Therefore I do not need to ‘ever accomplish the hard-wiring’ as you suggest – what I do in the continuous process of increasing attentiveness is to become aware of and remove the redundant software programming. Then the hard-wiring, human intelligence, can function undisturbed and undistorted and the senses perceive unfiltered delight.

Human intelligence is indeed an ‘underlying’ function of the human brain, underlying in that intelligence is subordinate to, and hence crippled by, the instinctual survival passions emanating from the now-redundant primitive or archaic brain. This is the ‘general case’ in that survival instincts are genetically encoded in each and every human brain. The experience of the actualism process is that intelligence, when freed from the instinctual passions, is by its nature benevolent, sensible and intelligent.

I don’t know which kind of animals you have in mind, but animals on farms or in the wild do not enjoy life – they are driven by the survival instinct of ‘what can I eat, what can eat me’. In the wild animals are constantly on the alert, vigilant for predators and scanning for attack on prey. Animals that are provided with shelter, food and security become domesticated such that the survival instincts are not as pre-eminent but when push comes to shove the wild animal instantly re-surfaces – exactly as it does in the domesticated human animal when push comes to shove.

Animals are not aware that they are cruel, in panic, pining or bored but some are nevertheless are run by feelings and all of them are driven by instinctive imperatives. The idea that animals are innocent or happy is a myth.

Spiritual teachings have always maintained that one only needs to dissociate from one’s social conditioning in order to be ‘who you really are’ – the feeling ‘self’ which is none other than the animal instinctual passions. In contrast, actualism recognizes that the root cause of human malice and sorrow lays in the animal instinctual survival passions and not, as ancient wisdom has it, in conditioned thought and cultural socialization. A freedom from the human condition can only be achieved via ‘self’-immolation, which is both, the death of one’s ego (the social identity) and the extinction of one’s ‘being’ (the instinctual identity).

As for ‘is being happy our birthright’ – it does not make sense to call happiness our ‘birthright’ because there is no court where you could claim your ‘right’. I would rather describe it that the animal survival passions, universally manifest in humans as malice and sorrow, are our biological heritage – ‘me’ being as old as the first human – but a path to freedom from this software programming is now laid out. You can jump right on with both feet and complete the next step in human evolution.

The idea that ‘the social conditioning be the software programming, and the instinctual passions be the hardware programming’ is instilled by spiritual teachings and psychological theories that lay the blame of all the ills of mankind on social conditioning.

The uniqueness of Richard’s discovery is that he proved by example that one’s instinctual passions are permanently deleteable and therefore as much software as one’s social conditioning. One need not trust Richard that this is so because everyone has had a PCE at some time in their life when both ‘I’ as ego – one’s social identity – and ‘me’ a being – one’s instinctual identity – are temporarily in abeyance. In a PCE both ‘software programs’ crash simultaneously, leaving this body free of any identity whatsoever – as such, a PCE is experiential evidence that the instinctual passions are not hardwired.

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The issue of the instinctual passions also relates to your question in the second post –

Human intelligence is indeed an ‘underlying’ function of the human brain, underlying in that intelligence is subordinate to, and hence crippled by, the instinctual survival passions emanating from the now-redundant primitive or archaic brain. This is the ‘general case’ in that survival instincts are genetically encoded in each and every human brain. The experience of the actualism process is that intelligence, when freed from the instinctual passions, is by its nature benevolent, sensible and intelligent.

Your question appears to be induced by instinctual ‘self’-preservation which cannot conceive that this body would be able to survive, or maybe not even choose to survive, without ‘my’ instinctive survival program.

I as this flesh-and-blood body do not ‘resolve to choosing to live’ – I am already alive. The ‘preference’ to not be alive for a body sans identity would presumably only ever arise if one was incapable of enjoying being alive as in the case of a debilitating incurable disease that caused chronic pain. To defend oneself from bodily harm is pure common sense – you cannot ‘enjoy the universe’ when you are dead.

Here is an excerpt of Richard’s response to a similar question –

Respondent: Once these instinctual survival passions are eliminated what then is the response to danger such as overwhelming physical attack?

Richard: An intelligent response.

Respondent: Without the fight or flight response how does one deal with this type of situation?

Richard: Fearlessly. The instinctual passion of fear triggers any one of three reactions: freeze, flight or fight ... none of which are necessarily appropriate when dealing with the most common aggressor (human beings) in today’s world. In this day and age negotiation is by far the most efficacious response to a threatening situation. And fear – adrenaline coursing through the veins; the heart pumping furiously; the palms sweaty; the face blanched white; knuckles gripped; body tensed and so on and so on – cripples effective negotiation and is hardly conducive to a healthy outcome. Of course one still has the option to freeze or flee or fight if that is what the situation calls for ... with the added advantage of such action not being fear-driven (or courage-driven). Foolish courage – an impulse sourced in fear – can cause one to take needless risks.

There was a fanciful movie released circa 1995-6 called ‘Fearless’ by Mr. Peter Weir which gives the wrong impression of what being without fear is like ... ‘Foolhardy’ would be a better title. Richard, List B, No 39, 13.11.2000

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Once you begin to practice actualism and begin to de-program your belief in the supposedly unknowable nature of the universe, then the nature of the actualism process becomes easily apparent.

No wonder, you’ve ‘been tripping over my own feet with the latter’ – you have omitted the most significant part in your first ‘key element’ – the instinctual survival passions, which are a layer deeper than ‘accrued conditioning’. The ‘accrued conditioning’ is always first impediment to freedom, peace and happiness to be tackled and once there is a sufficient dent in the armour of one’s social identity, then it is possible to become more and more aware of the underlying crude instinctual passions. To believe that ‘I’ am a product of an accrued conditioning only is to remain ensnared in one’s spiritual-philosophical conditioning – the very first thing that has to go if one is to even begin to become a practicing actualist.

You may remember the piece from Peter’s ‘Actualist’s guide’ –

It is vitally important to understand that two stages happen with every investigation of a particular deep seated emotion over a period of time, such as aggression, sex, love, sorrow, authority, desire, etc. – first the social identity is dismantled, only then are the raw instinctual passions underneath are exposed. I know, I keep flogging this point but it is the only way to go deep sea diving into one’s own psyche. The initial tendency is to go straight into trying to look at the instinctual passions, but this is a disingenuous short-cut that can only lead to snorkelling around on the surface. This two-stage investigation is the crucial difference between the spiritual version of denial, selective awareness and remaining a passive watcher of life and the Actualist’s application of sincerity, all-encompassing awareness and becoming an active participant in this moment of being alive. An Actualist’s Guide

I always found that my attempts at ‘experiencing the actual universe directly’ were putting the cart before the horse. Whenever I ask the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and I am not happy, then I explore and remove the cause of not being happy – only when I am happy, can sensate experiencing have a chance of happening on its own accord. And whenever in the process of letting go of my spiritual beliefs I eradicated a cornerstone of my identity – a core belief, a deep-seated feeling, a bit of ‘me’ – then the crack in the door bought about a pure consciousness experience.

Yes, and it is remarkable how very little real threat to my both health and my safety there is when my perception is not clouded by instinctual ‘self’-preservation and when my life-style is not run by senseless pursuit of power, wealth, fame or excitement – in one word ‘self’-importance.

As I don’t know much about what chemical reactions happen in the brain, I looked up the Encyclopaedia Britannica –

‘Adrenalin has effects upon the nervous system, which are recognizable subjectively in man by feelings of anxiety and of increased mental alertness’. Encyclopaedia Britannica

From the word ‘effects’ I conclude that an increased output of adrenalin and other chemical neuro-transmitters does not necessarily require feelings of anxiety for ‘increased mental alertness’ to occur. In other words, the effects can be two separate effects and it is quite apparent that in a dangerous situation one functions better if the affective reaction can be eliminated.  Richard’s report about his response to an emergency situation – ‘necessity provides all the calorific energy required’ – seems to confirm my hypothesis.

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The number one ‘abuse’ is the animal survival programming, the very source of the production of adrenalin. Therefore the salient point for an actualist is not about abuse of adrenalin, but tackling the drug-factory – one’s very ‘being’ rooted in the instinctual survival passions.

Richard’s recently related story makes it very clear that the hypothesis I was offering above was wrong and that the instinctual passions and the production of adrenalin are inextricably intertwined – no passions, no production of adrenalin.

A classic example of this occurred whilst strolling along a country lane one fine morning with the sunlight dancing its magic on the glistening dew-drops suspended from the greenery everywhere; these eyes are delighting in the profusion of colour and texture and form as the panorama unfolds; these ears are revelling in the cadence of tones as their resonance and timbre fills the air; these nostrils are rejoicing in the abundance of aromas and scents drifting fragrantly all about; this skin is savouring the touch, the caress, of the early springtime ambience; this mind, other than the sheer enjoyment and appreciation of being alive as this flesh and blood body, is ambling along in neutral – there is no thought at all and conscious alertness is null and void – when all-of-a-sudden the easy gait has ceased happening.

These eyes instantly shift from admiring the dun-coloured cows in a field nearby and are looking downward to the front and see the green and black snake, coiling up on the road in readiness to act, which had not only occasioned the abrupt halt but, it is discovered, had initiated a rapid step backwards ... an instinctive response which, had the instinctual passions that are the identity been in situ, could very well have triggered off freeze-fight-flee chemicals.

There is no perturbation whatsoever (no wide-eyed staring, no increase in heart-beat, no rapid breathing, no adrenaline-tensed muscle tone, no sweaty palms, no blood draining from the face, no dry mouth, no cortisol-induced heightened awareness, and so on) as with the complete absence of the rudimentary animal ‘self’ in the primordial brain the limbic system in general, and the amygdala in particular, have been free to do their job – the oh-so-vital startle response – both efficaciously and cleanly. Richard, List AF, No 32 (25), 16.2.2003

By maintaining this conviction U.G. Krishnamurti paints himself into a corner making it then impossible to investigate the deeper feelings and genetic instinctual passions, which automatically arise before thought even has a chance to operate. LeDoux and others have done extensive empirical research that shows that the sensory input stream to the amygdala – which produces the feeling response – takes only 12 milliseconds as opposed to the 25 millisecond that it takes to reach the neo-cortex – which then produces the thought response.

If you could invent something that stretches that 12 msec out to 50, and put it in pill form ... I wonder if serotonin uptake inhibitors have an effect on this value. It’s on my to-do list to rummage through this LeDoux’s material.

I don’t think that a pill will ever be able to replace self-awareness and pure intent. But through self-awareness it is certainly possible to stretch ‘12 msec out to 50’ or more, and for Richard there seem to be no chemicals triggered by the amygdala at all. There is a growing body of evidence that the brain is programmed by a series of connections between nodes called synapses and that these connections are capable of change. If this is the case then deleting this programming can be explained in the following terms –

When you follow an emotion back to its origin as it arises and pin it down to an event, a memory, a belief, a fear, a part of your identity and finally the instinctual passion – then you can see it in the bright light of awareness and the emotion will lose its urgency and conviction and is seen for what it is – a bit of the software programming in the brain that can be deleted. The next time, when the same emotion arises, it will be less convincing, the synapse in the brain will slowly weaken and each time you investigate a particular feeling or belief, it will become weaker until the relevant synapse that may well form that program will eventually be broken.

As for ‘rummage through this LeDoux material’ – you can find a brief layman summary and the address for the LeDoux website on the instinct page in the AF Library.

When Richard answered that ‘at root fear is the most basic of all the instinctual passions’ you have somehow concluded that your theory of ‘sorrow comes from fear’ was now a fact for you and everyone else. But your theory is still a theory built upon Richard’s answer that ‘at root fear is the most basic of all the instinctual survival passions’. <snipped>

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At root, fear may be the most basic of all passions, but one has nevertheless to work at peeling away all the outer layers in order to reveal the root and then be able to eliminate it.

I have been peeling away the outer layers for a long time. How are you saying the root is to be eliminated once it has been revealed? That is what I am trying to get at.

I fully go along with Richard’s experience, as it accords with my own pure consciousness experiences – ‘only elimination will do the trick’, elimination of ‘me’. <snipped>

Once you have ‘revealed’ the root of a particular feeling in its totality, i.e. once you brought into the bright light of awareness, then that complete exposure and experiential understanding is at the same time the elimination of that feeling. If a feeling has not disappeared, then it has not been totally understood in all its aspects, and you then have another opportunity to look at it and examine it. Given that ‘I’ am all I think and feel myself to be, then the day I understand all of my emotions and instinctual passions in their totality, ‘I’ will disappear forever, never to return. It’s an incredibly exhilarating adventure.

Ok, it sounds like what you are saying is that once the root is revealed and understood completely then it disappears. This does make sense to me. This answers my question clearly and completely. Thank you.

Given that you still seem to hold to the conclusion that ‘sorrow comes from fear’ you now jump to a further conclusion that once ‘the root is revealed and understood completely’ then fear ‘disappears’ . You are therefore not concerned about eliminating what you call the ‘superficial emotions’ of malice and sorrow but that your sole aim in life is to become fearless. The aim of eliminating fear without aiming at eliminating one’s malice and sorrow is well-established in all the spiritual teachings – becoming fear-less by realizing ‘who you really are’, a process also known as Self-Realization. <snipped>

Maybe it will further clarify the difference between spiritualism and actualism by describing the process of examining a particular feeling – a process that, if thoroughly completed, can lead to the virtual elimination of that feeling together with that part of my identity who harboured and was nourished by this feeling. I will use sorrow as the example, given that the thread of our conversation initially started with the topic of exploring the causes of sorrow.

Whenever I experienced sorrow, the examination began right at the moment when I first became aware that I was experiencing the feeling of sorrow. Due to our social upbringing, every human being is taught to cope or deal with these undesirable feelings in very specific ways, amongst them being repressing one’s feelings, expressing them, accepting them or indulging in them in socially-acceptable ways, seeking solace and protection from some mythical God, Divine Intelligence or Divine Teacher or denying and transcending undesirable feelings by becoming a Higher Self. <snipped>

So when you find that what you understand to be the root of a feeling does not result in the elimination of that feeling, then you might have to go back to the ‘outer layers’ and investigate the traditional beliefs, values and conclusions that you are unwittingly taking for granted. Unless you question everything – and find a definite unambiguous factual answer to each of your questions – there is no way of ever experientially understanding the root of an emotion, let alone an instinctual passion.

The only thing I concluded was that fear is the predominant instinct, which I had already said to Peter before I ever talked to Richard so it wasn’t based on what Richard said.

Your conclusion, regardless of what it is based on, is non-factual. If you look at Richard’s quote, he said that ‘at root fear is the most basic of all the instinctual survival passions’, which is certainly not the same thing as ‘the predominant instinct’. The basic instinctual survival passions, common to all animal-life on this planet, are determined by the principle of ‘what can I eat and what can eat me’. However, historic and present day evidence makes it glaringly obvious that the predominant passions in the human animal are those of malice and sorrow.

Though it is certainly easier to admit to experiencing fear than to admit to being as malicious and sorrowful as everyone else, a remedy can only be applied successfully if the patient firstly admits to being sick. As long as one’s every emotion is explained or excused as being the sole result of being fearful, one cannot address, examine and eliminate malice and sorrow in oneself. And unless you eliminate your instinctual malice and sorrow, you can never be actually free of fear, for they are part and parcel of a single package.

Further on you stated:

Unless this instinctual animal heritage is acknowledged, recognized, and investigated and finally eliminated, what passes for peace on earth between human beings can only ever be maintained at the point of a gun- with police, army, and a strong justice system. It is not, as is commonly believed, the social, political or economic environment that makes people aggressive but it is our inherent animal-instinctual aggressive nature that can, when push comes to shove, explode at any time. <snip>

This seems to be the crux of the matter. It is a futile exercise to blame social conditions for violence, but it is also an extremely commonplace understanding. For instance I was recently reading a book entitled ‘Fist-Stick-Knife-Gun’ by a man who grew up in the South Bronx, a blighted inner-city ghetto area in New York. His life experience was marked by interpersonal violence from a young age, but he was able to go to college and turned his life in adulthood to helping the young people in these areas as a counsellor. But here again I found that he made the common mistake of blaming violence in the ghetto on the social conditions – as abysmal as they may be. It simply didn’t wash for me, because I know only too well that one can be living in the lap of luxury and still be extremely violent. It is not that I am totally discounting hunger and poverty as being among the causes of violence, but violence has far, far deeper roots that go all the way into our rudimentary animal instincts. One has to start where one is and free oneself from the grip of this primitive survival programming. While the particular form that violence takes is ultimately shaped and determined by the social environment, the propensity for violence, fuelled as it is by the rudimentary instinct of aggression common to all human beings, is to a large extent genetically determined. I feel it is basically incorrect to say that violence is learned, as this South Bronx-bred author does state unequivocally.

Recently there was a local television show called ‘Bad Behaviour’ where a journalist interviewed criminals convicted for murder or attempted murder, two males and two females. In the course of the interviews it became clear that for both women something had gone wrong in their socialisation, i.e. their moral and ethical ‘lid’ did not work, a fact that left them without sufficient control when their instinctual passions erupted. The sister of one of the women was owed a small amount of money by someone and the she decided to ‘teach her a lesson’ as she called it, stabbing her to death. Even after the deed she could not feel any remorse, shame or guilt for the act, only resentment that the death of the woman resulted in her being jailed, separated from her young son. She even said if someone would hurt her son, she would kill again.

The second woman could be described as a nice friendly housewife but was someone who had trouble ‘standing up for herself’. After years of disrespectful and abusive treatment from her husband one night she lost control and killed him with an axe. ‘I don’t know what came over me’ she said, ‘but I knew I had to go to the police and give myself up’. There are many similar stories where bottled up anger explodes and creates havoc and usually people say they didn’t know what came over them or that ‘I wasn’t myself in that moment’.

One of the men interviewed grew up in a street-fighting environment and when his family moved to Australia, he still saw the streets as being full of potential enemies. Subsequently whoever happened to give him a strange look, teased his mother for her foreign customs or looks was an adversary and needed to be attacked. When asked if he would change his behaviour after being released from jail he answered he could change when he gets married and has children. He imagined he would stop drinking, he would have new friends, not his gang-ho friends from the past, and then his attitude and behaviour would change. But without a wife and children he considered the task of changing his habits as being too great.

What I found most interesting in those reports was that because the social conditioning of each person had an obvious flaw, one could clearly see the results of the bare instincts operating in their naked brutality and simplicity – kill or be killed, protect your offspring at any cost, fear your enemy. Most sociologists are concerned with the question as to why the social conditioning fails in people and how to prevent it failing while nobody dares to look at the root cause – the animal instinctual passions. The root cause is far too close to the bone, so to speak. But to overlook the fact that each and every human being is endowed with instinctual passion is to carry on inventing better asbestos suits or questioning why the suits always have holes in them instead of putting out the fire.

One need only look at the world-wide incidence of violence to see something much deeper and more resistant to change at work. While there may be one or two isolated, extremely rare cases of tribes way off in the jungle somewhere who are essentially peaceful (come to think of it, I can’t think of a one), human violence and warfare has a world-wide incidence endemic to the human species. Terrorism is nothing new. Anger is nothing new. To blame the terrorism on ‘Muslim anger’ over the treatment of the Palestinians by the US-backed Israelis is akin to blaming the depredations of the Nazis’ to ‘German anger’ over the indignities of the Versailles treaty. It only makes sense whilst one is busily harbouring malice and sorrow oneself.

I like your comparison. It makes the nonsense of continuously finding the fault in others and thus perpetuating the cycle of taking offence and seeking revenge so blatantly obvious. Terrorism is indeed nothing new, in fact the sixteen hour BBC series on British history that is on local television right now has shown history to be an almost unbroken series of terrorist acts – tribes against tribes, kings against kings, lords against bishops, not to mention the countless unrecorded acts of senseless violence of common folk against each other.

As an actualist, the only thing I can do is to pick myself up by my bootstraps and change myself.

I get some definite reminders every now and again. I have some bleed-throughs of the instincts from time to time. For instance, I experienced a temper tantrum this week. I have not left the Human Condition, I am still in it. I have to ask myself why these things happen, and I have to admit that I am discouraged when I act childishly petulant and peevish. It is a most uncomfortable state. But I find that rather than ‘snowball’, these negative moods rather quickly dissipate once I get back to running the question. I am writing this so that others will not think that Actual Freedom is some kind of piece of cake, something easily accomplished. It’s darned hard to get right down to it. I have always had the greatest difficulty with anger. I am subject to ‘stuffing’ anger and can easily end up quite unawares that I am actually very angry and then ... kapow! it comes tumbling out.

One reason why I was initially drawn to Actual Freedom was because I always felt somehow uneasy when I realized how I was driven by my emotions. There was always something awkward about being blindly driven by emotions which do not make any rational sense and the fact that everybody is affected by, and acting out, the same emotions did not make it less embarrassing. A lot of effort in therapy and spiritual teachings goes into ‘accept yourself as you are’ but it always tasted of insincerity and cheap solace to me.

The other night we watched a program that portrayed the life of a lion family over a two-year period. I found it fascinating to see all the various instincts in action without the moral and ethical overlay, which animals simply don’t have. This made it easy to study their aggression, their nurture, their fear, their mating behaviour, their hierarchy, their territorial instincts and their arrangements of belonging to the group – all of their instinctual actions were obviously for their own survival, the survival of the pride and to make yet more lions. To know by experience that these very same instinctual animal programming is operating in ‘me’ makes the intent to move on ever more urgent.

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It is curious – such a simple aim – happy and harmless – and yet, I am again and again surprised how little attraction it holds for most people. It seems to be that some people, like you, are able to take the words ‘at face value’ while others have too much investment at finding fault with the option to even consider that becoming happy and harmless is the most significant thing they can do with their lives.

It is quite hard to understand. I am not at all happy with the way ‘I’ am. Perhaps No 12 said it best recently. He said he is not interested in changing, that everything is fine as it is.

I pondered about why one would not want to become free from the pain that is the Human Condition and I found a similarity to drug-addiction – for the brief hours or days of bliss one is ready to suffer countless days of sorrow, hypocrisy, malice, depression, loneliness and withdrawal-symptoms from that bliss – but to give up both the good and the bad feelings appears to be too much of a sacrifice. It would indeed be the beginning of the ending of ‘me’, my precious identity.

I think that the bigger the ‘highs’, and consequently the deeper the ‘lows’, the harder it is to give up the addiction, be it to drugs, to love, to power, to enlightenment, to God, to beauty, to bliss or to mania. I think I mentioned it before – in order to get rid of, for example, jealousy, dependency and loneliness I had to give up desiring for and running after the capricious good feelings that love provided, like security, bliss, sweet dreams and fleeting moments of connectedness.

The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ instinctual passions are so closely intertwined, they are in fact one and the same program. Such a simple fact – two sides of one coin – and yet none of the spiritual and religious wisdom expounded by thousands of teachers has ever taken notice of its significance for bringing a solution to humankind’s sorrow, fear and aggression. When one gives up bliss, love, truth and beauty one is not left with dread and emptiness as William James and other wise guys make us believe. Beneath the glossy feelings of love and bliss and the stark feelings of hate and dread lies the unpolluted and wondrous magnificence of actuality.

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Well, I did not come to this list or to this website because everything was fine the way it was. I am interested in changing ... irrevocably and fundamentally. It seems every once in awhile I run smack dab up against the instincts. It seems like it is a matter of practicing unceasing awareness in all your affairs. It seems like I fall sometimes into the trap of not running the question ... kind of like running on automatic pilot. If I trace an explosion of the instincts back to when they started, that’s usually what comes up ... I was not examining my experience, not running the question with honesty and assiduity.

I found that there are two kinds of emotional experiences – one was directly connected to my social identity, to my hopes and fears, disappointments and guilt, power issues and threatened beliefs, hurt feelings and passionate imagination. ‘Running the question’ each time I was feeling disturbed in any way has certainly provided me with the tools to become aware of each and every aspect of my social identity in action. These experiences have nearly completely ceased nowadays due to the substantial weakening of this outer layer of the ‘self’.

However, as the underlying raw instincts came to the surface once in a while, I began to understand that there is quite often no particular cause or reason for them – the instinctual program is simply running on automatic. ‘Running the question’ would not necessarily prevent the occurrences of such emotional outbreaks but being aware of ‘how I am experiencing this moment of being alive’ is essential to not let these events blossom into a full-blown dramas but to nip these outbursts in the bud in order to get back to feeling good or excellent.

What I am saying is that ‘I’ cannot prevent the instincts from coming to the surface as long as there is a ‘me’ still in existence. Only when the animal instinctual passions come to the surface can I examine them and fully experience their potential ferocity, which in turn fuels my intent to facilitate the ending of ‘me’.

Just now a bit of Richard’s screensaver was floating by that may be relevant to observing one’s instinctual passions –

Attentiveness is an aesthetic alertness that takes place with minimised reference to self. With attentiveness one sees the internal world with blameless references to concepts like ‘my’ or ‘mine’. Suppose there is a feeling of sadness. Ordinary consciousness would say, ‘I am sad’. Using attentiveness, one heedfully notices the feeling as a natural feeling – ‘There is human sadness’ – thus one does not tack on that possessive personal concept of ‘I’ or ‘me’ ... for one is already possessed. Attentiveness is the observance of the basic nature of each arising feeling; it is observing all the inner world – emotional, passionate and calentural – which is whatever is presently taking place in the affective faculty. Attentiveness is seeing how any feeling makes ‘me’ tick – and how ‘I’ react to it – with the perspicacity of seeing how it affects others as well. In attentiveness, there is an unbiased observing of the constant showing-up of the ‘reality’ within and is examining the feelings arising one after the other ... and such attentiveness is the ending of its grip.

Please note that last point: in attentiveness, there is an observance of the ‘reality’ within, and such attention is the end of its embrace ... finish.

Here lies apperception. Richard’s Articles, Attentiveness, Sensuousness, Apperceptiveness

We are all ‘wounded children’ who react to different situations based on our own early life trauma. The fears of pressure and expectation, of rejection and abandonment, of being ignored or misunderstood as children.

What you say does not really explain everything as to where these fears come from. Psychologist and psychoanalysts have not completely understood the fact that human beings are born with instincts, the same instincts that animals are equipped with to secure survival in the wild. Many psychs believe that children are born as ‘Tabula Rasa’, an empty sheet of paper to be written on by society. But if you watch babies and small children, they are not innocent at all. They have greed and malice already in them, erupting at different occasions – displaying our animal heritage.

These survival instincts consist basically of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Christians call them original sin, the East sees it as ‘karma’. These instinctual passions are being formed, conditioned, interpreted and channelled according to different societies through the usual conditioning of childhood and adolescence. The self is being formed.

Up to now everybody has believed that we cannot get rid of our instincts, that they are ‘hardware’. The only solution on offer has been to transcend one’s body-mind and emerge into an ethereal state of love, bliss and maybe enlightenment.

Richard discovered that we can actually eliminate our instincts, not only transcend them. The difference is that neither body nor the intelligent part of the brain have to be discarded or transcended, but we simply clean ourselves from our software – the animal instincts and the sense of self. It is now possible to live in the world, with all the pleasures the senses can provide, but without fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

Vineeto, I am not sure what you were trying to say in this post. What did you find ‘objectionable’ in my response to Peter’s post Legacy of Gurus.

I am not sure what you had in mind about dearly held beliefs and loyalty. But I know one thing, beliefs are easy, they are piece of cake. I can do research and find out that something is a belief and hence not care about it. But that process in my opinion (experience) is not very useful. I would rather watch out for and check out the feelings which act as glue for the beliefs. Checking out the feelings are fun. Same is true for the loyalty too.

Just as a point of accuracy, I didn’t use the word ‘objectionable’. I wrote to indicate that maybe you find emotions hidden underneath your questions and objections to Peter, as I know from my own objections and battles that I had often a hidden agenda when I was defending my own status quo. That’s the meaning of ‘Why defend the indefensible?’ Once I decided that I wanted to become happy and harmless I went for the cause of my objecting or fighting by turning the torchlight on to myself. I got particularly suspicious about my intentions when I wanted to use harsh words, wanted to hurt, became tricky, became emotional, defensive, sad, fearful, angry, sarcastic or played stupid – all tools that I had used in previous battles whenever I felt cornered.

But given that I was on a ‘battle’ with my own ‘self’, I wanted to discover the bugger that causes misery and suffering, disharmony and suspicion. I wanted to eliminate the root cause of battling in me. I had enough of petty ‘right and wrong’ discussions, man-woman disagreements, good and bad opinions and shouting or sulking arguments. I wasn’t interested anymore in winning an argument – I was only interested to find my own ‘original face’, even if it was dead ugly. And it is rotten and ugly, to say the least!

Our animal instincts in the primitive brain – everybody’s ‘original face’ – are our reactive, mindless, unintelligent, aggressive, instinctive and dangerous heritage. To admit their functioning in me, to acknowledge that these are what ‘I’ consist of at ‘my’ very core was indeed shocking, humiliating, threatening and devastating. But with the aim of eliminating ‘me’ it was also exciting and gratifying to be able to each day discover a little bit more of what ‘I’ am made of and incrementally reduce the influence of the instinctual passions in my life.

Well, you can see I am not one to discuss subtleties of faith with, I am throwing the baby out with the bath-water. But then, I am in a position to confidently do so, because I have eliminated the very program that facilitates the invention of god and religion in the first place – the instinctual passions of fear and aggression, nurture and desire. Without these instincts operating as the basic software, one has no need to play the game of enhancing the ‘good’ emotions to balance the ‘bad’ emotions, nor a belief in God’s moral rules of right and wrong via reward and punishment. Then the universe is seen as perfect, as it has always been. It is only the software-program in human beings that is desperately out of date. It had been necessary to bring about evolution from the stone-age to now, but now we have enough awareness and intelligence to live without those basic survival instincts. And this basic programming causes us to still ‘battle it out for survival’ and as such is responsible for war and suffering, fear, hope, jealousy and anger, as well as for the fairy-stories of gods and demons, souls and life-after-death.

I am not clear on how one eliminates the instincts. Does this happen on its own or is there something that ‘I’ need to do?

As for eliminating instincts, I found that the method works as effectively for discovering, experiencing, investigating and eliminating instincts as it does for investigating the beliefs, morals, ethics and values that shape our social identity. Personally, I had to get rid of my moral, ethical and spiritual restrictions first in order to be able to admit to, acknowledge and recognize the ‘gross’ instinctual passions that lie at the core of my ‘self’. First I had to question my ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, before I was able to recognize and investigate my own raw survival instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

A week ago I discovered in a National Geographic magazine from 1989 an article from Jane Goodall about the life of chimpanzees in the wild. She observed them over years and describes in detail their social behaviour. Being busy with the topic for a few days gave me plenty of time to ponder over the remarkable similarity between humans and chimps, which are our closest genetic cousins with their DNA-structure being 98% identical to humans. One night the realization hit that at ‘my’ core that ‘I’ am the same makeup as a chimp, an instinctually driven creature, but fortunately equipped with the capability of self-awareness. I can now see that the instinctual program in humans is no different to the instinctual survival program of chimps or gorillas. The understanding has been stunning, to say the least. I suddenly saw how simple it all is. ‘Me’, the chimpanzee, ‘me’, the instinctual survival program is the very core of my identity. This is what has to die.

With the help of pure intent and self-awareness I have removed the imprinted ethics and morals of my social and spiritual identity that kept the lid on those primary instinctual passions, and now I am able to see those bare instincts operating in me. Neither expressing nor repressing any emotions really does the trick and sets the magic in motion that carries me through again into the actual world of delight and perfection.

I understand the part about neither expressing or repressing the emotions. As I stated above I’m trying to actually understand what it is to be intimate with the instincts. This may be what I have been calling the thing itself which is what’s left when I stay with the feeling without naming it.

‘Neither expression or repression emotions’ is not a question of ‘not naming’ a feeling. I personally found it very important to name, distinguish, judge, discriminate, evaluate and investigate each feeling and what has triggered it, in order to get to the source of that feeling. The aim of the game is to replace feeling with actuality, belief with fact and discover ‘who’ one thinks and feels one is. In this way, more and more beliefs have evaporated into thin air as being simply silly and the accompanying feelings of fear, guilt, loyalty, worry, sorrow, etc. disappeared with them. It takes courage, persistence and bloody-mindedness to not only watch one’s affective feeling rise and fall, but to actually investigate and eliminate them. They constitute the major part of our identity, ‘who’ we feel we are.

Then, and only then, your instincts will come to the surface.

*

As for eliminating instincts, I found that the method works as effectively for discovering, experiencing, investigating and eliminating instincts as it does for investigating the beliefs, morals, ethics and values that shape our social identity. Personally, I had to get rid of my moral, ethical and spiritual restrictions first, in order to be able to admit to, acknowledge and recognize the ‘gross’ instinctual passions that lie at the core of my ‘self’. First I had to question my ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, before I was able to recognize and investigate my own raw survival instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

My understanding of what you have said is to keep using the method and deal with issues as they come up. Although I have been working on beliefs and emotions for a long time this area of instincts is new to me so I don’t know exactly where I’m at with it. For instance, if I don’t name a feeling and stay with it there is an energy that seems to be in the area of the old brain. Is this an instinct that is producing this energy? How do I become intimate with the instincts?

Having been programmed first with the Christian and later with Eastern religious belief, the fact that humans are born with a set of instincts – and not born ‘innocent’ – has been quite a new discovery for me. Christians say that one is born with original sin because of Adam’s disobedience, and in a way they come close to the fact that without moral and ethical restraint, we humans behave no differently than wild animals, instinctually driven.

Slowly, slowly, after I removed the layers of moralistic and ethical values I could dare to acknowledge and experientially discover that ‘me’, at the very core, consists of nothing else but crude and cruel survival instincts – fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Discovering and seeing in action each of these instincts was an adventure by itself, thrilling, fascinating and very revealing into the human nature.

First one removes the ‘truths’, convictions, intuitions and feelings that were instilled in us to make us a fit member of society – a man, a woman, a wife, a husband, a scientist, a clerk, an American, a follower or a ‘true’ believer. And it is great fun to dismantle those identities and eventually become an anonymous nobody. Then, on honest investigation, you will be able to recognize these instinctual passions as ‘you’, all of ‘you’. It is not a matter of having an ‘intimate’ relationship with one’s instincts, but to acknowledge, feel and experience that ‘I’ am my instinctual passions, nothing else. ‘I’ am rotten to the very core.

That experiential acknowledgment that underlying one’s precious feelings are the animal instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, gives one the motivation and pure intent to actively devote one’s life to irrevocably changing oneself.

Also I want to chat a bit about the subject that Peter has raised in his last post to you – the ‘good’ and – ‘tender’ instinctual passions. It was a good reminder for me when he said that it took Richard only a few months to eliminate anger, yet 11 years to eliminate the ‘good’ – pacifism, love, compassion, beauty and bliss.

So, as part of my investigation I watched a movie today which could be called a classic regarding this very issue. It is called ‘Good morning, Miss Dove’, a film made in 1955, full of the straightforward morals and ethics of post-war America. Miss Dove turns down a marriage proposal in order to become a teacher of her little town and teaches generation after generation not only geography but in particular how to behave like perfect moral citizens. Every word and gesture of hers is oozing the ‘good’ and the ‘right’, teaching the distinction between the respectable and the disreputable. In her subtle and ‘humble’ way she has got the whole town under her thumb, not only because almost everybody has been her former pupil and thus imbibed with the very same ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but also because she is flawlessly incorruptible. As such, she can even tell the priest how to pray with her on her death-bed.

The interesting part for me was that the concept of a morally flawless life could still touch me. Humans of all ages have strived for the best, have tried to be ‘good’ and have partly succeeded to keep the ‘bad’ under control. But ...

1. First of all, the whole system only works because everybody believes in God and in a life after death, where one will be either punished or rewarded for one’s deeds. Otherwise, what is the point of being good – it never really pays off in this lifetime.
2. Secondly, a flawless life according to the morals and ethics of normal society is such a dull and humourless affair because it is based on repressing and sublimating one’s every instinctual drive including sex. Miss Dove in the film did show this very well, as the town’s straight-laced spinster.
3. Thirdly, and what was also very obvious in the film, is that the sublimated and repressed instinctual drives are being transformed and used for power over others, which in itself is the very antithesis to freedom. Miss Dove was not only the saint of the town, loved and respected by everybody, she was also the queen, with every one of her former pupils eager to please her. Of course, with absolute power one can easily play humble – the art of subtle covert rule.

It’s been a good exercise to examine and analyze the stronghold of the ‘good’, to see the emotional attraction and the hidden traps. I find it harder to recognize than being angry or fearful because the ‘belief in the good’ only becomes apparent as a slight tug on the heartstring, a sweet feeling, an attraction for the ‘good’ hero in a story or a disappointment when the corrupt wins. But leaving Humanity behind means leaving the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ behind and every catch needs to be investigated.

A fascinating business.

I read about Sorrow in the AF glossary pages. One thing that rang my bell, in particular, was when it said:

This instinct [of the need to belong], implanted by blind nature to ensure the survival of the species, pumps the body with chemicals that induce the feeling of fear whenever one is straying too far away from the herd, abandoning other members of the family or group or being on one’s own. AF Glossary

Oh Boy, does that hit the mark. That seems exactly like what is happening. I feel like I have done something wrong and am being corrected, disciplined in no uncertain terms, brought back into the fold. I have strayed far, far away from the herd. Whilst I haven’t abandoned my family completely, I maintain considerable distance, and I am unaffected by any feeling of loyalty to my family or tribe. I also am on my own a good deal. I do not see myself as keeping any friends at work or being concerned to make any allies. That does not mean that I am blatantly unfriendly, but I just don’t seem to have the kind of relationship with co-workers that I see others having.

So what I am seeing here, from the reading in the glossary and thinking about it on my own, is that sorrow is a pre-birth programmed instinct to keep one in line with one’s group, tribe, work group, family group, etc. It is a way to insure that humans will conform with the wretched status quo even if that means being peevish, unhappy, or malevolent.

I found it useful to make a clear distinction between sorrow and the need to belong although they have common aspects. Leaving the herd created fear in me many times, popping up at regular intervals whenever the immensity of becoming actually free hit home.

The first layer of sorrow was closely linked to my social identity, to being a social being. I found that questioning common beliefs, i.e. how I should be and how things should be, and particularly questioning my spiritual beliefs, i.e. we are all here to suffer because it is God’s will, were essential to leaving the sticky sorrow-soup that is the glue holding humanity together.

Later I discovered the second layer of sorrow – compassion. Once my personal sorrow had disappeared out of my life and everything was running smoothly due to my rapidly diminishing social identity, I became more and more sensitive to, and aware of, the immensity of human suffering and sorrow. Compassion, the bittersweet feeling arising out of the nurture instinct, is very seductive in that is fulfils the need to belong without the tedious self-centred struggles of day-to-day sorrowful relationships. One simply lies on the couch and, watching the stark news in the world, feels connected to all the suffering people out there. Of course, nobody but me receives any benefit from this feeling – which proves, despite common belief, that compassion is an utterly selfish feeling.

When all is said and done it is simply so much more sensible to be happy and harmless – even if stepping out of the human program is frightening at times.

Everything about sorrow says to me ‘You will never leave us. You will always carry this sadness around with you. You cannot be happy. Whatever you do in life or no matter how far you travel, you will always have me to remind you of who you are’.

A little further on in the glossary, it says the following:

From my investigations and experiences it is obvious that ‘who’ I think and feel I am – ‘me’ at the core – encompasses both a deep-set feeling of separateness from others and the world as perceived by the senses as well as a deep-set feeling of needing to ‘belong’.

This over-arching feeling of separateness – of being a ‘separate self’, who is forever yearning to ‘belong’ – is the root cause of personal sorrow and the all encompassing ‘ocean’ of human sorrow in the world. AF Glossary

It is hard for me to admit that I want to belong, that I am not free from this herding instinct.

I found that the need to belong was slowly, slowly replaced by my judgement of silly and sensible and the obvious tangible benefits I gained from not belonging to a miserable group, race or battling gender. Of course, it is invaluable to have someone to talk or write to and share common sense and the experience of success without being continuously cut down to size, a behaviour directly linked to the herding instinct. Everyone who is not aware of his or her instinctual need to belong can only judge you as a competitor to the present leader or leaders or a lonely madman the moment it becomes apparent that you are walking tall in the world. Watching herding behaviour in animals has been very useful research material for understanding my own feelings and behaviour and that of other people towards me.

Perhaps outwardly I behave as if it does not affect me that much, but the fears that I experienced when ‘I’ am under scrutiny for apparently not ‘fitting in’ are telling a different story. I think that it will be important for me to investigate this instinct. So, the basic thrust of the instinct, as I understand it so far, is to ensure loyalty and conformity to the group? Is that it? Or is there something that I am missing? I would welcome feedback from anybody who has dealt with or is dealing with this sort of thing. I have wondered if what I am experiencing is the ostracization or rejection by the group that others talk about, you know, the ‘you just don’t seem like everybody else here – what’s the matter with you?’ How have other people dealt with this?

I have found two aspects to ‘ostracization’ – one was my own fear of being on my own and the other was the actual withdrawal, resentment and sometimes attack from others for leaving the commonly agreed terrain of malice and sorrow.

I could eventually tackle the fear of being on my own, because of the memories from my pure consciousness experiences where any separation magically disappears the moment the ‘self’ goes in abeyance. In a PCE it is clear that I have always been on my own and lived my own life without great problems. It is the feeling of separation, fear and worry arising from a ‘self’ that makes the feeling of ostracization a common reaction. In the end it was not so much that others avoided me but I who lost interest in belonging to a Humanity that ardently insists on keeping the status quo of malice and sorrow. One can do nothing about the sceptical, disinterested or outright aggressive reaction from others except being practical and sensible and such reactions are an inevitable by-product of being a pioneer.

But then, peace on earth, in this lifetime, is worth overcoming such obstacles, isn’t it?