What you have described in your first letter was not only a removal of your social identity but from your description it was evident that this temporary vacuum was immediately filled with emotion – it became an affective experience of ‘godliness’, also known as an Altered State of Consciousness. In such an ASC one feels that one knows the Truth, one feels oneself to be all-knowing, all-powerful, one-with-everything, filled with Love for all, compassionate to every living being and above and beyond all normal human experience. I once had such a powerful ASC that lasted for two days, and having learnt from Richard about its pitfalls, I used the experience to investigate exactly how my intelligence and my sensibility was devastatingly effected by these aggrandizing emotions. I was relieved when the experience was finally over and I was able to again think clearly and reasonably without being driven by feelings of grandeur and delusion. You can find the full description of the experience on our web-site.

You have described the experience ‘to be removed’ from your social identity in an earlier post –

My highest state occurred in July 1997 after reading Tao Te King by Lao Tse and ever since I’m searching... <snip>

My experience is that of being a man no.6, a state in which I had acquired real I, a Being made of light, state in which I was Everything within the Earth’s atmosphere limit, a God. My real I resembles a 900 years old child, extremely powerful and intelligent yet vulnerable. VORTEX is the word I like most. The experience of the state is like that of an atomic bomb detonated over your head, an atomic bomb made of love, bliss, freedom, will and extraordinary ecstasy (like your most powerful orgasm x 10000000). Everyone around you is literally dead, whether a spiritual man, a scientist or a savage from Africa. No. 32, 30.7.2001

In contrast to such altered states of consciousness, a pure consciousness experience is a non-affective ‘self’-less pure sensate experience where all of ‘me’, both ego and soul, both my social identity and my instinctual being are temporarily in abeyance. In a PCE there is no identity present to feel like a God living in an ethereal other-worldly realm. God, although everyone on the planet believes in him (or her) in some way or other, is nothing but a passionate imagination that only exists in people’s heads and hearts. In a pure consciousness experience one is one’s sense organs brimming with delight, wallowing in the enormous abundance of sensual experience that is perpetually here while one is at the same time fully aware of being an aware sensate and reflective human being.

This bare awareness of being aware, apperception, is the fundamental key to a pure consciousness experience – both coincide with each other.

With an investigative awareness running – how am I experiencing this moment of being alive? – one is able to examines one’s affective feelings, emotions and instinctual passions as they occur. The longer one practices such investigative awareness, the less one’s feelings, emotions and passions interfere with one’s sensuous attentiveness of being alive at this very moment – an awareness that simply registers sensate experiencing.

This sensate awareness is not something one can practice or cultivate in isolation from removing the affective feelings that interfere with the simple delight of being alive. Given sufficient practice of the actualism method, an ongoing idle sensate attentiveness to being alive can momentarily turn into an awareness of being aware, which is apperception, and a pure consciousness experience takes place.

And then you are hooked.

Before I met Peter and later Richard, I had not consciously questioned how and if the spiritual teachings were lived by the gurus themselves. It is one of their useful tricks, that the master is always exempt from his own teaching. He has already ‘got it’ and you, the disciple, have to practice humility, austerity, discipline, meditation, listening, etc. etc.

A whole new world opened up when I started questioning what was the practical outcome of the spiritual teachings in the master’s life, for his disciples and for the people who had lived the teachings of his lineage – in my case the Indian people. Had anything improved because of the teachings? Had my own life improved? Had my relationships to others become more loving, peaceful, happy? When enlightened, would I be living like the master? Did I like his lifestyle? How was he with women? How did he use power? Was it possible for everyone of his supposed 10,000 disciples to live like he did, all at the same time? Who would serve whom? Who would earn a living? Who would clean, cook and build the houses?

I started to put all the master’s seductive and soothing words to the test of common sense and was astounded that nothing added up. Not only was his teaching full of deliberate contradictions, but also it completely disregarded common sense. When I started to search for facts, there were more gaps than coherence. The teachings and the cult was only held together by the love, devotion and desire for enlightenment of his disciples. The further I investigated, the more I found dis-ingenuity combined with corruption, lies, extreme egotism, power games of the highest order, denial, greed, blaming the disciples and malicious competition with other gurus. Once I questioned and removed the overriding moral rule that you should never ever think for yourself and determine what is fact and what is belief, a whole Pandora box of rotten revelations followed.

One is not only defending ‘one’s sense of being’ – as spiritual teachers like to phrase it to emphasize that one only has to wake up to the illusionary nature of the psychological ‘self’ and be done with it. In actualism we explore and investigate our very core, ‘being’ itself, in order to facilitate the complete immolation of the ‘self’.

This ‘sense of being’ and its accompanying search for power and glory is not to be underestimated as it is supported by the strongest of passions, our desire to survive as a psychic and psychological entity. On the road to Actual Freedom, when the ‘self’ becomes thinner and thinner, the intense fear of death will at some point inevitably trigger a release of euphoriant chemicals in the brain as part of our physical survival program, and that chemical release can easily result in a blissful ‘unitary’ Altered State of Consciousness as the ‘self’ makes an instinctual grab for survival. It is essential that one becomes familiar with such overwhelming grand feelings while one’s intent is firmly set to the goal of an actual freedom beyond the delusion of Grandeur and spiritual so-called freedom. Indeed, ‘the door to an Actual Freedom has ‘Extinction’ written over it.’ And what a thrill!

When I experienced my first full-blown Altered State of Consciousness replete with feeling Love for all, with Truth continuously streaming into my head and the bliss of unlimited psychic power and knowledge, I came to understand even more how this whole psychic world works. In such a state one can tap into the pond of all of humanity’s so-called wisdom – the collection of ancient religions, beliefs, superstitions, atavistic feelings and passions. That ‘pond’ provides the ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’ for spiritual teachers – the very reason why their teachings seem to be so true and familiar. Having risen to the top of the psychic ladder, God-men can choose to swan along in the ‘good’ feelings and push the ‘evil’ passions to the bottom – or blame their disciples for causing their anxiety and divine anger.

The transmission of Energy – a feature of all master-disciple relationships – can only work because the disciples are looking for a short-cut to happiness and love by receiving seemingly ‘free gifts’ from the master and thus get trapped into the addictive bargain of giving love and gratitude in return for dependency on his or her authority.

In actuality there is no such thing as psychic transmission of energy because to become free of the Human Condition is to become free of the psychic web itself and this can only be done by oneself and for oneself. Such perfect freedom.

Further, to ‘love what one thinks and feels from moment to moment’ does not imply an entity which considers itself there, present, loving, and observing something different from what it regards as itself.

Well, you just haven’t discovered that quality of your alien entity yet that ‘loves what one thinks and feels’. It is a very convincing trick of this passionate entity to make one feel and believe that it is non-existent because it is ‘uncontracted’.

Someone who loves their own thoughts and feelings moment to moment and observes everything they see around them as nothing other than themselves has obviously got a very bad case of self-love and myopic introversion. Can you imagine a planet full of such people all saying ‘you are not you at all, you are a projection of Me’. ‘How can that be, you are not you at all, you are Me.’ ‘No I’m not’. ‘Yes I am’. ‘No, you are just an image of Me.’ ‘No, you are Me, not you ... you only think you are you.’ ‘No, I am me and you together for we are not separate.’ ‘Well, that’s all very well for you to say but I ‘know’ I am Me whereas you obviously only think you are you and haven’t yet recognized that you are Me.’ ‘Well you may be right ... but I’m interested in becoming Me because then you can be Me.’ ‘Ah, that’s better, now come and sit at my feet with the others and I’ll tell you how good it is to feel this ‘Me’-ness.’

Those who know by their own experience use the word enlightenment when referring to the permanent Altered State of Consciousness, the death of the ego, the expansion into Being. While one can revert to normal from a temporary Altered State of Consciousness because the ego is not permanently extinct, Enlightenment is an irreversible, permanent state where the feelings run rampant, now uncontrolled by any personal self or ego. Vis:

Enlightenment –– Upheld in the Eastern religions as the ultimate state of Godliness that is possible to be achieved by a human while remaining ‘in the body’. Contrary to popular belief, the Enlightened Ones are not without a sense of self; they merely shift their identity from ego to soul, from head to heart, from little self to big Self. The Enlightened Ones become kings of the psychic world, their powers derived from the surrender and unquestioning devotion of their disciples. In actuality, enlightenment is a massive delusion wherein one is convinced one is God or ‘at one’ with God. In the West, before the recent fashion for all things spiritual, anyone declaring themselves to be God would have been locked up or given psychiatric help, but now the Enlightened Ones are held in awe and reverence. With the possibility of eliminating the total identity, both ego and soul, the venerated state of Enlightenment and the exalted profession of Guru are now doomed to extinction, and those who have deliberately inflicted this psychic aberration or Altered State of Consciousness on themselves will be clearly seen as narcissistic megalomaniacs. AF Glossary

There is, however, a vast diversity of how the word is used in New Age spiritual circles. On one of the lists, where Richard occasionally writes, I found the following correspondence –

No 1: It might be fun to start a list of all the different qualifications we know of for the term enlightened.

No 2: Great idea! If everyone is cool with it I’ll publish it ‘How can you tell if someone is enlightened?’

No 1: They say they are beyond emotions ...

No 2: Maybe we need another list: ‘How can you tell if someone ISN’T enlightened?’

1. They eat meat.
2. They can’t sit cross-legged for more than 10 minutes.
3. They smoke cigarettes.
4. They drink beer.
5. They have sex.
6. They don’t know what bodhisatva means.
7. They have a regular Joe Shmoe name.

No 1: This is worrying – my Guru does 5 of the 7 things on your list of someone who isn’t enlightened. Mind you, he scores highly on number 7 – He’s got a barrel full of cool names.

For me, it is enough to have sufficient experiential knowledge of what I need to avoid – the instinctual grasp for ‘my’ psychological and psychic survival experienced in an Altered State of Consciousness. Now, from a state of Virtual Freedom, any Altered State of Consciousness would be dilapidation and has most definitely lost all of its former seduction of grandeur.

*

My sole interest is to eliminate all of my ‘self’, both the normal ‘I’ and spiritual ‘I’, in order to be the actual I, ‘what I am’, this flesh-and-blood body brimming with sense organs. As such, any experience that is not a PCE, however unusual or seductive, needs to be thoroughly investigated. That’s what makes the pursuit of Actual Freedom so simple.

The difference between the spiritual search and actualism is that spiritual people give great significance to a temporary absence of the ego in a out-of-the-ordinary experience, Satori or ASC, while for an actualist such absence of the ego only signifies the unabated and uncontrolled presence of the soul, the animal-instinctual part of the identity. Whenever one removes only one’s personal ‘self’, the ‘ego’, with one’s ‘soul’, the animal-instinctual ‘self’, still intact, this will result, by its very nature, in the ‘soul’ running amok, unfettered by a personal ‘self’, inevitably evolving into an impersonal ‘Self’.

Given Richard’s experience of going through enlightenment and struggling to come out of it into the actual world, it is now an unnecessary, arduous and convoluted enterprise to unwittingly allow oneself to become enlightened and then torturously endeavour to free oneself of enlightenment ... in order to become actually free.

In actualism one incrementally dismantles and eliminates both ego and soul, both one’s personal ‘self’ and the instinctual passions until both components of the identity become extinct in one great finale – bingo.

I want to tell you about a movie we watched lately, called ‘Fearless’ by Peter Weir. I found it interesting for various reasons. First, the hero has a near-death experience shortly before the plane crashes. He encounters an altered state of consciousness, being fearless and driven to help people, in particular the survivors of the crash. As I see it, the film describes well the delusion of an altered state of consciousness and even more so because the hero is an American, living in a Western society and not in the East. One can see the oddness and the ‘loony-ness’ of his state.

The only person who is not impressed by his heroic efforts to save people is his wife – as a down to earth, common sense and practical woman she can see that he is in severe physical danger indulging in his fearlessness in many silly ways. (He believes that he has already died and can only die once). She is then able to convince the woman whom the hero is currently saving and both try to reach his common sense.

He ends up seeing the point and in a dramatic second near-death experience he seems to come back to his senses. At least, that is how I would like to interpret his exclamation: ‘I am ALIVE!’ It could very well mean something completely different! Unfortunately, this is how the film ends. I guess that both the playwright and the director have no idea what happens when one actually comes to one’s senses! Peter sent him his journal to show that there is an option for a life after the altered state of consciousness.

I think, not many people would interpret the film like this. But the ‘state beyond fearlessness’ is definitely what I am aiming for!

In the light of my current discussion with Richard, it would be interesting to hear of any enlightenment experiences you had.

I had only one, which lasted for about three days, because I really wanted to investigate all its implications. It was an experience first of great love and compassion for all, together with the Great Wisdom that I wanted to spread to all those ‘poor’ beings whom I considered needed my advice. (oops, I knew then, that I really had to keep my mouth shut and my hands in my pocket. I did not want to do or say anything I would have to regret later or feel embarrassed about!)

With the grandeur came a great satisfaction of finally standing on the same podium that I had put Rajneesh on – now I knew from my own experience from which inner space he was talking and how he had been taking us all for a ride. I felt the power and authority and the wonderful tempting glory of it all. What a grand world it is – you know it all, you feel it all, you can help them all and you are superior to them all. Love pours out of every thought, grandeur is your nature and you swan in timelessness and eternity, forever relieved from the pain and sorrow of the personal little world of the poor mortals you left behind.

It was bloody good to have Peter as a landmark for common sense and Richard’s story and warnings as the blinking light-house and so it came that I did not ground on that wonderfully glimmering, seductively promising ‘Rock of Enlightenment’.

It took a lot of effort and re-starting my intelligence and common sense to dismantle the glory of Truth and the seduction of Power. I had to use all doubt and scepticism available to be able to discover the Truth-production machine in my head. The next thing to deal with was the attraction to power and glory. But without being able to rely on Truth, which was now impossible, how much power can you keep up? You can find the full description of the experience on our web-site.

But it was not all over yet. The sense of love and warmth that had resided in the heart moved further down into the belly, what Japanese call the Hara. I found it to be the seat of ‘being’, of bliss. It was a less fiery passion, more of a calm prevailing blissful state of eternal ‘being here’, as opposed to the actual being ‘here’. I don’t remember much of it except for the seductive invitation to stay there, ‘you have now found your destiny, this is what they are all talking about, this is your ‘ground of being’, you have arrived’.

I knew it was time to gather all my intent and my common sense and get out of this elusive, imaginary state of swanning in imaginary bliss and ‘being’. It was time to leave the wonder-full magician-castle in the clouds and enter the actual world of senses, sex and coffee.

... as this concurs with my own experience, which is in the current correspondence with Richard. I think all one can do to ‘warn’ another is to say watch out for this feeling of Love, which is definitely located in the belly, the seat of being. As we have both demonstrated it is possible to turn away from this blissful state, whether using ‘native intelligence’, ‘pure intent’ or whatever name.

Interesting that you talk about the blissful state. We found a book by Bernadette Roberts, a Christian mystic, called ‘What is Self?’ where she talks about no-ego and the no-self, only to describe that after enlightenment she gets even further lost into the fantasy of being one with Christ. And recently, when somebody asked me about Akashic Records, I experienced that bliss-state for about an hour, the state Mrs. Roberts seems to describe in her book. I finally got a grip on it – I could experience it and describe from the ‘outside’ what was happening. This blissful state seems unemotional, no love or compassion is felt in the heart, everything is a cool ‘oneness’. One feels all-pervading, ‘I am everything and everything is me and everything is divine’.

The experience can easily be mistaken as intimacy because the sense of ‘me’ is so expanded across the universe and spread so thin, so to speak, that ‘me’ is hardly noticeable. As ‘I am every thing’, one is of course ‘feeling’ intimate with the TV set or is able to intuit into someone else’s, in this case Mrs. Roberts, religious imaginations. (I had read Bernadette Roberts, a Christian Mystic’s book, ‘What is Self?’ prior to this experience). Fascinating and seductive and very eerie. I think this could be a bit like the parallel universe scientists fantasize about. One then lives in a universe where everything is a virtual replica of the actual, with the glow of divinity, unity and timeless-ness to it – and as it is virtual, it is controlled by the imagination of the one who makes it up. This ‘parallel’ universe ‘feels’ and is ‘imagined’ as intimate or not-separate, and yet it is twice removed from the physical body, the senses, this actual world. This ‘insanity’ of ‘feeling one with everything’ is the barrier that prevents one from experiencing the world as a flesh and blood body, with the senses. Boy, I really understand why these guys are so far out there, lost and locked in an imaginary space that has almost no return-ticket.

But then, you only have to pinch yourself and where it hurts, that’s actual.

It is good not to be trapped by this complete insanity. It is the same type of dis-association that people suffer from who are in an insane asylum. The film ‘Awakening’ depicted some of those people. There was one woman who could not walk to the window because the checker pattern on the floor was interrupted by a black line – until the doctor painted the black line into checkers. In her ‘world’ the black line was dangerous. The religious insanity is being locked into another type of fantasy-world, where one isn’t really the body and one’s True Self will be free only after death – it is an altered state of consciousness, i.e. mentally deranged, forever cut off from common sense.

When I experienced this there was a huge feeling of Love and Compassion, so it is interesting you say it was an ‘unemotional state, no love or compassion is felt in the heart’. I recognize the ‘I am everything and everything is me and everything is divine’, though.

Yes, I remember this ‘huge feeling of Love and Compassion’, it filled my whole chest and heart with this warmth that wanted to be spread to all of Humanity. When I dismantled it as the feeling component in the heart of the ‘Truth-Production-Machine’ in the head, it disappeared with a loud thump and I crashed on my bum for a day. Later something similar reappeared in the belly or Hara, a cool pervading bliss, a bit like stoned, all pervading and ‘I feel so wonderfully one with it all’, like touching the heights of human atavistic imagination. I remember Rajneesh talking about a hot and a later cool stage of enlightenment, so I cannot vouch for genuine invention of this story. The come-back is another thump, sitting out the dullness until the senses adjusted to the actual world after the ‘glitter’ of insanity.

As I said, the rungs of the ladder disappear and one is left ‘hanging in the middle’ with hardly any choice other than going forward. I say ‘hardly any’ because I am well aware of the fact that – probably with great effort – one is able to revert to some kind of normality.

It must be a huge effort to return to ‘normal’. I cannot imagine (not that I can imagine much anymore) taking on all these beliefs and emotions again, though it is undoubtedly possible to be seduced by the lure of love, or Love.

I have no idea how big the effort would be and I have no intention to check it out. But I know that it takes a stubborn intent to keep going in the face of all the instinctual fear that has now surfaced. Other people climb Mount Everest or journey to the North Pole to get their excitement and sense of achievement – I just do it on the couch.

Love and Enlightenment are lures that are certainly not to be taken lightly. That’s why Peter and me are putting so much emphasis on Virtual Freedom. In the face of ultimate extinction the survival instinct tempts one to grab for the only option for the ‘self’ to survive – Enlightenment, the delusion of immortality. But I know now by extensive experience how enlightenment looks and feels like and I am 100% sure that it is a second rate alternative to Actual Freedom.

To join you in the speculation – what I understood so far about enlightenment from reports of masters, gurus, Richard’s explicit descriptions and my own experience is that in an Altered State of Consciousness one identifies completely with the ‘good’ feelings, and therefore with the ‘good’ instincts of nurture and desire. We might never know what actually happens in the brain because the best deal on the path to actual freedom is to not have ‘to grind one’s ship on the Rock of Enlightenment’. And, as we all found out in our latest exploration, not even to grind on the ‘Rock of Deadly Fear’. When trying to put on to paper a schematic view of the brain in Enlightenment, it became obvious that there are no ‘chemical facts’ researched yet, and therefore one cannot make any statements as to what is physically happening. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the ‘pop’ into actual freedom will be a sudden pop when the last psychic (neural?) connection to the Amygdala ceases and causes, or results in, the ending of ‘me’. You can be sure that I will report on whatever observations I am able to make. After all, this is a one in a lifetime story, never to be repeated by me again. What serendipity!

Life is wonderfully easy without the burden of the ‘self’. It was never the body or the senses or the brain that were the culprit, it has always been the ‘self’ that corrupts both thoughts and senses. This ‘self’ is responsible for all the misery on the planet, for all the wars, tortures, murders, rapes, poverty, greed, corruption and hypocrisy. By dismantling and extinguishing it bit by bit I am able to live here, now, in this actual physical and sensually experience-able world. I don’t need to escape into a fantasy-place where I imagine that the ‘self’ does not exist. I came to see the fantasy-world of enlightenment as a big, big fairy-land and quite some people have been deluded into it, although rarely anybody succeeds in staying permanently deluded. A Buddhist pundit calculated that 0.0001% of seekers ever reach their ultimate goal. But in the end enlightenment is only an Altered State of Consciousness, a construct of passionate imagination and a delusion of grandeur.

I did experience this enlightened ‘Self’ myself – it is called having a Satori, I guess – and can observe it in detail from an outsider’s standpoint – seeing the grand belief and the overwhelming emotions of ‘wisdom’ and Divine Compassion – and I know the qualitative difference when there is no self at all in operation. All Enlightened Ones still have an identity; it is called ‘I am God’ or ‘I am one with God’. It is nevertheless an identity, very grand and ‘holy’, universal in its feeling but still with one at its core who claims to be ‘one with the Divine’. The Enlightened Ones loose their ego but safely keep their soul, their identity merely shifts from the head to the heart, leaving all the animal-instincts unquestioned.

Awakening is devastating.

Do you mean to say that it is an ongoing devastation for the ‘self’, for who we think and feel we are?

It is always shocking to see what assholes we really are.

I don’t agree with you here. Once I got rid of my ideas, beliefs, emotions – in short all of my identity – there is no-one there to be an asshole or call anyone an asshole. This is not pretended humility. When there is no asshole in me, I also see no asshole outside of me.

As long as I swanned around like one of the Enlightened Ones I felt superior, and everyone else needed my compassion or wisdom. It took me a week to fully get out of that seductive delusion. It is part and parcel of becoming enlightened; it comes with that ‘energy’ filling one’s heart, one is being swamped with ‘wisdom’, the greatest imagination the Self can produce. One is hooked into the collective ‘wisdom’ of humanity and thus perpetuates the suffering and morals that have been our heritage from the very beginning. ‘Good’ is only the backside of ‘bad’.

The name of the game is to throw the whole coin of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ out the window. The name of the game is freedom from good and evil, right and wrong.

Once I got rid of ‘who I am’ and simply live ‘what I am’, this flesh and blood body, there is only silly and sensible, a practical, down-to-earth, delightful enjoyment of the perfection of this benevolent universe. This is when peace on earth is possible.

I enjoyed comparing notes with you. Let me know what you make of it.

Your third level, what you call ‘freedom’, sounds as if one simply gives up searching and resigns into confusion and being lost. Not a very attractive alternative at all!

Well, I can see you haven’t been there. Ever heard it said that the more one knows, the less one knows? The enlightened state is exactly not knowing anything, but a blissful sense of wonder. It is lost-ness with love. And before you start thinking in terms of sex or relationship, I am speaking of love from one’s heart. The love that transcends all division.

The enlightened stage as I remember my experience being in an Altered State of Consciousness – and as I have read about in many descriptions – is not only a blissful sense of wonder but a feeling of being one with everything and therefore knowing all and everything, having the answer for everyone and the urge to emanate ‘truth’ to all and sundry. Yes, it is being lost in feeling, so utterly and completely lost, that there is no common sense left. One is feeling superior to all, because these other poor mere mortals have not ‘got it’ yet. And one is so swamped by one’s feeling of love and ‘truth’ that it seems the only ‘truth’ there is, regardless that there were already hundreds of enlightened ones with different messages creating various religions all over the planet.

I have had all kinds of psychic experiences of ‘being the heart’, ‘knowing’, feeling compassionate for everyone and everything, at one with the Divine and the imaginary bliss of being one with the universe – they are all very nice for the experiencer, but none of them is a solution to both personal and global peace-on-earth. And none of those experiences are actual – they all happen in the head – affective imagination to the point of madness.

The other day I wrote to Alan about such an experience of this religious insanity:

‘This blissful state seems unemotional, no love or compassion is felt in the heart, everything is a cool ‘oneness’. One feels all-pervading, ‘I am everything and everything is me and everything is Divine’. The experience can easily be mistaken as intimacy because the sense of ‘me’ is so expanded across the universe and spread so thin, so to speak, that ‘me’ is hardly noticeable. As ‘I am every thing’, one is of course ‘feeling intimate’ with the TV set or is able to intuit into someone else’s, in this case Mrs. Roberts, religious imaginations. (I had read Bernadette Roberts, a Christian Mystic’s book, ‘What is Self?’). Fascinating and seductive and very eerie. I think this could be a bit like the parallel universe that scientists fantasize about. One then lives in a universe where everything is a virtual replica of the actual, with the glow of divinity, unity and timeless-ness to it – and as it is virtual, it is controlled by the imagination of the one who makes it up. This ‘parallel’ universe ‘feels’ and is ‘imagined’ as intimate or not-separate, and yet it is twice removed from the physical body, the senses, this actual world. This ‘insanity’ of ‘feeling one with everything’ is the barrier that prevents one from experiencing the world as a flesh and blood body, with the physical senses. Boy, I really understand why these guys are so far out there, lost and locked in an imaginary space that has almost no return-ticket. Vineeto, List AF, Alan

But then, you only have to pinch yourself and where it hurts, that’s actual.

It is good not to be trapped by this complete insanity. It is the same type of dis-association that people suffer from who are in an insane asylum. The film ‘Awakening’ depicted some of those people. There was one woman who could not walk to the window because the checker pattern on the floor was interrupted by a black line – until the doctor painted the black line into checkers. In her ‘world’ the black line was dangerous. The religious insanity is being locked into another type of fantasy-world, where one isn’t really the body and one’s True Self will be free only after death – it is an altered state of consciousness, i.e. mentally deranged, forever cut off from common sense.’

It is such a relief that I am free of these eerie, seductive and imaginary experiences, which had completely removed me from the physical senses and any common sense. It is considered the pinnacle of religious achievement and yet the opposite of, and anathema to, living as a human being in this actual world. The objection to being here on the planet has created this insane paradise of spirit-ual imagining where one is not this flesh and blood body, but a spirit and feeling, waiting for the final redemption at the death of the body.

Now there is a third alternative – one can eliminate beliefs, emotions and instincts and be happy and harmless instead of feeling compassionate and swanning in an imaginary bliss. One can live in this actual, physical, magnificent universe without God but a magic that surpasses every possible imagination.

When I said that Papaji and Gangaji have got a heart, which can be felt – a transmission, it has nothing to do with human feelings as you describe in your mail. It is the heart of their being which is perceived, the sweetness coming from the divine. I don’t sense this in yours or Peter’s or Richard’s words. On the contrary, I find your words to be very firm and closed to the fact you want to deliver, your words are not flexible or poetic, they stem from the very logical world of materialism and don’t offer any juice to the spirit.

Yes, this is exactly the difference. The enlightened ones talk about and experience the heart of their being, juice to the spirit, poetry, sweetness and flexibility, all of which are qualities of the affective nature of their experience. You rightly don’t sense this kind of transmission in Peter’s or Richard’s words, because it is not part of actual freedom. Actual freedom is to experience the physical world – only. To experience this physical world without the Human Condition, without fear, aggression, nurture and desire, without the overlaying ‘self’, without the delusion of ‘soul’, is pure delight. If you would take the trouble to read a bit deeper into the matter you would understand that Richard is indeed the very first person who discovered the perfection of the actuality that is usually obscured by any kind of emotion, instincts and imagination, be it ‘normal human’ feelings or divine feelings.

I notice that you first assume that actual freedom falls into the same category as Papaji’s or Gangaji’s enlightenment, and then you criticise that our words don’t describe the state of enlightenment. Of course not. Actual freedom is something completely different altogether, in fact 180 degrees in the opposite direction of enlightenment. It is impossible to imagine the actual world – a world without concepts – and that’s why it is so important to remember one’s peak-experience. But then, we are not talking about the same experience. I will explain further down.

Richard described it best in his introduction to his journal:

For many years I sought genuine exploration and discovery of what it means to live a fully human life, and in October 1992 I discovered, once and for all, what I was looking for. Since then I have been consistently living an incomparable condition which I choose to call actual freedom – and I use the word ‘actual’ because this freedom is located here in this very world, this actual world of the senses. It is not an affective, cerebral or psychic state of being; it is a physical condition that ensues when one goes beyond Spiritual Enlightenment. In September 1981 I underwent a monumental transformation into an Altered State Of Consciousness which can only be described as Spiritual Enlightenment. [See Appendix No 1 on page 244] I became Enlightened as the result of an earnest and intense process which commenced in the January of that year. At approximately six o’clock on the morning of Sunday 6^th September 1981, my ‘ego’ disappeared entirely in an edifying moment of awakening to an ‘Absolute Reality’. I lived in the Enlightened State for eleven years, so I have an intimate understanding of the marked difference between Spiritual Enlightenment and actual freedom. Richard’s Journal, Introduction

What you sense as emotional responses on the list are just plain human responses, emotions are alive in the human realm and can cause both pleasure and pain. One does never get rid of these unless one suppresses the human nature and seduces oneself into enlightenhood....

I am not talking about suppressing the Human Nature or the Human Condition, and I am not talking about ‘seduction’ into enlightenment. Richard discovered that it is possible to completely eliminate the Human Condition, instincts, emotions, the whole lot. Enlightenment happens when you get rid of the ego and become divine feeling – the Self one with God, while actual freedom is the state when every bit of identity, ego, soul, being, Self, That, Truth, Divine Love, Universe and God have altogether disappeared. What remains is just the body with its senses and its wonderfully functioning intelligence.

I had wanted to become enlightened and the more I learned about it the more I wanted it. But firstly after Rajneesh’s death and the resulting transformation of the Ashram into another religion featured my first doubts about enlightenment being really such a good solution to life. Finally coming across Richard, the picture of enlightenment began really to wobble, and slowly, slowly I started to understand why so many things had not made sense.

This is the sense I made out of it afterwards – all the great moments, all my blissful experiences and all the love-filled moments I had put into the one category – ‘that’s what enlightenment is going to be like, just much better and going on forever’, a bit similar as I imagined heaven to be as a kid. But those experiences had all been of a varying nature, some were esoteric, some were plain imagination (like past-life fantasies), some were group-induced highs and some were insights into my practical life that hit like a hammer. But in hindsight, a few of those were pure consciousness experiences, where there was no affection, love or feeling of beauty involved, but which were an experience of purity, clarity and non-separation.

These were the experiences that had been the most appealing. Once I saw and understood the different quality between an emotional high, a blissful devotional séance, a powerful imagination and a pure consciousness experience (PCE), and once I had such a PCE again, it became clear what I wanted. It was obvious in that very moment.

Allow me to answer this question at the end of this post.

Yes, I know from my own experience that while feeling enlightened it does seem ‘to be Impossible to exist something beyond that, as this state contains all possibilities’ – but it only seems that way. (see )

Could ‘a person I very much loved’ by chance be another name for God, the glorious ‘Being’ who replaced ‘the identity called No 41’? That would make you about God number 5872.

The description of your ‘experience of being enlightened’ that it had ‘all + many more of the characteristics attributed by AF language for a PCE’ together with your comment that ‘‘I’ … belonged to a person I very much loved’ clearly point to an affective ‘Self’-loving experience whereas a pure consciousness experience is a non-affective ‘self’-less (and ‘Self’-less) experience. Your comments about feeling the collapse of ‘Suffering’ and the importance of ‘love’ are also words that describe an affective experience.

Such an experience seems very, very real while it is happening – all the good feelings come rushing in and seem to overpower the bad feelings … and these feelings are so much grander than ‘my’ normal experiencing that they are experienced as very real. However, Enlightenment, although experienced as very real, is a feeling and not actual. (see the AF Glossary for descriptions of fact and feeling, real and actual)

The writings of actualism do not ‘ignore the fact … that when this identity collapses, someone else gradually takes the space, and that is our true Self.’ It’s just that a ‘Self’, by whatever name, is a delusion born out of an illusionary self – or to put it another way – the idea of God is nothing but a fairy tale and to imagine oneself to be a God is to live in a ‘self’-created dream-like state.

I have come to know the ‘Self’ in an extensive Altered State of Consciousness but I have also had numerous pure consciousness experiences when the ‘Self’ and the ‘self’ (the identity) is temporarily absent. An actualist does not ‘ignore the Self’ but knows by experience that there is a Third Alternative to being normal or being spiritual.

‘The 4^th state of consciousness’ is another description for enlightenment. To search for the ‘true Self’ is spiritual, meta-physical practice because it involves the belief in something non-physical – the Self.

Given that ‘self’-aggrandizement is the very core of enlightenment, it is common amongst enlightened people or wannabe enlightened people to dismiss all other enlightened beings as ‘not quite enlightened’. ‘My Truth’ is a highly affective experience, and a very competitive one at that.

There is no doubt that according to ancient wisdom and common belief the experience of enlightenment is ‘the ultimate state available for humans’. Nevertheless, this ancient 5000-year-old experiment of achieving Higher Consciousness or God-consciousness is significantly flawed, i.e. it has failed to bring anything resembling peace on earth between human beings, and all the wars and murders and domestic violence and torture keep going on.

To recognize and admit to this long history of continual failure is to begin to initiate a change in one’s perception – a 180 degrees turn, away from all the ‘self’-aggrandizing spiritual beliefs and practices towards a down-to-earth investigation into one’s beliefs, feelings and instinctual passions that make ‘me’ tick.

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Now in response to your first question –

Given that you said that ‘this so-called Self, Absolute, I, God really exists’ and that this is ‘the ultimate state available for humans’, it is understandable that you don’t consider a third alternative possible.

A third alternative to being normal or being spiritual only comes into view when one is deeply dissatisfied with either of the traditional ‘self’-centred and ‘self’-obsessed states of consciousness.

For those who are dissatisfied with their life as-it-is and who are suss of the spiritual world, the Actual Freedom website points to the fact that there is an actual world right here under our very noses, a world which can only be discovered when one leaves the self and the Self behind.

On further investigation, I discovered a belief lurking in the depths – that it seems to be just as difficult to attain a condition of actual freedom as it is to ‘achieve’ enlightenment.

I’d like to throw in my observation that achieving enlightenment is peanuts compared to becoming actually and permanently free from the human condition. Why do you think hundreds of people have become enlightened in the last millennia while Richard is still the only one who is actually free?

The point I was trying to make is that actual freedom has only be discovered a few years ago for the simple reason that no one had dared to question everything, both the ego and the soul, whereas many have dared to question the ego and then aimed and settled for the delusion of enlightenment. An actual freedom from the human condition has always been available – it is only that Richard was the first to dare to question everything.

‘Accepting what actually exists’ is a spiritual term promoting the idea that the ‘I’ which resists to ‘what actually exists’ transforms into the ‘I’ which accepts ‘what actually exists’. And J. Krishnamurti for one made it very clear what is meant by ‘what actually exists’ –

‘We are always avoiding ‘what is’ ... my loneliness, emptiness, sorrow, pain, suffering, anxiety, fear, that is actually ‘what is’. (Part 3; ‘Truth and Actuality’; J. Krishnamurti, Autumn 1975; Published by KFI; ISBN PBTA78)

In the process of actualism I am not aiming at ‘accepting’ ‘what actually exists’ but I dismantle the entity that prevents me from experiencing the perfection that is always already here. Only when the entity is not, does this perfection become apparent. For ‘me’, the social-instinctual entity, it is much easier to become enlightened than to disappear off the stage forever – that’s the very reason why nobody has done it before Richard.

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And to add my own experience as evidence – some six months into my practice of actualism I arrived at an altered state of consciousness that had all the elements of enlightenment and only Richard’s strong warning not to run aground on the Rock of Enlightenment and rigorous sincerity saved me from entering permanent delusion.

For me, the only way to deflate this ‘mighty attractive proposition’ was to experience an altered state of consciousness with my wits intact and get as much information out of it as possible. Because I was able to both experience and observe this deluded state, I knew by my own experience that an ASC is indeed a poor choice compared to a pure consciousness experience. For me, this clear experiential observation was the end of the attraction of ‘the Glamour and the Glory and the Glitz’ and the rock of enlightenment eventually disappeared over the horizon.

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... it is not ‘just as difficult’ but it requires much more sincerity and far more ploughing into the depth of one’s psyche to become actually free from the human condition in toto than it does to become enlightened. After all, in the identity-swapping fantasy of enlightenment one is merely replacing a shoddy ego with a grand soul, comparable to swapping a rusty old Morris Minor for a brand-new Rolls Royce, whereas for actual freedom ‘I’ am required to persistently and willingly whittle away at my very ‘being’ until ‘I’ arrive at a point where ‘my’ immolation is inevitable.

I know by experience that it is possible to get past this ‘mightily attractive proposition for ‘me’’ by examining experientially the mighty feelings of attraction as compared to the actuality experienced in a PCE long before ‘self’-immolation. The other point is that if you have done a thorough demolition job on your spiritual beliefs, the idea of ‘getting out of it’ by escaping into an imaginary Greater Reality is seen to be patent nonsense. It may be attractive in theory but the more you progress in demolishing your ‘self’ the more you delight in the sensory experiences of the physical world.

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