Here

When I became a practicing actualist, I found it vital to sort out the practicalities of living because I can’t be happy as long as I have debilitating financial worries and I can’t be harmless if I withhold other people’s money or property. As for ‘I will have a good part of my money taken’ – when you owe money to other people it is not really yours, is it?

Spiritualists attempt to spend as much time as possible in their imaginary feel-good world in order to escape having to solve the pragmatic problems of their life. An actualist wants to be here in this physical world as totally as possible and that focus precipitates and involves sorting out one’s day-to-day life in the most sensible and straightforward manner.

As for ‘disagreeable jobs’ – it is a fact for most people that they have to work for money for food, shelter and clothes. When you ask how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and find yourself objecting to the fact of having to do a certain job, then you know that there is something to look at. It was only by slowly whittling away at my objections to the facts of life – the facts of the world-as-it-is and people-as-they-are – that I have incrementally succeeded in becoming happy and harmless.

Have your memories undergone a change?

Yes, most of my emotional memories have faded or disappeared completely once the emotional issues that sustained these memories – and that these memories in turn sustained –were dealt with at their core.

Since actualism, is the attention to the experience of the moment, ‘here’, you won’t be ‘roaming’ mentally, emotionally much; how is your emotional memory now? Are you always ‘here’?

Yes, I am always here in that daydreaming has stopped completely, neither do I imagine scenarios in the future nor waste this moment by indulging in past memories.

I remember when I realized the fact I am always here I was shocked – I desperately tried to ‘leave this moment’ and go somewhere else and I even stuck my head under the blanket trying to imagine myself somewhere else but it proved impossible. With imagination having lost its seductive and convincing power I found I am here, no matter what the situation, and consequently I decided that I might as well do whatever it takes to enjoy being here, in this, the non-imaginary world-as-it-is with all the other non-imaginary people-as-they-are.

What’s the first thought when you wake up?!

Something like: ah, it’s time to get up. Mmhmm, what’s the weather like? I wonder what will happen today…

Do you have to rmbr to practice attention first thing upon waking?

Not any more. The on-switch for attention stays on permanently nowadays and should an emotion interfere with my being happy and harmless, investigative questions automatically kick in. In the meantime when nothing is ‘going on’, as it were, and I am feeling excellent, attentiveness automatically ensures an on-going awareness of all of the sensate pleasures that simply being alive has to offer.

Many of his close associates seem to got him so wrong. Osho and many other eastern philosophies have stressed so many times on being happy ‘here and now’. There may be many methods how to achieve it.

I don’t think us disciples got him wrong there. Commitment and surrender were not only a big issue during ranch-time, but ‘totality’, as it was called later, was the main ingredient on the path to enlightenment. The story of digging only one hole and not 50 different ones to produce a well the stressing the point to not listen to other masters as to not get confused.

‘Being happy here and now’ only sounds like the same as living this moment here, now. The spiritual ‘here and now’ does not jell with the teaching of reincarnation, enlightenment being the ending of the wheel of birth and death and the teaching of meditation – closing your eyes and go somewhere else inside – to one day maybe become enlightened. Yes, when after all this effort you become enlightened, then you can laugh and say you were always ‘here and now’. But that is a different ‘here’ and ‘now’ than the here and now of normal mortals who were considered asleep and had to do dynamic meditation and other exercises to ‘wake up’.

The other obvious difference between the spiritual ‘here and now’ and the actual ‘here and now’ is how Osho and eastern philosophers regard the body and everything physical. The spiritual concept is that the world is ‘Maya’, an illusion. Once you ‘get it’, you can be happy in the spiritual realm of ‘here and now’. But you have to identify as the ‘watcher’, not as the body, you have to be detached from the body and from your senses in order to rise to your ‘true nature’. That ‘true nature’ is your consciousness, so they say, best to be achieved through meditation, which is in its purest form sitting motionless with closed eyes for hours on end. Then the identity shifts to ‘being the watcher’, to being Consciousness – and one day, one realizes that one is ‘One with All’, ‘That’, ‘Universal Love’, etc. The delusion is complete. One loses one’s ego on the way, but the soul, the feeling part of the instinctual being stays not only fully intact, but is aggrandized to the extent that one considers oneself to be God or the Universe itself.

Compared to this illusory scenario, the actual ‘here and now’ is to be here in this moment of time, which is the only moment one can experience anyway. To be actually here is to be in this place which is no-where in particular in the infinitude of the physical universe. Coming from no-where and having no-where to go we find ourselves here in this moment in time in this place in space. To be here is to be the universe experiencing itself as a human being. Being here now is to ‘be doing what is happening’ with no sense of ‘I’ or feelings of ‘me’. To be fully here, now without a fearful ‘self ‘or a ‘Grand Self’ is to be innocent, perfect and pure, fully engaged in this only moment of being alive.

Well, the issue of ‘going mad’ has been on my mind a lot for the last few months. I find it very reassuring that psychologists have classified Richard as mad in real-world terms, which is only logical as he has stepped out of the ‘sane’ world of wars, rapes, murders, tortures, domestic violence, child abuse, sadness, loneliness, grief, depression and suicide. However, it is quite a challenge to get used to leaving humanity behind and going mad – ‘mad’ according to my previous standards and to society’s standards. Sometimes there is an almost audible ‘clack’ in the brain, when an old synapse snaps, when I fail to understand how other people think and feel. More and more I fail to understand people’s emotional reactions, their psychological reasoning or the psychic vibes that I occasionally pick up when people report that they are feeling insulted, misunderstood, threatened or when they are desperately defending some non-sensical belief. It is sometimes very strange and bewildering indeed.

As far as I can still make sense out of what is happening, my ‘going mad’ is a feeling response to going 180 degrees in the opposite direction of everyone else and of my own old beliefs and emotions and my natural instincts. Further, there is the continuing disbelief that ‘how come it is so simple?’ and ‘how come, if it is that simple, nobody is doing it?’ – or almost nobody. Actual Freedom is like the magic elegant equation of mathematicians – one single solution for the whole bloody mess of the problems of the Human Condition, all of them are going to be wiped out in one stroke, forever!

In the last days I have been busy coming to terms with the fact that I am locked into ‘here’ and there is no escape possible. Since my last PCE, which I described to you in my post, I have experienced the limitations of thinking whenever I tried to use thought in order to grasp or comprehend the vastness and magic of the actual world, the immensity of this moment, the aliveness of being here. For a few days it was rather shocking, I felt disoriented, as if grasping for an outline that no longer existed. Thinking now is more episodic, stimulated when needed for practical situations or sorting out a particular issue. The outcome is that I am here in this moment with no way out – no imagination, no feeling (t’would be silly, I tried...) and no intellectualizing.

There was a feeling, though – a disorientation, a feeling of being trapped, a feeling of it all being too much.

I was reminded of Michael Ende’s ‘Unending Story’ – the boy has a wish granted and he wants to be not fat anymore. In the first stage he enjoys being thin and beautiful, but to complete the satisfaction he then has to forget that he ever was otherwise, that he had been ridiculed and suffered before for his appearance.

In a similar manner, with each item of identity that is eliminated, I am going through a transition period until the old synapse in the brain atrophies and emotional memories of former events disappear. Then the unfamiliarity, the oddness, the feeling of ‘going mad’ simply evaporates. As I know well from other issues, like believing in God, I now consider everyone else silly who believes in a bodiless entity, a divine spirit, a God or suchlike.

It is all a matter of perspective, you see.

Such fun!

Living in a peak-experience everything is perfect, everything is obvious, already happening without me having to control or direct it, in fact it can only happen if ‘I’ am not there. This memory I take back when I become ‘normal’ again, this then works as the thread, the pure intent to move further into scary enquiries.

So I know what I want and I need exactly this will and intention to overcome the fears and doubts which appear when I start cleaning myself up. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is the only question I need to check out what is happening now. Nothing else counts. Half an hour ago or tomorrow don’t count. And if I am not happy now, then there is something to do, to find out, to clean up. Which doubt, which objection, which emotion is preventing me from being happy now. It look so simple one thinks there must be a catch. But this is all there is to it. This method is so devastatingly effective and that is the scary bit – it works!

And once you see that it works, you become more daring and question yet another threshold of a dearly held belief or ‘Truth’. You will discover that however dear and proven those ‘Truths’ seem, that they are never based on facts.

To begin to experience embracing death is exquisitely delicious like an orgasm.

A death sought after, because of frustration with being here, can only lead to an Altered State of Consciousness because a strong negative feeling can only produce a strong good feeling as a chemical balancing act. A similar balancing act happened when my frustration with real life had lead me to fall in love with a spiritual master twenty years ago – I was desperate to escape the ‘real’ world, eager to seek a feel-good recipe to get out of ‘real’ life.

Self-immolation is different in quality, a more and more dispassionate, yet utterly sensate and thrilling experience. In the process of experientially understanding my tender and savage instinctual passions in operation they lose their grip, fire and reality ... and finally their credibility, until I simply observe a process of chemicals rising and subsiding.

What a marvel is the human brain!

On this list you have the opportunity to investigate hands-on and practically, and not merely theoretically, something utterly down-to-earth and entirely new to the history of consciousness, should you be ready to suspend both belief and disbelief and look into the facts. I know that the phrase ‘entirely new’ is something that every Guru proud of his profession uses but a glimpse of an experience of the world outside of belief – the actual world in its marvellous scintillating purity and perfection – will immediately belie the spiritual rehash that runs under the name of ‘entirely new’. It’s the ‘down-to-earthness that is 180 degrees opposed to the spiritual world, the matter-of-factness, the sensate delightful actuality of experiencing this world, here in this place and now in this moment. There is no other here and no other now – the metaphysical Here and Now is in fact ‘there’ in a world of no-time, no-space and no-form. The metaphysical Here and Now is merely a product of fervent fantasy, albeit a fairytale of global proportions.

This is a stupid question according to Actualists, however, what is happiness?

When I think of it from an evolution perspective, I get happy when I’m on the track to ensuring my survival, and my genes’ survival. Simply getting back to a state of happiness doesn’t make much sense from this perspective. If I have no reason to be happy (not on track), then I’m neutral or starting to feel bad. I know that if I did absolutely nothing and had no survival skills, then I’d feel very crappy, since death would be close. Life triggers the state of happiness when I’m on track. Actualism seems to say to drop off the evolutionary ladder and somehow get back to being happy (before you start experiencing PCEs). I have the belief that happiness is a state and that trying to trigger it without a reason over an extended period gets extremely tiring since it is not homeostasis.

Happiness is a feeling, therefore to theorize, philosophize or speculate about happiness doesn’t help to understand what happiness is, nor will it help you to feel happy – you will only arrive at various beliefs about happiness, but no genuine understanding that could help you to be happy. If you get stuck with the word happiness, try experimenting with feeling good.

Feeling good, as the word indicates, is a feeling and the only  way to understand what ‘feeling good’ means is by feeling it. The way to do this is by deliberately getting in touch with your feelings and observe them in operation and the best way to do this is by asking yourself each moment again ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’

If you feel good, then fine, if not then you determine which feeling you now have that is preventing you from feeling good. You may find sadness, grumpiness, resentment, numbness, listlessness, boredom, cynicism, hate, despair, anger, love, greed, dependency, loneliness, fear, hopelessness, wariness or some other feeling and then you set about to investigate what most recently caused you to feel this way in order to get back to feeling good as soon as possible. In other words, you investigate your ‘bad’ feelings as well as your ‘good’ feelings with the pure intent to be as harmless and as happy as possible.

And yes, you will find that it is initially hard work to feel good or feel happy for extended periods of time as you will find a myriad of excuses and so-called justified reasons for being annoyed, feeling sad, being bored and so on. This is why understanding that this moment is the only moment you can experience being alive is vitally important because then you will be less inclined to waste this moment by frittering it away by not feeling good about being here. You are here anyway, and it is now, and it can only ever be now, so why not make it your business to enjoy being here?

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