Selected Writings from Peter’s Journal

on Affective Feelings ~ Emotions and Calentures

I find myself, these days, both happy and harmless in that sorrow and malice have disappeared from my life. Gone now is the continuous neurosis of the relentless self-concerned thoughts spinning in my head and the accompanying churning emotions and feelings. A calm stillness pervades within and without – it is now a delight to be alive. And I have also achieved what was a driving ambition since ‘adulthood’: I am now experiencing living with a woman in complete peace, harmony and equity with its accompanying sexual delight – the icing on the cake, if you like. I can now look back on a life well lived, complete in itself, and free of any emotional scars as I troll through my memories. Peter’s Journal, ‘Foreword’

I vividly remember my reactions when I was first told of my son’s death. A woman I knew, who was involved in the ashram organisation, came up to me as I sat at the table and said she had something to tell me. ‘Your son has been killed in an accident.’ Immediately a wave of grief engulfed me, as though it saturated my body. I began to cry, so deeply that it really did feel as though I would sob my heart out. After what must have been only a few minutes, I then remember a deep feeling of loss – ‘I won’t ever see him again, he won’t be around in my life – and I will miss him!’ The crying continued for a few more minutes and then a numbness came over me which was to last for a few hours until I became involved in the practical things that needed to be organised – contacting his mother, organising travel, etc. This intense wave of grief was to return several times later in the day, but I recall thinking how calmly I was doing whatever was necessary. There was still a deep feeling of loss that he would not be in my life any more, that he would actually not be around any more. What was evident, even then, was that a large part of the grief I felt was really the fear that death had struck so close to me! That one day I, too, would die.

I was not interested in the details of his death at all, as any questioning would only involve guilt and blame, and the deep feeling of loss was already enough for everyone. I found myself coming back, again and again, to the fact that he was simply not around any more. Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’

It was the beginning of getting down and getting dirty to look unabashedly at all the emotions, feelings and instinctual passions that arise between men and women. To talk about and thoroughly investigate love, jealousy, dependency, sex, authority, power, gender roles, etc. without any conflict or battle. Our investigation became an exploration of the Human Condition and how it was manifest in a male body and how it was manifest in a female body. We became fascinated with finding and analysing the differences rather than continuing to blindly and stubbornly defend them. Which of these differences were merely socially imprinted, which were instinctually programmed, and which, if any, were genuine? This investigation and fascination proved to be the beginning of the end of conflict, and this was despite the fact that at many times the findings were uncomfortable, confronting, disorienting, bewildering, and at times appalling. ...

This is indeed a radically different approach to therapy, where one skates around on the surface and ‘releases’ and ‘expresses’ any emotions in order to feel better afterwards. ‘Venting’, as it is currently called in America. Or the spiritual approach of ‘they are only emotions and they are not the real Me’. In my life it has only been when I have deeply experienced, investigated and understood my emotions and feelings that I have been able to begin to become free of them. And of course to fully understand that the root of all emotion is malice and sorrow is devastating, to say the least. To see my precious emotions and feelings as nothing more than the bleating of the lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning self – me. Peter’s Journal, ‘Living Together’

The layer of programming beneath the social identity is the instinctual self – who we ‘feel’ we are, consisting of a primitive sense of self and the survival instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, instilled by blind nature to ensure the survival of the species. This instinctual programming has been held as inviolable and unalterable, and, as such, has remained un-investigated up until now. The only superficial ‘tinkering’ that has been undertaken to date has been to emphasise the so-called ‘good’ instincts of nurture and desire and repress the ‘bad’ instincts of fear and aggression. The social application of morals and ethics provides the ‘carrot and stick’, but police, laws and armies are ultimately required to keep the instinctual passions in check. The whole of our supposedly civilised world is still, at the very core, based on the suppression and control of these primitive instincts. When this veneer of suppression or control substantially breaks down we have riots, wars, anarchy and genocide resulting. Peter’s Journal, ‘Living Together’

One of the prime reasons I used to have for wanting to be with a woman was the feeling of emotional support, someone to be with to ‘help me make it through the night’, as the popular song goes. I was actually seeking an antidote to living in this sorrowful world, as I experienced it then. But in fact, whenever I was really in the pits or emotionally needy, a curious thing happened: the woman would lose respect for me or regard me as a wimp. The same would happen to me when the woman was needy.

Eventually I came to the realisation that we are actually on our own in the world, and what a good thing that is! I saw that demanding emotional support from another was a lot like being in a three-legged race as a kid. At school sport days we would have races where you put your arms around your partner’s shoulder, tie your adjoining legs together and hobble along in a race against others. That we should look to each other for emotional support actually handicaps both of us, trapping us forever in mutual misery and sorrow. Ultimately we could reject love by regarding it as supporting the ‘self ‘or the Human Condition – the very thing that both of us sought freedom from. Peter’s Journal, ‘Love’

It was extraordinarily freeing to no longer be led around by my dick, to no longer revert to fantasy and imagination, to no longer eye off other women. And I am free of the seductive power of women, that ultimate power that women exert over men. Of course, it was not merely an intellectual understanding and it translated gradually over the months into an actual free enjoyment of sex with Vineeto. With fear, guilt, imagination and blind nature no longer present, the physical act of sex reveals its delights – with a real woman, lustily sexual, eyes open, actual, delicious, tactile, sensual, immediate, body-tingling pleasure.

The actual physical pleasure of sex revealed was to far exceed the imaginative and fantasy world of sex I had previously lived in. For Vineeto, the investigation was into the female conditioning, and sex without love proved quite daunting. All of the religious morals and society’s values condemn a woman who enjoys sex as a whore, a slut: so guilt and shame were emotions to be faced on our journey. If she lifted the lid of restraint and repression, would she run amok? No. What we discovered was – surprise! surprise! – that we are equally sexual human beings. We found no essential difference in our libido, our enjoyment, our orgasms and our delight at the whole sexual experience.

Digging into the female sexual instincts also proved illuminating. Although Vineeto had largely come to terms with the desire to have children and had been sterilised when quite young, the instinctual behaviour still continued. We contemplated the fact that blind nature has equipped the female of the species with an instinct to procreate. This means she needs to attract a man to impregnate her, and preferably a physically strong one, in order to then protect her and the offspring. Then comes the need to keep the man around to provide food, shelter and defence. To accomplish this, being physically weaker in general, women had to develop what is known as feminine guile – a series of emotions, games, seductions, ploys, etc. Peter’s Journal, ‘Sex’

I also reached a stage where I felt torn apart, as though there were two of me inside. One who believed in the spiritual world – the world of spirits – and was hanging on to it for dear life, and the other me that was simply this body with its physical senses, a delicious calmness and a sense of wellbeing that had replaced the neurosis and swirling roller-coaster of emotions. I was split apart, and it felt like past and future – the person I had been and the ‘whatever I was becoming’ – as layers were falling off me.

But despite all the facts I was still reluctant to completely let go of God. And the reason was becoming glaringly obvious to me, not just a theoretical understanding. I knew what it meant by now. Believing in God, or some Thing, or some Energy meant that I had always abdicated the responsibility of how I was as a human being and therefore would never take the necessary steps to fix myself up. I trusted or hoped that someone or something else would do it one day. If there was no God, then the responsibility was mine. Nobody can fix me up but me. Of course!

The feeling of being a split person then became apparent and useful. I knew that the trouble lay in the psychological and psychic 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’

The transition from the emotional, feeling self to the free functioning of apperception eventually produces a radical mutation, and requires a pure intent firmly based on the peak experience. Ridding oneself of emotions and feelings is a shocking concept to human beings, anathema to what we regard as our very human-ness. But therein lies the cure to the disease of the Human Condition for those courageous enough to face the illusionary demons and dragons on the way. What I found happening was that as ‘I’ became thinner and was less in the way, an innate intelligence or awareness became obvious as functioning in my brain.

A common sense was operating that made any morals, ethics, or any need to believe anyone else, simply redundant. I came to a sort of delicious halfway point where I found I was not doing ‘the clean-up’ but, rather, it was happening to me. The right circumstances seemed to occur – an ease, a rush, as though I was on a kid’s slide, and all I had to do was let go and stop resisting ... and then whoosh, I would become free of the psychological and psychic entity. It appeared as though I could at last let go of the burden of being ‘me’ – the pretence, the trying, the struggle, the effort – and could just relax into being the actual me: not who I am, but what I am. Not to become some super-ego inflated ‘Man of God’, but the me as this flesh and blood body who has been there all along; the one who was searching for a way out of the madhouse he was in; the one who knew he was similarly inflicted as the other inmates and was searching for a cure. From then on I had no more doubt that I was becoming free of this psychological and psychic entity inside myself. Peter’s Journal, ‘Intelligence’

The aim was to bring myself out of my inner world of the psyche into the actual world of my senses – to become fully engaged in the actual world. It takes constant effort and vigilance at the start not to be sucked back into misery and sorrow, not to resort to malice.

The usual constant interacting with other similarly afflicted people creates a common ‘psychic world’ of fear, malice and sorrow as everyone battles it out for survival. It all, of course, simply happens in the imagination. This world appears to be real because of the commonly shared emotions and feelings, but it is not actual, factual. Many people I know are constant travellers in this ‘psychic world’ and have developed quite an expertise in interpreting the many and varied highways and byways. Therapists, astrologers, psychic readers and mediums are the experts in this world with the spiritual teachers as the indisputable Masters.

I simply stopped believing (or trusting) what everyone else told me was right or good or real and used ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive now?’ as my guide. The thread that holds it together is the knowledge of the peak experiences, when I know and experience everything as perfect. Everything really is and always has been perfect except for the churning self-centred thoughts and resulting feelings and emotions. It is as though the psychological and psychic entity creates a film or skin over every thing I see, feel, hear, taste and smell. This reminds me of the similar experience of the feeling of ‘shackles’ on me that prevented my freedom. Those shackles are real in the ‘psychic world’ but, as I have discovered, they are not actual. When I eliminate the ‘psyche’ or ‘self’ I become free of the ‘psychic world’ at the same time – free of those shackles I had experienced way, way back when I stood in front of my son’s coffin. Peter’s Journal, ‘Intelligence’

The fear that I faced at the start of this process of ridding myself of a psychic entity, and on the way through was psychic fear – fear that was present in my psyche. It is the very same fear that ruled my every action and thought for most of my life. The: ‘what does that person think of me?’, ‘what am I going to do next?’, ‘what if something goes wrong?’ – the instinct of fear I was born with. The fear we transform into doubt, and more doubt. I remember calling it the ‘what if’ syndrome at some point. In the face of it the most usual reaction is to freeze – not do anything.

I saw it as a bit like when you drive along a country road and a rabbit appears on the road. Blinded by the headlights he freezes, and splat – dead rabbit. The only difference for me when I met Richard was that wobbling around in doubt or freezing in fear meant simply more of the same – prolonging my ‘normal’ life of suffering and confusion. The suffering of knowing that something was seriously wrong in my life but staunchly denying it out of pride, or hoping that the latest guru or belief would work, when deep inside I had already seen it wouldn’t work. The confusion I was in at the time was because I had seen ‘behind the curtain’ of the spiritual world. I had seen the Gurus for what they were, and I had started to see that it was all the same ‘old time religion’. The facts didn’t gel with the beliefs and there was a certain discord; a ‘something’s not quite right’ – not that I knew what it was at the time.

So when I met Richard I found myself saying ‘I’ll give this a try, and I’ll make it the most important thing in my life’. That, as I look back, was my innate intelligence operating – the ‘if it doesn’t work, throw it out and find something that does’ or ‘don’t just freeze in the headlights’. Common sense, really. It wasn’t courage – it was common sense. I also had to retrieve my will and not ‘surrender’, leaving it up to Someone else or Existence – some imaginary roll of the cosmic dice. ‘Leaving it up to Existence’ is to accept being malicious and sorrowful – the dice are in fact loaded that way. Peter’s Journal, ‘Fear’

So the achievements of Cro Magnon are indeed extraordinary but obviously we are still trapped by the primitive behaviour patterns and emotional responses of our ancestors, the very people whose ‘Wisdom’ we hold in awe and reverence. And nowadays the more ancient, the greater the wisdom is thought to be. We are still cavemen and women with their same primitive beliefs and instincts, but now we live in comfort and, in most cases, safety. Our knowledge of the physical world, and access to and ability to process information, has resulted in an astounding quantum leap forward that has largely occurred this century.

These times bear no resemblance to the times of Plato, Socrates or Buddha and, as such, their values and opinions have absolutely no relevance now. It then became blindingly obvious to me that the past could hold no solutions. And all the revolutions trying to find ‘new’ solutions to violence and misery are simply re-runs of the past failed attempts, doomed to run their cycles of failure.

In Richard’s words: ‘The tried and true is nothing but the tried and failed.’ And the excuse that the solutions are right and it’s just the people who are at fault I now see for what it is: just another excuse and a debilitating one at that. It is understandable that when Cro was in his cave, it was essential for his survival that he fought and killed the others of his species for his territory, his food, his women and his children. When a sufficient group gathered together, tribal laws, customs and authority needed to be established. The sun, moon, stars and elements would have been held in fear and awe. As such they were talked to, appeased, soothed and worshipped.

I would guess that the concept of Gods with their subsequent wrath and benevolence was soon introduced to give power to the shamans and witches. But in my life the facts are that I haven’t found it necessary to fight for food, to capture and rape women, to protect my children by using violence, to be part of one group for protection and to fight another group for territory or sport. This behaviour is simply becoming redundant in most parts of the world now. Peter’s Journal, ‘Evolution’

I no longer run emotions or feelings like sympathy, empathy, love, compassion any more – they are a failed cop out, a film I used to put over things to avoid seeing the actuality of my behaviour, and of doing something about it. Now that I know there is an alternative that works, and that malice and sorrow is optional for people, I regard those who reject this alternative as suffering needlessly and inflicting suffering on others needlessly. One of my prime motives has been that I saw my very interactions with other people as causing pain and suffering in them, even when I was being ‘good’ and ‘loving.’ To suffer myself is one thing – to inflict it on others is malice.

I cared enough to eliminate my selfish malice and sorrow and I will stand no nonsense from others about not being ‘caring’; when what they really mean is not being ‘loving’. Like Richard, I’ll stick my head above the parapet and say, ‘All you have to do is get rid of your ‘self’ entirely, and then you will enjoy unparalleled actual peace for yourself twenty four hours a day, every day.’ And as more and more people care enough, peace will gradually spread through the world like a chain letter. However, I am under no illusion that most people will keep with the ‘tried and failed’, leading a dull second-rate life of trying to repress their emotions, of being as good as they can. And yet others will continue the futile aim of transcending their emotions with meditation, right thinking, and other spirit-ual devices. Most will indeed ‘turn away’ and peace may well take a few generations to establish but at last it is actually possible for those who want it. Peter’s Journal, ‘Peace’

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

© The Actual Freedom Trust