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Peter’s Correspondence on Mailing List B Correspondent No 8
RESPONDENT: I felt it was wrong of the group to not print your response to what I wrote, but I understand why they didn’t. PETER: Perhaps you could enlighten me as to your understanding of why they didn’t and as to why you didn’t express your feelings to the group. As it is, your false assumptions and aspersions about me, as well as your spiritual-therapy assessment remain unanswered on the list. RESPONDENT: First I would like to say that we are more alike in our thinking than not. I, too, am a product of the 60’s, and 50’s, and I had, and still have, all the feelings about the way this world is ran by our governments. PETER: No, No 8, we are not alike in our thinking. I gave up blaming others for the violence and suffering in the world and saw that I was the cause of violence and suffering for those very same feelings were in me. It was only by firmly grasping this fact, which is startlingly obvious in a pure consciousness experience, was I able to even begin doing something about it. It was only by seeing the inherent power and crippling humility that causes so much malice and sorrow in the spiritual world, which was startlingly obvious in the pure consciousness experiences I had while in the spiritual world, was I able to dig myself out of religious/ spiritual belief and to begin to tackle both the good and bad emotions in me that give rise to human malice and sorrow. RESPONDENT: I have also seen what a mess we are in and how much needless suffering is going on and want only to see an end to it. PETER: I don’t doubt the sincerity or fervour of your belief. All the priests, shamans, God-men, Gurus, Enlightened Ones and their followers for thousands of years, have offered the same spiritual message and yet the last century was the bloodiest to date. RESPONDENT: The way you look at things, trying to see just the facts, is also the way I have always looked at things. The way I see it is you just haven’t gone far enough yet. PETER: No. I spent 17 years thoroughly immersed in the spiritual world and I went far enough to understand experientially that it leads only to very seductive, grand and glorious feelings that can totally overwhelm any personal perspective, or ego viewpoint. It is quite extraordinary the extent to which sensible down-to-earth intelligence can be overwhelmed by chemical flows from the ancient instinctual brain so as to produce feelings of euphoria and delusions of grandeur and immortality. The tell-tale sign as to the fact that Enlightenment is only a feeling, albeit a Mighty Grand One, is that it does take effort and vigilance to maintain and it does take the love of others to sustain the feeling. RESPONDENT: If you accept where you are, and are comfortable with it, you won’t see what I am trying to say. PETER: Hardly an hour goes by that I don’t marvel at the innate common sense in this human brain and the serendipitous events that led me out of the spiritual world and revealed the actual world that was sitting here all along, under my very nose as it were. The only way to experience it permanently is to get rid of all illusion, both real world and spiritual world, both ego and soul. RESPONDENT: You want to twist every word I say to show you are right. In doing so you can’t really see what I am saying. I could take a few hours to respond to all you wrote, but I neither have the time or energy right now to do that. It would also do no good. You would most likely turn everything I say around to fit what you want to say. PETER: If you keep insisting on a discussion based on who is right and who is wrong – the normal basis of any discussions about spiritual values – we will indeed get nowhere in our discussion. These t’is, t’isnt arguments about beliefs are the very stuff of the enforced acceptance, emotive conflict or resentful withdrawal so common in the spiritual world. There is no substitute for a sensible discussion based on facts in order to decide what works and what doesn’t work to bring peace on earth. RESPONDENT: I don’t deal with many people just because of this sort of misunderstanding. Where I am coming from cannot really be understood until one reaches that same place. Words can go around and around and never get to that place. PETER: Whenever the Gurus and God-men are factually-challenged they eventually trot out the traditional hackneyed fall-back defensive position of ‘what I speak of is beyond words’. As if the experience of Godliness, God-realization, God-intoxication, Enlightenment, Awakened, or whatever other name you want to use, has not been written about and spoken about endlessly. It is indeed well-documented as a glorious and utterly ‘self’-fulfilling experience. All one’s dreams have come true and more, but its fatal flaw is that it is only a grandiose feeling that does nothing to address the elimination of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that are the root cause of human malice and sorrow. For all of the grandeur and passion of religious belief it has done absolutely nothing to eliminate human suffering on this planet and in fact, as you yourself acknowledged, is actively contributing and perpetuating human suffering as is evidenced by all the countless recriminations, persecutions, vitriolic conflicts and religious wars that are ever ongoing ... RESPONDENT: I most likely won’t be part of the mailing group for much longer. I can only deal with groups for a short time then I just want to be quiet. I am very interested in the whole ego thing so I will be responding to what I read in the magazine when I get my copy here. Just be open-minded and see what I have to say. You may not agree with any of it, which is fine, but you may also see where I am coming from. PETER: Yes, I did note with interest your post on the subject of ego. Given that my interest is peace on earth and I like to reply in detail I can’t comment on your post on the list so I will take the opportunity to do so here.
You say you can’t hate but you obviously can still blame other human beings for as you said at the start of this post – ‘I had, and still have, all the feelings about the way this world is ran by our governments’. These feelings usually range from being upset, miffed, impatient, perhaps even angry or swing back the other way to feeling pity for them, sad, despairing, hopelessness and perhaps even depressed. If you ‘can’t hate’ which of these other feelings do you ‘still have’? When you say ‘you no longer see any part of this wonder-full creation as being separate from your own being’, do you include the human beings who are in the governments that run this world and do you include all the wars, murders, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, despair and suicide in this wonder-full creation that is not ‘separate from your own being’? [endquote]. An interesting point of view. What Krishnamurti had to say was so ‘very important for people to hear’ that it was okay to deliberately conceal a long standing affair with his friend’s wife and engage in subsequent long and bitter legal battles against his friend in order to suppress any knowledge of it becoming public. Sort of a ‘don’t look at the finger, look at the moon’ argument or ‘I’m only a poor humble messenger but my message is pure gold.’ Do you not take a stand, presume a position, make a judgement on Krishnamurti by refusing to pass a judgement yourself and leaving it to others?
Well, that’s a bit of a come down for the exalted and much prized state of Enlightenment. This seems to none other than the ‘we are all enlightened, we only have to realize it’ psittacism that is floating around the spiritual world. So now, I assume your teaching is simplified even further to – if everyone sees ‘the fact of our being one with all life’ and ‘just lives (their) life not harming any one or any thing’ then there will be peace on earth. As for, ‘you may also see where I am coming from’ – where I see you coming from is a position of back-peddling and I would only encourage you to keep doing it all the way totally out of the spiritual world. Most people think there are only two worlds – the real world or the spiritual world, but if one dares to step out of all illusion there is an actual physical-only world of purity and perfection and the evidence of this is the pure consciousness experience. It far exceeds Enlightenment for all the capricious feelings and unfulfilled promises of purity and perfection of the spiritual world are experienced as an actuality in a ‘self’-less state – a perfection and purity that is rock-solid, sensately experienced, touchable, visible, tasteable, smellable, audible, ever-present, each moment again. * RESPONDENT: This is all too important to take lightly. We either change ourselves, which will change the world, or we go on destroying this beautiful planet and cause untold suffering. PETER: On this we agree. My point was exactly this –
Your immediate response was seemingly unequivocal –
Since then you have been attempting to defend the indefensible by somehow excluding Eastern religion from your statement even to the point of declaring your own teachings non-spiritual and even humbly down-grading your own Enlightenment. * RESPONDENT: I am really busy today and am leaving to care take some friend’s home for a week, so I have to get going. I may respond to some of what you wrote later on. It is very tiring for me to write and I don’t have a lot of energy. So I’m sorry if this seems too short of a response for you. Keep looking, but don’t limit your understanding to the past. It can always go deeper. I mean that for us all. PETER: I am surprised you keep responding at all. The only reason I came on to the mailing list was to offer a third alternative to those who were having doubts about Eastern religion and philosophy and the fact that it will bring peace on earth. You obviously have no doubts at all but I do think you should qualify your statement –
– lest others also question your teachings in the future.
RESPONDENT: Do any of you kind folks know of anyone writing about the ego that understand that the main problem is the physical need for security was carried over into the subjective illusion of ego? If so please let me know. I am very interested in this whole process and so far I don’t see where the psychologists are seeing it. PETER: I see you are starting to toy with the idea that there may be some physical basis for the illusion of the ego. As a radical proposition – which may well be too radical to get posted – I offer the following writing – All humans are instilled with an instinctual animal ‘self’ that is the very core of the self-survival program. Although this instinctual survival program is genetically-encoded in animals so as to ensure the survival of the species and not the individual, in humans the survival program is also ‘self’-centred. Our instinctual-rudimentary ‘self’ is both palpable and potent due to the surge of chemicals arising from the primitive brain (feelings). This ‘self’ is our instinctual ‘being’ at our very animal core – instinctual, thoughtless and emotional. Further, this primitive ‘self’ is made more complex in human beings by our ability to think and reflect and, as such, we have a more elaborated ‘self’ consisting of ‘who’ we think ourselves to be as well as ‘who’ we feel ourselves to be. ‘Who’ we think and feel ourselves to be is both a psychological ‘self’ and an instinctual ‘self’ – both mental and emotional – manifest as a discordant and alien identity that appears to be located as a thinker in the head and as a feeler in the heart and gut. Given that the instinctual animal ‘self’ in humans has morphed into a sophisticated and cunning psychological and psychic identity that appears to live within the flesh and blood body, it is obvious that the instinctual animal passions can only be eradicated by eliminating both the psychological ‘self’ and the instinctual ‘self’. The elimination of one’s ‘self’ needs to be total – both ‘who’ you think you are as a
social identity and ‘who’ blind nature has programmed you to instinctively feel you are … in spiritual terms, both the ‘ego’ and the ‘soul’.
The good news is that with the extinction of who you think and feel you are what you are will emerge – a flesh and blood human being,
free of malice and sorrow and free of any metaphysical delusions whatsoever.
RESPONDENT: I felt it was wrong of the group to not print your response to what I wrote, but I understand why they didn’t. PETER: Perhaps you could enlighten me as to your understanding of why they didn’t and as to why you didn’t express your feelings to the group. As it is, your false assumptions and aspersions about me, as well as your spiritual-therapy assessment remain unanswered on the list. RESPONDENT: I was just referring to their saying they would not post anything except what dealt with the issue of the magazine. But I thought it was unfair to not let you respond to mine and other person’s statements to you. It would have been better if I had brought it up to the group, but at that time I was dealing with more pressing personal things with my father dying. PETER: Yet, since the banning of any discussions about peace on earth on the mailing list, you have found the time to post 5 posts to the list and 2 to me privately. I guess it’s a matter of priorities. * RESPONDENT: First I would like to say that we are more alike in our thinking than not. I, too, am a product of the 60’s, and 50’s, and I had, and still have, all the feelings about the way this world is ran by our governments. PETER: No, No. 8, we are not alike in our thinking. I gave up blaming others for the violence and suffering in the world and saw that I was the cause of violence and suffering for those very same feelings were in me. It was only by firmly grasping this fact, which is startlingly obvious in a pure consciousness experience, was I able to even begin doing something about it. It was only by seeing the inherent power and crippling humility that causes so much malice and sorrow in the spiritual world, which was startlingly obvious in the pure consciousness experiences I had while in the spiritual world, was I able to dig myself out of religious/ spiritual belief and to begin to tackle both the good and bad emotions in me that give rise to human malice and sorrow. RESPONDENT: It is obvious to any one who thinks that we are all part of the problem. Who was I blaming? PETER: So, are you now switching positions and saying you like the way ‘this world is ran by our governments’? RESPONDENT: Because I see what you see. Even to the unawakened mind it is obvious that some things are worse than others and even the people in government can control the madness to some degree, but far too often they choose not to. PETER: How do you think that ‘the people in government can control the madness to some degree’ ? Are you advocating more police, more armies, more laws? Or should they adopt the Tibetan Buddhist government’s pacifist approach of fleeing to the next country and leaving the people to fend for themselves when madness manifests as invasion by a neighbouring country? This is choosing not to ‘control the madness’ in action. How would you go about controlling the madness given that it is all so obvious to you? RESPONDENT: Of course they are acting from the same illness as every one else. I shouldn’t have to say anything about this, it is all so obvious. PETER: Aye. The illness, as you see it, is that most people are un-Enlightened or un-awakened to the Truth. To use your words, the Truth is
Hence the way to cure ‘the illness’ is to stop identifying with human fear, suffering and hatred. This approach does nothing at all to cure the illness but it does offer a way of psychologically distancing oneself from the illness. This approach to dealing with trauma is commonly known as dissociation.
In the case of spiritual Awakening or Enlightenment, the resulting condition is of an altered state of consciousness where certain concepts such as ‘beliefs, images, fear, suffering, hatred, etc., etc.’, are separated from the conscious personality. Thus, the illness continues unabated and untreated but the traumatized victim no longer associates with the symptoms of the illness and no longer believes he or she has the illness. * RESPONDENT: I have also seen what a mess we are in and how much needless suffering is going on and want only to see an end to it. PETER: I don’t doubt the sincerity or fervour of your belief. All the priests, shamans, God-men, Gurus, Enlightened Ones and their followers for thousands of years, have offered the same spiritual message and yet the last century was the bloodiest to date. RESPONDENT: Is that the guru’s fault? Were the warring parties enlightened? I too would wish that the teaching of so many enlightened people had changed things to where we stopped all the needless killing. Again, is that the teachers, or teachings, fault? Of course it isn’t. PETER: Well, you could hardly accept that it is the fault of the teacher or the teachings for you are one of the teachers teaching those teachings. In order to avoid a confrontation that might raise your defences, let’s have a look at the sacred teachers and teachings of Zen Buddhism as exposed in two recent books –
It does seem that at least some are willing to lay some blame for war and suffering at the feet of the revered and sacred teachers. There are some serious cracks beginning to appear in the ‘sacred ceiling’, No. 8. It could be a good time to consider a career change. * RESPONDENT: The way you look at things, trying to see just the facts, is also the way I have always looked at things. The way I see it is you just haven’t gone far enough yet. PETER: No. I spent 17 years thoroughly immersed in the spiritual world and I went far enough to understand experientially that it leads only to very seductive, grand and glorious feelings that can totally overwhelm any personal perspective, or ego viewpoint. It is quite extraordinary the extent to which sensible down-to-earth intelligence can be overwhelmed by chemical flows from the ancient instinctual brain so as to produce feelings of euphoria and delusions of grandeur and immortality. The tell-tale sign as to the fact that Enlightenment is only a feeling, albeit a Mighty Grand One, is that it does take effort and vigilance to maintain and it does take the love of others to sustain the feeling. RESPONDENT: You have no direct understanding of enlightenment or you would not say it is a feeling. It has nothing to do with feeling. Because people have said what feelings they went through when they awakened doesn’t mean it is a feeling. PETER: Okay, let’s look at what you have said before about Enlightenment –
So perhaps we can say that Enlightenment is an absence of certain feelings as in – you no longer feel hate for others, you no longer have the living nightmare of your ego-thoughts and you no longer feel your being is separate from all of life or creation. Apart from lacking those particular feelings and thoughts you are apparently just a normal person with the normal range of feelings. * RESPONDENT: If you accept where you are, and are comfortable with it, you won’t see what I am trying to say. PETER: Hardly an hour goes by that I don’t marvel at the innate common sense in this human brain and the serendipitous events that led me out of the spiritual world and revealed the actual world that was sitting here all along, under my very nose as it were. The only way to experience it permanently its to get rid of all illusion, both real world and spiritual world, both ego and soul. RESPONDENT: I agree. PETER: Oh No 8, you are on record as saying –
No mention at all of the ending of soul but you definitely mention that your identity still goes on. Given that one’s identity consists of both ‘who’ we think we are and ‘who’ we feel we are, your experience is limited to the traditional spiritual shift of identity or altered state of consciousness. In this newly awakened state of consciousness one’s personal self, together with the unwanted thoughts and feelings, is transcended as one realizes one’s ego was living a nightmare. Grand feelings of salvation and gratitude swoon in as one feels saved from physical death and feels One with All and above evil and evil thoughts. This soul-full illusion of a higher self is a fantasy construction built upon the original illusion of self – the psychological and psychic entity that dwells within the flesh and blood body. An illusion built upon an illusion is a delusion. * RESPONDENT: You want to twist every word I say to show you are right. In doing so you can’t really see what I am saying. I could take a few hours to respond to all you wrote, but I neither have the time or energy right now to do that. It would also do no good. You would most likely turn everything I say around to fit what you want to say. PETER: If you keep insisting on a discussion based on who is right and who is wrong – the normal basis of any discussions about spiritual values – we will indeed get nowhere in our discussion. These t’is, t’isnt arguments about beliefs are the very stuff of the enforced acceptance, emotive conflict or resentful withdrawal so common in the spiritual world. RESPONDENT: Again, I agree. PETER: Then give me some facts which indicate that the experiences of ego-death, awakening, enlightenment or whatever other name are not of the usual religious/spiritual experiences. Given that our discussion is about peace on earth and you have said
you will need to do better to distance yourself from Eastern religion to prove that your dissociation from human malice and sorrow in the world is more than a feeling. * PETER: There is no substitute for a sensible discussion based on facts in order to decide what works and what doesn’t work to bring peace on earth. RESPONDENT: Of course, that is what I try to do. But if who I am trying to communicate with is so dead set on a belief what can I do? Of course, that is how many people may see me, and most likely do. Which is always a problem because there are truths that are facts that I couldn’t change and wouldn’t change. To those I speak to about these truths I may seem dogmatic. That is why I say you have to find this out for yourselves. I can’t do anything but point. PETER: Okay. The one truth you seem most consistent about is the truth that your being is one with life or all creation. You also say everybody else’s being is one with all except that they haven’t realized it, or awakened to the fact, like you have. Now the realization of this truth is common to religious experiences both in Western religions as in – ‘We are all God’s children’ and in Eastern religion as in – ‘We are all One’ or ‘We are all Buddhas’. And yet, despite this realization in many teachers and their followers, a Buddhist still steadfastly remains a Buddhist, a Christian steadfastly remains a Christian, a Cohenite steadfastly remains a Cohenite, or the teacher immediately sets up his or her own teachings which he or she steadfastly insists is different from all the rest of the spiritual/ religious teachings. As you said in a recent post to the list –
You too seem to have been compelled to set up your own independent shop despite your realization that we are all one. Does this not seem a glaring contradiction between your realization and your subsequent actions? This irrefutable pattern of behaviour, evident across all cultures and religions, makes a mockery of the realization that ‘We are all One’ for none of the Awakened or Realized Beings put their money where their mouth is, or should I say where their feelings are. And as we both know, this dogmatic insistence on the uniqueness of various religious teachings and experiences is the very stuff that breeds religious division, conflict and war. The spiritual realization that we are all one is nought but passionate imagination that in fact causes abominable separation and conflict between humans. * RESPONDENT: I don’t deal with many people just because of this sort of misunderstanding. Where I am coming from cannot really be understood until one reaches that same place. Words can go around and around and never get to that place. PETER: Whenever the Gurus and God-men are factually-challenged they eventually trot out the traditional hackneyed fall-back defensive position of ‘what I speak of is beyond words’. As if the experience of Godliness, God-realization, God-intoxication, Enlightenment, Awakened, or whatever other name you want to use, has not been written about and spoken about endlessly. It is indeed well documented as a glorious and utterly ‘self’-fulfilling experience. RESPONDENT: You just have not experienced what they, we, are talking about. If it was a word thing it would have changed the world a long time ago. What they are saying is true. It has nothing to do with a self-fulfilling experience. The self can never prepare for enlightenment. You are just missing a very important point, that can never be clear until you have seen the same reality. PETER: Well, at least we can determine that enlightenment is not a word thing – i.e. it cannot be described in words. You also insist it is not a feeling thing. Given also that you cannot touch it, smell it, taste it, hear it or see it, we could probably agree that it is indeed ‘other-worldly’. It is obviously not of the physical world, it is obviously not of the world of grim normal reality but it of the world of Greater Reality, as it is often termed. Once one experiences this new reality, one no longer has an ego that identifies with the nightmare of ‘fear, suffering, hatred’ that goes on in the physical world where we humans actually live. You also have a loose habit of using the word self which includes both ego and soul when what you really mean is ego. This shifty sloppiness does your case no good at all. * PETER: Whenever the Gurus and God-men are factually-challenged they eventually trot out the traditional hackneyed fall-back defensive position of ‘what I speak of is beyond words’. As if the experience of Godliness, God-realization, God-intoxication, Enlightenment, Awakened, or whatever other name you want to use, has not been written about and spoken about endlessly. It is indeed well documented as a glorious and utterly ‘self’-fulfilling experience. All one’s dreams have come true and more, but its fatal flaw is that it is only a grandiose feeling that does nothing to address the elimination of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that are the root cause of human malice and sorrow. For all of the grandeur and passion of religious belief it has done absolutely nothing to eliminate human suffering on this planet and in fact, as you yourself acknowledged, is actively contributing and perpetuating human suffering as is evidenced by all the countless recriminations, persecutions, vitriolic conflicts and religious wars that are ever ongoing. RESPONDENT: The truth is not a grandiose dream. PETER: Well No 8, just previously in this post you said –
To me, something that billions of people have wished for over thousands of years and that has not happened does seem to qualify for the title of the most grandiose dream of all time. RESPONDENT: Again it has nothing to do with feeling. If the teachings you followed didn’t show clearly what is needed to go beyond the instinctual aggression, passions of fear, etc., then you weren’t following an enlightened teacher. PETER: What they taught is exactly what you teach – a transcendence of unwanted and undesirable instinctual passions and an increasing disidentifying with them to the point where complete dissociation occurs as in an altered state of consciousness experience. All teachers in the Eastern spiritual traditions teach the same thing with only minor cultural or fashionable variation to techniques employed and jargon used. I know you insist your teaching is non-spiritual, non-traditional and unique but you have yet to demonstrate that this is so. RESPONDENT: Of course I agree whole-heartedly with the problem that religious belief has caused and is still causing. I have nothing whatsoever to do with religion. PETER: Do you go by the theory that if you say something for long enough then it will become a truth, for your whole teachings intimate Eastern religion and philosophy? * RESPONDENT: I most likely won’t be part of the mailing list group for much longer. I can only deal with groups for a short time then I just want to be quiet. I am very interested in the whole ego thing so I will be responding to what I read in the magazine when I get my copy here. Just be open-minded and see what I have to say. You may not agree with any of it, which is fine, but you may also see where I am coming from. PETER: Yes, I did note with interest your post on the subject of ego. Given that my interest is peace on earth and I like to reply in detail I can’t comment on your post on the list so I will take the opportunity to do so here.
You say you can’t hate but you obviously can still blame other human beings for as you said at the start of this post –
These feelings usually range from being upset, miffed, impatient, perhaps even angry or swing back the other way to feeling pity for them, sad, despairing, hopelessness and perhaps even depressed. If you ‘can’t hate’ which of these other feelings do you ‘still have’? When you say
do you include the human beings who are in the governments that run this world and do you include all the wars, murders, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, despair and suicide in this wonder-full creation that is not ‘separate from your own being’? RESPONDENT: Just because I can’t hate doesn’t mean I can’t see the facts before my eyes. I find nothing wrong with feeling many ways about things in this world. That does not for a moment make me feel separate from the whole. That would be nonsense. It saddens me deeply to see what is happening in the world. PETER: I presume you see what I see – people being malicious or angry to the point of killing others and people being sorrowful or sad to the point of killing themselves. You have said you don’t feel hate any more and now you say you can feel deeply sad in your awakened state. It is good to find someone in an awakened state who is willing to be honest about what is going on with them and how they experience the world rather than say it can’t be put into words. I am curious though when you say that after your ego-death, if I can use that term, you no longer identify with the nightmare of ‘fear, suffering, hatred’ yet you still feel the suffering of others. Is it that you no longer think you are identified with other human beings but you still feel identified? If so, this would be in accord with my experience in that transcending the thinking self still leaves a feeling self, often denoted as an impersonal self or a grand Self. RESPONDENT: When you see what is real, and the false is still acting on the world, you do all you can to help stop that process. And that is what it is: A process of misunderstanding based on a false belief brought about by the ego dream. I know at the core of all those people doing all the things that cause suffering is the same being I am. I know that by going through what I did changed all that for me and it can change it for everyone. PETER: But curiously enough you still say you suffer as in ‘it saddens me deeply to see what is happening in the world’. I presume this deep sadness for others is a suffering for others as in feeling compassion for others. This again would be in accord with the transcendence of a personal self and personal suffering to a state of being an impersonal self who then feels sorrow for others – an impersonal, non-identified suffering. Again this is in accord with my experience – the ending of personal psychological suffering is not the end of suffering for then one has the experience of suffering for all of humanity, a psychic suffering, whereby misery and pain can literally drip off everything. My experience in the psychic world is that this type of suffering can be far deeper than one’s own personal suffering for one then takes on everyone else’s suffering. No wonder the Enlightened Ones are driven to save the world and desperate to entice others to join them in their crusade, for underpinning the Divine lays, ever lurking, the desperation of universal suffering – often referred to as the Diabolical. Of course, there is no Divine or Diabolical, bliss or despair, malice or sorrow or any of the instinctual passions in the actual world. All these feelings and beliefs, ideas and fantasies exist only because they are the psychological and psychic machinations of a wayward identity within the flesh and blood body. These feelings may well be real, and are felt to be so because of the chemicals that surge through the human body from the reptilian brain ... but they are not actual, as in existing in the physical world. * PETER: Yes, I did note with interest your post on the subject of ego. Given that my interest is peace on earth and I like to reply in detail I can’t comment on your post on the list so I will take the opportunity to do so here.
You say you can’t hate but you obviously can still blame other human beings for as you said at the start of this post –
These feelings usually range from being upset, miffed, impatient, perhaps even angry or swing back the other way to feeling pity for them, sad, despairing, hopelessness and perhaps even depressed. If you ‘can’t hate’ which of these other feelings do you ‘still have’? When you say
do you include the human beings who are in the governments that run this world and do you include all the wars, murders, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, despair and suicide in this wonder-full creation that is not ‘separate from your own being’?
An interesting point of view. What Krishnamurti had to say was so ‘very important for people to hear’ that it was okay to deliberately conceal a long standing affair with his friend’s wife and then to engage in a subsequent long and bitter legal battles against his friend in order to suppress any knowledge of it becoming public. Sort of a ‘don’t look at the finger, look at the moon’ argument or ‘I’m only a poor humble messenger but my message is pure gold.’ Do you not take a stand, presume a position, make a judgement on Krishnamurti by refusing to pass a judgement yourself and leaving it to others? RESPONDENT: I agree that the way the Krishnamurti group handled that whole thing was wrong, and K should have stepped in and stopped that. But the fact remains that what he was saying was very important and if it had all come out many people who have been helped by what he had to say may not have been. PETER: Who are you agreeing with No 8? Certainly not me. Now you are blaming the Krishnamurti group, presumably because they didn’t conceal their Master’s duplicity and deceit. You don’t seem able to bring yourself to question Krishnamurti’s actions for that would mean you would be questioning a revered teacher and that is a sacred no-no. This ethic that the message of Enlightenment is more important than the veracity and conduct of the Enlightened Ones has forever humbled seekers into silence and cognitive blindness. But in his day and age of increased information and communication this sacred code in the spiritual community is being broken down. Even on the mailing list there is some debate about various teachers and their behaviour. This questioning is tentative and selective for there is a definite pecking order as to who is fair game to question and who is considered too high up on the scale, or too close to home, to question. I see you have joined in this delicate selection process and, as a teacher yourself, you obviously have a dilemma as to who to blame and who to praise. You have put Father Dionysus, Otto Kernberg and Ammachi down so far, but your comments deriding students who hang around teachers may not endear you to the Cohenite students so it may well be politic to tone down a touch in this area. There seems to be a very profound dilemma amongst spiritual teachers these days – how watered down does one make one’s message so that it doesn’t appear live old-time religion without it being nothing more than a set of morals, a bit of feel good and lot of dis-identifying? The other approach is to go for the full-on charismatic God-realization approach but this does have its drawbacks in terms of being forever on-guard and on-stage. Added to all this, the Guru business is such a crowded market nowadays that it is tough to get enough customers to qualify as a bona fide teacher. * RESPONDENT: I am awake, but I am not perfect in the eyes of some, perhaps most. So what? Most people have such a misunderstanding of what it means to be enlightened. Enlightened people are just people who have seen the fact of our being one with all life. I just live my life not harming any one or any thing. That is simple, we can all do that, awake or not. PETER: Well, that’s a bit of a come down for the exalted and much prized state of Enlightenment. This seems to none other than the ‘we are all enlightened, we only have to realize it’ psittacism that is floating around the spiritual world. So now, I assume your teaching is simplified even further to – if everyone sees ‘the fact of our being one with all life’ and ‘just lives (their) life not harming any one or any thing’ then there will be peace on earth. RESPONDENT: Why not? I am awake, I harm nothing or no one. If everyone just lived that simply were would the wars and killing come from? It is true that the mind of the unenlightened is the same mind as the enlightened, except for the enlightened have awakened to a clear direct seeing the fact before our eyes. PETER: Okay, let’s look at the facts before our eyes. The Dalai Lama is an avowed Buddhist who would claim that he would harm nothing and no one. He is a pacifist, which meant when someone invaded his country he fled. Now if everyone in the country you lived in was a pacifist it is like hanging out a sign – pleas invade – we won’t stop you. The Dalai Lama, now safe behind the protection of the Indian army is busily trying to get someone else to free his country. Pacifism is an unliveable ideal in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. Do you not rely on the guns of the police and army for the privilege of feeling a pacifist? Would not it be more sensible to tackle the root cause of malice and sorrow – the instinctual animal passions in humans – rather than striding the moral high ground sprouting unliveable ethics that completely ignore the facts before our eyes. The Enlightened not only cop-out from acknowledging any malice in themselves but they also cop-out from acknowledging sorrow in themselves. As you yourself stated Enlightenment means that one no longer identifies with one’s personal suffering but that one feels universal sorrow or compassion for others. This is easily seen in action whereby they continually rile against the unenlightened as the cause of wars and suffering. The excuse for this malevolence is that they feel compassion towards those who have yet to realize that the wars and killing is all a dream – created by their ego – from which they haven’t yet awakened. RESPONDENT: There has been no one in my life who I let believe I was some high and mighty being because I was awake. I have had a problem with people who have tried to put me on a pedestal for just being awake. If I let them it would just be ego playing another game. PETER: Why should people want to put you on a pedestal in the first place? Just what Guru-energy are you radiating? Is it you or your seductive message of dissociation from the symptoms of the animal instinctual passions in operation in humans? Do you find you have to be humble to put them off? Again your actions of putting yourself above Father Dionysus, Otto Kernberg and Ammachi on the list does seem to weaken your case for being an ordinary man. It must be a tricky business getting these balances just right. * PETER: As for, ‘you may also see where I am coming from’ – where I see you coming from is a position of back-peddling and I would only encourage you to keep doing it all the way totally out of the spiritual world. Most people think there are only two worlds – the real world or the spiritual world, but if one dares to step out of all illusion there is an actual physical-only world of purity and perfection and the evidence of this is the pure consciousness experience. It far exceeds Enlightenment for all the capricious feelings and unfulfilled promises of purity and perfection of the spiritual world are experienced as an actuality in a ‘self’-less state – a perfection and purity that is rock-solid, sensately experienced, touchable, visible, tasteable, smellable, audible, ever-present, each moment again. RESPONDENT: Believe what you wish about what you think is ‘back-peddling’. It means nothing to me. PETER: And yet you now seem to be ‘flexing your spiritual muscles’ on the mailing list a bit more by putting down other teachers since I made this comment. But then again, this could well be just a coincidence. RESPONDENT: I have no problem with all you say about this rock-solid world. I too feel the same way. Except there is more to it than the surface, and it is just as real. PETER: Aye indeed, for you do not live in this rock-solid world for you see it as merely the surface. Where you spend most of your time is in the spiritual world that you, and many others, believe underlays this rock-solid world. By holding any spiritual belief you can never be actually here in this physical rock-solid world of sensual delight, purity and perfection. I always find it kind of cute that spiritualists insist that they are here – in the actual world where we flesh and blood human beings live – whereas they are desperately trying to be ‘there’ in the spiritual world. It’s good that you have made the distinction between where you live and where I live so crystal clear. You see I have an enormous yes to being right here, right now in the rock-solid physical actual world, whereas you have an enormous yes to being somewhere else in the spiritual world. We do indeed live in different worlds... * RESPONDENT: This is all too important to take lightly. We either change ourselves, which will change the world, or we go on destroying this beautiful planet and cause untold suffering. PETER: On this we agree. My point was exactly this –
Your immediate response was seemingly unequivocal –
Since then you have been attempting to defend the indefensible by somehow excluding Eastern religion from your statement even to the point of declaring your own teachings non-spiritual and even humbly down-grading your own Enlightenment. RESPONDENT: There have been, and perhaps still are, teachers from the East who were awake. They did their best to help others to see. The religions that came up after them did not, for the most part, know what the teacher knew and distorted it all into a mind game. I will not put down those teachers, yet I have nothing to do with religion. If you see things as clearly as you think you do you would see that some of those teachers were really telling the truth as well as words can. PETER: Yet again, it is not the teacher’s fault that religions exist, it is those who follow. I know of no spiritual teacher, who had the opportunity, money and business acumen, who did not actively set up an organization surrounding him or her in their lifetime and arrange for it to be perpetuated after their death. Perhaps you could enlighten me if I am wrong? * RESPONDENT: I am really busy today and am leaving to care take some friend’s home for a week, so I have to get going. I may respond to some of what you wrote later on. It is very tiring for me to write and I don’t have a lot of energy. So I’m sorry if this seems too short of a response for you. Keep looking, but don’t limit your understanding to the past. It can always go deeper. I mean that for us all. PETER: I am surprised you keep responding at all. The only reason I came on to the mailing list was to offer a third alternative to those who were having doubts about Eastern religion and philosophy and the fact that it will bring peace on earth. You obviously have no doubts at all but I do think you should qualify your statement –
– lest others also question your teachings in the future. RESPONDENT: I have a very limited contact with people, and even less contact with people who are trying to understand. The little time I spend on the net is the minimum I can do to help. I don’t know how long I will be on there, but as long as there is some feedback. I am still waiting for my copy of the ego issue so I can respond to what is said in it. I don’t know if anything that has been said here will make any difference to you. It doesn’t really matter. PETER: I find that you are making your position clearer with every post, which I do appreciate. What I like is that an actualist can have a conversation with a spiritualist about such a vital and urgent matter as peace on earth and I think that matters a lot. So far the only hope for peace on earth has been to pray for God’s intervention or follow the teachings of God-men. It is good to get a voice for, and scrutiny of, the third alternative and even if it is censored from being posted on a public mailing list, it will go into the actualism records for others to read.
RESPONDENT: Well said, Peter. I have said that the instinctual animal part of us is at the root of the ego fear. PETER: Whereas I said ...
‘Ego fear’ makes no sense. Fear is an instinctual passion that we share in common with many other animals and, as such, is a deep-seated emotion, not a thought. RESPONDENT: That as the human brain evolved and saw itself as a separate being it carried over the instinctual need to protect the body into feeling the need to protect this false sense of self. PETER: It is only the human self that cunningly divides itself into a false, unwanted mortal self and a real desirable immortal self. The self is one entity consisting of who we think and feel we are. To split one’s self into two is to create a duality of false and Real, bad and good or Evil and God. RESPONDENT: I guess I haven’t made this clear. We are really in agreement on this. PETER: Despite your insistence we are not in agreement at all. What I am saying is that the root cause of human malice and sorrow are the instinctual passions. To tackle half of the problem just leads to a soul cut loose from any common sense whatsoever, so much so, that the world is increasingly full of people who insist that they are God-on-earth. RESPONDENT: I’ve just been pointing out that the ego is a phantom and has no reality in itself. I have found that as the phantom is seen through the instinctual processes change. PETER: But you will not question whether the other half of your self is equally illusionary. If the ego is illusionary, why can you not entertain the idea that the soul may well be illusionary as well? As for the ‘instinctual processes change’, all evidence of the Enlightened state is that fear and aggression are sublimated but not eliminated – as you would know – and nurture and desire are given full, uninhibited reign such that people feel Divine Love and even God-realized.
PETER: I got this post from No 7 but it had no message with it or attachment. Perhaps you could forward your response directly to me if you wish – if you still have a copy? I thought bypassing the Moderator is easier.
RESPONDENT: I got the same post from No 7, with nothing attached. I did send a very short reply, which I no longer have, which just said I didn’t think it would be of any use to respond. I also sent in my last post to the group, but it looks like No 7 didn’t like it because he hasn’t posted it. PETER: I find the level of disagreement on the list about spiritual matters to be astounding. There are so many conflicting views about how a Enlightened master should be and behave, what is Enlightenment, which teachings to follow, whether to follow the fundamentalist path or the watered down path, whether to retreat from the world or try and be in the world, whether peace and happiness is possible ‘while having a body’, etc. All of this disagreement and conflict is okay as long as it is addressed in terms of ‘I agree but’, or if it is dressed up in loving ‘we are all one’ feelings. RESPONDENT: As I said in that last post, I am tired of hearing my self speak/write and need to be quiet again. So I won’t be on the group any longer. I don’t feel it does any good anyway. I do not like having to defend anything. Not that I mind being wrong, when I am, it is just contrary to the simple life I live. I wish you well, Peter. Keep on their backs. Even though I disagree with some of what you say I also agree with where you are coming from. PETER: I take it that your agreement with ‘where I am coming from’ is based on the only point of agreement that we ever reached in our exchanges. From my first post to the list to No 1 –
From your first post to me –
From that time on you keep insisting, in every way possible, that your awakened viewpoint has nothing to do with the Truth, Ancient Wisdom or Eastern religion. RESPONDENT: Just be open to the possibility that there is more that you are missing, which I try to do in my own case all the time. PETER: I deliberately and with forethought turned my back on the spiritual world but I can see that you are probably too enmeshed and enshrined in it to even consider that there might be a third alternative. I only wrote to the list to let anyone who had doubts about the spiritual path know that there is now a third alternative. Interestingly, this alternative was pioneered by an ex-Enlightened being who managed to extradite himself from spiritual delusion and dared to live in the actual world free of any identity (being, Self, feeling of Oneness, Allness, etc.) whatsoever. I wrote to No 1 about my ‘experiences’ that led me to question the spiritual world, to ‘be open to the possibility that there is more’–
I know very well the possibility I am missing and I am well pleased to have missed it. Somehow the career of a spiritual teacher or God-man never quite suited me. I have enjoyed our exchanges and have taken the opportunity to archive them on the
RESPONDENT: Thanks for the Web site address. I wish you had shared that with me at the beginning, and also to the group, which you may have before I joined. PETER: Given that the mailing list is a discussion forum that purports to question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ I joined the discussion in order to see if some people had some doubts about the veracity and usefulness of the Enlightened state itself. If someone does have doubts about the spiritual path then I take the opportunity to offer more information, eventually including the Actual Freedom Trust website address. I am not proselytizing, only offering an alternative to those who might be interested. Given that no one expressed any doubts and I was quickly silenced on the list, this opportunity never arose. One person corresponded with me privately and I gave him the address although his interest may well prove to be intellectual only and not applied. RESPONDENT: You have, and still are, misunderstanding much of what I have said. You so want it to fit in where you can make a point in what you are saying that you just don’t see what I am saying. And perhaps I am guilty to some degree of the same thing. It is funny how you think I am a spiritualist when that is hardly the case. When I went through that transformation 22 years ago one of the first things I wanted to do was start a publication called ‘Actuality’. I read a lot of what