Selected Correspondence Peter

Naiveté

I was talking to Vineeto the other night about our life experiences and what lead us to actualism. A common thread was a dissatisfaction with the pseudo peace of the spiritual world – the sham of the talk and feelings of ‘we are all one’ vs. the actuality of the selfishness, divisiveness and isolationism of all religious/spiritual fantasies. Many of our contemporaries coped by being cynical about ‘the organization’ or the people in it and went on about their own selfish pursuit of Self-realization while others adopted a Sunday-spirituality approach to life. In talking we both agreed that cynicism is the pits – it hurts, as it is the most debilitating of human attitudes.

So overwhelming is cynicism both in the real world and the hallowed cloisters of the spiritual world that the only way to continue spiritual pursuit is to pretend to be absolutely gullible in order to veil the underlying pain of cynicism. Spiritual followers need to be absolutely gullible in order to abandon all intelligence and common sense, to turn a blind eye to all the ‘evils’ perpetrated in the name of ‘goodness’ and to opt for believing puerile fairy stories that there is life after death for ‘me’ as a spirit-only being in an imaginary spirit-world.

To be a spiritualist one needs to be both deeply cynical about human existence on this fair planet and absolutely gullible in order to believe in the archaic fairy stories of good and evil spirits.

It takes an enormous amount of naiveté to consider that there is indeed a third alternative – that peace on earth, in this lifetime, as this flesh and blood body only is not only possible, but definitely attainable.

To be an actualist it is imperative to abandon cynicism and gullibility and actively cultivate naiveté – the closest thing to actual innocence.

Yep. And there is no greater cynical self-isness than to seek a greater reality, or an ‘actual reality’ as some now refer to it, and thereby accept that the on-going reality of the human condition on this fair planet need not, or indeed can not, be changed as it is somehow part of some perverse divine and therefore ‘perfect’ plan. To preach this nonsense is to actively perpetuate the ancient dualistic beliefs of Good and evil, Right and wrong, Truth and illusion, Spiritualism and materialism, Glory and damnation, Heaven and hell. An actualist sets his or her sights far higher than feeling Glorious.

If one allows oneself to be at all sensitive, it is clear that what human beings do to each other is indeed hellish. But to then trip off into a personal greater reality is to turn away from the possibility of becoming aware of one’s own anger and sadness and the change this very awareness engenders.

It is ultimately cynical to continue believing that human beings cannot live together in utter peace and tranquillity and it is only one’s own naiveté that emboldens an actualist to prove that this is possible.

Proving that peace on earth is possible is a dare, a challenge that has now come of age given the increasing exposés of the legendary failure of all forms of spiritualism to bring anything remotely resembling peace on earth.

You said recently,

People with so called ‘pumped up’ self-esteem are generally more reluctant to look at the ‘bad’ feelings than people with a low aka bad self-esteem.

Also people with ‘high self esteem’ may be likely to try to talk people with suspected low self-esteem into their category, hence encourage them to ‘look away’ from the bad feelings hence contributing to sustaining a kind of society which is at large is supporting fundamentally self-centred egotistic behaviour.

Me myself being an example of a person with an exceptional low self-esteem have tried many ways to improve that self-esteem, only to find that all this esteem stuff incredibility superficial and is basically merely rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic.

I like what you said here. The problem I always had with self-esteem is that esteem is a societal value. Esteem is a judgement or estimation of one’s worth that ultimately relies on the fickle opinions and attitudes of others. As I dug into the matter of self-esteem I found that living my life dependant upon the esteem of others was rather like being a puppet with others pulling my strings.

What really pulled the rug out from esteem was when I discovered that the greatly esteemed Masters were all hypocrites in that they were ‘normal’ in their off-stage life – they all got angry and they all got sad, they were all seduced by the need for power over others and they all relied upon others’ adulation in order to maintain their Self-esteem.

I found, and still find, integrity to be streets ahead of self-esteem because integrity is solely my own business based on my own assessment and is not reliant on the fickle judgement of others.

Integrity is an undercurrent in my life that keeps me from settling for second best.

