RESPONDENT: While at it – could you do the same [clarify authorship] for this fragment, from the same website, please?

May I conclude from the following, Peter, that you are indeed the author?

PETER: Yep. After I wrote my journal – a documentary of the process of becoming virtually free of malice and sorrow – it occurred to me that it might be useful to pen a Glossary of terms used in actualism, essentially to explain that words are used in actualism by and large as per dictionary definitions and not as spiritualists use such words (or more to the point, misuse such words).

RESPONDENT: If so, what do you think about my amendment of the words ‘A fact is what is ascertained sensately’ to ‘A fact is what *can* be ascertained sensately’? Just being pedantic here.

PETER: Far from being pedantic, your proposed amendment would make what I said into something I did not mean it to mean. As such I am unimpressed.

Perhaps if I can explain the difference between fact (what is ascertained sensately) and fiction (what is believed to be true or imagined to exist) in another way then you may well understand what I am saying and why I am saying it.

When I first came across Richard I naturally assumed that he was a spiritualist who was talking about the spiritual world in different terms than other spiritualists. Pretty soon I realized that this was not so and I came to understand that what he was saying was that the world of the senses – the actual world – is all there is and further that the actual world is in fact utterly peerless in its pristine perfection and it is only ‘me’ who affectively experiences this world either as a fearful grim reality or as a hopeful fantasy Greater reality.

I can remember thinking about this radical proposition for a good deal of time – running the question almost constantly for several weeks: ‘What if this physical world is all there is and the whole notion of there being ‘something else’ or ‘somewhere else’ was fiction, albeit an almost universally believed fiction?’

Eventually I came to the conclusion that what Richard was saying made eminent sense, even if it was 180 degrees opposite to the revered teachings of every spiritual teacher and every spiritual teacher.

Here is a bit from my journal on the topic of belief and fact that may also be of interest –

[Peter]: ... ‘Since I met Richard I have been challenging the very act of believing itself, and I am actively dismantling the beliefs that I find so as to strip away the veil of misery and sorrow, which they maintain and constantly reinforce. No longer seeing the world through grey or rose coloured glasses, no longer with my head in the sand or in the clouds, means that I am different from other people. I actually experience the world as it is as a near-perfect place (except for human beings, of course). It requires no belief, faith, hope or trust to see that this is the case; the physical universe simply is perfect, pristine, pure, infinite, and happening this very moment. Human beings have just been programmed, socially and instinctually, into believing that this is not so. This programming consists of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that we are born with, overlaid with the beliefs we have been indoctrinated with since birth – in total called the Human Condition.

Further the advice of parents, teachers, priests, gurus, philosophers – indeed all of the human Wisdom – is founded on the belief that you can’t change Human Nature. Not only is life on earth a sick joke, but there is no cure possible! The Mother of all beliefs!

It is only a belief-system, but it is very insidious. It creates an imaginary world, made of beliefs, that is so dense, so elaborate and so convincing that it seems real. But it is not actual or factual. And when one first peeks through a crack in the door out from this world it can look overwhelming fearful – that is why it takes sincere intent and a certain courage to tackle the journey out. The essential thread for me was having had a significant pure consciousness experience in which I had experienced an absence of ‘self’, and where I actually experienced the delight, ease and magic purity of this planet. I think most people have had similar experiences at some times in their life and these glimpses of such a startling potential sent so many to the East in the first place.

But then, of course, with the newly acquired ‘spiritual’ beliefs firmly in place any subsequent experiences became spiritual in nature – and I’ve had a few in my time. I am not talking about the fickle feelings of bliss, love, beauty, or oneness experienced in an altered state of consciousness. Here I am talking about a direct experience of the actual physical world of people, events and things as they physically are – be it an ashtray, a sunset, a rainy day, talking to the cashier at the bank, the bedroom ceiling, going to work on a Monday, getting a flat tyre, doing nothing or something, having breakfast for the 17,000th time – in short, everything and anything actual. The world of people, events and things – not the world of imagination.’ Peter’s Journal People

*

RESPONDENT: What follows below is, I think, Peter, a nice example of your freedom of the need to justify yourself and to identify the character flaws of other people as opposed to your own absence of such flaws.

PETER: I have had this criticism levelled at me many a time before but it simply makes no sense at all. I have always been upfront about the fact that ‘I’ was as bad and as mad as any other instinctually-driven being on the planet.

Again from (the very first page) of my Journal –

[Peter]: ‘As I sit on the balcony of our small flat contemplating life, I am moved to start writing my story. The urge has been welling in me over the last few months, so I’m now making a start. There is now ample time, given that I have all but retired, to reflect on the sense I have made of life.

Indeed, that has been the innate drive in my life: to make sense of this mad world that I found myself living in. The insanity of endless wars, conflict, arguments, sadness, despair, failed hopes and dreams seems endemic. *And worse still, as I gradually forced myself to admit, I was as mad, and as bad, as everyone else.* I had tried all of the solutions that Humanity offered in order to be happy, but in the end they made no sense and haven’t worked to sort out the mess.’ [emphasis added] Peter’s Journal, Foreword

Acknowledging that I was ‘as mad and as bad as everyone else’ was the starting point of my realizing that I needed to change – that I needed to become free of malice and free of sorrow if I wanted to be harmless and if I wanted to be happy.

Such as simple matter-of-fact acknowledgement, the necessary prerequisite for change to happen, is what is sometimes colloquially known as ‘getting off one’s high horse’.