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Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List with Correspondent No 32
PETER: Hi, RESPONDENT: You say that in your case actualism is the third alternative to both materialism and spiritualism. PETER: Yes. This is how I put it recently in a post to No 52 –
Many people seek happiness via the relentless pursuit to amass more and more material possessions, the idea supposedly being that the accumulation of financial wealth with its associated power over others is the meaning of life on earth. In the dog-eat-dog materialist world success is to be the biggest dog on the block. Running parallel with this materialist viewpoint within the human condition is the ancient belief in a spiritual world – an ethereal world of spirits – in essence a place where the human spirit or soul or atman supposedly goes after the death of the physical body. Because these archaic spiritual beliefs still maintain a tenacious grip over human beings, many people run a bet each way – whilst still pursuing materialism they also take care to indulge in some form of religious/spiritual belief to varying degrees of intensity. And there are a small percentage of people who are so disenamoured with materialism that they devote their lives to spiritual pursuits becoming priests, monks, nuns, sannyasins, teachers and the like and in doing so becoming dependant on others to provide for their sustenance as well as their status. As you can see materialism and spiritualism are not necessarily black and white distinctions, as most people seem to dabble in both with nay a blush. RESPONDENT: Although spiritualism is largely discussed on this mailing list and on the site, why there is no such discussion concerning materialism (as there are far more materialist practitioners around me and in the world than convinced spiritualists). PETER: The reason that spiritualism is discussed more than materialism on this mailing list is that this is an uncensored mailing list and what people choose to write about reflects their interests and passions. The comment that I would make is that I would assume that those who are currently interested in actualism would have already seen and experienced that the pursuit of happiness and the meaning of life is not to be found in materialism and would therefore have gone seeking both happiness and the meaning of life in spiritualism – the only alternative previously known to them. It follows that the reason that we have a lot of discussion about spiritual beliefs on this list is that a prerequisite to becoming an actualist is to abandon one’s emotional ties to spiritualism. Having said that, I also think that this will only be the case in these early years of actualism, because as actualism becomes more widely known, those who are sufficiently disenamoured with materialism will increasingly be aware that there are now two other alternatives – the down-to-earthness of actualism or the other-worldliness of spiritualism. And just as a footnote, it also seems to me that those who have expressed an interest in actualism to date have not needed to trod the spiritual path as intensely as did Richard, nor for that matter, as did either Vineeto or I. They can read our ‘been there, done that’ reports and make up there own minds as to what they want to do with their lives. RESPONDENT: And if peace-on-earth is your aim, then this might be a major topic to tackle as there are far more wars for oil then for religious purposes. PETER: I have written about the shortcomings of materialism on this mailing list before because once I finally stopped believing in spiritual beliefs, I then had to take a clear-eyed look at materialism once more so as to finally remove all of the beliefs, notions, psittacisms and passions that give substance to the universal belief that human existence is, and hence always will be, a grim battle for survival. As for ‘there are far more wars for oil than for religious purposes’, I don’t have a sufficient grasp of geo-politics to know one way or the other. In my somewhat limited knowledge of the history of human conflict, it would seem that the very early wars between humans were scrappy affairs fought over territory and resources. As tribes were eventually amalgamated into nations the motives for war would appear to be increasingly about power and prestige rather than territory and resources per se. In these early years it would appear that the priests and shamans simply went along for the ride garnering what influence and power they could by playing on the fears and superstitions of the kings and emperors. Over time the priests and shamans appear to have wheedled their way to the top of the heap and it could be said that many wars were fought largely in order that the Godmen, Popes or High priests could then strut their stuff on a larger stage. The Dark Ages in Europe comes to mind as an example of a prolonged period of inter and intra-religious conflict and persecution. Your comment may be a particular reference to the two recent Gulf Wars, both of which are seen by some people as being wars fought for oil. Whilst I think it’s a reasonable comment to make about the first Gulf War – at the end of the war Kuwait’s oil passed from Iraqi control back into Kuwaiti control – I would see the second Gulf War as being more ideologically driven than economically driven. It is pertinent to remember that after terrorist’s attacks on the very heart of the U.S.’s economic, defence and executive might the U.S. was forced to respond and they initially did so by striking back at the heart of the terrorist group responsible for the attacks, which meant sending troops into Afghanistan. The U.S. then decided to do something about the other long-term thorn in their side, Saddham Hussein, who had been merrily thumbing his nose at the U.S. for years by persistently flaunting the ceasefire conditions he had agreed to after his defeat in GW1. As I understand it, the ideology behind the toppling of Hussein was to end his dictatorial reign and bring democracy to Iraq – an ideology based on the fact that democratic nations have been proven to be much less prone to wage war than dictatorial regimes, Monarchies or Theocracies. So whilst oil may have been a footnote on the agenda somewhere, I don’t see it as being the main motive for GW2 and as I understand it, Iraq’s oil will now be in Iraqis’ control and not Saddham Hussein’s personal control. But that’s just my understanding of the matter based on information I have gleaned and I am more than willing to change my view if I came across fresh information to the contrary. As I said, I don’t have a great interest in or knowledge of geo-politics and the only reason I have commented on your comment is to illustrate that many things I would glibly accepted as being fact in the past I now put in the ‘maybe’ box. Nowadays if I am interested in the subject I take care to check the source of the information that is being put out so that I can understand the slant that is being put on it – for an example I check if the source is anti-U.S., anti-capitalism, pro-capitalism, anti-authority, pro-socialism, pro-Environmentalism, anti-change, academic, pragmatic, and so on. RESPONDENT: I ask this as I find myself spending at least 8 hours a day as a ‘materialist’ and less then ½–1 hour/day investigating the human condition operating as me. Spirituality is not on my agenda anymore, yet fear of not having enough money to pay for rent, food, clothes, car, etc. is a major issue to deal with at least right now. PETER: I found that the only way to investigate the issues and feelings that arise from working for a living was whilst I was working for a living. I didn’t have an on-off attitude to being an actualist – I didn’t, and eventually couldn’t, switch off attentiveness for any reason. Actualism is about being happy and harmless in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are … and that obviously includes being happy and harmless in the time you spend working in order to earn ‘enough money to pay for rent, food, clothes, car, etc.’ RESPONDENT: I’m also a great lover of comfort, so the fear of not living in comfortable conditions gives me the necessary will to get up every morning and go to work. PETER: I can remember in my spiritual years, that many people were anti-materialist to the point of actively resenting the fact that they had to work for a living – having to be in the real-world as they called it. This resentment at having to work for a living is why many of them wanted to become Gurus and ‘get their money for nothing and their chicks for free’. Basically if you became Enlightened, you assuage the fear of survival by bludging off others. In India I found that they were quite upfront about the whole business – you either got a job struggling in the real-world or you became an apprentice to some Guru with the hope of one day maybe becoming a God-man in your own right. The actualism approach is radically different in that the aim of an actualist is to more and more facilitate the felicitous feelings about being here in the circumstances you find yourself in right now – including having to get up in the morning and having to go to work if that is your circumstances right now – whilst simultaneously being aware of any feelings that inhibit your happiness and cause you to be belligerent to others. Or to put it another way, eight hours a day is a lot of time to waste being grumpy and resentful – if you have to work for a living, as most people do, why not enjoy your time working by being happy and harmless? RESPONDENT: So how have you made the distinction between being an actualist instead of a materialist, PETER: As a generalization, a materialist is someone who has never bothered to question the selfism inherent in the relentless pursuit of amassing more and more material possessions, whereas an actualist is someone who is sensitive to the selfism inherent in both materialism and spiritualism and, because of this sensitivity, seeks to be free of this selfism. RESPONDENT: … and where is the line between laziness and giving yourself more time to investigate? PETER: Well for a start, as an actualist the time I spend ‘investigating the human condition operating as me’, to use your words, is the time that I am awake, conscious and aware. It starts from waking in the morning, continues through the day, no matter what I am doing or not doing, and ceases the moment consciousness seeps away and I go to sleep at night-time. As for laziness, even as a young man I was never impressed by materialism and this has meant that I have been able to spend less time working for a living than those who pursue materialism. When I came across actualism, the last traces of my materialistic beliefs and urges eventually wilted on the vine, which meant I have trimmed my material possessions down to the necessary luxuries – good food, comfortable shelter and clothes, computer, TV, necessary furniture. By being sensible I found I was able to halve the money I had previously needed to earn in the days when I was a driven being, which means that I now have much more time to savour doing nothing in particular. RESPONDENT: And what the hell is a materialist? I ask this as one cannot be both an actualist and a materialist, yet at the same time one has to work in order to survive and live a comfortable life. PETER: A materialist is someone who is instinctually driven to accumulate more and more material possessions. This is not the same thing as the fact that most people in industrialized countries have to sell their time in exchange for money in order to buy food and clothes, pay rent and pay for transport. As an actualist I came to experientially understand that to resent a fact or rile against a fact or complain about a fact – in this case the necessity to sell one’s time in order to buy food and clothes, pay rent and pay for transport – is but to waste this opportunity of sensually delighting in this on-going moment of being here in this actual world of the senses. RESPONDENT: On the other hand, I do understand at least intellectually the form in which aggression, nurture and fear usually manifest themselves. I’m not that sure if I understand the part desire plays in my life and in humans in general. Can you provide some examples in which desire deviated your efforts of being happy and harmless? PETER: Curiously enough I was thinking about this the other day whilst watching a TV show about the material excesses that the rich and famous are required to indulge in in order to demonstrate to other people that they are rich and famous. It led me to reflect on why I was never impressed by the pursuit of material possessions, financial wealth and power and I traced this disinterest back to a seminal event in my youth. During my university years, we had a compulsory year off in order to gain some practical experience and I travelled by ship to London to work in an architectural office for a year. At the end of the year I decided to return home overland through the Middle East and Asia. The further I travelled from Europe, the poorer the people were, culminating in seeing the streets of Calcutta packed with sleeping bodies at night time and being accosted by children in Madras waving their leprosy infected limb-stumps in my face and begging for money. And then immediately after, still in a state of shock, I boarded a plane for Australia to stay at a friend’s house in Perth, only to find myself the very next day decadently lolling about in their swimming pool with a glass of wine and a plate of snacks on the edge. This contrast between the have’s and have-not’s was so obvious, and so in my face, that I was never again to be tempted by the desire for material excesses – and the payoff was that I didn’t have to work for the excesses that I no longer desired. And nowadays, with the instinctual passion of desire no longer dominating my life, I am thus more and more able to enjoy what are termed the simple pleasures of life – such as the freshly brewed cup of coffee that Vineeto has just placed on my desk above my keyboard. A sign perhaps that it is a good time to end now and indulge in some of the other pleasures of life. But before I do, in an attempt to avoid any misunderstandings, I should point out that I am not anti-materialist in the sense that I am in any way against material possessions and physical comfort, i.e. I am neither a Luddite, nor a pejorist, nor a miserabilist. Far from it in fact – I want all of my fellow human beings to have what I have, to have at least the same level of safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure that I enjoy. Those people who live in the wealthier, more technologically advanced countries lead longer, healthier lives, need to have fewer children, have better housing, have access to better medical and educational facilities, drink cleaner water, breathe cleaner air, eat more nutritious food, need to work less, have more time for leisure, have better police, fire and rescue services, are less prone to die or be injured in earthquakes, floods and cyclones ... and so on and so on. And, as more of the world’s population are becoming wealthier in a stabilizing global population, increasingly more and more people are enjoying the material benefits of wealth and increasingly less and less suffer from the deprivations of poverty. Isn’t that astounding … and all this beneficence is solely due to human ingenuity. The crux of what I am saying in this post is that the meaning of life is not to be found in materialism, nor is it to be found in spiritualism – it is to be found right here, right now, in the astounding sensual world we flesh and blood bodies live in.
RESPONDENT: I’ve recently had a chat at a cafe with a very close and intelligent friend of mine about actualism and the so many things it promises to offer (above all, the discovery of the cause and the means to end human psychological suffering). PETER: If by the phrase ‘the means to end human psychological suffering’ you mean the means to end not only one’s own suffering but the suffering that one either deliberately or unwittingly inflicts on one’s fellow human beings … and if you are using the phrase ‘physiological suffering’ to include both mental and emotional suffering … then I am following you. RESPONDENT: His objection may already be in the PETER: If I take it that your friend was not merely philosophizing but that he has indeed found ‘his own way’ then his discovery, and therefore his opinions, would then be of no use whatsoever to anyone else. If he is still in the process of finding his own way then he obviously disparages following the lead or taking note of anyone else’s experience at all, which means he cuts himself off from the possibility that fellow human being’s experiences may have some relevance to his own search. Whilst it is obviously his freedom to do so, such an approach doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I have not had to find my ‘own way’ in most matters in life – my very lifestyle is dependant upon the discoveries of fellow human beings who were here before me. I didn’t discover the wheel, I didn’t work out how to get water to my house, I didn’t discover how to plant crops or husband animals or invent electricity or television or computers and so on. Neither am I self-reliant in that I depend on others to grow my food, build my shelter, provide my electricity, protect my house, pave the road, collect the rubbish, drive the bus and so on. With this is mind, why should I ignore the discovery of a fellow human being who has discovered ‘… the cause and the means to end human psychological suffering’, to use your words, simply because I hold the conviction that I need to have the ‘freedom’ to find my ‘own way’. When I met Richard I had the choice to either take on board what he was saying – see if it made sense and if it did, road test the method he used in order to become free of malice and sorrow to see if it worked – or not and then move on. Have you not got this freedom of choice as well? But it makes no sense to me to cobble oneself with the belief that one needs to reject the discoveries of others on the basis of ‘I need to do it my way’. This is not my idea at all of being free to make a sensible choice. If I had stuck to my beliefs or listened to such advice from others, I would not have abandoned the spiritual path and chosen to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless – in other words, I would have wasted the opportunity that coming across Richard afforded me. RESPONDENT: ... and that simply ‘copy and paste’ doesn’t work in practice. PETER: In the time I decided to go public about the fact that I have abandoned spiritualism in favour of becoming happy and harmless I have had many people accuse me of being a clone or a disciple or whatever and of merely parroting Richard’s words. I make no apologies whatsoever in using many of Richard’s terminology and phraseology – it makes sense to do so particularly as I have no hang ups about picking the brain’s of others and following others’ leads, of tapping into and utilizing another’s expertise and attempting to emulate the success of a fellow human being who has discovered ‘… the cause and the means to end human psychological suffering’, to use your words. I understand your friend has his principles and his opinions about matters such as this – but for me the rewards of becoming carefree and benign have far outstripped the need for ‘me’ to hang on to the selfist belief that ‘I’ need to do things ‘my’ way. RESPONDENT: He said that’s the reason why he doesn’t like all these ‘preachers’ as they eliminate all originality and authenticity in the individual practicing their teaching/ method. PETER: As someone who has spent the last 6 years in ‘the individual practicing’ of the actualism method, I can only report that it does indeed bring about a tangible and dramatic reduction not only in my own suffering, but even more significantly, in the suffering that I had either previously either deliberately or unwittingly inflicted on my fellow human beings. Now if your friend sees both the process of actualism, its incremental successes and its end goal as being unoriginal and unauthentic then he is in good company because most people who have come across actualism have dismissed it as being yet another spiritual teaching and continued on their merry way, apparently finding comfort in doing what everyone else does. I do wonder though when he says he wants to ‘find his own way’ – does he know what it is that he wants to find, does he have a goal or purpose in life? The reason I say this is because when I came across Richard I found that I had a similar goal to what he had in his life – to find a way to bring an end to the suffering that we human beings inflict upon ourselves and upon each other. Perhaps that was why it was relatively easy for me to swallow my spiritual pride and start to do what I wanted to do and not do what others told me I should do. RESPONDENT: And he said about Richard that he intentionally searched for an ‘original’ way in order to prove that he is unique, that he had this goal in mind prior to finding a way of being happy and harmless. PETER: I take it that your friend must have some special insight into Richard’s intentions and motives as this is contrary to what Richard says were his intentions in finding a way to become happy and harmless and what he says are his motives in going public with his discovery. Does your friend happen to know Richard personally or is this something he has intuited from reading Richard’s writings or did he base his judgement of Richard solely on his own past experience with spiritual teachers or is merely repeating a psittacism from a spiritual teaching that he has taken on board? Look, I can understand people being cynical of someone who claims to have found a way to end human malice and sorrow – it is after all a huge claim to make. I can only say that being cynical did not sit well with me because I saw that my holding on to this feeling meant that I believed there could never be, and therefore would never be, an end to human suffering. If I chose to keep believing this then I was stuck with holding to spiritual beliefs, all of which say that suffering is essential and that ultimately peace is only possible after death in some other-world, and I couldn’t and wouldn’t accept that. RESPONDENT: And that he was mainly searching for this ‘artistic’ uniqueness, ‘actualism’ being only the means to this end. PETER: I take it by ‘‘artistic’ uniqueness’ your friend is talking about those who strive to be unique, as in standing out from the crowd. The only way to stand out from the crowd is to have some degree of fame or notoriety, which means devoting one’s life to doing whatever it takes to win the acclaim, or the condemnation, of others. I personally saw that to devote my life to such a pursuit was not only totally ‘self’-centred but that it was the very antithesis of freedom because my feeling of being unique was dependant upon the whims of what others feel about me. And what I like about Richard is that he had the same sensible approach to what it is to be a human being as I did – being a God-man did not sit well with him exactly for the very same reasons that the prospect of becoming a God-man did not sit well with me – it is a form of bondage and most decidedly not an actual freedom. RESPONDENT: I’m interested in what you think on this subject and not Richard’s response. PETER: Well, you will tend to get the same response from me as you would from Richard, which is no doubt why I am dubbed a disciple or a clone or whatever. I do however write from the perspective, and with the experience, of someone who is only virtually free of the human condition and not actually free of it as Richard is, but we do both share a sensible approach to the business of being a human being and we do both experientially understand that sensibility is not possible when beliefs, emotions and passions rule the roost. RESPONDENT: On the other hand, I have some questions of my own: is actualism applicable everywhere on Earth, in Africa for example? PETER: Provided someone has a burning discontent with their life as-it-is such that they are sufficiently motivated to devote their life to becoming free of malice and sorrow then it doesn’t matter where they were born or where they live. Already we have people who live on different parts of this planetary globe who have indicated that they are interested in actualism and some have reported success in becoming less harmful to others and more happy. One can only do the business of actualism – becoming free of malice and sorrow – right now, wherever one happens to be now, regardless of where this wherever happens to be on the planet RESPONDENT: I ask this as ‘we’ are a product of/influenced by our environment as much as we are a product of our genes … PETER: I never bought that one even as a kid. At university my closest friends were someone born in Malaysia of parents born in China, someone born in Australia of parents born in Italy and someone who lived in Australia but who was born in Greece. The primary connection we all had was genetic – we were all fellow human beings – and any cultural or social differences were very much secondary. By the way, it took me another 40 years to demolish the biggest of the divides that separate human beings – my gender conditioning – but that’s another story. RESPONDENT: … and it seems that it’s easier to become an actualist in Byron Bay with all its alternative lifestyles and wonderful environment then let’s say in a polluted city with kilometres of concrete and street buzz or a poor country of Africa. PETER: I have found by experience that the only way I can make a sensible evaluation of other people’s suppositions is to check their suppositions against the facts of the matter. In this case, if we take the numbers of people subscribed to this mailing list as being a gauge of the number of people thus far interested in actualism and say halve the number as some who are subscribed have made it clear that they have done so in order to voice their objections, then there are many more non-Byron Bay-ites than there are Byron Bay residents. So it would appear that what seems to you to be the case is not substantiated by the facts of the matter. As for living in a town where people live ‘alternative lifestyles’, these people mostly have set-in-concrete beliefs and as such have no interest whatsoever in abandoning those beliefs in favour of taking on something as down-to-earth as becoming happy and harmless. As for a ‘wonderful environment’, as a kid I was personally attracted to the idea of living in the tropics and in my twenties I lived for a while in a small village in England and found that I liked the rural lifestyle. During the next 20 years, due to my parental obligations and spiritual aspirations, I lived in many other places but when these petered out I happened to receive a phone call one day from someone who wanted a house designed in a sub-tropical sea-side rural tourist town called Byron Bay on the other side of the continent from where I was living at the time. Because of this serendipitous event, I soon after found find myself living in that little sea-side rural tourist town in the subtropics, where another serendipitous event occurred in that I met Richard one evening which then led to another serendipitous event when I met Vineeto one afternoon. It is my experience it is the events that happen and the people one meets and interacts with that are the stuff of life and exactly where these happenings happen and where they lead one to live is secondary. A pure consciousness experience of the actuality of what it is to be a human being is not to be confused with a nature experience – one can have a PCE, at any time, wherever one is, or wherever one is living. Given that a PCE is not place-specific, culture-specific or gender-specific it follows that the 24/7 living of an actual freedom is also not place-specific, culture-specific or gender-specific. RESPONDENT: And if you were to raise a child, how were you to deal with the free operation of the child instinctual passions? Wouldn’t you instil in him some sort of values in order to curb these passions, some form of psychological control? PETER: Probably not that much different than the way I did – I have been the biological care-taker to two children. The only difference, and it is a significant difference, would be that I would not have been plagued by feelings of doubt, anguish, guilt, possessiveness, jealousy, remorse and so on whilst doing the job of care taking for my children. The most obvious of the instinctual passions that a parent or carer has to deal with in children is anger and there are several ways of dealing with it. In very young children one ways is to ignore it and let it run its course as it always does, but when the anger is expressed by hitting people or breaking things then the carrot and stick approach is next on the list. When my children got to the age that I was able to reason with them then I could point out that hitting others usually meant you were liable to get hit back or suffer some form of punishment and that breaking things meant that when you calmed down all you had left was a broken thing. Generally I, along with my wife, established a few sensible rules so that the family unit could function as reasonably as it could – given that we were all of us subject to our moods, feelings and emotions. I also let them know that society at large had rules, be they laws or conventions, that it was sensible to obey or conform, otherwise they would find themselves in trouble of some sort. I didn’t put the fear of God in my children because that seemed a weird thing to do – I simply taught them the essential rules of the game as it were. Now that I am virtually free of malice and sorrow, I still play the game by and large by the same rules I passed on to my children – except that playing the game and complying with the rules is effortless nowadays because I am no longer prone to be antagonistic or abusive and nor am I inclined to feel sad or to wallow in melancholia. There are a few rules and customs that I find non-sensical and weird but nowadays I rarely, if ever, find myself getting upset or angry about them. RESPONDENT: Are there any multiple-layer meanings in actualist writings or only ‘face value’ words and expressions? PETER: I know what you are saying and I think I know why you are saying it as it was something that haunted me in my early days. I can remember sitting in Richard’s living room one afternoon after a particularly intense session of
trying to understand what he was on about and thinking that what he was talking about was astounding. Richard was busy making coffee at the time
and all of a sudden I said something like – ‘well, I’m hooked. You can let me in to the secret now. You can tell me what’s really
going on’. From memory, the expression of bemusement on Richard’s face made me realize that there was no hidden meaning or secret in what
Richard was saying in the normal sense of the words. He hadn’t ‘arrived from another planet to save us humans’, he wasn’t ‘the next
Saviour of Mankind’, he wasn’t ‘in possession of some long-lost wisdom’ he wasn’t ‘the re-incarnation of some LDM From memory, it was soon after this that I discovered for myself the hidden meaning or secret in what Richard was saying when I remembered that I had had a PCE and that I had experienced that there is in fact an actual world that is pure and that is perfect. From then on I knew what Richard was talking about – it was not an impossible dream or an ancient fairy tale, it was an actuality in the very sense of the meaning of the word. So when I say I understand where you are coming from, it is because I have been there myself. My only advice is that if you want to really understand what Richard is on about then keep going, keep reading and start to be attentive to your feelings because it is only your own vital interest in these matters that will push you beyond your fears and beyond your suspicions and thereby pave the way to either remembering or provoking a pure consciousness experience. RESPONDENT: My mind tends to make various connections when reading something, for example ‘extinct as the Dodo’, this bird being considered in popular culture a clumsy and unfitted for survival species (thus associating it with the identity). PETER: Oh, yes. There were things that Richard has written and still writes that literally leap off the page at me. It is as though he is offering both an invitation and a challenge to those who read his words and care enough to take them at face-value. For me the challenge was and still is – am I sincere in wanting peace on earth, which in down-to-earth terms meant and still means am ‘I’ willing to devote my life to the business of becoming happy and harmless? I liked your questions because they were all questions I asked myself at one time or other. They were all issues that I found that I eventually had to put to one side if I was sincere about wanting to become actually free of the human condition. It’s a big list to wade through and I had to do it on my own – none of my peers or friends were interested in actualism so I eventually gave up seeking their counsel. I can only report that even if a virtual freedom from malice and sorrow was the only thing possible then all of the effort has been well worthwhile. And yet I don’t dismiss the fact that leaving ‘the fold’ is a difficult business, and that this is particularly so for the pioneers in this business.
RESPONDENT: I’ve established a what you call ‘prima facie case’ in regard to actualism and I’m very pleased to have found this new alternative. PETER: I like the term ‘prima facie’. I notice that whilst the Oxford dictionary definition indicates ‘based on a first impression’ I use the term in the legalistic sense of a case having been made to warrant further investigation. RESPONDENT: I’ve been pondering about what’s written here and it’s a very accurate radiography of the human condition, as it confirms and throws new light on some of my past experiences and observations about life. PETER: Yes. Once I started to say, ‘Yes, I know that one’ or ‘Yep, I’ve been down that alley’ or ‘Yep, that’s me’ I stopped being objective about actualism and started to be subjective about it. This simple act of acknowledgement meant that my interest in actualism moved from being ‘interested’ to being ‘vitally interested’. RESPONDENT: Now I understand life from a new perspective but there are many instances when it’s difficult to see a fact about something, e.g. love & relationship, as this was my most precious ‘objective’ for more then 10 years, the thing that kept me alive. Yet, this is theory and just a bit of practice till now. I’m at the stage where the power of my spiritual pride and cynicism weakened and allowed me to understand and assimilate many new things. PETER: Yep, I can relate to that. It took a while for me to get off my spiritual high horse and start to really listen to what was being said and then to start to think about it instead of just emotionally reacting to it, but when I did I started to become aware that what Richard was saying about the human condition and how to become free of it applied to ‘me’ as well as to everyone else … and not just to everyone else. RESPONDENT: The more difficult part is now coming: practice, and more precisely I can’t find what you call ‘pure intent’ as I don’t want and I’m quite scrupulous not to transform this into another belief system. To be more exact, let’s take an example: sex drive. I’m in a relationship for 6 months, but there is a constant drive to sleep with other women. Now if I’ll fuck these other women, I’ll cheat on my girlfriend and our relationship will begin to deteriorate. If I don’t, I won’t feel content with myself and hypocrisy, resentment and the ensuring suffering will emerge coupled with some aggressive outbursts within the relationship that will finally contribute to its dissolution. In the first case, the sex drive rules, in the second the social identity acts as a barrier, yet with no results in terms of happiness or tangible results. The former situation has been the case in my last two relationships where there was a greater degree of involvement from my part. There are many examples as this one, and as ‘me’ begins to fade, these drives become more and more ‘surfaceable’. This ‘pure intent’ is supposed to help yet I think that at this stage I have more of a ‘well-meaning intent’. PETER: That’s a good description. From memory, I would say that when I started to become interested in actualism I also had a ‘well-meaning intent’. Everybody who is interested in actualism starts from where they start, in the situation they are in and
with the level of intent that they currently have. In my case, my well-meaning intent was sufficient for me to set myself what I felt to be a
realizable goal – to change myself sufficiently such that I could live with at least one person in unreserved peace and harmony. As it turned out
it was a pretty radical goal and in order to achieve it I found that I had to continuously raise my level of intent. And by doing so I started to
have pure consciousness experiences whereby I came to experientially understand what having a [connection to] pure intent means. (Editorial note: Pure intent is, of course, a manifest life-force; a genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and
benignity that originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe. See I can also relate to your example of starting to become acutely aware of the brutish aspects of the human animal instinctual sexual desire. It can be quite disturbing and daunting when one starts to become aware of the ‘dark side’ of one’s human nature and it’s not something that you would deliberately want to do unless you had a very good reason to do so. The very good reason that I had was that I wanted to get rid of everything that stood in the way of me being able to live peacefully and harmoniously with Vineeto in an intimate companionship. What this intention meant in practice was that not only did I want to be happy but that my being harmless to others became even more important. This over-arching intention to stop causing harm to others meant that I was able to make my way through the maze of beliefs, feelings and passions that stood in the way of this being possible. I don’t know if that makes sense to you or not, but it did to me when I started to realize that I wanted to become an actualist and it makes even more sense to me now. RESPONDENT: Does this pure intent come only from remembering one’s PCE’s? PETER: As Richard uses the term pure intent, yes. It is only when one directly experiences the peerless perfection and unimaginable purity of the actual world in a PCE can one make the life-changing decision that this is how one wants to live one’s life – come what may. This come-what-may decision to set in motion a process that will eventually lead to ‘my’ demise requires a purity of intent such that one will never ever again settle for second best. RESPONDENT: I do have some memories of perfection but right now most of my memories are either grey or rose coloured. PETER: My experience is that ‘well-meaning intent’ has it roots in the common-to-all pure consciousness experience whereby all human beings feel that they are trapped within the human condition and either accept this as their fate, rile against it, or seek to escape from it. For me the appeal in actualism was, and still is, the opportunity to be free of all of the human condition. RESPONDENT: I also know that this ‘pure intent’ is not only the domain of actualism, that there are instances in life when I succeeded despite of the odds because of an ‘intent’. PETER: A well-meaning intent has two possible outlets – either secular or spiritual. A brief clear-eyed look at history will reveal that all of the practical advances in human health, safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure have come from well-meaning secular activities and precious little, if any, have come from well-meaning spiritualists. Whilst well-meaning spiritualists aim is provide succour and comfort for ‘the soul’ they have a long history of fiercely resisting the efforts of well-meaning secularists to advance human comfort and eliminate human suffering. RESPONDENT: Finding the AF site proved to be one of these instances. I surfed the internet for hours after quitting the 4th way ‘school’, being amazed at how much bull-shit was in terms of spiritual sites: Advaita, Maharkrishna, Sufi, yogi, blackbuddinks, pundits, etc. I was guided in this search mainly by the idea that if someone has found something worthwhile, it would have to be here in order to disseminate it, ‘though I remember at the time I was searching for an enlightened living man. PETER: Would I be right in saying that you have a well-meaning intent combined with an uneasiness about settling for second best? In hindsight, it was my uneasiness about settling for second-best that kept me moving on when I kept discovering the flaws in spiritualism – both in the teachers and the teachings. RESPONDENT: To resume, I’m interested in activating the pure intent PETER: It sounds as though you already have a similar intent as I had when I first became sincerely interested in actualism and you seem to have grasped the fact that actualism is about being happy and harmless in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are, i.e. that it is, unlike spiritualism, an utterly down-to-earth business. Once I had grasped this fact – exactly as I do in any other down-to-earth business – I then set myself a long-term goal, to change myself sufficiently such that I could live with at least one person in unreserved peace and harmony. By doing so, I immediately gave direction, purpose and meaning to my well-meaning intent, whereupon I imperceptively moved from thinking about practicing actualism to practicing actualism. I use the word ‘imperceptively’ here deliberately as it was not as though ‘I’ made a conscious deliberate decision to start practicing actualism, it was more like I found that I had started, despite ‘my’ fears, doubts and objections. In hindsight, all ‘I’ had to do was to get out of the way and allow my well-meaning intent a chance to blossom. Setting myself a long-term goal was only part of activating pure intent because the process actualism is about being attentive to how I am experiencing this moment. In other words, implicit in the actualism method is the short-term immediate goal of being happy and harmless right now, wherever I happen to be now, doing whatever I happen to be doing now. In this moment-to-moment business, I also discovered that it was useful to set myself a series of short-term goals in order to start breaking a life-time of accrued habits and beliefs. I found that little things were good to start with – not feeling miserable about the weather, not being annoyed about how other people were driving, not being frustrated if the waiter was slow and so on. Everyday life is chock-a-block full of opportunities for me to cease being antagonistic to my fellow human beings and to cease feeling miserable about being here. Exactly as with learning any new skill, it’s best to start with easier, simple, more basic steps in order to gain the confidence and expertise necessary to tackle the more thorny and stubborn issues. Once I got rid of the spiritual idea that I had to be grateful to ‘someone’ or ‘something’ for being here, I started to more and more experience a fascination with being attentive to being here, which in turn led to a joie de vivre, which in turn lead to a PCE. And the PCE itself then gave me a goal that was way beyond the goal I had initially set myself – not that it made it redundant in any way but it made my first goal but a stepping stone on the path to becoming actually free of the whole of the human condition. RESPONDENT: and also in a description of the way you experience it, its tangible qualities so-to-speak. PETER: The tangible qualities of pure intent are that I can never ever settle for anything less
than being actually free because I know that to do so is to settle for second best. I experience pure intent as a palpable drive, an obsession with
seeing this process through to its inevitable end. (Editor’s note: Pure intent is, of course, a manifest
life-force; a genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity that originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential
character of the infinitude of the universe. See RESPONDENT: Many thanks for your considered replies. PETER: It’s a pleasure. Having been at this business for a good time now I know that the discoveries I have made about the human condition are not unique to me – whilst there are minor variations between social identities, my instinctual identity is generic to the human species and therefore common to all. Having said that I cannot walk your path to freedom for you any more than Richard can walk my path to freedom for me. The wonderfully exquisite thing about daring to become free of the human condition is that it is a journey only you can make.
RESPONDENT: I’ve been pondering about what’s written here and it’s a very accurate radiography of the human condition, as it confirms and throws new light on some of my past experiences and observations about life. PETER: Yes. Once I started to say, ‘Yes, I know that one’ or ‘Yep, I’ve been down that alley’ or ‘Yep, that’s me’ I stopped being objective about actualism and started to be subjective about it. This simple act of acknowledgement meant that my interest in actualism moved from being ‘interested’ to being ‘vitally interested’. RESPONDENT: What do you mean by ‘vitally interested’? PETER: Meaning that I moved from being interested in actualism because it included an accurate assessment of the human condition to being interested because what was being said applied to me in particular. Another way of putting it is that my interest moved from a passive objective interest in what is on offer to a passionate personal engagement with what is on offer. * RESPONDENT: Personally speaking, I can’t find a better and a more practical way to test and to begin to practice what actualism is on about then in a relationship. I do have a high regard for experiential, dirty-hands understanding and not merely theory, and the only way to put such an understanding to the test is practice. On the other hand, one can test being happy & harmless on one’s own, but this can easily turn to some form of sweet dreaming. PETER: It is not essential to have a companion in order to begin the practice of being happy and harmless, as living in the world-as-it-is with people as-they-are constantly provides opportunities that normally provoke malice or evoke sorrow. Having said that, my experience of living on my own during my spiritual years is that I had a tendency to withdraw from the world of people, things and events and was therefore more likely to indulge in fantasy and imagination – in fact it was during this period that I had an ASC, a 4 hr. taste of how it feels to be Enlightened. This is undoubtedly the value of this mailing list to practicing actualists – it serves not only as an ongoing example of the human condition in action but is also a touchstone as to whether one’s own investigations are down-to-earth or whether they are of the fashionable head-in-the-clouds variety. RESPONDENT: But in a sincere relationship you can’t play hide and seek with yourself anymore, there is always a close mirror to watch your moves. And the results in terms of happiness are readily available and observable, for someone else can easily see ‘my’ old and new and non-spiritual tricks. I’ve also found that it’s not absolutely necessary for the other to be a practicing actualist. PETER: It’s not necessary at all that one’s companion be interested in being happy and harmless because actualism is about you becoming happy and harmless – not other people and not ‘everybody else’. RESPONDENT: Most human beings have a fair degree of common sense and a desire to be happy, and they can discern between theory and facts, between what is sublime but non-existent and that which simply works and brings benefits. PETER: Given that devoting one’s life to being happy and harmless is seen to be a foolhardy and irresponsible exercise, to then expect that one’s peers will be understanding and supportive of your efforts and of your successes is to court disappointment. I had the wind knocked out of my sails regarding this expectation when I wrote my journal and gave some copies to my spiritual friends as I wanted to share my discovery with them. Not only were they not interested, they were dismissive and on one occasion when I asked why, I was told I was being both offensive and disloyal. When I tried to place a few copies in the local bookstores I was told it was too radical, that I was ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’. Although it was a shock at first, I soon came to realize that being a pioneer means having to run the gauntlet of peer apathy, disapproval, censure and on occasions hostility. * PETER: My experience is that ‘well-meaning intent’ has it roots in the common-to-all pure consciousness experience whereby all human beings feel that they are trapped within the human condition and either accept this as their fate, rile against it, or seek to escape from it. For me the appeal in actualism was, and still is, the opportunity to be free of all of the human condition. RESPONDENT: Yes. I suspect that I’ve had many PCEs, although I can remember only one, when fully engaged in a love relationship. In my view, love brings one near to the possibility of a PCE cause it creates some sort of safe environment, distracts one from the real world struggles; when all it’s not rosy or violent, brings about deeper aspects of oneself and exposes them to one’s partner and when the feelings quit the scene and silence sets in, what’s left is the senses world, although for a brief few moments, and then the attention turns back to one’s lover. The appreciation however remains and a certain flavour associated with it... PETER: In my experience, the feeling of being deeply in love with someone is the closest one can get to the experience of an altered state of consciousness where one is Love personified. In both cases, one is awash with, and adrift in, the passions of nurture and desire. It is a daring proposition to abandon such feelings in favour of an actual intimacy with a fellow human being. * RESPONDENT: Finding the AF site proved to be one of these instances. I surfed the internet for hours after quitting the 4th way ‘school’, being amazed at how much bull-shit was in terms of spiritual sites: Advaita, Ramakrishna, Sufi, yogi, blackbuddinks, pundits, etc. I was guided in this search mainly by the idea that if someone has found something worthwhile, it would have to be here in order to disseminate it, ‘though I remember at the time I was searching for an enlightened living man. PETER: Would I be right in saying that you have a well-meaning intent combined with an uneasiness about settling for second best? In hindsight, it was my uneasiness about settling for second-best that kept me moving on when I kept discovering the flaws in spiritualism – both in the teachers and the teachings. RESPONDENT: I had this uneasiness that something is wrong for as long as I remember, that something is not as it should be, a deep, very deep dissatisfaction and uneasiness, not being able to settle for the ordinary things the others were quite comfortable with. Someone who knows me well said that I’m a ‘searcher’, yet this was never my intention. My intention was always to find. PETER: Yes. To be a searcher without wanting to find never made any sense to me, but then again to glibly call oneself a spiritual searcher does seem to be the fashion nowadays. * RESPONDENT: Many thanks for your considered replies. PETER: It’s a pleasure. Having been at this business for a good time now I know that the discoveries I have made about the human condition are not unique to me – whilst there are minor variations between social identities, my instinctual identity is generic to the human species and therefore common to all. Having said that I cannot walk your path to freedom for you any more than Richard can walk my path to freedom for me. The wonderfully exquisite thing about daring to become free of the human condition is that it is a journey only you can make. RESPONDENT: Ha, don’t worry. I won’t make of you some sort of ‘coach’. I just wanted to make sure that this is the path you’ve travelled and that these are your footsteps, to know where am I and to mutually enjoy a fruitful and rewarding exchange of experiential know-how. It’s just that you started close to the point where I’m now that triggered the questioning. The same thing I will probably do in the future with Vineeto in regard to ‘the fourth way’ ways. And the same thing I’ve done with Richard in regard to Spiritual Enlightenment. And the same thing I’ll do with any other practicality that requires a higher degree of expertise, like diving. PETER: I always like to nut things out for myself but occasionally I do get stuck and then I either read the help menu or ask someone who is also in the business. There is a lot to be said for being able to follow in the footsteps of others – I’d be sitting in a cave right now, trying to light a fire by rubbing two sticks together if it were not for the efforts of millions of my fellow human beings, both those who lived in the past and those currently alive. It’s also grand to be in the forefront of a discovery that makes utterly redundant all previous suppositions, theories and beliefs about the nature and workings of the human psyche such that it is now possible for anyone who so desires to intentionally bring about its ending. Nice to chat again.
PETER: You have asked for my comment in your post to No 63(R) – RESPONDENT No 63(R): I haven’t had the time to study the AF-site in depth, only the main features, but that sounds sensible. I mean, if you know you can live physically without them, they have to be something other than the body. RESPONDENT: The site is great and it accurately reflects the Human Comedy. (see also the correspondence :-)) PETER: Personally I have never found the human condition to be a Human Comedy, if that’s what you mean, and no-where on the website will you see that term used. An estimated 160,000,000 humans beings were killed by their fellow human beings in wars alone in the last century and an estimated 40,000,000 human beings killed themselves – is this part and parcel of what you term the Human Comedy? What I found to be one of the prime differences between actualism and spiritualism is that actualism does not involve a personal dissociation from the darker sides of human condition, as does spiritualism. A clear-eyed on-going awareness enures that nothing gets swept under the carpet. RESPONDENT: The part that I found most useful is the difference made between facts and beliefs. PETER: If I may suggest, if this is what you find most useful, you might want to examine the
difference between what you believe the website ‘accurately reflects’ and the facts that it is actually reflecting. I put together RESPONDENT: In between these two there are doubts... as an example only:
I had a distinct sense of defence/ instinctive grouping/ rallying when PETER: Well, it was your feeling, so you should know what it was. Paranoia is another word for fear, and whenever I feel fear, the immediate thing I ask myself is why do I feel fearful? A very simple question to ask and when I found the answer I then discovered a bit more about how ‘I’ ticked, which meant I was then a bit more informed about the facts of the human condition. As for your having ‘a distinct sense of defence/ instinctive grouping/ rallying’, I don’t see that I can make any comment that would make sense to you. If you have that feeling then no matter what I have written, or indeed whatever I write to you now, you will feel I am being defensive. As I wrote recently, I very early on discovered that whenever ‘my’ feelings rule the roost, it is impossible to have a sensible conversation with anyone. RESPONDENT: There is no evidence to support that via the AF site anyone has become virtually free and 7 years have elapsed. Still, these are early days... am I sensing hope? PETER: Did you feel hope that someone else will become virtually free of malice and sorrow or are you hoping that you will become virtually free of malice and sorrow? I only ask because there is a good deal of difference between the two – i.e. they are two different feelings. RESPONDENT: This is so maybe because you cannot live any ‘teaching’. PETER: To try and live a ‘teaching’ is clearly nonsense. I was taught how to be an architect at a university and, in hindsight, the whole process was by and large a dismal failure. I was mostly taught by academics who had no idea of the hands-on business of being an architect, let alone any knowledge of the very down-to-earth business of building, and as a consequence when I graduated I knew very little about the practical business of being an architect and nothing at all about practical business of building a building. Over the years, by a process of trial and error, I taught myself to both be a good architect and a good builder – an accumulated expertise based on my own hands-on experience and accumulated common sense and supplemented by the many tips I took on board from other hands-on practitioners. But working for money is only part of one’s life-skills. Because I live in a country that has moved beyond self-reliant agriculture, cottage industry and snail-mail communication, working for the necessary money to survive has been but an incidental part of my life activities. As for general life-skills and life-attitudes – the process of learning this began way back before I was even aware that I was a ‘me’ and I was unwittingly taught the usual set of morals, ethics and psittacisms that were fashionable at the time. Then at some point in my adult life, my real-world life fell to pieces and I found the wisdom of the Eastern teachings appealing for a while until I discovered that the revered Eastern spiritual teachings were nothing other than Eastern religion. Having twice found the teachings of others to be lacking sincerity and efficacy, when I came across Richard and his discovery I was very careful to check out his bona fides. The first thing I did was to make it a point to clearly understand what he was talking about – no ifs and buts, no obscuration, no turning a blind eye, as I had done in my spiritual years – and I did this because this time I didn’t want to fool myself yet again. The other aspect was to check out how he was as a human being – was he walking the talk or was he a charlatan? When I established a prima facie case for Richard’s sincerity and the sensibility of actualism, I then dropped everything else and set about finding out for myself whether I could become both happy and harmless – the essential core of the actualism practice of becoming free of the human condition. I found the process to be one of trial and error, lapsing back into old ways of being, becoming aware again and getting myself back on track. It’s an utterly simple do-it-yourself business. It is impossible to live someone else’s teaching vicariously but it is quite another thing to find out whether what someone else is saying works in practice. Of course, to learn anything new demands 100% effort, otherwise the enterprise is sabotaged before it even starts. I found that out both in my work and with living with a companion – unless I fully committed to doing what I did at work the result was always unsatisfactory and unless I fully committed to living with my companion I always left the door open to failure, and it’s exactly the same with the business of becoming happy and harmless. RESPONDENT: This site is mainly the product of a person life experience translated into thoughts. PETER: I don’t know whether you have noticed yet but there are two sections to the website. One section is maintained by Richard and it contains both his writings and his correspondence and the other section is maintained by Vineeto and it mainly consists of Vineeto’s writings and correspondence and my writings and correspondence as well as cross-referenced links to Richards writings and correspondence. What is on offer on the website is far from an abstracted ‘teaching’ of one person. RESPONDENT: It’s a huge mistake to think that by practicing ‘it’, you can arrive somewhere. PETER: Unless one has some degree of interest in becoming free of malice and sorrow, reading what is written on the website will be by and large a waste of time and effort – at best only of academic interest to would-be plagiarists. RESPONDENT: Thoughts/ideas cannot generate experience, they can do all sorts of things: simulate, represent, imitate, emulate but they cannot experience. PETER: Thinking about whether or not one wants to become free of malice and sorrow is not the same as practicing becoming happy and harmless in one’s daily life. In my experience, prolonged thinking about whether or not to commit to anything merely leads to procrastination and postponement, which in turn leads to feelings of frustration and resentment, which in turn only fuels feelings of doubt and suspicion … and then the whole cycle starts over again. RESPONDENT: Anyone who thinks that he experiences something different in terms of consciousness when immersed in a certain thought medium might simply fool himself. It’s at best a lab experience. PETER: I was well aware of that when I came across Richard – but it wasn’t a thought medium I had immersed myself in previously, it was the thought-less feeling medium of spiritual teachings combined with the psychic powers of spiritual teachers. But then again I wasn’t a Krishnamurtiite, so I never was fully indoctrinated into believing that thinking was the root of all evil. Because I had previously twice experienced the dangers of being trapped within a group-psyche, both as a normal bloke and then as a spiritual follower, I deliberately stopped sitting in Richards’s living room after a while and went out and road-tested actualism for myself, by myself. I also stopped reading his correspondence at this stage because I wanted to practically test the actualism method by myself in my daily life – and not try to hold it as belief or a theory or an ethic within some sheltered workshop. RESPONDENT: I raised this objection in my latest post to Richard but it seems he’s on vacation. PETER: It may well be that Richard has far better things to do with his time than respond to objections that are based on misrepresentations and/or misinterpretations of what he has written. If you care to peruse Richard’s correspondence you will find that a good deal of it is taken up with correspondents attempting to put words into his mouth that he did not in fact say and then accusing him of being pedantic and defensive when he takes the time to make it clear what he did in fact say. RESPONDENT: This NEW possibility is actualised simply via the connection made between you and this Universe: pure intent. PETER: This isn’t pure intent, this is the old ‘waiting for Godot’ scenario … or in secular terms, ‘waiting for Scottie to beam me up’. You have apparently replaced whatever spiritual beliefs you had before with a new spiritual belief – pantheism. By believing the physical universe to be a metaphysical entity (Universe with a capital U) it appears you have created yet another mythical God with whom you only need to connect in order that He/She/It will bring you deliverance. RESPONDENT: This connection already exists because you, as this body, are an integral part of the physical Universe; IT manifests itself/ affects via the people, things and events of your everyday life. So, the process of ‘self’-immolation is not your doing, but the effect life’s facts/events have on a non-physical entity known as ... ‘you’. PETER: Well, I guess we had to have someone try and make actualism into a pantheist belief and take it up as a teaching. This mailing list does represent a potpourri of spiritual beliefs – and the only mantra they have in common is ‘above all, don’t try to change’. RESPONDENT: The ‘PCEs’ (my opinion) are used by the hardcore actualists in order to endorse/sustain their ‘actualist-self’. Once you experience a PCE, all the (repetitive) lingo associated with actualism will simply die out. PETER: I understood from what you have written on this mailing list that you have acknowledged that you cannot remember having had a pure consciousness experience. If this is the case, you seem to be basing your advice to others on what you think a PCE might be. And yet this is what you said above –
I also noticed that you made comment to someone else on this list as to the authenticity of his
experience, based on what you think a PCE is supposed to be. Personally I found the expression RESPONDENT: This ‘lingo’ is at least a warning sign that a person creativity, innate originality, authenticity are seriously affected. The PCE is supposed to be the height of a person’s genuineness and naivety, PETER: No. A PCE is a temporary experience of the total absence of ‘me’ – i.e. the absence of ‘me’ and ‘my’ disingenuousness and cynicism. RESPONDENT: … the infinite source for new and original thoughts; PETER: No. A PCE is a temporary experience of the total absence of ‘me’ – i.e. the absence of ‘me’ and ‘my’ hackneyed feelings and visceral thoughts. RESPONDENT: … it’s supposed to be as perfect, new and refreshing as each new moment. PETER: No. A PCE is a temporary experience of the total absence of ‘me’ – i.e. the absence of ‘me’ frees this body to sensately experience the seamless flawlessness of this moment. To describe this moment as ‘refreshing’ implies that previous moments were wearying or dull whereas even normal attentiveness reveals that this moment is ever-fresh, as in it has never been experienced before and can never to be experienced again. RESPONDENT: Look into the site and see how repetitive it all is. PETER: Yeah. Every time I come up with a good phrase or term Richard pinches it. He’s probably already got his eye on ‘conditional atheist’. The same thing also happens in my work – as soon as I came up with something that was good someone else would pinch it, exactly as I did whenever I found something good. It’s how we human beings learn to do things better. I use a good deal of Richard’s phrases in my writing, particularly the simple catch-phrases such as happy and harmless, because it made sense to me to do so. Having said that, the fundamental reason the website is repetitive is that what is being said is so utterly simple and not at all convoluted or complex. By the way, I have just given three descriptions of a PCE and I invite you to use your browser’s search engine and search the website in order to determine whether the descriptions are merely repetitive ‘lingo’. RESPONDENT: I have extensive experience in the past with the ‘work’ language while in a spiritual group and a common ‘lingo’ is a sure sign of belonging to a ‘group’. The same excuses were used... that it’s an exact language with no literary pretences, that its sole purpose is to accurately convey/ describe the process and the experiences. PETER: This is quite a common objection. Apparently many people have been conned in the past and because of this have developed a hard shell and a suspicious attitude. This protective shell manifests both as a defence – a resolve to never fully commit oneself to anything again, lest one gets hurt again – or in some cases as an attack – a resolve to be cynical towards whoever is tempting one into fully committing to something again. Cynicism – a form of sublimated anger – was never my thing and for whatever reason I could never ever completely close down to the possibility that there must be someone offering something genuine in ‘the freedom market’. This protective shell is a big issue for many people and I have seen many people succumb to these feelings in their lives and most simply settle for ‘acceptance’. But then again, I know of someone who stubbornly refused to let these debilitating feelings rule his life and recently has managed, after a 20-year struggle, to finally break free of them (without taking the usual route of ‘surrendering’ his will to a mythical God or an authoritarian Godman, I might add). RESPONDENT: The early morning blue sky can be described in a million different ways... even using the same words, but a person’s writing style is unique as his signature. And the writing style of Peter and Vineeto is very similar to the point that someone wondered if ‘they’ are not but one and the same person! PETER: Ah, my cross-dressing secret is out. No 23 can confirm that he has met someone who called herself Vineeto so the question remains am I but a figment of Vineeto’s imagination, Richard’s imagination, your imagination or the collective imagination of all of the list members? RESPONDENT: Above, I am not questioning the teaching but the ‘self’ ability (cunningness) to deal with it. PETER: Given that you have concocted your own version of actualism and made it into your own teaching t’is no wonder you are not questioning ‘the teaching’ … which makes the rest of your comment self-evident. RESPONDENT: Peter and Vineeto, your comments are welcome. PETER: I usually don’t bother commenting on the various teachings offered on the list nowadays … but you did ask. Perhaps I will just finish by making a comment on the ‘you-don’t-have-to-do-anything’-method that many people on this list appear to be both practicing and teaching. I practiced that method for some 17 years on the spiritual path and in hindsight doing nothing meant that nothing changed. In fact it was only when I stopped doing nothing and really started practicing dissociation did I start to make significant progress on the spiritual path. This is when I realized that following a Guru’s advice that you don’t need to do anything other than surrender – to the Guru, to ‘It’, to God, or whatever – is advice specifically tailored to make one a slave to the Guru, It, God or whatever, and to be a slave to a living deity, or a dead deity, is the antithesis of freedom. The other path is to practice dissociation with the aim of becoming Self-realized, the idea being that one can become a deity oneself and to feel oneself to a God, or at one with an Impersonal God. When I started to have these experiences and feel these feelings, I started to become suss of the spiritual path. My point is that to achieve any of these altered states of consciousness on a permanent basis requires single-pointed intent, incessant practice and stubborn effort, and considerable effort at that. Those teachers who are genuinely self-realized have attained their altered state of consciousness by ‘doing something’ – not by ‘doing nothing’ as they advise their disciples to do. The only reason I can see for this duplicity is that if they told their disciples to ‘go and do it for themselves, by themselves’ they would have neither disciples nor followers to worship them, which would mean their own Godship would crumble. It’s not for nothing that the spiritual world can be described as a self-perpetuating belief-system. So when I came across actualism I found it refreshing that Richard was upfront in saying there is something that can be done to become actually free of the human condition and unless you do this ‘something’ it is highly unlikely that you will ever become free of the human condition. That ‘something’ turned out to be that I needed to devote my life to the single-pointed intent of becoming happy and harmless. I knew that if I went down that path it would be the end of ‘me’, but I found the challenge irresistible. No matter how much I flinched at the price to be paid, the idea that ‘I’ had to do all ‘I’ could to become as happy and harmless as possible in order to become actually free of the human condition of malice and sorrow made absolute sense to me. The other aspect of the ‘you-don’t-have-to-do-anything’ method is that those who have become Self-realized all claim that in the end all of their efforts were futile as all they really needed to do was realize they were God or whatever and then it was all over. What they conveniently forget, or their new identity artfully forgets, is the effort that the previous identity had to make in order that the permanent altered state of consciousness could happen. Now of course what we are talking about in actualism is not an altered state of consciousness – a psychological/ psychic event that brings about a permanent state of dissociation whereby one’s identity is altered from a secular-psychological identity to a spiritual-psychic identity – but an actual freedom from the human condition that is the result of a psychological/physical event that results in the physical body being freed of any psychological or psychic parasitical entity whatsoever. However, the events do have similarities in that they are singular spontaneous events and, going by Richard’s experience, an altered state of consciousness can result if the process of total ‘self’-immolation is incomplete or is deliberately interrupted by one’s psyche craving for survival and glory. The point of what I am saying is that to become actually free of the human condition requires a singular event to happen and I have recently had a glimpse of this event – a preliminary experience of the nature of this event, is how I can best describe it. And in this experience I had a flash that all ‘I’ had been doing up until the moment of ‘my’ ending was a waste of time and effort. In other words, I experienced that when ‘I’ no longer exist, then all ‘my’ efforts will have been irrelevant but … and this is a big but … ‘my’ efforts are crucial to the seminal event that brings about the ending of ‘me’ happening. It is precisely because I have experienced both the daunting feelings at having to step on the path at the start and have had a glimpse of the final destination of the path that I can see no sense at all sticking with the ‘you-don’t-have-to-do-anything’-method – in my experience all you get by waiting is more waiting. Well that’s it from me. I see that you are taking a rest from the list for a while which could well be a good thing – after all his mailing list was only set up as a side issue to the information contained on the web site. And for me, it’s time for me to go and play at something else now.
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