I have been tootling along with a few more words and a bit of tidying up of the Glossary on the web-site recently, and the latest word was ‘benevolent’. I found myself writing it slanted a bit towards naiveté‚ – that ‘oh so, so essential’ ingredient on the path to freedom. It takes a bucketful and more to counter one’s personal fears and resistance and a mountain full to overcome the cynicism, despair and gloom of Humanity. One needs to concoct it, remember it, access it, resurrect it, find it, dig it up, fuel it, play with it, carry it in your pocket, stash a bit under the bed, season your meals with it, and stock up on it as much as possible from a peak experience.

Be foolish, gullible, silly and extremely naïve in ‘real-world’ terms for you are actually doing what is foolish, gullible, silly and extremely naïve in real-world terms – not to mention ‘spiritual-world’ terms – you are becoming free of the Human Condition. One needs to be naïve to believe it is possible in the first place, but as one gets into it you find your naiveté is supported by facts and incremental success (i.e. finding that it works). This then produces confidence which then grows into surety, then an obsession takes over, naiveté‚ blossoms, and a benevolent inevitability ensues.

For me, naiveté was absolutely essential to counter any fear that arises. With pure intent as a golden chord, as Richard saw it, and naiveté‚ as a constant companion, becoming free of the Human Condition of malice and sorrow is inevitable. It would be foolish to think otherwise.

One of the realizations I had recently, after all the business of quitting my job, was that spiritual values, or spiritual-type thinking still has a hold on me. I still have within me, probably from hundreds of thousands of years of conditioning, the tendency to think of myself as a flawed ‘sinner’, which results in considerable ‘self’-castigation and ‘self’-loathing. I thought I saw this rather clearly in operation when I was filled with ‘self’-recriminations and ‘self’-criticism after leaving the job. I measure myself to an impossible standard of perfection, and naturally do not measure up and then berate myself most strenuously. I literally flagellate myself. It is, I think, a hangover from my spiritual days. It is form of behaviour which characterizes spiritual believers who blame themselves when they do not measure up to the impossible standards of their chosen spiritual teachings. I observed myself doing the same thing with actualism. Turning it into some kind of Almighty system that I had to measure myself against, and then berating myself because I didn’t measure up. It is something that was quite literally operating in my own psyche and not something that I have picked up from actualism. This is, I think an important insight, and I have caught myself up to the same shenanigans from time to time since then and I am quicker on the uptake this time. So, I think I am still extricating myself from the spiritual world, even though I do not hold any blatant spiritual beliefs, I do still have spiritual-like thinking and behaviour which causes me to berate myself mercilessly. I’m about sick of it and want something better for myself.

I can assure you that what you are going through is par for the course for an actualist. It is not something I have written about much but it is something that everyone will go through in one way or another. I saw myself as being so perverse that I would never entertain doubt in all my spiritual years, turning a blind eye to all sorts of shenanigans and skulduggeries, and yet here I was, not prepared to give my all to becoming happy and harmless. I eventually came to recognize what an extraordinary level of gullibility is required to be a spiritual believer and what an extraordinary level of naiveté is required in order to deliberately set upon a course that leads to ‘self’-immolation. Always the memory of the potential of what is humanly possible – as I know from a pure consciousness experience – would serve to lift me out of any downward spirals.

The only solution to being continually consumed by these entrenched feelings is to make your own pure consciousness experience your focus, your objective. This way any dodgy comparison, insidious feelings of guilt and doubt and impractical notions of perfection are all seen for what they are – ‘me’ raising all sorts of objections to ‘my’ demise.

It is as though you attach a rope or mental thread to your PCE and use it as a guide to what is your touchstone or loadstar – the exemplary innocence of a ‘self’-less experience.

Until you are actually free from the human condition, the living of a pure consciousness experience 24 hrs. a day, everyday is ‘your’ goal, ‘your’ measure, ‘your’ standard ... and ‘your’ business to do.

This is what makes actualism – the business of becoming free of the human condition – the adventure of a lifetime.

