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Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List with Correspondent No 37
PETER: Hi, Welcome to the mailing list. RESPONDENT: I’d like to introduce myself (or flesh and blood body) first. I was raised in a Christian home – lost my religious faith in college – began studying philosophy thereafter – became awestruck by Meher Baba, but also very confused and uncomfortable with many of his inconsistencies. I have fearfully studied and read voraciously in order to find the freedom that I have only recently begun to explore with this notion of actual freedom. What I read here has a ‘gravitational pull’ that I find I cannot resist. Meeting Bernadette Roberts (author of ‘The ‘experience’ of No-Self’) last February, then learning and absorbing what I could of UG Krishnamurti and Suzanne Segal left me ripe to assimilate what I am reading here. PETER: I spent many years on the spiritual path and also started off being awestruck, moved on through confusion and uncomfortableness and eventually graduated with a diploma in disillusionment. It was a priceless journey because I discovered what didn’t work ... and after I became an actualist, I discovered why. By the way, the experience of ‘No-Self’ is a spiritual other-worldly experience whereas what is on offer here is a non-spiritual down-to-earth freedom – the antithesis of spirituality. If I can pass on a bit of personal experience that you may find useful – it is important at the start to slowly read what is on offer on the Actual Freedom Trust website and think carefully about what is being said, rather than skim read assuming you already know what is being said. When I first came across Richard, I would listen to what he said and make many assumptions based upon my previous understandings. He had only written his Journal at that stage and I took home a printout for some supplementary reading, but I was soon to discover the advantage of the written word over the spoken word. I found that I needed to slowly and carefully read what was written, often going back and back over sentences, in order to try and really understand what he was saying. Sometimes I would read a few sentences and then deliberately sit back and contemplate upon the matter. These contemplations often led to realizations of the fact that actualism and actuality is indeed totally 180 degrees opposite to spiritual belief in all respects. These realizations sometimes even lead to a slow slide into pure consciousness experiences – brief sensual experiences of the peerless perfection and pristine purity of actuality. As long as you then don’t claim this sensate-only experience as ‘your’ own and turn it into an affective experience, you will then know – by direct experience – that there is a world of difference between ‘self’-lessness and ‘No-self’. * PETER: Given that others have also written to you, I’ll cut to some questions you have asked about a topic I have had some particular experience with. RESPONDENT: Now – on to ‘relationships.’ I think I can ask this one pretty simply. If one is slowly whittling away at love, compassion, nurture, desire – then is there still room for rearing children and ‘sticking with’ your marriage partner come what may? PETER: Being virtually free, my experience is that once you free yourself of the shackles of your social-spiritual conditioning and are free of being driven by your instinctual passions, you are then free to do whatever you deem appropriate in any situation. If the situation is that you have children to rear then you do the job much, much better by being virtually free of malice and sorrow. Similarly, if you decide to ‘stick with’ your marriage partner come what may, at least you free your partner from the imposition of your moods and emotional demands. RESPONDENT: Is the actuality of benevolence enough to keep people together as long as it’s a sensible thing to do? PETER: When you tap into the already existing benevolence that lies crippled by your instinctual passions everything – including whatever obligations remain – becomes easy and effortless. RESPONDENT: Or is there still some cultural factor that makes it ‘sensible’ to ‘care’ for spouse and child? PETER: In virtual freedom from the human condition, no cultural factors remain to restrict or impede sensible action. These include the social, cultural and spiritual mores that conspire to lock one into any of the traditional social identities of being a father, mother, son or daughter. Remaining ensnared by this socially imbibed role-playing acts to prevent the possibility of an unfettered intimacy between what are, in fact, fellow human beings. RESPONDENT: In other words, where does the ‘continuity’ required to care for a child come from in actual (or virtual) freedom (where ‘continuity’ doesn’t exist)? PETER: ‘Continuity’, as you put it, ceases to exist only when there is no psychological or psychic identity to harbour past hurts, nor to conjure any future expectations. It follows that the very best thing that you can do in caring for a child is to free him or her from ‘your’ hopes and fears as well as ‘your’ resentment, anger, frustration, sadness and misery. RESPONDENT: It’s easy to think that caring for your child is only based on the nurturing instinct. Does the ability to raise a child necessarily disappear along with the nurturing instinct – or is the benevolence of virtual or actual freedom enough to maintain ‘parenthood’? PETER: Speaking personally and in hindsight, the only reason I married was because it was the only socially acceptable way to have sex when I was young and randy. Having children came with the package, so to speak. Then the instinctual drive and passion of nurture took over my life, causing me no end of pain and suffering and causing me to inflict no end of pain and suffering on my wife and children. As I came to become aware of what was going on, I deliberately aimed to suppress these feelings, to concentrate on the more pragmatic, practical aspects of caring and to allow my children as much freedom as possible to live their own lives. When their school years came, I realized that a peer-driven socialization process had kicked in and that my influence as a parent declined dramatically. By then, it was simply a matter of providing food, shelter and money for as long as was needed. In hindsight, this was the best I could have done in the circumstances, given ‘who’ I was then. It is impossible to save children from the inevitability of being socially conditioned, and it is impossible to free them from their genetic-endowment of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. The only advice my father ever gave me, apart from practical matters, was to ‘be happy’, but he didn’t tell me how because he didn’t know. He had also fought in the Second World War and consequently abhorred violence, something he passed on to me. This influence was to emerge in my spiritual search as I threw myself headlong into a search for happiness and peace, so conceivably my own influence on my children was that life was a search for happiness and peace. When I became an actualist and found out how to be happy and where peace really lay, I wrote my Journal and sent my son a copy. What he does with what I have found out is his business, which is as it should be – and is – in this perfect actual world we live in. It is as much an imposition to bring up a child as an actualist as it is to deliberately impose any beliefs on a child – for the simple fact that a child lacks sufficient life experience and erudition to distinguish between belief and fact, to know what works and what doesn’t work. The best an actualist can do is to provide practical care, pass on practical survival skills and ... eliminate his or her own malice and sorrow so as not to impose either on the child. This best far outstrips what passes for parenthood in either the normal or spiritual worlds. RESPONDENT: Does the fact of raising a child necessarily indicate the continuing presence of ‘nurture’? PETER: Just as the elimination of the instinctual passion of aggression does not mean that one cannot defend oneself appropriately if physically attacked, the elimination of the instinctual passion of nurture does not stop one from rearing children. In both cases the job is done much better without the blind crude instinctual imperative operating. In a similar vein, the elimination of the instinctual passion of desire does not mean one ends up being a celibate monk – or a globe-trotting Guru – sponging off others for food, shelter and veneration. Rather than suppressing or denying, a progressive elimination of all of the instinctual passions means one discovers that one is already living, and always has lived, in a sensual paradise, the earthy incomparable cornucopia of this planet we call Earth.
RESPONDENT: I have a series of questions that go out to all who are interested. I’ve been asking the actualist question now for several months with some success at times – occasional glimpses what it is to be free – but very temporary. What I find as an even more common theme is worries arising about what I might have to ‘give up’ if I continue further and the difficulty of ‘seeing what is on the other side of a ‘problem’’. Here are a couple issues that are important to me right now. I’m interested currently in this idea of ‘family ties.’ I understand the whole issue of the need to belong to a certain degree – but the hardest thing for me with this whole belongingness need is ‘how to’ relate to my family of origin. I know that the actualist strives to treat everyone on an even playing field by seeing through the deceptions of belonging. Take a simple thing like for example, ‘Mother’s Day.’ If I send a card to my Mom in appreciation of her care for me – then am I necessarily ‘falling into the trap’ of belonging? Also, seeing that ‘gratitude’ is binding, is there a way of appreciating someone without feelings of gratitude? Finally, being that I am married with 2 children – I notice the fear that if I pursue actualism to its end – then I might abandon them. Sometimes it feels like it’s ‘actualism vs. family.’ What is ‘family’ when one is virtually or actually free? Can one still drive 5 hours to visit your parents without doing it just to fulfill their expectations? What about when they become ill and die? Am I to treat them like strangers? It seems to me that even though I am ‘severing emotional’ connections – isn’t there still a connection with my biological parents more than just biology? I mean they did raise me and provide food and shelter and all. Do I only feel a ‘debt’ toward them? Or can I still maintain relating with them just based on the fact that they are biological parents? Also, I read Richard say once that basically parents are just ‘human beings who happened to be your biological parents.’ (my paraphrase) I wonder though, isn’t there just a little more to it? For example, one of my sons is adopted. My wife and I ‘play the role’ of parents – but I am working at not ‘being’ the role. Aren’t we ‘parents’ in any other way than merely biology? PETER: I thought to respond to this post, even though you have since reported that you have had some insights about these issues. I like it that you are having your own insights about the issues that are relevant to you in your life,
and that you have had Having said that, however, you are not alone in the process of actualism and much information can be gained from the experience of fellow human beings who have managed to rid themselves of malice and sorrow. I have learnt a good deal from observing Richard’s common sense approach to the business of being a flesh and blood human body in the world as-it-is, so I’ll pass on my experience about the consanguineous issues you have raised since I have been both a son and a father in my life. I’ve also written on this topic in my journal, so I’ll try and keep this brief. Perhaps the most significant event that gave me cause to think about the whole issue of family happened a few years after my father died. Both my sister and I were at the age where we had left home and were capable of looking after ourselves financially and we then agreed that it would be good for our mother if we released her of her obligations to continue to provide for us. We told her that she had done a good job in looking after us whilst we were growing up but that now her time and money was hers again, to do with as she wished. I remember at the time thinking what a freeing thing this decision was, both for my mother and for myself. This realization meant that later on, when I became a father, I did exactly the same. Although one of my sons died at an early age, I released the other son of the burden of the expectation that I would continue to provide for him beyond the point where he left the nest and also of the burden that he would have to provide for me in my old age. This simple unilateral action – one that can be taken by either a parent or an offspring – means that one is well on the path to seeing, and treating, one’s parents and children for what they really are – fellow human beings. The only reason I was willing to take this step as a father was that I had by then set my sights on becoming happy and harmless and this meant that I had to release my son of my continually interfering in his life – of wanting him to do things my way. By setting my sights on becoming happy and harmless, I became aware of the issues around family that made me unhappy and the times when I did something or said something that caused ripples in other family member’s lives. As a practicing actualist, I came to see how both my societal and instinctual programming pervaded every aspect of my interactions with my son and how the combination of both actively conspired to prevent peace and harmony between us. The first thing I found I needed to do was to become aware of what was going on, to understand the nature of this programming. The second was to see and acknowledge my part in the emotional turmoil that this programming generates, and the third and most important was to have the courage to change. Such radical change inevitably means going against what society regards as ‘normal’, ‘right’ and ‘good’ – the eons-old code of conduct based on the moral codes and ethical standards that have been unquestioningly passed down from generation to generation. This act of ‘breaking free of the mould’ then enabled me to clearly see and experience the underlying instinctual animal programming in action – those very crude, ‘self’-centred genetically-encoded compulsive drives that act to sabotage even the best of intentions of human beings to live together in peace and harmony. By being attentive to this genetic programming in action, I then became progressively less susceptible to the consuming power of both the savage and tender instinctual passions. My experience is that once you have gone through this process with the major issues that prevent you from being happy and harmless, you then find yourself virtually happy and harmless – happy and harmless 99% of the time. At this stage the changes ‘I’ can instigate tend to be more minimal as ‘I’ have done most of the substantive work that ‘I’ can do and the resultant feelings of redundancy eventually lead to the realization that the extinction of ‘me’ is the next step to be taken. As you know, this is a report of work in progress on the path to actual freedom, but I have always written on the basis that my experience will be of interest, and may be of use, to those interested in becoming free of the human condition, in toto. RESPONDENT: Finally, what I find is a common theme in my journey with actualism so far is that there are all these issues that keep popping up that immediately generate a good deal of fear – then it seems I come up with an intellectual solution or compromise – then later the same issue comes back to bug me again. I must admit this is a real pain. What am I doing wrong? I wonder if I’m allowing emotional analysis to dominate over any sort of ‘apperception?’ PETER: The idea of change, or of tackling something new, usually generates a good deal of fear. From this feeling of fear can come doubt, reluctance, inertia, stuckness and so on, but the same feeling can also generate a sense of adventure, thrill, curiosity, fascination, determination and so on. Several years ago, I experienced the same range of feelings when I gave up drawing with pen on paper on a drawing board and changed to CAD (computer aided drafting). At first I just wanted to muddle along in the old style that I had been taught in my youth, but then one day I realized I might still be drawing for a good many years to come and that, unless I changed to CAD, I would eventually end up a Neanderthal architect. After that came the resistance to starting something new, then came the trials and tribulations of having to throw out all I had learnt in the past about drawing and starting all over again. After a few weeks I found I had to actually get rid of my drawing board so that I fully committed myself to one thing only – learning a whole new way of drawing. With hindsight, I had to undertake exactly the same process when I stopped being a Neanderthal spiritualist and wanted to become an actualist – the initial resistance, a period of trial and tribulation, the necessity to cut all ties with the past, and finally throwing myself in the deep end and getting on with it. Needless to say the effort, in both cases, has been worth it – but I do acknowledge that the process of change is, in itself, always a challenge. RESPONDENT: Most of the time, when I ask these questions – I am stuck with ‘I don’t know’ as the answer – and it doesn’t seem that I can do much better than that. But the major challenge seems to me right now the fact that ‘I’ want to be free – so the questioning is intense – yet the desire to be free causes a good deal of pain through uncertainty. PETER: Whilst the process of change is, in itself, always a challenge … the hardest part of all is making the decision to fully commit yourself to the process. RESPONDENT: I have to wonder sometimes whether U.G. Krishnamurti is right by saying that the desire to be free is what causes misery? Is there an easier way? PETER: Well, if you are into Eastern mysticism and you want a delusionary state of spiritual freedom, there’s always the U.G. Krishnamurti way. From what I have read of U.G., his bottom line is a nihilistic acceptance of the inevitability of human suffering and misery on earth – a view rooted in the spiritual dogma that it is impossible to change human nature. All spiritual teachers preach the doctrine of acceptance for the basic reason that the idea of men and women taking it upon themselves to become free of malice and sorrow is anathema to all religious and spiritual belief that there is an omnipresent and omnipotent God or Presence, by whatever name, who is really running the show. The priests and gurus wield the admonition of ‘acceptance’ like an axe in order to cut people down to size, to keep them humble and in their place – on their knees. However, if you sincerely desire to become happy and harmless in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are – and you are not happy and harmless now – then you need to stop accepting your lot in life because it is obvious that there is work to be done and changes to be made. RESPONDENT: How can my desire for freedom be strong and ‘deliver the desired results’ when it seems that that very desire often moves me away from experiencing this present moment? Comments are welcome. PETER: The universal human desire for freedom is not an enemy, nor is it the cause of human misery, as the spiritualists would have us believe. The desire for freedom is based upon the experiential understanding that there is more to life than you normally experience. Whether you consciously remember these experiences or not – sometimes people find it difficult to remember their pure consciousness experiences – the disparity between these experiences of the perfection and purity of the actual world on one hand and your life as-it-is now on the other is the very source of the desire for freedom. Thus far in human history, the shamans, gurus and Godmen have latched on to this innate human desire for freedom, peace and happiness and have cornered the market by peddling their alluring fairy tales of immortal souls and spirit worlds and seductive states of God-consciousness. However, in this newly emerging post-spiritual era, this sham can now be clearly seen for what it is – ancient superstitions and myths fabricated upon the urge for ‘self’-aggrandizement that is built into the animal instinctual survival program. Only when you come to fully understand the breathtaking scope of this scam are you able to finally free yourself from the spiritual platitudes and inanities that have squashed, crippled and perverted the human desire for freedom for millennia. Then you are free to gaily crank up your own desire for a genuine freedom from malice and sorrow – free to roll up your sleeves and get stuck into the fascinating business of finding out exactly what is preventing you from being happy and harmless now. And what a grand thing to do – to dare to head off on your own in a direction that is 180 degrees opposite to what everyone else accepts as being right and true – to experience that delicious feeling of committing yourself totally to your search for freedom, peace and happiness for the first time in your life.
RESPONDENT: I’m beginning to read Joseph LeDoux’s books to better understand the relevance of his work on emotion to Actual Freedom. PETER: The only relevance that I can ascertain is his experimental confirmation that feeling precedes thought. RESPONDENT: Besides that – I’m looking at a book by Antonio Damasio – titled ‘Descartes’ Error’. Now I have no well-formed views on what he is saying, but what I’m gathering so far is that Damasio’s work (he looks specifically at the case of Phineas Gage and others with frontal lobe damage) is a confirmation of LeDoux’s work, and in that sense may be of use to actualists. PETER: It pays to remember that neither LeDoux nor Damasio are interested in becoming free of the human condition and, as such, they are interested in explaining what is, rather than what is possible. RESPONDENT: Interestingly enough, Damasio seems to be saying that emotion and feeling is integral to experience as a self (both social and instinctual) – but since he dealt with people with frontal lobe damage, he seems to be saying that loss of self is dangerous and maladaptive. PETER: Which is but confirmation of the status quo. RESPONDENT: So he is trying to correct the ‘Cartesian Error’ that reasoning and cognition is without feeling or emotion – so he is afraid of the idea of a ‘selfless cognition.’ PETER: ‘Not at all interested in ‘the idea of a ‘selfless cognition’’ may be a better way of describing it. RESPONDENT: So, on the one hand he seems to support the actualist affirmation of the instinctual self, yet he also claims that loss of self is disorienting and disturbing. PETER: It is useful to consider that an actual freedom from the human condition is not considered normal by the psychological and psychiatric standards applicable to the human condition. But then again, that is to be expected, is it not. The other relevant point to consider is that Richard is not someone who has suffered brain damage but is someone who has managed by his own efforts to rid himself of malice and sorrow – an event that coincided with the extinction of all traces of either a psychological or psychic ‘self’. RESPONDENT: My hunch is that may be due to the fact that he has studied what he calls ‘secondary emotion’ – that is the processing of the frontal lobe with the functioning of the amygdala still intact. Anyway, this is mostly a pre-formed opinion since I haven’t had sufficient time to mull over the ideas, but I’m wondering if others have read Damasio’s work and what thoughts you might have. PETER: I remember several times being hooked in by the experimental work and theories of neuro-scientists and the like, until I remembered that all they are studying is the functioning of the human brain – the hardware if you like – within the current functioning of the human psyche – the software programming if you like. And that, unlike actualists, they have no interest whatsoever in changing the social and instinctual programming that is the very cause of all the misery and mayhem among human beings on the planet.
PETER: You wrote, quoting something that I had written on the website – RESPONDENT: I’m giving this one last go. I’ll state my case and be done with it. The following is from the Library and Glossary entry of ‘How to become free from the Human Condition.’
What I’d like to point out about this statement is the way it polarizes the path to actual freedom on the ‘happy’ side and the ‘human condition’ on the ‘miserable’ side. Richard tells me that a person in the ‘human’ world can be reasonably happy. Even Peter and Vineeto seem to think that a ‘human’ life can have value. Yet, there is absolutely none of this in the quoted statement above. If it were stated that ‘the choice is simple, it’s either a life with misery, pain, and not fully living or...’ – then a statement like that leaves room for even the value of a ‘human’ life. It’s just difficult for me to reconcile how one could even be ‘reasonably happy’ and also living a ‘death-like’ life. I’m sorry, ‘death-like’ life just does not fit my description of every ‘human’ on the planet. How could I feel good about raising my son to live an almost inevitable ‘death-like’ life? I’m glad that I am able to experience living directly for myself rather than trying to believe this sort of oversimplification that appears on the Actual Freedom Trust website. I know plenty of religious people even who are by no means living a ‘death-like’ life. I don’t see how one’s life could even be of value or meaningful if this stark picture is correct. Life is no ‘cake-walk’ in Gary’s words, yet even a ‘human’ life is not devoid of delight and happiness. This exaggeration appears to possibly be an overreaction to the failure of it’s author’s own ‘tried and failed’ spirituality. Maybe it will be said that I’m not reading with ‘both eyes open.’ Or, that I am taking the words too seriously – since it’s experience after all that matters. Well, what happens when experience says that the words are just plain wrong? And possibly hazardous? PETER: When I first started to be interested in actualism, I lead a normal human life and I was indeed ‘reasonably happy’. I had a job that I was good at and that I liked doing, I was living in the subtropics in a very nice little house within walking distance of the Pacific Ocean in a small town and I enjoyed all the comforts and pleasures of living by myself. When I began my investigations into the human condition, I discovered that I was reasonably happy only because I didn’t watch the evening news on television and my years of spiritual practice had furnished me with an armour of self-righteousness that meant that I blamed everyone else for the ills of the world while blithely denying my own contribution to the malice and sorrow of the human condition. Having said that, I do take your point that for someone who is reasonably happy with his or her life as-it-is, then this statement can be quite shocking. The quote you posted is from the website Library entry ‘How to Become Free from the Human Condition’ but originally this passage came from my Journal. It perhaps reads better in its original context. I’ll post the relevant section for you to judge.
As you can see, the passage you quoted was written at the time when I finally got my head out of the clouds and started to allow myself once again to become sensitive to the horrors of the human condition. I turned on the television again, started to became aware of the world as-it-is and started to allow myself to feel all those feelings I had cut off from or subjugated in my spiritual days. I started to feel my anger and indignation, self-righteousness, sadness and despair, fear and terror. In short, I started, for the first time, to get in touch with the full range of my feelings. I also remembered what had started me being really serious about my search for freedom and that was a realization that I had had some years earlier. I had a vivid experience that I was living my life as if I was in a straight jacket from which I desperately yearned to be free. Not free as in needing to ‘wake up’ from my dream-like state and by doing so become Awakened as yet another Saviour of Mankind, but free as I had experienced freedom in a pure consciousness experience. In a pure consciousness experience, this flesh and blood body is suddenly magically freed of ‘me’, the parasitical entity that thinks and feels he lives ‘inside’ the body. In a PCE it is startlingly evident that ‘I’ do not exist as an actuality – it is as though ‘I’ had never existed. I as this flesh and blood body sans any psychological or psychic entity whatsoever, suddenly found myself in the paradisiacal actual world of sensual delight. There was an utter stillness, a stillness that has a vibrant aliveness to it that is scintillating and sensately rich. There is an utter purity because there is no evil in the actual world, and there is an utter perfection for actual world is peerless. It is as though one is fully alive for the first time in one’s life, one’s senses are literally on stalks delighting in seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, tasting, thinking and reflecting and in being aware of the experience of being alive. From the perspective of this experience of utter freedom from the human condition, brought on by the temporary disappearance of ‘me’, returning to being ‘normal’ is experienced as being once more cut off from the magnificence of the actual world. In other words, I experienced normal/spiritual life as a being a death-like state compared with the experience of being fully alive, as a flesh and blood body only, in the actual world. I don’t know if this explanation helps to throw some light on the passage you objected to, but I thought putting it in context might help. When I look back on some of my previous writing, there are things I see now that I could have said better, or that could have been made clearer. I started going over some of my writings at one stage but the task became too daunting, particularly as I was also replying to correspondents as well. In the end, I decided that re-editing might also take some of the passionate flavour out of my descriptions of my early explorations and discoveries about the nature of the human condition and of the dawning of ‘my’ own instinctual complicity in the human condition – the discovery that I was as mad and as bad as everyone else, was how I described it at the time. So, while I appreciate your feedback and comments, given what I’ve said above, I’ll let the passage stand as-it-is as an apt expression of my experience at that time in my early stages of actualism and the contrast between being reasonably happy with my life as it was and the experience of being fully alive as experienced in a PCE.
PETER: I, as this flesh and blood body sans any psychological or psychic entity whatsoever, suddenly found myself in the paradisiacal actual world of sensual delight. There was an utter stillness, a stillness that has a vibrant aliveness to it that is scintillating and sensately rich. There is an utter purity because there is no evil in the actual world and there is an utter perfection for actual world is peerless. It is as though one is fully alive for the first time in one’s life, one’s senses are literally on stalks delighting in seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, tasting, thinking and reflecting and in being aware of the experience of being alive. From the perspective of this experience of utter freedom from the human condition, brought on by the temporary disappearance of ‘me’, returning to being ‘normal’ is experienced as being once more cut off from the magnificence of the actual world. In other words, I experienced normal/spiritual life as a being a death-like state compared with the experience of being fully alive, as a flesh and blood body only, in the actual world. I don’t know if this explanation helps to throw some light on the passage you objected to, but I thought putting it in context might help. <snip> So, while I appreciate your feedback and comments, given what I’ve said above, I’ll let the passage stand as-it-is as an apt expression of my experience at that time in my early stages of actualism and the contrast between being reasonably happy with my life as it was and the experience of being fully alive as experienced in a PCE. RESPONDENT: Thanks for putting the passage I objected to into context for me. I do find it helpful. It seems to me that you were using the phrase ‘death-like’ in the context of sort of a ‘crossroads’ experience – only two choices available – living fully or settling for being separated from the actual world – which can feel ‘death-like.’ PETER: Let’s not forget that what is on offer on this list is the third alternative. There are three choices – remaining normal where the best on offer is to be reasonably happy, or becoming spiritual where the best on offer is a dream-like utterly-selfish state of God-realization or a ‘God-and-I-are-best-mates’ scenario … or becoming actually free of the whole lot. RESPONDENT: Put into context, I have no objection to your description. It is rather quite a good description when understood as your experience. PETER: Not just my experience, but an experience that everyone has had at some times in their life. RESPONDENT: I have to wonder though about how it is related in the entry ‘How to Become Free of the Human Condition.’ Let’s juxtapose the two statements... from your Journal...
then from the entry, How to Become Free from the Human Condition...
I can appreciate the sensibility in reusing material that is already written. The second passage drops the reference to the personal, the ‘for me’ part. The way it reads then becomes universalised – as if this is the case for all. PETER: Given that everybody has had a PCE at some stage in his or her life, what I am talking of is universal. I would remind you that you have written of having such an experience yourself –
PETER: I would suggest from your description that you may well be able to relate to what I am saying. After all, you did open this conversation by saying –
RESPONDENT: It also drops any sort of reference to your personally experienced PCE and the vitality of the actual world that you experienced. It seems to me that it was a vital part of your experience – both remembering a PCE and realizing that it is possible for you to make your way to the actual world – not to mention your personal life history and trajectory. So it seems to me that ‘death like’ phrase is ripe for misunderstanding if it didn’t refer back to your experience – which is not referenced in the entry ‘How to Become Free from the Human Condition.’ PETER: Are you implying that every passage I write has to be prefaced in this way when what I am talking about is universal, i.e. personal to everyone? RESPONDENT: Wouldn’t it be an easy jump from reading the second passage to the idea that a life lived in the ‘real’ world is not a life worth living at all? PETER: Apparently so, but then again, it never occurred to me that anyone who was genuinely interested in actualism would want to mount a defence of the ‘real’ world. I always assumed I was writing to someone who was dissatisfied with their life as-it-is in the ‘real’ world. If I can put it another way – the passage you are objecting to is on the Actualism web-site in a section entitled ‘How to become free of the Human Condition’. It has not been spoken from a soapbox on a street corner, it is not in a pamphlet dropped into your letterbox. The location of the passage presupposes that the person reading it is interested in becoming free from the human condition and, as such, some plain talking would seem appropriate. RESPONDENT: Now the reason this sort of question is important for me is because that I realized as I was putting the AF method in practice for me – it became very important how I considered the value of the lives of others. PETER: Speaking personally, when I began to put the actualism method into practice I simultaneously began to focus my attention on my own life. This was because I came to understand that the only person I can change, and need to change, is me. By doing so I took what Richard was saying personally whilst also regarding it as being universal in that I am but one of an estimated 6 billion human beings on the planet ensnared within the human condition. RESPONDENT: Is it worth bringing children into the ‘real’ world? PETER: It seems that you are a bit late in asking that question. RESPONDENT: What sort of happiness can we want for them? PETER: My experience is that children learn a lot from observing their parents. This meant that, like it or not, I had to lead by example – which is why I found it impossible not to take up the offer to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless. RESPONDENT: If one sees a life in the ‘real’ world as worthless – then it can get rather depressing – very quick. PETER: If I may suggest, the alternative to becoming depressed is to make sure you do something worthwhile with your life. RESPONDENT: Now, I don’t see you, Richard, and Vineeto as saying that a life lived in the ‘real’ world is without worth – yet it seems hard to reconcile a description of life in the ‘real’ world as ‘death-like’ with a description of life in the ‘real’ world as ‘valuable’ or ‘worthwhile.’ But, maybe I’m reading too much into the description of ‘death-like.’ If it’s possible to be both ‘reasonably happy’ and ‘death-like’ at the same time, then I suppose we can just call it a quirk of language and how our experience is expressed with language. PETER: And yet you said at the start of this post –
I don’t see your difficulties in reconciling living life in the ‘real’ world with the experience of being free of the human condition as a quirk of language at all, but rather that you are trying to reconcile the description in question from the standpoint of two distinct experiences. For someone who is reasonably happy with the experience of being a being in the ‘real’ world the description can be felt to be offensive, but for someone who remembers a PCE – the experience of being fully alive, sans identity, in the actual world – the description is a matter of fact statement. Perhaps this will be of some use in understanding the nature of the quandary you seem to have arrived at, at this stage of your investigations. All sorts of doubts and hesitations arise whenever anyone is faced with chucking out the old and beginning something entirely new. Despite this resistance for things new, the universe itself has an inbuilt propensity for betterment that can be seen in action in the human species as a combination of daring, curiosity, naiveté, altruism and intelligence. These qualities are what an actualist continually taps into on his or her path to becoming free of the well-and-truly-passed-its-use-by-date human condition.
PETER: I’ve been reflecting on our conversation about my use of the phrase ‘death-like’ to describe the experience of normal living compared to the vibrancy of a pure consciousness experience. I questioned whether I was being stubborn about my use of the phrase and whether another term would be more appropriate in the ‘How to become free of the human condition’ section of Actualism. You seem to favour ‘not fully alive’ for normal living, whereas Richard uses the term ‘second-best’, and ‘second-rate’ is another that comes to mind. I tend to stay clear of terms that allude to the spiritual-affective altered states of consciousness when referring to a down-to-earth sensual experience of the actual world and to me ‘fully’ could have that connation, given that its opposite is empty. However, it is useful to remember that what we are discussing is the appropriateness, or inappropriateness, of a term describing the radical difference between ‘normal’ self-centred experience and the self-less experience that everybody has briefly experienced at some time in their life in a PCE. Given that Richard and Vineeto have used other expressions to describe this difference, you may well also find another term more relevant to describe your own experience of the difference between normal life and a PCE. I have given a good deal of thought to the term ‘death-like’ and have decided to keep it as it is, as it is my description of the difference. What is also apparent is that any objections to the writings of actualism by anyone who is genuinely interested in actualism can lead to discussions such as this – discussions which can only serve to provoke those subscribed to the mailing list into thinking a bit more deeply about what it really means to become free of the human condition. It would be a pity to get bogged down in semantics in our discussion and risk losing sight of the bigger picture – actualizing peace on earth between human beings.
PETER: I’ve been reflecting on our conversation about my use of the phrase ‘death-like’ to describe the experience of normal living compared to the vibrancy of a pure consciousness experience. I questioned whether I was being stubborn about my use of the phrase and whether another term would be more appropriate in the ‘How to become free of the human condition’ section of Actualism. You seem to favour ‘not fully alive’ for normal living, whereas Richard uses the term ‘second-best’, and ‘second-rate’ is another that comes to mind. I tend to stay clear of terms that allude to the spiritual-affective altered states of consciousness when referring to a down-to-earth sensual experience of the actual world and to me ‘fully’ could have that connation, given that its opposite is empty. RESPONDENT: I personally like ‘second-best’ or ‘second-rate.’ It lets you know that it doesn’t measure up to what’s possible, yet it doesn’t polarize into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ I hadn’t thought of the word ‘fully’ as polarizing into ‘fully’ and ‘empty’ but I suppose one could read it that way. I was rather thinking of actual freedom as being ‘fully’ living and ‘normal’ human life as ‘not so fully,’ living but certainly not ‘empty.’ My concern with polarizing language is not only a hurdle that I have run into personally, but something I think others will run into as well when coming to actualist writings. I do think it’s in the Actual Freedom Trust’s best interest to steer clear from ‘polarizing’ language when entering into dialogue with the rest of the ‘human’ race. The less accurate representation is given of life in the ‘real’ world, the less chance that dialogue will ‘pay off.’ PETER: Given that actualism points to a freedom that is the polar opposite of the traditional spiritual freedom, it is inevitable that the majority of readers will read into the actualism writings either a personal or a general condemnation that is simply not there. The topics that are being talked about openly on this mailing list are by their very nature confrontational and as such will bring forth attitudes and feelings that are ‘polarising’. But to attempt to censure, water down or stifle these discussions in order to make the dialogues ‘pay off’ is to miss the whole point of actualism. * PETER: However, it is useful to remember that what we are discussing is the appropriateness, or inappropriateness, of a term describing the radical difference between ‘normal’ self-centred experience and the self-less experience that everybody has briefly experienced at some time in their life in a PCE. Given that Richard and Vineeto have used other expressions to describe this difference, you may well also find another term more relevant to describe your own experience of the difference between normal life and a PCE. I have given a good deal of thought to the term ‘death-like’ and have decided to keep it as it is, as it is my description of the difference. RESPONDENT: I appreciate your consideration of the ‘appropriateness’ of the term ‘death-like’ to ‘normal’ human life. You again appeal to your own experience and say that others may talk about it differently – so I can only reiterate the importance of the difference between speaking personally and universally. I have directed your attention previously to two different contexts...
PETER: And I don’t have anything to add to what I have said previously. * PETER: What is also apparent is that any objections to the writings of actualism by anyone who is genuinely interested in actualism can lead to discussions such as this – discussions which can only serve to provoke those subscribed to the mailing list into thinking a bit more deeply about what it really means to become free of the human condition. It would be a pity to get bogged down in semantics in our discussion and risk losing sight of the bigger picture – actualizing peace on earth between human beings. RESPONDENT: Agreed. I’ve also run into similar issues with Richard’s usage of the word ‘pathetic.’ On the one hand, he’ll refer to life in the ‘real’ world as ‘pathetic’, yet on the other still possibly wonderful and meaningful. Such is semantics. PETER: I have no idea what you are agreeing with. You seem to be skipping through the actualism writings in order to search for words that you object to. By reading in this fashion you run the risk of losing sight of the fact that Richard’s writings always describe actuality and always point to the bigger picture – the greatest challenge facing all human beings, actualizing peace on earth. RESPONDENT: One other point – No 33 brought into this discussion the idea of a ‘bird’s eye view’. I think that point is relevant here to the general issue of semantics. Tom Nagel, the philosopher, has brought into recent philosophical discussion a distinction of a ‘view from nowhere’ versus ‘what it’s like from the inside’. PETER: Personally I don’t relate to the idea of a bird’s eye view, let alone ‘the distinction of a ‘view from nowhere’ versus ‘what it’s like from the inside’’. When I recalled my first substantive PCE, I wrote about how I experienced the actual world and it was a sensual experience – as ‘down-to-earth’ an experience as you can get.
RESPONDENT: The relevance of that sort of distinction is to see that from a ‘bird’s eye’ view – my life and all it comprises can be ‘puny’ or ‘pathetic’ – even from the point of view of a PCE, my life in the ‘real’ world can be seen as ‘death-like’ – but it is due to the sheer contrast of perspective – when one resumes life in the ‘real’ world – it just won’t work to see one’s life as ‘pathetic’ or ‘death-like’. From the subjective point of view, people describing your life from the ‘bird’s eye’ view or even the ‘PCE view’ are to be disregarded as irrelevant – or worse, can become a ‘threat’. PETER: The other point that is relevant to your objections is how I experienced other human beings in my PCE – they were fellow human beings.
No matter what others read into the actualism writings, the intention of the Actual Freedom website has always been to simply convey information to fellow human beings that it is now possible to become actually free of the human condition. Speaking personally, an integral part of this process of becoming free of the human condition is the essential understanding that we are all fellow human beings and this understanding has always been an undercurrent in my intent in writing to others. Whilst others may instinctively react to what I am saying and feel it to be polarising in some way, what is in fact being offered is information that is invaluable to any of my fellow human beings who wish to become from free of the human condition of malice and sorrow. RESPONDENT: I’m sorry, but I’m not planning to raise my children to live ‘death-like’ lives – holding out some pathetic hope that maybe, just maybe they will eventually become virtually or actually free at maybe age 40 or 50 – after being knocked around by the ‘real world’ awhile. Lived from within the ‘real’ world – one’s attention gets focused on a smaller horizon than the universal point of view can afford – it’s only when one looks at it from the point of view of Perfection does one become disillusioned and want something more. I realize that I’ve extended the discussion into other areas at this point. I don’t mean to distract current issue of the use of the ‘death-like’ phrase. I just thought this might be a good time to add some thoughts that have ‘spun out’ from this. PETER: I have commented on the matter of raising children in previous posts and received no reply so I had assumed you were not interested in pursuing the topic. If you want to pursue the subject further, just let me know. However, the main issue at hand on this list is not the raising of children but how adults can become first virtually, and then actually, free of the human condition. There is a belief amongst many that adults can learn a lot from the’ wisdom’ and ‘innocence’ of children – a belief that only points to the paucity of a sensible down-to-earth approach to the greatest challenge facing all human beings – actualizing peace on earth. If adults are not willing to make the effort to do it by their own practical example, how can we ever expect our children to learn?
RESPONDENT: It seems to me that this particular thread is coming to a close, so I took the liberty of only responding to one section of your last post, since my intention is to bring this particular discussion to an end. * PETER: It would be a pity to get bogged down in semantics in our discussion and risk losing sight of the bigger picture – actualizing peace on earth between human beings. RESPONDENT: Agreed. I’ve also run into similar issues with Richard’s usage of the word ‘pathetic.’ On the one hand, he’ll refer to life in the ‘real’ world as ‘pathetic’, yet on the other still possibly wonderful and meaningful. Such is semantics. PETER: I have no idea what you are agreeing with. RESPONDENT: I intended to agree with your statement that ‘It would be a pity to get bogged down in semantics in our discussion and risk losing sight of the bigger picture.’ PETER: Okay. It was just that your agreement was immediately followed by another example of focussing on particular words rather than on the bigger picture. On reflection, I also see that my use of the word ‘semantics’ may have been inappropriate because wanting to be clear about the meaning of words is obviously a sensible thing to do. However in many cases correspondents have focussed their attention on particular words solely because they find them personally offensive – a fixation which only prevented them from being able to see the bigger picture of what is on offer in actualism. Vineeto calls this being hampered by a ‘myopic vision’ – the inevitable result of the innate ‘self’-centredness programmed into each and every human being. * PETER: You seem to be skipping through the actualism writings in order to search for words that you object to. RESPONDENT: This certainly has never been my intention. PETER: It would appear that the many previous correspondents who were initially attracted to actualism never intended to go nit-picking through the writings but they ended up doing so anyway. T’is a strange phenomenon because I doubt if these same people ever bothered, let alone ever dared, to put the famed spiritual teachings to a similar scrutiny. But then again, all one needs to do is believe the spiritual teachings and Holy Scriptures and one gets an instant feeling of belonging and self-gratification, whereas if one is at all interested in being fully alive, here in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are, then actualism becomes a confrontational challenge to one’s own ‘self’-centred thoughts and feelings. * PETER: By reading in this fashion you run the risk of losing sight of the fact that Richard’s writings always describe actuality and always point to the bigger picture – the greatest challenge facing all human beings, actualizing peace on earth. RESPONDENT: I agree with this statement as well – I am willing to disregard semantics, except when it interferes with understanding, and I see my concerns regarding semantics have been unconvincing – no problem. PETER: As I said, my use of the word semantics was inappropriate, but I take your point. RESPONDENT: I’m quite willing to get back to the main event ... actualizing peace on earth :o) PETER: If I can just reiterate that I am not stymieing objections, doubts or questions – far from it. What I am saying is to be wary of not losing sight of the bigger picture on offer whilst making your investigations. The way to stay focussed is to have an aim or purpose to one’s investigations and for an actualist this aim is to become unconditionally happy and unconditionally harmless. I used to spend days, weeks or months nutting out some particular issue or other until the ‘Ah! Yes’ clicked in and the issue was resolved such that it didn’t come back any more. Once I had an issue running I would not let up until it was resolved completely, not only intellectually but also experientially. I did this by becoming attentive to my emotional reactions to the issue – be they annoyance, frustration, angst, sorrow, indifference, apathy, acceptance, or whatever. This attentiveness inexorably led to an in-depth investigation and exposure of my precious morals, ethics, opinions and beliefs contiguous to the issue – which then allowed me to become aware of the animal instinctual passions that lay in stealth beneath my ‘self’-serving veneer of ‘goodness’. When I finally came to clearly understand the facts of a particular issue – both intellectually and experientially – my normal ‘self’-centred reactions, objections, worries, feelings and passions about the issue disappeared such that I was more able to be happy and harmless more of the time – which in turn meant that I had more time to be more able to appreciate and savour the delights of being here in the world as-it-is with people as they are. There is no better business than actualizing peace on earth.
RESPONDENT: I took some time away from the list for a while in order to sort some things out regarding my current attempt at actualism. The main focus I want to operate with now is experiential. It became apparent that some of my ‘clashes’ with some of you have had their roots in my attempted analytical/emotional understanding – rather than tested out in experience – thus, I often treated much of what was said as having implications for me that they just don’t need to have. PETER: Although most of the posts on this list are a one-to-one communication, the nature of what is being discussed should be of interest to all and applicable to all. This is because what is being discussed on this list is the human condition of malice and sorrow and how to become free of it. Only by understanding and acknowledging that the human condition is universal to all human beings can one stop being a supporter of the status quo, stop defending the indefensible, stop denying one’s own feelings of malice, stop indulging in one’s own feelings of sorrow and take up the challenge of becoming actually happy and harmless. RESPONDENT: Anyway, I’d like to invite any and all of you to give your input regarding my reflections – and I say this especially for Vineeto, since I have the sense that you (Vineeto) think that I don’t value your input – I do value your input. My former evaluation of your style was probably too hasty. PETER: Speaking personally, I always value the sincerity of input, and matters of style are way down my list. RESPONDENT: A quick note on an experience I had the other night... I was experiencing some anxiousness about the ‘meaning of life’ and noticed that much of my thoughts revolve around searching for an enduring value or figuring out whether my life has had enough enjoyment – wondering how I would evaluate my life if I were lying on my death bed... when I realized how silly the whole thing was ... why would I spend my final moments reminiscing about the past – which is not even present anyway? PETER: I am always somewhat surprised that so few people seem to stop to spend the time to do a bit of stocktaking and re-evaluating as to what they have done and where they are headed. Many of my generation had both the opportunity and time to think about the ‘meaning of life’ and many indeed did begin searching for something better than grim reality and something less shonky and self-indulgent than Olde Time Religion. Unfortunately, most followed fashion and found Eastern religion and that sucked the very life out of them. By becoming believers in Truth, they have become as morally-superior and as intellectually-disingenuous as the countless generations before them who surrendered their will to a mythical God in exchange for a front row seat in an imaginary afterlife. And I can only say this because I too went down that path for a good many years. And the only reason I stopped being a follower and a believer was that I took the time to do some stocktaking and re-evaluating of my life – and I didn’t like what I saw, so I determined to change. Better to make such evaluations now – even if it involves contemplating lying on your deathbed – and make the necessary changes now rather than end up dying in sad regret of never having fully lived. RESPONDENT: It was strange to recognize that I often spend my time looking for some narrative that ties ‘my’ life together into some meaningful narrative, and I realized that this sort of enterprise is one of the hopeless things that ‘I’ do, since the ‘meaning’ of my life depends upon some interpretation of the events of my life. PETER: Who else but you is going to interpret the events of your life and who else but you is going to determine what meaning it should have? There is no one better qualified, or more vitally interested, than you to decide what to do with your life. I know, for me, it was glaringly obvious that if I wanted to become free of the human condition in toto, then the doing of it was up to ‘me’. RESPONDENT: Then and there I realized experientially, not just intellectually, that this is my only moment of being alive – what a waste to cling to the past or future! Or to try and compose meaningful narratives out of the past and future – any such emotional story is always ‘up for grabs’ and must be defended by the identity. Anyway, it dawned on me that the only reliable meaning one can find is ‘now’ – since that’s all that’s actually here, now. :o) PETER: Given that you have asked for input on your reflections, I will offer some suggestions based upon my experience as an actualist. They are only suggestions but you might well find them useful. Whenever I had an experiential realization that this is the only moment I can experience being alive I deliberately made the effort to focus my attention on sensate experiencing, be it hearing the full range of sounds about, smelling the smells of various things, seeing with either soft-focused or investigative eyes, feeling with the whole of one’s skin or the touch of the finger and taking the time to savour the variety and intensity of taste. By doing so I started to become more aware of and more familiar with the sensual pleasures of the physical world. Cultivating this awareness and familiarity leads to a sensual delight in being here which in turn can sometimes lead to a delicious slipping into a PCE of the actual world. As well as focussing my attention on sensate experiencing of the physical world, I would often deliberately contemplate on the nature of the physical world. This meant that in looking at the sky, I started to understand that we human animals ‘swim’ at the bottom of the earth’s atmosphere rather as fish swim in the sea. The air we breathe in and out and move around in ebbs and flows in the form of breezes and winds, its temperature varies seasonally, daily and often momentarily, it varies in moisture content between dry and decidedly wet and visually it offers a constantly changing scene varying from starless or star-filled nights, endless varieties of sunrises and sunsets, and a constantly changing scene of cloudless or cloud-filled days. Added to all this is the precipitation cycle that draws water from the land and oceans and deposits it around the planet in the form of rain, constantly nourishing the vegetate life and thereby sustaining the animate life on the planet. This very same combination of sensate experience and reflective contemplation can be applied to all of the physical world we live in, without discrimination. Thus the materials, objects, tools and machines that human beings fashion out of the earth equally become things of fascination – the very matter of the earth made even more wondrous by the application of ingenuity. Over time these experiences of sensual delight in being here can develop into a marvelling at being here doing this business of being alive and then things really get cooking because you then start to become obsessive about wanting to live this experience as an on-going actuality, 24/7. What can also be gleaned from such moments – provided one is observant and doesn’t latch onto the experience and claim it for one’s own self-aggrandizement – is that such moments of sensual experiencing and pure contemplation only occur when ‘I’ am absent. You can observe that such moments weren’t occurring when I was feeling bored or lacklustre a while ago, in fact it couldn’t have occurred then because the predominant experience I was having then was feeling bored or lacklustre. In such moments you can realize that only ‘I’ stand in the way of the perfection and purity of the actual world becoming apparent. Then it is clearly seen that ‘me’ is the problem, not ‘me’ choosing to ‘cling to the past or future!’ or attempting to ‘try and compose meaningful narratives out of the past and future’ . In such moments you can realize that the traditional approach of practicing detachment (as in not-clinging) and practicing denial (as in no past and no future) can only lead to disassociative states of being – the antithesis of the experience of being fully alive in this very moment of time, in this very place in physical space. What actualism offers is a way of progressively dismantling ‘me’, the spoiler who stands in the way of the pure consciousness experiencing of being fully alive in the actual world. Actualism is not about dissociating from, or associating with, the grim reality of normal human experiencing. What is on offer is a third alternative – eliminating ‘who’ you think and feel you are and discovering what you are – but for this to happen work needs to be done to get from A to B. As you have probably gathered, the main point of my input regarding your reflections is to encourage you to more and more make your contemplations as down-to-earth as possible. This way you not only avoid the trap of spirituality but you will find yourself more and more coming to your senses, both literally and figuratively.
PETER: I would just like to make a comment about the subject of ‘dumb’ questions before I reply to your post.
Asking questions is a sign of interest and curiosity and listening to and carefully weighing up the answers is a sign of sincerity and intelligence. I remember watching a television documentary about the so-called intelligence of chimpanzees and much ado was made of the fact that some use twigs to pick ants out of a nest or use rocks to crack nuts open. And yet what struck me most was a segment which showed chimps sitting in the rain getting soaking wet – obviously their so-called intelligence didn’t extend to such a basic thing as finding shelter, let alone fashioning it out of branches and leaves. Nowadays I make the same observation whenever I see human beings hiding from the world in meditation, praying to some mythical God or lapping up the Wisdom of some Godman or other in unquestioning reverence. Human beings have become so stuck in the ancient rut of believing the spiritual fairy tales of good and evil spirits, of a Creator God and of a life after death that they have collectively agreed to completely shut out the possibility that it is possible to leave the old behind and move on. So any questions you have of daring to leave the old behind and move on are hardly dumb questions, for to even consider the possibility of ditching the old is daring, not dumb. You may well feel foolish in asking your questions, as I remember I did in the early days, but I came to recognize this as pride standing in the way. I then realized that it was silly to let a feeling stand in the way of my becoming free of the human condition. * RESPONDENT: I took some time away from the list for a while in order to sort some things out regarding my current attempt at actualism. The main focus I want to operate with now is experiential. It became apparent that some of my ‘clashes’ with some of you have had their roots in my attempted analytical/emotional understanding – rather than tested out in experience – thus, I often treated much of what was said as having implications for me that they just don’t need to have. PETER: Although most of the posts on this list are a one-to-one communication, the nature of what is being discussed should be of interest to all and applicable to all. This is because what is being discussed on this list is the human condition of malice and sorrow and how to become free of it. Only by understanding and acknowledging that the human condition is universal to all human beings can one stop being a supporter of the status quo, stop defending the indefensible, stop denying one’s own feelings of malice, stop indulging in one’s own feelings of sorrow and take up the challenge of becoming actually happy and harmless. RESPONDENT: My understanding of the ‘human condition’ has changed quite dramatically the last year or so – as a result of encountering actualism. Whereas I used to understand the ‘human condition’ as a rather abstract term which referred to the fact that there is so much suffering in the world, I can see that actualism gives it quite a unique and more interesting meaning. As I see it now, for the actualist, the ‘human condition’ refers mainly to something concrete – that is the instinctual passions one is born with – and all that results from that basic fact. I remember Vineeto once calling the human condition a ‘disease’ – which I didn’t like, since I saw many people who are generally relatively happy individuals, but now I agree it is a disease – since it refers to the instinctual passions one is born with – it couldn’t be anything but a disease. I see that now. I had to understand it first though, before I could agree. PETER: In my early days of actualism I remember asking Richard a ‘dumb’ question as to what was the source of the human condition. He replied that it was the genetically-encoded instinctual survival program – a program that is universal in its basic format in all sentient animals – and in the human species this program manifests itself as instinctual passions, mainly those of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. As I thought more about it, it became obvious that I had each of these passions extant, and flourishing, in me. Despite my good intentions, my moral forthrightness and my spiritual leanings it was obvious to me that I was, at heart, an instinctually driven being – utterly obsessed about my own survival and the survival of my genes. As I became aware of these passions in operation I came to more and more understand and experience that this programming acts not only to prevent my own happiness but also acts to prevent me from being harmless to my fellow human beings. Although I usually like to base my understandings on my own experience, it is also useful to observe others, and by doing so I could see that everyone, without exception, is instinctually driven, which is why the best they can hope for is a relative happiness and a conditional harmlessness. Another observation that can be made is that what human beings proudly call ‘civilized behaviour’ is but a thin veneer that readily dissipates when a person, tribe or nation feels they have their backs to the wall or when they take offence at the words or actions of others. Then the human condition does indeed become ‘something concrete’ – manifested as murder, rape, domestic violence, child abuse, suicide, torture, ethnic cleansings, genocide, acts of terrorism and territorial and religious wars. As you can see, it doesn’t take a great deal of thinking to see the link between your own personal feelings of anger and acts of terrorism and war and your own feelings of sadness and the universal feeling of despair that inflicts all of humankind. * RESPONDENT: A quick note on an experience I had the other night... I was experiencing some anxiousness about the ‘meaning of life’ and noticed that much of my thoughts revolve around searching for an enduring value or figuring out whether my life has had enough enjoyment – wondering how I would evaluate my life if I were lying on my death bed... when I realized how silly the whole thing was ... why would I spend my final moments reminiscing about the past – which is not even present anyway? PETER: I am always somewhat surprised that so few people seem to stop to spend the time to do a bit of stocktaking and re-evaluating as to what they have done and where they are headed. Many of my generation had both the opportunity and time to think about the ‘meaning of life’ and many indeed did begin searching for something better than grim reality and something less shonky and self-indulgent than Olde Time Religion. <snip> And I can only say this because I too went down that path for a good many years. And the only reason I stopped being a follower and a believer was that I took the time to do some stocktaking and re-evaluating of my life – and I didn’t like what I saw so I determined to change. Better to make such evaluations now – even if it involves contemplating lying on your deathbed – and make the necessary changes now rather than end up dying in sad regret of never having fully lived. RESPONDENT: Yes, it seems that ‘stocktaking’ is essential for change to take place. PETER: And in order for any stocktaking to take place, one needs firstly to be sufficiently discontent with one’s own stock in life. * RESPONDENT: It was strange to recognize that I often spend my time looking for some narrative that ties ‘my’ life together into some meaningful narrative, and I realized that this sort of enterprise is one of the hopeless things that ‘I’ do, since the ‘meaning’ of my life depends upon some interpretation of the events of my life. PETER: Who else but you is going to interpret the events of your life and who else but you is going to determine what meaning it should have? There is no one better qualified, or more vitally interested, than you to decide what to do with your life. I know, for me, it was glaringly obvious that if I wanted to become free of the human condition in toto, then the doing of it was up to ‘me’. RESPONDENT: There is no one better qualified for the job than ‘me.’ On the other hand, insofar as the narrative ‘I’ construct depends upon beliefs and hopes for the future – it is always in question – not certain – thus, not entirely reliable. PETER: Given that the ‘narrative ‘I’ construct’ is in fact the life you are leading now, the question remains – what do you want to do with the rest of your life. I know when I came across actualism I had little trouble in reliably assessing that I was far from being free of malice and sorrow and as such the challenge implicit in actualism to devote my life to becoming actually happy and harmless proved irresistible. * PETER: Whenever I had an experiential realization that this is the only moment I can experience being alive I deliberately made the effort to focus my attention on sensate experiencing, be it hearing the full range of sounds about, smelling the smells of various things, seeing with either soft-focused or investigative eyes, feeling with the whole of one’s skin or the touch of the finger and taking the time to savour the variety and intensity of taste. By doing so I started to become more aware of and more familiar with the sensual pleasures of the physical world. Cultivating this awareness and familiarity leads to a sensual delight in being here which in turn can sometimes lead to a delicious slipping into a PCE of the actual world. RESPONDENT: Yes, I know exactly what you mean – and this is why I’m finally getting that an ‘experiential’ approach is the only way to go – or as you call it further down, ‘down-to-earth.’ PETER: It does take a while to get it that what is on offer here is utterly down-to-earth. It is not at all ethereal or other-worldly as is spiritualism nor is it at all about accepting or better coping with the grim reality of normal human experiencing. * PETER: As well as focussing my attention on sensate experiencing of the physical world, I would often deliberately contemplate upon the nature of the physical world. This meant that in looking at the sky, I started to understand that we human animals ‘swim’ at the bottom of the earth’s atmosphere rather as fish swim in the sea. The air we breathe in and out and move around in ebbs and flows in the form of breezes and winds, its temperature varies seasonally, daily and often momentarily, it varies in moisture content between dry and decidedly wet and visually it offers a constantly changing scene varying from starless or star-filled nights, endless varieties of sunrises and sunsets, and a constantly changing scene of cloudless or cloud-filled days. Added to all this is the precipitation cycle that draws water from the land and oceans and deposits it around the planet in the form of rain, constantly nourishing the vegetate life and thereby sustaining the animate life on the planet. This very same combination of sensate experience and reflective contemplation can be applied to all of the physical world we live in, without discrimination. Thus the materials, objects, tools and machines that human beings fashion out of the earth equally become things of fascination – the very matter of the earth made even more wondrous by the application of ingenuity. Over time these experiences of sensual delight in being here can develop into a marvelling at being here doing this business of being alive and then things really get cooking because you then start to become obsessive about wanting to live this experience as an on-going actuality, 24/7. What can also be gleaned from such moments – provided one is observant and doesn’t latch onto the experience and claim it for one’s own self-aggrandizement – is that such moments of sensual experiencing and pure contemplation only occur when ‘I’ am absent. You can observe that such moments weren’t occurring when I was feeling bored or lacklustre a while ago, in fact it couldn’t have occurred then because the predominant experience I was having then was feeling bored or lacklustre. In such moments you can realize that only ‘I’ stand in the way of the perfection and purity of the actual world becoming apparent. Then it is clearly seen that ‘me’ is the problem, not ‘me’ choosing to ‘cling to the past or future!’ or attempting to ‘try and compose meaningful narratives out of the past and future’. In such moments you can realize that the traditional approach of practicing detachment (as in not-clinging) and practicing denial (as in no past and no future) can only lead to disassociative states of being – the antithesis of the experience of being fully alive in this very moment of time, in this very place in physical space. RESPONDENT: Right – it’s not ‘me’ choosing to ‘cling to the past or future’ that is the problem, but ‘me.’ Clinging to the past and future is a symptom, not the cause. I definitely don’t want to go the detachment route – and it’s not so much that there is no past or future – just that the past and future aren’t actual. Now is all that is actual. PETER: And not only is this moment in time the only moment you can experience as an actuality, but this place in physical space is the only place you can experience as an actuality. Those who deliberately practice not-clinging to time (this moment) and space (this physical place) end up wafting around with their head in the clouds, being some-place-else-but-here – the antithesis of fully being here in this moment of time, in this place in physical space. So, if I may suggest, when you contemplate on the fact that this moment in time the only moment you can experience as an actuality, don’t neglect the fact that this place in physical space is the only place you can experience as an actuality – then you will really start to come down to earth for the first time in your life. * PETER: What actualism offers is a way of progressively dismantling ‘me’, the spoiler who stands in the way of the pure consciousness experiencing of being fully alive in the actual world. Actualism is not about dissociating from, or associating with, the grim reality of normal human experiencing. What is on offer is a third alternative – eliminating ‘who’ you think and feel you are and discovering what you are – but for this to happen work needs to be done to get from A to B. As you have probably gathered, the main point of my input regarding your reflections is to encourage you to more and more make your contemplations as down-to-earth as possible. This way you not only avoid the trap of spirituality but you will find yourself more and more coming to your senses, both literally and figuratively. RESPONDENT: Thanks for your input, Peter. Down-to-earth is so much more fun than dissociation! A thought I’ve been mulling lately… It seems that spiritual freedom takes the path of despair – while actual freedom takes the path of delight. PETER: The very idea of spiritual freedom is totally dependent for its existence on the firmly entrenched belief that human existence on earth is essentially a suffering existence. In monotheistic religions this usually equates with being born in sin and the only means of salvation are feelings of repentance combined with a mind-numbing surrender to the authority of some mythical God. In Eastern religions a plethora of fairy tales of the essential misery of human existence abound and Buddhism, the fastest growing of the Eastern religions, is up front in its teachings about life on earth. The Four Noble Truths of Buddha proclaim –
As can be seen from the first Noble Truth, the belief that life is fundamentally disappointment and suffering is fundamental to the Buddhist religion. If you don’t believe this first premise then the whole of Buddhist teachings can be seen for what it is – a moral and ethical teaching that does nothing but promote smug feelings of pious self-righteousness. If you eliminate the belief that life is ‘fundamentally disappointment and suffering’ then you leave a very big hole in the belief in a God, by whatever name, and the belief in a life after death, by whatever tradition. And if you do the necessary work to eliminate not only the belief but the affective experience that life is ‘fundamentally disappointment and suffering’ then the whole frantic pursuit of a spiritual freedom can be seen for what it is – dissociation and self-aggrandizement run amok. And in this process of eliminating these beliefs and invidious feelings what increasingly becomes magically evident are feelings of delight and wonderment at being here, doing this business we call being alive. RESPONDENT: This is starting to be fun :o) PETER: Yep. Once you ditch the seriousness of the moral self-righteousness of spiritual belief there is a lot of fun and freedom to be had in investigating the human condition in toto.
RESPONDENT: Just a general response – as to avoid longwindedness. PETER: In my experience, it’s a tough thing to avoid. I remember trying to write shorter posts at some stage but eventually I gave up. I have found that the programming that makes up the human condition is so complex and so convoluted by the long history of belief and runs so deep that there are no shortcuts to understanding the programming and how it operates. To me it was often like trying to become free of a glue pot and it takes effort and time to do so, hence lengthy posts on occasions. RESPONDENT: I have been keeping your advice in mind over the last few days with some interesting results. First, an emphasis on sensuous attention to the senses – rather than trying to analyze what’s going on in my head. What I find is the more I am able to experience sensuously what is presented by the senses – that intellectual concerns begin to lose significance – since what is actually happening is much more interesting anyway. PETER: Just so you don’t misinterpret what I was saying, I’ll just post a bit from the Library –
The relevant wording is that it is important to discriminate between the ways you experience the world and that this discrimination is done by becoming attentive as to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive. If this discriminating is done by repressing, ignoring or denying affective and cerebral experiencing whilst concentrating on sensate experiencing then it is nothing more than a ‘Stop and smell the roses’ philosophy – a philosophy that does nothing to facilitate a freedom from the human condition. I’m not dismissing your investigations and experiences, far from it. The whole point of the process of actualism is to more and more develop a delight at being here and delight is sensuous appreciation. But don’t forget when you’re not feeling good or not feeling excellent or not experiencing delight then you have something to look at and something to investigate – i.e. there is work to do. I noticed in your post to Richard that you are starting to realize that sincerity and integrity are vital to the actualism method. It is exactly these qualities that will prevent you from deluding or fooling yourself when you ask yourself ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ A little catch phrase that struck me in my early investigations and still sticks in my memory is that ‘fooling others is one thing but fooling myself is really, really silly’. RESPONDENT: It’s amazing what ‘wisdom’ the senses seem to have all on their own – their ability to discern and navigate without ‘me’ doing anything. PETER: Although wisdom is not a word I would use, I like your line of thinking. The observation of how I as this body can and does function remarkably well without that ‘little man in the head’ having to continuously pull at the levers can then lead to observing how many times that little man in the head (and his soul mate in the heart) manage to well and truly stuff things up. And not only for this flesh and blood body, but for others as well. RESPONDENT: Second, yesterday I had several experiences of being ‘near’ PCEs. I know that ‘I’ was still around, but the senses were greatly heightened, yet effortlessly so. I remember reading about someone in virtual freedom talking about the body feeling almost like constant orgasm. Anyway, when those moments happen – I definitely notice a tingling sensation throughout the body that might be described that way. Also, I used to wonder how anyone could find the experience of say, just lying in bed, interesting – but it’s starting to seem to me that it’s not so much ‘what’ is happening or being experienced that is fascinating, but ‘that’ it is happening here and now – that is where the real fascination comes in. PETER: Yep. Feeling excellent and experiencing the delight of being here on this paradisaical planet can be heady stuff – utterly thrilling at times. I can’t remember whether you were around at the time but we did have a discussion on the list some time ago about near PCEs, mini PCEs and so on. What came out of that discussion was the term ‘excellence experience’, so as to maintain a distinction between such experiences and a pure consciousness experience when both ‘I’ and ‘Me’ are temporarily in abeyance. A few links from this correspondence –
… and on the topic of discernment –
I don’t want to be a probity policeman insisting on the use of particular terms however I do see the sense in making a clear distinction between completely different experiences both for the sake of accurate communication and as an aid to fruitful ‘self’-investigation. This is also the very reason I put together the Glossary. As in all fields of scientific study, it is sensible to use commonly understood and agreed upon terminology when studying, personally investigating and discussing the full range of human experiencing – which is after all what this mailing list is about.
PETER: I’m not dismissing your investigations and experiences, far from it. The whole point of the process of actualism is to more and more develop a delight at being here and delight is sensuous appreciation. But don’t forget when you’re not feeling good or not feeling excellent or not experiencing delight then you have something to look at and something to investigate – i.e. there is work to do. RESPONDENT: Right – I do realize that the process of actualism is more than a ‘stop and smell the roses philosophy.’ Another way of putting my change in focus might be (as I’ve been thinking about it lately) living from ‘outside in’ – instead of living from ‘inside out.’ Now these are just words – but what I mean by it is that I find myself often trying to analyze my every thought, feeling and figure out where the motivation is coming from – which tends to be an analytic/ emotional process in itself which doesn’t work. I am certainly not trying to ignore the ‘inner’ processes, feeling, thoughts, etc. that are occurring – simply taking sensation as the starting point for attention. Feelings and thoughts are not ignored, but are second in priority. Now this is only a strategy – certainly not a recommendation for anyone else. It is something I’m attempting to see whether it brings long-term results. Whether I will eventually negate the strategy that anything at all has ‘priority’ in attention – I don’t know – but I also won’t know until I try it. I think ‘where’ this strategy got started is noticing the more ‘cerebral’ one is about all this – the less one is experiencing what is actually present now. PETER: I realize I have to be wary of giving anyone specific advice, particularly as my memory is fading about the details of my early years as an actualist. However, if I read you right, you seem to be becoming increasingly interested in being here and I can relate to that. For me, this change of interest, and focus, came about from two realizations. The first was that the whole crux of Eastern spiritual teachings was to retreat from being here – going ‘inside’ and finding an ‘inner peace’ in a non-physical feeling-only world. The second was the inescapable fact that this is the only moment I can actually – as in sensately – experience and to waste it by being ‘somewhere else’ is but to waste yet another moment. RESPONDENT: There is so much going on in experience that sometimes I wonder where to start – what to look at first – whether to try to ‘take it all in’ – in some indiscriminate way – or to focus on a particular feeling or sensation. I don’t know what your strategies were or are, but this is merely one that I’m exploring right now. (Now, reading back through this, and reflecting on it some more – I’m beginning to think that I already know the answer (from my own experience) as to what takes priority – that is, whatever is preventing me from experiencing this moment completely sensuously – so it must be two-fold – sensuously experience whatever is happening now as well as investigating whatever is preventing the actual. So it’s not likely that any simple ‘outside-in’ strategy would produce lasting results – rather it seems that the ‘priority’ is first of all ‘now’ and ‘feeling good’ by sensuous attention to thoughts, feeling, and sensations – then if one is not ‘feeling-good’ – figure out what is preventing that (now). There very well may be a somewhat subtle seduction in the idea of starting with the senses – since one is ‘pushing away’ or ‘repressing’ what is happening on the ‘inside.’ Thus, possibly avoiding ‘work that needs to be done.’ Was that your point, Peter? PETER: My experience is that what to look at is always obvious – what to look at is what is preventing you from being happy and harmless, right now. Unless your explorations have a down-to-earth intent they will never produce down-to-earth results. RESPONDENT: OK – so I’m disagreeing with myself now – I’m including what I already said about the ‘outside-in’ strategy with this post – though now after the current reflections – I plan to abandon that strategy for the current one which seems to more accurately reflect what I read in general on the actualist site. It’s nice to finally understand ‘why’ a particular process is in place and exactly what it does. There is a world of difference between doing something a particular way because someone else tells you it works – and doing it that way because you see for yourself how it works and exactly what it does.) PETER: Yep. I remember realizing that actualism was not about believing what Richard said was the truth, but finding out for myself whether it was a fact. And the only way to do this is to thoroughly road-test the method for yourself, by yourself. * PETER: Yep. Feeling excellent and experiencing the delight of being here on this paradisaical planet can be heady stuff – utterly thrilling at times. I can’t remember whether you were around at the time but we did have a discussion on the list some time ago about near PCEs, mini PCEs and so on. What came out of that discussion was the term ‘excellence experience’, so as to maintain a distinction between such experiences and a pure consciousness experience when both ‘I’ and ‘Me’ are temporarily in abeyance. <snip > I don’t want to be a probity policeman insisting on the use of particular terms – however I do see the sense in making a clear distinction between completely different experiences both for the sake of accurate communication and as an aid to fruitful ‘self’-investigation. This is also the very reason I put together the Glossary. As in all fields of scientific study, it is sensible to use commonly understood and agreed upon terminology when studying, personally investigating and discussing the full range of human experiencing – which is after all what this mailing list is about. RESPONDENT: I agree that common terminology is useful. I like the term ‘excellence experience’ very much as it seems we need a term for this – and it seems right in line with what a ‘virtual freedom’ would be like, since in those excellence experiences – I do experience being ‘virtually free.’ It seems that some of us – (I’m thinking now of myself, No 38, and No 21 – and I’m sure there would be others) that are groping for a term for this – which is why the terms ‘near-PCE’ or ‘mini-PCE’ are being used. I certainly don’t want to police terms either – but I do like ‘excellence experience’ since it gives the sense of being a sort of imitation or ‘near-PCE’ yet also different in kind. A metaphor I’ve been using lately runs like this. The normal human experience is where the ‘self’ is (or seems to be) in the driver’s seat. An ‘excellence experience,’ ‘near-PCE,’ ‘mini-PCE,’ or virtual freedom even is where the ‘driver-self’ is in the back seat. And an actual freedom or PCE is where the driver has (temporarily in the PCE) exited the car all together. PETER: It’s good fun not only to be making sense of all this but also to be able to communicate with each other in such a straight-forward manner. It is such a refreshing change to have mutual consensus based upon verifiable facts and tangible experience rather than the individual grandstanding and communal disharmony that the disparate beliefs of the spiritual world inevitably produce.
PETER: I’ve been doing some thinking about your post and what you said about your change in focus lately. I’ll just repost the relevant piece as a reminder of what you said – RESPONDENT: I do realize that the process of actualism is more than a ‘stop and smell the roses philosophy.’ Another way of putting my change in focus might be (as I’ve been thinking about it lately) living from ‘outside in’ – instead of living from ‘inside out’. Now these are just words – but what I mean by it is that I find myself often trying to analyze my every thought, feeling and figure out where the motivation is coming from – which tends to be an analytic/ emotional process in itself which doesn’t work. I am certainly not trying to ignore the ‘inner’ processes, feeling, thoughts, etc. that are occurring – simply taking sensation as the starting point for attention. Feelings and thoughts are not ignored, but are second in priority. Now this is only a strategy – certainly not a recommendation for anyone else. It is something I’m attempting to see whether it brings long term results. Whether I will eventually negate the strategy that anything at all has ‘priority’ in attention – I don’t know – but I also won’t know until I try it. I think ‘where’ this strategy got started is noticing the more ‘cerebral’ one is about all this – the less one is experiencing what is actually present now. PETER: The more I thought about what you said, the more I could relate to it. It’s like what I have heard Richard describe as if ‘bringing yourself to the very outer layer of your eyeballs’ and I liked the description so much I have also used it myself. I can also remember describing this shift of focus or of attentiveness as ‘like stopping hiding behind the curtains and bringing yourself to the very front of the stage’. And no doubt other people will have other ways of describing this process of becoming less ‘self’-obsessed and more interested in, and aware of, what is happening ‘outside’, as you describe it. I have just found this piece from my journal that is relevant –
I found it interesting that I had to dig around in my memory to fully relate to what you were saying and on reflection I can see that this is not something I have to consciously make the effort to do now – I have become so accustomed to it that it has become second-nature now. But I do remember that it took constant stubborn effort at the time and I would find myself constantly falling back into not being here for long periods of time. This is not some easy thing we are talking of doing here – it is radically switching one’s focus 180 degrees from normal – ‘inside’, exclusive and ‘self’-centred – to not-normal –‘outside’, inclusive and unconditional. I went through a brief period of berating myself for falling back ‘inside’ until I realized that this was completely natural – the result of how ‘I’ have been programmed to think, feel and operate. I also came to realize that these periods of going back to normal – feeling bored, lacklustre, ‘out of it’, annoyed, melancholic, sad, fearful, and so on, were rich fields, tangible examples of my psyche in operation, ready and ripe for immediate investigation and exploration. Whenever I became aware that I had ‘not been here’ for a while, I immediately wanted to know why, what caused me to revert to normal? Then I would deliberately make an investigation of how my psyche had operated in that time – and the investigation was quite fresh because I could remember the event that triggered the feeling or emotion, I could often still feel the effects of the emotion, I could remember it taking over as it were. I have describe these investigations as periods of ‘self’-obsession – a deliberate and scientific obsession identical to that which a scientist, investigator or explorer has when he or she really wants to get to the bottom of something, once and for all. Sometimes these investigations would go very intensely for days, other times they would stew on the ‘back burner’ for months, sometimes the answer came easily, other times deep-sea diving was necessary, plunging into very dark, forbidding and forbidden places in my psyche. Then when the source was uncovered, the matter resolved, the answer found and the programming eliminated, it was back to feeling good, feeling really good or even feeling excellent. Whilst these explorations seem daunting at first, soon they take on a thrilling fascination and then even the explorations, no matter how daunting, become the very stuff of life itself. Then you find you’re really cooking – as if your life really has meaning for the first time. I think that about covers the ground of what I wanted to say. No doubt I have said all this before anyway, but I always enjoy talking afresh about this stuff, because we are pioneering this business of actualism and any tips or hints we can pass on to each other makes the job easier. I call it ‘trampling the long grass on the path’ – you have to trample your own grass for yourself but in doing so it inevitably makes the path easier for others to follow.
RESPONDENT: I do realize that the process of actualism is more than a ‘stop and smell the roses philosophy.’ Another way of putting my change in focus might be (as I’ve been thinking about it lately) living from ‘outside in’ – instead of living from ‘inside out’. Now these are just words – but what I mean by it is that I find myself often trying to analyze my every thought, feeling and figure out where the motivation is coming from – which tends to be an analytic/ emotional process in itself which doesn’t work. I am certainly not trying to ignore the ‘inner’ processes, feeling, thoughts, etc. that are occurring – simply taking sensation as the starting point for attention. Feelings and thoughts are not ignored, but are second in priority. Now this is only a strategy – certainly not a recommendation for anyone else. It is something I’m attempting to see whether it brings long term results. Whether I will eventually negate the strategy that anything at all has ‘priority’ in attention – I don’t know – but I also won’ t know until I try it. I think ‘where’ this strategy got started is noticing the more ‘cerebral’ one is about all this – the less one is experiencing what is actually present now. PETER: The more I thought about what you said, the more I could relate to it. It’s like what I have heard Richard describe as if ‘bringing yourself to the very outer layer of your eyeballs’ and I liked the description so much I have also used it myself. I can also remember describing this shift of focus or of attentiveness as ‘like stopping hiding behind the curtains and bringing yourself to the very front of the stage’. And no doubt other people will have other ways of describing this process of becoming less ‘self’-obsessed and more interested in, and aware of, what is happening ‘outside’, as you describe it. I have just found this piece from my journal that is relevant –
<Snipped> Whenever I became aware that I had ‘not been here’ for a while, I immediately wanted to know why, what caused me to revert to normal? Then I would deliberately make an investigation of how my psyche had operated in that time – and the investigation was quite fresh because I could remember the event that triggered the feeling or emotion, I could often still feel the effects of the emotion, I could remember it taking over as it were. I have describe these investigations as periods of ‘self’-obsession – a deliberate and scientific obsession identical to that which a scientist, investigator or explorer has when he or she really wants to get to the bottom of something, once and for all. Sometimes these investigations would go very intensely for days, other times they would stew on the ‘back burner’ for months, sometimes the answer came easily, other times deep-sea diving was necessary, plunging into very dark, forbidding and forbidden places in my psyche. Then when the source was uncovered, the matter resolved, the answer found and the programming eliminated, it was back to feeling good, feeling really good or even feeling excellent. Whilst these explorations seem daunting at first, soon they take on a thrilling fascination and then even the explorations, no matter how daunting, become the very stuff of life itself. Then you find you’re really cooking – as if your life really has meaning for the first time. RESPONDENT: All of what you say above I can identify with. If there are ‘stages’ of actualism, then this is the ‘stage’ I’m at. One where I must remind myself to ‘ask the question’ or to actually ‘be here now’ – but not as a watcher – rather as the flesh and blood body. Pushing awareness to the surface of the eyes describes it about right. PETER: And of course, one is not actually being here, as a flesh and blood body only, unless one is having a pure conscious experience at the time – a temporary period when there is no ‘I’ inside, or separate from, the corporeal flesh and body that I actually am. Unless I am having a PCE, in which case I am having a temporary experience of actually being here in the actual world, I am always ‘doing my best’ to be here by being continually attentive to how I am experience this moment of being alive. RESPONDENT: Occasionally, I will have some very successful days where things are getting clearer, then I will revert back to ‘normal’ for hours, days, or weeks while I ponder – but lately, I’ve been more determined – basically tired of slipping back to the normal and fearing what consequences following this thing through might bring. It is becoming an irresistible urge – even though ‘I’ might not be able to recognize the end result- or really know where this process leads. PETER: I can relate to this very well. In hindsight, it wasn’t as if I decided to become an actualist – there being no defining moment or definitive decision – but rather I was irresistibly drawn to proceed. All ‘I’ could do was deny, avoid, procrastinate or delay. I have just looked in my Journal and found that I have used the phrase ‘continually attracted’ to describe why I wanted to know about how to become actually free of malice and sorrow. RESPONDENT: There is a point, spot, place – whatever you want to call it where ‘effortless’ is the modus operandi – it seems that mental effort automatically implies a division we experience as ‘self’ – it seems the trick is finding that place where everything happens effortlessly. Effortlessness must be a sign of ‘apperception?’ PETER: Taking into consideration that you said previously – ‘occasionally, I will have some very successful days where things are getting clearer’, I suggest that it might be useful to reflect as to whether this increased clarity came about from effortlessness or from thinking – utilizing the brains capacity for attentiveness, sensual perception, sensible evaluation and contemplative reflection. I only say this because it is fashionable in many circles to denigrate the astounding ability of the human animal to be able to think and reflect and to venerate all sorts of affective experiences and imagination. Perhaps I can put it this way – when I ask myself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ I am asking a question and to come up with an answer requires thinking, aka mental effort. When you say ‘it seems the trick is finding that place where everything happens effortlessly’, I assume from the thread of this conversation that you are talking about getting to the stage where the actualism method is happening effortlessly – an effortless constant sensual attentiveness as to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive. If this assumption is right then I would point out that you have previously said –
If I take your words at face value, they confirm my own experience that it takes determination, i.e.
to eventually get to the stage where a sensual attentiveness becomes effortless. In short, getting from the stage of being interested in actualism to the stage where the process is operating automatically and effortlessly requires effort – there is no other trick to it. If I can refer to a recent comment No 62 made on the list And isn’t it great to find out these things for yourself – to discover that your own freedom is exclusively in your own hands. Given that have said you welcome feedback, I’ll just round off with a comment on – ‘it seems that mental effort automatically implies a division we experience as ‘self’’. If I read you right, this supposition seems to be a hangover from Eastern religious belief wherein the ‘self’ is believed to be a thinking-self or ego-self only and a spurious feeling of freedom is gained by abandoning common sense thinking in an attempt to become a feeling-self only. As you know by now this is old archaic thinking – superstition based on ignorance of fact and empirical observation. To suppose that one can become free of being a psychological and psychic ‘self’ without ‘mental effort’ does not make sense. After all, ‘who’ you think you are is the result of thousands of years of cultural and social programming and ‘who’ you feel you are is the end result of billions of years of the genetically-sequenced struggle for survival of life on this planet. To become free of all of this programming in order for intelligence to be freed from these brutish instinctual passions is no easy task – to abandon thinking in favour of feeling is to forsake this task in favour of ‘self’-preservation. Having said that I can relate to what you are saying as I remember my early days of actualism when I thought that when I was feeling good or feeling excellent then I was ‘being here’ but when I was feeling angry, annoyed, frustrated, worried, sad or so on then I was ‘not being here’. As I began my investigations and ponderings about the nature of the human condition, I also thought I was not ‘being here’ if I was busy nutting out some issue or other, i.e. if I was busy thinking rather than sensately experiencing this moment of being alive. This idea of mine eventually lost credence as I started to become fascinated with, and subsequently began to enjoy, the process of thinking about the human condition and investigating how my psyche was programmed to function. The realization that really blew it out of the water, however, was the experiential realization in a PCE that it is always now and I am always here – I can never be anywhere else but here and I can never actually experience anytime other than now. It follows that if I am busy thinking now then that is what I am doing now, exactly as I am thinking now while typing these words and exactly as you are thinking now reading these words. This leads to the fact that I am often thinking – not always obviously – but to think that I am not here because I am thinking makes no sense at all. What I am saying can be confirmed by observation of what is happening whilst in a pure consciousness experience. In this temporary experience of ‘self’-defection the ability to think and reflect is neither absent nor is it inflamed by passion and imagination. In a PCE the ability to think and reflect is unfettered by beliefs, morals and ethics and is freed from both the savage and tender survival passions. A PCE confirms that who ‘I’ think and feel I am is a chimera, an illusion, someone and something that has no substance, someone and something that is not material, not flesh and blood. Who ‘I’ think and feel I am is not actual like the ‘stuff’ of the universe – be it the vacuum of the spaces between the swirls and lumps of matter in the infinitude of the universe or the play of the clouds across this earthly sky, the air that touches your skin, the warmth of the sun, the scent of a flower, the plastic of a computer keyboard or these fingers typing these words. In a PCE, I experience the actuality of all of this matter. In a PCE, I experience an actual world, existing in fact, sensately experienced as being so alive, so vibrant and so immediate that my identity as a ‘being’ temporarily disappears. With ‘me’ no longer here to rule the roost, as it where, a palpable freedom exists for I experience what I actually am for a period of time – a mortal flesh and blood human being, bristling with sense organs, able to think, reflect, contemplate and communicate as well as being able to be aware that I am aware. In fact, what I am is the very ‘stuff’ of this universe temporarily formed as this flesh and blood body and capable of being aware of this awareness. Or to put it as Richard puts it – ‘what I am is this universe experiencing itself as a flesh and blood human being’. In a PCE – provided you resists the atavistic temptation to start swooning in rapture at the beauty of it all or indulging in ‘self’-aggrandizing fantasies (or else it deteriorates into an ASC) – you can readily discern that the only reason you are experiencing the sensual delight and utter peacefulness of the actual world is because ‘you’ have temporarily left the stage. From this experiential realization pure intent can arise to devote one’s life to the task of becoming happy and harmless – to actively dismantle my ‘self’, to dare to question the veracity of ‘my’ precious beliefs, to want to really come to understand both the nature and the source of the peripheral feelings of ‘self’ and sense of ‘being’ and to not stop until the process is finished and the very source of ‘me’, ‘me’ as a feeling ‘being’, is permanently eliminated, expunged. Then, when the PCE wanes and you return to being ‘normal’ again, back in normal everyday reality, ‘you’ find yourself with something to do. ‘You’ then have a reason for being, a life goal, a task, a job, and a fascinating one at that. And I can vouch that there is no more fascinating and rewarding thing you can do with your life than to devote your life to the task of becoming happy and harmless for this is the path to actual freedom.
Peter’s Text ©The Actual Freedom
Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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