Selected Correspondence Peter

Social Identity

Other people examine ideas, statements, hypotheses, explanations, theories as provisional models which either do or don’t conform to objective reality. (You might have noticed that these two types of people have been in conflict for a couple of thousand years?)

Which only emphasises how silly it is hold to any beliefs whatsoever, be they religious, spiritual, metaphysical, mystical, humanistic, atheistic, materialistic or whatever. Beliefs are the bane of humankind.

I’m one of the latter, for better or worse. If an idea, thought, model, theory, whatever, is comforting, reassuring, beautiful, but most likely untrue, it is useless to me as a belief. It never becomes something I trust in, rely on, or defend. As a consequence, I have not been willing or able to believe in anything supernatural for a long, long time. Now, you and Peter, evidently being of the other type who select beliefs on the basis of their utility rather than their factuality, seem not to understand this.

No. The image you have concocted of me has no basis in fact and if you care to read my journal you will see that it is a fabrication. Before I became a spiritualist I would have described myself as being an atheist, as the notion of an omnipotent God was a nonsense to me as was the idea of a life-after-death. I came across spiritualism for the first time in my life about age 35 and the attraction was two-fold – the possibility of freedom before physical death and the idea of living in peaceful communes so as to prove that is possible for human beings to live together in peace and harmony. I also would have described myself as an atheist during this period as the notion of an omnipotent God was a nonsense to me as was the notion of a life-after-death.

The belief that spiritual people are capable of living together in peace and harmony was gradually dispelled as the dream faded and the ‘it’s every man and women for themselves’ reality set in. The other shocking thing was that when my guru died he had ‘Never born, never died, just visited the planet’ chiselled on his tombstone. In other words, I had been conned into believing that Eastern spiritualism had nothing to do with a life-after-death which is clearly wrong as all Eastern religion includes the belief in life-after-death.

The other relevant point to make is that I never ‘chose beliefs according to their utility value’ as you put it. I was born into a Western, Anglo-Saxon, Christian society which inevitably meant that I developed a social identity that was made up of the beliefs, values, morals, ethics, ideas and opinions of the parents, peers and society I was born into. Nobody is able to ‘choose beliefs according to their unity value’ as every other human being born on the planet inevitably imbibes a full set of beliefs, values, morals, ethics, ideas and opinions which become the very substance of their social identities. A social conscience is another way of describing this identity – a ‘someone’ who keeps the instinctual urges under control such that one is able to function as a fit and useful member of society.

There is a good deal written about this on the AF website if you are interested in following it up. The AF Library topic ‘Social Identity’ is an apt place to start.

You (pl – especially Peter) automatically assume that other people are like you, and unfortunately you (pl – especially Peter) are largely deaf and blind to counter information.

I automatically assume that other people are essentially like me in that all human beings born inevitably develop a social identity that overlays the instinctual self or being that is genetically-encoded in each and every fertilized egg and which is fully formed by about age 2 years.

As I’ve explained, rather than having spiritual beliefs that I must let go, I was never able to acquire them in the first place. I just couldn’t convince myself that these comforting beliefs in supernatural entities were actually true/ correct/ factual. I couldn’t believe them if I tried (and I did try). So I find it ludicrous when someone who a few short years ago was shouting ‘yahooo!!!’ at an empty chair tells me how necessary and how difficult it is to lose those precious spiritual beliefs.

Swapping one’s beliefs or changing one’s beliefs or even rejecting beliefs is one thing but intentionally undertaking a process of deliberately exposing all of one’s own beliefs is quite another. When I was a normal bloke, I became very disillusioned with the materialistic beliefs that I was told were the way-it-is and when I came across Eastern spirituality and its beliefs they appeared to me to be ‘the truth’ because they pointed to the paucity of material beliefs and they pointed to the possibility of a freedom from these beliefs based on the experiential observation that one can become free of one’s personal identity.

Abandoning the spiritual path and turning around proved to be only the start of a long and intense process of exposing all of the beliefs I either held dear or had not previously bothered to investigate for lack of interest and intent. I was not only amazed at the extent to which Eastern spirituality has permeated Western philosophy, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, science, eduction and medicine, but also at the extent to which I still held many religious/ spiritual beliefs, values, morals, ethics, ideas and opinions as a result of my childhood social conditioning – the beliefs that I thought I had rejected or thought I had transcended still lay dormant for lack of the pure intent to actively dismantle my social and instinctual identity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But in spite of the feelings of guilt, I find that I’m not in any way less caring. Instead of feeling that I’m part of a network of people whose fates are intertwined, I’m looking at my ‘near and dear ones’ as ordinary fellow human beings, and I find that compassion and loyalty are being replaced by simple, good-natured playfulness. (There is definitely still affection here, but not of a possessive kind).

I can relate to what you are saying because I have had the same experience myself, most particularly in relation to my son. I came to notice that whenever I regarded him as ‘my’ son then a whole lot of feelings stood in the way of the intimacy of experiencing him as being a fellow human being. I became aware that whenever I felt him to be ‘my’ son then I found that I was needlessly protective, compulsively possessive, demanding, interfering, dismissive, expectant, and so on, which meant that I felt proud, hopeful, despairing, loyal, disappointed, annoyed, jealous, controlling, frustrated, and so on. I also noticed that whenever I had these feelings I could not help but impose them on him – no matter how hard I tried not to there was always a subtle, and sometimes a not so subtle, leakage.

The only reason I stopped being a player in this game was because I came to my senses in that I saw that it was ‘my’ feelings that stopped me from simply sitting down with him when the opportunity arose and having a down-to-earth intimate chat about things of mutual interest, exactly as I am wont to do with any of my fellow human beings when the opportunity arises.

It’s good to hear that your investigations are bearing fruit. Just a comment – it’s not that ‘probably I learnt to do this in my childhood’, every human born on the planet is taught by a process of carrot and stick to control the emergence of the instinctual passions. Indeed the whole notion of good and bad and right and wrong comes from this childhood training.

I remember having had a similar feeling myself and it was a very palpable sense of freedom. This is how I described it soon after –

‘I knew that the trouble lay in the psychological entity – that bundle of beliefs and instincts that I was born with, and that was passed on to me by other equally malicious and sorrowful members of the tribe. Handed on well-meaningly of course, but this passing-on is just a perpetuation of the ancient and primitive ways. Realising this, I was able to firmly identify this entity as not me, but an intruder. I had always tried to avoid Richard’s astute comment that ‘a mature adult is really lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning’. But once I could identify the source of all the trouble, this ‘mature adult’ entity inside me, I knew it would only be a matter of time before it disappeared. I had the ‘bugger by the throat’ was how I put it at the time. It became a process of re-wiring my brain – untangling the beliefs to replace the crazed and muddled circuitry with facts and common sense. ‘Silly and sensible’ replaced ‘right and wrong’, ‘good and bad’. An ease and calmness began to pervade everything, as I no longer had to keep up an effort to maintain appearances or fulfil any expectations of society or God. I remember being so relieved at not having to maintain an identity any more – it had been such a load for so long! Now there was simply no room for God in my life, no need for any authority of any sort – in short no need to believe in anything at all – no need to ‘fervently wish something to be true’, despite the facts to the contrary.’ Peter’s Journal God

And to think all this came about as a consequence of deciding that I would make being happy and harmless the most important thing in my life. In hindsight, I hadn’t eliminated my social identity at this stage because whilst one’s identity has two aspects – instinctual and social – they are intermeshed such that they form one entity, but rather what happened was that ‘I’ gave myself a new job to do.

No longer was ‘I’ involved in the confusing and fearful business of being the controller, ‘I’ now was busy with being aware of how I was experiencing this moment of being alive with the aim of being as happy and as harmless as possible. Hence the palpable sense of freedom from having to be perpetually on guard was replaced by the thrilling business of being attentive to how I was experiencing being here in this moment of time. I don’t know if this makes sense to you at this stage but I would be interested in your comments if you feel like replying.

Yep. If you have a belief then for ‘you’ it is a truth and you are then obligated to hold on to your truths no matter what the facts of the matter are. The only reason that one would want to give up one’s beliefs was if one had something better to do with one’s life – and what better thing than eliminating malice and sorrow from one’s life.

The remarkable aspect of being attentive with the intent to eliminate both malice and sorrow is that it is an objective awareness in the sense that it is equally attentive to both the good and bad emotions – unlike the spiritual practices and teachings which focus one’s attention only on the so-called bad emotions. It makes no sense to do half the job, as has been the tradition, if one wants to be free of the human condition in toto.

Based on what you have written, it does seem that you have made a great breakthrough. The reason I have written that it is important to focus on the social aspects of one’s identity is that this was the way I made my first breakthroughs. First came the intent to be happy and harmless – in my case I wanted to be able to live with at least one person in utter peace and harmony – and then came developing the unnatural habit of attentiveness necessary to discover what was preventing me form doing this. And lo and behold, I discovered that it was my social identity – ‘my’ beliefs, morals, ethics, principles, and values – that were the outer layer that I had to tackle in order to become more happy for more of the time and less antagonistic for more of the time.

I posted a bit from my journal above that seems to align with your discovery. You may also find a lot of what I have written in my journal to be of use to you at this stage because it is all about the hands-on business of becoming virtually free of malice and sorrow with only passing references to the theory of it.

Well said. And yet it seems that this common sense is an uncommon sense and no more so than amongst the goody-two-shoes spiritualists or for that matter amongst the real-world nihilists and anarchists.

And just to pass on a tip, you may well find that patience and perseverance are what is now required if you want to build on your successes.

I fully acknowledge I would be still bumbling about in confusion and wafting along aimlessly if I had not serendipitously come across Richard and his discoveries, which is why I am always pleased to have the opportunity to pass on my experience and expertise as an actualist to others.

I have found that palpable evidence of the demolishment of the social identity is a relative absence of what I will, for lack of a better term, call the ‘inner critic’. There used to be an ‘inner critic’ who was a rather noisy chap in the head who would almost immediately categorize others according to their racial, ethnic, class, weight, size, etc.

Whilst I am still aware of this critical voice in the head, the corresponding feelings that arise in the heart are much more open to examination. And I realize that it is this tendency to lock on to others with particular emotional reactions to their ‘differentness’ that in large part complicates interacting with others in the social environment. <Snipped>

The ‘inner critic’ or the ‘rather noisy chap in the head’ is in fact one’s social identity in action. ‘He’ or ‘she’ is naught but a social construct and as such only exists relative to, or in relationship with, other social identities. ‘He’ or ‘she’ is typified by such thoughts as ‘I wonder what he or she is thinking about me?’, ‘Does he or she like me?’, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’, ‘Am I saying the right thing?, ‘I don’t like what he or she said’, ‘They don’t understand me’, ‘What about me?’ and so on.

The creation of this social identity was both a purposeful action and a necessity given that all human beings are instinctually programmed with ‘self’-centred animal survival passions that compel each and every human being to fear and be wary of each other as well as battle or compete with each other. The only way to tame the crude instinctual animal programming in human beings is to teach each newcomer a set of dos and don’ts, shoulds and shouldn’ts, rights and wrongs, goods and bads and this programming directly leads to the formation of an ‘inner critic’ or ‘rather noisy chap in the head’ whose ‘job’ is to keep the crude instinctual passions firmly ‘in control’. It therefore follows that the only way to really get in touch with the subjugated instinctual passions – to be able to fully experience them and therefore be able to fully understand them – is to take one’s social identity apart, bit by bit.

Every time you become attentive to this ‘inner critic’ trotting out yet another moral or ethical platitude or psittacism is another opportunity to investigate the sensibility of ‘his’ thoughts or feelings. Provided one’s aim in life is to become actually happy and harmless, what is silly and what is sensible is always apparent and because of your intent you are compelled to do is what is sensible – despite what your ‘inner critic’, and other people, think or feel about it. In this way one actively diminishes one’s social identity to the point where ‘he’ or ‘she’ no longer rules the roost and inhibits the opportunity to experiential investigate the crude instinctual passions in operation.

OK so if I read you correctly there are not particular categories of insight which need to be explained before they can be discovered … I suppose this is what I am concerned about.

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

I found an old discussion of mine with Gary where I talked about my strong spiritual beliefs at the time. Now I see things the way he did when replying to me. Funny because I cannot even remember why it was so hard to grasp originally.

Yep. I would often look back and wonder why I had got so upset about something or other at the time, or why I had been so stubbornly holding on to a belief, or why I had taken a moral stance about a particular issue. It eventually became clear to me that ‘I’ was no longer that same person I was then because that part of my identity that felt the need to feel that way at that time was no longer in existence – I have described it as ‘Peter the spiritual disciple’, or ‘Peter the architect’, or ‘Peter the father’, or ‘Peter the goody-two-shoes’ no longer exists.

What belief did you have that kept you feeling attached to being Australian?

The belief that it is good to have a national identity, the belief that it is essential to feel as though I belong somewhere, the belief that I need to feel like some place is home, and so on. When I eventually came to realize that, by and large, these feelings are feelings that other people have told me I should feel – that’s what social conditioning is after all – it was relatively easy to give them up in favour of being an anonymous and autonomous citizen of the world.

To put it another way, I gave up feeling I belonged to one particular national group because of the invidious and aggrandizing feelings associated with holding on to such an identity entailed and I fostered the felicitous feelings associated in feeling myself to be a citizen of the world and seeing and treating all of my fellow human beings for what they are, fellow human beings, and not ‘who’ they are.

And just to say again what can never be said enough – the process of actualism is not about not feeling – in its first stage it is about becoming aware of the invidious and aggrandizing feelings as they occur and actively endorsing the felicitous feelings such that one can be as happy and harmless as possible whilst still being a ‘self’.

Belonging to a family?

I had to look at all the beliefs that have been passed down the generations about how one should feel and shouldn’t feel about being a father, a son, a mother, a daughter, a brother, a sister and so on. It’s probably more accurate to call these the morals and ethics of social conditioning but a particular event happened that caused my whole emotion-backed thinking about the nature of belonging to a family to come crashing down –

‘The last time I met my older son was interesting, as I was able to see quite clearly that here was a young adult with little experience in life, and yet he was so opinionated. He was mostly repeating what he had heard from others and he took it to be true – actual.

Given that some of his opinions and values were really my past beliefs, I was able to see – quite shockingly – that ‘who’ we are consists of nothing more than the opinions and beliefs of others. I thought then of how I had been at that age – trying to make sense of life and grabbing on to anything that seemed to make sense or had appeal. So what ‘I’ as a social identity was made of was nothing more than the opinions and beliefs of others – my father’s and those of my father’s generation, which in turn came from their fathers, and so on, back into the dim dark ages of the cave-men and cave-women. Peter’s Journal People

I too find that the partner relationship is where we really test the mettle. At this juncture, I don’t have the child-rearing compulsion to interfere with the simple facts of the nature of the relationship, and that has created (or exposed perhaps) some turmoil. Semi-amusing anecdote: I’ve been pondering the questions raised by my investigation into AF, particularly in the notion of ‘love’. My SO asks the loaded question ‘Do you love me?’, and I responded innocently enough ‘I’m not sure what love is’. Wrong answer. The ensuing ‘situation’ may however precipitate some earnest discussion. Without going into gory details, I did discover that some of my behaviour of late has definitely included an element of malice towards her, cloaked in an air of righteousness.

I particularly like what you have discovered because it is an experiential observation and understanding of your own feelings and not a mere intellectual understanding of someone else’s experience – and there is a world of difference between the two.

I particular remember how shocked I was when, despite years of spiritual practice, I became very angry over a trivial matter. It was as though a crack had suddenly opened up in my oh-so-righteous persona and, although it was an uncomfortable experience, it provided an invaluable insight into the hidden deep-seated passions that lay just under the surface.