Again at the risk of seeming over pedantic, you are on your own in this exercise, which is exactly what makes the process so thrilling. Nobody but you can journey into your psyche, nobody but you knows what is the next thing you have to do, the next vital issue to be faced. I have no special perception, or sense of what is going on, other than what you report and all I, or any other experienced or expert actualist, can do is pass on knowledge, experience and technique – the most valuable of information, for it is all factual.

I like the term ‘to let one’s guard down’. It addresses the issue of one’s instinctual survival program, it requires an active naiveté, and it allows one to experience firstly one’s personal psychological and emotional programming and then to experience the collective psychological and emotional programming of the human species. It beats spiritual vulnerability by two country miles for the spiritual people retreat inwards and create a protective bubble around themselves in order to be ‘present’ in the world. To let one’s guard down is to be considered insane by both real world and spiritual world viewpoints, which is why neither will understand what you are doing – but that is simply the way it is for all pioneers.

As you can see, the title is ‘What I am vs. Who I am’, and the diagram essentially addresses the issue of the process of the extinction of ‘who’ I am – the psychological and psychic entity and the emergence of ‘what I am’ – this flesh and blood body only, actually free of ‘who I think and feel I am’. The diagram quite deliberately separates out the active diminishing and eventual extinction of ‘who I am’ – and the emergence and eventual freedom of ‘what I am’. ‘What I am’ has always been here, it is just that it has been obscured and totally dominated by ‘who I am’ – and it is only by systematically and methodically daring to peel back the layers of social conditioning, beliefs, morals, ethics, psittacisms and instinctual passions that ‘what I am’ is more and more able to become apparent. ‘What I am’ thus becomes incrementally freed, strengthened, gaining confidence from the surety of facts, the increasingly unfettered intelligence and the heightened senses – all actual, down to earth, sensible and verifiable experiences. ‘What I am’ is not a new creation, a new identity – it is simply what remains when the ‘who I am’ disappears in total. To put it another way, the ‘who I was’ when I first met Richard will never meet the ‘what I am’ that will emerge when ‘I’ become extinct.

Of course, one has glimpses of this ‘self’-less state in the PCE, when for a period ‘who I am’ exits the stage, or is temporarily absent, but ‘what I am’ can only be totally free when ‘who I am’ ceases to exist permanently. ‘Who I am’ is capable of resurrection or fighting back at any stage – indeed it is passionately driven to do anything possible to survive – including selling off Grandmother if need be – which is where the middle line of the diagram comes into play. This is a simple representation of the wide and wondrous path to Actual Freedom – from naiveté to Actual Freedom. We have started the line with naiveté, for it surely requires naiveté to not only consider that an actual freedom from the Human Condition is possible, but that you, personally, are the one who can do it. To fly in the face of the Wisdom of the Ancients – ‘to go where no man has gone before’ in Star Trek terms, as I put it in my Journal. I conveniently ignored Richard in my dramatization as I figured that the next pioneers were plotting a brand new course – avoiding the instinctual seduction of the Rock of Enlightenment that had dashed the efforts of all before. The other point about naiveté is that the spiritually cynical and the worldly cunning, by their very attitude, exclude themselves from the adventure, and this has been evidenced by the many who have met Richard, or read a bit about AF, and turned away.

I would have assumed that anyone on this list was here because they had an interest in the subject matter being discussed here – how to actualize a personal peace on earth and thereby offer oneself as proof that peace on earth is possible, in this lifetime, as a flesh and blood human being and not in some spurious afterlife. As a part of this discussion it is pertinent to undertake a clear-eyed, intelligent assessment of one’s own efforts to date and the efforts of billions of one’s fellow human beings. To look at the efforts to date and acknowledge their failings to bring anything remotely resembling peace on earth.

To undertake this investigation requires naiveté not cynicism, determination not fatalism, bloody-mindedness not defeatism, confidence not pessimism, a stubborn refusal to settle for second best not resignation, and a burning discontentment with the Human Condition of malice and sorrow not a self-centred complacency. If you are content with your life as it is, if your spiritual pursuits have bought you peace, happiness and freedom or if you are certain they will, then this discussion list is clearly not for you.

The prerequisite for being interested in actualism is to abandon one’s cynicism and re-activate one’s naiveté, a seemingly impossible task for those who have been involved in the spiritual world for years and have become aware by experience of its perennial failure to deliver the goods. Seemingly it is an equally impossible task for those who have devoted their lives to changing human nature and have become aware of the perennial failure of any real-world idealism to deliver the goods.

What I have discovered on the path to Actual Freedom is that layer upon layer of aggressiveness is revealed when one begins to become aware of malice in operation in one’s own psyche. All of this malice can ultimately be sheeted home to a ‘me’ inside this flesh and blood body who feels attacked, who loves to fight, who likes to blame others, who likes to see others suffer, who thinks he is right, who likes to feel superior, who feels resentful, who is ever on-guard and who feels and thinks he needs to be in control. It takes an enormous amount of naiveté and pure intent to dare to let one’s guard down and acknowledge the rottenness of the instinctual passions that are programmed in this body. Both naiveté and pure intent are gleaned from the pure consciousness experiences we have all had in our lives and these experiences form the very basis of the inherent knowledge we all have that there must be something better than normal life within the human condition.

‘To even consider a journey into yourself to free yourself of the Human Condition requires a burning discontent with life as it is – both for yourself and for your fellow human beings’.

Or am I being too naïve ...?

Recently, I was speaking to someone who was carrying a gun there, in fact many of them were friends of mine, and interestingly, he was of the opinion that many of them would not have been able to kill anyone. So maybe that is why you weren’t given a gun!

T’is interesting writing on this list. When I said I was a Sannyasin to find peace of mind and peace on earth (the New Man), I was told I was silly. When I said I was seeking Enlightenment, I was told I was silly. When I said Rajneesh was talking about God, I was told I was silly. When I said Rajneesh was teaching in the Eastern spiritual tradition, I was told I was silly. When I said I saw the Religion forming, I was told I was silly. When I said that I probably would have killed to protect Rajneesh – all of a sudden I am the only one who loved him that much!

The level of denial is quite breath-taking. Most take the facts we are talking of and take them personally, whereas we are talking of the Human Condition – common to all. Any personal experiences we relate, as evidence of the Human Condition in us, is then used against us, as a defence for the status quo.

Maybe I am just too naïve ... but I do like naiveté – it’s the closest quality to innocence that we humans can muster.

<Preach-Mode> Well, try and drop naiveté, and move into pure innocence </Preach-Mode>

I assume you are talking of the Divine ‘pure innocence’ that includes such things as Divine Anger – as a ‘device to wake up the sleepy’, Divine Jealousy as in ‘I am the Only God’, Divine Sorrow as in ‘feeling Compassion for all sentient beings’.

No, innocence is only possible with the complete and utter eradication of both ‘self’ and ‘Self’. The total extinction of ‘me’ who is sorrowful and malicious is the only option.

Given the abounding cynicism of the spiritual world, it is an essential quality to re-discover one’s naiveté in order to even begin to contemplate innocence. One needs to travel 180 degrees in the other direction from a cynical view-point.

So, I am not discouraging you – quite the opposite, my experience is that you will find the experience of investigating and communicating invaluable. I certainly appreciate your enthusiasm and writing as it gives me an opportunity to enthuse and write as well.

After all, naiveté beats cynicism, communication beats silence and being an actualist in the world-as-it-is with people as-they are beats escaping to an ‘inner world’ – by much more than a country mile.

Win, win and more win.

Being a down-to-earth sort of ‘old chap’ and a bit naive to boot – I believed it was about a New Man, a city to challenge the world, a new way of living and working together, a new way of being together as human beings. A city of higher consciousness than the rest of the world. A city free of crime, a city of love. But as you say I am only one of the many who ‘didn’t get what the ranch was about’, perhaps you can tell me what the Ranch was really about? What is the true overview as you see it?

Okay, so whereas I merely ‘believed’ what the ranch was about, you ‘know’ and you ‘see’ due to your higher level of consciousness. It does rather strain my neck a bit, as I am forced to forever look ‘up’ to your level. It does make discussion, on the basis of us being two human beings, more than a bit difficult.

