|
Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List with Gary
PETER: Hi Gary, GARY: Something else you wrote in your recent post to me caught my attention. You said:
Reflection on this observation of yours results in the realization that this is so. It seems that fear and anxiety are much more on the surface layer, if you will, of consciousness, whereas sorrow is a deeper-down rudimentary emotion. There is a bitter-sweet feeling of sorrow associated with the self – the ‘who’ I think I am. There have been times in the not-long-ago past when, reviewing my life, this emotion came to the fore and caused me to tear up at the eye, while contemplating ‘my’ life. It is much the same feeling I have had while watching a sad part in a movie and welling up with tears momentarily. I have found these emotions to be most interesting opportunities to observe ‘me’ in action. I think the underlying deep sorrow is about the supposed ‘tragedy’ that life comes to an end – a kind of funereal experience. Of course in some cultures one’s death is accompanied by the most unrestrained jollity, but that seems to be the exception. PETER: My observation about sorrow being the predominant human passion is based upon observation of the human condition in action as well as my own personal experience. When I said sorrow was a hallowed emotion I was referring to the fact that all religious and spiritual belief is founded upon sorrow – the presumption that human life, here on earth, is essentially a suffering existence. The religious belief in a God, by whatever name, or the spiritual desire to become a God, by whatever name, is rooted in our personal experience of sorrow and sustained by compassion – a universal agreement to participate in the sorrow of others. There is a clearly a sacred and inviolate covenant that the common-to-all bond of sorrow and suffering is what ultimately unites the human species. Thus in order to break free of the human condition it is necessary to continuously and persistently ‘pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps’ so as to break free of the spiritual/social and automatic/instinctual predisposition to indulge in, and wallow in, the deep set feelings of bitter-sweet sorrow. GARY: I wonder if it is correct to speak of layers of consciousness? I think sorrow is on a deeper layer than fear and anxiety, at least in my experience. The anxiety and the fear seem to be more associated with the social identity – the ‘who’ I am that craves security, position, status, ‘respect’ from others, to do the ‘right’ thing, etc. The fragility of life, the evanescence of life – that is something that most wish to push away, or completely deny by wishful fantasies of everlasting life in a supernatural realm. PETER: I have yet to come across anything that contradicts the premise that the basic animal instincts are those of fear, aggression, nurture and desire but I think it is fair to say that these instinctual reactions are most obviously, and disastrously, experienced in the human animal species as the deeply-felt emotions of malice and sorrow. I remember when Richard read my journal he was interested in what I wrote about fear because he said it was not a major issue for him on his journey out of the human condition. I wrote that I experienced fear as often manifesting itself as doubt and hesitation but that I found the fear associated with radical change could be channelled into the thrill of discovery and the challenge of a pioneering adventure. Since then my experience is that sorrow is the predominant human emotion which an actualist needs to focus upon if he or she is to become free of humanity, simply because it is the passion of sorrow that ultimately binds humanity together. Becoming free of sorrow is not a one-off event or realization – it requires moment-to-moment attentiveness, developed over time and with practice, to the point of obsessive attentiveness. GARY: But getting back to the question I was posing: do you think that consciousness has levels? Or is consciousness a ‘whatever comes up’ affair – i.e. whatever is happening at the moment? There was a charge levelled by the actualism objectors a while ago that it is ‘Freudian’, and so passé. Perhaps this charge is made because of the observation that there is an outer social identity which, when demolished, gives one the opportunity to tip upon the instinctual passions. While there is nothing that I can find in actualism writings to suggest that there is an unconscious or a subconscious mind, the suggestion that there is an outer social identity with its’ accrued social values, morals, ethics, etc. and a deeper-down, more rudimentary animalistic ‘self’ consisting of genetically inherited instincts strikes one as a Freudian notion, although there are chief differences. I’d appreciate your thoughts about this matter. PETER: I remember doing a brief skip through the writings of Freud and others when I first came across actualism. For about a year I did a fair bit of wide ranging reading in order to check out the state of play with regards to both the historic and current understandings of the human condition. I checked out both the spiritual world and real world viewpoints and ended up having to acknowledge Richard’s incomparable expertise in the field – not only intellectually but of equal importance, experientially as well. In hindsight, it was this intellectual checking out for myself, combined with my own success in becoming incrementally more happy and harmless, that served to set my doubts and fears aside. With regards to Freud and his theories about human consciousness, I find the whole notion of levels of consciousness to be both confusing and esoteric in nature. Rather than considering the human mind as having levels of consciousness, it is far more accurate and down-to-earth to understand that every human mind is inevitably subject to comprehensive social programming overlaying an intrinsic instinctual programming. The social programming can be likened to the operating software program of a computer and the instinctual programming can be likened to the bios program – a level deeper certainly, but still software. As such, it is the programming of the mind that has deeper levels and not consciousness per se. At its deepest level this programming is species instinctual – every human being is psychologically and psychically bound to the notion of Humanity, which in itself is the psychological and psychic manifestation of the human species. The notion that consciousness itself has levels gives rise to the commonly-held belief that ‘I’ as consciousness have deeper levels which in turn gives rise to the feeling that there is a real ‘me’ lurking somewhere inside and if ‘I’ can only become this real ‘me’, ‘I’ will find freedom and fulfilment, not to mention power and immortality. You will have no doubt noticed in your own investigations the various levels of programming that the human mind has been subjected to. You will have noticed that as you strip away an outer layer of belief you are more easily able to acknowledge the facts and make sense of a situation. Similarly as you remove the outer layers of social programming you are more able to understand and experience the deeper layers of instinctual programming that have been genetically encoded by blind nature. This basic survival programming of fear, aggression, nurture and desire forms the deeper layers that have been wrongly construed as being deeper layers of consciousness or unconscious layers in some jargon. * Because actualism is so radically different to anything else that has passed for knowledge and wisdom about human consciousness I eventually gave up looking for the similarities with past thinking so as to concentrate my focus on the differences. This is not to deny the contribution that many human beings have made to the study of human consciousness but actualists are in fact involved in a process that is a radical departure from all that is considered normal, natural, wise, profound, traditional or esoteric. Because of this it is useful to always keep in mind the experience of pure consciousness when there is no ‘I’ or ‘me’ being conscious, let alone so-called levels of consciousness operating. What is readily apparent in a pure consciousness experience is a singular remarkable experience of consciousness – consciousness being conscious of consciousness – a sensuous awareness of being aware, completely bare of any ‘I’ thinking or ‘me’ feeling whatsoever. For an actualist, a pure consciousness experience always serves as a touchstone of pure experiencing, a source for personal understanding and a springboard for further investigations.
