RESPONDENT: I preferred to answer you this way as I am at work and I write through ‘windows of opportunity’ (;-).

My interest is located right now in the area of the ‘self’ reactions towards practicing actualism. That’s why I am not questioning ‘the teaching’ per see because I did it some time ago and I have already established a ‘prima facie case’. The information is valid and it’s high time to test it and further enquire into it. I agree with you that feelings prevent a sensible understanding and communication. Feelings and beliefs are the main obstacle in understanding the information supplied on the website. They distort the data received by the eyes before it’s processed by the brain.

PETER: Yes. And this is something you yourself can observe in action, not only when reading posts to this mailing list or when reading the Actual Freedom Trust website but in the rest of your daily activities and in interactions with others, no matter who they are. Once you get your own attentiveness up and running you can start to be aware of the precise moment that a feeling such as fear, anger, jealousy or resentment kicks in and then you can also notice what effect the feeling has not only on yourself but also on others around you.

I do acknowledge that this is easier said than done because I remember it took me months of persistent effort to get to the stage where I was able to do this. At first whenever I did remember to ask myself how I was experiencing this moment of being alive I would then realise that I had been running on ‘automatic’ for hours – completely and utterly self-absorbed in ‘my’ own feeling-fed world. And for anyone who has been a practicing spiritualist, i.e. who has been practicing detachment for a good while, even beginning to becoming interested in being here is doubly difficult as one needs to completely reverse the focus of one’s awareness from retreating ‘inside’ to being attentive to what is actually happening ‘outside’, as it were.

RESPONDENT: I have experienced lately some visceral (to quote No 60) reactions both to actualism and actualists. They are irrational in nature (not supported by arguments) and after they pass I can sometimes trace their source.

PETER: Yes. Over time the full gamut of the emotional reactions have been expressed on this mailing list. Some that come to mind are aggression arising out of fear, resentment arising out of jealousy, ennui arising out of boredom, bewilderment arising out of lack of knowledge, obscuration arising out of cunning and so on. You might also have noticed that it is far more easy to see feelings in action in someone else than to see them and feel them in operation in oneself, as one’s ‘self’ – and this is particularly so when and as feelings and emotions are occurring.

RESPONDENT: There are some questions though: Why is it that feelings are metaphysical and thoughts are not? The first have their origin in the heart (a physical organ) and the latter in the brain (another physical organ), they are both the end refined products of these bodily parts.

PETER: If I can just correct a common belief, the heart is not the origin of feelings, it is an organ whose sole function is to pump blood around the body. As Richard has recently written on this mailing list, the three ways a human being experiences the world is sensate firstly, affective secondly and cognitive lastly, and as you well know the affective experience is predominant to the point where it very often totally obliterates both sensate and cognitive experiencing.

As an example, after my son died I would often walk along a deserted stretch of beach near where I lived at the time totally immersed in feeling grief, so much so that hours could go by without me being aware of the sensate experience of my feet on the soft sand, the breeze on my skin, the sound of the waves breaking on the shore and so on. Eventually it dawned on me that by choosing to hang on to my feeling of grief, I was cutting myself off from the sensual experience of being here and this realization was the breaking of the stranglehold that grief had over me.

I can similarly remember being overwhelmed by cerebral introspection on many occasions such that it totally obliterated sensate experiencing until I eventually came to see the futility of indulging in abstracted thinking, imaginative scenarios, neurotic obsessions, meditative fantasizing, philosophical ruminations, compulsive worrying and so on. What eventually twigged me to the senselessness of such mind activities was that firstly such thinking always feeling fed-thinking but, more importantly, that it always impeded the possibility of any direct sensual experience of the actual world of the senses.

There has been a good deal written on the Actual Freedom Trust website about the three ways human beings experience the world and how this experiencing operates, but there is no substitute for your own hands-on investigations if you really want to know how you have been genetically and socially programmed to experience the world – which is exactly what I was pointing to in my reply to your question.

RESPONDENT: Is it possible to exist an actualist group psyche, bearing in mind that we still are selves and enjoy plenty of feelings? I have seen some synchronicity around here...

PETER: If you mean, is there what could be called a group dynamic that operates on this mailing list, then the answer is yes. There is always a group psyche, to use your term, which operates whenever feeling-beings get together. One can see this in operation in any group – there can be dissent within the group, an instinctive taking sides and forming of sub-groups, a collective bowing to authority such as is seen in temples, churches, ashrams, synagogues and meditation groups, a mass sharing of excitement such as at sporting events, a mass sharing of resentment and anger as seen at protest rallies, a collective hysteria as seen when law and order breaks down, mass outbreaks of fear in the face of sudden frightening events and so on. Because of the overwhelming power of these collective psychic emotions and passions, an actualist needs not only to be attentive to the destructiveness of his or her own feelings but also to the destructiveness of collective human feelings because that’s when the destructiveness of the feelings that arise from the instinctual passions can become horrifically devastating.

As for ‘an actualist group psyche’, I can talk with authority about the only unabashed and unreserved actualists that I know directly – myself, Vineeto and Richard. There is no group psyche that operates between the three of us – we simply have something in common. Primarily this common interest is that we are fellow human beings but also we share an interest in being free from the human condition, which is why Vineeto and I tap into Richard’s expertise in the matter. We always enjoy each other’s company and we are able to do so because we harbour no feelings of malice towards each other whatsoever and nor do we experience sadness at having to be here.

With regard to seeing ‘some synchronicity around here’, I would put that in the same category as serendipity – the simple fact of being alive presents a smorgasbord of opportunities, situations, coincidences, events, meetings, settings, locations, and so on, such that serendipity abounds and synchronicity is possible. My down-to-earth experience is of the serendipitous events that lead to my meeting both Richard and Vineeto which in turn allowed the synchronicity that happens between us – and by synchronicity I mean being able to co-exist together both happily and harmlessly whenever we happen to meet or interact. This synchronicity is also apparent in our correspondence on this mailing list as we tend to use the same terminology for ease and accuracy of communication, we all rely on facts as being the arbiter in deciding sensible action and we have all have direct experiential knowledge of the human condition (or have had in Richard’s case).

*

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: As for pantheistic beliefs, I don’t think it’s the case and I’m not expecting for Godot either. My intended observation was that events and people influence me more than I influence myself.

PETER: You would be well aware from your spiritual experience, that the common way to attempt to make a connection to events, people and the ‘world outside’ is to attempt to make an imaginary affective connection in the vain hope that this will assuage or even transcend one’s feeling of being a separate ‘being’. Reading your words at face value, this is ‘the connection’ I assumed you were referring to particularly as you persist in deifying the physical universe by calling it the ‘Universe’.

RESPONDENT: I don’t know if this is valid in relation only to the ‘social identity’ but I have observed that interesting reactions happen only in some circumstances and thus I am enabled to see parts of ‘me’ that are usually hidden from conscious awareness. I found it also useful to try and look at me through another person eyes.

PETER: Hmmm. What you are saying is not something that I can relate to. The way I came to understand how the human psyche operates, and thus how the human condition came into being and how it still operates, was by studying how my own psyche operates and functions in real time. Perhaps I can put it this way – humanity is made up of over six billion ‘me’s – all pretty much the same as ‘me’ with regard to their instinctive drives and with slight variations as to their particular social conditioning and life experiences. As such, the best – as in the simplest, most direct, most time effective and most practical – way for me to study the human condition is to conduct an on-going investigation into how ‘I’ function.

I do remember this process of ‘self’-investigation felt quite selfish to me at some stage because I was totally focussing on my own malevolent and melancholic feelings but when I investigated this feeling I saw that it made no sense because the only reason I was conducting the investigation, and indeed could conduct the investigation, was because I had made becoming both happy and harmless my number one priority in life.

RESPONDENT: In the above circumstances ‘I’ am exposed but unlike others I make the effort to keep the lights on and fully experience it. This is ‘my’ pure intent at this moment.

PETER: Just the other day I had a visit from a man who I have known from my spiritual years. I always enjoy chatting with him, and particularly so because he is one of the few people I know from that time who is still actively searching. He even became interested in actualism for a while but he could be said to be a spiritual-experience junky because he had an altered state of consciousness experience and ardently wanted more of the same. As such the proposition that spiritualists are searching 180 degrees in the wrong direction had no appeal to him at all.

He started to talk about a TV documentary he had seen regarding the latest relativistic cosmological theory which proposes that the universe we humans sensately experience is but one of many universes, aka ‘quantum fluctuations’, that could have, or indeed have, arisen from the ‘background quantum vacuum’. Given that I had also seen the program and that this is currently a thread on this mailing list I was interested in chatting with him about the sense he made of relativistic cosmology. In short, I found that he baulked at any attempt to talk about the sense of the notion because he was enamoured with the whole theoretical construct in that it opened up the further possibility of all sorts of further imaginary scenarios.

One aspect of the TV program that I particularly remembered was the on-going discussion amongst the relativistic cosmologists as to why this universe ‘came into being’ and not one of the infinite number of other randomly possible universes that could have ‘come into being’ out of the background quantum gravity. The conclusion that seems to be prevalent is that ‘this universe’ has occurred solely in order that human consciousness could exist – in other words, the cosmologists’ imaginative ‘reasoning’ came to a conclusion that is utterly anthropocentric. At the end of the program one of the scientists related an anecdote where an audience member supposedly interrupted a cosmologist’s lecture and declared that she knew that the universe sat on top of a giant turtle’s back. The cosmologist responded by asking the woman ‘what was the turtle standing on?’, to which she replied ‘you can’t trick me – it’s turtles all the way down’. As the program ended the final image was of a stack of turtles, on top of which sat not the universe but the figure of a human being.

It occurred to me that the ending exemplified the ‘self’-generated obsession that human beings have that consciousness is primary and matter is secondary, so I pursued this line of conversation with my guest for a while. At first he had some difficulty in acknowledging that matter does exist separate from (his) consciousness, then he had difficulty in making a distinction between (his) consciousness and matter. As the conversation moved on it became clear as to why he was having such difficulty. He said he once had a spiritual experience of an ego-less state whereby his own consciousness merged with ‘everything’, as he put it. When I asked him if everything had a capital ‘E’ as in ‘Everything’ he sheepishly acknowledged that it sometimes did – I say ‘sheepishly’ because he knows I am an actualist. His liking for relativistic cosmology – or subjectivistic cosmology as it would be more accurate to call it – was immediately obvious because any metaphysical theorizing that gives credence to the ‘self’-aggrandizing fantasies of ‘self’-centred consciousness would be intuitively appealing.

Given that he had had an experience of an expanded ‘self’ consciousness and indeed was even teaching this to others, it became obvious that it was futile to pursue the topic further so I made us coffee, he bummed the makings of a cigarette from me and we put our feet up for a while. The conversation then turned to the subject of searching for the meaning of life and he made the comment that he had always been driven to make sense of life even as a young boy and that he thought that this was a prime motivation for human beings in general. I agreed with him and said that I had written a book about the sense I had made about the human condition because I thought it might be of interest to others.

As the conversation continued it emerged that what he was interested in was making sense of the possibility of a higher form of consciousness as in an overarching Consciousness that transcends the grim reality of everyday existence. I then said that I had also been attracted to this until a series of events that began with the death of my son and culminated with my meeting Richard led to me abandoning trying to make sense of this ‘self’-centred fantasy and completely reversed my focus to becoming vitally interested in making sense of why the human condition is typified by endless wars, conflicts, arguments, sadness, despair, escapist fantasies, failed hopes and impossible dreams.

Bringing the conversation closer to home I said I wanted to know why I couldn’t live with at least one other person in peace and harmony and that I had used this as the starting point of my investigations into the human condition. We both agreed that there is no more difficult a testing ground than this but he was wary of pursuing the subject further as the very subject appeared to be too close to the bone.

Afterwards I reflected on the vast gulf between his intent and my intent in wanting to make sense of life – his is a search for the True Meaning of consciousness, whereas mine is wanting to experientially understand the malice and sorrow that is inherent to the human condition such that I can become free of it. It seemed to me that while we both were driven by the same motivational impulse to make sense of things, our focus and our intent were indeed poles apart.

This chance meeting appeared to me to encapsulate the differences in intent between an actualist’s search for meaning and the traditional search for meaning, which is why I mentioned it in the context of our discussion as it may be of use to you given your years of being on the spiritual path and your own spiritual experiences.

RESPONDENT: Here is a rough ‘psychological’ model for the different parts ‘I’ am made of:

1. a part that is known both by ‘me’ and other people
2. a part that is only known by ‘me’ and unknown to others (recently I have begun to expose this part to my partner and close friends)
3. a part that is only known/seen by others and not by ‘me’ (this is where interacting with others is most rewarding)
4. a part that is unknown both to me and the others (hmm, I wonder what is made of...)

PETER: Personally I never bothered to arbitrarily split my ‘self’ up into parts or archetypes or whatever. What I could relate to is the simple two-part model that makes experiential sense – an outer layer consisting of ‘who’ I think ‘I’ am and a deeper layer consisting of ‘who’ I feel ‘I’ really am deep down inside. This is straightforward descriptive terminology that anyone can relate to. Another way of describing the two parts is that there is an outer layer consisting of an imbibed social identity and an inner layer consisting of a genetically-encoded instinctual being.

Keeping things simple makes the business of investigating one’s own psyche so much easier – the process is analogous to peeling the layers of an onion.

RESPONDENT: I am fascinated by the idea that actualism uses some of the basic software elements of the ‘self’ (altruism and desire) and ... hocus-pocus: the ‘self’ vanishes provided there is a connection with the purity of the Universe.

PETER: And the only way to test out the idea to see if it works is by becoming an actualist – the catch 22 the most baulk at.

RESPONDENT: But I also wonder whether desire and altruism also disappear together with fear, nurture, aggression, egoism and narcissism when the process is completed.

PETER: I can certainly affirm that all of the instinctual passions and their consequences disappear completely in a PCE, and from my own experience of living in a virtual freedom from the human condition for some 6 years now I can report that, whilst altruism is still a motivating force in my life, the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire have all but become ineffective … and from 7 years of close observation of Richard I can confirm that not a skerrick of them is observable in action in someone who is actually free of the human condition.

RESPONDENT: It is possible to start from aggression and egoism and become Alexander the Great or to use nurture and narcissism and become God-on-Earth or to develop egoism and desire and be another Rockefeller or to use desire and narcissism and become a top-model or to strengthen desire and altruism and ...

PETER: Yep. It all boils down to intent – ‘what you want to do with your life’ is another way of putting it.

RESPONDENT: Software (the psyche) can be modified, upgraded, deleted, transferred, shared, etc., you can function in many different ‘modes’ (altered states) but can ‘you’ function with no software at all?

PETER: The only answer to this question that is worth its salt is an experiential answer. The very nature of the question itself demands an experiential answer – and that is the dare implicit in actualism.

RESPONDENT: Do the senses and thoughts of a successful actualist work together in perfect harmony with altruistic intent but with no desire attached to them?

PETER: Speaking as an actualist, I found that I had to put wanting to become happy and harmless above every other desire in my life – anything less than a 100% commitment only invites failure.

RESPONDENT: In my view altruism and egoism are not separate from each other, they are the two faces of the same coin, of the same archetype, like good/bad.

PETER: Whilst this may be your view, altruism is not a selfish action, else it is not altruism.

Altruism – Regard for others as a principle of action; unselfishness. Oxford Dictionary

I also know from experience that altruism is an instinctive drive within human beings. When I first heard of my son’s death my first reaction was a gut reaction to swap places with him – to give my life in order that he could live again. This was a visceral gut-reaction and one that is well evidenced as being common to all parents when faced with similar situations. When I came to see the lifeless body in the coffin I again had an altruistic impulse and this time it was to devote my life to find a way to ending the angst that each and every successive generation has to go through in trying to make sense of the human condition we are all unwittingly born into. It was exactly this impulse that eventually lead me to accepting the challenge of following in Richard’s footsteps such that a way will be established for future generations to become free of the malice and sorrow endemic within the human condition.

RESPONDENT: As with any other archetype, this particular one is made of two opposites, one directed outwards and one inwards. Aggression/Fear and Nurture/Desire may be included in the same category. Altruism is measured by the person who receives it not by the one who gives. If I measure my altruism it may very well be in fact a measure of my disguised egoism (as in spiritual practice). These are my reactions, hope they are only thought reactions.