This is important, how to eliminate these ‘instinctual survival passions’? This is where I’m getting stuck, I think. You mean that repressing the ‘negative’ instincts and indulging in ‘good morals etc’ is the spiritual predicament and what we need is to free us from ALL survival passions, good and bad, and in doing so we’re released from our ‘instinctual cage’. So I suppose the outcome of this would be that we aren’t creating suffering for ourselves and others through our ignorance anymore. Is that it? When we see actuality there’s no need to for pretence anymore ...?

It is not a matter of ignorance. This is the spiritual concept whereby we are born innocent and then corrupted by ignorance (or evil, in the more fundamental traditions) and it is only when we discover the truth or Truth do we become free of ignorance ... or evil.

By the time one reaches adulthood one has a fully developed sense of ‘real’-world cynicism. This attitude to life on earth is fuelled by societal spiritual and religious beliefs that life on earth is meant to be a suffering existence and that ultimate peace and happiness is only possible after physical death in a mythical after-life.

This view is further reinforced and strengthened by the commonly-held ancient belief that children are born ‘innocent’ and are corrupted by ‘evil’ or ‘wrong thinking’ since birth. These beliefs combine to form the unanimous views that ‘life’s a bitch’, and ‘you can’t change Human Nature’ – the deeply cynical concepts that underpin the Human Condition.

Abandoning these cynical ‘real world’ and ‘spiritual world’ beliefs about human existence is essential if one is to even consider becoming free of the Human Condition. In order to begin the process of changing human nature in oneself, one needs to re-activate and cultivate one’s innate naiveté – the closest one can get to innocence while still remaining a ‘self’.

In the PCE, the direct experience of the purity and perfection of the actual world becomes suddenly apparent and ‘who’ one was literally moments before falls away as though a distant and discordant memory. One’s fears and battles, troubles and worries, anger and sadness disappear along with one’s very persona, for the PCE is a ‘self’-less state. In the PCE it becomes inconceivable that human beings could be malicious to each other to the point of waging war and sorrowful to the point of suicide whilst living on this delightful, bountiful, paradisiacal planet. An Introduction to Actual Freedom, The Pure Consciousness Experience

The understanding that we are born the way we are and are fated to be ‘who’ we think and feel we are is enormously liberating in itself. No longer do we need to feel guilty for the way we are, no longer to we need to pray to God or grovel before God-men, no longer are we helpless victims, no longer do we need to feel resentful at having to be here in the first place.

The fact is we are here and the challenge then becomes how to fully embrace being here.

While it is both fascinating and intriguing to contemplate upon an Actual Freedom – what would it be like, how would it be, etc. – it must always remain unknowable to ‘me’ as I am now. The only thing ‘I’ can actually do to facilitate an actual freedom from malice and sorrow is to get myself to a state of Virtual Freedom as rapidly as possible. This involves ridding myself of my social identity and instinctual-based sense of ‘self’ as much as is ‘humanly’ possible. To get to the 99% stage is what ‘I’ can do to facilitate ‘my’ demise. There is work to be done and plenty of it, for continual perfect days are well beyond normal human expectations anyway – for one becomes virtually happy and harmless, 24 hrs a day, every day. Depression, sadness, loneliness, boredom, resentment, anger, animosity, annoyance become but vague memories as ‘I’ become less and less substantial, less of the one who is experiencing, less of the one who is controlling, less of the one who is thinking and feeling. Apperception, naiveté and sensate experience replace confusion, doubt, fear and alienation.

The other facet to the path to Actual Freedom – to the 99% stage – is that realisations are clearly seen for what they are, sudden and dramatic flashes or glimpses of a belief exposed as merely fictitious and not factual. These realisation have a feeling ‘high’ associated with it, as a sense of liberation and startling clarity is affectively interpreted and experienced. While extremely useful and ‘par for the course’, as beliefs are exposed and eliminated, it is what one does with the realization, what action or change is evinced, that is important and significant, not the realization itself, per se. One needs to be aware of realisation addiction, to put it bluntly, as one can spend an inordinate amount of time and effort looking or waiting for them and as such ‘not being here’. They are but curiosities and will eventually subside – to have had their day, exactly as will the rest of impassioned feelings and irrational imagination, if peace is one’s aim. A personal peace in the world-as-it-is, with people as-they-are, that is.

No 8, I am curious as to what brought you to this list – was it just for a bit of flaming? Vineeto and I went on to the Sannyas mailing list a few months ago, to see if there were perhaps others who may be dissatisfied with the spiritual path and eventually got cyber-executed for daring to question Rajneesh. As an ‘ex’ I was wanting to let others know there is now, for the first time, an alternative available to the spiritual ‘freedom’ offered by Eastern Religions. A few people did come across to the Actual Freedom List but apparently none are sufficiently interested to take the jump out of the spiritual world. In my experience, it does take a burning discontent with life as-it-is, and I wonder if that applies to you. This discontent can take different forms – for me, one of the discontents was the continual failure of my ‘love’ relationships and a desire to free myself from sexual inhibitions, instinctual compulsiveness and ignorance. Another factor was, having had children, there was nothing I knew that I could pass on to them – I was confused, bewildered, bedeviled ... and definitely not free! I had no answers.

A bit of ‘cut and paste’ to briefly tell you my story –

University days were filled with a wonderful optimism and naivety as the sixties’ youth revolution gathered momentum. We were going to change the world! Socialism, peace, love, sexual freedom, environmentalism – anything was possible to have or to change.

I marched to stop the Vietnam war, I poster-pasted to save the forests, I grooved to the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park in London, I hung around in Amsterdam, I travelled to the East, I became politically and socially concerned and involved. I’ve thought about these times during the last twelve months – what happened to the dreams, the enthusiasm of those times? Remember John Lennon singing ‘Imagine’ or ‘Give Peace a Chance’, or watching Woodstock? We were going to change the world! And then it all started to fade a bit – I got rather lost in the daily business of wife, two kids and two cars. And then, when that crashed, I was off to the East with thousands of others, seduced and fired up by the promise of a New Man, Peace, Love, Utopia and an end to my personal suffering. In fact, the whole of the revolution of the sixties was simply sucked into the mystery, confusion and ‘mindlessness’ of the Eastern religions.

Of course spiritualism failed – there was nothing new in it at all, now that I look back. How could the solution lie in the past? There would have been peace and happiness in the world by now if it worked – it has had at least 3000 years to prove itself. So when the social revolution and the promised spiritual solution failed, I was back in ‘comfortably numb’ normal, but I couldn’t rest there – that naivety was still burning within me, that refusal to accept that this was all there was to life. I am amazed to see that so many people of my generation have reverted to ‘comfortably numb’ – have lost their naivety. Surely the purpose in life is to be the best I can – to be the best possible. Peter’s Journal, Peace

Maybe you have a story to tell, a reason why you’re on the list, an aspiration or goal in life, some discontents with life as-it-is? I would be interested to hear from you because I also liked what you wrote on the Listening-L list – such passion for investigation is rare in people these days, and most particularly on spiritual lists.

I have just finished watching a TV documentary about Timothy Leary of ‘turn on, tune in ... and drop out fame’. In the late 1960’s he was at the forefront of experimenting with and publicizing the use of LSD and other chemicals that act to interrupt and temporarily alter the fixed, robotic electro-chemical circuitry in the brain.

A few aspects of the documentary were interesting and none more so than to see a historical documentary where so many of the characters were playing themselves. Many of the main figures of the 60’s psychedelic scene were interviewed for the film and these clips were spliced with old interviews and archival footage. Someone who was now 60 or 70 years old was interviewed, juxtaposed with film of them as 20 or 30 year olds. What was revealing to see was that the naiveté of youth and the well-meaning 60’s aims of peace, love and brown rice for all, had wilted and been replaced by a turning away, a foreboding cynicism, an introverted self-love and a lust for immortality. Two of the central characters who demonstrated this best were Timothy Leary himself and Richard Alpert who is now known as Ram Das.

