PETER: Hi,

RESPONDENT: Peter, I’ve just finished reading your online journal and enjoyed it immensely. Your common sense approach to the subject matter within each chapter rang true to many of my own views upon this life we experience.

PETER: Becoming an actualist was a life-changing experience for me because I had to stubbornly break a lifetime habit and instinctive compulsion of ‘self’-centred affective experiencing. The main point I wanted to get across in writing my journal was that the process of actualism is a life-changing experience and to regard actualism as a philosophy is a cop-out.

RESPONDENT: Unlike both yourself and Richard I have never been down the spiritual paths – neither western nor eastern, and can not remember being anything but an out and out atheist, so reading your journal made perfect sense to me – I have no religious baggage to unload.

PETER: You have obviously at least intellectually explored some spiritual paths as you have recently said –

[Respondent]: ‘I’ve read everything from Advaita to existentialism, from Buddhism to humanism but I’m finding this actual freedom stuff is bizarrely both the simplest and most difficult idea to comprehend!’ Respondent to No 60 ‘Being happy w/o feeling it.’ 19.3.2004

I am curious – when you say you ‘have never been anything but an out an out atheist’, why then did you bother reading spiritualism?

The reason I ask is that most Western people who claim to be atheists use the word atheist as meaning they do not believe in the monotheist Christian God and yet they quite happily believe in the animism of Environmentalism, the metaphysics of Einsteinian science, the mysticism of philosophy, the occultism of traditional healing, or whatever. When I use the term thorough-going atheist, I use the term to mean someone who not only intellectually discards any spiritual, mystical or metaphysical beliefs whatsoever but does so on the basis of their own direct experience that any and all spiritual, mystical or metaphysical beliefs are naught but human feeling-fed fantasies, i.e. they have no existence in the actual world.

A lack of any hands-on experience of the spiritual path need not be a hindrance to becoming actually free of the human condition … provided one starts to become vitally interested in being here.

RESPONDENT: What I need to look at within myself is my emotional response to life – although this statement would probably make those who are close to me laugh out loud since I am continually being berated (albeit jokingly) for having very little or no emotional side.

PETER: Gender conditioning is the strongest aspect of social conditioning. It starts from the very moment a baby emerges from the womb and continues unabated until death. As you would have read in my journal, my desire to make sense of, and break free of, this conditioning was paramount in my becoming a practicing actualist. And being born and conditioned a male, the very first thing I needed to do was to stop feeling aloof and stop being detached and start to get in touch with my feelings.

RESPONDENT: I am also looking at my ego and becoming more aware of how it gets in the way in normal day-to-day interactions using HAIETMOBA. I am also aware that what I’m probably doing is bolting on some actualism to my current life style, …

PETER: If you are aware of this then you will also be aware that you are wasting the opportunity that actualism offers.

RESPONDENT: I certainly don’t have the pure intent to ‘go all the way’ although I think I do have what you refer to as PCEs but only fleetingly. These moments usually come when sitting looking at the trees through the windows of my conservatory.

PETER: The fleeting moments you describe may well be what are sometimes referred to as Nature Experiences whereby one feels an inner peace by making an affective connection with the inherent stillness of this paradisaical planet. Nature Experiences are commonly experienced as being precious ‘time-outs’ from the rat-race or the real-world and whilst they could be a precursor to the onset of a PCE they are more generally experienced as spiritual experiences in that ‘I’ as spirit being connect with the spirit of nature, or ‘I’ as feeling being feel connected with the Whole.

RESPONDENT: I am that man who you both describe from your own past – married, 2 children, 2 cars, nice house, good job etc. – however I am mostly happy.

PETER: If by ‘both’ you are referring to both Richard and I, then we did differ in that Richard had more children and less cars than I did.

From my discussions with Richard it appears that whilst we were both reasonably happy and fairly content with our life styles at the time we both definitely kept an ear to the ground for something better. And what we had in common was the integrity to refuse to settle for the second-best, be it materialism or spiritualism.

RESPONDENT: Actualism is helping to weed out the areas that I have struggled with in the past – death, infidelity, insecurity and anger, but more than that it’s giving me confidence to be what I am and the intelligence to know what I am not.

PETER: What you do with what is on offer in actualism is obviously up to you. Whether you become a practicing actualist or not is totally dependant upon your own intent to want to change. Daring to want to change so radically and irrevocably as to become actually free of the human condition is obviously not going to appeal to everyone.