RESPONDENT: Now, the real question goes to Vineeto & Peter only, as Richard never claims any quality except those which RIPEETO is so naively describing.

RESPONDENT: Peter, Vineeto, may you not find your lives completely wasted but profit in the best possible way from your ‘big leap’. I’m certain you will enjoy life with Richard. For taste’s sake, try not to be too hypocritical about honesty – and don’t, if possible to avoid, tell people you’re just being honest about honesty. Well, I guess it’s impossible to avoid. Human Comedy Goodbye List. 7/9/2005

PETER: Despite the fact that you asked a loaded question and not a real question and that your question was but a prelude to a premature evacuation the very next day, I’ll post the following as it is what I wrote immediately preceding the quote I sent to No 60 last night with regard to my honest-to-myself attentiveness of the full range and extent of my feelings –

[Peter]: ‘Malice is a bit different as it is generally not upheld as a human virtue and most people even manage to deny it in themselves. It is always someone else who is cruel, jealous, vindictive or violent and I am simply responding to their malice! It was amazing to see in my own children unprovoked and unlearned acts of aggression. The idea that children are born innocent is just an idea, not a fact. I have some memories, even as a kid, of plotting revenge against someone – but of course most of the actual malicious actions were condemned. One didn’t break things, hit people, or say certain things – I was taught to behave ‘properly’. The trouble is, all the malice was then forced into cunning, clever and subversive actions that were to persist in my life. The willingness to tell a tale on someone as a subtle revenge is a classic. We call it gossiping, to disguise the maliciousness. I remember a few times actually having to will myself to stop, biting my tongue. The worst situation, of course, is in ‘relation-ship’ (or ‘battle-ship’) with a woman.

The malice often took the form of withdrawal – an insidious revenge, but also a self-inflicted pain; a terrible price to pay in the long run. I came to see a lot of New Age-spiritual-therapy behaviour as only thinly disguised malice. ‘I have to be honest with you’ or ‘I would like to share something with you’ is usually the opening line of someone who is about to take revenge or be spiteful. Again much of what we humans regard as entertainment is but our pleasure at witnessing malice and violence inflicted upon fellow human beings. Competitive sport is another arena for malice to be played out, whether watching or participating. A few times in my life the lid would really fly off and rage would surface, quickly followed by shame.

In particular I remember a time when we were working with some Indian stonemasons in Poona. One of the workers was doing something wrong despite my having just warned him. Well, I gave him a full serve of rage, only to discover afterwards that he really was doing it right all along. I was deeply ashamed, not only that I had lost my temper, but that I had done the typical thing at the time – chosen an Indian as my victim. A few months ago I even felt the thrill of what it would be like to kill someone, after reading a newspaper article about a murder, and that really brought malice home to me. To experience it in me that intensely was shocking indeed. Peter’s Journal, ‘Intelligence’

I remember once talking to someone on our balcony about the business of taking a good clear look at my feelings and beliefs – ‘to bring them out into the open in order to shine the bright light of awareness on them’ is the way that Richard has put it. As we talked, my visitor was somewhat bewildered as to why I would want to do it. He indicated that I was somehow kidding myself by wanting to be as happy and harmless as humanly possible – in fact, I got the impression that he thought me dishonest and insincere because his conviction was that to be ‘honest’ meant to cherish one’s feelings and to be ‘sincere’ meant to let them all hang out and to hell with everyone else.

Exploring and investigating the dark side of one’s own psyche while neither expression nor repressing is only one aspect of the business of examining one’s own feelings and passions – there are some very sweet aspects to be discovered as well. One exploration that is fascinating to make is to get in touch with one’s childhood naiveté. A lot of people are well acquainted with getting in touch with their childhood hurts and wounds – the times they were bullied, the times they were wrongly accused of something they didn’t do, the feelings of indigitation, the feelings of resentment, loneliness and so on … but I found that there were also wonderful memories of carefree days of leaving home in the morning and riding my bike for hours on end, either alone or with mates, simply riding for the fun of riding, exploring for the fun of exploring, being aimless for sheer exuberance of being aimless – the only restriction being that I needed to be home before dark. They were days immersed in a childhood guileless naiveté, the closet to being innocent that is possible within the human condition.

By the simple act of getting in touch with this childhood naiveté once again, I realized that it had never ever quite gone away in my later life – that despite all the trials and tribulations of later life I had never quite lost it entirely and bowed under to cynicism. On reflection, I guess this is why I was such a ‘fool’ or so ‘dishonest’ or so ‘insincere’ or so ‘hypocritical’ as to want to eliminate malice and sorrow from my life in order that I could again become as guileless and as carefree again as I was in those childhood days.

Of course, as you have rightly pointed out, this is not an actual freedom from malice and sorrow – it’s still ‘me’ being a feeling being – but for me feeling felicitous and being once-again naïve sure beats feeling miserable and being resentful.

12.9.2005

RESPONDENT: The wonder of the world is what is most obvious and most mysterious at the same time: that one can see, hear, smell, taste, feel temperature and touch and the position of the body. The mystery to me, is not that it is the universe which experiences itself as a human body, that is quite obvious; the strange thing is how ANY EXPERIENCE, any kind of PERCEPTION is possible. The explanation to THIS I call factor X or noumenon.

The story which for me comes closest to this is from Spain and has its origin, alas, in the recent wave of fanatic terror. You remember the simultaneous train bombings which were supposed to occur all inside the central station in order to take it down? A man killed there, as so many, left wife and child. The woman couldn’t bear to tell her child that his father was dead. So she told the five-year-old that, as he certainly remembered was his father’s ability and habit, he had again done some magic: he had transfigured himself into one of the stars at the sky. She pointed out to her child into which one. The next evening, it was already dark when the mother came home from work, her child was standing at the window, holding a sheet of paper to the glass. What are you doing? the woman asked. Only then did she realize what he was doing, which was what he told her: I’m showing my new painting to dad!

PETER: Your story reminded me of an event that happened in my life –

[Peter]: ‘As I begin to put into words the sense I have made of life, I am reminded of the time I stood beside my 13-year-old son’s coffin. It was indeed a shocking experience to be confronted by the sight of the dead body of someone so young and so close. Shocking to my very core. It was then that I really determined to find out how to remove the ‘shackles’ that I felt had always bound me, and to experience life free of them before I died! I had been, at this time, some ten years on the spiritual path, but this experience was to prove for me a seminal point – the beginning really.

Two things in particular stick in my mind from the time of my son’s death. My ex-wife had wanted to see the body and the undertaker led us out to the little room in which the coffin stood on trestles, set up for our viewing. I remember looking at the body, which had been prepared to look serene with whatever skills an undertaker uses. What struck me immediately was the lifelessness of the corpse. This was obviously the dead body of someone who had abounded with almost frenetic energy when he was alive. There was a wail from beside me as my ex-wife put into words exactly what I had seen – ‘He’s not here, he’s not here’. After leaving the funeral parlour we drove aimlessly around the small coastal town, finally parking on the edge of the river estuary. As we wandered out onto the tidal mudflats, she looked up at the greying sky and shouted out his name several times. I looked up at the sky and clearly remember thinking, ‘No, he’s not up there either.’

I had experienced the death of both parents previously, but the death of one of my children, particularly one so young, completely shattered my nonchalant view I had of being alive. When I was seventeen, my father had died when he was only in his early forties. He had suffered a heart attack about two years before, but had continued to work very hard to fulfil his ambition of providing a house and some security for my mother. He died when it was half-complete, and I always saw the futility in his gesture, as my mother was lonely in the house without him and sold it a few years later anyway. I guess it was the only thing he knew to do as a husband, but it always seemed such a pointless sacrifice.

I also have a distinct memory from this time of my mother trying to find a priest who would officiate at the cremation. My father was a Lutheran, but the Lutheran minister refused to conduct the service, as my father had also been a Mason, which was objectionable to the minister for some reason. So, here was my mother ringing around to find anyone with a back-to-front collar willing to do the job.

What my son’s death at such a young age did for me was to intensify the sense of urgency to find the meaning of it all – after all, I saw how short life can actually be. Here I was, my father dead, my son dead; I was still alive, in my early forties, and I was obviously living on borrowed time – as I saw it. And I knew that I was not even really living yet – there was fear, hesitancy, and that feeling of invisible shackles from which I yearned to break free.’ Peter’s Journal, Death

As you can see they are similar events in that both relate to a parent’s reaction to a family member’s death – one was an acceptance and perpetuation in the belief in a life after death, the other was to not accept and not perpetuate the belief in a life after death because the experience of the finality of physical death made the imaginary nature of this belief clear.

This event proved pivotal in my life as it proved to be the beginning of the end of my spiritual search. Once I had pulled the plug on the belief in a life after death – the core belief that underpins all spiritual/ religious/ metaphysical belief – I was much more able to clearly look at the flaws and failures of the whole spiritual business. What I also realize, in hindsight, is that it was the beginning of my search for the meaning of life, not in some other-worldly non-physical realm or ‘noumenon’ but right here on earth in this life time.

As it turned out, it took me several more years before I was finally ready to completely give up the spiritual search … and then I serendipitously came across Richard who pointed me not only to the fact that the meaning of life was to be found in the physical world but his description of his ongoing experience twigged my own memory of having at least once experienced the intrinsic meaning of life to be found in what he terms the actual world (in order to distinguish it from the grim reality that feeling human beings invariably feel the physical world to be).

Just to round this off with a further comment. You said above –

[Respondent]: The meaning of life is that afterwards it’s over. [endquote].

As you may have gathered from my life experiences, it was only when I accepted the fact that there was no afterwards that I could focus my attention on seeking the meaning of life in the very physical world where we corporeal mortal earthlings live. The more I did so the more ridiculous it seemed that I should have ever been hooked into believing that the meaning of life should or could be anywhere else but here on earth and at any other time but this very moment of being alive.

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