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Selected Correspondence Peter How to Become Free from the Human Condition
RESPONDENT: So I have now modified the question to ‘Am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ This has been quite useful in reminding me to experience rather than feel this moment. PETER: Well, I did it the opposite way. I became vitally interested in ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ And if that meant I was feeling angry, sad, melancholy, lacklustre, depressed, then I would track back to find out what it was that bought on that feeling. What was said, what happened, when did it happen? I wanted to understand feelings, their source, how they worked, what caused them to kick in, etc. Only by understanding them, could I begin to get free of their insidious grip. I also knew that until I was rid of the source of feelings entirely – ‘me’ – I would have to live with them. So best to understand them and best to aim for the felicitous and innocuous ones – and feeling happy and feeling harmless are surely the best one can aim for of the feelings. The other point is that conducting an active investigation into one’s very psyche is a way of neither expressing nor avoiding feelings – one simply waits with interest and fascination for the next feeling to turn up to be investigated. The very act of observation, investigation, contemplation, understanding and insight is the only way I, this flesh and blood body, can rid myself of the psychic and psychological entity that prevents my sensible, sensate experiencing of the infinitude of the actual world. So, my experience is to become fascinated with what you are feeling and why you are feeling it. It can be scary business to investigate feelings and emotions, for the Human Condition is an animal instinctual condition but the investigation is actually liberating. It could be useful to you, at this stage, to read I do like it when anyone begins to look at feelings and the role they play in preventing we humans from being happy and harmless. Your discovery that you experience life by feeling only is crucial, and what you do with the discovery is vital to your being permanently happy and harmless. Good Hey.
RESPONDENT: It has been quite revealing, thinking about my belief in my uniqueness. Once I recognize and acknowledge that I am not unique, large part of me becomes weak to defend. It also makes me more ruthless in dealing with my feelings and emotions. I remember now the following correspondence with Richard three years ago. At that time I did not realise his last sentence was so meaningful:
It is indeed a good news. Once I realise that ‘It is the human condition that is to blame ... not the flesh and blood body called No 4’, it makes life much simpler and it is much easier to investigate and remove other beliefs. It looks like that ‘being unique’ is the mother of all beliefs. It has been helpful discussing these things with you. PETER: I have been able to spend many hours discussing such things with both Richard and Vineeto and it is wonderful that this mailing list now allows the opportunity to broaden such discussions into an open to anyone forum. Much of what is being discussed is very difficult to take on board at first reading and it may need several readings and a lot of contemplating before the penny drops – the ‘uh hu, that’s what he or she meant’ bit. First comes the understanding of the fact and then comes the acknowledgement and experiential understanding of the fact and then action ensues. When I read your exchange with Richard, I thought to myself that he had described the fact of the matter so succinctly – ‘It is the human condition that is to blame ... not the flesh and blood body called No 4’. Recognizing and acknowledging this fact means you are instantly able to throw guilt, blame, denial, objection and avoidance out of the window and get on with the job that is always at hand – being happy and being harmless. I also noted with amusement that I had recently used almost identical terms to describe the universal, common to everyone, nature of affective feelings. Richard’s description – ‘There is no difference between English anger ...’ – was so straightforward that it has stuck in my head as it were. No wonder people accuse me of being a clone – I use similar words and very often the same words to describe the same facts. Then, out of interest, I went searching for the past conversations I have had with you on the list and found the following. I thought it interesting because the topic relates to the three possible ways of experiencing the world that is a currently being discussed on the list.
And here you are now saying –
Once it sinks in that you are not unique you start to see that you just been infected with the human condition via social conditioning and genetic propensity. Then you start to become a student of the human condition – you make an experiential study of feelings and emotions as they come up, you take a good look at all of Humanity’s ancient beliefs and wisdoms, you also look at Humanity’s ideals, values, morals and ethics in terms of ‘are they silly or sensible and do they work in practical terms’. You start off by being interested in the human condition, then you find yourself becoming curious, then
a fascination grows which can eventually become an obsession. Soon you find this curiosity about the human condition runs almost constantly in the
background as a sensual attentiveness and an investigative awareness – a wordless ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?
RESPONDENT: Yes I am interested in becoming free of human condition and I cannot help but do it ‘my’ way. PETER: Why? Once I realized ‘I’ was in no way unique and in no way an individual it was easy for me to give up ‘my’ pride, prejudices and preconditions and follow someone else who had become free of the human condition and do it his way. There was a slight variation to Richard’s way in that I avoided becoming Enlightened on the path – as I was well forewarned by Richard – but the way or method I used was identical to Richards. Everybody is socially conditioned and programmed and there is very little essential difference in this programming as there is little essential difference between the various human tribal cultures, their religions, beliefs, morals and ethics. The instinctual passions are also universal and common-to-all – there is no difference between German anger or Indian anger or Australian anger nor is there in any difference between French sadness, Chinese sadness or Lithuanian sadness. Once I understood the fact that no one is unique or special in that everybody is entrapped within the same human condition, I was then able to gaily abandon doing things ‘my’ way and get on with being sensible. I gave up doing what didn’t work to make me happy or harmless and I started to become really curious about actualism and how to become free of the human condition in toto. Besides trying to ‘be’ an individual and ‘be’ unique is such an effort that it was a tangible relief to head off down the path to becoming an anonymous ‘nobody’ – a non-identity. RESPONDENT: I understand that actuality is different than what I understand it to be, but as I don’t have any first hand experience of it, I can’t do better than just making intellectual sense of it. PETER: Why do you believe this, if I may ask? As long as you have ‘first hand experience’ of being sad and malicious you always have an opportunity to begin investigating the human condition in operation as your ‘self’. This is the only way to move forward because your understanding of actualism will go from intellectual curiosity to direct experimentation through trial and error and on to intrigue and fascination. This is a step above making intellectual sense of actualism as you then start the process of becoming incrementally free of the human condition and as you start to become free you will inevitably facilitate the onset of a pure consciousness experience of actuality. You will then have your own experience of the delight and purity of ‘self’-less living under your belt, as it where, to act as a your own touchstone and guide for your further investigations ... and then you can really start to stand on your own two feet and become autonomous for the first time in your life. While this is only a suggestion it is founded upon the experience of all that I know of who have
assiduously practiced the actualism method so far. If you can’t remember a PCE there is a way to induce one but it does require compulsive
effort and obsessive enthusiasm, both of which are contrary to all spiritual teachings.
RESPONDENT: Just some thoughts – How is it possible for all the bad stuff to go, those bad emotions etc., how can they go for good? PETER: I assume from your posts that you have had a good grounding in the awareness-watching business, which is a reasonable starting point. You also seem interested in the possibility of getting rid of at least some of the emotions i.e. the bad ones. One of the problems usually with the traditional awareness approach is that one can spread oneself a bit thin on the ground and not zero in on a particular issue. It makes good sense to pick one issue out of the bundle of feelings and emotions that assail one every day. Anger is an excellent starting point as it is an easily recognised and strongly felt emotion. The next trick is to pick a situation that causes you to be angry. It could be when driving your car, an excellent time for self-observation. The aim would then be not to get angry with other drivers, pedestrians, traffic jams, slow drivers, red lights, etc. To be aware of when anger arises, with the aim of not letting anger ruin your happiness while driving the car. For me, I particularly remember someone at work who could raise my heckles and ruin my happiness for hours afterwards. I made it my mission for a few weeks not to let him get at me. Not to get angry, not to let anyone get me angry. Not to let the bugger get me down! It wasn’t him personally – it could have been anyone or any situation. And anger itself went. I suggest giving it a go in an actual situation, give it a try. RESPONDENT: What removes them? PETER: You, there is no one else who is as vitally interested in your happiness as you ... and there is no God to do it. RESPONDENT: Is it the removal of the verbal belief or is it some times more the removal of an actual false impression about something ie. the removal of an impression that is stimulated under a certain condition but which has no real substance apart from itself and if so why keep it? PETER: No, in the example I gave above anger is anger and it not only ruins your day but it will probably do no good to the person you get angry with. RESPONDENT: What is left? Yes, that is certainly a concern. PETER: From my experience – two things, both positive. One is a little bit less of ‘No 3’.
‘No 3 the angry one’ will have disappeared. Second that means that there is more possibility of and more opportunity for being happy and
harmless. It is but the simple putting into practice of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ In this case it is while driving
the car, driver cuts in on you, flash of anger, reported and noted, back to being happy. Next time driver breaks sharply in front, got it even
quicker then, even quicker back to being happy and eventually ... ‘well that was a pretty silly thing he did, good thing he missed me ... what a
lovely day it is to be driving a car ... such a good thing, this being alive business ... funny ... I used to get really angry about things like
that...’ * RESPONDENT: So what do you do with the other feelings that arise? Do you mean you don’t attempt to go into them and find out more? PETER: I find that I can best concentrate on, and contemplate upon only one thing at a time. I
can drive a car while thinking or talking but as far as tasks requiring my full attention and awareness – I do one at a time. So for me at the
start, rather than try to spread myself thin by trying to being aware of hundreds of feelings, reactions, doubts, thoughts, emotions I zeroed in
on one to study in detail. I always found that there was one particular pertinent issue at any one time that was spoiling my happiness. It was
usually the issue that I was avoiding, that bought up most fear, or dominated my thoughts most. This was then the one to ‘tackle’, the one to
dig in to, talk over, focus on, contemplate upon, etc., but it was usually obvious.
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. How I would have described myself 2 years ago is that I had constant turmoil and churning in my head. This is probably due to being a male, and women may well describe it more as churning in the heart. When I met Richard my aim was firmly established to reduce and eventually eliminate this churning to the point where I experienced life as I had in the PCE – free of this neurosis. By running the simple ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ I was able to isolate and investigate the particular issue that was the cause of my not being happy at the time. With that one dealt with, up popped the next one and away I went again – success breading success. As for the ‘help of the Question’, again I’m at a bit of a loss as to what you mean. I stopped having a big Question, rolled up my sleeves and concentrated on the little questions such as why was I irritated by what Vineeto was doing, what was the source of that, why did that feeling come up, what was that feeling? I brought the question back to something I could do about myself. The question was not just for the sake of questioning but the question was to investigate in order to find and discover an answer. In the discovering of the answer, the facts as opposed to the beliefs, a small but significant change resulted – I was more happy and more harmless. T’is of such little steps that Virtual Freedom is obtained. This is, after all, a practical method to become free of the Human Condition – it is not a philosophy. RESPONDENT: One intellectual question still comes up even though I may be solving it in practice. Even though I know that feelings are the premature conclusion of fact, once it has been accepted by the body as truth how does the body undo those part truths? My answer would be to review those beliefs & feelings in detail without jumping to conclude at the first emotional impulse and see what happens. PETER: Again, I’m having trouble following you. You say ‘I know that feelings are the premature conclusion of fact’. For me, it is clear that any feeling that arises is commonly expressed as an emotion-backed thought. This is evidenced when one identifies a feeling, say annoyance (mild anger), and traces it back to its source – say, something someone said an hour ago. One can clearly see that the feeling, those churning thoughts or worries, are due to an emotional response to what was said. These thoughts can linger on to produce a ‘feeling of annoyance’ that can last hours and days even – ruining any chance of being here. Often people relate feelings to a more dramatic outburst, such as a rush of anger, or a flush of love, while remaining in ignorance of the long term general background of feelings. A fact has nothing to do with feelings. A fact is a fact, a tree is a tree, a coffee cup is a coffee cup. No doubt, when people discover or read a fact it could produce a feeling response in them – but that is a reaction to the fact. When we point out that, after 5,000 years, and with billions of people following the spiritual path, there is still no peace on earth that is a fact. Now when one discovers a fact for oneself, acknowledges and realizes it, one can have a realization – a blindingly obvious flash of such intensity that a change is evidenced – one can no longer go back to believing what one believed before. What this will do is eliminate the associated feelings one has in relying on the belief and not the fact. It is such a painful, confusing and bewildering life most people lead in relying on belief, as one is never confident, able to proceed in any activity or relating with the surety that a sensible reliance on facts can give. RESPONDENT: In other words, the result of having an instinctual primitive self is to suffer and rooting out the cause of suffering in whatever form is essentially a learning about the active and accumulated influence of that primitive self which is the ending of it. PETER: Of course, ‘the learning’ you describe would not be the normal usage of the word. The learning I experienced was more of an un-learning of all the teachings, Teachings, beliefs, conditionings, etc. that made up ‘Peter the Sannyasin’, the father, the man, the lover, the ... It was a self-demolition process – hence the fear and angst that arises. When I first started, it quickly became apparent that I had to throw all I knew out the window, wipe the slate clean and acknowledge that what ever I thought I knew was really what others had told me was true. It is impossible to throw the lot out at once, but this was the attitude I adopted. This is easy to see in one’s work or in learning something new when one tries out for oneself, find out what works, adapts and changes. But when it comes to the Human Condition this means being willing to question the Revered Teachers – the mythical Wise and Holy Ones and their teachings. Thus it was that ‘Peter the spiritual seeker’ was eventually demolished and then one can get at the instinctual primitive self – the root source of the primitive instinctual emotions of fear and aggression. The path to Actual Freedom is not a learning but a self-immolation, and the first phase is the demolition of one’s social identity – the ‘guardian at the gate’ if you like. To ‘learn’ or redefine Actual Freedom words is but to ‘clip-on’ a bit of knowledge to one’s already dearly-held beliefs. Actual Freedom is not a philosophy or yet another belief-system – to treat it as such is to miss the
main event – an actual freedom from malice and sorrow.
PETER: It is interesting to look back on the process and the stages I went through in investigating feelings, emotions and instinctual passions. With each emotion I investigated it was always an essential first step to investigate the goods and bads, the rights and wrongs, and all the things I had been told and thus assumed to be true – my beliefs. I know we keep flogging this aspect but unless one undertakes this process any investigation will be superficial and offer only a temporary relief of the symptoms without ever tackling the underlying cause of the instinctual passions. What I am suggesting is to be alert to the feelings that arise from one’s instilled morals, ethics, beliefs and values, for these are the first line of ‘self’ defence that needs to be tackled. This is where labelling and making sense of the feelings and emotions is vital for then you can make sense of the apparently arbitrary and chaotic jumble that arises. RESPONDENT: A point that comes to mind. The apparent chaos is possibly what happens when ‘my’ feelings momentarily loose their meaning and one seems to be floundering. Resolve at this point certainly is necessary if one is not to immediately fall back into feelings. PETER: A good point to remember is that there are three ways human beings can experience the world – affectively by feeling, cerebrally by philosophical-type thinking and sensately by direct, momentary sensate involvement. The psychic and psychological entity has no option but to experience the world affectively and cerebrally. We humans are instinctually programmed to feel our way in the world by means of an animal instinctual survival program, the predominant one being fear. As such, when no fear arises, when no excitement is happening, when there is nothing to worry about, ‘I’ feel bored, lost, floundering, meaningless, useless, scared, etc. But you, as the flesh and blood body called No 3, need to have more and more time free of this alien bugger who insists on running the show, causing nuisance, raising objections, being emotional, worrying, etc. This ‘down-time’ is also condemned by society for one is taught to be useful, to contribute, to be creative, that your ‘life’ needs to have a meaning and a purpose. For an actualist, it is often in these periods when nothing is happening – when ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ produces no drama, no issue, nothing to explore – that one can evince a delight and a joie de vive at being alive here and now as a flesh and blood body, located no where in particular on this paradisiacal planet as it floats in the vastness of space. The most pregnant time for a pure consciousness experience can be when one’s guard is down, when no issue is burning and no fear is arising. This is the opposite of the spiritual where one is hunting for the passionate experience and an emotional high as one’s prize or one’s due right in life. John Lennon sang ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’. I would see it as ‘life is what is happening now while you are planning for, or waiting for, your next experience’. Every moment, there is a door available marked ‘actual world’, and it is often most accessible at exactly those moments when there seems to be nothing going on in terms of emotions or worry. The ever-present, physical-only, actual world is ever-peaceful, ever-pure and ever-perfect. There is no fear, no aggression, no good, no bad, no right and no wrong in the actual world. Then, when you come back from the actual world, to resume being an ‘I’ in the real-world, you recommence the fascinating business of dismantling what you have seen to be in the way of your being happy and harmless. * PETER: This rewiring requires persistence, perseverance and repetitive effort – exactly like learning anything new does, except in this case one is unlearning something. Thus one’s success, or not, is exactly proportionate to the amount of time and effort afforded to the task. RESPONDENT: Aye, not only that, it is progressive, as in I can continue with ‘How am I...’ where I left off. PETER: Good, Hey. * PETER: For those wondering where or how to start, the basic approach in actualism is to tackle whatever issue bugs you most, whatever is your particular thing that is making you most angry or most sad. Go for whatever of the obvious passions that you want to be free of and then investigate every feeling, belief, moral, ethic or psittacisms that stands in your way on the path to freedom from malice and sorrow. If you want to be free of malice, then make it the most important thing you are doing when you are doing it. Go about your daily life as you normally do but notice all the times when you are annoyed about something – it might be that it is a rainy cold day, it might be the driver who cuts in on you, it might be something a friend said or something you read or saw on TV. Notice whenever you blame someone for doing something or not doing something. Notice how you talk to other people, what feelings you are having while you talk. Are you being confrontational to this person, a touch aggressive perhaps? Are you feeling resentful, bitchy, sarcastic, cynical, critical, dismissive, arrogant, above-it-all, scornful, irritated or bitter? Do you often berate yourself or give yourself a hard time? Do you take out your anger on others? If so – who, when and why? Can you catch yourself doing it and become aware of it while you are doing it? If you can become this aware then you have found the secret of actualism, for neither the savage nor the tender passions can stand the scrutiny of awareness. In this case, you will have begun the process of becoming free of malice. You will have begun to get ‘the bugger by the throat’. Your malice will noticeably wilt and eventually wither as you become more and more aware of it and all its subtle, and not so subtle, nuances. Then you can do the same thing with sorrow. By running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ you start to notice all those times you are feeling melancholic, sad, lacklustre, bored, resentful, cut off, remote, detached, lonely, depressed, burdened, weighed down, resigned, sympathetic, empathic, gloomy, or hoping for a better day. You start to notice how much time you waste being unhappy and not being here. You then start to notice what things or events trigger these sorrowful feelings. You notice the seduction of wallowing in sad memories and you start to notice the feelings you get when you listen to certain music or watch certain films. The trick is to become aware of the sorrow-full feelings when they are happening, put a label on the feeling and discover when it started and what caused it. The process of becoming aware of your feelings and becoming aware of how they are preventing you from being happy and from being harmless is the process of actualism. While the process is simple and straightforward, the very real challenge is to take it on fully – to
make becoming happy and harmless the most important thing in your life – numero uno. There is no doubt that fear will arise on occasions but if
you set your sights on becoming both happy and harmless you will find that fear, like all of the survival passions, cannot be sustained in the
light of awareness.
PETER: To recap your query – The ruthless challenging, exposing and understanding of these beliefs and instincts actually weakens their influence on my thoughts and behaviour. The process, if followed diligently and obsessively, will ultimately cause them to disappear completely. The idea, of course, being to eliminate the cause of my unhappiness, so that I can experience life at the optimum, now. RESPONDENT: I would assume that the meaning of the second paragraph is to challenge, by paying attention to and extending the scope of awareness rather than by challenging to desensitise. PETER: The answer is neither yes nor no. The purpose of the actualism method is firstly to stop avoiding, denying, suppressing or attempting to transcend one’s own ‘self’-centred instinctual survival passions. The process of becoming aware of these passions in action in your own psyche then leads to you being able to be ‘desensitised’ to these passions, as in ‘Reduce or eliminate the sensitivity of a person to a neurosis, phobia, etc.)’ Oxford Dictionary. You are then no longer prone to be paralysed by fear, overcome by anger, engulfed by nurture or driven by desire – you can become then virtually free of the instinctual passions – virtually happy and harmless. But the precursor to becoming desensitised is to remove the impediments to becoming sensitive to, and therefore aware of, one’s own fear, anger, nurture and desire in action in one’s own psyche. This first stage is only possible for those who have become free of being enamoured, awed and encumbered by spiritual/religious beliefs, values, ethics and morals – there are no short-cuts to Actual Freedom. RESPONDENT: As for the rest of your comments, I would have to agree with what your saying. The process of labelling feelings has been very difficult and for the most part I have unable to determine why. PETER: Speaking from experience, I found two major impediments to becoming aware of and labelling my feelings as they arose – my social identity with all my real-world Christian beliefs, morals and ethics and my layered-on-top Eastern spiritual identity with yet another set of beliefs, morals and ethics. Being born a male in a Christian society meant that I was taught to suppress my feelings and being born-again into Eastern religion meant denying my unwanted feelings and solely identifying with goodness and Godliness. What I soon discovered in actualism was that it is impossible to become aware of, let alone label, my fear and aggression while maintaining my spiritual identity of being a holier-than-thou goody-two-shoes. At one time I did consider that Krishnamurti-ism was a particularly onerous conditioning, as it does seem a very cerebral, detached, feeling-denying-and-suppressing philosophy-religion. But then again, the followers of Rajneeshism, a very emotive, devotional, feeling-expressing philosophy-religion, are seemingly equally unable to be aware of, label and be conscious of their own feelings of malice and sorrow. Whatever nature of spiritual/religious conditioning you have – be it Eastern, Western, Eastern layered on Western, repressive, expressive, devotional, Self-devotional, monotheistic or pantheistic – is irrelevant, because it is impossible to be aware of what is actually happening in the physical corporeal world if you have your head stuck in the clouds in the imaginary spirit-ual world. RESPONDENT: It seems as if they [feelings] have the ability to sink out of conscious view just at the right time and only persistence beyond belief has paid any dividends. Lately it is becoming more obvious just how clever ‘I’ am at managing to screw up the investigation and arrive at a state of doubt. This was combined with my determination to tackle the bad emotions to arrive at the good, which turned out to be really just another excuse for staying with the bad. What I have decided is to approach the bad (emotions) from the state of greater freedom; it is indeed a lot easier that way. Certain feeling/emotions can be put aside temporarily so as to get awareness operating better rather than just trying to be rational in a dark room. PETER: If I read you right, you have set yourself a goal in life – to feel good or feel excellent – and then you are investigating whatever stands in the way of your goal. If you started off feeling really good and suddenly noticed as you put your feet up at lunchtime that you have lost it and are feeling a bit low, then put a name on the feeling – say annoyed – and then trace back and remember when you came off feeling good and why. If it was something someone said, have a root around and discover why you became annoyed. What button was pushed – was it pride, was it guilt, was it your manliness, was it some moral view you held that was offended? When you have milked the event or incident for what it was worth and discovered a bit about yourself and what makes ‘you’ tick, then you get back to feeling good or you even crank up a bit of feeling excellent at having been aware of how you were experiencing that particular moment of being alive and had made some discoveries about yourself. It is impossible to tackle all the emotions at once, as you said, for this can only be an intellectual-only approach. By all means read and intellectually understand but it is the putting into practice of the method that produces actual change – and the putting into practice of the method means one step at a time. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is a one step at a time approach – one feeling, one moment – right now. The other discovery you seem to have made is that is vitally important is to set yourself a benchmark for how you want to feel or experience this moment. If your benchmark is ‘normal’ or average or so-so, then running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ will mostly produce a meaningless answer of ‘normal’, average or so-so. By setting a benchmark of feeling good or feeling excellent, then mostly the question will produce at least a not-so-good or below the benchmark average. Then it is easier to be aware of your feeling at the time and much more likely to be able to name it. RESPONDENT: I find that an emotion approaching from the state of feeling good or great with the accompanying awareness is much easier to tackle. In other words I don’t try to solve all the emotions in order to be deserving of feeling good or great. What I now try to do is get in a position where I can better tackle them. PETER: I like what you have written, for many people seem to have difficulties in remembering a PCE to uphold as their benchmark whereas everyone can remember feeling excellent and thus be easily able to set this feeling as their benchmark. Perhaps it was a particularly carefree time, a particularly sensual experience, a time of particular joie de vie. Then you use this as your benchmark and aim to keep your head above water for as long as you can and when you become aware that you are sinking or have sunk, then you find out the cause and get back to as close to your benchmark as you can. Good on ya. It sounds as if your stubborn perseverance is bringing rewards. The rewards of actualism are beyond belief for they are down-to-earth and actual.
RESPONDENT: Just to make sure that you do know what I’m getting at. I was talking about the physical disability of being tired or say fatigued and its effect on the ability to be aware. When I am tired the mind is dull and lacks the ability to discern the tricks of ‘me’. PETER: It may be appropriate that I am writing this now because I walked down town for a haircut today, had breakfast about 12 in a café and Vineeto picked me up and we went shopping at the local nursery for some plants. We wandered up and down the pathways oohing an aahing as the selection available was almost as extensive as range of foods available from the local supermarket. We took our time purely for the delight of seeing a mere fraction of the extraordinary ways that life has manifest itself on this bountiful planet. Eventually we had a box full of the plants that took our fancy and tootled off home where we immediately launched into several hours of gardening. Now, in the early evening I am typing a post to you with that delicious sensation of tiredness after physical exercise and the satisfaction of getting one’s hands in the soil. The answer to the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ right now is deliciously tired and immensely satisfied with life. We have closed the curtains in the flat and are in what we call ‘night mode’, the lights are soft, two keyboards are clicking away and there is still the remnants of coffee taste in my mouth – the linger of coffee, as it is called. A wonderfully descriptive word, linger... Just to pass on a little bit of information and experience, it is useful to make a distinction between real-world alertness or on-guardness, spiritual awareness and contemplative attentiveness. I remember sometimes meeting Richard and he was just waking up from an afternoon nap or was just idly lazing around or gazing at nothing in particular and it was obvious that he was not being alert in the wide awake, taking particular notice, thinking something in particular sense that is usually meant by being alert. He called it ‘mind in neutral’ – a time of not thinking anything in particular, and not seeing anything in particular that you put a label on or a name to – a ‘gazing with soft eyes’, to use another Richard term. I came to understand that these times of utter ease and peacefulness, of a softy delicious awareness of the delight of being alive as a flesh and blood body can be entry points into being aware of the utter purity and perfection of the actual world we live in. This is when a bare awareness can happen, not a ‘me’ being aware or ‘me’ being alert. If I can remember back to the start of ‘my’ process, it often felt as though I was on alert all of the time as issue after issue or feeling after feeling would come rushing in. It was sometimes very chaotic, most often bewildering and certainly disorienting in the early months. But often out of this very chaos came melt-downs, as it were, where PCEs would sometimes happen out of the intensity of my discoveries or explorations. I have described this initial period of actualism as becoming ‘self’ obsessed – my attentiveness was solely focussed on what ‘I’ was experiencing – whilst carefully driving, banging in nails or doing whatever other things I was doing at the time. If I could make a distinction that may be useful – I was alert to what I was doing but I was increasingly becoming aware of how I was experiencing this moment. I know this could be labelled as nitpicking, to use a term that has crept into the list lately, but there is a distinction that is useful to discuss. What I came to discover was that sometimes the answer to the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ might well be that I am deliciously tired and immensely satisfied with life ... in fact, I am feeling excellent right now. What I would do in the early days was then start worrying that nothing was happening or I started to miss the excitement of another discovery and ‘I’ would then be back in full control. As such, it took a while to get the knack of stretching out my times of feeling good because I was constantly on the alert for feelings of anger, frustration, resentment, sadness, guilt, etc. – which is exactly as it should be in the early days of actualism. But if there is nothing going on as it were, no particular burning issue that you are avoiding or that has just arisen and needs looking at, then it is as equally important to begin to revel in feeling good, to start to wallow in feeling excellent in order to switch over to marvelling at the wonder of it all. The next thing to investigate will come wandering in the door by itself, or may even become apparent from reading on the website or on this mailing list. Whatever pulls you away from feeling good, have a good look at, note it down, and get back to feeling
good as soon as possible. Later, when you have time for a bit of contemplating, you can mull it over to get to the bottom of it. This way you
don’t repress your feelings nor do you express them, you become aware of them in action and then you conduct your own investigation, as only you
can.
PETER: Nice to hear from you again. Before I reply to your post I would like to make a comment on something you wrote to Gary recently – RESPONDENT to Gary: If ‘I’ exists in any given moment which is a likely scenario, then it is likely that ‘I’ will be involved in any conscious decision and action. I think that is where the self has to agree to its own demise or even temporary absence. PETER: Spot on. Many people seem to have trouble with the proposition that ‘I’ can, consciously and with forethought, set upon a course of action that will lead to ‘my’ demise. And yet many of these same people have absolutely no problem with the traditional Eastern philosophy that ‘I’ can, consciously and with forethought, set upon a course of ‘right’ thinking, in the case of Buddhists and neo-Buddhists, that will lead to ‘my’ aggrandizement. It is the same ‘I’ who has the motivation, who does the work – it is simply a matter of a different direction, a different intent and a different result. It’s no small thing to get over this hurdle of supposedly ‘not-doing’ because it is a crippling legacy of one’s spiritual beliefs. All of the Masters, Sages, Gurus and Prophets have peddled the same nonsense that Transformation or Salvation is only achievable by the will or grace of God. This is despite the fact that their own attainment was achieved by their own stubborn efforts whereas it was only the final climatic event that resulted in an enduring Altered State of Consciousness that was not of their own doing – thus seemingly granted by the will or grace of God. The God-men propagate the idea of God’s will purely out of self-interest because they happen to be the God to whom you should surrender your will to. If you take believing and following the wisdom of God-men out of the business of freedom and if you take the belief in God out of the business of discovering what it is to be a human being, what you are left with is discovering the meaning of life by your own efforts – aided and abetted by the innate predisposition of this infinite and eternal physical universe to manifest purity and perfection. The search for freedom, peace and happiness really begins in earnest when one frees oneself from all spiritual/religious belief and this is why the sense of freedom is palpable when this stage occurs. Finally one is able to begin to stand on one’s own feet and walk taller in the world. RESPONDENT to Gary: Am ‘I’ running the question knowing full well that it means that ‘I’ will eventually expire? I would say the implications of that is realised more the longer the question is on going. I guess what I’m saying is that ‘I’ am probably initially, somewhat seduced into continuing with running the question. PETER: The bottom line seduction in actualism is ‘Do you want to be happy and harmless, in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are?’ This quite simple, direct and uncomplicated proposition is seemingly incomprehensible to those who have been taught to believe that this is not possible under the proverbial Grand Scheme of Things. It takes a good deal of courage to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that underpins the belief in a GST – that human existence on earth is essentially a suffering existence and that this suffering is an essential part of the GST. The belief in a GST, in whatever form it takes, dooms human beings to remain collective puppets forever tethered by imaginary strings to some higher entity, energy or disembodied Intelligence. Once there is a crack in the door of this belief the question then becomes who or what is standing in the way of me becoming happy and harmless? This is where the seduction really comes in to play because running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ will not only provide the experiential answer to who or what is standing in the way of me becoming happy and harmless but it will simultaneously serve to begin to remove the impediments that prevent me from being happy and harmless. The astounding thing with this method is you can do it anytime, anywhere. You can do it first thing in the morning, whilst having breakfast, driving to work, at work, driving home, at home, while watching TV, last thing at night, while talking with people, while alone, whilst busy and whilst doing nothing. It’s totally free, it cost nothing, it requires no club membership, it requires no belief , trust faith or hope. It’s something you do by yourself, for yourself and for those around you, for a happy and harmless person is pleasurable company – even if some do find it a wee bit disconcerting. As you said, the longer the question is ongoing, the more you get to realize that there is only one ‘who’ who is standing in the road of me being happy and harmless. You start to get glimpses that this ‘who’ is not, as is commonly believed, someone else who is preventing me from being happy and harmless right now but it is actually ‘me’. Once you begin to really get a grip on the fact that it is only ‘me’ who is ruining my only chance of being happy in this moment, you simultaneously begin to break the ingrained habit of blaming others and being angry at others for seemingly causing me to be unhappy ... and by doing so you then begin to become more and more harmless towards others. And as you have more and more tangible success with running the question ‘How am I experiencing this
moment of being alive?’ you soon discover that, despite ‘my’ fears, ‘I’ am happily agreeing to ‘my’ demise – which is what you
referring to in your comment to Gary. * PETER: This innate strength of one’s ‘being’ is not to be underestimated and an actualist needs to both understand and experience this strength if one is to ever become free of its clutches. The toughest of the passions to escape from are those that humanity holds most dear – the tender passions, and it is these bleeding heartstrings that can either suck you back into the real-world or catapult you into spiritual aggrandizement. To put it plainly, the desire to love or be loved is powerful stuff and when love fails to bring sufficient fulfilment in the real-world there is always the seductive lure of narcissism – Self-Love. RESPONDENT: I have had enough run-ins with the instincts to know what you mean. Even contemplating tackling them can put you on shaky ground. It’s not just a thought or idea, it’s a deep seated process which initially completely defies any in-depth awareness. PETER: I had many experiences and realizations on the path – they are par for the course – but they always occurred perfectly in time on time, never too soon and never too late. Once you make the effort to get the process really rolling it gathers its own momentum as one’s attentiveness does its job – bringing previously hidden issues to the surface one by one. As this momentum gathers, the dare is not to put your foot on the brakes, as it were. The next issue to tackle is always easy to spot – it is always the one that is literally in your face, in this moment. As such, it has to be acted on immediately – there is no time for rehearsals in being here, doing what is happening. Actualism is about throwing out the script that your parents and peers wrote as to ‘who’ you should be and how you should act and then breaking free of one’s instinctual animal heritage that is the very cause of one’s malicious and sorrowful feelings and actions. Thus the fear that arises in the process of actualism can be likened to stage fright – or feeling
like you are on shaky ground – as you begin to feel the thrill of the business of being here without a script. I remember many a time being
concerned that I was ‘losing the plot’ but it would soon disappear when I remembered that the plot within the human condition includes
resentment, frustration, anger, violence, avarice, greed, corruption, loneliness, sadness, despair and suicide. Then I remembered that my aim in
actualism was to break free of the straightjacket of living a pre-scripted life in a pre-determined manner – in short, I wanted to lose the
plot.
PETER: What I would do in the early days was then start worrying that nothing was happening or I started to miss the excitement of another discovery and ‘I’ would then be back in full control. RESPONDENT: Yes I can relate to this. Sometimes the only reason I can see for not being happy is that I’m not doing enough to be happy or that somehow I’m happy because I’ve cheated. PETER: The other night I was laying on the couch doing nothing and it struck me that I was happy for no particular reason at all. I was simply happy to be aware of being here. I reflected that I was well content with all the effort I had made to remove the impediments that stood in the way of this unconditional happiness and how ruthlessly simple the actualism method is in removing these impediments. One simply needs to become aware of when one is not happy and ask oneself why? Find out the reason, question whether it is really worthwhile being unhappy for and if not, chuck it overboard. Similarly, if you find yourself being annoyed or angry – ask yourself why? Find out the reason, question whether it is really worthwhile being unhappy for and if not, chuck it overboard. As for cheating, I remember feeling as though I was a traitor because I wasn’t playing the game that everyone else was – I wasn’t fighting for my rights, I wasn’t blaming others, I wasn’t joining in conversations about how tough life was, I wasn’t sympathising when someone else was complaining about something or someone. At these times it was often as though I had stepped out the door temporarily and was able to see the vast scheme of things – being able to see the non-sense of human beings still wilfully engaged in a psychological and psychic, grim instinctual battle for survival. * PETER: As such, it took a while to get the knack of stretching out my times of feeling good because I was constantly on the alert for feelings of anger, frustration, resentment, sadness, guilt, etc. – which is exactly as it should be in the early days of actualism. But if there is nothing going on as it were, no particular burning issue that you are avoiding or that has just arisen and needs looking at, then it is as equally important to begin to revel in feeling good, to start to wallow in feeling excellent in order to switch over to marvelling at the wonder of it all. The next thing to investigate will come wandering in the door by itself, or may even become apparent from reading on the website or on this mailing list. Whatever pulls you away from feeling good, have a good look at, note it down, and get back to feeling good as soon as possible. Later, when you have time for a bit of contemplating, you can mull it over to get to the bottom of it. This way you don’t repress your feelings, nor do you express them, you become aware of them in action and then you conduct your own investigation, as only you can. RESPONDENT: Aye, ‘tis good advice. PETER: It is always a particular pleasure to write to someone who is genuinely interested in becoming free of malice and sorrow. It is no small thing to be a pioneer in finally ridding this fair planet of the animosity and despair that has exemplified the human condition since time immemorial. In this emerging post-spiritual era, actualism is the only game to play in town.
GARY: I think I may be looking for the chemical highs when ordinary life begins to look too dull and boring. But why does life look dull and boring at times? Just observing the creep of the feeling of boredom, an interesting emotion (?), into one’s life and routine provides plenty of opportunity for exploration. I think I may seek the chemical highs as a means of assuring myself that there actually is a ‘me’ there, because when things get too ordinary or comfortable ‘I’ am afraid there is no ‘me’ left. So, ‘I’ want the excitement of ‘plumbing the depths’, rather than settling for the more durable sensory pleasures and delights of everyday life which are always apparent: the scrumptious feel of the wind on my face on a late fall day, the hearty and pleasing smell of wood-smoke, the exquisite pleasures of a piping hot cup of coffee on a cold morn, etc. One becomes inured to the pathos and emotional turmoil of life and simply overlooks or misses all the simple satisfactions of a life freed from the emotional ups and downs. So this business of seeking to ‘plumb the depths’ has its’ drawbacks. There is a time for that when the opportunity presents itself but there is also a time (any time actually) to savour the rewards of typical everyday life. One, I think, becomes more practiced in living life as a sensory experience rather than living life from an emotionally-charged, affective orientation. PETER: Getting back to your question about a common denominator amongst the people seriously
following actualism, I see the quality of stubbornness or bloody-mindedness as vital. So far, some people have taken an interest in actualism to a
certain point where some change has happened in their lives and then backed away from further pursuits. For some, their spiritual beliefs are too
strong to abandon, for some the prospect of leaving a comfortable hope, ideal, relationship or group is too daunting and some have even suffered
from what could be called stage fright – the fear of the consequences of being actually free is too much. There is an initial flushed enthusiasm
of discovery, understanding and change in the early stages and this is typified by my writings in my journal. What follows, after this initial
stage, can be intimidating as the putting into practice of what one understands is the real test, and the real work, on the path to an actual
freedom. * GARY: I have made major progress recently by severing my ties to AA and the spiritual program of AA. I can see now that I was straddling the line. It became more and more difficult and even downright impossible to maintain an affiliation with an organization with an avowed spiritual purpose. I was not being honest with myself by thinking that I could occasionally attend meetings ‘for support’ yet remain aloof from the evangelizing and propaganda. More and more, I felt like an imposter. Religious indoctrination is very subtle. It permeates 12 Step organizations like AA. It even permeates social work, as I am finding out. When you begin to jettison spiritual values, you find that you don’t have much in common with spiritual people anymore. To question them about this is to often incur their considerable wrath, as they regard as heresy any meaningful attempt to look into the stranglehold that spiritual, mystical, and religious thinking has in these areas. PETER: Becoming free of the human condition means what it means. To step out of Humanity is to
no longer be a member of any exclusive club, to hold no truths as sacred or holy, to cherish no beliefs, to have no precious feelings, to nurse no
malice or sorrow in one’s bosom.
GARY: Recently you wrote on the differences between intelligence and instincts. I am going to continue with my practice of snipping relevant passages and sentences from your post and then responding to those, rather than try to reproduce the entire large post and reply to each and every point. I find that it is bit more manageable for me that way. However, I must say before I do that your recent post was exceptionally well written and powerful. I think you expressed your points with particular clarity and forthrightness. All in all, I found your points have persuaded me to take a long, hard look at just what I think and feel about the whole matter of intelligence as it relates to the instincts. PETER: Yes. This taking ‘a long, hard look at just what I think and feel about the whole matter of ...’ is an integral part of the business of actualism. What we have been taught to be true needs to be re-visited and thought about, what we have been seduced into believing needs to be taken apart and replaced by facts – in short, every belief, truth and psittacism needs to be placed on the table for examination. Then we can get beyond who is right and who is wrong, what is good and what is bad and we can examine what are the facts of the situation. This form of investigation bypasses ‘me’ as a social identity – ‘my’ morals, ‘my’ ethics, ‘my’ values, ‘my’ viewpoint, etc. This continual action of bypassing or undermining ‘me’ as a social identity eventually weakens and diminishes this identity, allowing even more of my psyche to be investigated, even more deeply. As I wrote to you recently we are doing the business of actualism right here, right now. Exactly as you examine your reactions and feelings as to what is on the table for examination, so do I. If nothing is twigged, well and good. If something is twigged, then I have something to look at, something to investigate. It’s all good stuff, very enjoyable and most enthralling as it is happening right now. GARY: At first, reading your post aroused a kind of defensive response in me and I was inclined to respond in a defensive kind of manner, but I decided to wait, think it over more, and really consider what you are saying, ‘chew’ on it a bit more before putting anything down in writing. I also decided, as you suggested, to re-read that portion of your Journal on Intelligence. I recognized immediately that I had read it before, but this time the words took on a different meaning, fuelled in part by my desire to unravel, understand and get to the bottom of this whole thing. PETER: Yep. I remember well the feelings that welled up in me when I first read Richard’s writings but the excitement of discovery eventually overcame ‘my’ reluctance at being exposed and ‘my’ defensiveness. Soon I twigged to the fact that actualism is a voyage of discovery and freedom and the only person who stands in the way of beginning, continuing and completing this journey is ‘me’. * PETER: According to this definition of intelligence human beings have been very intelligent in developing and making weapons. There were three great wars in the last 100 years on the planet, WW1. WW2 and the Cold War. GARY: This is where the defensiveness set in. I thought I don’t need you to tell me about the appalling brutalities that have been committed in the past 100 years. But rather than persisting in a defensive reaction, and making some kind of defensive retort to your post, some kind of knee jerk reaction, I decided to really try to understand what I was feeling defensive about and why I was feeling that way. There is something about this whole issue that I just have not ‘gotten’, something that has not clicked with me. And it goes way beyond just dealing in the semantics of it – the meaning of words and their usage – and it goes to the heart of the matter. And I must admit – and this is very hard – that I have been mistaken in this: you see, I thought that making and using weapons was an intelligent reaction to a perceived danger from other human beings, but I am reconsidering this. PETER: Yes. The important thing is not who is wrong and who is right in any search for the facts – for I certainly make no claim to infallibility. The important thing is to get to the root of the problem – the morals, ethics, values and beliefs that give substance to ‘me’ as a good and valued member of society, i.e. my social identity. If you can break through this outer crust then you get the chance to investigate the inner crust – ‘me’ as an instinctual animal replete with a full set of blind utterly ‘self’-ish instinctual survival passions. Your description is also very clear as to what happens when you run the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ with sincere intent. The answer in your case was ‘I am being defensive’, as in ‘I am feeling fearful’. Having honestly acknowledged the how bit and given it a label, curiosity led you on to discover what it was that caused this feeling and why? The only way running this question will have any effect at all, is if it is used as a method of ‘self’-examination and discovery – it beats any spiritual mantra or traditional therapy by a country mile. Most spiritual afflictionados arrogantly dismiss, avoid, misinterpret or deliberately distort the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ as though they have ‘been there and done that’, whereas most have not even begun to examine the workings of their own psyche. I know this well from personal experience – I had barely scraped the surface when I began the process of actualism. Spiritual ‘questioning’ is nothing more than pitifully questioning the supposed ignorance of others, while simultaneously hiding behind the conviction of one’s own self-importance and moral superiority. As for making and using weapons I would concur with you that it is a necessary activity within the passionate human condition, but this expediency does not necessarily make it an intelligent activity. When silly and sensible replace right and wrong and instinctual passion is eliminated you are free to decide what is an appropriate reaction to the particular situation. Life is simple, only ‘I’ make it complicated. GARY: I found that in thinking about what has happened in the last 100 years, indeed in all of recorded human history, it has been impossible for me to separate what has happened historically from what goes on at an individual, ‘personal’ level, what takes place inside of this critter named ‘Gary’. I am just another sane, normal human being – and it has been these same sane, normal human beings that have, for the most part, been responsible for the appalling bloodshed that has happened and is still happening. PETER: Yes. And the traditional solution has been to ignore what is going on, blame others for it or vainly rile against it and attempt to change others in accordance with my beliefs . I came to see that to think I could change the human condition in others was an act of futile egomania, particularly when millions have tried and billions have fought it out with each other as to which is the right way. Actualism is about freedom from the human condition – not changing the human condition in others. * PETER: I am not making a moral or ethical stance in this – it was common sense for Great Britain that Germany and Japan had to be resisted. GARY: That is the commonly accepted view. I am reminded in this connection, however, that in school we were taught the same thing about the Kaiser and German militarism in the First World War. I recently was browsing a book in the book store about WW1 wherein the author developed the interesting thesis that the English were actually responsible for the start of the war in that they consistently provoked the Germans and their allies and deliberately and with malicious intent engaged in the kind of sabre-rattling and expansionist policies that goaded on the war, with the resultant bloodshed. This is quite the opposite from the usual view. Actually, I would say that since every human being inherited the blind instincts that nature genetically endowed all sentient creatures with as a rough and ready software package for survival, that all the human beings that lived at that time were responsible for the war and what happened in the war, that would include the pacifists, the isolationists, the politicians, the priests and ministers, rabbis, gurus, and every sane, normal human being living on the globe at the time. Maybe that seems to be going a bit too far? What do you think? PETER: I just brought the whole issue of who is responsible for all the wars conflicts, acrimony, suffering and pious high-mindedness back to me and my feelings. If I got angry how could I blame others for getting angry? If I could be overcome by a murderous rage, as in wishing another obliterated, feeling jealousy, wanting revenge or wishing retribution or justice, how could I blame others for having the same feelings or even acting on them? If I was feeling sanctimoniously superior, how could I blame others who hypocritically took the moral high-ground while preaching that others were to blame for the ills of humanity. How could I remain a follower of a spiritual Guru while condemning others for belonging to spiritual/ religious groups who fought each other over which sanctimonious viewpoint or self-righteous group was right and which was wrong? And the one that really challenged me personally was – if I couldn’t live with other human beings in peace and harmony, how could I blame others for not being able to do so? In other words, the only way there is going to be peace on earth is for me to prove it is possible. As I wrote in my journal –
Integrity is key to sheeting home the ills of humanity to ‘me’, for ‘I’ am humanity and
humanity is ‘me’.
GARY: (...) Then there are those times that I still go off on full automatic – that happened yesterday and I was aghast at my angry reaction to my partner – I remorsefully apologized, but at the same time was thinking that it is all part of the cycle – the anger, the guilt, the apologies, etc. I must have really been missing the boat for this to have happened, and I know I have a lot of work to do. There’s no sense in berating myself for this ‘slip’ – it happens from time to time. I was thinking that there is really no difference between the anger that is expressed in yelling in the house, and the anger that pulled the trigger at Babi Yar, the anger that dropped the bomb from the Enola Gay on Hiroshima, etc, etc. PETER: This is why it is important when running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ to trace the feeling back to the incident that triggered the feeling of sadness, melancholy, anger, frustration or whatever. Quite often a feeling can hang around for days, weeks or even months, totally ruining your happiness and benevolence in this, the only moment you can experience. If the triggering event was too far in the past to remember I didn’t bother trying to trace it because I would only be dredging through the garbage bin of the past looking for any old excuse or justification for my feeling angry and sad now. But if I could peg the feeling or emotion to some recent triggering event it was like finding gold because I was able to see the direct cause and effect relationship between feelings and behaviour. This discovery of cause and effect is the experiential understanding that ‘my’ precious feelings, while not actual, do give rise to effects that are very, very real. With practice this process will eventually result in an almost instantaneous linking between triggering event and automatic emotional reaction – at this point, as I am fond of saying, it is really as if you have got this bugger – my self’ – by the throat. You get to see the emotional reactions kick in as they are happening and this ‘there it is again’ awareness weakens their stranglehold and enables intelligent appropriate reaction to overcome blind passion. If one particular reaction keeps returning again and again then this awareness in itself, when combined with integrity, will eventually goad you to actual change. It is of no use at all to beat yourself up if you miss the onset of a debilitating emotion or feeling and fall into the pits for hours or even days or feel pissed off at someone for hours or even days. The important thing is that you become aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and if it is not optimum, get out of it, get back to feeling good and then crank it up to being excellent if you can. Another chance will always come along, a fresh opportunity for investigation and discovery – in the
meantime, log up the hours, days, weeks and months of feeling good or feeling excellent, always being as harmless as possible. If you beat
yourself up, the buggers who insist you remain sad and second-rate, are only winning.
PETER: This is why it is important when running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ to trace the feeling back to the incident that triggered the feeling of sadness, melancholy, anger, frustration or whatever. Quite often a feeling can hang around for days, weeks or even months, totally ruining your happiness and benevolence in this, the only moment you can experience. GARY: Yes, I’ve had some recent experiences of that, much to my chagrin. It seems sometimes that despite my ardent efforts to keep the question running, I slip back into anger and fear. I’m flabbergasted right now and wondering if I’m doing something obviously wrong, whether I am deluded, or just what is happening. I think recently, going back to the time of my last post, quite a bit of anger was brewing in me, which later came exploding to the surface when I resigned. I was not really aware of just how intensely angry I was. Perhaps that’s a partial explanation. PETER: Again that blackboard with successes written on the top, or however you want to see it, is invaluable. The bottom line is always if I stuffed up yesterday, or if I have been lost in some worry or overcome by some emotion, it was in the past – finished, gone. The success is that you have now discovered it and you can get back to feeling good or feeling excellent again. The trick is not to get down on yourself otherwise you are again missing out on experiencing this moment, the only moment you can experience of being alive, to the optimum. * PETER: If the triggering event was too far in the past to remember I didn’t bother trying to trace it because I would only be dredging through the garbage bin of the past looking for any old excuse or justification for my feeling angry and sad now. But if I could peg the feeling or emotion to some recent triggering event it was like finding gold because I was able to see the direct cause and effect relationship between feelings and behaviour. This discovery of cause and effect is the experiential understanding that ‘my’ precious feelings, while not actual, do give rise to effects that are very, very real. With practice this process will eventually result in an almost instantaneous linking between triggering event and automatic emotional reaction – at this point, as I am fond of saying, it is really as if you have got this bugger – my self’ – by the throat. You get to see the emotional reactions kick in as they are happening and this ‘there it is again’ awareness weakens their stranglehold and enables intelligent appropriate reaction to overcome blind passion. If one particular reaction keeps returning again and again then this awareness in itself, when combined with integrity, will eventually goad you to actual change. It is of no use at all to beat yourself up if you miss the onset of a debilitating emotion or feeling and fall into the pits for hours or even days or feel pissed off at someone for hours or even days. The important thing is that you become aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and if it is not optimum, get out of it, get back to feeling good and then crank it up to being excellent if you can. Another chance will always come along, a fresh opportunity for investigation and discovery – in the meantime, log up the hours, days, weeks and months of feeling good or feeling excellent, always being as harmless as possible. If you beat yourself up, the buggers who insist you remain sad and second-rate, are only winning. GARY: Your words here only confirm my recent experiences. I am getting a fresh look at how cunning and crafty ‘I’ can be. For instance, I can tell myself that I am not angry when I am actually seething in anger. PETER: Emotions have a curious quality in that they colour and distort not only what is happening now but they also colour and distort what has happened recently. If sadness overwhelms us it seems as though our whole life has been miserable, if anger arises it seems as though it has always been there. This was hard to discern in myself initially but it was obvious whenever I talked to Vineeto in one of our end-of-day chats. Sometimes she would say I have been feeling, say lacklustre, all day. I would ask her if she felt that when we were down in the village at the coffee shop and she would say ‘not then’. I would ask her how she was at work and she would say she was into her work and enjoying it. Eventually it emerged that the feeling had only recently emerged or had only briefly occurred but that it now felt as though it had been there all day. This is why it is vital to chock up success – driving to work, fine, feeling good – morning at
work, one flash of annoyance because of ... soon back to feeling fine – lunchtime, feeling excellent – etc. It is equally as important when
running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ to acknowledge that you are feeling fine, good or excellent as it is
to acknowledge that you are feeling lacklustre, bored or annoyed.
GARY: I’d like to go back to a previous thread about sorrow – back
on
I’ve been doing one heck of a lot of ‘pulling’ lately, because just in the past day or two I’ve had an acute onset of sorrow, or rather I could say an eruption of those bitter-sweet feelings of grief, angst, sorrow, and disappointment, quite unbidden, and yet so, so familiar. Yesterday I felt almost paralysed by these feelings, they were so intense. Again, I am reminded that actualism is about examining and experiencing one’s feelings in the light of a sensuous awareness, not about suppressing or repressing one’s emotions. I wonder if, as one is breaking free of the Human Condition, one is liable to experience fresh onslaughts of the ‘automatic/instinctual predisposition(s)’? I remember reading in Richard’s Journal the kind of scary, intensely abnormal and psychotic state that he experienced as he was on the verge of self-immolation, the description of which should be enough to deter any but the most serious of inquirers. I don’t want to suggest necessarily that that is what I am going through. But I have noted that the further and further I go my own way, depending on nobody, practicing attentiveness and sensuousness, and demolishing the social identities I have formed since birth, the more intensely do I seem to experience the raw survival program of the human species. So, last night, as I commenced to get a grip on my boot straps, a fascinated awareness reflected on ‘So this is human sorrow and suffering – this is the bitter-sweet feeling of sorrow, so deeply embedded, so ancient, so much a part of being a human being that it is in a sense my very life. It is what my life has been about, never very far around the corner, always lurking in the background, something I have tried to ameliorate through compassion and acts of pity and helpfulness, something I have tried to assuage by loving others and being loved, through being comforted and comforting in turn’. I don’t want to ‘get over’ sorrow just to have it come back again. Is one in a sense subjecting oneself to these bouts of emotion? Am I on the wrong track? Are these ‘pity parties’ totally unnecessary or is there some intrinsic value to going through these experiences? What does one need to do to finally and irrevocably break free from these ‘automatic/instinctual predispositions’? I have a sense that your answer is going to be to get back to being happy and harmless just as soon as one can ... which would be a splendid answer ... but I’ll let you answer this yourself. PETER: Taking your questions one at a time –
No. The process of actualism is firstly to demolish the outer layer of one’s identity – one’s social conditioning. This social conditioning that each and every human being is inevitably subject to since birth is a two pronged habituation aimed at taming the brute instinctual passions via suppression and repression and encouraging the tender passions via praise and glorification. An actualist’s sincere investigations will reveal that both aspects of this conditioning comprise a moral and ethical straightjacket, a puppet-like existence which one either submits to, riles against or embraces by opting for seductive lure of self-glorification. For an actualist the seeing of, and the direct experiencing of, the inherent failure of this social conditioning is the ending of his or her social identity. This ending happens progressively as one’s instilled morals, ethics and values are questioned and investigated and what is revealed underneath is what this social conditioning was specifically designed to hide – the fact that human beings are instinctually driven animals. Thus, as you say, one is in a sense subjecting oneself to bouts of emotions beginning with the feelings and emotions triggered by one’s own social identity – feelings such as moral indignation, self-righteousness, prudishness and the like – and ending with the underlying instinctual drives and passions that give substance to one’s instinctual being. This direct experiencing is an essential component of dismantling one’s social and instinctual identity and while at times the journey may seem daunting, the rewards are inestimable. As you indicated, as the bouts subside – which they invariably do – you are left with a fascinated awareness of having been aware of experiencing your own psyche in action. You have experienced ‘you’ in action for a brief period – neither suppressed nor repressed, neither glorified nor condemned. My only other comment is that you never get more than you can handle because you set your own pace, you reap your own rewards and, by the very nature of your intent to become free of malice and sorrow, you have tapped into a palpable stream of benignity and betterment that is intrinsic to the physical universe. In short, nothing can go wrong provided your intent is pure. Another little reminder I used to run was that whatever went on in my head or heart in the day, I would go to sleep at night-time and find myself having breakfast the next morning, yet again. Then I was reminded that actualism is really about being here in this moment in time, in this place in space, and that the thrilling process of actualism, with all of its explorations and dramas, is what enabled this to happen more and more as ‘I’, the interloper, became thinner and less substantial.
You won’t get a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer from me about what is essentially your business. If it is working and brings tangible results then it works and only you can be the judge of whether you are getting tangible results. What I would do whenever I got a bout of the doubts, was try to remember the Peter who was before I became an actualist. What did he get upset about, what did he worry about, what made him angry, what made him sad and so on? I would then check how I was now and what tangible progress had been made towards my goal of becoming actually free of the human condition. There was obviously a beginning to your own track, you know your own progress by comparison with ‘who’ you were at the start and you know the nature of the end of the track from your own PCE, so only you can answer your question.
It is vitally important to be aware of whatever feelings, emotions or passions one is experiencing without indulging in the inherited habit of suppressing or repressing or expressing or morally judging the experience. How else to find out what makes ‘me’ tick – and all the other ‘me’s on the planet as well? How else to fully understand the human condition than by direct personal hands-on experience? What I found was that I first needed to stop judging these emotional experiences as being right or wrong, good or bad, in order to be able to understand by direct experience and observation not only the debilitating effects of the emotion or passion but also how they actively prevent me from being here. So, to get back to the comment of mine about sorrow –
There is nothing at all to be gained by indulging in or wallowing in sorrow but if the feeling comes along by itself or is triggered by some event such as listening to music or watching the news then make the effort to check it out while it is happening. There is no more valuable attentiveness than this for an actualist, for you are literally discovering and experiencing what it is that makes ‘you’ tick.
You keep doing what works to make you free from the feelings, emotions and passions that are the root cause of malice and sorrow. The discovery that something works in practice brings an overweening confidence that enables you to then tap into the genetically-promulgated propensity for betterment that is inherent in the very cellular structures of animate life in the actual world. And as you seem to be discovering the only thing that can break the stranglehold of ‘automatic/instinctual predispositions’ is the cultivation of an on-going fascinated awareness.
Yep, get back to being happy and harmless just as soon as you can – but with the essential proviso that you be interested enough, and attentive enough, to learn whatever you can from these emotional experiences. If you milk these experiences for information then you can learn from them – if you indulge and wallow in them then you are but indulging and wallowing in the human condition. It is vital that you dip into these experiences as deeply as possible in order to learn as much as possible about how the human psyche operates because then you are learning what it is that is both the substance and driving force for the human condition in toto. I could go on but I had better rope this post in. I’ll just end on a reminder that to be an actualist
is to set off on a course that is diametrically opposed to all of humanity’s so-called wisdom. Whilst there is an inherent carefree simplicity
to living free of the human condition that you would have experienced in a PCE, becoming actually free of the human condition requires stubborn
perseverance and consummate patience. My experience is that it is a mightily good thing that the process of becoming free works incrementally
because the experience that the process works – i.e. produces tangible results – is what ultimately provides both the incentive and the
confidence to go all the way.
GARY: Social differences are also apparent, whether differences in customs, mores, ethical practices, etc. I think it is not so much differences that are the root cause of hatred, intolerance, warfare and strife but identity in any form. PETER: Given that passionately holding on to one’s own historical cultural, religious and social differences only causes disharmony, intolerance, hatred, greed, aggression and competition – in short, malicious feelings – it behoves anyone interested in becoming happy and harmless to set about diligently and painstakingly dismantling his or her social identity. It is not that an actualist retreats from the world of people, things and events – quite the opposite in fact. An actualist devotes his or her life to being happy and harmless in the world-as-it-is with people as-they-are and discovers en-route – by cultivating an on-going attentiveness – that his or her social identity is the first layer of identity that stands in the way of actualizing this aim. GARY: It is the instinctual passions that form the rudimentary sense of identity in sentient creatures that are the root cause of our inability to get along with each other and live in peace and harmony. Once the root cause of the problem is eliminated, along with it go any sense of being unique, different from others, as well as any need to defend worn-out ideals, beliefs, truisms, and political, social, or religious systems of thought. PETER: If I may, I will put what you are saying another way that may be more pertinent for those who are reading but who are yet to begin the process of actualism. The first thing an actualist does is to make becoming happy and harmless one’s burning ambition and single-pointed aim in life. This of course means that he or she aims to progressively eliminate any feelings of malice and sorrow from their life. Now despite the fact that the root cause of malice and sorrow are the genetically encoded animal survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, he or she will soon discover in their investigations that it is the defence of their own social identity that initially triggers most of their feelings of malice and sorrow. To reiterate, an actualist experientially discovers that the ingrained habit of defending the beliefs, morals, ethics, values and psittacisms that he or she has been taught to be truths is what initially gives rise to his or her malicious and sorrowful feelings and thus becomes aware that it is this outer layer of identity that needs to be demolished first. The only way to undertake this process of actually demolish one’s social identity, and not take it on as a theory or an intellectual understanding, is to make being happy and harmless one’s burning ambition in life. Unless one does that, there is insufficient motive to move beyond an intellectual-only interest and no impetus to become aware of, investigate and question the feelings that arise from being a social identity. GARY: The actualist’s solution to conflict and disharmony is self-immolation – the elimination of all that stands in the way of living with other human beings in peace and harmony. It is the end of ‘me’. With the end of ‘me’, there is no need to be defensive or even on my guard against possible encroachments. Gone too is any sense of insult and every form of grievance. Because any kind of identity for human beings seems to be a breeding ground for resentment and grievance, I think. Every ethnic, religious or racial group has had its own nasty tale of historical grievances – every group has had its own dreary history of being discriminated against. Even so-called ‘dominant’ groups in society today were once in a position to be discriminated against and discriminated against others in their turn. PETER: As a social identity – an impassioned member of a racial, religious, spiritual, ethnic, national or gender group – one is not only obliged to believe what everyone else in the group believes and to feel what everyone else in the group feels but one is also compelled to carry the burdens of anger, resentment sorrow and grief from all the other members of the group, including the long-dead ones. The desire for retribution and the lust for revenge for past wrongs and hurts inflicted on long-dead members of the group is passed on from generation to generation, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly. Thus, one’s social identity literally starts with the mother’s milk. This fact can be readily seen in the historic foundations for many of today’s disharmonies, discords, conflicts and wars. Many conflicts are rooted in conflicts that happened hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. As if this was not madness enough, many of these conflicts are purely mythical – they either never happened or they have been so embellished and distorted in the on-telling of the story that it is now impossible to discern what is fact from what is fiction. To vainly look for rights and wrongs, goods and bads in this endless tale of mayhem and misery – the cherished Humanity – is an utterly futile exercise. The only practical contribution anyone can make towards ending this madness is to divest himself or herself of all of the cherished beliefs and associated feelings that causes him or her to feel the need to be a part of this ongoing saga of mayhem and misery. A way out of this madness has now been discovered, has been thoroughly mapped and extensively documented and is now being disseminated, discussed and put into practice – and, as you are confirming by your own investigations, the first part of this way out is to divest oneself of one’s own social identity. GARY: There recently was a retrospective of the Roots program of the 1970s on TV. I remember watching this back in those days. There was the interest at that time for people, particularly Americans, to find out their ‘roots’, and there was a proliferation of the uncovering or the discovering of ‘who I am’ as one’s ethnic identity. In any event, I was struck while watching the program by the anger of the people they were interviewing as they talked about their reactions to the program. There was this universal feeling of rage and anger among people they interviewed, this abhorrence of slavery, the realization that they were themselves descended from slaves and that these horrors were perpetrated against their own ancestors. But I was particularly struck by the anger, and it seemed to me that it makes no sense to be angry about these things because if one is angry and holds a grievance, then sooner or later that feeling is going to be expressed, it must be expressed, in some sort of action against others. If one is angry, then one essentially feels that someone is to blame for these horrors. In my personal experience, anger must always have a target. It always comes out one way or another. It seemed as I listened to the anger of these people on the program, many the descendants of slaves, that the same sense of outrage, grievance, and resentment was unleashing itself afresh on those who are held to be responsible. I realize that I am on a bit shaky ground here as the issue of race is an extremely complicated one and an extremely volatile one to discuss in a public forum. But in a sense I am not really talking about race, although the topic does touch on the issue of race, but I am talking about identity. One identifies as a black person, or a white person, or a person of Italian ancestry, Polish ancestry, or what have you. One identifies as a member of a ‘dominant’ group in society, or as an oppressed person, a minority. Actualism is about the demolishment of all kinds of identity, and it is this that people find so difficult to stomach, because people really cling to these identities, even to the death. One need only open one’s eyes, look around the world at what is happening, to see the havoc that identity is causing. PETER: Well said. If we were sailing mates, I’d say ‘I like the cut of your jib’. Just as an aside, one of the aspects of the spiritual misuse and abuse of words that particularly struck me lately is the spiritual use of selfless or no-self to describe the delusionary state of God-realization. The person suffering from this altered state of consciousness often claims to have no identity when the fact is that they believe, feel and proclaim that they have become a timeless and spaceless psychic identity – aka God by whatever name – temporarily residing in a flesh and blood mortal body. Thus, he spiritualists should be up-front and describe their exalted and acclaimed state as a body-less or a no-body experience – the very antithesis of a self-less experience. Spiritualism is all about inflating both the social identity and instinctual identity such that one feels like god – and its hard to imagine a bigger identity than feeling oneself to be God – whereas actualism is about incrementally eliminating both the social and instinctual identity. 180 degrees opposite. Well, I’m off to yet more delights. Nice chatting with you.
GARY: There is a shift back and forth between the sensuous apperceptive awareness and the ‘normal affective being’. One day this week I was experiencing the most painful sense of alienation, loneliness, and angst, all rolled into one. But the remarkable thing is that the next day these feelings vanished completely and hardly make any sense at all. PETER: What you are saying relates to something I said in my previous post –
This ‘resuming the business’ equally applies whenever a period of feeling good or feeling excellent fades – it is important to become aware of and then experientially investigate exactly when and why feelings such ‘alienation, loneliness and angst’ returned to centre stage as it were. What was it that triggered off these feelings – was it something someone said, or didn’t say? What particular event or incident happened or what anticipated event or incident didn’t happen? This combination of self-awareness and self-investigation is essential if you are to make sense of how ‘you’ tick. Unless you make sense of how and why you have reverted back to the normal human default programming of feeling malicious or sorrowful, then similar events or incidents will inevitably produce the same results – a rapid decent from feeling good or feeling excellent back into feeling peeved, annoyed, melancholic, sad, frightened, lost, lonely and so on. I particularly like the way Vineeto recently described this investigative process. She said this process of de-programming as akin to changing the default settings in a computer program by searching for the ‘option box’ in order to take the ‘tick’ out of the default setting. It is this default programming setting – both the socially-instilled programming and the genetically-encoded instinctual programming – that automatically causes human beings to get angry or sad whenever particular incidents or events occur, threaten to occur or are imagined to occur. Unless one makes the effort to take the ‘tick’ out of the ‘box’, the human default setting of
malice and sorrow runs automatically – regardless of normal efforts to ignore it or suppress it, or the spiritual efforts to sublimate it or
transcend it. This is the practical down-to-earth business of actualism – a step-by-step deprogramming. And, of course, if you miss a chance or
don’t quite get it the first or second time, life is excellent at providing another opportunity. Peter’s Text ©The Actual Freedom
Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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