Peter’s Correspondence on Mailing List B Correspondent No 12
RESPONDENT: I am amazed to actually see ‘in print’, that the Soul could be eliminated. PETER: Yes indeed, ‘who’ we think we are and ‘who’ we feel we are both phantoms, to use No 7’s words. The spiritual search has traditionally stopped half way by only addressing the savage instinctual passions (aka ego) while dearly and desperately identifying with the tender passions (aka soul). RESPONDENT: The physical form was created by the Soul, how can the creator be removed? The Soul is Eternal, it is an ‘individuation’ of the One Soul, that is the Source of All. To propound the dissipation of the Soul infers that that which is All, can be eliminated by some technique developed by ‘external consciousness’. PETER: My stance is that God is a human invention and, as such, can be dispensed with as easily as the notion of Evil. Once this is done one’s own awareness – the brain’s ability to be aware of it’s own functioning, a bare awareness known as apperception – is perfectly capable of eliminating all illusion, all of one’s self and its associated instinctual passions. RESPONDENT: When you get thru with all of these methodologies of consciousness, you are still left with ‘the witness’... ie, the Soul. The Soul is innocent; it is the ‘experiencer’ of the All That Is. It does not judge, it experiences. So it does not get into the idea of good and bad, there is pleasant experiences and unpleasant experiences, when the Soul decides it has had enough, it withdraws its focus from an area of experience and focuses ‘somewhere’ else to expand its experience of All That Is. PETER: This process is called dissociation – an active withdrawal from unpleasant earthly experiences and a total focusing on pleasant ‘other-worldly’ experiences. As I said to No 8, all one is doing is splitting the ‘self’ in two, creating and reinforcing the idea of an earthly, mortal ego-self and a spirit-ual, immortal Soul-self. RESPONDENT: In a reality that believes in beginnings and endings, that could look like a ‘death’ of a physical form, or in the case of a ‘master’, the ‘disappearance’ of the form. Note the scripture which refers to the taking on of incorruptibility. When one accepts one’s own ‘immortality’, and acts accordingly, your physical form goes thru a physical chemical process, which changes the form from carbon base to a crystalline base. All fear is ‘leached’ from the form, as well as, the ‘little me’. The Soul then stands forth, uncompromised by limitations of any kind. Flesh and blood is not what we Truly are. That, my friend, is what we have come to this limitation to show, the Truth of the ONE. Incidentally, I am a Master of Light and Love, I have already ascended this plane and returned. I Know of what I speak. PETER: ... And thus darkness, evil and suffering are regarded as intrinsic to the human condition on earth where we human flesh and blood humans actually live. Personally I find this a deeply cynical view of human life on earth. Who, or what, God was so perverse to set this system up? Why do we insist on believing this scenario? RESPONDENT No 14: I’m wondering what total freedom would be. From our vantage point as beings moving physically through the World and all the worlds within it, what would we, if totally free, be free from? Fear? Attachment? Longing? Love? I’m sorry if this is very basic stuff. That’s where I am. PETER: The modern freedom is to be free of the illusion of thinking and feeling ourselves to be a spirit being trapped within a mortal flesh and blood body and thus become free of all illusion. To be totally free of a ‘self’ – both the ego and the soul – allows us to be what we are, not who we are or who we Truly feel we are, as in Self-realized. This allows us to be flesh and blood mortal human beings, free of any ‘self’ whatsoever. The problem with the Bronze Age spiritual wisdom that we modern humans still follow, is the very belief that who we really, truly are, is a spirit that inhabits the body and that goes ‘somewhere else’ after physical death. All of the nonsense of the spiritual path can be sheeted home to this single very ancient belief in spirits. A total freedom is beyond spiritual freedom, for it is a freedom of the physical body from the illusionary spirit and the associated instinctual passions, not an imaginary freedom of the illusionary spirit from the physical body. RESPONDENT: It is always interesting when the word ‘Freedom’ is spoken of in the context of absolutes. PETER: Do you mean rather than in the context of Absolutes? RESPONDENT: Could it be, freedom refers to the ‘natural state’? PETER: Ancient spiritual belief has it that we are born innocent and corrupted by evil since birth. This is known as the Tabula Rasa theory. Thus, those who achieve a spiritual freedom claim to be living in a ‘natural state’ for their evil has been transcended by achieving a state of Godliness. And yet there is ample evidence that the practice of renunciation and transcendence has failed to eliminate the instinctual passions in any of the so-called Holy men. We humans who live in the twenty first century now know that every human being is born with genetically-encoded animal instinctual passions of fear aggression, nurture and desire – i.e. there is no such thing as ‘natural innocence’. It is a myth. RESPONDENT: Innocent beingness ... being without comparisons ... no judgements ... hmmm. PETER: Again there is ample evidence that spiritual belief is chock-full of comparison and judgement such as the spiritualists who claim their way is the only way, or my Guru is the only Guru or my truth is the Absolute Truth or ‘I know it is so because it is so’. ‘Innocent beingness’ is an illusionary state, fuelled by passionate belief and superstition, and requiring continuous faith, trust and hope to sustain it in the face of the overwhelming evidence of its failure to ‘deliver the goods’ – peace on earth. RESPONDENT: What if you Are Spirit having a human experience? PETER: What you are is a flesh and blood body inhabited by a spirit (non-physical) entity. This spirit has two parts – a social identity commonly termed ego and an instinctual identity commonly termed soul. By transcending, or rising above, the ego one gets to feel one is one’s instinctual self which can, provided one looses all grip on reality, lead to the full-blown delusion of being Spirit or God-personified. RESPONDENT: What if you are only having a dream in which you are pretending you are not free? What if someone like myself walked up to you, in the dream, and said, ‘Wake up, you are only dreaming’? PETER: As the Eastern spiritual path splutters to an inglorious end it is obvious that the dreamer’s dream of spiritual freedom is only a dream and not an actuality. The God-men are coming under increasing scrutiny and are being exposed as not being what they claim to be. RESPONDENT: The greatest hindrance to ‘enlightenment’ is not knowing you already are. PETER: Given that ‘who’ you know you already are is an illusionary Divine Spirit born out of an illusionary self, it is obvious that Enlightenment is a delusion. A delusion is a false belief, an illusion arising from taking an already existing illusion far too seriously. The extinction of both ego and soul is the only way to bring an end to the folly of religions and religious belief. RESPONDENT: One day you sit down with yourself. Being honest with yourself, you begin your query...What do I believe about myself? What do I KNOW, is an unequivocal fact of existence? PETER: When I did this and went all the way, beyond beliefs, Knowing, feelings and imaginations, what I came to was the irrevocable fact that ‘what’ I am is this flesh and blood mortal body formed when a sperm fertilized an egg. Spiritual seekers ignore this fact, for their single-pointed search is for the real ‘me’ – the narcissistic belief that beyond the normally-experienced ‘I’ trapped in this body is the real supersubstantial ‘Me’ of truly cosmic dimensions. It is this fantasy that has spawned the multitudes of God-men, the slavery of the Master-disciple system and directly resulted in the plethora of religious belief that endarkens and stupefies human sensibility and intelligence in the East. RESPONDENT: This is ‘tough country’ because you can’t include anyone or anything else, in your analysis of yourself. What ‘Anyone says’ is all hearsay evidence. Not admissible in the ‘inner court’. You are your only witness! PETER: This is what is known as practicing denial – one cuts off from, or dissociates from, the ‘real’ world and the world of people, things and events and enters fully into an inner world, where Lo and behold, you find your true Spirit. The major reason this act of delusion is ‘tough country’ is because one needs to totally deny common sense and sensate experience in order to fully dissociate from the physical world completely and utterly as do the Enlightened Ones. It’s extremely difficult stuff to convince yourself that this physical world is a dream, that this keyboard and monitor are but figments of ‘your’ dream and the only thing real is ‘you’ inside this body. Further, you would have to believe that these words you are reading upon the screen are part of your dream and that the person who has typed these words is also part of your dream. If you have managed to fully realize this state of solipsism then you are a truly rare being. RESPONDENT: LOLOLOLOL ... if you want to ‘cut to the chase’ and Know Freedom again ... go into your ‘closet’ and have a ‘sit-down’ with you ... You are All that matters, in the final analysis! PETER: I see the realization that ‘I am All that matters’ as utterly selfish and narcissistic but, yet again, it is obvious that I live in a completely different world than you do. RESPONDENT: How could innocent beingness be an illusion if the being isn’t ‘doing’ anything other than observing? PETER: If ‘innocent beingness’ is Real then everything else, such as the computer monitor you are reading these words on, and everyone else, such as me typing these words, must be an illusion to you. This is known as solipsism. I know this would be a shattering blow to your spiritual ego but perhaps, just perhaps, you might consider that both the computer monitor and this human being called Peter are factual and ‘innocent beingness’ is a delusion? To remain an observer is to miss out on the chance of being an active participant in the business of being alive as a flesh and blood mortal body in this very moment of time in this very place in space. RESPONDENT: You are presupposing this state is some sort of psychological construct ... you are denying that it is possible be without an ulterior motive. PETER: Eastern religious teachings and philosophy is based on the idea that the ego, or personal self is merely a psychological construct and the flesh and blood human body is merely a vehicle and this is best summed up by the phrase ‘I am not the mind, I am not the body’. The teachings claim that there is a real self, soul or Spirit who is the genuine product and one only needs to ‘realize’ this and one gets to be Divine, Immortal, Timeless and Spaceless. Unfortunately this feeling of Godliness comes with a fatal flaw – the drive to spread the message that there is a real ‘you’ inside and all else is an illusion. The drive to be a Saviour of mankind is part and parcel of the delusion of Divinity and is nothing other than self-aggrandizement for to be a Saviour comes hand in glove with a hypnotic psychic power over any gullible human beings who are willing and eager to believe. RESPONDENT: Where did the idea of ‘selfhood’ come from in the first place? PETER: All human beings are born with a set of genetically-encoded survival instincts broadly fear, aggression, nurture and desire. These instinctual passions are instilled by blind nature to ensure the survival of the species. However in human animal these instinctual reactions are ‘self’-centred, as it is in apes – our nearest genetic cousins. Our instinctual-rudimentary ‘self’ is based firmly on the surge of chemicals arising from the primitive reptilian brain that give rise to causing automatic thoughtless and instinctual-emotional reactions. Thus this elementary ‘self’ is felt to be our instinctual ‘being’, at our very core. ‘Selfhood’ is not an idea – it is based on a genetic-encoded ‘self’ located in the primitive brain. Further, this primitive ‘self’ is made more complex in human beings by our ability to think and reflect and to be conscious of that process. As such, we have a more elaborated ‘self’ consisting of ‘who’ we think ourselves to be and ‘who’ we feel ourselves to be. ‘Who’ we think and feel ourselves to be is a psychological and psychic ‘self’ – both a mental and emotional identity – that develops in the neo-cortex as a discordant and alien identity that appears to be located in the head (as ego) and felt in the heart (as soul) and the gut (as instinctual being). RESPONDENT: Mankind is full of facts, yet it is known, facts are but the accepted opinions of a given time period. PETER: A curiously good description of the commonly accepted opinion that God, by whatever name, does exist and the commonly accepted opinion that there is life after death, in whatever form. RESPONDENT: What is the one immutable thing no being can deny? Easy ... one’s existence. PETER: If you are talking about your physical existence as a flesh and blood human being, then I would agree. I have no trouble agreeing with you because you and I are having this conversation – you know, real fingers tapping on real keyboards, real pixels appearing on real screens. Now ‘who’ you think and feel you are is another thing – you claim that your existence is ethereal, spirit only, non-material, Self-centred and ‘immutable’ as in absolute, unchallengeable, supreme. Sounds awfully like a delusion of Grandeur to me. RESPONDENT: If Freedom means anything, it means I am the sole responsible party for my existence, as well as, my only accurate historian. PETER: Are you saying that you are the sole responsible party that caused the sperm to impregnate the egg that grew to be the flesh and blood body called No 12? If so, you truly are laying claim to being a creator being – the sole creator of your own existence. Further, you are your own historian, as in creating your own history. In psychological terms this is the definition of delusion – the creation of an illusion ‘innocent beingness ’ from an illusion – the social/psychological and instinctual/psychic ‘self’. RESPONDENT: Therefore all ideas ‘about’ existence and my personal being are under my own authority to claim or discard according to whether I determine they are ‘workable’ in my reality. PETER: In other words, you are creating your own reality, or your own truth. RESPONDENT: Freedom has nothing to do with ‘consensus’, it has to do with personal volition. PETER: Are you saying Freedom is your personal volition – as in desire or choice – to create your own ‘ideas about existence’ and your ‘personal being?’ RESPONDENT: For any being to return to true freedom, that being must have the courage to jump out of the ‘herd’ and be honest enough to face everything that would restrict them in determining the meaning and experience of that freedom. PETER: From where I stand in the actual world, I see two herds – those who suffer in the grim reality of the ‘real’ world and those who imagine and feel themselves to be above it all because they choose to believe in and create their own Greater Reality in accordance with Bronze Age religious/ spiritual beliefs and superstitions. RESPONDENT: I am Still a Being of Light composition having a human experience, and no amount of well-formed phrases can change my birthplace. It is not wise to tell people that what they Know of themselves is faulty. PETER: Indeed, even now on the planet people are being killed for daring to question the spiritual beliefs of others. The good thing about the Net is that punishment for daring to question and face everything is limited to flaming, cyber-censorship or cyber-execution. RESPONDENT: Until one has developed full trust in the Love of All That Is, one has no real knowing on a conscious practical level, they remain in the 3/4 dimensional worlds of ‘faith and belief’. For example, I can move, at will, to any ‘location’ I so choose, dissolving and recombining these atoms and molecules into any form I choose, now that’s the freedom I talking about. Practical Freedom 101. PETER: Excellent news. Then I can stop replying to your posts and you can ‘recombine’ on my porch and we can have an in-depth discussion about life on earth, as-it-is with people as-they-are. And you can tell me more about your ‘ideas about existence and your personal being’, ‘true freedom’, and about your own personal ‘reality’. RESPONDENT: That is what I am on this planet to remind folks of, their God given rights, the Right to Love and Be Loved. When Love is embraced and allowed to work its magic thru the Heart, all of mankind will again be free ... free to create an even grander vision for themselves. Perhaps, they will even move from this world, flying into the stars giving living testimony, as to the nature of Love. PETER: From where I stand in the actual world it is those who have suffer from an Altered State of Consciousness such that they believe themselves to be Saviours of mankind that have led ‘herds’ of followers to think and feel that they are the Chosen Ones and believe in an ‘other-worldly’ freedom and peace. This man-made delusion is the basis of all religious and spiritual belief and the cause of all the religious conflicts, wars, retributions, persecutions and vilifications. It’s time to dare to question everything ... RESPONDENT: What is the one immutable thing no being can deny? Easy ... one’s existence. PETER: If you are talking about your physical existence as a flesh and blood human being, then I would agree. I have no trouble agreeing with you because you and I are having this conversation – you know, real fingers tapping on real keyboards, real pixels appearing on real screens. Now ‘who’ you think and feel you are is another thing – you claim that your existence is ethereal, spirit only, non-material, Self-centred and ‘immutable’ as in absolute, unchallengeable, supreme. Sounds awfully like a delusion of Grandeur to me. RESPONDENT: If Freedom means anything, it means I am the sole responsible party for my existence, as well as, my only accurate historian. PETER: Are you saying that you are the sole responsible party that caused the sperm to impregnate the egg that grew to be the flesh and blood body called No 12? If so, you truly are laying claim to being a creator being – the sole creator of your own existence. Further, you are your own historian, as in creating your own history. In psychological terms this is the definition of delusion – the creation of an illusion ‘innocent beingness ’ from an illusion – the social/psychological and instinctual/psychic ‘self’. RESPONDENT: Therefore all ideas ‘about’ existence and my personal being are under my own authority to claim or discard according to whether I determine they are ‘workable’ in my reality. PETER: In other words, you are creating your own reality, or your own truth. RESPONDENT: Freedom has nothing to do with ‘consensus’, it has to do with personal volition. PETER: Are you saying Freedom is your personal volition – as in desire or choice – to create your own ‘ideas ‘about’ existence and your personal being?’ RESPONDENT: For any being to return to true freedom, that being must have the courage to jump out of the ‘herd’ and be honest enough to face everything that would restrict them in determining the meaning and experience of that freedom. PETER: From where I stand in the actual world, I see two herds – those who suffer in the grim reality of the ‘real’ world and those who imagine and feel themselves to be above it all because they choose to believe in and create their own Greater Reality in accordance with Bronze Age religious/ spiritual beliefs and superstitions. RESPONDENT: I am Still a Being of Light composition having a human experience, and no amount of well-formed phrases can change my birthplace. It is not wise to tell people that what they Know of themselves is faulty. Until one has developed full trust in the Love of All That Is, one has no real knowing on a conscious practical level, they remain in the 3/4 dimensional worlds of ‘faith and belief’. For example, I can move, at will, to any ‘location’ I so choose, dissolving and recombining these atoms and molecules into any form I choose, now that’s the freedom I talking about. Practical Freedom 101. PETER: Excellent news. Then I can stop replying to your posts and you can ‘recombine’ on my porch and we can have an in-depth discussion about life on earth, as-it-is with people as-they-are. And you can tell me more about your ‘ideas about existence and your personal being’, ‘true freedom’, and about your own personal ‘reality’. RESPONDENT: That is what I am on this planet to remind folks of, their God given rights, the Right to Love and Be Loved. When Love is embraced and allowed to work its magic thru the Heart, all of mankind will again be free ... free to create an even grander vision for themselves. Perhaps, they will even move from this world, flying into the stars giving living testimony, as to the nature of Love. From where I stand in the actual world it is those who have suffer from an Altered State of Consciousness such that they believe themselves to be Saviours of mankind that have led ‘herds’ of followers to think and feel that they are the Chosen Ones and believe in an ‘other-worldly’ freedom and peace. This man-made delusion is the basis of all religious and spiritual belief and the cause of all the religious conflicts, wars, retributions, persecutions and vilifications. RESPONDENT: Thus spake Zarathustra. Superman! Lenin, Mao, Trotsky ... Man is all that exists. I guess the fact that I have complete memory and experience of ‘entry’ into the world of flesh and blood, and knowledge of how that happened, knowledge of how to construct a physical form ... I know for sure we live in different worlds! PETER: Ah, the summary dismissal. But at least we have agreement that you and I live in different worlds. Who you are is ‘a Being of Light having a human experience’ just passing through, so to speak, whereas I am an earthling – a corporeal, flesh and blood, mortal. I am still waiting for you to materialize on my porch for you claimed –
Or do I merely add you to the long, long list of ‘Beings of Light’ who eternally proclaim and promise ... but never have delivered? RESPONDENT: Thus spake Zarathustra. Superman! Lenin, Mao, Trotsky ... Man is all that exists. I guess the fact that I have complete memory and experience of ‘entry’ into the world of flesh and blood, and knowledge of how that happened, knowledge of how to construct a physical form ... I know for sure we live in different worlds! PETER: Ah, the summary dismissal. But at least we have agreement that you and I live in different worlds. Who you are is ‘a Being of Light having a human experience’ just passing through, so to speak, whereas what I am is an earthling – a corporeal, flesh and blood, mortal. I am still waiting for you to materialize on my porch for you claimed – ‘I can move, at will, to any ‘location’ I so choose, dissolving and recombining these atoms and molecules into any form I choose, now that’s the freedom I talking about. Practical Freedom 101.’ Or do I merely add you to the long, long list of ‘Beings of Light’ who eternally proclaim and promise ... but never have delivered? RESPONDENT: Wow man ... you really believe, This is it. You remind of the book ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’. Supermen, that is all mankind can aspire to. Don’t you think that is kind of arrogant? PETER: ‘Who’ everyone thinks and feels they are is a non-physical ethereal entity trapped inside a flesh and blood body. Thus ‘I’ see out of these eyes, ‘I’ touch with these fingers, ‘I’ hear through these ears, ‘I’ taste with this tongue and ‘I’ smell through this nose. Thus ‘I’, as spirit, feel forever isolated from the physical sensual actual world that is happening this very moment. This is the very reason that ‘I’ feel lost, lonely, frightened and feel the world to be a grim and alien place. This spirit ‘I’ has two parts – a social identity commonly termed ego and an instinctual identity commonly termed soul. By following Eastern religious practices, one transcends, or rises above, the mortal grubby ego and one gets to feel one is one’s instinctual self which can, provided one looses all grip on reality, lead to the full-blown delusion of being a pure Spirit or God-personified. For a normal flesh and blood mortal human being to call himself or herself God-on-earth is the height of arrogance and fantasy escapism. To rid the body of all of illusionary ‘self’, both ego and soul, is the height of sensibility and responsibility. RESPONDENT: Look at all this beauty, the perfect symmetry of nature, that fact that when you go for the next breath, it is there ... you need not even think about it. Was this all just an ‘accident’? A lightning bolt in a puddle? PETER: The fact that both intelligence and consciousness arise from matter is far, far more of a miracle than the common fairy tale that ‘it’s all the work of some Higher Power’ or the delusion that this infinite, eternal, pure and perfect universe is ‘my’ personal Reality or ‘My’ personal creation. RESPONDENT: Even the most materialist scientists can’t hang there anymore. Science and religion are going to collide any minute now. PETER: Human history has been a constant struggle for intelligence and common sense to break free of the grip of fear, superstition, mysticism and the wrath of spiritualists. The human condition is still firmly in the grip of ancient wisdom and religious belief and the anguish, despair, conflict and bloodshed this causes beggars description. RESPONDENT: Here’s a good one; you know how the aborigine’s art has all those ‘dots’ in them to construct the painting ... did you ever ask one what those dots are? IF you can get them to answer, you may be surprised to find out that the art is a physical rendition of what things look like on the sub-atomic level. PETER: Do you know they also believe the land is roamed by giant spirit animals and that their social wisdom involves a brutal form of ‘payback’ undertaken by spearing or wishing evil and death on the other. Another popular form of settling disagreements is for two antagonists to sit opposite each other and beat each other on the head with wooden clubs until one falls unconscious or dead. Is this also what you call ancient wisdom? Show me an ancient aboriginal relic of an electron microscope, and then I’ll agree you have a point. RESPONDENT: This world’s ideas about existence did not start with the bronze age ... the ideas at work here are much deeper into mankind’s past. How would supposed ignorant natives know about other planetary systems, if planet earth be IT. How could the Dogon of Africa know how many stars are in the Sirius system and Pleiades if they hadn’t have had some sort of encounter. THEY say it is their home. PETER: Are you trying to say there was once a golden age of scientific knowledge, or that the planet was once ‘seeded’ from other planetary systems and somehow, for some strange reason, humans have since lost the plot? These common beliefs of the Paradise-Lost type have no at all evidence to support them – quite the opposite. Recent studies have revealed the sheer brutality of ancient spiritual belief with physical evidence of ritual human sacrifices to heavenly Gods and earthly spirits in almost every religion on every continent going right back to the Bronze Age. RESPONDENT: Do we deny them, tell them they are fools? ... even though they had the information long before it was ‘proven’. PETER: There is no need to tell anyone else they are fools for desperately holding on to their spiritual beliefs – acknowledging that I was a fool to have been sucked into spiritual belief was sufficient for me to start becoming actually free of the Human Condition in toto. Of course, it was a massive blow to my spiritual pride, but it proved just as easy to drop a belief as it was to adopt one and then I got to stop feeling a fool in continually trying to justify my precious beliefs in the face of facts and common sense. It is the first step to becoming an autonomous human being, walking upright and free. RESPONDENT: What I see at work here is the ego. The ego always denies Anything that could possibly disrupt its comfy little seat of ‘normalcy’. The ego can’t Stand anything it can’t control. Even when confronted by what it believes to be ‘impossible’, the ego will find a way to ‘disallow’ the information. ‘Oh, that was Just my imagination.’ PETER: Everyone believes it is impossible for intelligence and consciousness to have evolved from matter for to acknowledge this would be the ending of any spiritual/ religious belief. This fact also means that both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as spirit/soul are but illusionary fabrications and the real me is this flesh and blood body only. Faced with this information which ‘I’ take to be an appalling threat to ‘my’ very existence, ‘I’ frantically seek to deny it and desperately imagine a way out of being here in the material world. There is an alternative to this fantasy of denial and escapism that is fuelled by ‘my’ fear of exposure and ‘my’ fear of death and that is to deliberately embark upon a process that will eventuate in ‘self’-immolation – to experience a psychological and psychic death of my ‘self’ before physical death and thus become what I am – this flesh and blood body only. RESPONDENT: With the way consciousness operates in this century, if someone were to outright poof into view, in front of a bunch of people, the first reaction would be fear. Christians have the whole idea of ‘poofing’ or any other ‘miracle type stuff’ consigned to one person, they hope to God, returns. They certainly aren’t prepared for ‘just anybody’ doing miracles, in this day and time. PETER: Are you perhaps hinting this as a justification for failing to ‘materialize’ on my front porch? Billions of people have waited, or are still waiting, for the Second Coming, the reappearance of their God, the promised miracle that will bring either Armageddon or magically turn the earth into a Garden Paradise. RESPONDENT: Again, this ideology protects the ego and keeps it comfortable in the status quo ... it also keeps the idea of being powerless, alive and well. PETER: Humans always think in terms of being powerful or powerless, such is the grip of the instinctual passions. Instinctual human life is a grim relentless battle for power, right and might, and this is reflected in their mythical God’s and God-men. This is why peace on earth is impossible unless one breaks free from the status quo, the human condition, and rids oneself of the instinctual passions – both the so-called savage passions of fear and aggression and the so-called tender ones of nurture and desire. RESPONDENT: At the same time, doing ‘miracles’ in the Indian subcontinent would hardly raise an eyebrow. Those people have had so much exposure to such things, it has become matter-of-fact. There is a ‘science’ that they take for granted that makes western minds go ‘gaa gaa’. PETER: The Indian Skeptic Society has been running an on-going campaign that is continually debunking the magic tricks of the sages and shamans of India who make a living feeding off the superstition and fear of others. The standard of sleight-of-hand, or hypnotic-based, magic they encounter is woeful and pathetic compared to the slick tricksters of the West. RESPONDENT: All anyone has said, here and elsewhere, is that there is more to IT than the 70 or 80 years that most live on this planet ... if one ‘suspects’ this may be so, they will find a way to answer that question, by whatever means they find necessary. May Love, Light, and Peace be with them as they return to Full Consciousness and Joy. PETER: The questions I ran with were – ‘What if this is it, this 70 or 80 years? What if there isn’t life after death? What if everyone has really got it 180 degrees wrong ... everyone?’ ‘What if I was putting my money on the wrong horse, and everyone else was doing the same thing?’ ‘What if I was striking a bargain with God and there wasn’t a life after death?’ Bargaining is perhaps the most insidious reaction to the fear of death because it involves the belief that one can indeed cheat or avoid death. This is, of course, nothing but a delusion, for death is an undeniable fact. Some people seek a form of immortality by producing children, or consider power and fame as some form of immortality – ‘at least I will be remembered’. The most common bargain is the religious and spiritual pursuit, with its promise of some kind of life after death. Indeed, this is trading time, happiness, leisure, sensual pleasure and freedom, which is available right now, for time and effort involved in worship, meditation, prayer, devotion and suffering, in the hope for some ‘good spot’ in a supposed afterlife. The other price paid lies in the necessity of complying with the moral and ethical codes of the particular spiritual or religious group in which you believe, with its ensuing loss of freedom. It seems an appalling price to pay, given that there has been no actual authenticated report back of any life after death from anyone who has died – let alone any verified ‘poofing’. * RESPONDENT: I am Still a Being of Light composition having a human experience, and no amount of well-formed phrases can change my birthplace. It is not wise to tell people that what they Know of themselves is faulty. Until one has developed full trust in the Love of All That Is, one has no real knowing on a conscious practical level, they remain in the 3/4 dimensional worlds of ‘faith and belief’. For example, I can move, at will, to any ‘location’ I so choose, dissolving and recombining these atoms and molecules into any form I choose, now that’s the freedom I talking about. Practical Freedom 101. PETER: Excellent news. Then I can stop replying to your posts and you can ‘recombine’ on my porch and we can have an in-depth discussion about life on earth, as-it-is with people as-they-are. And you can tell me more about your ‘ideas about existence and your personal being’, ‘true freedom’, and about your own personal ‘reality’. RESPONDENT: My experience has taught me, the people who are calling the most for Christ’s return, are the least prepared for it. PETER: The 5 billion out of 6 billion people in the world who don’t believe in the story of Jesus, the Son of God, are not prepared for it at all. But I am prepared for you to materialize on my front porch, so as to demonstrate the type of Practical Freedom you are talking about. Rather than waiting for Godot, or the Second Coming, after death, or the next lifetime, etc. – I got off my bum, out of the lotus position, got my head out of the clouds and rolled up my sleeves and set about the task of ridding this body of malice and sorrow. The rewards are extraordinary – tangible and actual and ever-present. RESPONDENT: Hi everyone, Divinity walks on two feet ... around here, at least. PETER: Is this the new humble No 12? Recently you wrote –
I take it you have now decided to have legs and feet so you can blend in with mere mortals. * RESPONDENT: No 6 asked why did it require courage to be one’s own self? For all of the meditations and practices folks put themselves thru, it takes ‘courage’ to act accordingly in a world that doesn’t even believe in anything you are about. That is why so many who are ‘searching’ find themselves in monasteries, ashrams, caves, deserts, etc. There is a belief that there is no place in the world for spiritual pursuit, except in these prescribed areas. PETER: To the contrary, the West has increasingly indulged in Eastern religion for some 40 odd years now to the point that it has now become mainstream. The bookstores are awash with spiritualism, Hollywood has embraced the New Dark Age, the Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra are media stars, Oprah Winfrey ‘got’ spiritualism, etc. etc. In fact, many Gurus and teachers make a very good living from the current fashionable fascination with all things spiritual and mystical. Many people opt out of seeking power in the real world, only to seek power and authority in the spiritual world. Any power over another human being be it physical, psychological or psychic is the very antithesis of freedom. RESPONDENT: One must accept one’s personal experience so completely, that that awareness is not left ‘out there’ in the cosmos somewhere, rather is brought to ‘ground level’ where that awareness is put to use like a new tool that was purchased in the hardware store. PETER: The perennial problem with having one’s head permanently in the clouds is that one ultimately believes that nothing really matters at ‘ground level’, that human life on this planet is somehow ‘perfect’. If one believes in Eastern religion then one thinks and feels that this physical planet is only illusionary and all human suffering – all the wars, rapes, murders, fights, feuds, domestic violence, repressions, retributions, depression and suicides – is an essential part of some weird Divine Plan. The only way to become free of malice and sorrow is to cultivate a new awareness that is not tainted by such devious spiritual beliefs. RESPONDENT: If, in my final analysis, I have ‘discovered’, I am Love, in action, in form, I am then behoved to Act accordingly, for my own sanity’s sake. Anything else would be continuing a ‘personal lie’. PETER: The problem with feeling oneself to be a Divine Being trapped in a flesh and blood body is then what do you do, how do you act? Despite the fact that one feels timeless, the clock still ticks, the moments do pass. Despite the fact that one feels as though ‘I can move, at will, to any ‘location’ I so choose, dissolving and recombining these atoms and molecules into any form I choose’, all the God-men’s so called miracles are but myth and legend. Despite the fact that one feels as though one is uniquely chosen to spread the message of Universal Love, one still finds oneself alone and isolated, not only from all the other uniquely chosen God-men but also from one’s own grateful followers. No amount of love, no amount of gratitude is ever enough, for Divine Love is as much a gaping hole as human love is – it is insatiably demanding and ultimately unfulfilling. The lives of the God-men have attested to the insatiable desire for more and more love and more and more commitment from their followers in the name of the beloved God-man’s Teachings. Just a note that I am not deliberately neglecting women teachers and Goddesses – it is simply easier writing in one gender only and the wielding of psychic power in the religions has traditionally been a male preoccupation, especially in the East. Women have generally been taught to wield their power covertly and are rarely found in the upper echelons of religions. RESPONDENT: I may ‘fit in’ with the masses because I ‘looked and acted’ normally, however, my personal house would be in disorder ... guilt and fear would be behind my interactions with the world around me ... ego! PETER: There are thousands and thousands of Eastern spiritual followers who have had some sort of awakening experience whereby they have had a glimpse of feeling Divine and have chosen to act as though they have risen above the masses and the earthly plane. Many are therapists, healers, group leaders, teachers, meditation leaders, etc. and their new act or identity well suits their professions. They learn to talk the talk, radiate the energy and tap into the psychic fears and desires of their clients and followers for their own Self-gratification and income. RESPONDENT: If anyone wants to make an observation on what the difference makes on a physical level, look at how the Dalai Lama carries himself, his body movements, his facial expression, and compare them to the Pope. PETER: Your assessment does seem superficial and no doubt biased by your passion for Eastern religion as opposed to Western religion. Curiously both men both hold similar positions within their religions. Both are theocrats, one of Vatican municipality, the other of a country he has fled, both are supported by ‘the masses’, both lived in idle Holy splendour surrounded by the finest riches of the country, both have humble servants, adoring followers and enormous unquestioning power over their administration and the masses in general, and both have been chosen by the high priests. RESPONDENT: Truth is self evident when looked for honestly ... no excuses. Truth, when intentionally hidden, becomes heavy and burdensome. PETER: The more one feels oneself to be Divine, the more one is burdened and obliged to spread the message. After all, one has discovered the Truth that we are not mortal grubby flesh and blood bodies, that there is no death, that this physical world is just an illusion and ‘who we really are’ is an Immortal Spirit. The problem is that this is purely a Self-centred realization for the realization is that ‘I’ am Divine and every thing, and every one else, is but an illusion. This inherent Self-centred nature of the experience is exactly why all of the Enlightened beings, why each claim they have a unique message, why they are apt to put down or criticize the Teachings of others and why they compete with each other for followers. This inherent Self-centredness of all spiritual experiences is the direct cause of all the disharmony and rivalry amongst the present crop of teachers and Gurus and all the ongoing religious conflicts and wars between the followers of Long Dead Gurus on the planet. This inherent Self-centredness applies whether one calls one’s new identity an Impersonal Self or a Self – it is still a Self-experience. Purity and perfection can only be realized when both the personal self, as ego, and the instinctual self, as soul, are extinct, and this is clearly evidenced in a pure consciousness experience of the actual world. Doing only half-the-job – sublimating the ego and becoming a Self – does nothing to eliminate one’s malice and sorrow. PETER: Just a comment on your teachings of the spiritual superstitious version on the functioning of the human body that you posted to No. 30 – RESPONDENT: I am reminded of something I needed to ‘connect’ many years ago. Something that represents a common ‘mis-location’ in understanding the functionings of the ‘body consciousness’. I am going to ‘split hairs’ here to make a point. PETER: An understanding of exactly what is consciousness is essential for anyone seeking a genuine freedom from malice and sorrow.
Thus consciousness has three meanings –
In a normal person consciousness is what is happening when one is alive and awake. Unconsciousness is what is happening when alive and in deep sleep, concussed or anaesthetized and is epitomized by oblivion.
The second meaning is the one that is commonly used to describe the awareness of oneself and is epitomized by three faculties ... the sensate, the cerebral and the affective. Thus in a normal person consciousness refers to the consciousness of the psychological and psychological entity only, who we ‘think’ and ‘feel’ we are, as opposed to what we are. It is only in a Pure Consciousness Experience that the psychological and psychic entity’s affective and cerebral dominance is temporarily absent that the extraordinary perfection and purity of the actual is sensately evidenced.
This collective sense of consciousness forms such a strong illusion as to appear real. Unfortunately the actual evidence of this collective ‘consciousness’ is that it varies from culture to culture and religion to religion and, as such, is merely a socially imbibed and adopted belief system. The collective sense of consciousness is the direct result of the automatic instilling of a culturally appropriate conscience in each group member with its associated values, ethics and morals. This collective consciousness is epitomized by a feeling of belonging to a group and gives rise to such feelings as ‘we are all one’, ‘we are all God’s children’, ‘we are all That’ or other similar platitudes. As is evidenced by the facts of ethnic, territorial, religious and ethical wars these feelings are utterly fanciful and nonsensical. The over-riding selfishness inevitably proves stronger for those willing to grab for power, and in the spiritual world the most powerful leaders inevitably declare narcissistically that ‘I am the One’, I am God’ or ‘I am That’. For the mere followers, the collective consciousness operates such that one will inevitably surrender one’s will for the supposed ‘good of the whole’, and if ‘push comes to shove’ to willingly and passionately kill and die for the group and its leader. It is this instinctive feeling of a collective consciousness that lies at the very heart of one’s social identity and forever enslaves the individual to a particular group and all human kind to the Human Condition of malice and sorrow. RESPONDENT: The Brain is a computer; it processes information and relays it to the proper centres. The information is brought in thru attraction by attention of the mind. PETER: What about the sensate input from the eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin? Or is this purely illusionary for you? Are you so self-obsessed that you run on a closed mind-loop of only ‘I’ exist and everything else and everyone else is ‘Me’? Are you still being the sole creator of your own existence again? To remind you of a previous correspondence that you failed to reply to –
If you insist on creating your own reality, I guess it doesn’t matter a fig how your mind operates or what you think and feel because it has nothing to do with anyone else who exists in your reality. No wonder you desperately need to feel ‘We are all one’ and need to connect with others because it must be very, very lonely living in a reality of your own making and of which you are the ultimate authority. RESPONDENT: The ‘hardware’ that attracts the mindal energy is intelligence, the software that governs how that energy/info is used is intellect. PETER: The hardware is a two brain system – an ancient instinctual brain that is primary and thoughtless emotional and a newer neo-cortex that is the seat of human intelligence. The software consists of two facets – a social programming that forms one’s social identity and an instinctual survival program that forms one’s instinctual self. Being software, both these programs can be deleted – i.e. although they are felt to be real, cause immense pain and suffering both in oneself and to others one comes in contact with, they can be changed and ultimately deleted. This deletion of the instilled social and genetically-encoded instinctual programming results in a beneficent clarity of intelligence freed from the insidious influence of the animal passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. RESPONDENT: Of course the more refined the intelligence, the more refined the information being processed. PETER: The more conditioned the programming, and the more passionate one is about this conditioning, the less intelligence is free to operate. RESPONDENT: The real discovery here is that the ‘seat of intelligence’ and also the governing software, are located in the same place ... the Heart. PETER: There was an enormous outcry by the church when heart transplants were first proposed. The reason the ancients believed the heart was the centre is that the ancient reptilian brain – the seat of the instinctual passions – pumps chemicals to the heart as a response to fear, aggression, nurture and desire, thus these responses are sensately experienced in the heart region. RESPONDENT: One of the problems people experience is mistaking the Heart for the centre of emotions. That centre is in the pit of the abdomen. When the emotions are allowed out of their ‘pit’, they are brought up into Heart for purification, and ‘intelligently’ dispensed with. PETER: The more savage emotions of fear, dread and despair are sensately experienced as chemical flows in the gut or abdomen whereas the tender emotions of nurture and desire tend to be sensately experienced as chemical flows in the heart region. The source of these emotions has been empirically demonstrated to be the ancient reptilian brain and we that humans share these instinctual passions – both the tender and the savage – with other sentient animals. These genetically-encoded instinctual passions are blind nature’s rather clumsy software package designed to ensure the survival of the species – to endow each and every human with fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Being only software, this programming can be consciously and deliberately deleted if one is daring enough. RESPONDENT: The mind is just a big sea of information, nothing to be ‘glorified’, as has been done on this planet. PETER: And yet it is the process of thinking that has brought the amazing technological advances in safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure that an increasing number of we modern human beings are beginning to enjoy. And yet the church, the priests and their faithful followers would have us condemn and demean intelligence in favour of believing some mythical God or Higher intelligence is going to actualize peace on earth – an end to the grim instinctual psychological and psychic battle for survival still fought between all human beings on the planet. It’s time to get real and stop mouthing ‘self’-gratifying psittacisms from the past. RESPONDENT: The brain can only ‘process’ the feeling/emotion, that’s where one finds themselves ‘looping’ on some issue and staying awake all night. PETER: So why blame the brain for this self-centred neurosis – why not turn one’s attention on the real issue that is inhibiting peacefulness – one’s precious feelings and emotions – both the savage and the tender? Why not look somewhere different than the traditional, fashionable hackneyed solution that has failed again and again? RESPONDENT: If that information is taken out of the realm of the mental/mind and embraced/accepted by the Heart, the ‘looping’ ceases. PETER: Indeed, one can dissociate from these churning emotions by going inside and imagining oneself to be above it all to connect with the Light, to feel God, to become an Impersonal Higher Self, or whatever other feeling state one gets into. One gets out of grim reality and escapes into a Greater Reality, by whatever name or whatever God, but it is all a fantasy, an illusion based on an illusion. The pioneering challenge is now for those willing to abandon both reality and Reality in search of the ‘self’-less experience of actuality. RESPONDENT: The ‘intelligent’ manner to handle ‘the problem’ is then sent into the mental, if a physical action is needed ... or an ‘understanding’ appears in processing centres that puts the mental to ‘bed’. The ‘ah hah’ thing. PETER: The ‘‘ah hah’ thing’ is the enormous relief that one doesn’t have to do anything except realize that the world of people, things and events is all an illusion and ‘who’ you really are is a spirit in transit – a grandiose ‘me’ of Godly power and immortality. RESPONDENT: There is a ‘sister’ of mine from India, who has been known as Hazur. She said something I really appreciated, ‘A quiet mind is a Divine Mind’. That’s kind of opposite of what is taught, isn’t it? PETER: Not nowadays, No 12. This advice is taught in the popular press and is fashionable in both East and West. The extreme form of mind quieting is those people who spend hours a day, sitting in a quite corner with their eyes closed, hiding from the world seeking Divine Realization. The churning of the mind that everyone experiences is ‘self’-centred neurotic thoughts and worries that are underpinned by the feelings and emotions arising from the passions integral to the instinctual animal ‘self’. To trip off into a fantasy of a real Self with a ‘Divine Mind’ is a self-indulgent ancient fantasy that is to head 180 degrees in the opposite direction to actually eradicating the problem. RESPONDENT: I am always counselling my clients to stop thinking, so they can Know. I get a lot of funny looks ... PETER: But I bet when they get a taste of thoughtless dissociation from the world of people, things and events they find it addictive. It is such a cheap way out for one has to do nothing, there is no work to be done, there is no tough stuff to do, no changes to be made – just an acceptance of things the way they are, i.e. that humans will always be malicious and sorrowful and that the solution is to feel oneself to be Divine and above it all. It’s called copping out and I did it for years before integrity forced me to stop kidding myself, and others, that I was being genuine and honest. I finally realized that if I was fooling myself, I was being really, really silly.
Peter’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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