15.5.2003

PETER: Hi,

You wrote in response to my recent post on PCEs –

RESPONDENT: Just to let you know a very big thankyou for that extremely intelligent information – just letting you know that all of that typing was worth it. Some things really do make a difference.

PETER: It’s always a pleasure to make sense of something – as much as the eyes delight in seeing and the skin relishes touching so does the brain enjoy sorting through information and making sense of it. I remember when I first came across actualism I was challenged by what I read to abandon the ‘get out of your head into your heart’, ‘thinking is wrong’, ‘no-mind’ spiritual philosophies and to start thinking about life, the universe and what it is to be a human being.

Great fun.

RESPONDENT: I live on the Sunshine Coast, does the actual freedom group have another contact apart from e-mailing such as gatherings to support the ecstatic beauty that is Life.

PETER: No. One of the aspects of actualism that initially appealed to me was that actualism is not at all a group business. This was a breath of fresh air for me because I realized that actualism meant what it said – it is a do-it-yourself business.

There are no meetings of fawning disciples humiliating themselves in front of a charismatic leader to be had here. There is no incumbent hierarchy, there are no rules and regulations to be adhered to, there is no party line to toe – or to rile against, there is no mutual admiration society to be found in actualism. After all, the aim of a committed actualist is to become free from the human condition, to become autonomous, to be able to stand on one’s own two feet, to be able to walk freely in the world-as-it-is, to interact freely with people as-they-are – unencumbered in any way by any compulsive need to seek the support and shelter of a group as some form of armour or protection.

The other day I happened to meet a former acquaintance from my spiritual years and as we chatted it soon became obvious that we had little in common to talk about – he was still a member of a spiritual group and I was no longer a member of that same group. When he talked about feeling ‘we are all one’, it was obvious to me that what he meant was ‘I feel ‘we’ members of the group are all one’ because ‘we are all members of the one group’. As such he instantly excluded me, along with every other non-member of his group, from his ‘we are all one’ feeling – a feeling of exclusivity that is common to all spiritual groupies.

Attentiveness will reveal that belonging to any such group or organization is both insulating and isolating – the warm feelings of belonging to a special group insulate one from the grim reality experienced outside the group, which in turn means one is isolated from the rest of one’s fellow human beings who remain firmly locked outside of the group.

This was one of the aspects of the spiritual path that troubled me most in my spiritual years – which is why it was such a breath of fresh air to come across a freedom that didn’t rely on insulating oneself from grim reality by isolating oneself from the chance of experiencing the vibrant actuality of the world as-it-is as well as providing the opportunity of an actual intimacy with all of one’s fellow human beings.

Actualism delivers as an actuality that which spiritualism has ever only promised as an exclusive dream.

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