feel the need to be a part of this ongoing saga of mayhem and misery.

A way out of this madness has now been discovered, has been thoroughly mapped and extensively documented and is now being disseminated, discussed and put into practice – and, as you are confirming by your own investigations, the first part of this way out is to divest oneself of one’s own social identity.

Well said. If we were sailing mates, I’d say ‘I like the cut of your jib’.

Just as an aside, one of the aspects of the spiritual misuse and abuse of words that particularly struck me lately is the spiritual use of selfless or no-self to describe the delusionary state of God-realization. The person suffering from this altered state of consciousness often claims to have no identity when the fact is that they believe, feel and proclaim that they have become a timeless and spaceless psychic identity – aka God by whatever name – temporarily residing in a flesh and blood mortal body. Thus, he spiritualists should be up-front and describe their exalted and acclaimed state as a body-less or a no-body experience – the very antithesis of a self-less experience.

Spiritualism is all about inflating both the social identity and instinctual identity such that one feels like god – and its hard to imagine a bigger identity than feeling oneself to be God – whereas actualism is about incrementally eliminating both the social and instinctual identity. 180 degrees opposite.

Well, I’m off to yet more delights. Nice chatting with you.

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