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Peter’s Correspondence on Mailing List B Correspondent No 8
RESPONDENT: Excuse me for not directing this email to an individual who wrote what I am responding to. I find the way this site is formatted that it is very difficult to see who is saying what and who is quoting who? PETER: I assume that I am the individual you are responding to as you mentioned peace and animal instinctual passions in your post and they are topics I have written about. RESPONDENT: My perspective is somewhat different from what I have been reading here. I, too, have had many awakening experiences over a span of 35 years. I, too, have seen the madness of believing in gods, heaven worlds and all that. It is very clear that religion has failed to bring about anything close to peace, and in fact has caused far more suffering than any other system in the world. I saw this many years ago and knew that if I was to find the truth it would have to be just seeing the facts as clearly as possible. PETER: Sounds a sensible approach to me but what I came to see was that I didn’t have to see a fact, a fact is something that already exists and I simply had to acknowledge it. I am not being pedantic here but many people ‘see’ fairies, goblins, ghosts, Santa Claus, flying saucers and all sorts of apparitions but that doesn’t necessarily make them factual. All of these seeings are culturally, religiously or historically influenced. A follower of Eastern religion and philosophy doesn’t hear the Voice of God, a Christian doesn’t feel Buddha in his heart and 19th Century people saw horse and carts in the sky and not flying saucers. A fact, on the other hand, stands by itself whereas any belief is nonsensical. By its very nature a belief is not factually true ... otherwise it would not need to be believed to be true. A fact is obvious; it is out in the open, freely available for all to see as being true. To believe something to be true is to accept on trust that it is so. A fact does not have to be accepted on trust – a fact is candidly so. A fact is patently true, manifestly clear. A fact is what is ascertained sensately and thus demonstrably true. A fact has actual verity, whereas a belief requires synthetic credence. Something I am curious about is that you stated that –
and yet you continued on following Eastern religion and philosophy. Did you not see the madness in Eastern religion or was your seeing based on a rejection of the Western religious world-view and the adoption of the Eastern religious world-view? Many spiritual seekers tend to wear rose coloured glasses when looking at the East and fail to see the appalling ignorance, arrogance, oppression, poverty, class structure and religious persecutions that is the result of thousands of years of intense devotion and practice of Eastern religions and philosophy. It is only now that some brave scholars are beginning to question, investigate and document the Eastern religious ‘madness of believing in gods, heaven worlds and all that’. Two of the studies that I found particularly revealing about the Zen tradition is ‘Zen at War’ by Brian Victoria Weatherhill, 1997 and ‘The Rape Of Nanking’ (The Forgotten Holocaust of World War I) – Iris Chang, Basic Books, 1997, http://www.darkzen.com/. Methinks the next generation may not be so blindly infatuated with the East as ours was. RESPONDENT: It was only then that life started to show where the real problems were and what could be done about them. I will try to condense what I have come to see in as few words as I can. After my first awakening/ satori/ enlightenment it was clear that life was one. That some how all the seeing of separate parts was a trick of the thinking mind. This left me with a deep love for all being, but it also brought up more questions. It had turned my life inside out. PETER: When you say ‘it was clear that life was one’ you must be referring to a feeling that life was one. As I look about me I see that there are 6 billion human beings on the planet all battling it out in a grim instinctual battle for survival. And this same battle has been going on for millennia while half the world thinks that suffering is God’s way of testing us and violence is the work of the Devil, and the other half keeps insisting it is all an illusion. The fact that over 160,000,000 human beings have been killed by their fellow human beings in wars in the last century alone, that over 40,000,000 humans killed themselves in suicides and that over 1,000,000,000 human beings were affected by warfare belies you feeling that ‘life is one’. These are flesh and blood human beings, not illusionary and not ‘a trick of the thinking mind’. And much of the killing was done in the name of love, be it earthly or Divine. RESPONDENT: It was about 8 years later after looking ever deeper into it that I awoke one morning and from the time the eyes opened until they closed in sleep that night there took place a complete transformation of what was left of this being. The ego was dead, there was no god to take its place. It was clear that the very words we use to communicate were a symptom of an underlying illness of misidentification. That we had evolved in such a way as to turn everything into abstractions and rarely, if ever, saw what was real before our eyes. PETER: To regard that which is physical, tangible, palpable, visible, touchable, smellable, eatable, audible as an illusion is a trick of the impassioned mind that requires enormous effort. In the East this effort requires the torturous abandonment of sensible thinking and common sense – giving rise to the term ego death and the emergence of what could well be termed soulism – a feeling-only state of delusion. The lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning psychological and psychic entity that is the self becomes the Self – cunningly feeling Oneness, Wholeness, Timeless and Spaceless. The Eastern pursuit of ‘Ego-death’ has proven to be a very tragic delusion, for one becomes completely dissociated from what is actual as evidenced by the senses. This means that one renounces the world, both real and actual and begins a process of turning away, turning in, letting go, withdrawing, disidentifying and finally complete dissociation aka Enlightenment. The reason I use the word tragic is that spiritual seekers – many of whom began the spiritual search to find a way to bring about peace on earth – have now been seduced into turning away from the endemic malice and sorrow in the physical world we human beings live in and now regard it as illusionary, not real. They regard the spiritual world as REAL, the normal world as a nightmare to be avoided and the actual physical world as a dream created in their own minds. . The question I ran for a long time is ‘Has everyone got it 180 degrees wrong?’ The fact that all these theories of human existence on earth were cooked up thousands of years ago was the beginning of my doubts. The other thing I found as I contemplated on the question was that it started to explain an awful lot of things about why the spiritual path that didn’t work. RESPONDENT: I had been teaching before this and after it became very difficult to find anyone who would listen because I no longer talked in religious or spiritual terms. After a while I just stopped talking with anyone about this. It seemed pretty hopeless. PETER: Many teachers report a feeling of hopelessness and frustration at their pupils not ‘getting it’. I always thought they were being compassionate until I woke up to the fact that they were displaying the very human qualities of anger and frustration – something I had assumed they had transcended. Since then I have found many demonstrations of the fact that Enlightenment does not mean the elimination of malice and sorrow – it means the transcendence of human qualities – as in ‘existing apart from, and not subject to the limitations of, the material universe’. As such the truly Enlightened Ones feel sorrow – manifest and disguised as Divine compassion – and malice – manifest and disguised as Divine Anger. RESPONDENT: Over these many years things have become ever clearer. I have seen that it isn’t so much that we are acting from our animal instinctual conditioning as it is what took place as we developed the ability to abstract life into words, pictures, concepts, etc. As that process developed what had been our instinct to protect our bodies was carried over into feeling a need to protect the images we had of ourselves. The ego has always been just conditioned thought that formed as a sense of personal identity. PETER: This is the old-fashioned out-dated Eastern philosophical view of human existence on earth. The East has always seen the physical world as a dream, an illusion, Samsara, Maya, etc., and thinking was seen as the link to suffering in this dream world. Basically the idea is if you stop thinking about the suffering in the physical world it will go away. By a process of abandoning sensible thought and common sense they attempted to dissociate themselves from this ‘illusion’ by shifting their identity to become a new non-personal identity, yet another illusion. The cause of malice and sorrow is the identity or ‘self’ that dwells within the flesh and blood body. To rearrange this identity by shifting, polishing, making it holy, making it impersonal, making it Real, making it True, or whatever trick is used, is not eliminating it. The human body is instinctually programmed to do anything to survive and the alien psychological and psychic entity in the body, fuelled by the flush of chemicals released from the amygdala will thus do anything to survive. The multitudinous variations of real self, true self, Self, atman, pure being, Godliness, etc. offered up by Eastern religion and philosophy are a testament to cunning ‘self’-survival in action. The survival instincts are not ‘conditioning’ – they are a genetically encoded program that automatic responds to input producing almost instantaneous robotic bodily reactions. In human beings these bodily reactions cause chemicals to flood the thinking and reflective neo-cortex and thus become passionate reactions or deep-seated emotions. The instinctual reactions are thus psychological and psychic reactions in human beings. Fear hobbles us with a desperate need to belong to a group, to cling to the past, to hang on to whatever we hold ‘dear’ to ourselves, to resist change, to fear death and consequently to desperately believe in a life-after-death. Fear impels us to seek power over others or to mindlessly support the powerful in return for their protection. Aggression compels us to fight for our territory, our possessions, our family, our ‘rights’ and our treasured beliefs and values – striving for power over others. At core, we love to fight or to see others fighting. Nurture causes us to care, comfort and protect but also leads to dependency, empathy, pity, resentment, senseless sacrifice for others and needless heroism. Women are programmed to reproduce the species and men are programmed to provide for, and protect, the offspring – a blind and unremitting instinctual drive. Desire relentlessly drives us to needless sexual reproduction and sexual hunting, senseless avarice, inevitable corruption and insatiable greed for possessions and power. These instinctual animal passions in humans are not ‘feeling a need to protect the images we had of ourselves’, they automatically operate to protect both body and self and unless those passions are eliminated they will continue to run amok and forever act to spoil our peace and happiness. RESPONDENT: The fear that we are nothing can rarely surface. As soon as some doubt starts to arise it is blocked so we never see what is really going on. We add all sorts of other identities to our own false sense of self to help us feel we are in fact who we think we are. We cling to ‘our’ family, ‘our’ country, ‘our’ race, and on and on always trying to build up walls of ‘us’ against ‘them’. There is in reality no such entity. All wars, all hatred, all suffering ultimately comes from that process. PETER: I see you are claiming there is no such entity as ‘our own false sense of self’ thereby obviously implying that either there is a real sense of self or a real self. The great realization in the spiritual world is that there is a false self who is an illusion because ‘it’ lives in the illusionary physical world but there is a Real self who lives in the Real spiritual world. The spiritual view is that ‘I’ as the thinker is the issue and then one is extolled to actively encourage ‘me’ as the feeler to run rampant. My experience when I started to run with the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ was that it was feelings which continually and relentlessly emerged as my experiencing. Thus ‘I’ needed to feel grateful for being here in order to transcend the underlying feeling of resentment at having to be here at all, and ‘I’ needed to feel love in order to bridge the gulf that ‘I’ as an alien entity feel between ‘me’ and other human beings. ‘I’ feel compassion for others as a way of being able to indulge my own feelings of sorrow and ‘I’ feel indignant when someone else suffers injustice as ‘I’ really like a good fight. ‘I’ am ever fearful of what others think of me or feel about me, ‘I’ am ever on guard, ‘I’ am ever ready to defend myself against having ‘my’ feelings hurt. ‘My’ ploys are many in the battle with others – confrontation, withdrawal, snide remarks, denial, a bit of undermining, a bit of cutting down to size, a bit of a whinge to someone else – ‘I’ can be as cunning as all get-out in these battles, if need be. ‘I’ readily believed in the spiritual beliefs and wallowed in the blissful feelings as a welcome escape from everyday reality and the promise of an after-life was poetry to ‘my’ ears and salve to ‘my’ heart. ‘I’ felt deep-down that there was no hope for Humanity and no hope for me, and from these feelings were born a desperate belief in an after-life as an escape from the despair of life on earth. The list goes on and on as ‘I’ fight it out for survival with others in a grim world, and ‘I’ will ultimately do anything to stay in existence. ‘I’ am rotten to the core – the combination of animal instinctual passions and an ability to think and reflect make the human animal not only malicious but cunningly malicious. This lethal combination allows the human species not only to wage wars, inflict genocide, rape, murder, torture and pillage to a scale unprecedented in any other animal species but allows for the psychic warfare and power battles, blatant denial, fantasy escapes, corruption, deception and deceit that is endemic in all human interactions. It soon became obvious to me that freedom from being an identity – social and animal-instinctual – was the only way to get free of this constant emotional churning and the constant selfishness of indulging in denial and fantasy escapism. You are firstly inventing a ‘false sense of self’ and then you go through a process that leads you to declare ‘there is in reality no such entity.’ Thus your real self is then free to blame the ego or false self as the reason for ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ . Thus your real self survives as an increasingly dissociated and disembodied entity and meanwhile ... ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ continue given that the real culprit has got off scot-free The spiritual search will never bring peace on earth. ‘Self-immolation is the only solution. RESPONDENT: There had been within this being a very subtle sense that this was all somewhat spiritual. Then about a month ago the last vestige of that feeling fell through. It was like another deeper Satori only this time it destroyed even that subtle sense of otherness. We are just life taking place. It is so profound and yet so very very simple. No one becomes enlightened. There is no one there to become enlightened. It is all a wonderful mystery, that shall always remain a mystery. It is joy beyond any thing the mind can conceive of and yet it is as simple as pure sound. There are no Godmen or gods. There is just THIS. It is far more than any words can ever express, yet it is the nothing that is everything, yet never a thing. Get simple. PETER: What you are describing is the process of dissociation from the ‘real’ world and its miseries and violence. Unfortunately one also dissociates even further from the actual physical world thus going even further away from the chance of peace on earth, in this lifetime as this flesh and blood body. What I am saying seems pretty simple to me but I live in the actual world and not the spiritual world. RESPONDENT: Sorry for this being so long. No amount of words can express the real. PETER: I think the spiritual ‘real’ has been very well described by billions and billions and billions of words over the millennia. Thanks to the marvels of the Internet anyone can access them and anyone can clearly understand what is being expressed if they care to dig in a bit. One site on the Net lists 502 awakened beings, listed by alphabetical order. As for me, I have no trouble expressing the actual in words, and it’s such good fun. * For a brief review of both these books see: http://www.darkzen.com/
RESPONDENT: I, too, have seen the madness of believing in gods, heaven worlds and all that. It is very clear that religion has failed to bring about anything close to peace, and in fact has caused far more suffering than any other system in the world. PETER: Something I am curious about is that you stated that – ‘I, too, have seen the madness of believing in gods, heaven worlds and all that’ and yet you continued on following Eastern religion and philosophy. Did you not see the madness in Eastern religion or was your seeing based on a rejection of the Western religious world-view and the adoption of the Eastern religious world-view? RESPONDENT: I agree with most of what you have posted. PETER: It does seem that your agreement is very selective, as is your view of what constitutes religion. The root of the word is the Latin religio meaning ‘obligation, bond, scruple, reverence’, and its definition is –
Most spiritual seekers pursuing Eastern Religion and philosophy are extremely loath to acknowledge the fact that they are followers of, and deeply immersed in, a religion. It was only that I had a flash one night that I was deeply involved in the ‘madness of believing in gods, heaven worlds and all that’ that helped me to pull out before it was too late. Mind you, it took another 3 years and the blatant ‘other’-worldliness of a major Satori experience before I began to really come to my senses. You are on record as saying –
– which does seem to me that you are following an ancient tradition of spiritualism. Could I stretch my assumption to say you are a follower of Eastern religion and philosophy or would this be too presumptuous? I would like to be clear about what it is you are agreeing with and what you are not agreeing with. Simply avoiding, feinting agreement or dismissing my questions is no answer. I would also be interested in your comments about the revelations of Zen Buddhism in the book reviews at the link I posted. In order to keep this discussion simple and on-track, I’ll summarize your position as you have recently posted it on the list,
Thus it is our personal identification (ego) which has caused the untold suffering on the planet but the suffering is necessary so that a few people can undergo an ego-death.
Thus the suffering is endemic, cannot be stopped – and is indeed necessary – and all we can do is go deeply into a process of dis-identifying with the suffering on earth. So you propose that human suffering on earth is not a problem, but identifying with it is. From where I live that sounds awfully like a process of denial and dissociation – the essential process espoused by all Eastern religion and philosophy. * RESPONDENT: As for your experiments in your relationship I think it is really great to have that open of an approach to getting beyond our conditioning. Far too many relationships never bother to question such things. They just seem to blindly go on and no one grows from them to the degree that is possible. I was married for almost 20 years to a wonderful woman and we went through much of what you wrote about. At the end of our marriage it wasn’t out of not caring for each other that we ended it. It was out of a deeper love and openness to the fact that we had different directions to go and freely and lovingly let go of each other. It has been good for both of us and we are still very close to each other. My last relationship was with another wonderful woman. We were together for 8 years and never had any harsh words toward the other or any problems at all. We are still very close and talk with each other a few times a week. We saw that it was time to move on and did so lovingly. I am much older than her and wanted her to be able to learn from others. She saw my need to be alone to go deeper into what has been my life’s work. I have been a hermit for 12 years now and it has been very good for me. When I talk with people about my relationships that ended they can’t relate to us still being such good friends. As though we should hate each other like too many people do. PETER: We have totally different approaches to relationships with totally different results. The only thing that brought total success for me in the relationship was in eliminating all my instilled social, cultural and spiritual conditioning in order to get stuck into the animal instinctual passions. The first layer is what most people fiddle around with by trying to find a way of compromising, accommodating or following the latest fashionable theories and beliefs. In past relationships I went from real world male to SNAG and finally had to delete the lot in order to fundamentally change. That was the thrilling bit, for underneath is a not too pretty set of animal passions. I went through many a scary time exposing layers of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that had been covered over by beliefs, ethics and morals. I came to see my social identity as the guardian at the gate of the instinctual passions. It is instilled in us to control them and unless you remove your social identity you can never dig in to explore the underlying survival instincts – ‘me’ at my very core. What serendipity to find someone who was equally willing to remove absolutely everything that stood in the way of living together in peace and equity. I decided to give it 100% commitment – all or nothing. I came to understand and face the fact that I was at least as much at fault as my partners in all my past failed relationships. I also came to understand and face the fact that in past relationships most of time I was not really living with the woman because I was usually ‘some-where’ else. By ‘some-where’ else I mean avoiding, withdrawn, self-absorbed, resentful, suspicious, defensive, careful, worried, fearful, annoyed, scared, etc. This time I wanted to know that if we did part at any time it would be with me knowing that it was not my fault – that I had given it 100%. What a delight it is to now live with a woman in easy companionship, where I can simply be myself with no pretence, no effort, no compromises, no bargains, no bonds. I am with her because I enjoy her company in all the activities we do together – just in her ‘being around’. It is delightful to have her as a companion. ‘It’s good you’re here’ is our favourite expression to each other. People around think that we are in love (little do they know!), and that it will wear off, as it always does; or that we are ‘soul mates’, having by some miracle found the ‘right one’. It is silly to worry whether this will last forever or that, given a change in circumstances, either of us may have a different companion at some future time. But I live with her as though it will be forever; totally, with no doubt – one hundred percent! As you can see, my approach to living with someone in equity, peace and harmony was to bring to an end the process of forever learning, from having good endings, and from continuing to grow and move on. I had already moved on from three relationships and I wanted an end to continually growing and learning – I was challenged to prove that peace on earth was possible in this lifetime. The idea that we grow from our suffering or should be continually moving on is a bit like the idea of a never-ending spiritual search – one is supposed to be in a state of not-knowing, life is a journey to somewhere else, life is a mystery that cannot be solved, etc. I became vitally interested in peace on earth is this lifetime – with people as-they-are, in the world as-it-is. RESPONDENT: Sometimes the real test of a relationship isn’t so much being together but how does it end, if it does? And how free is it? PETER: For me the main event is always here and now, which means if I am living with someone then I have no concern about when, how or if it will end. If I am not happy now, if I am annoyed, moody, discontent, out of it, lacklustre, sad or whatever then I am somewhere else but here and now, not doing what is happening in this moment of time. By fully taking on board the fact that this very moment is the only moment I can experience means that I have abandoned the idea of postponement. For me there is no end of this relationship for, if it happens, it is not happening now. The exquisiteness and sensual delight of being here, doing what is happening, means the ending of the idea that I am coming from somewhere or that I am going somewhere. Freedom lies in being absolutely locked into, and fully committed to this very moment of time – to fully embrace being a flesh and blood human being on this paradisiacal material earth. RESPONDENT: A friend of mine had his lover leave him for another man. He was heart broken and was talking about how evil his lover had been for leaving him and how bad the other man was for taking her away. I asked him if he loved her? He said he did. I said, then if you love her you only want for her happiness. It became clear that he was not speaking from love, but from insecurity and a feeling of loss that was coming from the ego. He saw the point and changed his perspective and showed her love and understanding. In about a week she came back to him. They are now far more open with each other. Relationships are a very rich field for growth and learning to express more love. PETER: My experience with Vineeto is that love and its accompanying roller coaster of deep-seated emotions and feelings is what really prevents actual intimacy – the direct experience of the other. How can two people relate to each other as human beings with this constant churning of deep-seated emotions and feelings? Love is but a failed antidote to fear and loneliness, an attempt to bridge the separateness that inevitably occurs when two lost, lonely, frightened and very, cunning entities attempt to live together. The only solution is to get rid of the fearful and lonely ‘self’ in order to allow the direct intimacy hidden beneath. To get rid of all imagination and belief enables one to experience the wonder of the actual and physical. We have found that living without this emotional burden of love allows us to live together with an ease, comfort, delight and level of consideration that we never thought possible. The Eastern approach of blaming thinking and letting the emotions that arise from the instinctual passions get off scot-free is a process that can only lead to an altered state of consciousness – not peace on earth, in this lifetime. Instinctual passions when freed of any sensible thought and earthy sensuousness results in impassioned delusion, altered states of consciousness and finally, the infliction of theomania. Human beings are unique among the animal species in that we have a large ‘modern’ brain – the neo-cortex – capable of thinking, planning and reflecting which overlays the primitive reptilian brain – the amygdala – the source of the animal instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Recent studies by LeDoux and others empirically confirm that the ‘quick and dirty’ instinctual, passionate responses of the primitive brain are primary and automatically over-ride the thoughtful, considered responses of the neo-cortex. We humans are, in fact, genetically programmed to be driven, consumed or overwhelmed by the animal instinctual passions that give rise to malice and sorrow. Thus, in spite of all our best and well-meaning efforts to keep our malice and sorrow under control, we are but ‘animal’, at our very core. These instinctual passions produce the feelings of love and hate, compassion and sorrow, humility and pride, belonging and loneliness, bliss and dread, etc. The constant tightrope of balancing the extremes of mood swings produced by the chemical flow from the amygdala is exhausting work but to seek solace and succour in a fantasy world of so-called good feelings does nothing to eliminate the instinctual animal passions. The Ancient Ones have got it 180 degrees wrong – it is feelings and emotions arising from the instinctual animal passions that are the problem, not sensible thinking, contemplative reflection or sensate sensuousness. I noticed No 20 is beginning to cotton on to this fact as well, when he said in a recent post to you –
‘Self’-immolation is the only way to eliminate human instinctual malice and sorrow because it brings a permanent irrevocable end to the psychological and psychic reactions caused by the primitive reptilian brain. RESPONDENT: They (relationships) too can be gone beyond. Now I feel my relationship is with Life Itself, and that includes all beings. PETER: I gave up on going beyond anything because I found, by a wonderful process of deleting absolutely everything that was illusionary and instinctual, that I like being here on earth. I like my fellow human beings, I like my householder life, I wallow in the sensual pleasures of delicious food, intimate companionship, sumptuous sexual play, espresso coffee, TV watching, couch lazing, computer play, hot showers, soft pillows, warm bodies, afternoon walks, etc. Life on earth was meant to be simple and easy ... and peaceful. Being here on earth as a flesh and blood mortal body is such a yummy experience I am nowadays fluxomed when I come across people who want to go beyond. That’s why I enjoy writing, for it is such a pleasure to be able to point out that there is now a third alternative to remaining ‘normal’ or becoming ‘spiritual’.
PETER: I’m forwarding this reply to your last post direct to you as No 7 won’t post it on the list as its subject matter is inappropriate and he wrote indicating he did not want to be a middleman in forwarding posts. Hence not only has my questioning been silenced but also my right of reply. Cute Hey
RESPONDENT: Rather than responding to every word you wrote I am just going to relate to the things I feel I should. First I would like to say that I believe you are a caring person and think you have found something important that you want to share. I just happen to disagree with your findings. PETER: Given that this appears to be your last post to me by the dismissive tone at the end of this post I have set out this post as a summary of your disagreement about my findings as to how peace on earth can be actualized. This does make the post long but it does make interesting reading for anyone who may be interested in a discussion about peace on earth between an actualist and someone who has awakened to the Wholeness of Being. * PETER: Surely it’s time to consider a new non-spiritual, down-to earth, approach to becoming free of the human condition of malice and sorrow? RESPONDENT No 2: Could you simplify your question? I cannot tell whether you are seriously interested in ‘becoming free of the human condition of malice and sorrow’ or whether you are already convinced it is impossible. PETER: My question was not a rhetorical one but a sincere question asked in a forum that promotes open dialogue and discussion. From my teenage years, as I gradually emerged from the sheltered existence of school and family, I was shocked to discover a world where people fought and killed each other with ruthless efficiency. One of my earliest shocking memories was seeing films of the aftermath of the WW2 concentration camps. This seemed like some dark evil history as I was living in a country largely free of overt violence. Later, my university days were gradually to fill with a wonderful optimism and naiveté as the sixties’ youth revolution gathered momentum. We were going to change the world! Socialism, peace on earth, love, sexual freedom, environmentalism – anything was possible to have or to change. From these heady days I developed a burgeoning interest in finding freedom, peace and happiness. I marched to stop the Vietnam war, I poster-pasted to save the forests, I grooved to the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park in London, I hung around in Amsterdam, I travelled to the East, I became politically and socially concerned and involved. Remember John Lennon singing ‘Imagine’ or ‘Give Peace a Chance’, or watching Woodstock? We were going to change the world! And then it all started to fade a bit – and I gradually got lost in the ‘real world’, the daily business of wife, two kids and two cars. And then, when that comfortably-numb world crashed, I went through my ‘dark night of the soul’, and I was off to the East with thousands of others on the spiritual path, seduced and fired up by the promise of a New Man, Peace, Love, Utopia and an end to my personal suffering. I’ve thought about those times recently – what happened to the passion, the enthusiasm of those times? In fact, the whole of the peace revolution of the sixties was simply sucked into the mystery, confusion and ‘mindlessness’ of the Eastern religions. The famed ‘spiritual path’, the Western pursuit and belief in Eastern religion and philosophy, has failed to deliver anything remotely resembling freedom, peace and happiness to humanity. Now that I look back it has failed because there was nothing new, different or original in it at all. How could the solution lie in the well-tried so-called wisdom of the past? There would have been peace and happiness in the world by now if it worked – it has had at least 3,500 years to prove itself. As Ken Wilber wrote in an issue of the What Is Enlightenment magazine of the success of Eastern religion –
(For those with a calculator it is 0.0000001 of the total population). This is a stunning figure to contemplate upon. When I realized that I had simply moved from rejecting Western religious belief as meaningless fairy tale in my youth only to have landed myself in an Eastern religion in my middle years I was shocked. When I realized that millions upon millions upon millions of believers, meditators, devotees, monks and nuns had assiduously trod the spiritual path for thousands upon thousands of years in the East with so little result I was devastated. Eastern religious practice succeeds only in producing an elitist lineage of transcended God-men who then perpetuate their ancient stories, myths and fables to the next generation of gullible believers. I know the system well for I was a gullible believer for some 17 years and was dangerously close to becoming a God-man myself before the warning bells rang and my common sense reasserted itself. As I dug deeper in to spiritual belief I discovered that peace on earth is not even on the agenda of Eastern religions – life on earth is meant to be a suffering existence and it is an endless cycle of misery – it is deemed to be a necessary, essential and unchangeable part of some greater cosmic plan. This ‘necessary suffering’ is the human condition of malice and sorrow and includes all the wars, murders, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, despair and suicide. Being vitally interested in peace on earth, I decided to question spirituality, the belief in God and the idea of life after death – to dare to question the sacred teachings. RESPONDENT: My perspective is somewhat different from what I have been reading here. I, too, have had many awakening experiences over a span of 35 years. I, too, have seen the madness of believing in gods, heaven worlds and all that. It is very clear that religion has failed to bring about anything close to peace, and in fact has caused far more suffering than any other system in the world. I saw this many years ago and knew that if I were to find the truth it would have to be just seeing the facts as clearly as possible. PETER: Sounds a sensible approach to me but what I came to see was that I didn’t have to see a fact, a fact is something that already exists and I simply had to acknowledge it. I am not being pedantic here but many people ‘see’ fairies, goblins, ghosts, Santa Claus, flying saucers and all sorts of apparitions but that doesn’t necessarily make them factual. All of these ‘seeings’ are culturally, religiously or historically influenced. A follower of Eastern religion and philosophy doesn’t hear the Voice of God, a Christian doesn’t feel Buddha in his heart and 19th Century people saw horse and carts in the sky and not flying saucers. A fact, on the other hand, stands by itself whereas any belief is nonsensical. By its very nature a belief is not factually true ... otherwise it would not need to be believed to be true. A fact is obvious; it is out in the open, freely available for all to see as being true. To believe something to be true is to accept on trust that it is so. A fact does not have to be accepted on trust – a fact is candidly so. A fact is patently true, manifestly clear. A fact is what is ascertained sensately and thus demonstrably true. A fact has actual verity, whereas a belief requires synthetic credence. Something I am curious about is that you stated that –
and yet you continued on following Eastern religion and philosophy. Did you not see the madness in Eastern religion or was your seeing based on a rejection of the Western religious world-view and the adoption of the Eastern religious world-view? Many spiritual seekers tend to wear rose coloured glasses when looking at the East and fail to see the appalling ignorance, arrogance, oppression, poverty, class structure and religious persecutions that is the result of thousands of years of intense devotion and practice of Eastern religions and philosophy. It is only now that some brave scholars are beginning to question, investigate and document the Eastern religious ‘madness of believing in gods, heaven worlds and all that’. Two of the studies that I found particularly revealing about the Zen tradition is ‘Zen at War’ by Brian Victoria Weatherhill, 1997 and ‘The Rape Of Nanking’ (The Forgotten Holocaust of World War I) – Iris Chang, Basic Books, 1997, http://www.darkzen.com/. Methinks the next generation may not be so blindly infatuated with the East as ours was. RESPONDENT: I agree with most of what you have posted. PETER: It does seem that your agreement is very selective, as is your view of what constitutes religion. The root of the word is the Latin religio meaning ‘obligation, bond, scruple, reverence’, and its definition is –
Most spiritual seekers pursuing Eastern Religion and philosophy are extremely loath to acknowledge the fact that they are followers of, and deeply immersed in, a religion. It was only that I had a flash one night that I was deeply involved in the ‘madness of believing in gods, heaven worlds and all that’ that helped me to pull out before it was too late. Mind you, it took another 3 years and the blatant ‘other’-worldliness of a major Satori experience before I began to really come to my senses. You are on record as saying –
– which does seem to me that you are following an ancient tradition of spiritualism. Could I stretch my assumption to say you are a follower of Eastern religion and philosophy or would this be too presumptuous? I would like to be clear about what it is you are agreeing with and what you are not agreeing with. Simply avoiding, feinting agreement or dismissing my questions is no answer. I would also be interested in your comments about the revelations of Zen Buddhism in the book reviews at the link I posted. * PETER: In order to keep this discussion simple and on-track, I’ll summarize your position to date, as you have recently posted it on this list:
Thus it is our personal identification (ego) which has caused the untold suffering on the planet, but the suffering is necessary (‘could not have happened without it’) in order that a few people can realize this and undergo an ego-death.
Thus the suffering is endemic, cannot be stopped – and is indeed necessary – and all we can do is go deeply into a process of dis-identifying with the suffering on earth. So you propose that human suffering on earth is not a problem, but the mind’s identifying with it is. From where I live that sounds awfully like a process of denial and dissociation – the essential process espoused by all Eastern religion and philosophy. RESPONDENT: I have never followed any Eastern religion or philosophy. I have never had a guru, teacher, or any guides. I have read what many had to say and after I awakened it became easy to see who was awake and who wasn’t. To those who were awake and doing the best to express the inexpressible to others I am grateful. PETER: You do seem to be desperate to dissociate your present state of ‘being consciously aware of the Wholeness of Being’ from the long Eastern religious tradition of altered states of consciousness because that would not sit at all well with your previous realization – ‘that religion has failed to bring about anything close to peace, and in fact has caused far more suffering than any other system in the world...’ However, you are also on record on this list as saying –
... and yet you quote Eastern Religion and philosophy in support of your case and trot out the hoary old argument that it is not the teacher’s fault but always the fault of those who follow the teachings. Being an awakened teacher yourself this does seem to be a self-serving argument and a classic way of denying any responsibility for the fact ‘that religion has failed to bring about anything close to peace, and in fact has caused far more suffering than any other system in the world’ ... as you yourself originally said.
I can only assume that ‘all those who went before us’ refers to all the awakened/Enlightened ones who helped to point you in the right direction. So you say ‘I have never had a guru, teacher, or any guides’ but you have had ‘all those who went before us’ to ‘help point us in the right direction’. Are you not splitting hairs just a wee bit too fine, or does the word ‘us’ not refer to you?
Again it does seem that, at least prior to your latest realization, that you were immersed in the religious/spiritual world that ‘has failed to bring about anything close to peace, and in fact has caused far more suffering than any other system in the world’... to use your words. It must be such a relief to have to not be a part of that tradition anymore and to have moved on or ‘gone beyond’ ... to use your term. * RESPONDENT: It was about 8 years later after looking ever deeper into it that I awoke one morning and from the time the eyes opened until they closed in sleep that night there took place a complete transformation of what was left of this being. The ego was dead, there was no god to take its place. It was clear that the very words we use to communicate were a symptom of an underlying illness of misidentification. That we had evolved in such a way as to turn everything into abstractions and rarely, if ever, saw what was real before our eyes. PETER: To regard that which is physical, tangible, palpable, visible, touchable, smellable, eatable, audible as an illusion is a trick of the impassioned mind that requires enormous effort. In the East this effort requires the torturous abandonment of sensible thinking and common sense – giving rise to the term ego death and the emergence of what could well be termed soulism – a feeling-only state of delusion. The lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning psychological and psychic entity that is the self becomes the Self – cunningly feeling Oneness, Wholeness, Timeless and Spaceless. The Eastern pursuit of ‘Ego-death’ has proven to be a very tragic delusion, for one becomes completely dissociated from what is actual as evidenced by the senses. This means that one renounces the world, both real and actual and begins a process of turning away, turning in, letting go, withdrawing, disidentifying and finally complete dissociation aka Enlightenment. The reason I use the word tragic is that spiritual seekers – many of whom began the spiritual search to find a way to bring about peace on earth – have now been seduced into turning away from the endemic malice and sorrow in the physical world we human beings live in and now regard it as illusionary, not real. They regard the spiritual world as REAL, the normal world as a nightmare to be avoided and the actual physical world as a dream created in their own minds. The question I ran for a long time is ‘Has everyone got it 180 degrees wrong?’ The fact that all these theories of human existence on earth were cooked up thousands of years ago was the beginning of my doubts. The other thing I found as I contemplated on the question was that it started to explain an awful lot of things about why the spiritual path that didn’t work. RESPONDENT: I do not regard the above as illusion. I totally enjoy all the wonder of this world. PETER: Again a look at what you have said on this list might help clarify your position on what it is you sensately experience with your eyes, ears, smell, touch and taste and how you see all the fighting and suffering in the world–
So, you see all the fighting and suffering in the world as madness that we are dreaming and not as an illusion. Is this not the difference between seeing something as a dream and seeing something as an illusion splitting hairs? Do not both descriptions point to the fact that you regard the madness as unreal – i.e. not actual?
Again you clearly say that you see we are living in a dream.
Now you indicate that we ‘turn everything into abstractions’, yet another word that indicates that our perception of the world, prior to awakening, is unreal as in dreamlike/ abstract.
Again, prior to awakening, you had developed ‘the ability to abstract life’ – which presumable includes ‘all the wars, all hatred, all suffering’ – into ‘words pictures and concepts, etc.’. This abstraction is the result of the ego – as personal identity, as our image we have of ourselves or just conditioned thought – and when the ego disappears and we awaken, ‘all the wars, hatred and suffering’ are seen to be the result of the abstraction of our conditioned thought. This torturous explanation as to the reasons for human malice and sorrow leaves me lost for words – a rare occurrence, indeed.
So we can add ‘surface images’ to dreamlike and abstract as words used to describe the pre-awakened perception of the world, but you don’t regard it as an illusion. Hmmmm. As for ‘I totally enjoy all the wonder of this world.’ you have also posted –
What you describe doesn’t seem to be an unconditional enjoyment and wonder. The main condition you place on your enjoyment is that you regard all ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ as being just the result of a process of ‘conditioned thought’ – i.e. a dream/ abstraction/ surface image that merely goes on in the brain. This sounds awfully like dissociation to me. * RESPONDENT: Over these many years, things have become ever clearer. I have seen that it isn’t so much that we are acting from our animal instinctual conditioning as it is what took place as we developed the ability to abstract life into words, pictures, concepts, etc. As that process developed what had been our instinct to protect our bodies was carried over into feeling a need to protect the images we had of ourselves. The ego has always been just conditioned thought that formed as a sense of personal identity. PETER: This is the old-fashioned out-dated Eastern philosophical view of human existence on earth. The East has always seen the physical world as a dream, an illusion, Samsara, Maya, etc., and thinking was seen as the link to suffering in this dream world. Basically the idea is if you stop thinking about the suffering in the physical world it will go away. RESPONDENT: Where I am coming from will never be out-dated. It has been around forever because it is real. But few have seen it. You must have been into a Hindu spiritual teaching. They are always talking about this sort of thing, the higher teachings of Buddhists see the wonder and beauty in this world. It is not that the world is not real, it is the images that separate the human mind from that reality are illusion. No one I respect says to stop thinking. Just watch it and see what it tells you about the way you see the world and how the mind works. When one is just simply aware in the moment thinking can stop by itself. It is in those moments one can awaken to the real. PETER: In other words, when thinking stops, awareness happens and one can awaken to the real. Therefore it is thinking that stands in the way of what is real being revealed. All Eastern spiritual practices, that ‘have been around forever’, point to this way of awakening to what is real, hence the emphasis on meditation, stilling the mind, practicing ‘right’ thinking and ‘right’ awareness to steer you away from the illusionary dreamlike, abstract images as well as the seductions of earthy sensual pleasure. Or, as you put it –
This ‘far more subtle view of the world’ does require that one shuts down or distorts sensible thinking and sensate perception in order to see ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ that are actually happening to flesh and blood human beings as only images or believe that they are only caused by conditioned thoughts of the thinking mind. * PETER: As for ‘the higher teachings of Buddhists’ perhaps we could look to the source of these teachings. The essence of the Buddha’s teaching was said to be the Four Noble Truths:
No mention of ‘the wonder and beauty in this world’, quite the contrary. Like all spiritual teachings one needs to look at the fundamental principle upon which it is founded. In Buddha’s case his core principle upon which all his teachings are founded is that ‘life is fundamentally disappointment and suffering’. The ‘Noble Eightfold Path’ can then be seen quite clearly as a ‘right’ re-conditioning of the mind which is very similar to your teachings of
For someone whose declared position is that ‘I have never followed any Eastern religion or philosophy’ you do seem to make a habit of using Eastern religion and philosophy to support your case for peace on earth and your ‘non-religious’ philosophy does bear a very striking resemblance to that of Buddhism. * PETER: The survival instincts are not ‘conditioning’ – they are a genetically-encoded program that automatic responds to input producing almost instantaneous robotic bodily reactions. In human beings these bodily reactions cause chemicals to flood the thinking and reflective neo-cortex and thus become passionate reactions or deep-seated emotions. The instinctual reactions are thus psychological and psychic reactions in human beings. Fear hobbles us with a desperate need to belong to a group, to cling to the past, to hang on to whatever we hold ‘dear’ to ourselves, to resist change, to fear death and consequently to desperately believe in a life-after-death. Fear impels us to seek power over others or to mindlessly support the powerful in return for their protection. Aggression compels us to fight for our territory, our possessions, our family, our ‘rights’ and our treasured beliefs and values – striving for power over others. At core, we love to fight or to see others fighting. Nurture causes us to care, comfort and protect but also leads to dependency, empathy, pity, resentment, senseless sacrifice for others and needless heroism. Women are programmed to reproduce the species and men are programmed to provide for, and protect, the offspring – a blind and unremitting instinctual drive. Desire relentlessly drives us to needless sexual reproduction and sexual hunting, senseless avarice, inevitable corruption and insatiable greed for possessions and power. These instinctual animal passions in humans are not ‘feeling a need to protect the images we had of ourselves’, they automatically operate to protect both body and self and unless they are eliminated they will continue to run amok and forever act to spoil our peace and happiness. RESPONDENT: That is the definition of conditioning. PETER: Well, let’s look have a look at what your previously stated definition of conditioning and see if we see any similarities –
Just to remind you that you also said elsewhere that ‘The ego has always been just conditioned thought’ and from this it is clear that your definition of conditioning is not something that is a ‘genetically-encoded program that automatic responds to input producing almost instantaneous robotic bodily reactions’. The animal instinctual passions programmed in human beings are something very real. They are the very cause of human malice and suffering. To call them ‘a phantom in the mind’ is to call all ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ that these instinctual animal passions cause a phantom of the mind. To regard the genetically-encoded animal instinctual passions as a phantom in the mind is the old-fashioned out-dated Eastern philosophical view of human existence on earth that comes from the ancient superstitious belief in spirits – hence the very world spiritual.
What I am saying is that there is now solid empirical scientific evidence that confirms what we see with our very eyes and can confirm in our own experience, if we are sufficiently aware – that human malice and sorrow is the direct result of our instinctual animal passions in operation. This is a shocking thing to realize, let alone acknowledge, and one only does so with the firm knowledge that it is possible to eradicate them otherwise one stares into a black hole of terror and dread. This is where the pure consciousness experience is invaluable as it provides the proof that it is not only possible, but utterly essential, to eradicate all of these instinctual passions in order to actualize peace on earth.
You are also on record as saying ‘but if any science can find it, (the truth) it will come by way of the ‘theoretical mystical science’’ – a further indication of your denial that the instinctual passions are real and genetically-encoded i.e. physical. You go even further into denial and insist that the source of ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ is meta-physical – ‘a phantom in the mind’. Vis:
Here you make a cautious but clear distinction between ‘animal instinctual conditioning’ and your meta-physical, mystical view of the cause of ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’. * RESPONDENT: The fear that we are nothing can rarely surface. As soon as some doubt starts to arise it is blocked so we never see what is really going on. We add all sorts of other identities to our own false sense of self to help us feel we are in fact who we think we are. We cling to ‘our’ family, ‘our’ country, ‘our’ race, and on and on always trying to build up walls of ‘us’ against ‘them’. There is in reality no such entity. All wars, all hatred, all suffering ultimately comes from that process. PETER: I see you are claiming there is no such entity as ‘our own false sense of self’ thereby obviously implying that either there is a real sense of self or a real self. The great realization in the spiritual world is that there is a false self who is an illusion because ‘it’ lives in the illusionary physical world but there is a real Self who lives in the Real spiritual world. The spiritual view is that ‘I’ as the thinker is the issue and then one is extolled to actively encourage ‘me’ as the feeler to run rampant. My experience when I started to run with the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ was that it was feelings which continually and relentlessly emerged as my experiencing. Thus ‘I’ needed to feel grateful for being here in order to transcend the underlying feeling of resentment at having to be here at all, and ‘I’ needed to feel love in order to bridge the gulf that ‘I’ as an alien entity feel between ‘me’ and other human beings. ‘I’ feel compassion for others as a way of being able to indulge my own feelings of sorrow and ‘I’ feel indignant when someone else suffers injustice as ‘I’ really like a good fight. ‘I’ am ever fearful of what others think of me or feel about me, ‘I’ am ever on guard, ‘I’ am ever ready to defend myself against having ‘my’ feelings hurt. ‘My’ ploys are many in the battle with others – confrontation, withdrawal, snide remarks, denial, a bit of undermining, a bit of cutting down to size, a bit of a whinge to someone else – ‘I’ can be as cunning as all get-out in these battles, if need be. ‘I’ readily believed in the spiritual beliefs and wallowed in the blissful feelings as a welcome escape from everyday reality and the promise of an after-life was poetry to ‘my’ ears and salve to ‘my’ heart. ‘I’ felt deep-down that there was no hope for Humanity and no hope for me, and from these feelings were born a desperate belief in an after-life as an escape from the despair of life on earth. The list goes on and on as ‘I’ fight it out for survival with others in a grim world, and ‘I’ will ultimately do anything to stay in existence. ‘I’ am rotten to the core – the combination of animal instinctual passions and an ability to think and reflect make the human animal not only malicious but cunningly malicious. This lethal combination allows the human species not only to wage wars, inflict genocide, rape, murder, torture and pillage to a scale unprecedented in any other animal species but allows for the psychic warfare and power battles, blatant denial, fantasy escapes, corruption, deception and deceit that is endemic in all human interactions. It soon became obvious to me that freedom from being an identity – social and animal-instinctual – was the only way to get free of this constant emotional churning and the constant selfishness of indulging in denial and fantasy escapism. RESPONDENT: I am not implying there is a self in any form. You have no idea of what the great realization in the spiritual world is. You just have words and beliefs. PETER: Well, as far as your words go, you not only implying there is a self – by whatever name and in whatever form – you have stated it repeatedly and quite clearly –
Here you use the words ‘state of being’ instead of ‘self’, but a state of being obviously refers to some state of consciousness and not the flesh and blood body only. Being is defined as
No mention of a being as a flesh and blood corporeal body only.
What is clearly indicated here is that we have ‘the creation of a being’ that is capable of being consciously aware of God, by whatever name. The use of capital letters is common in spiritual writing to denote god, divineness, godliness, sacredness, etc. There being no physical change to the flesh and blood body with this act of creation, this new being is clearly synonymous with creating a new identity, a new Self, or whatever other name. This inner shift of perspective that you have so clearly indicated is commonly termed an altered state of consciousness. This is a far, far, far cry from self-immolation, which results in the extinction of alien entity inside the body with the resultant elimination of all instinctual animal passions – the root cause of human sorrow and malice.
And here you use the term identity in lieu of self or being. Methinks you should tighten up your terminology but the trouble is, as the spiritual world is now coming under increased scrutiny, you might find yourself being called even more to task if you settled down to being clear about what it is that you are teaching. After all, you have confirmed that
while clearly stating
To put it simply, you have confirmed that religion doesn’t work, you have awakened to a state where ‘I am able to point out where the real problem is’ and you are offering a new, and I take it, non-religious, solution to end ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’. These are big claims that should be able to withstand thorough scrutiny lest you are merely offering a disguised form of religiousness which you yourself agree is part of the problem and not the solution. * PETER: You are firstly inventing a ‘false sense of self’ and then you go through a process that leads you to declare ‘There is in reality no such entity.’ Thus your real self is then free to blame the ego or false self as the reason for ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ . Thus your real self survives as an increasingly dissociated and disembodied entity and meanwhile ... ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ continue given that the real culprit has got off scot-free. The spiritual search will never bring peace on earth. ‘Self-immolation is the only solution. RESPONDENT: Nonsense. PETER: Which part is nonsense? You are on record as saying that it is the mind identifying with suffering and hatred that is the problem and awakening from this dream is the solution –
And as you awaken you discover that your mind is no longer ‘identifying with beliefs, images, fear, suffering, hatred, etc., etc.,’ all because you have had a shift in perspective, commonly known as an altered state of consciousness. This does not bring an end to ‘all wars, all hatred, all suffering’ but merely ensures that your mind no longer identifies with it. This is why I said the spiritual search – the search for Awakening, Enlightenment, Self-realization, Wholeness of Being, or whatever other name – will never bring peace on earth. To dismiss my statement as nonsense does nothing to refute it at all. You can’t just bluster and blather away what you have clearly stated as your teachings. RESPONDENT: There had been within this being a very subtle sense that this was all somewhat spiritual. Then about a month ago the last vestige of that feeling fell through. It was like another deeper satori only this time it destroyed even that subtle sense of otherness. We are just life taking place. It is so profound and yet so very very simple. No one becomes enlightened. There is no one there to become enlightened. It is all a wonderful mystery, that shall always remain a mystery. It is joy beyond any thing the mind can conceive of and yet it is as simple as pure sound. There are no godmen or gods. There is just THIS. It is far more than any words can ever express, yet it is the nothing that is everything, yet never a thing. Get simple. PETER: What you are describing is the process of dissociation from the ‘real’ world and its miseries and violence. Unfortunately one also dissociates even further from the actual physical world thus going even further away from the chance of peace on earth, in this lifetime as this flesh and blood body. What I am saying seems pretty simple to me but I live in the actual world and not the spiritual world. RESPONDENT: More nonsense. I am perfectly aware of the suffering going on it this world. As is all the members of this group who you keep telling as though you are the only one who sees this. I do not dissociate with the actual physical world. No awake person does. It is from seeing the need to bring about peace in this world that I do the little that I am able to point out where the real problem is. PETER: Okay, again you seem to be engaging in petty shifty semantics – To quote from your teachings on the list –
It is clear from the words you use that you are talking of disidentifying from ‘all suffering, hatred etc.’ that is going on in the actual physical world. No amount of bluster will blow away your words for they are accurate transcriptions copied from your posts to this list. * RESPONDENT: Sorry for this being so long. No amount of words can express the real. PETER: I think the spiritual ‘real’ has been very well described in billions and billions and billions of words over the millennia. Thanks to the marvels of the Internet anyone can access them and anyone can clearly understand what is being expressed if they care to dig in a bit. One site on the Net lists 502 awakened beings, listed by alphabetical order. As for me, I have no trouble expressing the actual in words, and it’s such good fun. RESPONDENT: This to me is the key statement of where you are coming from. If you had a clue of what I have been trying to say, or had ever had a real awakening you would know full well why words can never express that Reality. The ego is manifest insecurity. You went to the East to find some way of feeling secure. It was all right that you had to not face the truth of what was going on as long as you felt secure and that some how you ‘belonged’. Then that all fell apart. You had to find something to relate to to again feel like there really is a you who belongs. You start looking at the world through new eyes, which would have been wonderful if you had not had such an anti dogma dogma. You have only been looking at the surface. Like a man wearing drinking strews for eyeglasses. You see your little facts and come to a conclusion and totally identify with your newfound beliefs. Reality is never a conclusion. And that sort of seeing is not new at all. It is just the very narrow view of the sceptic who has not really seen anything new. Yet you go on and on about how you are the only one to have seen this. Peter, I hope you will take a deeper look at all of this. I can sure understand why you would feel as you. There is something very real in what many Eastern teachers had to say. Please don’t cut yourself off from that just because you were let down by one small part of it. I very much agree with you that the religions have failed and that most of what is being taught in them is just so much dreaming silliness. But there have been truly awakened people who knew far more than you or I do. So you have devoted the major part of your reply to the points I raised with an imaginary critique of where I am ‘coming from’ which is – failed, desperately grasping at something, embittered, blinkered, dogmatic, narrow, egotistical. Then you show understanding, feel sympathy for me and tell me I am cutting myself off from Reality because I feel let down. I fail to see what your therapizing of me has to do with the facts we are discussing. I have had every one of these accusations made to me before and they usually come at the last-gasp stage of discussions. It is the summary dismissal stage, so commonly used as a last resort by spiritual teachers. * PETER: What really got me moving on the search for freedom, peace and happiness was the death of my son, some 10 years later. It was indeed a shocking experience to stand beside my 13-year-old son’s coffin and 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. 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. This experience was to prove for me a seminal point – the beginning of my search really. The other relevant point was that I realized that I had discovered nothing that I could reliably and honestly pass on to my children, there was nothing I knew that worked that would definitely make their lives happier or richer. This personal experience gave me the driving force to dare to stop at nothing even, as it subsequently proved necessary, daring to question spirituality, both the teachers and the teachings. As part of this questioning I did pass through a phase of being angry at the teachers for I saw that they were wielding their psychic power to ensnare gullible disciples. This quickly dissipated when I realized that they only had power over me because I had let them have power over me and that the real issue was my susceptibility, gullibility and laziness in wanting to be a follower and a believer and not an explorer and a discoverer. I had a wonderful time in the spiritual world. It was an amazing opportunity to immerse myself totally in the following of a living master and to experience the overwhelming experience of group highs, fervent belief and burning idealism in full flight. It was only by fully immersing myself in and experiencing both the ‘real’ world and ‘spiritual’ world without resorting to resentment, blame, bitterness or cynicism that I was able to remain naïve enough to even consider that there was a third alternative. RESPONDENT: You wrote to another member about the losses you have had in your family. We have all had those loses, and it does make us want to come to understand more so we can deal with such pain. So many millions of people feel the same pain we do and turn to religion for some comfort. It is only illusion, but who can blame them for seeking relief from their suffering? There have always been a few who went beyond the surface and found something real. PETER: Are you saying the pain is only illusion or are you saying that religion is only illusion or the comfort that religion offers is only illusion. Your use of the word ‘it’ is ambiguous. In the light of your claim. ‘there is something very real in what many Eastern teachers had to say.’ I would appreciate your clarification on this point as to which of the three – suffering, religion, or the comfort offered by religion – is illusionary and which is real. * RESPONDENT: Please don’t let the suffering you have gone through cut you off from something that can take you beyond suffering. Not that we ever completely lose some since of loss. As I write this, my own father is dying. They don’t expect him to live through the day. I also lost my dear mother and little brother in the last three years. I understand loss and suffering all too well. That is in part what drives me to try to express the inexpressible to all who will listen. We truly are the same being, with the same needs. I wish you well PETER: You have again made an inaccurate assessment based on your ‘going beyond suffering’ philosophy that seems eerily similar to the ‘turn to religion for some comfort’ that you appear to disparage in your previous section. My remarks were directed at the sense of urgency the death of my son gave to my spiritual search for I abandoned the idea of a life after death. As for suffering, I thoroughly investigated grief for a period of 3 years and discovered amidst the overall feeling various facets – a seductive bitter-sweet indulgence in feeling sorrow and a gut-wrenching level of emotion that death had struck so close that it had triggered my own instinctual fear of death. As I continued to tease grief and sorrow apart and investigate, and name the various layers, the exploration eventually produced an experiential realization of the fact that he simply was no longer alive and I would see him no more. Since then I have not suffered from grief and had a head start in my later investigations into other feelings of sorrow, despair, terror and dread. It was only by investigating and eliminating the dark, evil and bad emotions that I was able to avoid the ages-old instinctual trap of seeking to ‘go beyond’ them into the warmer feelings of Light, Godliness and the impassioned search for Wholeness, Oneness and Timelessness. Unless sorrow is eliminated it is merely transcended to emerge as Compassion – a deep feeling of sorrow and pity for others. Unless the diabolical is eliminated the human search for freedom, peace and happiness will always be a search to ‘go beyond’, to find the Divine – by whatever name. And, as you said
Which brings me back to my original question – ‘Surely it’s time to consider a new non-spiritual, down-to earth, approach to becoming free of the human condition of malice and sorrow?’ Looking forward to your reply ...
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