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Peter’s Correspondence on Mailing List C Correspondent No 4
PETER: Hi,
[Peter]: I disagree, so thought I would butt in on your poetry and give you another definition of
here-now for your consideration. It’s a bit radical admittedly but it could be worth considering for someone who is vitally interested in
here-now and how to get to being here permanently. The first bit is the dictionary definition – <snip> RESPONDENT: Just wanted to tell you that you are actually disagreeing with Osho’s words and he is not here to discuss further with you. I did the same myself once, really embarrassing. PETER: I have no trouble at all disagreeing with Osho’s words. He is wrong and history has proved him wrong. RESPONDENT: I have read your mail, and it seems for now you have found your third alternative of searching after having tried searching in the spiritual and in the material. Isn’t it all about searching? If this third one works for you, fine, if Osho works for me, fine, it is all about searching, and what are we searching for? You seem to look for enlightenment, so do I, I guess so do we all, within our own concepts of what enlightenment is. But when the search is something on the outside, it will fail. When you say that the world of Osho is like another eastern religion, it is because you think the happenings, like white robe, meditations etc. are the main stuff. Well, in my experience it is not. They are only means to take us into the realms of ourselves, tools to dig out the direction inwards, they are nothing in themselves. Screaming Yahoo in front of an empty chair – didn’t you scream Yahoo for yourself? To see what it did to you? If you don’t have your focus on yourself, you can go on searching for the third and then the fourth and fifth alternative, you are searching on the outside just the same, and that doesn’t take you anywhere. Believe me! PETER: I suggest that what you will find in searching ‘inside’ is vast and limitless. There seems no limit as to what the human mind can imagine depending on the input. Human superstition and fears have conjured up countless good and evil spirits and gods in almost every possible form, resulting in about 6,000 religions on the planet. Within the ‘inner’ world of every human a passionate Ancient battle rages, while the physical outer world has moved on.
RESPONDENT: Your mail is long and I read 3/4 of it. I became very sad during my reading. Because you seem to think your third alternative is the only one working and what the rest of the world do is fake. How come you think like this? You describe many wonderful delights which I know of, a lot of what you have attained I have attained too. How come you are so narrow-minded (of course when you come from the mind it has to be narrow), why can’t you be open to the wonder it is that sensuous pleasure is available to everybody, that freedom and relying on ‘facts’ (instead of emotions and dreams) is something you can share with people coming from ‘other alternatives’? There are many paths because there are many different people of different tastes, but the essence is the same. Please don’t be a creator of barriers. Don’t look at what/how people do, but what they are. Look at their lives, their experiences. You will see we are not so different as you might wish us to be, even if we follow different paths. PETER: Fair enough, I was just offering an alternative Non-Spiritual down-to-earth solution to the Human Dilemma. So you are not interested, so why even bother to criticize if you haven’t even bothered to read my book. Guess you don’t even like the idea of what you ‘think’ it is about.
PETER: Great thing about a mailing list is that it is open for all to see, so I’ll take the opportunity to respond to your post to No 23 concerning me. So, to respond to your post – RESPONDENT No 23: Why do you allow yourself to be in any way affected by this person’s poison, this person is quite obviously a mind dweller and mind dwellers love to mind fuck, it is their expertise, just watch these experts disappear up their own arises if you just give them enough rope. RESPONDENT: You know, it is unbelievable that minds can be so thick. I haven’t given up hope that there must be a gap, a small slice of openness for communication to peep through, but it seems not so. I’ve never before in my life come across someone so totally brainwashed and it makes me a bit curious – how is it possible? But you’re right, it is poison and it doesn’t do good. PETER: Great that you haven’t given up hope of finding any small slice of openness. When I met Richard I was intrepid in both my questioning and scrutiny of what he was saying – there was no way I was just going to take on another set of beliefs. What he was saying that he had found out about the Human Condition was both incomprehensible and frightening to ‘me’. I would often recoil in bewilderment but I was determined to ascertain for myself whether or not what he was saying was factual. To go away, read, contemplate, question, investigate, recall, ponder, ruminate ... and then come back and ask again. I would pursue this process with each of my dearly-held beliefs until the clear facts emerged. I have written more of it in the Intelligence chapter of my journal, if you are interested. As for never coming across someone so brainwashed before, it is not that I am sprouting Wisdom or a new belief system. I am simply stating facts. When talking to Richard, I always tried to avoid getting into a ‘tis’ – tisn’t’, ‘right and wrong’ type of discussion. Much better to look at the facts of the situation – and they were always 180 degrees different to what I had been taught. The certainty and surety comes from facts and common sense, whereas doubt and confusion are the direct result of belief and feelings. And what I talk of is the actual world of purity and delight that we have all experienced in a pure consciousness experience – that world that is right under our noses when ‘I’ temporarily abdicate the throne. It is not a philosophy or something Richard has invented. This actual world is ever-present, but it is not a world that ‘I’ can experience, therefore ‘my’ demise is essential. A bit from my journal may throw some light on things –
So, this is not for the faint of heart or weak at knee – I just figured I had nothing left to lose ... except more of the same feeling of not being free, not really living ...
PETER: Just a reply to your observations about us, what we are saying, and how we are saying it. RESPONDENT: What doesn’t seem to be understood by Peter and Vineeto is that we all go, and we cannot go otherwise, in our own direction and pace. PETER: On the contrary, I understand this as a common belief, both in the ‘normal’ world and the ‘spiritual’ world. In the normal world it comes in the form of ‘who do you think you are’ or you ‘go with the flow’ or ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’. In the spiritual world it is enshrined in ‘Existence provides’ or ‘it is God’s will’ or ‘we are all Enlightened, we just don’t know it’ or ‘everything’s perfect anyway ...’ I had it very strongly and I was shocked out of it, firstly the death of my son aged 13, shortly followed by the death of the spiritual master that I followed. I then had a sense of urgency, such that I made becoming free my priority in life – and I wanted to be free, on this earth, in this lifetime. I found it increasingly difficult to believe in an afterlife or a God after the both deaths. I then simply put the ‘foot on the accelerator’ – I gave up waiting for Godot. But I firmly acknowledge that while the perfection and purity of the actual world is ever-present, under our very noses, it will not be everyone who is interested to discover and experience it. And fair enough too – we are, after all, becoming freer in a modern society. We now have access to a lot more information about life and, as such, are more free and able to decide for ourselves how we wish to live our lives. RESPONDENT: They claim to see clearly, but they miss totally that humanity exists of individuals. Hence they speak of their own experiences as if it was the truth of mankind – which it isn’t! PETER: ‘Humanity’ is the name we give to the 5.8 billion individual ‘I’s’ that, imbued with the instincts of fear and aggression, ‘battle it out’ for survival on the planet. ‘I’ am humanity and humanity is ‘me’, and there are 5.8 billion others. When I saw this clearly it was obvious that ‘I’ was the problem and the only person I could change was me. It was senseless to try and change 5.8 billion others, useless to blame others since ‘I’ was one of them, and it was silly in the extreme to wait for the Gods to do it as they were too busy fighting amongst themselves anyway! It is only when ‘I’ voluntarily abdicate the throne in this flesh and blood body, will there cease to be malice and sorrow in me. I will have then stepped outside of humanity and become a non-contributor to the endemic malice and sorrow of humanity. But to do this, to take the first step, ‘I’ have to have the courage to question all of the ‘truths’ and Ancient Wisdoms that are the very substance of ‘humanity’ and ‘my’ very bondage to ‘humanity’. RESPONDENT: They don’t understand this. In the beginning I read both Peter and Vineeto’s mails and I found many things to agree with them upon. It doesn’t occur to them that what they have found and experienced with Richard can be found with Osho. PETER: Not so. Osho is very firmly in the Eastern spiritual philosophy part of humanity’s Wisdom. These ancient teachings all point to the belief that this paradisiacal planet and our flesh and blood bodies are an illusion, and that our souls will go ‘somewhere else’ after death. Thus any experience of the physical, actual world forever remains an affective one, rather than a direct sensate experience. The experiences bear no resemblance, for those who are discriminating. RESPONDENT: And so we use different words. But they seem to understand only dictionary words, which tells me of lack of flexibility and intelligence. PETER: Yes, I had this with talking to Vineeto in the early days when we began to question spiritual conditionings and beliefs. She would say things like ‘you are twisting my words’ or ‘that’s not what I mean by that word’. After much to-ing and fro-ing, we eventually realised the sense in having a conversation using words with mutually agreed meanings – otherwise any sensible or meaningful conversation was impossible. We now communicate using the dictionary definition of words (a world-wide accepted standard) – and it is always clear what she says and means, and vice-versa. As for ‘flexibility’, this direct and clear communication also meant that we could not ‘slide’ away or ‘fudge’ anything between us – it has helped to bring a directness, honesty and intimacy that is delicious and ever-sparkling. RESPONDENT: Instead of responding to other Sannyasins’ experiences and insights, they keep on hammering and repeating into boredom their own hard-found truth. PETER: Very few people on the list have talked of their personal experiences and insights and those that did I responded to. They may not have liked the response, but I did respond and tried to point to the possibility that there could be another experience that is possible as a human on this planet in these marvellous times we live in. Boring has been a word that has been used a lot about our writing. I would get very bored and resistant to reading Richard’s writings. I would often nod off to sleep, day-dreaming, etc. Then I began to realize ‘my’ investment in being bored. ‘I’ would sort of close down as it all became too much or my mind would go into a sort of grid lock. I would get headaches from trying to understand, from trying to ‘kick-start’ my intelligence, from trying to untangle what was fact from what was belief. But that was just for me – maybe for you they are just plain boring. RESPONDENT: Instead of them inquiring into our experiences, they go on and on exclaiming themselves to have got it right and the rest of us to be wrong. That doesn’t set the ground for talk between equals. PETER: Nowhere have either Vineeto or I exclaimed ‘to have got it right and the rest of (you) to be wrong’. A fact is a fact – it stands on its own as it were – it is neither right or wrong. To me it is far better to live one’s life based on facts rather than beliefs – then one is free to judge things as ‘silly’ or ‘sensible’ firmly based on facts. Simple things like – if you want to live with a woman (or man) it would be good to do so in peace, harmony and equity. In the case of Vineeto and I, we had a contract to look at everything (in ourselves only – not the other) that was in the way of that being possible. And within 12 months we succeeded – and one of the first things I had to throw out was ‘right and wrong’. Also, it was a trap for me when I would put what Richard was saying into the ‘right and wrong’ basket. It was a recipe for conflict, and a vain attempt by ‘me’ to justify ‘my’ knowledge, ‘my’ experience – in short, ‘my’ very existence. And beneath it all, ever-lurking, lay pride. As for ‘equals’, on meeting Richard, I quickly had to abandon the principle. Here was a man who was happy and harmless, had a knowledge of the Human Condition that is unprecedented in human history and who knew the delusion of Enlightenment from the inside. I settled into his lounge-room and lapped up all I could – to find out ‘a new way of walking’ – as someone posted the other day – upright, free, independent, beholden to no-one. Happy and harmless. I freely acknowledged I had a lot to learn and that he was a far superior human being. He is, after all, free of malice and sorrow, and I unabashedly set out to learn all that I could in order to emulate his freedom. I can’t give you more than the sense I make of the Human Condition – that bummer of a birthmark – that all we humans are embroiled in. What you make of it is your business, but I do appreciate your comments and observations. They are most welcome.
PETER: The certainty and surety comes from facts and common sense, whereas doubt and confusion are the direct result of belief and feelings. RESPONDENT: Language consists of many words, some mean different things, but imply a same underlying meaning, others mean the same, but imply different notions. As I have said before, I can agree and recognize with many things that you and Vineeto have written in earlier mails. What makes it impossible to talk together is the total lack of flexibility exposed by you to understand the meaning implied in other’s words. It seems to me you are only able to understand your own terminology. PETER: As I said before –
But if you insist on being ‘flexible’, fair enough. RESPONDENT: What you say above here: ‘Certainty and surety comes from facts and common sense’ doesn’t fit my experience. My exp. of certainty and surety comes from knowing who I am, knowing my own truth. And my truth is for me what your facts are for you. This you shouldn’t argue on, ... PETER: Everybody has what they fondly declare to be their ‘own’ truth and passionately defend it – even declaring their ‘right’ to do so. Unfortunately, what I discovered was that ‘my’ truth was no more than ‘me’ taking on some particular versions of Ancient Wisdom and interpreting them to fit ‘my’ selfish motives. This ‘I’ did in order to become a member of some particular group and gain a sense of belonging – all to soothe the lost, lonely, frightened, and very, very cunning entity ‘I’ really am. ‘My’ truth was nothing more than a phantasm, designed to perpetuate ‘my’ existence and once I saw and acknowledged this, it was impossible to defend any more. All this would not matter one iota but people do fight with each other as to whose ‘truth’ is ‘right’, or gang together in religious or social groups and fight horrendous wars as to whose collective ‘truths’ are right. RESPONDENT: You could try to be a little more understanding that others can have similar experiences and express them differently. PETER: The only way we can determine whether experiences are similar is by comparing notes, as it were. Everybody on this list is following a path devoted to obtaining an altered state of consciousness (ASC) whereby one feels Divine, Oneness, Immortal, Spaceless and Timeless. I am talking of experiences that are pure consciousness experiences (PCE) whereby I am this flesh and blood body, mortal, made of the same stuff as the earth, doing what is happening right now, right here. I am the universe experiencing itself as a human being. RESPONDENT: I don’t talk according to your journals and definitions. I talk according to my experiences, trying to convey myself through English which is not my native tongue. Also, you gnaw on the facts. Tell me the fact of a rosebush. A rose is a rose ...??? Tell me the fact of the fragrance of a rose. Tell me the fact of the fragrance of Osho’s words. Tell me the facts of my experiences, can you???? PETER: Yes you can see, smell and touch a rose – its factual existence is firmly established by the physical senses. As for ‘the fact of the fragrance of Osho’s words’ everyone will have an affective response, usually reinforced by the group, so as to feel love, bliss, oneness, safe, etc. It is an emotional response aimed at soothing ‘me’, giving ‘me’ a sense of ‘coming home’. The lost, lonely frightened and very, very cunning entity has found it’s ‘true’ role and ‘mission’ in life – to feel ‘at one with God’ and – given sufficient drive – to even become God. * PETER: And what I talk of is the actual world of purity and delight that we have all experienced in a pure consciousness experience – that world that is right under our noses when ‘I’ temporarily abdicate the throne. It is not a philosophy or something Richard has invented. This actual world is ever-present, but it is not a world that ‘I’ can experience, therefore ‘my’ demise is essential. RESPONDENT: Yes, this is so. Osho has showed us the way all the time, some got it and some didn’t. PETER: No. What I have said many times before, and is clearly obvious in Rajneesh’s discourses and the words of others that he lauds, is that he clearly points to an ‘inner world’, permanently accessed by a state of an altered state of consciousness (ASC) – Enlightenment. RESPONDENT: You say you have found your actual world, not by the help of Osho, I have found my actual world, by the help of Osho, yet we convey the same with different words. What is amazing to me about how you and Vineeto share here on the list, is that you seem unable to understand if we don’t use your terminology. PETER: No, we talk of two completely different things. You can be as ‘flexible’ as you want, or give your own meaning to the words I use, it does not alter the fact – we are talking of two completely different things. Two very different experiences of two very different worlds. Pumpkins ... ... Keyboard
PETER: But to do this, to take the first step, ‘I’ have to have the courage to question all of the ‘truths’ and Ancient Wisdoms that are the very substance of ‘humanity’ and ‘my’ very bondage to ‘humanity’. RESPONDENT: To take the first step for me was to be attentive to the urging inside telling me there was more to this life than only what I sensed and saw. Somehow my genes remembered where I came from. This urging has been with me for my whole life. As I grew, and learned the way of the world, I felt myself going further and further away from myself. The nagging insisted. I realized I stood in my own way, which means I had become my personality. I have returned. I didn’t question any beliefs, my nagging was enough and now I have no questions and no answers other than the immense wellbeing of knowing my truth. PETER: Another post from you. The trouble is I have to reply in words, what to do ... Yes, I can relate to your description very well. What you are describing is the feeling of ‘coming home’, ‘realizing I am That’, ‘finding my inner peace’, ‘finding God’ etc. The terminology varies between particular religions and spiritual philosophies but all point to an ‘inner’ peace and a ‘communion’ with some form of supreme being or energy. My experiences led me to challenge the belief in a supreme being and an after-life as well as my ‘inner’ experiences and spiritual identity – and this questioning led me inexorably to the actual world of purity and perfection, delight and innocence. And the amazing thing is, it is under my very nose as it were, all ‘I’ – both ego and soul – had to do was get out of the way. * PETER: Osho is very firmly in the Eastern spiritual philosophy part of humanity’s Wisdom. These ancient teachings all point to the belief that this paradisiacal planet and our flesh and blood bodies are an illusion, and that our souls will go ‘somewhere else’ after death. RESPONDENT: Eastern or western, what does it matter? Osho may have said that our flesh and blood bodies are illusion, that our souls will go somewhere else. He has also contradicted this, as he has with about everything he has said. How can you believe such a man? There must be something else about the man, and it is. PETER: Do I sense that we are beginning to differentiate what we are talking about by using
words? When you say ‘That which is not of this world, but which the world is of, has no earthy preferences’, it is very clear to me that you
talk of the spiritual world – whereas I am talking of an actual world – as earthy as the earth is. Or as salty as sex is, as I wrote * PETER: We now communicate using the dictionary definition of words (a world-wide accepted standard) – and it is always clear what she says and means, and vice-versa. RESPONDENT: Oh my, and this you do here too, talking dictionary definitions. What do you do when you want to share something which is not defined in the dictionary? What do you do when you come across two different definitions of the same word? PETER: The English language is an amazingly descriptive one and we have yet to have a discussion where we wanted for words to describe something. It may take time but as long as we stick to the fact that words are meant to mean what they mean – the basis of human verbal and written communication – it is always clear in the end. As for two definitions, we simply qualify which one we are talking about. For me, I always knew that ‘I’ didn’t want to be pinned down, ‘I’ didn’t want to be clear or direct ... for ‘I’ was an impostor, an alien – lost, lonely frightened and very, very cunning. And ‘I’ can only wilt and wither in the light of clarity and scrutiny. This is why I write, this is why I welcome scrutiny, to cause the extinction of any remaining entity, any duplicity, any malice, any sorrow. * PETER: As for ‘flexibility’, this direct and clear communication also meant that we could not ‘slide’ away or ‘fudge’ anything between us – it has helped to bring a directness, honesty and intimacy that is delicious and ever-sparkling. RESPONDENT: With flexibility I meant the ability to understand others using different words about the same thing. Now I understand this is impossible for you. Do I really need to buy a dictionary and learn by heart all the definitions to be able to communicate with you? PETER: What you do is your business. For me, I went out and bought a dictionary when I came across Richard’s writings. I wanted to understand precisely what he was saying. RESPONDENT: What is your need to point out another possibility for another experience to us? PETER: In the interests of brevity – RESPONDENT: There exists nothing such as facts. PETER: I think you are in real trouble if you say that your computer screen is not a fact and these very words you are reading are not a fact. Next you will be telling me that I am not a fact and I am but a figment of your imagination. Not even in your wildest imagination could you anticipate my response to your words. No, these words are actual given that you can see them on the screen On my screen, they are flowing – as if by magic – from my fingers on the keyboard, right now, right here. * PETER: I can’t give you more than the sense I make of the Human Condition. RESPONDENT: Of course you cannot, not even this. Because you can know the human condition as your condition, nothing more. PETER: The Human Condition is common to all, as per definition. The ‘spiritual’ world is firmly within the Human Condition. Since time immemorial humans have worshipped Gods, believed in good and evil spirits. The only difference between you and I is that I acknowledged the Human Condition in me and actively pursued its total elimination in me. I gave up trying to become God and immortal and set myself a sensible, down-to-earth aim – to become free of the Human Condition of malice and sorrow.
PETER: What you are describing is the feeling of ‘coming home’, ‘realizing I am That’, finding my inner peace’, ‘finding God’ etc. The terminology varies between particular religions and spiritual philosophies but all point to an ‘inner’ peace and a ‘communion’ with some form of supreme being or energy. My experiences led me to challenge the belief in a supreme being and an after-life as well as my ‘inner’ experiences and spiritual identity – and this questioning led me inexorably to the actual world of purity and perfection, delight and innocence. And the amazing thing is, it is under my very nose as it were, all ‘I’ – both ego and soul – had to do was get out of the way. RESPONDENT: You relate to my experience as a belief. It isn’t a belief for me. PETER: I fully understand. When I was on the spiritual path I had many experiences that re-inforced the feelings I was having of ‘coming home’, of having found ‘peace at last’. And to consider what I was experiencing as a belief was, at the time, inconceivable. It was only when the master died and I really saw that I was in an Eastern Religion, that I began to see that I believed in the Master and His teachings. Exactly as a Buddhist believes in Buddha and his Teachings and exactly as a Christian believes in Jesus and His Teachings. It was not even then a great problem – I could just move on if I wanted to ... but then I realized that the passionate believers are the very ones who fight the religious wars still raging on this planet. Then I started to question what it is that we believed and why we humans need to believe ... I use the word ‘we’ deliberately as I was enquiring into the Human Condition i.e. common to all, not special in ‘me’. It made it clear what I was questioning, tackling and eliminating. It also avoided me taking it personally and defending ‘my’ existence to ridiculous lengths. RESPONDENT: Finding that which is not of the world, but which the world is of, took away my identification with my personality / I / ego. It was not an amazing thing to me, ‘cause I have known all along that I had to get out of my own way to be free. So finally I managed that, with the help of Osho. PETER: I find your use of the word ‘identification’ interesting. It seems to me that you feel free because you don’t ‘identify’ with your personality / I / ego. Does that mean you are free of being sad, lonely, melancholy, peeved, angry, jealous, confused or is it just that you are not identified with these feelings? RESPONDENT: It didn’t happen while asking ‘how do I experience being here’, this question led me into discrimination instead of acceptance, it led me into searching instead of finding, it led me into judging good or bad and into making choices and to make up my mind about what I want or not. PETER: For me, running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ led to discrimination – was there anything that was preventing my happiness in this moment, the only moment that I can experience being alive? Then I wanted to find out what feeling or emotion was there (sad, angry, bored, etc.), why it was there in me and what had caused it to be there ... so as to eventually eliminate it ... so I had more happiness in my life. I refused to accept being angry at others, and sad for myself. It was a continuous search-and-destroy mission and once I got to the very root of a feeling I found that I could eliminate it – or rather it disappeared. My searching led me to ‘finding’ and fixing each time again. I was getting tangible results for my efforts. I threw out moral and ethical judgements and went for judging on the basis of silly and sensible, and I made many choices on that basis with the aim of becoming more happy and more harmless. But the first thing I had to do was – I had to make up my mind as to what I wanted to do with my life. RESPONDENT: Asking ‘what am I’ freed me of all this, now for the first time in my life I feel free and centred and in this way everything is totally perfect. How could it not be? Only the mind can delude us. PETER: And only our intelligence can save us from our passions and instinctual emotions of fear and aggression. Only our native intelligence and common sense – the human brain freed of any psychological and psychic entity whatsoever – can free us of the illusion of ‘Humanity’ and the delusion of ‘Divinity’. * PETER: The next part of your post consists of ground we have discussed at length – namely your insistence that words have no meanings, or that you can give any meaning you want to a word – and that all dictionaries are useless. Maybe you imagine that Vineeto and I kneel down and pray to our dictionaries at night time –
So, I think that covered all that was new in your last post ...
PETER: Everybody has what they fondly declare to be their ‘own’ truth and passionately defend it – even declaring their ‘right’ to do so. RESPONDENT: Every body? You know this or the dictionary? PETER: So why do you stubbornly insist that you are uniquely different from everybody else? It seems to be a constant theme of yours. I see that the evidence what I said is quite clear. There are about 6,000 religions on the planet and the country I am in, and many others, have laws that enshrine the principle of Religious Tolerance. Indeed, it is part of what are deemed the basic Human Rights. These laws and rights are aimed at preventing individuals or groups from attacking, defaming, discriminating against or persecuting another on the basis of differing religious beliefs. In other words, we need laws and ethical codes to prevent humans from fighting, killing and persecuting others because they each believe their God or Truth is the best. Imposing and policing these laws do manage to ‘keep the lid on things’ a bit ... except for Northern Ireland, Israel, the Balkans, India, Afghanistan, Africa, Iraq, Indonesia, Malaysia ... Sannyasins had direct experience of this at the Ranch when both sides armed-up. That’s where it really hit home for me – that I would have been willing to kill for, or die for ‘my’ Master. It’s just par for the Human Condition – the more you love someone – the more you are willing to kill others to protect him/her and to sacrifice your life in order that they can live. And billions of people are currently playing out this scenario all over the planet, right now, as I type these words – and not only that, they are defending their right to do so. This is what Richard calls ‘institutionalized insanity’. * PETER: Yes you can see, smell and touch a rose – its factual existence is firmly established by the physical senses. RESPONDENT: So you say the rose, and I guess you mean people, too, are only of matter, exists only of earth? PETER: Aye, indeed. The cells started to form and multiply when the sperm hit the egg, this body inside a womb of a woman, emerged into the world and here I was. This very brain remembers nothing before the age of about 3 years. I consume water and food from the earth, which is converted into me – proteins, vitamins, fats, minerals – all from the earth. And I keep going until an accident kills me or the system slowly deteriorate. Then I die and rot back to the stuff of the earth I came from. I have been here 50 years and could be here another 20-40 years. There is nothing around me that is not from the earth. This computer – metals and plastics – all from the earth. This coffee cup – clay from the earth. Vineeto beside me – flesh and blood. Electricity – cunningly transferred by a wire system from some remote power station – but energy from the earth. There is nothing on this planet that is not ‘of the earth’ – except the alien entity inside us. * PETER: As for ‘the fact of the fragrance of Osho’s words’ everyone will have an affective response, usually reinforced by the group, so as to feel love, bliss, oneness, safe, etc. RESPONDENT: What about your response to [No 23’s] salty sex, isn’t that affective? What does your junior say about that? PETER: If you are interested in what I have to say about sex, I suggest you read about it in my journal. I can rave on about my second favourite subject, but I am trying to be brief. If you also read the two chapters before, it will make more sense to you as to what is affective as opposed to what is sensate. RESPONDENT: You address us individually but you are not able to talk to us individually. You talk to me as if I was a group. Don’t I give a shit about the group! And I am certainly no groupie of yours. :-) PETER: I am not writing to you, the spiritual believer. I am writing to you, the fellow human being and I am reporting – as a fellow human being – what I have found out and the extra-ordinariness of it all. That there is actually a way to become free of malice and sorrow. Many on the list complain that I am not talking to ‘them’ and it is true. I am communicating directly to the fellow human being using common sense and native intelligence – saying don’t believe what everyone has told you – don’t just go on believing what the old fuddy duddies of the past have told you is true. It is 1999, not 500 BC, and there is now available a way out of the mess we humans have found ourselves in. I don’t expect you to believe me but if you are at all dissatisfied with your life and in following the ‘tried and failed’ methods ... maybe, just maybe, it might be worth considering ... trying something ... new? To get to where I am, I had to demolish ‘Peter, the Christian’, ‘Peter, the father’, ‘Prabhat, the Sannyasin’, ‘Peter, the architect’, ‘Peter, the man’, ‘Peter, the lover’, ‘Peter, the ... and so on ... until finally it was Peter at his instinctual core ... It is such an adventure to discover ‘what’ you are rather than ‘who’ you think and ‘who’ you feel you are... to free yourself of the ‘shackles’ of the Human Condition. I am free of the ‘world’ I was born into, I am free of the mutually-agreed scenario ‘that to be a human being is to suffer’ – I am free of sorrow. And as there is no entity in me that can take offence – I am free of malice. I simply met a man who was already free and followed the path, and the method, and I am reporting to whoever wants to listen ... that it works. Richard, Vineeto and I are laying a trail of words that are a guide map, but the wonderful thing is ... you get to make the journey yourself. And who would have it any other way? RESPONDENT: So stop telling me what I have experienced or not, because you cannot know. You can only guess, and that doesn’t fit to your terminology of talking facts. Deal? PETER: I am not ‘telling you’ anything – I am just reporting from the actual world. Where there are neither Gods nor Demons, good or bad ... nothing to fear. All here is pure, perfect and delightful. All you have to do is step out of the real world, into the actual world, and leave your ‘self’ behind
RESPONDENT: And you too, Peter, I would like to give a good send-off.
PETER: If you are happy with what is, for you in the world as it is, then excellent! Actual Freedom is clearly not your thing, and fair enough. To even consider a journey into yourself to free yourself of the Human Condition requires a burning discontent with life as it is – both for yourself and for your fellow human beings. It also requires a pioneering spirit to challenge Ancient Wisdom and the set-in-concrete mother of all beliefs – that ‘you can’t change Human Nature’. Not to mention a good dose of bloody-mindedness, a touch of rebel, a sprinkle of panache and a dash of daring. So, it’s bye from me, I’ve enjoyed our posts. Thanks for the good send-off.
Peter’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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