7.8.2000

RESPONDENT: This planet-plane of existence, is a fixed point on the experiential road to self and God realization. It is predictable in its function. In a simple sense, it is like an obstacle course designed to open our individual ‘inner’ reality. A catalyst. There are many who are trying to fix it. It is divine love that creates those obstacles in the first place which provide the agony and trauma through which we grow.

PETER: So you are saying it is divine love that creates all the agony, trauma, suffering, wars, murders, poverty, rapes, domestic violence, child abuse, corruption, etc. on this planet-plane simply in order that a few may realize that they are God? If this is all the creation of divine love it does seem a Self-ish creation to me. Could it be that your realization that human beings are but cannon-fodder in some great divine plan is not some spiritually/ culturally influenced creation of your own ‘individual ‘inner’ reality’?

As a kid, when I heard the Christian stories of God, I always thought it was such a cruel and sadistic story if you weren’t born a Christian and could achieve redemption and salvation. Much later in life I found myself enmeshed in Eastern religion and eventually came to be aware that its fundamental premise is that earthly existence is meant to be suffering – a meaning of life vision that is equally cruel and sadistic.

RESPONDENT: It is true that we each will become free, but only when we graduate. The ‘undergraduate’ always goes through a stage where he believes the curriculum and infrastructure needs changing. It is a great awakening to realize that all is perfect, even these well meaning and painful attempts to alter the ‘status quo’.

PETER: Would you tell the children in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Northern Ireland, North Korea, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Eritrea, etc. that they should just realize ‘all is perfect’? This ‘all is perfect’ philosophy was invented in the East by reclusive monks who were provided with money, wealth, food and sustenance by others and then spent all day in sheltered seclusion from the evils of the world looking ‘inside’ for perfection.

This is called denial and dissociation and is now practiced in the West by spiritual seekers who ‘turn off’ their television sets, if they own one, ‘tune out’ from the world of people, things and events and ‘tune in’ to an ... ‘individual ‘inner’ reality’ ... to use your words.

*

PETER: You also wrote to me in a separate post –

RESPONDENT: Every hive needs a queen, workers and drones, they are all inextricably linked.

PETER: It must feel very good for those who are born average normal human beings to eventually realize that they indeed are a queen and thus not one of the workers or drones.

RESPONDENT: When I started to ‘see’ I began criticizing the apparent foolishness of various roles, particularly from a religious perspective. The sheep need a shepherd, just as much as the shepherd needs the sheep.

PETER: Are you saying you ‘stopped criticizing the apparent foolishness of various roles, particularly from a religious perspective’ because you now realize ‘the sheep need a shepherd’? Are you saying you have now become a shepherd with a flock of your own? Why is it that all seekers of freedom, peace and happiness who go all the way on the spiritual path end in the role of being yet another shepherd, desperately gathering yet another flock, in yet another field?

RESPONDENT: The sheep may safely graze, and the shepherd has a sense of purpose. ‘Just love honey glazed lamb’, hahaha.... All is well.

PETER: How is it that I am accused of being cynical on this list? I find the universal acceptance of the inescapability and unchangeability of human suffering, anguish, violence and torment that is written into ancient wisdom – as in, ‘it is all God’s will’ – to be a deeply pessimistic, undignified and ultimately demeaning view of the existence of the human species on this paradisiacal planet.

Of course, if one believes in this theo-centric viewpoint, and everyone does, then the only way to be free from suffering, apart from suicide, is to pay homage to, and surrender to, one’s God – or better still, to rise to the top of the spiritual hierarchy and believe that one is a God in one’s own right.

Thank goodness there is now an alternative to this impassioned madness.

24.8.2000

RESPONDENT: This planet-plane of existence, is a fixed point on the experiential road to self and God realization. It is predictable in its function. In a simple sense, it is like an obstacle course designed to open our individual ‘inner’ reality. A catalyst. There are many who are trying to fix it. It is divine love that creates those obstacles in the first place which provide the agony and trauma through which we grow.

PETER: So you are saying it is divine love that creates all the agony, trauma, suffering, wars, murders, poverty, rapes, domestic violence, child abuse, corruption, etc. on this planet-plane simply in order that a few may realize that they are God? If this is all the creation of divine love it does seem a Self-ish creation to me. Could it be that your realization that human beings are but cannon-fodder in some great divine plan is not some spiritually/ culturally influenced creation of your own ‘individual ‘inner’ reality’?

As a kid, when I heard the Christian stories of God, I always thought it was such a cruel and sadistic story if you weren’t born a Christian and could achieve redemption and salvation. Much later in life I found myself enmeshed in Eastern religion and eventually came to be aware that its fundamental premise is that earthly existence is meant to be suffering – a meaning of life vision that is equally cruel and sadistic.

RESPONDENT: Love the term ‘so you are saying’ ;-)... I said what I said because that was the way to say it. You have an interpretation within your realm of experience, as I do.

PETER: I see you have averted from answering my question. I was seeking clarification as to what you were saying, as I am interested in the substance and content of your statement – not the style. It is called seeking clarification so as to avoid misinterpretation and obscuration of our relative ‘realms of experience’.

RESPONDENT: The mechanics of life within the planes of matter, energy time and space are bound by laws, many in the physical (physics) realm were discovered fairly recently. Many ‘discoverers’ added views such as Albert E, and more recently, Stephen Hawking, which can (relative to their field) appear to be ‘imaginary’, ‘metaphysical’ or mystical.

PETER: Neither Einstein nor Hawking work in practical empirical science but in the field of theoretical sciences, dealing with things that can neither be seen nor measured. Both men are self-proclaimed mystics, searching for the meaning of life in mathematical equations and unfathomable theories.

[quote]: One of the key elements in the wave of public attention that broke over Einstein at the end of 1919 was the alleged incomprehensibility of his new theory. <Snip>. But the world seemed to want their new hero to be incomprehensibly clever, and one popular story of the time (which Einstein encouraged) was that Einstein himself had once claimed that the general theory was understood by only twelve men (in 1919 it would have been taken for granted that no woman could possibly understand the theory).

But perhaps we can understand this public response to the new hero, since something very similar has happened to another cosmologist at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s. Stephen Hawking, hailed by many people as the greatest scientist since Einstein, wrote a book, ‘A Brief History of Time’, that became an international bestseller, in spite of (or, perhaps, because of the widespread story that nobody who lacked a PhD in physics could begin to understand it. Once again, the world had found itself a guru of incomprehensible genius, to admire and set on a pedestal. ‘Einstein, A life in Science’, Ch. 6, by Michael White and John Gribbin Simon and Schyuster 1993

It is important to make a clear distinction as to what are physical laws – empirically measurable, clearly demonstrable and readily repeatable – and what is mere theory, postulation or assumption. I find it most telling that the clocks of the worldwide satellite navigation system were programmed according to Newtonian laws and not according to Mr. Einstein’s theory that suggests time somehow varies relative to the velocity of the clock itself. Similarly, all of the space exploration uses Newtonian physical laws and not Einstein’s esoteric theory.

A scientific theory ain’t a physical law – a theory is speculation or conjecture.

RESPONDENT: The reason I mention this is because I have discovered, without the brilliant minds that these guys were born with, as many others have, laws that transcend the ‘cultural laws’.

PETER: Theoreticians such as Mr. Einstein and Mr. Hawking and their ilk are human beings, exactly like you and I. As such, it is inevitable that they had an upbringing steeped in religious/ spiritual belief. Their theories are about the creation and ending of this eternal universe and about ‘other-worlds’, other than this infinite universe. The physical, actual universe, being eternal, has no beginning and no end and, being infinite, has no edge or outside to it.

RESPONDENT: One of which is the impeccable law of karma. When I was at the angry stage of criticizing, (and trying to understand) the gross inequities here, the most extreme in most people’s eyes being such as child starvation, and the various examples you made, I was willing to do everything and anything to ‘know’.

PETER: Why did you stop seeking an answer and settle for the traditional ancient Bronze Age wisdom?

RESPONDENT: I couldn’t reconcile the beauty and perfection at the atomic, and cosmic level, with the apparent ‘stuff ups’ within the human situation.

PETER: Yes indeed. Why is it on this paradisiacal and bountiful planet where increasing numbers of human beings are enjoying unprecedented safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure that the Human Condition is still epitomized by malice and sorrow? I saw the enormity of this perversion one day in a pure consciousness experience. I clearly remember driving up the escarpment that encircles the lush semi-tropical coastal plain where I live. I stopped and looked out at the edge of the greenery, where a seemingly endless ribbon of white sand neatly bordered it from the azure ocean. Overhead great mounds of fluffy white clouds sailed by in the blue of the sky. Right in the foreground stood a group of majestic pines towering some thirty meters tall. I was struck by the vastness, the stillness and the perfection of this planet, the extraordinariness of it all, but ... and the ‘but’ are human beings! Human beings who persist in fighting and killing each other and can’t live together in peace and harmony one on one, let alone collectively.

It was one of those moments that forced me to do something about myself, for I was undoubtedly one of those 6 billion people. It was exactly one of those moments that forced me to do something about my anger, my sadness, my avoidance, my selfish disinterest – and stop either hiding my head in the sand or continuing to stick my head in the clouds, pretending I was ‘above it all’.

RESPONDENT: I now realize that to blame the recent crash of the Concorde on ‘the law of gravity’ is extremely limited. I am saying the suffering you talk of is simply a result of the consequences of each individual’s own action.

PETER: So, are you saying everyone killed in the Concorde crash was killed as the result of karma? Karma means –

In Buddhism & Hinduism, the sum of a person’s actions, esp. intentional actions, regarded as determining that person’s future states of existence. Oxford Dictionary

– is directly translatable as God’s will. If you are evil, you get punished, if you are good you get to go to Heaven or Mahaparinirvana or the Further Shore.

RESPONDENT: Why are some children born badly malformed, for example. You can take the chaos theory if you choose, or absorb the higher understanding.

PETER: Well, according to your higher understanding they must be born deformed because of the law of karma. Given that they are born malformed, they presumable got their bad karma from something they did in a previous life. This higher understanding only adds an even more perverse twist to Mr. Buddha’s central tenant, the first of his Noble Truths, – ‘life is fundamentally disappointment and suffering’. Not only do you suffer once, you get to do it again and again and again and if you’re really bad you get to be re-born malformed, or get to die in a plane crash.

RESPONDENT: We all ultimately do (that answers your Self-ish comment). WE ALL ULTIMATELY GET THERE.

PETER: ... unless we stuff up, become a disbeliever, or do something really bad and then get to be re-born malformed or die in yet another plane crash. With this sort of a horrendous scenario running it is no wonder people desperately want to ‘get there’ ... and out of having to be here, on earth.

RESPONDENT: To quote another of ‘Their’ songs. ‘The long and winding road’.

PETER: To believe in karma is to believe in an endless, torturous road with no hope other than getting there – to a meta-physical ‘other-world’. Thus a spiritual seeker eagerly forfeits any chance of peace on earth for the utterly ‘self’-ish pursuit of an eternal peace after physical death.

RESPONDENT: I totally associated with your views and how you expressed them.

PETER: I’m flabbergasted. You have managed to sidestep everything I have said by claiming a higher understanding and a higher moral position. You stated –

[Respondent]: ‘It is true that we each will become free, but only when we graduate. The ‘undergraduate’ always goes through a stage where he believes the curriculum and infrastructure needs changing’ [endquote].

– thereby implying that you have graduated, while I remain at undergraduate level.

This is not associating with the facts I have presented at all – this is saying they don’t apply to you because you have risen above them.

RESPONDENT: The same ‘miracle of life’, (laws), that illuminated my anger, also gave me the answers. To most, this just doesn’t make sense. They ‘k-NO-W’ of many that didn’t make it, and some that have no hope. They don’t yet K-now that the law of karma and reincarnation are aspects of the same law.

PETER: Well, given you passionately believe that it is all God’s will I guess it is your way of justifying the appalling malice and sorrow that result from our genetically encoded instinctual passions. You say the ‘miracle of life’ – God by another name – illuminated your anger in order that you could see it is all God’s will. So God created your anger and then illuminated it, to show you His power in order that you have a Higher Understanding. This only makes sense if you are into circular thinking predicated upon a false premise and can see no further than a ‘self’-centred or ‘Self’-centred viewpoint of the physical universe.

A ‘self’-less view of the vibrant pure and perfect actuality of the physical universe only happens in a pure consciousness experience and not in an affective ‘Self’-centred experience such as an epiphany, Satori or a similar Altered State of Consciousness.

RESPONDENT: An interesting ‘recent’ discovery indicates the reality of ‘tissue memory’ for example.

PETER: One of the more curious aspects of the human brain is that the primitive animal-instinctual segment, commonly termed the reptilian brain, seems to have its own separate memory, which is an emotional-only memory of past events. There is also evidence that any long-term memory recall is very short on factual detail, and further, that we only recall the last time we remembered the event rather than being able to trace back to the original event. Thus it is that these past memories are primarily psychological and psychic in nature, i.e. they are ‘my’ unreliable and largely emotional memories. When a current event triggers an automatic kick-in of an instinctual reaction, it also activates a feeling in the neo-cortex, and this often opens a floodgate, as it were, and we get past emotional memories flooding in as well. Many people also access these emotional memories deliberately as they like to indulge in the bitter-sweet feelings of sorrow or grief, or the lusty feelings of anger and revenge. This is not ‘tissue memory’ – this is base-instinctual memory.

RESPONDENT: Science is also ‘unfolding’, as is everything, including the individual.

PETER: Empirical science is indeed progressing to the point that it is often able to correct, or even eliminate, the supposedly karmic-caused birth deformities you mentioned. This is despite the ethical and moral objections that doctors and scientists are playing God or interfering with the sacredness of life.

As for the ‘individual’ – humans stubbornly insist on remaining ensnared within the Human Condition, either by staying normal or becoming ‘spiritual’, and neither action is a sign of free individual autonomous behaviour.

RESPONDENT: Quantum science recognizes the predictability of a ‘cluster’, and the randomness of the ‘particle’.

PETER: ... as theories only.

RESPONDENT: This is the scientific explanation of the ‘spiritual law’ of the predictability of a ‘culture’, needing a ‘queen bee’ (to reintroduce the analogy), and the sacred uniqueness and individuality of ‘I’. The ‘I’s destiny is to individualize.

PETER: Well, I looked at this and I can make no sense at all of what you are saying, let alone its relevance to your previous statement.

RESPONDENT: One of the energies that fuels the ‘leap’ is anger and frustration at the understanding of the status quo. That has been my experience. With that insight came a torrent of understanding that I didn’t feel worthy of. That is also ‘par’ for the course.

PETER: What you describe is leaping out of feeling anger and frustration at other people’s behaviour and of your own associated feelings of helplessness and despair. This commonly fuels an affective experience of being touched by God, being saved, being born again, hearing God speak, feeling Divine Love, being let in on the secret, etc., depending upon one’s cultural/ religious/ spiritual predilections. These experiences are always accompanied by feeling immensely grateful to the teacher, the Master, God or existence. This gives rise to the spiritual feeling of being unworthy and feeling humble, whilst at the same time secretly feeling proud to have been especially Chosen.

RESPONDENT: Gurdjieff wanted to change the role of the lion. Within all the species, there is a narrow range of experience. One of the reasons people have such affinity with animals. A sense of comfort.

PETER: People feel affinity with animals because they empathize with them as fellow animals.

RESPONDENT: Within the human species you have ‘sinners’ and ‘saints’, and many recorded examples of ‘transformation’ from one ‘state’ to another.

PETER: There is plainly no anger or sadness in a cloud or a rock or a tree, but these passions – both the tender and the savage – clearly exist in many animal species, including humans. Only human beings with their ability to think and be aware of not only their actions but also their thoughts, feelings and their own mortality, have separated their actions and feelings into good and bad and invented the concept of ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’. To continue with these archaic beliefs is to abdicate what is an exciting individual opportunity – to actively rid oneself of the instinctual passions that are the cause of one’s own innate aggression and sadness.

RESPONDENT: To quote a well known hair conditioner ad (aaaaggghhhh...) ‘It won’t happen over night but it will happen’. Even the ad agencies are getting in on the act hahaha.

PETER: It certainly is not happening overnight as these fantasies have been around for at least 3,000 years and zilch has changed in basic human behaviour. Given there are over 2,000 religions still in operation, and yet more created every day as yet another being is transformed and is moved to spread the message, methinks the species is only sinking deeper into a quagmire, unless individuals start to take unilateral action.

*

RESPONDENT: Regarding your comments about me. I have the biggest T.V money can buy, I drive an XJK Jag convertible and live in a beautiful penthouse overlooking the Indian Ocean, but, of course, you were attempting to categorize me.

PETER: I am not attempting to categorize you – I leave that entirely up to you for I don’t know you at all. What I said was –

[Peter]: ‘This is called denial and dissociation and is now practiced in the West by spiritual seekers who ‘turn off’ their television sets, if they own one, ‘tune out’ from the world of people, things and events and ‘tune in’ to an ... ‘individual ‘inner’ reality’ ... to use your words.’ [endquote].

If you are not one of those people then you are not one of those people, but I personally know many who fit the category and often hear talk of the ‘evils’ of television.

*

RESPONDENT: When I started to ‘see’ I began criticizing the apparent foolishness of various roles, particularly from a religious perspective. The sheep need a shepherd, just as much as the shepherd needs the sheep.

PETER: Are you saying you ‘stopped criticizing the apparent foolishness of various roles, particularly from a religious perspective’ because you now realize ‘the sheep need a shepherd’? Are you saying you have now become a shepherd with a flock of your own? Why is it that all seekers of freedom, peace and happiness who go all the way on the spiritual path end in the role of being yet another shepherd, desperately gathering yet another flock, in yet another field?

RESPONDENT: I don’t follow you logic in assuming, because I see the link between the sheep and the shepherd, that I have become the latter.

PETER: Given you made the comment about various roles and mentioned only two, it implied you were either one or the other. Are you therefore saying you are a sheep? Or are you just watching what the sheep and the shepherds do ... as in, being a watcher?

RESPONDENT: You say why is it, that those who are enlightened assume that role? I say they have only taken a step to the next rung, even though the (m)asses venerate such figures. Feeds their EGO ... back on track again ... hahaha ... also fulfills the ‘prophecy’ (complies with the laws of predictability).

PETER: Are you now saying the enlightened ones are sheep, merely fulfilling the prophecy and complying with the laws of predictability?

RESPONDENT: You say there’s an alternative to this impassioned madness.

PETER: Loudly and clearly, in case you have missed the point, but I do understand it is impossible to see if you are completely immersed in impassioned madness of the real-world or the spiritual world. I figured if I had left one reality I had found lacking and entered into another world I found lacking then I had nothing left to loose by coming here to the actual world as a mortal flesh and blood body only.

RESPONDENT: And you ‘thanked goodness’.

PETER: I said ‘thank goodness’ which is a commonly used expression of great relief where I live.

RESPONDENT: My comment ... Understanding the so called ‘madness’ is the answer, but I’m not sure who or what to thank.

PETER: Jumping out of the real-world madness into spiritual world fantasies is but to jump from the frying pan into the fire. You may have understood something about reality but jumping into the spiritual world is not the answer – it is but another facet of the problem. The answer lays in stepping out of both illusionary worlds and into the actual world, leaving your ‘self’, behind ... where ‘you’ belong.

2.9.2000

RESPONDENT: I really appreciate and enjoy your contribution, particularly your point regarding your disillusionment staying at an ashram. I have always been aware of the whole guru phenomenon. Disillusionment ... an interesting word !!!

PETER: I would suggest that if you were really ‘aware of the whole guru phenomena’ you would have been able to have an insight into the whole of Eastern religion/spirituality. You would have seen that it is based on human beings surrendering to a Higher Power or His/Her/Its earthly representative. You would have seen that not only is this deliberate act of surrender the antithesis of freedom but that it does nothing but perpetuate the whole sorry mess of humans fighting it out with each other, whether it be in a grim reality or in the fantasy of a psychic-spiritual Greater Reality.

RESPONDENT: You explanation re the primitive brain etc was also illuminating in its detail.

PETER: Yes. It is quite amazing that there is a fully functional animal-instinctual brain inside the skull of every human being, which is ever primed to attack and defend, fight or flee, dominate or submit. This instinctual survival program is the primary cause of malice and sorrow in the world – all the wars, rapes, murders, tortures, corruption, perversions, retributions, domestic violence, despair, suicides and religious beliefs can be sheeted home to this fact that humans are instinctual animals at core. The ancient moral concepts of good and evil and the beliefs in Gods and Devils need be seen for what they are – imagined stories and fear-filled tales that were based on ignorance of the source of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

Now that a way has been pioneered to eliminate the instinctual passions it becomes a purely individual responsibility for those daring enough to make the journey out of the past.

RESPONDENT: When we ‘see’ after such (by western standards) extreme lifestyle, it is difficult to appreciate that others can ‘see’ without such austerities. So many feel ‘cheated’ if they are able acknowledge that they didn’t have to go through all the ‘self denial’. It is easier for them to deny an alternative route. ‘You couldn’t possibly know, you haven’t even BEEN to India let alone sat at the feet of the master’ is so common.

PETER: When I finally saw the futility and utter meaninglessness of the grim reality in the real world and had my dark night of the soul, I jumped into the spiritual world, boots and all, for I was desperate in my search for freedom, peace and happiness. I could never understand those who dabbled half-heartedly in the spiritual world or took a safe middle path by trying to keep a foot in each world. Many of the people I know from my spiritual years seem to have retreated back to a foot-in-each-world approach or have totally gone back to the real world seeking security and solace in their parent’s values and dreams.

What really moved me to live in spiritual communities, however, was to explore and test out the spiritual ideal of ‘we are all one’ and therefore ‘we can all live in peace and harmony together’. What I found in practice was the continual abysmal failure of an unliveable passionate ideal. I now realize the failures were not the followers’ fault, as the teachers and Masters would have us believe, but are due to the failure of the ancient teachings to address instinctual malice and sorrow as well as the duplicity of the teachers themselves.

RESPONDENT: I went up the opposite trail, seeking fortune/happiness in a tangible, material way, but I did so not willing to compromise my integrity on the altar of materialism. Each significant step opened up a new perspective on the whole journey. There was enough of these ‘stages’ (critical mass) for me to see the reality of the journey. I became successful in that I stuck to my original goal of ‘freedom’. I only understood that to mean at the earlier stages, financial freedom, with the result of not having to ‘work for the man’. Never having had a vocation as such, except to ‘see through the illusions’ which I ‘instinctively’ knew were present.

PETER: I don’t see that you went up the opposite trail at all, it seems as though you just didn’t go up the spiritual trail far enough to learn enough. I firstly lived in the material world, played the games as I was taught, and found them desperately lacking in integrity and meaning. I then lived in the spiritual world, played the games as I was taught, and found them also desperately lacking in integrity and meaning.

Financial freedom is as much a myth as spiritual freedom. The only freedom worth a pinch of salt is an actual freedom from both the real world and the spiritual world.

RESPONDENT: The only way we differ, if I understand you correctly, is that you see that the whole population will achieve this understanding ‘this lifetime’. If that is the case, do you see a ‘shift’ in the biological laws?

PETER: We differ enormously for, if I read what you are saying correctly, you have one leg in the real world and one leg in the spiritual world. I would see this as fence sitting where I come from. I don’t have a leg in any of these illusionary ‘self’-created worlds, for I am vitally interested in a ‘self’-less freedom from malice and sorrow that is eminently liveable in the marketplace.

What I am writing about is not some fashionable movement that will somehow cause the Heavens to open and a peaceful golden light descending to wipe out evil and make it all better. The freedom I am writing about is purely an individual matter of personal integrity such that one does the only practical, pragmatic and sensible thing one can do to contribute to peace on earth – actively facilitate one’s ‘self’-immolation.

RESPONDENT: The book The Celestine Prophesy had an interesting way of describing this phenomenon. Up to the eighth ‘insight’ (of nine) ... to this point a great book of ‘confirmation’ for me), the ninth is where disciples simply move to a higher resolution of vibration, supposedly similar to that of the Mayan race.

PETER: I find the supposed wisdom of the Celestine Prophecies and similar books to be utter nonsense – a sort of a mass-appealing nonsensical mish-mash of morals, ethics, feel-good homily and escapist fantasy in typical New Dark Age style.

As for the Mayans, it was trendy in the West many years ago to laud them as an advanced civilization but the accumulated evidence of their sheer brutality and fondness for offering human sacrifices to the Gods has since dimmed their shining light to almost black.

RESPONDENT: My experience (inherited and supplemented this life) tells me that we have to encounter the ‘illusions’ before we can be ‘disillusioned’.

PETER: How can one inherit experience? Given that we are all here for the first and only time, the only valid experience is personal experience, supplemented by the facts gained from the successes and failures of other human beings currently here, or who have lived before us. The only inheritance I hung on to was my father’s advice to be happy, despite the fact that he clearly did not know how. When I eventually plucked up the courage to question the inherited spiritual/religious wisdom I lived by for 17 years, I found it not only lacking in substance and relevance but ludicrous in content. No wonder there is no peace on earth after 3,000 years of spiritual/religious wisdom – peace on earth is not even on their agenda.

RESPONDENT: When the existence of the individual is dominated by physical survival, as has been the case since recorded history, the statement ‘to a hungry man, God is a piece of bread ‘ still stands.

PETER: So therefore ‘to a rich and well-fed man, God must be merely a sop or a baby’s dummy’. For me, living as I do in a relatively safe country, with all the comfort, leisure and pleasure available in these times, I had to admit that I was neither, happy nor harmless despite my boots-and-all spiritual involvement ... and that deeply troubled me.

RESPONDENT: Do you see humanity all achieving states similar to ours simultaneously?

PETER: Again, we live in different worlds, so your question makes no sense. I can only assume by what you write that you see yourself having some sort of higher state of consciousness than the rest of humanity. Given that this belief in a higher consciousness has been pursued by billions of practitioners over millennia I see no reason at all why the delusion of Divinity should somehow break out like some contagious disease in the billion or so believers now on the planet.

I personally have been witness to a 30-year span of the West’s flirtation with Eastern religion and I see no fundamental change in human behaviour – in fact, what I see is an increase in both the normal head in the sand denial and the spiritual head in the clouds escapism.

RESPONDENT: There are many that subscribe to the view that ‘God will come again, and everybody will be uplifted’. Even that limited ‘belief’ has two streams. One, it will happen within the physical realm and two, at some ‘other place’.

PETER: What amazes me is the plethora of confused, conflicting and contradictory beliefs and ideals that are hobbled together under the umbrella of spirituality or ‘higher consciousness’. A better term than higher consciousness would be ‘muddled consciousness’, or, as I am apt to say – humanity is presently passing through the New Dark Ages ... with absolutely no sign of them ending.

The only way to actualize peace on earth is to step out of both the real world and the spiritual world, and leave your ‘self’ and your ‘Self’ behind, where ‘you’ belong.

The only way to become unselfish, pure and perfect is to become completely ‘self’-less – to eliminate both ego and soul.

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