Spirituality

[Peter]: The expression I heard Richard use was to ‘keep your hands in your pockets’, meaning be wary of doing something you may regret while in the midst this period of psychological and psychic turmoil. The process can be very confusing and disorienting for one is demolishing one’s own spiritual/ social and one’s instinctual identity – something any good psychiatrist would warn you against and something your priests and Gurus will utterly condemn as being evil. It may be useful to ask questions such as – am I trying to change the other, am I blaming the other, is my reaction considered and considerate or is it thoughtless instinctual? One’s own interactions with others provide a literal goldmine of valuable information as to how the human psyche is socially and instinctually programmed.’ I spoke to No 7 just a while ago about a recent experience with fear. There is no need to really go into all of it right now, but in light of what you wrote, the advice to ‘keep your hands in your pockets’ is sensible. I do regret acting unwisely in the situation. I did become somewhat aggressive. I recall the supervisor saying that I was ‘defensive’. [endquote].

RICHARD: To ‘trust’ someone – anyone at all – is to invite betrayal … to ‘trust’ someone is to impose a demand upon them that they may not be able to live up to (or want to) and I never do that. I have had no use for ‘trust’ at all: to ‘trust’ is to attract deception. Etymologically, ‘trust’ – a covenant with ‘The Truth’ – is in the same category as faith – loyalty to ‘The Truth’ – and both are aligned with belief. Belief means fervently wishing to be true. There is not much difference between ‘trust’ and faith … as a generalisation perhaps ‘trust’ is used more in spiritual circles, whereas faith is more aligned with the religious. ‘Trust’ seems to have more solid connotations than faith – to the spiritual aspirant, who scorns religion and all its trappings – yet, essentially they amount to the same. They all give rise to hope. Hope, the antidote to despair, is what most people live on. Living in hope – having faith or trusting – is a poor substitute for the living purity of the perfection of the actual. Hope sets one up for disappointment time and again … and all it is, is the antidote for despair. All trusting, believing, hoping and having faith and certitude are but the antidotes to distrust, disbelief, despair, doubt or suspicion.

So, even in a room where I presume were mostly atheists, spirituality was accepted and sacrosanct. As I see it, this is the reason why it is a important insight that virtually everyone is ‘spiritual’ at least in their desire to connect with others, the truth, the universe, or whatever. It is the ‘real’ existence of the psychic web which makes the feeling of unity possible and the search for this unity in whatever form the essence of the ‘spiritual’.

• [Respondent]: ‘Some thoughts on what it means to be ‘spiritual’. On the one hand, being ‘spiritual’ can mean believing in a god, truth (by whatever name), the afterlife, etc. i.e. – belief in the supernatural. On the other hand, being ‘spiritual’ can refer to an attitude or outlook on life which values such things as family, community and community service, a feeling of unity with the universe and all peoples and beings. It is this second sense of the word ‘spiritual’ that everyone inevitably shares to some extent. As a feeling being ‘I’ cannot help but attempt to unite my ‘self’ with other ‘selves’ for security and fortification. It is ‘my’ very nature to do so. […snip…]. Not too long ago, I attended a single Humanist meeting. I was surprised to find out that on the one hand, spiritual beliefs were shunned as primitive belief, yet ‘spirituality’ (as in community, connection with all beings, etc) was quite important.

(Although, due to the total lack of precedence, ‘he’ increasingly infused it with the grandeur/ the glory / the allure of the ASC as well).

RICHARD: Are you able to contemplate the atmosphere of your pure consciousness experience? By contemplation I do not mean trying to feel the experience; a peak experience is not a matter of emotions and passions, it is in a realm of its own, as you may remember. Contemplation, to work successfully, needs to be pure … stripped of emotive thought. For a moment allow yourself to set aside – not give up – your psychological state of ‘being’, which is occupied by the latest accumulation of worries and preoccupations. Make all of your identity unimportant, for now, and contemplate the perfection of being here now. Allow this moment to live you, instead of you living in the present. Experience yourself as Being the doing of what is happening. An immediate peace and calm emerges and all is wiped clean, allowing a three-hundred-and-sixty degree awareness to operate. It is like having eyes in the back of your head. In this clean atmosphere you can freely allow the pure quality of the immediacy of this moment to become paramount. It is of itself not at all concerned with the culturally defined personality you were just before; it takes no notice of any ‘problem’ that has just been plaguing you and is calmly unperturbed by any psychological interference. Instantly the friendly solution to all humankind’s problems lies open all around. It is a condition which cannot be mistaken as anything else than authentic, as it is your very character. It is the simple, actual quality of the universe itself … it is a magical world … a fairytale-like wonderland. In this, the actual world, love, worship and adulation – the whole Spiritual gamut of surrender and obedience – do not play a role. Divinity has become obsolete as a solution, because what you are seeing and experiencing now is pre-eminent. An intimacy closer than you have ever been with yourself, as you normally are, has replaced everything else … this kind familiarity has superseded all what humans have ever believed as being The Truth.

PETER: If ‘I’ seek meaning for ‘my’ life then narcissism can be the only result – and the long history of the famed spiritual search attests to this fact. If ‘I’ simply reject the traditional meanings of life then meaninglessness aka nihilism can be the only result and this seems to be where U.G. Krishnamurti has ended up.

Being born of the biologically inherited instinctual passions genetically encoded in the germ cells of the spermatozoa and the ova, ‘I’ am – genetically speaking – umpteen tens of thousands of years old … ‘my’ origins are lost in the mists of pre-history. ‘I’ am so anciently old that ‘I’ may well have always existed … carried along on the reproductive cell-line, over countless millennia, from generation to generation. And ‘I’ am thus passed on into an inconceivably open-ended and hereditably transmissible future. In other words: ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’; ‘I’ am aggression and aggression is ‘me’; ‘I’ am nurture and nurture is ‘me’; ‘I’ am desire and desire is ‘me’ and so on. This is one’s ‘Original Face’ (to use the Zen terminology); this is the source of the ‘we are all one’ feeling that is accessed in spiritual practices and mystical mediation.

VINEETO: [..] I have spent many years exploring therapy groups and spiritual feeling states and it was quite a challenge to slowly wake up to the fact that feeling is not identical to actuality – in fact, feeling has nothing to do with actuality. In the past I might have felt harmless^* but was nevertheless quite harmful in that my ‘self’-centredness inevitably caused ripples in other peoples lives. I found that while I might have felt that I valued peace, I still instinctively acted in attack and defence mode. While I might have felt that I was willing to sacrifice my ego for a higher cause, I was actually cultivating humbleness as a means of soul-istic ‘self’-aggrandizement, and so forth.

VINEETO: [..] You might also have observed that pointing out a fact that pulls the rug from under someone’s precious belief often raises their hackles and as such is considered to be an act of aggression in the believer’s eyes. Whilst I would not choose to take someone’s beliefs apart in ‘real life’, as you call it, this mailing list is up front about being a non-spiritual mailing list and has been specifically set up ‘to assist in elucidating just what is entailed in becoming free of the human condition’. (From the welcome message to the Actual Freedom mailing list) As such this list is the very place to openly question and actively investigate all of the spiritual/philosophical beliefs, worldviews and psittacisms that pass for wisdoms and truths within the human condition so as to be able to make a clear-eyed investigation and assessment of the facts of the matter.

When I first came across actualism I went through a phase of enthusiasm where I wanted to share with my then-friends from my spiritual years that I had found the solution to my life-long quest for peace and happiness, a quest which I assumed was the same for them. At first, I naively thought people would be as pleased as I was to hear about an alternative to the well-worn religious/spiritual path – but no, none of my former friends who I talked to was in the least interested in questioning their precious beliefs, let alone entertain the idea of abandoning the safety of the spiritual path, and setting off in a completely new direction. At first I was flabbergasted by their disinterest in actualism, but with increasing attentiveness I began to understand my own doubts and fears and saw it as an ingrained part of the human condition that one wants to avoid changing one’s own life but invariably either wishes or even demands that other’s should change.

VINEETO: The phrase I would use now, in hindsight, for those ‘no-feelings’ of lack-lustre and listlessness is resentment of being here. Within the human condition there is a basic resentment of not wanting to be here, wanting to be somewhere else, waiting for something else to happen than what is happening now, as a basic attitude to life==, which is then reinforced by the various religious and spiritual conditioning that life on earth is essentially suffering and that the real life will only happen for the spirit after you die.

PETER: There seems to be a very deep-set misunderstanding that arises even from the running of the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive??’ for the traditional approach would be – am ‘I’ feeling safe and comfortable ‘inside’ this body despite what is happening in the rock-solid world ‘out there’? This approach to the question merely perpetuates the self as an entity that is separate from the actual world, it does nothing to actively demolish and break down the barriers that prevents one as a mortal flesh and blood body being fully immersed in and engaged in the business of doing what is happening, right here and now in the physical, rock-solid actual world. This actual freedom is 180 degrees opposite to the spiritual freedom which is the escape from being here, right now in this only moment one can experience being alive.

RICHARD: Are you able to contemplate the atmosphere of your pure consciousness experience? By contemplation I do not mean trying to feel the experience; a peak experience is not a matter of emotions and passions, it is in a realm of its own, as you may remember. Contemplation, to work successfully, needs to be pure … stripped of emotive thought. For a moment allow yourself to set aside – not give up – your psychological state of ‘being’, which is occupied by the latest accumulation of worries and preoccupations. Make all of your identity unimportant, for now, and contemplate the perfection of being here now. Allow this moment to live you, instead of you living in the present. Experience yourself as being the doing of what is happening. An immediate peace and calm emerges and all is wiped clean, allowing a three-hundred-and-sixty degree awareness to operate. It is like having eyes in the back of your head. In this clean atmosphere you can freely allow the pure quality of the immediacy of this moment to become paramount. It is of itself not at all concerned with the culturally defined personality you were just before; it takes no notice of any ‘problem’ that has just been plaguing you and is calmly unperturbed by any psychological interference. Instantly the friendly solution to all humankind’s problems lies open all around. It is a condition which cannot be mistaken as anything else than authentic, as it is your very character. It is the simple, actual quality of the universe itself … it is a magical world … a fairytale-like wonderland. In this, the actual world, love, worship and adulation – the whole Spiritual gamut of surrender and obedience – do not play a role. Divinity has become obsolete as a solution, because what you are seeing and experiencing now is pre-eminent. An intimacy closer than you have ever been with yourself, as you normally are, has replaced everything else … this kind familiarity has superseded all what humans have ever believed as being The Truth.

It is possible to live in this modern era, freed from out-dated Philosophy and Psychiatry, challenging every Spiritual and Metaphysical tenet and surpassing any of the Altered States of Consciousness. Discarding all of the beliefs which have held humankind in thralldom for eons, the way has now been discovered which cuts through the ‘Tried and True’ and enables anybody to be, for the very first time, a fully free and autonomous individual, living in utter peace and tranquillity, beholden to no-one.

Just as an aside to the issue of assertiveness, it is both interesting and informative to see the parallels between the psychologically-based movements aimed at establishing a strong and assertive self and the Eastern religious-based movements aimed at establishing a dissociated and superior self. The distinctions are seemingly nowhere more blurred than in the U.S. where the utter ‘self’-ishness and ‘self’-centred nature of both movements are so intermingled that every pursuit and every activity has the tag spiritual added to it.

PETER: When I started to become free of malice and sorrow, I found my emotional bonds or ‘neediness’ with other people became noticeably weaker. The most noticeable effect of this was that I lost my former spiritual ‘friends’ because I was no longer a member of a group of fellow believers. As I progressively became free of malice, I was no longer interested in participating in conversations where the ills of the world were blamed on others. And as I became progressively free of sorrow, I was no longer interested in participating in conversations where being here was regarded as a miserable business and where it was firmly believed that succour or relief could only be found by retreating ‘inside’. There was a period of time where I felt an outsider or a loner but recently I had occasion to meet quite a few old friends at a social event and all feelings of being an outsider and a loner had totally disappeared. I had a pleasurable time with a group of fellow human beings, regardless of their beliefs, gender or cultural conditioning.

The two common human reactions can be crudely summarized as fight or flight – assertiveness, standing up for ‘my’ rights, making ‘my’ point, demanding justice, etc. are in the fight ⚔️ category and being humble, surrendering ‘my’ will, being grateful, turning the other cheek, being a pacifist, etc. are reactions in the flight 🏃 category. These typical reactions are prevalent both in the spiritual world and the real world and are socially instilled and/or instinctually programmed.