Both said they had taken LSD hundreds of times and both had developed different interpretations of their experiences. Richard Alpert had a taste of the Divine, an altered state of consciousness, and became a mystic, a spiritual teacher, and a full-on devotee of an Eastern God-man. His experience when in an altered state of consciousness was that he was not the body and not the mind. He described stepping out of illusion of the real world into God-Consciousness. He then talked of Timothy Leary saying ‘he wasn’t into mysticism’.

Courage and intelligence has a way of eventually winning out over brute fear and superstition – a brief view of the facts of history attests to this. We don’t live in caves and hunt like animals anymore, we just instinctually act as if we do because that is the way we have been programmed to act. It is if of no use at all to feel guilt or shame about this genetic programming, or feel resentful or be cynically embittered about one’s lot in life – the situation we find ourselves in calls for an unfettered investigation and the instigation of sensible action such that we can become free of this condition we are all inevitably born into.

I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic, neither a soothsayer nor a doomsdayer, neither gullible nor cynical. What I am is naïve. For whatever reason I could not fully turn away into acceptance and the escapist fantasy of the spiritual world, nor was I sucked into resignation and the fatalistic cynicism of the real world.

Methinks you are thus far underestimating the significance of actualism and its tried and tested method of eliminating malice and sorrow, which is more than understandable. This is no little thing we do here – the very beginnings of the ending of war, rape, murder, torture, child abuse, corruption, despair and suicide is being forged on this mailing list.

It’s the only game to play in town.

I have posted links to that article to several people, but have never received comment back. The revelations cut to the quick of what can happen if one takes the belief that ‘I am not the body’ to heart – complete and utter dissociation from what ‘the body’ is doing and what is actually happening. In the town where I live there are many people practicing martial arts, all of them seemingly in ignorance of the real significance of the philosophy that underpins the practice. What is most clear for me is that dissociating from and feeling that one has transcended the malice and sorrow in the world can only be achieved by dissociating from one’s personal malice and sorrow – or to put it into play ground language, ‘I am one of the good guys and the others are the baddies’.

As you said, there is indeed a great deal of myth about peace and harmony in the East, yet a little reading reveals an almost continuous history of warfare, conflict and brutality in the East exactly as there is in the West. Further, the combination of a fatalistic acceptance and dissociative religious beliefs has ensured the faithful believers, in India in particular, remain ensnared in appalling poverty and suffering. It is amazing to think I once believed that the religious philosophy that enshrines and perpetuates the poverty, repression and superstition in India was Wisdom or the Truth, but then again I was simply thoroughly investigating the only alternative to being normal that was available at the time.

It is an interesting exercise to be able to look back over my life experiences without any emotional memory clouding or colouring the events. What I see is ‘failure’ writ large and clear. I am definitely a failure in real world terms. I have failed at love – and eventually I gave it up. I have failed to find meaning and fulfillment in my career – eventually I worked in order to buy myself time to do nothing. I have failed at fatherhood – I eventually gave up when my son was able to take care of himself and I cut my emotional bonds. I failed to be a ‘ good’ member of society for I saw no sense in fighting for causes while blaming others for the ills. In short, I failed to play the game of belonging, or not belonging, to the various groups that make up society and I failed to play the games I was supposed to play.

With the benefit of hindsight, whenever I found something that didn’t work, and by its very nature was unworkable, I eventually abandoned it and kept looking for a better way of doing something – to find something that actually worked. It was exactly the same thing when I was on the spiritual path when I eventually discovered and finally admitted religion/ spiritualism didn’t work and never could work to bring peace on earth.

Again in hindsight, it is clear to me that the most important attribute that kept me from settling for second best was integrity, combined with a naïve and deep-seated desire for peace on earth.

It is obvious to me that the main legacy that Rajneesh left was a group of people steeped in cynicism, fatalism, defeatism – which is what surrender is – doomsdayistic pessimism, resignation and self-centred complacency. Rajneesh’s blatant stupidity and ignorance in taking on and deriding the American Christians and its inevitable failure was to ultimately crush any naiveté and enthusiasm in his followers, leaving a wimpish lot of faithful and loyal devotees to soldier on.

