Please note that Vineeto’s correspondence below was written by the feeling-being ‘Vineeto’ while ‘she’ lived in a pragmatic (methodological), still-in-control/same-way-of-being Virtual Freedom.
> Selected Correspondence Vineeto Delusion Actualism Homepage RESPONDENT No. 50: HA! That’s amazing how that works! RICHARD: It is indeed ... and yet so simple too. And, speaking of simplicity, this may be an apt moment to provide the reminder that, by having already established feeling good (a general sense of well-being) as the bottom line for moment-to-moment experiencing then if, or when, feeling happy and harmless fades there is that comfortable baseline from which to suss out where, when, how, why – and what for – the feeling of being happy and harmless ceased happening ... and all the while feeling good whilst going about it. Furthermore if, or when, there is a sinking below the bottom line, and feeling bad (a general sense of ill-being) is the moment-to-moment experiencing then, rather than trying to suss out where, when, how, why – and what for – the general sense of well-being (feeling good) ceased occurring, it is far more useful to first get to a stage of being neutral, because, when in the feeling bad position, feeling good can appear to be so, so far away ... indeed, at times, feeling good can seem to be but a dream, a fancy, a chimera, a will-o’-the-wisp, from that position, and what’s the point anyway, that method didn’t work either (of course), it’s all stupid, life sucks, and ... and all the rest of those self-pitying, self-justifying, defeatist assertions. Plus, as already mentioned previously, any analysing and/or psychologising and/or philosophising whilst one is in the grip of debilitating feelings usually does not achieve much (other than spiralling around and around in varying degrees of despair and despondency or whatever) anyway. Needless is it to add that the step from being neutral to feeling good is not such a big step? And then one is back on track again. Richard, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, No. 50, 12 Oct 2003 RESPONDENT: Delirium n : a state of excitement and mental confusion often accompanied by hallucinations Hallucination n : illusory perception; a common symptom of severe mental disorder Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) VINEETO: Ah … actualism is not about silly academic word games, it is a hands-on enterprise. I’m playing for keeps, the real McCoy. Beware, the wide and wondrous path is a one-way street, ‘I’ am instigating my own disappearance for the benefit of this body and that body and everybody. No wonder, you perceive this as ‘delirium’ and ‘hallucination’. From the perspective of those within the human condition the door to an actual freedom has a warning sign on it which says ‘insanity, do not enter here’. But once I had seen through and through, over and over, the madness of what is called sanity, this warning no longer holds sway. Funny, today I perceive the instinctual battle between human beings as ‘delirium’ and the search for a spiritual Higher Self as a particularly mesmerising ‘hallucination … a common symptom of severe mental disorder’. RESPONDENT No 56: Delirium n : a state of excitement and mental confusion often accompanied by hallucinations. Hallucination n : illusory perception; a common symptom of severe mental disorder. Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) VINEETO to No 56: Ah… actualism is not about silly academic word games, it is a hands-on enterprise. I’m playing for keeps, the real McCoy. Beware, the wide and wondrous path is a one-way street, ‘I’ am instigating my own disappearance for the benefit of this body and that body and everybody. No wonder, you perceive this as ‘delirium’ and ‘hallucination’. From the perspective of those within the human condition the door to an actual freedom has a warning sign on it which says ‘insanity, do not enter here’. But once I had seen through and through, over and over, the madness of what is called sanity, this warning no longer holds sway. Funny, today I perceive the instinctual battle between human beings as ‘delirium’ and the search for a spiritual Higher Self as a particularly mesmerising ‘hallucination … a common symptom of severe mental disorder’. RESPONDENT: The way you put things, means that Richard was under a severe mental disorder for 11 years … VINEETO: Not only Richard, but Jiddu Krishnamurti, Mohan Rajneesh and all the other enlightened beings as well. The difference between Richard and all the other people who have suffered from the delusion of enlightenment was that Richard was suspicious of the narcissistic feelings that accompanied the delusion, so much so that he continued to question and investigate the very state of enlightenment itself. If you read Richard’s story you will see that he had inadvertently fallen into the delusion of enlightenment on his search for the perfection experienced in pure consciousness experiences and because of this the delusion of self-realization did not sit well with him. RESPONDENT: … plus the years he was in the process of becoming enlightened. VINEETO: In ‘the years he was in the process of becoming enlightened’ he was immersed and enmeshed in the madness that is the human condition just like you and me and every other human being on the planet. Just because you don’t perceive the wars and ethnic cleansings and murders and suicides and depression and domestic violence and child abuse as being madness doesn’t mean that it isn’t madness. It is a madness that countries need armies to deter other countries from invading, that communities need an armed police force to maintain law and order amongst its citizens and that many people need medication to help them cope with their anger and depression and in some cases prevent them from committing suicide. RESPONDENT: Are you sure that this mental disorder can be reversed? VINEETO: Not ‘reversed’ but ended. Given that Richard managed to free himself from the hallucination of enlightenment, there is no doubt that any enlightened one could do the same provided they are ready to pay the price – their precious immortal ‘Me’. VINEETO: I don’t know what ‘never-never land’ represents for you, but I am reminded of Peter Pan’s dreamland for children, where one is transported from the misery and dullness of the ‘real’ world into the unreal land of imagination, where one never has to become a grown-up. JAMES: Never-never land was not a good description to use because you have no way of knowing exactly what I meant. It did seem like an unreal land but it is more of a void or not-knowing. Kind of a disconnected feeling which is what I meant by a feeling of abandoning humanity. VINEETO: ‘Abandoning humanity’ in Actual Freedom terms stands for gaily taking the pen-ultimate step before self-immolation. After one has removed one’s social identity of being a son or daughter, a man or woman, an American or Englishman, a seeker, a writer, a doctor, etc. and has become an utter non-identity, one is then able to investigate the collective psyche, the result of the instinctual passions that all human beings have in common. Applying attentiveness and awareness to the instinctual passions as they arise enables one to stop acting as per the instinctual software in the brain and thus one can slowly, slowly reduce the automated reactive and emotional impact that instincts have on our feelings, thoughts and behaviour. In doing so one not only becomes happy and harmless but also stops being part of the biggest fold of all, humanity itself. One is no longer a member of the species that ‘nourishes malice and sorrow in their bosom’ to quote Richard’s expression. Whereas ‘a disconnected feeling’ is clearly an affective feeling, arising out of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. To have a ‘a disconnected feeling’ has nothing at all to do with ‘abandoning humanity’; it is, on the contrary, common to all human beings and arises out of the Human Condition in each of us. You see, in order to communicate about the possible advantage that Actual Freedom could have for your life, it is essential to not mix up the terms that we use with emotional or spiritual terms. For instance, ‘not-knowing’ is used by Buddhists and other Eastern religions as an expression for the highest achievable wisdom when one enters the ‘Unknowable’, synonymous for the ‘Truth’. Aspiring to or succeeding in achieving the ‘Truth’ and reaching a state of ‘not-knowing’ is well accepted in the ‘book of rules for humanity’. When achieving a state of ‘not-knowing’ one simply exchanges the illusion of the ‘self’ for the grand delusion of a higher ‘Self’. * VINEETO: Abandoning humanity is only possible after one has rid oneself of one’s social identity first and thus has the confirmation and confidence that the method works. Moreover, without experiencing the purity, magnificence and perfection of the actual world in a pure consciousness experience one’s abandoning humanity can only lead to feelings of dread and despair or the grand delusion of Oneness. RESPONDENT: How to ‘eliminate’ ego? I do not know. Is it the source of suffering? Absolutely. VINEETO: During my spiritual search, it has never been easy for me to locate this ego, to completely understand what it is I have to get rid of in order to become happy (enlightened). Once I came across Richard’s explanation, derived from his being enlightened and seen through the delusion it was, things suddenly made shocking sense: getting rid of the ego means wanting to keep the good bits and throw away the bad bits. And the sorting out the good bits from the bad bits made it so confusing. Slowly I began to understand that the good bits – love – are only there to heal, cover up and balance out the bad bits. Once I really get rid of the bad bits, the good bits are redundant as well. They both colour the seeing of a tree as a tree, of a dog as a dog and of a human being as a human being. And once those both veils are taken off my eyes I can see the magnificence and magic in every tree, dog and human being. No emotion is needed to glorify it. It is already perfect, it doesn’t need any enhancement by what I call the ‘self’, the very sum of all human instincts, emotions and beliefs both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Once I stop doing, feeling, proposing, interpreting, in short messing around, with the world as-it is, then everything is simply perfect. It is ‘I’ who is at the core of all the trouble. And this ‘I’ consists of ‘ego’ and ‘soul’, concepts and emotions, everything that is not touchable, visible, audible, tastable or smell-able. Pretty radical, isn’t it! * RESPONDENT: Clarity does not arise, but the intensity of looking and listening to the ego is deepened. VINEETO: I see from our conversation that you seem to take Richard’s writing and his method as just another spiritual writing about how to get free from the ego. But his discovery has nothing, nothing at all, to do with any of the familiar spiritual approaches. His finding is not about getting rid of the ego, ‘watching’, and maybe becoming enlightened. In fact, actual freedom lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to any spiritual beliefs whatsoever. Richard was enlightened for 11 years and with diligence and effort managed to work himself out of the massive delusion that enlightenment is. It is very hard when one lives inside the passionate belief-structure to see that the whole thing is only a belief-structure and not the ‘truth’. For me, when I understood it for the first time with all its implications, it was like leaving planet earth in a spaceship and seeing it as a globe hanging in space for the very first time. A completely different perspective indeed. VINEETO to Alan: I want to tell you about a movie we watched lately, called ‘Fearless’ by Peter Weir. I found it interesting for various reasons. First, the hero has a near-death experience shortly before the plane crashes. He encounters an altered state of consciousness, being fearless and driven to help people, in particular the survivors of the crash. As I see it, the film describes well the delusion of an altered state of consciousness and even more so because the hero is an American, living in a Western society and not in the East. One can see the oddness and the ‘loony-ness’ of his state. The only person who is not impressed by his heroic efforts to save people is his wife – as a down to earth, common sense and practical woman she can see that he is in severe physical danger indulging in his fearlessness in many silly ways. (He believes that he has already died and can only die once). She is then able to convince the woman whom the hero is currently saving and both try to reach his common sense. He ends up seeing the point and in a dramatic second near-death experience he seems to come back to his senses. At least, that is how I would like to interpret his exclamation: ‘I am ALIVE!’ It could very well mean something completely different! Unfortunately, this is how the film ends. I guess that both the playwright and the director have no idea what happens when one actually comes to one’s senses! Peter sent him his journal to show that there is an option for a life after the altered state of consciousness. I think, not many people would interpret the film like this. But the ‘state beyond fearlessness’ is definitely what I am aiming for! Promptly after this movie, I had a few sleepless nights contemplating death. The days were sparkling and gay but the nights brought up my fears. ALAN: I always wondered a bit why Richard, in particular, railed so much against the gurus and spiritual masters. I even accused Richard of having a ‘bee in his bonnet’, which he readily admitted. Sure, I knew these people were to blame for leading people up the garden path and I have examined for myself the delusion of enlightenment. But, responsible for all the wars, tortures, rapes, domestic violence and suicides – I was not so sure. Then today, reading Richard’s reply to No 12, I suddenly ‘got it’ – a fact is so obvious when you see it. Of course the gurus and maters are responsible for all the wars, tortures, rapes, domestic violence and suicides, because they have not eliminated the Human Condition in themselves and they continue to perpetuate the misery, sorrow and malice, while telling all and sundry they are the embodiment of peace on earth. I may well have a ‘bee in my bonnet’ myself in future! Because of the above realisation (and my current discussion with Richard about the PCE & ASC), I was able to look at my remaining tenuous belief in some form of life after death, ‘Oneness’, ‘Universal Consciousness’ or, whatever you like to call it. Close examination has caused this belief to vanish, leaving me even more free to enjoy this moment. As a fact, there is no ‘life after death’ – what a relief!!!!! Thank you Richard and No 12. VINEETO: Wheeeeeeee, Alan, that is truly an occasion to get the bottle of Champagne out of your fridge and have a big toast on yourself! What a day of remarkable significance when you stop being immortal – or potentially immortal – and become alive in this moment. I can take the analogy that I wrote to you the other day a bit further – everybody walks on their hands and suffer blisters and headache, and then we wonder why we feel so mad and weird walking upright. To come to one’s senses and walk upright, one first has to fall on to one’s nose, or bum, and most people object to that position... Leaving immortality behind is a big step towards walking upright, at least in my experience. Welcome to the ‘bee in the bonnet’-club. * ALAN: Your mail has prompted me to investigate further the ‘zombie state’. I discovered that I was waiting until I had more ‘time’ to actually be ‘here’ – what a joke – this moment is all I have and here I am waiting – and what a lovely excuse for not being ‘here’. I discovered doubt – doubt that you, Richard and Peter are living a delusion, doubt that you and Peter are blind followers of Richard – and what a lovely excuse for not being ‘here’. VINEETO: Yes, I do understand the doubts you are talking about. After all, we are just a handful of pioneers compared to the whole world of believers. I had these doubts again and again, they usually took the form of doubting my effort, ‘Am I really on the right track’?, ‘Am I doing all that is needed’? or ‘What if I end up enlightened?’ Peter and I found emotions going round and round in a circle: fear – frustration – doubt – fear and the only way out was to muster our intent and investigate the facts of the situation. I take it that when you are ‘here’ there is no doubt that you are not following a delusion?... or following the only sanity there is? ALAN: No doubt at all. When ‘here’, I am absolutely sure I am following a delusion – only joking. When I am ‘here’ I could not care less whether I am following a delusion, an illusion, or raving lunatics. I know where I am – here – and whatever anyone else does is wholly a matter for them. VINEETO: Well, that is our advantage compared with all the hundreds of religions and philosophies, isn’t it. When ‘here’, we experience, this is it, this is the obvious, actual, undoubted factuality, the bottom-line. That’s why I could finally give up the highly valued and cherished belief in Osho and Zen-mystics – I had a day of belief-less actuality and the experience was far superior to any belief. VINEETO: (...) Well, slowly, slowly, after a hundred failures I start to grasp that there is no point in going back into Mr. Kant’s cave... [Vineeto]: ‘But it was not all over yet. The sense of love and warmth that had resided in the heart moved further down into the belly, what Japanese call the Hara. I found it to be the seat of ‘being’, of bliss. It was a less fiery passion, more of a calm prevailing blissful state of eternal ‘being here’, as opposed to the actual being ‘here’. I don’t remember much of it except for the seductive invitation to stay there, ‘you have found your destiny, this is what they all talk about, you have arrived’. <snip> ‘Big deal! Seeing the Power and Glory in action and its impact on me I turn away. This is not the perfection I am searching for, this is not the purity that I know from peak-experiences. As I watch the sky dawn in its wonderful changing colours with life awakening all around, leaves rustling in the wind, cicadas chirping, magpies whistling, fear returns and I welcome it as a sign that I am on the road to freedom again. The delusion of Power and Glory is seen for what it is – and disappears while I lie on the couch contemplating life and death and the universe.’ Vineeto, Exploring Death and Altered States of Consciousness (Note from the editor: It was in fact Plato’s story from The Republic) ALAN: ... as this concurs with my own experience, which is in the current correspondence with Richard. I think all one can do to ‘warn’ another is to say watch out for this feeling of Love, which is definitely located in the belly, the seat of being. As we have both demonstrated it is possible to turn away from this blissful state, whether using ‘native intelligence’, ‘pure intent’ or whatever name. VINEETO: Interesting that you talk about the blissful state. We found a book by Bernadette Roberts, a Christian mystic, called ‘What is Self?’ where she talks about no-ego and the no-self, only to describe that after enlightenment she gets even further lost into the fantasy of being one with Christ. And recently, when somebody asked me about Akashic Records, I experienced that bliss-state for about an hour, the state Mrs. Roberts seems to describe in her book. I finally got a grip on it – I could experience it and describe from the ‘outside’ what was happening. This blissful state seems unemotional, no love or compassion is felt in the heart, everything is a cool ‘oneness’. One feels all-pervading, ‘I am everything and everything is me and everything is divine’. The experience can easily be mistaken as intimacy because the sense of ‘me’ is so expanded across the universe and spread so thin, so to speak, that ‘me’ is hardly noticeable. As ‘I am every thing’, one is of course ‘feeling’ intimate with the TV set or is able to intuit into someone else’s, in this case Mrs. Roberts, religious imaginations. (I had read Bernadette Roberts, a Christian Mystic’s book, ‘What is Self?’ prior to this experience). Fascinating and seductive and very eerie. I think this could be a bit like the parallel universe scientists fantasize about. One then lives in a universe where everything is a virtual replica of the actual, with the glow of divinity, unity and timeless-ness to it – and as it is virtual, it is controlled by the imagination of the one who makes it up. This ‘parallel’ universe ‘feels’ and is ‘imagined’ as intimate or not-separate, and yet it is twice removed from the physical body, the senses, this actual world. This ‘insanity’ of ‘feeling one with everything’ is the barrier that prevents one from experiencing the world as a flesh and blood body, with the senses. Boy, I really understand why these guys are so far out there, lost and locked in an imaginary space that has almost no return-ticket. But then, you only have to pinch yourself and where it hurts, that’s actual. It is good not to be trapped by this complete insanity. It is the same type of dis-association that people suffer from who are in an insane asylum. The film ‘Awakening’ depicted some of those people. There was one woman who could not walk to the window because the checker pattern on the floor was interrupted by a black line – until the doctor painted the black line into checkers. In her ‘world’ the black line was dangerous. The religious insanity is being locked into another type of fantasy-world, where one isn’t really the body and one’s True Self will be free only after death – it is an altered state of consciousness, i.e. mentally deranged, forever cut off from common sense. * VINEETO: One never knows how many actors are still waiting behind stage until they had their appearance. It is fascinating, when I think about it. The moment I discovered the ‘drama queen’, it lost its conviction. The moment I discovered ‘me’, the Truth-producing enlightened faculty, it became impossible to believe that produced ‘truth’. And the day I discovered the ‘believer’, the mechanism of believing I could not believe anymore – the mechanism was switched off and disappeared. I had to investigate the facts. One piece after the other fell off ‘me’, while at the same time taking the veil off the physical senses. The colours became more vivid, the sounds multi-layered, the skin awake to sense the air in temperature and consistency, the little hair on the forearm being touched by the soft breeze. ALAN: So what is left now of ‘Vineeto’? VINEETO: Good question, my search-light looking for ‘me’ is constantly switched on. As I described above, one objection has been that I thought I hadn’t quite properly understood these spiritual realms. But what a relief when I finally popped my head out of the delusion, back into here, leaving such collective imagination behind. Enough is left of ‘Vineeto’ to stage another insane mini-drama in the head. But, in the meantime, I am having a bloody good time. * VINEETO to Alan: Yesterday we again saw Monty Python’s ‘The Search for the Holy Grail’, and one scene particularly struck me for its aptness – King Arthur and his knights encounter the monster with the thousand teeth in the cave and are pursued by it, back and forth, on the screen. The chase is played out in a simple cartoon. There seems to be no way out for the knights, they surely will be devoured any minute, when suddenly the animator, who was busy painting the monster, dies from a heart attack. The monster duly disappears and the knights find themselves, alive and well, in 20th century English countryside – here. I had a good laugh, because that’s what I find myself doing – sometimes there is this ‘monster’ of fear chasing me until I find the cartoonist (‘me’) and the show is over! The other thing that went through my mind was my story about me being a ‘Truth-Production-Machine’. I wrote about it at the time, having an enlightenment experience: [Vineeto]: ‘In my mind I was like Gangaji swanning into a hall of disciples, all-knowing, generous, compassionate, and full of the Wisdom of all the Ages. Big deal! Seeing the Power and Glory in full action and its impact on me I turn away. This is not the perfection I am searching for, this is not the purity that I know from peak-experiences. As I watch the sky dawn in its wonderful changing colours with life awakening all around, leaves rustling in the wind, cicadas chirping, magpies whistling, fear returns and I welcome it as a sign that I am on the road to freedom again. The delusion of Power and Glory is seen for what it is – and disappears while I lie on the couch contemplating life and death and the universe. Still, great realizations after another are floating in and out of my head, engulfing me with their convincing web. Suddenly I become aware of what is happening – I am a ‘Truth-Producing-Machine’! I am producing the ‘Truth of Freedom’ to maintain my ‘Self’. What a bummer! Just call it the ‘Truth of Freedom’ and turn it into a spiritual belief-system! Very, very cunning indeed. Back into ‘old time religion’! This realization truly ripped the carpet from under my feet. While it crumbled I recognized the enormity of its implications. My certainty vanished while I desperately tried to maintain an understanding about freedom and death. What to do now? Where to go from here? The ground I was standing on as an identity shook considerably but didn’t disappear entirely. I was still trying to make sense of me and life.’ Vineeto, Exploring Death and Altered States of Consciousness As I see it today, there was an experience of ‘getting it’, understanding the Power and Glory of the heartfelt, chest filling experience of Enlightenment and I then stepped out of that drama of the ‘Self’, I abandoned this particular belief / imagination / emotion. But in the frantic and desperate attempt to survive the ‘self’ jumped to the next possible identity: ‘I’ had seen through this immense illusion, ‘I’ have greatly understood, ‘I’ am the hero again. And with the ‘I’ claiming the honour of the realization for its identity, a Pandora box of new imaginations, fears and identities is given full reign. * VINEETO: As I said, the rungs of the ladder disappear and one is left ‘hanging in the middle’ with hardly any choice other than going forward. I say ‘hardly any’ because I am well aware of the fact that – probably with great effort – one is able to revert to some kind of normality. ALAN: It must be a huge effort to return to ‘normal’. I cannot imagine (not that I can imagine much anymore) taking on all these beliefs and emotions again, though it is undoubtedly possible to be seduced by the lure of love, or Love. VINEETO: I have no idea how big the effort would be and I have no intention to check it out. But I know that it takes a stubborn intent to keep going in the face of all the instinctual fear that has now surfaced. Other people climb Mount Everest or journey to the North Pole to get their excitement and sense of achievement – I just do it on the couch. Love and Enlightenment are lures that are certainly not to be taken lightly. That’s why Peter and me are putting so much emphasis on Virtual Freedom. In the face of ultimate extinction the survival instinct tempts one to grab for the only option for the ‘self’ to survive – Enlightenment, the delusion of immortality. But I know now by extensive experience how enlightenment looks and feels like and I am 100% sure that it is a second rate alternative to Actual Freedom. RESPONDENT: Many of his close associates seem to got him so wrong. Osho and many other eastern philosophies have stressed so many times on being happy ‘here and now’. There may be many methods how to achieve it. VINEETO: I don’t think us disciples got him wrong there. Commitment and surrender were not only a big issue during ranch-time, but ‘totality’, as it was called later, was the main ingredient on the path to enlightenment. The story of digging only one hole and not 50 different ones to produce a well the stressing the point to not listen to other masters as to not get confused. ‘Being happy here and now’ only sounds like the same as living this moment here, now. The spiritual ‘here and now’ does not jell with the teaching of reincarnation, enlightenment being the ending of the wheel of birth and death and the teaching of meditation – closing your eyes and go somewhere else inside – to one day maybe become enlightened. Yes, when after all this effort you become enlightened, then you can laugh and say you were always ‘here and now’. But that is a different ‘here’ and ‘now’ than the here and now of normal mortals who were considered asleep and had to do dynamic meditation and other exercises to ‘wake up’. The other obvious difference between the spiritual ‘here and now’ and the actual ‘here and now’ is how Osho and eastern philosophers regard the body and everything physical. The spiritual concept is that the world is ‘maya’, an illusion. Once you ‘get it’, you can be happy in the spiritual realm of ‘here and now’. But you have to identify as the ‘watcher’, not as the body, you have to be detached from the body and from your senses in order to rise to your ‘true nature’. That ‘true nature’ is your consciousness, so they say, best to be achieved through meditation, which is in its purest form sitting motionless with closed eyes for hours on end. Then the identity shifts to ‘being the watcher’, to being Consciousness – and one day, one realizes that one is ‘One with All’, ‘That’, ‘Universal Love’, etc. The delusion is complete. One loses one’s ego on the way, but the soul, the feeling part of the instinctual being stays not only fully intact, but is aggrandized to the extent that one considers oneself to be God or the Universe itself. Compared to this illusory scenario, the actual ‘here and now’ is to be here in this moment of time, which is the only moment one can experience anyway. To be actually here is to be in this place which is no-where in particular in the infinitude of the physical universe. Coming from no-where and having no-where to go we find ourselves here in this moment in time in this place in space. To be here is to be the universe experiencing itself as a human being. Being here now is to ‘be doing what is happening’ with no sense of ‘I’ or feelings of ‘me’. To be fully here, now without a fearful ‘self ‘or a ‘Grand Self’ is to be innocent, perfect and pure, fully engaged in this only moment of being alive. RESPONDENT: If you actually understand what Richard talks about you would realize, Good Friend Vineeto, that to post a response to such an obviously emotional offering is the height of folly and the furthest thing from the unencumbered intelligence that one must be if they have been applying the method that he (Richard) has described on the list many times since two years, with great success. Emotion, the compensatory response that is the cause of Beautiful No 1’s offering, has not the capacity to understand, yes? And whatever intelligence present is unable to read your offering because it is the strangle hold of the unintelligent emotion, yes? After all, according to Good Richard, the world is in the control of the disease of emotion. VINEETO: According to your logic talking to anybody would be ‘the height of folly’ because every human being is an emotional being, genetically programmed with instinctual passions. The silliness I responded to was the pretence of No. 5 and No. 1 not to understand what Richard is talking about, whereas it is such a simple statement that one can permanently get rid of one’s whole identity, both ego and soul. It is such a degrading, particularly female, conditioning to play silly instead of simply stating that ‘I disagree’. RESPONDENT: Namaste Good Friend Peter, A pleasure to communicate with you. VINEETO: I take it from your silly reply that you disagree. RESPONDENT: Perhaps you would show where the logic is incorrect? It is as follows: Posit 1. The world is ruled by emotion Posit 2. Emotion is a disease that renders intelligence inoperative ergo: The world is without operative intelligence. Posit 3. No 1 is part of the world ergo: No 1 is without operative intelligence Posit 4. It is intelligent of me to try and communicate intelligently with No 1 Mind you, these are not thoughts form here, but are instead a tool to illustrate that anyone who would claim to understand Good Richard’s offerings (Posits 1 and 2) and still arrive at posit 4 is either: 1. Dishonest 2. Does not truly understand Richard’s offerings. VINEETO: Oh Dear. It’s let’s be tricky time, is it – all this nonsense started with your initial false premise that [Respondent]: If you actually understand what Richard talks about you would realize, Good Friend Vineeto, that to post a response to such an obviously emotional offering is the height of folly. [endquote]. This is, of course, nonsense, given that Richard himself has spent an inordinate amount of time responding to an obviously emotional person, namely you. You can posit ‘til the cows come home but meanwhile I’ll write and talk to whomever I please. * RESPONDENT: It is so much easier to find fault with the one who is talking from disease than to ask why one does not understand, as the dictates of Actual Freedom demands one must, what a complete and utter waste of time and resources offering a response is, isn’t it? VINEETO: It is such a degrading, particularly male, conditioning to pretend to know what the other is saying rather than admit that one hasn’t got a clue. It is also a clever way to avoid having to admit to the possibility that the other may well be right! RESPONDENT: Thank you for sharing your experience Good Peter. I will keep that in mind about you while reading your posts. VINEETO: I take it from your silly reply that you disagree. I am not ‘Good Peter’. * RESPONDENT: I wonder what Good Richard would think of the claim of ‘great success’ with his offerings? From here, I can see no space for there to be any particular level, great or poor, of success in what Richard offers. It is all or nothing, yes? There is no intelligence in the thought of a partial suicide, yes? Much Love VINEETO: ‘From here’, your spiritual world, is the wrong place to get the whole view. From the actual world where I live I have experienced increasing success ever since I started to apply the method – I am living with a man in perfect equity, peace and harmony for 24 hrs a day and I am having a perfect day 99% of my time. RESPONDENT: Please, I would claim no ownership Good Friend. ‘Owner of’ is an identity. VINEETO: Ah, so you don’t own your spiritual world, you just create it. * VINEETO: Actual Freedom is not ‘suicide’, it is self-immolation, and those two are 180 degrees apart. RESPONDENT: deep bow VINEETO: Forgive me please. I should have used one of Good Richard’s actual words. The corrected question would read ‘there is no intelligence in the thought of a partial extinction, yes?’ Your premise that ‘there is no intelligence in the thought of a partial extinction’ is again wrong as it derived from ‘your’ spiritual worldview. I am not talking about a spiritual path to Enlightenment but about investigating and incrementally extinguishing both my social identity and my instinctual passions to the point where they are now almost non-existent. The intent for this investigation is derived from many pure consciousness experiences, which have become my ultimate guide and measure. To measure success in the light of these PCEs is easy and as plain as a pikestaff. Even a partial extinction of one’s social identity and instinctual passions beats the common garden-variety of Self-Aggrandizement any day of the week. * RESPONDENT: PS: Are you thinking of replying Good Friend Vineeto? Are those thoughts a failing in Good Richard’s method that he has described on the list many times since two years, and you have applied with great success, or have you failed to understand what the success of Good Richard’s methods actually means? VINEETO: There is no failure here. Your measure of success is certainly different to measuring actual success. It is your interpretation of what I wrote that makes you ‘fail to understand’ and revert to supercilious replies that make no sense. Contrary to spiritual teaching where there is only one end-result, if one removes one’s concept of one’s parochial self, actualism is about instigating actual change and that actual change shows instant success in my life and my relationship with my fellow human beings with every facet of identity, be it spiritual, social or instinctual, that is being demolished. It is not a feeling of success but success based on tangible results. RESPONDENT: But Good Friend you offered this social identity: ‘I am living with a man in perfect equity...’ VINEETO: Oh, dear. Obviously you don’t know what social identity is in daily life – Your social identity is a psychological creation manufactured by society to act as a guardian over the wayward instinctually driven self you were born with. Guided by pure intent to become utterly happy and harmless, born of the PCE, one’s culturally-imposed social identity will gradually become redundant and can easily be eliminated. With an almost non-existent social identity one can live with another human being in perfect equity, peace and harmony 24hrs a day. Your idea of social identity is nothing but a cerebral concept and has nothing to do with actuality. You can keep focussing your attention on my use of a personal pronoun if you wish, but the real content of what I am saying is in the rest of the words of the sentence. Do you always miss the point of what is being said by getting stuck on the first word? Maybe we can move on to ‘am’ now? RESPONDENT: ... and spiritually you offered your identity to be the owner of time: ‘I am having a perfect day 99% of my time’ VINEETO: ‘Owner of time’, my foot. No 4, have a look at the clock, or your watch if you wear one. You don’t mind me using a personal pronoun or should I use an impersonal pronoun when addressing you. Do you see how the little hand moves as you watch it? This is called time. Now do you see after it has moved 5 of those little spaces. Well, that is 5 seconds more of your life ticking away. Is that too complicated to understand or should we discuss the matter for a few more posts? As for ‘spiritually you offered your identity’ – this is again your spiritual conjecture because there is not a skerrick of spiritual belief in me, I am hosting no spirits whatsoever, and I don’t believe in any life after death. Maybe your ‘deep bow’ position is responsible for your bent interpretation of straightforward words? RESPONDENT: There is nothing then, ‘overlaying and corrupting the experience of the purity and perfection of the physical universe.’ It is the energy of that universe itself as the human mind, which is ‘cleansing’ itself of the contamination of both genetically and socially based cause/effect reaction; or – using Krishnamurti’s metaphor for the occurrence – there has been a mutation of the brain itself, the same occurrence we see anywhere else in nature when some obstruction to the most optimum capacity of organismic function has reversed itself or has developed out of its own disease or imbalance. VINEETO: ‘That universe itself’ ... ‘cleansing itself of the contamination’ is the perfect expression for God, which in Eastern religion is an aggrandized ‘Me’ that feels itself to be the universe itself, cleansing itself. This perverted and ‘self’-centred view of the workings of the physical universe is the result of the spiritual practice of dissociation and identification with the greater whole. Whereas what I said was that I investigate into the genetic/instinctual and social/spiritual programming in me that is overlaying and corrupting the experience of the purity and perfection of the physical universe. Therefore my statement and your idea of ‘Krishnamurti’s metaphor’ are 180 degrees opposite – I, this flesh and blood body, am actively dismantling both my social and instinctual ‘self’ while you are suggesting that the ‘the energy of that universe’ aka God ‘is cleansing itself’ . RESPONDENT: It is god to you when you are conceptualizing it. When it is What you ARE it is simply what is happening, it is simply consciousness without the illusion of separateness, of division, such as PCE, actualism, atheism, etc. You expend far too much energy trying to define what you hear in your own terms, which terms themselves are nothing but ‘eastern religion’ reduced to ‘this flesh and blood body’ which is what YOUR god is. VINEETO: No, there is not conceptualizing needed. An illusion can be seen as what it is when one is not caught up in the feeling of being ‘that universe itself’ ... ‘cleansing itself of the contamination’. Just as one can recognize an unconscious behaviour by diligently observing oneself and then step out of it, it is also possible to recognize a passionate belief as nonsensical and non-actual and step out of it. When I investigated that overwhelming feeling of ‘What you ARE’ , I had to admit that, although very convincing and gratifying, it was only meta-physical and thus I was able to step out of it and leave that part of my ‘Self’ behind. This is not replacing one belief with another; this is removing the believer and entering the actual world of sensate and reflective experiencing. RESPONDENT: Have you been able to localize this self through your indoctrination into Peter/Richard’s way of looking at life? If so, where does it end and the ‘other’ begin? VINEETO: I don’t know what you mean by ‘the other’. Once I am outside of the self, there is no ‘other’, just this body and brain functioning perfectly well and experiencing the world around me intimately, sensuously, fully alive and in appreciation of my surroundings. While I am writing to you, Peter is clicking away on his keyboard, the computer is humming quietly, the night still and magical with the full-moon high in the sky. My fingers find their way from typing letters to making words, my body still tingling from sex. Life is wonderfully easy without the burden of the ‘self’. It was never the body or the senses or the brain that were the culprit, it has always been the ‘self’ that corrupts both thoughts and senses. This ‘self ’is responsible for all the misery on the planet, for all the wars, tortures, murders, rapes, poverty, greed, corruption and hypocrisy. By dismantling and extinguishing it bit by bit I am able to live here, now, in this actual physical and sensually experience-able world. I don’t need to escape into a fantasy-place where I imagine that the ‘self’ does not exist. I came to see the fantasy-world of enlightenment as a big, big fairy-land and quite some people have been deluded into it, although rarely anybody succeeds in staying permanently deluded. A Buddhist pundit calculated that 0.0001% of seekers ever reach their ultimate goal. But in the end enlightenment is only an Altered State of Consciousness, a construct of passionate imagination and a delusion of grandeur. I did experience this enlightened ‘Self’ myself – it is called having a Satori, I guess – and can observe it in detail from an outsider’s standpoint – seeing the grand belief and the overwhelming emotions of ‘wisdom’ and Divine Compassion – and I know the qualitative difference when there is no self at all in operation. All Enlightened Ones still have an identity; it is called ‘I am God’ or ‘I am one with God’. It is nevertheless an identity, very grand and ‘holy’, universal in its feeling but still with one at its core who claims to be ‘one with the Divine’. The Enlightened Ones loose their ego but safely keep their soul, their identity merely shifts from the head to the heart, leaving all the animal-instincts unquestioned. RESPONDENT to No 14: Awakening is devastating. VINEETO: Do you mean to say that it is an ongoing devastation for the ‘self’, for who we think and feel we are? RESPONDENT: It is always shocking to see what assholes we really are. VINEETO: I don’t agree with you here. Once I got rid of my ideas, beliefs, emotions – in short all of my identity – there is no-one there to be an asshole or call anyone an asshole. This is not pretended humility. When there is no asshole in me, I also see no asshole outside of me. As long as I swanned around like one of the Enlightened Ones I felt superior, and everyone else needed my compassion or wisdom. It took me a week to fully get out of that seductive delusion. It is part and parcel of becoming enlightened; it comes with that ‘energy’ filling one’s heart, one is being swamped with ‘wisdom’, the greatest imagination the Self can produce. One is hooked into the collective ‘wisdom’ of humanity and thus perpetuates the suffering and morals that have been our heritage from the very beginning. ‘Good’ is only the backside of ‘bad’. The name of the game is to throw the whole coin of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ out the window. The name of the game is freedom from good and evil, right and wrong. Once I got rid of ‘who I am’ and simply live ‘what I am’, this flesh and blood body, there is only silly and sensible, a practical, down-to-earth, delightful enjoyment of the perfection of this benevolent universe. This is when peace on earth is possible. RESPONDENT: I don’t feel inclined to read your book. I read parts of yours, Vineeto’s and Richard’s sites. When I replied to you, it is from having read your mails. I don’t feel very eager to discuss with you, we have our different viewpoints and experiences and that is ok. The reason I answered was because you seem to have taken a position from where you look down on others, and that I find it strange that you can do that from your illuminated state of delight. Expansion beyond enlightenment should be able to offer a broader view to life than what you can. Also I find some of your words to be agreeable upon, but I don’t sense your heart through the words. Read Papaji or Gangaji here on the net, the flavour of their words is something totally different. VINEETO: Yes, you observed it right – the flavours of Papaji (W.L. Poonja) and Gangaji Antoinette Varner) are very different, they have got ‘the heart’ in it. The whole issue of actual freedom is the freedom from emotions, feelings and the instinctual passions. ‘Heart’-felt passions have been the source of both religious and tribal wars, of domestic violence, and of the misery and gulf between men and women. Any questioning of the love and devotion that the followers have for the enlightened ones and the religious leaders has led to emotional responses which you can now see happening on the sannyas mailing list. Richard was indeed the first one to question the state of enlightenment because it did not match the way he experienced the world in the peak experience. In arduous years of investigation he discovered the massive delusion that enlightenment is and, by eliminating not only the ego but also the soul, all the heart-felt emotions, he managed to get himself out of this delusion. What was left after the complete elimination of ego, soul, identity and being was simply the physical human flesh-and-blood body, perfectly functioning in this magical fairy-tale like world. Without the Human Condition, without the overlaying fear, aggression, nurture and desire this world is experienced as-it-is, benevolent, friendly, easy and magically delightful. As for your notion of us looking down on others – that is a curious matter. Of course, the actual world is superior to any state of enlightened delusion in that it is not merely a creation of human imagination but factual, obvious and perfect, as evidenced by the physical senses. If you have experienced it once in a peak experience – or remembered one you had, you would easily agree with me. Many people seem to have peak-experiences, if only for a short period of time. In my writing I am simply sharing the joy of having been able to clean myself up with Richard’s method and becoming virtually free. It is possible for everybody because I am nobody special. Everybody with enough intent and courage can indeed become happy and harmless. * VINEETO: So, you say one is imagining all this and it is not happening or is an illusion, and further that you are only witnessing it from some inner world which cannot be talked about – but only felt. RESPONDENT: Hey, stick to your facts, Vineeto! I want you to show me where in my mail I said this. If you cannot show me, this is your talk, your bullshit talk. You speak about facts! Don’t think you can show me anything other than you making hens out of feathers, that is what you do. Phah! VINEETO: (...) The cultivation of a spiritual ‘watcher and the subsequent Self-realisation is a mere delusion (an illusion fabricated out of an illusion), whereby the psychic entity ‘feels’ it is Immortal and Eternal. Spiritual freedom is imaginary, cerebral, fleeting, emotive (loving), compassionate (sorrowful), and woe-fully corrupted by power and authority. Actual Freedom lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to spiritual freedom. It is actual, sensate, tangible, ever-present, delightful, pure and perfect and available to any who is daring enough to free themselves of both the psychological and psychic entities within. RESPONDENT: Actualists claim that they never lived before and will never live again afterwards. So whatever they know about past achievements of man comes out of books which doesn’t cover all of history and is an interpretation of the writers. VINEETO: Not only me or the ‘actualists’, nobody has lived before or will afterwards – they may imagine that they are eternally alive as ethereal spirits, but that is only an imagination born out of the fervent wish to be immortal. Therefore all the ‘Truths’ perceived from eternal souls, past lives, divine visions, etc. are a delusion (an illusion born out of an illusion). You are right, everything that is said or written is interpreted and perceived through the filters of the Human Condition. But nevertheless, one can sort out the facts about the past achievements of man from his beliefs and interpretations. Without the ‘self’, which is responsible for the distortion, one can sort facts from fiction. I discovered ‘me, the believer’ – now the very act of believing is impossible. (...) * RESPONDENT: I don’t think you read Akashic records, do you? VINEETO: Yes, I have been tapping into those Akashic Records when ‘I’ still lived in the psychic world, and I have been studying the phenomenon as such on my way to freedom. It is a fascinating subject. As I have seen it, ‘Akashic Records’ is another word for the whole of humanity’s beliefs, the whole of Ancient Wisdom. For some reason this collective belief is accessible to whoever expands his or her ambition and search in the direction of collective beliefs and feelings. Nevertheless, those ‘Akashic Records’ are nothing but humankind’s collective imagination with millions of details and variations. They are the whole of the atavistic beliefs and, as such, an intrinsic part of the Human Condition. In that collective psychic world one finds Universal Sorrow with its opposite – Compassion and Universal Dread with its opposite – Bliss. Those feelings, when one taps into them, are very powerful and convincing. You have probably experienced them yourself. They seem so all-encompassing as if there has never been anything as compelling and true as this experience. So powerful as to be convincingly real – one feels that one has discovered the Hidden Secrets of Humanity – that All has been revealed! That is simply due to the nature of the collective. And yet, these compelling feelings and thoughts are not actual. They only exist in the head (or heart). The moment I become aware of what is happening and, as a result, stop feeding them, they shrink into normal size emotions and eventually die away. Here is a bit that I wrote when I had an experience of Universal Dread – if you are interested... The desperate feeling of being forever trapped in the psychic world that I experienced during that dread is summed up in the saying that you keep quoting: ‘There is nothing new under the sun’.
> | [Vineeto]: ‘Watching a film on WW II, I was completely overwhelmed by the feeling of the collective sorrow, guilt, depression and dread that made up the ‘dark part’ of the ‘German soul’. The feeling became so bizarre and threatening that I started to desperately look for something to bring me back here into the actual world. At the same time I was curious to experience and explore this new intensity of feeling. I seemed to be standing at the edge of an immense abyss of hell, which emanated all of the terror and dread of humanity, stretching endlessly into a grey dead infinity with no hope and no way out, ever. My eyes were searching for something physical to anchor on. I stood at the window, repeating to myself, ‘this is a fence, this is grass, this is a flower.’ The bright redness of the bougainvillea outside in the garden penetrated a little into this powerful magnet of dread that was threatening to swallow me for eternity.

Above the abyss of dread appeared enlightenment, seductively blinking, promising bliss as the solution to this overwhelming hopelessness and sense of ‘evil’. But as I had seen through the illusion the enlightenment option only a few days before, I was not convinced to go down that land of imaginary bliss – I wanted freedom from illusion, any illusion. So I fixed my eyes on the red flowers, until slowly, slowly the dread lost some of its power and turned into the familiar feeling of fear. But it was far from being over! I started to look for more actuality, longing for the taste of coffee in my mouth, for sounds in my ear and wind on my skin. Nothing else would get me out of this powerful collective and atavistic passionate dream. Peter had told me about a similar experience that he had had just a few days earlier and had seen that there is no solution to be had in feeling everyone’s dread, everyone’s hopelessness. |

So I activated all my willpower to manoeuvre myself back into the physical world of the senses, where neither dread nor enlightenment exist – and I eventually succeeded. The experience left me shaking for another day, and I am glad to know that the door marked ‘dread’ is as much a dead-end-road as the door marked ‘enlightenment’. Quite a Rocky Horror Picture Show, just more real – and yet, all happening inside one’s own head! Vineeto, Exploring Death and Altered States of Consciousness

This drama was one of the many that I encountered when dismantling the psychic entity in me, the very ‘who’ I thought and felt I was. It is an enormous drama, played out on the stage and along the script of humanity’s past. The more the ‘self’ felt exposed and threatened, the more the drama changed from being personal into being felt as the vastness of the collective psyche. It was an incredibly fascinating time, discovering the emotionally compelling, yet dreamlike fantasy world that the Human Psyche is capable of producing. As one piece after another of the psychic construct fell off ‘me’, it simultaneously removed another layer of the dampening and distorting veil that had covered my physical senses. The colours are now more vivid, the sounds multi-layered, the skin awake to feel the temperature and consistency of the air, the tiny hairs on the forearm being touched by the soft breeze, everything is alive, throbbing, delighting in the smorgasbord of the unending sensual pleasures that this world presents.

Everybody teaches, believes and hopes that love and compassion are the remedy for misery and hate, and nobody told us that those ‘good’ emotions are as much part of the disease as the ‘bad’ emotions. To free oneself from the whole disease of the Human Condition, the Psychological as well as the Psychic World, is to arrive in the actual world of people, things and events. A flesh-and-blood body innocent of any ‘being’ whatsoever is benevolent, free of both good and evil, delighting each moment in the infinite magnificence of being here and being alive.

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