PETER: A couple of lines from your post to Vineeto have twigged me to write a comment. I particularly liked the following line from your post to Vineeto –
In the same vein, to blame one’s own anger on the careless driver who cuts in on you, on what someone else said or didn’t say to you, on what someone else did or didn’t do, or on some event that did or didn’t happen sometime in the past or in your childhood is but to perpetuate anger by the simple act of justification. It is a fact that the only way to stop mass outbreaks of violence is to use even more violence as was done to the Nazis in WW2 and no doubt will be done to the current crop of bad boys. Acknowledging this fact means one is thus freed from following the hypocritical and self righteous path of pacifism which in turn enables one to focus on the only possible contribution one can make to bringing an end to the anger and sadness that blights the human species – getting rid of your own malice and sorrow. * PETER: You also wrote the following –
There is a widely held belief that the human species has had a Golden Age at some time in the past or that a natural state of innocence existed way back in the mists of time and that this all the ills of mankind are due to the loss of this supposed innocence and peacefulness. This supposed loss is generally attributed to technological and scientific progress and an accompanying retreat from spiritual and primitive values. The factual evidence from anthropological and archaeological research directly contradict these beliefs as there is ample evidence that every tribal group fought amongst each other as well as with their neighbours. These fights were either defensive or opportunistic attacks with the victims most often either eaten or offered up as sacrifice to the Spirits or Gods. Cannibalism was still practiced in some primitive tribes until mid last century whilst human sacrifice to some God or other has yet to cease. And yet despite all the evidence of the human species’ predilection for anger and violence the belief that its causes are other than blind nature’s instinctual animal survival programming are still not only prevalent but held to be credible. There is even a notion that some animals are innocent and peace loving creatures. Dolphins are often lauded as such despite evidence of what can only be described as warfare, rape and mob violence. Our closest genetic cousins, the chimps, are similarly touted as gentle, peaceful creatures whereas warfare, rape, murder, infanticide and cannibalism have all been observed and documented as occurring as intrinsic to their natural state. The factual evidence of the instinctual nature of animal and human animal violence is ignored, resisted, denied or dismissed. Many researches have bowed to public pressure and either willingly or reluctantly recanted their findings. As an example, Jane Goodall now makes no mention of the errant and malicious side of chimp’s natural behaviour that she documented early in her career, whilst anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon is still being subjected to malicious personal attacks because his studies of the primitive Yanomamo tribe in Venezuela. The Yanomamo were one of those ‘extremely rare cases of tribes way off in the jungle somewhere’ who were imagined to be ‘essentially peaceful’ and yet Changnon’s studies proved that they were anything but peaceful and innocent in their natural state. The following is an excerpt from an article about Chagnon’s findings and I will post it here only because the link I had to it is no longer active –
Also, if you are interested in the treatment still being dished out to N. Chagnon by some of his opponents, you could start with the following link – http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1282/22_52/67004535/print.jhtml There is nothing as thrilling as the process of actively discarding one’s social beliefs and experientially understanding one’s instinctual animal nature by the simple act of seeing and acknowledging facts. This process does put one’s social and instinctual ‘self’ on the spot, as it were. I likened the process to painting my ‘self’ into a corner from whence there was no escape possible. Good, hey.
GARY: I’d like to go back to a previous thread about sorrow – back
on
I’ve been doing one heck of a lot of ‘pulling’ lately, because just in the past day or two I’ve had an acute onset of sorrow, or rather I could say an eruption of those bitter-sweet feelings of grief, angst, sorrow, and disappointment, quite unbidden, and yet so, so familiar. Yesterday I felt almost paralysed by these feelings, they were so intense. Again, I am reminded that actualism is about examining and experiencing one’s feelings in the light of a sensuous awareness, not about suppressing or repressing one’s emotions. I wonder if, as one is breaking free of the Human Condition, one is liable to experience fresh onslaughts of the ‘automatic/instinctual predisposition(s)’? I remember reading in Richard’s Journal the kind of scary, intensely abnormal and psychotic state that he experienced as he was on the verge of self-immolation, the description of which should be enough to deter any but the most serious of inquirers. I don’t want to suggest necessarily that that is what I am going through. But I have noted that the further and further I go my own way, depending on nobody, practicing attentiveness and sensuousness, and demolishing the social identities I have formed since birth, the more intensely do I seem to experience the raw survival program of the human species. So, last night, as I commenced to get a grip on my boot straps, a fascinated awareness reflected on ‘So this is human sorrow and suffering – this is the bitter-sweet feeling of sorrow, so deeply embedded, so ancient, so much a part of being a human being that it is in a sense my very life. It is what my life has been about, never very far around the corner, always lurking in the background, something I have tried to ameliorate through compassion and acts of pity and helpfulness, something I have tried to assuage by loving others and being loved, through being comforted and comforting in turn’. I don’t want to ‘get over’ sorrow just to have it come back again. Is one in a sense subjecting oneself to these bouts of emotion? Am I on the wrong track? Are these ‘pity parties’ totally unnecessary or is there some intrinsic value to going through these experiences? What does one need to do to finally and irrevocably break free from these ‘automatic/instinctual predispositions’? I have a sense that your answer is going to be to get back to being happy and harmless just as soon as one can ... which would be a splendid answer ... but I’ll let you answer this yourself. PETER: Taking your questions one at a time –
No. The process of actualism is firstly to demolish the outer layer of one’s identity – one’s social conditioning. This social conditioning that each and every human being is inevitably subject to since birth is a two pronged habituation aimed at taming the brute instinctual passions via suppression and repression and encouraging the tender passions via praise and glorification. An actualist’s sincere investigations will reveal that both aspects of this conditioning comprise a moral and ethical straightjacket, a puppet-like existence which one either submits to, riles against or embraces by opting for seductive lure of self-glorification. For an actualist the seeing of, and the direct experiencing of, the inherent failure of this social conditioning is the ending of his or her social identity. This ending happens progressively as one’s instilled morals, ethics and values are questioned and investigated and what is revealed underneath is what this social conditioning was specifically designed to hide – the fact that human beings are instinctually driven animals. Thus, as you say, one is in a sense subjecting oneself to bouts of emotions beginning with the feelings and emotions triggered by one’s own social identity – feelings such as moral indignation, self-righteousness, prudishness and the like – and ending with the underlying instinctual drives and passions that give substance to one’s instinctual being. This direct experiencing is an essential component of dismantling one’s social and instinctual identity and while at times the journey may seem daunting, the rewards are inestimable. As you indicated, as the bouts subside – which they invariably do – you are left with a fascinated awareness of having been aware of experiencing your own psyche in action. You have experienced ‘you’ in action for a brief period – neither suppressed nor repressed, neither glorified nor condemned. My only other comment is that you never get more than you can handle because you set your own pace, you reap your own rewards and, by the very nature of your intent to become free of malice and sorrow, you have tapped into a palpable stream of benignity and betterment that is intrinsic to the physical universe. In short, nothing can go wrong provided your intent is pure. Another little reminder I used to run was that whatever went on in my head or heart in the day, I would go to sleep at night-time and find myself having breakfast the next morning, yet again. Then I was reminded that actualism is really about being here in this moment in time, in this place in space, and that the thrilling process of actualism, with all of its explorations and dramas, is what enabled this to happen more and more as ‘I’, the interloper, became thinner and less substantial.
You won’t get a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer from me about what is essentially your business. If it is working and brings tangible results then it works and only you can be the judge of whether you are getting tangible results. What I would do whenever I got a bout of the doubts, was try to remember the Peter who was before I became an actualist. What did he get upset about, what did he worry about, what made him angry, what made him sad and so on? I would then check how I was now and what tangible progress had been made towards my goal of becoming actually free of the human condition. There was obviously a beginning to your own track, you know your own progress by comparison with ‘who’ you were at the start and you know the nature of the end of the track from your own PCE, so only you can answer your question.
It is vitally important to be aware of whatever feelings, emotions or passions one is experiencing without indulging in the inherited habit of suppressing or repressing or expressing or morally judging the experience. How else to find out what makes ‘me’ tick – and all the other ‘me’s on the planet as well? How else to fully understand the human condition than by direct personal hands-on experience? What I found was that I first needed to stop judging these emotional experiences as being right or wrong, good or bad, in order to be able to understand by direct experience and observation not only the debilitating effects of the emotion or passion but also how they actively prevent me from being here. So, to get back to the comment of mine about sorrow –
There is nothing at all to be gained by indulging in or wallowing in sorrow but if the feeling comes along by itself or is triggered by some event such as listening to music or watching the news then make the effort to check it out while it is happening. There is no more valuable attentiveness than this for an actualist, for you are literally discovering and experiencing what it is that makes ‘you’ tick.
You keep doing what works to make you free from the feelings, emotions and passions that are the root cause of malice and sorrow. The discovery that something works in practice brings an overweening confidence that enables you to then tap into the genetically-promulgated propensity for betterment that is inherent in the very cellular structures of animate life in the actual world. And as you seem to be discovering the only thing that can break the stranglehold of ‘automatic/instinctual predispositions’ is the cultivation of an on-going fascinated awareness.
Yep, get back to being happy and harmless just as soon as you can – but with the essential proviso that you be interested enough, and attentive enough, to learn whatever you can from these emotional experiences. If you milk these experiences for information then you can learn from them – if you indulge and wallow in them then you are but indulging and wallowing in the human condition. It is vital that you dip into these experiences as deeply as possible in order to learn as much as possible about how the human psyche operates because then you are learning what it is that is both the substance and driving force for the human condition in toto. I could go on but I had better rope this post in. I’ll just end on a reminder that to be an actualist is to set off on a course that is diametrically opposed to all of humanity’s so-called wisdom. Whilst there is an inherent carefree simplicity to living free of the human condition that you would have experienced in a PCE, becoming actually free of the human condition requires stubborn perseverance and consummate patience. My experience is that it is a mightily good thing that the process of becoming free works incrementally because the experience that the process works – i.e. produces tangible results – is what ultimately provides both the incentive and the confidence to go all the way.
PETER: You wrote in comment to something I wrote to No 13 –
GARY: This accords with my own recent bout of morbidness. I realized on some level, at least, that the grief was part and parcel of ‘my’ very identity – it is a large part of who I think ‘Gary’ is. It is a very old, familiar emotion that heralds to the early years of life, and perhaps goes back a good deal further. It is tied up with my mother’s tragic illness and subsequent devastating disability, the sadness and grief of a small child, along with all the sympathy and well-meaning endeavours of a number of relatives and close family friends, later worn as a kind of badge of honour and used to justify the most malicious actions, and by the age of 7, I am sure, became a very part of my personality and modus operandi in the world. To experience this grief again, unhindered by the social identity with its conceptions of what is right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and to be able to see the effect that this emotional state had on my close, live-in partner, along with its unspoken demand for attention, nurturance, as well as the imposition of my moods and emotions on another, and the hurt that this caused in her, was a revealing glimpse at ‘me’ – the passionate identity – going full blast. It did not do to tell myself that I ‘should not’ feel this way, or be this way. No, it took much longer to sort it all out, but also to make the shift to a sensuous awareness of the feeling and emotion and what it felt like, as well as a forfeiture of the claim of uniqueness – that this grief was ‘my’ own, but rather, looking at it as human grief and sadness, and the effect that this emotion is having on this present-day world of people in their interconnectedness. As the shift came and happened, it seemed to be a short hop, skip, and jump to pulling myself up by my bootstraps and determining to pull myself out of the welter of sad emotions and get on with the business of living my life to the best of my ability – happy and harmless again. It was not a wrenching experience, which would imply a kind of suppression or repression, but it was a shift easily made when I realized the futility of remaining a sorrowful and suffering person. So there it is: Just a few thoughts for now. PETER: Two things you said point to something I perhaps failed to give sufficient emphasis to in GARY: To experience this grief again, unhindered by the social identity with its conceptions of what is right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and to be able to see the effect that this emotional state had on my close, live-in partner, along with its unspoken demand for attention, nurturance, as well as the imposition of my moods and emotions on another, and the hurt that this caused in her, was a revealing glimpse at ‘me’ – the passionate identity – going full blast. No, it took much longer to sort it all out, but also to make the shift to a sensuous awareness of the feeling and emotion and what it felt like, as well as a forfeiture of the claim of uniqueness – that this grief was ‘my’ own, but rather, looking at it as human grief and sadness, and the effect that this emotion is having on this present-day world of people in their interconnectedness. PETER: What you make clear in your comment is that the primary motive for wanting to get off your bum – or out of the lotus position – and change yourself is care and consideration for the effects your moods and emotions, and subsequent behaviour, is having on others. I usually tend to forget to emphasize this aspect because for me it was a given. I was always interested in living in peace and harmony with others – in fact this was the major attraction in tripping off down the spiritual path with its promise of blissful communal living, consensus, co-operation, and the like. When I discovered that spiritual communities are held together by a combination of mindless surrender and fanatical loyalty which only results in fear-ridden pious insularity from the rest of one’s fellow human beings, I bailed out and began to look for something that worked. When I came across actualism I settled on a practical goal – being able to at least live with at least one other person in peace and harmony and in order for this to work I came to realize that it was totally up to me to change – not the other person. As success came in the process of actualism, it then became very easy to broaden this aim to include others, be it family, work colleagues, acquaintances, and so on. The instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire are sourced in the thoughtless automatic survival program that can readily be seen in operation in all animate life. This survival mechanism is seen at its crudest in the ‘what can eat me – what can I eat?’ reactions of all animals but some animal species also have altruistic tendencies solely in order to ensure the survival of their kin, and thus the species. This instinctual propensity for altruism or self-sacrifice can also be readily observed in the human animal species and, as such, can be personally experienced, particularly by those who have children or who have felt the instinctual urge to have children. For an actualist it is essential not to remain ensnared by the crude totally self-centredness of the instinctual passions but to tap into and actively make use of the altruistic propensity that is genetically programmed in the human beings. Thus an actualist does not aim to become without feelings, emotions or passions but rather to actively diminish the malicious and sorrowful feelings whilst aiming to foster those that are felicitous and caring. The crude survival instincts are genetically programmed solely to ensure the survival and propagation of vegetate and animal life, but the emergence of the unique combination of awareness and intelligence found in the human species has meant that this crude programming has been often consciously utilized for betterment of life on the planet. The discovery of actualism takes the betterment of life on this planet to a new stage – the opportunity for individual members of the human species to eliminate their own blind and crude instinctual survival program, a program that is now not only redundant for survival but is also the direct cause of all of the malice and sorrow that typifies the human condition. It is not for nothing that Richard termed his instinct-deleting discovery ... Actual Freedom.
GARY: Your post, as usual always thoughtfully presented, contained the following statement –
I cannot honestly say that I have always been interested in living in peace and harmony with other human beings – probably only for the latter part of my life. I nearly perished in a sea of alcohol, anger, depression and sadness which, at the age of 34, made me see the complete untenability of my way of life – the only way of life that I had known up until then. I suppose extremely crude survival instincts kicked in and kicked me in the butt to do something to stop killing myself. Besides, the pain was unbearable. Presented on a silver platter, through the vehicle of AA, spiritual ideals seemed the only way out of the morass that I was in – in fact, at the time, it was the only thing on offer. I went from the personal madness and delusion of the alcoholically insane to the institutionalized madness of religious and spiritual belief. Even after becoming involved with a religious pacificist group I still had my reservations about living in peace and harmony with other human beings. I remember thinking that I could never be a pacifist because I could not vow not to kill another human being. I would kill if I had to. It seemed insane to allow someone to have their way with me or those near to me, without lifting a finger to do anything to stop it. Over a long period of time, the ridiculousness of living one’s life according to an ideal has hit home. I chuckle to myself during this holiday season when so many wishes and hopes are offered for peace in our world. Wishes and hopes are about as worn-out as all the other useless ideals that humanity has dreamed up. Only the most determined efforts to rid oneself of malice and sorrow are up to snuff. Ideals are a waste of time. One can wish and hope until the cows come home for peace and harmony, pray, sing, troop around singing Xmas carols, but all these collective, feel-good activities pale in comparison with getting down to brass tacks and doing something about it. You are really on your own in doing this work- that doesn’t mean that talking to others, like on this list, is not helpful or advisable, but when it comes right down to it, nobody can do it for you, you have to do it for yourself. If you pay heed to what most other people are doing, you might as well forget it, because most people are running off in the wrong direction. PETER: Your post clearly points out an essential prerequisite for anyone to be interested in becoming an actualist – a thorough disillusionment with both real-world materialism and other-worldly spiritualism. This disillusionment has to be more than intellectual – it has to be firmly rooted in life experience. It is not enough to think that materialism and spiritualism fail to bring happiness and contentment, one has to experience for oneself that the tried and true values and dreams of humanity have all been well and truly tried and that all have well and truly failed. The early stages of an actualist’s investigations into the human condition are marked by a curiosity as to exactly why the tried and true values and dreams of humanity fail, and this stage can be quite dramatic because what one is also doing is questioning all of one’s own values and dreams. By being more and more aware of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ one starts to see clearly that people in the real world are too involved in their own ‘self’-centred battle for survival to savour the delights of being here, doing nothing in particular. It also becomes apparent that the spiritually inclined have totally abandoned all thoughts of being here and have opted to withdraw ‘inside’ in to a fantasy world of their own creation. As this investigation proceeds there comes a stage when it becomes so obvious that everyone has got it wrong, and always has got it wrong, that one begins to lose interest in, and emotional contact with, where one has come from and starts to more and more wonder and delight at the perfect peacefulness and peerless purity of this paradisiacal planet we humans live on. The habitual feelings of malice and sorrow together with their panaceas, love and compassion, eventually loose their tenacious grip in the face of a fascinated awareness of being here. As one’s awareness of this awareness becomes increasingly ‘self’-less, there is less experience of ‘me’ being aware, and more and more a bare and pure sensuous discernment of the universe happening at this very moment. In hindsight, this stage represents a point of no return on the path to freedom as the emotional ties that bind you to humanity – the feelings of malice and sorrow together with their antidotal feelings of love and compassion – are so weakened as to be ineffectual. I once experienced these ties as long tentacles stretching way into the distance behind me – tentacles that stopped me from being free. I also realized that if these tentacles were broken then ‘I’ would be no more. And not only would ‘I’ cease to exist – but even more shocking – nobody would miss ‘me’. Nobody would grieve ‘my’ passing, for no one really can know ‘me’ because ‘I’ am non-physical and non-substantive. They may think and feel they know ‘me’, as ‘I’ think and feel ‘I’ know other ‘me’s’, but because ‘I’ have no substance in actuality, then it would be impossible for others to even notice ‘my’ demise. If these emotional ties or tentacles were to be broken, ‘my’ final demise would be a very private and solitary experience – followed by oblivion. What became apparent from this experience was that if these tentacles no longer existed I, this flesh and blood body, would be irrevocably alone in the world. While a feeling of fear arose, there was also an acknowledgement of the fact that I have always been alone in the world in terms of being autonomous and free. Because of my numerous pure consciousness experiences combined with a substantial period of living virtually ‘self’-less, I knew that after ‘my’ demise what I am, this flesh and blood body, would continue on doing what I have always done ... get up in the morning, have breakfast, do whatever I do in the day, and go to bed at night. Since this experience these tentacles have become even weaker, as is evidenced by an almost total disappearance of the normal emotional ties that bind ‘me’ to the other ‘me’s’ and the lack of any emotional memories that give substance to a ‘me’ having a past or a future. But the experience did remind me of the fact that ‘I’ have to die, as in experience death, if these bonds are to be completely broken ... and that these bonds have to be completely broken if ‘I’ am to die.
PETER: I recently watched a National Geographic television program which I found most interesting in that it presented some facts about the animal instinctual program that were new to me. I thought I would pass on the information, as you may well be interested. National Geographic programs are commonly heavily slanted towards showing the tender passions of animals, emphasizing the cute and cuddly aspects of nurture and desire whilst paying far less attention to the raw and crude ‘what can I eat, what can eat me?’ nature of instinctual aggression and fear. At one stage I was very interested in the studies of instinctual behaviour in chimps – animals with the closest genetic make-up to the human species – and I found much useful information by digging beneath the myths and prejudices. Perhaps the most pertinent similarities between chimps and humans are that the instinctual program in both species is not only species-centred but also self-centred. Because of this similarity in instinctual programming chimps display a range of behaviours almost identical to that of humans – utter self-centredness combined with a species-centred compulsion to propagate and proliferate the species. The very real danger of being attacked and eaten by other animals necessitates safety in numbers with a subsequent need to co-operate with other members of the family/tribe in order to defend territory and attack the territory of other families or tribes. This necessity does not sit well with a constant need to have to compete with other members of the family/tribal structure for food, sexual conquests and power over others. Thus in chimps – as well as humans – sibling rivalry, jealousy, conflict, retribution and anger as well as petulance, remorse, sorrow and dejection are common behaviours, as are habitual outbreaks of war, murder, rape, torture, cannibalism and infanticide. The recent program I watched was about another animal species with social behaviour very similar to chimps and that many uphold to be loving, intelligent, even spiritual beings – dolphins. The program detailed research on what it termed the wild side of dolphins and drew on evidence of an eighteen year long study conducted on dolphins in Western Australia as well as other studies in various locations around the world. Contrary to popular belief the dolphin world is one of almost constant conflict and competition between rival groups or pods, all competing with each other for food, territory and sexual conquest. Changing allegiances are commonplace, either forced or voluntary, for the bigger the pod, the more food can be harvested and the more females can be captured from other pods. Whilst being part of a particular group is necessary for survival, almost constant inter-group rivalry and fights are an on-going consequence. Inter-group behaviour is typified by the constant hassling of females and aggressive fights between males. Commonly two or more males form an alliance in order to capture a female and then take turns guarding the female while the other feeds. The research also indicated a strong suspicion that males kill and eat female dolphin’s young in order to claim her to mate with. Vicious fights, even to the death, between males of the same pod have been also been observed. Dolphins also display unprovoked malicious behaviour, often toying with and torturing their prey before the final kill. They are also one the few species known to kill for sport only – they have been observed torturing and maiming seals, porpoises and other dolphins, eventually leaving their prey crippled or dying but uneaten. Apart from the glaring gulf that exists between popular myth and scientific evidence as to the full range of instinctual animal behaviour, I was particularly struck by several aspects of animal behaviour that are of particular relevance to the human species. Both dolphins and chimps are vulnerable to attacks by other species as well as by members of their own species and are therefore forced to hunt in numbers as well as rely on numbers for their own protection. The offspring of both species require feeding, protection and teaching of survival skills for a period of about 6 years and a family/tribal structure offers the best chance for survival, for both nurtured and nurturer in this period. This safety by numbers strategy by no means fosters harmonious interactions – au contraire, inter-group conflict is often as malicious as group-to-group conflicts. What could be seen initially as a herding or socializing instinct could well be no more than a reluctant fear-driven imperative arising from the necessity to successfully propagate the species. The resulting alliances are more like expedient strategic pacts formed solely to increase the odds of survival. There appears to be no instinctual bonding per se within the group at large, other than a crude necessity to huddle in groups so as to increase the chances of propagating and rearing offspring as well as increase the odds when waging warfare against other members of the species. Observing the instinctual programming of animals is a fascinating business, particularly when this observing is clear-eyed. One starts to see clearly that this instinctual programming in each and every animal species has one purpose and one purpose only – to proliferate that particular species. Observing animal behaviour in other species has the advantage that one can study the instinctual survival program devoid of the layer of socialization that humans have been instilled with. It is not a pleasant business to acknowledge that at core one is but a crude animal – passionately driven by fear, aggression, nurture and desire such that one can never be neither happy nor harmless. But the reward for daring to look with clear eyes at the animal instinctual passions that underpins the human condition is an incremental freedom from malice and sorrow. Good, hey
PETER: Your post clearly points out an essential prerequisite for anyone to be interested in becoming an actualist – a thorough disillusionment with both real-world materialism and other-worldly spiritualism. This disillusionment has to be more than intellectual – it has to be firmly rooted in life experience. It is not enough to think that materialism and spiritualism fail to bring happiness and contentment, one has to experience for oneself that the tried and true values and dreams of humanity have all been well and truly tried and that all have well and truly failed. GARY: Disillusionment is a good word for it. I had been disillusioned before I started on my spiritual quest many years ago. I thought that I was happy living a spiritual kind of life and I thought that I had found something enduring, something that would carry me through thick and thin. I seem to recall the feelings that I had at the time – on the one hand there was a profound feeling of satisfaction and gratification, similar to the feelings an addict has when contemplating his/her stash. There was this feeling of being safe and secure in the bosom of these belief systems and religious bodies that I had been attracted to. There also was a childish excitement and wonder at the full range of gods, demigods, spirits, denominations, sects, churches, etc. I felt that there was an unending supply of the goodies that I needed in order to live the good life. If one did not work (and of course it did not) I could always jump ship at the next port and sign on to something new. But it all wore away so incredibly fast that it made my head spin. After all, although the feelings and emotions were real enough, the entire edifice was illusionary. When the final straw came, it all collapsed like a house of cards. PETER: Yep, any spiritual belief needs constant feeding and nourishment to sustain it, and if you dare to pull the plug it all collapses like a house of cards. GARY: I actually approached actualism and this list with the same feeling of suppressed excitement and wonder that I approached the various spiritual denominations with which I had been identified. PETER: Which means to me that your naiveté was still operating, another prerequisite for an actualist. The further I went in the actualism method the more I realized how deeply cynical spiritualism is about human existence on earth. GARY: And because one has had this practice at being inducted into these lifestyles, one has to undergo a sort of prolonged period of deprogramming, or perhaps I should say one has to deprogram oneself. PETER: And this is precisely what is meant by demolishing one’s social identity. GARY: The difference with actualism is that you are entirely on your own. You have to be on your own. That doesn’t mean that others can’t be of help or that there isn’t this process of ‘comparing notes’ going on, but you have to go your own way, and to the instinctual entity that inhabits this flesh-and-blood body, that is an extremely frightening proposition. PETER: Yes, but the trick is to turn fear into thrill, a switch that is essential for any adventurer. When this sense of thrill is combined with altruism, it means that the end of ‘me’ is not a fear-filled proposition to be avoided but a glorious event to be eagerly anticipated. * PETER: The early stages of an actualist’s investigations into the human condition are marked by a curiosity as to exactly why the tried and true values and dreams of humanity fail, and this stage can be quite dramatic because what one is also doing is questioning all of one’s own values and dreams. By being more and more aware of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ one starts to see clearly that people in the real world are too involved in their own ‘self’-centred battle for survival to savour the delights of being here, doing nothing in particular. It also becomes apparent that the spiritually inclined have totally abandoned all thoughts of being here and have opted to withdraw ‘inside’ in to a fantasy world of their own creation. As this investigation proceeds there comes a stage when it becomes so obvious that everyone has got it wrong, and always has got it wrong, that one begins to lose interest in, and emotional contact with, where one has come from and starts to more and more wonder and delight at the perfect peacefulness and peerless purity of this paradisiacal planet we humans live on. The habitual feelings of malice and sorrow together with their panaceas, love and compassion, eventually loose their tenacious grip in the face of a fascinated awareness of being here. As one’s awareness of this awareness becomes increasingly ‘self’-less, there is less experience of ‘me’ being aware, and more and more a bare and pure sensuous discernment of the universe happening at this very moment. GARY: The pristine purity and perfection of the physical universe becomes more and more evident as one becomes increasingly ‘self’-less. The senses become remarkably alert and exquisitely sensitive. Each happening, even the most mundane things, are experienced for the delight that they are, without a sorrowful, resentful, anxious, or malicious ‘me’ occupying ‘my’ attention. The sheer delight of simply being alive at this moment in time seems to become more and more a steady feature of one’s present functioning. Given that there has been no final, momentous elimination of the instinctual self as far as ‘self-immolation’ occurring, there is still plenty of ‘me’ around to mess up the experience of this perfection, whether through feelings of boredom, anxiety and angst, or resentment. These ‘self’ centred, affective experiences are increasingly experienced as something potentially instructive and fascinating to look into, as their continued rigorous investigation and scrutiny is what eventually eliminates ‘me’ in my entirety. This is much more than a hope or a belief that this is going to happen. It is a certainty and an assurance built upon the simple fact that the method works to eliminate the blind instincts that every human being seems to be clinging to. PETER: Certainty and assurance can only come with trying something out and discovering for yourself that it works in practice. Then you know for a fact that it works. Whenever I found myself feeling doubt on the path, I would only need to remember that the process works and had bought results in the form of palpable change. In the end, it’s hard to doubt or argue with a fact. * PETER: In hindsight, this stage represents a point of no return on the path to freedom as the emotional ties that bind you to humanity – the feelings of malice and sorrow together with their antidotal feelings of love and compassion – are so weakened as to be ineffectual. I once experienced these ties as long tentacles stretching way into the distance behind me – tentacles that stopped me from being free. I also realized that if these tentacles were broken then ‘I’ would be no more. And not only would ‘I’ cease to exist – but even more shocking – nobody would miss ‘me’. Nobody would grieve ‘my’ passing, for no one really can know ‘me’ because ‘I’ am non-physical and non-substantive. They may think and feel they know ‘me’, as ‘I’ think and feel ‘I’ know other ‘me’s’, but because ‘I’ have no substance in actuality, then it would be impossible for others to even notice ‘my’ demise. If these emotional ties or tentacles were to be broken, ‘my’ final demise would be a very private and solitary experience – followed by oblivion. What became apparent from this experience was that if these tentacles no longer existed I, this flesh and blood body, would be irrevocably alone in the world. While a feeling of fear arose, there was also an acknowledgement of the fact that I have always been alone in the world in terms of being autonomous and free. Because of my numerous pure consciousness experiences combined with a substantial period of living virtually ‘self’-less, I knew that after ‘my’ demise what I am, this flesh and blood body, would continue on doing what I have always done ... get up in the morning, have breakfast, do whatever I do in the day, and go to bed at night. Since this experience these tentacles have become even weaker, as is evidenced by an almost total disappearance of the normal emotional ties that bind ‘me’ to the other ‘me’s’ and the lack of any emotional memories that give substance to a ‘me’ having a past or a future. But the experience did remind me of the fact that ‘I’ have to die, as in experience death, if these bonds are to be completely broken ... and that these bonds have to be completely broken if ‘I’ am to die. GARY: I wonder sometimes if the affective, painful emotions that I have eluded to from time to time, for instance, bouts of ‘self’ pity and sorrow, or bouts of resentment, are the death throes of the instinctual ‘self’, ‘me’ raging in all ‘my’ glory, desiring to continue, craving to live, and that ‘I’, on some level, sense my demise and make a desperate grab for attention and succourance. PETER: I would say that what you are discovering is completely normal in that these instinctual passions are at the root of every human psyche. It’s not so much that you stir them up – it’s more that you dare to discover their existence. It’s a fascinating business to take a walk around inside your own psyche. GARY: Since ‘I’ am entirely illusory, all these emotions and feelings that arise from the instinctual part of the brain are similarly illusory (although they are experienced as real enough), and ‘I’ only think and feel in ‘my’ bosom that this death of ‘me’ is going to be a painful passage. PETER: It is good to remember that your feelings are not illusionary in that they are the direct result of various hormonal releases triggered by a rudimentary genetically-encoded program in the primitive mammalian brain that constantly quick-scans the sensory input looking for danger signs. This program grabs hold of the information a split-second before it hits the neo-cortex and subsequently the thinking brain thinks there is a thinking and feeling being inside. (Editorial note: This above assertion by feeling-being ‘Peter’ is
at odds with what ‘he’ wrote in the Actual Freedom Library: “The arising of instinctually-sourced feelings produces a hormonal chemical
response in the body, which can lead to the false assumption that they are actual.” The only way this madness can end is for this thinking-feeling entity to cease operating, i.e. die. There is a thinking/ feeling/ chemical loop operating that gives credence and substance to ‘me’ and the only way to break free of this loop is to break free of it all at once – lest one ends up merely feeling free. GARY: The awareness that the emotional ties or tentacles that you referred to that bind me to humanity are being weakened and demolished has occasionally filled me with an existential dread. I have found myself wondering if this dread, as it seems to be a by-product of the method, is in some way a sure sign that one is utilizing the method to maximal effect? PETER: If you plumb the depths of the human psyche, my experience was that I came across dread, beneath which lay an unspeakably horror-filled hellish realm. I have read that the primitive mammalian brain has its own separate memory capacity and I suspect that such journeys into the depths of one’s psyche tap into primitive atavistic memories genetically-encoded in the mammalian brain’s memory. The other interesting discovery you can make – if you want to, that is – is that not only is there fear and dread, aggression and savagery but there is also sexual predatoriness and an unquenchable lust for power. What also can be experienced is the flip side of fear and dread – the narcissistic feelings of awe and bliss that gave rise to the famed mythical escapist fairy tales that have been passed down from generation to generation. You can take a walk in these feelings and experience their seductive lure and discover for yourself the instinctual passions that fuel the search for spiritual ‘freedom’ and God-realization. Investigations and explorations such as these are par for the course of an actualist, but the proof that you are using the method to maximum effect is whether one is becoming more happy and more harmless in one’s everyday life. If these deep impassioned experiences happen on the way, then milk them for all the information you can, and then get back to feeling good or feeling excellent as soon as possible. Only by understanding these experiences for what they are you do you come to realize that these experiences have no significance in themselves – i.e. there is no hidden meaning or ‘message’ to be discovered within the human psyche, as spiritualists believe. GARY: Perhaps, though, the only real thing that shows that the method is working is one’s own quotient of happiness and harmlessness – is one’s stock on the rise, so to speak? Is one increasingly happy and harmless in all one’s affairs? PETER: Having said what I said above, the fact that you are tapping into the instinctual passions is a sign of success because it is only by doing this process of in-depth exploration can one become genuinely happy and harmless. Only by knowing how ‘you’ are instinctually programmed to operate can you break the habitual cycle of automatic unthinking knee-jerk reactions and feelings. This is where sincerity plays its part – you know if you’re fooling yourself when you notice suppression or denial kick in as soon as a feeling emerges and by becoming aware of this you can then allow the feeling to happen so that you can explore it in action. If this exploration then goes deeper into the underlying passions and instinctual drives you get to discover a bit more about what makes ‘you’ tick deep down inside. The salient aspects of the process of actualism – and what distinguishes it from spiritual ‘self’-observation and ‘self’-awareness – is that one’s investigations need to be sufficiently deep and sufficiently thorough and sufficiently unfettered by social mores, ethics and morality so as to get to the very bottom of one’s instinctual being. One needs to investigate the nature of evil as well as well as the nature of good in order to make sense of the human condition in toto. Once this is done sufficiently, and I use the word deliberately for only you will know what is sufficient for you, then a whole new investigation unfolds – an exploration of the sensual delights of the actual world. In the first stage these investigations run parallel but ‘self’-investigation is predominant. But later, as ‘self’-investigation runs out of steam and one becomes virtually happy and harmless – being effortlessly happy and effortlessly harmless 99% of the day – then one’s attention naturally focuses on the fascinating and sensual experience of actuality. GARY: Since ‘I’ crave immortality, ‘I’ can only regard ‘my’ death with the utmost horror, as I cling passionately to survival at all costs. Perhaps that is why death has almost universally been regarded as a tragedy(?) I sometimes find my mind lingering on the thought of death with something like abhorrence or dread, so there must still be an instinctual self, a core ‘self’ dreading the experience and passionately clinging to life. PETER: I had quite a few experiences where I thought about what it would be like to die and I also found that deep feelings of fear and dread would grip me. The other experience I had was imagining that I welcomed death and something really good would happen on the other side and deep feelings of bliss and meaning would be the result. These experiences, while shedding light on the instinctually driven nature of near death experiences and the passing over into ‘another world’ experience of Enlightenment, are but psychological and psychic experiences. What became evident from these experiences is that is impossible to feel or think one’s way into ‘self’-immolation, an affirmation of something that Richard also says. Again, I am not saying don’t have these experiences or saying avoid them or suppress them if they occur because when they occur then you can milk then for vital information. This caveat applies to all of what I write as I think you understand – I am simply sharing experiences, passing on tips and flagging some warnings. There are no shoulds and shouldn’ts – if you find yourself going down some weird path or into some emotional experience, go with it if you want to, because it’s your exploration, your journey and only you know what areas you need to explore. Some things and some experiences and investigations were of more interest and more pertinent for me and less so for Vineeto, most were common for both of us and also for Richard, but some were more idiosyncratic, apparently dependant on slightly different social, spiritual or gender conditioning. GARY: As I have to die, as you say in experience death, does one go then through the entire range of affective experiences related to death? Is it in other words, although not an actual physical death, a death nevertheless of that which wishes to live forever? This is the ‘main event’ (death) before one’s time is up, isn’t it? PETER: As I have yet to experience psychological and psychic death the only thing I could say would be speculation. But I speculate a glorious end to a wonder-filled journey of a lifetime – the process of becoming free of malice and sorrow, forever.
Peter’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer |
