PETER: Hi,

You wrote in regard to a post I sent to Gary –

RESPONDENT: This is one of the best posts I’ve read on this list so far. I’m butting in as some of this stuff dovetails with other threads I’ve been following. It really conveys some pragmatic aspects of AF, and that’s where I’m wrestling. I think the child-rearing example has plenty to chew on.

[Peter to Gary]: As you might have gathered by now, I have abandoned any hope for Humanity as it simply keeps going around in circles, endlessly re-running the tried and failed methods, ideals and beliefs. The next generation frantically digs through the trash bin of history, looks for something that feels good or seems right, dusts it off, blindly ignores all of the evidence of the past failures, forms a group around a charismatic leader and starts to passionately fight the good fight. Enough is enough. <snip> So, in a bid to rope in this rave and wrap it up, the two thoughts that occurred to me was the futility of Humanity’s search for peace by persisting with the long-tried and always-failed methods and how this contrasts with the radical new approach – the do-it-yourself method.

If all else fails, which it clearly is – take unilateral action. Peter to Gary, 20.1.2002

PETER: I might suggest that if it were so easy then there would be peace on earth by now. The problem up until now is the instinctual notion of ‘we’ – the passionate bond that ties human beings together ensures that ‘we’ either sink together or tread water together. As such, ‘we’ will always get it wrong and the only way out of the mess is for individual members of the species to take unilateral action – to lead by practical example, to prove that it is possible to become actually free of malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: I’ve wondered in the past what the next stage of evolution would look like. Certainly the last big one was the development of some measure of self-awareness, perhaps the next is a refinement of that process, a la AF or similar.

PETER: The process of spiritual awareness is totally locked into and fixated with spiritualism. A thorough examination of the process of spiritual awareness will reveal it is a process unabashedly aimed at self-aggrandizing. Why else do those who succeed on the spiritual search end up feeling God-realized or God-like or a God or Goddess? So-called spiritual awareness is in fact a compulsive restriction of awareness in that sensate experience is avoided and sensible thinking is denied. Nowhere is this more obvious than those who sit in the lotus position meditating – retreating from the world of the senses, indulging in imaginary ‘inner’ fantasies and yet claiming they are being here.

The actualism method is not a refinement of the spiritual process of self-aggrandizement – in actualism, the process of ‘self’-awareness is the aimed diametrically opposite – at self-immolation. Or, to put it another way – the spiritual method aims to blow the balloon up, actualism aims to pop it.

RESPONDENT: In the meantime, the wars and political machinations (just to name a very few) just about makes me puke. Given that, what to do? I still have to walk the planet for a while. I’ve been somewhat stuck there recently, trying not to wallow too much, but it’s too easy to succumb to my Irish melancholy sometimes. That way lays madness, so it’s better to adopt a more stoic stance, hence ‘take unilateral action’ makes more sense.

PETER: When I came across actualism, I really didn’t have any other options. I knew by experience that the real world sucked and I also knew by experience that the spiritual world was a wank. That’s why I started, for the first time in my life, to become really interested in being here – and in asking myself how I was experiencing this moment of being alive, this the only moment that I can actually experience. What naturally followed from this was the deliberate decision to make becoming happy and harmless my numero uno goal in life – not number six, not number three, but number one.

Only by doing this is success in becoming happy and harmless guaranteed.

RESPONDENT: Turning back to the pragmatic section of the broadcast...

[Gary]: The only other thing I would mention is that there is another easy way of understanding the nature of the animal instinctual programming that I have run across and that is to observe children. Granted that the children that I work with as a social worker have, in many cases, been horribly abused by their parents and caretakers, but they seem not to have developed the internal controls that are inculcated by society as morals, ethics, and values, and the underlying instinctual package is plain for all to see. The malice and sorrow of these little people, their fights with one another, their pain and suffering, is readily apparent. The children are very obviously in a primitive survival mode almost all the time. The destructiveness of these self-centred passions is something I wrestle with everyday in my work.

[Peter]: Having had children myself and watched others, it is readily apparent that fear, aggression, nurture and desire are instinctual passions and not something that is taught or picked up from others or one’s environment. Chinese anger is the same as African anger and Australian anger. As for the nature vs. nurture debate – the instinctual passions are ‘natural’ in that they are genetically encoded and ‘nurture’ plays a minor role in the degree and manner of suppression or expression of these passions. Even then, the role of ‘nurture’ in the suppression and control of the instinctual passions is by no means certain as innate differences can be readily observed in very young children even with identical upbringing.

[Gary]: There is another thing about nurture, aside from the ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate. There seems to be a feeling among those who I am going to dub ‘nurturists’ that if only enough nurture is supplied to each and every human being, the problems of humanity will be solved and there will no wars, no violence, etc. It’s the old ‘what the world needs now is Love Sweet Love’ syndrome, and it is strong among those who are positive, nurturing types. Obviously children need a great deal of nurturing, and I am not suggesting to stop nurturing them. But nurture does not eliminate the genetically encoded instinctual passions of aggression and fear.

[Peter]: That love fails, and always has failed, can be seen in the bitter-sweet sadness of love songs and the tragedies and melodramas that pass for great love stories. Only in the fairy stories do people live happily ever after and only in mythology do loving societies exist. My experience is when the instinctual passion of nurture kicks in with regard to caring for children, it invariably triggers off the full range of associated instinctual passions. Fear abounds in protecting and providing, aggression kicks in the form of jealousy and possessiveness and desire simply changes focus from sexual hunting to nest-building security, both of which are pursued relentlessly. Exactly as love always fails, the instinctual passion of nurture also fails to deliver the goods for the simple reason that it is impossible to separate the good from the bad in the intertwined package of instinctual passions.  Peter to Gary, 20.1.2002

PETER: The whole point of actualism is to become happy and harmless in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. It’s not about changing your wife or husband, your children, your boss, your neighbour or your living circumstances. It’s not about changing the morals or ethics or the social, political, educational or legal systems of the world. It’s not about stopping other people fighting or feuding, nor is it about saving or salving other people. Actualism is not about changing others – it’s about taking unilateral action and changing yourself, radically and irrevocably.

*

PETER to Gary: Last year I found myself designing a house that was completely foreign to what I would normally consider my style and yet I did the job I was paid to do without a glimmer of resentment or frustration. I did the best I could to give the client what she wanted in the way of style and used my experience and knowledge to ensure that she got best practical value for her money. It was a liberating exercise for me, for not only had I broken free of the values imposed by my vocational training but also of the belief that there is an intrinsic and absolute beauty. As there was no conflict at all between the client and myself, everyone won out of the situation.  Peter to Gary, 20.1.2002

RESPONDENT: Effortless. I’ve had odd moments like that myself in my profession. I think it has something to do too with not being invested in any specific outcome, or its measure. Is this the same as the ‘flow’ we’ve read about?

PETER: There is ample evidence that everyone has experienced brief one-off experiences of perfection and purity, where there is no ‘I’ or ‘me’ present to muck things up. These experiences are commonly called peak experiences although Richard has used the more descriptive term pure consciousness experience (PCE) so as to distinguish these brief moments of ‘self’-lessness from the spiritually-polluted, totally-affective, entirely-imaginary altered states of consciousness (ASC) where an aggrandized ‘self’ claims the experience for his or her own glory.

However, my story was not told as a moral or ethical tale or an instance of wisdom such as the psittacism that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. The story I told was a practical example of the actualism method in action and as such the example falls into the reward-for-effort category. I did not miraculously have a temporary experience of being in the flow – what I was talking about was a pragmatic result of some four years of constantly working on eliminating malice and sorrow from my life. I did not set out to become free of beauty, I set out to become happy and harmless and one of the reoccurring times when I was not harmless was in occasional uncomfortable, difficult or even antagonistic interactions with my clients.

What I eventually tracked these feelings down to was that I had been programmed to regard beauty as an absolute value – something that ‘I’ thought and felt was worth fighting for or worth defending. When I saw that this old program stood in the way of harmonious interactions with my fellow human beings, it was clearly time to eradicate it from my life.

The result of this process was not a moral or ethical decision made based on what I should or shouldn’t do, or what was the right thing to do or what was wrong the wrong thing to do, because this would only mean that I was suppressing the feeling – in other words, kidding myself. The end result of this process was the experiential understanding that maintaining this old piece of programming would mean I was not harmless, and because being harmless is my numero uno goal in life, there was no way I could sustain the ideal or the passion-backed feeling of beauty.

The other discovery that happened when the feeling of beauty collapsed was that the feeling of ugliness collapsed along with it and as a consequence even more of the magic of actuality became apparent in my daily life.

*

PETER to Gary: I’ve noticed I’ve gotten into what could be described as a story telling mode, but my experience is that I have gleaned as much information from listening to Richard’s down-to-earth stories as I have from listening to or reading his Journal and his correspondence. In hindsight, the process of actualism for me firstly involved backtracking out of that great fantasy diversion that all seekers of freedom and peace have traditionally made – the spiritual path. Having got out of that mess, I then found myself back where I left off before I went up that track – making sense of and becoming free of the real-world. I had done a bit of it in my time before I became a spiritualist but I was emboldened and encouraged by Richard’s discovery to go all the way.

I guess that’s why I am writing more about day-to-day down-to-earth ‘real’-word issues with you, because once I got my head out of the spiritual clouds, these are what became my fascination. Peter to Gary, 20.1.2002

RESPONDENT: Stories can provide a non-linear mechanism of information conveyance in those cases where purely intellectual discourse fails (re Gary and I faith/belief). Despite our efforts to break free of our ingrained programs, we still have a socio-cultural language basis. The stories can often carry a lot of information in a very small package.

PETER: I don’t know what you mean by a ‘non-linear mechanism of information’. When I re-read my story, I thought it was reasonably straightforward but maybe the further explanation I gave will be of help in understanding it. I’m not trotting out a spiritual-type wisdom, spinning a mythical yarn or recounting moral tale – I told the story in order to relate my down-to-earth experiences of applying the actualism method to a fellow human being.

Spiritual teachings, both Eastern and Western, are awash with fairy-tale stories of mythical God-like figures and these fairy stories have been passed down and embellished over millennia. The whole point of spiritual stories is that they convey an affective feeling and not that they make intellectual sense, are factual or even relate to actual flesh and blood human beings.

I too am no fan of intellectual discourses but discussing and thinking about an issue in order to make sense of it is another matter entirely. It can take a good deal of effort to break the habits of spiritual indoctrination of thoughtless faithful acceptance – the ingrained ‘socio-cultural-language’ program as you called it – and to start to re-engage one’s brain and learn to think again.

If you take away the socio-cultural-language programming that disparages intellectual discourse you may well find a wealth of information in discussions on this list as well as on the Actual Freedom Trust website that will both facilitate a bare awareness and encourage clear thinking. Only by becoming aware of, and then making sense of, one’s own social and instinctual programming can one ever become free of the human condition.

27.1.2002

RESPONDENT: So, I’m not the only one who is not impressed with the human general state of affairs?

PETER: I might suggest that if it were so easy then there would be peace on earth by now. The problem up until now is the instinctual notion of ‘we’ – the passionate bond that ties human beings together ensures that ‘we’ either sink together or tread water together. As such, ‘we’ will always get it wrong and the only way out of the mess is for individual members of the species to take unilateral action – to lead by practical example, to prove that it is possible to become actually free of malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: Easy is clearly not the right word. Obvious would probably be more suitable. I do have to watch my word selection in this list. ‘We’ cling to our instincts with an iron grip.

PETER: I had similar problems with words when I first came across actualism. I started to become aware how loose I was in the meaning of words but that this was generally the case in any discussions about freedom. I realized that it suited me not to question too deeply what was being said because the freedom I was seeking was a feeling-only, other-worldly experience and not a sensate-only down-to-earth experience. After writing my journal, I set about writing a glossary of common terms used in actualism, giving their dictionary definitions and an explanation of the difference between the word’s actual meaning and its varied and confusing spiritual meanings.

RESPONDENT: Widespread change is always precipitated by individuals who dare to question the status quo, not always to their physical well-being.

PETER: Yep. Those who challenged the status quo of beliefs with the empirical discovery of the actuality of the situation – in other words the facts – often had a hard time of it and Galileo’s treatment stands out as a classic example. Richard’s discovery that it is possible to become free of instinctual malice and sorrow, be it virtually or actually, is still in its infancy but there will come a stage when it becomes more widely known and the opposition will possibly become organized and institutionalized. However, the internet offers a wonderfully subversive means of dissipating this discovery and it is hard to see that censorship will thwart this.

I also remember passing through a phase where I imagined all sorts of retribution would be heaped upon me for being a heretic but the fears eventually wore themselves out in the face of the long-sought-after realization of peace on earth. Simultaneously I also realized that as the process took hold my whole drive to teach others started to collapse and I began to realize that rather than becoming rich and famous, I was also becoming increasingly autonomous and anonymous.

There is an inherent safety in focussing all of one’s attention on changing oneself and not others.

*

PETER: I did not set out to become free of beauty, I set out to become happy and harmless ... <snip> The other discovery that happened when the feeling of beauty collapsed was that the feeling of ugliness collapsed along with it and as a consequence even more of the magic of actuality became apparent in my daily life.

RESPONDENT: Just out of curiosity, how do you appreciate beauty now?

PETER: I don’t, for if I appreciated beauty there would be an equal part of the world of people, things and events that I disparaged, loathed and hated for being ugly. What I discovered was that by affectively classifying things as beautiful or ugly, I automatically missed out on the opportunity of clearly seeing the actuality of this peerless universe. The other aspect that I discovered early on in the process of actualism was that desperately holding on to any of the morals, ethics or values I had been taught to be truths only prevented me from experientially understanding the full scope of the human condition and how it operates in this flesh and blood body.

The whole process of eliminating the affective division of beauty/ugliness from my life started with an intellectual understanding and proceeded experientially as I became aware of how certain aspects of my feelings and emotions interfered with me being happy and harmless. From memory, the first and most obvious aspect was the common-to-all habit of classifying the weather as beautiful or terrible. I quickly saw how my mood was influenced by ‘my’ liking or disliking a fact. This meant that if I woke up in the morning and didn’t like the weather, I had started the day feeling grumpy. It took me only a few days of being aware of these habitual feelings to see how senseless it was to rile against a fact and how it prevented me from being happy and harmless because a grumpy person can never be harmless.

*

RESPONDENT: Stories can provide a non-linear mechanism of information conveyance in those cases where purely intellectual discourse fails (re Gary and I faith/belief). Despite our efforts to break free of our ingrained programs, we still have a socio-cultural-language basis. The stories can often carry a lot of information in a very small package.

PETER: I don’t know what you mean by a ‘non-linear mechanism of information’.

RESPONDENT: Just that a handful of words can convey a meaning greater than the sum of its parts. This predisposes a commonality of ‘socio-cultural-language’ between the sender and recipient. Analogous to the old saw – ‘one picture is worth a thousand words’. Even if I may have eliminated all my programming, any statement I might make to my neighbour will likely carry more implied content than to a Zulu tribesman, for instance.

PETER: My experience was that it took a great deal of conscious effort to take my social-cultural-spiritual bias out of language such that I was able to understand the written words that are used to convey the process of becoming free of the human condition. It is common to all spiritual teachings to disparage the written word as a means of communication and to encourage affective feeling-only communications such as satsang, communal prayers and meditations and the like. To describe a room full of people sitting silently with their eyes closed as communicating with each other is clearly nonsense. What in fact they are doing is retreating from the trials and tribulations of communicating with their fellow human beings and imagining a world where ‘we are all one’. Seventeen years on the spiritual path was sufficient experience for me to notice that spiritual beings were just as lost, lonely, frightened and cunning as real-world beings. The myth of peace and harmony between spiritual beings is just that – a myth.

Personally, when I met Richard’s discovery, I found it refreshing to come across a clear no-nonsense description of the human condition together with a coherent description of how to become free of it – and all of it written in dictionary definition words that said what it meant and meant what it said. It was a refreshing and radical change from the spiritual teachings I had followed for all those years.

But again, breaking free of my spiritual conditioning did take a while. I remember, after many months of listening to Richard, I was so fascinated by actualism that I wanted to know what was the hidden secret behind it all. If it meant Richard had come from another planet and a spacecraft was going to land and take us away, then I was in to it. It seems so silly now but I was so spiritually indoctrinated that the word was not the thing and that there was a secret message behind the words that I could not conceive that someone would have the audacity to not only say what he means but to mean what he says.

There is no secret message behind the words of actualism for it unabashedly points to an experience that everybody has had in there lives – a pure consciousness experience – and it explains the very simple, but at first difficult to put into operation, method of achieving that same tangible pure consciousness experience of freedom from the human condition, 24 hrs. a day, every day.

I might just end with a tip for beginners and that is to start the method of becoming attentive by focussing on obvious things and good examples are being grumpy about the weather, being upset about the traffic or being annoyed by what someone else says or does. This way you become used to becoming aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and begin to notice what it is that is preventing you from being happy and harmless right now.

30.1.2002

RESPONDENT: Easy is clearly not the right word. Obvious would probably be more suitable. I do have to watch my word selection in this list. ‘We’ cling to our instincts with an iron grip.

PETER: I had similar problems with words when I first came across actualism. I started to become aware how loose I was in the meaning of words but that this was generally the case in any discussions about freedom. I realized that it suited me not to question too deeply what was being said because the freedom I was seeking was a feeling-only, other-worldly experience and not a sensate-only down-to-earth experience. After writing my journal, I set about writing a glossary of common terms used in actualism, giving their dictionary definitions and an explanation of the difference between the word’s actual meaning and its varied and confusing spiritual meanings.

RESPONDENT: It’s really a substantial paradigm shift. The spiritual traditions do adhere to a the-truth-that-can-be-spoken-is-not-the-truth kind of schtick.

PETER: Not to mention that other traditional spiritual teaching – the-word-is-not-the-thing. I remember having a conversation with an ardent spiritualist in my lounge room one day and he started down the spiritual line that matter does not exist and that only spirit or energy exists. I picked up a coffee cup and said ‘Are you telling me this coffee cup doesn’t exist?’ He said something like – ‘That’s the word coffee cup, not the thing’ to which I replied ‘No, that’s the thing we call a coffee cup’. He looked at me bewildered for a second because he almost started to consider that the coffee cup might be actual, i.e. existing in fact, in this case made of the material stuff of the earth, exactly like he and I. He quickly continued on with his particular spiritual party line for a bit until I pointed to the television set and asked him what he would call that? ‘God’ he replied and the conversation was all down hill from then on.

RESPONDENT: Also, in recent years I’ve spent some time ‘exploring’ my feelings/emotions and expressing those in words is a nebulous activity at best.

PETER: Whereas in actualism it is not only vitally important to become aware of which feelings are preventing you from becoming happy and harmless but also to name the feeling in exact words. This can be quite difficult for men who in all societies have been taught to repress their feelings and particularly so for spiritual men who further imagine they have transcended their undesirable feelings and as such tend to be dismissive of actualism.

I remember when I came across actualism I saw it as the ‘get down and get dirty’ business of exploring my psyche in action as opposed to wandering around with my head in the clouds as I did for much of my spiritual years.

RESPONDENT: I’ve been encouraged to ‘share’ my feelings, open up, etc., usually to a disappointing degree of effectiveness. In my experience, that activity usually ends up creating more discord than resolution.

PETER: Yep. There has up until now been only two alternatives available for men. Be a ‘real’ man or become a sensitive new age guy, a SNAG. I tried both alternatives and found both to be unsatisfactory. The third alternative was to investigate my social and instinctual programming that entrapped me into having to play one or other of these male roles.

RESPONDENT: The pragramatism that you are espousing is like a breath of fresh air. It also appeals to my engineer brain, a profession that is predicated on determinism. It’s not voodoo, it’s common sense.

PETER: Perhaps a definition of pragmatism might be useful at this point –

Pragmatic – Practical considerations as opp. to theoretical or idealistic ones. Oxford Talking Dictionary

And yet even those who have a professional training or occupation that is reasonably pragmatic still believe in the spiritual fairy tales of good and evil spirits and an other-than-physical world, they still value feelings more than common sense and still look to the dim dark past for answers to the current on-going crisis they call ‘my life’.

When I came across actualism, I adopted a pragmatic approach to ‘my life’. The first step was to acknowledge that I was neither happy and, equally importantly, nor was I harmless despite my best efforts. By the simple act of acknowledging I had a problem, and that I caused problem for others, I was also acknowledging that whatever I had been doing up until then wasn’t working to fix my problems. Then it was relatively easy to backtrack out of the spiritual world, abandon all that I had been doing wrong up until then, start to shed all of the beliefs I had taken as truths and start off down a fresh track.

*

RESPONDENT: Just out of curiosity, how do you appreciate beauty now?

PETER: I don’t, for if I appreciated beauty there would be an equal part of the world of people, things and events that I disparaged, loathed and hated for being ugly. What I discovered was that by affectively classifying things as beautiful or ugly, I automatically missed out on the opportunity of clearly seeing the actuality of this peerless universe. The other aspect that I discovered early on in the process of actualism was that desperately holding on to any of the morals, ethics or values I had been taught to be truths only prevented me from experientially understanding the full scope of the human condition and how it operates in this flesh and blood body.

The whole process of eliminating the affective division of beauty/ugliness from my life started with an intellectual understanding and proceeded experientially as I became aware of how certain aspects of my feelings and emotions interfered with me being happy and harmless. From memory, the first and most obvious aspect was the common-to-all habit of classifying the weather as beautiful or terrible. I quickly saw how my mood was influenced by ‘my’ liking or disliking a fact. This meant that if I woke up in the morning and didn’t like the weather, I had started the day feeling grumpy. It took me only a few days of being aware of these habitual feelings to see how senseless it was to rile against a fact and how it prevented me from being happy and harmless because a grumpy person can never be harmless.

RESPONDENT: Well, that’s easy to say if you don’t live in the snowiest large city in the US. ;-)

PETER: I have lived in cold climates as well as in the tropics and found that I prefer the subtropics. Which is not to say that if I lived in another climate zone that I would waste this moment by objecting to, or complaining about, a fact.

RESPONDENT: I suppose I need to restate my question a bit. If you walked into the Louvre (for instance) and came across a Rembrandt (for instance), what would your reaction be? How would that be different from your reaction before you discovered AF?

PETER: When I was in Europe in my twenties I visited a number of galleries and saw an eclectic cross section of what is regarded as great art. What stands out in my memory was visiting the Louvre, I think it was, and being impressed by Monet’s huge painting of waterlilies on a pond. I was fascinated that what looked up close to be a mess of paint became at a distance a delightful image of a lily pond full of light and colour. The other memory is of visiting the Van Gough gallery in Amsterdam and looking at his note books and seeing the amount of sketches and studies that went into what appeared to be the spontaneous paintings hanging in the gallery proper. I also remember that much of the old art looked old – it was dark, stiff, formal and often religious in subject matter. I could only guess that my reaction now would be as it was at first seeing.

