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Peter’s Correspondence on Mailing List C Correspondent No 23
PETER: Hi, RESPONDENT: Subject: IsaacPETER: Asimov... ?, Newton ... ? Einstein’s brother ... ? RESPONDENT: Dear Peter, Do you live in Byron Bay? love No 23 PETER: Yes.
PETER: You wrote of an experience you had to No 1 the other day that I would like to comment on, if you don’t mind. I am running on the assumption that we are having a free-wheeling discussion here and everything is able to be commented on by whoever wants to. What I have found essential in discussing life, the universe and what it is to be a human being, is that we put the issue ‘on the table for discussion’, and try not to take it personally. In the past I used to not to ‘expose myself’ because it would inevitably be used by others against me. We are discussing our experiences of life and sometimes that involves stepping beyond what we consider safe. It’s good to be able to do that as fellow human beings, all in this game together. So you wrote about an experience you had a few years ago ... RESPONDENT: When I asked you if you thought what you had written about love was real I was not sure whether you were joking or not. It is sad to think you have not experienced real love! Without it this world is such a desert! I must admit I was 33 before I had my first experience of real love and it was through Osho! It happened in 1987 while I was walking along the foreshore of the Swan river asking myself the question ‘Who am I’? At some point the answer ‘I am nothing’ came back and then in a flash I became everything, there was no longer any separation, I was love, I was knowledge, I was everything! During the weeks that followed this unconditional love for all things pervaded my whole life, the gratitude I felt towards Osho brought me to tears every time I thought of him. I loved myself and because in no way could I find separation from others, I loved others equally, our true nature is love! ‘Unconditional love’, Love upon love upon love! PETER: A good experience by the sound of it. I had a similar one on the beach here some 3 years ago and wrote about it in almost identical terms. It’s in the God chapter of my journal. What I have found since, is that if you ask yourself the question ‘what am I’, rather than ‘who am I’, you get a completely different answer. Then you are able to have a pure, perfect and direct experience of the physical universe that is so magical and sensate that there is no room for God or any Love. What I also found that unconditional Love is an emotional interpretation only and a poor substitute for direct intimacy. Vineeto is also writing a good bit on her Enlightenment experience that you may be interested in. She took notes through the whole process and it’s one of the best descriptions I’ve read. So ... I managed a short one, must be a record for the least words.
RESPONDENT: I got bored reading all the reams of information you put out before, that is not your fault. I just don’t like to spend that much time reading emails. I would like you to try to tell me in no more than 30 words what it is you are saying in your book! PETER:
and as it’s my post, and I am having such fun, you can have another 30 words (at no extra cost – bar the effort of reading)
RESPONDENT: If you don’t think you can do it in less than 30 words, I would not mind talking to you on Mirc or ICQ. PETER: I generally like to have open correspondence, available for whoever is interested, as it then becomes a discussion between fellow human beings about life, the universe and what it is to be a human being. After all, we are all doing this thing of being a human being for the first (and only) time, and shared experiences and varied viewpoints can only aid us in make sense of it all. I am definitely not of the school that says we should not, or indeed cannot, talk of these matters. Considering the dearth of any sensible writing and investigation that comes not from the 2,000 to 3,000 years dead ‘Wise’ men (or their current mimics), I delight in an ‘up to the moment’ unfolding ... as this list provides.
PETER: I thought you had disappeared. RESPONDENT to No 4: Why do you allow yourself to be in any way affected by this persons 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. Vineeto can always surrender to ‘that’, but that is really up to existence, she or he is just playing in a play they think they are running. To wake that play up would take a Master and unfortunately for them the Master is dead! ... love RESPONDENT to No 12: Dear, who ever thinks they have credibility. You are truly fucked because you think you’re someone. love and all that comes with that ... No 23, the nobody RESPONDENT to Peter: Why the fuck are you so fucking boring, could you get a life off the net and stop boring the fuck out of me with your absolute crap! LOVE AND CUDDLES TO YOU AS YOU SUFFER ... No 23, the humble PETER: I take it you weren’t impressed by the 30 words I sent you.
PETER: After your last posts I thought you had disappeared over the proverbial cyber-hill. I like it that you have come back and challenge what I am saying. What Richard, Vineeto and I are proposing is new, radical and preposterous to people – to those in the ‘spiritual’ world and those in the ‘normal world’. To point to a third world – an actual world of perfection and purity, that is ever present, right here, right now. It deserves every challenge and scrutiny. RESPONDENT: Challenging one’s belief systems and not believing anything until it is your own personal experience is a worthwhile thing to do. PETER: Agreed. I would only add, after ‘taking care of business’ such as shelter and food, it is the only worthwhile thing to do – if one is to become free of the Human Condition. Anything that stood in the way of my being happy and harmless became my business, my obsession. RESPONDENT: But this has nothing to do with going beyond the mind’s frontiers, it just gives the mind something entertaining to do while life goes on! PETER: For me, once I realised that I didn’t want to be a God-man and that I didn’t believe in an after-life (a better place ‘somewhere else’), the spiritual world of feeling love and God began to crumble. Then, one day, it dawned on me that I was actually alone in the world, and if anyone was going to get me free it was me. And the only tool ‘I’ had was my intelligence. And what I discovered was that there is a third I – I as this flesh and blood body. It is this third I, this flesh and blood body only, that is able to think and reflect and sensately experience the purity and perfection of the actual world but – and this is the crunch – only when ‘I’ who I think I am (ego) and ‘I’ who I feel I am (soul) depart the scene. RESPONDENT: Because this experience of challenging one’s belief systems is so entertaining, one does not need to watch soap operas on TV to escape life’s dull moments. PETER: I don’t know if I would call it entertaining. For me it was often times scary, bewildering, challenging, dis-orienting, fearful, thrilling, and down-right insane and it required stubbornness, bloody-mindedness, nerves of steel, pig-headedness, but above all a sincere intent. As for soap operas ... have you noticed that we humans most like love stories (sorrow) and thrillers or ‘action’ films (malice). Our entertainment is watching other humans ‘playing’ at being sorrowful or malicious – the Human Condition. RESPONDENT: If you go beyond the mind first all the stupid belief systems are exposed for what they are! PETER: Again, for me, I came to see that the Eastern religions and philosophies tackle the mind (ego) only to give full reign to the heart (soul). This has the effect of completely stifling and denying any clear intelligent functioning of the brain. This stifling causes the mind to retreat into the fantasy world of blissful and divine feelings and taken to it’s extreme can result in an altered state of consciousness (ASC) whereby one becomes Love or God. The second ‘I’ of Ramana Maharshi’s fame, the Self, is a mere delusion – a self-aggrandizement. RESPONDENT: Giving people, things to do with their minds is a waste of time! PETER: The most intelligent thing in the universe is the human brain. The technological achievements wrought by this intelligence never ceases to astound and amaze me. This physical universe, in its perfection, purity, infinitude and fairy-tale like magic is indeed a paradise beyond our fantasies. And yet we humans feel sorrow and malice, sad and lonely, separate and alien. And the remedy to this – the spirit-ual way – is to cultivate ‘feelings’ of bliss, Love, and Divinity. What about questioning ‘feelings’ themselves – the passions and feelings that we kill and die for, the instinctual urges that take us over in fits of rage or depression, the instinctual needs to belong to a group, blindly follow and trust a leader, the need to belong? RESPONDENT: Ask yourself the question ‘Who is thinking?’, what is beyond the mind? PETER: If you ask this question you end up with the Buddha Nature, God, Love Agapé, That, Self, The Universe, Existence, or whatever other name. It’s funny isn’t it that one always discovers one is ‘God’ at heart. By asking ‘what’ am I, one discovers a different answer – the third I, this flesh and blood body and definitely mortal – free of the illusion of ego and the delusion of soul. RESPONDENT: Nothing else matters except discovering ‘THAT’! PETER: It matters not at all what we humans discover, feel, experience, discover, proclaim as the ‘truth’ or the ‘way’. Nothing has fundamentally changed on the planet – there is still depression, loneliness, grief, despair, murders, rapes and suicides – even in the spiritual world. So far, there have only been two choices, remain ‘normal’ or become ‘spiritual’, and I am pointing out that a third alternative now exists. An alternative that addresses these problems directly – at their root.
RESPONDENT: The taste of no mind has a different taste, like the ocean it is always salty, remind you of anything? Dear No 14, I was talking in a sexual sense! PETER: This is really just a P.S. to my other mail to you and is addressed to your comments about saltiness and sex. There is a common idea that the elimination of feelings would leave one in a barren ghastly state in a world devoid of meaning. Maybe this helps to give the flavour of what I experience in the actual world – Now the ‘actual’ in Actual Freedom means it works, and the ‘down-to-earth’ bit means exactly what it says. ‘It means that given sufficient effort and intent that one can eliminate sorrow and malice from the human body. This means, in practical terms, that one no longer suffers from feelings of sadness, melancholy, boredom, neediness, sympathy, empathy, despair or fear, let alone annoyance, offence, anger, revenge or violence. It is then possible, by way of practical demonstration, to live with a companion in total equity, delighting in freely and mutually enjoyed sex, discussion’ companionship and physical intimacy. The physical pleasures build and build, as does the awareness of the immeasurable and limitless perfection and purity of it all – increasing ‘off the scales’. One literally ‘buckles at the knees’ as the paltry attempts of the old ‘I’ to fearfully hang on wither in the helter skelter slide to freedom. And all this is actual, sensate – as evidenced by the physical senses – not cerebral or affective. You know, things like the smell of a woman’s armpit during sex, the feel of the breast or bum, the way you can tease a nipple to hardness, the fresh unique journey that is each sexual encounter as a literal salubrious smorgasbord of sensuality unfolds as wave after wave of pleasure engulfs us both. To feel a woman as equally sexual such that you don’t know who is thrusting or who is wiggling or where you end and she begins. To ride wave after wave of pleasure of such intensity that ejaculation is but a side order, not the main meal. And after ... to lie back and chat about how it was for each of us, to compare notes, to discuss the nuances, pleasures, particularly delicious bits, or just to lay back in that state where all the cells of the body are sexually alive and tingling and drift off into a delicious half asleep state. To drift off entirely or to eventually surface and wobble to the shower where you realise that to have hot water on tap to pour over your body is a simple pleasure that rivals any. Then maybe a cup of freshly ground coffee and a post-coital cigarette, and wonder what other pleasures are next, and in what order they will come. Hedonism has got nothing on this. Freedom is this and much, much more. Can’t I tease you into considering the possibility of living in paradise, here, now, on earth. It is a paradise not only of physical pleasure as it also offers a stillness and purity wherein one is no longer driven by the instincts, where the mind is a perfectly clear and delightful and playful thing and the usual feelings of fear and aggression are replaced by a consuming sense of well being and benignity. And loneliness disappears as one immensely enjoys ones own company.’ Good Hey...
PETER: You wrote to Vineeto but I thought I’d answer. RESPONDENT to Vineeto: I assure you that I’m not talking about an eastern ideal or philosophy, the experience of the witness I’m describing is my current personal experience, for me it is a fact! PETER: I have no doubt you have these experiences and that they are real. i.e. – that to you they are a fact. You may have noted that when I talk of experiences there is a clear distinction between a down-to-earth experience and an affective cerebral experience. To give you an example of each – When I was in Buddha hall shouting Ya-Hoo to an empty chair with thousands of others all dressed in long white robes – that was an experience of startling clarity – a brief pure consciousness experience (PCE) whereby I saw what ‘I’ was up to – ‘I’ was in a religion! This moment of bare awareness was not at all affective, it was neither good, bad, blissful or dreadful – it was just a startling realization of what this person called Prabhat was up to. After that I would walk around the Ashram and would find myself singing – ♫‘give me that old time religion, that old time religion ... it’s good enough for me.’♪♫ This experience was supported by the factual evidence of a religion – worship of a dead Master, prayer, gratitude, love, surrender, devotion, loyalty, acceptance, feeling of belonging. Also there were feelings of compassion for those not in the group and a feeling that those who left or went elsewhere were missing out or were being traitors. The Altered State of Consciousness experience (ASC) I have written of before was where I was Love and Love was me. I was the Universe and the Universe was me. My thoughts were pure poetry and my chest swelled with the Grandness of it all. I was ‘home’ at last. RESPONDENT: If you are experiencing some other personality in this space of being that you call witnessing, as far as I’m concerned you are not just witnessing! There is no personality in this space what so ever. There is no me in this space! There is just witnessing! Feelings are nothing more than subtle thoughts, and I’m not talking to you about thoughts, PETER: Feelings are indeed nothing more than subtle thoughts, but it may be useful to dig in a bit deeper here rather than gloss over this. Feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts. To give you a practical example – once Vineeto was late for an appointment and I started to think why she was late. Very soon the underlying emotion grabbed hold and soon I was feeling jealous and the longer it went on the more it raged. It is the feelings and the underlying emotions that are the cause of our sorrow and malice as human beings and yet we stubbornly refuse to even acknowledge that they may be the problem. We still insist on following the Eastern Religious and philosophical notion that it is thinking that is the problem. Hence the doctrine of no-mind! It is the feelings and passions that we humans kill and die for. RESPONDENT: I’m talking to you about what I experience when there are no thoughts! There is no female or male in witnessing just being! I have taken the time to read some of your long winded postings, and as far as I can see you are talking about spaces of the mind that you are experiencing whether that be body mind spaces or pure mind spaces and there is no difference really! Mind is mind! In witnessing, there is no-mind! I am in no way negating the intelligence of the mind, the mind is useful! I am saying there is being beyond it! PETER: I am not denying your experiences at all. It is the aim of the spiritual world to locate the ‘being’ beyond mind. It is well documented. In the version you are following, with the Ramana Maharshi lineage, one discovers that one is That. In other lineages or paths one discovers one’s ‘original face’, the Source, Existence, Unconditional Love or whatever. Despite everyone’s insistence of having a personal realization or a having found ‘my’ truth, the experience in the Eastern no-mind tradition is a common feeling (an emotional backed thought) of Self aggrandizement – of being bigger, vaster, grander than one’s ordinary self. It is indeed a wonderful state – it took Richard 11 years to dig his way out of his Altered State of Consciousness. I only had some briefer, but nevertheless telling experiences of this state, which is why I know very well what you are talking about. But in the end it is only a feeling. There is no ‘other world’. There is no God. There is no ‘Universe’ as in ‘the Universe is taking care of me’. All these things are but phantoms of our imagination, given credence by the fairy tales passed down for millennia. I see in your last post you have now become ‘the universe experiencing itself as a human being’. Is this some ‘miracle conversion’ perhaps? seeing you talk of seeing us as ‘like born again Christians’? Hallelujah ...! Your experience is that you feel that you are ‘the Universe experiencing itself as a human being’ Polar opposites – 180 degrees opposite. Despite your frantic insistence to the contrary, and now your twisting of words and wayward adopting of terminology – we are talking of two vastly different experiences. The spiritual experience (ASC) is cerebral-affective and the PCE experience is sensate only. The spiritual experience (ASC) gives credence to the psychic entity within the body resulting in Self-aggrandizement – to realise you are That, to become The Universe ... albeit temporarily trapped in a human body ... but when ‘your body’ dies ... then ‘you’ are freed! The PCE is an experience when one realises that both the psychological and psychic entity stand in the road of one’s destiny – to be the physical universe experiencing itself as a human being ... when the entity dies ... then you are actually free! Many, many people read what Richard, Vineeto and I are saying and all say it is the ‘same thing’ as the mystics have been saying. I was attracted to Richard initially on the same basis and it took me many months to understand the difference. I was, however, more attracted to the down-to-earthness of it. Things like being able to live with a woman in peace and harmony, sorting out sex, being happy and harmless... But that was just me.
PETER: I see it has been cooking hot over your way. The summer here has been wonderful as we now get the slow build to the wet season with intermittent days of warm and wet, blustery storms or clear sparkling blue sky. A wonderful sub-tropic mix. So, on with the concise brevity – * PETER: On the spiritual path one merely ‘feels’ silent on those occasions when one is in a trance-like state of ‘no-mind’ or when one has the delusion of feeling ‘one with the Universe’. A synthetic silence achieved by turning away from the physical and the actual – to the metaphysical and imaginary. RESPONDENT: Peter you have not experienced silence, you are talking a load of horseshit. Silence is our nature, silence I am while the world happens around me, and then noisy I am when I want to be. Silence is always the backdrop of my noise! You are firmly stuck in your mind and to you that is the only possibility. I’m telling you, you are wrong, silence is not a trance like state, it is our natural state! PETER: From my observation sadness, loneliness, despair, melancholy, anxiety, fear, excitement, anger, jealousy, resentment, etc. are our ‘natural state’ and we attempt to escape by turning in to a silent inner world – usually achieved by stilling the bad selfish thoughts and concentrating on the good divine thoughts. A temporary imaginary silence. Easily disturb-able by again finding a post from the terrible twins – from the actual world. RESPONDENT: You have opted for a convenient way out for your mind! I’m sure your mind is very happy with this option! PETER: The path to actual freedom is not only convenient, it comes with an easy-to-follow set of instructions, you don’t have to bow down or pay allegiance to anyone, it’s totally free, it’s available to anyone, it’s obligation free – and it works. To be happy and harmless is to be me as I am, this flesh and blood body, free of both ego and soul.
RESPONDENT: Well now that Vineeto and Peter have gone to talk on their own list, what shall we talk about? PETER: ... ... ... ... ... ...
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