Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List with Correspondent No 31
RESPONDENT: Peter, and all others who find ‘Grübelsucht’ a more than mouthful word.... are you certain it was in the Oxford (presumably) English dictionary? Yours doubting that fact. PETER: [G, f. grübeln to brood + Sucht mania.] A form of obsession in which even the simplest facts are compulsively queried. Excerpted from Oxford Talking Dictionary Copyright © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Here is a relevant URL (the fourth paragraph down the page ... plus footnote No 4): http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin21.htm I liked what you posted, particularly that the characteristic form of the mania is of a metaphysical character ...
PETER: Good to hear from you again. You wrote to Gary – RESPONDENT: There’s a lot of things going on right now that are common to a lot of people ... owing to the media pumping out image after image of what they would like to describe is what is going on. I read your contribution and I want to ask very sincerely that perhaps there’s an element not quite revealed, something which allows us to go get breakfast and drive a car. The allowing process I guess. It’s not quite belief versus belief as Peter wrote ... rather more about the allowing of things to happen when we would like them to happen. So on with the question: this allowing business, don’t you think it’s a form of power? When one’s power is questioned or confronted, doesn’t this bring up something deep and fundamental in ourselves? When our power to go to work and do it peacefully without disruption (to put it mildly in the recent context) is forcefully taken away ... doesn’t this do something in us? I’ll leave it there because there’s a few other aspects this line of considering leads on towards... No 31 to Gary 24.9.2001 PETER: Allowing requires someone, an ‘I’ or ‘me’, to allow something to happen. In actuality there is no one ‘who’ allows things to happen. In actuality, there is only this flesh and blood body doing what is happening, be it typing these words, making breakfast, drinking coffee, laying on the couch or driving a car. Being what I am as opposed to ‘who I think and feel I am’ elicits a palpable freedom and a sensuous delight in being here. Getting hung up on being a someone ‘who’ is allowing things to happen is to take a back seat in the thrilling and wondrous business of being alive as a flesh and blood body. Allowing is like accepting one’s lot in life – a form of fatalism. If you take allowing to its limits you end up being a watcher – a totally disembodied entity watching ‘your’ body doing what is happening. In other words, you end up twice removed from actuality. Actualism is about going the other way – coming to your senses, both literally and actually. And surely there is nothing more sensible than enjoying being here. Which is why actualists make such a big thing about being happy and harmless. I fully acknowledge it is not an easy thing to do because enjoying being here goes against all one’s social and instinctual programming but the only way to get free of this programming is to have the confidence to dismantle it. Once one has tasted the perfection and purity of this actual world we live in, one can, if sufficiently motivated, glean the necessary confidence from the intrinsic propensity of the universe to manifest itself in abundance and excellence, not only in quantity but also in quality. * And just another thought to finish – at one stage a few years ago I wrote quite a bit about acceptance, a topic which dovetails in with your questions about allowing. I wrote it at the time that I was making sense of this aspect of my programming and you may well find it a useful aid for your own investigations. You will find it under Peter’s Correspondence, Book Review, on the actualism website.
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