PETER: The altruistic desire to ‘self’-immolate obviously has nothing to do with egoism – it runs far, far deeper than that. Whilst those who have had children would readily relate to the innate human altruistic impulse, this whole enterprise is work in progress and each individual who devotes his or her life to becoming free of malice and sorrow will obviously do so only by accessing their own sincere intent to do so. In other words, the ball is in your court.

30.3.2004

RESPONDENT: Why is it that feelings are metaphysical and thoughts are not? The first have their origin in the heart (a physical organ) and the latter in the brain (another physical organ), they are both the end refined products of these bodily parts.

PETER: If I can just correct a common belief, the heart is not the origin of feelings, it is an organ whose sole function is to pump blood around the body. As Richard has recently written on this mailing list, the three ways a human being experiences the world is sensate firstly, affective secondly and cognitive lastly, and as you well know the affective experience is predominant to the point where it very often totally obliterates both sensate and cognitive experiencing. <snipped>

There has been a good deal written on the Actual Freedom Trust website about the three ways human beings experience the world and how this experiencing operates, but there is no substitute for your own hands-on investigations if you really want to know how you have been genetically and socially programmed to experience the world – which is exactly what I was pointing to in my reply to your question.

RESPONDENT: I’ve recently heard a report about someone who lives thanks to an artificial heart. I wonder if he experiences any feelings now ... his report may dissipate the globally widespread heart/love and coloured balloons nausea. For what I can remember, when in the grip of deep emotions I felt a physical (both painful and pleasurable) sensation in the stern/stomach area and prior to the ASC the chest area was intensely stimulated/heated while my heart beat rapidly increased. But rapid and powerful heart-beat may well be just a physical effect.

PETER: If I can again correct a common belief, the heart is not the origin of feelings, it is an organ whose sole function is to pump blood around the body.

[quote]: In the same year as Copernicus’ great volume, there appeared an equally important book on anatomy: Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (‘On the Fabric of the Human Body’, called the De fabrica), a critical examination of Galen’s anatomy in which Vesalius drew on his own studies to correct many of Galen’s errors. Vesalius, like Newton a century later, emphasized the phenomena, i.e., the accurate description of natural facts. Vesalius’ work touched off a flurry of anatomical work in Italy and elsewhere that culminated in the discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey, whose ‘Exercitatio Anatomica De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus’ (‘An Anatomical Exercise Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals’) was published in 1628.

This was the Principia of physiology that established anatomy and physiology as sciences in their own right. Harvey showed that organic phenomena could be studied experimentally and that some organic processes could be reduced to mechanical systems. The heart and the vascular system could be considered as a pump and a system of pipes and could be understood without recourse to spirits or other forces immune to analysis. Harvey’s book made him famous throughout Europe, though the overthrow of so many time-hallowed beliefs attracted virulent attacks and much abuse from those who did not wish to believe the plain evidence of their senses. Information gleaned from Encyclopaedia Britannica

And not only was he subjected to the scorn of his peers who held to their traditional beliefs but also to the ridicule of the religious establishment who ardently believed the heart was the seat of the soul and hence of the deep-seated human feelings.

When I started to become attentive to my feelings and emotions many memories surfaced of past occasions in my life when I had experienced deep emotions or indeed when I was utterly overcome by raw instinctual passions. I recalled many occasions in my life when I had been gripped by fear, stirred to aggression, overwhelmed by nurture or driven by desire. Indeed it was an outburst of anger in my latter years on the spiritual path that twigged me to the fact that my spiritual ‘goody-two-shoes’ persona was but a very thin veneer and that deep down I was still prone to being resentful, angry, frustrated, jealous, melancholic and so on. Not that I delved into these memories at all, but they did serve to remind me of the extent of the work I needed to do to become aware of the extent to which the instinctual passions dominated my life, be it stridently or subtly.

When I stopped being a spiritualist and started being an actualist, there was a good deal to be aware of and to take a good look at – the first layer being my Eastern spiritual beliefs, ethics and morals and the next layer being my Christian beliefs, morals and ethics. As I peeled away each of these outer layers I was then able to take a clear-eyed look at the raw animal survival instincts that are the base operating system of each and every human being.

The process of actualism involves exposing one’s own beliefs, morals, ethics, feelings, emotions and instinctual passions to the bright light of awareness and in order to be able to do this one needs the intent to actively explore them whenever you find that they stand in the way of you being happy and harmless.

*

RESPONDENT: Is it possible to exist an actualist group psyche, bearing in mind that we still are selves and enjoy plenty of feelings? I have seen some synchronicity around here...

PETER: If you mean, is there what could be called a group dynamic that operates on this mailing list, then the answer is yes. There is always a group psyche, to use your term, which operates whenever feeling-beings get together. <snipped>

With regard to seeing ‘some synchronicity around here’, I would put that in the same category as serendipity – the simple fact of being alive presents a smorgasbord of opportunities, situations, coincidences, events, meetings, settings, locations, and so on, such that serendipity abounds and synchronicity is possible. My down-to-earth experience is of the serendipitous events that lead to my meeting both Richard and Vineeto which in turn allowed the synchronicity that happens between us – and by synchronicity I mean being able to co-exist together both happily and harmlessly whenever we happen to meet or interact. This synchronicity is also apparent in our correspondence on this mailing list as we tend to use the same terminology for ease and accuracy of communication, we all rely on facts as being the arbiter in deciding sensible action and we have all have direct experiential knowledge of the human condition (or have had in Richard’s case).

RESPONDENT: Okay, yesterday I was watching TV and I thought about someone 3 seconds before the phone rang and guess who was at the other end of the line? And this is not a singular event. At the same time when I sent an email to the AF mailing list saying that I will take a vacation also No 33 simultaneously did the same thing. I have also noticed that whenever I’m interested in something I find that thing in a surprisingly and unexpected way. E.g. your Catch-22 phrase, I had no idea what you meant when reading your post but a few days ago I’ve seen a TV documentary about the book.

If it is telepathy, synchronicity or serendipity, I don’t know but I heard many people experiencing it.

PETER: My experience is that it is attentiveness itself that very clearly reveals the extent of the psychic web that connects individual human beings. One of the first manifestations of this powerful enmeshment that I became aware of was the extent to which I had been influenced by the psychic powers of a spiritual teacher and of the group psyche of being one of his followers. It was a fascinating investigation of not only my own gullibility in falling into the trap but also of the extreme difficulty in breaking free of being a spiritual believer. Once I had cracked ‘the big one’, I then moved on to the other aspects of the myriad of ways ‘I’ am psychically connected to others – by family, by gender, by race, by culture, by class, by nation and lastly, and most fundamentally, by species.

I also became observant of the hit-and-miss nature of my own intuition in practice, such that I was eventually able to abandon relying on a gut-reaction – a confluence of feeling and imagination. I began to take notice not only of when my guesswork worked but also of when it didn’t and I also became aware of the particular feeling that had triggered my gut-reaction as it kicked in, and I discovered that it is mostly fear.

Nowadays what I find most astounding is that whenever I am feeling excellent neither intuition nor psychic vibes impinge upon my experience of being here … and as a consequence I become more and more aware of the intrinsic benignity of the universe itself.

*

RESPONDENT: In the above circumstances ‘I’ am exposed but unlike others I make the effort to keep the lights on and fully experience it. This is ‘my’ pure intent at this moment.

PETER: Just the other day I had a visit from a man who I have known from my spiritual years. <snipped>

Afterwards I reflected on the vast gulf between his intent and my intent in wanting to make sense of life – his is a search for the True Meaning of consciousness, whereas mine is wanting to experientially understand the malice and sorrow that is inherent to the human condition such that I can become free of it. It seemed to me that while we both were driven by the same motivational impulse to make sense of things, our focus and our intent were indeed poles apart.

This chance meeting appeared to me to encapsulate the differences in intent between an actualist’s search for meaning and the traditional search for meaning, which is why I mentioned it in the context of our discussion as it may be of use to you given your years of being on the spiritual path and your own spiritual experiences.

RESPONDENT: I am well aware of the search for meaning enterprise. This is especially intense during adolescence, many of my classmates and friends were interested in philosophy (Cioran, Nietzsche), psychology, the Great Artists and even bits of eastern spirituality. But I also remember discussing this theme with my then girlfriend after a sex encounter on a roof-top while gazing at the stars. I remember we were aware that after this initial search for meaning and questioning of life, most people get stuck in the petty worries and schemes of everyday living. I remember saying that I will not become one of them, a blasé, never.

As for my situation, I understand your point and your friend interests but they are not part of my current intentions. I’m not regarding PCE as an escape from my day-to-day ‘grey-rose’ work-home-clubs-sleep numb existence (an ASC with a different stamp on it). I’m not searching for an altered poppy-smile state here, my interest is located in living the facts of life day-by-day whatever the cost.

PETER: Yep. I have had many pure consciousness experiences that startlingly revealed that the meaning of life is abundantly apparent in the actual world of sensate experiencing and that it is clearly not to be found within the human condition, be it in grim reality or in the fantasy world of a Greater Reality, by whatever name it masquerades as.

RESPONDENT: And I’m not a half-measure man... I usually go till the end. It’s amazing that this AF stuff is something consistent in whatever direction I explore it, even though afterwards it seems at best insane.

PETER: I too was initially attracted by the down-to-earth sensibility of actualism – it simply lays out the facts of what it is to be a human being, points the finger at the root causes of the malice and sorrow inherent within the human condition and offers an utterly simple, and demonstrably obvious, path to becoming free of it. And I can relate to the seemingly insane bit for I would often, after listening to Richard or reading some of his writings and being struck by its consistency and sensibleness, experience my head spinning afterwards as I realized that what he was saying was diametrically opposite to what people believed or imagined to be ‘the Truth’ about the root cause of human belligerence and suffering.

RESPONDENT: Actualism is like gravity, the closer you get, the harder it is to resist.

PETER: Well put. Although it is not obviously the case for everyone who comes across actualism, I can clearly remember ‘not being able to stay away’ when I came across Richard.

*

RESPONDENT: But I also wonder whether desire and altruism also disappear together with fear, nurture, aggression, egoism and narcissism when the process is completed.

PETER: I can certainly affirm that all of the instinctual passions and their consequences disappear completely in a PCE, and from my own experience of living in a virtual freedom from the human condition for some 6 years now I can report that, whilst altruism is still a motivating force in my life, the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire have all but become ineffective … and from 7 years of close observation of Richard I can confirm that not a skerrick of them is observable in action in someone who is actually free of the human condition.

RESPONDENT: What specific desires have you lost along the way, if you can nominate just a few? Desire for me is the most shadowy item in the actualist bookstore.

PETER: This is what I wrote about instinctual desire in The Actual Freedom Trust Library –

Desire — 1 The fact or condition of desiring; the feeling that one would derive pleasure or satisfaction from possessing or obtaining something; a longing. 2 sexual appetite, lust. 3 an expressed wish, a request. 4 something desired or longed for. Oxford Dictionary

Peter: Desire is the drive to survive – it translates into sexual conquest, power over others, and attaining the necessities of survival such as territory, food, offspring, and the protection of others. Desire is the instinct that drives us to sexual avarice and a blind urge to impregnate, procreate and reproduce ourselves – come what may. The relentless desire to accumulate, amass, covert, dominate, control and obliterate is the direct cause of poverty, corruption, hunger and famine. The Actual Freedom Trust Library

Before I became an actualist, I had a good deal of experience of the failure of materialistic pursuits to bring me happiness, let alone allow me to be harmless. The instinctual passion of desire most prominently manifests as the desire for wealth and its associated power over others, the desire for fame and the adulation of others, the ceaseless accumulation of possessions and property always seemed paltry pursuits. Whilst I had previously found these pursuits wanting, as an actualist I have come to experientially understand the brutal and senseless instinctual passions that underpin these desires.

Once I came to experience raw instinctual survival fear and consequential aggression, the deep-seated emotions that arise from instinctual drive began to lose their affective power, so much so that I no longer harbour any moral or ethical objections to material wealth per se. Nowadays I am appreciative of the tangible benefits of the safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure that are the by-products of wealthy societies.

I have also had a good deal of experience of the failure of spiritual pursuits and I have already written about this extensively so I won’t go over the territory again, other than to say that I discovered the spiritual world to be an incestuous cesspool of self-gratification.

The most primal instinctual passion is the desire to procreate – to impregnate or be impregnated, depending on one’s gender. Of all of my investigations into the human instincts this has proved to be one of the most rewarding as not only have I succeeded in disempowering the brutish and senseless sexual drive such that I am now free to enjoy the sensual pleasures of sex but I have also freed others from my sexual predatoriness. In hindsight, the investigation into instinctual sexual desire has been one of the most fruitful aspects of my investigations into the instinctual passions as it has not only opened the door to being able to live in peace and harmony with my partner but it also help attune my senses to the myriad of sensual delights of everyday living.

One desire, however, still remains active and persistent and that is the desire to become actually free of the human condition.

RESPONDENT: And I’m not sure whether Richard is running on altruistic auto-pilot. For if he’s not on auto-pilot, then what motivates its actions? (based on your own experience of PCEs).

PETER: In a PCE, ‘me’ and ‘my’ instinctual passions are temporarily in abeyance. With the whole affective faculty temporarily inoperative, neither selfist nor altruistic feelings are present because everything is experienced as being utterly perfect in the actual world of the senses.

In a PCE, consideration for one’s fellow human beings is an effortless consequence of the total absence of instinctual malice and sorrow. This consideration is effortless in that it is not a product of any moral or ethical requisites whatsoever and nor is it a product of the tender half of the instinctual passions. And further this consideration is not passive in a PCE as one taps into the intrinsic benignity of the universe itself and as such, one literally wishes the best for each and every one of one’s fellow human beings.

My observation is that Richard’s effortless well-meaningness is the inevitable outcome of his being free of the human condition.

*

RESPONDENT: It is possible to start from aggression and egoism and become Alexander the Great or to use nurture and narcissism and become God-on-Earth or to develop egoism and desire and be another Rockefeller or to use desire and narcissism and become a top-model or to strengthen desire and altruism and ...

PETER: Yep. It all boils down to intent – ‘what you want to do with your life’ is another way of putting it.

RESPONDENT: Indeed so, intent is the human freedom of choice.

PETER: I realize that the issue of freedom of choice, aka free will, has been the subject of philosophical debate down through the ages, but as an actualist none of it makes sense to me. Once I started to become aware of the extent to which the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire constantly influenced both my thinking and my actions, the very notion of freedom of choice became almost risible. What I did notice, however, was that there was one constant thread that ran through my life and that was, and still is, an innate caring for my fellow human beings and it is this that has caused me to be uninterested in certain things and events and yet vitally interested in others.

In hindsight, it is not that I have deliberately chosen to do certain things and not do others in my life, it is more like I have not been attracted to certain opportunities that arose and yet have been attracted by other opportunities. And often by the time I discovered that I was attracted by an opportunity, I found that I was already doing it, despite whatever qualms and reservations I may have previously had.

The business of being alive is very simple and becoming an actualist only simplified the business further. I ended up with a single aim that was in total accord with an intent I always had in my life – to be happy as well as being able to live in harmony with my fellow human beings. As such, I didn’t so much make a choice to become an actualist, it was more like not resisting the ‘gravity’, to use your analogy.

2.5.2004

RESPONDENT:

[Peter]: ‘That the human brain is programmed, via a genetic code, with a set of instinctual or base operating functions, located in the primitive brain system which causes automatic robot-like animal reactions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire to be transmitted via chemical messages to various parts of the body including the neo-cortex.

Genetic adaptations and alterations, such as would be necessary to alter or delete this now-redundant crude programming, are well documented even within the lifetime of individual members of a species.’ (from An Introduction to Actual Freedom)

If you can provide some examples for the emphasized statement, it would be most appreciated.

PETER: I wrote this some time soon after I had seen a documentary on the work of a scientist who had reported what he termed genetic adaptations in frogs. He had noticed varying physiological features in a single species of frogs that were dependant upon the varying altitude that the frogs were found within a single mountain river. Unfortunately I did not take note of the scientist’s name at the time and I could not find any reference to his work on the Internet. Because I could not verify the comment I made, I soon after changed the statement to read –

[Peter]: ‘Physiological alterations that could eliminate this crude programming, as a biological adaptation to changed circumstances, are well documented within the animal species.’ [endquote].

You will find this changed statement is repeated on the Actualism website but an unaltered relic that escaped updating still remained in the ‘Introduction to Actual Freedom’ and I shall now update this as well.

Following your question, I again searched the Internet and I did come across an article which made reference to what could have been the research referred to in the documentary I saw but it stated that the research has now been largely discredited.

As I scouted around I came to understand that there is a good deal of discussion and research currently being undertaken on the issue of genetic mutations in order to come to a more complete understanding of the processes involved. According to modern theories and studies of heredity and evolution the tremendous variation amongst living organisms comes about in two ways, namely through spontaneous mutation and through chance hybridisation during sexual reproduction. Such spontaneous mutations and chance hybridisations are essential components or instruments of the evolution of all living beings on earth. Such mutations are not determined by environmental conditions but arise mainly through replication of the material of inheritance.

There is also a theory which proposes a complimentary process occurs, that of adaptive mutations. The term ‘adaptive mutations’ expresses the fact that the constraints of life and the environmental conditions not only work selectively on preformed characteristics, but also can determine new ones. Such characteristics can be described as ‘goal-directed’ without presupposing an evolutionary goal. Although I personally find the empirical evidence collected thus far to support the theory of adaptive mutations to be somewhat confusing, some scientists apparently have no doubt –

[Johannes Wirz]: ‘A significant component of genetic variation is without doubt no longer attributable solely to chance events in the replication of the material of inheritance, but can only be understood by considering the relationships between living organism and the world in which it lives.’ Progress towards complementarity in genetics. Johannes Wirz, http://www.anth.org/ifgene/wirzcomp.htm

I have no scientific expertise in the field but the following quote from the same paper did make sense to me –

[Johannes Wirz]: ‘Waddington used Drosophila experiments to develop the concept of organismic totality and adaptive reaction to specific qualities in the surroundings. He described short term physiological changes that had become genetically fixed ‘genetic assimilation’. Such changes as take place over a long period, he described as ‘evolutionary adaptation’. Progress towards complementarity in genetics. Johannes Wirz, http://www.anth.org/ifgene/wirzcomp.htm

Thus it would seem that I am on reasonably safe ground in saying –

[Peter]: ‘Physiological alterations as an adaptation to changed circumstances are well documented even within the lifetime of individual members of a species.’ [endquote].

and leave others to debate whether beneficial physiological changes do lead to genetic adaptations, or ‘genetic assimilations’.

*

P.S. The following correspondence might also be of interest to you.

24.9.2004

RESPONDENT: Vineeto/Peter, How do you live with a single partner without experiencing loyalty?

PETER: Because I live with a woman who is invariably happy and harmless, the question of loyalty never arises.

Or to put it another way, I am constantly aware that I am living with the best woman I could live with, so the idea of changing partners or looking out for someone better or someone new never enters the picture.

RESPONDENT: Is that a preference or socially conditioned behaviour?

PETER: Neither, it is simply common sense in operation. Looking for better than best makes no sense to me.

RESPONDENT: I prefer having sex with different partners.

PETER: Speaking personally, I have always preferred quality over quantity.

RESPONDENT: At this stage I don’t know if it is simply a preference or my instinctual passions in action.

PETER: When I first came across actualism one of its major attractions was my interest in getting to the root of the sexual malaise such that I could freely enjoy the sensual delights of sexual play – something that I found impossible to do whilst shackled by religious/spiritual morality, be it either the Western variety or the Eastern, whilst remaining firmly ensconced on one side of the gender divide, let alone whilst being compelled by the animal instinctual passions to be a sexual predator.

In hindsight, it was fortunate that I had made living with at least one person in utter peace and harmony my number one priority in life at the time and this meant that I then had sufficient motivation to experientially investigate the mores and moralities of societal sexual and gender conditioning as well as the murky depths of the human instinctual sexual drive – to push on beyond where I had always stopped before.

Personally, I have found the whole investigation into sexuality to be one of the most daunting of practical investigations as well as one of the most rewarding. Daunting in that one inevitably confronts the most strident of societal moralities and taboos as well as the strongest of the human instinctual drives both of which make the investigation close-to-the-bone as it were – and rewarding in that, as each murky layer is seen through, one moves closer to the intimacy that living with another person in utter peace and harmony actually is.

Again with the benefit of hindsight – and something which is obvious to me now – the only reason I was able to make such an investigation, and reap such rewards, was that I made intimacy my first priority which meant that getting to the roots of the sexual malaise became a subsequent preference.

4.10.2004

PETER: When I first came across actualism one of its major attractions was my interest in getting to the root of the sexual malaise such that I could freely enjoy the sensual delights of sexual play – something that I found impossible to do whilst shackled by religious/spiritual morality, be it either the Western variety or the Eastern, whilst remaining firmly ensconced on one side of the gender divide, let alone whilst being compelled by the animal instinctual passions to be a sexual predator.

RESPONDENT: My sexual social conditioning is both family derived and spiritual (Christian). It sounds something like this: find a suitable good looking/loving woman, bond/marry with her (eventually have 2 kids), respect her and ‘enjoy’ a lasting relationship without cheating on her.

The problem is that after I am involved in a relationship for a longer period of time the sex is not as great as in the beginning so I tend to look for new partners.

PETER: Yet again evidence that the instinctual passions are ultimately stronger than social conditioning, hey?

RESPONDENT: Is your sexual pleasure diminishing/increasing/remaining constant in quality as time passes?

PETER: Nowadays sex is such an ever-fresh sensual experience that I no longer suffer from the problem of feeling trapped, being bored, wanting to move on, imagining I am having sex with someone else, retreating inside in order to evoke a personal bliss, being senselessly driven to ejaculate, and so on.

It’s quite remarkable what is to found at the end of the path that humanity has always hung a sign that says ‘do not enter here’.

*

PETER: In hindsight, it was fortunate that I had made living with at least one person in utter peace and harmony my number one priority in life at the time and this meant that I then had sufficient motivation to experientially investigate the mores and moralities of societal sexual and gender conditioning as well as the murky depths of the human instinctual sexual drive – to push on beyond where I had always stopped before.

RESPONDENT: What I notice is that after sex there is a very pleasant atmosphere, anxiety-free, relaxing and the problems, mores and moralities vanish albeit for a brief period. I enjoy these moments more and more and as they begin to slip away I track the gradual arising of the anxiety level and what causes it.

PETER: As a suggestion, I found it vital to check out the precise nature of the feelings I was having not only after having sex but also whilst having sex. It’s also found it good to keep in mind that any prolonged or strenuous physical activity can produce an increase in hormonal levels that induce feelings of well-being and even euphoria – I have friends who get a high from the hormones produced from prolonged running.

*

PETER: Personally, I have found the whole investigation into sexuality to be one of the most daunting of practical investigations as well as one of the most rewarding. Daunting in that one inevitably confronts the most strident of societal moralities and taboos as well as the strongest of the human instinctual drives both of which make the investigation close-to-the-bone as it were – and rewarding in that, as each murky layer is seen through, one moves closer to the intimacy that living with another person in utter peace and harmony actually is.

RESPONDENT: It’s so easy when not in the grip of the values, beliefs and instinctual urges that dominate 99% of my waking life. In such moments it’s surprising that they exist at all and have such a debilitating effect on my well-being. In the after-sex moments I can see the utter futility of real-world struggles and controls, they don’t exist at all.

PETER: I can only reiterate what I have said about putting the desire for an actual intimacy first – unless you are interested in the tantric ‘sex-for-the-sake-of-getting-blissed-out-of-it’ approach that is becoming more and more fashionable these days.

*

PETER: Again with the benefit of hindsight – and something which is obvious to me now – the only reason I was able to make such an investigation, and reap such rewards, was that I made intimacy my first priority which meant that getting to the roots of the sexual malaise became a subsequent preference.

RESPONDENT: The sexual act is the most direct form of intimacy that I experience and I usually experience it not with my partner as social conditioning somehow gets in the way (I’m working on that) but with (new) partners that are interested only in sex with no subsequent expectations.

PETER: And as I have said, the intimacy that I sought was the intimacy that comes from living with another person in utter peace and harmony – from the shared mundane experiences of eating a meal together, watching a television program together, having a coffee in a café, shopping for food, strolling through town, tending the garden, having a chat as well as the mundane experience of mutually enjoyable sex. As is evident from a pure consciousness experience – there is far more to intimacy than having sex with someone.

25.3.2005

RESPONDENT No 80: I was recently reading Time and they had an article about meditation and the mind and such. One part of the article talked about how scientist monitored the brain activity of Buddhist monks while they meditated and they found that these people had high activity in the part of the brain where happiness is experienced like nothing they had seen before. The subject title is all in fun, but I wonder if an actualist can produce similar results. Just something I was thinking about.

RESPONDENT: Hi Peter, when you say ‘the world as-it-is’ what do you mean ... the actual world or the world as it is perceived by ‘me’?

PETER: I remember having a discussion with a spiritualist about this very topic soon after I abandoned spiritualism to become an actualist. He believed that the fact that everyone has a self-centred affective perception of the world meant that the physical world was a self-created illusion. We happened to be standing in front of his car at the time and I reached out and touched the glass of the headlight and asked whether or not the headlight existed in fact given that we could both see it and both touch it. He said that while we could both see it, we saw it from different perspectives, he from one angle, me from another, therefore we perceived it differently. I then realized that pursuing the matter was a waste of both his time and mine because here was a man who refused to talk sense and was determined to live, and remain living, in a world entirely of his own making.

This incident, coming as it did in my early years of investigating the human condition, highlighted the fact that in my spiritual years I had also retreated from the world as-it-is – the world of interactions with fellow flesh and blood human, of tangible palpable things and actually occurring events – into an utterly self-centred world – a world of affective interactions like-feeling souls, of ethereal non-substantial things and supposedly illusionary non-consequential events. It was then that I realized that I had in fact wasted a good many years of my life trying to be anywhere but here and anywhen but now.

But then again, it was hardly a waste of time because I know by experience the seduction of dissociation and lure of dissociative states.

RESPONDENT: Same question goes for ‘people as-they-are’.

PETER: One of the things that never sat well with me in my spiritual years was the sense of superiority that believing in a spiritual teaching or belonging to a spiritual group inevitable engenders. Of course when you are busy being a fervent believer or a loyal group member it is difficult to clearly see that, by holding such beliefs, you are separating yourself from most of your fellow human beings and are cunningly laying the blame for the ills of humankind on those of your fellow human beings who don’t believe what you believe, thereby actively contributing to the divergence and acrimony that typifies the human condition. When I dropped my spiritual beliefs I then discovered a whole lot of secular beliefs that caused me to feel separate from or superior to my fellow human beings.

The other aspect of setting your sights on being happy and harmless with people as-they-are is that one is compelled to stop the habitual and futile exercise of endlessly trying to change other people, or waiting and hoping that other people change, and focus one’s attention exclusively on changing the only person that one can change, and indeed needs to change – me.

RESPONDENT: No 80 questioned or thought whether or not the part of the brain with monitored high activity involved in producing happiness for the Buddhist monk while meditating is also involved in producing (a-caused) happiness for an actualist asking ‘Haietmoba?’ while apperception is operating. From your answer I can’t see any clear or implied ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know’.

PETER: From what I saw on the television program, I have no doubt that the Buddhist monk felt happy when he meditated – I didn’t need to see an image of increase in neural activity in one part of his brain to tell me this. I have experienced the very same thing whilst meditating – often I would feel blissful feelings and I presume these feelings resulted in increased neural activity in parts of this brain as well. From what I understand, any feeling that a feeling being has results in increased neural activity in some part or other of the brain, but it is not a subject that interests me at all, quite frankly.

What did however interest me about the program was the fact that here was a fellow human being who felt happy because he was practicing a technique that involved cutting himself off from the world-as-it-is with people-as-they are. It reminded me yet again that the spiritual world and spiritual pursuits are 180 degrees opposite to the actual world and the intent of an actualist.

And just to make it perfectly clear, it is obvious that some people are happy living in the spiritual world pursuing spiritual pursuits, however when I started being interested in being here, my focus of attentiveness, together with my intent, radically changed.

26.4.2005

RESPONDENT to No 81: What is your point? that money are a form of credit, that they are based on trust and belief? that they do not reflect actual properties of things and services, but that they are a form of ... belief and trust? Are they a form of relativistic singularity, not existing outside our field of perception? If that is the case, why don’t you live without money? It’s simply as that ... walk your talk.

Now, take this example: is it belief to assume that with $ 5.000.000 I can buy a New York physical empty 3 rooms apartment or a car branded Chevrolet and hire a driver into the bargain? There’s no need to trust or believe ori sa cred that I can do the above. Your case is simply silly.

PETER: This latest beat-up on the list – that money is a belief, a rehash of an argument that has been run before on this list – has reminded me of the extent to which many people will go in order to have an argument.

I have often come across people whose initial knee-jerk reaction to anything anyone else says is to say ‘no’ and then immediately take the opposite tack so as to not be seen to acquiescing in any way or to present a different opinion for the sake of argumentation. The other knee-jerk reaction is to say ‘yes, but’ and then launch off on a sidetrack in an attempt to re-gain the upper hand in order to exert or re-exert their superiority. When you start to take notice of theses schemes and tactics (the human condition in action) it is amazing to see how much of human interaction and communication is based upon competitiveness, combativeness, obscuration and in many cases downright deceit and deception.

With this in mind, it is no wonder that human beings find it nigh on impossible to clearly see and acknowledge the facts of the matter at hand, let alone live together in peace and harmony.

12.5.2005

PETER to No 75: ... I remember being struck by the inanity of this propensity to philosophize when contemplating my own mortality and I wrote about it in my journal at the time –

[Peter]: ‘During my investigations into death over this last year, I have become aware that the most shocking thing for human beings is that we are able to contemplate our own death. It is amazing that, of all the animals on the planet, only we human beings, with our ability to think and reflect, know that we have a limited life span and, further, that we could die at any time. We know this, we can talk about it and think about it. We see other people and animals die, and we see our bodies aging and dying. We know that death is an inevitable fact. This is the fact of the situation, but we have avoided this fact largely by making ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘What happens after death?’ into great religious, philosophical and scientific questions. Indeed, for many humans the pursuit of the answer to these meaningless questions is deemed to be the very meaning of life. The search for what happens after life becomes the point of life and the Search is endless. One is forever on the Path. One never arrives.

That always seemed some sort of perversity to me. All that the religious and spiritual meanings of life have offered us is that they point to life after death – that’s where it is really at! ‘When you die, then you can really live!’’ Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’

RESPONDENT: I presume you are aware that they refer to a metaphorical ‘death’ ?!

PETER: It may be an apt to time to post something else from my journal as it refers to an experience I had when death was closest – there being no more instinctually felt death than the death of one’s progeny – as it confirmed to me the utter finality of death –

[Peter]: ... ‘As I begin to put into words the sense I have made of life, I am reminded of the time I stood beside my 13-year-old son’s coffin. It was indeed a shocking experience to be confronted by the sight of the dead body of someone so young and so close. Shocking to my very core. It was then that I really determined to find out how to remove the ‘shackles’ that I felt had always bound me, and to experience life free of them before I died! I had been, at this time, some ten years on the spiritual path, but this experience was to prove for me a seminal point – the beginning really.

Two things in particular stick in my mind from the time of my son’s death. My ex-wife had wanted to see the body and the undertaker led us out to the little room in which the coffin stood on trestles, set up for our viewing. I remember looking at the body, which had been prepared to look serene with whatever skills an undertaker uses. What struck me immediately was the lifelessness of the corpse. This was obviously the dead body of someone who had abounded with almost frenetic energy when he was alive. There was a wail from beside me as my ex-wife put into words exactly what I had seen – ‘He’s not here, he’s not here’. After leaving the funeral parlour we drove aimlessly around the small coastal town, finally parking on the edge of the river estuary. As we wandered out onto the tidal mudflats, she looked up at the greying sky and shouted out his name several times. I looked up at the sky and clearly remember thinking, ‘No, he’s not up there either.’

I had experienced the death of both parents previously, but the death of one of my children, particularly one so young, completely shattered my nonchalant view I had of being alive.’ Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’

RESPONDENT: What do you think about this statement of Jesus? ...’Come to take light!’

PETER: Exactly the same as I think about every other supposed statement that somebody called Jesus who was purportedly the son of God is reported to have said.

RESPONDENT: Here’s the 100 billion HumanityTM sponsored question: is that Light metaphysical or physical?

PETER: I have read that many people who have had near-death experiences report ‘seeing’ a light before losing consciousness, indeed I watched a TV documentary of volunteers who were placed in a centrifuge and were exposed to high ‘G’ force levels and most reported briefly seeing a light immediately before losing consciousness. It would seem from this that there is substantive evidence that the phenomenon of seeing a light (or ‘seeing the Light’) is caused by a withdrawal of blood from the brain as a prelude to losing consciousness in particular circumstances or (as a reasonable extrapolation) as a prelude to the irrevocable and total cessation of the functioning of the brain organ itself … and not, as many people believe, as a curtain raiser to the ‘main event’, the entry of one’s psyche or ‘being’ or spirit into some mythical after-death ethereal realm.

15.5.2005

RESPONDENT: What do you think about this statement of Jesus? ... ‘Come to take light!’

PETER: Exactly the same as I think about every other supposed statement that somebody called Jesus who was purportedly the son of God is reported to have said.

RESPONDENT: Here’s the 100 billion HumanityTM sponsored question: is that Light metaphysical or physical?

PETER: I have read that many people who have had near-death experiences report ‘seeing’ a light before losing consciousness, indeed I watched a TV documentary of volunteers who were placed in a centrifuge and were exposed to high ‘G’ force levels and most reported briefly seeing a light immediately before losing consciousness.

It would seem from this that there is substantive evidence that the phenomenon of seeing a light (or ‘seeing the Light’) is caused by a withdrawal of blood from the brain as a prelude to losing consciousness in particular circumstances or (as a reasonable extrapolation) as a prelude to the irrevocable and total cessation of the functioning of the brain organ itself … and not, as many people believe, as a curtain raiser to the ‘main event’, the entry of one’s psyche or ‘being’ or spirit into some mythical after-death ethereal realm.

RESPONDENT: Well Peter, I was playing a bit with ‘contradictions’.

PETER: By ‘playing a bit with contradictions’ I take it that you mean that you took what I was talking about (the finality of death) and pretended that I was talking about ego-death in order to create the appearance of a contradiction despite the fact that I posted a second quote from my journal to again make it clear that I was talking about actual physical death and not a ‘metaphorical ‘death’’.

RESPONDENT: The point I was making was not to take a metaphorical expression and twist its intended meaning (take it literally), in this case life after the ego-death, so as to demonstrate your point about spiritual beliefs.

PETER: And yet I was not talking about a metaphorical expression at all – I was taking about a fact of life, in this case the fact that everybody dies. Nor did I twist the meaning of the word death, rather I made my meaning even clearer by posting yet another quote about the finality of physical death. Was it not you who did the twisting in order to concoct a contradiction in order to play with it?

RESPONDENT: What started from a misunderstanding (a false premise) is doomed to arrive at a false conclusion, even if the aforementioned conclusion is correct (aka factual) in another context. Fact: ‘death is the end’, spiritual belief: ‘when the ego dies, you live the real life’, your belief about the spiritual belief: ‘there’s life after physical death’, conclusion: ‘the spiritual belief is false’ because of the fact.

The spiritual belief is true, your belief about the spiritual belief is false. You use your false belief about a true belief to demonstrate a fact (that which is actual). But the fact renders both beliefs irrelevant and the fact itself needs no demonstration.

PETER: I’ll pass on getting involved in your philosophical argumentations about false beliefs and true beliefs as it is based upon a contradiction that is entirely your own concoction. The point of my original post was the tendency of people to indulge in philosophizing about death rather than acknowledge the fact of death … and lo and behold you prove my point by attempting to turn my down-to-earth report into a metaphorical philosophical debate.

I wonder why?

RESPONDENT: I quoted another statement from these texts ‘Come to take light!’ to see if this time you take it literally or metaphorically. Either way, you lose ... when taken literally is physical light and when taken metaphorically is metaphysical light (knowledge). But if you were to take it metaphorically, it would have meant that you apply a double standard, as and when it suits your purpose.

PETER: Either way I lose, hey?

And all the while – whilst you busy yourself with winning self-concocted philosophical arguments against an imaginary foe – the finality of physical death literally draws closer, every moment.

25.5.2005

PETER: to No 75: ... I remember being struck by the inanity of this propensity to philosophize when contemplating my own mortality and I wrote about it in my journal at the time – <snipped> Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’.

In my experience there is nothing like contemplating the inevitability – the 100% certainty – of one’s own death to get one thinking back down-to-earth. Peter to No 75, 10.5.2005

RESPONDENT: I presume you are aware that they refer to a metaphorical ‘death’?!

PETER: It may be an apt to time to post something else from my journal as it refers to an experience I had when death was closest – there being no more instinctually felt death than the death of one’s progeny – as it confirmed to me the utter finality of death – <snipped> Peter’s Journal, ‘Death’.

RESPONDENT: What do you think about this statement of Jesus? ... ‘Come to take light!’

PETER: Exactly the same as I think about every other supposed statement that somebody called Jesus who was purportedly the son of God is reported to have said.

RESPONDENT: Here’s the 100 billion HumanityTM sponsored question: is that Light metaphysical or physical?

PETER: I have read that many people who have had near-death experiences report ‘seeing’ a light before losing consciousness, indeed I watched a TV documentary of volunteers who were placed in a centrifuge and were exposed to high ‘G’ force levels and most reported briefly seeing a light immediately before losing consciousness.

It would seem from this that there is substantive evidence that the phenomenon of seeing a light (or ‘seeing the Light’) is caused by a withdrawal of blood from the brain as a prelude to losing consciousness in particular circumstances or (as a reasonable extrapolation) as a prelude to the irrevocable and total cessation of the functioning of the brain organ itself … and not, as many people believe, as a curtain raiser to the ‘main event’, the entry of one’s psyche or ‘being’ or spirit into some mythical after-death ethereal realm.

RESPONDENT: Well Peter, I was playing a bit with ‘contradictions’.

PETER: By ‘playing a bit with contradictions’ I take it that you mean that you took what I was talking about (the finality of death) and pretended that I was talking about ego-death in order to create the appearance of a contradiction despite the fact that I posted a second quote form my journal to again make it clear that I was talking about actual physical death and not a ‘metaphorical ‘death’’.

RESPONDENT: You took a quote from a spiritual text ‘When you die, then you can really live!’ and used it to prove the actualism point that there’s no life after death in contrast to the spiritualism point that there’s life after death.

PETER: I was not aware that what I said was a quote from a spiritual text as all that I did was paraphrase the Christian notion that there is life after death and that for a ‘good’ Christian – one whose sins will be forgiven – afterlife is a better life in a place called heaven. I also mentioned spiritual traditions as it is widely reported that even the self-realized believed that physical death was not the end of being.

As a matter of passing interest – what spiritual text are you referring to as a precursory search of the Net pointed only to the quote of my own words in Peter’s Journal.

RESPONDENT: What I pointed out was that the above quote referred to the death of the ego and was not written so as to be taken literally.

PETER: And yet I was not quoting a spiritual text: what I was referring to is the traditional religious dogma and traditional spiritual belief in life after physical death, and not life after ego-death as you would have it.

RESPONDENT: How you intend to use that quote is your business of course, but I wanted to underline its intended meaning.

PETER: Given that the quote came from a chapter in my Journal entitled ‘Death’ and that the whole of the chapter was about physical death – not ego-death – the meaning of what I said was as I intended it, and not as you interpreted it and continue to insist on interpreting it despite my explanations.

*

RESPONDENT: The point I was making was not to take a metaphorical expression and twist its intended meaning (take it literally), in this case life after the ego-death, so as to demonstrate your point about spiritual beliefs.

PETER: And yet I was not talking about a metaphorical expression – I was taking about a fact of life, in this case the fact that every body dies, nor did I twist its meaning, rather I made my meaning even clearer by posting yet another quote about the finality of physical death.

RESPONDENT: Okay, that’s a fact of life and nobody disputes that.

PETER: Really? By far the majority of the 6 billion plus human beings on the planet at the moment would vigorously dispute the fact of finality of physical death and the rest would believe it to varying degrees of uncertainty and only a very few would agree to the finality of death with a 100% certainty.

*

PETER: Was it not you who did the twisting in order to concoct a contradiction in order to play with it?

RESPONDENT: I did not do the twisting at all. I pointed out that the intended meaning of the spiritual text you quoted is not the meaning you derived. In other words, its meaning had no relation with the issue you were pondering upon (the factuality and inevitability of physical death).

PETER: I am reminded of Vineeto’s comment about taking the wind out of furphies. In this case, I think I’ll just wait until it blows itself out. Why you keep on about this is beyond me.

*

RESPONDENT: What started from a misunderstanding (a false premise) is doomed to arrive at a false conclusion, even if the aforementioned conclusion is correct (aka factual) in another context. Fact: ‘death is the end’, spiritual belief: ‘when the ego dies, you live the real life’, your belief about the spiritual belief: ‘there’s life after physical death’, conclusion: ‘the spiritual belief is false’ because of the fact. The spiritual belief is true, your belief about the spiritual belief is false. You use your false belief about a true belief to demonstrate a fact (that which is actual). But the fact renders both beliefs irrelevant and the fact itself needs no demonstration.

PETER: I’ll pass on getting involved in your philosophical argumentations about false beliefs and true beliefs as it is based upon a contradiction that is entirely your own concoction. The whole point of my post was about the tendency of people to indulge in philosophizing about death rather than acknowledge the fact of death … and lo and behold you prove my point by attempting to turn my down-to-earth report into a metaphorical philosophical debate.

RESPONDENT: Well, I do acknowledge that I have a tendency towards intellectualizing. While sorrow, malice, rapes, torture, human trafficking, exploitation, sexual abuse of children, slavery, suicides and all the other human horrors go on simultaneously while we are having this conversation. To indulge in philosophizing or thinking about death and arrive at the conclusion that death is the End is a source of inspiration for living life more fully.

PETER: Which was the point I was making after all – in my case ‘living life more fully’ meant taking up the challenge of being happy and harmless as the way … and the means … to become actually free of the human condition.

RESPONDENT: In other words, if I can’t embrace death with all my being, I can’t embrace life with all my being. It’s the end of fear to realize that death is a matter of when rather than if.

PETER: The other point about death being the end, finito, kaput, is that it means that everything one does has no ultimate meaning or overarching purpose which in turn means that I need no longer take ‘my’ life seriously, i.e. life is meant to be fun.

*

PETER: The whole point of my post was about the tendency of people to indulge in philosophizing about death rather than acknowledge the fact of death … and lo and behold you prove my point by attempting to turn my down-to-earth report into a metaphorical philosophical debate. I wonder why?

RESPONDENT: I wanted to understand how deep is your understanding of Christian spirituality. For example, Dostoevsky made a big deal out of the expression you quoted, and he did so as that expression lies at the heart of Christianity, one has to die in order to be reborn and live a new life.

PETER: No 32, I have no doubt you could run rings around me in terms of your knowledge of Christian mysticism but my point would be ... so what? I can only assume that as you have been on this mailing list for several years you must by now have had at least a suspicion that actualism is diametrically opposite to spiritualism.

As an aside, I was watching a TV interview program the other night in which the man being interviewed a strong spiritual experience he had in which he described his spirit leaving the body. His description seemed to me to typify the difference between an ASC whereby one experiences ‘me’ as spirit as being real and the body as illusionary and a PCE whereby one is what one is, this body and ‘me’ as spirit is known to be a ‘self’-created illusion as ‘I’ do not exist in the actual world.

Given the fact that actualism is diametrically opposite to spiritualism is writ large – and repetitively so – all over the actualism website and that you have been around long enough to realize that this is so, why would you want to engage in conversation with me on this mailing list so as to ascertain how deep my understanding is of (Eastern?) Christianity? Do you somehow imagine that demonstrating a superior intellectual knowledge of the metaphorical quagmire that passes for spiritual wisdom somehow makes one more able or more qualified to take on the down-to-earth business of actualism?

If so, I can only suggest you take what actualists write literally and not metaphorically.

*

RESPONDENT: I quoted another statement from these texts ‘Come to take light!’ to see if this time you take it literally or metaphorically. Either way, you loose ... when taken literally is physical light and when taken metaphorically is metaphysical light (knowledge). But if you were to take it metaphorically, it would have meant that you apply a double standard, as and when it suits your purpose.

PETER: Either way I loose, hey?

RESPONDENT: Precisely. Should I take it then that ‘Come to take light!’ is, both literally and metaphorically, a meaningless expression to you and as such you’re declining the offer? I guess you’re right after all, light cannot be bottled and selled at the local supermarket, thus it cannot be bought and taken away for private consumption.

PETER: And yet I have already explained the fact that seeing a light is apparently a commonly-reported occurrence by those who have had near death experiences, thereby pointing out that this natural physical phenomenon may well be the genesis of the spiritual belief in the Light. But then again, the metaphorical expression ‘Come to take light’ may well have a different meaning, and knowing spirituality as I do, it may well have several meanings according to whichever pundit you read or whichever sect you follow.

Therein lies the pitfall of metaphors and metaphorical meanings – they are open to such a wide range of meanings and of interpretations of meanings such that they invariably confuse communications (and they are often used quite deliberately in order to do so) rather than add clarity to communications. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of clear thinking and straight talking.

*

PETER: And all the while – whilst you busy yourself with winning self-concocted philosophical arguments against an imaginary foe – the finality of physical death literally draws closer, every moment.

RESPONDENT: I find out that sometimes is better to loose than to win, it’s probably the main reason why I’m interested in actualism and co-responding with you. I can’t be a winner in the interaction between me and actualism, when I really succeed ‘I’ loose, or at least that’s how I experience it.

PETER: Maybe it’s a matter of attitude but I never did battle with Richard as it was clear to me early on that he was the expert in matters pertaining to an actual freedom from the human condition whereas I was not only a novice in such matters but was somewhat ‘behind the eight ball’ in that my mind had been muddled by years of spiritual belief and practice. One of the most potent feelings I became aware of and had to leave behind in the dust was pride – being proud of my hard-won spiritual experience and wisdom. This is how I wrote about it soon after –

[Peter]: ... ‘Fear welled up in me as I realised I no longer believed in the Spiritual – it was obviously just the religion of the East, and religion had obviously failed in the East as it had in the West. After thousands of years, nowhere is there peace on earth or happiness. But I knew I could not just believe Richard either. The enormity of it all was beginning to dawn on me. Nobody could help me. I could only rely on the facts, my own intelligence and experience. But the facts were undeniable. And a fact is a fact, whereas a belief is only a belief. In short it meant everybody else has got it wrong and I have got it right. I knew that would place me as a heretic – the very people who are persecuted and burnt at the stake! Besides, what about all those years of belief and faith – how could I have been such a fool!

Pride reared its ugly head, but I recognised it as the same pride that had bound me to the spiritual path in the first place and had given me a feeling of superiority. I then realised the connection between pride and humility, so subtly hidden beneath the ‘good-ness’ of the spiritual world. In the end I came to realise that I would be a greater fool to continue pursuing something that didn’t work, simply because everybody else was! It was useful to see Vineeto also struggling with exactly this same pride, as I often saw something in someone else that was relevant to turn in on myself. In the end I realised it was my life, and to worry about what other people thought is not to be free – and freedom was the very thing that I was after.’ Peter’s Journal ‘God’

*

RESPONDENT: Anyway, be that as it may, I observed a tendency in actualists to take *only* the literal meaning out of the spiritual texts instead for the intended metaphorical meaning... or to put it more bluntly: an unwillingness to understand and an emotional apriori rejection of everything spiritual, either silly or sensible.

PETER: But then again I long ago abandoned the notion that there is anything sensible in spiritual texts which is why I have no inclination at all to discuss what you presume are the intended meanings of supposedly metaphorical statements contained within them.

RESPONDENT: When saying: ‘suffer the little children to come unto me’, Jesus is referring to the inner child existing in everyone of us. What are the properties of this ‘inner child’? Is he actual, real or imaginary? Why is he suffering and at the hands of whom? If this child really exist in everyone of us, does it necessarily mean that he is oppressed? What happens when this inner child meets Jesus, then why else the expression ‘to come unto him’?’

PETER: Well for once I am left wordless. Perhaps I can remind you of something you said previously in this post as it seems relevant –

[Respondent]: ‘Well, I do acknowledge that I have a tendency towards intellectualizing. While sorrow, malice, rapes, torture, human trafficking, exploitation, sexual abuse of children, slavery, suicides and all the other human horrors go on simultaneously while we are having this conversation.’ [endquote].

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