PETER: Welcome to The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List. You wrote in response to something I recently wrote –

RESPONDENT: Lemme jump in here as well, came across the site a week back, have been reading the stuff. I am 28 yrs old male. Moved past organised religion, went thro JK’s writings a little bit and then UG and stopped there. His certainty in what he was conveying that JK’s ways or any other spiritual pursuit is just a sham, self delusion and there is nothing there, just another belief world, seemed to make sense to me and so I stopped.

PETER: Yep. Many people who have come across U.G. Krishnamurti have stopped in their tracks – it appears that a dose of spiritual nihilism is sufficient to persuade many people to stop seeking.

RESPONDENT: I just completed a Vipassana course (Mr Goenka’s way) and was about to progress on that way as it seemed ‘real’ and trying to see reality and discard all the beliefs. Richard’s writings suggest that’s not so. It’s Mr Buddha’s reality that one is seeing and not actuality of the things.

PETER: When I came to understand that all of the so-called meditative practices that have been spurned by Eastern religion – deliberately turning away from the world of the senses and ‘tuning in’ to one’s own inner imaginative world – are the antithesis of being here in the vibrant, sensual world of people, things and events, I dismissed the whole lot as being self-centred dissociative codswallop.

RESPONDENT: I shall try to start investigating and uncovering myself as suggested in the site. How do ‘I’ tick seems a sane thing to see and be aware of and understand first. Why do ‘I’ go after these techniques, what’s the thought or belief and desire process behind all that, basically why do I do the thing I do; to find out all these answers seems very important to me and actualism would, I understand help in me uncovering all this.

PETER: What comes to mind is the fact that any investigation without impetus, direction and purpose will be meaningless. In fact this is what I said to No 71 immediately following the section you responded to –

[Peter]: ‘And ridding myself of these shackles was the essential precursor to beginning to becoming free from malice and sorrow … and as this process gained momentum I correspondingly found that I incrementally became free of the putative antidotal passions to malice and sorrow – love and compassion.

I can relate to a good deal of the brief history of your searching you have posted, although I personally was indoctrinated into Western societal conditioning and not Eastern. You may well find my journal interesting reading as it documents not only a bit of my own history but also how the serendipitous discovery of actualism gave ‘my’ life impetus, direction and meaning’. Peter to No 71, 2.9.2004

Needless to say that actualism is all about being attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive in order that you can progressively eliminate malice and sorrow from your life. To put it bluntly … if you’re not asking the question in order to become more happy and harmless, you ain’t doing the actualism method.

RESPONDENT: Times I have found perfect and delightful are those moments, when my senses get activated, esp my seeing. My head feels lighter, not too many thoughts or feelings and vision is clear, smooth; awareness gets sharper, brighter, I notice that I can see far ahead and sideways clearly, 180 degree vision clearly, easily and sharply. Time slows down ie my mind I guess is not wandering. But I don’t think self is absent, not sure; these moments come now and then, usually in the evenings and I had just put it down to fact that that thoughts are not there much and I am in the moment as much as possible. Are these mini pces?

PETER: Given that a pure consciousness experience has got nothing to do with ‘being in the moment’, I would doubt it very much, but I am not an arbiter of another’s experiences – that’s your business.

RESPONDENT: Anyway forget those moments, they are not important for now.

PETER: And yet any experience you have is important, nay vital. In fact, the whole thrust of actualism is to stop wasting this moment, the only you can experience being alive, by indulging in the usual things that human beings indulge in – feeling bored, craving excitement, being annoyed, feeling the bitter-sweetness of sadness, feeling righteous, feeling resentful, being dissociated, wallowing in the past, worrying about some future imagined scenario, and so on.

RESPONDENT: Let me get to my main query, what’s the starting point in the attention part? You say ‘I’ is full of beliefs, conditioning plus genetic conditioning. And It’s I who can see through all this. So attention to the moment which is attention towards one psyche I guess and its done by asking that q and looking at the feelings. First social identity is in the way right? I mean I who is full of beliefs or morals first comes in the way.

PETER: If I may interject – when you ask ‘what’s the starting point in the attention part’, I would ask what is your intent in wanting to be attentive to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive? If you ask yourself the question without any intent – as in aim, goal, objective, plan, purpose – then surely it is obvious that the whole exercise will be a complete waste of time and effort.

RESPONDENT: If there is irritation at somebody, first when I look, I see that moral thought of don’t get irritated man, calm down etc comes first. You suggest I watch this and the very watching, attention will stop this and then I can get into my irritation more clearly. Ok I see the irritation is due to this, some person who I don’t like all that much, said this, I reacted like this etc.

You say, I have to understand completely why I got irritated. To quote from af intro – ‘At the root of this emotion is inevitably found a socially-instilled moral, ethic or belief or a crude instinctual passion.’ I don’t think in the above case it was a moral, or ethic which was the cause of the irritation, now what’s the crude instinctual passion that could have been the cause, I am not sure, its not as if it was a erotic or fear or aggression thingy. It’s somebody who I don’t like all that much, making fun of me or teasing me say, irritation arises, what’s the crude instinctual thing there, nurture? I shall see through this more clearly next time.

PETER: Has it not occurred to you that irritation is but a mild form of anger and that anger is in fact a manifestation of instinctual aggression … whether one’s feeling of irritation be repressed or expressed, whether it be self-castigation, a moody withdrawal or a verbal jibe at another or some other acted-out behaviour?

In short, attentiveness reveals that if one is feeling irritated about anyone or anything, one is being anything but harmless.

RESPONDENT: Also Importantly by not suppressing or expressing and carrying out the above investigation, (so its a mixture of intellectual analysis and watching right?) that is I trace back the event, label the emotion see why and how I got irritated but instead of in self analysis, I don’t say to myself ‘ok I wont do that again, I will take a deep breath and move on’ but here in af I just try to understand the functioning of me completely and stop at that, right? I see that I have to honest and genuine in these and not to try to fool myself and deny any negative or positive feeling. I hope what’s written above makes some sense to you. I shall start my investigation in earnest and come back with lots more doubts and queries, so I will be troubling you a bit!

PETER: I notice that you have mentioned the ‘af intro’ – the ‘Introduction to Actual Freedom’ which Vineeto and I put together. Given that you have quoted from the introduction, it is pertinent to point out that the main focus of the first half of the Introduction is the lamentable failure of all of humankind’s revered wisdom and well-meant endeavours to bring an end to the malice and sorrow that is the salient characteristic of the human condition. And that the second half of the introduction documents the newly discovered method whereby one can rid oneself of malice and sorrow to the extent that one can then become actually free of the human condition in toto.

Soon after coming across Richard it became very clear to me – so clear that it was constantly in my face as it were – that in order to be an actualist I needed to devote my life to the moment-to-moment business of being both happy and harmless … that only a total commitment would guarantee success. The reason I point this out is that if one hasn’t got a vital – and I do mean vital – interest in peace on earth then one will not have sufficient motivation to put into practice the very method that Richard used to become free of the human condition, in toto.

4.10.2004

PETER: In a post you posted the following quote without making any comment –

RESPONDENT:

[quote]: ‘memetics has implications for the nature of our very selves.

According to Dennett a person is ‘a particular sort of ape infested with memes’. We all pick up countless memes throughout our lives and these (along with our genes and the environment in which we live) make us the unique individuals we are. But isn’t there a real self inside who lives this life? Isn’t there a real ‘me’ who makes my decisions, and holds my beliefs. Isn’t there a real self who has consciousness and free will? I would say no. The self is just a word around which memes can gather. All sorts of memes benefit by us having the false idea of a self inside. So the self is just a complicated memeplex, created by and for the memes themselves for their own protection and replication.’ [endquote].

PETER: Having concocted the fanciful notion of memes, memetics and memeplexes, do the proponents of this supposed infliction by theoretical non-substantive particles proffer any solution to their own self-created dilemma?

Anti-meme inoculation? Aerial spraying of conflict zones with anti-meme-icides? Meme-resistant creams and potions? Search for an anti-meme gene? The adoption of a diet that is rich in anti-memetic compounds or of meditative practices that enhance one’s resistance to memes such that one can eventually become a meme-free zone unto oneself? Memetic-based therapies? Counselling for early childhood meme-abuse?

But then again all of these solutions would be fought tooth and nail by pro-memetic supporters.

Mass rallies of support for memes-rights would result. Organizations would be set up to champion the cause of endangered ethnic, tribal and cultural memes. Legislation would be passed limiting meme research and ensuring their protection. Astronomers would begin to search for alien memes and start to discover meme holes. Meme museums would be built and sacred-meme spiritual movements would be spawned leading to the construction of meme shrines. The emerging conflicts between the supporters of various memes would lead to meme wars and the emergence of meme-liberation and meme-rights terrorist groups would mean …

It is often great fun to take a factoid – in this case the notion that such a thing as a meme has any existence in actuality – and take it for a walk, as it were.

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