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 How to Become Free from the Human Condition Actualism Homepage RESPONDENT: I am still a very emotional being, maybe even more so now, as I feel everything with much more intensity then I used to…yet I don’t give it credence most of the time, but even if I inadvertently do, then I have an excellent fall back cushion. And this has made all the difference. VINEETO: When I disentangled myself from the spiritual practice of dissociation I began to allow myself once again to become sensitive to my own undesired feelings as well as to the perversities and horrors of the human condition. In short I allowed myself to feel the full range of my emotions in order to examine them and trace them back to ‘me’, the affective identity inside this flesh-and-blood body. When a reaction to a certain situation kept creeping up again and again, avoiding giving it ‘credence’ was not enough. I had to feel the feeling, label it, sort it out, understand it in the context of my social identity and figure out which part of ‘me’ was responsible for my emotional reaction in order to become free from it. Then I could go back to feeling excellent again and, as a result of this rooting around, was less prone to be disturbed by a similar situation. RESPONDENT: I also bumped into some of your older writings recently which really helped, (../actualism/vineeto/list-af/corr.htm), where you translate – or better said clear up – the NDA language into readable straight talk. VINEETO: It was more meant as a joke at the time and the joke is on me, because I was exactly such a hypocritical goodie-two-shoes as displayed in the example. When I had an image to defend, a soul to nourish or a belief to maintain, there was not much room to be honest with myself, let alone laugh at myself. But once I began to question my loyalty to the guru, the teachings and the group of disciples, I could be much more straight with myself. GARY: In the moment of pure sensuousness, when a fascinated attentiveness basks in the wonder of being here in this moment in time, there is no latching onto the feelings of relatedness or belonging. Attentiveness is a clear slate of sensory datum and pure, immediate perception, devoid of affective feeling, as well as the incipient attractions and repulsions to or against others as are operative in one’s ordinary sense of social being. In attentiveness, I am as apt to be without a feeling of connectedness in dealing with my fellow human beings as I am in not feeling connected to the tree, as were you. Attentiveness however also notices the psychic tentacles with the same fascination that it notices the exquisite patterns of light and shadow falling across the bark of the tree, and I nevertheless ‘keep hands in pockets’ when examining and noticing these feelings of connectedness without giving into the feelings or being impelled to action by them. VINEETO: Yes, it is absolutely astounding that this one methods works to progressively dismantle all my problems. Whenever I notice an affective reaction to whatever someone says or does – I inquire why that is so – I discover a certain expectation or fear – I inquire why that is so – I notice the nature of my ‘psychic tentacles’ that automatically weave their web – I inquire what is the underlying purpose in having that particular bond – and bingo, brought to the light of awareness, my ‘psychic tentacles’ can no longer hold their grip. * VINEETO: Throughout the process of actualism I have become aware of, and incrementally dissolved, my ‘connections’ to things in my close environment and I investigated my affiliations and friendships with people. As you pointed out, most sharing between people consists of commiseration, but as I continued with the actualism practice I had less and less to complain about my own life, which meant I had less and less common misery with people. The wonderful outcome of this ‘unconnectedness’ is that I am more and more able to meet and treat people as fellow human beings – that means I recognize and treat them as what they are instead of relating to them as bit players in ‘my’ game, subjects of ‘my’ moral judgements and demands, projections of ‘my’ fears and desires. GARY: I certainly agree with the part where you say that you have less and less to complain about with your own life. I hardly feel it is a service to my fellow human to gripe about commonplace goings-on, although it is an all-too-human characteristic. I am less inclined to gripe or complain since I investigated into the basis of such commonly held complaints as the Monday morning blues, upsets about the weather, complaints about one’s political leaders, as well as many other commonplace ills too numerous to mention. VINEETO: With attentiveness operating almost seamlessly, I am able to clearly see any complaints and worries I have about the world as-it-is and people as-they-are for they are expressions of either malice or sorrow. Attentiveness also enabled me to be sensible enough to sort out the practical circumstances of my life such that I stopped doing many of the silly, stressful and time-consuming things I used to do solely in order to be ‘someone’ in the world and to be recognized as such. Once I made these practical changes the only task then left was to wear out and finally stop the habit of complaining that every human being engages in. Some complaints however, such as the knee-jerk rages against authority and authority figures or feeling sad and sorry for a blighted humanity run very deep and as such take a bit more digging into in order to fully understand and undo. Such complaints are rooted deeply in the core feeling of ‘we are all in the same boat’ which gives rise to the nonsensical belief that ‘we can only become free together all at once’. It is obvious that there are no practical lifestyle changes that I can make to diminish these complaints other than cutting the cord each time these feelings arise and, each time again, step out from humanity, the sad and sorry cesspool of malice and sorrow. GARY: A welcome change is that since practising Actualism I have a much keener appreciation of the marvel and wonder of human beings – that most intelligent creature in the world, that fabulously sensitive and finely attuned pinnacle of evolutionary creation. Even the dullest human being is a marvellous creature to behold. And a lot of this sense of wonder and appreciation is directly due to the falling away and demolishment of the deeply conditioned judgements of others owing to their social class, status, background, or perceived worth or valuelessness. VINEETO: By getting rid of my own complaints, boredom, annoyance and irritation I succeeded in enjoying my own company and I increasingly became aware that I like my fellow human beings. With this liking comes hand-in-glove an appreciation of my fellow human beings and an admiration of the astounding human ingenuity and caring in many fields of science, engineering, health and safety. One thing that played a major part in my increasingly liking people-as-they-are was the acknowledgement of my own malice and sorrow, that I recognized it as being due to the human condition and that I understood that everybody, through no fault of their own, is born into the same human condition. I then put this intellectual understanding into daily practice whenever I interacted directly with people, read or heard of other people or read or heard of other people’s views of other people. Nevertheless, I am often left bewildered at the fact that most people prefer to remain in the situation they find themselves in. But then again, most people I know choose to spend their lives as they do – my aim is to live in peace and harmony with people-as-they-are, without exception. * VINEETO: Yes, nice to talk again. Did you have a pleasant hiatus caused by summertime outdoor activities or was it something else? GARY: Well, both. I was camping for a few days recently and was away from my PC. But my hiatuses have more to do with the usual process by which I write to the list in fits and starts, or so it seems to me. I will write a couple of times and then drop out for awhile, just monitoring posts until something really grabs me. Sometimes it is difficult to get a toe-hold back into writing again, after a prolonged absence. In any event, I sometimes take too long in preparing a reply to a correspondent and then find myself losing interest in responding in the first place. VINEETO: Writing on the list has been a great pleasure and an excellent tool for me from the very start. I enjoy the fellowship of sharing with others who are interested in my personal discoveries of the workings of the human condition and how to become free from it. The process of putting my experiences into words adds an additional degree of clarity to each issue at hand. To write about a topic or to answer questions requires me to reflect and contemplate about an issue, to question if I am harbouring a belief or a feeling about the issue, to sometimes do some research in order to talk about the issue at hand more comprehensively, to sum up and to summarize my experience and understanding – in all, it aids the process of self-exploration and understanding immensely. The latest discussions on the infinite nature of the universe gave me many opportunities to not only contemplate but to experience again and again the peerless infinity of the universe and to put my experiential understanding in words such that others could also make sense of the nature of this physical universe. Therefore, even when a post takes a week or more to be completed, I always assume that others on the list will benefit from the writing. GARY: You had asked how I am doing. I am very well. I am returning to the list after a lengthy hiatus during which time I mainly lurked, reading the posts occasionally, and sometimes in depth. I had rather lost my interest in writing to the list, but had not lost my interest in Actualism. VINEETO: I can relate to this, as I am now in a phase where I seem to have lost interest in writing to the list unless there is some sensible conversation to be had about practical experiences. But no matter if I write or not, I never cease to be vitally interested in this moment of being alive and in what prevents me from being actually free. There is a commitment that happened deep down inside a few months after I came across actualism, after I experienced what being free from ‘me’ is like. It is a commitment that is irreversible, unlike the new-year’s resolutions that are abandoned days after they were made. I think I have told the story before but it signifies for me the day I realized that I was hooked for life. At one time I was particularly troubled by doubts and fears so much so that after a couple of miserable days I decided to talk to Richard about it. I said to him that the way I feel now I don’t think I am able to go through with becoming free, I am too much of a coward, I don’t have the strength and saying it I felt as despondent and scared as one can be. Richard listened attentively as he always does and then said, okay, if that is so, what are you going to do with the rest of your life, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and so on? I didn’t have to think long, it was pretty obvious that although I was in the grip of my feelings at the time that they wouldn’t last forever and then I would not be able to resist pursuing the freedom I knew to be the genuine article. There simply was, and still is, nothing else I want to do with my life. The other day someone asked if Peter and Vineeto ever take a holiday from actualism to which I could only say ‘holiday to where’. I am pleased to be here, I enjoy being here, I am vitally interested in being alive, I am aware of what I do, think, feel and sensately experience – why on earth should I want to take leave from that? It took me much effort to get this awareness going to the point were it happens by itself and now it is impossible to switch it off. The alternative could only be to deliberately do something to dull down, to get lost in imagination, to wallow in feelings, to be half-conscious or drugged and to pretend not to be here. The capacity to be aware of being aware is exactly what makes the human species unique amongst sentient beings and to work towards ridding this awareness of selfism – in any form – is a great adventure. GARY: Instead, I have continued to apply myself to demolition work. I use that short-hand phrase to signify using the method to dismantle the social identity and expose the underlying instinctual passions. Then I have been able to get at the buggers. However, I have had long periods during which nothing much seemed to be happening. Getting a ‘taste of the instincts’ has sometimes seemed like a prolonged forced feeding at the pig trough of the Human Condition. But then, nobody is forcing me, are they? I realize in retrospect what has been lacking has been sustained, unremitting attentiveness on my part and sometimes simply the pure intent to proceed further. VINEETO: There is something else that helps me and that is to remember to be friends with myself and rather than being down on myself for being irritated or fearful to instead give myself a pat on the back for noticing that I was. This way it’s much easier to pull myself up by my bootstraps and to get back to being happy again in no time. It’s a persistent habit to break, this telling myself off for not being perfectly happy for 24hrs a day, but I do notice it much quicker these days than I used to. Then it is not so much a matter of weening myself off the ‘trough of the Human Condition’, as you call it, but more a slipping out of ‘my’ skin and sensately – and sensuously – enjoying being here. I also had to realize that after I’ve been through certain intense feelings and passions there is nothing further to be learned from staying in the feeling. I used to be suspicious of Richard’s expression of ‘nipping the feeling in the bud’, ostensibly for the reason that it could be confused with repressing the feeling. But now I realized that I was also avoiding the technique itself because ‘I’ wanted to hang onto being ‘the explorer’ of deep passions whenever they occurred and I can see now that there is neither meaning nor value in ceaselessly examining an instinctual passion over and over and over again. In other words I have come to understand that no valuable insight is to be gained from deeply and repeatedly feeling fear – the most prominent of the passions for me – and this understanding has greatly helped to simply notice and label the feeling, in this case my fear of oblivion, and then get on with enjoying this moment of being alive, which is after all the point of actualism. GARY: I can tell you this: that I have during this period of time always used the Actualism method and have not found it necessary nor desirable to take side-detours or short cuts. I have never found it necessary to find add-ons to supplement my use of the Actualism question. Unremitting attentiveness and cranking up my pure intent have been the keys to pulling through what have seemed like unbearable onslaughts of deep dread and fear. VINEETO: It’s so simple, isn’t it and yet almost everyone feels the urge to concoct their personal addenda in order to avoid its ‘self’-diminishing effects. GARY: But along with complacency and a relative backing-off from the deeper sources of resistance at times, there has been for a long time steady progress too. I think of a graphic presentation of in which there are peaks and valleys, and regressive movement, but on the average a steady overall increase in happiness and harmlessness. VINEETO: Yep, and with the increase of being happy and considerate towards others comes a waning of ‘me’ because ‘I’ need an arena of problems and passions in order to thrive. GARY: I do think that one of the very interesting things here on the list is the vital opportunity for so many different people to share experiences with one another. I think experiences with Actualism are going to be variable. And of course unlike the snake oil salesmen and charlatans, no guarantee is offered or otherwise implied. Naturally different people have different life experiences, different personalities and constitutions, different temperaments, different motivations, etc. Sometimes it seems like the issues that I have struggled most greatly with have been the issues that I have struggled with my entire life. VINEETO: I can’t quite see how experiences with practicing actualism are going to be essentially variable at core if one fully commits oneself to becoming free from malice and sorrow. The result, if intent and effort are genuine, can only be a decrease in malice and sorrow and the progress is conditional to each actualist’s own effort and intent. Once I got my attentiveness up and running eventually all of the issues that I had struggled with in my life have come to the surface, as you observed happened with you, and this is where the intent born of a PCE always leads me to take the particular action that I know I need to do in order to become free of each of these issues. GARY: In other words, it is ‘me’ and to a large extent it is senseless to struggle with ‘myself’, as I cannot rid me of myself (pardon the hyperbole here). VINEETO: No, I can’t ‘rid me of myself’, but what I can do is pay attention to, and become aware of, ‘me’ in action, thus interrupting the automatic quick and dirty neural pathway, which in turn stops ‘me’ feeding ‘me’ – then inevitably atrophy sets in until one day ‘I’ willingly and happily give myself permission to let go of the controls and agree to ‘my’ demise. And in the meantime I have a great time being alive. GARY: What happens when I crank up the attentiveness and pure intent knobs is that these ‘struggles’ vanish in a twinkling. VINEETO: Yes, it works like a charm. GARY: I am sure others have had that experience. It’s a bit like shovelling yourself out after a massive snowstorm and once again the sun is shining. The whole world is bright and aglow again. VINEETO: Currently the popular vote on the list is to ignore, or dissociate from, one’s ‘struggles’ by pretending that there is nothing to be gained by making an effort. RESPONDENT: I would like to point out that I was not comparing Actualism and Zen, per se, it was the actual exercises that I was asking about, which was to give me an idea if I was understanding HAIETMOBA correctly. VINEETO: Whilst I appreciate your intentions I’d have to say that you were in fact ‘comparing Actualism and Zen, per se’ – the ‘actual exercise’ of both actualism and Zen is only meaningful when seen in context with their relevant goals and, in the case of Zen, in context with the philosophy that underpins it and in the case of actualism, with the understanding about the nature of ‘me’. RESPONDENT: Is there an example of this exercise being explained from beginning to end that I haven’t came across yet? VINEETO: Possibly. There are several descriptions of the method of actualism – I can recommend all of Richard’s articles, but specifically on this topic ‘This Moment of Being Alive’, ‘A Précis Of Actual Freedom’ and ‘Attentiveness And Sensuousness And Apperceptiveness’. Peter wrote about the method in the ‘Introduction to an Actual Freedom’ which I think you already found and I have selected some of my writings on ‘How to Investigate Feelings’. Additionally there are the selected topics in the Library on ‘How Am I Experiencing This Moment of Being Alive’ and on ‘Actualism’. If this is too voluminous for you, I can point you to Frequently asked questions – ‘What is the answer to ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and ‘How do I induce a PCE?’ RESPONDENT: Maybe I could make this a little clearer ... When I label the feeling and investigate it, is there a further technique for getting rid of the feeling that I am having? VINEETO: Here is an excerpt from the originator of the method – Richard: ‘... if ‘I’ am not feeling good then ‘I’ have something to look at to find out why. What has happened, between the last time ‘I’ felt good and now? When did ‘I’ feel good last? Five minutes ago? Five hours ago? What happened to end those felicitous feelings? Ahh ... yes: ‘He said that and I ...’. Or: ‘She didn’t do this and I ...’. Or: ‘What I wanted was ...’. Or: ‘I didn’t do ...’. And so on and so on ... one does not have to trace back into one’s childhood ... usually no more than yesterday afternoon at the most (‘feeling good’ is an unambiguous term – it is a general sense of well-being – and if anyone wants to argue about what feeling good means ... then do not even bother trying to do this at all). Once the specific moment of ceasing to feel good is pin-pointed, and the silliness of having such an incident as that (no matter what it is) take away one’s enjoyment and appreciation of this only moment of being alive is seen for what it is – usually some habitual reactive response – one is once more feeling good ... but with a pin-pointed cue to watch out for next time so as to not have that trigger off yet another bout of the same-old same-old. This is called nipping it in the bud before it gets out of hand ... with application and diligence and patience and perseverance one soon gets the knack of this and more and more time is spent enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive. And, of course, once one does get the knack of this, one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy and harmless’ ... and after that to ‘feeling perfect’ ...’. (Richard, Articles, This Moment of Being Alive). RESPONDENT: Or is it observing the feelings as they happen that lessens their grip? VINEETO: Personally, observing the feeling was not enough – I had my fair share of this observing business in my spiritual year and the only result was detachment. In actualism I look for the cause that prevents me from being happy and harmless in this moment and mostly, seeing and understanding the cause, coupled with sincere intent, is sufficient to get me back to feeling happy again. If not, then I need to dig a bit deeper why my feeling of worry, misery, anger, love, loneliness, etc persists, for instance I need to look for a particular pattern, or habit, or a perceived advantage that persuades me to choose to be miserable. * VINEETO: As for old fears and insecurities, there were plenty of them. Some of them were so old they dated back centuries and more – the archaic fear of being burnt as a witch, for instance, for daring to question the existence of god, heaven and afterlife and the archaic fear of expelled from society or of being executed for daring to lift the taboos of sexuality and begin to enjoy it for its own sake. RESPONDENT: Whoa! this sounds almost like reincarnation. I assume you are referring to genetics, passing the memory on from one gene-ration (never noticed before how this word broke down- love words!) to another. VINEETO: I was not referring to genetics, the hardware, so to speak but to the collective software of the human condition, something that in spiritual circles is known as the Akashic Records or etheric knowledge. When a child is conditioned, parents, teachers and peers not only pass on their personal knowledge, their morals, ethics, beliefs and experiences but also impart, on a non-verbal emotional-instinctual level, the taboos, fears and rules of survival that they themselves have imbibed, going back to the beginning of humankind. Additionally, in an altered state of consciousness one can consciously access those records of various cultures and explore the ancientness of human ‘wisdom’ and experience and its instinctually-based fibre. RESPONDENT: Am I misinterpreting what you are saying? I came to this from one of your links... Richard: Okay ... let us pursue this to see where it takes us. Being born of the biologically inherited instincts genetically encoded in the germ cells of the spermatozoa and the ova, ‘I’ am – genetically – umpteen hundreds of thousands of years old ... ‘my’ origins are lost in the mists of pre-history. ‘I’ am so anciently old that ‘I’ may well have always existed ... carried along on the reproductive cell-line, over countless millennia, from generation to generation. And ‘I’ am thus passed on into an inconceivably open-ended and hereditably transmissible future. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Alan, 20 August 1999). Going by Richard’s explanation could the fears and insecurities not then be carried forward in the genes? VINEETO: Yes, the propensity for the basic human fears and insecurities is carried forward in the genes just as the propensity for the basic human aggression, nurture and desire and that’s exactly why human beings find it so unbelievable that human nature can, or should, ever be changed. But this propensity can be mitigated to the point where one is virtually free from these passions and this propensity can even be permanently eradicated. From recent gene-studies I understand that it is not only the genes, which determine what we are and ‘who’ we are but the way genes are activated. The ‘Human Epigenome Project’ is just at the beginning of mapping out this fascinating story. ‘Genes are silent unless activated. To have them is not necessarily to be under their influence’ says Jill Neilmark in her article about this topic. (http://edge.org/q2007/q07_14.html) I admit that I am an absolute layman on the topic of genes but what I understand is that whilst instinctual passions are genetically inherited in animals, the ‘self’ that they form themselves into in human animals, including all feelings and emotions, can be deleted using the human brain’s ability for intelligence and apperceptive awareness. Richard has done just that and I am determined to prove that this process is repeatable. What is deleted in this case is software, not hardware. Here is how Peter described the process from a scientific viewpoint – Peter: ‘Changing only you is eminently achievable – and scientifically verified as possible. It is possible to re-program one’s own brain from all the social programming and it is possible to evince a mutational adaptation to eliminate the instinctual passions. A bit I wrote recently explains this very point – ‘The modern scientific empirical discoveries of neuro-biology and genetics, with regard to the human brain and how it functions, have revealed two very fascinating aspects – That the brain is programmable in the same way a computer is programmable. The program is formed by physical connections or pathways between neurons, and this program is mostly formed after birth. These pathways (synapse) are also capable of being changed at any time. The old connection simply ‘dies’ for lack of use and a new one is formed. That the human brain is also pre-programmed, via a genetic code, with a set of base or instinctual operating functions, located in the primitive brain system which causes automatic thoughtless passionate reactions, primarily those of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, to be transmitted via chemical messages to various parts of the body including the neo-cortex. Physiological alterations that could eliminate this crude programming, as a biological adaptation to changed circumstances, are well documented within the animal species. The first discovery accords with the practical experience of being able to radically change one’s social identity – the program instilled since birth that consists of the morals, ethics, values and psittacisms that make up our social identity. It stands to reason that a psychological identity that is malleable to radical change is also susceptible to total elimination. The second discovery accords with the practical possibility of eliminating one’s very ‘being’ – the emotive source of the instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. This blind and senseless survival program is now well and truly redundant for many human beings and can now be safely deleted, for the human species has not only survived … it is now beginning to flourish.’ (Introduction to Actual Freedom, Actual Freedom 1). (Peter, Actual Freedom List, No. 13, 26.10.1999). * RESPONDENT: I am a little confused ... I came something you wrote about emotions, this morning, which seems to contradict what you wrote earlier. Putting it into context it is like this... [Vineeto to Respondent]: You do know, do you, that actualism is not about not having emotions, let alone outlawing them? (Vineeto, General Correspondence, No. 11, 27.12.2006). But then this from: https://www.actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/vineeto/selected-correspondence/corr-180.htm... [Gary]: Feelings are indeed where the Human Condition lives on, unchanged, in all its wretched misery and sorrow. [Vineeto]: Yes, it’s 180 degrees in the opposite direction to where we humans have searched for solutions. In the course of my exploration into what my ‘self’ and the Human Condition consist of I was amazed how many times I found ‘180 degrees opposite’ the appropriate expression. Just a few such opposites as an example: emotions – no emotions... (Vineeto, Actual Freedom List, Gary, 19.8.2000). ? VINEETO: Ok, to put all of this in context – ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’ – instinctual passions and the resultant emotions and feelings are the very substance of ‘me’. In other words, instinctual passions in humans form themselves into an identity, a ‘self’ and only when the ‘self’ disappears, emotions and passions also disappear. You can experience this in a pure consciousness experience where the ‘self’ is temporarily absent with the consequence that all emotions and passions are also absent. It is not possible to simply reject emotions, to outlaw them, as some fiction writers suggest. History shows that to try and be a stripped-down ‘self’ has resulted in a split between one’s cognitive and one’s affective faculties (with the later pushed into the unconscious) and the continuous effort of suppressing and repressing one’s existent emotions is both useless in the long run and harmful to both oneself and others. In extreme cases such suppression can result in alexithymia and/or a psychopathic condition. Instead of rejecting, suppressing and repressing one’s emotions the actualism method invites you to become aware of your emotions (including the presently unconscious ones) as and when they are happening, particularly when they are interfering with you being happy and harmless. Bringing your feelings and their embedded beliefs and patterns into the light of awareness then enables you to make a conscious choice. Richard: ‘What the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom is on about is a virtual freedom wherein the ‘good’ feelings – the affectionate and desirable emotions and passions (those that are loving and trusting) are minimised along with the ‘bad’ feelings – the hostile and invidious emotions and passions (those that are hateful and fearful) – so that one is free to be feeling good, feeling happy and harmless and feeling excellent/perfect for 99% of the time. If one deactivates the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and activates the felicitous/ innocuous feelings (happiness, delight, joie de vivre/ bonhomie, friendliness, amiability and so on) then with this freed-up affective energy, in conjunction with sensuousness (delectation, enjoyment, appreciation, relish, zest, gusto and so on), the ensuing sense of amazement, marvel and wonder can result in apperceptiveness (unmediated perception).’ (Richard, Articles, A Précis of Actual Freedom). The consequence of choosing the felicitous/ innocuous feelings is that, whilst both good and bad feelings nourish and maintain the ‘self’ (you might have noticed in yourself and others how for instance suffering and/or virtue puff up the ‘self’), the felicitous/ innocuous feelings leave ‘me’ unemployed. When everything is all right and a delight to behold, there is nothing for ‘me’ to do or fuss about and ‘I’ incrementally wither away to the point where I am able to live virtually free from malice and sorrow. The final step comes when ‘I’ expire and with ‘me’ all instinctual passions, emotions and feelings disappear forever. VINEETO: How did you find Richard’s Journal? Have you given up after the first chapter because it is so dense and choc-a-block full with unknown words? RESPONDENT: I am enjoying reading his journal and I am still at it, as I am reading different books at the same time. VINEETO: Just a suggestion – because Actual Freedom lies 180 degrees opposite to all spiritual beliefs, as you might have understood from your meeting with Richard – it is definitely less confusing to read Richard’s Journal by itself, without mixing it with other writings. Words might look similar – and being spiritually conditioned one easily translates Richard’s words into meaning something spiritual. After all, the spiritual world is all one knows – with the rare exceptions of a pure consciousness experience. To interpret the actual into something ethereal, supernatural or spiritual would be missing the point completely. Personally I had to read the journal, particularly certain paragraphs and passages, many times over until I got my first glimpses of the non-spiritual actual and down-to-earth nature of what Richard is saying. Further I had long discussions with Peter about it, doing a reality check by comparing my understanding and opinion with his. Now it all looks obvious and transparent, but back in my spiritual days, some of Richard’s words fitted my beliefs, convictions, feelings and intuition, and some just didn’t make sense until I questioned all of my own beliefs, one after the other... The story of what happened when I popped through the thick clouds of beliefs and saw the actual world for the first time, you will find in Vineeto’s Bit of Peter’s Journal (pg.193ff, A Bit of Vineeto). RESPONDENT: Why don’t you just tell us how to experience this freedom that you talk about. How to live life in freedom 24 hours a day? You keep on talking about everything but you never share how we, poor ignorant sannyasins can also live in this ‘third alternative’ realm. Isn’t it not the time that you once and for all share the ‘how’ to this thing you are always talking about? VINEETO: I am glad you asked. Also you say: RESPONDENT: A real intelligent person would not have any beliefs. He would be a ‘seeker’ and at the same time rely on his own understanding and not believe. VINEETO: I agree fully with your understanding that it is very good to question all the beliefs that one has. It is the first and most important step to experience the actual world, which is here all the time, only hidden under all the concepts, emotions and beliefs we have piled on top of it. For instance, the moon was for Mr. Gurdjieff not just the piece of rock circling the earth, but the place where all souls would go after death. How could he see the moon as the big piece of rock and grey sand that it factually is? And freedom is a ‘boots and all’ adventure, it is about turning one’s head inside out and upside down, it is re-wiring one’s brain. Slowly, slowly you come to question everything you have ever learned, and on the way you are finding out the extent of what you have been taught! So many ideas and ‘truths’ I had taken for granted, some of which have come with the mother’s milk, or school-teachers, or other ‘respectable’ authorities, and then these ideas and ‘truths’ would, with relentless investigation, turn out to be mere assumptions, beliefs, opinions and not at all facts. So you can brace yourself for many a surprise and, as I say, the safe carpet under your feet will disappear many times. Yes, where to start! The way Peter started, after he understood that Richard had something valuable to offer – he went every day, for six month, and sat in Richard’s lounge-room to absorb this so strange, unheard-of, and bewildering way to see and experience the world. He learned from the spoken word, but he also read Richard’s journal at least a dozen times. There is definitely not a transmission happening, no pass on of ‘energy’. It is possible to understand the flavour of this actual world by words, and there are quite a lot of them available. Personal presence is not at all required – a remarkable difference to the spiritual transmission of ‘Wisdom’. I hung out with Peter, I had more objections and doubts at the start – being a devout sannyasin then – but as I was exposed to Peter’s ravings day by day, some of the bewildering new understandings would stick, some would make sense and then – the first successes became apparent from investigating into my psyche, my behaviour, my emotions... To get a grip on what this actual world outside of beliefs and instincts is about, you can read. Read and read and re-read. Until something in your brain will start shifting, clicking, doubting the old, understanding the ‘here’, and then you will start understanding and sometimes experience for yourself what Richard means by ‘actual’ – actually being here. Whenever your head starts fuming, remember that you are tackling 40 or more years of conditioning, of believing things the way everyone does, of feelings, intuition and passion. And not only are you investigating your own behaviour and conditioning, but also the whole of the Human Condition, which means, everything everybody has believed up to now, the whole of Humanity. It is not a small thing we do. It is a true pioneer’s job, the adventure of a lifetime. One of the first to climb the Mount Everest of evolving into a new species – so to speak, a species without malice and sorrow, a species of happy and harmless human beings. The first thing I had to do after 17 years of spiritual conditioning was to switch my brain back on. I delighted in using my intelligence again, started doubting the old, used scrutiny and discrimination to slowly question everything that I had taken for granted wisdom. What a gullible person I had been, you could have told me any fairy-story of astrology and invisible energies, channelling and chakras, and I was ready to believe it all! Investigating and using my intelligence again, I felt like being back in High school or University, where intellect and intelligence are being trained, where it was o.k. to think, where I learned about facts – though even many of those so-called facts later turned out to be mere assumptions, disguised as scientific theories. I re-discovered the joy of discrimination, of relying on myself instead of authority, of using ‘silly’ and ‘sensible’ instead of moralistic appraisals. And then I encountered fear – fear to leave the familiar fold – my peers, my sannyasin friends and acquaintances, the women’s club with their particular beliefs and feelings, family-sentiments, love-dreams. Most of all, I was fearful to question the authority of Osho, of God, of the divine plan behind it all, and the belief in authority as such. Suddenly I had to realize and acknowledge that I am alone, standing on my own two feet, nobody is there who knows ‘the truth’ and no all-caring and all-powerful ‘Existence’ is ‘taking care of me’. Wow, what a bummer – and then, what a freedom. I can actually do what I want, think sensibly, take care of myself without the concept of any Almighty God and enjoy life, even if everybody else chooses to be miserable for a million and one reason. If you think that the choice where to start with un-conditioning yourself is too big, you can start with something simple like the weather. Weather is something so obviously outside of our control, and yet almost everyone I meet complains about the weather. What a delight, when it is blue sky with vivid colours, what a delight when it rains, wetting the ground, tinkering raindrops on the roof. If the weather annoys you, there is something to look at, maybe it is some emotion surfacing about something completely unrelated to the weather or some conviction being tickled that makes you wobble. How am I experiencing this moment of being alive? This is the core sentence and the method to all of Richard’s discoveries, the key to the actual world. With this sentence you can take apart the whole of your psyche, bit by bit, digging deeper and deeper into your unconscious. Whenever you are not happy now, there is something to look at. And every moment not happy, or not investigating into the reasons of unhappiness, is a wasted moment. There is only now, only this moment; yesterday is but a memory, tomorrow but a fantasy. If I waste this moment of being alive, because I am complaining about something, or I am worried or half-hearted, it is a wasted moment of my life. It is so wonderfully simple, so obvious – and yet, with all our conditioning, beliefs, emotions and instincts in action, it is very difficult to understand and actualize. But now, with this method, you can examine and investigate everything that keeps you from being happy now. Richard has written a whole chapter about this vital issue of ‘This Moment of Being Alive’. This method brings you back into this moment of being alive, there is no other moment to be experienced. If you don’t experience this moment as perfect, then this is the moment to apply change. It sounds so simple, but hardly anybody ever does it. VINEETO: How am I experiencing this moment of being alive? This is the core sentence and the method to all of Richard’s discoveries, the key to the actual world. With this sentence you can take apart the whole of your psyche, bit by bit, digging deeper and deeper into your unconscious. Whenever you are not happy now, there is something to look at. And every moment not happy, or not investigating into the reasons of unhappiness, is a wasted moment. There is only now, only this moment; yesterday is but a memory, tomorrow but a fantasy. If I waste this moment of being alive, because I am complaining about something, or I am worried or half-hearted, it is a wasted moment of my life. It is so wonderfully simple, so obvious – and yet, with all our conditioning, beliefs, emotions and instincts in action, it is very difficult to understand and actualize. But now, with this method, you can examine and investigate everything that keeps you from being happy now. RESPONDENT: There’s nothing new under the sun. VINEETO: Well, if this is not new for you, tell me, what are your discoveries when you apply this method, every day, each time you are not happy, each time you are proud, sarcastic, annoyed, bored, irritated, sad, resigned, cynical, resigned or desperate? If that method is all too well known to you, tell me what success you had with it in your life. Are you happy and harmless, every day, whatever the circumstances? Do you live with your woman in peace, harmony and equity all day long, day-in, day-out? And, if it is not new, and you apply it with success, why do object to what I say? I have never come across such a radical and successful method before that can clean you up completely from any identity whatsoever. Pursuing this method sincerely and relentless one can rid oneself completely of the psychological and psychic entity inside of oneself. I assume that’s why so many people object – it works. It has worked for me, and I am nobody special. I am an ordinary person, a down to earth, normal, flesh and blood human being, and if I can do it, anybody can do it who wants to take the challenge. You said in your mail to Peter the other day, ‘for myself the limit is that that masters shouldn’t be dead for more than 50 years’ . What do you do with the dead masters then? Bury them? Delete them? Why should their guidance be as old as 50 years, and what’s the need for any authority at all? Why not rely on your own sensibility and sensate experience of this moment of being alive? After all, it is the only moment you can experience being alive. VINEETO: Yes, I can. I appreciate your scrutiny. RESPONDENT: Why? VINEETO: Why scrutiny? Scrutiny has been one of the main tools to make me free. Scrutinizing every so-called fact for its factuality, every belief for its validity – which I always found lacking – and scrutinizing every emotion that went on in my head or my heart. Once I had understood that it is ‘I’ who is in the road, my ego in the head and my soul in the heart, I started to scrutinize whenever emotions happened or beliefs surfaced. Underlying both emotions and beliefs I found the instincts, in-built and innate in me and every other human being. To become free of those beliefs I had to examine them thoroughly, study how they are expressed, and how they are generally accepted in the moral system, the spiritual belief-system and amongst scientists. Everybody believes you cannot change human nature. Well, I know you can change it – you can even get rid of instincts. And it was scrutiny that brought me to that freedom. The second reason why I appreciate your scrutiny is because we are discussing about facts, not feelings. In the ‘feeling world’ everybody is in their private world, but with facts as a basis communication and common sense are possible. RESPONDENT: Yes, scientists may work with facts because they are working with the visible, the material, the measurable. The definitions found in dictionaries refers to that and to the commonly relied upon as truths, those are formed by the way people have been living – commonly unconsciously. The definitions are not transferable to the inner world, the individual world. VINEETO: Exactly, the definitions are not transferable to the inner world, because the inner world is a psychic construct, woven by the belief systems of millions of people, yet ‘felt’ differently by everybody. Everyone has their individual dream of their inner world – and it has nothing to do with facts. Millions of Catholics believe in Jesus, maybe half of them believe in Mother Mary’s immaculate conception, but it is still their collective belief built upon a romantic fantasy. Immaculate conception is a factual impossibility. Before I applied scrutiny I did believe almost everything that people would tell me: life after death, reincarnation, the power of coloured waters, the workings of chakras, the magic of stars, mysterious and miraculous healings, karmic causes for disease, the truth of Tarot, the existence of channelled entities, you name it. But most wars are fought over beliefs, not over food and plain physical survival. It is this inner individual world that causes fights and killing, famine and abuse. Just now the fundamental Hindus have decided to attack the Indian Christians – one man’s God is evil to another – a conviction that resides in their ‘inner individual world’. VINEETO: When I describe the actual sensual experience of the world around me and when I talk about eliminating beliefs and emotions in order to be capable of such pure experiencing the actual, I am talking about the third alternative – tackling the root cause of the problem, not just transcending it. This means, eliminating the Human Condition in you, not only dis-identifying from the duality of the good and bad of the ‘normal’ world. It also means eliminating the spiritual duality of ‘being the watcher’ to a supposedly ‘illusory world’. The Third Alternative removes everything that is preventing one from experiencing the purity and perfection of the actual world, which is already happening. Only because we are wearing grey-coloured or rose-coloured glasses because of our conditioning, feelings, beliefs and instincts we are unable to see it. RESPONDENT: I find the colours you repaint the past with to be only yours. For me they are not valid as I perceive the past with my own mind’s filter. As long as I find that you holding up a false past to compare your new third way to, I find your whole story to be contaminated with a false past. If you were able to write from a clear space without telling me everything I have experienced in the past is a shit brown colour... then perhaps... But as it is, your notion that you have eliminated all dualities is just another falsehood ... because you keep making the same old comparisons in every paragraph you write. Your third way seems nothing more than another illusion created by a tense mind. VINEETO: When I took Sannyas I had been raised and conditioned as a catholic middle-class German. In order to understand Osho I had to at least question those religious and social conditionings. But I was ready to do so, because life wasn’t all that wonderful, burdened as I was with those conditionings. I attempted to leave the ‘normal’ world of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behind and entered the ‘spiritual’ world of ‘good dharma’ and ‘bad karma’. At that time, I could have blamed Osho for ‘telling me everything I have experienced in the past is a shit brown colour’. But my search was for freedom and I was willing to investigate what other people had told me to be the truth. With Actual Freedom a second de-conditioning took place, a spiritual de-conditioning. And again, I was ready for it, because after all those years of sincere effort my search did not show the results I had been aiming for. This second de-conditioning was much more radical and went far deeper than the first, it is going to eliminate all of me , ego and soul, emotions and beliefs, instincts and ‘spiritual achievements’. It leaves me as this physical body with its senses, free to delight in this pure, perfect and infinite universe as a sensate and reflective flesh-and-blood human being. Nothing more, nothing less. Actual Freedom provides a simple and effective method to achieving and is available for everybody who wishes to go for the best – presupposing that you are discontent with your life as it is now. VINEETO: (...) And then you wrote about your magic experience on the veggie farm at the Ranch: RESPONDENT: Then I heard a small voice in my head say to me – there is no problem, O.K., you are leaving, but since you are here for only another afternoon why don’t you just let go of this mind of yours that you know is making you so miserable, you can have it back at 5 o’clock when you leave, and you can just enjoy this crazy outing. Sounded very logical, so I agreed. Immediately, I was in bliss. Suddenly, everywhere was beauty and magic. It took me the whole time we were out in that field for me to plant just one artichoke. VINEETO: You know, this is exactly what I mean, when I use the method of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Each time I ask that question, it becomes obvious that there is only this moment, and if I am not happy now, I am wasting this moment of being alive. And out of that understanding I come back here, into this moment of being alive, in its actuality, abundance, magic, perfection and purity. Or I tackle what stops me from being here, what makes me unhappy, angry, sorrowful, malicious, fearful or desperate – and sort myself out, such that I get back here. The magic is, it works each time. Peter described it like this: Peter: Sometimes, seeing through some part of ‘me’ as a mere belief or instinctual pattern would come as a flash of realisation, sometimes as a slow painful dawning, which I would fight tooth and nail, reluctant to even acknowledge, let alone throw out. But gradually I could notice the psychological entity becoming thinner, actually weakening its hold over me. It then became apparent to me that I was indeed fixing myself up as much as ‘I’ could! (Peter’s Journal, Intelligence). RESPONDENT: Most awakenings come out of pain, out of crisis. Were it not for suffering, how would we ever know anything was wrong? Like when there’s a splinter in your foot, you know from the pain that it needs to be removed. In this case, it is natural to be open to a remedy. Yet, when suffering is our life, we are less open to examine its cause. Somehow in the midst of my suicide crisis, I opened and trusted enough to doubt what I thought was true, my own thinking, my conditioned self. VINEETO: Yes, that is my experience too, in the midst of the crisis, I gathered enough momentum to question everything I had believed before, and broke through to the actual world, which becomes apparent when we stop piling ideas and beliefs on what we experience. We come our senses both literally and figuratively. Very scary – and very magical. But in my experience it is not the pain that triggers the break-through, but having had enough of it and desperately wanting to find a way out of that pain. There are also people who are so much in love with their pain, they will never have an ‘awakening’, as you call it, or a break out of one’s dearly held belief structure. It needs a certain sensibility to question both the inevitability of the pain and the ‘truth’ of one’s present situation. RESPONDENT: Osho says: meditation and love go hand in hand. Is it not the same as what you guys have been saying? Meditation defined as aliveness, watchfulness, investigation, paying attention to one’s feelings. VINEETO: When you are trying to fit what we say into what Osho said you will miss the point entirely. In the last days I have talked to two old girlfriends, both enthusiastically and devotedly on the spiritual path, and I have tried to tell them about my findings and experiences. It was bewildering to see how they both said it was all the same like the spiritual. It leaves me at a loss what words to use. But, I will try again – Actual freedom is 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Meditation is based on the watcher. You watch your thoughts and feelings in order to rise above them, to dis-identify from them, which in the end amounts to going somewhere else, where you are not the body, not the mind, not the emotion. You are to identify with the watcher and thus move away from the source of your troubles, your body and brain inflicted with the emotions and instincts of the Human Condition. If you persist and identify with the watcher strongly enough, you become the watcher and simply ‘watch’ your body doing its number. Nothing is changed in the Human Condition except ‘you’ become someone other than this flesh and blood body. Then you become the ‘soul’ (the heart), and maybe you even become so deluded as to flip into an altered state of consciousness, aka enlightenment. Actual Freedom is firmly based on this flesh and blood body with its physical senses as the only actuality there is. Everything that not perceivable by the physical senses is feeling and imagination, deeply ingrained in our genetic heritage and our socially absorbed psyche, but nevertheless imagination and as such non-actual. The aim of the path to actual freedom is to come out of the psychic and psychological structure of the ‘real’ world, the instinctual passions, emotions and beliefs, and step into the actual, sensate and sensual world of the physical universe, where everything is already here, perfect, magical and pure. In order to come out of the real world one needs to investigate into the ‘hooks’ that keep pulling one back into misery, malice and fear – and investigate and eliminate them whenever they appear. That is done by running the question: ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Then everything that is preventing you from feeling good will be examined and traced to its root. Usually, when examining an emotion, the first thing I found was a certain concept. By questioning the validity of it and the effects that this idea had in my life, I often recognised that it fitted a general, collective belief-system. Questioning the collective belief proved a bit more scary. But it is only fear that prevented me from acknowledging the belief as belief and the facts as facts. Acknowledging the facts brought me back to here, back to my senses. For instance, survival fear would blink red lights when I decided to quit working with my former peer-group. Examining the facts revealed that I could easily survive without the income from that particular job. But the instinctual fear blurred my view and made it great detective work to come to a sensible evaluation. I had to see the instinct in its functioning in order to not be driven by it. * RESPONDENT: On a spiritual path a sub-personality called ‘watcher’ is often created. But doesn’t one need to create a sub-personality called an ‘investigator’ to investigate all emotions, instincts and beliefs ? VINEETO: No, the ‘watcher’ is not a created sub-personality. The ‘watcher’ is a created identity to eventually replace the ‘normal’ identity so one can become the Divine, ‘the Whole’, ‘That’. You don’t need a sub-personality to investigate. You simply investigate. You apply ‘sensible’ and ‘silly’ instead of ‘feeling right’ or ‘feeling wrong’. It may happen in the course of investigating that you identify yourself as the investigator – as I have done for a while – but I used it, riding on the thrill of being the ‘discoverer’. But ruthlessly questioning every emotion and belief, this part of the affective identity was, in due course, also discovered and eliminated. But first things first. RESPONDENT: Also, I would like to know how you do it in practice. My mind is so creative that it is willing to create emotions, problems, feelings, etc. forever... especially when I start looking for them, trying to sort them out and make sense out of them. It is like a self psychoanalysis. Let’s say you feel a bit anxious. You recognize it and see that you don’t feel that you perform well at work. So, you are anxious because of that. Now, you analyse why you don’t perform well at work and there are several reasons: you don’t like it so much but you need the money and like the life stability it provides; you feel somewhat depressed because of the gloomy weather, you have got a nasty common cold and you feel that everything is gray and boring. VINEETO: Yes, it is like self-psychoanalysis but with the aim of eliminating the psyche, not, as traditional therapy does, ‘healing’ the psyche and shuffling the instinctual passions around a bit. I used to compare it with moving furniture on the sinking Titanic. In the process, all the emotions and beliefs of the Human Condition come in to scare you like ghosts. How dare you question your own ‘self’! But in persisting and taking one step at the time, you find that slowly, slowly you start making sense, first of one bad mood, then another and the success of a bit more freedom each time gives you the courage and strength to move on. Taking your example gloomy weather – weather is something so obviously outside of our control, and yet almost everyone I meet complains about the weather. What a delight, when it is blue sky with vivid colours, what a delight when it rains, wetting the ground, tinkering on the roof. If the weather annoys you, there is something to look at, maybe it is some emotion surfacing about something completely unrelated to the weather or some dearly-held conviction being tickled that makes you wobble. When you stick with one issue until you found its core-belief – it might take days – you will experience that it loses its grip, that you can see the implications and ramifications. A bit more freedom from being affected by the weather is gained ... a bit more happiness. RESPONDENT: What is the next step you do? Stay with your feelings no matter how long they last. The common cold will be gone, you will get an interesting project eventually at work and good sex at home? Do you turn on TV and enjoy a movie, read a book? Do you try to change your life (might no be good idea if in bad mood). VINEETO: Well, it is up to you. I usually stuck with one issue until I gained more clarity. Some issues were too complex, I had to whittle away the surrounding emotions and beliefs first. But in the end I knew that if I don’t tackle the subject now when its happening, it will be back in due time. So why not do it now? But it is your life, your investigation, your pace. Peter and I have written in Peter’s Journal about how we tackled our issues – which are more or less similar to everybody, as they are all part of the Human Condition. (‘Intelligence’ is a good chapter for a description of his investigations). But the order and importance of the issues are most likely to be different for everyone. Some days you might wonder why you even dared to question the ‘Tried and True’, or one could call it the ‘Tried and Failed’, what turmoil of questions you let yourself into. On other days you may be dancing because you finally found the root-cause for your unease at work. It’s all a thrilling enterprise, the adventure of a lifetime. It is such a fascinating thing to un-wire one’s own brain and to challenge the belief that ‘Human Nature cannot be changed’. It is possible. It can be changed. RESPONDENT: Or is it that because your main project in life is self investigation, you don’t mind self investigation no matter how many black clouds are coming your way? You remember a PCE as a reference point which lets you endure? Or maybe is it like you recognize how precious this life is and enjoy the journey from nothing to nothing? VINEETO: You asked what kept me going? Yes, the first and the following peak-experiences were very important. I understood from these experiences that it is ‘me’ who is in the road, all of ‘me’. And so I set out to dismantle ‘me’, made up of beliefs, emotions and instincts. I developed a fine nose for what is ‘me’ and what is simply the body and its senses, what is conditioning and what is the brain’s intelligence and apperception. And I mistrusted every ‘believing’, every ‘feeling’. I dusted my brain off, got it out of the cupboard where it had been put away as the ‘mind’ – in spiritual circles responsible for all evil – and I started to use my discriminating and inquiring capacity to discover the actual facts under the rubbish heap of ‘gut-feelings’, intuition, ‘truths’ or general accepted conviction. Sure, it raised a great deal of fear to strike off on my own from the group that I ‘believed’ and ‘felt’ I belonged to. But with every discovered fact my confidence grew, with every dismantled belief my dependency on others diminished, morals were replaced by ‘silly’ and ‘sensible’ and I could use my own intelligence to make that choice. Investigation and an actual freedom are my main project in life. It is the only sensible thing to do with my life. I became vitally concerned with my own happiness and eliminating malice in me. The PCE as the reference point showed me how easy and perfect it is, so why not have it 24 hours a day, every day? And since it is only this moment that I can experience the delight of being alive, it would be a waste of time not to experience the perfection of this moment. I have only this moment – it is as precious as anything. Without an after-life to look forward to or worry about, I have maybe 30 more years and then that’s it. I didn’t want to waste those 30 years in misery, doubt, depression, jealousy, hate or even a bad mood. That’s what kept me going through all the dark clouds of fear, doubt or laziness. It is not a journey from nothing to nothing – it is a journey from misery to delight, from malice to harmlessness, from identity to not being separate, from ‘self’ to freedom. RESPONDENT: We are all ‘wounded children’ who react to different situations based on our own early life trauma. The fears of pressure and expectation, of rejection and abandonment, of being ignored or misunderstood as children. VINEETO: What you say does not really explain everything as to where these fears come from. Psychologist and psychoanalysts have not completely understood the fact that human beings are born with instincts, the same instincts that animals are equipped with to secure survival in the wild. Many psychs believe that children are born as ‘Tabula Rasa’, an empty sheet of paper to be written on by society. But if you watch babies and small children, they are not innocent at all. They have greed and malice already in them, erupting at different occasions – displaying our animal heritage. These survival instincts consist basically of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Christians call them original sin, the East sees it as ‘karma’. These instinctual passions are being formed, conditioned, interpreted and channelled according to different societies through the usual conditioning of childhood and adolescence. The self is being formed. Up to now everybody has believed that we cannot get rid of our instincts, that they are ‘hardware’. The only solution on offer has been to transcend one’s body-mind and emerge into an ethereal state of love, bliss and maybe enlightenment. Richard discovered that we can actually eliminate our instincts, not only transcend them. The difference is that neither body nor the intelligent part of the brain have to be discarded or transcended, but we simply clean ourselves from our software – the animal instincts and the sense of self. It is now possible to live in the world, with all the pleasures the senses can provide, but without fear, aggression, nurture and desire. The method is to question not only what we call ego, but also our emotions, beliefs and instinctual reactions, trace them down to their roots and understand their workings. The tricky bit is that we are so used to seeing everything through the eyes and context of the self, this separate entity inside the body. That’s where the peak-experience becomes important. Since it is a completely new and radically different approach and 180 degrees opposite spiritual beliefs, I give you Richard’s definition of a peak-experience: Richard: pure consciousness experience (PCE) –– A PCE is when one’s sense of identity temporarily vacates the throne and apperception occurs. Apperception is the mind’s perception of itself … it is a pure awareness . Normally the mind perceives through the senses and sorts the data received according to its predilection; but the mind itself remains unperceived ... it is taken to be unknowable. Apperception is when the ‘thinker’ and the ‘feeler’ is not and an unmediated awareness occurs. The pure consciousness experience is as if one has eyes in the back of one’s head; there is a three hundred and sixty degree awareness and all is self-evidently clear. This is knowing by direct experience, unmoderated by any ‘self ’ whatsoever. One is able to see that ‘I’ and ‘me’ have been standing in the way of the perfection and purity that is the essential character of this moment of being here becoming apparent. Here a solid and irrefutable native intelligence can operate freely because the ‘thinker’ and the ‘feeler’ is in abeyance. One is the universe ’s experience of itself as a human being ... after all, the very stuff this body is made of is the very stuff of the universe. There is no ‘outside’ to the perfection of the universe to come from; one only thought and felt that one was a separate identity. Apperception is something that brings the facticity born out of a direct experience of the actual . Then what one is (‘what’ not ‘who’) is these sense organs in operation: this seeing is me, this hearing is me, this tasting is me, this touching is me, this smelling is me, and this thinking is me. Whereas ‘I’, the identity, am inside the body : looking out through ‘my’ eyes as if looking out through a window, listening through ‘my’ ears as if they were microphones, tasting through ‘my’ tongue, touching through ‘my’ skin, smelling through ‘my’ nose, and thinking through ‘my’ brain. Of course ‘I’ must feel isolated, alienated, alone and lonely, for ‘I’ am cut off from the magnificence of the actual world – the world as-it-is – by ‘my’ very presence. (Actual Freedom Library, PCE). Relying on the confidence of the peak-experience it is possible to start and question one’s beliefs and determine the facts, distinguish silly and sensible and and dig into one’s conditioning. VINEETO to No. 12: ‘The spiritual practice of ‘awareness’ only shifts one’s identity to the ‘watcher’, a newly created spiritual identity. When those ‘transcended’ emotions and instincts return because the watcher wasn’t watchful enough, they are raging in full force. Instincts are not being eliminated by transcendence, not even reduced, they are only put aside through dis-identification. No, not witness – eliminate, remove, extinguish. There is a big difference. Witnessing creates a new entity, the ‘watcher’. One is to identify with and become the ‘watcher’ and dismiss or transcend the rest as imaginary. Body-mind, emotion, thought and senses, as well as the physical world, are considered an illusion, while Consciousness is proclaimed to be one’s true nature.’ RESPONDENT: You’re saying eliminate, how do you apply that in practice? Please tell me more about your approach. VINEETO: Where have you been? In many of our posts Peter and I have been talking about eliminating emotions and very often described how we did it. I remember your last mail to Peter where you said: RESPONDENT: Until now your messages are not making my heart sing. Are you perhaps ‘trying’ too hard? VINEETO: I don’t think that this letter will make your heart sing, because it is the ‘heart’, the ‘feeling being’, that inhibits experiencing the perfection and purity of the actual world. It is the ‘affective being’ that interprets what is actual with a wide range of emotional responses. Eliminating emotions won’t make your heart sing, it will silence it forever. No longer will you feel sad, desperate, lonely, frightened, melancholic, compassionate (i.e. suffering together), malicious, resentful, insulted, hopeful, jealous, angry, anxious or hateful. These emotions and instinctual passions will be replaced by something else, something far superior. Pristine purity, perfection and the delight of heightened senses – a smorgasbord of tastes, a cacophony of sounds, a magic range of vivid colours and movements, an abundance of smells. Without ‘self’ you will be able to see and treat other people as your fellow human beings – benevolent and beneficent. Now to your question: ‘How do you apply that in practice?’ First of all, you have to be a seeker and an investigator and not a believer or a follower. Then, I had to acknowledge the fact that my emotions are ‘me’ and by eliminating my emotions I am eliminating the very essence of ‘me’. So this recipe for eliminating emotions and instincts is, in fact, a recipe for the self-immolation of the psychological and psychic entity inside of you. Peter gave a very descriptive report in his journal of how he did it: Peter: ‘Broadly, what emerged that I could relate to was that I, as a human being, had been programmed since birth with a set of beliefs, which formed my social identity, and that by identifying, challenging and investigating these beliefs they could be eliminated. Further, I had come into the world pre-programmed with a set of instinctual passions, and these instinctual passions too could be similarly eliminated. The ‘I’ that I think I am and that I feel I am, that troublesome psychological and psychic entity, was actually nothing more than the sum total of these beliefs and instinctual passions! And the whole package could be got rid of! Not transcended as in the spiritual world, but actually annihilated. It sounded good to me … if a touch scary. The essential method was to undertake a total investigation into anything that was preventing me from being happy and harmless now – after all, the point of living is to be happy and harmless now, not at some time in the future, or at some time in the past. The question to ask myself was, ‘How do I experience this moment of being alive?’ Now is, after all, the only time I can experience being happy. Any emotion such as anger, frustration or boredom that is preventing my happiness now, has to be traced back to its cause – the exact incident, thought, expectation or disappointment. At the root of this emotion is inevitably found a belief or an instinctual passion. The ruthless challenging, exposing and understanding of these beliefs and instinctual passions actually weakens their influence on my thoughts and behaviour. The process, if followed diligently and obsessively, will ultimately cause the beliefs to disappear completely and the instinctual passions to be greatly minimized. The idea, of course, is to eliminate the cause of my unhappiness, ‘me’, so that I can experience life at the optimum, here, now. It soon presents success incrementally, as freedom from these beliefs and instinctual passions will indeed inevitably result in increased peace and harmony for myself and in my relating with those around me. The method does bring up fear and resistance, because one is dismantling one’s very ‘self’, those very beliefs one holds so dearly. It sounds so simple, but most people who had talked to Richard were not even willing to take a small step along the way. Most people would seemingly like their life to be better, but faced with the prospect of actually having to do something themselves, or having to change the way they are, they soon turned away, only to re-run the ‘tried and failed’ methods. Of course, the major fear is that it will work and the identity will go in toto! For me, I just figured that I had ‘nothing left to lose’; it was either a slow, miserable, painful, death-like life or a quick death of what I saw as the problem – the ‘self’ or ‘psychological and psychic entity’ within.’ (Peter’s Journal ‘Introduction’). The core sentence and the key method to eliminating emotions is to ask oneself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ With this sentence you can take apart the whole of your psyche, bit by bit, digging deeper and deeper into your unconscious. Whenever you are not happy now, there is something to look at. And every moment not being happy, or not investigating into the reasons of unhappiness, is a wasted moment. There is only now, there is only this moment, yesterday is but a memory, tomorrow but a fantasy. If I waste this moment of being alive, because I am complaining about something, or because I am worried or half-hearted, it is a wasted moment of my life. This method is so wonderfully simple, so obvious when you start applying it – and yet, with all our conditioning, beliefs, instinctual passions and emotions in action, it is very difficult to comprehend and actualize. But applying this method diligently and persistently, you can examine and investigate everything that keeps you from being happy now. If you are interested, there is a detailed description on this URL: (Richard, Articles, This Moment of Being Alive). Richard gives a wonderful description of the time when the seeking stops and one arrives at one’s destiny: Richard: The day finally dawns where the definitive moment of being here, right now, conclusively arrives; something irrevocable takes place and every thing and every body and every event is different, somehow, although the same physically; something immutable occurs and every thing and every body and every event is all-of-a-sudden undeniably actual, in and of itself, as a fact; something irreversible happens and an immaculate perfection and a pristine purity permeates every thing and every body and every event; something has changed forever, although it is as if nothing has happened, except that the entire world is a magical fairytale-like playground full of incredible gladness and a delight which is never-ending. ‘My’ demise was as fictitious as ‘my’ apparent presence. I have always been here, I realize, that ‘I’ only imagined that ‘I’ existed. It was all an emotional play in a fertile imagination ... which was, however, fuelled by an actual hormonal substance triggered off from within the brain-stem. (Richard’s Journal, Article 18, edited). RESPONDENT: (...) Does, what you call ‘elimination’, happen without effort, or is it something that has to be ‘done’? VINEETO: While I am taking a particular emotion or belief apart, digging deeper and deeper into its root cause, something is ‘done’, effort is applied. I am using my brain, contemplating, investigating, searching, daring, asking, questioning, doubting, until I get to the bottom of that particular issue. It is part of ‘me’, an alien, but fiercely defended, entity inside my body, for ‘I’ am nothing but my feelings, emotions, beliefs and instinctual passions. Hence ‘I’ will do everything to obstruct this questioning, this investigating and this eliminating, for ‘I’ am terribly afraid to die. To investigate in spite of that fear requires courage, effort and a burning intent. Only after I have dug deeply into that issue, exposed it to the light of awareness and understanding, it will disappear ‘without effort’, never to rear its ugly head again. At the same time, removing the filtering veils of beliefs and fears, my senses become heightened, I am more here and less in fear, love, hope, churning emotions or in remote fairy-worlds. I am on this planet, on the chair, the rain pouring on the leaves sounds deliciously in my ears, the fridge is humming, my toes curling in delight. Life is eminently easy and wonder-ful, magically abundant and carefree. Once all discoveries are made, all beliefs dismantled, all instincts laid bare, they go up in smoke and ‘I’ will die the illusory death that ends the existence of the ‘self’. To investigate into the survival instincts of the ‘self’ is effort, living in this actual world is utterly effortless, an ongoing delight.
Vineeto’s Selected Correspondence | Library – How to Become Free
Actualism Homepage Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997- . All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer and Use Restrictions and Guarantee of Authenticity