*

PETER: I might just end with a tip for beginners and that is to start becoming accustomed to attentiveness by focussing on obvious things and good examples are being grumpy about the weather, being upset about the traffic or being annoyed by what other people say or do. In this way you become used to making a habit of being aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and you begin to notice what it is that is preventing you from being happy and harmless right now.

RESPONDENT: Well, I’ve been doing that for some time now, prior to stumbling on to AF. I have become somewhat proficient at detecting the processes in action, but have gotten stuck at what to do next. While AF offers an attractive model, I’m still not convinced that ‘happy and harmless’ is the complete destination.

PETER: The ‘what to do next’ for me was to make becoming happy and harmless the most important thing in my life. This gave my life meaning for the first time and meant that what to do next was always clear. The only question that then remained was how long I was willing to stand in the way of doing what was obvious.

RESPONDENT: I have no illusions about my ability to ‘do some good’ for the world, but it seems like it’s still a worthy objective.

In the end the proposition of being a pioneer in this brand-new business of becoming free of malice and sorrow stood out as being the most worthy of objectives on the planet right now.

RESPONDENT: Another crude example as a query, if you don’t mind... Let’s say the US as a whole subscribed to the notion of AF in the 1930’s. What would be the appropriate action based on the country learning that Jews were being put to death by the millions in Germany? Invade to prevent further suffering or not get involved because fundamentally we can’t influence others?

PETER: The appropriate action would be the same appropriate action that was recently taken by some of the world’s armies to put an end to the genocide that was happening in the Balkans. The only reason there is not mayhem and lawlessness in the country I am currently living in is because it has an armed police force prepared to do whatever is necessary to stop outbreaks of murder or genocide. Law and order is only maintained at the point of a gun and history has amply proven that the only way to stop outbreaks of violence by one tribe or group or gang is to send armed police or armies in to stop the violence.

Pacifism is an idealistic, ‘if only someone would wave a magic wand’ head-in-the-clouds communal dreaming whereas actualism offers a pragmatic individualistic method for eliminating malice and sorrow – which is only applicable if you are interested in becoming free of malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: As a side query, how does that concentration camp inmate become ‘happy and harmless’?

PETER: The only way thus far known is by asking himself or herself ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Whilst becoming progressively free of malicious and sorrowful feelings would in no way change the inmate’s physical suffering, at least it would have the effect of relieving them of their emotional suffering.

Or, to use a more everyday example that you could perhaps relate to more readily – if a person is physically ill that is one thing but to then emotionally suffer on top of the illness only serves to mightily and unnecessarily compound the situation, both for the person who is physically suffering and for those he or she interacts with.

As a side response, I recently wrote to Gary on the subject of the ideal of pacifism and you may have missed the post. You will find it relevant to your questions because I made mention of the people of East Timor and the Balkans who, up until their liberation by invading armies, actually lived in concentration camps and suffered from acts of genocide.

1.2.2002

RESPONDENT: Thanks for the responses to my queries (and from Vineeto too, and Richard’s anecdotal evidence).

PETER: It’s been a pleasure, I have enjoyed our conversations.

RESPONDENT: My trepidation re AF stems from an aversion to detachment, and while some of the feedback you’ve given me has seemed ‘slippery’, I think I understand enough now to grasp that that is not the case.

PETER: Spiritualism teaches detachment as in believing ‘I am not the body’ and that ‘who I really am really’ is a disembodied spirit. But following this spirit-ual teaching is to remain forever cut off from the magnificence and purity of the actual world we flesh and blood bodies live in.

Actualism is utterly and completely non-spiritual and as such, the actualism method of asking ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is specifically designed to break free of the ingrained habit of dissociating from one’s feelings and detaching from sensual experiencing. I am not asking you to believe me, however your own on-going observations and investigations may well reveal this to be the case.

RESPONDENT: Some spiritual disciplines preach ‘be here now’ forms, but then scurry back to the cave when the going gets tough.

PETER: The proof for me that the ‘be here now’ preachers were full of pith and wind was that, when they realized they were God, they totally retreated from the world and made their living bludging off others who aspired to learn detachment.

RESPONDENT: AF seems to espouse being fully in the world, warts and all.

PETER: Actualism is not about being in the real world because, as life-experience reveals, the real world sucks. In the real world some 6 billion human beings currently are involved in an instinctually-driven grim battle for survival. The human yearning for freedom is to seek a way of escaping from this instinctually-based illusion but this search for freedom is still well and truly stuck in the ancient fairy-tale beliefs of escaping to a spirit-ridden world – where good spirits go after ‘their body’ dies.

There are no warts such as malice and sorrow in the actual world – there is only purity and perfection. There is no anger in a tree, sadness in a rock, resentment in a coffee cup, feeling of alienation in a cloud – nor is there God in a television set. Actualism espouses abandoning the belief in an imaginary spirit world, stepping out of real world into the actual world and leaving your ‘self’ behind where ‘you’ belong.

RESPONDENT: I’m satisfied for now, and need to do some more reading and practicing so I can come up with yet more probing questions. Oh yeah, and study the dictionary.

PETER: Reading and practicing is a good combination.

If you can’t remember having had a PCE in the past, then contemplating on what you are reading may well induce one. What I did was read deliberately looking for the differences between actualism and spiritualism and the resulting realization that everyone has got it 180 degrees will induce a PCE, because one can only fully realize that everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong by being temporarily outside of the human condition.

The most direct way to induce a PCE, of course, is by practicing actualism – asking yourself, each moment again, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ There will often be serendipitous opportunities occurring when you are not feeling worried, stressed, anxious, annoyed, melancholy or such, when a brief lull can occur in one’s normal ‘self’-centred perception and a sensuous appreciation of the purity and perfection of the actual world seeps in. When this happens you get to directly experience that there are in fact three worlds – an illusionary real world, a delusionary spiritual world and an actual world that is incorruptible in its perfection.

The aim of asking oneself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is to develop a fascination with the immediate-only business of being here. A self’-less sensuous appreciation of being here is often likely to happen when one is not busy with one’s feelings but when one brings one’s fascinated attention to the very surface of the eyeballs as it were, to the very surface of the skin, to the eardrums when hearing, to the nose when smelling, to the taste buds in the mouth when eating or drinking. Whenever a PCE happens you get to directly experience the freedom from the human condition that is being freely offered on the Actual Freedom Trust website.

I have appreciated your sincerity in our communications – it is an essential attribute that will stand you in good stead in your future reading and practicing.

6.2.2002

RESPONDENT: Thanks for the responses to my queries (and from Vineeto too, and Richard’s anecdotal evidence).

PETER: It’s been a pleasure, I have enjoyed our conversations.

RESPONDENT: I realize how long it’s been since I indulged in really good discourse. It seems most times anything resembling conversation devolves into emoting or posturing. And this is with ostensibly intelligent persons. When I was a young ‘un, we used to engage in this pastime regularly and I loved it, get the old noggin working. Is the planet just getting stupider? Even more amazing, this conversation doesn’t even occur face to face!

PETER: I don’t know that the planet is getting more stupid, but the latest fashionable fixation called the New Age should be more rightly called the New Dark Age. The New Dark Age has seen a re-run of almost every conceivable ancient superstition, myth and legend – a return to fear-ridden imaginary worlds of good and evil spirits, Gods and Goddesses, ancient healings and esoteric medicines, divinations and prophecies, energies and auras, folk tales and legends, gurus and shamans, fairies and goblins, devils and demons, sacred sites and cosmic planes, chakras and levels of consciousness, telepathy and spiritualism, visions and entities, ESP and UFO’s, Chi Gong and Feng Shui, somas and souls, mysticism and meditation, rituals and rites, astrology and geomancy, reincarnations and past lives, karmas and dharmas and so on.

I have tried to have face-to-face conversations with New Dark Agers about their beliefs but soon gave up as I discovered that spiritualists do not like having their beliefs questioned. The difference with conversations on this list is that questioning beliefs is part and parcel of actualism and any emotional reactions that do occur in this process are but a sign that you are identifying with the belief – in other words, that particular belief forms a discernible affective component of your identity. While abandoning your cherished beliefs can be difficult, by doing so you end up becoming free of that part of your identity and also palpably free of the affective responses that automatically arise from the need to constantly maintain and/or defend your beliefs.

*

RESPONDENT: My trepidation re AF stems from an aversion to detachment, and while some of the feedback you’ve given me has seemed ‘slippery’, I think I understand enough now to grasp that that is not the case.

PETER: Spiritualism teaches detachment as in believing ‘I am not the body’ and that ‘who I really am really’ is a disembodied spirit. But following this spirit-ual teaching is to remain forever cut off from the magnificence and purity of the actual world we flesh and blood bodies live in.

Actualism is utterly and completely non-spiritual and as such, the actualism method of asking ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is specifically designed to break free of the ingrained habit of dissociating from one’s feelings and detaching from sensual experiencing. I am not asking you to believe me, however your own on-going observations and investigations may well reveal this to be the case.

RESPONDENT: While ‘attachment’ is clearly a culprit, the usual Buddhist response of non-attachment, or detachment is 180 degrees out. I see that now. The actual world suggested by AF seems to have the qualities that I had envisioned the Buddhist model to have, but never quite lived up to.

PETER: The actual world already delivers, and always has delivered, because it exists as an actuality. It is already, always here under our very noses, as it were. The actual world is pure and perfect in its peerless infinitude, whereas the real-world is but an illusionary ‘self’-created nightmare and the spiritual world is but a delusionary ‘self’-imagined dream.

It is my experience that even a virtual freedom from the human condition is vastly superior to suffering from the exalted state of Self-realization, God-realization, Buddha-hood or whatever other name is used.

*

RESPONDENT: I’m satisfied for now, and need to do some more reading and practicing so I can come up with yet more probing questions. Oh yeah, and study the dictionary.

PETER: Reading and practicing is a good combination.

RESPONDENT: As in most matters of any value.

PETER: And yet when it comes to the search for freedom, most people never bother to read the source material that their particular belief or faith is based on, they do not bother to recognize, let alone address any anomalies or inconsistencies in the teachings and never question why these beliefs and faiths have always failed to deliver their promises despite the fact that millions upon millions of people have arduously and diligently attempted to put them into practice. I can certainly remember how gullible I was in my spiritual years – the shamans of old demanded faith, hope, trust and unequivocal loyalty of their followers in order to silence dissent and to nip in the bud any outbreaks of questioning the teacher and the teachings. There is a vast difference between gullibly accepting the imaginary dreams of the spiritualism and sincerely investigating the down-to-this-earth pragmatism of actualism.

*

PETER: If you can’t remember having had a PCE in the past, then contemplating on what you are reading may well induce one. What I did was read deliberately looking for the differences between actualism and spiritualism and the resulting realization that everyone has got it 180 degrees will induce a PCE, because one can only fully realize that everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong by being temporarily outside of the human condition.

The most direct way to induce a PCE, of course, is by practicing actualism – asking yourself, each moment again, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ There will often be serendipitous opportunities occurring when you are not feeling worried, stressed, anxious, annoyed, melancholy or such, when a brief lull can occur in one’s normal ‘self’-centred perception and a sensuous appreciation of the purity and perfection of the actual world seeps in. When this happens you get to directly experience that there are in fact three worlds – an illusionary real world, a delusionary spiritual world and an actual world that is incorruptible in its perfection.

The aim of asking oneself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is to develop a fascination with the immediate-only business of being here. A self’-less sensuous appreciation of being here is often likely to happen when one is not busy with one’s feelings but when one brings one’s fascinated attention to the very surface of the eyeballs as it were, to the very surface of the skin, to the eardrums when hearing, to the nose when smelling, to the taste buds in the mouth when eating or drinking. Whenever a PCE happens you get to directly experience the freedom from the human condition that is being freely offered on the Actual Freedom Trust website.

RESPONDENT: Well, I’ve had plenty of experiences that seem similar to what you describe, and I wasn’t always stoned when they happened. Here’s a trick of mine... I find quite often that when walking around, even out in the woods or such, my head is turned down towards the ground, and my thoughts are off on some carousel. When I can catch myself doing this, I stop and turn my head up, and open my eyes wide, and forcibly look at the world with all my vision, the full hemisphere. It’s always astonishing when I actually see everything that is really around me. It certainly makes me realize how much the sum of our sensory input is taken for granted. There must be some psychological/ physiological basis for that: we must somehow desensitise to the stimuli, and need an ever increasing fix... bigger TV, more and richer food, louder music, etc. It wasn’t that way so much when we were children.

PETER: The psychological/ physiological basis for desensitising to sensory stimuli – if I can paraphrase your description – is ‘you’, the psychological and psychic entity that has parasitically taken up residence inside you, the flesh and blood body that your parents named No 38. ‘You’, the thinking and feeling entity, relentlessly monitors the sensory input and continuously maintains a thinking and feeling response to it. I use the words relentless and continuously deliberately for this monitoring process is instinctual in nature – it is genetically programmed in all animal species. Subsequently whenever you touch something, there is always a ‘me’ thinking and feeling as though ‘I’ am touching something as opposed to the direct sensation of nerve ends responding to stimuli. This is what I mean by – a self’-less sensuous appreciation of being here is often likely to happen when you are not busy with ‘your’ thoughts and feelings but when you brings your ‘self’ to the very surface of the eyeballs as it were, to the very surface of the skin, to the eardrums when hearing, to the nose when smelling, to the taste buds in the mouth when eating or drinking.

By its very nature, ‘I’ cannot experience a PCE but by making the aim of ‘my’ life to become happy and harmless in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are ‘you’ are actively creating the very circumstances for a temporary experience of the purity and perfection of the actual world to occur.

And just to once again draw attention to the difference between actualism and spiritualism – you may have noticed that those who suffer from solipsism would claim there is no flesh and blood finger, (no body), no physical sensation (only affective feeling) and no material object that the finger is touching (matter is illusionary), just ing-ing happening. Solipsism is a condition that happens to those who retreat from the world of people, things and events and become so enamoured with their own thinking and feelings (ing-ing) that they become so totally ‘self’-centred and ‘self’-obsessed that they are compelled to deny the very existence of both their fellow human beings and of matter itself.

Solipsism – In philosophy, the view or theory that only the self really exists or can be known. Oxford Talking Dictionary

*

PETER: I have appreciated your sincerity in our communications – it is an essential attribute that will stand you in good stead in your future reading and practicing.

RESPONDENT: One thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that I have no interest in wasting my or anyone else’s time with untruths, or even neurotic fabrications. I did a therapy stint for a while, and while it did have some value, I got very tired of regurgitating my own schtick repeatedly. I could well imagine that others were as tired of hearing mine as I was of hearing theirs. Sort of reminds me of a colony of chimps picking nits off each other.

PETER: I saw an interview the other day with that doyen of therapy, Woody Allen, where he was asked whether therapy had helped him in his life and even he dismissed it as being of not much use. From what he said in the interview he seems to have now slipped into a stoic resignation or a begrudging acceptance of his lot in life – a condition that is common to many men of his age.

It’s good to find out and recognize when a door is the wrong door, when a revered wisdom has obviously failed and to eventually abandon hope that any of the old ways will bring peace and happiness. I remember once saying that actualism should have a sign on the door saying ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ and by that I meant the hope that the traditional long- tried and always-failed methods would somehow, sometime, miraculously deliver the goods. When I recognized and acknowledged to myself that everything I had tried so far had failed to provide happiness and peace, I was then ready to try out something radically new.

20.2.2002

PETER: Just a comment with regard to your recent post on the topic of relationship. You wrote in response to Gary –

GARY: On the subject of my ‘relationship’ with my partner, the matter gets a bit stickier. Since my need to affiliate with other human beings in groups has greatly lessened, to the point of almost being totally absent, I have wondered at times if I transferred these feelings on to my partner and whether I am clinging to her to get these self-same needs met. I do enjoy our being together, and I look forward to our weekends and holidays together, even our simple presence together in the evening when the day is done is very enjoyable. To be honest: I do find myself clinging to her at times with feelings of ‘love’ and affection. Yet I can say that for every moment in which there is this feeling of love and affection, there are counterpoised moments when the invidious passions are in evidence: resentment, peevishness, annoyance. In short, malice. It increases my feeling that you cannot have the positive, loving emotions without having the whole instinctual package. At least, that’s the way I think of it at this point. In other words, the entire package needs to be deleted.

So, I guess where this leaves me is to say that I think the closest thing I have to a ‘normal relationship’ is my relationship with my partner. It is here that the instinctual passions of nurture and desire occur most clearly and cleanly, compared to my other everyday ‘relationships’. To sum this all up: it seems to me that a ‘relationship’ is about sharing joy and sorrow, sharing the complete pathos and movement of human emotion and human feeling. If one is freeing oneself from the Human Condition, does one need or desire relationships then? In an actual intimacy, is there any ‘relationship’ with the other that one is relating to? Is there any ‘connection’ at all, or is this entirely absent? These are just a couple of the questions that occur. Gary to Peter, 8.2.2002

RESPONDENT: I too find that the partner relationship is where we really test the mettle. At this juncture, I don’t have the child-rearing compulsion to interfere with the simple facts of the nature of the relationship, and that has created (or exposed perhaps) some turmoil. Semi-amusing anecdote: I’ve been pondering the questions raised by my investigation into AF, particularly in the notion of ‘love’. My SO asks the loaded question ‘Do you love me?’, and I responded innocently enough ‘I’m not sure what love is’. Wrong answer. The ensuing ‘situation’ may however precipitate some earnest discussion. Without going into gory details, I did discover that some of my behaviour of late has definitely included an element of malice towards her, cloaked in an air of righteousness.

PETER: I particularly like what you have discovered because it is an experiential observation and understanding of your own feelings and not a mere intellectual understanding of someone else’s experience – and there is a world of difference between the two.

I particular remember how shocked I was when, despite years of spiritual practice, I became very angry over a trivial matter. It was as though a crack had suddenly opened up in my oh-so-righteous persona and, although it was an uncomfortable experience, it provided an invaluable insight into the hidden deep-seated passions that lay just under the surface.

If I can elaborate a bit on your observation – what normally prevents such clear observations from occurring is the human social conditioning and the feeling of righteousness is particularly common for those who have imbibed religious or spiritual conditioning. Because of these spiritual feelings, it is extremely rare to find anyone who is capable of, let alone willing to, admit that they have malicious feelings towards others. If they do admit to feeling malicious, it is almost always cloaked in some form of self-righteous justification, as in ‘it was the other’s fault’, ‘I was simply sharing my feelings’, or even ‘I was doing it for their own good’.

The other major factors that prevent such clear observations form occurring are the socially imposed feelings of guilt and shame. As children, all humans are trained to feel guilty and shameful if they think or feel wrong or evil thoughts and we subsequently learn the games of deceit and denial as a way of avoiding blame and/or punishment. Because of the tenacity of this childhood programming it is vital for an actualist to both understand and experientially observe that the feelings, emotions and passions that constantly arise are the human condition in action and not one’s personal fault.

By conducting your investigations with this understanding in mind you are conducting an investigation in a hands-on scientific down-to-earth manner, free of any moral or ethical judgements of good or bad, right or wrong. By investigating the human condition in action in you – and as ‘you’ – you also avoid the traditional spiritual trap of creating yet another identity, a superior ‘real you’ who then observes a supposedly ‘illusionary you’.

You will find this business of becoming aware of your social/spiritual persona is not a one-off understanding but an ongoing process. You will become continually aware of whenever you think you are right and the other is wrong, when you feel as though you are being good and the other is being bad. You will find that these feelings arise because of beliefs you have been taught to be universal truths and you will become fascinated as you unearth and acknowledge the facts of how ‘you’ have been socially and instinctually programmed to think and feel.

Of course, you have to be sure that this is what you want to do with your life, because once you launch yourself into this process you will never be the same again.

RESPONDENT: I’m starting to see that it is always ‘happy and harmless’, it’s a package deal.

PETER: Again, this is one of the most crucial understandings in actualism and one that clearly separates it from all of the past failed methods to find a way to become free of malice and sorrow. The pursuit of happiness has been a long and fruitless search thus far for human beings solely because everyone has put their own happiness first and being harmless second – if being harmless gets a look in at all, that is.

Once you begin to observe in yourself the malicious element of merely pursuing your own happiness you also begin to see that it is normal behaviour within the human condition, i.e. everybody blames someone else for being the cause of their unhappiness and blaming others can only be a malicious act. And then you begin to see that this ultimately ‘self’-centred focus on ‘my’ happiness is why human beings do not, and cannot, live together in peace and harmony.

Speaking personally, it was the desire to be harmless that attracted me to begin the process of actualism and it was the desire to be harmless that has provided all of the impetus to push on beyond the limits of the measly ‘self’-centred pursuit of happiness only.

RESPONDENT: In chewing through this recent lab experiment, I also came to understand something that Vineeto had stated a while back that has been puzzling me. She stated that true intimacy is unilateral. By our sociological definition, intimacy (or rather its alter ego – love) is bilateral, requiring two or more cooperating participants. True intimacy cannot require the involvement of another person for its fruition, as that immediately creates a ‘relationship’ with its attendant rules, roles, and expectations, rather than the simplicity/ clarity/ honesty of an individual bringing happiness and harmlessness to the table.

PETER: What I soon discovered in my first months of actualism was if there is going to be peace on earth between human beings then it was up to ‘me’ and it had absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. This understanding can be a daunting challenge because once you let it in completely you put yourself on the spot, as it were. What ‘I’ did was take up the challenge and make becoming actually happy and harmless my primary aim in life and put everything else second. ‘I’ saw that it was the very best thing ‘I’ could do with my life. Every other challenge paled into insignificance – others could pursue security, wealth and fame if they wanted to, others could pursue immortality for their souls if they wanted to, but ‘my’ work became the real pioneering work inherent in the pursuit of an actual freedom from malice and sorrow.

I like what you have reported because it is your own observation of your own feelings, in other words it is an experiential understanding of what has been reported by Richard and the other actualists. As you would know from your own life experience, an experiential understanding based on hands-on experience is far superior to an intellectual understanding of the words of others. No amount of intellectual understanding can substitute for hands-on experience, and the only way to become free of malice and sorrow is to become aware of all of the nuances of malice and sorrow in action in your own psyche, and as your own psyche.

16.4.2002

PETER: Most people are taught to love themselves, to stand up and fight for their rights, to be proud of their human-ness. In other words, every human being is taught to make the best of their programming and is taught that it is not possible to question the fundamentals of this programming. By dutifully following this ‘self’-centred and socially-condoned path everyone is oblivious to his or her own programming because ‘I’ am this programming and this programming is ‘me’.

RESPONDENT: Absolutely true. Even more insidious to some of us in the US is the rabid patriotism at play ... it’s not just the individual who is programmed to ‘to stand up and fight for their rights’, but the group.

PETER: There aren’t any individuals within the human condition, there are just team players or those who think and feel they are individuals. Amongst the latter, the common groupings are those who adopt an intellectual superiority via detachment from their feelings and spiritualists who adopt a moral or ethical superiority via dissociation from their feelings.

I remember No 4 some time ago realizing that it is impossible to be unique, as in ‘individual’, while remaining trapped within the human condition, i.e. despite what we may think and feel, all human beings are socially and instinctually programmed to believe the same beliefs.

RESPONDENT: And woe be to you who dares question that belief.

PETER: Indeed. History is littered with the bodies of those who were foolish enough to question the belief of others.

Whereas actualism is utterly safe, because the only beliefs you need to question to become free of the human condition are your own.

RESPONDENT: I’ve been shocked at times at the knee-jerk reactions of previously cognitive individuals.

PETER: Speaking from experience, I was hardly capable of any sustained clear thinking before I learnt to distinguish and separate thinking from my feelings and beliefs. It took an enormous amount of effort to get rid of the programming that prevents clear thinking from happening.

The first hurdle is the problem of cognitive dissonance – the total inability of a pre-programmed brain to even consider, let alone understand, that there might be an experience of freedom that is actual and sensual and not spiritual and affective. It was only because I remembered that I had had such an experience, that I knew that actual freedom lay completely outside of my spiritual beliefs and preconceptions.

RESPONDENT: Oh well, I ain’t going to fix that one, so I may as well start with myself.

PETER: Again speaking personally, I was desperately driven to start changing myself because I saw that the real-world sucked and the spiritual world was a wank. I’ve written about my motivations for taking up actualism before, so I won’t go into them here, but my urge to be free was, and is, a passionate one, not a ‘may as well’.

I recently watched a TV documentary about the last days of John Lennon. At the end of the program they showed a section of Central Park that had been set aside as a John Lennon ‘peace park’. The central focus of the park was a big plaque with the word ‘Imagine’ written on it. Presumably people go to the park, look at the plaque and imagine peace on earth. If there was an actualist peace park, it would have a plaque which said ‘are you ready to do something practical about peace on earth?’

*

PETER: It is no little thing to question such ideals as pacifism – to not only understand that they fail but to also understand why they fail. It is only by thinking about why conflict is the norm within the human condition that you start to become aware of your own genetically-encoded contributions to the well-spring of malice and sorrow in the world.

This way you move from having an ideal about peace on earth to being interested in actually doing something about peace on earth – in other words, you resurrect your naiveté and take unilateral action.

RESPONDENT: Pacifism, like all belief systems, has an agenda and protocol. It’s really become clear to me that once one decides what’s good and what’s bad, that critical thinking goes out the window.

PETER: What I discovered was that the monotheistic religions tend to be more concerned with morality, with good and bad. The Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, tend to be more concerned with ethics, with right and wrong thinking. Maybe that’s why spirituality has such a strong appeal to men and intellectuals. It has certainly dominated much of the 20^th Century literature, philosophy, theoretical science and thinking to an extent that is amazingly wide-ranging.

RESPONDENT: That’s the appeal of religious groups ... they’ll quite willingly take over the responsibility for your thinking. There’s a long line of people who quite willingly give up that piece of hard work.

PETER: What I discovered was that the Eastern religions were even more insidious than the monotheist religions because their adherents are encouraged not to think about the human condition, not to think about the world as-it-is – not to be at all interested about what goes on ‘outside’, as it were. The followers of Eastern religions are encouraged to ‘accept’ that the physical world is a grim reality and that the only escape is to dissociate from the inherent evil of a grim reality and go ‘inside’, where peace, tranquillity and meaning is to be found.

Over the past few years I have had occasion to have some discussions with a Buddhist and I am continuously amazed at how quickly he can assimilate anything I may happen to say about actualism into his own religious beliefs. He does not even blink an eyelid, let alone stop to think or contemplate. These interactions continue to remind me of the overwhelming power that the sense-numbing combination of belief and passion has over human thinking – so much so that this disability has been recognized in psychiatry and given the label of cognitive dissonance. The other aspect that always stands out in these discussions is that he is so totally self-centred that he has no interest whatsoever in what is happening in the world, i.e. he is so much is he concerned with maintaining his own ‘inner peace’ he doesn’t give a fig about peace on earth.

But what is most fascinating is that I can recognize myself in him, he is exactly how I was when I was trapped within the spiritual world – so convinced I was right that I was completely closed to even considering that there could be a third alternative.

RESPONDENT: The funny thing is that in my dealings with people who sign on with a religion, there’s an initial rapture as the burden of dealing with life’s issues is lifted, but it doesn’t last, and they tend to slide towards bitterness. Religion is the greatest obstacle to the human race really advancing.

PETER: I remember as a kid thinking that religion was silly, the very idea of a white-bearded God sitting on a cloud in heaven seemed really weird. What really shocked me one day was when I realized that the Eastern spiritual group I was in was nought but ‘olde time religion’ cunningly dressed up as something different. A classic example of cognitive dissonance on my part.

From that very first glimpse it took me years to painstakingly extract myself from the spiritual world and in doing so I eventually lost all my friends, all of my clients, and two relationships. To take the step from realizing to action does take both sincerity and effort and the subsequent changes always come at a cost. Needless to say, the tangible rewards for this effort – a virtual freedom from malice and sorrow in my case – far exceed whatever the ‘peace-parkers’ could imagine.

That ‘religion is the greatest obstacle’ is a spiritual-world psittacism often trotted out by spiritualists in order to separate their own spiritual-religious practices from that of the herd. And perhaps the most devious of all of the Eastern religions is Buddhism, despite the fact that Buddhists have been forced into adopting a pre-emptive defence by declaring that ‘Buddhism is not a religion’. Spiritual beliefs are a far greater obstacle than religion for those who are genuinely interested in peace on earth, in this lifetime, as this flesh and blood body.

What does separate spiritual people from materialists is that at least some of those from the West took up Eastern religious belief because they questioned the veracity and sensibility of their first religious conditioning – monotheistic religions. Having done so they have unwittingly landed themselves in an even more insidious belief system, one that scorns the worship of One God and yet encourages the followers to feel themselves to be God. However, if a spiritualist has been able to question at least some of their own childhood beliefs, then he or she may be better equipped to question his or her own new beliefs than someone who has yet bothered to question any of their beliefs.

21.4.2002

RESPONDENT: Hello Peter (note to self – politeness counts)

PETER: You could call politeness the outcome of felicitous feelings.

*

PETER: There aren’t any individuals within the human condition, there are just team players or those who think and feel they are individuals. Amongst the latter, the common groupings are those who adopt an intellectual superiority via detachment from their feelings and spiritualists who adopt a moral or ethical superiority via dissociation from their feelings.

I remember No 4 some time ago realizing that it is impossible to be unique, as in ‘individual’, while remaining trapped within the human condition, i.e. despite what we may think and feel, all human beings are socially and instinctually programmed to believe the same beliefs.

RESPONDENT: Interesting reading, and a subtle point indeed. To maintain oneself as an ‘individual’ is to identify oneself in terms of the group, and its processes. It doesn’t matter what side of the line one falls on, one is still defined in relation to the group, hence is a part of it in some fashion.

PETER: Even the famed rebels and revolutionaries of history, be they real-world or spiritual, remained trapped within the human condition. As a social identity the only options available are to comply, shift alliances, swap sides, rebel against the current fashionable beliefs or opt for following spiritual beliefs but all of this is but huff and puff within the confines of what can be seen and felt as a cage of beliefs. While you may find this to be a subtle point, it is not one that the famed spiritual teachers can even conceive of because they remain firmly trapped within the human condition.

What I didn’t find at all subtle, and what really got me off my bum, is the fact that each and every human being is not only socially programmed to remain faithful to Humanity but that each and every human being is genetically encoded with the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Understanding this was of such significance to me that I put it this way on the very first page of my journal –

[Peter]: ... ‘Indeed, that has been the innate drive in my life: to make sense of this mad world that I found myself living in. The insanity of endless wars, conflict, arguments, sadness, despair, failed hopes and dreams seems endemic. And worse still, as I gradually forced myself to admit, I was as mad, and as bad, as everyone else.’ Peter’s Journal, Foreword

*

PETER: Indeed. History is littered with the bodies of those who were foolish enough to question the belief of others.

Whereas actualism is utterly safe, because the only beliefs you need to question to become free of the human condition are your own.

RESPONDENT: Well, safe is a stretch. Once one questions beliefs to this sort of extent, it’s a one way street.

PETER: It sounds as though you have got the gist of what is on offer in the process of actualism.

RESPONDENT: And if one finds oneself in a situation where one doesn’t quite go along with rabid flag-waving jingoism (for example), one can easily find oneself on shaky ground in the group. (Not that that ever disturbed me before).

PETER: It is impossible to remain an identity within the human condition and expect to become free from the human condition.

*

PETER: The first hurdle is the problem of cognitive dissonance – the total inability of a pre-programmed brain to even consider, let alone understand, that there might be an experience of freedom that is actual and sensual and not spiritual and affective. It was only because I remembered that I had had such an experience, that I knew that actual freedom lay completely outside of my spiritual beliefs and preconceptions.

RESPONDENT: I’ve had several experiences where I’ve gone through some long torturous internal analytical process, to find at the end that in my thinking I had clearly had my head far up my butt. It’s almost dizzying to look back on some of my processes and wonder ‘what was I thinking?’

PETER: What I was talking about was a pure consciousness experience, but I can well relate to what you are saying. It’s essential for an actualist to be able to feel a fool and freely admit it. When I first came across actualism I had to admit that I knew nothing about the human condition and that I had to throw out everything I learnt and start over again. Whilst I realized I really knew nothing – the spiritual ‘not knowing’ is a fact, not a virtue – I did have a lot of life experience of what didn’t work and this was definitely a plus.

It is so refreshing to be able to be naive without being gullible – it’s one of the many benefits of lived experience not squandered by giving up in acceptance, or giving in to cynicism.

RESPONDENT: The most important lesson out of that was that any time I was ‘sure’ about something, I had better take another long look at it.

PETER: You can never be sure about a belief, simply because a belief requires that you have to believe it to be true or factual. But once you have ascertained the facticity and actuality of something for your self, then you have the certainty to proceed. You may find the bit of writing about fact in the glossary to be good food for thought.

*

PETER: Again speaking personally, I was desperately driven to start changing myself because I saw that the real-world sucked and the spiritual world was a wank. I’ve written about my motivations for taking up actualism before, so I won’t go into them here, but my urge to be free was, and is, a passionate one, not a ‘may as well’.

RESPONDENT: My ambivalence must be showing ... Or maybe apathy. Either way, it’s becoming a less and less tolerable situation, as I could conceivably pop off at any time.

PETER: I have seen quite a few people baulk at actualism when they realized what was involved in fully taking on the challenge. While I never understand their choice to turn away, let alone waste time by dithering wondering whether to start, the decision to take on actualism has to be a personal choice.

*

PETER: Over the past few years I have had occasion to have some discussions with a Buddhist and I am continuously amazed at how quickly he can assimilate anything I may happen to say about actualism into his own religious beliefs. He does not even blink an eyelid, let alone stop to think or contemplate. These interactions continue to remind me of the overwhelming power that the sense-numbing combination of belief and passion has over human thinking – so much so that this disability has been recognized in psychiatry and given the label of cognitive dissonance. The other aspect that always stands out in these discussions is that he is so totally self-centred that he has no interest whatsoever in what is happening in the world, i.e. he is so much is he concerned with maintaining his own ‘inner peace’ he doesn’t give a fig about peace on earth.

RESPONDENT: Similar to my experiences. I’ve been amazed at the chameleon like characteristics of Buddhism ... that’s the primary factor in its spread. It always struck me as odd that Tibetan and Zen flavours bear almost no resemblance.

PETER: There have been some examples of spiritualists who even manage to absorb some of actualism into their spiritual beliefs and some have even started to teach their own personal hodgepodge version of actualism to others. What they don’t realize is that they stand out like dog’s balls because they come across in the vein of spiritual teachers – seeking power and authority by questioning and probing the beliefs of others while blithely never daring to question their own beliefs. The reason they don’t dare question their own beliefs, as you put it so well, is that 

[Respondent]: ‘Once one questions beliefs to this sort of extent, it’s a one way street’. [endquote].

*

PETER: That ‘religion is the greatest obstacle’ is a spiritual-world psittacism often trotted out by spiritualists in order to separate their own spiritual-religious practices from that of the herd.

RESPONDENT: Well of course. I tend to lump ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ together. Regardless of the dogma, they tend to smell the same to me.

PETER: It takes a good nose to sniff out spiritualism precisely because of its chameleon like character. As your investigations proceed you may well be surprised at the extent of its almost complete infiltration into every aspect of Western society. I know I was.

28.4.2002

PETER: Even the famed rebels and revolutionaries of history, be they real-world or spiritual, remained trapped within the human condition. As a social identity, the only options available are to comply, shift alliances, swap sides, rebel against the current fashionable beliefs or opt for following spiritual beliefs but all of this is but huff and puff within the confines of what can be seen and felt as a cage of beliefs. While you may find this to be a subtle point, it is not one that the famed spiritual teachers can even conceive of because they remain firmly trapped within the human condition.

What I didn’t find at all subtle, and what really got me off my bum, is the fact that each and every human being is not only socially programmed to remain faithful to Humanity but that each and every human being is genetically encoded with the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Understanding this was of such significance to me that I put it this way on the very first page of my journal –

[Peter]: ... ‘Indeed, that has been the innate drive in my life: to make sense of this mad world that I found myself living in. The insanity of endless wars, conflict, arguments, sadness, despair, failed hopes and dreams seems endemic. And worse still, as I gradually forced myself to admit, I was as mad, and as bad, as everyone else.’ Peter’s Journal, Foreword

RESPONDENT: I started to go through your journal (as one related experience is worth a thousand metaphors), haven’t gotten too far into it, but came across one interesting item. You state that one of your first/strong PCEs occurred while under the influence of mind-altering substances. I have had my share of similar episodes and often wondered why that clear, direct experience couldn’t be carried over into the ‘normal’ life. Despite the general sentiment that those types of experiences weren’t ‘real’, I always suspected that they could actually translate to the mundane. Your journal suggests that that is the case. Good.

PETER: There is ample evidence that all of the revered other-worldly spiritual experiences have their roots in mind-altering psychotropic substances. As far as I have ascertained, every ancient culture had shamans or Godmen who imbibed magical potions in order to access the world of the spirits and Gods. In the East many Buddhists and Hindus seeking an experience of Nirvana still openly practice this tradition. I have seen many a Hindu Holy-man high on ganja in India and saw a Buddhist monk in Japan following in the tradition of searching for magic mushrooms to aid his meditation.

In the West, mind-altering substances have gradually been phased out of religious practice over the centuries, but their use by the youth of the 60’s spawned an exodus to the East in search of the permanent drug experience. Thus the search for the peace-on-earth experience that is sometimes induced by the use of psychotropic drugs eventually devolved and dissipated into the traditional Eastern search for the Nirvana experience, the ‘I am God’ experience. Those who didn’t pursue the Eastern spiritual tradition soon found that the effectiveness of mind-altering drugs in producing peak experiences wore off over repeated usage, leaving many of them dependant on the drugs as a temporary way of getting out of ‘normal’ grim reality.

Personally, I only had a pure consciousness experience the first time I used the drug ecstasy and because subsequent usage failed to produce a similar experience, I soon gave up using it. In speaking to other people, this decline in effect over time seems common, whilst many reported that psychotropic drug use resulted in altered state of consciousness experiences or other psychotic experiences rather than pure consciousness experiences.

The confusion over the differences between a pure consciousness experience and an altered state of consciousness exists because both experiences are of an ‘other-than-normal-world’ – one being a direct sensuous experience of actuality and the actual world, the other being an affective experience of a culturally-sustained imaginary spirit-ual world. An actualist needs to be very attentive as to the nature of any other-than-normal-world experiences so as to be able to ascertain for himself or herself whether the experience is imaginary or actual, affective or sensate, fantastical or down-to-earth, ‘self’-enhancing or pure. (You can find some background information on the website).

Nowadays, we know that the magical potions used by the ancient shamans and Godmen are not magic potions but substances containing chemicals that have an effect on the functioning of the brain – commonly they increase the flow of dopamine within the brain, as I understand it. The human body sometimes produces an excess of dopamine naturally, in times of great shock, in pain or in life threatening or near-death situations, which would also account for the reports of altered states of consciousness experiences and pure consciousness experiences that sometimes occur in these situations.

Whilst I have no moral objections to the use of mind-altering psychotropic drugs, they are generally illegal, their effectiveness diminishes with repeated use, many have possible harmful side effects and they commonly produce an array of psychotic experiences such as dread, bliss, paranoia and assorted delusionary states. Whilst psychotropic drugs can temporarily cause the ‘door’ to actuality to open, allowing a pure consciousness experience to happen, they cannot by themselves make one permanently free from the human condition.

What I have personally experienced, and seen in others, however, is that the persistent use of the actualism method – a sensuous attentiveness to being here – does produce the conditions whereby a drug-free pure consciousness experience can happen. As a working hypothesis, I would tentatively speculate that a sensuous attentiveness can lead to realizations – or ‘radical shifts in perception’ as you have termed them further on in this post – that have a shock effect which causes the brain to flood with dopamine, which in turn can cause a temporary interruption to the entire affective system. It is this affective system that both sustains and gives credence to one’s very ‘self’.

Whatever the neurological explanation, it is clear that a committed actualist can, by the intensity of his or her investigations and purity of his or her intent, produce the circumstances where pure consciousness experiences naturally happen as a result of the process.

But to get back to your point about being able to live the ‘clear, direct experience’ that mind-altering drugs sometimes produce as a permanent on-going down-to-earth experience. My experience is that the process of actualism works in that it progressively removes the impediments that form the gulf between ‘normal’ ‘self’-centred affective experiencing and ‘self’-less pure consciousness experiencing. This allows one to get to a stage of being virtually free of malice and sorrow, living in a state where feeling excellent is normal and where drug-free pure consciousness experiences are common.

Just as an aside, it is interesting that actualism also produces results that far exceed the other traditional aspect of Eastern religion – the practice of meditation. The intense practice of meditation can also produce other-than-normal-world experiences. Because meditation involves the gradual and deliberate shutting down of one’s sensate experiencing of the physical world and the intentional enhancing imaginary-affective experiencing, it most often results in altered state of consciousness experiences, especially those of the consciousness-aggrandizing type. I have also had pure consciousness experiences from meditative practice but it is clear from talking to others that these are rare exceptions and by no means the norm. Again from experience, a virtual freedom from the human condition is so stress-free, enjoyable and peaceful that there is no need to seek relief in quiet periods of ‘getting out of it’ – a practice which does nought but heighten the traditional dichotomy between an ‘inner’ peace and a stress-full ‘outer’ life in the marketplace.

*

PETER: Indeed. History is littered with the bodies of those who were foolish enough to question the belief of others. Whereas actualism is utterly safe, because the only beliefs you need to question to become free of the human condition are your own.

RESPONDENT: Well, safe is a stretch. Once one questions beliefs to this sort of extent, it’s a one way street.

PETER: It sounds as though you have got the gist of what is on offer in the process of actualism.

RESPONDENT: Radical shifts in perception are usually a one-way street. That’s one of the reasons they’re radical.

PETER: Actualism involves much more than a ‘shift in perception’, it involves the deliberate dismantling of one’s social and instinctual identity, a process which will not only bring about a change in your thoughts and feelings but also your actions. Whilst questioning and challenging the beliefs of others is by no means a safe and sensible thing to do, questioning your own beliefs is safe in that the only thing you are doing is diminishing your own miserable and malicious ‘self’. This process is utterly safe because ‘you’ are in control of the extent and pace of the process of your own ‘self’-investigation – only ‘you’ can challenge your own beliefs, no one else can.

You can escape your fate and become the master of your own destiny – the experience of actualism is that no one is standing in the way of you becoming free of the human condition.

*

RESPONDENT: I’ve had several experiences where I’ve gone through some long torturous internal analytical process, to find at the end that in my thinking I had clearly had my head far up my butt. It’s almost dizzying to look back on some of my processes and wonder ‘what was I thinking?’

PETER: It is so refreshing to be able to be naive without being gullible – it’s one of the many benefits of lived experience not squandered by giving up in acceptance, or giving in to cynicism.

RESPONDENT: This much I have learned over the last few years. Refreshing, yes, and a relief too. Quite pleasant to drop the heavy burden of our masks, our ‘responsibilities’. What were we dragging that baggage around for anyways?

PETER: Because thus far there were only two alternatives, being normal or being spiritual, there was no other choice because you are born with instinctual passions and conditioned to be a social identity. Whilst being an identity can be experienced as wearing a mask, I experience it more as ‘I’ am a fraud – particularly so because I have experienced that purity and perfection is possible.

*

RESPONDENT: I’ve been amazed at the chameleon like characteristics of Buddhism ... that’s the primary factor in its spread. It always struck me as odd that Tibetan and Zen flavours bear almost no resemblance.

PETER: There have been some examples of spiritualists who even manage to absorb some of actualism into their spiritual beliefs and some have even started to teach their own personal hodgepodge version of actualism to others. What they don’t realize is that they stand out like dog’s balls because they come across in the vein of spiritual teachers – seeking power and authority by questioning and probing the beliefs of others while blithely never daring to question their own beliefs. The reason they don’t dare question their own beliefs, as you put it so well, is that ‘Once one questions beliefs to this sort of extent, it’s a one way street’.

RESPONDENT: Oddly enough, the principles of AF are similar if not identical to how I interpreted Zen in my early days of study. It has that pure direct simplicity that I thought the Zen guys were trying to convey. Then they got tangled up in much dogma and it started to stink to me. Before you jump on this statement, I must re-emphasize the ‘how I interpreted’ fragment. Or perhaps I was projecting my own view on to their offerings... Who knows, and it’s all moot anyways.

PETER: I do recommend spending some time dipping into the spiritual teachings that have lead you up the garden path in past years. I found by deliberately doing this, I learnt a good deal about what makes ‘me’ tick and came to understand exactly what is seductive about spiritual teachings. I also learnt how deeply rooted spirit-ridden beliefs are within the human psyche and how they fit hand in glove with both our social identity and our instinctual identity. Dismissing beliefs or swapping beliefs is not the same as investigating and demolishing beliefs.

Exactly as in my building work, it was not enough to know that something failed – I needed to also know why it failed so I wouldn’t repeat the same mistake again.

*

PETER: That ‘religion is the greatest obstacle’ is a spiritual-world psittacism often trotted out by spiritualists in order to separate their own spiritual-religious practices from that of the herd.

RESPONDENT: Well of course. I tend to lump ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ together. Regardless of the dogma, they tend to smell the same to me.

PETER: It takes a good nose to sniff out spiritualism precisely because of its chameleon-like character. As your investigations proceed you may well be surprised at the extent of its almost complete infiltration into every aspect of Western society. I know I was.

RESPONDENT: Are you discriminating between spirituality and religion? As I said, I tend to lump them together (in one big compost heap), but if you have anything to say on the subject, I wouldn’t mind hearing/reading it.

PETER: I certainly discriminated between spirituality and religion for some 17 years. I gave up both real-world materialism and religion for spiritual communes and Eastern spirituality. For me at the time, there was a world of difference between religion and spirituality, they were chalk and cheese. For 17 years I experienced that there were only two alternatives until I happened upon actualism. What I discovered was that I could not just throw away a lifetime of conditioning overnight but that it took a great deal of meticulous effort and a constant attentiveness to become aware of how insidious this programming was such that I could weed it out.

I would assume as more is written and published debunking the myths of spirituality that it may be easier for future generations to see through the myths and legends of spirituality, but at the moment spirituality is the predominant influence in all human social programming. Human beings have come to accept that their instinctual ‘self’ or ‘being’ is a soul or spirit that has a life independent of the physical body and can even survive the death of the corporeal body. Because of this all-consuming belief the only way out of spirituality is the extinction of the soul – the ending of ‘being’ and the becoming of what you are – a mortal flesh and blood body.

It is one thing to read about other people’s discoveries and other people’s debunking of spiritualism and to agree with them, it is another to deliberately set off on a path that leads to ‘self’-immolation. Because of this, an actualist has to make their own investigations into the insidious nature of spiritual teachings and the influence of spiritualism on their own thinking and feeling so as to incrementally free themselves of all spiritual beliefs, concepts and feelings.

4.5.2002

RESPONDENT: Radical shifts in perception are usually a one-way street. That’s one of the reasons they’re radical.

PETER: Actualism involves much more than a ‘shift in perception’, it involves the deliberate dismantling of one’s social and instinctual identity, a process which will not only bring about a change in your thoughts and feelings but also your actions. Whilst questioning and challenging the beliefs of others is by no means a safe and sensible thing to do, questioning your own beliefs is safe in that the only thing you are doing is diminishing your own miserable and malicious ‘self’. This process is utterly safe because ‘you’ are in control of the extent and pace of the process of your own ‘self’-investigation – only ‘you’ can challenge your own beliefs, no one else can.

You can escape your fate and become the master of your own destiny – the experience of actualism is that no one is standing in the way of you becoming free of the human condition.

RESPONDENT: Gotcha. This is starting to sink in. It’s really quite a simple premise, but I’ve been amazed at the fight the ‘I’ puts up. I’ve wrestled with some issues, how to ‘fit’ this into my life, but I’m finding that that’s putting the cart before the horse. The ‘I’ insists on doing this in a controlled or deterministic fashion but it can’t be a ‘managed’ process methinks, it’s a matter of pure resolve/intent.

PETER: I have just written to No 39 on this very subject –

Devoting your life to becoming happy and harmless cannot be seen as prudent action as it is common wisdom that life on earth is essentially a suffering business – that one needs to fight to survive and that one learns and grows through suffering. Devoting your life to becoming happy and harmless is by no means an easy business because it goes against all of your social programming and it goes against your own survival instincts, which is why ‘self’-immolation is the only way to become actually free of malice and sorrow. Consequently, if you want to devote your life to becoming happy and harmless, you have to want it like nothing you have wanted before. Peter to No 39, 4.5.2002

We have recently had a History channel added to our satellite Pay-TV channels. As I have tuned into it over the past few days, I am reminded yet again as to what a tragedy the human condition really is. Apart from some programs that document the amazing history of the advances wrought by human ingenuity and common sense in the face of ancient ignorance and superstition, human history has been a on-going litany of cunning savagery and horrific acts of cruelty and torture, the likes of which is seen in no other animal species.

And if this isn’t enough, this pathos-ridden tragedy is fondly imagined to be a noble struggle between copious cosmic forces of good and evil and it is never acknowledged for what it is – an impassioned instinctual battle for survival that has now well and truly reached its use-by date. Rather than some clear thinking and clear-eyed seeing of the current human situation as-it-is, what is proffered as ‘solutions’ is yet more passion, yet more confrontation, yet more self-pity and more self-love … and yet more re-runs of eons-old beliefs and concepts that have not only failed to bring an end to human malice and sorrow but have only added fuel to the tragic saga.

And if this isn’t enough to fill one with despair, to top it all off, overarching all of this is that daddy of all beliefs – that ‘you can’t change human nature’. This belief not only ensures that human beings will remain forever entrapped within the human condition, but it also serves to perpetuate the fictitious battle between good and evil thus enshrining the ultimate power and moral authority of the goody-two shoes spirit-ual believers. And history shows that they have often wielded this power with ruthless efficiency to quell any who would dare to question their Divine authority.

From this perspective, the human condition can clearly be seen – and on occasions be actually experienced – to be a closed-loop, ‘self’-perpetuating psychic and psychic nightmare.

However, it is never too late to start on the adventure of becoming free of the human condition of malice and sorrow and the way out is both simple and direct – you devote your life to becoming both happy and harmless, because nothing less than a 100% commitment will do in order to break free of the nightmare. Nothing less than a 100% commitment will suffice to propel an actualist to step out of the impassioned illusionary real world and to leave his or her impassioned illusionary ‘self’ behind, where it belongs.

As you said, … ‘it’s a matter of pure resolve/intent’.

16.6.2002

RESPONDENT: Been mulling over this post from Peter, so here’s some babblings.

[Peter to Gary]: I find it always useful to remember why spiritual belief and superstition have thus far cornered the market in the human search for freedom, peace and happiness. Once someone has had ‘the Truth’ personally revealed to them in an altered state of consciousness – or as appears to have happened in Goodall’s case, misinterpreted a PCE as an altered state of consciousness – they are bound by a combination of gratitude and their own inflated sense of self-worth to spread the word that, while earthly life is a bitch, there is really truly a God who loves you. Peter to Gary, 7.6.2002

PETER: Just to keep the record straight, I have only assumed that Jane Goodall had a PCE, an assumption based solely on her description of the experience. Also many people who have an altered state of consciousness have had a very good dose of spiritual conditioning and, as such, are well schooled in the religious ‘God really loves me’ or the spiritual ‘I am God-realized’ experience. The essential point in discussing these matters on this list is three-fold.

The first is to make clear the distinction between the ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience of the actual world and the ‘self’-aggrandizing altered states of consciousness experiences that give an apparent feeling-only credence to the fantasy of spiritual other-worldly beliefs. The second reason is to encourage those who are interested in actualism to forsake the fantasy of spiritual beliefs and to progressively eliminate the time-honoured malice and sorrow implicit within the human condition.

The third, and most significant, is to encourage the practice of a sensuous awareness of the cornucopian delights of this eternal and infinite physical universe we mortal flesh and blood human bodies actually live in. By doing so, an actualist relieves others of the burden of his or her own feelings of malice and sorrow and also actively cultivates the circumstances for pure consciousness experiences to occur.

RESPONDENT: All well and good, but it started me thinking about the context of these sorts of experiences. In my case, I don’t think this AF stuff would sink in in the way it has unless I had established a ground or reference point from assimilating in a critical fashion everything that I’ve experienced to date, and not ‘buying’ most of it. As simple as the basic AF principles are, they are rather revolutionary, hence indigestible by most.

PETER: The first pre-requisite for someone to be interested in actualism is that he or she have a burning discontent with their life as-it-is. The second is an passionate curiosity to discover why both the relentless pursuit of materialism and the senseless pursuit of spiritualism have failed to deliver the goods for nowhere on earth is to be found autonomous magnanimous human beings living together in peace and harmony – and nor has there ever been.

One needs this combination of a personal motive and an altruistic motive in order to be even interested in devoting one’s life to the pioneering revolutionary business of evincing an actual freedom from the human condition.

RESPONDENT: I’m wondering if it’s possible for an individual to investigate AF without having experienced those years of programming, and somehow surviving them and recognizing them for what they are. A child couldn’t understand any of this, right?

PETER: As actualism is at present in its infancy, first-hand experience of the failure of the materialism and spiritualism to bring peace and happiness would appear essential, but even more important is a willingness to acknowledge this failure and a curiosity to discover why. A child has neither of these attributes.

RESPONDENT: On ‘life is a bitch’, I just noticed that I’m eating a bowl of cherries while typing. Must mean something ...

PETER: As the song goes, ‘life’s a bowl of cherries’?

*

PETER to Gary: Speaking of which, someone asked me the other day what I would do about the war in Palestine. I replied that if I lived in the area, the first thing I would do was stop being a Jew or Muslim because it is obvious that religious fervour fuels much of the hatred on both sides. The second thing I would do was stop being an Israelii or a Palestinian, because nationalistic fervour and territorial instincts fuel much of the hatred on both sides. And finally, I would leave the area, vote with my feet, abandon ship, get out, be a traitor to the cause.

The person who asked seemed to think I was somehow cheating by not offering a solution, not taking sides, not apportioning blame and so on, but he completely missed the point of my answer. He asked me what I would do and what I would do is make the only practical contribution I could – take unilateral action by stop being a believer, stop being a passionate combatant, stop looking for someone to blame and stop seeking retribution in the name of justice and fair play. It is quite extraordinary to see – as well as personally experience – the grip that the combination of ancient beliefs and instinctual passions has over Humanity, so much so that no-where is common sense to be seen. Common sense reveals that the only thing that can be done about peace on earth is personally doing whatever needs to be done to become actually free of malice and sorrow. Peter to Gary 7.6.2002

RESPONDENT: How terribly irresponsible of you! I’ve been wrestling with the ‘responsibility’ component of my identity, and it runs deep. However, it’s becoming ever clearer that your POV is the only one that isn’t mad.

PETER: Or, it could be said that the only responsible and practical contribution one can make towards bringing an end to the on-going wars between human beings is to rid oneself of every skerrick of malice and sorrow. In other words, if you feel responsible, be responsible and act responsibly. Use whatever passion and motivation you have – don’t stifle it because the process of actualism cannot be a dispassionate business.

RESPONDENT: The situation in the US now bears that out glaringly. I’ve always debated whether to vote (and vote you must if you’re a responsible citizen) for the democrat or the republican. It always comes down to a lesser of two evils, and I come away from the voting booth with a bad taste in my mouth, regardless of my action.

PETER: Democracy, for all its faults, has thus far proven a better way of organizing societies than the alternatives, be they monarchy, dictatorship, theocracy, communism or whatever. The major faults in democracy, apart from the inherent adversarial nature of party politics, can be sheeted home to the deceit, corruption, malice and sorrow inherent in human nature.

RESPONDENT: Lately though, the G.W. Bush and cronies have pushed deceit and lying to new depths. They manipulate the ‘security’ issue in order to scare the public into retreating to their comforting father-figures, while covertly bolstering their position and eroding civil liberties. The amazing thing is that nobody seems to notice, or care.

PETER: In war, the societal facades of decency, fairness, civil liberty, human rights and so on, rapidly fly out the window. War is never fair and never just. I remember being shocked when I started to take a clear-eyed look at the horrific wars that have been fought between human beings. I came to see that all wars are seen as moral or ethical crusades – as battles between good and evil – and yet, in every case, morals and ethics are the first casualties of war. Or to put it another way, I came to see that the good is a myth. I’ve written about war in the Peace chapter of my journal, which you might like to peruse and the bit about ‘the armies of the Gods’ in the God chapter is also relevant.

RESPONDENT: Coincidentally, I’m reading some Philip K. Dick (SF author specializing in paranoia, real or imagined), and there’s way too many parallels for comfort. It’s almost enough to make me want to move back to Canada, except it’s too cold. Post-tangent... It’s clear that the whole system is rotten to the core, and my cooperation (vote for, vote against, all the same) is not helping the situation.

PETER: As I said, I find the democratic system to be the best so far devised, mainly because the bulk of the administration and organization of a country’s services is in the hands of civil servants. I am amazed at the ingenuity of human beings and their ability to organize and nowhere is this more apparent than in modern democratic societies. They have organized the distribution of water, electricity supply, postal services, telecommunication and information networks, the transport of food, goods and people by road, rail, sea and air, the provision of health services, hospitals, fire fighting and emergency services, rubbish and sewerage disposal, police, law courts and jails and so on – all on a scale and with an efficiency that is breathtaking to contemplate upon.

Contrary to popular universal belief, and passionate conviction – it is not the systems that human beings have developed that are rotten to the core, it is human beings themselves. And contrary to popular universal belief, and passionate conviction – the rottenness that is evident in the human species is not due to an evil force or spirit that requires the ever-vigilance of a good force or spirit to keep evil from running amok. The ‘rottenness’ of human beings is, in fact, an inevitable result of the evolutionary development of the human species – from its roots in a grim, constant and brutally instinctive battle for survival where the passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire were a genetic necessity in order for the species to survive.

Richard’s discovery that these instinctual passions can now be safely deleted means that eventually the archaic, pathetic and utterly senseless battle betwixt good and evil will be confined to the dustbin of history and a genuine outbreak of peace and harmony will be spread like a chain-letter within the species.

Good hey …

28.7.2002

PETER: Some comments on your reply to Gary’s query, given that I was mentioned by implication –

GARY: I found it cute upon a pit-stop to the Krishnamurti Listening-L list to find a reference to myself having left that list and joined the Actual Freedom list, which according to the poster is ‘the ultimate cult’. According to this poster, supposedly I am too blind to see that I am in a cult with other cult-members, and several names were mentioned (No 13, Richard, Vineeto, No 21, Peter, etc.). Also, supposedly, there is no ‘communication’ or interaction among members of this list, according to said poster. The cult business has been visited time and again on this list, yet I find it behoves me to ask current participants to this list what they think: is Actual Freedom a ‘cult’? How would one know it is a cult or not a cult? Since some on this list have belonged to *actual* cults (Sannyasins, Krishnamurtians, etc), how is one to know that one is not just getting involved in a cult again, since one has been duped before?

Since there are other people participating in the list now, I would like to know what others think. Gary to the Actual Freedom Mailing List, 25.7.2002

RESPONDENT: Excellent query as it may lead to some discussion about the recent heated list activity. The common interpretation of the word cult has as a primary characteristic the wielding of power by one or several over a group of others. This power can only exist with the mutual agreement (at some conscious or unconscious level) of both parties to honour the hierarchal arrangement.

PETER: This deduction does not account for the fact that there are many, many cults founded upon dead people, in fact the deader the person the stronger the cult in many cases. Such cults, ‘with (its) primary characteristic the wielding of power’ ‘only exist(ing) with the mutual agreement of both parties’, can hardly exist by mutual agreement in these cases since a dead person is incapable of either agreement or disagreement. The power of any cult-leader, be they a living person, a dead person or a purely mythical figure, is entirely dependant on his or her followers believing in, and surrendering to a leader, thereby making him or her into a higher authority or Big Daddy/Big Mommy figure.

The fact that the power of a cult leader comes from the followers, and is entirely reliant on the followers, can also be seen by looking at a few examples from recent times. Mr. Hitler was revered as a Messiah-like figure in Germany by his followers who believed in the message of Nazism, whereas most of the rest of the world regarded him as a pathological megalomaniac. The loving followers of Mohan Rajneesh regarded J. Krishnamurti as a second-rate, too-intellectual, Guru, whereas the followers of J. Krishnamurti were generally scornful and dismissive of Rajneesh and his followers.

There are currently hundreds upon hundreds of self-declared Gurus on the planet, all of whose fame, power, influence and wealth is totally dependant upon the fervour and numbers of their followers. I am not denying that many of these Gurus have the capacity to wield considerable psychic power over their followers but the follower has to be fully compliant and blindly loyal in order for this power to operate. When I was a loyal follower of Mohan Rajneesh his word was God to me, yet when I stopped believing that what he said was the Truth he no longer held any power over me – in other words, I gave him power over me, it was not a matter of mutual agreement.

Nowadays I know that no one can exercise psychic or psychological power over me, which also means that no one is standing in the way of me being free.

RESPONDENT: If the players in this game do genuinely follow Richard’s edict about ‘not trusting in another person (thereby inviting betrayal), but evaluating the validity of a claim through reference to one’s experience’, then the argument ends there. I detect no indication of the attempt by the AF veterans to establish a controlling influence over the participants.

PETER: Given the human propensity to need someone to be an authority, a Big Daddy figure, the argument about actualism being a cult will no doubt continue long after the supposed cult-leader is dead and burnt.

Speaking personally, as one of the ‘AF veterans’, I look forward to the time when the mailing list has sufficient practicing actualists that the discussions can remain lively, interesting, down-to-earth and on-topic and not be dominated or overwhelmed by objectors or flamers. At this stage retirement is a definitive option.

RESPONDENT: What I do see is:

• One person who has passed through the fires and discovered something of interest. He has benevolently decided to present it to the rest of humanity, who may pick and choose as they like. Perhaps this person has lost any tendency or interest in exerting authority over others... It’s moot if the students are not interested in establishing that sort of relationship.

PETER: Speaking personally, I became interested in actualism because I had begun to be suss of the hypocrisy of the spiritual path, yet I had not given up on my search for a genuine freedom. As a consequence of my spiritual indoctrination, in the beginning I naturally regarded Richard as a Guru, an all-wise, all-knowing, omnipotent and omnipresent figure. What I rapidly discovered was that any attempts at fawning or worshipping washed off him like water off a duck’s back and I came to see that these feelings were simply feelings that I projected on to him. Not only that, but I soon discovered that these feelings prevented me from seeing him as a fellow human being – exactly like you and me – who had managed by his own efforts to free himself of the human condition.

I eventually came to understand that my making Richard a Guru – putting him on a pedestal – was a safe way of avoiding the fact that becoming free of the human condition was equally possible for me. So I assume making Richard a Guru is a stage that most who are interested in actualism will experience, many will pass through, and some will remain stuck on.

Actualism, whilst freely available for everyone, will clearly not be everyone’s cup of tea, particularly in this early pioneering stage.

• [Respondent]: A small group of others who have determined that the method on offer by this person has meaning to them, and they make a conscious choice to lead their lives in a similar fashion. They emulate his ‘philosophy’ and practice his techniques, likely with varying degrees of success. However, they are leading a simulation of the originator’s way (that’s what the word ‘virtual’ means after all), so it is possible that they have suspended some measure of their common sense in order to ‘be like Richard’. I can’t really ascertain that, but if that were the case, then they are dancing around the edges of cult-ness. [endquote].

Your supposition depends upon your definition of the term ‘common sense’. The common-to-all sense would have it that human beings need to be aggressive in order to survive in the world and that suffering is not only essential but is good for you. On the other hand, to me it is common sense to do all I can to become both happy and harmless.

Perhaps a better way of putting my desire to emulate Richard is that I have abandoned the usual common-to-all-sense and relied on the uncommon-to-all-sense of devoting my life to becoming both happy and harmless. Thus far this sense is indeed uncommon, for I only know of less than a handful of people who have openly declared themselves to be similarly motivated, and I have the good fortune to live with one of them.

RESPONDENT: What I do get from this group at times is a tendency to formulate fairly broad responses in quite black and white terms, at times sounding like a party line. Yes, the basic AF tenet is black and white, but I am suspicious of any system that attempts to fit the entire universe into one of two bins. Elemental particles may be black/white, but when you mix a lot of them together, it sure starts to look grey. YMMV.

PETER: So, the basic actualism tenet is black and white but ‘this group’ tends to formulate fairly broad responses in quite black and white terms. As part of this group, I have no trouble at all with making things black and white, bringing issues and beliefs out of the shadows into the light, understanding what were formerly grey areas, calling a spade a spade when appropriate. This is the whole point of actualism – to clearly understand the human condition and how it operates in black and white terms in order to be free of it. If you want murkiness and greyness, not-knowingness and uncertainty, obscuration and ambiguity, then there are a multitude of other forums on the Net whose discussions would better meet your criteria.

I remember once pricking up my ears at something Richard said. He said something like ‘Do you really believe that human beings will never find a way to live together in genuine peace and harmony – that there will never be an end to all the wars, rapes, murders, child abuse, domestic violence and corruption that human beings inflict upon each other?’ It sure made me understand how cynical the universal conviction is that there can never be a workable straightforward down-to-earth solution to ending human malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: So, AF is clearly not a cult per se. However, there is a ravenous horde out there who are determined to plug into a cult, and occasionally one of them is going to drift this way and project their needs onto an external group. That is nothing new, and is the source of great misery.

PETER: I spent 17 years fully immersed in an Eastern spiritual cult, and I do mean full-on. I renounced the real-world, left my job, gave away my money and possessions and wore the robes and mala of a spiritual devotee. By being fully committed, I learnt a great deal from the experience and I would not be where I am today had I not taken the risk and found out for myself whether spiritualism delivered what it promised. I know of many who were more cautious in that they kept a foot in both worlds – ‘tethering your camel’ was an expression they used. This meant they sat on the fence, neither here nor there, did neither this nor that, were for it or against it as it suited. They learnt nothing by experience as to the inner workings of the spiritual world and what happens when the revered teachings are put into practice, but remained outside the ashram gates, looking in, commentating and speculating on the goings-on within.

Because I got so much life experience and hands-on direct knowledge out of my years on the spiritual path, I knew the only way to make the same assessment of whether actualism worked was to jump in boots and all. I remember when I made the decision, a great feeling of having nothing left to lose because I knew by experience that the other common-to-all approaches to being a human being were less than perfect and produced less than perfect results, to say the least.

Nowadays it is not necessary for seekers to spend years on the spiritual path because so much of the spiritual teachings are available on the Net to be read at leisure without the need to become involved in a group or embroiled in a cult. It is also possible to join any one of many spiritual mailing lists in order to assess the effectiveness – or ineffectiveness – of the teachings in producing harmonious and peaceful communities. There are ample opportunities for a present-day seeker to check out for themselves the followers of almost any spiritual teaching, to assess the quality, range and tone of discussions and by doing so make your own assessment as to whether or not the followers are living the teachings and if they are, what effect it has on their daily lives.

Given the doubts you have raised in this post about actualism being a cult, I can only suggest that you take a clear-eyed look at spiritualism as it works in practice in order that you can move on from doubt to making an assessment one way or the other. The important thing about asking questions and having doubts is to find definitive workable answers and nowadays the Net makes it much easier than having to troop off to the East as was needed in the old days. As I remember it, living in doubt and not-knowing is the pits.

There is such a joy to be had in devoting yourself to something one hundred percent.

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless