18.8.2000

RESPONDENT: I’m new to this discussion and I’ve only read the past month’s posts so I may have missed some important parts of your posts. While some on the list are calling you cynical, I, for now, will simply view your words as a passionate critique.

PETER: Well, there are many passionate critiques of the Eastern spiritual path around nowadays. The West’s flirtation with Eastern religion began in the 19th century among the intellectuals of Europe but only blossomed into a popular movement that essentially grew out of the Peace movement in the 1970s. As such, there have now been many Gurus who have come and gone and many first-hand insider accounts are available about their ‘off-stage’ character and lifestyle. There is also an increasing scrutiny of Eastern religion and philosophy as more of the ancient texts are being translated and studied. The veil of mystique is being lifted and it is becoming increasingly obvious that Eastern religions are as puerile a fantasy as are the Western religions.

To be a mere critic of Eastern religion, while useful in itself, would ultimately be a negative-only exercise if no alternative was available. The alternative is a genuine and down-to-earth freedom from the Human Condition of instinctual malice and sorrow that will inevitably result in the ending of the senseless litany of violent mayhem, bitter resentment, escapist fantasies, melancholy and depression that plague the human species.

This new and non-spiritual down to earth path to freedom has only recently been discovered and is now in its initial pioneering phase.

RESPONDENT: At the end of your last post to No 15 you wrote ‘Thank goodness there is now an alternative to this impassioned madness.’ I’ve heard plenty of criticism in your posts but I have yet to hear what this ‘alternative’ is. Could you please clarify this grey area for me?

PETER: I listed some pre-requisites for anyone to be interested in this third alternative in a recent post to No. 14, but perhaps the most significant requirement is a burning discontent with your life as-it-is. For me, this discontent meant I could not stop searching for freedom, peace and happiness – no matter what. When I had finally run the gamut of the spiritual world, I could only acknowledge that success on the spiritual path meant I was becoming more isolationist, I found myself blaming others for faults and attributes I could no longer ignore in myself, I was turning away from the possibility of an intimate one-to-one companionship and I was abandoning the hope of getting to the bottom of my failure to uninhibitedly enjoy sexual play.

When I finally saw the utter selfishness of wanting the power of God-realization for myself, it was such a blow that it was enough incentive to look elsewhere. What attracted me to this third alternative was that it meant I could bring an end to malice and sorrow in me – as opposed to spiritual transcendence and ‘self’-gratification. That it would be possible to become actually free of the human condition, here in this actual palpable sensual world – as opposed to a spurious spiritual freedom in a non -tangible, feeling-only imaginary world

A brief summary of the method to achieve this freedom –

The key to freedom from the Human Condition is the unique capacity of the human brain to be aware of its own functioning. Human beings are thus capable of being aware of both what they are thinking and what they are feeling – the instinctual passions in operation. This ability is commonly known as self-awareness.

In recent decades, this capacity to be aware of our instinctually sourced feelings has been complemented by the scientific studies of the neuro-biology of the human brain that are heralding the beginning of an empirical understanding of the genetically-encoded instinctual passions. These scientific studies, firmly based on empirical observations, make nonsense of the traditional denial of the existence of instinctual animal passions in humans and the ancient belief that we are born ‘innocent’.

‘Self’-awareness is possible in human beings in that we have the ability to develop and cultivate an awareness of both the feelings arising from our social conditioning of beliefs, morals and ethics one has been instilled with since birth and the feelings and emotions that result from the chemical surges of the instinctual passions in operation. What one is ultimately attempting to do is to achieve a pure ‘self’-less state and this involves observing, investigating and eliminating ‘who’ one thinks one is and ‘who’ one feels oneself to be – a radical procedure, to say the least.

This particular aspect of awareness is not a natural phenomenon, nor one practiced on any of the traditional spiritual paths, and needs to be actively cultivated and persistently practiced in order to ensure success. As such, one needs to proceed with a bloody-minded persistence the likes of which one has not mustered before. To do so, one needs firstly to establish a simple, unswerving and primary aim in life – a sincere intent to become happy and harmless, as one experiences in a pure consciousness experience, for 24 hrs. a day, every day.

The method of becoming happy and harmless, 24 hrs. a day, every day, is both devastatingly simple and ruthlessly efficient. One needs to continually ask oneself the question ... ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ ...

The continuous asking of this question is the key to cultivating and developing ‘self’-awareness but it does require persistence and perseverance in order to ensure success. The essential method is to undertake a total investigation into anything that is preventing one from being happy and harmless now – after all, if one’s aim is to be happy then one needs to be happy now, not at some time in the future, nor some time in the past. The question to ask oneself is – ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ This moment is, after all, the only moment I can experience being happy.

Any emotion such as anger, frustration or boredom that is preventing my happiness now, has to be traced back to its cause – the exact incident, thought, expectation or disappointment. At the root of this emotion is inevitably found a socially-instilled moral, ethic or belief or a crude instinctual passion. This very action of awareness, investigation and understanding of these morals, ethics, beliefs and the animal instincts ‘in action’ and how they prevent one from being happy and harmless actually weakens their influence on one’s thoughts and behaviour. The process, if followed diligently and obsessively, will ultimately cause them to disappear completely. The idea of undertaking this process being, of course, to eliminate the cause of one’s unhappiness, or the cause of making others unhappy, so that one can experience life at the optimum, now. If one is happy now, then good. One can then ‘raise the bar’ to feeling very good, then excellent, then ... perfect.

The method soon presents success incrementally, as freedom from beliefs and instinctual passions is indeed a freedom that results in increased peace and harmony for oneself and in one’s relating with one’s fellow human beings. The method does bring up fear and resistance, because one is dismantling one’s very ‘self’, those very beliefs and passions one holds so dearly.

It sounds so simple, but very few people are even willing to take a small step along the way. Most people would seemingly like their life to be better, but faced with the prospect of actually having to do something themselves, or having to change the way they are, they soon sneak away, only to re-run the old ancient ‘tried and failed’ methods.

Of course, the major fear is that it will work and ‘I’ will ‘be’ no more.

Ah, this got a bit long again, but maybe it went some of the way to answering your question, as well as No 14’s.

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