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.

RESPONDENT: Same here. To cut a long story short, as a teenager I didn’t know what I wanted but I knew what I didn’t want. Actually, for me it wasn’t just a case of not wanting it, or feeling something was missing. I hated ‘the system’ (but not individuals) with a passionate intensity. Toward my late teens, I saw people’s modes of existence in one of three ways: they were servicing the ‘machine’; they were blithely unaware of the existence of the ‘machine’; or they were working in whatever way they could to subvert the ‘machine’. In the mid-eighties when I left school, everyone was ‘servicing the machine’. They were rebelling against parental control, but not rebelling against the values and goals that underpin it. My beef with civilisation ran a lot deeper than parental control, so I fancied myself as a radical of sorts. My ‘allies’ were political dissidents, artists, madmen, saboteurs, mystics, spiritualists, subversives of any kind who refused to play the games that keep the wheels of the machine turning smoothly.

I wasn’t outwardly radical in any obvious way. I didn’t belong to any organisations (because although plenty of people were looking for the answer, they didn’t have the right answer). And on the outside I was a fairly casual, caring, easy-going person. But inwardly I burned.

PETER: It took me a long time to recognize that my riling against ‘the establishment’ was simply a convenient outlet for my own resentment and anger. It’s not necessarily socially-acceptable to take out one’s anger on individuals but taking it out on an amorphus concept such as ‘the machine’, ‘the system’, the government’ or ‘the establishment’ is very socially-accepted within the multitude of competing and waring groups, be they racial, ethnic, tribal, political, social, economic or ideological. And there are none who feel more aggrieved than the self-righteous who hold to spiritual morals or humanitarian ethics.

RESPONDENT: A bit later on, I realised that these political and economic systems don’t just descend on us out of the blue. They’re the products of a million compromises. They’re all attempts by our predecessors to balance material, social and spiritual needs while preserving enough social stability to keep the species surviving.

PETER: Now that I have finally stopped my mindless riling against these systems, I have come to see how successful democracy and capitalism – when combined with effective public welfare and health systems – have been in providing an ever-increasing proportion of the growing but stabilizing human population on the planet with ever-increasing wealth, health, lifespan, clean air, pure water, nourishing food, leisure, pleasure, safety and comfort.

To use one of Richard’s metaphors that has stuck in my mind, I found that I needed to do a good deal of work before I could take off both my grey coloured glasses and my rose coloured glasses in order that I could begin to get a glimpse of the fact that grim reality is an illusion which is created by ‘me’.

RESPONDENT: So then I turned inwards and tried to have a good look at the heart and mind that lies right at the centre of everything I experience. At that time I wasn’t too far away from Richard’s starting point.

I knew that wherever I went, whatever I did, I would be there looking over my shoulder, and although I didn’t have any conscious recollection of an I-less state at that time, I still knew that ‘I’ was gonna be a terrible burden to lug around for the rest of my life. But, unlike Richard, I accepted that ‘I’ was inescapable – and, as it turned out, I spent the next 20 years trying out various alternative forms of ‘me’. None were satisfactory.

PETER: Yes. And it wasn’t as though I was doing anything ‘wrong’ in my search for freedom – it was just that ‘I’ along with everyone else on the planet, and everyone else who has ever been on the planet, have got it 180 degrees wrong. What Richard’s discovery reveals is that there is no freedom to be had within the human condition – the answer lays in becoming free from the human condition in toto.

*

PETER: 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. <snipped > 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: No choice but to go right to the roots of it. I’ve never quite been there myself; always managed to pull some ‘hope’ out of my hat, which really hasn’t been to my advantage in the long run.

PETER: Yes. ‘Hope springs eternal’ and when it doesn’t deliver the goods, ‘acceptance’ of one’s lot in life sets in.

*

PETER: Observation will reveal that all feelings and emotions have physical sensations associated with them.

RESPONDENT: Yes. I feel stupid for not having noticed this before.

PETER: Due in part to their social conditioning and in part to their traditional instinctual role, men in particular are not very good in getting in touch with their feelings. They often find it difficult to distinguish between thinking and feeling and none more so than those Eastern men who lived in monasteries and caves and concocted a philosophy that proposes that the way to become free is to cease thinking.

*

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: Sorrow does permeate the human condition, no doubt about it. I must have hung around a different circle of people though, because I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who genuinely believes in an afterlife. I think there are a lot of folks who are now suffering from being stranded mid-way between untenable religion and godless science. There now seems to be a weary resignation to the values of old religion, but without belief, or even faith. In my observation, most people think they need the old values of religion in order to retain their human dignity, even if God is dead, or never lived.

PETER: It is only because human beings insist on remaining passionate beings that they need to cling to their morals and ethics lest anarchy breaks out. Only when I became virtually free of my own malice and sorrow could I take a clear-eyed look at the falsehoods and disinformation that those who take the moral and/or ethical high-ground disseminate in order to promote their own self-interest and their own self-aggrandizement.

*

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...

RESPONDENT: Same here. Any veneer of optimism I’ve tried to impose just flakes off like old paint in a few days.

PETER: My experience was that recognizing my own sorrow and wanting to do something about it was relatively easy but admitting to my antagonism and wanting to do something about it was another. And the archives of the discussions on this mailing list over the years attests to the fact that my experience is something that is common to all. It seems that most people are far too proud to admit that they are as mad … and as bad … as everybody else on the planet.

*

PETER: ... 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.

RESPONDENT: Another version of it, still within the lot of a passionate being, is separating oneself deliberately, resisting the desire to belong or own or be owned, and instead cooking in one’s own juices. That’s more or less what I did for years.

PETER: The defiant loner whose epitaph reads – ‘… at least I did it ‘my’ way’.

*

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.

RESPONDENT: I did indeed follow this discussion; in fact I was just composing a reply to No 33 when yours came through. It seemed to me that he (?) was describing ‘conscience’, and I thought it particularly interesting that he described it as (from memory): the ‘guardian at the gate with chemical weapons’. Nice pun on ‘chemical’ too ;-) I used to think that conscience was somehow independent of any particular moral system. Moral systems vary throughout the world, and might change within an individual many times over the course of a lifetime, but I thought that conscience, the ‘knowledge’ of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in one’s ‘heart of hearts’ came from a deeper source. But it’s really not so. It’s all a function of what kind of person I think I am, what kind of person others think I am, what kind of person I want to be, and what kind of person I want others to think I am. The bodily effects that No 33 described are all too familiar to me.

PETER: Every human being, no matter what their gender, race or culture is imprinted with a social conscience by their parents and peers in order to make them a fit member of their family, tribe or nation. The reason this is necessary is because each and every human being feels culpable at heart because the human animal has the unique ability of being aware of his or her own fear and aggression. The imprinted social conscience acts to salve this culpability – as children we learn that we are rewarded for denying and dissociating from this culpability and are punished if we acknowledge our culpability.

*

PETER: 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: It seems daunting and scary from a normal state of mind, but I’ve noticed that in a PCE (and similar state), it all seems like much ado about nothing. In the complete absence of sorrow and aggression there is absolutely no need for conscientious remedies, yet no loss of ‘caring’ either. It’s great.

PETER: In a PCE there is neither malice nor sorrow present and this experiential observation is the key to the actualist method of self-immolation. Given that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’, then it is obvious that ‘I’ am both malicious and sorrowful at heart. Hence the way to work on ‘my’ demise is to work on eliminating all of ‘my’ feelings of malice and sorrow by dis-empowering them, and the way to do that is to bring them to the bright light of awareness – in short ‘I’ make a definitive decision to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless.

This is the up-front, in-your-face challenge of actualism.

To add an additional note, I notice that you have recently made reference to the philosophy of Thomas Metzinger to support your claim that an altered state of consciousness can have the same purity as a PCE. As you can see from the quote, he makes the point that such a state of being (‘being no one’) does not mean the ending of sorrow –

[Thomas Metzinger]: So, ‘being no-one’ means, no such things as selves exist in the world. There are only the temporal contents of transparent PSMs. What we called ‘the self’ in the past doesn’t exist. There is no essence, but only a complex self-representational process. But, although subjects don’t exist, they are sentient, endowed with the capacity to suffer. Not even being no-one protects us from misfortune, harm, and sorrow. Book Review Reiner Hedrich Justus Liebig Universität Giessen THOMAS METZINGER, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

There have been a good many attempts to develop purely philosophical/ psychological theories about altered states of consciousness in an attempt to develop a secular mysticism as opposed to the more traditional spiritual mysticism. Whilst spiritual mysticism is rooted in the morality of love and compassion, secular mysticism sits more comfortably with Humanism and its humanitarian ethics. It is interesting to note that some Buddhist scholars seem keen to develop and promote a secular Buddhism in an effort to distance Buddhism from its spiritual roots, presumably to the point of claiming that Buddhism is non-spiritual.

None of this is what actualism is about of course. As I understand it, the first stage of Richard’s patient dismantling of his altered state of consciousness ‘being’ was to dismantle the more obvious spiritual aspects, namely those of love and compassion. The next stage involved dismantling the more secular aspects, namely the Humanistic ethics of pacifism, justice, fairness and the need to belong to humanity at large. To dare to abandon all that humanity holds dear is radical indeed.

*

RESPONDENT: I do see actualism as being fundamentally different from the rest, in that other teachings are all concerned with modifying the self in one way or another, rather than eliminating it altogether. And that is a big difference – whether or not one shares the goal. I’m still testing the waters in this respect.

PETER: A fundamental difference demands a fundamentally different approach to what one has been doing before – the sincerity to make a complete break from the past, the verve to make a 180 degree U-turn, and the gumption to head off in a completely new direction.

10.1.2004

PETER: … it was just that ‘I’ along with everyone else on the planet, and everyone else who has ever been on the planet, have got it 180 degrees wrong. What Richard’s discovery reveals is that there is no freedom to be had within the human condition – the answer lays in becoming free from the human condition in toto.

RESPONDENT: The latter is proving hard to come to terms with. Some days it seems self-evidently true. Other days it seems to be the work of a well-meaning madman, adopted by people with a proven track record of long-term devotion to causes that ultimately lead to disillusionment.

PETER: I guess the difference is that I understood what Richard meant when he said everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong – in that everyone has been searching for the meaning of life within the existing human condition, by way of either materialistic or spiritual pursuits – which then meant that I didn’t waste the opportunity that meeting Richard presented by indulging in knee-jerk reactions or wallowing around in doubt. Once my interest and my own enquiries established a prima facie case the next thing to do was obvious – give it a go.

As for Richard being ‘a well-meaning madman’, that was a definite attraction. And my ‘proven track record of long-term devotion to causes that ultimately lead to disillusionment’ apparently means that I have a far better experiential understanding of the inherent failures of spirituality than any of my peers.

RESPONDENT: Today’s ‘me’ says: I am not completely happy with life as I’m living it. There is nobody I would rather be than me, but it is still not good enough by a long shot. I’ve wracked my brains wondering whether there is some aspect of life within the ‘human condition’ that I have not tried yet, something I have not given a fair go. It seems there isn’t anything left. I’ve changed my attitudes, beliefs, social groups, relationships, countries, jobs, lifestyles, habits, self-images; and not just once. I think I’ve given life within the ‘human condition’ a fair go. The only way left is out. Whether actualism is the best way ‘out’, I’m still not completely sure.

PETER: Well, if you want to get ‘out’ of materialism, then there is mysticism, spiritualism or religion … and if you want to get ‘out’ of both then there is cynicism, nihilism and anarchism … or there is the radical solution, become actually free of the human condition in toto.

RESPONDENT: I waver between transcendence of the ‘human drama’ and elimination of the ‘human condition’. Sometimes transcendence of the ‘human drama’ seems like an ultimately ineffective mind game, which makes the complete elimination of the ‘human condition’ much more attractive. Then that, in turn, begins to seem unnecessarily drastic, like cutting off one’s own legs in order not to kick little old ladies.

PETER: It says a lot about the human condition that the idea of devoting one’s life to becoming happy and harmless is felt to be drastic. I remember the very idea of setting off down this path as being terrifying because I knew it was a path that only Richard had travelled before – that big psychic warning sign ‘Do not enter under any circumstance!’ was a dead give-away to me that actualism is something brand new in human history.

RESPONDENT: The only criteria of success I find meaningful these days are: Can I experience each moment of life as happily as is humanly possible? Can I do so without preventing any other person from doing likewise? By those criteria, everything I have attempted so far is a failure.

PETER: And not only you but everything that everyone has attempted up until now has been a failure otherwise there would at least be some communities of like-minded people living together in peace and harmony. The current fashion is that Eastern religion, mysticism and philosophy is the answer and yet billions of people have assiduously practiced transcendence for at least 5,000 years and yet Eastern societies are no more peaceful, no more harmonious, no less corrupt, no less despotic, no less cruel, and no less sombre than their Western counterparts.

And yet despite this long history of failure human beings keep sifting through the dustbin of history, dusting off old beliefs and philosophies, shouting ‘Eureka, I’ve found it’ and then proceed to seek fame and fortune by dishing up rehashes of ancient wisdom to a gullible public.

RESPONDENT: By all accounts, actualism delivers these goods. I’m giving myself a couple of months to question it all to my satisfaction, and if all is well, I’ll plunge in.

PETER: I can only suggest that, in the interest of making a sensible assessment over the next couple of months, you could equally question whether your ‘questioning of actualism’ is based on your own life experience and your own sensibility or whether your ‘questioning of actualism’ is based on what other people have told you is the truth about life, the universe and what it is to be a human being.

It’s my experience that unless you are also willing to question the status quo, your questioning ‘it all to my satisfaction’ won’t be an open-minded questioning but will remain in the usual league of close-minded objections.

*

PETER: Due in part to their social conditioning and in part to their traditional instinctual role, men in particular are not very good in getting in touch with their feelings – often they do not even know what feelings are. They often find it difficult to distinguish between thinking and feeling and none more so than those Eastern men who lived in monasteries and caves and concocted a philosophy that proposes that the way to become free is to cease thinking.

RESPONDENT: A couple of years ago I would have written this off as applying to other men but not to me. Now I’m inclined to agree.

PETER: I have spent a good many years being a SNAG and hanging out in the women’s camp because I thought this was a way of becoming more in touch with my feelings. Women tend to claim the moral-high ground as they regard themselves as being the natural custodians of the tender passions and yet I found the women’s camp to be as full of animosity, anxiety, confusion, bluff, bluster and one-up-manship as is the men’s camp. As a generalization it could be said that men are taught to repress or deny their feelings whilst women are taught to express and indulge in their feelings – and it is obvious that one cannot become attentive to one’s own feelings whilst one is either busy repressing or denying them or whilst one is constantly being overwhelmed by them.

*

PETER: In a PCE there is neither malice nor sorrow present and this experiential observation is the key to the actualist method of self-immolation. Given that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’, then it is obvious that ‘I’ am both malicious and sorrowful at heart. Hence the way to work on ‘my’ demise is to work on eliminating all of ‘my’ feelings of malice and sorrow by dis-empowering them, and the way to do that is to bring them to the bright light of awareness – in short ‘I’ make a definitive decision to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless. This is the up-front, in-your-face challenge of actualism.

To add an additional note, I notice that you have recently made reference to the philosophy of Thomas Metzinger to support your claim that an altered state of consciousness can have the same purity as a PCE. As you can see from the quote, he makes the point that such a state of being (‘being no one’) does not mean the ending of sorrow – <snip>

RESPONDENT: I frankly don’t give a rat’s what Metzinger has to say about sorrow. As I understand it, the state of ‘being no-one’ he’s referring to is the ordinary state of being in which the ‘self’-generating mechanisms in the brain/psyche are invisible. The state of ‘being no-one’ is the ordinary human condition, and I don’t need him to tell me that sorrow exists here.

PETER: You referred to Thomas Metzinger’s philosophy as a possible explanation of your ‘interesting experience’ and how and why it was different from a PCE and I was simply fleshing out the differences.

If you re-read the quote you posted, you will see that you have misunderstood what he is saying. Metzinger makes it quite clear that the subjective experience of ‘being someone’ is one’s normal state and he contrast this normal state with an altered state of being, as in ‘being no-one’

[Respondent quoting David Voron]: ‘Metzinger’s point is that what we think of as ‘the self’ is a representation generated by the brain, as is the representation of ‘the world.’ The two representations are integrated into a ‘self in the world’ mental construction. Your subjective experience of ‘being someone’ emerges from this physical neural process. Neo-Virtualism 27.12.2003

and he contrast this normal subjective state of ‘being someone’ with a paranormal objective state of ‘being no-one’ –

[Thomas Metzinger]: ‘being no-one’ means, no such things as selves exist in the world. There are only the temporal contents of transparent PSMs. What we called ‘the self’ in the past doesn’t exist. There is no essence, but only a complex self-representational process. But, although subjects don’t exist, they are sentient, endowed with the capacity to suffer. Not even being no-one protects us from misfortune, harm, and sorrow. Book Review Reiner Hedrich Justus Liebig Universität Giessen THOMAS METZINGER, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

In reflecting on this conversation, it occurred to me that another way of describing altered states of consciousness would be to describe them as altered state of being.

RESPONDENT: I haven’t read his book. The passage I quoted simply seemed (and still seems) to provide a possible explanation of what happens in certain ASCs when previously implicit psychic/neural mechanisms become explicit (or ‘experience-able’ on the fly). Something Vineeto said about the experience of ‘walking through an invisible membrane’ has now enabled me to see the ASC/PCE and I/me issue in a different way. (More to follow in the next few days).

PETER: And the reason I gave ‘a rat’s’ and made mention of Metzinger’s philosophy is that he makes it quite clear that such altered states of being do not bring about an end to sorrow (exactly as such altered states of being do not bring about an end to malice).

Every now and again I like to try and bring the conversations on this list back to the raison d’être of this mailing list – actualizing peace on earth by way of ending human malice and sorrow. If you look through the archived correspondence on the web-site you will notice that by far the majority is concerned with peripheral issues – either correspondents desperately defending their own other-worldly spiritual beliefs or correspondents petulantly propounding the current crop of meta-physical pseudo-scientific theories – and very little is about the business of bringing an end to human malice and sorrow.

*

RESPONDENT: I do see actualism as being fundamentally different from the rest, in that other teachings are all concerned with modifying the self in one way or another, rather than eliminating it altogether. And that is a big difference – whether or not one shares the goal. I’m still testing the waters in this respect.

PETER: A fundamental difference demands a fundamentally different approach to what one has been doing before – the sincerity to make a complete break from the past, the verve to make a 180 degree U-turn, and the gumption to head off in a completely new direction.

RESPONDENT: Absolutely. I don’t see any value in doing this half-heartedly, and doing it whole-heartedly is not possible until I’ve ironed out a few doubts. You can be sure, though, that I’m not here to play silly buggers; I’m sincerely trying to assess whether this solution is the right one, and if it is, I’ll be in it 100%.

PETER: I’ll post a bit from my journal that I wrote that relates to my period of doubting what passes for wisdom within the human condition as it is not only relevant to your current stage of trying to make sense of Richard’s discovery and coming to terms with its ramifications but it will also be relevant to others on the list who seem to be at a similar stage –

[Peter]: If the aim of the spiritual path was to deliver to me the much sought-after ‘peace of mind’ then I had to admit that it had also failed. It was possible, through intensive effort and surrender, to still the mind, but from what I had experienced and seen in others, this involved a ‘getting out of it’, into some ‘other’ world. I came to see meditation as no more than sitting in the corner with my eyes shut, pretending the world didn’t exist. When they say the world is an illusion, they do indeed experience it that way. The inner, imaginary world becomes real and the actual physical world becomes an illusion!

I myself have experienced this when, after six months of withdrawal from the world, intensive spiritual reading and meditating, while walking along a beach I had an experience of being ‘pure love’. I was Love, and love for everything poured out of me. ‘Existence’ and I were one, and all was love. I, as I normally was, was definitely not there – I had become pure love. Or, put another way, I had an experience of the ‘self’ becoming the ‘Self’. It eventually wore off after about two hours but, on reflection, if I had continued on the spiritual path for longer with the same intensity, I could well have been typing very different words now – no doubt proclaiming myself as the latest saviour of mankind!

Somehow I knew that this was not what I was after, as I wanted to be an ordinary human being, not an extraordinary one like the Enlightened Ones. Besides, I had not met one whose life I would like to emulate. I had also seen enough of the power and authority, with its subsequent worship and adoration, to be dismayed at the thought that this system represented the pinnacle of human endeavour. Some spiritual teachers, seeing this objection in people, are now deliberately trying to appear ‘ordinary’ and make much of the fact. Was it set in concrete that the only way to get rid of the ‘self’ was to become the ‘Self’? Was the only way to escape the misery of being a human being to become a God or God-realised? Well, not according to Richard, and that was encouraging – and inspirational!

I had to acknowledge that I was a failure on the spiritual path, and in the end I found I didn’t even want to become Enlightened. But I knew there were countless others on the path who had and will continue to suffer failure. Since Buddha’s time, 2500 years ago, there have been at least 1 billion Buddhists and, I have read, perhaps one thousand at the most have become Enlightened. That’s a success rate of 0.0001%!! I also read recently some famous spiritual pundit saying that this was a good thing: implying it was good that it was so difficult – so impossible. So many monks have spent so many hours, for so many centuries, meditating in cold monastical cells, and he thinks it’s good that it’s tough and difficult! In the East self-torture is even revered as a spiritual virtue. I remember well seeing the filthy saddhus standing for hours in tortured poses – the more extreme the better. Well, why is Enlightenment just for the ‘chosen few’ and why – when it happens to someone – is he or she worshipped and revered like some God? Is it that it is such a miracle to become Enlightened in the first place that we bestow divinity on them, and then curry favour with them and worship them in the hope that it might rub off on us? I posed these and many other questions, as I tried to see what actual good had come out of a system that had been followed by billions of people, for thousands of years.

Buddhism has been in existence for at least 2500 years and Hindus supposedly twice as long. I was looking for evidence and facts – not hopes or beliefs.

The case for the defence was definitely not looking good, but I still found myself defending at least something of the spiritual and hanging on grimly. Surely there was a ‘Something’ else? Was it possible that I, and everyone else on earth up until now, had got it wrong and that only Richard was right? I had been reading widely throughout this time to check out the facts of what Richard was saying and what I found was astounding. I found that the whole of philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, astronomy, physics, indeed all of man’s knowledge, and wisdom is based on an underlying assumption of a ‘something more’ than the physical universe. A belief in the meta-physical permeates all human thinking and wisdom. If one eliminated this assumption or belief the whole lot comes crashing down like those card stacks I used to make as a kid. Then it all started to make sense to me, to fit the facts – everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong – everyone!

There has been no actual evidence nor factual proof after thousands of years to support the belief that there is a God or a Something else. The cry in the churches, temples, ashrams and satsang halls is still one of trust, faith and hope to maintain the belief in a Something else. It was as though I was able to begin to see through the whole charade and fantasy of the spirit-ual world – to be able to see things from another perspective. It was like a mist or a veil clearing. It was then that I realised that Richard was the only atheist I had met and seemingly the only one that has ever been.

I was obviously in the company of a mad man and a super-megalomaniac to boot. But then again, the wise men in the other camp were calling themselves God or at least ‘one with God’, and this seemed totally insane to me! I reached a stage when I thought I was going mad, but then again the whole world was mad anyway. I only had to watch TV, read history, or listen to the next-door neighbours fighting to know I lived in a mad house … and here I was worrying about going mad!! In particular I remember one day on the building site when one of the subcontractors said to me that he was having a bad morning and that he felt he should meditate, and did I mind. Given he was a straight sort of guy I thought he was joking until I saw him ten minutes later in full lotus position sitting right in the middle of the noise and chaos. And it was just at the time that I was thinking I was going mad!’ Peter’s Journal, God

17.1.2004

PETER: I guess the difference is that I understood what Richard meant when he said everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong – in that everyone has been searching for the meaning of life within the existing human condition, by way of either materialistic or spiritual pursuits – which then meant that I didn’t waste the opportunity that meeting Richard presented by indulging in knee-jerk reactions or wallowing around in doubt. Once my interest and my own enquiries established a prima facie case the next thing to do was obvious – give it a go.

RESPONDENT: I’m giving it a go, and part of giving it a go involves questioning things that clang with either my personal experience, knowledge or common sense. The prima facie case has been established. The way I see it so far, Richard is spot on with regard to the human condition. There are personal hang-ups involved in my own process (naturally enough), but I am trying to separate those from purely objective matters of fact. Finding Richard to be genuinely free from the human condition (and an expert on most of its varieties) does not automatically imply an infallible insight into the objective facts of this universe. To question some of his (and your) assertions on matters of fact is not to be a materialist or a spiritualist, or to ‘wallow’ in doubt.

PETER: When I came across Richard it gradually became obvious that he was an expert in matters of spiritualism and mysticism – indeed whilst I had been busily dabbling around in the shallows he had been doing laps of the pool for years. Given what he had to say about the revered spiritual teachings and mystical traditions I took the time, and made the effort, to investigate whether what he was saying was correct and this investigation also involved enquiring into the extent to which mysticism and spiritualism continues to influence much of the world of science. Whilst you may not be able to readily see that theoretical physics and cosmology embody the ancient mystical traditions of science it would be an opportunity wasted not to investigate the matter for there have been other correspondents on this mailing list who have turned away from actualism rather than inquire in to their own mystical ‘hang-ups’.

*

PETER: As for Richard being ‘a well-meaning madman’, that was a definite attraction. And my ‘proven track record of long-term devotion to causes that ultimately lead to disillusionment’ apparently means that I have a far better experiential understanding of the inherent failures of spirituality than any of my peers.

RESPONDENT: Perhaps also a propensity to interpret the whole of human endeavour in stark binary terms, based on your personal experiences.

PETER: And yet it was the PCE, an experience that is common-to-all and not personal, which revealed that peace on earth already exists in the actual world. And it was the PCE that which revealed that despite this already existing peace on earth all human beings are either passionately involved in a ‘self’-centred grim instinctual struggle for survival and/or desperately believe in the existence of a fairy-tale or science-fiction mystical other-worldly realm.

RESPONDENT: There are two kinds of people in the world: those who say there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t.

PETER: This appears to be a comment aimed at denigrating the fact that a new experiential discovery has been made about the fundamental workings of the human psyche – one that renders all past theories, propositions, myths and legends utterly redundant.

In the mid 16^th century a Flemish physician by the name of Andreas Vesalius was appointed a lecturer in surgery at the University of Padua with responsibility for giving anatomical demonstrations. At first, Vesalius had no reason to question the theories of Galen, the 2^nd century Greek physician whose books on anatomy were still considered as absolutely authoritative in medical education in Vesalius’ time. However, in 1540, breaking with this 1400 year old tradition of relying on Galen, Vesalius openly demonstrated his own method … doing dissections himself, learning anatomy from cadavers, and critically evaluating the ancient anatomical texts. His own hands-on experience of the human anatomy soon convinced him that Galenic anatomy had not been based on the dissection of the human body, a practice, which had been strictly forbidden by the Roman religion. Vesalius revealed that Galenic anatomy was an application to the human form of conclusions drawn from the dissections of animals, mostly dogs, monkeys, or pigs.

‘Vesalius’ work represented the culmination of the humanistic revival of ancient learning, the introduction of human dissections into medical curricula, and the growth of a European anatomical literature. Vesalius performed his dissections with a thoroughness hitherto unknown. After Vesalius, anatomy became a scientific discipline, with far-reaching implications not only for physiology but for all of biology; medicine became a learned profession’. Encyclopaedia Britannica

As can be seen it took the inquisitiveness of one man and his willingness to engage in hands-on empirical research as well as his having the audacity to question the revered ancient texts to wipe away 1400 years of misinformation and mythology in order to set medicine on the path to being an empirical science. Radical discoveries such as these make all the previous ‘wisdom’ of all the previous venerated ‘experts’ completely redundant and entirely useless.

Vesalius’ discovery of the actual structure and workings of the human anatomy is directly analogous to Richard’s empirical observations as to the actual structure and workings of the human psyche and his ground-breaking discovery that it is possible to rid oneself of the instinctual passions that give rise to human malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: Everything that is not actualism is either materialism or spiritualism, hence 180 degrees wrong.

PETER: Yes. 180 degrees wrong, in that everyone has been, and still is, searching for the meaning of life via the pursuit of a thoroughly outdated archaic wisdom based solely on myth and legend and not on facts and sensibility.

RESPONDENT: Given freedom to define the terms, you can pull any rabbit out of your hat, as you have done with Einstein and Paul Davies and other ‘spiritual scientists’.

PETER: I haven’t pulled a rabbit out of my hat – I deliberately inquired into theoretical physics because they were proposing theories about the universe that did not gel with my own experience of the infinitude of the universe that I had experienced in a PCE. What I found was that theoretical physics and cosmology is rife with mysticism – other-worldly thinking, totally engaged in wish-fullness, based on thought experiments and competitive imagination, completely devoid of practicality and sensibility.

RESPONDENT: It is this kind of stuff that, in my opinion, converts actualism from a very coherent and original psychological assessment of (and remedy for) the human condition into a form of reductionist dogma verging on fundamentalism.

PETER: You are not alone in wanting actualism to accommodate some aspects of the human condition and to demand that an actual freedom from the human condition retain some aspects of the human condition. Some want religious tolerance to be retained, some want love fitted in somewhere, some want to hang on to imagination or to romance or to science fiction – all demanding a conditional personally-tailored freedom, rather than an actual and complete freedom from the human condition in toto.

RESPONDENT: One thing that persistently rings false for me w.r.t actualism (as a philosophy, not as a practice) is the apparent equivalence of all things metaphysical, supernatural and spiritual.

PETER: I found that when I began to practice actualism I started to come down-to-earth for the first time in my life, which in turn meant that my interest in all things philosophical, mystical, metaphysical, supernatural and spiritual gradually paled into insignificance compared to the on-going fascination with doing this business of being alive on this verdant planet.

RESPONDENT: The mind and universe contain things that are not actual, yet not supernatural or spiritual either. The meaning of a sentence is not actual. It’s not the black and white symbols on your screen, and it’s not the electro-chemical processes that cause them to appear on your monitor. It’s not the neural activity in my brain or yours. It depends on all of these things as its representation undergoes physical transformations, but it is not any of them. It’s also not supernatural, and it’s also not spiritual. The number 3 is not actual, but neither is it supernatural or spiritual.

PETER: So am I to take it that when you say that ‘the meaning of a sentence is not actual’ then it is impossible for human beings to communicate with each other – that when you say ‘it’s not the black and white symbols on your screen’ then I can’t know what you mean by the sentence?

It’s no wonder that men drive women mad, when push comes to shove, they are apt to make a philosophy out of anything, including ‘the meaning of a sentence’.

RESPONDENT: A quick note re Paul Davies: you mention him receiving the Templeton(?) prize for religion, as if this supports the charge of ‘spiritual scientist’. Readers of his books would conclude that he was awarded this prize for demonstrating how and why some conventional religious beliefs are untenable, for explaining that physics is better placed to describe and explain phenomena than religion, for explaining that science can account for most aspects of the universe’s behaviour without God’s intervention, and for cautioning against invoking God to explain the hitherto unexplained, ie. invoking a ‘God of the gaps’ to explain tricky phenomena like consciousness, the illusion of free will, etc.

It is also a bit rich to criticise a theoretical physicist, whose job is to construct explanatory models that are consistent with observable phenomena, for ... doing his job.

PETER: Rather than speculate upon what ‘readers of his books would conclude’, here is what Paul Davies himself has said on this very subject –

[Paul Davies]: ‘There is no doubt that many scientists are opposed temperamentally to any form of metaphysical, let alone mystical arguments. They are scornful of the notion that there might exist a God, or even an impersonal creative principle or ground of being that would underpin reality and render its contingent aspects starkly arbitrary. Personally I do not share their scorn. Although many metaphysical and theistic theories seem contrived or childish, they are not obviously more absurd than the belief that that the universe exists, and exists in the form it does, reasonlessly. It seems at least worth trying to construct a metaphysical theory that reduces some of the arbitrariness of the world. But in the end a rational explanation in the sense of a closed and complete system of logical truths is almost impossible. We are barred from ultimate knowledge, from ultimate explanation, by the very rules of reasoning that prompt us to seek such an explanation in the first place. If we wish to proceed beyond, we have to embrace a different concept of ‘understanding’ from that of rational explanation. Possibly the mystical path is the way to such an understanding. I have never had a mystical experience myself, but I keep an open mind about the value of such experiences. Maybe they provide the only route beyond the limits to which science and philosophy can take us, the only possible path to the Ultimate. pp 231-2, The Mystery at the End of the Universe. The Mind of God. Paul Davies. Penguin Books 1992

Given that he so blatantly champions the cause of metaphysics and the mystical, it is no wonder he was awarded the Templeton Prize of 795,000 Pounds Sterling –

[quote]: ‘the Templeton Prize honours and encourages the many entrepreneurs trying various ways for discoveries and breakthroughs to expand human perceptions of divinity and to help in the acceleration of divine creativity’. Website of the Templeton prize

RESPONDENT: All of this clangs for me.

PETER: Aye. The only reason that one would even dare to leave mystical imagination behind is if one wanted to live the actuality that one experiences in a PCE, 24/7.

I remember one incident that particularly stood out for me at the time I was enquiring into the differences between imagination and actuality was when I watched a TV documentary on the Voyager spacecraft missions. (Voyager I, launched on Sept. 5, 1977, flew by Jupiter in March 1979 and reached Saturn in November 1980. Voyager II, launched on Aug. 20, 1977, sped by Jupiter on July 9, 1979, passed Saturn on Aug. 25, 1981 and flew past Uranus on Jan. 24, 1986. It encountered Neptune on Aug. 24, 1989.)

Here’s what I wrote about it soon after –

[Peter to No 32]: ‘I recently watched a television program documenting the first Voyager spacecraft flyby of the planets in our solar system. It was intriguing to watch the scientists’ reactions as the first photos and data streamed in from the first planet. They were stunned at what they saw as the pictures began coming in – what was actual was indeed beyond their wildest imaginations and theories. As each successive flyby happened the scientists’ astonishment only increased to the point that by the last flyby of the outermost planet they had already abandoned their theories and concepts and were utterly fascinated by what they were seeing with their eyes. In a similar vein, I heard an entomologist say that the insects that exist in the average rubbish bin are far more astonishing than any imagined creature from another planet thus far dreamt up by any science fiction afflictionados’. Peter to No 22, 3.1.2001

A pragmatic example that the actuality of this infinite, eternal and only universe far exceeds the paltry imaginations of anything the ancient mystics, and their modern day pseudo-scientific equivalents, have ever – or could ever – dream up.

*

PETER: You referred to Thomas Metzinger’s philosophy as a possible explanation of your ‘interesting experience’ and how and why it was different from a PCE and I was simply fleshing out the differences. If you re-read the quote you posted, you will see that you have misunderstood what he is saying.

RESPONDENT: I’ve done so, and I do not think I have misinterpreted it.

PETER: I’m not saying you misinterpreted it, merely misunderstood it.

*

PETER: Metzinger makes it quite clear that the subjective experience of ‘being someone’ is one’s normal state and he contrast this normal state with an altered state of being, as in ‘being no-one’

[Respondent quoting David Voron]: ‘Metzinger’s point is that what we think of as ‘the self’ is a representation generated by the brain, as is the representation of ‘the world.’ The two representations are integrated into a ‘self in the world’ mental construction. Your subjective experience of ‘being someone’ emerges from this physical neural process. sceptics.org, Review of Metzinger ‘Being No One’, quoted by Respondent, Neo-Virtualism 27.12.2003

RESPONDENT: In the section I quoted, he does nothing of the sort. He is saying that selves are subjective illusions that do not exist in actuality.

PETER: Okay. I cut the quote you posted for brevity but here is what followed on from the above –

[Respondent quoting David Voron]: ‘Although the sense of self arises from this process, the process itself is invisible to us. We experience through this process, which is itself transparent. We do not experience ourselves as the contents of this representational process but, as Metzinger says, ‘simply as ourselves living in the world right now.’ sceptics.org, Review of Metzinger ‘Being No One’, quoted by Respondent, Neo-Virtualism 27.12.2003 [Emphasis added]

As you can see, in the quote you posted, Metzinger clearly goes on to say that the subjective experience of ‘being someone’ is experienced ‘simply as ourselves living in the world right now’, in other words as I said ‘being someone’ is one’s normal state. Is this not your everyday experience? Do you not normally experience yourself as ‘being someone’?

*

PETER: and he contrast this normal subjective state of ‘being someone’ with a paranormal objective state of ‘being no-one’ –

[Thomas Metzinger]: ‘being no-one’ means, no such things as selves exist in the world. There are only the temporal contents of transparent PSMs. What we called ‘the self’ in the past doesn’t exist. There is no essence, but only a complex self-representational process. But, although subjects don’t exist, they are sentient, endowed with the capacity to suffer. Not even being no-one protects us from misfortune, harm, and sorrow. Book Review Reiner Hedrich Justus Liebig Universität Giessen THOMAS METZINGER, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

In reflecting on this conversation, it occurred to me that another way of describing altered states of consciousness would be to describe them as altered state of being.

RESPONDENT: He is saying nothing whatever about an experience of self-lessness, or an altered state of self. Where?

PETER: Where – in the quote directly above. Why do you think he uses the term ‘being no-one’ in contrast to the term ‘being someone’ if he is not talking about an altered state of being – as in experiencing oneself as an other-than-normal being?

RESPONDENT: ‘being no-one’ means, no such things as selves exist in the world.

PETER: Indeed, and if you believe this philosophy – based on the Eastern philosophy that the egoic-self is an illusion – you might even come to think and feel that rather than being ‘some-one’ you are ‘being no-one’ – as in ego-less. And yet as Metzinger points out, ‘being no-one’ does not mean you will be free from sorrow – which was the point of my posting the quote.

RESPONDENT: I interpret this differently from you. For my money, the last sentence means: although selves don’t exist in actuality, they suffer.

PETER: Okay. Given your own reports to this mailing list, when you are ‘being some-one’ – experiencing yourself ‘as you are living in the world right now’ – then you are apt to experience sorrow from time to time. What Metzinger is saying is that even if you think and feel you are ‘being no-one’, as in free of the ‘subjective experience of ‘being someone’ (which) emerges from this physical neural process’ then you will still not be free from sorrow.

RESPONDENT: This is no different from Richard saying that whilst selves are not ‘actual’ they are very ‘real’.

PETER: There is a world of difference between Metzinger’s philosophical/ spiritual ego-centric notion of what ‘being some-one’ means and Richard’s experiential understanding of both the psychological and the psychic nature of ‘being’.

Metzinger, like all adherents to Eastern philosophy, maintains that one’s ‘being’ is purely psychological – ‘a ‘self in the world’ mental construction’, while blithely ignoring the fact that the ‘self’ is an instinctual passionate being at heart, i.e. an affective being.

At least three thousand years of history have attested to the fact that ego-death does nothing but produce delusionary states of grandeur – often cunningly disguised as Humbleness – and all because an impersonal identity, as in Metzinger’s ‘being no-one’, is still an instinctual being at heart and, as such, still capable of not only feeling sorrow but also of being malevolent.

RESPONDENT: There is no reference to a paranormal state here, AFAICT.

PETER: As I read the reviews of his book, Metzinger has written a philosophical book entitled ‘Being no-one’ in which he makes it clear that one’s normal state is ‘being someone’ and in which he expounds upon the illusionary nature of the ego, or the psychological self. Given the title of his book his thesis apparently is that ‘being no-one’ is a state one reaches when one realizes that the state of ‘being someone’ is an illusion – a thesis that is not surprisingly in complete accord with the Eastern mystical philosophy of ego-death.

RESPONDENT: Again, I don’t think he’s talking about altered states of being at all. I was, but I don’t see that he was.

PETER: I do realize that all of what is termed ‘the philosophy of human consciousness’ is confusing and the reason why this is so is because –

1. they are philosophical theses and not down-to-earth explanations
2. they are based on ancient wisdom and not on empirical observations
3. they are vague and confusing

When I first dipped into the philosophy of human consciousness after meeting Richard – when I began to check out the bona fides of actualism for myself – I came away shaking my head. Because I had considerable experience of the practical failings of Eastern mysticism, I was easily able to see that their whole philosophy was based on a flawed premise – that the transcendence of a personal ego is the summum bonum of human existence.

This inherent restriction in consciousness studies to date is the equivalent of trying to study anatomy based on Galenic 2^nd century anatomical theories whilst blithely ignoring the host of empirical discoveries that has been racked up since Vesalius first dared to question Galen’s pre-eminence by conducting hands-on investigations of the human anatomy.

I can’t remember if Monty Python ever did such a sketch, but perhaps they could have done a sketch where the philosopher returns home after a hard day’s thinking and reports to his wife that he had just thought him-‘self’ out of existence and she looks him up and down and says … ‘so does that mean you won’t be needing dinner tonight then?’

*

PETER: And the reason I gave ‘a rat’s’ and made mention of Metzinger’s philosophy is that he makes it quite clear that such altered states of being do not bring about an end to sorrow (exactly as such altered states of being do not bring about an end to malice). Every now and again I like to try and bring the conversations on this list back to the raison d’être of this mailing list – actualizing peace on earth by way of ending human malice and sorrow.

If you look through the archived correspondence on the web-site you will notice that by far the majority is concerned with peripheral issues – either correspondents desperately defending their own other-worldly spiritual beliefs or correspondents petulantly propounding the current crop of meta-physical pseudo-scientific theories – and very little is about the business of bringing an end to human malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: In the time that I’ve been reading the list, I haven’t seen it this way.

PETER: I guess it’s just that I take being happy and harmless for granted nowadays so much so that I am puzzled that others would not want it for themselves – regardless of the price to be paid.

RESPONDENT: I see people keenly interested in the psychological, physiological and practical implications of actualism, but I also see quite justifiable reservations regarding actualists’ assertions outside their area of expertise.

PETER: I presume you are commenting on the current thread of discussion concerning one particular aspect of the mystical tradition that permeates all of the sciences. The emergence of empirical evidence-based science from the ignorance, superstition and mysticism of the past is an on-going struggle – an emergence of fits and starts, often resisted tooth and nail by those who have a vested interest in maintaining the mystical tradition at any cost.

The mystical tradition is still very much alive and kicking in all scientific education as it is in any discipline. My architectural education had two distinct streams – one was pragmatic, down-to-earth and practical and the other was mystical, fanciful and ‘creative’ and it was instilled into me that the latter was more meaningful than the former. To be pragmatic, down-to-earth and practical was seen as boring, mundane and ‘uncreative’ whilst to be mystical, fanciful and creative was where the true meaning of life really lay.

Apparently the same applies in the fields of scientific endeavours as not only are whole fields of science devoted to the pursuit of the mystical, the sacred and the profound but many mystical scientists have won fame and fortune and the accolades of his or her peers for championing the mystical tradition. In fact, a clear-eyed look at the current state of the sciences reveals that a significant turning back to the mystical roots of the past has been occurring – a turning back that closely parallels the current fashionable obsession with Eastern spirituality and philosophy.

The discovery of an actual freedom from the human condition renders the whole mystical tradition not only irrelevant but it exposes it for what it is – an aberration from the dim, dark ages of humanity. Far from being outside of an actualist’s area of expertise, the mysticism still taught and practiced in current day science is precisely the field of expertise of an actualist. A practicing actualist has a hands-on experiential understanding of the workings of the human condition (including the instinctive lure of mysticism and spiritualism) and as such is more capable of making sensible down-to-earth observations and evaluations and is more readily able to discern between what is mere belief or theory and what are the facts of the matter, unlike an impassioned scientist steeped in the mystical tradition.

RESPONDENT: My personal observation, for what it’s worth, is that the questioners often seem to be at least as open-minded, i.e. willing to refine or modify their synthesis of the facts, as the answerers.

PETER: I do appreciate that it is early years for actualism. Because it is such a radical departure from the previously accrued wisdoms and because it represents a complete break with the past, the sensibility inherent in actualism will take a long time to be understood, appreciated and absorbed – but now that the findings are published the wisdoms of the past will increasingly fall into the category of historical curiosities.

RESPONDENT: I also see that questioners are in a bit of a double-bind. Success in this enterprise is not possible without total sincerity. Total sincerity is only possible if one can assuage one’s doubts concerning the bona fides of Richard and Actualism w.r.t. matters of fact. If the attempt to assuage these doubts is not directly pertinent to the daily practice of being happy and harmless, they are intellectualising, dealing with peripheral issues, or not fulfilling the raison d’etre of the mailing list, or having ‘knee-jerk reactions’.

I regard myself as having a sincere interest in what actualism offers. I have had a glimpse of its central motivation and guiding light (the PCE), and the psychological/emotional aspects of Richard’s teachings are making good sense. I see the purpose of these dialogues as opportunities to share both experiences and ideas, but sometimes I sense that questioners are being spoken at, rather than spoken with. It creates resistance that would not otherwise be there.

PETER: By this logic Vesalius should not have had the audacity to present the facts of his discoveries to his Galen-influenced colleagues – as in ‘spoken at’ them – but rather should have ‘spoken with’ them as in allow at least a bit of Galen-influence and mysticism to be incorporated into his empirical discoveries. No matter how he presented his discoveries, no matter what ‘style’ he adopted, the amount of resistance of his Galen-influenced peers to his discoveries was solely dependant on each individual’s penchant for clinging on to the revered knowledge and authorities of the past.

As for my style – speaking at rather than speaking with, as you put it – I tend to use my time writing as productively as I can which means I attempt to put as much information and facts into each response as I can, on the basis that maybe some of it may be of use to anyone who reads it. When I first read Richard’s report of his discovery I found that I had to overcome my instinctive reluctance to read what was obviously heretical and iconoclastic in order to be able to concentrate on understanding the substance of what he was saying. Because of this experience, I always assume that anyone reading my reports of the nuts-and-bolts of practicing actualism will need to do the same if they want to understand the gist of what it is I am reporting.

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

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