5.7.2000

PETER: Hi,

RESPONDENT to No 7: (...) In spiritual practice the rule of thumb is that you are not anything that you can observe. So, the trick is if you can see something, a feeling, a thought, etc. as it ‘arises’ the fact that you are capable of witnessing it means that you are larger than it, not defined by or ultimately identified as the thing (feeling is the best example) that is being witnessed. The problem, as you seem to surmise, is that there continues to be an implied ‘you’ doing this witnessing. The feeling or thought has become an object of consciousness, but the sense persists that there is someone one, some Who doing the witnessing. Of course, this fuels the search for the ‘real’ you. (...)

PETER: Just to join in with my two bob’s worth on watching. I coined a couple of terms that I found useful to me and that tended to cut through my spiritual teachings and give me a more down-to-earth approach to the running of the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ One was that I became ‘self’-obsessed for the first time in my life and the second was that this obsession had a purpose and a meaning and that was as a psychic ‘search and destroy’ mission.

A bit that I wrote describing my path to virtual freedom may be of use –

[Peter]: ... ‘A curious thing began to happen when I contemplated on what it is to be a human being, when I pondered the Human Condition, when I became ‘self’-obsessed.

Soon everything that I did, every action, every word, every thought, was analysed in terms of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Then I was able to identify the lost, lonely, frightened, and very cunning entity that ‘I’ am – the cause of malice and sorrow within me. This is definitely not meditation, it is 180 degrees opposite. This is being fully occupied in the world of people, things and events: not retreating or hiding from it. The whole point of the exercise is to identify that identity in action – a sort of a psychic ‘search and destroy’ mission, if you like – and the aim is to become as happy and harmless as is humanly possible. The point of meditation on the other hand is to merely ignore and ‘rise above’ the behaviour in question: to dissociate from and transcend it, as they say. Transcending, per definition, is to ‘go above and beyond’, which is really ‘Above and Beyond’, as we all know.

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

Another piece I discovered that may help drive a wedge between the spiritual approach and that of the actualist –

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

[Peter]: ... ‘What I understood of the method, briefly, was to make being happy your immediate goal, enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive as much and as often as possible – after all, this is your only moment of being alive that you are able to actually experience. Being happy yesterday is useless and imagining or hoping for it in the future is avoiding the issue. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ was the question to be continuously asked until it becomes a non-verbal attitude or a wordless approach to life with the aim to minimize both the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ feelings and maximize the happy and harmless feelings. If you are not happy now, then you have something to look at. Richard suggests getting back to feeling good before investigating the source of the unhappiness as it makes the investigation so much easier, of course. What particular belief, conditioning or instinctual passion is causing your unhappiness in this moment? Once having discovered the cause or the issue behind the diminishing of happiness, one can root around layer by layer until it is exposed to the bright light of awareness and the silliness of it all is clearly understood.

For sorting out one’s beliefs and social conditioning there is a useful test that can be applied: ‘Is it silly or sensible?’ Does my conviction make sense? Is it supported by facts, or is it a belief; does it work? Whatever is preventing my happiness now deserves my total attention and thorough investigation – simply believing the opinions, beliefs and values of other similarly inflicted people is to be gullible in the extreme. It is my life I am living and it is happening now. I then became vitally interested in my happiness for the first time. And I was looking to get to the root of it, to be free of whatever was causing my unhappiness, such that it would never come back. Finished, gone. And nobody else does it for me – I do it for myself!’ Peter’s Journal, God

Ah! Just found another bit that describes the difference between the passive act of being a watcher and the active act and intent of being an actualist – 180 degrees opposite. How more radically different can one get from self-aggrandizement on one hand and self-immolation on the other?

[Peter]:  ... ‘Simultaneously I proceeded to investigate with Richard all things religious and spiritual. What became apparent was that he was no spiritual Master whose ‘Energy’ created blissful feelings. There were no discourses, no spiritual practices, no meditation – just a frank and open discussion ranging over all facets of the Human Condition. What these investigations started to reveal was confrontational to the very core of ‘who’ I thought I was, because I was one of those human beings suffering from the Human Condition. Every time we would talk about something that I took as ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘real’, I was challenged to look at it afresh. Was this just something I had heard or read and assumed to be a truth – or was it that I simply believed, assumed or wished it to be true? Was it silly or sensible? What were the facts of the situation? What was my actual experience about this?

My mind would sometimes go into a sort of gridlock, unable and unwilling to withstand what it took as an assault. Rightly so, because the very ‘I’ who I thought I was, was being found out as made up of nothing more than the beliefs of others, society’s conditioning and a set of primitive animal instinctual passions! It was both exciting and terrifying at the same time as I found myself questioning all that I held to be true. I was conducting an investigation into my very own psyche – how extraordinary! Often it all felt too much as yet another wave of fear swept over me, but three things kept me going.

One was the memory of the purity and perfection of the peak experience I had had some ten years previously – and I was beginning to have similar experiences again, little reminders of my goal. The second was my intent. I wanted to live as I had experienced in a pure consciousness experience. I had arranged my life in such a way that I could devote almost the whole of my time to this investigation, whether being with Richard and Devika, Vineeto, or taking the time to contemplate by myself. I was also reading prolifically to investigate what was the current wisdom on a wide range of the Human Condition. I soon found myself obsessed, so fascinating was it to discover, for myself, exactly what it is to be a human being. Therapy had been like fiddling with the parts, rearranging the furniture to suit the particular beliefs of the therapist. Here I was taking the whole package apart – stripping away and delving deeper than I ever had before. It occurred to me that no wonder nearly everyone else who had come across Richard had run for the hills!’ ... Peter’s Journal, ‘God’

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

Well that’s it for me for now. I just wanted to post my experiences about awareness, to point out the differences of the spiritual approach and the actualist approach and report my successes. I found the only way to start something new was to drop all ideas that I had taken on board before and this is why I personally coined a couple of practical terms that had nothing to do with previous terms I had been accustomed to.

13.7.2000

RESPONDENT: Could you please re-send part 2 of the map to No 3. I mistakenly deleted it.

PETER: Map Pt 2 enclosed. Hope you enjoy it. It was good fun to write.

This business of reprogramming one’s own brain – deleting the program of ‘who’ I have been taught to be and ‘who’ blind nature has programmed me to feel I am, deep down, is a fascinating business. Yet despite what went on in my head or my heart while I was fiddling with the works – and some of it was often weird – I would still get up the next morning and find myself having breakfast, yet again. Eventually having breakfast became the most important thing that I was doing, for I was, for the first time, doing what was happening and being aware of it at the same time. It is what the spiritual people call being ‘here’ except it is being here in this physical tangible, palpable, actual world as a physical body and not the inner, ethereal, imaginary spiritual as a disembodied entity.

It’s good to have you on the mailing list ...

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