Selected Writings from Peter’s Journal

Time – This Moment, Timelessness and Eternity

‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’ sang John Lennon in 1980. It was a line from a song he wrote for his son, and it’s from a man who had wealth, fame and power. For me, it has a similar ring to it as my father’s advice of ‘it doesn’t matter what you do, be happy’. Why is it that so many people feel, as the clock ticks on, that they are ‘running out of time’, ‘too busy’, ‘don’t have enough time’? Why, as they face the end of their lives, do they think that they have wasted time, wondering where it has gone? Why do people continually dream, work, plan and invent things to do, and then complain of not having enough time?

I remember sharing a house with friends one Christmas, and everyone decided to go off on camping trips for their holidays. Days were spent in busy preparation and off they all went.

I decided, given I already lived in a wonderful beachside town that people were straining to get to for their holidays anyway, why not holiday at home? I had a wonderfully relaxed time; days spent reading, walking to the beach, lunching in town and then home for an afternoon nap in my own bed. Several days later they all arrived back and I watched another busy day of unpacking and cleaning up. I had started to see through a lot of the traditional neurosis about time before I met Richard, but then I decided to really change my life, to rid myself of the neurotic behaviour I could see I was programmed with. Little did I know what the full consequences of that would be! Peter’s Journal, ‘Time’

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, an Altered State of Consciousness, is a denial of death in the sense that the Gurus believe themselves to be in a state of Immortality and Timelessness – a delusion that they are beyond death. In 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 and myth. They identity completely with the Soul, Self, Atman or whatever – a separate entity from the physical body that lives on and cheats death. Thus, even the Enlightened Ones have their place to go to after death – the various Eastern versions of Heaven. Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’

Graveyard

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. Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’

Still, life was sort of sweet enough. The usual thing: get up in the morning, have breakfast and then do whatever ... but the enthusiasm and idealism had definitely waned a bit to be replaced by a subtle resignation and a wee touch of cynicism. It was then that my younger son died and things took a drastic turn. No longer did I have forever, no longer could I just drift along, ‘letting things happen’ to me. My son was dead aged thirteen, and I had outlived my father: I was on borrowed time and still knew nothing about living. At the time I did not appreciate the extent to which this event would change my life. From then on I was to be driven by a relentless intent to find the ‘meaning of life’. In short, it became the most important thing to do with my remaining time ... I could hear the clock ticking relentlessly in my head. And as middle age came on I saw it undeniably in the aging of my body. Peter’s Journal, ‘Spiritual Search’

What my son’s death at such a young age did for me was to intensify the sense of urgency to find the meaning of it all – after all, I saw how short life can actually be. Here I was, my father dead, my son dead; I was still alive, in my early forties, and I was obviously living on borrowed time – as I saw it. And I knew that I was not even really living yet – there was fear, hesitancy, and that feeling of invisible shackles from which I yearned to break free. Peter’s Journal, ‘Introduction’

Acknowledging the fact of death has also had a curious effect on how I experience time. Knowing that death will come, it will just be another event to respond to the moment it occurs. It simply makes no sense to fear a fact – it is how it is, it is a fact. This frees me from the fear that I am running out of time – that I am in a hurry to fit everything in. This is not to be confused with the feeling of intensity that people falsely call ‘being here, being really alive’, a feeling which is really fuelled by the fear of death. For some people this intensity is induced by a near-death experience, when they see life as ‘precious’ and not to be wasted on ‘petty things’.

Nor am I talking about the spiritual concept of ‘being here’. I remember being visited recently by a friend who has spent years vigilantly on the spiritual path, and he talked about ‘being here’. It was very strange, as I experienced him as being ‘somewhere else’, as though stoned. It was then that I fully understood that Enlightenment is actually an ‘Altered State of Consciousness’, a ‘getting out of it’, and an attempt, by a fanciful flight of imagination, to defy the actuality of death by denying or transcending the fact of mortal earthly life. Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’

Being free of the belief in an after-life, I am now free to actually be here, fully acknowledging the fact that before the sperm hit the egg I wasn’t here, and when this body dies, I die, since I am this body. What else could I be? A walk-in, like Rajneesh? Having no belief in a past or future life enabled me to tackle the issue of my behaviour, my actions, my feelings and emotions, and, of course, my happiness, right now. I have no second-chances at living, this is it, so I have to be the best I can be now. This understanding was crucial in order to be able to fully embrace the responsibility I had to free myself of the psychological and psychic entity and the ensuing malice and sorrow that was shackling my enjoyment of life. It didn’t allow me any room for denial, bargaining or accepting a second-rate life. I simply could no longer postpone or avoid. It made the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ so vitally intense to me and meant that the process of becoming free was guaranteed of success.

Success in being free means, essentially, a life led without the fear of death. No psychological or psychic fear of death, no feeling of running out of time, no spiritual belief in an after-life or ‘other-world’, distract me from fully living this moment of time. With no ‘sense of continuity’ – as Vineeto calls it – each moment is fresh, and I am doing what I am doing for the first time. This does not deny the fact that what I do is largely repetitive. I get up in the morning, have breakfast and do whatever I do and then go to bed at night-time – exactly as I have done every day for forty-nine years. Frankly, the idea of immortality appalls me – I think the present arrangement is perfect and I see the attempts of human beings to alter it, or to try to ‘cheat’ it, as plain silly. I desire no ‘remote control’ to fast-forward time, slow it down, replay it, or ‘change channels’. I am firmly and safely located in time, in this moment, the only moment I can experience, doing whatever is happening now. Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’

I am finally free to be an autonomous human being, happy and harmless, delighting in being alive. I simply wasn’t here before I was born. And I simply won’t be here (or anywhere else) after I die. I will be like the parrot in John Cleese’s sketch: ‘dead, extinct, finito, kaput, stuffed, no more, finished, obliterated’.

Exactly as my father, my son, my mother, Rajneesh, Krishnamurti, Jesus, Buddha, and all the billions who have been on this earth before me.

I had lived in fear of death and tried to avoid death and the suffering of life by ‘getting out of it’ spiritually. But in the end, by fully acknowledging the fact of death, and rejecting belief – finding out the facts for myself – I am now free of the psychological fear of death, actually free.

To acknowledge the fact of death is an essential prerequisite to begin the journey to becoming free of the Human Condition of malice and sorrow. It meant that I could no longer turn away from the facts of my mortal life in this actual physical world.

A genuine freedom from the Human Condition has to be an actual freedom, easily and readily liveable by anyone, in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are, and not some imaginary escape or transcendence into a ‘spiritual world’ peopled with ‘higher-evolved’ ethereal beings.

Actual Freedom is, per definition, both non-spiritual and down-to-earth, and as such, is a both a freedom from the need to believe in an after-life and an authentic freedom from the fear of death. Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’

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, drink in hand, looking at a spectacular sunset on a 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 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 apologised for being late, and I explained what had happened to me. We had a beach walk, dinner at a nearby restaurant, and tootled home to bed. Peter’s Journal, ‘Love’

What a delight it is to live with a woman in easy companionship, where I can simply be myself with no pretence, no effort, no compromises, no bargains, no bonds. I am with her because I enjoy her company in all the activities we do together; just in her ‘being around’. It is delightful to have her as a companion. ‘It’s good you’re here’ is our favourite expression to each other. People around think that we are in love (little do they know!), and that it will wear off, as it always does; or that we are ‘soul mates’, having by some miracle found the ‘right one’. What we experience in our companionship is the direct result of mutual hard-won effort and not of some hand of fate or Karma. It is silly to worry whether this will last forever or that, given a change in circumstances, either of us may have a different companion at some future time. But I live with her as though it will be forever; totally, with no doubt – one hundred percent! Peter’s Journal, ‘Living Together’

As the ultimate goal in my life has been to find happiness, it has been easy to place work in its appropriate context. For me work is an exchange of time and labour for tokens with which to purchase the requisites for a pleasurable life. The remaining time I then organised in such a way as to devote the maximum to studying and understanding what it is to be a human being. Peter’s Journal, ‘Living Together’

Richard had got himself Enlightened some seventeen years before by an intensive method aimed at finding the state he had experienced some time earlier in a ‘peak experience’. He achieved an altered state of consciousness complete with feelings of Oneness and Timelessness, Love for all, Compassion, and a drive to spread his Message. What in fact he had been aiming for was what he had experienced previously – a direct experience of the purity and perfection of the physical universe, but what he had attained he eventually called ‘Absolute Freedom’ – an extraordinary state of bliss and self-aggrandisement. He became at one with God or the ‘Absolute’, as he named it. As he began to talk to people they told him that what he was saying was very like what the spiritual Masters were saying, and he then discovered that he was in a state known in the East as Enlightenment. Despite the extraordinary wonderful feelings, a few doubts remained simmering beneath the surface: why was this state different to what he had aimed for, why was he driven to save mankind, why did he feel timeless when the clock still ticked away? Peter’s Journal, ‘God’

The essential method was to undertake a total investigation into anything that was preventing me from being happy now – after all, the point of living is to be happy now, not at some time in the future, or at some time in the past. The question to ask myself was, ‘How do I experience this moment of being alive?’ Now is, after all, the only time I can experience being happy. Any emotion such as anger, frustration or boredom that is preventing my happiness now, has to be traced back to its cause – the exact incident, thought, expectation or disappointment. At the root of this emotion is inevitably found a belief or an instinct. The ruthless challenging, exposing and understanding of these beliefs and instincts actually weakens their influence on my thoughts and behaviour. The process, if followed diligently and obsessively, will ultimately cause them to disappear completely. The idea, of course, being to eliminate the cause of my unhappiness, so that I can experience life at the optimum, here, now. Peter’s Journal, ‘Introduction’

The essential difference is that Richard’s method concentrates all of the attention on this moment in time, this actual moment now. The whole emphasis is on how am I experiencing myself NOW? This has the effect of eliminating the future as something to worry about, and the inevitable postponement that it brings. The ‘there’s always tomorrow’, ‘one day I will...’, or the spiritual ‘in my next lifetime’ are simply a cop out. By bringing my attention to the fact that this is my only moment of being alive, and that if I was happy ten minutes ago and I’m not happy now, the fact is: I’m not happy now. So what is the cause, the source? I don’t deny that I didn’t have a goal and that this goal was in the future – to be happy and harmless 24hrs. a day, every day. However, my immediate aim was to be happy now, in this very moment of being alive! But it does take time to work through each of the beliefs and instincts, to thoroughly investigate them. I always considered it a nonsense to delude myself with spiritual belief that I was already Enlightened, ‘That’ or perfect, when I knew exactly how I was inside and how I acted. It always seemed as though I was kidding myself that I was all right when, if I was honest with myself, I knew I wasn’t.

But then the day came when, on waking up in the morning, I knew that I would have a perfect day, and that this perfection required no effort from my side. Perfection is the very nature of things, the milieu of it all in the actual world. The perfect days kept coming until I knew with confidence that this was how it was to be from then on. And then I knew ‘I’ was redundant, no longer required, obsolete, a nuisance, with my bleatings, objections and doubts. It was time to finish, to retire and die, but with a sense of a life well lived. This confidence also led me to want to write, to sort out the sense I had made of life, while it was opportune. Peter’s Journal, ‘Time’

The second thing that kept me going was my intent. I wanted to live as I had experienced living the peak experience. I had arranged my life in such a way that I could devote almost the whole of my time to this investigation, whether being with Richard and Devika, Vineeto, or taking the time to contemplate by myself. I was also reading prolifically to investigate what was the current wisdom on a wide range of subjects relating to the Human Condition. I soon found myself obsessed, so fascinating was it to discover, for myself, exactly what it is to be a human being. Therapy had been like fiddling with the parts, rearranging the furniture to suit the particular beliefs of the therapist. Here I was taking the whole package apart – stripping away and delving deeper than I ever had before.

The third was confidence. What gave me the confidence to continue was my experience that this method actually worked. Every time I looked into a belief and saw that it was only a belief, not a fact, it would soon be demonstrated in my life that I was free of it. I was indeed becoming free, actually, bit by bit – my life was indeed ‘getting better all the time’ (as the Beatles sang). This progress made the spiritual years seem like kindergarten. My relationship with Vineeto had rapidly gone past the point of previous failures and was sailing into untroubled waters. Despite the occasional fear attacks, I was experiencing life as happier, less neurotic, less emotional and much stiller. It actually worked as it went – and, magically, the next thing to look at popped up at the right time. Always the aim is to be happy now, not in some future time. Of course as this succeeded, I simply raised the stakes – what about experiencing life as perfect for twenty-four hours a day, every day? Thrilling stuff indeed! Peter’s Journal, ‘God’

So my retirement in the last twelve months was really a retirement from life, the act of living, with all its effort, emotions and worries. A retirement from ‘being’, from having a purpose and a continuity, from having a psychological and psychic entity in me that is malicious and sorrowful. Then I, this body, is simply doing what is happening, which right now happens to be typing these words. I know that at some time today Vineeto will go off to work, I will eat, type whatever words come, laze around and eventually go to bed. I know that later on, if I’m still alive, I soon will have to work to earn some money, but beyond that there are no plans, no desires, no expectations, except knowing that whatever happens will be perfect.

Of course, I have preferences and also practical things to do, but I will simply be doing them when I’m doing them; they require little, if any, planning. This has nothing to do with the spiritual ‘being in the moment’ or ‘being here’, which is an attempt to hold on to an inner state of bliss, which in turn involves practising a constant detachment from the physical world, the body and the emotions.

To attempt to bring one’s meditation into the marketplace is to attempt the impossible. As I know from my experience meditation is an artificially contrived, imaginary state of bliss that is notoriously fickle and temporary. Only very rarely does it lead to a more or less permanent altered state of consciousness, but then the real trouble begins as one begins to lose all touch with the actual, sensual world. Peter’s Journal, ‘Time’

By not being, or becoming, or having come from somewhere, or going somewhere, I as this body, am safely and firmly located in time. I am never out of time. I am never busy or not busy. l always have enough time because it is right here, this very moment of being alive, doing what is happening now. This moment is the only time I can experience; the past is nothing but a memory stored in the brain cells, only some of which I can recall if required. And the future hasn’t happened yet, and when it comes it will be this moment. Time is but a continual stream of moments and I, as this body, did not exist in this stream forty-nine years ago, and when I die I will cease to exist in this stream.

Living this as an actuality leaves no room for the ‘self’, that identity who had a past and a future. By doing what is happening in this moment, ‘I’ cease to exist, for my awareness is involved fully in what is happening, in this case typing these words, feeling the cooling breeze on my legs and occasionally being aware of traffic and bird calls outside. Having 360 degree vision, as Richard puts it, within which I am able to focus my attention on whatever is appropriate. It is all so eminently effortless but, as I discovered, it does take time to get used to living this way. There was a ‘can it be this easy, this simple, this lazy, this effortless, this good, this perfect?’ It goes totally against the ideas of struggle, effort, achievement, being creative or useful.

I now see everyone else as wasting time by avoiding this very moment by living with their past, usually sad memories, or by dreaming and planning their future in a futile attempt to give purpose or meaning to their lives. They are all avoiding or missing out on the thrill of experiencing this moment of being alive as a sensate human being.

The method Richard devised to eliminate the ‘self’ – malice and sorrow – is flawless and ruthlessly effective. If my attention or awareness is constantly focused on ‘How I am experiencing this moment of being alive?’, there is simply no room for a past or future, a sense of continuity. There is no room for feelings or emotions or for ‘going inside’ as a way of avoiding and withdrawing. There is simply no room for the ‘self’. Practised assiduously, the psychological and psychic entity actually withers and will eventually die, as does anything starved of nourishment or sustenance.

Then ‘what I am’ emerges, I as this body, the one that was here anyway, the one that had been struggling at the shackles for freedom. Fresh each moment ... again and again and again.

I have now discovered the meaning of life. Peter’s Journal, ‘Time’

It is now time for an evolutionary change that will simply make the past beliefs and animal instincts not only archaic and redundant but silly. The way is now open for a new species of human beings to supersede the old. The method to achieve this is simple, direct and straightforward; the results immediate, actual and apparent. You actually change yourself. When you are ready to give up on the idea that there is ‘someone’ or ‘something’ else that is going to fix you up, then you are ready and able to do it yourself. As it begins to work it becomes obvious that no-one else could do it anyway. A confidence gathers, soon an obsession takes over and it quickly becomes the adventure of a lifetime. Peter’s Journal, ‘Evolution’

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. It is now possible to change Human Nature. There is now a cure available for the disease called the Human Condition – for those who want to be free of it. Peter’s Journal, ‘Evolution’

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. Peter’s Journal, ‘Evolution’

In my life I simply exchange a bit of time, working for someone else, for some tokens called money, which I then exchange to rent a comfortable flat, for food, clothes, and the surprising little else I actually need to enjoy life. My hunting and harvesting is done with a trolley in the local air-conditioned supermarket and takes me thirty minutes a week. Humans, at least where I live, have organised an amazingly effective administrative, legal and commercial system that, combined with my sensible actions, serves to provide a safe and wonderfully comfortable life for me. Every pleasure I need in life is located in this flat or within walking distance.

So much pleasure that Vineeto and I sometimes have to run a little schedule to decide which pleasure next – sex, food, play on the computer, watch some TV, a walk...? One has to be wary of ‘pleasure stress’ when this actual world of delight and physical pleasure is revealed. Hedonism really – and the word has such a bad press in the real world of suffering! This is not to deny that I could be confronted with danger or indeed ill health at some time, but then I will just respond appropriately at the time. It is truly amazing that I now actually experience the planet as a safe and delightful place in which to live, while all around live in fear and aggression.

An evolutionary change is now beginning to happen in that a new species of human beings is emerging on the planet. Human beings actually free of fear and aggression – actually free of the Human Condition. I propose an appropriate name for this species would be ‘Homo Delightus’. Given that this evolutionary change happens in the brain, a re-wiring if you like, the only one who can begin to cause this to happen is me. And it is now available to whoever wants to make the effort to become happy and harmless. Peter’s Journal, ‘Evolution’

© The Actual Freedom Trust