A little exchange from the Sannyas List will illustrate the point –

‘I was attracted (to Sannyas) by two things –

• The promise of what I would call peace of mind, the permanent cessation of the endless self-centered churning thoughts and emotions in me.

• The promise of peace on earth, the emergence of a ‘New Man’, such as would bring an end to war, pollution, poverty, repression, violence and sorrow on this fair planet.’

Responses to the above –

1. ‘O, poor guy, who promised you all of this? I have never heard Osho promising anything to anybody, why should you be an exception?’

2. ‘Now these ‘promises’ were never made...only made up by you, and in your dreaming you chose to believe them.’

3. ‘Perhaps you still could find some benefit in taking responsibility for choice of action. No one forced you to believe anything. You made choices. You looked for and found what didn’t exist.’

The last response was a classic – it sure didn’t exist! Ah, what an amazing experience it was to have been a disciple of a living Guru, to see his dream fail, see him set up a religion to carry on his dream, see him, in person, playing the God-man to the hilt, to meet him zonked out of his mind and to be personally so blinded by trust, faith, devotion, surrender and loyalty that all of my intelligence was almost non-existent.

As you can see, the title is ‘What I am vs. Who I am’, and the diagram essentially addresses the issue of the process of the extinction of ‘who’ I am – the psychological and psychic entity and the emergence of ‘what I am’ – this flesh and blood body only, actually free of ‘who I think and feel I am’. The diagram quite deliberately separates out the active diminishing and eventual extinction of ‘who I am’ – and the emergence and eventual freedom of ‘what I am’. ‘What I am’ has always been here, it is just that it has been obscured and totally dominated by ‘who I am’ – and it is only by systematically and methodically daring to peel back the layers of social conditioning, beliefs, morals, ethics, psittacisms and instinctual passions that ‘what I am’ is more and more able to become apparent. ‘What I am’ thus becomes incrementally freed, strengthened, gaining confidence from the surety of facts, the increasingly unfettered intelligence and the heightened senses – all actual, down to earth, sensible and verifiable experiences. ‘What I am’ is not a new creation, a new identity – it is simply what remains when the ‘who I am’ disappears in total. To put it another way, the ‘who I was’ when I first met Richard will never meet the ‘what I am’ that will emerge when ‘I’ become extinct.

Of course, one has glimpses of this ‘self’-less state in the PCE, when for a period ‘who I am’ exits the stage, or is temporarily absent, but ‘what I am’ can only be totally free when ‘who I am’ ceases to exist permanently. ‘Who I am’ is capable of resurrection or fighting back at any stage – indeed it is passionately driven to do anything possible to survive – including selling off Grandmother if need be – which is where the middle line of the diagram comes into play. This is a simple representation of the wide and wondrous path to Actual Freedom – from naiveté to Actual Freedom. We have started the line with naiveté, for it surely requires naiveté to not only consider that an actual freedom from the Human Condition is possible, but that you, personally, are the one who can do it. To fly in the face of the Wisdom of the Ancients – ‘to go where no man has gone before’ in Star Trek terms, as I put it in my Journal. I conveniently ignored Richard in my dramatization as I figured that the next pioneers were plotting a brand new course – avoiding the instinctual seduction of the Rock of Enlightenment that had dashed the efforts of all before. The other point about naiveté is that the spiritually cynical and the worldly cunning, by their very attitude, exclude themselves from the adventure, and this has been evidenced by the many who have met Richard, or read a bit about AF, and turned away.

For those willing to consider the possibility of an actual freedom, the next step is to garnish a pure intent – an intent to make it something one is willing to dedicate one’s life to and a purity such that one will settle for nothing less than the purity and perfection so obviously experienced in a Pure Consciousness Experience. If it is possible for a brief time it must be possible as a permanent state – purity and perfection is possible as a flesh and blood human being, it requires one’s pure intent to become a ‘self’ consuming passion in life.

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Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust