Selected Correspondence Peter

Time – This Moment, Timeless and Eternity

Einsteinian relativity theory relies upon imagining that time is a fourth dimension to the three dimensions of space, thereby allowing that time can be an abstract entity (t) having a hypothetical numerical value in abstract relativistic mathematics. A PCE experientially reveals that time is not an abstract dimension because a pure consciousness experience is the direct experience that this very moment is the only moment that is happening and that this very moment is perpetually happening. Whilst past moments did happen and future moments will happen, only this moment is actual – one is perpetually locked into this seamless moment of time as it were. It is always this moment of time, one cannot actually experience any other moment of time but this very moment.

This is not an esoteric or philosophical wisdom as one can also become aware of this fact in one’s normal daily life – in fact the actualism method is specifically designed to bring one’s attention to this fact as an on-going experience. As an example, if you care to remember back to the moment when you first opened this post and began to read it, it is obvious that when you did so you could experience that the opening of the post was happening in this moment and now that you are reading these words it is also this moment. As Richard puts it – this very moment is the arena in which actual events happen.

To keep with this practical observation, if you look at the computer monitor that you are reading these words on you will see that it has three spatial dimensions – width, length and depth – and that your observation of this is happening in this moment. The very spontaneity and instantaneity of this very moment gives vibrancy to the things and events that one sensately experiences in this moment of time. In short, in actuality, time is not a fourth dimension, space and time are not a continuum, space is not bent, nor is it expanding – all of these concepts and theories are nought but impassioned (subjective) fantasies.

To get back to your comment, I take it that you are aware that the theoretical subatomic particles described in quantum physics are mathematical suppositions that have no material existence. Quantum physics deals with abstracted models of hypothetical subatomic realms in exactly the same way that relativistic cosmology deals with abstracted models of hypothetical universes that have no material existence.

For me, once I understood that much of science masquerades theory as being fact and imaginary models as being things that actually exist, I also understood the absurdity of calling an internally-logical subjective theory an objective scientifically-verifiable fact. But then again, I have no emotional investment in supporting relativistic theory because I was not indoctrinated into believing that it is true, and nowadays I know by direct on-going experience that there is no underlying metaphysical reality to the universe. My ongoing objective attentiveness reveals that this is the only moment I can experience and this objective observation itself makes a nonsense of Einsteinian relativistic subjective observations and theoretical calculations.

The actuality of the infinitude of the physical universe compared to the fantasies of metaphysical beliefs is such a good subject to contemplate upon.

Who knows, it may even provoke the males of the species to get out of their heads and in touch with their feelings – after all taking such a step is an essential prerequisite to beginning to become free of the insidious grip of the instinctual passions.

We have had extensive discussions about time and likely we will apply that term with a slightly different understanding then as it is being understood by the majority of people. My latest way of going about this subject time is that I find it necessary to take in account that time for most people is not an actuality but rather a concept that is more or less the fuel for the engine of a social/spiritual identity. For an actualist time is most certainly not thinking whereas thinking as well as performing a sequence of actions like preparing a nice breakfast getting dressed a.s.o. yet requires time. In short for a realist, time most often is a source of pressure, hence the flesh-blood-body is carrying a considerable load of stress, whereas for an actualist time basically is to enjoy, thus a source of sensuous pleasure, hence the flesh-blood-body knows how to relax.

For me, contemplating on the fact that this is the only moment I can actually experience being alive eventually led to the realization that this is the only moment I can actually experience being alive which in turn led me to have a direct experience that this is the only moment I can actually experience being alive. This experience is known as a pure consciousness experience.

There is a lot to be gained from thinking about time – exactly as there is in becoming attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive, this the only moment you can ever experience as an actuality.

In my experience this concept of time appeared to be one of the main ingredients from which my social identity was being generated.

To have a concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose.

I find it, Peter, kind of surprising that, you don’t find time considered to be a concept.

And yet I didn’t say that I ‘don’t find time considered to be a concept’. Human ‘beings’ have a psychological and psychic persona who thinks and feels it exists over time and therefore time is experienced as a psychological and psychic concept. Hence ‘I’ have emotional memories of ‘me’ existing in the past and imaginary fantasies of ‘me’ existing in the future. Whereas, in fact, the only time that can be experienced as an actuality is this very moment. This is not to deny that past moments did not exist or that there will be future moments to then experience but the only moment that you can actually – i.e. sensately – experience is this very moment. Hence, as I said – ‘To have a concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose’.

I take it that my invitation to dialogue on that subject is been accepted.

The only person thus far I have refused to dialogue with is No 22 and that was because it is impossible to have a dialogue with someone who has convinced himself that he is GOD.

Ok. So time you consider to be a concept if not, you could not call it either ‘practical’ nor sensible to have it and even more so you must have one.

No. Time is a fact. Past time is a fact, as is future time. But the only time that can be experienced as an actuality is this very moment. Hence, to rephrase what I said – To make a concept out of a fact is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose.

But guess what I found for practical, running off to the dictionary in a desperate attempt to stop the spinning.

1. orderly : so from your statement I might conclude that you advocate disorder
2. systematic : well ... indeed I beg to differ from opinion.
3. efficient : if you will excuse my please
4. pragmatic : I choose that for my plea for sanity
5. business-like: There’s no business like actual business but this really did it: on top of that I find as a synonym ‘sensible’.

Which means that anyone who makes a concept out of the fact of time is neither being pragmatic nor sensible, to pick the most relevant meanings.

Btw, most accurate perception, Peter, there’s no arguing about this, yet we differ somewhat from opinion as so you might suspect already. Note: as I want to make it clear that reading prima facie or face value for me is as if I wrote that myself and repeat it until it sounds like spoken with a voice of honesty. So ... then it works out like thus:

I ‘lose’ you already after the first line. It appears to me if it [to have a concept of time] is not sensible then it must be silly. I must think black-white here because I see no options to differentiate, as you even deny the practical purpose of having firmly integrated in the brain the concept of time. Don’t hang me for this one (you did not say that and neither do I imply you said so); it is just my way for pleading for sensibly because next, you begin pleading for that statement as to be even ‘more’ then silly.

It seems as though the confusion is about the meaning of the word ‘concept’. A concept means an idea, a notion, an abstraction, a conceptualization, a conception, a theory. As you can see, a concept is abstract thinking whereas the aim of asking yourself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is to get you out of your head, out of abstract thinking, conceptualizing, theorizing, imagining, and so on, and get you to come to your senses. And you can only sensately experience this moment – you can only hear something in this moment, you can only smell something in this moment, you can only taste something in this moment and so on.

Then you bring in your psychological and psychic concept (which made me spin around) and then you jump to hence, ‘‘I’ have emotional memories of ‘me’ existing in the past and imaginary fantasies of ‘me’ existing in the future’ so just to make a wild guess would that mean something like ‘time is a boat on Lala-river’?

Okay, I’ll attempt to go along with your terminology.

How about – ‘you’ are a boat on a Lala-river, a river that ‘you’ call ‘your life’. ‘You’ usually spend most of your time either re-running past emotional memories or imagining things that may or may not happen in the future. By doing so, ‘you’ are unable to focus your attentiveness on how you are experiencing this, the only moment you can actually, i.e. sensately – experience being alive.

The actualism method is aimed at more and more mooring ‘you’, the ‘boat on Lala-river’, to being here, in this very moment of time. It’s not an easy thing to do at first because ‘you’ are so used to not being here – in fact even the idea of being here, and nowhere else, is at first a frightening business. But what ‘you’ can do is nibble away at all the programming – both social and instinctual – that prevents you, the flesh and blood body called No 23, from being here, firmly moored in the utter safety and perfect stillness of this very moment.

‘To have a concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose’ which I find as a statement a bit too radical. But hey, OK that’s how you tick.

It is very common to hear the refrain that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ within the human condition. This understanding that it has all been said and tried before is the cause of a morbid fatalistic despair that feelings of hope never manage to quell. Once I acknowledged that it was obviously useless for me to re-run the old tried and failed solutions it then made sense to me to try something really radical – something that had only been road-tested once before. If that makes me too radical in your eyes, hey, that’s OK with me.

I would agree in its ‘phrasing’ though with : ‘Peters concept of time is neither sensible, nor does it serve any practical purpose’.

And yet because I found having a concept of time neither sensible nor serving any practical purpose, I focussed my awareness on how I am experiencing this moment of time – because I realized that this moment is the only moment I can actually experience. As such I no longer have a concept of time, for me time is a simple and obvious fact.

So thus I find your sensibility with regard to the following statement ‘the only time that can be experienced as an actuality is this very moment’ questionable.

If that means you are leaving the statement open to question, then it sounds good to me. Whenever I ran one of these questions in my head for a while – and there were many such questions that are thrown up in the process of actualism – I would look for an experiential answer and not an intellectual answer. In other words, I would seek an answer in my own experience and not settle for just agreeing with what someone else said because it sounded good, right, appropriate, groovy or whatever.

Hence to make this a little more transparent: What is the discriminating factor/ mechanism by which you are enabled to make a distinction between past and future?

Calendars and clocks.

Iow, how can you know the difference between what actually happened (emotional memory) and what your imaginary projections are?

In order to prise these three separate issues apart, – actual experience, emotional memory and future projections – a practical down-to-earth example may be useful. I will use an example that I have written about in my journal, a time when I was waiting to meet Vineeto –

‘The final straw came as I waited to meet her one evening and she was late. As the time ticked away, so my mind raced away, and after about thirty minutes I was furious. How could she be late? How could anything else, or anyone else, be more important in her life than me? As my fury built and built, as my mind churned over countless possibilities as to why she was late, suddenly I began to see the stupidity of it all. Here I was, comfortably sitting at a seaside café, cool drink in hand, looking at a spectacular sunset on warm summer’s evening. I’m involved in the adventure of a lifetime, I’ve found out more about what it is to be a human being in the last few months than I have in a lifetime, there is this wonderful woman in my life – and I’m being neurotic because she is thirty minutes late! Gradually I came out of it and was able to be where I was, delighting in the balmy evening air and the gaiety of the scene as the last of the beach-goers drifted home. When Vineeto arrived she apologized for being late, and I explained what had happened to me. We had a beach walk, dinner at a nearby restaurant, and tootled off home to bed.’ Peter’s Journal, Love

This is a description of something that actually happened – two people were involved in an event that occurred in a definitive location over a definable period of time in the past. As I have described, at the time this event was happening, ‘I’ had feelings of jealousy raging, and these feelings prevented me from enjoying the sensual delight of what was actually happening at the time. If ‘I’ now had an emotional memory of what happened, ‘I’ would simply be reliving ‘my’ feelings of jealousy in this moment, thereby preventing me from enjoying the sensual delight of being here.

By evoking an emotional memory of having been jealous in the past, ‘I’ re-vive the emotion in this moment and thereby run the danger of imagining situations or events to justify ‘my’ feeling jealous now. Given that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’, ‘I’ therefore exist over time – in other words, ‘I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations.

So ... this is merely a plea for my sensibility not to say sanity with regard to my ‘In my experience this concept of time appeared to be one of the main ingredients from which my social identity was being generated.’ And I begin to suspect that this perception is rather accurate with regard to the overall make up of any social identity.

Indeed, your statement is rather accurate but, if I may suggest, it would be more accurate to say that ‘I’ as a social and ‘me’ as an instinctual identity can only experience this moment conceptually and/or affectively. At this point, it is good to remember that there are three ‘I’s altogether and only one is actual. (see here for reference)

Ie. ‘I must not be too late at school/ work/ appointment/ the airport’, aso. Or ‘How much am I a going to ask/pay for say 1 hour of service’, aso. Imo, if time is not appropriately conceptualized this brings about stress in the system.

And yet you don’t need a concept of time in order not to be late – you simply need a watch and the sense to plan not to be late. Again you don’t need a concept of time to know how much to charge for one hour of service, a watch gives you the time, and market-value usually determines the appropriate rate per hour. And as for stress, having an appropriate concept of time does nothing to eliminate stress because being a thinking ‘I’ and a feeling ‘me’ is inherently a stressful business.

Which brings indeed once more to light; the interesting qualities of this way of conversation. So I’ll put my experience as to the concept of time differently.

• Ground zero? Neither the past nor the future are actual.

That’s a reasonable concept, or working hypothesis. I certainly took it that way when came across it in Richard’s writings. For me it made sense, but then I went looking for my own experiential evidence that this was so.

Reflective contemplation on issues such as this, combined with a pure intent to be happy and harmless, can lead to a direct, unfettered sensual experience of the actuality of this very moment. Such experiences are known as pure consciousness experiences, whereby ‘I’ and ‘my’ concepts, beliefs, theories, imaginations, feelings and passions are temporarily in abeyance for a brief period.

• Only through inference I can conclude that there must have been a past and a future yet to come.

No. Even as an ‘I’, you don’t have to conclude that there was a past. Whilst ‘you’ have mostly emotional memories of the past, the past did in fact exist and there is ample evidence of the fact. I need look no further than the fact that I have received a number of posts from you all dated and timed, that prove that the flesh and blood body called No 23 typed them out and sent them. Now the entity called ‘No 23’ who first started corresponding on this list is not the same ‘No 23’ who is reading these words for, as I take it from your correspondence, ‘No 23 the spiritualist’ seems to be somewhat weakened. This process is what is meant by demolishing one’s own social identity, as bits of your identity literally fall by the wayside as you begin to replace your beliefs with facts.

Again, you don’t need to conclude ‘through inference’ that there is a future yet to come for, barring accident or physical death, you can be reasonably certain that you will awaken tomorrow morning and the day after that, for a number of years yet to come.

• I may have images of the past or the future yet these are nothing more than then the activity of my brain ie memories.

No. You can look at a photograph taken of you in the past and that is an image, but it makes no sense at all to deny that there was an actual flesh and blood body called No 23 existing at the time the photo was taken. This type of conceptual thinking, i.e. thinking abstracted from facts and actuality, is common in spiritual circles and can only lead to a ‘me’ who imagines ‘I’ am real and the past, the physical world and other human beings are but an illusion.

• So ... now seems to be this floating experience in between past and future yet, it all happens HERE.

Indeed. If you start believing that the world of people things and events is but an image, your feet can literally leave the ground and you can feel as though you are floating. Actualism is about getting your feet back on the ground – a radical proposition, I know.

• So ... time is not actual only here is actual what does that mean actual here? Here there cannot be isolation as here stretches out from my small room into the infinity of the universe. I’m here an Animal at heart with yet a brain that calculates a body made of stardust.

No. Only this moment is actual for only this moment can be actually, i.e. sensately, experienced. This is not to deny that past moments did not exist or that there will be future moments to then experience. If you do so you start to trip off into imaging all sorts of things, such as feeling yourself to be timeless, which then leads to feelings of being immortal ... and so on. Pretty soon your head is so far in the clouds that you can never get back down to this very earth where we flesh and blood human beings actually live.

• So ... How can I live without the concept of time? Given that this is more or less from a Darwinian perspective I take it that you’ll enjoy this little poetic eruption.

I seem to have dissected your poem a bit, but then again I was never a fan of poetic imagination.

Actualism ... Let’s make things better.

The wonderful thing about actualism is that making things better by having the pure intent to become happy and harmless is entirely your business – it has nothing at all to do with anyone else. And what a relief that is, for your destiny is entirely in your own hands, and who would have it any other way. You have to earn your freedom from the human condition, nobody can magically give it to or bestow it upon you. If someone else could make you free, you would end up beholden to them – be they a God, Goddess, God-man or God-woman – and being beholden to someone or something is not freedom.

Mr. Reanney –
In order to bring spacetime back into the realm of physics, Hawking is forced to abandon ‘real’ numbers and use ‘imaginary’ ones. Real numbers give a positive quantity when multiplied by themselves; pure imaginary numbers give negative values when multiplied by themselves. The special virtue of imaginary numbers in this context is that they cause the distinction between space and time to disappear. This makes it possible to use Euclidean geometry to build models of the cosmos because, in this representation, time has no privileged status. <snip> Hawking defends the use of imaginary numbers on the grounds that it is ‘merely a mathematical device (or trick) to calculate answers about real space-time’. However, the universe we live in exists in real time. Hawking’s model predicts that in real time, ‘it [the universe] would collapse again into what looks like a singularity in real time. Thus, in a sense, we are still all doomed, even if we keep away from black holes’. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 154

Does that also mean that if somehow we could all manage to avoid living in ‘real’ time and hang out in ‘imaginary’ time we would avoid being ‘doomed’ and avoid the black hole? Having invented black holes – a mathematical supposition given credence by the discovery of some, as yet, unexplained observational irregularities in the vast depths of space, the theoreticians are indeed having a field day. I find it telling that the scientists have to resort to fanciful speculation as they approach ‘nothing’, the subatomic where mass (as in substantially evident) disappears; and when they explore the ‘vast’ – the more distant (as in substantially evident) realms of the infinite universe.

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Well there are a few more quotes so I will just tootle on and finish ...

Mr. Reanney –
As Fred Allen Wolf says in Parallel Universes:

The past, present, and future exist side by side. If we were totally able to ‘marry’ corresponding times each and every moment of our time-bound existences, there would indeed be no sense of time and we would all realize the timeless state, which is taken to be our true or base state of reality by many spiritual practices.

Through mathematics and experiment, we have deduced the existence of a fourth spacetime dimension but we do not experience it as it is. We see it in glimpses, strangely fractured into ever-dissolving, non-dimensional planes called ‘now’.

We know this is less-than-perfect because our reality is locked into fiction – this Dali-esque ‘now you see it, now its gone’ trick-state called the present. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 203

It would seem to me that Mr. Einstein’s greatest contribution to physics is to theoretically propose ‘another’ dimension – space-time – which gave validity to the mystics ‘other’ dimension. Interestingly after the publication of his theory it was Herman Minkowski who offered a geometric picture of this new spacetime and it was only reluctantly that Albert accepted it. On my reading he seemed wary of the many extrapolations that resulted from his theory but by then Fame and Fortune were his for the basking in. Mr. Hawking recently added imaginary time to the space-time dimension and ‘Bingo’, the theoreticians have completed the scenario of the actual being illusionary – both in matter and space, as well as time.

What I found when I came across actualism, was that I was more interested in what happened before I was here and what was going to happen after I was gone – a fascination born of years in the spiritual world with its concept of eternal time and my eternal being.

A bit from my journal about my realizations concerning the utter futility of spiritual philosophy may be useful –

... 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!’ Peter’s Journal ‘Death’

So, I do understand your difficulties on focusing your attention on No 7, here, now and not go searching for the ‘Here and Now’. It is exceedingly difficult to turn one’s brain around, so to speak. The programming is so set, so set in one direction, so used to viewing and experiencing the world in the usual duality of either normal or spiritual that anything else seems inconceivable. It took me months and months of effort, not only of reading but contemplating and investigating the facts for myself.

To No 23: I have decided that anything more ABOUT Peter and Vineeto bores me right now, also. I am going to interact with them elsewhere, else-time.

I take it you are talking of some sort of ‘next lifetime’ interaction, so favoured by many. You surely won’t be meeting me in that great commune in the sky, or on Sirius for that matter.

To No 23: No, their written material will be highly regarded by our children.

This comment really intrigued me. Are you saying that the next generation will be the one who will finally abandon the idea of good and evil spirits roaming the earth, and that the earth will no longer be a place where humans are forever meant to suffer and fight, as some sort of cosmic ‘penal’ colony. That the next generation will finally get around to doing something about the endemic suffering and fighting on the planet.

Why is it always the ‘next’ generation that is going to find the answer as this generation fails yet again to find the solution to the Human Dilemma and inevitably turns to praying to the Gods for salvation and redemption?

I wrote a bit in my journal on what happened to the last generation –

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

And a bit more –

... ‘In my life I have been involved in many revolutionary movements and I had many ideals about changing things. In some thirty years of adult life, I have been involved and concerned with movements for peace; for environmental, political, social and spiritual change. And I have come to see all of them as revolutionary – in other words, going around in circles. I remember watching a TV program about the Hungarian uprising and those that fought and died for freedom. Some twenty years later the Russians simply walked out anyway. I participated in a spiritual revolution with a living Guru deriding the past traditions and the idea of religions only to see him eventually form his very own Religion and become part of the traditional religious warring campus. And the so-called ‘New Age’ of today is really nothing but a return to the Dark Age of spirits, omens, divination, witches and shamans.

And so it has been going on for millennia ... round and round in circles ... revolution after revolution. It is so good to be free of that nonsense and to have found a process that is evolutionary, that actually works. A process that is easy, simple, uncomplicated, describable, direct, and that produces both instant results and an assured evolutionary change for me – becoming actually free of malice and sorrow.’ Peter’s Journal, ‘Peace’

The ‘next’ generation was of no concern to me, I wanted freedom for myself, here, now, on earth – no matter what the cost.

And I ended up becoming the ‘next’ generation anyway ... Cute Hey.

Self-realisation or Enlightenment is a mere delusion (an illusion fabricated out of an illusion) whereby the psychic entity ‘feels’ it is Immortal and Eternal.’

‘Actual Freedom lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to spiritual freedom. It is actual, sensate, tangible, ever-present, delightful, pure and perfect and available to any who is daring enough to free themselves of both the psychological and psychic entities within.

Is your ‘ever-present’ anything like ‘Eternal’?

No, I am only capable of experiencing this moment of being alive as a sensate, reflective flesh and blood human being. This moment is ever present.

I, as this body, did not exist some 50 years ago before the sperm hit the egg, and when I die nothing can continue. My awareness of being alive – consciousness – will cease with this body. This is clearly indicated when I am asleep when consciousness ceases for the period of sleep. Death is the cessation of consciousness. I am mortal, not ‘Eternal’.

It is the physical universe that is eternal and infinite, pure and perfect.

‘You are always given a single moment; you are not given two moments together. If you know the secret of living one moment you know the whole secret of life, because you will always get one moment-and you know how to live it, how to be totally in it.’ Osho

Looks good on the surface – if you don’t think about what he is really saying – but dig in a bit ...

‘You are always given a single moment

I am not given a moment – it is always here. I can either be here in this moment, as this flesh and blood body or ‘I’ can be somewhere else, ‘off’ replaying or rehearsing some scene, worrying about what someone else is thinking, feeling sad, lonely, deep in my ‘inner’ world or cut off altogether in an altered state of consciousness. For ‘I’ am anywhere but here, now.

you are not given two moments together

I guess this is a ‘no-mind’ piece of Wisdom – but even the scientists are running a fantasy about parallel universes and they guess that then you could have two moments. I always see the parallel universes in a stack like a pile of plates on God’s dinner table.

If you know the secret of living one moment you know the whole secret of life, because you will always get one moment

There is this whole secret bit running and the biggest secret is that the ‘Truth that cannot be spoken’. The secret is actually no secret at all – it is that by achieving an altered state of consciousness one gets to feel like God and one imagines oneself to be immortal.

In the actual world there are no mystical secrets – they are seen plainly as the fairy tales they are.

– and you know how to live it, how to be totally in it.’

Yes indeed, there is no grander feeling than to feel like God, to have a feeling of Oneness with it all, one feels as big as the universe. You are so ‘totally in it’ because it is all your own creation. If the physical world is an illusion then you are ‘totally in’ an illusionary moment in an illusionary world. The author is, after all, on record as saying he was an alien on earth and just a visitor.

Me, I am an earthling, made of the same stuff, ageing and mortal. The mystics can never know the actual world.

It’s so good that it is 1999 and serendipitous that I met Richard and got free of all these nonsensical mystical beliefs.

To prove that it is possible to change Human Nature ... That there is – ‘something new under the sun’.

Gee – there’s a lot of words again ... another rave, hey.

All just to say – ‘step out of the real world into the actual world and leave your ‘self’ (and ‘Self’) behind.’

Hence to make this a little more transparent: What is the discriminating factor/ mechanism by which you are enabled to make a distinction between past and future?

Calendars and clocks.

Yet you would not be able to use them sensibly had time not been firmly been integrated as a concept in your system.

No. I was taught how to tell what time of the day it is by looking at the hands of a clock at school. Quite straightforward stuff, like when the little hand points at three and the big hand points at twelve it is 3 o’clock. The same thing with days in the week and months in the year. Nothing conceptual about knowing what time it is at all, it’s all down-to-earth.

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Iow, how can you know the difference between what actually happened (emotional memory) and what your imaginary projections are?

In order to prise these three separate issues apart, – actual experience, emotional memory and future projections – a practical down-to-earth example may be useful. I will use an example that I have written about in my journal, a time when I was waiting to meet Vineeto – <story snipped>

As I have described, at the time this event was happening, ‘I’ had feelings of jealousy raging, and these feelings prevented me from enjoying the sensual delight of what was actually happening at the time. If ‘I’ now had an emotional memory of what happened, ‘I’ would simply be reliving ‘my’ feelings of jealousy in this moment, thereby preventing me from enjoying the sensual delight of being here.

By evoking an emotional memory of having been jealous in the past, ‘I’ re-vive the emotion in this moment and thereby run the danger of imagining situations or events to justify ‘my’ feeling jealous now. Given that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’, ‘I’ therefore exist over time – in other words, ‘I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations.

[I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations.] Ok given that now is the only moment you can experience any reference to future or past (ability to discriminate) can only be arrived upon as a factual instance by appliance of time as a concept (a measure tool) hence I say the discriminating mechanism is the ability to conceptualize time.

A memory of a past event is not a concept of a memory of a past event – it is a memory of a past event. Similarly the reasonable anticipation of a future event, say that I am going to get up in the morning and have breakfast, is an anticipation – not a concept of a reasonable anticipation. To make a concept out of something is to make an idea, a notion, an abstraction, an hypothesis, a theory or an image out of it.

Iow long as I can label an experience as past (memories) this discriminating mechanism is the very labelling of the experience. Otherwise there would be only experience.

And the only moment you can actually experience is this very moment that you are reading these words. You don’t need to have a concept about this experience. You read the words on the screen and they mean something to you. Reading is a sensory experience, it is not a concept. The computer screen is an object made of the stuff of this planet we humans live on, it is not a concept. And the only moment you can actually experience all this is this very moment. If you are sensually experiencing this moment, there is simply no room for conceptualisations or abstractions, let alone past emotional memories or future fearful imaginations.

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Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust