If you get a chance I would like your opinion on this unusual audio programme by my good friend Fintan Dunne. http://breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1647

Your good friend Fintan Dunne has a nice sonorous voice but the content of his dissertation is deeply steeped in mysticism and metaphysics. Here are a few things I wrote down from what I heard –

• ‘We are the God collectively …’
• ‘Sleep is a mini-death’ (and we will wake up after physical death just like after sleep)
• ‘The personal identity is preserved (after death)’
• ‘The natural projector that produces the holographic image that we experience as the world around us …’
• ‘We are part of the supermind …’

His belief in life after death is based on his belief in something that is non-physical, non-tangible, ephemeral and non-actual (like God, super mind, an immortal non-physical personal identity).

In a ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience you come to understand that anything supernatural and metaphysical is solely born of the feverish imagination of human beings only, based on our fear of death and our desire for immortality in some form or other – it has no existence outside of the human mind. To use Fintan’s words – in a PCE ‘the natural projector that produces the holographic image that we experience as the world around us’ temporarily stops functioning and stops producing those affective images of the world around us, stops interpreting, imagining and repressing. Then these eyes can directly experience the world around me, these ears can hear the unmitigated sounds around me, this nose experiences the smells in the air without interference from ‘my’ objections or desires, the skin directly enjoys the sensation of warmth or cold, wind or touch and so on. The ‘projector’ is turned off and with it any ‘holographic image’, psychic perception or affective interpretation … in a PCE ‘I’ don’t interfere at all with the direct experiencing of the actual world. It is a wonder-ful, amazing, delightful and utterly fearless way of experiencing the world we live in.

How do objectively know that there is no life after death?

Experientially.

In a ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience the ‘self’ goes temporarily in abeyance, leaving this actual flesh-and-blood body free to delight in being alive. In an actual freedom the ‘self’ has gone extinct – and cannot be revived even if one tried.

The belief in a life after death is based on the belief of a soul that survives physical death – whereas I know from many pure consciousness experiences that this soul, the ‘self’, ‘me’, is something that not only can go in abeyance while I am still alive but something that can be extirpated while this body is still alive. It became obvious to me that such an imaginary ‘thing’ that does not exist in actuality can not possibly survive physical death when it can even disappear before physical death.

I remember Vineeto saying she is ‘100% certain’ that there is no God or afterlife. I remember thinking then (and still basically thinking the same thing) that 1) it is impossible to ‘100%’ prove a negative. Of course I don’t believe in Gnomes or trolls (internet trolls are a fact of course and as an actualist I don’t consciously engage in any kind of believing), but that does not ‘100% prove’ that they do not exist. It is of course very improbable that Trolls or a God exists. Don’t get me wrong, I find the notion of believing in God, and afterlife, or any spiritual belief to be unobjective, nonfactual, and a silly waste of one’s precious time. I understand that the notion of anything apart from this physical universe is unconceivable in a PCE, but that still does not seem to warrant Vineeto’s ‘100% certainty’ argument (which seems strangely fundamentalistic in the manner of fundamentalist Christianity to me).

I see that you have addressed your question to Richard but as you have mentioned me, I’ll respond as well.

In one of my early discussions with Richard I asked him: ‘How do you know for sure that there is no life after death?’ His answer was simple and straightforward. He said something along the lines of ‘there is nothing (no entity) inside this body that could survive physical death, because there is only this flesh-and-blood body’. In an instant I could see that what he said made sense.

As a then-spiritualist I had left the option open that ‘something’ could survive physical death but that ‘something’ that I imagined would survive was clearly some aspect of the entity inside and separate from the physical body – someone or something I called soul, Presence, spirit, ‘Being’, or whatever. I never had any doubt that my physical body is mortal and yet all spiritual teaching has it that ‘you are not the body’ because the body is only a temporary abode, they maintain that ‘who you really are is a consciousness separate from the body’, a consciousness that is part of, or ‘at one with’, the ‘Universal Consciousness’ and which can unite with the universal Consciousness either before or after death.

Consequently when Richard told me that there was no entity inside his body, I knew that this was the end of my hope for ‘life’ after death. If one can get rid of one’s entity in toto before death, it sure ain’t something that survives death.

Given that the topic of the thread is about 100% certainty, to abandon hope in an afterlife is equally not enough to deliver 100% certainty. When I met Richard, even though I was a spiritualist at the time, I had a somewhat agnostic stance in regards to a life after death – I thought that it did not matter much either way. Yet only when I experienced in a PCE that ‘I’ as ‘being’ do not exist in actuality – and therefore this ‘being’ is nothing at all that would survive the death of this body as an actuality – did I know with 100% certainty that any investment in a life after death is definitely a waste of time and energy.

To my surprise it turned out to be an enormous relief to finally and irrevocably abandon any notion of a ‘bank account in heaven’ as I put it at the time, i.e. accumulating kudos for karma, God, the value of my soul, an imaginary accrual of good behaviour and right beliefs for an invisible judge. I discovered that the deepest seated beliefs were the ones I had taken on board as a child – the Christian heaven and hell, and although I was not aware at the time, they were only transformed into more ephemeral religious /spiritual/ mystical/ philosophical beliefs of Eastern persuasion.

Only by unreservedly abandoning all belief in non-material realms was I able to unreservedly say yes to being here in this physical universe.

*

Why did I take Richard’s report that there is no alien entity inside his body at face value?

It was obvious to me that he genuinely experiences what he reports. There is no contradiction in his body language, no obfuscation in his words, no evasion of delicate topics, and not a skerrick of resentment, anger, sadness or condescendence. Within a few meetings I could determine that what Richard said made a lot of sense, whatever topic he talked about, which cannot be said about any of the enlightened people I had met, and I had met quite a few in my time. The spiritual gurus rely on their magnetic energy of Love and Compassion, their authoritative Wisdom, their Ancient metaphysical knowledge while Richard had none of these affective properties. Instead of the affective power play I knew so well from the spiritual gurus, Richard encouraged me to utilize my own common sense and native intelligence in order to assess his reports.

The other thing that gave credence to his reports was that Richard said he had been enlightened himself and managed to get out of it, in other words he could give a personal-experience-insight into the whole realm of spiritual enlightenment. As such I could easily see that he knew far more about the ins and outs of enlightenment than any master or wannabe I had ever met or read for that matter.

As for my belief in God, it fell apart in bit and pieces and I have written about it on various occasions –

Finally one evening, when talking and musing about the universe, I fully comprehended that this physical universe is actually infinite. The universe being without boundaries or an edge means that it is impossible, practically, for God to exist. In order to have created the universe or to be in control of it God would have to exist outside of it – and there is no outside! This insight hit me like a thunderbolt. My fear of God and of his representatives collapsed and lost its very substance by this obvious realisation. In fact, there can be no one outside of this infinite universe who is pulling the strings of punishment and reward, heaven and hell – or, according to Eastern tradition, granting enlightenment or leaving me with the eternal karma of endless lives in misery. This insight presupposes, of course, that there is no place other than the physical universe, no celestial, mystical realm where gods and ghosts exist. It also implies that there is no life before or after death and that the body simply dies when it dies. A Bit of Vineeto

The insight that hit me like a thunderbolt catapulted me into a PCE and with the ‘self’ (and ‘my’ passions and beliefs) temporarily absent it became suddenly obvious that the belief in a God, by whatever name, is part of the passionate defensive armour of ‘me’. In a PCE neither agnosticism, Popperism or any other philosophical abstract thinking have any relevance because the facts of what it is to be a human being become immediately clear, sensately and sensibly. With no passionate entity present it is patently clear that God has no existence in actuality – that he/she/it is nothing other than a universally-sustained and collectively-endorsed belief that billions of lost, lonely and frightened ‘beings’ have a vested interest in keeping in existence.

In a pure consciousness experience a lot of things of what it is to be a human being become stunningly clear whenever I focussed my attention on these topics. Just as when a background noise suddenly stops and its very absence makes you aware of how much the noise had infiltrated your experience, when the ‘self’ and its incessant ‘noise’ is absent, it becomes obvious how ‘I’ constantly live in a fear-filled world of ‘my’ own making and as a consequence ‘I’ am wont to seek succour and solace in beliefs – no matter how inane they may be.

A PCE is not a matter of degree – it is a fundamentally different experience of the world – one directly experiences the actuality of the world as-it-is and of people as-they-are. Not only does the grim reality that ‘I’ normally experience disappear, but so too does the imagined panacea to grim reality – the belief in a Greater Reality (God by any other name). A PCE gives you an outsider’s view for the very first time, temporarily free from the very entity who shapes and distorts this body’s experience of the world. You could compare it to previously knowing only the village you live in and its surrounding hills and suddenly being in a position from where you see the planet from outer space.

Contrary to No 81’s firm belief and persistent repetition, my 100% certainty about a god-less universe and a non-existent afterlife has nothing to do with dogmatism but rather it is the result of deliberately and consistently cracking the firmament of my beliefs and prizing apart the stronghold of the ‘self’-centred worldview that is the inescapable result of the human condition. This process has allowed me to have many direct experiences that God has no existence whatsoever outside of human imagination. And once you know a fact as a fact, that’s the end of having an opinion or a belief or a degree of uncertainty about it.

I always liked a story told about Galileo’s, which, although unconfirmed, helps to make the distinction between fact and belief so very obvious. The story goes, when Galileo was forced to recant his radical discovery that the earth moves around the sun and as such is neither stationary nor at the centre of the universe, he whispered, ‘eppur si muove’ (‘and yet it moves’). His later books spirited out of Italy to the Netherlands confirm that despite overwhelming opposition Galileo was 100% certain of what he had seen and understood – repeatable empirical observation contradicted ubiquitous ancient belief. It is interesting to note that it took until 1992 before the Church formally acknowledged its error in condemning Galileo – that it took so long speaks volumes for the recalcitrant nature of spiritual/religious belief.

My certainty of the fact that matter is all there is and that there is no consciousness outside of matter is the result of sensible contemplations and discussions, cemented and verified by many ‘self’-less experiences. This combination has allowed me to whittle away at my former conditioning and persistently question my intuition, to recognize that what most people believe and preach is not based in fact and by doing so to understand beyond doubt, that the magic of this universe lies in the fact that matter, in this case the human brain, is capable of not only reflecting but also of reflecting on itself.

It is the inherent quality of matter itself that makes it capable of such wondrous magic, just as it is inherent to the stuff that is this planet that it continues to manifest itself as the ginormous variety of terrestrial and aquatic fauna and flora visible on its surface crust. Life is so incredibly miraculous in operation, whichever direction you look, and when you take your ‘self’ out of the centre, i.e. when ‘you’ are no longer the most important person in ‘your’ universe, then the vibrancy of the non-passivity of matter itself becomes vividly apparent and tangibly obvious. As if by magic, all conceptualizing of a duality of dull/dead matter one side and a Transcendental Consciousness on the other side fall in a heap and I am no longer separate from all that is happening. I am matter and as matter I am eminently capable of not only being apperceptively aware but also of reflecting upon the fact that consciousness is an inherent quality of matter at a certain stage of its evolution.

*

As for ‘the Popperian view that some things cannot be known with 100% certainty’ – Karl Popper’s proposition was that, logically, nothing can ever be known exhaustively by the ordinary way of knowing, which in itself is absolute claim that according to his philosophy can never be known exhaustively. Apart from this logical impassé, his theories have, by and large, been refuted and discarded by more than a few people years ago and for a down-to-earth non-philosopher it is obvious that some things can definitely be known for sure – for instance the fact that everyone will die one day.

To distinguish fiction from fact I found the simple scientific principle useful, which demands that legitimate theories must be falsifiable. You might be familiar with the old debating trick where one side is asked to disprove the existence of something that doesn’t exist: ‘Prove to me there isn’t a green-eyed monster under this table. It is an invisible, odourless monster, and you can’t tangibly sense it – it has no mass. But it’s THERE! Now prove to me it isn’t there!’ To pose non-falsifiable hypotheses is the hallmark of a pseudo science.

The claim of the existence of God or an afterlife is equally pseudo science because it is a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Have you noticed that it is impossible to prove that God doesn’t exist? By God’s very nature He/She/It is beyond and above sensual perception. And life after death cannot be proven wrong because dead people don’t talk … and yet their ‘souls’ are reported to make people’s hair stand on end.

Yes, they do dissolve because, contrary to the affective/psychic world, which is intuitive and therefore an affective experience that is unique to everyone, the actual world is the same for everyone – it is actual and can be sensately and sensibly experienced as an actuality by everyone once the ‘self’ steps out of the way.

*

A remark on your recent post to No 81, because it’s on the same topic –

No No 81: To believe in god, afterlife, or any sort of dualistic spiritual energy is a belief and therefore silly in my book. Nonetheless, I don’t claim 100% certainty on those issues because I remain skeptical that anyone can know whether or not there is a spiritual realm with 100% certainty. Quite frankly, I see no need for an actualist to be 100% certain. I’d take reasonably/sensibly certain as being quite enough. Which is what I am at this point.

You may reconsider when you think about how many things in life you already take with 100% certainty to be factual. The very process of actualism involves the incremental diminishing of the habit of believing what others tell you to be truth (or Truth) so as to enable to flourish uninhibitedly one’s innate curiosity and naiveté to discover for oneself the facts of the matter.

In hindsight, it was only because I had sufficient discontent, disappointment and doubt about the spiritualism process I had practiced for almost 2 decades that I was keenly interested in finding out if there was something fundamentally new in what Richard was saying … even if that did mean abandoning all I believed to be true and right. I can highly recommend ‘wiping the slate clean’ of what others have told you to be ‘the truth’ and discovering the facts of the matter for yourself.

This is true for me too. Though improvement was made in my practice of spirituality – I ALWAYS sensed that it would never deliver totally until after death. Eventually, I decided that I’m not waiting for after death because I figured there may be no after life.

When I encountered actualism, I tried at first to maintain the agnostic stance that there may or may not be an afterlife and I thought it did not really concern my life right now because I would find out in due time (at death). However, as I became more and more attentive to how I experienced this moment of being alive, I had to put many of my beliefs under scrutiny and I began to realize that my non-committal agnostic stance towards the possibility of life after death was preventing me from fully being here.

One day I dared to contemplate about the issue of a possible life after death right through to its obvious conclusion and the lingering agnostic option disappeared to be replaced by a confidence that when I die then that will be final – and the issue disappeared forever. I realized that holding onto the mere option of ‘me’ being a spiritual ‘being’ had locked me out of experiencing the sheer and wonderful actuality of this physical body being alive right now in this pure and perfect physical universe. In short, it is impossible to be vitally interested in being here whilst holding on to any spiritual or agnostic beliefs.

This is what is meant by actualism being ‘non-spiritual’.

The materialist’s motto is ‘life is a bitch and then you die’ while spiritual and religious people’s motto is ‘life’s a bitch but if you are a good enough person on earth you will be rewarded in heaven after death’. I always felt cheated by the Christian proposition that I should suffer life on earth for seventy-odd years for some spurious afterlife reward solely based on hearsay, make-believe and nonsensical fairy-tales. When I learnt that in Eastern mysticism you could experience paradise on earth by becoming enlightened, I gladly dropped my Christian belief in an after-death-reward in exchange for the promise of a here-on-earth reward.

However, the longer I pursued enlightenment the more unlikely it became that this could ever be the solution to all of my problems, let alone all the ills of humankind. Even the Enlightened Ones admitted that one’s real and true liberation will only be obtained in Parinirvana, i.e. after death. And the inner peace that I was supposed to gain from practicing meditation invariably waned when I opened my eyes and re-joined ‘the world’. None of the results of my persistent spiritual practice was good enough – I wanted a better deal for my efforts.

When I met Richard it soon became clear that he had discovered the unblemished valid-for-all solution to all the problems of humankind and he had a road-tested method whereby I could come to experience peace here-on-earth, in this moment, and 24 hours a day. I was inexorably drawn to investigate further – it was too good to refuse.

And I found that he is right – there is not a single flaw in actuality. There cannot be. This actual universe is perfect, pure and it is already always here – and I can experience it when ‘I’, in my totality, step out of the way.

How do I know for sure? First I acknowledged that a belief in an afterlife is only a belief – and as long as I have to believe in something in order for it to exist, it does not exist in its own right, it cannot be actual. I wanted more than a belief that depended on my passion in order for it to be true – I wanted to be absolutely sure. This intent to be absolutely sure led me to deliberately suspend believing wherever I discovered a belief and take a good long look at the facts of the matter. This intentional practice of questioning and investigating in due course caused sufficient disruption to my belief system and to my identity such that one day my beliefs imploded and my identity temporarily collapsed with the result that I had a pure consciousness experience.

In a PCE, when the ‘self’ is temporarily in abeyance, it becomes stunningly and undeniably apparent that the whole notion of God, any god, and consequently the existence of an afterlife is ‘self’-created and ‘self’-sustained. It is ‘me’, the instinctual-spiritual parasite-like entity inhabiting this physical body who craves for a body-less immortality. In a PCE when ‘I’ am in abeyance it is blatantly obvious that ‘I’ am nothing more than an impassioned being, a spirit-like phantasma. A PCE is the proof that there is nobody inside this physical body who survives its death for ‘I’ am but an illusion desperately searching for a meaning in ancient fairy tales in order to justify ‘my’ pathetic existence and assuage my instinctually fuelled fear of death.

Yes, I remember, questioning my spiritual beliefs was shocking at first, then thrilling and then incredibly liberating. One day I realized that for God to rule over an infinite and eternal universe he would have to be outside of it, which is a physical impossibility, and with this realization my whole supernatural ‘universe’ came crashing down.

When my belief in a controlling, punishing and rewarding God disappeared and the notion of God’s power to grant ‘me’ an my afterlife, also disappeared, all my worries about my bank account in heaven and all my hopes for a better life somewhere-else vanished. With no ‘Scottie’ to ‘beam me up’ out of here I was free to abandon the waiting game for heaven and focus my attention from wanting to be ‘there’ to being interested in being here, from waiting for ‘then’ to being fascinated with what is happening now.

The other thing that happened when I realized that there is neither a God and a Divine Power nor an afterlife, was that the absolute values of right and wrong, good and bad that are part and parcel of all religious and spiritual belief were all questionable and subject to scrutiny. This meant I was then free to make my own choice of what is silly and what is sensible instead of following the supposed rules of some all-powerful supernatural Force.

There is an enormous freedom to be gained by questioning one’s spiritual beliefs.

Our identity is like a sixth sense although questionable could be a tool that’s only purpose is to have us believe in God. Why should we have it? Maybe it was put there. There’s a 50 percent chance of one drawing the conclusion that God exists, there’s no evidence of it, all there we have is identity.

To propose that ‘my’ only purpose is to believe in God begs the question as to what sort of God it is that would cause me to suffer and to inflict my suffering on others solely in order that ‘I’ should believe in Him, Her or It. Or to put it another way, if this God, whom I have to believe in, is omnipotent and all-loving then why does He, She or It not put an end to human suffering on earth?

Before you speculate any further as to the purpose of the identity and if ‘it was put there’, it may be useful to gather some factual information, namely that the identity arises from the genetically encoded instinctual survival passions.

When we get rid of that, the chance of believing in God becomes 0 I’m told. But the benefits are supposed to be inhumanly enormous. After we lose the identity we get to experience no fear or other inhibiting emotions.

One does not ‘lose’ one’s identity – what ‘I’ have to do to bring about the death of ‘me’ is that ‘I’ deliberately and consciously set in motion a ‘process’ that will ensure ‘my’ demise. One of the first things to do to set this ‘process’ in motion is to actively and deliberately investigate one’s own belief that there is a God.

Simply to believe what is written on the AF website is to merely swap one belief for another. The challenge in actualism is to dare to find out for yourself whether or not God exists and to find out what are the tangible benefits – both to yourself and to your fellow humans beings – of ridding yourself of your malicious and sorrowful feelings.

So I guess, you wouldn’t feel anything if you were standing on a train track and a train moving at 250 mi/ hr. was 3 seconds away from your occupied space, there can be two outcomes, living or dying.

A person without a psychological and psychic identity ‘standing on the train track’ would not have any affective feelings interfering with his common sense and intelligence, which means it is highly unlikely that he or she would be standing on the train track with a train coming towards him ‘at 250 mi/hr.’ in the first place.

If the man with no identity were on that track and he manages to get off in time, he would not have experienced the rush, …

Correct.

… instead it would be seen as a sensible act.

As I said, sensibility starts way before in that unimpeded intelligence ensures that one avoids dangerous situations such as standing on a train track.

But what if he were not so lucky? Would he beg to relive that instance?

When hit by a train, any man would be dead – regardless of whether he was actually free, enlightened, awakened, realized, a loyal believer of any religion, an agnostic or an atheist. In any case, there would be no ‘being’ in existence afterwards to ‘beg to relive that instance’ – despite commonly held beliefs, physical death is the end for every body and every ‘being’, just as John Cleese described his dead parrot in ‘Faulty Towers’: ‘dead, extinct, finito, kaput, stuffed, no more, finished, obliterated’.

There is no second chance – this is the one and only life each of us are living and it is solely up to each of us as to how we want to live it.

It’s all very simple really – spiritual belief has it that the death of the ego is sufficient to become ‘who you really are’, which is ‘me’ at the core of my being. Whereas actual freedom involves the death of both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul in order that I become what I am – this flesh and blood body only.

That being is dead already. From the death of that state it is obvious to Richard that there’s nothing left but matter. I can dig that. How to extinguish that identity remains mysterious to me, as do a couple of other matters.

The ‘how to’ only makes sense to contemplate when you have come to the conclusion, for yourself, that you *want to* extinguish ‘that identity’, whereas you presently still maintain that ‘perhaps I find the idea of extinction terrifying’.

I want to extinguish my identity completely. I don’t find that terrifying. What I find terrifying (actually I’m not even sure that I do find it that terrifying – rather it seems to logically follow that it does induce fear – or at least apocalyptically huge pointlessness) is not my identity being destroyed now (leaving a benevolent, scintillating, infinite, eternal, ever-present, serendipity-inducing, actively-alive actuality, which is beyond imagination, beyond reality and beyond emotion), but everything which in some way I am one day being completely and utterly destroyed, along with a benevolent, scintillating, infinite, eternal, ever-present, serendipity-inducing, actively-alive actuality, which is beyond imagination, beyond reality and beyond emotion. Or anything like it.

Do you realize that this identity which you want to completely extinguish is the very same identity that you believe somehow survives your physical death?

Can you now see why investigating one’s belief in, or abandoning one’s agnostic stance of remaining open to, a life after death is instrumental to understanding what this business of extinguishing one’s identity entails?

*

… and therefore you are bound to doubt that Richard’s Being is indeed extinguished

No. I doubt Richard’s Being is extinguished because it is sensible to doubt the kind of pronouncements being made by Richard. Totally accepting something like this as true which I haven’t investigated beforehand is obviously insane.

In my personal experience merely doubting has no value at all. What I did when I came across actualism was to make a sensible judgement of Richard’s report by firstly taking it at face value and then establishing a prima facie case as to its sensibility from all the information I could gather. From there I took up the challenge to *experientially* verify for myself the facts of the situation. However, this required that I stopped relying on belief – and its stable-mate agnosticism – and instead investigated each belief, conviction, opinion and truth that I had taken on in my life in order to replace them with solid facts and experiential evidence.

*

[…you are bound to doubt that Richard’s Being is indeed extinguished] and consequently that his condition is something entirely new to human history.

Yes, now again we get to this ‘consequently’ bit. Here it makes no sense whatsoever. As I keep on asking, how does having no identity make it clear that nobody has ever had no identity before? Richard seems to base his knowledge on an enlightened picking up or not picking up of psychic footprints. (…)

Of course, the ‘consequently’ makes no sense to you … you haven’t resolved the first issue which is to investigate if your belief in a life after death, in whatever form, is fact or fiction. Once you resolve this issue to your own satisfaction, you will be in a much better position to understand for yourself what Richard means when he says his being is extinguished.

What do I have to resolve? Do I have to accept that death is the end of absolutely everything that in some way I am? This would amount to a belief to me. Just as it would amount to a belief to accept that the opposite is true. I accept neither 100 per cent until it is definitively revealed to me one way or another. It seems more likely that something in some way that I am continues. Does this have to change to a ‘more likely that something in some way that I am does not continue’? What do I need to do to ‘resolve’ this. Please inform.

You don’t have to do anything. But if you want to stop vacillating between belief and doubt about an actual freedom being entirely new to human experience, then a useful starting point is your belief, or more to the point your agnostic stance, about life after death. And a belief, any belief, is only satisfactorily resolved one way or the other when you find out for yourself the solid and conclusive fact of the matter.

*

The issue of a belief in a life after death is fundamental to actualism – if you believe in a life after death or if you want to remain ‘open’ to a life after death then spiritualism is for you, if you think a belief in life after death is non-sensical then you will have a firm footing from which to understand what actualism is about – if you are interested in peace on earth that is.

So I have to intellectually accept this life after death thing before a PCE will come? Somehow my willingness to accept that when my brain-spirit-body dies something which in some way I am will remain is blocking a PCE? How? Moreover, …

Before you add more questions onto this line of thought, it would make sense to first make sure that your premise is indeed based on what I actually said.

Nowhere did I say that you have to ‘intellectually accept’ that there is no life after death. Nowhere did I say that this intellectual acceptance is a preliminary for a pure consciousness experience.

To quickly jump to conclusions based upon one’s familiar way of thinking is a common trait of the human condition – that’s why paying attention to this moment of being alive, particularly to one’s feelings and thoughts, is so crucial when one is embarking upon finding out about something new, particularly when it is entirely new to human experience.

[Moreover,] how do I get rid of that willingness. I can see that my brain-body-psyche/spirit will die for good when the time comes. I can see that. Isn’t that good enough? I’m willing to accept that something that is not brain-body-psyche/spirit something benevolent, scintillating, infinite, eternal, ever-present, serendipity-inducing, actively-alive actuality, which is beyond imagination, beyond reality and beyond emotion, which in SOME way I am WILL survive. But I’m not that attached to the idea. It’s only a willingness after all. If, when the head snaps back and the brain dies and actual freedom floods over me and I find out for sure it’s not true, I’ll give it up, no problem. Even though it does seem it might auger fear and despair. So what do I have to do? Give up the willingness. No problem. It’s just a thought anyway.

What I did in order to rid myself of belief was to meticulously discover the facts about the things I had taken on board as the truth. Seeing the fact will make any belief redundant … and any doubt as well.

This link might be useful to determine what constitutes a fact as opposed to a belief, an acceptance, an idea, a doubt, faith, trust, imagination, intuition and so on.

*

Your circulatory correspondence on this topic …

It seems to me that my correspondence is circulatory because I’m not getting a straight answer to my questions. I am quite willing to accept that it is my crooked reasoning that is warping what is too straight for me to see. But I need to see my crooked reasoning.

Your reasoning is ‘crooked’ because on one hand you want to maintain a belief in life after death …

No I don’t. I don’t want to completely reject it. But it’s not a big deal.

This is what you said (additionally) on this subject at the top to this letter –

Firstly it [the idea that ‘nothing which in some way I am does not continue after death’] may not be a belief. The electric aliveness that doesn’t seem to be completely me, and yet is here, is not a belief, and it doesn’t seem to be just meat. Richard may have extinguished his psyche-spirit, but I don’t see why that strange-yet-actual life isn’t something different to the vagaries of spirit, that it wasn’t always here, and that it won’t always, in some way, be here.

Secondly, I don’t believe in anything that I don’t know as experience. At least I do my best not to. But not believing in something does not mean that it doesn’t exist. I don’t believe in becoming a famous musician, but it might still happen. [endquote]

This is what dancing around the subject before finally turning one’s back to it looks like in print –

• I don’t want to completely reject it
• It may not be a belief
• I don’t know by experience
• Not believing in something does not mean that it doesn’t exist
• It’s not a big deal

It obviously is ‘not a big deal’ to you, otherwise you would get straight to the task of finding out the facts about life after death. To remain an agnostic about the big questions in life is to chicken out on experientially discovering the answers to the difficult questions of life but it also means that you will never get a satisfying, definitive, conclusive, i.e. experiential, answer about what it is to be a human being.

Straight thinking as opposed to circulatory thinking means to begin at the start and only ‘move on’ when the first point is understood and resolved. To reiterate for emphasis – the issue at hand is the belief in life after death.

Right-o. It’s taken me this long to find out that this is the starting point. And that’s only because you told me. Why other questions I have asked have not been the starting point may become clear later.

The reason why I suggested that this is the starting point for you is because you are having difficulty in understanding how one’s being – the very being that supposedly survives physical death – can be extinguished whilst still being alive and furthermore, why this extinction of one’s being is entirely new to human history.

In an attempt to make this even clearer, and more pertinent to you, I will point out that you have already said in this post –

‘I want to extinguish my identity completely’. [endquote]

If you are sincere in saying this, and I don’t doubt that you are, the question then becomes a matter of when … if you believe ‘you’ as an identity can survive physical death then you obviously cannot extinguish your identity whilst alive. If you, however, totally abandon your belief that ‘you’ as an identity will survive physical death then your intent to become free of your identity in this lifetime becomes very palpable indeed.

*

I know from experience that at first it takes guts and determination to even consider that physical death is the end …

I am quite willing to consider that.

O.k. Are you also willing to find out with 100% certainty that physical death is the end?

*

… but I discovered, the more I looked into the matter, that I, along with everyone else had been sold a dummy and it was a great relief when I finally stopped worrying about a life after death. The way I sorted out the issue of my beliefs in life after death was experientially, not intellectually, i.e. I investigated the *feelings* I had around the issue which allowed me to replace my beliefs with straightforward facts.

I’m certainly not worrying about it. I hardly give it a second’s thought. And if I do it seems stupid to think about something I have absolutely no idea about. And if there are any good ideas about it, they surely can’t apply when the idea-machine is dead.

Yet in order to find out with 100% certainty whether physical death is the end or not the end of ‘you’, you will have to give it much more than ‘a second’s thought’ – much, much more.

Actualism Homepage