PETER: Hi,

In a recent post to Richard you asked a question concerning  me –

RESPONDENT: My first questions relate to what is (apparently) lost in AF. If there is no imaginative faculty, no mind-space at all in which to visualise objects and processes, how is it possible to understand systems and processes that do not occur right before one’s eyes?

For example: could Peter continue being an architect if he were to experience the final physiological transformation that Richard has undergone? By what means could he design and mentally manipulate new architectural plans if he had no imaginative faculty? How could he understand and discuss plans with a colleague, without seeing an actual representation of them? How could he rearrange mental images if he has no ‘mind space’, no inner eye? Would he become useless (as an architect) without his CAD software?

PETER: The reason I thought to respond was that I have made a living as an architect whilst being a ‘normal’ person and continue to do so whilst being virtually free of malice and sorrow. I have also had numerous PCEs so I know by experience what it would be to be work as an architect free of the burden of passions and imagination.

As I remember it, when I was normal the design process was a somewhat tortuous process – it was an essential part of the process to try and form a mental image of what I was designing before I tried to convert the mental image into a drawing. This forming of a mental image sometimes began even before the job started, before I met the clients or saw the land. The mental image was then based solely on what ‘I’ wanted to do, which was often at odds with what the client wanted to do or had the money to pay for or what best suited the site, the climate, the local regulations, the ease of construction, and so on. In other words the image of what I wanted to do was utterly selfist, passionate and imaginary and not at all not rooted in actuality.

This process of forming a mental image and then trying to actualize it in some form is often termed ‘the creative process’ and I very often suffered angst and anguish going through this process – feelings that are well-documented as being part and parcel of being a ‘creative’ person. Of course many self-aggrandizing feelings also arise – there is no more smug feeling than ‘me’ feeling that ‘I’ am being creative – particularly when ‘I’ receive the plaudits of others for being ‘the creator’.

However this feeling of smugness always had a hollow ring to it for me because ‘I’ was often aware that ‘I’ was claiming credit for something ‘I’ was not responsible for. Sometimes I would put this feeling into words such as ‘it wasn’t me who did it’ and I have heard others do likewise. I have also heard people say things like ‘there is a creative force that works through me’, often implying that ‘there is a Creative, aka Divine, Force that works through me’ and the more megalomaniacal even get to think and feel that ‘I am the Creative Force’. There is so much self-indulgent twaddle that has been written about creativity as to make the word creative hackneyed and I was aware of this even in my pre-actualist days.

When I became an actualist I started to become more attentive to my feelings and this included the feelings that were happening when I was trying to mentally conceptualize a design, as well as those feelings that were happening during the putting-it-down-on-paper stage. I started to become attentive to not only the emotional ups and downs that I went through but also to the effect these feelings had on others in my interactions with clients and builders, as well as those most close to me.

Late one night in my first year as an actualist, as I was working on the drawing board, I had a pure conscious experience whereby my mind became aware of itself working. There was apperception happening in that there was no ‘me’ being aware – there was simply the brain being aware of the brain in operation, in this case doing the task of designing a house. The process that was happening was fascinating to observe – there was a continual consideration of the parameters that governed the design: the client’s requirements, past experience, site considerations, planning and building regulations, structural considerations, climate considerations, budget, ease of building, appearance, durability, workability and so on.

There was a repeated shuffling of ideas and information operating – a trial and error process of working out the best solution – and it was magical to observe, even more so because there was awareness of only part of the process that was going on, there was a good deal happening ‘on the back burner’ as it were. Sometimes a particular issue was set aside for a while whilst another issue was addressed and when I returned to it later the best solution came instantaneously which made it apparent that there was an awareness only of the surface activity of the brain in action.

The operation of the human brain is such an exquisite intricacy as to be truly wondrous. With no ‘I’ in the road to agonize over the process, nor a ‘me’ present to either exalt or despair at the outcome, there was simply the brain doing what the brain does – think, plan, reflect, evaluate, compare, compute, assess and mull over, as well as simultaneously being aware that this is what it is doing. And not only that, whilst the brain is being apperceptively aware, it is also serving as the central processing unit for the sensory perceptive system of the body – continually processing the myriad of sensate information that is this flesh and blood body’s sensual sensitivity to whatever is happening in this moment.

In a PCE, it is wondrously apparent that the brain itself is not doing the sensing, it is only interpreting or making sense of the sensory input – and only doing so when and if it is needed to do so. There is an awareness that it is the eyes that are doing the seeing – there is no image of what the eyes are seeing that is transferred to the cerebral brain, there is an awareness that it is the ears that are doing the hearing – there is no sound that is transferred to the cerebral brain, there is an awareness that it is the skin that is doing the feeling and touching – there is no tactile response felt in the cerebral brain … and so on.

In a PCE, the brain, bereft of any illusionary identity together with its associated affective faculty, is incapable of forming mental images or indulging in imaginary scenarios – it is either apperceptively aware that it is involved in doing what it does, thinking and interpreting sensory inputs or it is not, in which case there is no thinking or interpreting going on, simply a sensual awareness of being conscious of being alive.

Now whilst such ‘self’-less experiences of apperception only occur in a PCE, an actualist who has got to the stage of being virtually free of malice and sorrow can operate and function with very little of the debilitating effects of ‘I’ stuffing things up or ‘me’ strutting the stage like some disembodied drama queen in a dream, or a nightmare, of ‘my’ imagination. In virtual freedom it is readily apparent that there is no need to indulge in imaginative fantasies nor to attempt to create mental images – in fact should they occur they are quickly seen for what they are – a pathetic substitute for the sumptuousness of actuality.

To bring this back to the business of being an architect, it means that any attempt on ‘my’ part to form a mental image, either prior to or during the design process, only inhibits the doing of the designing – a practical doing that happens anyway and happens at its very best whenever ‘I’ am absent from the scene.

I don’t know if that answers your question but I had fun writing of my experiences as an actualist. As I said, there is so much twaddle written about so-called creativity that it is good to have some sense written about the actuality of creating something.

*

PETER: In a separate post you also wrote –

RESPONDENT: I’m wondering if parts of this experience offer a glimpse of what AF is like.

Is this what is meant by a PCE?

PETER: From what you have written, the experience you had sounds very much like a PCE … but only you can be the ultimate judge of the nature of your own experiences. You will find a description of a PCE that served as my touchstone in actualism in my journal and Vineeto has catalogued a section on PCEs in the library section of the Actual Freedom Trust website. For descriptions of what it is like to live actually free of the human condition there is Richard’s Journal.

As you have probably twigged to by now, remembering a PCE is one thing, what you want to do with that memory is yet another.

21.11.2003

PETER: The operation of the human brain is such an exquisite intricacy as to be truly wondrous. With no ‘I’ in the road to agonize over the process, nor a ‘me’ present to either exalt or despair at the outcome, there was simply the brain doing what the brain does – think, plan, reflect, evaluate, compare, compute, assess and mull over, as well as simultaneously being aware that this is what it is doing.

RESPONDENT: Ah, I see my mistake now. The I-complex tends to regard itself as the very heart and soul of intelligence, which is amazingly stupid in hindsight.

PETER: What I was describing was the functioning of the human brain in a pure consciousness experience when ‘I’ am temporarily absent, and as you know, a pure consciousness experience is a rare event. In normal experiencing the ‘‘I’-complex’, to use your words – doesn’t regard itself as the very heart and soul of intelligence, ‘he’ or ‘she’ so totally dominates that there is precious little thinking happening that is not ‘I’ thinking and moreover whatever thinking is happening is most often dominated by ‘my’ feelings. In short, ‘I’ don’t tend to regard myself as being the centre of ‘my’ world, ‘I’ am the centre of my world.

The actualism method is specifically tailored to break down dominance and if the process is allowed to fully run its course self-immolation is the end result.

RESPONDENT: I should know better already. Whenever I’m playing music, programming or writing at my best, ‘I’ get the hell out of the way, and that’s when all the interesting stuff starts to happen. I suspect this is a common hurdle for newcomers to AF. If ‘I’ am equivalent to ‘my’ intelligence or creativity, then the absence of ‘I’ is absence of intelligence or creativity. Not so.

PETER: Yes, but as you know, there is a vast difference between single-mindedly focussing one’s attention on a task and having a ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience, which is what I was talking about.

I don’t want to put a damper on your reflections about the subject but history shows that seeking fulfilment and meaning via the single-minded fixation on artistic, academic, scientific or sporting pursuits is a fickle business. I remember about 10 years ago doing a job when everything went well – not only the design but the building process as well. When it was completed I remember thinking ‘now what’ – this is as good as it gets doing what I do for a living and even if every job was as good as this it was definitely not the meaning of life. I then understood experientially that what I did to make money – what people pretentiously call ‘being creative’ – was no more and no less than what I did to make money, which helped in that it put a final line through the idea that what ‘I’ did for a living was the meaning of life.

*

PETER: In a separate post you also wrote –

RESPONDENT: I’m wondering if parts of this experience offer a glimpse of what AF is like.

Is this what is meant by a PCE?

PETER: From what you have written, the experience you had sounds very much like a PCE … but only you can be the ultimate judge of the nature of your own experiences.

RESPONDENT: At the moment when I drifted into the ‘bubble’ of perfection, and for some time afterwards, yeah, I’m pretty sure that was a PCE, and it was a lovely way to spend the day.

PETER: Yes indeed. Not only does one drift into a bubble of perfection, as you put it, but that character or person who only a moment or so before felt anxious, or annoyed or indifferent or lonely or bored … has disappeared, as though ‘he’ never existed.

RESPONDENT: It wasn’t what I had expected. Quite a few years ago I had some very intense (and fascinating) ASCs on LSD, and I expected this ‘trip’ to be a faint echo of same: ie. mind exploding with fantastical geometrical visions, the universe revealing its authentic deep structure in the form of fractal patterns everywhere. But this was something altogether different. I’ve had MDMA [‘E’] a few times as well, but this little ‘bubble’ of space and time seemed more ‘pure’ and ‘clean’ and ‘perfect’ than anything I’ve known before.

PETER: Yes. The stand-out qualities of a PCE is both the purity and the perfection of the actual world and the utter sensuousness of the experience affirms that this purity and perfection are innate qualities of the physical universe, i.e. one isn’t swooning around in some aggrandized or altered state in meta-physical imaginary world.

RESPONDENT: The thought that life can be actually lived this way 24/7 is interesting indeed. ;-)

PETER: Altered states of consciousness are far more tempting because denial and dissociation are easier options than taking responsibility for actually doing something to bring an end to human malice and sorrow. But when I came across Richard, I had had enough of the duplicity of the spiritual world and I was hooked by Richard’s sincerity and a burning desire to do something meaningful with my life.

30.11.2003

PETER: Yes. The stand-out qualities of a PCE is both the purity and the perfection of the actual world and the utter sensuousness of the experience affirms that this purity and perfection are innate qualities of the physical universe, i.e. one isn’t swooning around in some aggrandized or altered state in a meta-physical imaginary world.

RESPONDENT: Exactly. I’m happy to say this has been happening quite a lot lately, not quite with the purity of the psilocybin experience last summer, but enough to give me a glimpse of what is possible if I persist in dissolving the crap that’s been cluttering up my mind and heart for years.

PETER: We have had discussions on this list in the past that may be useful for you to look up as they refer to experiences one can have that, whilst being marvellous, are not PCEs. Someone used the term ‘excellence experience’ to describe such delicious but nevertheless affective experiences in order to distinguish them from the ‘self’-less pure conscious experience of actuality and you might also find it a useful term use – or not. Vineeto has collected these discussions and catalogued them in the The Actual Freedom Trust Library.

RESPONDENT: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the psychological and emotional structure of ‘me’. I’ve never been a community minded person, always regarded nationalism, racism, religious affiliations etc as glorified tribalism (at best a joke, at worst, the cause of unspeakable suffering in the world). I thought I was immune to all of that crap. But just lately I’ve realised (with some surprise) that another kind of tribe (the family) is deeply embedded in me. For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to dissolve these webs of entanglement in my mind and emotions. Not walking out on the family, not abandoning friends, but refusing to carry them around with me, refusing to define myself (or others) in terms of our special relationships based on kinship or shared experiences. I’ve never thought of myself as a possessive or clannish person by nature, but it’s all there. This psychic network of family relationships and friendships is a large part of ‘me’.

PETER: What you write of reminds me of the time I first really became aware of not being free. I had been on the spiritual path for years but when my teenage son died I experienced that I was ‘bound’, as though I had invisible bands around my chest that I needed to break free of. Having someone so young die seemed such a waste, which made me realize that I also was wasting my life unless I became free of these bands before I died. It was then that I became really serious, as in sincere, about my spiritual search but all I found was that I had been gullible in that I had been suckered into being a religious fanatic, albeit Eastern religion instead of Western religion.

After I ditched the spiritual path, I have since done a good deal of practical work in dismantling my social identity – my identity as a father, a lover, a provider, a rational-thinking male, a SNAG, a WASP, a socialist, a pacifist, a creative person, a patriotic Australian, and so on. It’s a big list to go through because I wanted to get rid of – or at least reduce to the most miniscule that ‘I’ possibly could – the affective parts of my social identity such that I could be happy and harmless whilst in the company of my fellow human beings. And if I wasn’t, then I had something to look at, for I then knew that some bit or other of my social identity needed to be discarded.

About 3 years ago I was sitting on a grassy bank near where I live, looking out over the sea early one morning when I had an experience that was somewhat similar to that which I had had all those years before when I stood beside my son’s coffin. This time I experienced that the reason that I was not free was because I was tethered by long tentacles attached to my back, which trailed off into the distance behind me. I remember thinking at the time that these tentacles or strings are what attaches me to Humanity – to no one in particular, but to Humanity itself.

In hindsight – and I am only now trying to make sense of it in order to pass on some information that may be of some use to you – it could be said that the last years of the work I have done in dismantling my social identity has meant that the feeling of not being free has somewhat changed. The feeling of being bound around the chest could be said to be the obvious feeling of being bound and restrained by the rules of society – a feeling that has given rise to the commonly-held feeling that ‘if only I can break free of my social conditioning then ‘I’ am free’.

By the stage of my second experience of not being free I had by-and-large demolished my social conditioning – including the spiritual conditioning that insists that to become free of social conditioning is the meaning of life – which meant I was then able to experience that there is in fact another layer beneath one’s social conditioning that one needs to become free of, and that is the human condition itself. My experience of being tethered to Humanity made it clear that I would not be actually free whilst these invisible emotional tentacles – as in psychic ties – remained.

It also occurred to me at the time that ‘I’ only exist whilst these tentacles exist and if these tentacles disappeared then ‘I’ would cease to exist … because ‘I’, as an affective non-physical being, only exist as a member of an affective ‘big club’ we call Humanity, a ‘club’ that has no existence in actuality. The feeling I had was that if ‘I’ disappeared no-one would mourn ‘my’ passing because no-one would even know ‘I’ had died as ‘I’ have no existence as an actuality.

Again with the hindsight of my own experience, the reason I needed to do the necessary work to become free of my social conditioning – including my spiritual conditioning which was part and parcel of this conditioning – is that I was then able to become virtually free of malice and sorrow. I was then able to clearly see, and experience, that it is the human condition itself that I need to be free of in order that I become actually free of malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: The results of trying to dissolve all of this have been mixed.

Occasionally it feels liberating. Occasionally there’s a sense of guilt associated with disloyalty (and all the rest of the psychological and emotional baggage that goes with it).

PETER: I remember trying to tip-toe my way through the minefield of morals and ethics until I found I had to take a good look at whether they were sensible or not, i.e. whether or not they worked in practice. For example, as children we are told by our parents and teachers not to get angry and not to hit other children. If we do then we are told it is wrong and that we are being bad, we are punished in some way and then told to say sorry to whomever we got angry with or whomever we hit. Not only are we made to feel guilty for not being ‘good’ children but the let-off of saying sorry means we then demand of others that they have to forgive us for being angry at them in the first place.

When I started to understand why morals and ethics have been developed, and how they operate in practice, it became clear to me that the only sensible way to become free of them was for me to become free of the instinctual passions that the morals and ethics are designed to stifle and repress in the first place. If I do not get angry when Betty says, or Tom doesn’t do, or when ‘they’ don’t, or when ‘they’ do, or when life is ‘unfair’ and so on, then the compulsion to feel guilty and the need to gratuitously say sorry doesn’t even need to come into play.

Whilst I couldn’t sort these things out as a child – long before I was even capable of making sense of what was happening I was unwittingly programmed to think and feel this way – as a grown-up I now able to do this.

And just another comment that is relevant to the issue of morals and ethics – there is a tendency for some people who have some appreciation of the inherent restrictions of their social conditioning to discard their original moral and ethical conditioning in favour of adopting moral behaviour and ethical stances that are seen by society at large as being immoral and antisocial – thereby fondly imagining that by swapping camps they have somehow freed themselves from their societal conditioning. Many then form affiliations with like-minded ‘outcasts’ in order to feel kinship with others who also feel they have ‘seen the light’ or who ‘know the truth’, or who justify their malice towards others as being ‘honest’, as being ‘real’, as being ‘authentic’, or as being ‘true’ to themselves.

To me it made sense that the only way to actually become free of the binds of morals and ethics is to pull the plug on what they are there to keep a lid on – the savage instinctual passions. If you are harmless towards your fellow human beings then feelings of guilt do not arise and when others try to make you feel guilty their barbs will find nothing to hook on.

And to round the conversation back to your case, in my experience the ‘sense of guilt associated with disloyalty’ was eventually experienced as a diminishing side-effect of increasingly whittling away at my social identity in order that I could become more happy and less harmful towards others.

RESPONDENT: But in spite of the feelings of guilt, I find that I’m not in any way less caring. Instead of feeling that I’m part of a network of people whose fates are intertwined, I’m looking at my ‘near and dear ones’ as ordinary fellow human beings, and I find that compassion and loyalty are being replaced by simple, good-natured playfulness. (There is definitely still affection here, but not of a possessive kind).

PETER: I can relate to what you are saying because I have had the same experience myself, most particularly in relation to my son. I came to notice that whenever I regarded him as ‘my’ son then a whole lot of feelings stood in the way of the intimacy of experiencing him as being a fellow human being. I became aware that whenever I felt him to be ‘my’ son then I found that I was needlessly protective, compulsively possessive, demanding, interfering, dismissive, expectant, and so on, which meant that I felt proud, hopeful, despairing, loyal, disappointed, annoyed, jealous, controlling, frustrated, and so on. I also noticed that whenever I had these feelings I could not help but impose them on him – no matter how hard I tried not to there was always a subtle, and sometimes a not so subtle, leakage.

The only reason I stopped being a player in this game was because I came to my senses in that I saw that it was ‘my’ feelings that stopped me from simply sitting down with him when the opportunity arose and having a down-to-earth intimate chat about things of mutual interest, exactly as I am wont to do with any of my fellow human beings when the opportunity arises.

RESPONDENT: None of this has the purity of a PCE, but it’s getting closer.

PETER: Yes if you are having a PCE, then second-best is second best, but if your not having a PCE then second-best is a darn sight better than wasting one’s time wallowing around feeling miserable about having to be here or about doing whatever it is that one is doing or needs to do, or feeling bitter about and being antagonistic towards one’s fellow human beings.

RESPONDENT: I think dissolving the ‘inner family’ has made it possible to travel more lightly, and there is less sense of ownership (including ownership of ‘my’ ‘own’ consciousness) than there was before. More and more often I’m experiencing myself as the actual physical universe experiencing *itself* through my eyes and ears and heart and mind. If this has any mystical connotations, it shouldn’t.

PETER: It took me a bit to come to appreciate that if ‘I’ had the feeling – as in the affective experience – that ‘I’ was ‘the actual physical universe experiencing *itself* through my eyes and ears and heart and mind’ then I was but a step away from delusion. The way to check this out for yourself is to compare whatever it is you are feeling against how you experienced yourself in a PCE. This way you can determine for yourself whether what you are feeling is on-track or whether or not you might be wandering off track. It’s not for nothing that it is essential to be attentive to both one’s so-called bad feelings and one’s so-called good feelings.

RESPONDENT: It’s more like amazement that this universe and life on earth have evolved from a chemical soup into increasingly complex forms of organic sludge and finally into self-aware and world-aware creatures. There’s a simple delight in being conscious of it all, and an amazement that it should exist at all.

PETER: Yes, it is indeed amazing and magical and delight-filled when you take a clear-eyed look at it. And to think that there are those who claim that this amazing physical actuality is but an illusion and that their own inner affectations and imaginations are the only true reality.

*

PETER: Altered states of consciousness are far more tempting because denial and dissociation are easier options ...

RESPONDENT: Jeez, not for me. I’ve found ‘denial and dissociation’ so bloody boring as to be an impossible way to live.

PETER: I made the comment because this was my experience – even a good many months after I had a good intellectual grasp of the fact that actualism had nothing to do with spiritualism and that any ‘self’-aggrandizing states were but a wank, I gradually became aware that I was having subtle behind-the-scenes ‘self’-aggrandizing feelings. The only reason I discovered them was that they came bubbling to the surface such that I could neither deny them nor dissociate from them. I mentioned it in my journal so as to flag a warning as it were to others who might tread the path –

[Peter]: ... ‘About this time I started to come to grips with an undercurrent of feelings that had been welling up in me as I got further along this path to freedom. As I began to increasingly understand the full extent of what Richard had discovered, I had begun quite cunningly to plot my role in the Movement that would sweep the world. Images of money and fame began to subtly occur – and sometimes not so subtly. I would see myself travelling and talking to halls full of people, spreading the message! Yes, it was good old power and authority again – the attraction of the Glamour, Glory and Glitz. No wonder the Enlightened Ones are seduced and then trapped by it! It seemed to me an instinctual grab for power by my psyche, which rightly felt threatened with elimination. I also had to admit to myself that power and authority was a definite attraction in my desire for Enlightenment – a sort of spiritual version of ‘Money for nothing and your chicks for free’.’ Peter’s Journal, God

RESPONDENT: At various times (being aware that ‘I’ am the thorn in ‘my’ side, but unable to penetrate through it) I’ve looked into various spiritual teachings that are light on metaphysics eg. J Krishnamurti and Zen.

PETER: Perhaps a better way of saying it is that they are very careful to couch their teachings in words that can’t readily be seen to be meta-physical. Jiddu Krishnamurti played largely to Western audiences so he was usually very careful to couch his teachings as being non-religious and was very careful in his use of words so as to disguise the religiosity of his message. Zen’s metaphysics on the other hand have been penned by men who have spent so long isolated from the world-as-it-is and people as-they-are that their teachings are but rarefied nonsense … which apparently is why they have such widespread appeal, particularly amongst those with an intellectual-only bent.

Oops, there I go again being politically incorrect …

RESPONDENT: The result has invariably been a numb stupidity, a state of absolute paralysis of will, and a dullness like living death. Obviously never succeeded in breaking down the ego, and without that the ‘spiritual life’ would be intolerable (for me).

PETER: I got into spirituality because it promised peace on earth and living in spiritual communities was to be the proving ground of whether this was possible or not. When that turned out to be a furphy, I then figured that the personal pursuit of an impersonal freedom, aka death of the ego, was the go. Over time, it gradually dawned on me that this meant that if I was successful I would end up being a God-man compelled to gather followers in order that they revere me as a being a God-man. About this time the whole spiritual pursuit began to have a sour taste for me.

RESPONDENT: I’m probably not the best one to judge, but I reckon the psychedelic experience (esp. LSD) is as dramatically different from ‘spiritual’ experience as it is from ‘ordinary’ experience.

PETER: Well given that you have considerable experience of being ‘normal’, that you apparently have had psychedelic experiences and that you have had at least one pure consciousness experience that you can remember, you may also come to have an ASC spiritual experience if you hang in with being attentive to your feelings on the path to actual freedom.

The reason I say this is because Vineeto had a full-blown altered states of consciousness experience when she was exploring the issues of love and compassion – in-depth explorations can bring in-depth experiencing of the emotions and passions that are integral to the human psyche. I personally didn’t have an ASC in my explorations perhaps because I had had one previously towards the end of my spiritual years, but I did hit the bottom of fear one day only to experience excruciating dread in a hellish realm that was not dissimilar to Dante’s fiery inferno or the descriptions of Christian Hell.

Not that I am saying that anyone who is now interested in treading the path to actual freedom will have to experience what I experienced, or what Vineeto experienced, or what Richard experienced for that matter, but some degree or type of ‘plumbing of the depths’ is essential in order that one is able to experience for oneself, first-hand, the instinctual passions that lie at the very core of the human psyche. But it is your journey to make, if you want to make it, and only you can make the journey – all I am offering is tips and hints based on what it is that I have discovered thus far. In other words, take these words at face value and decide for yourself in your own experience as to whether they are relevant or not or if they make sense or not.

RESPONDENT: I’ve never read of a spiritual experience that reveals a universe teeming with self-similar fractal structures at many different levels of abstraction, with the abstract and the concrete interwoven in ways that the most gifted human imagination could *never* devise. I dunno though. Maybe Richard has experienced something of the sort.

PETER: I have had only one psychedelic drug experience in my life and that was when I was a 20yr. old travelling around Europe. Someone offered me a pill that they said ‘would make me feel good’ and me, being a gullible lad from conservative suburban Australia, took it thinking it was some type of vitamin pill. I can only presume it was LSD as what followed was a complete distortion of all my sensory inputs which was quite something as I was then driven through downtown Frankfurt for a night at a bar. Lights, noise and movement were but a jumble and any attempts at orienting myself or making sense of what was happening or of what I was experiencing as apparently happening were impossible.

I didn’t experience the psychedelic experience as being an expansion of consciousness as some say it is but rather as a distortion of sensory perception which usually entices the mind to imagine all sorts of weird and wonderful scenarios, and sometimes downright terrifying ones by all accounts. Presumably one could have a spiritual experience in such a state, imagining there to be fairies at the bottom of the garden or that it is all God’s ‘Leela’ or even that all of what one is experiencing is but an illusion staged solely for my benefit, but I am no expert in drug-induced experiences. I do know that one psychedelic experience was enough for me … I never hankered for more.

*

PETER: Altered states of consciousness are far more tempting because denial and dissociation are easier options than taking responsibility for actually doing something to bring an end to human malice and sorrow. But when I came across Richard, I had had enough of the duplicity of the spiritual world and I was hooked by Richard’s sincerity and a burning desire to do something meaningful with my life.

RESPONDENT: I share that burning desire. Life just can’t go on as it has.

PETER: For me, once I discovered that reality sucked I was always on the look out for something better. After I found out that the spiritual world was full of charlatans I sat down one day and decided I had nothing left to lose – which is why I used the phrase as a sub-title to my journal. It appears that most people experience that as terrifying to acknowledge – to dare to put all of one’s eggs in one basket, instead of sprinkling them around many baskets – but for me it was thrilling because I was then able to let go of the past and whole-heartedly embrace the changes that are necessary in order to become actually free of malice and sorrow. This is not to say that there weren’t a few wobbles and a few sidetracks but it has been, and still is, a thrilling business to be in.

If I can add a rider to this post, I do appreciate that you write of your personal experiences and your personal feelings as it means that we can talk about down-to-earth matters. I’ve never been fond of intellectualizing for intellectualizing sake and I eventually found the male habit of philosophizing to be a way of dissociating from the reality of one’s own everyday life (and I say this because I eventually came to understand that this was the reason why I joined in the philosophizing) and yet I now find myself having to respond to posts that are nothing but intellectualizing and philosophizing. I have the choice to ignore them of course but you might have noticed that I do take the opportunity to sprinkle them with some personal anecdotes and some down-to-earth talk that I figure will be of interest to others on this list who are interested in what is happening ‘where the rubber meets the road’.

Nice to chat …

24.12.2003

RESPONDENT: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the psychological and emotional structure of ‘me’. I’ve never been a community minded person, always regarded nationalism, racism, religious affiliations etc as glorified tribalism (at best a joke, at worst, the cause of unspeakable suffering in the world). I thought I was immune to all of that crap.

For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to dissolve these webs of entanglement in my mind and emotions. Not walking out on the family, not abandoning friends, but refusing to carry them around with me, refusing to define myself (or others) in terms of our special relationships based on kinship or shared experiences. I’ve never thought of myself as a possessive or clannish person by nature, but it’s all there. This psychic network of family relationships and friendships is a large part of ‘me’.

PETER: What you write of reminds me of the time I first really became aware of not being free. I had been on the spiritual path for years but when my teenage son died I experienced that I was ‘bound’, as though I had invisible bands around my chest that I needed to break free of. Having someone so young die seemed such a waste, which made me realize that I also was wasting my life unless I became free of these bands before I died.

RESPONDENT: Did that feeling of being ‘bound’ first arise when your son died, or was it something that had always been there, that only then became painfully apparent?

PETER: Being ‘normal’ was never ever satisfactory, particularly as the pursuit of material wealth and financial power never appealed to me – I somehow knew that ‘something’ was missing but I didn’t know of any alternative. About age 33 I fell for the belief that abandoning grim reality and opting for a greater reality meant freedom. I guess when my son died I no could longer kid myself that I knew anything about freedom and hence the feeling of not being free suddenly surfaced as being more urgent and therefore much more obvious.

RESPONDENT: I think I know what you mean about those bands. If we’re talking about the same thing, there’s nothing abstract about it is there? ... for me it feels something like a weight or a drag in the solar plexus region.

PETER: I would describe my feeling as more like being in a straight-jacket and, yes, there was nothing abstract about it at all – there was a definite physical component to the feeling, as there is with all feelings.

Plumbing the depths of such feelings can be fraught with danger for depression, and despair can lay at the bottom, but at the time, and in the circumstances, this feeling of not being free proved to be inspirational and motivational – the feeling was so strong that it was not something I could either dismiss or deny as I had done so often before.

RESPONDENT: I’ve noticed something lately that I find strange and interesting: the emotions of platonic love, fear, and a (vaguely doomed) sense of obligation are all, on a physiological level, quite similar. They have a different ... uhm ... cognitive halo ... surrounding them, but the sensation of aching heaviness is, if not identical, then pretty close.

PETER: Observation will reveal that all feelings and emotions have physical sensations associated with them. The last half century of scientific study has unearthed the cause of this – a veritable cocktail of hormones are triggered by instinctive reactions to both actual or presumed physical dangers as well as to intuitive, as in speculative or imaginary, psychic dangers.

(Editorial note: This above assertion by feeling-being ‘Peter’ (that ‘hormones are triggered by instinctive reactions’) is at odds with what Richard reports (that hormones are triggered by instinctual passions):

RESPONDENT: The self is nothing other than conditioning, the thinker/ feeler/ doer is thought.

RICHARD: As feelings demonstrably come before thought in the perceptive process this is but a shallow understanding.

RESPONDENT: Why divide the process up?

RICHARD: I am not dividing the process up ... that is how it operates naturally (as is borne out by laboratory testing): sensate perception is primary; affective perception is secondary; cognitive perception is tertiary. The sensate signal, a loud sound for example, takes 12-14 milliseconds to reach the affective faculty and 24-25 milliseconds to reach the cognitive faculty: thus by the time reasoned cognition can take place the instinctual passions are pumping freeze-fight-flee chemicals throughout the body thus agitating cognitive appraisal ... and whilst there is a narrowband circuit from the cognitive centre to the affective centre (through which reason can dampen-down and stop the reactive response) the circuitry from the affective faculty to the cognitive faculty is broadband (which is why it takes some time to calm down after an emotional reaction).” Richard, List B, No. 12, 16 January 2003 [emphasis added].

RESPONDENT: If we’re talking about the same thing, I carry this sensation/feeling around with me everywhere I go (sometimes it’s more oppressive than others, of course, but it’s almost always present to some degree). Apart from a few short interludes of genuine happiness, I always have.

PETER: We may well be talking about different things here. I was talking about a singular life-changing realization – the realization that my life would be a waste if I didn’t become free of the sense of bondage that I experienced as bands around my chest. From what I understand you are talking of an almost constant background feeling of heaviness. If this is the case then I can relate to this – for me it was a feeling of seriousness and responsibility that was both wearying and stressful. It’s a tough job being an entity living inside a corporeal body, ever on guard, ever needing to be in control and yet never being able to do so. It appears that my son’s death was the catalyst for me not accepting this as being a good enough way to live.

RESPONDENT: Only rarely am I completely free of it (more below). And, hmmm, just realised as I’m writing this, I actually feel guilty about feeling this way. (Allow me to rant for a moment here because this is quite unexpected). Yes. A thousand exhortations to ‘count your blessings’, ‘think yourself lucky’, ‘thank your lucky stars’, ‘there but for the grace of God ...’, have all been taken (literally) to heart. Heh. When I hear other people talk about the ‘unbearable lightness of being’, it seems to me that ‘being’ is not a balloon, it’s a fucking boulder!

PETER: The human condition is littered with dimwitticisms that exhort you to be grateful for your suffering, not to grumble about your lot in life, to accept things as they are, and so on. When I came to realize that most, if not all, of these platitudes originate from those who believe that they will finally rest in peace in a spurious after-life, I came to understand the extent to which sorrow permeates the human condition. It’s not for nothing that ‘self’-centred reality is know as grim reality.

RESPONDENT: ‘Freedom’ (from this boulder) has taken a couple of forms for me. Firstly, there definitely were PCEs in early childhood, and more and more echoes of these are coming back to me lately. (There was also a deep and leaden melancholy feeling, in spite of being a tough, robust, healthy kid raised in ‘happy’ circumstances). Secondly there was mischief with my mates which gave me great delight. Thirdly, a deep and lasting relationship with my girlfriend. And finally, dalliances with psychedelics. I’ll pause for now, otherwise this’ll become an autobiography.

PETER: The problem I found with being a normal human being was that I was prone to bouts of melancholy no matter how ‘positive’ I tried to be, that I had a tendency to be antagonistic no matter how much I tried to hide it … and that I had an over-arching feeling of being separate from everyone and everything, a feeling which was only temporarily relieved by ‘belonging’ to someone or by ‘owning’ something. It’s the lot of being a passionate being.

*

PETER: It was then that I became really serious, as in sincere, about my spiritual search but all I found was that I had been gullible in that I had been suckered into being a religious fanatic, albeit Eastern religion instead of Western religion.

RESPONDENT: I can certainly relate to the desire to throw oneself wholeheartedly into a spiritual pursuit. I was never ‘capable’ of it myself. If I had been capable of it, I probably would have done so at various times in my life. The reason I wasn’t ‘capable’ of it was because, from about 17 onwards, I persistently alternated between eastern and western world views, hoping to find a perspective that was both intellectually tenable and emotionally satisfying / stimulating. I got a life-affirming ‘charge’ from western romanticism, but it usually petered out into nihilism after a few days. Conversely, I found the east’s emphasis on transcendence stimulating at first, but stultifying after a few days. So although I did not stick with any faith or philosophy, I’ve stuck religiously to this swinging pendulum for nearly twenty years now. Only too happy to chuck the whole thing now ;-)

PETER: I didn’t know anything about Eastern religion in my youth and by the time I did it was too late – I had fallen for it hook, line and sinker. And I am more than glad that I did because I got to know it from the inside as it were. If I hadn’t made such a thorough investigation, I would probably still be trying to reconcile materialism with spiritualism as I see many other people trying to do.

*

PETER: After I ditched the spiritual path, I have since done a good deal of practical work in dismantling my social identity – my identity as a father, a lover, a provider, a rational-thinking male, a SNAG, a WASP, a socialist, a pacifist, a creative person, a patriotic Australian, and so on. It’s a big list to go through because I wanted to get rid of – or at least reduce to the most miniscule that ‘I’ possibly could – the affective parts of my social identity such that I could be happy and harmless whilst in the company of my fellow human beings. And if I wasn’t, then I had something to look at, for I then knew that some bit or other of my social identity needed to be discarded.

RESPONDENT: Father and lover must be pretty hard to ditch ... but I’d guess that ‘creative person’ might have been a little more stubborn than expected ;-)

PETER: Becoming happy and harmless does have consequences – becoming autonomous and anonymous are wonderful side-effects, but apparently ones that frighten many away from actualism.

*

PETER: By the stage of my second experience of not being free I had by-and-large demolished my social conditioning – including the spiritual conditioning that insists that to become free of social conditioning is the meaning of life – which meant I was then able to experience that there is in fact another layer beneath one’s social conditioning that one needs to become free of, and that is the human condition itself. My experience of being tethered to Humanity made it clear that I would not be actually free whilst these invisible emotional tentacles – as in psychic ties – remained.

It also occurred to me at the time that ‘I’ only exist whilst these tentacles exist and if these tentacles disappeared then ‘I’ would cease to exist … because ‘I’, as an affective non-physical being, only exist as a member of an affective ‘big club’ we call Humanity, a ‘club’ that has no existence in actuality.

RESPONDENT: It’s always fascinating to hear about how people experience themselves. As one who had already decided to become free of the human condition by eliminating the affective self, it’s understandable that those last vestiges of self would be experienced as ‘tentacles’. It’s a little different for me in that there seems to be two of ‘me’ (i.e. two souls, not just one ego and one soul). See if this makes sense:

The first affective self is the ‘stone’ or ‘boulder’ that I referred to before. It’s the weight of love, caring, responsibility, and it happens to feel (viscerally) not unlike fear, guilt or doom, except that one experiences them with a courage instead of weakness. (How absurd this seems when I think about it. I wonder if this is specific to me, or whether other people feel this way.)

PETER: If by courage you mean ‘it takes courage to fight the good fight’, ‘it takes courage to go on despite the setbacks’, ‘it takes courage to pick oneself up again and to keep going’, and so on, then I can remember having had such feelings when I was a normal man. I remember it as being bloody hard work trying to be good and loving all the time – it’s a stressful business by and large.

RESPONDENT: The other affective self is a busy, restless little fellow. He’s not enmeshed in tentacles, he is a bundle of tentacles and claws. Actually, I visualise ‘it’ is as a kind of crab or some other crustacean scuttling away blindly but purposefully, never satisfied, in truth not even satisfiable (or not for long anyway).

PETER: Forever needing to be busy, forever wary, forever thinking about the past or worrying about the future, basically neurotic and ever fearful at root?

RESPONDENT: I think of the first affective self as a somewhat unhappy person who’s bearing up as nobly and kindly and with as much dignity as possible. The second one is just a mad scuttler, a heartless mechanism that perpetually strives for god-knows-what. Writing about this helps to clarify something. Probably these affective selves are none other than what you guys call ‘sorrow’ and ‘malice’ respectively.

PETER: Yep, the so-called ‘good’ passions are at root sorrowful and the so-called ‘bad passions’ are at root fearful. And it is these instinctual passions, both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, that fuel the malice and sorrow of the human condition.

RESPONDENT: To ‘me’ (guess which one ;-)) ‘they’ do not feel like the same entity, but rather two sets of twins. That is, each of these affective selves has its counterpart with a pair of twin egos. One of these twin egos is a rather melancholic, whimsical, friendly, harmless, bumbling, caring sort of fellow, and the other is a ruthless, self-centred ratbag who looks out for number one in every situation (though he’s pretty good at disguising this).

PETER: My description was that there was a ‘goody-two-shoes’ a front-man if you like – beneath which lay a not very pleasant person who had a ‘dark side’ that was literally diabolical.

*

PETER: And just another comment that is relevant to the issue of morals and ethics – there is a tendency for some people who have some appreciation of the inherent restrictions of their social conditioning to discard their original moral and ethical conditioning in favour of adopting moral behaviour and ethical stances that are seen by society at large as being immoral and antisocial – thereby fondly imagining that by swapping camps they have somehow freed themselves from their societal conditioning. Many then form affiliations with like-minded ‘outcasts’ in order to feel kinship with others who also feel they have ‘seen the light’ or who ‘know the truth’, or who justify their malice towards others as being ‘honest’, as being ‘real’, as being ‘authentic’, or as being ‘true’ to themselves.

RESPONDENT: Yeah, absolutely right. Moral systems are all different ways of inhibiting and/or harnessing the wild beast. Little point in trading one type of harness for another, while the beast remains unchanged.

PETER: If you have followed my recent conversation with No 33 you will have understood that only by becoming happy and harmless can morals and ethics become redundant. Of course ‘the beast’, to use your words, will resist this, as being happy and being harmless goes against ‘the beast’s’ very nature – but what to do? If you want to be free of the human condition this is the work to be done, no matter how daunting or how scary it may seem at first.

*

RESPONDENT: But in spite of the feelings of guilt, I find that I’m not in any way less caring. Instead of feeling that I’m part of a network of people whose fates are intertwined, I’m looking at my ‘near and dear ones’ as ordinary fellow human beings, and I find that compassion and loyalty are being replaced by simple, good-natured playfulness. (There is definitely still affection here, but not of a possessive kind).

PETER: I can relate to what you are saying because I have had the same experience myself, most particularly in relation to my son. I came to notice that whenever I regarded him as ‘my’ son then a whole lot of feelings stood in the way of the intimacy of experiencing him as being a fellow human being. I became aware that whenever I felt him to be ‘my’ son then I found that I was needlessly protective, compulsively possessive, demanding, interfering, dismissive, expectant, and so on, which meant that I felt proud, hopeful, despairing, loyal, disappointed, annoyed, jealous, controlling, frustrated, and so on. I also noticed that whenever I had these feelings I could not help but impose them on him – no matter how hard I tried not to there was always a subtle, and sometimes a not so subtle, leakage.

The only reason I stopped being a player in this game was because I came to my senses in that I saw that it was ‘my’ feelings that stopped me from simply sitting down with him when the opportunity arose and having a down-to-earth intimate chat about things of mutual interest, exactly as I am wont to do with any of my fellow human beings when the opportunity arises.

RESPONDENT: Noticed all of the above, especially in relation to my girlfriend. (Wonderful thing, this ‘love’, eh?). But most of it was years ago. For the last five years or so we’ve enjoyed the kind of relationship that you and Vineeto are exploring, and I’d have to agree with you that it’s a lot better than conventional ‘love’. (Some people don’t understand, but so what? The conventional loving relationships of our peers are mostly ending in bitter acrimony, while we are happier together (and more comfortable apart) than ever, so we both know we’re at least getting something right). It’s a different matter with my ‘blood’ family, but I won’t go into that just now ...

PETER: When you say ‘for the last five years or so we’ve enjoyed the kind of relationship that you and Vineeto are exploring,’ are you saying that you live with your girlfriend in utter peace and harmony – because that is how I live with Vineeto. The reason I say this is because before I began to rid myself of my own feelings of antagonism and sadness I never could live this way with anyone, let alone with a companion. Before then I had the tendency to be as moody and as cantankerous as anyone else I knew – not that I was willing to admit it at the time.

*

RESPONDENT: I think dissolving the ‘inner family’ has made it possible to travel more lightly, and there is less sense of ownership (including ownership of ‘my’ ‘own’ consciousness) than there was before. More and more often I’m experiencing myself as the actual physical universe experiencing itself through my eyes and ears and heart and mind. If this has any mystical connotations, it shouldn’t.

PETER: It took me a bit to come to appreciate that if ‘I’ had the feeling – as in the affective experience – that ‘I’ was ‘the actual physical universe experiencing itself through my eyes and ears and heart and mind’ then I was but a step away from delusion. The way to check this out for yourself is to compare whatever it is you are feeling against how you experienced yourself in a PCE. This way you can determine for yourself whether what you are feeling is on-track or whether or not you might be wandering off track.

It’s not for nothing that it is essential to be attentive to both one’s so-called bad feelings and one’s so-called good feelings.

RESPONDENT: You’ve said it very tactfully, but I hear the implied warning. Let me clarify something that makes the warning unnecessary. When I said ‘I experience myself as the physical universe experiencing itself ...’, I didn’t mean ‘I-as-identity’, I meant ‘human being as self-conscious physical organism’ experiencing the universe it lives in. (That’s quite wondrous enough for me, without affixing any mystical significance to it.)

PETER: If you are a ‘‘self-conscious physical organism’ experiencing the universe it lives in’, then your consciousness is a self-conscious consciousness, as it is with every human being on the planet. Attentiveness will reveal that this self in self-consciousness is a psychological and psychic self – ‘the affective self’, as you previously said you experienced him, ‘he’ of ‘two souls, not just one ego and one soul’.

In contrast to a PCE when the ‘self’ is temporarily in abeyance, this ‘self’ is readily discernable by any human being. ‘I’ experience myself as being inside my body looking out through the eyes of my body, of hearing sounds through the ears of my body, of smelling smells with the nose of my body, of feeling touch with the skin of my body, of tasting tastes with the tongue and the mouth of my body. ‘I’ can even experience myself as being a little man located in the head frantically trying to control things or a little man in the heart desperately trying to feel or intuit what is going on.

Nothing mystical at all about this, but if one imagines that this non-actual ‘self’ is ‘the physical universe experiencing itself’ then one is but a step away from delusion.

RESPONDENT: There is, however, a danger for me (in ASCs) which I recognise. It’s an echo of LSD experience which I alluded to before involving the fractal-like nature of mind and universe. I’ll go into it later if necessary, but at this stage it’s not an issue.

PETER: Given your recent posts to the list, this seems to be a matter of work in progress.

*

RESPONDENT: It’s more like amazement that this universe and life on earth have evolved from a chemical soup into increasingly complex forms of organic sludge and finally into self-aware and world-aware creatures. There’s a simple delight in being conscious of it all, and an amazement that it should exist at all.

PETER: Yes, it is indeed amazing and magical and delight-filled when you take a clear-eyed look at it. And to think that there are those who claim that this amazing physical actuality is but an illusion and that their own inner affectations and imaginations are the only true reality.

RESPONDENT: Crazy isn’t it.

PETER: Well crazy as it may seem, this has been and still is, held up as being great wisdom not only in spiritual circles but also in some so-called scientific circles. ‘Self’-centredness is the bane of humankind.

*

PETER: Altered states of consciousness are far more tempting because denial and dissociation are easier options ...

RESPONDENT: Jeez, not for me. I’ve found ‘denial and dissociation’ so bloody boring as to be an impossible way to live.

PETER: I made the comment because this was my experience – even a good many months after I had a good intellectual grasp of the fact that actualism had nothing to do with spiritualism and that any ‘self ‘-aggrandizing states were but a wank, I gradually became aware that I was having subtle behind-the-scenes ‘self’-aggrandizing feelings. The only reason I discovered them was that they came bubbling to the surface such that I could neither deny them nor dissociate from them. I mentioned it in my journal so as to flag a warning as it were to others who might tread the path –

[Peter]: ... ‘About this time I started to come to grips with an undercurrent of feelings that had been welling up in me as I got further along this path to freedom. As I began to increasingly understand the full extent of what Richard had discovered, I had begun quite cunningly to plot my role in the Movement that would sweep the world. Images of money and fame began to subtly occur – and sometimes not so subtly. I would see myself travelling and talking to halls full of people, spreading the message! Yes, it was good old power and authority again – the attraction of the Glamour, Glory and Glitz. No wonder the Enlightened Ones are seduced and then trapped by it! It seemed to me an instinctual grab for power by my psyche, which rightly felt threatened with elimination. I also had to admit to myself that power and authority was a definite attraction in my desire for Enlightenment – a sort of spiritual version of ‘Money for nothing and your chicks for free’.’ Peter’s Journal, God

RESPONDENT: Heh! All too familiar! My personal version of it is not so much the lure of Power, Influence, Wealth, Fame (Hell, I’d shun those for purely selfish reasons!) But the thought of how Knowledge, Experience, Wisdom, and other such qualities might stimulate the hormones of bunch of adoring doe-eyed female seekers ... heh, how pathetic we are ;-)

PETER: I thought I understood the trap well but I discovered it was only an intellectual understanding – being gripped by the passions gave me an experiential understanding of the overwhelming power of this instinctive lure. No wonder it has seduced all those who trod the traditional path to freedom.

*

RESPONDENT: At various times (being aware that ‘I’ am the thorn in ‘my’ side, but unable to penetrate through it) I’ve looked into various spiritual teachings that are light on metaphysics eg. J Krishnamurti and Zen.

PETER: Perhaps a better way of saying it is that they are very careful to couch their teachings in words that can’t readily be seen to be meta-physical. Jiddu Krishnamurti played largely to Western audiences so he was usually very careful to couch his teachings as being non-religious and was very careful in his use of words so as to disguise the religiosity of his message. Zen’s metaphysics on the other hand have been penned by men who have spent so long isolated from the world-as-it-is and people as-they-are that their teachings are but rarefied nonsense … which apparently is why they have such widespread appeal, particularly amongst those with an intellectual-only bent.

Oops, there I go again being politically incorrect …

RESPONDENT: Yes, that has become a lot more apparent lately.

PETER: When I first became interested in actualism I deliberately delved back into various spiritual teachings and I was shocked to find what I had been blind to before – that the revered teachings were nothing other than meta-physical teachings, there was nothing down-to-earth about them at all. I found that it was essential to find out the facts of the matter for myself when I was questioning the beliefs I held, lest I became a non-believer, i.e. a believer of contrary beliefs. Once I realized that holding any belief is silly, I wanted to become free not only of my beliefs but of the compulsive need to believe.

*

PETER: If I can add a rider to this post, I do appreciate that you write of your personal experiences and your personal feelings as it means that we can talk about down-to-earth matters. I’ve never been fond of intellectualizing for intellectualizing sake and I eventually found the male habit of philosophizing to be a way of dissociating from the reality of one’s own everyday life (and I say this because I eventually came to understand that this was the reason why I joined in the philosophizing) …

RESPONDENT: Never quite thought of it that way, but you’re probably right. Given the choice of talking footy, horse racing, women or philosophy over a beer, I choose philosophy any day – but maybe it’s a way of prolonging the seeking and postponing the finding ...

PETER: Or as is currently fashionable in some teachings, a way of denying the need to seek by accepting the belief that there is nothing to find?

*

PETER: … and yet I now find myself having to respond to posts that are nothing but intellectualizing and philosophizing. I have the choice to ignore them of course but you might have noticed that I do take the opportunity to sprinkle them with some personal anecdotes and some down-to-earth talk that I figure will be of interest to others on this list who are interested in what is happening ‘where the rubber meets the road’.

RESPONDENT: Well, the big problem seems to be that the experience can’t be imparted. Without the experiences there are only ideas, suggestions, clues. To be fair to the intellectualisers, it’s pretty hard to understand what is implied in a PCE without having experienced it. And without that, none of this verbiage, however colourful, is worth the bandwidth.

PETER: Thus far there have been people who have recalled having had a PCE and yet have turned away from actualism and there have been people who have not recalled having had had a PCE and yet have been sufficiently attracted by the common sense inherent in actualism to have stuck with it to the point where their investigations into their own psyche in operation have provoked a spontaneous PCE. Remembering having had a PCE apparently does not necessarily translate into having the necessary intent to become happy and harmless.

It is up to each individual who comes across ‘this verbiage’ as to what they want to do with what they read … and who would have it any other way?

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Peter’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.