PETER: Hi No 23,

RESPONDENT: Update!: <Darwinian- to Quantum-theoretical level> M< y >our<*m< Y >our<*M< Y >our<*m< y > <OUR<*

^note as the exclamation sign might suggest that this is an order I make this note to make it clear that the intention of ! Is merely meant to be a ‘strong suggestion’, thus leaving it up to the reader to choose to ‘ignore’ or ‘take notice’.

PETER: I have no idea what any of this means.

RESPONDENT: That’s perfectly Ok Peter. Vis [thus leaving it up to the reader to choose to ‘ignore’ or ‘take notice’.] as you state you have no idea what it means I take that you have read it ‘face value’ and next decided that you did not understand what the intent and/or meaning of the message was.

PETER: Yep.

RESPONDENT: Just for the record as pointed out in previous messages these are so called ‘patafok’ instructions. They are small pointers notes/reminders I make to myself they only intend to support the simulation process of a virtual (cyberspace) coffee table discussion. As indeed I needed (don’t misunderstand me here, please) an Emb. EVF’s opinion on that I very much appreciate your response.

PETER: I’ve have never understood any of these ‘patafok’ instructions and now I know why. So I’ll just continue to ignore them on the basis that you are just talking to yourself and not me.

RESPONDENT: So ... even if the topic seems to have become a little hazy I’ll see if I can ‘nutshell’ it anyway. For purpose of completeness and to bring a little more coherency in the conversation, I just wanna make my position clearest as possible as to why I have been ‘hammering’ on the significance (for me that is) on the ‘Byron conflict’ I was there as an actual witness/ participant of/in a situation that is best described as a rather ‘intensive’ meeting between a ‘graduated’ Humaniversity student dissident and an Emb. VIE (virtual intimacy expert) Now this HS was a self-proclaimed expert on human intimacy. The demonstration of his ‘expertise’ gave me a clear clue how it is on the one hand of utmost necessity to experience an instinctive feeling , yet on the other hand the difficulty actually to choose neither to suppress nor to express it.

That’s what nerves of steel (as I understand it) is all about; it has nothing to do with the need to portray oneself as a hero (I have the guts to do it and you don’t, so I’m more daring). Nerves of steel are required to ‘contain’ that kind of energy that is released in the system. Which is basically a vast difference as to a meditation method called the Aum (a humaniversity deviced method in order to explore intense social interaction).

PETER: I take it you are talking about examining a feeling or emotion as it is happening rather than running on automatic by either suppressing it or expressing it. This is just plain common sense, it doesn’t require nerves of steel at all. For example, if you want to explore and understand anger, it makes sense that you first have to acknowledge that you do feel angry sometimes. By doing so you are then able to become attentive to feelings of anger when and as they occur.

If you feel angry and then you blurt it out on other people or blame people, things or events for causing your anger, you miss the opportunity of putting the feeling of anger on the microscope slide and examining it, so to speak. Or, to put it another way, if you are fully involved in suppressing or expressing a feeling, you simply have no time left to be attentive to the feeling as it is occurring.

What does take ‘nerves of steel’ is to devote one’s life to this on-going continual process of ‘self’-investigation with the intent not to cease until ‘self’-immolation occurs.

RESPONDENT: ^Note1: I have the last couple of days indeed experienced the ‘Amygdala-effect’; in fact, yesterday night it came to some sort of climax I felt some sort of a cracking at the back of my head next I found myself a bit giggling and I heard myself say ‘this must be the Amygdala’. Now it feels somehow as if the Amygdala is ‘pricked’ up on my spine a bit ET-like, as if indeed I can feel that part in my head. There’s also a bit of muscular activity in my neck, which very much seems to be related to breathing^.

PETER: I remember when I first read that Richard reported that the precursory event to becoming free of the human condition was accompanied by a physical sensation at the top of the brain-stem. As I recall, he likened it to the turning over of record on one of those old 50’s record players. This happened when Richard became Enlightened and it subsequently took eleven more years until the process of ‘self’-immolation was complete.

I was curious at the time that the event of becoming free of the human condition appeared to have a physical component as well as the obvious psychological and psychic components – the extinction of the psychological and psychic entity in total. I say ‘appeared to have’ because we only have Richards’s report of the event and no other tangible evidence to support it. Even so, what I made of the report of the physical sensations was that it could have been related to the physical extinguishing of the instinctual animal survival programming – the genetically-encoded programming that gives rise to the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire in the human animal.

Now of course, all this is at best speculation, a working hypothesis until proved as a fact or abandoned as nonsense. But at the time I found the assumption very useful because it set me off on a course that made me open to the possibility that the root cause of my malice and sorrow was utterly non-spiritual and that it was physical in nature – my instinctual survival programming. It made good sense to me that there was a physical cause to human behaviour and this was a breath of fresh air after spending years believing in spiritual esoterica or blaming someone else or something else for my own feelings of malice and sorrow.

My particular interest in the physical origins of the instinctual passions led to Richard writing more on the subject of instinctual passions and to my own attempts to explain their origins in what someone recently described as pseudo-scientific terms. (see The Actual Freedom Trust Library)

The reason I am writing this is to give you some background to what you are now terming the ‘Amygdala affect’ – and I like the term, by the way. There is no doubt that on the path to actual freedom many weird and wonderful psychic and psychological events can and do happen and that sometimes there can even be physical sensations that occur. From my experience, these events may well be par for the course but they are neither the main event nor are they a sure sign of anything in particular. The only sign of success on the path to an actual freedom from malice and sorrow is the incremental reduction of feeling malice and sorrow and the subsequent emergence of more and more of the felicitous feelings in everyday life. For a sincere actualist there can be no other measure of success than this.

Consequently I came to see that marking my success in becoming free by the occurrence of physical sensations was akin to a spiritualist marking their success in becoming God by how much their Kundalini was rising or how much their third eye was opening. I also saw that if Richard had said his ankle twitched when he became free there could well be a generation of followers all limping around saying ‘all is going well, I’m nearly there’. As I write I am reminded of the ‘Placebo effect’ wherein a patient does not know whether any improvements are a physical result of the treatment or purely imaginary.

My point is not to take what is written about other people’s experiences as a gospel because believing can lead to all sorts of imaginations. And not to confuse sincerity with humourlessness – it’s essential to be able to laugh at all the weird and wonderful experiences, be they psychological, psychic or physical, which happen on the path to actual freedom.

The last thing an actualist does is take one’s ‘self’ seriously – that’s what the spiritualists do.

RESPONDENT: ^note2: my tendency to over explain has been previously discussed (I have taken notice of that).

PETER: I seem to have the same tendency as I have had numerous complaints that my posts are too long to even bother reading. And just to make it clear, I personally have no problem with over explanation because actualism is brand new in human history and as such takes a lot of effort to both intellectually and experientially understand. My comments about your posts relate to the desirability and usefulness of keeping the conversation ‘on topic’ and my inability to understand your ‘patafok’ instructions to yourself.

RESPONDENT: So ... as to your [I have no idea what any of this means.] and [I’ll pass on the offer, as I long ago gave up taking a walk in someone else’s imagination.] I leave it with that for now.

PETER: Me too.

31.3.2002

PETER: Again I can only suggest abandoning the anguish of self-enquiry, a machination common to Krishnamurtiites, and begin practicing the fascinating business of hands-on self-observation. This way you get to find out the answers to all your questions by yourself – which is the only way to stop being a believer, a doubter, a follower, a dreamer, a philosophiser, an objector, a dissenter, an agreer, a sceptic, a cynic, a fence-sitter or whatever.

RESPONDENT: So ... am I: a believer, a doubter, a follower, a dreamer, a philosophiser, an objector, a dissenter, an agreer, a sceptic, a cynic, a fence-sitter or whatever? Let’s start with: am I a dreamer?

PETER: I take it this is a question you are asking of yourself and not of me. I have no idea what your particular predilections are. Your own investigation of your own particular beliefs, feelings and passions that form your identity is entirely your business and it can only be your business. However, every human being born has been subjected to an almost identical social conditioning and every human animal has been genetically-encoded with exactly the same instinctual passions. This means that we can swap notes and share our discoveries on this list because we humans share a common heritage, both social and instinctual.

*

RESPONDENT: So ... to set the stage so to speak: ping- pong level 4 defcom off ‘chess mixmode’ quake off <TAN-GO on! I well can imagine to have happened a dialogue the like ‘At the point of a gun’ while sitting at the Byron cafe had not been there, certain influences, so to speak well over my hat, that prevent this from happening. ^note: it is being assumed that the reference to this so-called ‘incident’ rings a bell as to the nature of that conflict is being rooted for the main part in a loyalty conflict, yet if any elaboration is requested I’m willing to go into details^.

PETER: I’ll pass on the offer, as I long ago gave up taking a walk in someone else’s imagination.

RESPONDENT: Well maybe how about a little beach jogging instead of walking? Yet on the other hand I’m not sure if I can ‘simulate’ a cyber beach meeting, it was already kind of not very easy to manage a virtual coffee table not to even mention the fact that thus far the topics that have been issued have not really been done in a coffee table manner but rather as an exclusive one to one conversation.

PETER: And yet not in any way exclusive. Not only is this conversation available for those on the mailing list to read and join in if they wish but it is archived on the Actual Freedom Trust website so as to be available for others to read, wherever they may be. Spiritualism is always exclusive to the faithful believers of a particular sect or movement which is why tolerance of others is constantly required. Whereas actualism is inclusive to everyone who is interested in becoming free of malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: Yet I’ll make an effort. I read the report:

PETER: Despite your hunch, I was not at the meeting and nor was Vineeto. Nil out of two for hunches. Hunches, intuitions, instinctual guesses, gut feelings, speculations, sixth senses and the like have been scientifically tested to be no better or no worse than flipping a coin to decide whether something is true or false, right or wrong, silly or sensible – 50/50 or thereabouts.

RESPONDENT: Richard is truly gifted to take a reader in a sort of Dostojewskian way to a staged environment.

PETER: If you are referring to Dostoevsky, I can only say that my memory of reading the famed Russian writers was one of unrelieved doom and gloom.

These dark works reveal Dostoevsky keen psychological insight, savage humour, and his concern with profound religious, political, and moral problems, especially that of human suffering. Oxford Dictionary.

That sounds the exact opposite to Richard’s writing style to me but, hey, if that’s how you read him, that’s how you read him.

RESPONDENT: Not only that, he also writes in a pure stream of consciousness and makes his ‘inner process’ visible almost palpable, so that an attentive reader can have the sensation as if taken by the hand of a person that is outside the human condition and being jogged into a PCE while reading.

PETER: If that’s what you feel when you read his report of the meeting then that’s what you feel. I would only comment that your use of the term ‘pure stream of consciousness’ can be confusing because ‘stream of consciousness writing’ is a term specifically used to describe an un-ordered and totally random flow of emotive thought written down as they occur. Even if you put the word ‘pure’ in front of the term ‘stream of consciousness’ as it is normally used, I personally don’t see how this relates to Richard’s writing style.

Again the term ‘inner process’ usually refers to the psychic or psychological machinations that go on in the head and hearts of normal human beings. I have never seen any evidence of Richard having an ‘inner process’, in the 5 years I have known him, nor any sign whatsoever of a psyche in operation in any of his copious correspondence.

You also use the word ‘sensation’ in the phrase ‘the sensation as if taken by the hand’ when I take it you mean ‘the feeling as if by taken by the hand’. You may take all this as me being pedantic but, having spent years reading spiritual gooblygook, I enjoy conversations where words are used to mean what they should mean.

RESPONDENT: For me that PCE experience ‘kicked in’ where I as the reader suddenly became aware, that the conversation was observed by two other people and that even there was some sort of an audience more or less being impressed by Richard’s passionate exhibition of Actual freedom in motion on the market place, thus the moment that one of the staged characters is brought alive brings, about a dramatic shift as to the atmosphere in which the conversation was happening and as a reader I was forced to take sides for Richard being indeed the one who is ‘laughing’ the best.

PETER: I remember when I first read Richard’s Journal that I found a lot of his writing quite difficult and dense, if I can use that word to describe writing. There seemed to be so much packed into it that was difficult to read let alone understand. It wasn’t only his use of words that stretched my vocabulary and often sent me scurrying for a dictionary. It was that every sentence needed scrutiny and thinking about so I could ascertain exactly what he meant. And then what he meant needed a good deal of contemplating on – sometimes for days and even weeks before the penny dropped.

I don’t know if you know the expression but it is a good description of having a realization about something. I would at first develop an intellectual understanding about something he wrote and after a period of contemplation a realization would happen – an Ahhh ... – almost as if a penny dropped into the slot machine. A realization is as though a fog has lifted or a light suddenly goes on in a dim room. A realization is when a belief implodes and clarity, based on a rock-solid understanding and acknowledgement of a fact, suddenly occurs.

Spiritual people also have realizations but a spiritual realization happens when an old belief is seen as false and calenture, the desperate clutching on to a new belief, occurs. It is important for an actualist to discern this difference lest he or she seizes upon the realization of a fact and start taking it to be a sign of ‘my’ wisdom rather than understanding the realization for what it is – the collapse of ‘my’ belief and thinking freed of the burden of belief. I don’t want to put a damper on enthusiasm here because such realizations are thrilling and uplifting, but if you can keep your feet on the ground while being thrilled and uplifted you are more likely to want to do the work needed to have more realizations rather than rest on your laurels thinking you ‘know’ it all.

The other thing I wanted to say about reading Richard’s Journal was that at some point – and I can’t remember when but I suspect it was after a few of these realizations – I became aware that I had been skipping over the first sections of each chapter and concentrating on intellectually understanding the last sections of each chapter. As I started to really read the first sections of each chapter with the same attentiveness I had read the last sections, I suddenly realized that these were descriptions of how somebody who was free of the human condition experienced this actual world we all live in. I was startled to realize that these were descriptions of pure consciousness experiences except this was somebody’s on-going permanent experience.

I know I have said this many times before but there is a gold-mine to be had in Richard’s descriptions of ‘self’-less, ordinary, down-to-earth living because this is the carrot for an actualist, this living can be every human being’s destiny. I only write this because maybe this is what you got of reading Richard’s description of his conversation with a spiritual teacher. And I say maybe, because I don’t know – I can only relate what you are reporting to my own experiences when I first started to dig into actualism and began to try to understand what was on offer and started to have realizations.

I remember it as both exciting and turbulent and I soon came to understand a realization – when a belief implodes and clarity, based on a rock-solid understanding and acknowledgement of a fact – was only the start. For an actualist, it is never enough to know something – it must be implemented and put into practice such that a palpable and irrevocable change occurs in my life.

Whenever this happens it is as though a bit of ‘me’ has fallen off and I feel lighter, less burdened and more free. More able to feel felicitous feelings and I have less reason or inclination to feel malicious or sorrowful. Because the realizations are based on the discovery of fact and not on ‘my’ adoption of a self-serving belief, ‘I’ cannot claim any credit – although ‘I’ am wont to try. You will recognize this propensity when it comes, it’s the Saviour of Mankind syndrome. But to be forewarned is to be forearmed, and provided you heed the warnings and use your realizations to fuel your fascination with how you are experiencing this moment of being alive, ’tis a grand adventure.

Well that was a bit of rave again, but I do enjoy writing about the process of actualism. It is so simple, which I know puts a lot of people off because the human tendency is to like obscuration, mystification, confusion, distraction, complication and vagueness. This is why it takes such an effort to become attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive but the rewards for making the effort is freedom – the down-to-earth freedom that Richard describes in his journal.

2.4.2002

RESPONDENT No 65: A sceptical look at The Sceptical Environmentalist http://www.gristmagazine.com/grist/books/lomborg121201.asp

RESPONDENT: Thanks for the link, this is my digest of it. Intro Stephen H. Schneider quote:

[quote]: If Lomborg at least had spent time in meetings with the people who really do debate these issues, this book might have been a useful contribution to the field. But for a non-participant like Lomborg to drop in flaunting a flimsy Greenpeace connection (the group denies he was a significant member, incidentally) and using sheer volume of citations – most to secondary sources and many to the same pieces over and over again – as a way to feign serious scholarship and thus get serious attention almost defies imagination. Stephen H. Schneider

PETER: By your logic, if one believes that a worse world is coming soon, or at least believes it is not as good as one thought it was, then this will wither the social identity.

RESPONDENT: Authors the like Mr. Lomborg are suspected of making profit of the gullible believing wishful thinking crowd.

PETER: And yet the impassioned Environmentalists not only make a living out of the crowd, they are also self-proclaimed Saviours of the Planet.

RESPONDENT: His followers are likely, rather then investigating the facts for themselves, to hold their faith in ‘would be experts’ the like i.e. the pseudo-spiritual crap of ‘ Mr. Redfields (the celestial promise)’

PETER: Which only begs the questions as to who the followers of Schneider and co. hold their faith in?

Whenever I found having faith in what others said, or found myself being cynical about what others said, I took the time and made the effort to investigate the facts for myself. I fail to see how you expect to become happy and harmless in the world as-it-is unless you are willing to make the effort to become free of the beliefs that would have you believe that the world as-it-is is a grim and awful place.

RESPONDENT: Mr. Lomborg claims that

[B. Lomborg]: ‘We will not lose our forests; we will not run out of energy, raw materials, or water. We have reduced atmospheric pollution in the cities of the developed world and have good reason to believe that this will also be achieved in the developing world.’ Bjorn Lomborg, The Sceptical Environmentalist

PETER: I take it from your comment that you haven’t read Lomborg’s book. If this is so, it is no wonder you are reduced to wondering.

*

 RESPONDENT:

[B Lomborg]: Our oceans have not been defiled, our rivers have become cleaner and support more life. ... Nor is waste a particularly big problem. ... The problem of the ozone layer has been more or less solved. Bjorn Lomborg, The Sceptical Environmentalist

PETER: And yet Lomborg provides substantive evidence in support of his statements.

[B. Lomborg]: The current outlook on the development of global warming does not indicate a catastrophe. ... Bjorn Lomborg

RESPONDENT: Well I surely welcome a global improvement of the climate maybe we have palm trees growing on the North Pole say in 10 years.

PETER: And yet there is no mutual agreement amongst climate modellers thus far as to the extent or the nature or the location of the effects of the projected future global warming.

[B. Lomborg]: And, finally, our chemical worries and fear of pesticides are misplaced and counterproductive. Bjorn Lomborg

Although you made no comment here, Lomborg provides a good deal of evidence to support his statement.

*

RESPONDENT:

[S. H. Schneider]: Lomborg’s estimate of extinction rates is at odds with the vast majority of respected scholarship on extinction. Before humans existed, the species extinction rate was (very roughly) one species per million species per year (0.0001 percent). Estimates for current species extinction rates range from 100 to 10,000 times that, but most hover close to 1,000 times prehuman levels (0.1 percent per year), with the rate projected to rise, and very likely sharply. <snip> The extinction rates are much higher. The above consideration confirms the likely current extinction rate of 0.1 percent, 1,000 times greater than prehuman levels. That figure is also supported by the following indirect measures: Area-species curves. Ecological research across a wide range of habitats shows that the number of species inhabiting a patch of land increases exponentially with the size of that patch. <snip> Since most species likely occur in tropical forests, these ecosystems are a good proxy: Even if no extinction occurred elsewhere, the planetary rate would still be 0.1 percent annually. Stephen H. Schneider

PETER: I take it you are directly quoting from Schneider’s criticism again.

I don’t know what things you worry about, but I wanted to investigate the things I worried about because worrying stopped me feeling good about being here. If I asked myself how am I experiencing this moment of being alive and found myself worrying about some doom and gloom report, I became curious enough to investigate the issue – to take the time and make the effort to find out for myself, rather than go on believing others. This was the only reason I mentioned Lomborg’s book on the list –as an aid for people to make up their own minds, if they wanted to, as to what is fact and what is myth about environmental issues.

*

 RESPONDENT:

[S. H. Schneider]: <snip> Although not enough species have been studied this way to produce regional or global extinction rate estimates, the high risk evident in the populations that have been examined is consistent with a high ongoing extinction rate. At current levels of habitat destruction, extinction rates are destined to rise, dramatically so. Consider that at an area-species exponent of 0.27 (a typical middle level), half the species are extinguished or committed to extinction by a 90 percent reduction in habitat area. But only another 10 percent reduction (to zero habitat) eliminates the rest of the species locally, and globally for species endemic to the patch. Now consider that some 35 percent of Earth’s land vertebrates and 44 percent of its plant species are limited to 1.4 percent of its land surface, the 25 widely recognized ‘hotspots,’ which contain about the land mass of Alaska and Texas put together. Consider, too, that the forests and other habitats in these remaining areas have been reduced to 10 percent of their prehuman levels (see, for example, Norman Myers et al., Nature 403, 2000), and most are at immediate risk of disappearing. Finally, consider that species extinction is increasingly enhanced by pollution, climate change, and the growing flood of invasive species – hence the foregoing estimates of extinctions based on habitat reduction are, sadly, minimal and modest. Stephen H. Schneider

PETER: Again I take it that this is a direct quote from Schneider. By posting it are you saying that what he is saying is fact or do you simply believe what he is saying is true?

The next time you ask yourself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and you come up with the answer ‘I’m worried about ...’ or ‘I’m feeling sad because ...’ or ‘I’m annoyed that ...’ you might just be curious as to whether you are worrying or getting upset about a belief and not something that is a fact. Or, to use your term, whether you are simply a paid up member of the ‘gullible believing ... crowd’.

When I came across actualism, I was challenged to investigate my beliefs because I understood that my beliefs formed an integral part of my social identity. I had good hands-on evidence of this direct link because I had experienced how much my spiritual beliefs had formed an integral part of my spiritual self-righteous identity. I also saw that beliefs are the bane of humanity – beliefs cause so much confusion, so much conflict, so much passion and have such a hold over human beings that they are even ready and willing to kill other human beings to defend them.

I deliberately set about on a course of investigating my beliefs by becoming very interested in the beliefs that humanity hold dear. I read, watched TV and observed the human condition and myself very attentively with the very specific purpose of investigating beliefs and ascertaining facts. I put everything on the table and I do mean everything. Because this was the first time in my life I had undertaken such an investigation of the beliefs that form and sustain the human condition, I was able to be very naïve about my investigation into my own beliefs and this naiveté stood me in very good stead. I went literally back to school, not as a gullible child but as a life-experienced, very curious, fascinated-with-life grown-up.

However, questioning and investigating beliefs is entirely your business because your beliefs are precious to you and you are the one who has an investment in either keeping them or eliminating them.

RESPONDENT: Well I can only change myself nevertheless it’s an interesting question: How will I be experiencing this moment of being alive 10 years from now?

PETER: Unless you are willing to question your beliefs – and your need to remain a believer – you will no doubt be worrying about the same things that everyone else will be worrying about 10 years from now. Which means you will not have changed at all.

*

PETER: As a postscript, I came across an interesting article the other day that is relevant to this topic. It’s from Newsweek magazine –

[Newsweek]: There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on the local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity. Newsweek, The Cooling World, Gwynne 1975

While all this has a very familiar ring to it, it is actually an excerpt from an article in a 1975 edition of Newsweek entitled ‘The Cooling World’.

As I said, it is imperative to be naive about your investigations into your own beliefs, sort of like going back to school – not as a gullible child but as a life-experienced, very curious, fascinated-with-life grown-up.

4.4.2002

RESPONDENT: Iow, how can you know the difference between what actually happened (emotional memory) and what your imaginary projections are?

PETER: In order to prise these three separate issues apart, – actual experience, emotional memory and future projections – a practical down-to-earth example may be useful. I will use an example that I have written about in my journal, a time when I was waiting to meet Vineeto – <story snipped> As I have described, at the time this event was happening, ‘I’ had feelings of jealousy raging, and these feelings prevented me from enjoying the sensual delight of what was actually happening at the time. If ‘I’ now had an emotional memory of what happened, ‘I’ would simply be reliving ‘my’ feelings of jealousy in this moment, thereby preventing me from enjoying the sensual delight of being here.

By evoking an emotional memory of having been jealous in the past, ‘I’ re-vive the emotion in this moment and thereby run the danger of imagining situations or events to justify ‘my’ feeling jealous now. Given that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’, ‘I’ therefore exist over time – in other words, ‘I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations.

RESPONDENT: Good! So I am simply ‘knowing’ that [‘I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations.] as a fact.

PETER: You don’t need to rely on ‘knowing’ this to be a fact, you can experience it to be a fact for yourself by being attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive. Knowing is a only start, but knowing is not a word I would use because spiritualists have so abused the word that they claim they know God exists when what they mean is they think, feel and believe God exists.

RESPONDENT: [I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations.] Ok <snip now is the only moment ‘I’ can experience any reference to future or past (ability to discriminate) can only be arrived upon as a factual instance by appliance of time as a concept (a measure tool) hence I say the discriminating mechanism is the ability to conceptualize time.

PETER: While you may well think and feel all sorts of things about time, it does not alter the fact that this moment is the only moment you can experience being alive. If you are wasting this moment of being alive by wallowing in past emotional memories or worrying about something that may or may not happen in the future, then it is impossible to be attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive.

RESPONDENT: Even more so ... when this ‘mechanism’ is being ‘influenced’, iow, that discrimination ability is being affected, there is an altered state of consciousness happening.

PETER: For normal people, there is an ‘I’ being conscious of ‘me’ being here which means that the best ‘I’ can do is think and feel ‘I’ am here in the physical world. For spiritual people who suffer from an altered state of consciousness, either temporarily or permanently, the personal ‘I’ is transformed into an aggrandized ‘Me’ who experiences the physical world as illusionary.

In the East, countless monks have wasted countless moments using their ‘discrimination ability’ to think about time, space and matter and all of them have come to the conclusion that this physical world we humans actually live in is an illusion. While such types of ‘discrimination ability’ can lead to delusionary altered states of consciousness, this belief is part and parcel of Eastern religion and philosophy.

RESPONDENT: There can come a moment when this mechanism is actually being altered in such a way that [I’ exist as past emotional memories, current affective experience and future fearful or worrisome imaginations.] can be rephrased as [I’ exist as emotional memories, current affective experience and fearful or worrisome imaginations.] thus making the time aspect redundant here, iow. that’s all there is ‘this moment experience’ thus ‘knowing’ has become part of the factual existence of this flesh-body.

PETER: The spiritual world is awash with ‘knowing’, and all of it is devoid of common sense down-to-earth experience. This is typified by such quandaries as ‘how to bring one’s meditation into the market place?’, ‘How to reconcile the inner and the outer?’, etc.

I’ve learnt by experience that knowing is not the same as doing.

*

PETER: The computer screen is an object made of the stuff of this planet we humans live on, it is not a concept.

RESPONDENT: As to [object made of the stuff of this planet we humans live on] Technically speaking you are now implying that [this planet we humans live on] is made of glass. It would however be a sign of extremely superstitiousness from me, if indeed I would take [stuff of this planet] as such that. You actually tried to make me believe that you meant glass in this context.

PETER: And yet I didn’t say or imply that this planet is made of glass. What I said is that the computer screen is made up of the very stuff that this planet is made of. Traditionally glass was made of soda, lime and silica, all sourced from the earth and nowadays all sorts of other minerals are utilized in the process, depending on the type and specific characteristics of the glass. There is nothing superstitious or supernatural about glass and yet I always find it magical that glass is made from the rock of this planet. It’s quite stunning what human ingenuity is capable of.

RESPONDENT: So ... I take this ‘stuff’ as what has been scientifically proven to be a movement of matter.

PETER: No. This stuff – the physical matter that this planet is – exists as a fact. It doesn’t matter whether this stuff exists in its raw state or whether it has been fashioned or formed by human ingenuity and effort into other stuff – it is all the stuff this planet is made of. This stuff doesn’t need to be scientifically proven to be so – it is so. Nor do any of the scientific theories, concepts, hypotheses and fantasies about the ‘movement of matter’ alter the fact that the matter of this physical world exists as a verifiable empirical tangible fact.

RESPONDENT: Assuming thereby that the formulae E= mc square is correctly representing the actual relationship of energy to matter, ie. matter becomes energy or energy is materialized thus the universe in motion.

PETER: It is commonly assumed that Einstein’s theory is a law that relates to the physical world we live in. I don’t make that assumption, for even a little investigation will reveal that this is not so.

Contrary to popular belief there is not one theory about matter, there are currently some eight main theories of matter, and a myriad of sub-theories. Nowadays there is a good deal of consternation in the world of quantum theory because the whole edifice of theoretical particles and assumed relationships has been thrown into question by the lack of any empirical evidence to support it. Some heavyweights in the quantum world are even proposing abandoning the whole thrust of the last century’s theories and beginning again with a new set of theories and concepts.

I always find it kind of cute that spiritualists make a big deal out of digging up meta-physical quantum theories of matter, time and space and desperately wave them as a flag in support of their own meta-physical beliefs. Ever aware of the fragility of their own belief-system, they seek comfort in a belief-system that is equally as fragile and spurious – one that is already threatening to collapse like a tower made of playing cards.

*

PETER: And the only moment you can actually experience all this is this very moment. If you are sensually experiencing this moment, there is simply no room for conceptualisations or abstractions, let alone past emotional memories or future fearful imaginations.

RESPONDENT: I may have images of the past or the future yet these are nothing more than then the activity of my brain ie memories.

PETER: No. You can look at a photograph taken of you in the past and that is an image, but it makes no sense at all to deny that there was an actual flesh and blood body called NO 23 existing at the time the photo was taken. This type of conceptual thinking, i.e. thinking abstracted from facts and actuality, is common in spiritual circles and can only lead to a ‘me’ who imagines ‘I’ am real and the past, the physical world and other human beings are but an illusion.

RESPONDENT: I’m 100% with you here. It is even at the edge of ‘insanity’ to deny that fact. I mean a total waste of energy and who would believe me anyway if I would say: ‘This picture only proves that a picture was taken of this flesh-blood-body called No 23 it does not prove that I the flesh-blood-body called No 23, did exist at the time that the picture was being taken’ or even that I might deny my flesh-blood-body-existence prior to the moment that the picture is being shown to me. Iow, I have just arrived so I don’t know anything about it, I’m quite surprised you show me that picture, yes I just come from planet Lala. I guess that picture refers to a future event here on Planet Earth so I wonder when that event when the picture is going to be taken will, become manifest.

PETER: One of the TV series I enjoyed was the ‘Red Dwarf’, a space fantasy-comedy where any number of imaginary scenarios were played out about space warps and parallel universes, time warps, time travelling, virtual realities, clones, emotional mechanoids and so on. A good laugh, made even funnier by the fact that there are whole fields of theoretical science and billions and billions of dollars devoted to such not-of-this-world thinking.

RESPONDENT: On the other hand that is maybe too advanced a strategy of avoidance and it could be easy de-masked as unwillingness/ inability to admit that there is a slight form of amnesia happening.

PETER: Or rather an example of an ‘unwillingness/ inability’ to admit that you are merely believing that the concepts, theories and fantasies of others are true, or are the Truth.

*

PETER: This type of conceptual thinking, i.e. thinking abstracted from facts and actuality, is common in spiritual circles and can only lead to a ‘me’ who imagines ‘I’ am real and the past, the physical world and other human beings are but an illusion.

RESPONDENT: Indeed: one safely can assume that this ‘but’ in [other human beings are but an illusion] can be considered as the great danger that lures in this way of conceptualizing.

PETER: In the normal world, the concept that we should all get on with each other is always sabotaged by ‘self’-centeredness and in the spiritual world the feeling that ‘we are all one’ is always sabotaged by the ‘Self’-centred feeling of ‘I am God’. Both concepts are well-proven failures.

RESPONDENT: This ‘I’ is capable of any type of imagination as long as it can keep playing a part as in such a way that it can discriminate itself as being ‘separate’ from its own imagination. Thus from that separateness comes either self-aggrandisement as in ‘I’ playing an exclusive/ important as Godman or God himself or the other side a self-degrading ‘I’ as ie. the one at mercy of the divine blessing/ will, aso. Either case in fact is distortion of actual experience because of an ‘unbalanced/ unrestricted functioning of the above discriminating mechanism. Iow, a case of more or less ‘insanity’.

PETER: And yet it is not only spiritualists who fail to discriminate fact from imagination. Theoretical scientists also seek glory and fame by searching for the Meaning of Life by developing all sorts of meta-physical concepts about space, time and matter. They do so by imagining all sorts of things that cannot and never can be seen, touched, smelt, heard or tasted and by imagining all sorts of events that have never, can never and never will be actually experienced by them.

I thoroughly recommend the active challenging of all of humanity’s cherished beliefs – not only spiritual beliefs but real-world beliefs, theories, concepts and psittacisms as well. How do you expect to experience the perfection and purity of the actual world if you fervently believe in a Greater Reality, gullibly fall for the stories that make the world as-it-is into a grim reality or unquestioningly accept the theories that make the world as-it-is into a world of science fiction.

*

RESPONDENT: So overtime there is not happening disembodiment, because that would imply that there is something a particular ‘I’, that would/ can/ will be or have been/ become disembodied.

PETER: Spiritual people believe they are disembodied spirits as is typified by statements such as ‘I am not the body’ or ‘I left my body the other day’. When meditating one day, I had an out-of-body experience but such experiences are what is known as hallucinations or figments of the imagination.

RESPONDENT: [I had an out-of-body experience but such experiences are what is known as hallucinations or figments of the imagination.] rephrased as [I had an out-of-body experience and such experiences are what is known as hallucinations or figments of the imagination.] So then it makes perfect sense to say: during that kind of experience the body had become a hallucination/ figment of the imagination.] .I say the spiritual ‘I’ had therefore ‘conceptualized’ a body, iow, ‘knew’ that such a thing was there as a flesh-body, it disagreed with the factuality [this body being palpable experience-able] hence that was a malfunctioning of the discriminating mechanism.

PETER: Or you could simply say I was ‘out of my tree’ at the time. I was always a little suss of these psychic experiences – they were a bit too weird for me. I guess that’s why I failed in the spiritual world, exactly as I failed in the real-world.

*

PETER: And yet this moment is the only moment you can actually experience. If I may suggest, the only way to know how you experience this moment is to become attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of time – which is precisely the purpose of the actualism method – ask yourself each moment again ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’. At first it takes a good deal of effort for you will find that you have made a habit of wasted a lot of moments by dwelling in past emotional memories, worrying about future events or being angry at someone or feeling sad about something. As you get the knack of it you get this wasted time down to a minimum and you learn to crank up feeling good about being here. With sufficiently stubborn effort the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ becomes wordless and your attentiveness comes to the forefront for the first time in your life.

Only by stubbornly and diligently practicing attentiveness can what ‘seems to be’ happening become the direct sensual experience of what ‘is now’ actually happening. The actualism method is unremitting in its efficiency and simplicity, which is why some people take the safe route and make a philosophy out of actualism rather than use the method themselves.

RESPONDENT: That’s why the program Patafok was designed; indeed to make sure that there is this attention at any moment available. The program now works to the degree that I just have to snap my finger to, so to speak, ‘crank up’ my pure intent.

PETER: And pure intent will ensure you have the necessary impetus to investigate all of the beliefs that prevent you from experiencing the perfection and purity of the actual world.

*

PETER: One of the major difficulties for newcomers to actualism is that they think there is something new to learn in actualism – something they can add on to what they have already learnt. This is quite understandable because all that human beings think and feel to be true or ‘the truth’ has been learnt from someone else. The tendency therefore is to see actualism as something new to learn, a new form of wisdom to be clipped-on or melded in to their existing belief, a new and superior philosophy than the one they had before, a new set of rules and regulations as to how to live one’s life, a convenient excuse for continuing to suppress emotions and feelings, a clever mask for sublimating undesirable emotions and feelings, a catchy concept to strut around and teach others, and so on.

RESPONDENT: I say now so far: To stubbornly hold on to the hypothesis that: given that time is a fact [to have a concept of time is neither sensible nor practical] is a not sensible statement from an actualist point of view] is to miss the boat completely. Hence the question: Can for the flesh-body time only be a concept? Must be answered with no. Only to ‘I’ be it spiritual or social ‘I’, time can be a concept. Thus as already has been mentioned in [This type of conceptual thinking, i.e. thinking abstracted from facts and actuality, is common in spiritual circles and can only lead to a ‘me’ who imagines ‘I’ am real and the past, the physical world and other human beings are but an illusion.] the statement [to have a concept of time is neither sensible nor practical] I wholeheartedly agree with and even more say ‘to stubbornly hold on to ones ‘self-fabricated’ concept of time is stubborn insanity and an utterly redundant activity’. PS. Really, Peter a brilliant move this moment a fact.

PETER: The amazing thing about a fact is that it doesn’t need anyone’s agreement or anyone’s passionate support for it to be a fact. You can disagree with a fact, deny a fact, distort a fact or try and make a concept out of a fact, but none of these tricks or objections change a fact, make it go away or change it in any way. I like facts because facticity and actuality are intrinsic to the actual world.

RESPONDENT: As the one question still open for me is: [does the table only exist as something situated/ placed/ located/ happening between the future and the past?] yet is rendered unacceptable as you say [I have learnt by experience to bale out when conversations get to this point] though it was not me who asked that question. I say no ... this table you are referring to can only be virtual thus right in this moment you read these words it’s here.

PETER: And yet the reason I mentioned the table was the following exchange –

[Respondent]:

1. [Is perhaps Time both; as well a concept as it is a fact?] (interesting ‘viewpoint’ like ie. the dual nature of light (wave/particle aspect)
2. [Is perhaps Time neither a concept nor a fact?] sub 2 [is perhaps Neither past nor the future then actual?]
3. is Time perhaps either a concept or fact? sub3 if this is so then ‘now’ also is either factual or conceptual, ‘less you look at ‘now’ otherwise then as situated/ placed/ located/ happening in between future and past. end intermezzo].

Or, if we were having this discussion at a coffee table, you could just as easily ask the following questions –

1. Is the table both a concept and a fact?
2. Is the table neither a concept nor a fact? sub 2. Perhaps it only exists when I am watching it?
3. Is the table either a concept or a fact? Sub. 3. Or does the table only exist as something situated/ placed/ located/ happening between the future and the past?

I have learnt by experience to bale out when conversations get to this point.

My point was that objecting to the fact that this is the only moment you can experience being alive is of the same ilk as objecting to the fact that material objects exists as a fact. As such, I’ll pass on your offer to continue this line of conversation. You will find that Richard has written a good deal on both these topics if you want to pursue this line of investigation for yourself.

*

PETER: Have you ever contemplated upon the fact that this list is the only place on the planet where people are having a conversation about how to become actually harmless and happy? It is quite extraordinary when you pause to think about it.

I appreciate your enthusiasm for the topic.

8.4.2002

PETER: Have you ever contemplated upon the fact that this list is the only place on the planet where people are having a conversation about how to become actually harmless and happy? It is quite extraordinary when you pause to think about it. I appreciate your enthusiasm for the topic.

RESPONDENT: I have contemplated your words as to the uniqueness of this list and the environmental issues global warming and species extinction a bit.

PETER: And yet you didn’t hesitate to write to the list taking sides in the Lomborg vs. Schneider case. This is what you said about Lomborg and his book –

[Respondent]: To me it looks like pseudo science is likely to become now the alternative for new Age Babble. This kind of stuff seems to be all geared to keep people having faith in their future and comfortably allow themselves to distort/ ignore/ deny any facts that are counterproductive as to sustain in their fantasy that a better world is coming soon or at least it is not as bad as they thought it were, thus food for the social identity to vigorously grow. Authors the like Mr Lomborg are suspected of making profit of the gullible believing wishful thinking crowd. His followers are likely, rather then investigating the facts for themselves, to hold their faith in ‘would be experts’ the like ie. the pseudo spiritual crap of ‘ Mr Redfields (the celestial promise)’. [endquote].

That’s a reasonable clear and unequivocal statement as to your position and yet in this post you now seem to see some merit in taking a contrary position, even to the point of paraphrasing what I wrote. And then you propose to wait for some imaginary genuine ‘actualist environmental team’ who then would presumably tell you what is appropriate for an ‘actualist’ to think and feel about the matter. So much for doing the work of finding out for yourself what is mere belief and what is substantive fact.

RESPONDENT: I am rather confident though yet not overly optimistic that there are people in, so to say, the environmentalist field who may be able to defeat the so called ‘bad’ prognosis for this planet but there is a big ‘if’ as far as I can see this if is not to be underestimated yet also not overestimated.

PETER: Having just said you will leave it to the genuine ‘experts’, you then come back with your affective opinions on the subject, i.e. feeling confident and optimistic rather than insecure and pessimistic.

It was exactly because I found myself swaying back and forth between these feelings whenever I listened to the environmental debate that I took the time and made the effort to find out for myself. Or to put it another way, I discovered it is impossible to be happy and harmless in the world as-it-is if I continuously waxed and waned between feeling good about the world as-it-is and feeling depressed about the world as-it-is.

RESPONDENT: Living in a country like Holland it is very obvious to me that what is interpreted, as a Democratic Voice globally is considerable different. Holland is a rather relatively peaceful country and it would be dishonest to say that so far ‘my’ country has not served me well and still does. Though I know that even among the Dutch Government there is some disagreement as to what level Holland is to support the US policies. [Btw, Government was the solution for the quiz (guess the snip) There where no correct answers offered] As Holland is part of Europe, its influence is limited. Very interestingly I noticed a change in awareness as European currency is almost entirely upon agreed with the Introduction of the ‘Euro’ that’s the standard European currency. end intro]

PETER: As you seem to be sliding off the topic somewhat here, I will take the opportunity to say something on the matter of ‘experts’ – something that is relevant to the whole issue of investigating beliefs and making the effort to determine the facts for yourself.

I had a formal education in the field of architecture, a job that supposedly straddles art and science. As such, I was taught various principles, beliefs and information in both science and art, all based on various expertise garnered over generations of writings and teachings. It was only after many years of practice that I came to understand that the hallowed principles I was taught were no more than a hotch-potch of fashionable beliefs and personal convictions, that the impassioned beliefs were idealistic, impractical and unworkable and that sensible action was very often either ignored in practice because matters of principle or personal belief were always given far more credence.

I also began to gather some first hand knowledge of the so-called experts in the field by reading, observation and direct evaluation of some of their work. I came to understand that those who garnered the most fame and trumpeted the most wisdom were not those who were expert in their fields, i.e. who were best at what they were doing. Many of the famous architects repeatedly built buildings with serious design and construction faults. Many were scornful of clients and peers who dared to point to the contradictions between their self-proclaimed genius and the flaws in the results of their genius when put into practice. Because of this life experience I developed a scepticism about automatically believing in experts – scepticism as in ‘doubt as to the truth of some assertion or apparent fact’ as opposed to cynicism as in ‘ostentatious contempt’ (Oxford Dictionary).

Another observation about experts is that they usually have gained name and fame in one particular field of endeavour only and this limited focus very often results in what can best be described as a fervent myopia. The acclaim and inflated sense of self-worth that their expertise brings is often accompanied by games of bluff and bluster amongst experts themselves as well as a supercilious attitude should their expertise be questioned, especially by mere lay people. The myths surrounding expertise are not only apparent in the real-world but are also glaringly evident in the spiritual world. When I started to become aware of the shortcomings and foibles of experts, I began to see that a layperson could very often make better sense of something than a so-called expert who had a passionate personal investment in the issue.

In a similar vein, by my own experience in my own work, I came to understand that the hands-on pragmatist almost always knew far more about the workings of something than an ivory tower teacher. As an example of this, I once watched a reporter interviewing a scientist who was doing field tests of pollution levels around cotton fields. He was asked by the interviewer what he had found and he said that it was important to realize that the levels he was measuring were in the order of 1 part suspected-pollutant per 1,000,000 parts of soil and that at these microscopic levels it was nigh on impossible to distinguish between naturally occurring conditions or cotton farming influenced conditions. Now while this incident can be dismissed as anecdotal, it served to make me sceptical about the strident claims of environmentalists, wary about the gap between theoretical science and empirical science and more alert to the media’s role in spreading doom and gloom.

I do acknowledge that it takes a bit of gall to question the revered and famed experts of humanity, but if you want to become actually free of human condition this is what needs to be done.

RESPONDENT: To jump to another subject;

[Peter]: Despite your hunch, I was not at the meeting and nor was Vineeto. Nil out of two for hunches. Hunches, intuitions, instinctual guesses, gut feelings, speculations, sixth senses and the like have been scientifically tested to be no better or no worse than flipping a coin to decide whether something is true or false, right or wrong, silly or sensible – 50/50 or thereabouts. Peter to No 23, 31.3.2002

PETER: I recognize the approach. It’s the very same one you used in your Lomborg vs. Schneider debate. First flip, go with the status quo, believe Schneider. Second throw, consider status quo view might be wrong. Third throw ... ‘just forget it’ and wait for the ‘actualism experts’ to decide what you should think and feel about the world as-it-is.

RESPONDENT: But then again: [not that it is very important] I think it may be good to get that ‘Lomborg-Schneider thing’ a bit going but so to say ‘slow motion’. Could you provide a passage for so to speak a ‘preliminary’ investment as to whether I find it worthy to purchase and hence would participate in ‘supporting’ Lomborg financially and possibly come to share conclusions with him as to the ‘Weight’ of the information available about Global Warming and/or Species extinction.

PETER: I can do better than that. If you go to http://uk.cambridge.org/economics/lomborg/sample.htm you will find a sample chapter available for free online and if you use your browser search engine you will no doubt find a good many more reactions and attitudes to the book, both positive and negative.

The only reason I found issues such as this important was when I found myself stirred to anger or overcome by gloom by what the so-called experts were saying. Then it became obvious that I needed to dig into the matter a bit, not to become an expert per se but to make sense of the issue – to sort out belief from fact, myth from reality, learning from experience and passion from sensibility.

The reason I posted the recommendation is that the book is an excellent primer for anyone who finds themselves wasting this moment of being alive by being angry or sad about what the environmentalists are saying ... and wants to become free of these feelings.

12.4.2002

RESPONDENT: As to my posting of the Lomborg-vs-Schneider topic:

I’m the first one to admit that this issue can be easily applied to ‘transcribe’ the good old ‘bad’ expectations ie. that humanity is ‘doomed’ in anyway, thus environmentalism can be easy become or perhaps has already started to become some sort of new religious believing, where the ‘experts’ can become the high-priest ‘cast’ and twig their followers to support their way of seeing as to what kind of actions should be taken with regard in participation on Saving this Planet, thus ‘Saving the Planet’ may be well lead to a redefinition of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ guys: those who are actively participating in saving likely will call them selves the ‘correct’ interpreters of ‘facts’ that are presented.

Of course then there also will be the ones who are ‘incorrect’. Only genuine ‘experts’ will be able to act on the facts in such a way that the workout can be called beneficial, iow, that’s where actualism comes in – an environmental team will at least need to be able to acknowledge the sensibility of the ‘HAIETMOBA’ sequence and willingness to test the vitality of it. I can’t say whether that will require subscription to the AF list. Currently I lack the expertise to arbiter in the ‘Lomborg-vs-Schneider case’.

As I see it this discussion among scholars I’ll leave up to them.

PETER: And yet you didn’t hesitate to write to the list taking sides in the Lomborg vs. Schneider case. This is what you said about Lomborg and his book –

RESPONDENT: To me it looks like pseudo science is likely to become now the alternative for new Age Babble. This kind of stuff seems to be all geared to keep people having faith in their future and comfortably allow themselves to distort/ ignore/ deny any facts that are counterproductive as to sustain in their fantasy that a better world is coming soon or at least it is not as bad as they thought it were, thus food for the social identity to vigorously grow. Authors the like Mr Lomborg are suspected of making profit of the gullible believing wishful thinking crowd. His followers are likely, rather then investigating the facts for themselves, to hold their faith in ‘would be experts’ the like ie. the pseudo spiritual crap of ‘Mr Redfields (the celestial promise)’.

PETER: That’s a reasonable clear and unequivocal statement as to your position and yet in this post you now seem to see some merit in taking a contrary position, even to the point of paraphrasing what I wrote. And then you propose to wait for some imaginary genuine ‘actualist environmental team’ who then would presumably tell you what is appropriate for an ‘actualist’ to think and feel about the matter. So much for doing the work of finding out for yourself what is mere belief and what is substantive fact.

RESPONDENT: As to [To me it looks like pseudo science] After having done some investigation as to the quality of the issued book, I find myself not capable of evaluating the validity of it as a genuine work of sound scientific exploration as I lack the ‘expertise’ that is required to compare it to other articles/books that provide data that are presented as factual evidence as to prove what state the planet is in from an environmentalist viewpoint. Furthermore I find it not correct to call the ‘sceptical environmentalist’ a pseudo scientific work as it has been published by Cambridge university thus: I withdraw my opinion which was in many ways biased:

PETER: One of the main thrusts of Lomborg’s book is that there are no two sets of data, one good and one bad, but rather that there is only one set of global data available – that which has been gathered by the relevant national and international organizations. It’s not a question of which of the conflicting data to believe, it’s a question of making a sensible interpretation of the data available and Lomborg makes a compelling case that the Environmentalists are either misinterpreting or ignoring this data for their own agenda.

You don’t need to be an expert in any of the environmental sciences to be able to follow Lomborg’s presentation of data, you only need to be interested in what the state of the planet is and be willing to put aside your own beliefs in order to be able to assess what makes sense and what doesn’t.

And again, just to make the point that I am not taking sides in this matter. My sole interest in investigating the doom and gloom environmentalist stance was to find out how much was belief and misinformation and how much was fact. I know it is fashionable nowadays to make a virtue out of ‘not knowing’ but when I became an actualist I made it my business to find out for myself rather than go on believing or disbelieving what others said.

RESPONDENT: As in the context of the evaluation of the value of the mentioned book, this opinion is neither contributing to a sensible discussion, nor does it do justice to the undoubtedly hard work Mr Lomborg has done. It is indeed refreshing to hear a voice that is although not sounding overly optimistic yet indeed less pessimistic then what often the media are trying to present as the ‘truth’ about the condition the planet is in.

PETER: Your further investigations into the matter don’t seem to have got you any further than where you were before. I’ll just remind you what you said in your last post –

[Respondent]: I am rather confident though yet not overly optimistic that there are people in, so to say, the environmentalist field who may be able to defeat the so called ‘bad’ prognosis for this planet but there is a big ‘if’ as far as I can see this if is not to be underestimated yet also not overestimated. [endquote].

Thus my reply to this latest comment is exactly the same as it was before–

Having just said you will leave it to the genuine ‘experts’, you then come back with your affective opinions on the subject, i.e. feeling confident and optimistic rather than insecure and pessimistic.

It was exactly because I found myself swaying back and forth between these feelings whenever I listened to the environmental debate that I took the time and made the effort to find out for myself. Or to put it another way, I discovered it is impossible to be happy and harmless in the world as-it-is if I continuously waxed and waned between feeling good about the world as-it-is and feeling depressed about the world as-it-is.

Swings of mood from optimism to pessimism are typical within the human condition. All human beings spend their lives in a self-centred passionate struggle for survival, a senseless struggle that is rooted in fear, feelings of despair and pessimism, relieved only by shows of bravado and feelings of hope and optimism. This seesawing of moods and emotions is what people fondly call living a rich life or, when things are going badly, learning a lot from suffering.

RESPONDENT: As Mr. Lomborg puts it: [There is some overall improvement, nevertheless it is not yet ‘good enough’]. Also he mentions that the ‘outcome’ of his predictions have a fair dependency on political decisions as to priorities that need to be agreed upon globally.

PETER: Having the advantage of having read the whole of Lomborg’s book, I cannot recall that he ever makes any predictions of his own in the book. Making such predictions is not his business because he is not an expert in any of the environmental sciences, nor does he claim to be. As a statistician, he has researched the source material of the empirical information that is available as to the current state of the planet and compiled it so as to expose the gulf between fashionable myths and the facts of the matter.

RESPONDENT: In many examples, issued in the chapter I have read there is a presentation of percentages as facts. This is for a layman like myself hardly a source for optimism as I know from my own experience that on a political level a deviation of a few percents can bring about massive disagreement among groups with vested interest in a certain matter and hence stalling or even completely impeding a process whereas there is an urge to make a decision to act on a matter.

PETER: It is clear that Lomborg aims at presenting the trends that are evident in the empirical global-wide data available as to the state of the world – and specifically he is interested in whether the trends of the data shows that the world is getting worse, as the Environmentalists claim. While he may sometimes use percentages to show trends in the data relating to global pollution, population, resources, climate, wealth, health, safety, wellbeing and such like, to confuse this with percentages of public political opinion is to slide off the topic. This discussion is about facts, not about political opinions or leanings – otherwise it would only lead to ‘massive disagreement among groups with vested interest in a certain matter and hence stalling or even completely impeding a process whereas there is an urge to make a decision to act on a matter’.

To get back on track, if you believe the world is a rotten place and only getting worse, despite the empirical evidence to the contrary, this belief will only make you feel sad and from these feelings of sadness inevitably comes feelings of anger. If you choose to hold on to the belief in spite of the facts, you are also choosing to hold on to the sadness and anger that comes with the belief.

RESPONDENT: As already mentioned that I lack the expertise to verify the presented facts I give him the benefit of the doubt in this matter and I choose to be optimistic yet not overly.

PETER: Choosing to feel optimistic does nothing to eliminate the underlying feeling of pessimism. This is like choosing to feel hopeful because you really feel despairing. This is how normal people function and how humanity functions – forever lurching between optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, fantasy and reality, feeling good and feeling bad, feeling sad and feeling angry.

If you are content to live your life this way, then that is your choice but living trapped in this nightmare was not good enough for me – I desperately wanted out because, despite the occasional good times, I knew I was trapped in a nightmare. I went for living in the fantasy of a spiritual world for a while but this was like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, from one form of hypocrisy to another, from one form of power battle to another.

And then I discovered actualism.

RESPONDENT: As to [Only genuine ‘experts’ will be able to act on the facts in such a way that the workout can be called beneficial, iow, that’s where actualism comes in – an environmental team will at least need to be able to acknowledge the sensibility of the ‘HAIETMOBA’ sequence and willingness to test the vitality of it.]

I rephrase: [Only genuine ‘experts’ will be able to act on the facts in such a way that the workout can be called beneficial] leaving it up to anyone for him/herself as to decide what is to be called ‘genuine experts’. <snip>

PETER: Deciding whom to believe still leaves you believing one side or another. Some people do choose to change their beliefs by swapping sides and then merrily proceed to do battle for the other side in the conflict.

Human beings are conditioned from birth to take a side in a conflict – it is an inevitability of being a social identity. You have to be either on the male side or the female side in the battle of the sexes. You are conditioned to be rich or poor in the battle for wealth. You are conditioned to have a political preference in the conflict of political views. You are conditioned to be loyal to the country you were born in the battle of nations. And so on, ad nausea.

If you are genuinely interested in becoming free of these never-ending battles the only way is to demolish your own social identity. The only way to do this is by taking the time and making the effort to investigate the emotional investments you have in being a paid-up member of one side or other in these conflicts.

*

PETER: I do acknowledge that it takes a bit of gall to question the revered and famed experts of humanity, but if you want to become actually free of human condition this is what needs to be done.

RESPONDENT: It appears to me that you may mistake expertise for specialism. (Atomica def) ‘Specialism: Concentration of one’s efforts in a given occupation or field of study. A field of specialization’. When I use the term expert I mean someone who has the expertise ‘Expert A person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject. The highest grade that can be achieved in marksmanship. Having, involving, or demonstrating great skill, dexterity, or knowledge as the result of experience or training.’ Iow, one can study a lifelong in a certain field without ever becoming an expert yet one hardly can be denied to be a specialist.

As to [Only genuine ‘experts’ will be able to act on the facts in such a way that the workout can be called beneficial, iow, that’s where actualism comes in – an environmental team will at least need to be able to acknowledge the sensibility of the ‘HAIETMOBA’ sequence and willingness to test the vitality of it.] I rephrase: [Only genuine ‘experts’ will be able to act on the facts in such a way that the workout can be called beneficial] leaving it up to anyone for him/herself as to decide what is to be called ‘genuine’ experts with regard to environmental issues.

PETER: Which only means that you not only need to decide who to believe but you also have to determine whether the person you believe is merely a specialist in the field or is a ‘genuine’ expert in the field. The way most people do this is to believe he or she who is most famous or he or she who has the most letters after their name, i.e. the most book learning. Which means you are back to following the herd, flipping a coin or following your gut feelings – back taking sides in one of the many conflicts that rage within the human condition.

I recognize that it is hard work to investigate your beliefs and that it is much easier to stay who you think and feel you are. It may not be satisfactory but at least it is familiar. It certainly is not freedom but then you can always take up a cause and blame someone else for keeping you from being free. The other traditional alternative is to dissociate from the battles in the world by feeling self-righteous as in ‘above it all’ but this hypocrisy didn’t sit at all well with me.

I remember the first time I really ‘got it’ about the role that beliefs play in making ‘me’ as a social identity. The following is an excerpt from my journal describing the event –

[Peter]: ... ‘The last time I met my older son was interesting, as I was able to see quite clearly that here was a young adult with little experience in life, and yet he was so opinionated. He was mostly repeating what he had heard from others and he took it to be true – actual. Given that some of his opinions and values were really my past beliefs, I was able to see – quite shockingly – that ‘who’ we think we are consists of nothing more than the opinions and beliefs of others. I thought then of how I had been at that age – trying to make sense of life and grabbing on to anything that seemed to make sense or had appeal. So what ‘I’ was made up of as a social identity was nothing more than the opinions and beliefs of others – my father’s and those of my father’s generation, which in turn came from their fathers, and so on, back into the dim dark ages of the cave-men and cave-women.

This particular experience spurred me on to find out the facts of things, rather than simply believing others. I was determined to find out for myself, to explore, to try something new; anything to break this stranglehold on me. No longer would I trust the opinions of others, no matter how hallowed or learned, sacred or dear to me they appeared. It was to prove a wonderfully freeing experience. The intellectual ‘Giants of Humanity’ became just some guys (usually dead) with a particular opinion, belief or idea, but all of it just another version of the same old stuff. And the famed and holy ‘God-men’ became charlatans, masters of hypnotism, spells, spirits, double talk, and mystical drivel, all with a direct lineage to the witchdoctors of the primitive cavemen.’ Peter’s Journal, People

As a child we are taught to believe what our parents, teachers and peers tell us – there is no other way to learn. In order to become free of these beliefs it is essential to learn how to think for yourself because this is something we have not been taught to do – we have been taught to believe, we haven’t been taught to think.

*

RESPONDENT: To jump to another subject;

[Peter]: Despite your hunch, I was not at the meeting and nor was Vineeto. Nil out of two for hunches. Hunches, intuitions, instinctual guesses, gut feelings, speculations, sixth senses and the like have been scientifically tested to be no better or no worse than flipping a coin to decide whether something is true or false, right or wrong, silly or sensible – 50/50 or thereabouts. Peter to No 23, 31.3.2002

To bypass any kind of objections. I know for a fact that you where there and Vineeto was also there to even be more specific: [Richard: ‘my colleague has misconstrued his statement about ‘having to do some work’ and asks, sincerely, just what he meant by this. That he referred to my colleague, I’m positive that this ‘colleague’ was Vineeto] Tell you how’ I flipped a coin three times and the third time it landed on ‘Peter does not speak the truth’, that’s what we call in Holland ‘Dutch justice’. It comes from an old Dutch popular ‘belief’ [Drie keer is Scheepsrecht]. It basically means three shots give it try if it doesn’t work the first time do it again if the third time doesn’t work ... just forget it.

PETER: I recognize the approach. It’s the very same one you used in your Lomborg vs. Schneider debate. First flip, go with the status quo, believe Schneider. Second throw, consider status quo view might be wrong. Third throw ... ‘just forget it’ and wait for the ‘actualism experts’ to decide what you should think and feel about the world as-it-is.

RESPONDENT: And yet there was no flipping of coins being done with regard to that subject. And even more so the way you describe it is not the correct procedure. Let me explain. The goal of flipping the coin is to decide that one is right in a certain matter where there is some doubt. Ie. In the L-vs-S case I now have flipped a coin three times the first and second time it landed on Schneider yet the third it landed on Lomborg thus I have taken sides for Lomborg.

PETER: Whether you decide by hunch, intuition, instincts, gut feeling, speculation, sixth sense or flipping a coin, you are still left with no more than a 50/50 chance of knowing whether something is true or false, fact or fiction, silly or sensible and so on. Heads one side of the battle, tails the other, heads the other ...

*

PETER: The only reason I found issues such as this important was when I found myself stirred to anger or overcome by gloom by what the so-called experts were saying. Then it became obvious that I needed to dig into the matter a bit, not to become an expert per se but to make sense of the issue – to sort out belief from fact, myth from reality, learning from experience and passion from sensibility. The reason I posted the recommendation is that the book is an excellent primer for anyone who finds themselves wasting this moment of being alive by being angry or sad about what the environmentalists are saying ... and wants to become free of these feelings.

RESPONDENT: Yep indeed. Global warming and species extinction are simply facts we all have to live with, yet it is not sensible to put oneself at the mercy of specialists or media opinions as to how one is to feel while living with these facts ... worrying is just wasting this moment of being alive.

PETER: I am left wondering whether you bother to read and think about anything I write. Not that it matters of course

Settling for believing what everyone else believes and settling for accepting that the world is a grim place and only getting grimmer can only leave you disassociated and disconnected from the world-as-it-is and people as-they-are – or to use your words, back in La-La land. If you worry about global warming and species extinction, then trying not to worry about them is only trying – trying to cope with a grim reality that is founded on nothing more than beliefs.

My suggestion is to investigate why you are worrying in the first place – are you wasting your time worrying about or trying not to worry about a belief. This is the way you dismantle your ‘self’ – by investigating and becoming aware of what makes you tick, by discovering why you get angry, pissed off, annoyed, anxious, worried, melancholic, sad, lonely, depressed, resentful and so on.

It’s a thrilling business to throw yourself into the adventure of discovering how you tick and why. It is, quite literally, the adventure of a lifetime.

18.4.2002

PETER to No 38: Most people are taught to love themselves, to stand up and fight for their rights, to be proud of their human-ness.  In other words, every human being is taught to make the best of their programming and is taught that it is not possible to question the fundamentals of this programming.  By dutifully following this ‘self’-centred and socially-condoned path everyone is oblivious to his or her own programming because ‘I’ am this programming and this programming is ‘me’.

RESPONDENT: Now considering [people are taught to love themselves] [Most people...] iow. [every human being...] [everyone...]? [is taught to make the best of their programming] Are you saying that you were taught to love yourself and that you experience that as being programmed?

PETER: In the real-world, the programming one gets is more usually to ‘stand up for oneself’ and take ‘pride in one’s achievements’. It’s a necessary form of indoctrination undertaken by parents and peers so as to prepare the child for the grim battle ahead. In the spiritual world, the programming is a preparation for retreating from the world and going ‘inside’ and it is usually based on some form of ‘love your self’.

There is also the narcissism that is rooted in the instinctual passions of all human beings, but this is a layer deeper than the social programming that I was talking about.

RESPONDENT: Could (one of) you give one/some clear example(s) as to what exactly you have detected to be a ‘program’, iow, what kind of program was that and how was it (explain explicitly please) implemented?

PETER: In my case, programming via genetics, parents, school, peers, Christianity and Rajneeshism. In your case, programming via genetics, parents, school, peers, Christianity and Rajneeshism, as I understand.

RESPONDENT: Personally I cannot detect a program that instructs me to love myself, yet I have tried to ‘implement’ certain instructions to do so ie. ‘I’m a loveable, capable, beautiful human being’ – however as I lack the so called ‘affective data’ these mainly remain ‘hollow phrases’.

PETER: I found that it was one thing to think about these things and quite another to be attentive to the feelings that arose in the course of everyday life of people, things and events. I was very often astounded at what feelings and passions were constantly going on beneath the surface, as it were.

RESPONDENT: As to [to be proud of their human-ness] as to experience those feelings as in fact recognizable I am as to now not able to detect any such feelings as feeling ie. ‘loveability’ or ‘pride’ so ... How did you become aware of ie. pride what were/are the physical parameters of it as to [question fundamentals of this programming]. What are those fundamentals iyo?

PETER: I did nothing more than ask myself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ until it became a wordless constant attentiveness. Trying to think about what makes ‘you’ tick never works, you have to experience it for yourself.

25.4.2002

RESPONDENT: Could (one of) you give one/some clear example(s) as to what exactly you have detected to be a ‘program’, iow, what kind of program was that and how was it (explain explicitly please) implemented?

PETER: In my case, programming via genetics, parents, school, peers, Christianity and Rajneeshism. In your case, programming via genetics, parents, school, peers, Christianity and Rajneeshism, as I understand.

RESPONDENT: As to [Christianity and Rajneeshism.] Roman Catholic in fact but it’s being considered as an offspring of Christianity. In the past I indeed would use the expression ‘Rajneeshism’ yet not anymore so... I prefer to say Oshoism you might say that I’m personally honestly hypocritical here yet considerate (though not overly.) Same I said to Richard goes here for U too I respect your privacy as I respect my own.

PETER: Given that Rajneesh’s original name was Chandra Mohan Jain, you could also call his religion Jainism or when he became Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (in Hindi, Bhagwan literally means god) the choice could also be Bhagwanism or Rajneeshism and he was even Maitreya for a while which would have made it Maitreyaism. That he reinvented himself as Osho in the last year of his life is seen by many as an attempt to distance his image from that of ‘The God who failed’. Whatever name you prefer to call his religion, Rajneesh, like his nemesis J. Krishnamurti, was but a passing particle in the vast cesspool of Eastern spirituality.

My point in replying as I did is that you and I have almost identical programming – that this genetic/instinctual programming and social/ spiritual indoctrination applies to all human beings with only very slight variations. That’s why Richard’s discovery of an actual freedom is applicable to all human beings and that’s why my experiences in undoing this programming is also applicable to all human beings.

RESPONDENT: So ... the following can be considered as the end of an investigation I like to call it a ‘peer’ review.

PETER: If you insist on refusing to make your own investigations, you can only end up thinking this mailing list is about ‘peer’ review – a situation which can only result in you being a follower or a rejector, a believer or a doubter. Speaking personally, when I came across actualism I never believed anything Richard said or wrote without checking it out for myself.

RESPONDENT: As you’ve been upfront and honest with the revelations through your diary I think the atmosphere has been created to politely (gentlemen like so to speak) revaluate this list history we now share. This happens from the condition of absolute ‘doubt’, which means to me ‘ZERO tolerance’ yet that is a stretchable concept as we have agreed about ‘time’ as an actuality – 22.4.02 3:02:17 (in Holland)

PETER: 24.4.02 / 2:02:20pm and it’s a wonderful early autumn day here in Byron Bay. It’s a delight to be here in this moment, the only moment I can experience of being alive.

Rather than agree with me that this is the only moment you can actually experience being alive, you can play a game for a while and try to be here in this moment of time. Initially you will find that you can only keep the game up for a very short time period as eventually something will pull you away from being here – some past emotional memory, some worry or anxiety about a future event, some consuming emotion or feeling will overtake you.

The whole point of actualism is not to waste this moment, the only moment you can experience being alive, by being angry, frustrated, sad, bored or such, let alone by wallowing in memories of the past or fantasizing or worrying about the future. The whole point of actualism is to develop an on-going attentiveness to being here, hence the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’

*

RESPONDENT: I decided to ‘cut some mustard’ here and have made a ‘thread-mix’ of a former conversation you and I where recently having yet the header Self-Awareness is ‘respectfully’ kept^

[Respondent]: Very good Peter, (sort of basketball as a way of dancing while playing ball ‘disclaimer’) Any negative attribution as to the use of ‘hypocrite/hypocrisy ‘ has as such now been rendered ‘neutral’.

[Peter]: Speaking personally, I never rendered the feeling of being a hypocrite neutral, for in order to do so I would then have to be insincere. In my spiritual years, what I did was puff up my feelings of superior righteousness whereby others where the bad guys, others were the problem and so on and these feelings then masked and shielded my hypocrisy to a large extent. Two facts served to shatter my veneer however. One was the failure of yet another relationship and my acknowledgement that I was equally responsible for its failure and the other was an outburst of anger one day that demolished my self-image as a being a peaceful man.

Both these incidents nagged me, for it made it obvious that despite my beliefs and fine ideals, I was being insincere and hypocritical, i.e. I was sprouting one thing and doing another. When I came across actualism I was presented with the challenge of doing something practical about my insincerity and hypocrisy and the challenge was to devote my life to becoming actually happy and actually harmless. Thus it is that sincerity – the ending of hypocrisy – is both the starting point of actualism, the driving force on the path and the end of the process of actualism.

I strongly recommend cranking up sincerity ... not neutralizing it. Peter to No 23, 24.3.2002

(decloaking) Also speaking personally: In stating that vis: [Any negative attribution as to the use of ‘hypocrite/hypocrisy’ has as such now been rendered ‘neutral’.] It has only been meant to say that the attribution to the expression ‘hypocrite/hypocrisy’ has been rendered neutral. To make it perfectly clear: when using that expression, I do neither attribute a negative meaning nor a positive meaning to that word. Iow, it is absolute ‘clean’ of judgement as to being right or wrong thus it may be interpreted by a reader as to his own need to be hypocritical or not to be hypocritical thus dismissing him/her (and myself) from the obligation to be absolutely honest or sincere and choose his/her own level that suits with his/her needs/ demands/ desires with regard to survival/ comfort at large.

PETER: It goes without saying that everyone is free to make their own judgement as to what level of hypocrisy suits them, but to call such a judgement ‘absolutely honest or sincere’ is to blithely ignore that such a judgement is utterly self-centred. Actualism is about raising the bar far beyond the level of ‘normal’ self-centredness, for what we are talking about on this list is what has been sought after by countless human beings for millennia – a genuine and actual peace on earth.

RESPONDENT: To even put it more clearly, I ‘respect’ the lost, fearful and lonely very cunning alien identity that resides in the body as ‘I’ in its desperate need to hide away from the light of exposal. Because either when it’s being spiritually shelled or socially, it will always feel to be ‘imprisoned’, in fact disowned, ‘less it comes to be facilitated and respected for what it is.’ This list is an opportunity to come to that (that is for me it has been) and I’m really happy that I took it.

PETER: And yet this list is about ‘self’-immolation, not ‘self’-respect.

RESPONDENT: Now ... Given that a child’s playfulness is the very essence of his/her existence/ awareness, any distortion/ discouragement/ violation of that quality means his ‘game’ becomes disturbed/ distorted or even ruined; that is ‘death’ for a child and that’s a fundamental shock in narcissism the brain has to cope with. Iow, its innate ability to reflect upon itself as being playfulness is being hampered.

PETER: The playfulness of a child also includes the innate instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, which means a child’s play is anything but innocent. Contrary to popular belief, children are not born innocent. It is because of this that a child has to be taught right and wrong, good and bad so as to make the child a fit member of society.

Only when a child becomes an adult and becomes vitally concerned about peace on earth, is there an opportunity to be able to cultivate an ability to reflect upon itself and begin to undo this programming.

RESPONDENT: This [ability to reflect upon itself] is what actually is ‘me’ so this me is not a matter of identity but a feature that goes pack and parcel with the flesh-body.

PETER: While the ability of reflection is an innate ability of the human brain, this function is completely taken over by a ‘self’, the psychological and psychic entity that is formed by one’s social and instinctual programming. Both aspects of this programming are experienced as discordant identities – ‘me’ as a thinking identity can be experienced as a little man in the head constantly trying to be in control, whilst ‘me’ as a feeling identity is usually felt in the heart to be ‘me’ at the core of my being.

RESPONDENT: Yet the Death experience needed to become accepted and so it does became ‘integrated’, as being wounded/ hurt/ abused aso, (that’s the way it goes) and recorded as memory and thus these memories becomes part of the shielding and the brain settles for this as an alternative ‘me’ and starts to disown/ deny and eventually reject the condition on which playfulness freely was flowing as it assigns this condition as too dangerous; iow, I become identified with being this is how a fragmentation process is initiated.

PETER: As far as I can make out you are talking of two fragmented ‘me’s’, an innate playful ‘me’ and a ‘wounded/ hurt/ abused’ ‘me’. This aligns with the traditional views of the human psyche whether it be psychological view or spiritual view. Psychology sees the illnesses of an excess of malice and sorrow as a failure to integrate these two ‘me’s’ into a more or less coherent whole that is better able to cope and fit into a malice and sorrowful society. Whilst spirituality aims to ‘disown/ deny and eventually reject the wounded/ hurt/ abused’ ‘me’ and realize that who you are is the real ‘me’, felt deep down inside as ‘me’, a spirit-only Being.

Actualism is about eliminating both of the parasitical non-actual identities that stand in the way of experiencing the already always existing peace on earth.

RESPONDENT: A Sequence of ‘Death shocks’ make the brain more and more ‘curb’ some instinctual inclinations/functions (which currently we now conveniently label as being malicious and sorrowful) toward what is regarded as ‘secure’ behaviour for the organism.

PETER: Is this your experience or is this what you make of actualism or is this based on your spiritual beliefs and experiences? I only ask because it does seem to be somewhat of a potpourri theory.

RESPONDENT: All my inflated assertions as to why or how the body comes to an end, all my assumptions as to why peaceful coexistence with fellow beings is such a difficult thing to realize, all my considerations about being an animal at heart (from a Darwinian perspective) was yet hypocrisy in action.

PETER: If you are saying that all of the assertions, assumptions and considerations you have taken on board as being truths have come to nothing, I can relate to that.

When I came across actualism, I took my spiritual ‘not knowing’ to be a fact. This meant I could start over again the business of finding out, all the time being wary of how much my spiritual conditioning had infiltrated my thinking and feeling. The path to actual freedom is littered with spiritual and real-world beliefs and as they become exposed by attentiveness, these beliefs need to be investigated and replaced with fact – not merely disowned, denied, liked or disliked, accepted or rejected as is common in ‘normal’ life.

As Vineeto said recently, ‘your entry ticket to the actual world – question everything, particularly your own beliefs and passions, the human condition in action as yourself.’

*

PETER:

[Peter]: Two facts served to shatter my veneer however. One was the failure of yet another relationship and my acknowledgement that I was equally responsible for its failure and the other was an outburst of anger one day that demolished my self-image as a being a peaceful man. Both these incidents nagged me, for it made it obvious that despite my beliefs and fine ideals, I was being insincere and hypocritical, i.e. I was sprouting one thing and doing another.

When I came across actualism I was presented with the challenge of doing something practical about my insincerity and hypocrisy and the challenge was to devote my life to becoming actually happy and actually harmless. Thus it is that sincerity – the ending of hypocrisy – is both the starting point of actualism, the driving force on the path and the end of the process of actualism.

I strongly recommend cranking up sincerity ... not neutralizing it. Peter to No 23, 24.3.2002

RESPONDENT: No ... It’s honesty that needs to be cranked up (that is as I see it), sincerity is what is left when you live in Actual Freedom on the ‘net’ I think it is appropriate to refer to that as ‘Virtual Freedom’.

PETER: The problem with the word ‘honest’ is that it has a connotation that is tainted in the spiritual world. As I wrote in my journal about my investigations into malice and sorrow –

[Peter]: ... ‘I came to see a lot of New Age-spiritual-therapy behaviour as only thinly disguised malice. ‘I have to be honest with you’ or ‘I would like to share something with you’ is usually the opening line of someone who is about to take revenge or be spiteful.’ Peter’s Journal, Intelligence

Because of this I much prefer to use the word sincerity, which has a connotation of being honest with oneself, rather than demanding honesty from others. Given that actualism is solely concerned with changing oneself, it would be extremely foolish to not be honest with oneself, which is why sincerity is both the starting point of actualism, the driving force on the path and the end of the process of actualism.

As regards to ‘sincerity is what is left when you live in Actual Freedom’ – from my own experience of living in virtual freedom, from many pure consciousness experiences and from a fine-tooth observation of Richard, I found that when you no longer nurture malice and sorrow in your bosom, an actual innocence negates the need to crank up sincerity in order to counter the natural human tendency for duplicity.

RESPONDENT: Iow, strange as it may seem after all those years, Actual Freedom appears to be only the beginning, the first step so to say. For me HAIETMOBA? has turned out to be the answer to the Impossible question which was: ‘can you change without time?’

PETER: That ‘Actual Freedom appears to be only the beginning’ does sound somewhat similar to No 12 when he spat the dummy on this list and claimed to have moved beyond actual freedom into a state he called AFF – Actual Fucking Freedom ( No 12 to Vineeto, 16.6.2000). What you write does leave me with the impression that you may have had some similar consciousness-aggrandizing experience lately, but I may well be misinterpreting what you are saying.

RESPONDENT: Now ... Peter, I considered the name you have gotten from BSR and then I considered how you came in touch with Richard and how I came on this list as I see it: an Actual Freedom is in fact the Masters Dream (the dawn of love) and to ACTUAL see that in all your fellow beings, Wow! That’s quite something.

But then again ‘imaginary poetry’ was really not your cup of tea. Yet I’d feel honoured (if I were you) and proud (not self aggrandized) to have been an architect of Osho. Now ... as I have the Ace of diamonds and the ace of spades I suspect that you have the Ace of hearts and the ace of clubs. So I say lets call it even here. As for Richard, he’s first, me second – indeed a whole different Ball game, yep, but as already admitted. I am only a beginner at snooker. Regards No 23 (silence)

PETER: I happened to meet someone the other day who mentioned that they remembered having met me some 6 years ago. It turned out that he had been in the Andrew Cohen commune in Sydney when I was planning to sell up, leave the real-world behind yet again and join the commune. As it turned out the taste of the commune I had was enough to convince me that I didn’t need to go down that path again as I had been there before – I had done spiritual communes and found them sadly lacking in peace and harmony, I had found sitting with eyes closed in meditation to be the antithesis of being here and the idea of a self-imposed celibacy smacked of a moral perversity akin to Catholic priesthood.

The meeting reminded me of the value I got from finding out for myself what this particular Guru’s teachings produced as practice. By doing so I was able to tick yet another spiritual teacher off my list of ‘tried and failed in practice’. Soon after I met Richard and I applied the same ‘find out for myself’ approach and now I find myself writing to others saying ‘I tried actualism and it works in practice’.

It seems such an obvious thing to say, but unless you are willing to make the effort to find out for yourself, you will never know if actualism works or not – you will never know if it is possible to become actually free of the human condition of malice and sorrow.

You mentioned at the start of this post that ‘the following can be considered as the end of an investigation I like to call it a ‘peer’ review.’ If you are conducting a ‘peer review’ of actualism, I suggest that the only sensible way to do this on the basis of a ‘find out for myself’ approach and, by doing so, become a practicing actualist. Otherwise you will never be open to the benefits of peer review – that you are not in this business alone, that others are doing it, that you are in no way unique, that there are people with more expertise than you and that we actualists all seek a common goal – peace on earth.

peer review – the evaluation by (other) experts of a research project for which a grant is sought, a paper received for publication in a learned journal, etc.; gen. a review of commercial, professional, or academic efficiency, competence, etc., by others in the same occupation. Oxford Dictionary

In order to be able to review your peers, or be reviewed by your peers, you need to be amongst peers of the same occupation or interests, which in the case of this list is doing something practical about peace on earth or being vitally interested in peace on earth.

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Peter’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.