21.8.2000

PETER: The search for a ‘spiritual’ freedom, peace and happiness, based on ancient superstition and metaphysical ‘other-worldly’ beliefs, has been on-going for thousands of years and has now had its day. It’s time for a modern scientific, practical approach to finding a genuine and actual freedom from the Human Condition in total. A freedom from ancient belief and spiritual superstition. A freedom from being a social identity attempting to obey pious spiritual/ religious morals and follow unliveable social ethics in order to keep one’s instinctual passions under control. And, finally, the elimination of the instinctual ‘being’ in this flesh and blood body, which also eradicates the instinctual animal passions – fear, aggression, nurture and desire – that are the very cause of ‘my’ malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: So what you are saying is that we have replaced eastern mysticism with western mysticism, and now we should replace that with science.

PETER: No. Eastern mysticism, religion and philosophy began to become popular in Western intellectual and scientific circles in the 19^th Century and blossomed into a fashionable movement amongst the young in the 1970’s as an adjunct to the peace movement. In fact, Eastern religion has permeated Western thinking and culture to such an extent that ‘I am not the body’, past lives, karma, meditation, and dissociation is rampant in all levels of society in many countries.

RESPONDENT: Science can hold the same piousness and trapping that previous religions have.

PETER: Indeed. Theoretical sciences such as cosmology and quantum physics are steeped in spirituality and religion for they are trying to comprehend what created the universe, what is beyond the infinite universe, what existed prior to eternal time and what will exist after eternal time ceases. No wonder they keep coming up with same old fairy stories of God by whatever name and ‘other’-worlds by whatever name. When human beings think about things that they cannot see, touch, hear, smell or taste then the only option is to resort (is) to impassioned imagination – thought unfettered by common sense and direct sensate evidence. This imagination which is ‘self’-centred is ultimately obsessed by the fear of death giving rise to stories of after-lives in other-worlds which are but poetry and music for the soul.

RESPONDENT: The spirit is not practical.

PETER: The spirit, or Self, or ‘who’ we really feel we are deep down inside, is an identification with the tender-only aspects of the instinctual animal ‘self’ and this feeling-only identity is arrived at by repressing, controlling or dissociating from the savage passions. A bit from the Dalai Lama from a WIE interview describes this process very well –

[Dalai Lama]: According to Buddhism, all our efforts ultimately should go to training or shaping our minds. Emotions such as hatred or strong attachment are destructive and harmful – we call them ‘negative emotions.’ So how can we reduce these negative emotions? Not through prayer, not through physical exercise, but through training of mind. Through training of mind we try to increase the opposite qualities. When genuine compassion, infinite compassion, or unbiased compassion is increased, hatred is reduced. When equanimity is increased, attachment is reduced. All of these destructive emotions are based on ignorance, and the opposite, or antidote, of ignorance is enlightenment. This is why it is very important to analyze the world of the mind and find out what its basic nature is. What are the different categories of mind? Which minds are destructive? Which minds are constructive? And so on. Once we have analyzed all these questions, then we should try to control our minds by adding more good and removing the bad. Dalai Lama, What Is Enlightenment magazine

This noble experiment has had 3,000 years to work and has failed to deliver the goods – there is no end to either malice or sorrow. This is obvious from his statement when he espouses the virtue of compassion, which is feeling sorrow for others – one’s personal feeling of sorrow is transformed into an impersonal sorrow for others. The Buddhist practice of praying for peace is a way of rising above the evil in one’s ‘self’ and shifting the blame on to those who are ignorant of the Divine knowledge ‘you’ have gained.

RESPONDENT: There is no test or empirical data on why I love or hate or fear.

PETER: Quite the contrary. Human beings are unique among the animal species in that we have a large ‘modern’ brain – the neo-cortex – capable of thinking, planning and reflecting which overlays the primitive reptilian brain – the amygdala – the source of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Recent studies by LeDoux and others empirically confirm that the ‘quick and dirty’ instinctual, passionate responses of the primitive brain are primary and automatically over-ride the thoughtful, considered responses of the neo-cortex.

We are in fact genetically programmed to be driven, consumed or overwhelmed by the animal instinctual passions that give rise to malice and sorrow. Thus, in spite of all our best and well-meaning efforts to keep our malice and sorrow under control, we are but ‘animal’, at our very core.

LeDoux’s studies concern the relationship between the thalamus (relay centre), the amygdala (primitive brain/feelings) and the neo-cortex (modern brain/thoughts). The most significant fact of LeDoux’s experimentation is that the sensory input to the brain is split at the thalamus into two streams – one to the amygdala and one to the neo-cortex.

The input stream to the amygdala is significantly quicker – 12 milliseconds as opposed to 25 milliseconds to the neo-cortex. Also, less information goes to the amygdala – it operates as a quick primal scan to check for danger, or opportunity, which is why it is described as the ‘quick and dirty’ processing pathway.

This dual pathway not only results in automatic instinctual bodily responses but the amygdala also has a direct connection to the neo-cortex – i.e. we sensately experience the resultant chemical flow a split-second after the bodily reaction, causing us to ‘feel’ the instinctual response. This flow of chemicals, experienced in the neo-cortex, the heart and the ‘gut’, are the very palpable source of our instinctual emotions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

RESPONDENT: The goal of science is not to eradicate the body but to dissect it to its base components.

PETER: If you are talking of medical science – I am constantly astounded by the inventiveness and technological advances in understanding, observing, monitoring, diagnosing and repairing the human body. Medical science has contributed mightily to the almost doubling of the average lifespan of human beings in the last century and the dramatic reduction in infant mortalities.

RESPONDENT: But we are not our heart/legs/central nervous system.

PETER: This boundless, infinite, eternal, perfect and pure physical universe has materially manifested and evolved luxuriant and abundant carbon-based life on this planet. The human species, the most sophisticated of life forms, capable of thinking, planning and reflecting, represents the pinnacle of the emergence and development of life, as we know it, in the universe. The human body is a marvellous organism whose chief characteristic, apart from intelligence is an ability to be conscious of itself in operation. Given that each human being is born with an instinctual ‘self’ overlaid since birth with a further layer of social identity this consciousness is a ‘self’-consciousness. Thus a consciousness of ‘who’ I think and ‘who’ I feel I am is constantly predominant and the bare consciousness of the flesh-and-blood-body only gets a peek in during a pure consciousness experience when the ‘self’ is temporarily absent.

RESPONDENT: When we die, we are not here, and no amount of dissection will find were the soul used to be.

PETER: I remember as a child my mother would have me say a prayer at night time that ended – ‘... if I should die before I wake, pray the Lord my soul do take’. I remember wondering at the time where this soul was, but as I found out more about religion I thought the whole idea to be very weird. The idea of a white-bearded God sitting on a cloud and overseeing all this was pretty silly to me. And as for sending his Son down so he could do a few miracles, start a Religion, be nailed to a cross, and after a few days go back up to sit alongside Dad and see how it works out...!! I remember clearly thinking, if there was a God, how come he created the mess in the first place, and if he was responsible for this mess, why the hell didn’t he just come down and sort it out. I eventually teetered off on my own into the real-world and when this collapsed found myself embroiled on the spiritual path believing this offered the chance for peace on earth – an end to the insanity of wars, fighting and feuding. What I eventually found on the spiritual path was nothing other than Eastern religion which combined the traditional universal belief in an immortal soul with the chance for one’s soul to realize it is immortal, and therefore Divine, while still ‘in the body’.

The path to the extinction of one’s soul begins with gaily abandoning the belief in God and an eternal life, and setting about the process of total ‘self’-immolation, such that one gets to live the pure consciousness experience 24 hrs. a day, every day.

Actualism Homepage

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Peter’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.