If I can elaborate a bit on your observation – what normally prevents such clear observations from occurring is the human social conditioning and the feeling of righteousness is particularly common for those who have imbibed religious or spiritual conditioning. Because of these spiritual feelings, it is extremely rare to find anyone who is capable of, let alone willing to, admit that they have malicious feelings towards others. If they do admit to feeling malicious, it is almost always cloaked in some form of self-righteous justification, as in ‘it was the other’s fault’, ‘I was simply sharing my feelings’, or even ‘I was doing it for their own good’.

The other major factors that prevent such clear observations form occurring are the socially imposed feelings of guilt and shame. As children, all humans are trained to feel guilty and shameful if they think or feel wrong or evil thoughts and we subsequently learn the games of deceit and denial as a way of avoiding blame and/or punishment. Because of the tenacity of this childhood programming it is vital for an actualist to both understand and experientially observe that the feelings, emotions and passions that constantly arise are the human condition in action and not one’s personal fault.

By conducting your investigations with this understanding in mind you are conducting an investigation in a hands-on scientific down-to-earth manner, free of any moral or ethical judgements of good or bad, right or wrong. By investigating the human condition in action in you – and as ‘you’ – you also avoid the traditional spiritual trap of creating yet another identity, a superior ‘real you’ who then observes a supposedly ‘illusionary you’.

You will find this business of becoming aware of your social/spiritual persona is not a one-off understanding but an ongoing process. You will become continually aware of whenever you think you are right and the other is wrong, when you feel as though you are being good and the other is being bad. You will find that these feelings arise because of beliefs you have been taught to be universal truths and you will become fascinated as you unearth and acknowledge the facts of how ‘you’ have been socially and instinctually programmed to think and feel.

Of course, you have to be sure that this is what you want to do with your life, because once you launch yourself into this process you will never be the same again.

I seem to fluctuate between a sense of alarm and anxiety at my ‘aloneness’ and the thrill of the realization that I am really getting somewhere by using the actualism method. And where I am getting is to be completely and totally free from being a member of the human club. When I set out upon learning about an Actual Freedom, I had many basic questions, some of which persist. For instance, I wondered: will I be able to work? Will I be able to provide for myself and my partner? Will I have a social life? What will that look like? and other questions such as these.

Regarding my ability to work, I have found that I am able to work, and that my capacity for work has, if anything, increased. I am better able to prioritize tasks, think things through and get done what needs to be done.

Your experience regarding working for money closely mirrors my own experiences. By becoming virtually free of malice and sorrow I am not only able to work more efficiently but I am also now able to do my work much better. By no longer resenting having to work, no longer being annoyed by other people, no longer being frustrated that I do not get ‘my’ way and so on, not only am I happier but I no longer create ripples for those around me by ‘my’ incessant demands. I am now equally interested that my clients are as satisfied with my work as I am and that they get as much value for their money as I do for my time committed.

The other issue with work is that I no longer seek meaning, kudos and identity from my work as I had been taught to both expect and/or demand. I am not special in what I do when I work for money – anyone can do my job and many do so, equally as well. My time spent working is what it is – selling my time and expertise to someone else in return for money to pay for food, shelter, clothes and the like. By eliminating all the beliefs and values around the issue of work a good deal of my social identity fell away – and those I work for, and with, are better off for it.

The ‘will I be able to work’ issue also occurred to me when I thought about the consequences of becoming free from Humanity. But I eventually came to realize that this was a belief I had, based on my observation of those who had ‘made it’ to the top in the spiritual world and who then become incapable of functioning and working in the world and end up having to rely on the financial and emotional support of their followers or disciples for their sustenance.

Need I point out that being able to more happily, sensibly and efficiently function in the world is further evidence that actualism is the antithesis of spiritualism.

However, regarding my ‘social life’, I find that I no longer feel the need to affiliate with other human beings the way I once used to.

In days gone by, I used to think that having ‘friends’ was very important, yet now I cannot really say that I have any ‘friends’ nor do I want any. Because the word ‘friendship’ implies an obligation to stick with another person through thick and thin, and I find that I am not prepared to do that. I would much prefer to go my own way and allow someone else the freedom to do the same, so I cannot say that anyone is my ‘friend’ in that sense. I feel much the same about family relationships (and I am talking about family of origin here, not family of procreation). I keep in touch with members of my family. But compared to other people who I see around me, my sense of a family identity is very weak indeed.

During the first two years of practicing actualism I also experienced that my ‘friendships’ dropped away but lately I have had occasion to meet several of these former ‘friends’ and to do work for several members of the spiritual group I was in before. All of these meetings have been delightful as am now meeting fellow human beings, I am interested in them as fellow human beings and, as such, have enjoyed their company. The difference between now and before is that I now make no emotional demands of people I meet which then frees them of the burden of ‘me’, nor do I have emotional expectations of them which then frees me from the constant need to intuit and imagine what they were thinking and feeling about ‘me’.

There is great significance in the phrase ‘fellow human beings’ because the only way you can begin to treat your fellow human beings as fellow human beings is to firstly demolish your own social identity. The first component that has to go is one’s spiritual identity because a Christian never meets a Buddhist as a fellow human being, a Rajneeshee never meets a Krishnamurti-ite as a fellow human being, and so on, because each have different beliefs, that make for differing identities. The very best that spiritualists can muster up is a feeling of oneness – a feeling that always fails to translate into a practical and tangible peace and harmony between members of a spiritual group, let alone between members of competing groups.

Then there are other aspects of one’s social identity that demand attention if one is to ever get to the stage where one can see and treat one’s fellow human beings as fellow human beings and not continue to think and feel them to be separate ‘beings’. A man never meets a woman and sees her or treats her as a fellow human being because men and women have been instilled with opposing gender identities – identities that are mandated by each side in the battle of the sexes and are rife with mutual feelings of suspicion, fear, ignorance and superstition. Similarly, a father never meets a son and a mother never meets a daughter for each has a socially-imposed identity relative to each other – a complex set of social obligations, emotional demands and needs, expectations and resentments that serve to prevent each from either seeing or treating each other as fellow human beings. Similarly, an American never meets an Australian, a Lithuanian never meets a Nigerian and so on, for each believe they belong to a different culture and each call a particular piece of the planet ‘home’. The list goes on, but I won’t, for you will have got the gist by now.

In the same vein, the prime minister of the country where I live recently announced a new initiative to promote harmony within the 200 odd ethnic groups that live in this country and suggested as part of this initiative that people should ‘celebrate their differences’. It obviously never occurred to him, or those who wrote his speech, that it is precisely because people cling to their differences – their old cultural, social and ethnic conditioning – that there is ethnic conflict and disharmony in the first place. In the case of your observation, the idea that encouraging people to continually air their grievances towards each other can achieve peace and harmony in the workplace makes no sense at all. <snip> #

It is much the same in the US, a multi-ethnic society as is Australia. There is the same ‘celebrate diversity’ theme trotted out again and again as a means of promoting ‘tolerance’ for others of a different stripe ethnically or racially. Yet only because there is disharmony, hatred, intolerance, greed, aggression, expansionism, etc is there this need to promulgate the antidotal tolerance, love, and compassion for others different.

And a clear-eyed observation will reveal that there is as much disharmony, hatred, intolerance, greed, aggression, conflict, competition and expansionism evident in the forces of good – i.e. in those who preach faith, tolerance, love and compassion – as there are in the forces of evil.

Differences are a simple fact of life for biological creatures. Biologically, we seem to share much more in common as human beings than we have different.

I have travelled to all five continents, met people from hundreds of tribes and seen people from hundreds more tribes on television and apart from differences in physical appearances, education and living standards I have seen no biological differences between human beings that are of any consequence. To claim that there is some type of biological diversity within the human species that needs to be passionately maintained can be traced to a fear of losing one’s own precious social identity and one’s own instinct-protected animal identity as a being. History has shown, and is showing, that human beings will desperately cling to their trivial race, creed and ethnic differences with all that entails, rather than happily become anonymous harmless citizens of the world.

Social differences are also apparent, whether differences in customs, mores, ethical practices, etc. I think it is not so much differences that are the root cause of hatred, intolerance, warfare and strife but identity in any form.

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

It is the instinctual passions that form the rudimentary sense of identity in sentient creatures that are the root cause of our inability to get along with each other and live in peace and harmony. Once the root cause of the problem is eliminated, along with it go any sense of being unique, different from others, as well as any need to defend worn-out ideals, beliefs, truisms, and political, social, or religious systems of thought.

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

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

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

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

The actualist’s solution to conflict and disharmony is self-immolation – the elimination of all that stands in the way of living with other human beings in peace and harmony. It is the end of ‘me’. With the end of ‘me’, there is no need to be defensive or even on my guard against possible encroachments. Gone too is any sense of insult and every form of grievance. Because any kind of identity for human beings seems to be a breeding ground for resentment and grievance, I think.

Every ethnic, religious or racial group has had its own nasty tale of historical grievances – every group has had its own dreary history of being discriminated against. Even so-called ‘dominant’ groups in society today were once in a position to be discriminated against and discriminated against others in their turn.

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

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

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

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

There recently was a retrospective of the Roots program of the 1970s on TV. I remember watching this back in those days. There was the interest at that time for people, particularly Americans, to find out their ‘roots’, and there was a proliferation of the uncovering or the discovering of ‘who I am’ as one’s ethnic identity. In any event, I was struck while watching the program by the anger of the people they were interviewing as they talked about their reactions to the program. There was this universal feeling of rage and anger among people they interviewed, this abhorrence of slavery, the realization that they were themselves descended from slaves and that these horrors were perpetrated against their own ancestors. But I was particularly struck by the anger, and it seemed to me that it makes no sense to be angry about these things because if one is angry and holds a grievance, then sooner or later that feeling is going to be expressed, it must be expressed, in some sort of action against others. If one is angry, then one essentially feels that someone is to blame for these horrors. In my personal experience, anger must always have a target. It always comes out one way or another.

One need only open one’s eyes, look around the world at what is happening, to see the havoc that identity is causing.

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

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

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

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

It’s pertinent to point out that ancient Eastern spirituality teaches that the illusionary identity (‘I’ as ego only) is borne exclusively of the process of conditioning … whereas actualism establishes by observation and experimentation that the social/ instinctual identity (both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul) is borne of the genetically-encoded instinctual passions.

Big deal about nothing – instinctual passions are still conditioning. Evolutionary conditioning, in fact. There are others who say much the same thing. Read writings by David Bohm, for example.

A quote will reveal what David Bohm saw as being the root cause of human malice and sorrow –

‘Indeed, for both the rich and the poor, life is dominated by an ever growing current of problems, most of which seem to have no real and lasting solution. Clearly we have not touched the deeper causes of our troubles. It is the main point of this book that the ultimate source of all these problems is in thought itself, the very thing of which our civilization is most proud, and therefore the one thing that is ‘hidden’ because of our failure seriously to engage with its actual working in our own individual lives and in the life of society.’ D. Bohm & Mark Edwards, Changing Consciousness

And another quote reveals the apparent source of this conviction –

‘... we went on to consider the general disorder and confusion that pervades the consciousness of mankind. It is here that I encountered what I feel to be Krishnamurti’s major discovery. What he was seriously proposing is that all this disorder, which is the root cause of such widespread sorrow and misery, and which prevents human beings from properly working together, has its root in the fact that we are ignorant of the general nature of our own processes of thought. D. Bohm, A Brief Introduction to the Work of Krishnamurti.

I cannot find anywhere that David Bohm has mentioned the words ‘evolutionary conditioning’ or anything like these words let alone where he indicates that the instinctual passions are the root cause of human malice and sorrow – all I could find made it patently clear that he lays the blame for the ills of humankind on thinking and not feelings.

Given that you have made the claim, perhaps you could provide the evidence that any of the spiritual teachings mention ‘evolutionary conditioning’ … or did you just coin the term on the fly, as it were?

Actually he doesn’t separate thinking and feeling. In his book ‘Thought As A System’ he considers thought to be one aspect of a larger system that not only includes feelings in the body but the all the myriad of connections with the body and world at large. Put aside regular conceptual boundaries placed in the word thought (ie the idea that thought is only internal and ephemeral ‘whispers in the mind’) and consider it to be part of a larger whole.

What you appear to be suggesting here is that if I ‘put aside regular conceptual boundaries placed in the word thought’ then I could consider it to ‘be part of a lager whole’, which presumably means that it includes the genetically-encoded instinctual passions. Therefore when David Bohm says that ‘the ultimate source of all these problems is in thought itself’, I am to assume he is saying that ‘the ultimate source of all these problems is in the genetically-encoded instinctual passions’? Are you for real?

You can see that the movement of thought influences the brain, the body and the environment at large (buildings, roads, pollution, cultural influence, government etc) and that feedback returns into our bodies through the senses to make us feel and act in certain ways.

The ‘larger whole’ – the ‘we all live in one big thought-system’ theory – still lays the blame for the ills of humankind at the feet of thinking and conditioning, not feelings borne of the instinctual passions.

He considers the effect that evolution has had as well.

Simply repeating a claim over and over does not make it a fact. Could you perchance provide some evidence where he David Bohm indicates that the genetically-encoded instinctual passions are the root cause of human malice and sorrow and not that thought is the root cause?

And please note that just because I quote or paraphrase someone does not mean that I endorse all they do and say. David Bohm spent far too much time and energy with the reprehensible J Krishnamurti.

If I may point out, it was you who made the comment –

Big deal about nothing – instinctual passions are still conditioning. Evolutionary conditioning, in fact. There are others who say much the same thing. Read writings by David Bohm, for example.

When I provided quotes that clearly indicated that Mr. Bohm specifically said that the ultimate source of all the problems that plague humanity is thought itself, you then offer a disclaimer that you are not prepared to endorse all that Mr. Bohm said. That puts an end to the possibility of any sensible discussion, hey?

*

I cannot find anywhere that David Bohm has mentioned the words ‘evolutionary conditioning’ or anything like these words let alone where he indicates that the instinctual passions are the root cause of human malice and sorrow – all I could find made it patently clear that he lays the blame for the ills of humankind on thinking and not feelings. Given that you have made the claim, perhaps you could provide the evidence that any of the spiritual teachings mention ‘evolutionary conditioning’ … or did you just coin the term on the fly, as it were?

Interesting person that No 58 mentioned a while back: John Wren-Lewis. Wren-Lewis has also been thinking about the effects of instinctual conditioning. Here’s a quote and reference:

‘The hypothesis I’ve come up with is that the block which cuts off so-called normal human consciousness from its roots in that other, impersonal consciousness, is some kind of inflation or hyperactivity of the psychological survival-system. Exactly how or when this originated in the history of our species I have no idea, and at present don’t propose to speculate.’ www.globalideasbank.org/befaft/B&A-5.HTML

However he does not come up with a system for dismantling the psychological survival-system, which is where Actualism is to be commended.

For a start, there is no such thing as ‘instinctual conditioning’, a point I made clear in the last post and one which you chose to ignore.

Secondly, Mr. Wren Lewis makes reference to what he terms a ‘psychological survival-system’, indicating that the survival-system is a mental process – and not a sequential process that is firstly physical, secondarily affective and only lastly cognitive. Not only does he not understand how the survival-system operates, he has no idea how it is passed from one generation to the next and it has apparently never occurred to him that it originated in the human species because the survival-system is common to all sentient animals.

So much for Mr. Wren Lewis’ thinking about the effects of instinctual survival passions – he is doing no more than trotting out the Eastern spiritual party line that thinking and conditioning ‘cuts off so-called normal human consciousness from its roots in that other, impersonal consciousness’, that which is also known as God by whatever name.

I can only assume that this will be another of those quotes you offer in support of your stance but then don’t necessarily endorse?

Actualism Homepage

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust