Selected Correspondence Peter

Thought

PETER: I have provided an answer for your database elsewhere, so I won’t bother repeating it here. Besides, now that you know what actualism is really about you will also know that such questions are a digression from the study of actualism. These types of questions have obsessed and tortured the minds of theoretical scientists, philosophers and spiritualists for millennia and done nothing but spawn yet more beliefs, theories and posits ... and yet more God-men espousing that only they know the Truth.

RESPONDENT: Indeed there are the occasional pop up thoughts of fear, but that is not my main problem. Mine is one of ‘trying’, the effort of thought rather than the effort to be aware. This though is an intermittent fault only, with the help of the Question.

PETER: The effort of thought rather than the effort to be aware has got me stumped a bit...

RESPONDENT: What I meant is that I was thinking about whatever presented itself and not giving it complete attention.

PETER: Thinking has had a very bad press in the spiritual world – ‘You are not the mind’, ‘leave your mind at the door’, ‘no-mind’, etc. are all phrases that attest to the spiritual belief that thinking is the problem, while not only letting feelings off scot-free but piously giving full reign to the supposed ‘good’ set. This misinterpretation of the human dilemma is based on the ancient ignorance of the genetically implanted instinctual passions and their subsequent effect on human behaviour. The revered ancients firmly believed that violence, masochism, torture, rape, etc. were the result of being possessed by evil spirits, and you can fully understand this if you have ever felt rage well up from somewhere deep inside you. ‘Something overcame me’, ‘It wasn’t me’ are common expressions used for this experience. For the less spectacular feelings such as sadness, melancholy, irritation and annoyance the ancients pegged thought as the problem – hence the Buddhists’ emphasis on ‘right thought’ and the meditative practices aimed at stopping thought.

Given that it is 1999, our knowledge and understanding, not to mention our physical circumstances, have so dramatically altered that we now can clearly see that these archaic beliefs about the workings of human biology, neurology, genetics and behaviour have no basis in facts. We now know why the spiritual ‘solutions’ didn’t work and why they can never work. The belief in God is an obvious fairy-tale but the belief in Good feelings will be a tough one for many to shake. It appears that good feelings – love, compassion, etc. and the accompanying morality of good and bad, and the ethics of right and wrong, are all that stop humanity from running amok. Indeed, they do a reasonable job – despite the fact that this has been the bloodiest century so far in human history, a substantial number of people have been spared the horrendous experiences of total warfare, me included. It is only from this reasonably comfortable and secure position that we are now able to tackle becoming free of the Human Condition in its entirety.

So, given the failure of God, the failure of ‘transcendence’ and the failure of morals and ethics, we now have discovered a method to eliminate the problem rather than merely seek solutions to the problem. The problem is that our instinctually based emotions contaminate thought and produce in us feelings of malice and sorrow, and, when ‘push comes to shove’, our moral and ethical safeguards rapidly break down to reveal the appalling dread, horror and violence of war and genocide.

Given our autonomous human make-up – flesh and blood body, able to think and reflect – the only resources we have available to ‘clean ourselves up’ is our ability to think and reflect.

Contemplative thought is the tool for the job – to make sense of the Human Condition and to become aware of how it is operating in oneself. As one gets the knack, this contemplative thought gradually becomes less contaminated, less churning, less confused and apperception can then occur. Apperception is when the mind becomes aware of itself as distinct from ‘I’ being aware of ‘my’ thoughts. Apperception is a Pure Consciousness Experience – a bare awareness. It is as though one has 360 degree vision or, as Alan said the other day, as though hearing and the other senses are amplified. The brain, freed of the pariah-like ‘self’, is capable of startling clarity in these times, and much can be gleaned from these experiences.

The trick is to try and remember these ‘gleanings’ so one can take them back into ‘normal’ life, as it were. It can be difficult at the start as one has no emotional memory of a PCE, but I would often write things down, jot notes, look at how I was in ‘normal’, see what action was appropriate to take, see what the issue was, think it through. It’s enormous fun, although sometimes a bit overwhelming in the beginning and I often felt quite split, as though I was two people. Looking back, these experiences often eventuated from setting aside time for contemplation and I would use Richard’s Journal as a catalyst, a kick start, to get the old brain working after all those years of spiritual drifting and day-dreaming. The brain really ‘likes’ to think, just as the legs like to walk or run. Thinking is its job, its function, and a brain freed of feelings and emotions is an amazing thing to behold. I’ve written more on this subject in the Intelligence chapter in my journal, if you are interested.

The other part of our ‘normal’ perception are feelings and the trick here is to aim for the felicitous feelings – care, consideration, patience, well-wishing, etc. while tackling the more pernicious ones that prevents one from being happy and harmless. Again the PCE will give invaluable insight as one checks exactly which feelings operate – and what is actual – when our perception is freed of an emotional ‘self’. When back to ‘normal’ again, you are then able to use whatever feelings are running to your advantage, to achieve your goal – passion became fuel for the fire to become free, stubbornness a refusal to give in, power the ambition to be one of the ‘few’, compassion the possibility to actually do something, rather than just feel sad for those fellow humans who suffer horrendously.

So, think away, think away ... as in contemplation ... opposed to meditation. (It’s that 180 degrees bit again).

ALAN: And the last 9 months. I have posted little to this mailing list and have spent little time in reflective contemplation. Whether this is because all the discoveries have been made and, as I said to Vineeto, ‘I certainly have had a sense of, there is nothing new to write or report – and maybe that, in itself, is worth reporting’.

PETER: Personally, I find spending little time in reflective contemplation difficult to relate to because it is not my experience. Perhaps your meaning is different to mine so I will define what reflective contemplation means to me.

The ability to reflect is innate in all human beings. In animals, a primitive instinctual memory of past events is evident – a dog nuzzling up for food, a lion returning to a favourite hunting spot, a cat being wary in a place where it was attacked before. Humans have not only this primitive instinctual memory but also a reasonably detailed factual memory which, when combined with thinking, forms intelligence. The action of thinking without the ability to reflect would leave us unable to gain the practical benefit of life-experience – one would be not only immature but one would be unable to learn from one’s life experiences. Given that the aim of actualism is to be here in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are, reflective contemplation is an essential activity for an actualist.

ALAN: I think we mean the same thing by ‘reflective contemplation’. Perhaps I should have said ‘pure contemplation’, viz: –

Richard: Pure contemplation is absolutely free from any pre-conceived concepts ... it lies beyond ‘human’ beliefs and ideals. Richard’s Journal Article 14

PETER: Perhaps another way of putting it is that reflective contemplation is part of the work that ‘I’ do in order to investigate and eliminate the ‘human’ beliefs and ideals that actively conspire to prevent pure contemplation from happening.

RESPONDENT: Actually he [Bohm] doesn’t separate thinking and feeling. In his book ‘Thought As A System’ he considers thought to be one aspect of a larger system that not only includes feelings in the body but the all the myriad of connections with the body and world at large. Put aside regular conceptual boundaries placed in the word thought (ie the idea that thought is only internal and ephemeral ‘whispers in the mind’) and consider it to be part of a larger whole.

PETER: What you appear to be suggesting here is that if I ‘put aside regular conceptual boundaries placed in the word thought’ then I could consider it to ‘be part of a lager whole’, which presumably means that it includes the genetically-encoded instinctual passions. Therefore when David Bohm says that ‘the ultimate source of all these problems is in thought itself’, I am to assume he is saying that ‘the ultimate source of all these problems is in the genetically-encoded instinctual passions’? Are you for real?

RESPONDENT: Yes, I am for real. You actualists have a real problem with deviations to your preferred lingusitic patternings. You took the logical step and then got all incredulous.

PETER: What you are saying in support of your long-running case that spiritualism is saying the same thing as actualism is the word ‘thought’ means the same thing as the words’ instinctual passions’ because I should consider them to ‘be part of a larger whole’. To me that is nonsense because words do have meanings and the reason we use words is so that we can accurately communicate meaning to others. As an example, as I sit here at the computer I am typing these words on a keyboard and watching the words appear on the CRT screen – both are part of a larger whole called a computer but each are distinct and different components. You might have noticed that when I used the word ‘keyboard’, the word accurately describes something that anyone familiar with computers would know, i.e. they would not assume that I was talking about a CRT screen or a printer.

Now if I can move this discussion from the intellectual to the experiential – what I am saying is that there is a distinct difference between thought and the deep-seated feelings of malice and sorrow that are the product of the instinctual passions. If, in your experience, you cannot make such a distinction, then you will fail to understand that what actualism is saying is distinctly different to what the Eastern spiritualists have been saying for millennia.

RESPONDENT: I would have said ‘the ultimate source of all these problems is in thought which is both informed by and feeds back into the genetically-encoded instinctual passions’.

PETER: Well, the soldier who experienced the rush of the instinctual passions a half-second before feeling-fed thought kicked in would not agree with you and nor can I because I have experienced the fact that the instinctual passions are the primary reaction and thinking or rational thought only has a chance to feed back later. And not only that but the brain’s circuitry is such that the feedback loop is biased in that the instinctual reactions and subsequent emotional responses are seemingly stronger and quicker circuitry than those that carry the cognitive reaction and subsequent reasoned response.

Whilst you say ‘the ultimate source of all these problems is in thought which is both informed by and feeds back into the genetically-encoded instinctual passions’ actualism says, and LeDoux amongst others confirms, that ‘the ultimate source of all these problems is in genetically-encoded instinctual passions which are not only primary ‘quick and dirty’ reactions but they also feed back into thinking such that reasoned responses, sensibility, sensitivity and clear thinking have little if any chance to operate’.

If you think that you and I are talking about the same thing, I can only suggest getting in touch with your feelings and observe them in operation because that’s how I came to experientially understand the difference between thinking and feeling.

*

RESPONDENT: You can see that the movement of thought influences the brain, the body and the environment at large (buildings, roads, pollution, cultural influence, government etc) and that feedback returns into our bodies through the senses to make us feel and act in certain ways.

PETER: The ‘larger whole’ – the ‘we all live in one big thought-system’ theory – still lays the blame for the ills of humankind at the feet of thinking and conditioning, not feelings borne of the instinctual passions.

RESPONDENT: Come on, you’re not playing fair. If you wish to critique the ‘we all live in one big thought-system’ theory then you must respect the internal logic, even if you believe the assumptions to be flawed.

PETER: Why must I respect the internal logic – I gave up believing Eastern spiritualism years ago. The internal ‘logic’ of spiritualism is a crock and an utterly ‘self’-centred crock at that. James Randy amongst others offered substantial prize money to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal feats – including the claims that thought can influence matter – and no-one has thus far succeeded.

As someone who has worked in the building industry for years I have yet to hear of anyone who has evidence that ‘the movement of thought influences … buildings’. I have had people tell me that a house should be sited on a certain position on a block of land because of an imaginary ‘energy line’ that runs under the ground and that a particular internal arrangements of the house will bring either good or bad ‘Chi’ if that’s what you mean by thought influencing matter, but I don’t believe in superstition.

RESPONDENT: You’re not playing fair when you conclude that the ‘we all live in one big thought-system’ theory ‘still lays the blame for the ills of humankind at the feet of thinking and conditioning, not feelings borne of the instinctual passions’.

PETER: You keep coming up with these spiritual theories and then, when I don’t agree with them, you accuse me of not playing fair. I take it that a fair game to you is one in which I would sit here saying ‘Yes, No 59 … yes No 59… oh yes No 59’. If this is your idea of a fair game I can only suggest you stop playing it with me and start playing it in front of the mirror – that way you would not only have a captive audience but no doubt an admiring one as well.

RESPONDENT: The theory does not say that. In this theory you can’t separate the feelings borne of instinctual passions from the larger system of thought.

PETER: This theory only appeals to those who are either incapable of, or are not interested, in making a distinction between feeling and thought … whereas I, along with others, can and do make a distinction.

RESPONDENT: The instinctual passions are an important part of the larger whole, being drivers and reactors to other elaborately interconnected parts of the thought system.

PETER: From what I understand of the brain’s operation – both intellectually through reading LeDoux and others and experientially by being attentive as to how this brain and other brains operate – there are no ‘elaborately interconnected parts of the thought system’, it’s all very simple really.

As I said above – ‘the ultimate source … is in genetically-encoded instinctual passions which are not only primary ‘quick and dirty’ reactions but they also feed back into thinking such that reasoned responses, sensibility, sensitivity and clear thinking have little if any chance to operate’.

Once I understood this intellectually I then ditched the ‘‘we all live in one big thought-system’ theory’ and all other spiritual concepts and started to find out for myself the experiential evidence that this is so. In short, I started to get in touch with my own feelings and passions and began to observe them in action – something that men, in particular, have been conditioned not to do. (...)

*

RESPONDENT: And please note that just because I quote or paraphrase someone does not mean that I endorse all they do and say. David Bohm spent far too much time and energy with the reprehensible J Krishnamurti.

PETER: If I may point out, it was you who made the comment –

[Respondent]: ‘Big deal about nothing – instinctual passions are still conditioning. Evolutionary conditioning, in fact. There are others who say much the same thing. Read writings by David Bohm, for example.’ [endquote].

When I provided quotes that clearly indicated that Mr. Bohm specifically said that the ultimate source of all the problems that plague humanity is thought itself, you then offer a disclaimer that you are not prepared to endorse all that Mr. Bohm said. That puts an end to the possibility of any sensible discussion, hey?

RESPONDENT: You put pay to discussion with feeble conclusions like that.

PETER: It was your failure to stand by the evidence you are offering in order to prove your point that actualism is nothing other than re-branded spiritualism, i.e. that it is not new, which led me to this conclusion. If you stop providing evidence that you are not prepared to stand by, and start to provide some that you are prepared to stand by, then we can have a sensible discussion.

In other words, it’s high time you stopped bluffing and started to play your trump cards – if you had any, that is.

RESPONDENT: In a previous point I said that Bohm would regard instinctual passions to be a part of the whole system of thought, so if Bohm sheets home the blame to thought you can be sure he includes a very wide section of experience including instinctual passions.

PETER: Why should I assume that he said something when he didn’t say it? Or more to the point, why do you assume that he said something when he didn’t say it?

RESPONDENT: For many years meditation was a struggle for me because I couldn’t get out of my mind. I was born into an intellectual family, my father being a university professor. I was very fond of the intelligence I inherited from him. My mind was my most prized possession, opening doors of opportunity for me, giving me power and influence over people of lesser intellect. Thus it was very hard for me to let go of the hold that my intellect had over me. I still cherish all the gifts that God has bestowed on me, but I am no longer ruled by my intellect. Neither am I a starry-eyed bliss ninny. What I am is abundantly happy, endlessly grateful and consciously connected with the Pure Source.

PETER: Indeed. The intellectual person is totally out of touch with their feelings, any common sense, any sensuality and disconnected from world of people, things and events. Similarly, the spiritual person is totally indulgent in their feelings, is totally disconnected to any common sense and any sensuality and is absolutely unattached from the world of people, things and events. It is the identity, the personal ‘I’ inside the head and the impersonal ‘me’ inside the heart that prevents the purity and perfection of the actual world becoming apparent.

To blame one’s woes on thinking, repress one’s savage passions and indulge in one’s tender passions, completely unrestrained by any common sense, is truly a thoughtless exercise, and can only lead to thoughtless affective experiences. It took me months and months of running the question ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ before I began to see that it was ‘my’ precious feelings that caused my malice and sorrow – and not bad thinking or wrong thinking, as I had been taught.

Feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts and always has its roots in ‘my’ crude animal survival instincts.

*

PETER: 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: The path you describe sounds very similar to what Krishnamurti espoused beginning in the early part of the 20^th Century, and thus hardly qualifies as ‘new.’

PETER: I take it when you say ‘sounds very similar’, you mean feels very similar. If you had read what I am saying you would have understood that I am an atheist through and through whereas Jiddu Krishnamurti was a God-man through and through.

To quote the man himself –

[Jiddu Krishnamurti]: ‘That state of mind which is no longer capable of striving is the true religious mind, and in that state of mind you may come upon this thing called truth or reality or bliss or God or beauty or love’. ‘Freedom From The Known’; ©1969 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd.

He is describing well your desired state of ‘pure, thoughtless awareness’. I find it a blatant deceit for the great and revered teachers to claim they are thoughtless, for it is clearly nonsense. A human being has to think to operate and function at a level of intelligence beyond a dog or a chimpanzee. What they are talking about as thoughtless is, in fact, the training of right thinking – thinking in a certain trained spiritual way so that one can eventually ‘realize’ – as in think and feel – oneself to be God.

RESPONDENT: I too am fascinated by the discoveries in the field of neurobiology but fail to see how an understanding of the origin and functioning of the reptilian brain gives us any advantage in controlling it.

PETER: Human beings have been forever trying to control their instinctual passions and it has clearly failed, for law and order in the world is still only maintained at the point of a gun. Further the Eastern religious practice of Divine Transcendence, whereupon one suppresses one’s bad feelings and savage passions and identifies solely with one’s good feelings and tender passions, does nothing but spawn human beings who believe themselves to be Gods and thus reek even more malice and sorrow on a blighted Humanity. I am talking about a new method that results in the elimination of the blind instinctual passions – not the failed methods of controlling or transcending. I am talking about a third alternative.

RESPONDENT: The Brain is a computer; it processes information and relays it to the proper centres. The information is brought in thru attraction by attention of the mind.

PETER: What about the sensate input from the eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin? Or is this purely illusionary for you? Are you so self-obsessed that you run on a closed mind-loop of only ‘I’ exist and everything else and everyone else is ‘Me’? Are you still being the sole creator of your own existence again? To remind you of a previous correspondence that you failed to reply to –

[Respondent]: If Freedom means anything, it means I am the sole responsible party for my existence, as well as, my only accurate historian.

[Peter]: Are you saying that you are the sole responsible party that caused the sperm to impregnate the egg that grew to be the flesh and blood body called No 12? If so, you truly are laying claim to being a creator being – the sole creator of your own existence.

Further, you are your own historian, as in creating your own history. In psychological terms this is the definition of delusion – the creation of an illusionary ‘innocent beingness’ from an illusion – the social/psychological and instinctual/psychic ‘self’.

[Respondent]: Therefore all ideas ‘about’ existence and my personal being are under my own authority to claim or discard according to whether I determine they are ‘workable’ in my reality.

[Peter]: In other words, you are creating your own reality, or your own truth.

[Respondent]: Freedom has nothing to do with ‘consensus’, it has to do with personal volition. [endquote].

If you insist on creating your own reality, I guess it doesn’t matter a fig how your mind operates or what you think and feel because it has nothing to do with anyone else who exists in your reality. No wonder you desperately need to feel ‘We are all one’ and need to connect with others because it must be very, very lonely living in a reality of your own making and of which you are the ultimate authority.

RESPONDENT: The ‘hardware’ that attracts the mindal energy is intelligence, the software that governs how that energy/info is used is intellect.

PETER: The hardware is a two brain system – an ancient instinctual brain that is primary and thoughtless emotional and a newer neo-cortex that is the seat of human intelligence. The software consists of two facets – a social programming that forms one’s social identity and an instinctual survival program that forms one’s instinctual self. Being software, both these programs can be deleted – i.e. although they are felt to be real, cause immense pain and suffering both in oneself and to others one comes in contact with, they can be changed and ultimately deleted.

This deletion of the instilled social and genetically-encoded instinctual programming results in a beneficent clarity of intelligence freed from the insidious influence of the animal passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

RESPONDENT: Of course the more refined the intelligence, the more refined the information being processed.

PETER: The more conditioned the programming, and the more passionate one is about this conditioning, the less intelligence is free to operate.

RESPONDENT: The real discovery here is that the ‘seat of intelligence’ and also the governing software, are located in the same place ... the Heart.

PETER: There was an enormous outcry by the church when heart transplants were first proposed. The reason the ancients believed the heart was the centre is that the ancient reptilian brain – the seat of the instinctual passions – pumps chemicals to the heart as a response to fear, aggression, nurture and desire, thus these responses are sensately experienced in the heart region.

RESPONDENT: One of the problems people experience is mistaking the Heart for the centre of emotions. That centre is in the pit of the abdomen. When the emotions are allowed out of their ‘pit’, they are brought up into Heart for purification, and ‘intelligently’ dispensed with.

PETER: The more savage emotions of fear, dread and despair are sensately experienced as chemical flows in the gut or abdomen whereas the tender emotions of nurture and desire tend to be sensately experienced as chemical flows in the heart region. The source of these emotions has been empirically demonstrated to be the ancient reptilian brain and we that humans share these instinctual passions – both the tender and the savage – with other sentient animals. These genetically-encoded instinctual passions are blind nature’s rather clumsy software package designed to ensure the survival of the species – to endow each and every human with fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Being only software, this programming can be consciously and deliberately deleted if one is daring enough.

RESPONDENT: The mind is just a big sea of information, nothing to be ‘glorified’, as has been done on this planet.

PETER: And yet it is the process of thinking that has brought the amazing technological advances in safety, comfort, leisure and pleasure that an increasing number of we modern human beings are beginning to enjoy. And yet the church, the priests and their faithful followers would have us condemn and demean intelligence in favour of believing some mythical God or Higher intelligence is going to actualize peace on earth – an end to the grim instinctual psychological and psychic battle for survival still fought between all human beings on the planet.

It’s time to get real and stop mouthing ‘self’-gratifying psittacisms from the past.

RESPONDENT: The brain can only ‘process’ the feeling/emotion, that’s where one finds themselves ‘looping’ on some issue and staying awake all night.

PETER: So why blame the brain for this self-centred neurosis – why not turn one’s attention on the real issue that is inhibiting peacefulness – one’s precious feelings and emotions – both the savage and the tender? Why not look somewhere different than the traditional, fashionable hackneyed solution that has failed again and again?

RESPONDENT: If that information is taken out of the realm of the mental/mind and embraced/accepted by the Heart, the ‘looping’ ceases.

PETER: Indeed, one can dissociate from these churning emotions by going inside and imagining oneself to be above it all to connect with the Light, to feel God, to become an Impersonal Higher Self, or whatever other feeling state one gets into. One gets out of grim reality and escapes into a Greater Reality, by whatever name or whatever God, but it is all a fantasy, an illusion based on an illusion. The pioneering challenge is now for those willing to abandon both reality and Reality in search of the ‘self’-less experience of actuality.

RESPONDENT: The ‘intelligent’ manner to handle ‘the problem’ is then sent into the mental, if a physical action is needed ... or an ‘understanding’ appears in processing centres that puts the mental to ‘bed’. The ‘ah hah’ thing.

PETER: The ‘‘ah hah’ thing’ is the enormous relief that one doesn’t have to do anything except realize that the world of people, things and events is all an illusion and ‘who’ you really are is a spirit in transit – a grandiose ‘me’ of Godly power and immortality.

RESPONDENT: There is a ‘sister’ of mine from India, who has been known as Hazur. She said something I really appreciated, ‘A quiet mind is a Divine Mind’. That’s kind of opposite of what is taught, isn’t it?

PETER: Not nowadays. This advice is taught in the popular press and is fashionable in both East and West. The extreme form of mind quieting is those people who spend hours a day, sitting in a quite corner with their eyes closed, hiding from the world seeking Divine Realization.

The churning of the mind that everyone experiences is ‘self’-centred neurotic thoughts and worries that are underpinned by the feelings and emotions arising from the passions integral to the instinctual animal ‘self’. To trip off into a fantasy of a real Self with a ‘Divine Mind’ is a self-indulgent ancient fantasy that is to head 180 degrees in the opposite direction to actually eradicating the problem.

RESPONDENT: I am always counselling my clients to stop thinking, so they can Know. I get a lot of funny looks ...

PETER: But I bet when they get a taste of thoughtless dissociation from the world of people, things and events they find it addictive. It is such a cheap way out for one has to do nothing, there is no work to be done, there is no tough stuff to do, no changes to be made – just an acceptance of things the way they are, i.e. that humans will always be malicious and sorrowful and that the solution is to feel oneself to be Divine and above it all. It’s called copping out and I did it for years before integrity forced me to stop kidding myself, and others, that I was being genuine and honest. I finally realized that if I was fooling myself, I was being really, really silly.

RESPONDENT: I think we must inquire as to what spiritual means with regard to emotional. To me, spirituality means to be free from all knowledge, from one’s entire content of memory.

PETER: And yet what is called by jargon spirituality includes not only its previous traditional meaning of Eastern religion but has now grown to embrace the mysticism in Western religion – a vast reservoir of psychic knowledge, atavistic memory and altered state experiences. What you are saying is that one denies modern scientific knowledge, one’s common sense and previous life experiences in order to tap into this ancient knowledge. Not knowing and no memory are but platitudes of the East’s so-called wise men.

RESPONDENT: That means you do not get emotional with regard to all forms of thought, because thought comes from memory and knowledge.

PETER: Then how come one is advised to practice right thinking – in order to have right memory and right knowledge? In order to train or control one’s emotions so as to only have the right emotions? Surely if this system worked we could expect the practitioners to be perfect and pure, that they would not get angry, sad, annoyed, cynical, arrogant, be deceitful, power hungry, etc.?

By the way, thinking is what the brain does and all thought does not come from memory and knowledge. The ability to think, reflect and plan is what sets us apart from all other instinctual-driven animals. Thought, when freed of the shackles of ancient beliefs and the influence instinctual passions, is a marvellous thing.

RESPONDENT: However, that does not mean the spiritual person does not show compassion.

PETER: So spiritual people do get emotional, as in showing compassion, which means sharing one’s sorrow or feeling pity for others? The spiritual teachings make no bones about sorrow – sorrow is deemed essential and inevitable in earthly human experience in the ancient teachings, and feeling and sharing sorrow is an indispensable part of all religion. The deeper the sorrow, the more the need for God. The blacker the Darkness, the stronger the Light. This is why religions have always condemned scientific progress, safety, comfort, pleasure and leisure – anything that reduces human suffering is anathema to religion.

You may also have noticed that all religion is founded on fear. Fear and damnation is writ large in the teachings, constantly evoked in the sermons and mutually reinforced amongst the followers. The stronger the fear, the more the need for God. The more hellish the damnation, the more desperate the need for salvation.

And there is no greater fear than the fear of death.

RESPONDENT: The spiritual person expresses love and compassion to its fullest. I would even say that being emotional has little to do with spirituality and love.

PETER: Are you now claiming that love and compassion are not emotions? Are they not strong feelings felt in the chest area or in the gut? Are not the euphoric feelings of Love of God and the gut wrenching sorrow for the Human Condition deep-seated emotions?

RESPONDENT: Yet, that does not mean the spiritual person is not in touch with his or her emotions. Quite the contrary. The spiritual person knows where the emotions belong and does his or her best to keep emotions where they belong.

PETER: You also said – ‘[Spirituality] means you do not get emotional with regard to all forms of thought’. So what you are saying is the spiritual person carefully chooses, as in thinks, which emotions to be in touch with and which not to be in touch with. Keeping undesirable emotions, or wrong thoughts to use the Buddhist jargon, where they belong means to repress them, which as we know from the lives of the Enlightened Ones, is certainly not to eliminate them. This is why perfection and purity is never actualized in the spiritual/religious world, despite all the well-meaning efforts of billions of devotees over the millennia.

RESPONDENT: Emotions do inspire whether in music, dance or many of the arts. I even get emotional over a beautiful sunset or watching children playing in the park.

PETER: Do you get sad listening to music, watching a sunset, do you get upset when watching children fight? Do you also get emotional when you watch the news on TV, when someone says something unkind to you, when you are driving, when you do not get what you want, when you do not get your way? Simple observations of this type will reveal that emotions arising from the instinctual passions conspire to prevent one from ever being unconditionally happy and unreservedly harmless.

RESPONDENT: But when thought comes into play I set aside my emotions.

PETER: This is called right thinking, or very selective attentiveness, whereby one can keep the undesirable emotions where they belong and only feel the desirable emotions. This right thinking is always difficult in the cut and thrust of the market place, which is why serious spiritual practitioners always retreated from the world of people, things and events.

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PETER: Just a comment on your post to No 12 entitled ‘achieving enlightenment’.

RESPONDENT: Some 27 years ago I had that enlightening experience, the light, the tunnel the warmth of the glow and that everlasting sense of peacefulness. We look for the words, but the words only take us away from that which is.

PETER: Unfettered awareness and attentiveness will reveal that one’s thinking is continually affected by one’s animal instinctual passions and this is what creates feelings – a feeling is an emotional-backed thought. When something is said or observed one always has a feeling reaction, which could be a moral or ethical judgement as in good, bad, right or wrong, or it could be an automatic reaction arising from the instinctual passions resulting in feelings of fear, aggression, nurture or desire. Thus one’s thinking is never a complete cycle but rather a continual staccato that appears to be a continual thought neurosis but, if accurately observed, is found to be a continual turbulence of feelings and emotions.

Thinking firstly needs to be freed of superstition and impassioned feelings for intelligence to begin to operate, such that thinking can complete its straightforward simple process of awareness, investigation, evaluation, decision and implementation. (...)

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RESPONDENT: Thought is the response of memory. When you are asked your name, you respond. When you are asked what you ate for dinner last Sunday you respond more slowly. A searching of memory takes place, similar to finding the correct path to open a file in your computer.

PETER: I watched a TV program documenting the amazing progress that has been made in the last century towards eradicating viral infection and epidemics. In 1918 an influenza epidemic killed 20 million people – more than died in WW I. By the last quarter of the century, defences and cures had been found for most deadly flu strains, polio, measles and chicken pox and smallpox had been eradicated. Millions upon millions of lives have been saved and suffering eliminated by human endeavour and intelligence. Jonas Salk, the pioneer of the polio vaccine, was interviewed and he said that it took until the1950’s before the combination of knowledge, experience and technique was such that real progress and innovation was possible in the fight against the plagues that had traditionally swept through human populations. I liked his definition of the thinking process – a combination of knowledge, experience and technique.

To belittle thought as a response to memory only, is but to parrot one the Eastern Church’s repressive favourite strictures designed solely to keep the priests and Gurus in power and control, and to keep the peasants in awe and gratitude and from thinking for themselves. To wallow in thoughtlessness is a self-indulgent wank.

PETER: You wrote to No 30 on the subject of clarity and perception –

RESPONDENT: Your follow-up question regarding the change in how we perceive ‘the world’ when our mood changes is an interesting one. I think there is a direct correlation between our level of consciousness and how we ‘see’, even in a physical sense. I too have noticed the dramatic lightening-up effect when the fearful or angry thoughts pass.

PETER: Fearful or angry thoughts are feelings, not thoughts. Fear is a feeling, as is anger. Feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts. A feeling is sensately experienced in the body, either in the heart area or the gut, due to the flow of chemicals from the instinctual brain.

Spiritual belief is that bad thoughts and wrong thinking are the cause of our malice and sorrow and completely ignore the fact that it is the feelings that arise from the instinctual passions that are the real problem.

RESPONDENT: I am starting to experience these episodes as energy fields passing through consciousness and resisting the urge to identify them as ‘my’ problems or fears. This gives them a relatively short life-span. I notice that when I am experiencing these heavy energy fields they seem very real and I can’t imagine that I will ever feel happy again, and yet when they pass I do indeed experience happiness, love and joy once again.

PETER: What you label ‘energy fields’ are in fact your very own feelings and emotions. It is common in the real world to blame others for one’s own fear and anger and it is common in the spiritual world to blame others in general – the unconscious, evil or normal people – while disowning these same feelings in oneself.

This is what is called dis-identifying with one’s feelings. This is the quintessential religious/spiritual practice whereby one dis-identifies from the bad feelings that arise from the savage instinctual passions – it is not ‘my’ anger or ‘my’ fear – and identifies with the good feelings that arise from tender instinctual passions – the real ‘me’ who is all-loving and all-encompassing.

RESPONDENT: You may be interested in the following scientific thing:

In a scientific mood today.

PETER: Yes indeed, we are starting to begin to understand a bit about the brain’s hardware. I always find it interesting that, in terms of mapping feelings, emotions and instinctual reactions, they can only watch and map the situation ‘as is’. The next major challenge facing the human species is to eliminate the animal instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that are located in the reptilian or ‘lizard’ brain located at the top of the nerve system of the spinal chord .

It could well be that in the future it may be possible to cause this elimination genetically, but that is a mere speculation.

In the meantime, there is a tried and tested way of doing it yourself. It is possible by your own effort, guided by your own native intelligence when freed of the psittacisms of the past, to cause the elimination of these instincts in yourself.

To cause their elimination to such an extent that the final demise is inevitable. To finally become human, freer than a bird on the wing, pure and innocent, perfect and delightful.

As for positive thinking, the problem for me always was the effort needed. The need to be on vigilant guard or in ‘positive mode’ was a constant effort on ‘my’ part. I found it an exhausting thing to maintain and I saw that I often used it to cover up something I didn’t want to look at, dig in to and investigate.

Some aspect of the Human Condition, that was in me, that was causing me to be unhappy (sorrow) or causing me to make others around me unhappy (malice).

The very commitment to become happy and harmless meant that I was compelled to eliminate all the feelings associated with malice and sorrow.

At the core of who you ‘feel’ yourself to be is your very instinctual ‘self’ – the core instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire – the very animal survival instincts that still entrap the human species in animal behaviour.

It is now possible to evoke that change in yourself, should you so desire.

I do like the human brain and the marvels it has wrought. It’s time to do something about the lizard brain.

That’s the next challenge for individual members of the human species – and the time is ripe.

RESPONDENT:

[quote]: Thought encloses itself in its own word’ What then is this activity from which one ought to abstain? It is the disordered activity of the mind which, unceasingly, devotes itself to the work of a builder erecting ideas, creating an imaginary world in which it shuts itself like a chrysalis in its cocoon.’ – The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

PETER: Eastern philosophy and religion deny and negate the innate intelligence and common sense operation of thought while giving full and unbridled reign to the affective and imaginary faculties. ‘Get out of your head and into your heart’ can be translated into ‘give up common sense and you can imagine and ‘feel’ anything you want to’. Feelings of Love, Oneness, God, etc. abound – varying only by the particular belief system one is influenced by at the time.

Hence Christians ‘see’ and feel Christ, Buddhist ‘see’ and feel Buddha, scientists ‘see’ parallel universes, etc. etc.

RESPONDENT:

PETER: And feelings and emotions form part of the ‘self’ – they are who we feel we are and as such ‘form a world of their own’ – very real and very substantial in that we kill and die for our passionate heart-felt feelings – and yet to date they have got off scot-free. It is significant to realise that feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts – a fact easily observed in one’s ‘self’ is given sufficient awareness.

PETER: ‘Not knowing’ is highly venerated in the East – where ignorance is bliss, thinking for oneself and questioning of one’s faith is actively discouraged – for the very reason that facts and common sense are anathema to beliefs and impassioned imagination.

Thus it is that people are encouraged to ignore what the ‘mind-fuckers’ are saying – ‘you are in your head and not your heart’ is a common spiritual put-down. One is encouraged to go by one’s own ‘experience’ by which they mean go by one’s own feelings for the spiritual world is but a world of feeling and imagination.

PUBLISHER No 1: I have tried intellectualizing and I enjoy that, which is why I return your emails – I think you must like intellectualizing as well. I have no problems with using the mind or whatever you wish to label it.

PETER: Do you have a purpose to your intellectualizing, as in using your thinking ability to find out, explore and investigate something which you do not know about? I always find it interesting that people will read, ask questions and investigate by whatever means to find out about computers, work, gardening, etc., but not about the Human Condition we find ourselves ensnared in. For this they accept, and follow devoutly, the Wisdom of the Ancient Ones as though their myopic world view and their fear-ridden perspective on human existence and meaning is somehow sacred and profound. Most curious.

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