was said on the actualism Web site and agree with most of it. That is how I have seen things for a long time, and it has gotten even clearer in recent times. I never played the guru role, and couldn’t. I just talked with those who seemed open. I knew for a long time if I wanted to play that role I could become rich and, seemingly, powerful, but that would have gone completely against the truth as I see it. I didn’t say one thing, if seen how it was meant, that was untrue on the mailing group. How people wish to interpret it is up to them, I can’t help that. Every time I go out on a limb to speak, or write, to people it always ends the same way. I say it as clearly as I can and it still gets twisted into something else. It is a useless process. PETER: I don’t know whether you have noticed or not, but people on the mailing list all agreed with you and all expressed gratitude for your contributions. They didn’t see that you were ‘going out on a limb’ at all. The spiritual world is able to contain a myriad of broader perspectives than the rock-solid physical, material actual world and your teachings are easily accommodated in the broad church of metaphysical belief. But I do appreciate your position on the Master-disciple game – we seem to agree that it sucks. Two points of agreement! RESPONDENT: One thing I do not agree with that I read on the actualism site is that part about their being no reality to the intuitive, precognition, etc. This is the only thing I meant when I wrote to you about there being more than the surface. I am not seeing anything other than the rock solid real world, but it is broader than most seem to see. I cannot, and will not, deny experiences that have happened most of my 61 years. I have seen events happening many miles away, and had them confirmed by people who were there. I have seen what was going to happen before it happened many times. I have seen objects jump off the wall from just my thinking about them doing it. I could write a book about all of this. So for me to say it is unreal would be to lie. That is all I meant while talking about there being more. In the latest findings of many scientists these things are just a part of the nature of the reality we all share. PETER: This is exactly what I mean by the fact that we live in two different worlds. The awakening from the nightmare of reality to the realization of Reality is to subjugate a false personal sense of self and replace it with a true, impersonal sense of Self. The evidence of the truth of this ‘other-world’ is the feelings that arise and the experiences that are experienced. This other-world is a psychic world – thus one feels psychically linked with all other humans and the feeling of ‘We are All One’ is realized. In my case the experience was ‘I am love and Love is me’ – and any personal sense of self was completely overwhelmed by this new experiencing. I have also experienced the opposite of Grand, seductive and glorious in this psychic world and that is the Diabolical – a world so repulsive, so horrendous as to literally tear at one’s innards. I didn’t stay there long, but long enough to know that the Grand and glorious psychic experiences are underpinned by the Diabolical, and the dream of good, immortality and unity is but the opposite of the nightmare of evil, death and a hellish eternal lonely damnation. Duality isn’t eliminated, it is reinforced by the creation of a new world of imagination – that of Reality. I don’t deny your experiences and I don’t deny that they are real. I have had many psychic experiences, all of which could be explained as psychic aberrations although I have never experienced physical objects moving – but my question would be ... ‘so what?’ If your psychic abilities were such that you could actually stop wars and suffering on this planet then I would willingly be sitting at your feet and following your teachings. We could then point you in the direction of trouble spots in the world and you could use your powers to end malice and sorrow in the world rather than moving objects and playing with clairvoyance. Until then, it is obvious that you have got yourself stuck in the spiritual world Reality – exactly as thousands upon thousands of others have in their search for a way out of being in the nightmare of real-world reality. I have already stated my position about the spiritual world and many people miss the fact that spiritual means
as well as
While you insist that your awakening, your experiences and your current state are non-spiritual, as in non-religious, it certainly is spirit-ual, as in being psychic in nature. Methinks you are splitting hairs, yet again. RESPONDENT: I really did enjoy that Web site. I will return to it many times in the future. It is very much like the one I have been building, in mind only so far, but I felt it may not do any good. I have the domain name for it already, which is Friends of Reality. If I get it done someday I will let you know. Maybe then you will see where I am really coming from. PETER: You have written thousands of words to me and on the mailing list and you have failed to indicate that ‘where you are really coming from’ is anywhere other than your own unique and personal version of the traditional spiritual world. What I find most telling is that everyone who has Awakened from the nightmare or illusion of reality has declared ‘We are All One’ and yet they illustrated by their words and actions that they indeed retain a very personal and ego-centric view of Unity such that theirs is a distinctive and original version – different from others. This fact alone makes a mockery of the feeling that ‘We are All One’. In actuality, all of the psychic world is seen for what it is – a fear-driven world of either doom and gloom reality typified by ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die’ or the phantasmagorical Reality of awakened souls awaiting their final release into Nirvana-land. An actualist is concerned with peace on earth, in this lifetime and, as such, turns away from all psychological illusion and psychic delusions, no matter how seductive and powerful. The actual world lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to the spirit-ual world.
Peter’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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