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Selected Correspondence Peter Social Identity
I’ll wrap this up with something Richard found the other day that says a lot about the Human Condition. I remember writing once of the Human Condition – ‘Thus it is established that ‘we are the way we are, because this is the way we are’ and further – ‘this is the way we will always be, because this is the way we have always been’ – simply translated as ‘You can’t change Human Nature’. But this little story illustrates it really well ...
Sometimes I get disappointed writing because I think I have nothing original to say. I berate myself because I see that my writing is just a rehash of what others are saying, and I seem to only blend and combine ideas that I get elsewhere. Sometimes I compare myself to others and come out short. Richard is obviously a very intelligent man and has an easy command of the language. You also write well and particularly in your recent posts your writing is crisp and clear. I think I also write well and I have had people compliment me on things that I have written. As for berating myself, I am sure it does not do much good or any good at all and it is something else for me to look at. In the real world, the Land of Lament, there is a heavy emphasis on developing ‘self’-esteem, which is a sense of pride for one’s competencies, strengths, and achievements. Conversely, there is a lack of ‘self’-esteem, or what people call ‘low self-esteem’, as evidenced by an extremely critical attitude towards oneself or berating oneself for lack of achievement and inner worth. I am coming to see that Humanity, the society, and the community needs a steady supply of people with ‘self’-esteem. In short, Society needs a steady supply of human beings who are ‘selves’ who either have ‘self-esteem or who don’t and want to have it. In this way, society and the community shape and mould the individual according to it’s selfish demands, and it demands ‘self’-sacrifice because it is ultimately selfish, like the individual self. So this ‘self’-beratement, the flip side of the coin from ‘self’-esteem, is evidence of ‘me’ struggling to stay in existence. It is ‘me’ as the parasitic entity flexing its’ muscles and attempting to maintain its’ foothold on this flesh and blood body. And as Vineeto recently pointed out, ‘I’ am redundant. In fact, ‘I’ am doomed. The human social identity is rooted in comparison to others – we are taught by reward and punishment to conform to society’s standards – to be ‘good like Johnny or Betty’, ‘not to be bad like Tom or Sally’. As children our performance and behaviour is constantly ranked and rated at home and school in comparison to others as we are imbibed with a social conscience. Conformity and mediocrity become our role models and we have only two choices – either to humbly acquiesce or blindly rebel. Humanity rewards conformity and punishes rebellion, giving rise to endless cycles of endemic necessary suffering and senseless necessary struggle. The only way out of this mess is to become autonomous – to break free of the shackles that continually hobble us to comparing ourselves to others who are similarly afflicted by the human condition. I found the only way to do this was to do it – thinking about it, worrying about it, or fearing the consequences of freedom only wasted even more time. The only way to dispel comparison on the path to Actual Freedom is to do the best you can do. If this best is free of malice and sorrow, if this best is done with integrity, then whatever is done is simply the best in the circumstances. It is a bit weird when you get to the stage when you lose this ‘self’-measure of comparison with others for I find I now have no standard other than my own integrity. Believing in society’s hypocritical goods and bads, opinionated rights and wrongs, yearning for praise and cowering before criticism all gradually disappear and then it is as if there is nothing to hold on to – no external reference for ‘me’ in comparison to others. This stage can be unnerving and daunting and it is mightily reassuring that the sun comes up every morning, no matter what was going on in my head or my heart. What I have come to see in my writing is that my experience is typical to all, in that I am a flesh and blood human being born into the human condition exactly like everyone else, and therefore my experience in becoming free of the human condition will be relevant to all. The usefulness of our conversations is that we on this list are the very first to be taking the direct route to an actual freedom from the human condition. The usefulness of anyone interested in writing about their own process is that a breadth of experiences will be recorded and made freely available on the web-site for anyone who is interested – for those who are doing it now and for those who will inevitably follow.
Stories can provide a non-linear mechanism of information conveyance in those cases where purely intellectual discourse fails (re Gary and I faith/belief). Despite our efforts to break free of our ingrained programs, we still have a socio-cultural-language basis. The stories can often carry a lot of information in a very small package. I don’t know what you mean by a ‘non-linear mechanism of information’. Just that a handful of words can convey a meaning greater than the sum of its parts. This predisposes a commonality of ‘socio-cultural-language’ between the sender and recipient. Analogous to the old saw – ‘one picture is worth a thousand words.’ Even if I may have eliminated all my programming, any statement I might make to my neighbour will likely carry more implied content than to a Zulu tribesman, for instance. My experience was that it took a great deal of conscious effort to take my social-cultural-spiritual bias out of language such that I was able to understand the written words that are used to convey the process of becoming free of the human condition. It is common to all spiritual teachings to disparage the written word as a means of communication and to encourage affective feeling-only communications such as satsang, communal prayers and meditations and the like. To describe a room full of people sitting silently with their eyes closed as communicating with each other is clearly nonsense. What in fact they are doing is retreating from the trials and tribulations of communicating with their fellow human beings and imagining a world where ‘we are all one’. Seventeen years on the spiritual path was sufficient experience for me to notice that spiritual beings were just as lost, lonely, frightened and cunning as real-world beings. The myth of peace and harmony between spiritual beings is just that – a myth. Personally, when I met Richard’s discovery, I found it refreshing to come across a clear no-nonsense description of the human condition together with a coherent description of how to become free of it – and all of it written in dictionary definition words that said what it meant and meant what it said. It was a refreshing and radical change from the spiritual teachings I had followed for all those years. But again, breaking free of my spiritual conditioning did take a while. I remember, after many months of listening to Richard, I was so fascinated by actualism that I wanted to know what was the hidden secret behind it all. If it meant Richard had come from another planet and a spacecraft was going to land and take us away, then I was in to it. It seems so silly now but I was so spiritually indoctrinated that the word was not the thing and that there was a secret message behind the words that I could not conceive that someone would have the audacity to not only say what he means but to mean what he says. There is no secret message behind the words of actualism for it unabashedly points to an experience that everybody has had in there lives – a pure consciousness experience – and it explains the very simple, but at first difficult to put into operation, method of achieving that same tangible pure consciousness experience of freedom from the human condition, 24 hrs. a day, every day. I might just end with a tip for beginners and that is to start the method of becoming attentive by focussing on obvious things and good examples are being grumpy about the weather, being upset about the traffic or being annoyed by what someone else says or does. This way you become used to becoming aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and begin to notice what it is that is preventing you from being happy and harmless right now.
It probably has more to do with triggers though, as in challenging the validity of a belief that triggers an instinctual response. Most systems that deal with neurosis, phobia, etc, seem to be only concerned with the ‘belief’ side of the problem and not instinctual triggers themselves, as apposed to the actualism desensitise, also includes challenging instinctual triggers. As you indicate, a grown-up awareness and a willingness to investigate inevitably leads to a curiosity as to what moral, ethic, value, belief or psittacism it is that triggers an automatic instinctual response in you. This awareness is in fact an awareness of your own social identity in action – in my case it was becoming aware of Peter the male, Peter the Australian, Peter the father, Peter the Christian-come-Rajneeshee, etc. I began to become aware of the feelings that arose when I was in female company and the feelings that arose when I was in male company. I began to notice the feelings that arose relative to the country I was born in, be it pride, patriotism, defensiveness or whatever. I began to notice the feelings that arose towards my family as distinct from others and how these feelings crippled intimacy. I began to notice how deep my moral and ethical conditioning ran – how many automatic good-bad, right-wrong judgements I made without even thinking about the subject or bothering to find out the facts, let alone take them into account. This is an exciting stage in the process because, as you increasingly become aware of your social ‘self’ in action, there will soon come a time when the whole stack of beliefs, morals, ethics, values, psittacisms and instinctual passions that constitute your identity will temporarily collapse and a PCE will occur. You will then be able to observe the insanity of a passion-fuelled Humanity from the outside, as it where, whilst free of any psychological-social or psychic-instinctual identity whatsoever. Then things really get cooking ...
I notice that I have a particular tendency to berate myself for feeling or displaying anger. This was undoubtedly conditioned into me with such parental admonitions as ‘Don’t you get angry with me, buster!’ Other people I come into contact with seem so uninhibited in their way of venting their spleen, of showing anger or making a big show of how angry they are. I often chuckle to myself because ‘I’ am not like that. But it is interesting, isn’t it, to stand back and realize how completely arbitrary this social conditioning is? I don’t know if ‘arbitrary’ is the right word for it. I mean, ‘I’ could just as easily be some other way based on what I was taught growing up, what values I imbibed from the elders and the tribe. Yes, to be a social identity, in whatever form or flavour, is to be firmly ensnared in the grip of a sad and sorry Humanity. Humanity is genetically/ instinctually and historically/ socially bound to consist of separate feuding tribes and families and religions. You only have to observe the fierce ongoing resistance to any attempts to break the stranglehold this tribal conditioning has on human beings. The blind, senseless resistance to the ‘globalization’ of trade, commerce, communications, language and culture is fascinating to watch. A united Europe is now a faded post-war dream, as every tin pot region seeks autonomy and independence, every religious/ spiritual group declares their right to be different, and groups desperately seek to preserve their cultural roots, traditions, language, beliefs, superstitions, sacred places, buildings and holy relics. The only way to regard, and treat, others as fellow human beings is to rid yourself of all this rubbish – a process of ‘self’-diminishing that can, if undertaken with pure intent, lead to ‘self’-immolation. When one stands back and really looks at it, one sees that one is not a unique individual but rather a composite of moral, religious/ spiritual values, and ethics that are designed to keep the instincts at bay. The realizations I had about this issue was triggered in meeting my son one day and clearly seeing that many of ‘his’ beliefs, attitudes, opinions and mannerisms were ‘mine’ and further how those that I regarded and cherished as ‘mine’ were really those that were passed on to me from my father. As Pink Floyd sang – ‘just another brick in the wall’ – a wall that stretches unbroken back into the mists of time. And as an instinctual animal I am but one of billions of blind nature’s cannon fodder in the battle for survival of the species, the product of my father’s sperm and I had but one purpose – my primordial sperm-spreading purpose in seeding an egg so as to reproduce yet another combatant in this senseless passionate struggle. The sheer power of realizations such as these can lead to feelings of hopelessness and despair which can lead to ‘dark night of the soul’ experiences with their flip side ‘I’ve seen the Light’ experiences. Sometimes the path to freedom can feel like a tightrope walking act as the very ground of one’s social identity and instinctual being starts to shimmer, shake and, sometimes, even disappear temporarily. The cute thing is when it does disappear temporarily, suddenly there is a pure consciousness experience; suddenly all is perfect and pure, pristine and peaceful as the storm of emotions and neuroses that was ‘me’, just a moment ago, disappears. * The spiritual path is the pursuit of emotional events and altered states, whereas the path to Actual Freedom is the pursuit of irrevocable actual change. For an actualist, the real work is in having the courage to maintain an ongoing awareness of how you are experiencing being alive, of cultivating a naïve fascination with being alive and developing a resounding YES to being here. It seems that people on a religious and/or (these words are interchangeable) spiritual path are always caught up in their feeling of uniqueness or different-ness from ordinary ‘wordly’ people. When I was into the spiritual lifestyle, I always had a sense of mission or a feeling of being special compared to the average heathens around me. It took me 17 years of exploration on the so-called spiritual path to finally understand, acknowledge, and act upon, the fact that spiritualism was nothing other than ‘Olde-Time Religion’. Every pundit, teacher or follower I met or group I was in felt they were unique or that they were specially ‘chosen’ in having the truth of their existence revealed to them personally. Spiritual revelations and experiences are music to ‘me’, as soul, and inevitably lead to ‘self’-ish introspection and an increased detachment from actuality. As a ‘normal’ entity, ‘I’ am programmed to be a social/ psychological and instinctual/ psychic entity that thinks and feels it is living inside the body. This non-substantial entity experiences himself or herself to be detached from the physical actual world anyway, but then to become a passionate spiritual identity in one of society’s fantasy spirit-ual worlds is to be twice removed from what is physical, palpable, tangible, sensual, audible, tactile, visual, corporal, animal, mineral, vegetable, and alive as in not passive. This actual world is chocked full of eye candy – to use the current web jargon – full of smell candy, air candy, people candy, touch candy, taste candy, skin candy, sound candy. This planet is a literal cornucopia of sensual delight and we human beings have the most sophisticated brain that is wired via its proliferate sensory receptors to be a receptor, an appreciator, able to think, reflect and contemplate ... and to be aware it is doing it! What it is to be a human being is to be the universe experiencing itself as a human being. This is the quality of experiencing available only in a pure consciousness experience.
Over the years I see this has been my way of defence, but now with my partner and friends I see again certain words create an instantaneous shutdown in communication. I watch the occasions of frustration rise as we all try to express things in the only way we know how, possibly all saying the same thing yet our understanding of the words can be very different. What passes for normal communication between human beings is really quite lamentable. The use of clichés, psittacisms and hackneyed phrases, most particularly in the spiritual world, means that no-one really says anything clearly and no-one really understands what the other is feeling, thinking or saying. This is particularly so when people try to communicate to others what they are feeling for we have learnt to be cunning and manipulative, we have learnt to repress or to be selectively emotive. You may well begin to notice that this obscuration is a quite deliberate and mutually agreed way of maintaining a safe distance while creating an illusion of intimacy or connection. The other observation that you may notice is how much of what passes for communication is really a sharing of mutual sorrow and malice. ‘How bad the weather is’, ‘how hard work is’, ‘what a b... my boss, boyfriend, mother, neighbour, workmate is’, ‘how bad the politicians are’, ‘how evil ... ‘ etc. etc. Once you start observing these traits in others – the easiest part – you are then ready to tackle the business of observing and acknowledging them in yourself and changing yourself – the most challenging, and rewarding, part. I would be interested on your views on obligation. Especially in relation to how to fit in with other people’s desire for me to oblige them. In practicing actualism more and more I ask this question as I oblige less and less to people who ask without gratitude or for reasons that aren’t honest. Obligation, duty and responsibility can all be seen as parts of the same package that we imbibe in early childhood and which is subsequently maintained and reinforced by family, peers and society. The physical reliance on the family group you are born into invariably comes with obligation, duty and responsibility and, as one grows and moves out into the world, more and more impositions are made upon you and you, in turn, inevitably make more and more impositions on others. In teenage years, the onset of the raging hormones of sexual potency can often cause rebelliousness or blind lashing out against these restraints but this eventually wears itself out and yet another good citizen toes the line and dutifully fulfils his or her social and instinctual role within the Human Condition – be it either normal or spiritual. This is the time-honoured life-cycle of the human species – unaltered for an estimated 40,000 years of regenerations of the current genetic model. I spent years riling against or resenting obligation, duty and responsibility until I discovered that the only way to become free of these shackles was to become perfectly happy and harmless – to become a model citizen, free of any malice or sorrow. Why rile against the conditions in your jail cell or waste your time blaming the warders or fellow inmates when you can step out of the cell? Actualism is not about fitting in with humanity – actualism is about stepping out of humanity. For me, the key was to stop expecting or demanding that other people behave how I thought they should behave, to stop imposing my moods and whims on others, to stop obliging the whims and moods of others, to stop expecting or demanding of others what I was unwilling or unable to give. The magic outcome of this process is that one eventually ceases to expect anything of anyone else – then you can never feel let down, disappointed, obligated, grateful or resentful. This cleaning yourself up – eliminating your social and instinctual identity – leads to a delicious and tangible autonomy. You become delightful company, both happy and harmless, free to interact with all of your fellow human beings in a way that is always appropriate, for you are guileless, innocent – childlike but with all the benefits of life experiences and a passion-free benign clarity. Actualism is not about rebelling against or trying to fit in with Humanity – actualism is about stepping out of Humanity.
It is also a stunner to realize that this deep questioning and examination of out-moded spiritual beliefs is dismantling my social identity, that it is part and parcel of this demolition work. This work leads to examining the other end of the duality: the tender instincts of nurture and desire. I have historically been focused on fear and aggression, but both sides of the equation need to be thoroughly explored. As you say, and quite sensibly so:
Most people who have been searching for freedom, peace and happiness have adopted a new identity – that of a spiritual seeker, and this new identity is the first thing that has to go before you get down to your original social identity. What made this process easier for me was that I figured whatever I could take on later in life as a belief, a conviction and an identity, I could very easily discard – a bit like a layer of clothing or the outer skin of an onion. Once this spiritual identity is out of the way, the work of dismantling the rest of one’s social identity can begin. Just as an aside, it is curious to observe that the Gurus and God-men still have much of their original identities operating – thus the Indian Gurus never quite transcend their roots and original religious beliefs exactly as the Western Gurus remain western and retain much of their original religious beliefs. An actualist needs to thoroughly clean the cupboard of all belief.
I am attracted to actualism because it offers a sharing of opinion and practical solutions to real problems. You communicate very well. Sharing of opinions is the normal way of communicating, whereas what I am communicating are facts, empirical evidence and experience based upon my intensive investigations of the Human Condition, both as it is universally manifest and as it is socially and instinctually programmed as ‘me’. When I came across Richard it was not a sharing of opinion but a communication based upon me learning as much as I could from him. I very quickly realized that my opinions were generally the opinions of others – my father’s or my peers’ generally. What came trotting out of my mouth was what I believed, what I had taken to be true, what I had assumed was right, what I had taken on board but never bothered to question. What I discovered about Richard was that he had questioned everything human beings held dear and that he ruthlessly pursued the facts of what it is to be an aware thinking human being. The aim of this mailing list is to lift our communication above the usual stilted sharing of opinions, beliefs and psittacisms that passes for normal or spiritual communication.
One thing though, I don’t think you’re at all overdoing it with the social-belief brakes on the emotions bit. It is indeed a significant hurdle in that it always appears integral. Good to hear that you are discovering this fact experientially. There is no substitute for understanding how your psyche operates in practice. This understanding means you are most likely already finding and jumping hurdles. ‘You’ dare to be aware and make the discovery, an old synapse is broken, a new one begins to be forged. ‘You’ then find change has happened, as if by magic – which it is, of course.
I’m not one for books of Revelation either, nor doom and gloom, but any child these days knows that the physical, material world in which we are living is collapsing because of mankind’s lack of consideration for the environment. Are you sure that you yourself are not imagining that Paul so definitely divides the human condition from the devastating state nature is now in? Sure, he gives our beliefs way too much credit, but could radical actualism go the same route and go into denial about the very real effects man’s imagining brain is capable of. Children don’t ‘know’ this from some innate sense of wisdom or foresight born of innocence – they have it drilled and drummed into them by teachers, media, parents etc. In the last few decades environmental studies have formed an essential part of all school curricula for all ages. Not only is it often taught as a separate subject in many cases, environmental issues dominate economics, science, politics, engineering, social sciences, entertainment, media, etc. Every child who receives a modern Western education is taught from a very early age that the material, physical world in which they live is either collapsing or is in imminent danger of collapsing and that human beings are at fault. My school days were in the late 50’s and early 60’s and environmental theory hadn’t been invented then. The major fear at that time was the Cold War and the threat of nuclear devastation, but doom and gloom predictions weren’t taught as part of the school curriculum as is case with the teachings of environmental doom and gloom. What children know is what children are taught. Thus what we think we know or take for granted is, almost without exception, what we have been taught by our parents, teachers and peers. We take this information to be true, as in factual, whereas an extraordinary amount of it is theory, fashion, belief, concept, current idea, old wives tales, psittacisms, prejudiced view, etc. One only needs to consider what the school curriculum would have been like a century ago and consider how much of it would be relevant today, how much our world view has changed and yet how much of the past we desperately cling to. However, what we have been taught as truisms forms the very substance of our social identity – ‘who’ we think we are. One’s social identity is the conglomerate of all the beliefs, morals, ethics, values, principles and psittacisms that each of us has been programmed with since birth. Unless this programming in the brain is questioned and sorted into silly and sensible and old redundant neural connections severed and new ones formed, one remains a victim of one’s social identity – whereas an actualist’s avowed aim is freedom from being this identity that has been imposed upon this flesh and blood body. Therefore it is vital that all one’s beliefs, morals, ethics, principles and psittacisms be questioned and reviewed. This is the practical business of an actualist, this is the very down-to-earth pragmatic work to be done. It is an uncomfortable, tedious, seemingly-pedantic, fear-provoking process that people are very reluctant to undertake for you are quite literally dismantling a very large part of your ‘self’. Most of this information is programmed into us at the early years but quite a lot of what we hold dearest is what we have adopted later in life as we ‘moved with the times’. Environmental belief and Eastern religious belief were two that I adopted later in my life, and as such, I found them relatively easier to question for they were a bit like the layers of clothing I had swapped during my adult life as fashions and times changed. So, the first thing to be aware of is that you are doing the very business of dismantling your social identity by questioning and challenging your dearly held beliefs. The second thing is that they don’t magically disappear by themselves. It requires stubborn effort to dig in and question and you will find much resistance, wariness, hesitancy and objection in yourself to devoting the necessary time and effort required. The third thing is that it is something you have to do yourself to the point that the ‘penny drops’ for you, otherwise you are back with simply swapping beliefs or adopting another belief – a useless enterprise that will do nothing to free you from the human condition. Actualism is not a philosophy – it is a down-to-earth practical method that can enable you to become free from the human condition.
In my experience, this social identity is a conglomerate of all the beliefs, morals, ethics, values, principles and psittacisms that I have been programmed with since birth. It is only when I have eliminated or wiped this programming back to a stage where I cease to be a believer, where I cease the very act of believing, that I can look and investigate the core instinctual being that is ‘me’. A lot of work is done on the way in eliminating the effect of these emotions on one’s daily life such that one achieves a virtual freedom – a stable ‘base’ from which one can look with clear eyes at one’s instinctual self, without the guardians of the social morals, ethics, principles, etc. relentlessly churning and stirring. Another way of putting it is that one is then able to dismantle the psychic entity without the psychological entity ‘jumping up and down’ so much. You have reduced the effects of the instinctual emotions in daily life to almost zero such that ‘I’ is almost ephemeral, ethereal, ghostly and hardly able to maintain its existence. Now this is, at the moment, just the experience of a few but I would say, on the basis of the evidence so far, that in order to avoid the trap of enlightenment, one needs to dismantle the beliefs that form one’s social identity in order to avoid the trap of becoming yet another Grand and Glorious identity. I would suppose that, as more and more people become actually free, that this ‘step outside Humanity’ will become less fearful and dramatic as one will have the confidence of knowing that others have done it.
Of course I don’t understand actualism, I would rather meet you with a clean plate each time and let your words and beliefs stand or fall on what you actually say. It is so easy for people who have ‘the answer’ to just dump everything they hear into their own little belief system compartments and in doing so negate their own and the others’ individuality. Personally, when I was in an Eastern religion, I was far from being an individual. I was trapped in a belief-system, was ‘in love’ with a Guru, and passion, loyalty and pride combined to ensnare me. I was en-meshed in a social group, reliant upon it for friendship, employment, meaning and identity. I was trapped into living my life by moral and ethical values which, although Eastern, were disquietingly similar to Western values of what is good, bad, right and wrong. Only when one is freed of all social identity and the genetically-encoded instinctual animal ‘self’ is one actually free of the Human Condition. If one has any identity whatsoever, be it social or instinctual-animal, then it is impossible for one to be an individual.
The issue of worthy or unworthy seems to me to be a bit of a side issue. The main question is what do you want to do with your life? I think what I want to do with my life is only apparent from one moment to the next and that seems to be constantly changing but it seems to do with being curious, seriously curious about the workings of self. I had actually decided to end this ego self 10 years or so ago but because it was self trying to end self without a ‘relentless inquiring attention’ there was bound to be failure. Now with the aid of ‘How am I question...’ more of the moments are caught rather than the usual see one moment then skip a few moments and get lost in self intellectualization again. Curiosity I think, needs to be given complete leeway. I was trained as an architect but on graduating found working in an office to be too removed from the building site where the business of building buildings actually happened. Consequently I became an architect-builder-carpenter as my interest was more in the practical implementing of a idea. When I came across Richard I had spent 17 years on the spiritual path attempting to end the ‘ego-self’ but was ready to abandon the effort. I had begun to have some Altered State of Consciousness experiences but the suspicions and doubts I had of the Master-disciple business, the God-men’s lifestyle, how they were with their women, etc., meant that Enlightenment was losing its attraction. I was also becoming more and more aware of the fact that Eastern Spirituality is nothing more than Eastern Religion. I soon came to see that there were two identities preventing me being happy and harmless – the ‘normal Peter’ who was father, man, architect, etc. and the ‘spiritual Peter’ – the believer, searcher, superior one, etc. So I set about dismantling both these ‘I’s by actively challenging the beliefs, feelings, emotions and instincts that gave substance to both the psychological and psychic entity that was ‘me’. What I increasingly discovered was that the brain of this flesh and blood body has an inherent ability to be aware of itself, an ability of apperception. When I ask ‘What am I thinking?’ or ‘What am I feeling?’ or ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ it is this apperceptive awareness that can provide the answer. It was enormously difficult and bewildering sometimes at the start but as fact replaced belief, clarity replaced confusion and pure intent replaced ‘open-ness’ and listlessness, ‘what’ I am – not ‘who’ I am – gradually emerged and became apparent. At first, the whole exercise can feel like a weird ‘self trying to dismantle self’’ exercise, but soon one realises that it is fact dismantling belief, apperceptive awareness dismantling self that is happening.
In other words, the result of having an instinctual primitive self is to suffer and rooting out the cause of suffering in whatever form is essentially a learning about the active and accumulated influence of that primitive self which is the ending of it. Of course, ‘the learning’ you describe would not be the normal usage of the word. The learning I experienced was more of an un-learning of all the teachings, Teachings, beliefs, conditionings, etc. that made up ‘Peter the Sannyasin’, the father, the man, the lover, the ... It was a self-demolition process – hence the fear and angst that arises. When I first started, it quickly became apparent that I had to throw all I knew out the window, wipe the slate clean and acknowledge that what ever I thought I knew was really what others had told me was true. It is impossible to throw the lot out at once, but this was the attitude I adopted. This is easy to see in one’s work or in learning something new when one tries out for oneself, find out what works, adapts and changes. But when it comes to the Human Condition this means being willing to question the Revered Teachers – the mythical Wise and Holy Ones and their teachings. Thus it was that ‘Peter the spiritual seeker’ was eventually demolished and then one can get at the instinctual primitive self – the root source of the primitive instinctual emotions of fear and aggression. The path to Actual Freedom is not a learning but a self-immolation, and the first phase is the demolition of one’s social identity – the ‘guardian at the gate’ if you like. To ‘learn’ or redefine Actual Freedom words is but to ‘clip-on’ a bit of knowledge to one’s already dearly-held beliefs. Actual Freedom is not a philosophy or yet another belief-system – to treat it as such is to miss the main event – an actual freedom from malice and sorrow.
For my taste, explaining of physics and biology of mind is an important task in itself even if its importance may pale in comparison to the task of achieving Actual Freedom. Yes indeed. The practical discoveries of neuro-biology and genetics are important. It is these very discoveries that make nonsense of Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy. The discoveries of the brain and how it functions have revealed two very fascinating aspects –
‘We Japanese usually think harmony and peace is the best values in relation. So sometimes, or often, we suppress our thinking to avoid disagreement, especially among the intimates. We are too much conditioned by the concept of harmony and peace and we often mistake disagreement as disharmony or anti-peace in relation. And then we miss the possibility to discuss more which maybe lead to go into deeper harmony and peace, and hung in the superficial harmony and peace or pretend to be in harmony and peace’. What you and I have been doing in our correspondence is digging a bit deeper than the usual superficial and the mere pretence and getting down to the facts of the situation. It is uncomfortable stuff, confronting and bewildering and threatening to No. 14, the dreamer, or No. 14, the disciple, or No. 14, the ... But these No. 14’s are the ones that have to go for the genuine No. 14, the flesh and blood body, free of an alien psychological and psychic entity to roam free and upright in this actual world of sensual delight where peace, harmony, benevolence and a pristine purity are rampantly and intrinsically abundant. It’s a tough call, looking self-extinction in the face, but it sure beats a life of pretence and being hung in the superficial. I have no other interest in the discussion other than looking at and discussing the facts of the Human Condition that we humans find ourselves trapped in. We humans have endlessly sought solutions ‘within’ the Human Condition – never daring to question the Human Condition itself. We have all looked in the same old places and at the same old solutions that have obviously failed to deliver anything remotely resembling peace on earth. We have forever believed and trusted that Ancient Wisdom would provide a solution to the horrendous mayhem and suffering that we humans inflict upon each other. We have huddled together in fear and trepidation around the temples and God-men, unwilling to strike off on our own to question, discover, uncover, investigate and find out for ourselves exactly what it is to be a human being. This is why both this list and the writings are unabashedly iconoclastical. There is no solution to be had in spiritual or religious pursuits, in fact any belief or faith actively supports, ‘nourishes’, enhances and embellishes the very problem – the psychological and psychic entity, the ego and the soul It is obvious that the solution has to lie outside of the Human Condition – it is the whole of the Human Condition itself that we have to become free of in, order to find an actual personal peace and facilitate an actual global peace. This mailing list offers an opportunity for those intrepid pioneers to swap stories, facts, experiences and discoveries on the wide and wondrous path to an Actual Freedom from malice and sorrow.
It is 1999, not 500 BC, and there is now available a way out of the mess we humans have found ourselves in. I don’t expect you to believe me but if you are at all dissatisfied with your life and in following the ‘tried and failed’ methods ... maybe, just maybe, it might be worth considering ... trying something ... mew.? To get to where I am, I had to demolish ‘Peter, the Christian’, ‘Peter, the father’, ‘Prabhat, the Sannyasin’, ‘Peter, the architect’, ‘Peter, the man’, ‘Peter, the lover’, ‘Peter, the builder, and so on ... until finally it was Peter at his instinctual core... It is such an adventure to discover ‘what’ you are rather than ‘who’ you think and ‘who’ you feel you are... to free yourself of the ‘shackles’ of the Human Condition. I am free of the ‘world’ I was born into, I am free of the mutually-agreed scenario ‘that to be a human being is to suffer’ – I am free of sorrow. And as there is no entity in me that can take offence – I am free of malice. I simply met a man who was already free and followed the path, and the method, and I am reporting to whoever wants to listen ... that it works. Richard, Vineeto and I are laying a trail of words that are a guide map, but the wonderful thing is ... you get to make the journey yourself. And who would have it any other way?
I have experienced dropping a personal ego to then find later that I was hiding in a spiritual ego so I can relate to what you are saying about taking on a new spiritual identity. Ah, then you will see that the creation of a new non-separate self is merely adopting a new spiritual identity. It does take immense courage to keep peeling away at the layers of the onion and not stop at the ages-old spiritual layer as everyone else has done. To not be seduced by good feelings or scared off by bad ones in one’s search for freedom from malice and sorrow requires an intrepid pioneering spirit. The end result of eliminating beliefs is that eventually one gets to the stage of ceasing the very act of believing and an immense and palpable freedom ensues. It is a very subtle business... and I think the danger is in stopping along the way to draw conclusions. I really like your computer metaphor of the delete button and not forgetting to empty the re-cycle bin! Up until now, every body who has tried to delete their social and instinctual identity has stopped when they got to the bad bits and frantically grabbed for the good bits. In doing so they merely installed a spiritual program, gratefully relieved to be able to find safety again. It takes audacity, persistence and bloody-mindedness to investigate one’s own instinctual passions at their very core for one is investigating, dissecting and deleting the very core of one’s own being. It is not something that can be done without the pure intent gleaned from a pure consciousness experience. My experience is that if it’s a subtle business then you are snorkeling around on the surface, for when one goes deep sea diving into one’s own psyche the business is not subtle but so profound as to totally change one’s life, irrevocably and irretrievably.
In my later years as a Rajneeshee I plunged head-on into expressive type therapies and found them lacking in substance. I was also shocked soon after to find myself overcome by anger one day and started to be aware that all of my spiritual colleagues suffered from similar slippages. Not only did these type of therapies lack substance but they simply did not work long term to alleviate anger or sorrow. There was a particular group who followed the ‘I am all right as I am’ path of ‘self’-love and these people had no qualms at all about expressing their anger at others, nor about being sad and spreading their sorrow to others. Suppression doesn’t work, emoting doesn’t work, nor does transcendence; otherwise there would be peace on earth by now. One extremely useful and practical thing I have learned from actualism is how to put emotions in a bind: one can put them in a bind when they come up by neither expressing nor repressing them. Any emotion or passion, indeed any movement, can be brought to the full light of a sensuous awareness and looked at as-it-is. One need neither give vent to the emotion nor suppress nor repress. One can also instantly appraise the probable consequence of those actions were one to take them and at a glance determine for oneself what is happening in the moment. When one’s emotions are put in a bind this way, a curious thing happens: they literally dry up – run out of steam – run out of gas – crash and burn. Any particularly vexing emotion or problematic situation can be dealt with in this way. With repeated use of this technique, I have found myself becoming much less emotional. When emotions come up, I can keep my hands in my pockets, observe what is happening, and determine how to get back to being happy and harmless in the moment. When the emotion is experienced fully, the energy is dissipated and gradually exhausted. With each succeeding experience like this, something is happening in the emotional part, the primitive part of the brain (speculation here), something which, given time, persistence and repeated practice, spells doom to ‘me’. I am experiencing a thrill even as I write these words this morning, because this is something that is entirely new, unheard of before, so far as I can determine. It is exciting to be talking like this, experimenting with these things, trying them on for size. An excellent description. Just in case anyone missed the opening sentence – ‘One extremely useful and practical thing I have learned from actualism is ...’ The only way this method can be effective, as in producing lasting results, is if it is combined with an active investigation of the beliefs, morals, ethics, values and psittacisms that form our social identity – ‘the guardian at the gate’ that prevents one from having a clear-eyed look at the emotions and passions in action. This method needs to be combined with labelling the emotion or feeling and understanding its source and this is where reading the web-site is essential. Richard spent years investigating and exploring the human condition and my investigations were subsequently so much easier because I was able to read what he had written and pick his brain for information. My particular discoveries combined with Vineeto’s are now available for others to read so this process becomes even easier again for those following. Your description adds to a growing body of evidence that the process works, and I would only add another comment for others who may be reading. Anyone who regards actualism as a process designed only to eliminate emotions is missing the point and needs to read more. If anyone attempts merely to eliminate emotions without having a goal to be free of the Human Condition they would only end up in some non-feeling zombie-like state – perhaps dwelling in some rationalist cold no-man’s land. The aim of the method, so well described above, is to reduce the insidious effects of both the savage and tender passions and aim for the felicitous feelings, such as feeling fine, feeling good, feeling excellent, etc. Until the whole of the psychological and psychic identity is extinguished one is still a feeling being but this process, if undertaken with pure intent, serves to weaken and diminish one’s identity and eventually facilitates its immolation. One’s own integrity combined with the memory that purity and perfection is only possible in a ‘self’-less state will always serve to prevent one from entering into imaginary delusionary states of Actual Freedom. The immediate and readily obtainable aim in the initial stages of actualism is to get to a Virtual Freedom from the human condition. It could well be described as learning to walk before you fly, lest you fall into the ‘I am already That’ trap. Another way of putting it is you always keep your feet on the ground, lest you end up with your head in the clouds. Discovering what is actual, as opposed to what we think and feel is real, is immense fun.
This broadening of one’s awareness – still triggered by asking ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is a win-win situation, for without it all of one’s gains in virtual freedom can be lost as one slips back into self-centredness and self-indulgence. Virtual freedom is by no means a permanent state, it is only a stepping stone on the path. To stop at any stage on the path is to risk losing all that one has gained from one’s hard work, but to push on requires a passionate dedication and obsession that can only be fuelled by altruism – the innate unselfishness that is programmed into all human beings as part of the survival instincts. When one takes the blind senselessness out of altruism then one’s ‘self’-sacrifice is made for peace on earth, not God or country. Actualism is about peace on earth – bringing an end to war, murder, rape, torture, domestic violence, corruption and child abuse. I was a little surprised by this statement of yours. It seems to imply that after having effectively done away with social identity one can easily go back to having one. This seems somewhat of a contradiction with the idea that the world would be better if we all did no better than virtual freedom. It does seem to me that the sensibility gained along the way is somewhat permanent and one would not simply go back to their old ways particularly if one was in a state of virtual freedom. What was your experience of the time you spent holidaying in virtual freedom? Did you find any tendencies to revert back to your old ways? It is my experience that in virtual freedom one’s social identity and instinctual passionate identity is so reduced as to enable increased periods of ‘self’-less awareness or apperception to begin to operate. I am on record as saying that I regard the social identity as the easiest of the two aspects of identity to minimize and this is, I think, due to several reasons. My experience on the spiritual path did involve questioning some of my real-world values and ethics and some degree of ‘self’-awareness, even though my efforts were misguided and misdirected. I also had experienced the relative ease with which one can change one’s social identity from normal to spiritual, so the challenge of change, per se, was not foreign to me, even if that change meant eradication. The instinctual identity or ‘being’ is another kettle of fish however, for the core ‘me’ is sourced in and sustained by actual hormonal substances in the body and it is universally held as not only sacred but biologically inviolable. As a consequence, the strength of human instinctual passion is the very stuff of legends – most of it an appalling legacy of unspeakable human cruelty and unimaginable human suffering while the remainder is an endless kaleidoscope of escapist fantasies and bizarre dreamings or yearnings. This innate strength of one’s ‘being’ is not to be underestimated and an actualist needs to both understand and experience this strength if one is to ever become free of its clutches. The toughest of the passions to escape from are those that humanity holds most dear – the tender passions, and it is these bleeding heartstrings that can either suck you back into the real-world or catapult you into spiritual aggrandizement. To put it plainly, the desire to love or be loved is powerful stuff and when love fails to bring sufficient fulfilment in the real-world there is always the seductive lure of narcissism – Self-Love. Not that this is a problem in any way – if you revert to normal, there will always be some gain from being a little more sensible and a little less passion-driven and if you do end up Enlightened and it doesn’t sit well with you, you just work your way out of it as Richard did. Actualism is by no means a serious business, it is above all an adventure of exploration and discovery and in an ultimate sense nothing can go wrong. What I wrote to Gary was meant to be both a generalised warning and an encouragement, for to be virtually free of malice and sorrow is an unprecedented and salubrious condition in the annuals of human history, bar one – an actual freedom from the human condition in toto. To be forewarned is to be prepared and nothing can go astray, provided your intent is pure and your ‘self’-investigations are thorough and sincere. You may well be beginning to reap the benefits of actualism in becoming more happy and less malevolent and, if so, you will have a good inkling that there would indeed be an end to the endemic wars and senseless conflicts between human beings if actualism became the norm for the human condition. On a personal note, my ‘holidaying in virtual freedom’ is an ongoing holiday, so much so that I now know that I will never go back to grim reality, led alone be seduced into delusions of grandeur. It was not a cute throwaway line when I subtitled my journal ‘nothing left to lose’. I was at a crossroad in my life at the time, I had well-travelled the other roads and had learnt enough about what didn’t work and had suffered enough and dreamed enough to take heed of a really way-out proposition – ‘Do you want to be happy and harmless, in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are?’ For me it was a serendipitous discovery, a priceless proposition, a golden opportunity – a seductive invitation to turn a life-long thirst into an actuality. As such, once started on the path, I never had any thoughts or feelings to revert back to my old ways at any time – I always burnt my boats behind me or, to put it another way, painted myself into a corner. I was always aware that my writing in particular was a way of doing both – that I would be not only agreeing to ‘my’ own demise but, by documenting it, I would leave my ‘self’ with no place to hide and no way to turn back.
Once you begin to really get a grip on the fact that it is only ‘me’ who is ruining my only chance of being happy in this moment, you simultaneously begin to break the ingrained habit of blaming others and being angry at others for seemingly causing me to be unhappy ... and by doing so you then begin to become more and more harmless towards others. And as you have more and more tangible success with running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ you soon discover that, despite ‘my’ fears, ‘I’ am happily agreeing to ‘my’ demise – which is what you referring to in your comment to Gary. I recall that when I first start running the question some 2 years ago (I think) there was a great objection to running the question. Now it is more than not, an immediate reward with the exception of the occasional guilty feeling when I realize that I had dropped the ball for some time. Guilt I know well. I was amazed to find, when I started to abandon my spiritual beliefs, morals and ethics, that they had simply been layered over my Christian beliefs, morals and ethics. And guilt belongs in the stick part of the carrot and stick in the Christian religion – typified by the pathos-ridden fairy story of the Son of God dying for our sins. Personally I didn’t worry about guilt too much because by becoming aware that I had dropped the ball for sometime I was instantly back in business again, which was clearly a success and not a failure. * It is my experience that in virtual freedom one’s social identity and instinctual passionate identity is so reduced as to enable increased periods of ‘self’-less awareness or apperception to begin to operate. I am on record as saying that I regard the social identity as the easiest of the two aspects of identity to minimize and this is, I think, due to several reasons. My experience on the spiritual path did involve questioning some of my real-world values and ethics and some degree of ‘self’-awareness, even though my efforts were misguided and misdirected. I also had experienced the relative ease with which one can change one’s social identity from normal to spiritual, so the challenge of change, per se, was not foreign to me, even if that change meant eradication. I have found reducing the social identity somewhat more difficult and I would say the roots of this would be a combination of deep resentment and a pacifist’s approach to dealing with issues, which effectively blocked out any attempts at investigation. I have just watched a press conference reporting in minute detail the execution of the man who planted the bomb that killed 168 people in a government building in Okalahoma, U.S.A. several years ago. Apart from the ghoulish fascination of the media, the aspect that I found most interesting was that the apparent motive for his horrendous act was a deep resentment at ‘the government’ because he blamed ‘them’ for the deaths at the Waco siege. Every human feels a deep resentment at having to be here on the planet and while most manage to keep it under control, others find socially acceptable outlets such as protest movements, demonstrations, political causes, social change movements, etc. Some people suppress their resentment by feeling grateful towards their own personal God or Existence while others sublimate their resentment by practicing acceptance and becoming dissociated from being here on the planet as in Eastern religion/philosophy. Most countries institutionalize resentment in their social structure by having an adversarial system of government complete with ‘opposition’ parties. On a tribal level resentment often turns into full-scale war wherein if a man attacked ‘the enemy’ and killed 178 people including civilians he would be given a medal and not a lethal injection. Be it on an individual level or a tribal level, resentment does nothing but fuel anger, revenge and violence or sadness, despair and suicide. For an actualist the only sensible thing to do is leave resentment well and truly behind in the dust, where it belongs, as you steadily move from feeling good to feeling excellent to the stage of being virtually free of any malicious or sorrowful feelings. In virtual freedom resentment plays no part in your life whatsoever. As for ‘a pacifists approach to dealing with issues’, I had the exactly the same approach when I was normal. I was definitely what was known as a wimp, I would rather run than fight and would rather avoid than confront. But I eventually became aware of the fact that suppression does not work 100% of the time – I was still resentful underneath and anger would occasionally bubble up to the surface, despite my being a goody two shoes. This awareness and acknowledgement of my suppressed resentment and anger compelled me to abandon my hypocritical pacifism because I saw clearly that, regardless of ‘my’ morally superior position and in spite of ‘my’ idealistic pacifism, ‘I’ was, deep down, as resentful as everybody else and, when push came to shove, as quick to anger as anyone else. You can readily see an analogous situation to the socializing system within the human condition simply by observing domestic animals. You can tame and pacify a cat by looking after it – giving it food, shelter, and protection – and in return the cat will play its part by occasionally rubbing up against you and letting you get close enough to stroke it. And yet, despite this socialization process and the animal’s apparent tameness, when a competitor or predator invades its territory, the same tame cat instantly reverts to being a savage fighting animal. If you then turn the same cat loose in the bush it quickly loses all its tame behaviour and reverts to being an instinctual feral hunter again. The same behaviour pattern is readily apparent in the human animal – taming humans to be good citizens by a process of reward and punishment doesn’t ultimately work because, when a competitor or predator invades their territory, humans can very quickly become inexplicably vicious. So poorly does the taming process work in the human species that mayhem and anarchy would be the norm if it were not for the fact that we have armed policemen patrolling the streets. Law and order in the human species is ultimately only maintained at the point of a gun. Laws, policeman and prisons are needed to punish those who break the laws of the tribe and lawyers and courts are needed to settle personal arguments that threaten to get out of control. Every country needs an army of men on standby in case they are needed to fight a war against other countries. Counties are forced to enter into treaties and alliances between themselves in order to form power blocks to prevent age-old wounds and resentments from being paid back in kind. Whenever a dominant power group of countries emerge, they then take it upon themselves to be the world’s police force – thereby lording it over other less powerful countries. When war does break out, as it does all too frequently, rules for warfare have been developed so as to try and limit the natural tendencies of bloodlust and revenge to turn into unspeakable acts of torture and genocide. This is the condition of the human species we all find ourselves born into and it is such a horrific condition that turning away and burying one’s head in the sand is the only way to cope. Some seek a feeling of freedom by totally dissociating from the very real horrors of the human world, while others pray to mythical Gods for forgiveness for feeling evil thoughts – the equivalent of sticking one’s head in the clouds. I remember feeling utterly confused one day when I realized that I had spent half my adult life being normal and half my adult life being spiritual and nothing made sense – there seemed to be no solution within the human condition. A period of contemplation on the nature of the human condition in toto, combined with the beginnings of questioning ‘my’ personal beliefs, triggered a pure consciousness experience where I was able to clearly see the human condition from the outside as it were. I’ll repost the description of this PCE as it is spot-on relevant to the process of actualism –
Doing something about one’s own malice and sorrow beats head-in-the-sand pacifism by a country mile. Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust |
