Please note that Peter’s correspondence below was written by the feeling-being ‘Peter’ while ‘he’ lived in a pragmatic (methodological), still-in-control/same-way-of-being Virtual Freedom before becoming actually free.
> Selected Correspondence Peter Social Identity PETER to Alan: I’ll wrap this up with something Richard found the other day that says a lot about the Human Condition. I remember writing once of the Human Condition – ‘Thus it is established that ‘we are the way we are, because this is the way we are’ and further – ‘this is the way we will always be, because this is the way we have always been’ – simply translated as ‘You can’t change Human Nature’. But this little story illustrates it really well ... [quote]: ‘Consider a cage containing five apes: in the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as it touches the stairs, spray all of the apes with cold water. After a while, another ape makes an attempt with the same result: all the apes are sprayed with cold water. This continues through several more attempts. Pretty soon, when another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes all try to prevent it. Now turn off the cold water. Remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To its horror, all the other apes attack it. After another attempt, it knows that if it tries to climb the stairs it will be assaulted. Remove another of the original five apes and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part with enthusiasm. Replace a third original ape. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four apes that do the attacking have no idea why they’re not permitted to climb the stairs or why they’re participating in the beating of the newest ape. After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all the apes that have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced. Nonetheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs. Why not? Because that’s the way they’ve always done it and that’s the way it’s always been around here.’ [endquote]. Cute Hey ... PETER: The issue of worthy or unworthy seems to me to be a bit of a side issue. The main question is what do you want to do with your life? RESPONDENT: I think what I want to do with my life is only apparent from one moment to the next and that seems to be constantly changing but it seems to do with being curious, seriously curious about the workings of self. I had actually decided to end this ego self 10 years or so ago but because it was self trying to end self without a ‘relentless inquiring attention’ there was bound to be failure. Now with the aid of ‘How am I question...’ more of the moments are caught rather than the usual see one moment then skip a few moments and get lost in self intellectualization again. Curiosity I think, needs to be given complete leeway. PETER: I was trained as an architect but on graduating found working in an office to be too removed from the building site where the business of building buildings actually happened. Consequently I became an architect-builder-carpenter as my interest was more in the practical implementing of a idea. When I came across Richard I had spent 17 years on the spiritual path attempting to end the ‘ego-self’ but was ready to abandon the effort. I had begun to have some Altered State of Consciousness experiences but the suspicions and doubts I had of the Master-disciple business, the God-men’s lifestyle, how they were with their women, etc., meant that Enlightenment was losing its attraction. I was also becoming more and more aware of the fact that Eastern Spirituality is nothing more than Eastern Religion. I soon came to see that there were two identities preventing me being happy and harmless – the ‘normal Peter’ who was father, man, architect, etc. and the ‘spiritual Peter’ – the believer, searcher, superior one, etc. So I set about dismantling both these ‘I’s by actively challenging the beliefs, feelings, emotions and instincts that gave substance to both the psychological and psychic entity that was ‘me’. What I increasingly discovered was that the brain of this flesh and blood body has an inherent ability to be aware of itself, an ability of apperception. When I ask ‘What am I thinking?’ or ‘What am I feeling?’ or ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ it is this apperceptive awareness that can provide the answer. It was enormously difficult and bewildering sometimes at the start but as fact replaced belief, clarity replaced confusion and sincere intent replaced ‘open-ness’ and listlessness, ‘what’ I am – not ‘who’ I am – gradually emerged and became apparent. At first, the whole exercise can feel like a weird ‘self trying to dismantle self’’ exercise, but soon one realises that it is fact dismantling belief, apperceptive awareness dismantling self that is happening. * 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. * RESPONDENT: This question arose as I was thinking about what you wrote. It seems possible that when an emotion looses its hold then so do all the associated beliefs. So I wonder why the beliefs have to be questioned one by one. Why not get down to the task of seeking out the emotions and not the beliefs as such. Or is it that it does not really matter which belief is questioned, as once the associated emotion is disbanded, other beliefs based on the same emotion will also loose their authenticity. PETER: (...) In my experience, this social identity is a conglomerate of all the beliefs, morals, ethics, values, principles and psittacisms that I have been programmed with since birth. It is only when I have eliminated or wiped this programming back to a stage where I cease to be a believer, where I cease the very act of believing, that I can look and investigate the core instinctual being that is ‘me’. A lot of work is done on the way in eliminating the effect of these emotions on one’s daily life such that one achieves a virtual freedom – a stable ‘base’ from which one can look with clear eyes at one’s instinctual self, without the guardians of the social morals, ethics, principles, etc. relentlessly churning and stirring. Another way of putting it is that one is then able to dismantle the psychic entity without the psychological entity ‘jumping up and down’ so much. You have reduced the effects of the instinctual emotions in daily life to almost zero such that ‘I’ is almost ephemeral, ethereal, ghostly and hardly able to maintain its existence. Now this is, at the moment, just the experience of a few but I would say, on the basis of the evidence so far, that in order to avoid the trap of enlightenment, one needs to dismantle the beliefs that form one’s social identity in order to avoid the trap of becoming yet another Grand and Glorious identity. I would suppose that, as more and more people become actually free, that this ‘step outside Humanity’ will become less fearful and dramatic as one will have the confidence of knowing that others have done it. As I wrote in my Journal – [Peter]: ... ‘So far, only Richard had left this squabbling, sorrowful ‘Humanity’ behind but he had gone a torturous route through Enlightenment and out the other side. I saw myself as a pioneer on a new, much easier, more direct course. I am full of admiration for the Richard who did it. He likened it to discovering a new continent in the days of old, in a tiny, leaky sailing ship, taking years for the perilous journey. Once discovered it was then easier for others, and now people can fly there comfortably in hours. I likened myself similarly, knowing what I was looking for, but plotting an easier course, avoiding the ‘Rock of Enlightenment’ that had thwarted all previous attempts.’ ... Peter’s Journal, ‘Intelligence’ RESPONDENT: I have been mulling over this word ‘desensitise’, as it does seem to suggest a preventing of awareness, which seems a contradiction. It probably has more to do with triggers though, as in challenging the validity of a belief that triggers an instinctual response. Most systems that deal with neurosis, phobia, etc, seem to be only concerned with the ‘belief’ side of the problem and not instinctual triggers themselves, as apposed to the actualism desensitise, also includes challenging instinctual triggers. PETER: As you indicate, a grown-up awareness and a willingness to investigate inevitably leads to a curiosity as to what moral, ethic, value, belief or psittacism it is that triggers an automatic instinctual response in you. This awareness is in fact an awareness of your own social identity in action – in my case it was becoming aware of Peter the male, Peter the Australian, Peter the father, Peter the Christian-come-Rajneeshee, etc. I began to become aware of the feelings that arose when I was in female company and the feelings that arose when I was in male company. I began to notice the feelings that arose relative to the country I was born in, be it pride, patriotism, defensiveness or whatever. I began to notice the feelings that arose towards my family as distinct from others and how these feelings crippled intimacy. I began to notice how deep my moral and ethical conditioning ran – how many automatic good-bad, right-wrong judgements I made without even thinking about the subject or bothering to find out the facts, let alone take them into account. This is an exciting stage in the process because, as you increasingly become aware of your social ‘self’ in action, there will soon come a time when the whole stack of beliefs, morals, ethics, values, psittacisms and instinctual passions that constitute your identity will temporarily collapse and a PCE will occur. You will then be able to observe the insanity of a passion-fuelled Humanity from the outside, as it where, whilst free of any psychological-social or psychic-instinctual identity whatsoever. Then things really get cooking ... * PETER to Alan: This broadening of one’s awareness – still triggered by asking ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is a win-win situation, for without it all of one’s gains in virtual freedom can be lost as one slips back into self-centredness and self-indulgence. Virtual freedom is by no means a permanent state, it is only a stepping stone on the path. To stop at any stage on the path is to risk losing all that one has gained from one’s hard work, but to push on requires a passionate dedication and obsession that can only be fuelled by altruism – the innate unselfishness that is programmed into all human beings as part of the survival instincts. When one takes the blind senselessness out of altruism then one’s ‘self’-sacrifice is made for peace on earth, not God or country. Actualism is about peace on earth – bringing an end to war, murder, rape, torture, domestic violence, corruption and child abuse. Peter to Alan, 28.5.2001 RESPONDENT: I was a little surprised by this statement of yours. It seems to imply that after having effectively done away with social identity one can easily go back to having one. This seems somewhat of a contradiction with the idea that the world would be better if we all did no better than virtual freedom. It does seem to me that the sensibility gained along the way is somewhat permanent and one would not simply go back to their old ways particularly if one was in a state of virtual freedom. What was your experience of the time you spent holidaying in virtual freedom? Did you find any tendencies to revert back to your old ways? PETER: It is my experience that in virtual freedom one’s social identity and instinctual passionate identity is so reduced as to enable increased periods of ‘self’-less awareness or apperception to begin to operate. I am on record as saying that I regard the social identity as the easiest of the two aspects of identity to minimize and this is, I think, due to several reasons. My experience on the spiritual path did involve questioning some of my real-world values and ethics and some degree of ‘self’-awareness, even though my efforts were misguided and misdirected. I also had experienced the relative ease with which one can change one’s social identity from normal to spiritual, so the challenge of change, per se, was not foreign to me, even if that change meant eradication. The instinctual identity or ‘being’ is another kettle of fish however, for the core ‘me’ is sourced in and sustained by actual hormonal substances in the body and it is universally held as not only sacred but biologically inviolable. As a consequence, the strength of human instinctual passion is the very stuff of legends – most of it an appalling legacy of unspeakable human cruelty and unimaginable human suffering while the remainder is an endless kaleidoscope of escapist fantasies and bizarre dreamings or yearnings. 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. Not that this is a problem in any way – if you revert to normal, there will always be some gain from being a little more sensible and a little less passion-driven and if you do end up Enlightened and it doesn’t sit well with you, you just work your way out of it as Richard did. Actualism is by no means a serious business, it is above all an adventure of exploration and discovery and in an ultimate sense nothing can go wrong. What I wrote to Gary was meant to be both a generalised warning and an encouragement, for to be virtually free of malice and sorrow is an unprecedented and salubrious condition in the annuals of human history, bar one – an actual freedom from the human condition in toto. To be forewarned is to be prepared and nothing can go astray, provided your intent is pure and your ‘self’-investigations are thorough and sincere. You may well be beginning to reap the benefits of actualism in becoming more happy and less malevolent and, if so, you will have a good inkling that there would indeed be an end to the endemic wars and senseless conflicts between human beings if actualism became the norm for the human condition. On a personal note, my ‘holidaying in virtual freedom’ is an ongoing holiday, so much so that I now know that I will never go back to grim reality, led alone be seduced into delusions of grandeur. It was not a cute throwaway line when I subtitled my journal ‘nothing left to lose’. I was at a crossroad in my life at the time, I had well-travelled the other roads and had learnt enough about what didn’t work and had suffered enough and dreamed enough to take heed of a really way-out proposition – ‘Do you want to be happy and harmless, in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are?’ For me it was a serendipitous discovery, a priceless proposition, a golden opportunity – a seductive invitation to turn a life-long thirst into an actuality. As such, once started on the path, I never had any thoughts or feelings to revert back to my old ways at any time – I always burnt my boats behind me or, to put it another way, painted myself into a corner. I was always aware that my writing in particular was a way of doing both – that I would be not only agreeing to ‘my’ own demise but, by documenting it, I would leave my ‘self’ with no place to hide and no way to turn back. PETER: 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. RESPONDENT: I recall that when I first start running the question some 2 years ago (I think) there was a great objection to running the question. Now it is more than not, an immediate reward with the exception of the occasional guilty feeling when I realize that I had dropped the ball for some time. PETER: Guilt I know well. I was amazed to find, when I started to abandon my spiritual beliefs, morals and ethics, that they had simply been layered over my Christian beliefs, morals and ethics. And guilt belongs in the stick part of the carrot and stick in the Christian religion – typified by the pathos-ridden fairy story of the Son of God dying for our sins. Personally I didn’t worry about guilt too much because by becoming aware that I had dropped the ball for sometime I was instantly back in business again, which was clearly a success and not a failure. * PETER: It is my experience that in virtual freedom one’s social identity and instinctual passionate identity is so reduced as to enable increased periods of ‘self’-less awareness or apperception to begin to operate. I am on record as saying that I regard the social identity as the easiest of the two aspects of identity to minimize and this is, I think, due to several reasons. My experience on the spiritual path did involve questioning some of my real-world values and ethics and some degree of ‘self’-awareness, even though my efforts were misguided and misdirected. I also had experienced the relative ease with which one can change one’s social identity from normal to spiritual, so the challenge of change, per se, was not foreign to me, even if that change meant eradication. RESPONDENT: I have found reducing the social identity somewhat more difficult and I would say the roots of this would be a combination of deep resentment and a pacifist’s approach to dealing with issues, which effectively blocked out any attempts at investigation. PETER: I have just watched a press conference reporting in minute detail the execution of the man who planted the bomb that killed 168 people in a government building in Okalahoma, U.S.A. several years ago. Apart from the ghoulish fascination of the media, the aspect that I found most interesting was that the apparent motive for his horrendous act was a deep resentment at ‘the government’ because he blamed ‘them’ for the deaths at the Waco siege. Every human feels a deep resentment at having to be here on the planet and while most manage to keep it under control, others find socially acceptable outlets such as protest movements, demonstrations, political causes, social change movements, etc. Some people suppress their resentment by feeling grateful towards their own personal God or Existence while others sublimate their resentment by practicing acceptance and becoming dissociated from being here on the planet as in Eastern religion/philosophy. Most countries institutionalize resentment in their social structure by having an adversarial system of government complete with ‘opposition’ parties. On a tribal level resentment often turns into full-scale war wherein if a man attacked ‘the enemy’ and killed 178 people including civilians he would be given a medal and not a lethal injection. Be it on an individual level or a tribal level, resentment does nothing but fuel anger, revenge and violence or sadness, despair and suicide. For an actualist the only sensible thing to do is leave resentment well and truly behind in the dust, where it belongs, as you steadily move from feeling good to feeling excellent to the stage of being virtually free of any malicious or sorrowful feelings. In virtual freedom resentment plays no part in your life whatsoever. As for ‘a pacifists approach to dealing with issues’, I had the exactly the same approach when I was normal. I was definitely what was known as a wimp, I would rather run than fight and would rather avoid than confront. But I eventually became aware of the fact that suppression does not work 100% of the time – I was still resentful underneath and anger would occasionally bubble up to the surface, despite my being a goody two shoes. This awareness and acknowledgement of my suppressed resentment and anger compelled me to abandon my hypocritical pacifism because I saw clearly that, regardless of ‘my’ morally superior position and in spite of ‘my’ idealistic pacifism, ‘I’ was, deep down, as resentful as everybody else and, when push came to shove, as quick to anger as anyone else. You can readily see an analogous situation to the socializing system within the human condition simply by observing domestic animals. You can tame and pacify a cat by looking after it – giving it food, shelter, and protection – and in return the cat will play its part by occasionally rubbing up against you and letting you get close enough to stroke it. And yet, despite this socialization process and the animal’s apparent tameness, when a competitor or predator invades its territory, the same tame cat instantly reverts to being a savage fighting animal. If you then turn the same cat loose in the bush it quickly loses all its tame behaviour and reverts to being an instinctual feral hunter again. The same behaviour pattern is readily apparent in the human animal – taming humans to be good citizens by a process of reward and punishment doesn’t ultimately work because, when a competitor or predator invades their territory, humans can very quickly become inexplicably vicious. So poorly does the taming process work in the human species that mayhem and anarchy would be the norm if it were not for the fact that we have armed policemen patrolling the streets. Law and order in the human species is ultimately only maintained at the point of a gun. Laws, policeman and prisons are needed to punish those who break the laws of the tribe and lawyers and courts are needed to settle personal arguments that threaten to get out of control. Every country needs an army of men on standby in case they are needed to fight a war against other countries. Counties are forced to enter into treaties and alliances between themselves in order to form power blocks to prevent age-old wounds and resentments from being paid back in kind. Whenever a dominant power group of countries emerge, they then take it upon themselves to be the world’s police force – thereby lording it over other less powerful countries. When war does break out, as it does all too frequently, rules for warfare have been developed so as to try and limit the natural tendencies of bloodlust and revenge to turn into unspeakable acts of torture and genocide. This is the condition of the human species we all find ourselves born into and it is such a horrific condition that turning away and burying one’s head in the sand is the only way to cope. Some seek a feeling of freedom by totally dissociating from the very real horrors of the human world, while others pray to mythical Gods for forgiveness for feeling evil thoughts – the equivalent of sticking one’s head in the clouds. I remember feeling utterly confused one day when I realized that I had spent half my adult life being normal and half my adult life being spiritual and nothing made sense – there seemed to be no solution within the human condition. A period of contemplation on the nature of the human condition in toto, combined with the beginnings of questioning ‘my’ personal beliefs, triggered a pure consciousness experience where I was able to clearly see the human condition from the outside as it were. I’ll repost the description of this PCE as it is spot-on relevant to the process of actualism –
> [Peter]: ‘During this time, I remember driving up the escarpment that encircles the lush semi-tropical coastal plain where I live. I stopped and looked out at the edge of the greenery, where a seemingly endless ribbon of white sand neatly bordered it from the azure ocean. Overhead great mounds of fluffy white clouds sailed by in the blue of the sky. Right in the foreground stood a group of majestic pines towering some thirty meters tall. I was struck by the vastness, the stillness and the perfection of this planet, the extraordinariness of it all, but … and the ‘but’ are human beings – human beings who persist in fighting and killing each other and can’t live together in peace and harmony. It was one of those moments that forced me to do something about myself, for I was one of those 5.8 billion people. It was exactly one of those moments that forced me to do something about being able to live with a woman in peace and harmony. To prove it was possible.’ Peter’s Journal, ‘Love’ |
Doing something about one’s own malice and sorrow beats head-in-the-sand pacifism by a country mile. GARY: It is also a stunner to realize that this deep questioning and examination of out-moded spiritual beliefs is dismantling my social identity, that it is part and parcel of this demolition work. This work leads to examining the other end of the duality: the tender instincts of nurture and desire. I have historically been focused on fear and aggression, but both sides of the equation need to be thoroughly explored. As you say, and quite sensibly so: [Peter]: There is no love or hate in a tree, a keyboard, a cloud, a coffee cup. There is instinctual fear, aggression, nurture and desire in animals for it is literally a dog-eat-dog world. There is instinctual fear, aggression, nurture and desire in the human animal but we have been socialized to mask our fear, be cunning with our aggression, be proud of our nurture and devious with our desire. Peter, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, No 8, 13.7.2000 PETER: Most people who have been searching for freedom, peace and happiness have adopted a new identity – that of a spiritual seeker, and this new identity is the first thing that has to go before you get down to your original social identity. What made this process easier for me was that I figured whatever I could take on later in life as a belief, a conviction and an identity, I could very easily discard – a bit like a layer of clothing or the outer skin of an onion. Once this spiritual identity is out of the way, the work of dismantling the rest of one’s social identity can begin. Just as an aside, it is curious to observe that the Gurus and God-men still have much of their original identities operating – thus the Indian Gurus never quite transcend their roots and original religious beliefs exactly as the Western Gurus remain western and retain much of their original religious beliefs. An actualist needs to thoroughly clean the cupboard of all belief. GARY: I notice that I have a particular tendency to berate myself for feeling or displaying anger. This was undoubtedly conditioned into me with such parental admonitions as ‘Don’t you get angry with me, buster!’ Other people I come into contact with seem so uninhibited in their way of venting their spleen, of showing anger or making a big show of how angry they are. I often chuckle to myself because ‘I’ am not like that. But it is interesting, isn’t it, to stand back and realize how completely arbitrary this social conditioning is? I don’t know if ‘arbitrary’ is the right word for it. I mean, ‘I’ could just as easily be some other way based on what I was taught growing up, what values I imbibed from the elders and the tribe. PETER: Yes, to be a social identity, in whatever form or flavour, is to be firmly ensnared in the grip of a sad and sorry Humanity. Humanity is genetically/ instinctually and historically/ socially bound to consist of separate feuding tribes and families and religions. You only have to observe the fierce ongoing resistance to any attempts to break the stranglehold this tribal conditioning has on human beings. The blind, senseless resistance to the ‘globalization’ of trade, commerce, communications, language and culture is fascinating to watch. A united Europe is now a faded post-war dream, as every tin pot region seeks autonomy and independence, every religious/ spiritual group declares their right to be different, and groups desperately seek to preserve their cultural roots, traditions, language, beliefs, superstitions, sacred places, buildings and holy relics. The only way to regard, and treat, others as fellow human beings is to rid yourself of all this rubbish – a process of ‘self’-diminishing that can, if undertaken with pure intent, lead to ‘self’-immolation. GARY: When one stands back and really looks at it, one sees that one is not a unique individual but rather a composite of moral, religious/ spiritual values, and ethics that are designed to keep the instincts at bay. PETER: The realizations I had about this issue was triggered in meeting my son one day and clearly seeing that many of ‘his’ beliefs, attitudes, opinions and mannerisms were ‘mine’ and further how those that I regarded and cherished as ‘mine’ were really those that were passed on to me from my father. As Pink Floyd sang – ‘just another brick in the wall’ – a wall that stretches unbroken back into the mists of time. And as an instinctual animal I am but one of billions of blind nature’s cannon fodder in the battle for survival of the species, the product of my father’s sperm and I had but one purpose – my primordial sperm-spreading purpose in seeding an egg so as to reproduce yet another combatant in this senseless passionate struggle. The sheer power of realizations such as these can lead to feelings of hopelessness and despair which can lead to ‘dark night of the soul’ experiences with their flip side ‘I’ve seen the Light’ experiences. Sometimes the path to freedom can feel like a tightrope walking act as the very ground of one’s social identity and instinctual being starts to shimmer, shake and, sometimes, even disappear temporarily. The cute thing is when it does disappear temporarily, suddenly there is a pure consciousness experience; suddenly all is perfect and pure, pristine and peaceful as the storm of emotions and neuroses that was ‘me’, just a moment ago, disappears. (...) * PETER: The spiritual path is the pursuit of emotional events and altered states, whereas the path to Actual Freedom is the pursuit of irrevocable actual change. For an actualist, the real work is in having the courage to maintain an ongoing awareness of how you are experiencing being alive, of cultivating a naïve fascination with being alive and developing a resounding YES to being here. GARY: It seems that people on a religious and/or (these words are interchangeable) spiritual path are always caught up in their feeling of uniqueness or differentness from ordinary ‘wordly’ people. When I was into the spiritual lifestyle, I always had a sense of mission or a feeling of being special compared to the average heathens around me. PETER: It took me 17 years of exploration on the so-called spiritual path to finally understand, acknowledge, and act upon, the fact that spiritualism was nothing other than ‘Olde-Time Religion’. Every pundit, teacher or follower I met or group I was in felt they were unique or that they were specially ‘chosen’ in having the truth of their existence revealed to them personally. Spiritual revelations and experiences are music to ‘me’, as soul, and inevitably lead to ‘self’-ish introspection and an increased detachment from actuality. As a ‘normal’ entity, ‘I’ am programmed to be a social/ psychological and instinctual/ psychic entity that thinks and feels it is living inside the body. This non-substantial entity experiences himself or herself to be detached from the physical actual world anyway, but then to become a passionate spiritual identity in one of society’s fantasy spirit-ual worlds is to be twice removed from what is physical, palpable, tangible, sensual, audible, tactile, visual, corporal, animal, mineral, vegetable, and alive as in not passive. This actual world is chocked full of eye candy – to use the current web jargon – full of smell candy, air candy, people candy, touch candy, taste candy, skin candy, sound candy. This planet is a literal cornucopia of sensual delight and we human beings have the most sophisticated brain that is wired via its proliferate sensory receptors to be a receptor, an appreciator, able to think, reflect and contemplate ... and to be aware it is doing it! What it is to be a human being is to be the universe experiencing itself as a human being. This is the quality of experiencing available only in a pure consciousness experience. PETER: In my later years as a Rajneeshee I plunged head-on into expressive type therapies and found them lacking in substance. I was also shocked soon after to find myself overcome by anger one day and started to be aware that all of my spiritual colleagues suffered from similar slippages. Not only did these type of therapies lack substance but they simply did not work long term to alleviate anger or sorrow. There was a particular group who followed the ‘I am all right as I am’ path of ‘self’-love and these people had no qualms at all about expressing their anger at others, nor about being sad and spreading their sorrow to others. Suppression doesn’t work, emoting doesn’t work, nor does transcendence; otherwise there would be peace on earth by now. GARY: One extremely useful and practical thing I have learned from actualism is how to put emotions in a bind: one can put them in a bind when they come up by neither expressing nor repressing them. Any emotion or passion, indeed any movement, can be brought to the full light of a sensuous awareness and looked at as-it-is. One need neither give vent to the emotion nor suppress nor repress. One can also instantly appraise the probable consequence of those actions were one to take them and at a glance determine for oneself what is happening in the moment. When one’s emotions are put in a bind this way, a curious thing happens: they literally dry up – run out of steam – run out of gas – crash and burn. Any particularly vexing emotion or problematic situation can be dealt with in this way. With repeated use of this technique, I have found myself becoming much less emotional. When emotions come up, I can keep my hands in my pockets, observe what is happening, and determine how to get back to being happy and harmless in the moment. When the emotion is experienced fully, the energy is dissipated and gradually exhausted. With each succeeding experience like this, something is happening in the emotional part, the primitive part of the brain (speculation here), something which, given time, persistence and repeated practice, spells doom to ‘me’. I am experiencing a thrill even as I write these words this morning, because this is something that is entirely new, unheard of before, so far as I can determine. It is exciting to be talking like this, experimenting with these things, trying them on for size. PETER: An excellent description. Just in case anyone missed the opening sentence – ‘One extremely useful and practical thing I have learned from actualism is ... ’ The only way this method can be effective, as in producing lasting results, is if it is combined with an active investigation of the beliefs, morals, ethics, values and psittacisms that form our social identity – ‘the guardian at the gate’ that prevents one from having a clear-eyed look at the emotions and passions in action. This method needs to be combined with labelling the emotion or feeling and understanding its source and this is where reading the web-site is essential. Richard spent years investigating and exploring the human condition and my investigations were subsequently so much easier because I was able to read what he had written and pick his brain for information. My particular discoveries combined with Vineeto’s are now available for others to read so this process becomes even easier again for those following. Your description adds to a growing body of evidence that the process works, and I would only add another comment for others who may be reading. Anyone who regards actualism as a process designed only to eliminate emotions is missing the point and needs to read more. If anyone attempts merely to eliminate emotions without having a goal to be free of the Human Condition they would only end up in some non-feeling zombie-like state – perhaps dwelling in some rationalist cold no-man’s land. The aim of the method, so well described above, is to reduce the insidious effects of both the savage and tender passions and aim for the felicitous feelings, such as feeling fine, feeling good, feeling excellent, etc. Until the whole of the psychological and psychic identity is extinguished one is still a feeling being but this process, if undertaken with sincere intent, serves to weaken and diminish one’s identity and eventually facilitates its immolation. One’s own integrity combined with the memory that purity and perfection is only possible in a ‘self’-less state will always serve to prevent one from entering into imaginary delusionary states of Actual Freedom. The immediate and readily obtainable aim in the initial stages of actualism is to get to a Virtual Freedom from the human condition. It could well be described as learning to walk before you fly, lest you fall into the ‘I am already That’ trap. Another way of putting it is you always keep your feet on the ground, lest you end up with your head in the clouds. Discovering what is actual, as opposed to what we think and feel is real, is immense fun. * GARY: Sometimes I get disappointed writing because I think I have nothing original to say. I berate myself because I see that my writing is just a rehash of what others are saying, and I seem to only blend and combine ideas that I get elsewhere. Sometimes I compare myself to others and come out short. Richard is obviously a very intelligent man and has an easy command of the language. You also write well and particularly in your recent posts your writing is crisp and clear. I think I also write well and I have had people compliment me on things that I have written. As for berating myself, I am sure it does not do much good or any good at all and it is something else for me to look at. In the real world, the Land of Lament, there is a heavy emphasis on developing ‘self’-esteem, which is a sense of pride for one’s competencies, strengths, and achievements. Conversely, there is a lack of ‘self’-esteem, or what people call ‘low self-esteem’, as evidenced by an extremely critical attitude towards oneself or berating oneself for lack of achievement and inner worth. I am coming to see that Humanity, the society, and the community needs a steady supply of people with ‘self’-esteem. In short, Society needs a steady supply of human beings who are ‘selves’ who either have ‘self-esteem or who don’t and want to have it. In this way, society and the community shape and mould the individual according to it’s selfish demands, and it demands ‘self’-sacrifice because it is ultimately selfish, like the individual self. So this ‘self’-beratement, the flip side of the coin from ‘self’-esteem, is evidence of ‘me’ struggling to stay in existence. It is ‘me’ as the parasitic entity flexing its’ muscles and attempting to maintain its’ foothold on this flesh and blood body. And as Vineeto recently pointed out, ‘I’ am redundant. In fact, ‘I’ am doomed. PETER: The human social identity is rooted in comparison to others – we are taught by reward and punishment to conform to society’s standards – to be ‘good like Johnny or Betty’, ‘not to be bad like Tom or Sally’. As children our performance and behaviour is constantly ranked and rated at home and school in comparison to others as we are imbibed with a social conscience. Conformity and mediocrity become our role models and we have only two choices – either to humbly acquiesce or blindly rebel. Humanity rewards conformity and punishes rebellion, giving rise to endless cycles of endemic necessary suffering and senseless necessary struggle. The only way out of this mess is to become autonomous – to break free of the shackles that continually hobble us to comparing ourselves to others who are similarly afflicted by the human condition. I found the only way to do this was to do it – thinking about it, worrying about it, or fearing the consequences of freedom only wasted even more time. The only way to dispel comparison on the path to Actual Freedom is to do the best you can do. If this best is free of malice and sorrow, if this best is done with integrity, then whatever is done is simply the best in the circumstances. It is a bit weird when you get to the stage when you lose this ‘self’-measure of comparison with others for I find I now have no standard other than my own integrity. Believing in society’s hypocritical goods and bads, opinionated rights and wrongs, yearning for praise and cowering before criticism all gradually disappear and then it is as if there is nothing to hold on to – no external reference for ‘me’ in comparison to others. This stage can be unnerving and daunting and it is mightily reassuring that the sun comes up every morning, no matter what was going on in my head or my heart. What I have come to see in my writing is that my experience is typical to all, in that I am a flesh and blood human being born into the human condition exactly like everyone else, and therefore my experience in becoming free of the human condition will be relevant to all. The usefulness of our conversations is that we on this list are the very first to be taking the direct route to an actual freedom from the human condition. The usefulness of anyone interested in writing about their own process is that a breadth of experiences will be recorded and made freely available on the web-site for anyone who is interested – for those who are doing it now and for those who will inevitably follow. PETER: In the same vein, the prime minister of the country where I live recently announced a new initiative to promote harmony within the 200 odd ethnic groups that live in this country and suggested as part of this initiative that people should ‘celebrate their differences’. It obviously never occurred to him, or those who wrote his speech, that it is precisely because people cling to their differences – their old cultural, social and ethnic conditioning – that there is ethnic conflict and disharmony in the first place. In the case of your observation, the idea that encouraging people to continually air their grievances towards each other can achieve peace and harmony in the workplace makes no sense at all. <snip>. GARY: It is much the same in the US, a multi-ethnic society as is Australia. There is the same ‘celebrate diversity’ theme trotted out again and again as a means of promoting ‘tolerance’ for others of a different stripe ethnically or racially. Yet only because there is disharmony, hatred, intolerance, greed, aggression, expansionism, etc is there this need to promulgate the antidotal tolerance, love, and compassion for others different. PETER: And a clear-eyed observation will reveal that there is as much disharmony, hatred, intolerance, greed, aggression, conflict, competition and expansionism evident in the forces of good – i.e. in those who preach faith, tolerance, love and compassion – as there are in the forces of evil. GARY: Differences are a simple fact of life for biological creatures. Biologically, we seem to share much more in common as human beings than we have different. PETER: I have travelled to all five continents, met people from hundreds of tribes and seen people from hundreds more tribes on television and apart from differences in physical appearances, education and living standards I have seen no biological differences between human beings that are of any consequence. To claim that there is some type of biological diversity within the human species that needs to be passionately maintained can be traced to a fear of losing one’s own precious social identity and one’s own instinct-protected animal identity as a being. History has shown, and is showing, that human beings will desperately cling to their trivial race, creed and ethnic differences with all that entails, rather than happily become anonymous harmless citizens of the world. 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: I seem to fluctuate between a sense of alarm and anxiety at my ‘aloneness’ and the thrill of the realization that I am really getting somewhere by using the actualism method. And where I am getting is to be completely and totally free from being a member of the human club. When I set out upon learning about an Actual Freedom, I had many basic questions, some of which persist. For instance, I wondered: will I be able to work? Will I be able to provide for myself and my partner? Will I have a social life? What will that look like? and other questions such as these. Regarding my ability to work, I have found that I am able to work, and that my capacity for work has, if anything, increased. I am better able to prioritize tasks, think things through and get done what needs to be done. PETER: Your experience regarding working for money closely mirrors my own experiences. By becoming virtually free of malice and sorrow I am not only able to work more efficiently but I am also now able to do my work much better. By no longer resenting having to work, no longer being annoyed by other people, no longer being frustrated that I do not get ‘my’ way and so on, not only am I happier but I no longer create ripples for those around me by ‘my’ incessant demands. I am now equally interested that my clients are as satisfied with my work as I am and that they get as much value for their money as I do for my time committed. The other issue with work is that I no longer seek meaning, kudos and identity from my work as I had been taught to both expect and/or demand. I am not special in what I do when I work for money – anyone can do my job and many do so, equally as well. My time spent working is what it is – selling my time and expertise to someone else in return for money to pay for food, shelter, clothes and the like. By eliminating all the beliefs and values around the issue of work a good deal of my social identity fell away – and those I work for, and with, are better off for it. The ‘will I be able to work’ issue also occurred to me when I thought about the consequences of becoming free from Humanity. But I eventually came to realize that this was a belief I had, based on my observation of those who had ‘made it’ to the top in the spiritual world and who then become incapable of functioning and working in the world and end up having to rely on the financial and emotional support of their followers or disciples for their sustenance. Need I point out that being able to more happily, sensibly and efficiently function in the world is further evidence that actualism is the antithesis of spiritualism. GARY: However, regarding my ‘social life’, I find that I no longer feel the need to affiliate with other human beings the way I once used to. In days gone by, I used to think that having ‘friends’ was very important, yet now I cannot really say that I have any ‘friends’ nor do I want any. Because the word ‘friendship’ implies an obligation to stick with another person through thick and thin, and I find that I am not prepared to do that. I would much prefer to go my own way and allow someone else the freedom to do the same, so I cannot say that anyone is my ‘friend’ in that sense. I feel much the same about family relationships (and I am talking about family of origin here, not family of procreation). I keep in touch with members of my family. But compared to other people who I see around me, my sense of a family identity is very weak indeed. PETER: During the first two years of practicing actualism I also experienced that my ‘friendships’ dropped away but lately I have had occasion to meet several of these former ‘friends’ and to do work for several members of the spiritual group I was in before. All of these meetings have been delightful as am now meeting fellow human beings, I am interested in them as fellow human beings and, as such, have enjoyed their company. The difference between now and before is that I now make no emotional demands of people I meet which then frees them of the burden of ‘me’, nor do I have emotional expectations of them which then frees me from the constant need to intuit and imagine what they were thinking and feeling about ‘me’. There is great significance in the phrase ‘fellow human beings’ because the only way you can begin to treat your fellow human beings as fellow human beings is to firstly demolish your own social identity. The first component that has to go is one’s spiritual identity because a Christian never meets a Buddhist as a fellow human being, a Rajneeshee never meets a Krishnamurti-ite as a fellow human being, and so on, because each have different beliefs, that make for differing identities. The very best that spiritualists can muster up is a feeling of oneness – a feeling that always fails to translate into a practical and tangible peace and harmony between members of a spiritual group, let alone between members of competing groups. Then there are other aspects of one’s social identity that demand attention if one is to ever get to the stage where one can see and treat one’s fellow human beings as fellow human beings and not continue to think and feel them to be separate ‘beings’. A man never meets a woman and sees her or treats her as a fellow human being because men and women have been instilled with opposing gender identities – identities that are mandated by each side in the battle of the sexes and are rife with mutual feelings of suspicion, fear, ignorance and superstition. Similarly, a father never meets a son and a mother never meets a daughter for each has a socially-imposed identity relative to each other – a complex set of social obligations, emotional demands and needs, expectations and resentments that serve to prevent each from either seeing or treating each other as fellow human beings. Similarly, an American never meets an Australian, a Lithuanian never meets a Nigerian and so on, for each believe they belong to a different culture and each call a particular piece of the planet ‘home’. The list goes on, but I won’t, for you will have got the gist by now. What normally happens in relationships when things start to go wrong, as they inevitably do, is that the each party blames the other for failing to meet their needs, fulfill their expectations, nurture them sufficiently, respect their feelings, and such like. Often a begrudging compromise is reached in relationships or failure is allowed to run its natural course. As you well know from your experience with actualism, the only way out of this mess is to demolish one’s own social identity, piece-by-piece, element-by-element. And the proof that this process works is that you begin to not only see but to treat the fellow human beings you come in contact with as exactly that – fellow human beings, regardless of their age, gender, kin, race, religion, culture, nationality, and so on. * GARY: I have found that palpable evidence of the demolishment of the social identity is a relative absence of what I will, for lack of a better term, call the ‘inner critic’. There used to be an ‘inner critic’ who was a rather noisy chap in the head who would almost immediately categorize others according to their racial, ethnic, class, weight, size, etc. Whilst I am still aware of this critical voice in the head, the corresponding feelings that arise in the heart are much more open to examination. And I realize that it is this tendency to lock on to others with particular emotional reactions to their ‘differentness’ that in large part complicates interacting with others in the social environment. <Snipped> PETER: The ‘inner critic’ or the ‘rather noisy chap in the head’ is in fact one’s social identity in action. ‘He’ or ‘she’ is naught but a social construct and as such only exists relative to, or in relationship with, other social identities. ‘He’ or ‘she’ is typified by such thoughts as ‘I wonder what he or she is thinking about me?’, ‘Does he or she like me?’, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’, ‘Am I saying the right thing?, ‘I don’t like what he or she said’, ‘They don’t understand me’, ‘What about me?’ and so on. The creation of this social identity was both a purposeful action and a necessity given that all human beings are instinctually programmed with ‘self’-centred animal survival passions that compel each and every human being to fear and be wary of each other as well as battle or compete with each other. The only way to tame the crude instinctual animal programming in human beings is to teach each newcomer a set of dos and don’ts, shoulds and shouldn’ts, rights and wrongs, goods and bads and this programming directly leads to the formation of an ‘inner critic’ or ‘rather noisy chap in the head’ whose ‘job’ is to keep the crude instinctual passions firmly ‘in control’. It therefore follows that the only way to really get in touch with the subjugated instinctual passions – to be able to fully experience them and therefore be able to fully understand them – is to take one’s social identity apart, bit by bit. Every time you become attentive to this ‘inner critic’ trotting out yet another moral or ethical platitude or psittacism is another opportunity to investigate the sensibility of ‘his’ thoughts or feelings. Provided one’s aim in life is to become actually happy and harmless, what is silly and what is sensible is always apparent and because of your intent you are compelled to do is what is sensible – despite what your ‘inner critic’, and other people, think or feel about it. In this way one actively diminishes one’s social identity to the point where ‘he’ or ‘she’ no longer rules the roost and inhibits the opportunity to experiential investigate the crude instinctual passions in operation. Actualism Homepage
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