FAQ corner — part 2 —
'frequently asked questions'
on self-actualization and healing issues

Who would be my best model of a self-actualized person?

Somebody wrote in to me in response to this website as follows:

I'm interested and curious in the ideas you've presented in your website. For clarification of your ideas, whom would you consider to be the more self-actualized person, Drew Carey or Craig Ferguson? (You may wish to check out an interview of them together on Youtube)

I ask this because I'm seeking to become a certain way, while I feel your site is leading me to become another way.

Actually, that person clearly hadn't understood one of the most fundamental aspects of the contents this site, and couldn't have properly read the notes on my Contact page. Indeed, if he'd read and understood the latter notes he wouldn't have sought to take up my time with such a (truly bizarre) query in the first place.

If you're wanting to be one way or another, then I gently point out that that's NOTHING to do with genuine self-actualization and everything to do with one 'flavour' or another of 'appropriateness', and therefore nothing to do with this website nor with me.

Similarly, any issue being made as to whether one personality is supposedly more self-actualized than another personality is a complete diversion and side-track away from actual (sic) self-actualization, and, again, is nothing to do with me or this site. Similarly, what's on YouTube or indeed anywhere else on the Net is of no relevance to what I and this site are about, which is genuine self-actualization. The latter may not be what you want, but it is what it is, and some people do greatly value it!

To the person who asked the above-quoted question, and anyone with like notions, I recommend particularly the careful reading and understanding of the following two articles of mine:

• Exit 'spirituality' — Enter clear-mindedness;

• Do you want to be 'appropriate'? — Or authentic?.

How do I clear attacks of shame / guilt over a past action?

Here is a particularly instructive example: a guy who I shall just call X emailed me, asking how he might clear himself of his torments surrounding a particular boyhood memory of his.

Recently, after quitting cannabis, my level of awareness has skyrocketed and I been better able to live in the Now in any situation and maintain a quiet peaceful mind full of awareness but all of a sudden I have this thought (the only thought really after I managed to resolve all the other negative thoughts I previously had) of something REALLY embarrassing come up in my head that has made me feel guilty and unworthy of being around people and has started to interfere with my ability to remain aware and in the Now; I suspect it has also been an unconscious reason as to why I find it difficult to over come my resistance to intimacy and, now slight (after working it out) anxiety while with the opposite sex. I've been trying hard to just ignore the thought and overpower it by focusing as hard as I can on the task at hand but it doesn't seem to work very well as it leaves me feeling depressed, unmotivated, and drained of energy afterwards. This thought has been triggered a few times before over the years and I've dealt with it, but I guess I haven't resolved it effectively enough since it came back.
 
So when I was around 10–13 (don't remember exactly when) I once tried to have sex with the family dog, I wasn't in love with the dog or anything I guess I just wanted to have sex with something. It didn't really work out because the dog was too small, but the fact that I got naked and tried is haunting me right now and I don't know how to resolve this thought completely. It just makes me feel like a sicko. I've heard that sometimes kids around that age are just figuring out their sexuality and often experiment and do some stupid stuff, but I still can't shake the thought off because it's something that I DID, or tried to do anyways and would have succeeded. When the thought attacks me, it also triggers a sense of being worthless when compared to my peers because I doubt any of them ever did anything quite like I did, this sense of worthlessness greatly discourages me from even thinking about talking about it to other people as I think (and I'm sure they will given the kind of culture, very religious and repressed I'm usually around with) they will look at me differently and even call me out on it.

Actually, X is in very good company here, because I myself had a slightly similar experience in my late teens, and I know from the inside how one can be tormented by feelings of shame, and of being a 'shit' and all that.

However, the reality is that it's a past action and so it's actually not here any more, and, although, yes, it can be explained as being part of one's inevitable boyhood explorations, even such an explanation as that is really unnecessary. At ANY time of one's life one may try something out, which within a broader context could be seen as problematical in some way and which would tend to draw massive opprobrium from 'society' in general if people at large got to know about it.

Indeed, even if it had become a habit or fixation, that still doesn't mean that there was anything bad about one, and clearly if one doesn't want to do such things now there can't be anything much of a problem apart from one's irrational and self condemnatory emotional responses to one's having been doing it in the first place.

There's nothing intrinsically bad, evil, 'immoral' or disgusting about trying to, or indeed succeeding in, having it off with a doggie, even though it's possible to recognise quite rationally various ways in which it's not very helpful to oneself, nor indeed to the dog, for one to be doing such a thing! Also, there are MASSES of actually much more harmful things that people do, that are actually ACCEPTED and even ENCOURAGED within our cultures — though typically people don't want to know anything much about the harmful side of the various things they do in everyday life.

So, when people get hot under the collar about a little wayward sexual exploration such as that recounted by X, they'd be simply demonstrating their own emotional problems (and, in virtually all cases, their gross hypocrisy), and the pejorative labels that such people put upon the particular act are simply labels that tell us about particular problems of the labeller, not the labelled.

The sensible approach to all such past happenings, therefore, is simply a completely non-judgmental light-hearted and lovingly straightforward I can see that doing that again wouldn't be a helpful way forward for me, and I've put that down to learning, and thus you move on in your life just that bit 'wiser' and more aware, in a joyful sort of way.

In this way your past apparent 'aberration' has actually served a useful function in giving you a handle for becoming more aware and better-functioning. You can't learn in a deep and aware way without sometimes trying things that you may immediately or later recognise as 'mistakes' or 'errors of judgment'.

But even those two latter terms are really not helpful, for they imply a negative judgment. Generally they're better replaced with a term like 'learning experience', meant in the most positive way. In other words, they aren't about learning that you're a shit (simply another pejorative label applied), but about your having more awareness and understanding now to assist you in being more aware and rational and having a happier and more positive life experience in future.

However, in the 'real world', there's a strong tendency for open and aware individuals to suffer greatly from retrospective attacks of shame, guilt and all manner of self condemnations, which get in the way of that simple learning, or simply override it and torment one even though one knows deep within oneself that one is okay and has fully learnt from the past.

This, of course, is where the garbage is exploiting the situation. In other words, all those self-condemnatory thoughts and emotions are NOT YOUR OWN! They're all garbage attack, and don't in the slightest degree point to how things really are, nor towards one's becoming a better person! Indeed, generally it would have been the garbage that manipulated one into 'unusual' sexual explorations in the first place.

Another example of this sort of thing is the sexual arousal that many people experience from images of torture and other traumatically humiliating / degrading behaviour towards fellow human beings — again, the source of a great deal of shame and inner suffering for people who experience that.

That's actually great news, because I present on this site a whole set of methods that I've found greatly effective for myself in dissolving garbage interferences and attacks and in progressively opening up one's deeply sourced intrinsic immunity to such garbage.

In the case of X, quoted above, I suggest that the most effective approach would be to treat all the untoward aspects of his situation, past and present, as 'common or garden' garbage interference and attack (which also his cannabis smoking would have very much helped open him to), and start from Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way to get to grips with and resolve his issue.

Note particularly the Grounding Point procedure to clear thought forms and illusory realities, and use of the Feedback-Loop Zapper procedure for dissolving the emotional button-pushing aspect of garbage attacks. Also, there's a crucial need for X to get his awareness better grounded.

Should one get rid of things given to one by people who are harmful and destructive etc.?

For a start, as I keep having cause to point out in these pages, there's no should or shouldn't. Things are simply as they are. The real issue here is about cause and effect, not should or shouldn't. The useful question to consider is Would it be beneficial for me to get rid of those things?

There's no nice convenient general rule about this, for it depends on the particular things, the particular person who has those things, and upon his/her specific situation. So, even for one person having a blitz on decluttering their living space, it wouldn't necessarily follow that every single item from a troublesome person is best cleared out. This is where it makes real sense to be practical. For each item, the first question inevitably must be Do I need the item? — i.e., NOT Do I want it?!

If you don't actually need it, a good second question would be: Would it be more beneficial to keep it or to clear it out? — NOT the same question covering all the items as a group, but the question applied individually to each item. So, we're recognising the uniqueness of each object / situation / moment in time, and each is best served with its own specific answer (i.e., apart of course from discrete groups of usually small objects that realistically are best considered together).

Rigorously applied Helpfulness Testing is the real way to deal with all that, so that you make the most beneficial choice for each item (or group of them) that you're considering.

However, if you're not using Helpfulness Testing, it would undoubtedly be the case that, overall, items that have been given to you by people who you perceive as troublesome in some way would most likely be of a high priority for clearing out — but still, if you're aiming to be clear-minded about it, then you'd do yourself a great favour by weighing up any genuinely useful / beneficial aspect of each item against any 'energy' / emotional drag or disturbance for you in keeping the item.

I think that if I myself still didn't have Helpfulness Testing now, in that situation myself I'd tend to err on the side of casting out. If I went thinking to myself, Oh that could be very useful as a paper-weight, and I was just thinking I want a paper-weight on my work desk, I'd most likely be hanging onto far too much 'baggage' that's weakening for me. Rather, I'd take that as a reminder to get something that feels friendly and harmonious, without problematical undercurrents, to use as my new paperweight.

So, overall, the best approach to such situations is to be practical and down-to-earth about any de-cluttering you're doing, and not to imagine that there's some actual rule to follow as to what to discard. It's about what makes best sense in your specific situation (and will minimize the environmental stress of your living / work space) rather than specifically what you feel that you 'want'.

If I give up smoking, will this immediately lessen 'dark force' control / influence over my life?

To me this is a funny sort of question for a person to be asking, and suggests to me that the person is feeling that (s)he 'ought to' quit smoking, but is looking for a convenient reason 'why not'. Looking for reasons 'why not' is a universal, time-honoured means of being one's own most proficient saboteur and avoiding taking some measure or action that one basically knows that one needs to take in order to bring about positive change in one's life.

Indeed, the person who asked me that question and prompted this answer here had already been reading fairly extensively on this site, and considered that my angle on self-actualization was extremely helpful to her and was enabling her to be progressively reducing garbage interference and influence in her life. So basically she'd have understood perfectly well the need to quit smoking as part of her process of self-actualization and clearance of garbage interferences from her life.

My point, then, about that question, as asked, is that it's completely unnecessary, because it's irrelevant as to whether or not any particular beneficial changes would be immediate. The only important thing is that the beneficial changes would occur. The quite obvious subtext in the question, then, is that the person's smoking addiction is struggling to keep a hold on her as she recognises more and more clearly that she needs to quit smoking in order to get the positive changes she really needs in her life.

For the record, to quit addictions (quitting smoking is extremely important, but also, ALL other addictions need to be similarly terminated) would be bound to lessen garbage control / influence in one's life immediately — BUT that doesn't mean that one would necessarily immediately see clearly observable changes, even though very major positive changes would indeed have occurred more or less immediately at a deeper level.

If one is fixated on the notion of everything in one's life suddenly being hunky-dory or at least immediately observably improved upon quitting the addiction(s), one is clearly effectively looking for a reason to fall straight back into the addiction(s) again, on the pretext that quitting didn't have any useful effect anyway. No, the only sane and meaningful way is to QUIT, period.

Then you move forward and get using your time and resources (including financial resources) in healthy and constructive ways at last. Then, bit by bit you'd progressively get finding your underlying genuine happiness emerging into your life.

Please see Letting go of addictions and compulsive behaviours.

Is it true that through seven days' practice of Tögal one's body could transform into light when one dies, leaving just hair and fingernails?

That question made me laugh. I explain what the supposedly 'advanced' Tibetan Buddhist practice called Tögal really is, in 'Spiritual' enlightenment — Personal experience, clarifications, tips and also in Night terrors and hell experiences — Understanding and clearing them. At the time of my own enlightenment at the very beginning of 1997 I started reading books by a selection of the most highly regarded Tibetan Buddhist 'Masters'.

Generally they were all into Vajrayana, the supposedly highest main branch of Tibetan Buddhism, and indeed were teachers of what they were calling Dzogchen, which is supposed to be the very 'highest' level altogether in Buddhism. In the former of the two above link references I explain about how Tögal, which is really a thinly disguised 'dark' practice that has nothing to do with enlightenment and indeed diverts people away from it, had got bundled in with the practice of Trekchö, which was the 'real' Dzogchen.

In those various books I read about the 'rainbow body' phenomenon, in which, allegedly, the body of an advanced practitioner would, immediately upon death, transform into various types of light manifestation — even rainbows — and finally just the hair and nails would remain.

This never fully rang true with me, even then when I was still quite naive and becoming rather gullible about the new 'spirituality' notions that I was then taking on. Quite apart from the matter of whether such things really did happen, what really struck me was the tremendous 'ego trip' aspect of all that. 'Rainbow body' was regarded as some sort of 'ultimate achievement' — which didn't make sense to me at all, for I couldn't see what was a more worthwhile or indeed 'advanced' achievement than simple self-actualization, including enlightenment.

What the hell did it matter what happens to one's body when one dies — except of course if one viewed it as some sort of status symbol, and one's social status was important (which it most certainly isn't!)?

That Tibetan Buddhist preoccupation with the achievement of 'rainbow body' was one of the things that caused me to part company with Buddhism and see that there was a lot of really quite nasty, actually anti-enlightenment, stuff going on even in the very highest quarters in Tibetan Buddhism, with an enormous degree of personal status / power / control agenda from the 'masters' and 'lamas'.

Then, after I'd dropped 'spirituality' like a hot brick in 2007, when I finally understood what 'spirituality' really was, and how it was one of the myriads of phenomena sourced from the garbage, I was able to start getting better insights into what this 'rainbow body' phenomenon really was.

Now, I have no way to physically verify, even to myself, whether 'rainbow body' has ever occurred physically, but from my understanding of astral realms, of which I do have some telling direct experience, the phenomenon fits very nicely into the general picture of astral realm experiences. A whole group or even community of people can have a sort of 'group astral realm' experience if they're sufficiently weakly grounded, as those Tibetan Buddhist communities would be (particularly its 'higher' members).

So, I'm effectively saying that those 'rainbow body' happenings are just in the imaginations of highly suggestive people, right? — Well, actually no. Astral realm experiences aren't as straightforward as that, and they can have a mind-bogglingly sinister aspect. I refer you to Beliefs and illusory realities — Their role in human irrationality, where I explain about astral realm experiences, and how harmful and indeed potentially sinister they can be, and how the 'rainbow body' phenomenon fits into the picture.

In that light, I'd expect that at least some 'rainbow body' events have occurred sort-of 'for real', but only partially in the physical 'reality', because they'd be impossible as fully physical events.

Rather, they'd have been fundamentally astral realm experiences of people who were so seriously ungrounded that the garbage was able to hijack part of their non-physical aspects to cause some degree of 'break-out' from the astral realm (in the astral non-reality) into the physical reality — an extremely harmful sort of happening that needs to be avoided as much as possible — NOT encouraged as those Tibetan Buddhist fools do.

A lot of such 'break-outs' like that would be at least a theoretical threat to the order and integrity of 'reality' and indeed 'Existence' as we know it — even to the point of bringing about a total breakdown of all 'Existence' into an irretrievable chaos — a terminal 'hell'. It really is that serious!

I can thus confidently say, as a reasonably grounded person, that (a) I myself have no plans to aim for any sort of 'rainbow body' death, and (b) my best understanding is that, never mind how little or much self-actualized I may be by the time of my death, there will be no strange, paranormal, psychic or 'metaphysical' phenomena associated with my death — i.e., apart from possibly within the personal illusory realities and astral realms of the odd very poorly grounded individuals who would have been stupidly revering me and sticking me up on a pedestal rather than get on with their own genuine self-actualization process.

Have all things already been experienced by fundamental consciousness?

Somebody wrote in as follows:

Does our true nature (fundamental consciousness) which is in this body to experience, evolve to the degree that we experience new things? Or have all things already been experienced by fundamental consciousness?

Hmmm… I think the most important thing to take on board here is that the more one genuinely knows, the more one understands the extent of one's not knowing anything!

There's actually no way that any human-type being could ever know what the exact situation is, even though various people who deludedly regard themselves as having superior knowledge through supposedly being enlightened or being gurus or having channelled or clairvoyantly or otherwise psychically gained 'information' (ha-ha!) would no doubt make out that they do know the answer to such a question and that there's something deficient about such a supposed impostor as me, who sees through their beliefs and illusory realities, not to mention their personal status issues.

Indeed, I greatly doubt that any aspect of consciousness — 'fundamental' or otherwise — could ever understand itself and the nature of 'reality' sufficiently to know such a thing.

Fortunately for us, that has no bearing on our self-actualization process, so we'd do best just to let go of such speculations, which at least are harmless if we make them briefly out of our natural inquisitiveness and then let go of them as we see that they're really unanswerable.

How do you know if you're a powerful master healer?

Easy! No 'if' about it. To the best of my understanding you couldn't be one because there isn't such a person — i.e., outside the beliefs of various spirituality-based traditions.

The very notion of a 'powerful master healer' is a deception sourced from the garbage, as part of a clear agenda to lead people astray and into serious problems. My best counsel regarding the above question is, simply to drop that question and the very notion of this 'powerful master healer' status (of oneself or indeed anyone else).

As I know from hard first-hand experience, the garbage seeks to get very many people interested in the notion of a 'powerful master healer' or 'healing master' — either in the sense of being / becoming one oneself, or in finding one to go to or to look up to. All that isn't about genuine healing but about personal status issues and self disempowerment (which latter is anti-healing in effect).

I refer you to Am I a Healer?, where I discuss a range of issues relating to being a supposed 'healer' and the way that the garbage gets in on the game.

Is being in love valid?

To me, that's a meaningless question — at least until one has defined what one is meaning by 'valid' in this particular context. Also, the very concept of being 'in love' is relatively little to do with genuine love, and everything to do with desire and attachment in order to avoid clearing oneself of particular emotional issues that one is carrying.

So, I can't directly answer the above superficially nonsensical question, but it's worth my saying that anyone who believes that being 'in love' (i.e., as generally understood) is a genuinely worthwhile way of living is barking up the wrong tree and is pointing well away from self-actualization — no matter how wonderful being 'in love' subjectively seems to be for some people (who, however, simply don't know the better and happier way of living that self-actualization would bring them).

It's not that self-actualized people don't have love in their lives, but they've let go of the extremely distorted notion of 'love' that actually isn't very much about love, which is held by ordinary people. Without attachment one then experiences love as an intrinsic aspect of the life experience, and thus any notion of 'being in love' with a specific person is really rather meaningless, seeing that 'being in love' is defined by desire / attachment rather than genuine love.

How can one prove that the dark force exists?

One can't. Also, one can't prove (i.e., with 100% certainty) that the Earth isn't flat and that there isn't some other explanation for the apparently overwhelming evidence that the Earth is actually roughly spherical. All one can ever do is come up with the most helpful hypothesis that explains best all the relevant observations.

In the case of non-physical manifestations this intrinsic unprovability is particularly obvious, for all we can ever go on is people's inner experiences plus a whole lot of untoward human behaviours and various 'paranormal' happenings. On this site I don't make the almost universal mistake of falling into belief about non-physical reality / realities, but instead I've built up a quite detailed working model or working hypothesis to make genuinely helpful sense out of what I have observed of my own experiences and what other people are going through, and how these relate to human dysfunction generally.

However, although the concept of 'proof' needs chucking out of the window, I'm confident that my own working model is more helpful than any other that I've yet encountered that seeks to explain apparent non-physical manifestations such as apparent 'entities', 'higher beings', 'hearing voices', night terror and hell experiences, and indeed all psychic experiences and phenomena.

I have that confidence simply because the working model gave me the means to progressively resolve my own dire situation that came to a head in 2003–2007, and I've had reports from other people who've put my own working model into practice in their own lives, in place of their previous views, and the consistent positive effects that resulted from their having done so.

Note, however, that the headline question was based on a confusion that I myself was carelessly promoting, in equating the 'dark force' or 'forces of darkness' with the underlying troublesome unseen influence that I nowadays call the garbage. In the light of my making that distinction clear nowadays, I should point out that any 'dark force' or 'forces of darkness' apparently doesn't exist, for, at least in my own working model it's just one of the plethora of illusory manifestations or simply fictional notions that the garbage gives us.

However, if we reword the headline question to replace 'dark force' with 'garbage', the answer is the same — it's just a working assumption based on masses of observational data, and the notion of a need to 'prove' anything (i.e., that the 'anything' is objective fact) needs to be chucked out as it's extremely unhelpful.

What are the side effects of night terrors?

Whoever asked that question appears to have had a misguided 'medical' view of the nature of night hells (which include what most people know as night terrors), for nobody who has a healthier view on hells would use the term 'side effects' in relation to them. Effects, yes, but 'side effects', no.

The different types of hell each have their respective types of harmful effect, in terms of giving the person particular emotional stresses that are almost universally not subsequently released as they need to be, and are instead stored within the person's awareness and so in various ways having harmful effects on the person's life experience and their ability to undergo a comprehensive genuine self-actualization process. You can get a better idea of this through a careful reading of Night terrors and hell experiences — Understanding and clearing them.

Are night terrors warnings from God?

WHAT? — Why in the name of Winnie the Pooh would anything you might call 'God' be delivering warnings at all to little toddlers — let alone 'warnings' in the form of such diabolical and harmful experiences as night hells??! Could it be that 'God' is giving such a diabolically severe and damaging 'warning' to the toddler because (s)he did one poo too many in his/her nappy as a baby, or maybe had puked down Mummy's back one time when (s)he was being 'burped'???! Come off it and pull the other one! — Clearly, whoever posed that absurd question was harbouring some seriously distorted and irrational notions taken up from a religion.

As I explain in The true nature of 'the forces of darkness' and its interference and attacks, what people call 'God', no matter in what form God appears to them to take, is nothing that objectively exists, but is at most an illusion that the garbage causes to be created in many people's awareness for very harmful purposes. Thus, 'God' and 'Satan' are just two illusory faces of the same underlying extremely serious problem for all humans.

Can an anxiety disorder cause hearing voices at night?

This confused question is very much coloured by the faulty and indeed nonsensical 'medical model' approach to what gets perceived as 'mental illness'. The very expression 'hearing voices' shows a clear misunderstanding, or indeed unwillingness to understand or even look at what's really going on, and 'anxiety disorder' is an extremely unhelpful description of what's actually an attack or ongoing series of attacks from the garbage. Until you actually gain a proper perception and understanding of what's really going on, you have no chance of clearing yourself of such untoward manifestations.

In this particular case the real point is that both the garbage attack (unhelpfully interpreted as 'anxiety disorder') and the illusion of non-physical beings or 'entities' speaking to one (unhelpfully described as 'hearing voices') are being caused by one and the same — the garbage, interfering in different ways.

The Good News is that in 'Dark force' and entity troubles — The real way to clear them I present a whole strategy and set of methods for progressively clearing oneself of such issues — though the best starting point is Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way.

Is clarity in your life better than being happy?

Well! — What an implied preconceived notion: clarity and happiness being (implicitly more or less mutually exclusive) alternatives!

People without clarity have a very limited idea of what happiness is, and have experienced little or none of the real thing, which latter is actually all part of having genuine clarity and the inner freedom that comes with it. People with limited awareness have a remarkable penchant for equating the partial oblivion created by their own unawareness with 'happiness'.

The question quoted above, then, is actually one of those nonsensical ones like Have you stopped beating your wife? (especially when asked of a single person!), and is for discarding — though before discarding it, let's reword it into a more honest form: Is clarity in your life better than a cocooned oblivion?. For that matter, why bother to live at all?

Why did I choose to be involved with a dark entity in this lifetime?

To the best of my understanding, that isn't the sort of thing that anyone (at ANY level of their being) chooses to happen for any lifetime at all. What does happen is that the garbage, in its various ways, interferes with people to cause them all manner of problems, including the illusion of having one or more troublesome 'entities' tormenting them or otherwise involved with them.

Then, when an affected person goes to psychics / 'healers', hoping that they can help in getting rid of the problem, the psychics / 'healers' come out with this fiction, that the person (typically, his supposed 'higher self') has chosen for them to have this problem in this particular lifetime, supposedly for some particular learning purpose (and thus it's supposedly all okay). And where did that story come from?

— Why, from the same place as the illusion of the troublesome entity. That is, from the garbage — because the latter is the fundamental 'messenger' that operates all channelling and psychic 'perceptions'.

During my own severe shenanigans from the garbage, at different times various people came out with that sort of garbage at me. Most commonly I was given it in the form of Your higher self [or, your soul] chose these experiences for you for your own learning in this lifetime, and made contracts with astral beings for them to give you those experiences — and so, implicitly, I'd have to just put up with the hellish mess that was being made of my life, and, when my 'higher self' considered that I'd learnt sufficient of what I was required to learn, I'd be released from that issue.

What a lot of bullshit that was! The real point of it, of course, was to deflect me from actually doing anything effective to clear the problem — and that would be the case for anyone who's been given such a story to 'explain' their particular 'entity' or other garbage problem.

So, if you want to clear yourself of 'entity' / garbage problems, the real place to go is 'Dark force' and entity troubles — The real way to clear them, though nowadays the best starting point by far is Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way.

If you don't want to clear yourself of such issues, frankly, you're lost, and there's nothing anyone can do for you about that.

Is it normal to feel fear when becoming enlightened?

This is one of the many questions that need some looking below the surface to understand what's really being asked, and what the real situation of the questioner is. For a start, I doubt very much whether the person asking that question is enlightened or indeed properly understands what enlightenment is.

That person wouldn't be, or have been, 'becoming enlightened', because you're either enlightened or not enlightened, for enlightenment is a virtually instantaneous change in one's view of 'reality' — much like the phase transition of water becoming water vapour; there's no intermediate transitional state.

Certainly, many people could feel some sort of initial emotional unsettlement once they've crossed the enlightenment threshold, and quite often that may involve feelings of fear — particularly as becoming enlightened is an ungrounding experience and the garbage would typically exploit the situation by attacking the person with particular emotions, which may be pleasant (such as 'joy', which is what I experienced) or unpleasant (such as fear or even outright terror).

The aim is apparently to get the person's attention upon the emotion feelings and squarely away from the very subtle experience of one's newly found enlightened state. For the same reason, the garbage would also give the person various types of visionary, transcendent or mystical experiences at that time, again to divert attention away from the genuine enlightenment.

Thus most people who've crossed the enlightenment threshold or got anywhere near it have gained hopelessly inaccurate and confused notions of what enlightenment really is, and almost universally those confused notions are very much present in the various 'spiritual' and metaphysical traditions and 'schools of thought'.

As to whether the feeling of fear in such a situation is 'normal', that's a pointless question based in the 'appropriateness' mindset, and is for discarding. Suffice it to say that, yes, for the reason stated above, fear can be felt when one is newly enlightened, or, much less rarely, going through a garbage-sourced 'pseudo-enlightenment' experience.

How can I get rid of a…['entity' description]

It doesn't make the slightest difference as to what the description of the apparent 'entity' is; I present a whole strategy and set of relevant methods in 'Dark force' and entity troubles — The real way to clear them — though nowadays the best starting point is Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way.

Quite often people are searching on this site for means to get rid of a 'sexual entity'. Let me clarify, that actually there's no such thing as a sexual 'entity' (i.e., a non-physical being), and what people are experiencing as 'sexual entities' are simply particular illusions given to them by the garbage while the latter attacks them with sexual feelings. So, what one is really needing to clear oneself of is simply various types of garbage interference and attack.

How do you keep entities away once they've been removed?

You don't, you can't! — And, generally speaking, the 'entities' could never have been removed, because they didn't exist in the first place! Please read what I have to say about the true nature of what people identify as 'entities'.

What does it mean — a demon has stolen my crucifix pendant?

Oh, my! What trouble that person is in! — Not because his/her nice crucifix pendant has gone missing (which is actually one bit of good news, for any such pendant is actually very harmful), but because of his/her whole 'garbage sourced belief system, which appears to include quite a paranoid element. Why on earth conclude that a demon, of all things, has stolen one's crucifix pendant? Indeed, just supposing an actual demon had stolen that pendant, doesn't that rather imply that the pendant wasn't serving a genuinely useful protective function in the first place?

Indeed, to the best of my own understanding, based in much hard personal experience, the crucifix is really no more helpful than, and pretty well as harmful as, the Pentagram (also very harmful) or indeed — wait for it! — the inverted Pentagram (i.e., pointing down rather than up), which I understand to be a Satanist symbol and, if anything, still more harmful because of the particularly harmful thought forms that have got associated with it.

That person urgently needs to dissolve all the illusory realities that (s)he is carrying, in which demons and other non-physical beings are 'real', and, as part of the process, to get his/her awareness progressively more strongly grounded — and get on with it as quickly as possible before still more untoward things go happening to him/her as a result of his/her garbage interferences.

Also, the person needs to get right out of the disempowering 'need for protection' mindset and get opening up his/her own intrinsic immunity to 'entities' and garbage interferences. I present the means for all that in 'Dark force' and entity troubles — The real way to clear them — though nowadays the best starting point is Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way.

What does it mean energetically, to lose a crystal?

This person looks to be in a quite similarly confused state to the one asking the previous question. In this usage of the word 'energetically', I take it to mean 'in subtle energy terms'. So, for a start, the person has an illusory reality / belief system in which non-physical 'energy' is 'real' and important. And clearly the person has some sort of belief concerning his/her relationship with crystals.

