Selected Correspondence Peter

Perfection

Just a side reflection. Don’t you find it cute that it is not okay for a human being to be happy and harmless, free of malice and sorrow – i.e. perfect – but it is okay for a human being to call himself or herself a God, or God-realised? Such is the insidious perversity of the Human Condition. I could even say the atavistically insidious perversity but t’would border on baroque verbosity.

Even if one was very harmonious and grounded in an absolutely positive relationship to life one could certainly feel very miserable from time to time.

While remaining a ‘self’ one is forever subject to the full range of emotional passions and there is ample evidence that even those who claim to be peace-loving and have a positive outlook on life are often overcome by anger or suffer inexplicable bouts of depression. This is the case even with the Enlightened Ones who have the full range of emotional passions intact despite their efforts to transcend the savage and emulate and radiate the tender passions. Apart from the mythical almost anonymous past-Masters whom we know nothing about, all of the recent and current crop of Gurus clearly demonstrate, at some time in their careers, all the attributes of what we begrudgingly acknowledge as our human failings.

But maybe you’re talking about the foundation for happiness first and foremost and not the actual experience. It would be very unrealistic, I think, to imagine perfection as constant sensatory bliss, if that’s the case then I surely see the need for mimicking life instead of actually living it. This could potentially be the ultimate delusion, a way to create a fairytale and not living in any world other than one’s own fantasy and imagination.

As I said, unless one is willing to contemplate being happy and being harmless, virtually free of malice and sorrow, 99% of the time – then forget the whole business. From your objections to my statement it is obvious that you find it impossible to contemplate that you, as-you-are, would be willing to sacrifice enough of your ‘self’ to even get to this state.

Do you think that a change as radical as becoming actually happy and harmless happens by some blinding flash of light, that it is an effortless achievement that requires that you do nothing? Even on the spiritual path those who have success build a foundation of spiritual experiences and assiduously practice transcendence. The same applies for any achievement or goal in the real world.

For anyone interested in becoming actually free of malice and sorrow, it is obvious that unless one is willing to contemplate being happy and being harmless, virtually free of malice and sorrow, 99% of the time – then forget the whole business.

My view of perfection is to be able to face every aspect of life, good or bad, and to avoid nothing ... there will most definitely be some hardship to endure even after achieving (realizing...) perfection (or almost perfection more accurately) if one is challenging oneself in life.

Purity and perfection are impossible to imagine while remaining a ‘self’. Up until now the best on offer has been a subjugation of one’s personal sense of ‘self’ whereby one is able to ride on, or identify with, the tender emotions and feel pure and feel perfect. Unfortunately one also feels Godly, Timeless and Immortal – a deadly cocktail of delusion. There is no good and bad in the actual world. There are no good and bad rocks, there are no right and wrong trees, there is no fear on a computer monitor, there is no anger in a cup of coffee. Only animals exhibit instinctual fear, aggression, nurture and desire and only humans and our closest genetic cousins exhibit passions and emotions associated with these instinctual reactions.

As for challenging oneself – how about an actual peace on earth, in this lifetime, for No 10? There is no greater challenge and no greater good that one could do for others.

So I can relate to a very sound and almost perfect foundation that gives oneself confidence to live in a new and even radically new and positive way but I just can’t see the end result being permanent bliss, but maybe that isn’t what you’re suggesting anyway?

No. Bliss is a passionate emotion and like all emotions it has a duality, an opposite emotion. Underlying all feelings of bliss is the feeling of dread, exactly as underlying Enlightenment lies the Diabolical and underlying the good is the bad and underlying God is the Devil, etc.

In the actual world, all the duality of human emotional passions does not exist at all.

And how can we know that the next day and the day after will be perfect even when we’ve left ‘the self’ behind? It might in fact be a total disaster and we might become extremely depressed or whatever. Is the ultimate state really to be perfectly happy all the time?

You can’t know until you have experienced the perfection and purity of the actual world in a pure consciousness experience. If you have already and can remember it then you and I both know that your question is yet another furphy. But if you steadfastly believe that human existence is meant to be a suffering existence then you will forever cut yourself off from finding out.

The key to the ultimate ‘self’-less sate of purity and perfection is to maintain an equal focus on the ‘harmless’ bit of becoming happy and harmless, for one can never be happy unless one is harmless. This harmlessness is an unconditional harmlessness in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are – not hiding away in some spiritual community of like-believers, run on strict moral and ethical codes in order to keep a lid on undesirable behaviour. Actual harmlessness is not an ideal, as in pacifism, but comes from having no identity or person ‘inside’ who can feel offended, feel attacked, who is constantly and fearfully on-guard and ever-ready to defend or attack.

There is no malice and sorrow in the actual world.

This sounds sane to me ... but I still have problems with understanding the self-less state. Do you mean having no identity whatsoever, not even as a flesh and blood creature? So it’s the end of self-consciousness...? One just exists without reflection of who one actually is?

And the perfection you mentioned does it mean that one will FEEL good all the time also?

One has no psychological and psychic identity whatsoever. No ‘I’ in the head – who ‘I’ think I am – nor ‘me’ in the heart – who ‘I’ feel I am. There is simply this thoughtful, reflective flesh and blood body brimming with sense organs being apperceptively aware. Apperception is the brain’s ability to be aware of itself – a bare awareness. There is no ‘I’ being aware, there is simply awareness operating by itself as a function of the brain of this flesh and blood body. The brain, freed of the neurotic burden of a social identity and the chemical surges emanating from the instinctual animal ‘self’ is able to operate with salubrious clarity. The physical senses – literally the stalks of the brain – are freed of their burden of guard-duty imposed by a fearful instinctual ‘self’, are heightened to an extent that one experiences purity and perfection as a sensual actuality that leaves any paltry feelings for dead.

As for being perfect: It is all too subjective. An enlightened person is not hung up on what society says is right or wrong, which is largely based on just belief handed down by other egos. Like Krishnamurti was found to have been having sex with his friend’s wife for many years. Many people thought this was so very bad. ‘How could a truly enlightened person do that?’ His friend had decided years earlier that he did not want to have sex for spiritual reasons. So he stopped. Well, his wife wanted to have sex.

So she did with Krishnamurti. Should she have suffered the rest of her life because her husband didn’t want to have sex? And why shouldn’t Krishnamurti have sex? You are not more spiritual because you have or don’t have sex. I have been celibate for 12 years, but that doesn’t make me any better than someone who has sex every hour on the hour. That is just the way my needs have changed over the years. People could say how bad it was that Krishnamurti didn’t let people know he was not celibate. He knew full well where most people’s heads are at in this matter. It most likely wasn’t from lack of honesty but from knowing many people might stop listening to what he had to say, and what he had to say was very important for people to hear. I will let others judge people like him. He did the best he could for over 60 years of teaching.

An interesting point of view. What Krishnamurti had to say was so ‘very important for people to hear’ that it was okay to deliberately conceal a long standing affair with his friend’s wife and engage in subsequent long and bitter legal battles against his friend in order to suppress any knowledge of it becoming public. Sort of a ‘don’t look at the finger, look at the moon’ argument or ‘I’m only a poor humble messenger but my message is pure gold.’ Do you not take a stand, presume a position, make a judgement on Krishnamurti by refusing to pass a judgement yourself and leaving it to others?

I agree that the way the Krishnamurti group handled that whole thing was wrong, and K should have stepped in and stopped that. But the fact remains that what he was saying was very important and if it had all come out many people who have been helped by what he had to say may not have been.

Who are you agreeing with No. 8? Certainly not me. Now you are blaming the Krishnamurti group, presumably because they didn’t conceal their Master’s duplicity and deceit. You don’t seem able to bring yourself to question Krishnamurti’s actions for that would mean you would be questioning a revered teacher and that is a sacred no-no. This ethic that the message of Enlightenment is more important than the veracity and conduct of the Enlightened Ones has forever humbled seekers into silence and cognitive blindness. But in his day and age of increased information and communication this sacred code in the spiritual community is being broken down. Even on the mailing list there is some debate about various teachers and their behaviour. This questioning is tentative and selective for there is a definite pecking order as to who is fair game to question and who is considered too high up on the scale, or too close to home, to question.

I see you have joined in this delicate selection process and, as a teacher yourself, you obviously have a dilemma as to who to blame and who to praise. You have put Father Dionysus, Otto Kernberg and Ammachi down so far, but your comments deriding students who hang around teachers may not endear you to the Cohenite students so it may well be politic to tone down a touch in this area. There seems to be a very profound dilemma amongst spiritual teachers these days – how watered down does one make one’s message so that it doesn’t appear live old-time religion without it being nothing more than a set of morals, a bit of feel good and lot of dis-identifying? The other approach is to go for the full-on charismatic God-realization approach but this does have its drawbacks in terms of being forever on-guard and on-stage. Added to all this, the Guru business is such a crowded market nowadays that it is tough to get enough customers to qualify as a bona fide teacher.

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I am awake, but I am not perfect in the eyes of some, perhaps most. So what? Most people have such a misunderstanding of what it means to be enlightened. Enlightened people are just people who have seen the fact of our being one with all life. I just live my life not harming any one or any thing. That is simple, we can all do that, awake or not.

Well, that’s a bit of a come down for the exalted and much prized state of Enlightenment. This seems to none other than the ‘we are all enlightened, we only have to realize it’ psittacism that is floating around the spiritual world. So now, I assume your teaching is simplified even further to – if everyone sees ‘the fact of our being one with all life’ and ‘just lives (their) life not harming any one or any thing’ then there will be peace on earth.

Why not? I am awake, I harm nothing or no one. If everyone just lived that simply were would the wars and killing come from? It is true that the mind of the unenlightened is the same mind as the enlightened, except for the enlightened have awakened to a clear direct seeing the fact before our eyes.

Okay, let’s look at the facts before our eyes. The Dalai Lama is an avowed Buddhist who would claim that he would harm nothing and no one. He is a pacifist, which meant when someone invaded his country he fled. Now if everyone in the country you lived in was a pacifist it is like hanging out a sign – pleas invade – we won’t stop you. The Dalai Lama, now safe behind the protection of the Indian army is busily trying to get someone else to free his country. Pacifism is an unliveable ideal in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. Do you not rely on the guns of the police and army for the privilege of feeling a pacifist? Would not it be more sensible to tackle the root cause of malice and sorrow – the instinctual animal passions in humans – rather than striding the moral high ground sprouting unliveable ethics that completely ignore the facts before our eyes.

The Enlightened not only cop-out from acknowledging any malice in themselves but they also cop-out from acknowledging sorrow in themselves. As you yourself stated Enlightenment means that one no longer identifies with one’s personal suffering but that one feels universal sorrow or compassion for others. This is easily seen in action whereby they continually rile against the unenlightened as the cause of wars and suffering. The excuse for this malevolence is that they feel compassion towards those who have yet to realize that the wars and killing is all a dream – created by their ego – from which they haven’t yet awakened.

There has been no one in my life who I let believe I was some high and mighty being because I was awake. I have had a problem with people who have tried to put me on a pedestal for just being awake. If I let them it would just be ego playing another game.

Why should people want to put you on a pedestal in the first place? Just what Guru-energy are you radiating? Is it you or your seductive message of dissociation from the symptoms of the animal instinctual passions in operation in humans? Do you find you have to be humble to put them off? Again your actions of putting yourself above Father Dionysus, Otto Kernbergand and Ammachi on the list does seem to weaken your case for being an ordinary man. It must be a tricky business getting these balances just right.

I truthfully do not believe in perfection. We are, surely, infinitely perfectible. Something to keep in mind when shopping for a guru. I think belief in our or someone else’s perfection has led to a great deal of mischief and misery in history. I limit my ideal to the top of the next hill.

Yes, it is increasingly obvious that the teachers have all failed to live up to the teachings which does beg the question why we blame either the teacher or ourselves and never-ever dare to question the veracity of the ‘sacred’ Bronze Age teachings.

I am interested in how one discovers for oneself what are ‘animal instinctual passions’ and what leads to their extinction and what is left when they no longer hold sway. What worries me is renunciation, which often leads to mere suppression and which rises naturally from a clinging to ‘perfection’.

The animal instinctual passions are essentially fear, aggression, nurture and desire and are easily recognized as feelings and deep-seated emotions in oneself. The Eastern spiritual practice of transcendence is to disassociate from the savage passions of fear and aggression and identify with the tender passions of nurture and desire. As such, spiritual seekers are encouraged to suppress and deny fear and anger and feel only love and Godliness which gives rise to the illusion of oneself as being perfect. This ‘perfection’ is never actualized for the underlying instinctual passions have only been ‘transcended’ and not eliminated.

Actual perfection and innocence is only possible with the extinction of the instinctual passions in toto.

Mr. Rajneesh – ‘[Idealism] goes on saying to you, ‘Do something – improve yourself. Do something – change yourself. Do something – become perfect.’ It appeals to the ego. Idealism belongs to the world of the ego. It appeals to the ego that you can be more perfect than you are; in fact you should be more perfect than you are. My message to humanity is a new man. Less than that won’t do. Not something modified, not something continuous with the past, but utterly discontinuous. The first thing to be understood: you ARE perfect. If somebody says to you that you have to become perfect, he is the enemy – beware of him! Escape from him as soon as possible. Don’t let him poison your being. Don’t let him destroy you. He may have been destroyed by others; now he is doing the same to you. He himself may be a victim. Have compassion on him, but don’t allow him to destroy you.’

‘You ARE perfect’ is the delusion of the spiritual view-point. The spiritual world is in complete denial of the modern discoveries of the fact that we are not ‘perfect’ – that we have an in-built instinctual survival program of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that inevitably causes us to live in fear and to be aggressive. It is this fact that prevents peace on earth, not the failure to live the – unliveable – spiritual ideal that if only we ‘all follow one God and one God only’ and then all will be magically okay, one day, in the future. When I finally stopped deluding myself that this insanity was going to bring peace to earth, and when I stopped being dishonest with myself in believing that I was ‘already perfect’, was I able to do something about becoming actually perfect.

There is now available a third alternative. The actual physical universe, being infinite – having no outside to it – and eternal – having no beginning or end – is pure and perfect. Most humans have experienced this purity and perfection at some stage in their life in what is called a PCE or pure consciousness experience.

There seems also an innate sense of this purity and perfection, but it is normally inaccessible to us humans, as we are born with an instinctual separate sense of ‘self’ with its accompanying instincts and are further imbued with a social identity. This very ‘self’, the who I ‘think’ I am and the who I ‘feel’ I am keeps me forever separate and alien from this purity and perfection.

The spiritual search is a vain attempt to seek ‘union’ with this purity and perfection by ‘feeling’ connected, feeling Goodness, God, Love or whatever – the best on offer to date. The major and ultimately disastrous flaw is that ‘when really cranked up’ these feelings lead to Union, Oneness, God-Realization, etc. and yet another Saviour or Guru is realized to form yet another Religion to cause yet more wars ...

The mere pumping up of good feelings leads to narcissism in the extreme as the core of the problem, the instinctual passions, lies forever untouched.

Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust