PETER: Hi Alan,

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

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see was that the naiveté of youth and the well-meaning 60’s aims of peace, love and brown rice for all, had wilted and been replaced by a turning away, a foreboding cynicism, an introverted self-love and a lust for immortality.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

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

Leary’s interest remained with the brain and thinking and he believed his ‘soul’ was located in his brain, to use his words. In his last years this thought became such an obsession that he arranged for his head to be cut off after his pre-arranged death and for it to be frozen in order that his ‘soul-brain’ could be revived at some future date. It’s such a bizarre tale and I still wonder if the film of his frozen head was genuine or a hoax. Certainly in his interviews he was convinced that his soul-brain was capable of mental immortality. Unlike his spiritual contemporaries, in his altered state of consciousness he didn’t identify with who he felt he was, his affective feelings, but he identified with who he thought he was, his nonsensical thoughts. What both Alpert and Leary shared in common with all other human beings was that they desperately maintained their true self to be a disembodied alien identity. One felt he was a soul-heart, while the other thought he was a soul-brain – anything other than a mortal flesh and blood body, a cellular arrangement of finite life span.

I was curious as to how Leary had managed to put such an eccentric twist to his altered state of consciousness experiences until he recalled a story from his childhood and his memory of his grandfather’s advice – ‘Don’t be like everybody else’. While he was alive, he was exactly like everyone else who has experienced the infinitude of the physical universe in that he instinctually seized the experience for himself and sought to contrive to become that experience – to be immortal, timeless, eternal and ... disembodied. And despite his frozen head being in a glass jar in a freezer somewhere he has ended up just like everyone else – dead. Same old story, just with yet another bizarre tale to add to the long, long history of human beings inane search for immortality.

The animal survival instincts, embellished into a psychological and psychic fear of death at the core of human beings, has produced a glut of fantastic fairy stories, fervent beliefs, grotesque rituals, weird altered states of consciousness – all of them passionately fuelled by a desperate and futile urge for immortality.

So, the essential question that arises from this post is ... ‘Is there life after death for Timothy Leary’s head or is he nothing but a dead head?’

Vineeto suggested that maybe he was simply a head of his times.

It’s so good to question and investigate the Human Condition – it’s such fun once you get past the point where fear holds you back. When nothing becomes too sacred to question or investigate.

PETER: Eastern spirituality dabbles in the superficial layer of the social identity, actualism tackles the fundamental issue of the instinctual identity,

RESPONDENT: Well I don’t take that at all from my readings from various sources. I take conditioning to mean all kinds of conditioning including that endowed by evolution.

PETER: I await the evidence from your various sources to substantiate your claim that the spiritual teachings tackle the fundamental issue of the instinctual identity and that they propose eliminating the instinctual passions that are part and parcel of the genetically-encoded survival program.

By the way, this survival program is not conditioning endowed by evolution over time – it is genetically encoded as an indivisible package in each and every human being born, i.e. it is not a progressive conditioning, it is an instantaneous condition. The instinctual program is the (human) condition and it is universal to every human being whereas social conditioning is individual in that it has slight cultural and gender variations.

Whilst you can fiddle with conditioning, and if you become a practicing actualist you can eliminate practically all of it – the only way to end the condition itself – as in, become free of the human condition – is to cease being an instinctually-driven ‘being’. (...)

*

RESPONDENT: So if Satori is realized in the heart of a ‘pseudo-entity whose superficial aspects are personal and finite, the essence of its inspiration, of its very reality, is drawn from the infinite and impersonal source in the depths.’

PETER: And thus a delusion is born out of an illusion, for according to the Zen Masters Satori ‘is realized in the heart of a pseudo-identity’ and ‘its very reality is drawn from infinite and impersonal source in the depths’ – in other words ‘me’ at my core.

RESPONDENT: How do you get ‘me’ at my core out of that? The quote says that the very reality is drawn from impersonal sources but realised in the heart of a pseudo-identity.

PETER: Okay. I’ll rephrase my comment –

[rephrased]: And thus a delusion is born out of an illusion, for according to the Zen Masters Satori ‘is realized in the heart of a pseudo-identity’ and ‘its very reality is drawn from infinite and impersonal source in the depths’ – in other words ‘me’ at my ‘in the depths’ or ‘me’ in ‘in the heart’. [end rephrased].

heart – ‘(The seat of) one’s inmost thoughts and secret feelings; the soul. (The seat of) spirit.’ Oxford Dictionary

In an effort to make it more clear, what I am saying is that both the soul and the ego are illusionary. The soul however is significantly more substantive in that it is an instinctual program – it is species-specific which means that it is impersonal (at heart ‘I’ am humanity and humanity is ‘me’) whereas the ego is individualistic (‘I’ as persona or social identity exist only in relationship to other ‘beings’). 

To abandon an illusion in favour of a more substantial illusion is an act of delusion.

RESPONDENT: Recently, I have not read spiritual books (maybe just one in half a year). I would over indulge, ‘feed’ on them in the past. They made me feel good. I was on a path to the goal of enlightenment and most importantly, immortality. I don’t try to meditate nor I follow any gurus any more.

PETER: Yes, I understand the ‘feel good’ aspect of reading spiritual books. The spiritual message is literally music to one’s ears, a sop to one’s very soul, to be told that there is a life after physical death for ‘me’, the psychic and psychological alien entity within this flesh and blood body. One is told what one always thought was the Truth – that life on earth is about suffering, that it is an illusion because one feels cut off and isolated from people, things and events. One is forever condemned to be an outsider, a watcher, an alien on the planet, and then to have Wise men to tell you that this is the Truth and that one is only visiting the planet and there is a ‘somewhere else’ after physical death, certainly does give one a hell of a good feeling. If pursued with vigilance this good feeling can be blown up into an extraordinary narcissism, whereby one becomes the Universe experiencing itself as a Divine and immortal being. This Timeless and Spaceless feeling of Oneness is but the result of shift of identity of the alien entity – the self becomes the Self, a purely feeling state, an Altered State of Consciousness. Unfortunately the Enlightened One is still trapped within a flesh and blood body but ‘when the body dies’ a final liberation or Moksha is fantasized.

RESPONDENT: To me, it seems that still there is something that could be called ‘immortality’ in a certain sense of this word.

PETER: Well, the Oxford dictionary defines immortality as 1 Endless life or existence; exemption from death; perpetuity. 2 Enduring fame or remembrance.

When I went to school I was taught that there are three elements of the physical universe – animal, vegetable and mineral. It was common before the NDA to give the term life to the carbon based life forms, i.e. animal and vegetable and to reserve the term mortal for something which has a definite life span, i.e. animal or vegetable. This life span for the human animal was some 40 years at the turn of the century and has now, largely due to modern alternative medicine replacing ancient traditional medicine, been stretched to some 75 years in affluent western societies. Modern genetic research has confirmed what our eyes have told us – that the collection of cells that constitute the human body collectively have an inbuilt, pre-programmed mortality. This limited life-span has been known to stretch to a bit more than 100 years in a few rare cases but then death comes. This fact of mortality is clearly obvious once one passes the age of about 40 years as the effects of the ageing and non-renewal of cells becomes clearly and undeniably evident.

So, as far as you and I are concerned, being human animals, mortality is a fact and immortality is a dream.

RESPONDENT: But this is not immortality of a person, an ego or a spirit. I have been born and will die. As you called it, we are the material universe experiencing itself as human beings.

PETER: A minor correction here, if I can. So far as we know, Richard is the only human being living on the planet who does not have an instinctually programmed and psychologically reinforced self. Everybody else, you, me, and about 6 billion others, all think and feel themselves to be something other than a flesh and blood human being, and a few human beings believe themselves to be a God and therefore immortal, i.e. something other than a flesh and blood human being. Many people have had glimpses of being a flesh and blood human being only, sans self, in a PCE and a handful have taken Richard’s lead and are attempting to emulate his condition of living continuously and permanently in this state. In the meantime, 6 billion humans fight it out in a grim battle for survival in a grim world – this state of fear and aggression, manifest as malice and sorrow, is commonly known as the Human Condition.

What we are as human beings is the most highly developed of the animals on the planet in that we are able to think and reflect. However this very capability is enmeshed with the primitive instinctual self to an extent that we think and feel ourselves to be separate and alien from the physical universe. Who we think and feel we are is a ‘someone’ who inside this body looking out through the eyes, hearing through the ears, smelling through the nose, etc. Thus we are isolated human beings who are indirectly experiencing the universe and that experience is of being lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning. This is 180 degrees different from being the universe experiencing itself as a human being. This state is evident only in a Pure Consciousness Experience. The only reason I can talk with any authority about being the universe experiencing itself as a human being is from the direct experience of the PCE and from living a life of Virtual Freedom whereby one is as close as possible to this state permanently, yet one remains ‘human’ – an emotional and cerebral entity. It is from this ‘base camp’ that the final step can be taken with confidence and surety.

RESPONDENT: But after we are gone there will be some other beings. The universe will experience itself in them, thus this ‘experiencing’ will go on and on. Right?

PETER: Well, as I said, so far only one human being has rid himself of the psychic and psychological entity that is the very cause of human beings to regard themselves as something other than what they are in fact. Everybody else is busy being themselves, an emotional and cerebral entity, fearful and aggressive, trying desperately to connect via the feelings of love and compassion with other similarly isolated entities or seeking a fantasy escape into a spiritual dream world.

But the one human, who has managed to achieve a pure selfless state and rid himself of his animal heritage, has lived to tell his tale, to write of his experience, so that you and I have the chance to do something about the situation we have found ourselves in. Personally, I couldn’t give a fig about what happens after I am dead.

When I came across Richard I could see that I had a chance to do something about the situation I found myself in. Aged 49, maybe 20 years left, still not happy and certainly not harmless. When offered a method to become happy and harmless, developed by someone who was obviously happy and harmless, I took up the challenge. In doing so I became ‘self’ obsessed – I wanted to find out as much as I could about the Human Condition and how it operated in me as ‘me’– who I think and felt I was. 2 years later I am now living a happiness and harmlessness that is beyond normal human expectations and far exceeds the imaginary spiritual dreams. I am only concerned with my life as a human on the planet, what I can do to permanently and constantly live as I did in the PCE. In my first PCE, lasting some 4 hours or so, I was in a self-less state. The experience was purely sensate – no thoughts or feelings of separation and no thoughts or feelings of a ‘me’ who felt connected or ‘at one with’ everything. Simply an overload of sensate input such that the fairy tale splendour of the physical universe was abundantly apparent and overwhelming obvious, and an awareness of the brain thinking and reflecting with pristine clarity. It is in these moments that one knows that what is missing – the self – is precisely what prevents this from being an on-going experience.

*

RESPONDENT: Also, I think that there is nobody in heavens stuffing our physical bodies with some recycled immortal souls.

PETER: The soul is the big one! For what is a human being without a soul. Ancient Wisdom has it that a body without a soul is but an animal. A body without a soul is inhuman and evil. I’ll let Mr. Oxford give the full story on the soul –

soul –– 1 The principle of life in humans or animals; animate existence. 2 The principle of thought and action in a person, regarded as an entity distinct from the body; a person’s spiritual as opp. to corporeal nature. 3 a The spiritual part of a human being considered in its moral aspect or in relation to God and his precepts, spec. regarded as immortal and as being capable of redemption or damnation in a future state. b The disembodied spirit of a dead person, regarded as invested with some degree of personality and form. 4 a The seat of the emotions or sentiments; the emotional part of human nature. b Intellectual or spiritual power; high development of the mental faculties. Also, deep feeling, sensitivity, esp. as an aesthetic quality; zest, spirit. 5 Philos. The vital, sensitive, or rational principle in plants, animals, or human beings. arch. 6 The essential or animating element or quality of something. Oxford Dictionary.

Seems pretty impressive for something that does not factually exist. The instinctual programming of the amygdala or primitive brain includes a primitive animal self that is most highly developed in the primates. This self in relationship to other members of the species is most evident in apes and chimps and leads us to see in them human behaviour at a less sophisticated level of operation. Fear, aggression, nurture and desire are seen operating unimpeded by developed intelligence, which simply translates to apes and chimps being less cunning and less efficient in killing than the human animal. We think them cute when they display instinctual nurture but are in denial of the mounting evidence of rape, murder, infanticide and war in chimps and apes that are the result of instinctual fear, aggression and desire.

This very-same primitive self, complete with its automatic survival program, operates in humans, but we manage to divide the instinctual passions into two groupings – the good passions and the evil ones. The self that is the good instincts we term ‘me at my core’, the ‘real me’, or my ‘very soul’. We simply deny the existence of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, as it is usually too shocking to contemplate these aspects within us. Thus we are usually ‘overcome’ or ‘overwhelmed’ by anger or violence or despair, for that is what appears to happen when instinctual passions surface. The amygdala automatically responds to a threat, real, perceived or imagined, and the hormones automatically flow – flooding the neo-cortex and away we go... Murder, rape, revenge, despair, torture, war, etc., all occur in a ‘blind’ rage – be it hot or cool.

As if this wasn’t enough of a heritage, we then have the universal fairy-tale of a life after death for this very-same soul, and the same instincts are then bought into play in defending this belief; for the soul – ‘me’ at my core – believes it is fighting for its very life (its life after death). Thus humans not only fight for real things like territory and food but we add fighting for causes, beliefs, ideals, rights and dreams to the list.

Fearing for survival is our main pre-occupation, and fighting for survival is our main occupation. Such is the Human Condition.

Good to be rid of a soul – and all that it represents – as far as I’m concerned. Everybody regards it as inconceivable to be without a soul but next time you have a peak experience have a good look around and see if you can feel one in operation. If you can, it’s not a Pure Consciousness Experience. In the PCE, as if by miracle, the soul and the ego, the self in total, disappear from consciousness, and if it can happen once, why not more times, and why not 24 hrs. a day every day?

Why not indeed?

RESPONDENT: It is not clear to me that according to you whether –

PETER: I thought it might be pertinent to discussions, given the fact that there are a number of Sannyasins on the list, to rephrase your questions regarding the legacy of the mythical Mr. Buddha.

Hence instead of the way you phrased it, your question would now become –

[example]: It is not clear to me that according to you whether –

1. Rajneesh left a legacy to his community (Sannyasins and ‘Friends of Osho’), a legacy under which freedom is attainable only after physical death. And hence this legacy is responsible for no peace on earth. OR
2. Rajneesh in some way personally responsible for no peace on earth because he ‘postponed’ freedom until the physical death. OR
3. Some other possibility which I have not thought of. [end example].

I always find it’s good to deal with Gurus that we know a bit about rather than Mythical Long-Dead Ones who we can but only fantasize about. There is nothing quite so pertinent and relevant to an actualist as a dearly-held, close to home, belief.

So, as for Rajneesh’s legacy, he is on record as saying ‘I leave you my dream’ upon his death bed and dictated that on his tomb in his mausoleum should be the words ‘Never Born, Never Died, Only Visited This Planet...’ The legacy he left his community was a dream that he had failed to materialize in his lifetime, hence he left it to his followers. This is a common theme with all Gurus – each and everyone has left their followers an unfinished dream. Rajneesh’s dream was that eventually the world would be full of His sannyasins bringing the ‘light’ into the world and, of course, exactly the same dream underpins each and every religion in the world. Hence the relentless drive to proselytize and spread the message – the more the numbers, the stronger the religion, the more famous and powerful the Master. What a legacy!

Rajneeshism, with its followers numbering only in the tens of thousands, is inevitably doomed to the spiritual dustbin.

*

RESPONDENT: Now about: ‘Never born never died...’ I have read so many times explanations of this statement on this list, from Richard, from you. But I still can’t make head or tail of this statement. All my thoughts are borrowed thoughts from you and Richard, I have no original thinking of my own on this statement. And that is not good. I do not want to end up in believing in what you and Richard say about this.

PETER: Yes. Merely believing what others say is a bummer of a way to live one’s life – although that is exactly what everyone does.

But to stop believing and to acknowledge the facts is to demolish No 5 the man, No 5 the lover, No 5 the Sannyasin, No 5 the good, No 5 the right, No 5 the proud, etc. – and what would eventually remain is what you are, not ‘who’ you are. For me the challenge of discovering that was too thrilling to let a few wobbles or reactions stop me.

Of course, I know ‘what’ I am – the universe experiencing itself as a flesh and blood human mortal being, so startlingly obvious in a Pure Consciousness Experience.

What Mr. Rajneesh felt himself to be was an immortal God – hence his statement chiselled in marble, on his tomb, in his mausoleum – ‘Never born, never died’. Would not you agree that a human flesh and blood body is the product of a sperm fertilizing an egg and that when the heart stops beating and the brain ceases working that the body dies – to rot away, if it is not burnt? Is this fact so difficult to acknowledge as a fact? It is of course shocking for it does acknowledge that who you think and feel you are is a walk-in, a parasitical entity that has taken possession of you, the flesh and blood body known as No 5. But it does explain why the Guru’s message of immortality for the soul is so appealing to the ‘self’. No better offer can be made to an imaginary, ethereal soul than an imaginary ethereal immortality. No wonder people fall in love with Gurus – a Saviour at last!

I’ve done it again – I’ve strung together a few shocking statements aka facts. It’s just that spiritual belief perpetuates human misery and suffering on earth and it is time to expose this nonsense for what it is – puerile nonsense.

PETER to No 22: Given that you keep posting the meta-physical writings of others to the list every now and again, I thought I would post my story as to how I was shocked out of believing in a life after death for ‘me’, as soul or spirit. To share with you what set me off really searching for the meaning of life in the physical world we mortal flesh and blood human beings actually live in. It’s a fairly long but it does tell a complete story in itself –

[Peter]: (...)

‘Within a few weeks, as we all assembled in the meeting hall for the evening talk, it was announced that Rajneesh had ‘left his body’ earlier that afternoon. His dead body was then carried into the hall and placed on the podium, and an emotional celebration was held. Here in front of us lay the body of the man who had been for me mentor, father and Guru! For the past ten years I had devoted my life to him and his vision. I had sat in devotion for hours and hours, had worked for his ideal, and had loyally followed him through thick and thin. Being his disciple and following his teachings had given my life meaning, direction and purpose. And now he was dead. His body was then carried through the streets amidst much pandemonium, as by now the word of his death had spread around Poona. At the burning place by the river, the body was placed on a pit full of firewood. Ghee and various perfumes were poured on, more logs piled on top, and the whole lot set on fire.

Several thousand of us were gathered in the firelight and the singing continued into the night. As the crowd thinned, I watched the smouldering remains of the fire, wondering what would become of all our dreams, and what I would do, now that he was gone. The next morning I was awoken with a message to come to the ashram, where I worked with a crew all day and through the night to convert the marble bed we had completed only months before into an altar for his ashes. The huge bedroom I had helped build was now to become his Mausoleum! (...)

*

During my investigations into death over this last year, I have become aware that the most shocking thing for human beings is that we are able to contemplate our own death. It is amazing that, of all the animals on the planet, only we human beings, with our ability to think and reflect, know that we have a limited life span and, further, that we could die at any time. We know this, we can talk about it and think about it. We see other people and animals die, and we see our bodies aging and dying. We know that death is an inevitable fact. This is the fact of the situation, but we have avoided this fact largely by making ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘What happens after death?’ into great religious, philosophical and scientific questions. Indeed, for many humans the pursuit of the answer to these meaningless questions is deemed to be the very meaning of life. The search for what happens after life becomes the point of life and the Search is endless. One is forever on the Path. One never arrives.

That always seemed some sort of perversity to me. All that the religious and spiritual meanings of life have offered us is that they point to life after death – that’s where it is really at! ‘When you die, then you can really live!’

I have read the work of some researchers who have studied the responses of people with terminal illnesses and they have documented people’s reactions in the face of death. Broadly, those reactions are seen progressively as denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It seems to me that since we all know we suffer from a terminal illness called ‘growing old’, at the end of which comes death, human beings actually live their lives in one, if not all, of the above psychological states at one time or another.

Denial of the fact of death is to believe in a Heaven, a place where we go to after death. This is common to all religions, with the Eastern religions adding the belief of reincarnation to somewhat muddy the water. Enlightenment, with its altered state of consciousness, is a denial of death in the sense that the Guru believes Him or Herself to be in a state of Timelessness – a delusion that they are beyond death. Denying the fact that the body dies and rots, they claim the body is but an illusion. ‘I am not the body’ is a common belief. A separate entity from the physical body – the Soul, Self, Atman or whatever – is self-created, that which lives on and cheats death. Thus, even the Enlightened Ones have their place to go to after death – the various Eastern versions of Heaven.

Added to the denial of death, the denial of life’s sensual pleasures, sex, comfort and leisure is entrenched in all the religions. In fact, suffering and sacrifice are deemed great virtues in both religion and spirituality. The curious thing I was to discover about the spiritual path was that at the core of the teachings, exactly like in the Western religions, lies the desire to achieve a ‘state of immortality’, and I had not seen it while on the ‘path’. Somehow I had managed to blind myself to these facts, as I was originally attracted to spirituality for the goal of personal ‘peace of mind’ in this life – to hell with the next one. This led me to believe that Eastern Spirituality was something other than, or better than, the ‘old-time Religion’ that I had known, and rejected as silly, in my youth.

Anger in the face of death is a common reaction, and it is obvious to all of us that many people live their lives in anger. It has never been a particular resentment for me, but I do know of people who are angry at having to be here. Most of this anger seems to be blindly and wildly directed at authority, and those who people see as responsible for the mess in the world. The so-called peaceful protests, movements and demonstrations are, in my experience, mainly an outlet for this anger. When people get together to combine their anger the results can be horrific, often deadly.

Bargaining is perhaps the most insidious reaction to the fear of death because it involves the belief that one can indeed cheat or avoid death. This is, of course, nothing but a delusion, for death is an undeniable fact. Some people seek a form of immortality by producing children, or consider power and fame as some form of immortality – ‘at least I will be remembered’. The most common bargain is the religious and spiritual pursuit, with its promise of some kind of life after death. Thus a bargain is made with one’s God or Guru – I’ll support, follow, love and devote myself to you and in return I get a ticket to the ‘next life’.

Indeed, this is trading time, happiness, leisure, sensual pleasure and freedom, which is available right now, for time and effort involved in worship, meditation, prayer, devotion and suffering, in the hope for some ‘good spot’ in a supposed afterlife.

The other price paid lies in the necessity of complying with the moral and ethical codes of the particular spiritual or religious group in which you believe – the necessity to comply, conform, love, and unquestioningly trust results in a tangible and palpable restriction of freedom. It seems an appalling price to pay, given that there has been no actual authenticated report back of any life after death from anyone who has died. (...)

*

The Human Condition is exemplified by the universal and inviolable acceptance that human life is typified by malice and sorrow and the only possible ‘solutions’ are spiritual or religious, all firmly based on Ancient Wisdom. Life on earth ‘is the way it is’ and there is nothing one can do about it. Acceptance is praised in the spiritual world as understanding that the world, the body and indeed even death itself, are an illusion. The most insidious teaching that now seems to be emerging from the East is a form of ‘it doesn’t matter what you do – it is all an illusion anyway’. For me, my son’s death ruled out the option of accepting that ‘this was all there was to life’. I wanted to be sure I got the most out of my life – to actually live the promised freedom, right here, right now, as this flesh and blood body.

What I have found is that all of the religious and spiritual doctrines and concepts about death are simply intricate fairy-tales retold and reinforced for millennia. They require constant injections of Faith, Hope, Trust, Devotion and Surrender to effectively maintain the belief in an afterlife – all to keep the underlying fear of death at bay.

I remember when Rajneesh died we selected a piece of marble and had an Indian stonemason chisel on it: ‘Never Born, Never Died, Only Visited This Planet…’ as the epitaph on his tomb. Rajneesh had dictated this to his secretary some months before his death. It seemed curious to me at the time, because I thought I had understood that the whole point of the spiritual search was the dissolution of the ‘self’ – in other words, ‘peace of mind’ or freedom for me, on earth. And here was Rajneesh proclaiming that he was only a ‘visitor’ here anyway, and even hinting that maybe he went somewhere else in the physical universe. There arose in me more questions than answers, but at the time I took it as was merely ‘par for the course’, given the inconsistency of his teachings. Now, of course, I am able to clearly see that the denial of living as this body, on this earth, at this moment of time, of all the spiritual teachers is both legendary and well documented – if one bothers to investigate.

In some of those people around me who are religious or spiritual I see an increasing devotion and fanaticism as the physical fact of death comes closer. For others, ‘sitting silently, doing nothing’, the mid-life crisis, old age, and finally death come by themselves. Some adopt a ‘sit on the fence’ attitude of ‘maybe, maybe not’ to the idea of an after-life – an indifference that actively precludes them from a full-blooded commitment to life on earth, as a flesh and blood body only.

RESPONDENT: I am amazed to actually see ‘in print’, that the Soul could be eliminated.

PETER: Yes indeed, ‘who’ we think we are and ‘who’ we feel we are both phantoms, to use No 7’s words. The spiritual search has traditionally stopped half way by only addressing the savage instinctual passions (aka ego) while dearly and desperately identifying with the tender passions (aka soul).

RESPONDENT: The physical form was created by the Soul, how can the creator be removed? The Soul is Eternal, it is an ‘individuation’ of the One Soul, that is the Source of All. To propound the dissipation of the Soul infers that that which is All, can be eliminated by some technique developed by ‘external consciousness’.

PETER: My stance is that God is a human invention and, as such, can be dispensed with as easily as the notion of Evil. Once this is done one’s own awareness – the brain’s ability to be aware of it’s own functioning, a bare awareness known as apperception – is perfectly capable of eliminating all illusion, all of one’s self and its associated instinctual passions.

RESPONDENT: When you get thru with all of these methodologies of consciousness, you are still left with ‘the witness’... ie, the Soul. The Soul is innocent; it is the ‘experiencer’ of the All That Is. It does not judge, it experiences. So it does not get into the idea of good and bad, there is pleasant experiences and unpleasant experiences, when the Soul decides it has had enough, it withdraws its focus from an area of experience and focuses ‘somewhere’ else to expand its experience of All That Is.

PETER: This process is called dissociation – an active withdrawal from unpleasant earthly experiences and a total focusing on pleasant ‘other-worldly’ experiences. As I said to No 8, all one is doing is splitting the ‘self’ in two, creating and reinforcing the idea of an earthly, mortal ego-self and a spirit-ual, immortal Soul-self.

RESPONDENT: In a reality that believes in beginnings and endings, that could look like a ‘death’ of a physical form, or in the case of a ‘master’, the ‘disappearance’ of the form. Note the scripture which refers to the taking on of incorruptibility. When one accepts one’s own ‘immortality’, and acts accordingly, your physical form goes thru a physical chemical process, which changes the form from carbon base to a crystalline base. All fear is ‘leached’ from the form, as well as, the ‘little me’. The Soul then stands forth, uncompromised by limitations of any kind. Flesh and blood is not what we Truly are. That, my friend, is what we have come to this limitation to show, the Truth of the ONE. Incidentally, I am a Master of Light and Love, I have already ascended this plane and returned. I Know of what I speak.

PETER: ... And thus darkness, evil and suffering are regarded as intrinsic to the human condition on earth where we human flesh and blood humans actually live. Personally I find this a deeply cynical view of human life on earth. Who, or what, God was so perverse to set this system up? Why do we insist on believing this scenario?

RESPONDENT: But we are not our heart/legs/central nervous system.

PETER: This boundless, infinite, eternal, perfect and pure physical universe has materially manifested and evolved luxuriant and abundant carbon-based life on this planet. The human species, the most sophisticated of life forms, capable of thinking, planning and reflecting, represents the pinnacle of the emergence and development of life, as we know it, in the universe. The human body is a marvellous organism whose chief characteristic, apart from intelligence is an ability to be conscious of itself in operation. Given that each human being is born with an instinctual ‘self’ overlaid since birth with a further layer of social identity this consciousness is a ‘self’-consciousness. Thus a consciousness of ‘who’ I think and ‘who’ I feel I am is constantly predominant and the bare consciousness of the flesh-and-blood-body only gets a peek in during a pure consciousness experience when the ‘self’ is temporarily absent.

RESPONDENT: When we die, we are not here, and no amount of dissection will find were the soul used to be.

PETER: I remember as a child my mother would have me say a prayer at night time that ended – ‘... if I should die before I wake, pray the Lord my soul do take’. I remember wondering at the time where this soul was, but as I found out more about religion I thought the whole idea to be very weird. The idea of a white-bearded God sitting on a cloud and overseeing all this was pretty silly to me. And as for sending his Son down so he could do a few miracles, start a Religion, be nailed to a cross, and after a few days go back up to sit alongside Dad and see how it works out...!! I remember clearly thinking, if there was a God, how come he created the mess in the first place, and if he was responsible for this mess, why the hell didn’t he just come down and sort it out. I eventually teetered off on my own into the real-world and when this collapsed found myself embroiled on the spiritual path believing this offered the chance for peace on earth – an end to the insanity of wars, fighting and feuding. What I eventually found on the spiritual path was nothing other than Eastern religion which combined the traditional universal belief in an immortal soul with the chance for one’s soul to realize it is immortal, and therefore Divine, while still ‘in the body’.

The path to the extinction of one’s soul begins with gaily abandoning the belief in God and an eternal life, and setting about the process of total ‘self’-immolation, such that one gets to live the pure consciousness experience 24 hrs. a day, every day.

RESPONDENT: Each human has a soul or psychic entity? So you too then? If not aren’t you human then? It’s no use speaking in general terms is it?

PETER: The soul or psychic entity is an illusion, but very real in its affective presence in the human body. The primitive self combined with the instinctual programming of fear, aggression, nurture and desire is overlaid with the beliefs that have been instilled as our social identity and forms a feeling of ‘me’ trapped inside this body, looking out on the world. The feeling of not quite fitting in, lost, lonely and frightened – an alien. In the past two years since meeting Richard, this illusionary alien entity within me has been reduced by sincere and honest effort and serendipitous events to the point of non-existence. I say ‘to the point of’ deliberately, as I have yet to experience what Richard experienced as an affective psychological death. Given that my affective capacities are virtually nil, it may well be a whimper rather than a bang. So yes, I am not ‘human’ in your terms in that I am virtually free of the Human Condition of malice and sorrow.

See my chapter Evolution if you are really interested in finding out.

RESPONDENT: I for one don’t desperately believe in an after-life but don’t deny it either, it’s a no-issue.

PETER: So you don’t care one way or the other. You are also on record as saying –

RESPONDENT: ‘To care whether a soul exists or not is to be worried about this life on earth’.

PETER: Methinks that if you are not worried about this life on earth and you are an active follower of a spiritual Master who taught the doctrine of another world, another dimension, another life after death, you do indeed have both feet in the spiritual world.

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