In reality, because crystals are so harmful for 'open' and 'sensitive' people to have around them (let alone, to 'use'!), each loss of a crystal represents the loss of one particular ongoing source of harm to that person. So, that's what it means in 'energy' terms when you lose one! — Not, I suspect, what the person was expecting to hear in answer to his/her question!

My counsel to all such people who genuinely want the best for themselves, is to do what I did about my quite large crystal collection, which I eventually came to recognise had been a significant factor in opening me to the severe garbage attacks that so disrupted my life from 2003 to 2007 and to some extent beyond.

I got rid of the lot — dumping most of them indeed over cliff-tops into relatively deep sea in rugged rocky places where they were unlikely to get transported to beaches where people would find them (at least, before they'd got worn down into more or less harmless tumble-stones). In Sacred geometry, wands and crystals — A serious warning I say more about the harmful effects of crystals.

If the astral isn't real, why is it the same for everybody?

Now, there's a real classic piece of confusion! I don't know whether the person was responding in a particularly confused way to what I'd written on this site or whether (s)he was responding to some bit of confused misinformation that (s)he had picked up from some other source.

I myself make no claim that the astral non-reality itself isn't real. Indeed, as it's part of the life experience of all people with sufficient awareness to be open to it, I take it for practical purposes as being 'real' — though keeping in mind that 'real' is just a label and doesn't really tell us about an intrinsic quality of anything. Please click the latter Glossary link to get a proper understanding of what the astral really is, and why it's so weird from our viewpoint.

However, what's leading to confusion is the fact that what we experience in the astral non-reality is itself not 'real' in any useful sense but is illusory instead. Indeed, it's the lack of consistency between different people's astrally sourced experiences, and even between any one person's astrally sourced experiences over time, that point to those experiences or phenomena as NOT being 'real' in any useful sense.

Yes, some people do each see sort-of similar things in the astral non-reality, and, because of their seriously ungrounded state and thus actually dangerous gullibility, overlook the multitude of discrepancies between one person's and another's astral experiences and thus conclude that the contents of the astral are consistent between different people and thus are 'real'.

The reality (sic) is that, although some people may see sort-of similar things in the astral non-reality (actually largely owing to particular garbage agenda to mislead them in very specific ways), overall there are very great discrepancies, particularly with regard to specifics. The contents of the astral non-reality are fundamentally of chaotic nature, not bound by physical 'laws' and thus having no enduring 'concrete' existence.

As I've come to understand it, much or even all of what consistency is observed by different people in the astral non-reality is caused by agenda of the garbage to mislead and cause problems — for most or all of what one perceives astrally is actually not really 'there' at all but is being shown to one by the garbage.

Can gong meditation remove a spirit attachment?

No. Indeed, it could quite possibly result in the odd person actually gaining some sort of 'spirit attachment'! Basically you'd be better off using a tiger's ear or a pig's testicle (still not recommended)! Although the latter two wouldn't remove anything from you, at least they wouldn't be doing all that much to unground your awareness in the very serious way that a gong meditation would.

Meditation is highly problematical in this respect at the best of times, but when certain types of sound are involved (gongs and singing bowls are among the most harmful in this context), the ungrounding effect is much stronger and thus, far from removing any 'spirit attachment', the problem is exacerbated and one is further than ever from resolving one's particular problem, and much more open to garbage interference and attack, and indeed gaining of 'entities' of one sort or another.

God told me I'm supposed to be a healer — now what?

I do empathize with the person who asked that question, because I myself naively got taken in by the notion, coming to me from various psychics and mediums as well as my own channelling, that I was destined to be a powerful 'healer' — and indeed a 'great' spiritual teacher / world leader of sorts!

The fact that in this case the person has completely uncritically taken it that it was 'God' that told him/her of his alleged 'healer' destiny tells me that his/her awareness was / is weakly grounded, and so that the person is very open to interference and attack from the garbage, and thus needs to be attending to his / her own re-grounding and self-healing rather than concerning him/herself with supposed healing of others.

So, seeing that 'God' is nothing more than an illusion created in particular people's mindspace by the garbage, we can re-word the above question: The garbage told me I'm supposed to be a healer — now what?. I hope that the person who used the original question as a search query that brought him/her to this site found the page "Am I a healer?" — Explaining 'healing' and the problems it causes, in which I present some 'home truths' with regard to healing and indeed my own decidedly salutary experiences with it.

Can you take on other people's karma?

No, but also in a particular, limited, way, yes. I think it's a safe bet that the answer would be a clear 'no' to the person who asked the above question, taking the question as meaning what the person most likely meant, incorporating one of the normal misunderstandings of what karma is. You can, however, undergo the illusion of taking on somebody's karma (i.e., in the conventional and actually seriously confused sense of the word) — and the garbage does indeed bring about that sort of misfortune upon various people.

However, I've gained a clearer understanding of the true nature of karma, and this includes a recognition that one may be carrying and indeed adversely affected by karmas (in the accurate sense, as explained in my glossary link for that word) that are being carried by lost human consciousnesses (parasitic lost souls and, in some cases, a 'spirit attachment' or partial walk-in) that are attached to one.

However, you can't choose to take any of those on — say, as a misguided 'compassionate' act, for example as is highly regarded in various Buddhist circles; that simply can't happen. However, if the garbage is able to interfere with you in the right ways, it could give you an illusory reality in which such things apparently can happen, and then, via that illusory reality, you could have adverse effects as if you really had taken on a particular person's (or group of people's) karmas.

How do I convince myself that I'm worthy?

For a start one drops such an incredibly unhelpful and indeed harmful question right away, and comes up with a genuinely helpful question! Presumably, what the person is really after is a means to gain self-esteem. In order to gain that, one very INeffective way of going about it is trying to convince yourself that you're better than you feel you are.

Instead you need to gain the understanding that the bad / negative thoughts and feelings that you have about yourself are NOT an honest statement of how things really are, and indeed that those thoughts and feelings are 'not me' — even if you can recognise that fact only intellectually at that stage. That, then, opens the way to your using very simple, effective, and, you will be glad to hear, painless, methods to progressively dissolve the issues that you're carrying, that are causing you to feel and think poorly of yourself.

As you get using such methods and actually clearing the garbage that you've been carrying, your self esteem will progressively emerge without your trying to convince yourself of anything!

Indeed, if you do take the route of trying to convince yourself of your 'worth' or positive qualities, what can very easily happen is that you get into a harmful posturing exercise, in which you go presenting to the world, and indeed to yourself, a rigid facsimile of self-esteem or 'worthiness' (whatever that may be!) — not a healthy situation at all! I encounter plenty of people who are to varying extents doing just that, and I don't find them nice people to get involved with at all!

Although various methods would work at least to some extent, my own experience points to two really effective methods — The Work, and, simplest and most effective of all in my experience, Grounding Point. In each of those methods you pick out the most all-embracing of your negative or/and limiting self beliefs / illusory realities, and subject each to the specifics of the particular method you're using. That way you progressively strip away all the garbage that has been holding you down, so allowing your intrinsic self-esteem to increasingly manifest. Simple!

How does one face one's dark self?

To face your dark self, first you have to find it. However, one little catch — there's no such thing!

If you have a belief or impression that you do have a 'dark self', that's some sort of garbage deception / interference that has come your way. I know that many people who are into various versions of 'spirituality' or indeed overtly 'dark' pursuits believe that one does have a 'dark self', usually because the garbage has insinuated that notion into their awareness in order to try to get them involved in, or at least accepting of, 'dark' and extremely harmful practices.

You certainly may feel that you're carrying a lot of 'darkness' or 'dark' experiences, but, as I've indicated, those are effectively garbage-sourced trash that you're carrying, and are NOT you. That's all stuff for clearing out so that you can be the free and naturally joyfully positive person that you actually incarnated to be.

I point to the means progressively to gain that much happier and more positive state in 'Dark force' and entity troubles — The real way to clear them and Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way — though nowadays the best starting point is Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way.

Does a self-realized person need to incarnate again?

That question appears to be based in serious confusions that are rife in the 'spiritual' traditions about how reincarnation operates. Really it's not answerable in any helpful way, as asked.

The particular weasel word is 'need', because the concept of 'need' simply doesn't come into what actually happens — contrary to the various myths that the garbage has put into the spiritual traditions. Indeed, in the context of the above question, the word 'need' is being used in a confusing way, because in this case what's really being meant is Is a self-realized person required or obliged to incarnate again?.

My own understanding is that it's a seriously harmful myth, that a (genuinely) self-actualized person wouldn't (or would 'have no need to') incarnate again. Nobody can helpfully be described as needing to incarnate. Incarnation simply happens, and consciousness has no means to understand how it operates or why it apparently 'chooses' to incarnate.

The problem is that great and harmful confusion is caused by there being a pathological type of reincarnation, which is actually the normal type, in addition to the quite rare healthy, 'natural' type of reincarnation, which is non-sequential and non-karmic.

The normal, pathological type does get associated in people's minds with a sense of some sort of obligation and indeed the myth of having an obligational process of positive evolution through successive soul incarnations. I refer you to The true nature of 'the forces of darkness' and its interference and attacks, where I explain in some detail about the two types of reincarnation.

As I understand it, a genuinely self-actualized person — i.e., one who is sufficiently advanced in his self-actualization process — would die properly, unlike the vast majority of people, and would revert to fundamental consciousness, thus being able to reincarnate in the healthy way — with no karmic or indeed significant chronological connection to any other lifetime that he has been through.

Does calling people 'Sir' have anything to do with the dark force?

An 18-year-old student wrote to me as follows:

I want to become an actor someday and my question is, when required to say 'sir', does that have anything to do with the dark force?

Actually the answer is very easy to work out for yourself once you've read and properly understood what I have to say about the true nature of the garbage. Can you come out with a good and rational cause for using that appellation of 'Sir', apart from overt or sort-of covert communication of or collusion with some sort of power / control / personal status agenda?

We can rule out politeness and courtesy as reasons to call anyone 'Sir', for the most polite and courteous communications come from people who are simply being natural and not covering themselves up with a stiff formality like 'Sir' / 'Madam'.

I appreciate that it could be argued that individuals, of whom there are hugely many, who are unable to be naturally courteous, have to use a stiff formal 'politeness' mode of communication in order to be acceptable in many workplaces — but that's still all part of the mess of the garbage agenda that seeks to turn everyone away from being naturally themselves — i.e., authentic.

So, although initially it may appear a bit over-the-top to say that 'Sirring' a person is a garbage-sourced or inspired thing to do, actually, when you look more closely with proper awareness and setting aside all preconceived notions, you'd see that garbage influence is bound to be part of the picture, no matter what other factors are involved. This should come as no surprise if you already understand how pervasive garbage influence is in life generally.

Does changing location lessen the effects of black magic?

I assume that the person is referring to black magic put upon him/her. The general answer to that is 'it all depends'. If you've been sent an elemental or other thought forms that are actually attached to you, then changing location is unlikely to have much effect — though in some cases possibly it could help ground the affected person's awareness a bit more and so help in that way.

However, changing of location to try to get away from a problem tends usually to have an initial ungrounding effect, so it may be a particularly bad choice — for getting one's awareness much better grounded is a vital part of the process of getting clear of garbage interferences and attacks, and black magic (which is really just more of the same, which has come through a human 'third party').

However, if the black magic has involved placing an elemental in one's abode to cause problems without actually attaching to one (i.e., it's attached to that dwelling or location), then a change of location would get you clear of that — but of course would leave the elemental possibly to cause trouble for somebody else, depending on the nature of its programming.

Self-realization — then what?

'Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, now let's watch the telly or go to the pub with the boys', sort-of thing, by the sound of it! — My reasonably aware and inspired guess is that the person asking that question has little understanding of what self-realization / self-actualization is.

His/her notion seems to be that self-actualization is simply a state you reach (you get to a tangible destination or 'there' point) or even just a particular highly-rated type of experience that one may have, and then there's nothing further that you need to do with your life, and so you'd be left wondering what the hell to do with your life from then on.

To the best of my understanding, the notion of people actually reaching 'full' self-actualization is a myth, even though the concept of 'full' self-actualization is a useful direction-setter for our self-actualization process. The reality is that however advanced you might become in your self-actualization process, there would always be further obstacles to 'full' self-actualization that you could clear.

However, I've come to the understanding that virtually all of the spiritual traditions have got things wrong about 'full' self-actualization. Reaching that isn't anyone's purpose of incarnation. Theoretical 'full' self-actualization would have you so ungrounded that you'd leave your incarnation. What's the point of incarnating with a life purpose to work to unground yourself to the point that you terminate the incarnation prematurely? — It simply doesn't make sense.

What does make sense is to be aiming NOT for anything like that theoretical 'fully self-actualized' state (of disappearance), but for a much more realizable state that I call optimal self-actualization. That's where you have great awareness AND still strong grounding, and are free of all significant emotional issues, so that you experience physical duality vividly in all its fullness, as a positive and creative experience.

If you choose to go further in your self-actualization process you actually progressively attenuate your life experience till, as I say, you reach a point at which you leave your current incarnation altogether. What a waste!

A person who is pursuing a genuine self-actualization process would hardly be likely to ask such an unaware question as Self-realization — then what?. As the self-actualization process opens up one's awareness and life experience, one opens to new possibilities and avenues of exploration. There's never any need or point in trying to speculate about what you or anyone else would do in the future when they've reached any specific point in the unfolding of their life experience.

In view of the postulated existence of 'fundamental consciousness', could it be that all things, both animate and inanimate, are conscious to some degree?

Actually, that's a completely unanswerable question for anyone in the whole of 'Existence'. Indeed, to a genuinely enlightened person it's not particularly meaningful. From the enlightened perspective we have no means to distinguish between awareness / consciousness and what it experiences (including all objects and phenomena), so on that basis one might simplistically conclude that everything we observe is conscious.

However, that would be true only if all objects and indeed all matter were actual parts of fundamental consciousness, and actually consciousness is fundamentally unable to understand the true nature of itself or of anything it observes or experiences.

On the other hand, if we just regard all non-living or at least inanimate things as being non-conscious and treat them with disregard, that would be an inharmonious outlook within consciousness itself, which would degrade one's life experience.

So actually the healthiest practical approach to the question is to keep a completely open mind about what is or isn't conscious, but to treat all things, including non-living ones, with a certain down-to-earth practical love and respect as though they were indeed conscious to some degree, but without getting 'precious' or 'holy' about it, and without going as far as, for example, talking to trees or indeed your wheelie bin!

Trees may be living, but talking to them would still not be appropriate or helpful, except as just a passing creative, poetic expression of a way that you're feeling at the particular time (in which case you wouldn't really be talking to the trees in the first place, except in a figurative way!).

How do you handle the hate from people that you get because people don't like truth?

First, I take it that the particular questioner is using the word 'truth' somewhat figuratively, for actually we can't know what's true in any absolute or objective sense — which is why the word 'truth' is nowadays not in my everyday vocabulary, and I prefer to use the term 'What Is', with the rider that nobody fully perceives 'What Is', though the more self-actualized one is, the closer one gets to fully perceiving it, because the self-actualization process progressively strips out and dissolves one's beliefs and illusory realities so that one can better see what's really there.

Secondly, I don't recognise a specific emotion or mental state that I could call 'hate'. Rather, I see a whole range of harmful and destructive emotional disturbances and mental states that people generally label as 'hatred', in their unawareness of what's really going on.

So, I don't think in terms of 'hate' but simply in terms of a whole variety of problematical attitudes and responses, which have ranged from superficially 'polite' attempts to get into some sort of argument or 'discussion' with me (with the clear intent to impose their opinions / beliefs upon me), right through to vitriolic abuse (e.g., one very disturbed person responded to this site by berating me angrily and inarticulately for, according to her, being preoccupied with money, and finishing off by saying MAY YOU ROAST IN HELL!), and even to the odd psychic attack, including one potentially lethal one of which I was aware.

What open and sensitive people such as me need to keep clearly in mind is that we don't have to take that shit from anyone! Okay, there may be particular face-to-face situations where the best and safest option is to let a person rant in an uninterrupted monologue till they run out of steam, but generally, the fullest possible non-engagement is my approach. If somebody seeks to abuse me or get into an argument with me, my general response (though subject to the specifics of each individual situation) is just No, I'm not interested, and to walk away.

Let them think (or indeed proclaim to the world) that I'm 'arrogant' or whatever, for nothing I could do would change their outlook anyway, so why wear myself out by engaging with people who are functionally very 'sub' sub-humans — puppets — because they're being controlled by programming and garbage interferences and are not functioning as truly themselves.

With regard to how I handle the whole mass of shit and garbage that people want to put upon me in response to this website, just look at the long screed on my Contact page! — Yes, I do get the odd individuals still writing in, completely disregarding the restrictions I lay down there — but what happens then is that I have a quick look at their messages in MailWasher, and as soon as I see that one is problematical and of the sort that I've already indicated that I don't answer, I simply stop reading it and delete it, also drawing a mental line under what of it I've read, so that it never reaches my basic email program and also doesn't engage with me mentally.

The odd individuals write in brazenly saying that they know they're ignoring my restrictions, and still evidently they appear to regard me as obliged to read their messages once I've received them. The reality is that as soon as I see such a message and recognise the outlook of the writer, I delete the message before even seeing what (s)he is trying to tell me. Or on the odd occasions I send the respective individuals packing with a figurative 'flea in the ear'.

I'm under NO obligation to take 'stick' and intrusiveness from anyone, and of course the thwarted stick wavers will see me as 'arrogant', 'conceited', 'deluded', 'mentally ill', 'immoral', 'perverted', and so-on. None of that sort of stuff is news to me, and so there's no point in my listening to any of those irrational responses.

There's a fairly widespread belief, that people who are into self-actualization need to or are 'meant to' leave themselves open to all 'negativities' that are thrown at them, so that they can work on their own emotional issues that are brought up by such responses from people and make them feel uncomfortable. That's typical of the distorted notions based upon grains of 'truth', which the garbage insinuates into people's awareness.

Yes, it can sometimes be helpful to choose to experience some particular 'negativity' or stress for the purpose of working on what it triggers for you — but that needs to be, at most, only an occasional thing on carefully and awarely chosen opportunities. Generally the need is to keep stress and emotional button-pushing to the lowest practical level in order to keep not only your self-actualization process but your mental and physical health in the best possible shape.

In terms of how I handle garbage that does reach me and 'pushes buttons' for me, that's simply a matter of discarding what can be discarded immediately (e.g., by deleting a particular email), and using my standard methods for clearing garbage attacks, which means using one of the Feedback-Loop Zapper procedures to disable the emotional button-pushings, and, where appropriate, using the Grounding Point procedure to initiate the dissolution of particular relevant illusory realities that may be involved. — And, of course, to keep clear in my own mind that the person's problematical communication / behaviour towards me was his/her own problem and NOT mine!

There's another aspect of having the vast majority of people either responding overtly negatively or simply shunning me and my insights — and that's the isolation factor. Every no-soul person has some version of that issue, and for most people that aspect is very troublesome, not least because the garbage exploits the situation, cultivating in the person a distorted, amplified sense of isolation from everyone, and typically using masses of isolation trauma material in certain primary archetypes with which to really load the person with painful emotion supposedly related to their apparent isolation in the physical here-and-now.

That happened very much to me, but over recent years my self-actualization methods have been getting me increasingly clear of it, so that I'm decreasingly troubled by that apparent isolation. The more self-actualized you become, the less do you get the pushing of painful emotional 'buttons', and the more you're in touch with the direct perception (as distinct from mere intellectual 'knowing') that things are simply as they are, and any uncomfortable or painful feelings that things ought to be different for you become less and less significant.

Why won't you discuss your views with anyone?

The primary reason why I don't do that is because when people ask that question or just imply it, what they really mean by 'views' is 'opinions' or 'beliefs', and, because I don't hold opinions / beliefs, I therefore have no views in the sense that's normally meant, and thus there's nothing for me to discuss — at least, with people seeking to get into such discussions with me!

What they're all seeking to do in their different ways is to try to impose their own opinions, beliefs and rigid intellectualization patterns upon me to try to pressure me to change, dilute or indeed abandon the working model of reality and human function and dysfunction that I present on this site, and, in at least some degree, to get me to conform to or at least put some sort of seal of approval upon their own at least partly confused notions on the subject.

Quite apart from people who openly criticise or say they disagree with me, I get others who genteelly seek to start a 'discussion' or 'dialogue' with me about my 'views' or 'ideas' — always with the at least implicit assumption that of course I'd want such a discussion / dialogue, and indeed, that even if I didn't want to, I'm under some sort of obligation to do so whenever that's requested of me. That's inconsiderate and intrusive of them, seeking to load me down with their own issues and confusions.

I reproduce here an example of this sort of thing that came to me from a guy who I shall just call X, and then comment on it further below, so that others may understand more clearly just why I reject such approaches and regard any would-be engagement of mine with the particular individuals as being very poor use of my time and resources. I originally quoted his message in full, but more recently I thought it better not to be giving his personal confusions such a public display, so have removed his mini-treatise to keep focus on what's actually important.

Since you have a similar mentality to my own, I'd be appreciative if you would read this…Just some thoughts I'd like to share with you:

[6 paragraphs]

I'm curious about what you think of all this.

Now, for one thing, X has had the discourtesy and lack of consideration to completely ignore the notes on my Contact page, in which I clearly state that I generally don't respond to messages in which people ask for my views on things or who are seeking discussion with me over my supposed 'views' or the contents of my writings.

And then, did you notice the weasel words, Since you have a similar mentality to my own, I'd be appreciative if you would read this…? Now, that's straightaway a clear warning signal to me, that here is somebody who assumes, or makes out to assume, that he has a similar mentality to my own — yet the confusions that he then displays show that he has little clue about what I'm really going on about on this site, and so there's no clear basis for such an assertion, that he and I are of 'similar mentality' — well, apart from our being fellow humans and having an above-average (albeit clearly not identical) depth of awareness.

Then, do you notice, the implied logical non-sequitur, that if I have a 'similar mentality' (whatever that's supposed to mean) to his, it's appropriate for me to be using up my own time to read and take note of his own views and indeed engage in a discussion with him, a complete stranger to me?!

But then, where X is theorizing about some of the concepts in my working model (please everyone, do remember that it's just a working model, based on my own observations and experience), he is clearly regarding my writings as putting forward actually a theory of how things are.

Now, if I were doing the latter, there would indeed be a basis for discussion, but that's what I state in many places on this site, that I'm NOT doing. I'm not putting forward a theory of how things are (i.e., relating to matters beyond the immediate observable physical 'reality'), because I understand that 'how things are' in any objective sense is actually unknowable to me or to any of us, and therefore there's no real basis for discussion about it.

I put forward my working model NOT as any sort of statement of 'Truth', but as a practical basis for people to start addressing and actually resolving a huge range of personal and social problems that so far haven't been effectively addressed at all. Thus, intellectual theorizations and discussions about my working model are pointless. To adapt a quote from the composer Igor Stravinsky, My working model is like a nose — it just is!

Yes, everyone is free to intellectualize and theorize about my or anyone else's concepts, but that doesn't mean that to do so would be doing them a lot of good, and it certainly doesn't mean that they have any good cause to come to me to load me with their thoughts and, indeed, confusions.

The 'intellectualizers' who occasionally write to me are people being driven by a compulsion to think 'intellectually'. They're generally doing so as part of the manifestation of a deep-seated insecurity issue, so, by that compulsive intellectualization they're seeking to convince themselves that there's something superior about them as compared with other people — but actually they thus make themselves feel all the more isolated, and don't achieve anything worthwhile anyway.

That's the flip-side of the anti-intellectual pattern that's highly prevalent among people who are 'open' and aware (and usually weakly grounded), who compulsively fixate on being supposedly 'intuitive' — as though being intuitive without clear, rational, and indeed conceptual thought as well would benefit anyone! Conceptual thought itself is great, and is an essential aspect of a genuine self-actualized state.

However, the vast majority of people don't understand in what circumstances they need to go easy on their conceptual thought processes in order to allow them to balance with their deeper, less (or non-) conceptual thinking processes, many of which are below the conscious level.

By fixating on 'being intellectual', they're actually NOT being rational nor indeed genuinely intellectual any more than those who are being compulsively 'intuitive', because they're limiting themselves to only one component of genuine rational thinking, which latter incorporates awareness and, most important, 'listening' to one's own deepest aspects (and understanding how to keep clear of garbage and other interference in the process).

One thing that's very striking about X's communication, and indeed communications of that general type from other people that I've had, is that it's an 'empty', speculative affair — a sort of 'intellectual masturbation'. That is, it's not actually addressing a particular issue with a clear purpose to change anything for the better — whereas my own working model was born in a pressing need to address and resolve a very dire personal situation*, which I was able to do, thanks to my practically based working model and the methodology that I based on it.

— And one related consideration is that each such communication I've had from such 'intellectualizers' has shown clear signs that the respective person wasn't at all, or at best only minimally, using my methodology to clear any issues of their own. For them, endless intellectualization and indeed in some cases overt 'philosophizing', was being used as a very thorough and extremely unhelpful substitute for real, practical self-actualization.

On the above basis, perhaps you can now see how weakly-based is X's assertion that he is of similar mentality to me (without prejudice, of course, to any consideration of what one might think of my own outlook or 'mentality'! ).

So, basically, anyone seeking to run an intellectualizing or philosophizing trip on me will get short shrift, if indeed they get any response at all. In the case of X, I did actually reply on that occasion, and this was the terse content of that reply:

Actually, all that is decidedly wearisome. As stated on my Contact page, I don't engage with that sort of stuff.

This explanation here, then, is for other individuals who contact me in similar vein to X, so that I can then refer them to here so that they get a proper explanation without my having to waste more of my own precious time and resources engaging with such people and their confusions.

Why don't you run a forum on your site?

Actually I did, for a while. However, I did so fairly reluctantly because I understood from the outset the shortcomings that a forum would have with regard to my sort of subject material. I sought to keep a tight rein on what went on in that forum, because, as already noted further above, actual discussion is generally time-wasting and counter-productive with regard to the sort of subject matter that I present on this site.

On the odd occasions while the forum was running, I'd receive intimations from one person or another that they were feeling put off from posting in the forum because of the way I pulled the stuffing out of the very confused questions that people posted there, and indeed after a little while the forum fell into disuse, which was actually some relief to me, and so I then 'laid it to rest'.

Actually, all those confused questions were a very good reason for me not to be running the forum at all, for I could be trying to sort out the confusions in people's questions till the cows come home on a blue moon in a month of Sundays in a year that never comes anyway, and of course have no time to get on with my life in the meantime. Not only that, but people's confusions are generally horrendously contagious, and thus really there's no place for them to be publicly aired at all on a site dedicated to genuine self-actualization, as this one is.

I appreciate that lots of people want to discuss various aspects of what I present on this site, but the reality is that in such discussion they'd be (a) rehearsing their own confusions and seeking to pass them on to others, and (b) wasting their time and pointing themselves away from actually getting on with their self-actualization and garbage interference clearance process itself. What's the use of that?

If people really want a forum, despite their own better discernment (if only they could actually 'hear' the latter!), then it's always open to them to start up their own — though I do caution that I'd not associate myself or this site with any such forum, nor put any sort of seal of approval on it, nor participate in it in any way.

Why won't you answer questions that I want to ask you?

Actually, that's a very revealing question, which shows a great misapprehension of what I'm on about, and indeed of the questioner's own real needs. My task isn't one of delivering 'words of wisdom' for people to lap up as they would from 'spiritual' teachers and gurus, but instead it's all about pointing people in very practical ways towards their own self-actualization process; the two are mutually pretty well incompatible.

On this site I present a detailed working model, based on my own personal observations and experiences and supported by my inner inquiry by means of Helpfulness Testing, and also supported by the results of my applying that working model through my healing and self-actualization methods.

Within that framework of reference I give a huge amount of information, both to enable people to take up my methods and get clearing their own garbage interferences as part of a genuine self-actualization process, and to give people a clear understanding of the theoretical basis and personal historical background of the methodology and working model that I present.

One particular very widespread and pervasive misapprehension is that if a person has published writings in which he appears to be highly intelligent and knowledgeable, it's okay for anyone to contact that person to ask him questions and 'pick his brain' — with an implicit assumption that he is under some sort of moral obligation to answer such questions (and has all the time in the world to do so), and if he doesn't 'play ball' he is being mean-minded and 'unfriendly' and is behaving in an improper manner for somebody of his standing.

I myself regularly have people taking a poor view of me in that respect, because they've labelled me (awarely or unawarely) as a teacher or guru, and, in their view, there's something wrong about a teacher / guru who doesn't freely deliver his 'words of wisdom' upon demand.

In fact, if I did the latter, what I'd actually be doing would be effectively carrying out the requisite thinking on behalf of the particular people instead of giving them the nudge or indeed loving kick up the arse that they really need in order for them to get on with the business of cultivating their own awareness and thinking power, and indeed their own self-actualization process.

Thus it is, that through generally refusing to answer questions, and referring people back to the material on this site instead, I'm being much more genuinely caring, and indeed a much more genuine friend, than I'd be if I just kept pacifying them by doing what they want. Wants and needs aren't at all the same thing!

When people feel that they need to ask me questions, the real problem is their own compulsive self disempowerment through feeling that they have to 'ask the expert' rather than cultivate their own self command and work out the answers that they genuinely need*. The whole mindset involved in keeping on 'asking the expert' is a sure way to sabotage one's own self-actualization process or prevent such a process from ever really getting established.

My experience is that the majority of questions that people seek to ply me with aren't even questions that are worth attempting to answer. Many are simply unanswerable from a self-actualization viewpoint, and many of those that are answerable simply serve no helpful function in being answered, because they'd provide irrelevant information that diverts attention from one's real self-actualization direction and simply load one with more and more 'story', just as the garbage would have happen.

However, most of the questions that are at least sort-of answerable are so full of the person's misunderstandings and preconceived notions that it's simply not worth my while answering them at all, for I could spend my whole life trying to unravel people's confusions for them on an individual basis, and really not benefiting anyone very much.

If they can't sort out their ideas properly and drop their beliefs and preconceived notions upon reading the relevant material on this site, clearly they wouldn't understand to any worthwhile extent even if I did seek to sort out their confusions through answering their questions individually.

Also, it's good practice for a would-be questioner always to maintain awareness of whether his desire for a particular answer or bit of information is on the basis of practical need or simply to satisfy curiosity. If it's the latter, it's truly not for burdening other people with, and is either for him to work out for himself or indeed to gently let go of as an irrelevance.

My recommendation to everyone who wants to ask me questions is to learn and get using Helpfulness Testing, in a consistently rigorous and careful manner (to avoid getting led astray by garbage interference and indeed their own preconceived notions).

Helpfulness Testing doesn't tell one what's true, but it does indicate what is or would be 'strengthening' or 'weakening' for one to choose or use, and thus it can indicate more clearly than any other means just what questions and lines of inquiry would really be beneficial for you to pursue, and indeed, as to whether it's in your best interests to 'ask the [supposed] expert' about something that does need to be answered, or to simply work out your own most helpful answer.

But the preliminary question that needs asking (to yourself) each time is, Would it really be helpful at all for me to seek or try to work out an answer to this?. Your time and energy may well be more helpfully spent in other pursuits!

So, when I turn away somebody who's come to me with questions, far from being mean / unhelpful, I'm doing the most helpful thing possible in that type of situation, even though the person involved may well feel superficially frustrated and perhaps rather fed up with me (to put it politely!).

I'd also gently point out that people do need to understand that I'm just one mortal man, doing my best to get on with my own life as well as to manage and continue developing this and my other websites, and it wouldn't be possible for me to get on with my life at all if I were generally attempting to go individually answering the questions people ask me.

Notwithstanding all the foregoing, I'm of course happy to receive the odd questions for which answers really are needed — though it needs to be understood that I'd answer questions only where I considered that it would serve a useful purpose for me to do so (it often does not, as already noted further above), and usually any answers that I do give would be placed here on this or another relevant page on this site and not answered privately on a one-to-one basis, so that as many people as possible can benefit and there would be no need for me to spend time answering the particular questions again for anyone else.

The important thing is for people first to get right out of the mindset in which they assume that they need to ask me questions, and to settle themselves squarely into a mindset in which they have a default presumption that they will work out their own answers because they're fully capable of doing so (okay, that may mean a fair bit of reading on this site, but that wouldn't be a waste of time).

Then of course, when something turns up that defies their attempts to find or work out an answer or solution, AND their Helpfulness Testing indicates that it would be 'strengthening' for them to ask me the particular question, that would most likely be a sensible time to raise the particular thing with me.

"…But I was only wanting a quick clarification…"

Sure thing — hard cheese! — In other words, the questioner is seeking to get me doing the thinking for her and help demotivate her from cultivating deeper awareness and genuine understanding of her own. She's also not yet got her head around my clearly stated requests on my Contact page and elsewhere on this site to leave me alone so I can get on with my own life.

When you really stop and think about it with due awareness, you see that such responses from people are thoughtless and inconsiderate, and couldn't achieve anything genuinely useful or helpful. Maybe sometime I shall start answering such people in a language that they do understand — Baaaaa!.

What is the meaning of a dark entity that follows me everywhere I go?

Actually, that question, or variants thereof, used to come up about once every few days among the search queries that bring people to this site.

Well, for a start, just in case they didn't already realize, such people have a serious problem. However, the problem wouldn't be what virtually all of them believe, for NONE of them actually has an entity (in the sense of a conscious non-physical being) following them, despite all appearances and impressions. Indeed, the issue is just the same regardless of the apparent nature of the 'entity'; in other words, if one apparently had an angel or indeed 'Jesus' following one around, that would be effectively the same (serious) problem, and nothing 'good' or desirable at all.

Anyone with such a problem has seriously weak grounding, which is enabling the garbage to interfere with them and give them particular interferences and illusions to unsettle them, cultivate fear or other unhelpful emotions, and generally distort and disrupt their life experience. That interference would in some cases be mediated by an elemental, which would, under control by the garbage via the person's own non-physical aspects ('energy system'), add to impressions of there being an actual conscious non-physical being or 'spirit' in the vicinity.

To get effectively addressing and progressively resolving all such problems, regardless of whether you consider yourself to be actually in crisis, the best starting point for addressing that or any other problem of 'psychic' or 'occult' manifestations or phenomena that I yet know of is right here on this site: Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way.

Why does dark energy keep soul mates apart?

Many variants of this question have appeared among the regular search queries that bring people to this site.

The simple answer is that it doesn't and can't, for one mind-bogglingly simple reason — in reality there's no such thing as a soul mate — at least in the sense generally meant. So, if you feel that some sort of troublesome influence is keeping you apart from particular individuals, that would reflect a particular type of garbage interference that you're getting, which is directing you to crave for what is unavailable to you and which (generally) wouldn't at all be in your best interests to get involved with anyway.

To get effectively addressing and progressively resolving all such issues, the best starting points that I yet know of are right here on this site: Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way and 'Dark force' and entity troubles — The real way to clear them — though nowadays the best starting point is Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way, whether or not one considers oneself to be in crisis.

Do self-actualized people see the future?

No, not at all, because nobody at all can ever genuinely see what isn't in the present, 'in the now'. What people call 'the future' is just an imaginary extrapolation from the here-and-now. However, many people who regard themselves, or are regarded by others, as enlightened or self-actualized believe that they sometimes see future events or situations, or indeed believe that they 'see into the future'.

Please note, though, that 'believe' is the operative word here, because they're ALL mistaken. The whole notion of 'the future' as something, or an aspect of reality, that actually exists (and thus could be seen) is an idle myth. No marks, of course, for guessing where that myth comes from; yes, it's the garbage, which seeks to convince people who are sufficiently ungrounded and thus open to its illusions and weasel communications, that they can see into the future, and that the future is already more or less fixed and so can be seen into or usefully predicted.

When a person gets the impression that (s)he is seeing into the future, what the person is really experiencing is an astral realm that, thanks to the garbage, purports to be the future, or some aspect of it, or a vision thereof.

Thus, as with all supposed psychic perceptions, when somebody gets the impression that he is seeing into the future, what's really happening is that the garbage is showing that person something illusory in order to convince him either that some particular thing is going to happen in the future, or/and that he has 'special powers' and so will be looked up to by other people.

The latter of course feeds any personal status issues that the person has — and generally enlightened and supposedly self-actualized people do still have such (unacknowledged) issues because of the garbage-sourced distorted context in which they've gained their supposed enlightenment / self-actualization. That also motivates them further to unwittingly consort with the garbage by opening to the astral non-reality in order to supposedly see more and more things in the future and thus strengthen their self-perception as superior individuals who other people are supposed to look up to and follow.

Thus a seriously and harmfully inaccurate view is widely held, to the effect that having such psychic 'perceptions' and other 'special powers' are part and parcel of being enlightened / self-actualized, so that anyone who is so but has managed to cultivate the healthy grounding of their awareness so that the garbage can't interfere with them to show them things (and thus they don't have significant 'psychic perceptions), is then widely seen as not enlightened and not advanced in their self-actualization.

There are individuals who dismiss me myself in that manner. I don't (make out to) have 'special powers' or 'special perceptions', and therefore I can't be enlightened / self-actualized, and thus must be an impostor, a charlatan, and 'rubbish', 'crap', and so on.

I can't speak for other people who are enlightened / self-actualized, but actually (a) I do have a fair amount of astral perception — what people would call psychic perception — but have learnt from very severe personal experience the very good sense of filtering it out as far as possible, and disregarding what still comes through, because of the illusory nature of and garbage involvement in that sort of 'perception', and (b) I have additional, much more subtle non-physical perceptions that are apparently NOT astral — deep level perceptions.

My understanding is that it's these latter perceptions that come to the fore as one's only (worthwhile) non-physical perceptions as one becomes more advanced in one's self-actualization.

Because these are actually communications from one's own deepest aspects, not only are they very subtle but they don't give the detailed sort of (mis)information that the garbage transmits with merry abandon as supposed 'psychic' or indeed 'higher' perceptions — and they'd never show you the future, apart from possibly gently nudging you to look at certain aspects of how things are developing at the present time, which are highly suggestive of particular future developments.

That, surely you'd agree, couldn't in any normally understood way count as 'seeing [or prophesying] the future'! Rather, it's just the application of grounded, properly aware clear-mindedness and good sense to what's happening at the present time. You can find an example of this sort of thing in operation in my own article The future of humanity — Countenancing the unthinkable.

What is the graceful and enlightened way to deal with people who judge you?

There's a fundamental misunderstanding in this type of question, for it implies that somebody who is enlightened or at least very aware would have one specific 'ideal' way of dealing with situations, including any involving people who judge him/her. In fact the approach of a person who is reasonably advanced in a genuine self-actualization process, and who is enlightened, would be clear-minded, and, as part of that, would be fully flexible and open-minded about how (s)he would respond to any particular person or situation.

Thus such a person would NOT have one stock approach to people who go judging upon him/her. Rather, (s)he would spontaneously and intuitively respond in what (s)he considers to be the most helpful manner in each respective individual situation.

Theoretically, thus, (s)he may respond in what is generally seen as a kind and accepting way to one criticizing person, yet may completely ignore the judgments from another, while speaking or acting firmly or even apparently harshly to another, and also may respond differently to one particular person on different occasions.

The point is, if you have sufficiently deep awareness you wouldn't just be seeking to look sweet and 'acceptable' to everyone, nor indeed to project any particular self-image, but would consider honestly what response to a particular person looks likely to be the most helpful to them and others on that particular occasion — i.e., what's in their deepest best interests rather than necessarily what they or anyone else wants or expects of you.

One aspect of the enlightened / self-actualized person's approach to responding to those who judge and criticize him is that he'd respond on the basis of clear thinking — a rational appraisal of the situation — and NOT on the basis of upset feelings, even if he does feel uncomfortable feelings at the time (which would typically be more from garbage attack rather than issues that are genuinely his own).

However, things may be less clear-cut in practice, because certain garbage interferences can cause such a person still to transiently 'slip up' and make a personal gaffe, responding in a less than helpful way to a particular situation. So, the fact of such a less-than-ideal response to one particular situation doesn't necessarily mean that the person isn't enlightened and indeed fairly advanced generally in his self-actualization.

Every enlightened / self-actualized person still has work to do in clearing his own remaining issues and interferences, and every person still stumbles at times and makes the odd errors, for the latter are all an inevitable part of an active learning process. I've made plenty of gaffes myself, including the odd ones in recent years — but while I'd have liked of course to have got everything 100% right first time, I can look back to each gaffe as a very useful learning experience for me, and thus of significant benefit.

Why does my life suck after receiving enlightenment?

Why does the hippopotamus in your bath never cause flooding in your bathroom? — Because (presumably) you have no hippopotamus in your bathroom or indeed in your abode to start with!

Get the message? — The person who asked the above question is highly confused and has a completely mistaken notion of what enlightenment is, and indeed shows no sign of having become genuinely enlightened. Genuine enlightenment is a very specific personal transformation of viewpoint / outlook on 'reality' that you CANNOT receive from anyone or anything. It can only simply happen (i.e., from within oneself). So, anyone who believes that they've 'received' enlightenment has definitely not received genuine enlightenment, no matter what they may have actually received.

In fact, as I see it, there's a considerable likelihood that the person who asked that confused question is in a serious situation as a result of indeed having received something most untoward (i.e., from a person or in a particular group situation, or indeed from the garbage via an elemental or some sort of illusory apparition), which (s)he was led to misinterpret as 'enlightenment'.

While it could be just that the person had got sufficiently ungrounded to get a lot more noticeable garbage interference and attack, it's also possible that the person had additionally got landed with a troublesome elemental, or a 'spirit attachment' or indeed just conceivably a partial walk-in — and in the unlikely case of the latter, the person could have also been incorporated into the cacoprotean network.

The good news for any such person — if indeed they're willing to heed it and 'do their homework' — is that potentially very effective methods for rectifying their situation are presented or pointed to on this site.

Why don't you improve your writing style and cut out all your tedious repetitions?

I'll let you into a little secret. When I read through certain of my original writings on this site I myself find various repeated points therein quite tedious, and would so much like to clear out most or all of them! They really do get on my tits!

However, there's good reason why they're there and why I have no plans for removing them. If people who came here reading the relevant pages were reading right through and with an overall reasonably rational approach to my subject matter, then a lot of repeats of certain points would indeed be pointless.

However, in the real world, the vast majority of people who come here do so on the basis of search engine queries, and don't read pages right through, but either 'land' on a specific point on a page initially or do an on-site search for what they're interested in — again leading them to 'land' on particular sections of the respective pages.

Also, I've found that, quite apart from such straightforward physical incomplete reading of my material, a high proportion of people who don'tionally read right through my writings — especially the longer ones — simply have too-short attention spans or too ingrained preconceived notions to keep in mind various crucial points that I make early on in the respective pages, where it's necessary for those points to be kept in mind to make proper sense of what follows on the rest of each of those pages.

This has been repeatedly brought home to me by the misunderstandings of my writings that come to me from people who write in to me or post on forums. THAT is why I've no sensible alternative but to keep hammering certain points home ad nauseam!

What does it mean, to be a healer in Christ energy?

In real, practical terms, what that means is to be well and truly embroiled with the garbage and its various deceptions, and thus to be in deep and serious trouble.

A good bit of the problem is that people who believe they're using 'Christ energy', whether in healing or for any other reason or purpose, are generally completely unaware that they have a problem, for they've completely bought the particular garbage-sourced illusions and deception as being 'reality', and thus, just as the garbage is seeking to make happen, are feeling very special and 'above' others who are supposedly not using purported 'Christ energy'.

A Clairvoyant, medium, or other psychic may tell a person that (s)he is a 'healer' in Christ energy, but (s)he is always completely unaware that, because of the very nature of the channelling / clairvoyance processes, the information that (s)he has gained can't have come from anything other than the garbage, and thus needs to be dropped like a red-hot brick and completely disregarded (and with no 'ifs and buts'!).

Actually, as I've pointed out in many places on this site, the 'highest', purest and indeed one completely safe, healing 'energy' comes directly from none other than ONE'S OWN deepest aspects, and if you invoke or channel what appears to be any sort of external 'energy' what you're really doing is channelling from the garbage and whatever it dishes up to you.

The garbage can and often does give the impression of a beautiful loving radiance in order to convince the duped would-be 'healer' that (s)he is channelling something truly 'high', wonderful and very special, so feeding personal status issues as well as progressively bringing about a whole range of problems. For more information, please see Am I a Healer?.

Is it fair to send a psychic attack to an enemy?

My goodness — revenge, revenge, revenge! I'm very happy to be well clear of distorted individuals like that one! I'd better qualify that comment at once, though, because evidently this person is clearly struggling with the issue and does have some inkling that there must surely be a better way!

I'm often quite taken aback at the breathtaking and mind-boggling confusion and lack of awareness that's displayed in many search queries that bring people to this site, and the above question points to the sort of thing that I so often see — albeit in this case apparently trying in some degree to come to his/her senses.

For a start, nothing in the whole of 'Existence' is intrinsically fair or unfair, for things are simply as they are. Like 'good' and 'bad' / 'evil', 'fair' and 'unfair' are just judgmental labels that people put upon particular actions or policies, which tell one more about the labeller rather than what's being labelled. A more sensible and meaningful version of the question would therefore be: Would it be beneficial or helpful to send a psychic attack to an enemy?

And then, what's this about an 'enemy'? There are undoubtedly people with problematical outlooks and behaviours, yes, but that's only because of certain unresolved issues or problems that those individuals are carrying.

Again, nobody is intrinsically an enemy; 'enemy' is just a judgmental label put upon a person because their behaviour has in some way proved troublesome to you, or indeed simply because you dislike the person, and you've earmarked them for warring against in some way. What a waste of one's energy and life experience, and of one's opportunities for genuine happiness!

So, then, additionally we need to ask, what genuine benefit do you imagine you'd gain by harming that person, whether by psychic attack or any other means? Would it really change the person's behaviour for the better towards you? — The best answer by far to that question isn't at all what the would-be attacker would be looking for, for the real answer is to use Helpfulness Testing and find out for oneself what is the genuinely most beneficial option for one to choose on that occasion.

However, there's a catch, because a person with such confusion and lack of deep awareness would be unable to use Helpfulness Testing properly, and would almost certainly get spurious 'answers', which were from his own soul programming and preconceived notions rather than from is own deepest aspects. Thus, the chances of such a person getting the much needed 'right' answers and actually 'waking up' and coming to his senses would be vanishingly small.

And, almost finally, there's the matter of the idiocy of choosing psychic attack in particular as a means to harm somebody. People who are into 'dark' practices generally feel quite smart in using psychic attacks rather than, for example, going out to stab their victim or stick a petrol bomb in his letterbox or mixing rat poison with his coffee, both because the Law would be extremely unlikely ever to find them out or be able to take action against them in the case of psychic attack, and of course because sending psychic attacks helps the attacker to feel 'special' and 'important' through using 'special powers'.

However, what they don't understand (at least, properly) is that every psychic attack and indeed the use of all 'special powers' is carried out in cahoots with the garbage, and thus, by carrying out psychic attacks they're opening themselves up significantly more each time to the tremendous problems that the garbage can bring them, and are generally being really ugly distortions of what being an incarnated human is really about.

The sending of psychic attacks has a particular way of rebounding upon the sender — and in that sort of thing you don't have recourse to the Law to resolve your self-created predicament!

Also, the very act of seeking to harm another person, except in the odd rare situation where such an action is genuinely necessary because a person is behaving extremely harmfully and simply has to be stopped from doing that, for the benefit of everyone*, is strongly weakening to one's own non-physical aspects.

Thus, generally speaking, the person who wants to do harm to a supposed 'enemy' is straight-away harming himself, indeed even by just the intent of doing such a thing, even if he doesn't act upon that intent. When you regard a person as an enemy, you're straight-away being an enemy to yourself and seriously degrading your life.

So, the person who asked the above headline question was clearly in a thorough mess emotionally and mentally, and, in that single question he was showing that he's most likely compulsively harming himself at almost every turn. One thing you can be sure of about that person and indeed all who go in for 'dark' practices is that he, and they, generally don't have overall good health and will have relatively short lives, and have no understanding of what genuine happiness or freedom are.

Are you going to go on Twitter?

It's a little joke of mine, that if I ever chose a 'soundbite' social networking site to join, it would be Squitter, the social networking site for colo-rectal cases. No doubt their bird-brain soundbite messages would be called squits. I can sometimes be quite adept with my little squits and squitters!

But seriously, I do sort-of marvel at the way some people, even ones who've read quite a lot of my work on this site, just assume that Squitter — no, I mean Twitter — would be a good place for me to spend time. I appreciate that some people recognise, at least to a fair extent, the importance of my work and want it to get out to 'the masses', but really, do they seriously think that I can reduce my 'message' into little squit — I mean tweet — size soundbites? — Sure, if I went about things right I could have a possibly impressive-looking number or 'followers' on Squ — no, I mean Twitter — but what self-actualization value would that have?

I've now had cause to delete the original continuation of this note, which was referring to Facebook, because, most reluctantly, I have, as from January 2015, set up a Facebook profile and have 'Facebooked' all my sites — i.e., given Facebook 'Like' and 'Share' buttons to all pages that I consider to have content worth public 'sharing'. I still have no plans, however, to open a Squ- no, I mean Twitter, account.

Actually being on Facebook is a pretty yucky and gut-churning experience for me. Managing and adding to my profile there has a certain feeling as though all the time I'm wading in an open sewer, in which the real point and purpose of Facebook is just masses upon masses of trivia and tittle-tattle. No doubt I'll be widely seen on Facebook as a really conceited elitist pillock because I have every intent to keep my own profile there as clean and tittle-tattle-free as the Facebook system will allow.

What practices do people do in Satanism and other 'dark' cults and traditions?

Yes, I've actually been asked the odd question of that ilk — and I put my response here in order to forestall other requests for such information from me.

One thing that it's necessary for me to make very clear here is that I myself am NOT a Satanist, and am altogether NO authority at all on what people actually do in their respective 'dark' cults and traditions, because I've never been a member of nor indeed associated with any of the latter at all, and haven't wanted in the slightest to go physically researching on what they get up to.

It's therefore pointless for anyone to be asking me such a thing, even though I do understand how they could have got innocently misled into imagining that I'd be some such authority.

My insights into 'dark' practices have come to me simply from certain practices and experiences that the garbage sought to drag me through, plus a whole lot of insights related to those practices and other observations of mine, which I've gained through my inner inquiry process using Helpfulness Testing.

I've thus gained quite a deep understanding of the sorts of process involved in 'dark' practices — i.e., the processes that underlie the actual rituals that the practitioners use (about which rituals themselves I know next to nothing). However, all these 'insights' of mine only constitute a working model that I've found extremely helpful, and I can't thus honestly go pronouncing to anyone that, say, Satanists, do this or that.

If one really wants to know what Satanists do, really one's only workable authority on that is Satanists themselves — and, for one's own mental and physical health I can't recommend anyone to engage with such people or that sort of subject matter, at least without some very specific practical need to do so (I doubt whether there would ever be so in reality, except perhaps as part of a crime investigation conducted by law enforcement agencies).

I think what tends to confuse some people is that I do mention on this site the odd apparently 'Satanistic' practices that the garbage dragged me through or at least sought to get me involved in — but we need to remember that my information was gained through my inner inquiry (which clearly identified certain practices as 'Satanistic') and so, although extremely helpful for gaining a working understanding of various ways in which the garbage interferes with us, it doesn't have the 'authority' to justify my publicly making claims as to what Satanists or other category of 'dark' practitioners do.

Yes, it's likely that I've been given quite accurate indications of the odd practices that Satanists or other 'dark' practitioners tend to do — though for the most part such indications are more or less generalized and don't give the down-to-earth detailed specifics of the particular practices / rituals / behaviours.

However, because such information that I've gained lacks actual physical verification I generally don't pass on that information to others, except in the odd spots on this site where some little bit of that helps to make a point or give a better picture of my own personal experiences and how I've gained my insights into how the garbage operates.

One point that one needs to bear in mind, too, is the fact that although some specific practice may be indicated to me to be something that, say, Satanists do, that doesn't necessarily mean 'all' or even 'most' Satanists; rather, it means 'at least some' of them. Indeed, it could well be (for all I know), that there might be some official Satanist 'Party line' that excludes certain practices or behaviours that my own inner inquiry has indicated to me as 'Satanistic' or 'done by Satanists'.

That would make perfect sense if you understand how seriously disturbed and screwed up and garbage-mucked-around-with are people who are into 'dark' practices. Even in cults or traditions that have well defined 'rules of engagement' there would be massive variations between individual and local group behaviours.

Thus in a particular tradition or cult there may be an official 'Party line' that proscribes harming people, at least except in certain very specific circumstances, but the reality of what at least many of the practitioners actually do would be another matter altogether, because they'd be driven by their garbage-manipulated emotions into frequently doing or trying out seriously irresponsible and harmful things.

Even if they believe that severe retributive karma would descend on any of them who go gratuitously harming anyone, those who go doing the harmful acts would generally twist their own reasoning around to convince themselves that for one supposed reason or another they're doing the right thing and would be more or less exempt from that karma or could simply carry out some practice to supposedly clear it before they go on and do something else harmful — or of course simply not care what happens to them as long as they're able to go on doing what they feel like doing ("I'm damned anyway, so I might as well carry on doing what I'm doing", sort of thing).

How can I go about introducing my 'unorthodox' view of life to new people I meet, and still be accepted?

Somebody wrote in, mentioning that he has issues that the medics had, in their execrable 'wisdom', called 'bi-polar disorder' (which I recognise as just one of the myriad types of garbage interference / attack strategy), and went on to ask the following question, which will no doubt ring a bell for a fair number of us:

I have trouble finding people with the same ideas or perspective to talk to in my life, and it leads to a feeling of isolation. Do you have any recommendations on how to go about introducing my views to new people I meet? I feel that if I do, sometimes people think I'm a little off my rocker.

This is, or rather, appears to be, an issue to some extent for anyone who is at least to a fair extent open and aware — and most starkly so for no-soul people. The hard truth of the matter is that the vast majority of people are programmed NOT to understand what you're going on about (or to misunderstand it if they claim to understand it) when you broach to them your more 'unorthodox' view on, and insights into, your life experience.

That may sound to be pretty hard on you, and to be an unliveable situation. However, although it's far from ideal, there IS a way of handling this — but the answer isn't exactly the one that most affected people believe they need. The point here is that keeping on trying to do what's bound to fail (i.e., have unwanted results) is a completely futile exercise, so clearly a different approach is required, with some decidedly lateral thinking.

The real need in order to handle this situation, then, is to dissolve the emotional stresses that you're experiencing, that make you feel the need to go more or less routinely telling people around you or who you meet from time to time, about those 'unorthodox' aspects of your life view and life experience.

You also need to work to dissolve ALL emotional stresses and other garbage interferences that are causing you in one way or another to feel lonely or isolated. You also need to dissolve all fears and embarrassments that you may be carrying, relating to what people might think of you as somebody a bit 'different' in one way or another. In addition, you need to dissolve all illusory realities that you're carrying, in which it's important for you to share your life view and ideas with anyone, and also all those illusory realities in which you're lonely or isolated, and also ones in which you need to be accepted (by anyone).

Effective methods for bringing about any or all of these changes are presented on this site*.

Am I saying, therefore, that you should never tell such things to anyone who isn't 100% on your own 'wavelength'? — No, not at all — not least, because there's no should nor shouldn't about anything in our whole life experience. The issue is simply about cause and effect, and indeed there's no absolute 'right' and 'wrong' about such effects.

this is coming down to is that your progressive clearance of the relevant emotional stresses and isolation / loneliness feelings plus the related illusory realities would render you increasingly flexible and at least potentially rational in the way that you can interact with each person who you encounter in your everyday life.

As you become more clear of your old garbage, you become not only more rational but more perceptive of what's really going on for each person who you encounter, so you can make an initial assessment of the person, and monitor that person's response and 'energy' when you exchange, perhaps, an initial conventional greeting.

It thus becomes possible with practice to determine to what extent, if any, it would be worthwhile your saying anything to the particular person that goes beyond what would make sense to a very conventional, programmed sort of outlook.

If you pick up that the person seems to have a certain degree of openness / awareness, it's a reasonably simple matter, with a little care, to put out the odd 'leading' remark, in the course of a bit of conventional, superficial, conversation, that would 'test' the person without dropping yourself right in it; if your 'testing of the water' elicited no response, or there was some sort of 'clunk' or twisted or adverse response, then, generally speaking, best policy with that person would be to continue without further thoughts of mentioning the 'unorthodox' aspects of your life experience to them.

— But in real practical terms, because there's no actual rule about this you're always free to try something out and see what happens, so that you can learn from it and become more skilled about your interpersonal interactions in the future.

I have a lot of experience with this sort of approach, particularly in my many hitch-hikes. There are still the odd occasions where I manage to drop myself in it — particularly where the particular person gives clear 'energy' signs of being open and aware but has got side-tracked by some (usually religious) belief system that didn't make itself immediately apparent.

I found that some such individuals would actually wait for me to say 'too much' (even asking me a number of questions whose answers would be 'self incriminating' ammunition for the person then to use against me) before they give any intimation of their beliefs — and then I'd typically get a real gutful of (usually evangelical Christian) garbage from them (even, as a great rarity, abuse for not having a 'proper job' and therefore supposedly being work-shy and a sponger and scrounger off the State!).

Nonetheless, generally I manage pretty well, tailoring the amount of 'unorthodoxy' that I may allow into a conversation, to each particular individual's apparent degree of awareness and his/her responses to whatever I've said so far. If I notice any sort of 'clunk' area in the conversation, I let it drop and leave it to the other person to raise it again if (s)he wants to — putting attention instead on straightforward physical things in the here-and-now.

Although that means I often take something of a 'back seat' in a conversation with one of these people, at least I can put more of my attention on the passing views during the ride (remember, I'm talking of my hitch-hiking encounters here, though the principles are the same in all of life), and just keep clear in my mind that the particular person is in a 'world of their own', defined by their own soul programming. It would simply be a stressful waste of my attention and energy to attempt to share anything significant about my own life with him/her.

Thus, I leave virtually completely out of the equation any consideration of What would (s)he think of me?, and keep in view the simple practical issues of what would be most rewarding / satisfying on the one hand, and stressful, time-wasting and unsatisfying on the other hand.

Once you have, to a reasonable extent, cleared your fear of what people might think of you, you do NOT go around like a five-star champion bull in a china shop full of flapping red rags, but at the same time you do accept that some people will perceive you as 'odd', 'a bit loopy', a 'nut case' or even overtly 'mentally ill / disordered', and so you come to terms with the fact with good grace.

If you strenuously try never at all to give anyone the impression of your being 'a bit odd', you'd actually be living a rather paranoid and horribly restricted life, and it would cause major future problems for you as the garbage gets exploiting your fears and your petty paranoia.

The need, then, is, yes, to minimize, as far as reasonably possible, the number of occasions / situations where you give anyone an impression that there's something 'wrong' about you, but you do so while accepting that the undesirable result WILL still happen on occasions, and to be relaxed about it because that's simply 'the lie of the land' at the moment (a light-hearted 'Sod the lot of them — they don't know what I know!', sort-of thing).

Even people who've taken some sort of 'silly' view of you can still actually come to see that there's something also remarkably and indeed maybe exceptionally 'okay' about you, if you tailor your responses to them appropriately in an aware and considerate way, and share with them what can sensibly be shared with them without eliciting unwanted and 'silly' responses.

Much of your inner experiences may be unshareable with them, but what about, for example, your having just seen a new migrant black swan down on the canal, or enjoying the impressive formations of those thundery shower clouds just approaching (or, for example, Oh, just look at those seagulls on your chimney — what a crazy place for them to be shagging!), and so on? There really are generally things that can be shared in a healthy and buoyant manner without getting embroiled in the dull trivia that are the standard fare of 'normal' programmed people's conversations.

One great bonus in this whole approach is that it's 100% practical and thus is grounding to one's awareness — something whose importance can't be overemphasized.

Why don't you write a book on all this?

If I produced a book, it would be out of date, very likely already missing really important new updates, even before it was released. The problem is the 'live' and dynamic nature of what I'm presenting on this site. People want the comfort of a book, in which all the ideas are static, set in stone, sort-of thing, as some sort of authoritative 'statement of reality' for them — but that's simply not how my material works.

It's in a state of constant flux with my ongoing accumulation of new observations and new and deeper insights, and thus the only 'book' there could be, at least at the present time, that genuinely presents my work on self-actualization and clearance of garbage interferences, is this very website.

I thus have no definite plans to produce the book that various people ask me for. In late 2015 I did change tack a bit after having self-published all my literary works as books, and found the process quite manageable, and I started writing a book intended to be complementary to this site, called The Great Life Turnaround — Living with Clarity and Intent, but that foundered as I'm only one man and had too many other priorities.

Early in 2018 I finally decided to shelve it indefinitely, to help reduce the pressure of tasks that are always (more or less) silently clamouring to be done.

However, there's a related issue. Some people are naturally concerned that my writings on this site would be lost when I die, unless relevant measures are taken to preserve them and keep them available — and supposedly immortalizing them in book form has been suggested as one thing that's needed.

Actually, once I've died it would make sense for somebody to compile the writings into book form, but, for the reason stated above, not before then. So far, though, I'm not sure that I know anyone who'd be suitable to take on that task, for the individual(s) concerned would need to have more clarity and commitment to their own self-actualization than anyone I've yet knowingly encountered.

Some individuals do regard themselves as suitable, but all those I know are indeed not so, and wouldn't have the motivation / commitment for them to carry through with such a major task — quite apart from the issue of their having issues that would very likely cause distortions in my work during their transferring it into different media. Also, translations into other languages, although greatly needed, would be impossible without really serious distortions coming straight in.

Unfortunately, what I see as by far the most likely is that if my work does (notionally) survive at all significantly after my death, it will be in distorted form that actually loses the real essence of my work and 'message' and simply feeds more garbage-cultivated traditions and indeed religions. I'm not aware of any way I can stop that happening, much as I'd like to!

Aren't your beliefs similar to those of… [tradition, 'teacher' or writer]?

As an example, one person wrote in as follows:

I don't mean to annoy you but are your beliefs or way similar to the Zen Buddhist way where silly rituals are not part of the path to enlightenment?
I was brought up a Presbyterian and other Christian denominations most of my life until I looked at other religions and finally was more comfortable with Zen. But, my spirit gets continually dragged back to Christianity with all of the crazy conspiracies on the internet and major problems in the world.
 
So are you open to the Zen concepts?

People like this are tedious for me, because they don't at all read my material on this site — at least, with any sort of useful understanding — and instead come to me asking pointless, time-wasting questions. This isn't a matter of whether or not I 'get annoyed' by such questions, but of what's the best use of my time and resources — and one thing such best use does not include is answering questions from people who are locked into their own preconceived notions and can't (be bothered to) read the abundantly explanatory material here on this site.

For a start, the enquirer shows that he is completely out of touch with what I'm on about, because he (like so many others) writes …are your beliefs or way similar to…? So, straight-away it's clear that he hasn't read enough here to understand that I don't hold beliefs. Indeed, like so many others, he appears to be unable to conceive of a life experience that's outside belief, so I'm seen as having just yet another belief system ("My belief is better than yours", and all that!).

As must be abundantly clear to any reasonably aware person who gets reading through my writings on this site, I subscribe to no tradition nor belief system, and systematically clear myself of any illusory reality or hint of belief that I notice from time to time within my awareness. However, because all the 'spiritual' and metaphysical traditions, each in their own respective way, represent side-tracked, distorted attempts by people to get into some sort of self-actualization process, it's inevitable that there will be observable overlaps between my outlook and working model on the one hand and particular tenets of the various traditions on the other.

Overall, Buddhism does appear to me to have come relatively close to a proper understanding of our real need for self-actualization, and, at least in some quarters, does properly recognise the nature of enlightenment. Indeed, a person with an extremely great degree of clarity, on examining the Buddhist 'teachings', would find within the latter virtually all the information that one would need in order to get into and pursue a genuine self-actualization process, with enlightenment a straightforward part of the 'package'.

The reality is that, although the information is there, in all the various Buddhist traditions of which I'm aware it's garbled. That information is all mixed up with masses of garbage sourced confusions and misinformation, so that all strivings towards self-actualization within any such tradition lead one into a whole range of illusory realities, distorted understandings, and, frankly, one or another sort of dead end, in which one believes that one is still on an 'enlightenment' / self-actualization 'path' but one is actually completely diverted from genuine self-actualization, and indeed is (more or less covertly) a captive of the garbage instead.

I have no direct personal experience of Zen Buddhism, but from what I've heard said about it, it appears that it's less loaded with 'teachings' and cultural baggage than other Buddhist traditions — which, on the face of it, would appear to be a strong plus point. However, my understanding is that it's still to a considerable extent meditation based (harmful), and still puts a lot of emphasis on a guru-student relationship (also harmful). Also, the mere fact of its being a tradition at all puts it right outside of the real way for one to have a genuine comprehensive self-actualization process running in one's life.

As to that weasel question, So are you open to the Zen concepts?, that's really loaded with misconception. To be open to Zen concepts or indeed the concepts of any particular tradition at all (i.e., in the sense of being willing or prepared to take them on as some sort of belief) is to be closed to genuine self-actualization.

Yes, you can pick up some notions from such traditions, which to some extent resemble aspects of genuine self-actualization, but they're within a distorted context that leads one into side-tracks. So, if I took on supposedly Zen concepts, I'd be abandoning my own self-actualization process.

However, if, with due awareness and clarity, you're prompted by particular Zen concepts to improve in particular ways your own personal working model of 'reality' and of how you can increase you state of self-actualization, then actually that in itself isn't Zen but simply your own best efforts towards genuine self-actualization (which doesn't and can't belong to any tradition), even though people may look at you and, out of their own unawareness, say you're 'obviously' into Zen.

For genuine self-actualization you need to form your own concepts. Sure, you may get prompts from any aspect of life experience, but what you do NOT do is to go picking up other people's or traditions' concepts and using them 'as is' rather than creating your own personal working model and genuine understanding.

On this site I present my own working model, so that people can get prompts from it to help them create their own working models, which may or may not be identical to or closely resemble my own. Whoever takes up my own concepts 'as is' — in other words simply as a belief system — is as lost as (s)he would be in similarly taking on the concepts of Zen or any other tradition.

More recently I had a person who gave me a lift during a hitch-hike tell me that my ideas sounded to be effectively those of Taoism (Daoism). Again, much apparent similarity would no doubt be found between what I put forward on this site and absolutely basic, 'philosophical' Taoism. However, the moment you put a label on what I'm promoting, whether that label be Taoism, PhilipGoddardism or MickeyMousism, you're transforming it into something other that what I'm putting forward!

The trouble is, the mere fact of its having a label transforms it into something of a belief system, however subtle, in which you look to that named system rather than the indications from your own deepest aspects in order to trawl up supposedly wise words and determine what are your own most beneficial life choices. It becomes a matter of 'what Philip Goddard [or the Tao or MickeyMouse] says / indicates' rather than 'what my own good sense together with Helpfulness Testing / inner inquiry indicates as most beneficial for me at the present time'. — Sheep, sheep, sheep — ever sheep! BAAAAAA!

The vast majority of people are programmed to live that way — even the vast majority who believe they aren't doing so — and they won't understand the point I'm making here, any more than they genuinely understand what I'm on about in this site overall. It always looks more 'cool' to your peers for you to be following a well known and respected ancient tradition or guru, and keep making apparently wise quotes from that and maybe other supposedly highly reputed sources rather than actually to be using your full intrinsic clarity of mind and good sense! Why? — Because your peers are 'sheep' too!

What exactly do you do in your everyday life?

One person recently wrote in as follows:

I was reading through your site and finding your philosophy very interesting. One of the things I was wondering: what exactly do you do in your day to day life? It's very difficult to function as a 'member of society' without tying yourself down to commitments, vows i.e., having a 'normal' job or a family.

One thing that's immediately clear is that the guy has written in with the semblance of a bit of idle curiosity without bothering to get his answer from relevant reading on my websites (i.e., my other sites as well as this one), and also he has disregarded the notes on my Contact page, which make it pretty clear as to in what circumstances I'd be likely to respond to a question sent to me from this site. Indeed, his question comes squarely within the range that I don't generally respond to.

The other thing that really stands out is that he, like so many others who write in, has come to me with an agenda based in his own preconceived notions. What he appears to be actually doing is trying to convince himself and the world around him that he can't change significantly for the better (i.e., in a genuine self-actualization direction), and that therefore there would be no point in him or indeed anyone else bothering about self-actualization.

If people take up Helpfulness Testing, carried out in the careful, vigilant and rigorous way that I describe in my guide to that procedure, then they can work out for themselves what are their own best choices for them to enable themselves to be on a self-actualization process while still working to 'make ends meet'.

Isn't it best to avoid fluoride toothpaste?

I'd not normally address a 'small detail' sort of question here, but the answer for this one covers the general principles of having a rational and healthy outlook on all apparently 'foreign' substances that are considered by some to be harmful.

Somebody wrote in to me as follows:

I wanted to ask, you mentioned using fluoride anti plaque formula toothpaste in some of your writings. I've always avoided it because of what i know about fluoride and also the fluoride they put in water. I do the same things with lower plaque on my lower front teeth with the sticks and have a little recession as well like you were talking about. So you're okay with fluoride toothpaste?

First, we need to make a clear distinction between (a) trace elements and compounds that are a fundamental part of a healthy intake from our environment (food / water) and (b) trace substances that are not so, and are present only as contaminants or are misguidedly added as some sort of 'medication'. Fluoride comes into the first category — we actually need a very small amount of it in our daily intake, whether it being in food or through any other source. Without enough of it we would have defective and weak tooth enamel and other physical problems.

Fluoride is also quite virulently poisonous in very small amounts — but of course still distinctly larger amounts than we actually need. So, the important thing is to ensure that we get enough but not greatly more than that — a simple enough principle, surely you'd agree.

Fluoride occurs naturally in significant concentrations in drinking water in some areas, and it's possible that in some of those areas people are being somewhat overdosed naturally — and therefore THEY need to avoid anything that would add to their fluoride intake and consequent toxic load. That means not only being careful to use non-fluoride teeth-cleaning agents if at all possible, but also not drinking tea and any other beverages that are known to have a significant fluoride content.

However, that's ONLY because those particular people are already being overloaded with fluoride. It doesn't mean that very tiny amounts of fluoride per se are harmful and must be avoided by everyone. Fluoride in a very small concentration has been widely added to drinking water, at least here in the UK, but only in areas where it's been found that people generally are getting insufficient fluoride and this has been considered to be impacting unfavourably on most people's dental health.

It's certainly arguable that such mass fluoridation of drinking water isn't good policy, for it doesn't take into account individual circumstances and could cause serious problems for the minority of individuals in those areas, who for one reason or another are already getting enough or indeed too much fluoride from other sources. However, for many of us it's a fact of life whether or not we 'agree' with it, and it may be that those of us in fluoridated drinking water areas need to be particularly careful not to go loading ourselves with much more fluoride (but without getting paranoid about it!).

So, bearing that in mind, if you really are already getting enough fluoride (and how would you know that anyway, unless you very carefully and vigilantly use Helpfulness Testing?), what might you do to ensure that you don't get yourself into the 'overdose' range of fluoride intake?

For one thing, cut out ALL tea. I do mean actual tea here and generally not the so-called 'herbal teas' — though to be on the safe side I'd recommend Helpfulness Testing on any infusion / beverage that you might wish to drink. There are good reasons anyway for cutting out not only tea but all caffeine-containing beverages or other preparations, so by cutting out tea you can kill two birds with one stone and cut out one completely unnecessary source of excess fluoride, as well as getting rid of an insidiously benign-seeming drug dependency.

For another, stop using fluoride toothpaste…? — Oh no, you don't!!! — Well at least, as a general thing. The point here is, the real need for probably the vast majority of people who aren't already into the 'overdose' level of fluoride is to use fluoride toothpaste to help strengthen their tooth enamel through the very brief topical application of the fluoride toothpaste during each teeth-brushing session, BUT to take sensible care to avoid swallowing any while brushing (but while not being paranoid about the odd small trace that might still get swallowed once in a while), and to thoroughly rinse your mouth out immediately after the brushing, so that the amount that you've swallowed overall is insignificant for all practical purposes.

This precautionary behaviour is quite important anyway, as toothpastes generally contain other substances that, shall we say, aren't terribly good for you when ingested, so even non-fluoride toothpastes really need to be treated with the same degree of care and respect.

However, the need for fluoride toothpaste would be much less anyway if only people ate properly healthy diets and had a really thorough oral hygiene session daily (i.e., much more than just brushing, using not only floss but, say, interdental sticks too, to really carefully and thoroughly remove as much as possible of the plaque and other gunge that regular brushing regularly fails to remove.

On the other hand, some people have a distinctly higher fluoride requirement than the majority, because of various particular physical conditions. This may in some cases be temporary and in others more or less ongoing.

As far as I can tell, I myself have been a case in point, because during my years at grammar school, back in the 1950s, I was frequently exposed to seriously harmful levels of mercury vapour in the school laboratories — particularly the biology laboratory, where the botany teacher left a tray with metallic mercury spilled in it out on the bench for a year or more — this tray often getting quite strongly heated.

— AND of course we delightful little schoolboy brats kept taking little bits of that mercury out and letting little beads of it drop to the floor for the fun of seeing the little silvery 'splats' there on the floor, of course without a thought about the further concentration of mercury vapour we were creating in the air we were breathing.

As I understand it from my own inner inquiry, that mercury poisoning would have been the primary cause of a number of physical problems that I had in my later years at school and into my adult life — and one of those was my very weak tooth enamel, which tended to erode away readily, especially on the biting surfaces of my teeth, to cause a major sensitivity problem, which led to a frustrating tussle with a succession of dentists, trying to get them to agree to crown all my molars, at least on my right-hand side. I did finally succeed, though it took some years to get the whole job done (mostly on the right side).

My understanding nowadays is that the enamel weakening had resulted at least largely from an abnormally high level of fluoride loss from my body, resulting from the mercury poisoning. So, if I'd known about all that at the time of the mercury poisoning, or soon afterwards, theoretically I could have more or less saved my tooth enamel by using fluoride toothpaste then (which I hadn't been doing) and indeed actually taking a fluoride supplement — though the latter would have been risky without Helpfulness Testing.

So, yes, the real answer to establishing when, and to what extent, you personally would do best to supplement your fluoride intake or indeed use fluoride toothpaste, is to use Helpfulness Testing, because your own deepest aspects would always have a reasonable idea of the level of any fluoride deficit or excess in your system and thus, through Helpfulness Testing, could indicate what's your most beneficial choice at the present time.

What can I do about all the people who I've harmed through my healing activities?

I greatly empathize with people who've been into the standard New Age and related healing pursuits, including running practices as clairvoyants and other types of psychic and indeed supposed 'spiritual teachers', and then have 'woken up' to their unwitting garbage involvement in those pursuits and realize that they've unwittingly been harming and causing problems for many people. Actually they're in good company, for I myself had to face the same question!

Well, we've completely innocently been causing quite a lot of harm to a goodly number of people — so, what shall we do about it? Spend the rest of our lives trying to chase up all those people and tell them what was really going on and what they really need to do to get clear of those problems? — Indeed, actually try to undo all those problems for them?

— Or, maybe, spend time every one of our remaining days, sending (supposed) distant healing to each of those people, many of whom one wouldn't now have sufficient connection with anyway to have any useful effect for them whatsoever — or, again, go sending out huge sums of money (that we haven't got) to those hapless individuals by way of supposed compensation?

— Okay, that all sounds like a pretty bum deal, without likelihood of really achieving anything useful, doesn't it, so let's spend the rest of our lives in abject penitence, gnashing and wailing and wielding our self-flagellating equipment upon ourselves! — And, of course, praying to 'God' (actually just a garbage-sourced illusion, so 'He' is really not there to help you in the first place!) for forgiveness and mercy to save ourselves from eternal damnation!

Oh, my goodness, what a confusion of muddle and mess! How about, instead, actually applying some plain good sense here and setting aside all the accusing, anxious and self flagellating pseudo-thoughts that the garbage keeps putting in our minds!

So, what's the reality? — The reality is that things are as they are and things were as they were, and we did as we did, and indeed, at all moments in the past each of us did the very best that (s)he knew how, taking into account all the facts of each situation. — So, all notions of some sort of mega-karma about to descend upon us with horrendous retribution are clearly out of place, and sourced (of course!) from the sweet little garbage.

Thus, as suggested, when we inadvertently harmed people through our healing activities, we did so completely innocently, having had the very best of intentions for those people. Clearly, then, this is where we need to get realistic about the situation.

The reality is that in most or all areas of our lives, at times we would occasionally completely unawarely and unintentionally affect other particular people adversely, and also get such adverse effects ourselves — so the matter of our past (supposed) healing activities is only a particular case of a more general principle in our lives.

Surely the only practical approach is generally to draw a line under what's passed, for there's no way that we can restore what's already passed. The way forward, therefore, is to work diligently on our own self-actualization process, including clearing all emotional issues, illusory realities and accusatory or menacing garbage attacks (e.g., feelings of guilt) relating to our past deeds — and to be educational living examples of people following a truly healthy life direction (i.e., that self-actualization process).

That of course includes learning from our past actions and their (at least likely) outcomes — but self recriminations and supposed karmic obligations are no part of such a learning process!

Of course, here and there would most likely be the odd individual who we think we harmed, who we know well and have the opportunity for putting them in the picture. However, I have little doubt that other one-time 'healers' would have the same issue as I've had about doing that sort of thing. In my own experience, yes, the garbage was telling me I had to trace all the relevant people, explain to them and even refund to them any fees I'd charged them — but I saw that that would be unworkable to any significant extent, even if it were otherwise a genuinely helpful thing to go doing.

Almost everyone who I'd given healing / 'guidance' to had been thoroughly ensconced in New-Agey 'healing' and 'spirituality' and simply wouldn't understand what I was on about if I did seek to explain to them. Some could respond very adversely and cause quite a lot of completely unnecessary and indeed harmful aggro in my life, while some others could well suffer through being either frightened by what I told them, or/and through their then bearing some grudge against me — which would harm them (further) rather than me.

The reality is that at least most of those people had too much soul programming to enable them to properly 'wake up' and get into a genuine self-actualization process — and the vast majority had too limited an awareness to recognise that anything I'd been doing had caused them harm. I did attempt to explain to a very few such individuals who I encountered face to face, where I thought they might understand, and at least they were superficially 'nice' about it — though I don't know how much was really achieved by my doing that.

However, generally nowadays, on such an encounter, at most I'd simply remark in general terms about my own having 'woken up' and dropped the whole 'spirituality' thing in favour of self-actualization.

But fundamentally, at an early stage I drew a line under all my past 'healing' and 'spirituality' dealings with people, for I saw that the most benefit that I could bring to people generally was in simply getting on with my own self-actualization and being as positive an influence in the world generally as I could be, and minimizing any further harm I might cause to anyone, without driving myself out of any sense of obligation or 'trying to make amends'.

Life is simply better and more deeply enjoyable for us when we're being a natural positive influence all round (i.e., through our living example rather than evangelism!).

So, the amends we really need to make are NOT obligationally based ones, but simply the improving of our own functioning, so that we cause progressively less harm and more benefit to other people — and of course that means joyfully getting on with our own self-actualization process, and setting aside any apparent pressures to get pulled down by what's in the past.

This does NOT mean denying all responsibility for what one has done — not at all! But people generally have a very distorted notion of what genuine responsibility is and what it involves. The most responsible approach to the types of situation I'm considering here is one of a healthy pragmatism and an actively manifested will, as I've already said, to maximize one's beneficial effects and minimize any harmful effects upon other people and indeed oneself.

If you die in your sleep do you realize you've died? Or do you just think you're dreaming?

Somebody wrote in as follows:

If you die in your sleep do you realize you've died? Or do you just think you're dreaming? Do you have a page about what happens right after you die? It seems a person would be more prone to attacks from the garbage if he is confused about whether or not he is dead.

Various traditions and so-called 'Masters' (i.e.,'spiritual' ones) have a lot to say about what you experience when you die and indeed afterwards. The sad truth, however, is that in every single case they're completely off their trolley and have been making complete fools of themselves — at least in the eyes of anyone with sufficient depth of awareness and groundedness to hold those assertions about death and after-death experience to proper scrutiny.

Surely, it's hardly 'rocket science' to recognise that NOBODY in the whole of 'Existence' could ever actually know what you experience when you die or have died, for one glaringly obvious reason! Yes, by the very nature of death, once a person has died it's too late for them to come back and tell anyone what they've been experiencing!

Of course, at once upon reading this, an uncountable gaggle of 'spirituality heads' would be jumping up and down and scornfully dismissing my down-to-earth words here — pointing out that myriads of people all over the place have had the spirits of dead people communicate with them and tell them about the afterlife and the spirit world.

However, those observations would be useful ones ONLY if those apparitions and manifestations were what they're making out to be. To the best of my own understanding, they're not, and are ALL simply illusory manifestations that the garbage causes to occur in the respective individuals' awareness in order to lead them seriously and harmfully astray.

And similarly, all the accounts of after-death experience that come from the various traditions and seers, clairvoyants, mediums, psychics, 'teachers', 'Masters', gurus and so on are simply channelled 'information' — which means that it's been passed to those various 'messengers' by nothing more nor less than the sweet little garbage in order to mislead and cause serious problems.

There are, of course pointers to types of experience that at least some people may quite likely get upon and after death, but that's not the same thing at all as actually knowing what we would experience when we die.

My own inner inquiry supports my general understanding that the garbage always seeks to interfere with people during the dying process, because they're becoming less and less grounded and are thus increasingly open to the astral non-reality.

Thus people whose awareness isn't already well closed down by a large amount of soul programming can be expected to undergo various astral realm experiences, which would vary widely from person to person, just as such experiences vary enormously between individuals in life. So, some people would subjectively seem to be drawn into some wonderful loving light and enter some sort of apparent paradise, while others would have 'fair to middling' experiences and others would have hell experiences.

However, any 'paradise' experiences would NOT be benign (to my best understanding they're just a particularly insidious version of the hell phenomenon), and thus would be for complete shunning just as much as any obvious 'hell' experiences.

What all such experiences would be about would be the garbage's means to program those individuals into regarding themselves (in further incarnations) as minions in power / control hierarchies — where they live their lives on the basis of following rules laid down by others and accepting 'received wisdoms' about the nature of themselves and 'reality' instead of being genuinely free and looking awarely at what's actually there and what's actually going on.

Part of that programming would be to force the person to reincarnate, i.e., as a soul reincarnation. Please read up about that in The true nature of 'the forces of darkness' and its interference and attacks.

On the other hand, a no-soul person who is enlightened and well advanced in their self-actualization process, provided that he has trained himself during everyday life to shun and disregard any illusory manifestations from the garbage and to keep his conscious awareness centred on the non-dual underlying nature of himself and everything he experiences, stands a good chance of dying properly (i.e.,'as Nature intended') and simply reverting to fundamental consciousness.

For such a person any manifestations (even supposedly 'Jesus' or 'God' beckoning to one) would be shunned and simply allowed to merge with oneself and dissolve, in the understanding that it's all just illusory 'froth', and most likely the process would be subjectively remarkably like simply going into a deep sleep.

So, to come back to the original questions, clearly, strictly speaking they're unanswerable, but it's a reasonable supposition that some people caught up in astral realm experiences would initially believe they're dead or wonder if they are so. Undoubtedly for some people the garbage would exploit any uncertainty felt as to whether or not one has died, and make things more difficult for one — though actually if one is in such astral realm experiences in the first place, issues arising from feeling uncertainty as to whether one has died or not would actually be only a small convolutionary detail in the overall horrendous pickle that one is in.

"Are you schizophrenic?"

Yes, that question has actually been asked of me directly by somebody who wrote in with a whole bunch of pointless questions that she could answer perfectly well for herself if she troubled to read the relevant material on this site, for whatever good it would do her.

In real, aware terms that question is breathtakingly stupid and pointless, and shows that the particular person hadn't been reading or at least genuinely understanding the relevant material on this site, and, like so many people, had come to this site loaded with various preconceptions with which she then sought to 'shape' what she was reading here. In the relevant Glossary entry I explain my 'take' on the range of human predicaments that people, out of ignorance and unawareness, call 'schizophrenia'.

Indeed, not only did I have that particular individual ask me whether I'm 'schizophrenic', but others whose posts I've seen in the odd forum have written about me actually as being a 'schizophrenic'! — But on what basis? When my own garbage shenanigans in 2003 to 2007 caused me to be hospitalized a few times, did the psychiatric consultant dealing with me, or any of the doctors there, diagnose me as 'schizophrenic'?

— Nope, not at all (though they did look for evidence on the basis of which they could stick that label on me)! So, where have some people got the notion that I'm 'schizophrenic'?

I can only assume that that's their way of trying to shield themselves from properly engaging with and understanding the content of my writings, by attaching a pejorative and — to a considerable majority of people — distinctly emotive label to me. Then, according to their twisted reasoning, they can feel free to dismiss or belittle me and my 'message', and of course, not to contaminate themselves by using my self-actualization methods and turning their lives around in any worthwhile way!

At least it would have been a bit more honest, albeit not much more so, if instead they were saying something like This Philip Goddard guy has a disfigured knob, and therefore his writings are rubbish and we can all ignore or laugh at him! At least I do have a slight disfigurement to my knob, so, that would be true!

So, what was my answer to that thoughtless person's question? — I simply referred her back to the notes on my Contact page, which make it quite clear as to whether or not it's appropriate for people to go writing in with questions that they could answer themselves through reading the relevant material on this site. In any case, to answer that particular question is a bit like answering the question Have you stopped beating your hippopotamus? (Okay, 'wife', if you're that conventional!).

The moment you answer that one, either with 'yes' or 'no', you're strongly implying that you're going along with the questioner's hopelessly wrong preconceptions, and you've effectively been tricked into giving false and actually quite absurd misinformation about yourself. I simply don't recognise schizophrenia as a genuine 'condition' in the first place, and instead pay proper attention to the actual issues that need resolving in individual people's particular predicaments — whether my own or anyone else's.

I'd say this, though. According to my best understanding, an inability to make a proper distinction between everyday physical 'reality' and particular illusory realities / astral realm experiences is at least one of the primary criteria that the 'psycho' workers use to label a person as 'schizophrenic'. If you're stupid enough to be seeking evidence on which you could put that label on me (as though doing so would serve some useful purpose!), then, where is your evidence, from all my writings, that I have that problem?

"You mention the value of walking, but would it be all right for me to take my dog with me when I go walking?"

There's nothing wrong or troublesome about going out walking with a dog, or indeed, human company. However, that's a different sort of experience from actually going out walking on your own, and it's the latter that's most supportive to one's self-actualization process. Therefore, if you have a dog and also want your walking to be of maximum benefit, the real answer would be to have some walks with dog and some without dog, and indeed on your own. Every one of us needs to learn to be comfortable with his / her own company.

People generally use other people and indeed pets as 'comforter' companions, to hide from themselves significant emotional issues of isolation / loneliness feelings that they actually need to dissolve. Through comforting yourself by having companionship, you don't dissolve the issues but instead actually hide them. It's not that companionship in itself is a problem, but using it to avoid solitude and the loneliness / isolation feelings that it triggers for you is another matter.

On this site I give effective methods for dissolving such emotional issues, so you can ensure that solo walking is, or at least steadily becomes, an enjoyable and positive experience for you, with no sense of loneliness.