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 Living Together Actualism Homepage RESPONDENT: 2. You are moments away from leaving your spouse after a long, deep relationship. The spouse announces that she has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Do you stay to help her (familial, genetic and social programming), or do you leave as planned in order to be happy? VINEETO: Generally speaking, as a practicing actualist I am happy and harmless regardless of what situation I am living in. Being virtually free from the human condition, I am no longer bound by morals and ethics – there is no such thing as actual-freedom-morals or ethics – nor am I driven by instinctual passions and, as such, whatever I do is without malice and sorrow. Morals and ethics only exist because of the need to keep the lid on the selfish instinctual passions and when these passions no longer rule the roost I am able to make a sensible decision about what is appropriate and best for everyone in the situation, me included. The second thing to consider is that, as an actualist, I investigate all my emotions that inevitably come up when relating to other people, the ‘bad’ emotions like greed, anger, withdrawal, fear and hate as well as the ‘good’ emotions like love, beauty, trust, hope and faith. When there is neither love nor hate, neither fear nor trust, neither despair nor hope clouding my perception then it is inevitable that no matter who I live with I will live with the person, or persons, in utter peace and harmony. RESPONDENT: Maybe these are trite examples, but they are in the real world. Thanks. VINEETO: Actualism is about living in the world as it is with people as they are. I am not intending to change other people – or the world – but I whittle away at removing what prevents me from being happy and harmless right here, right now. * RESPONDENT to Gary: I’m starting to realize that AF presents a very radical shift, despite its apparent simplicity. I was talking with my wife, who is an intelligent person, about some of the genetic and cultural programs running in our brains and was surprised at how resistant she was to exploring their nature. While she admitted that they existed, she didn’t believe they could be modified, and more importantly, believed they were valuable, if not a key component of her very self. To lose them would be to lose her ‘self’. That’s scary. VINEETO: In my explorations I found that my social conditioning as a woman was deeply connected to the instinctual female role of a child-bearer and nest-maker. Women are encouraged to be more emotional while men are expected to be successful hunters and providers in the world for which one needs to use brawns and brains more than feelings and emotions. Consequently, expressing feelings and knowing how to put them to use was my most valuable asset for yielding power over others in order to get what I wanted, particularly in my relationships with men. But apart from being a power-tool, feelings were also the main ingredient of my identity as a woman – ‘I’ am first and foremost my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’. Only because I was deeply fed up with the havoc that my feelings created in my life and the life of others around me, was I able to see the sense in questioning all of my feelings – because examining my feelings is a tangible step to being able to be intimate with all of my fellow human beings regardless of their gender. It’s a lonely business being trapped on either side of the gender divide. RESPONDENT: The constant state of tension brought by the animal hunger of the male for the female, and the female’s control of that situation, has long been a painful place for me. VINEETO: I can tell you that ‘the female’s control of that situation’ is only perceived as such on the male’s end. For instance, the whole movement of women’s liberation was born of the idea that the men had control over the women’s lives. In other words, each side in the battle of the sexes sees the other side as being the controller, being more dominant, being more manipulative, being unable to understand the other, and so on. The idea that someone else is in control of my life is in itself part of the automatic instinctual battle for power between the sexes and the first step to become free of feeling controlled and being controlled was for me to admit that, and find out how, I was driven by my own instinctual passions and shackled by my own imbibed social identity of being a woman. The more I discovered that the cards were distributed equally, i.e. equally restrictive for both genders, the more my defensiveness and my idea of being a victim dropped and I was then able to explore precisely what convictions and conventions, roles and rules I had taken on board about what it is supposed to mean to be a woman. The way I began to unravel the mystery of the eternal battle between the genders was easy – whenever I got upset about anything Peter or another man said to me or about me, I had something to look at. Whenever I found myself about to defend my convictions about what women are or what they should do or how they could be, I became aware that there was a piece of my identity as a woman in it as well. Whenever I dared to replace such a dearly held idea, passion or dream with facts a piece of my identity as a woman also went down the drain. After a few initial fears and hesitations, and as those roles and rules were slowly uncovered and discarded, it became increasingly delightful to find out that the differences that I had imagined existed between genders were disappearing. A few months into our relationship and into my explorations about my conditioning I suddenly looked at Peter and saw him without perceiving him as a man and my lover and all that it entailed. It was such a shock at first because I had never been able to look at him without simultaneously overlaying an image of what I wanted or feared or dreamt of. Suddenly there was a human being sitting next to me – and I had never seen that human being before, because I had been so busy with what I felt and thought about him. It is a delicious magic when the curtain of instinctual ‘self’-centredness breaks, if only for a few moments at first, and gives way to experiencing an intimate meeting with another fellow human being. * VINEETO: Only because I was deeply fed up with the havoc that my feelings created in my life and the life of others around me, was I able to see the sense in questioning all of my feelings – because examining my feelings is a tangible step to being able to be intimate with all of my fellow human beings regardless of their gender. It’s a lonely business being trapped on either side of the gender divide. RESPONDENT: The constant state of tension brought by the animal hunger of the male for the female, and the female’s control of that situation, has long been a painful place for me. VINEETO: I can tell you that ‘the female’s control of that situation’ is only perceived as such on the male’s end. For instance, the whole movement of women’s liberation was born of the idea that the men had control over the women’s lives. In other words, each side in the battle of the sexes sees the other side as being the controller, being more dominant, being more manipulative, being unable to understand the other, and so on. The idea that someone else is in control of my life is in itself part of the automatic instinctual battle for power between the sexes and the first step to become free of feeling controlled and being controlled was for me to admit that, and find out how, I was driven by my own instinctual passions and shackled by my own imbibed social identity of being a woman. The more I discovered that the cards were distributed equally, i.e. equally restrictive for both genders, the more my defensiveness and my idea of being a victim dropped and I was then able to explore precisely what convictions and conventions, roles and rules I had taken on board about what it is supposed to mean to be a woman. The way I began to unravel the mystery of the eternal battle between the genders was easy – whenever I got upset about anything Peter or another man said to me or about me, I had something to look at. Whenever I found myself about to defend my convictions about what women are or what they should do or how they could be, I became aware that there was a piece of my identity as a woman in it as well. Whenever I dared to replace such a dearly held idea, passion or dream with facts a piece of my identity as a woman also went down the drain. After a few initial fears and hesitations and as those roles and rules were slowly uncovered and discarded, it became increasingly delightful to find out that the differences that I had imagined existed between genders were disappearing. A few months into our relationship and into my explorations about my conditioning I suddenly looked at Peter and saw him without perceiving him as a man and my lover and all that it entailed. It was such a shock at first because I had never been able to look at him without simultaneously overlaying an image of what I wanted or feared or dreamt of. Suddenly there was a human being sitting next to me – and I had never seen that human being before, because I had been so busy with what I felt and thought about him. It is a delicious magic when the curtain of instinctual ‘self’-centredness breaks, if only for a few moments at first, and gives way to experiencing an intimate meeting with another fellow human being. RESPONDENT: I agree with all of what you say, but it doesn’t seem complete. It works for individual relationships, ... VINEETO: As you say ‘I agree with all of what you say’ – I take it that you understand that it is possible for you to change the immediate world in which you live as far as living together with your companion is concerned. If you can see that the actualism method works for your ‘individual relationship’ then you can also see that your becoming happy and harmless will contribute significantly to the peace and harmony in your house. Somebody has to be amongst the first to turn around 180 degrees and stop perpetuating malice and sorrow in the world. RESPONDENT: I’ve been down the detachment path too, but found it didn’t cut the mustard at all either. Seemed like the baby with the bath water. VINEETO: On our website we used an adapted illustration from P. Livingston to demonstrate this radical procedure. RESPONDENT: Every time I go spelunking in the site, something interesting pops up. You mention love as being one of the hardest to let go of, and this is a real tough spot for me too. I’ve been in a very long-term relationship, which has been strained of late. This whole notion of love is a difficult one, but there’s some interesting dialog you had with Gary at the above link. Before I stumbled on to the AF site, I had determined in my own way that what passes for love seems mostly indistinguishable from mutually interlocking neuroses. OK, that’s fine, but I asked myself if there wasn’t a possibility for man and woman to live together in peace? Well, that’s certainly been answered here, but can I live in peace with this particular woman of many years relationship? That shall come out in the wash, but in the meantime I have no choice but to do this work myself, with strong emphasis on eliminating malice. It has been too easy over the years to build up a nice collection of barbs that I can shoot at her during my own moments of misery. VINEETO: When I observed my own feelings of love, as well as love stories and soap operas on television, it became obvious that love is the one and only solution that people generate in order to smooth over and cover up all the nasty daily incidents in a relationship. When the going gets tough you can be certain that man and woman profess how much they love each other. The other thing is that love inevitably comes with a whole range of feelings that make life together either a living hell or a second-rate compromise – possessiveness, jealousy, disrespect, ruthlessness, blame and demands for attention, comfort and support. To become aware of and investigate the feelings of love can be a first step towards genuine intimacy. The secret of living in peace with another person is not love, as is universally believed, but investigating – and eliminating – everything in you that is responsible for causing disharmony, resentment, retreat, detachment, disagreement and misery. You can do this investigation together with the other person – if she is interested – but it works just as well to do it on your own. What had impressed me when I first met Peter was that he was willing to give the experiment of our peaceful living together a hundred percent commitment and that he was, just a I was, determined not to blame or change the other. RESPONDENT: This bit from Gary registered: [Gary]: I found myself recently ‘slipping’ and telling my partner ‘I love you’. It was during one of those ‘nice and cosy’ periods, like you describe (below). It really felt like it just slipped out and that I didn’t really mean it. It also seemed like it is just a reflexive habit, you know, when one is in such moods to give utterance to such endearments. And there really is no difference between saying ‘I love you’ and saying ‘I care for you’ or ‘I want to be with you’. All these sentiments pretty much add up to the same thing. When I first read this post, I was having trouble grasping just what you meant by ‘consciously allow the feeling to happen in order to fully understand and explore it experientially’. I think I have been kind of regarding Love as a no-no and quashing the feelings when they come up rather than simply allowing them and exploring them when they do. I think I’ll give that a try. (Re: Love, 21.9.2000). I had a good chuckle, esp. ‘‘slipping’ and telling my partner ‘I love you’’. I’ve been there quite a few times, the words pop out, then I’m something like the deer in the headlights, trying to make sense of what I just said. I’ve been considering love a no-no too, so perhaps taking his tack would be an interesting approach. (Was it, Gary?) VINEETO: This is a good example of how an ‘ethical safe-guard’ can prevent you from becoming aware of and acknowledging a feeling. By considering the feeling of love a no-no, you might ignore, deny or avoid the feeling of love whenever it occurs and thus you are hampered in investigating it further. For a successful investigation you need an honest and all-inclusive stocktaking. RESPONDENT: While all this is well and good as a practical bit, I know I run a real risk of the relationship ending. I’m willing to take that as it’s become clear that there are no alternatives. This raises a whole flurry of feelings, around responsibility, shared history, relationship with the progeny, who gets the dog, bla bla bla. VINEETO: Here is a bit from Peter’s Journal that might be relevant in your situation – Peter: The other vital ingredients to guarantee success were intent and peak experiences. We both had intent. I was willing to give it everything I could, and Vineeto likewise. The point was that I was doing it for me, I wanted to make it work and I would do everything I could to make it work. I regarded this as my last, and therefore only, chance to prove that it was possible for me to live with a woman in perfect peace and harmony – nothing less would do. Then, even if it did fail, I wouldn’t be left with that feeling that I had held back; that I could have done more, that the ‘shackles’ had won out again. (Peter’s Journal, ‘Living Together’) RESPONDENT: So, while poking around in the above vein, I ran across this bit from Richard on Alan’s site: Richard: Speaking personally, ‘I’ lost everything. ‘My’ wife, ‘my’ children, ‘my’ business, ‘my’ house, ‘my’ car ... the lot. But, most importantly, I lost ‘me’ ... and they were ‘his’ wife, children, business, house, car and so on, anyway ... not mine. I inherited all ‘his’ stuff when ‘he’ disappeared, and I took five years to taper-off all of ‘his’ legacy. Nowadays, being me as-I-am, I have an entirely new life that is infinitely better ... vastly superior. That lifestyle was ‘his’ choice, not mine, and suited ‘his’ temperament only. (Richard’s Journal, Article 36). The good catholic boy in me reacted to this. I have been such a responsible being all my life that this POV is incomprehensible. This is abdication of ALL GOOD CHRISTIAN/ HUMAN PRINCIPLES. Yet at the same time I see the utter plain truth of this. VINEETO: Personally, everything I owned, did or said and every person I was in contact with had great emotional significance to me as an identity and therefore every change in my familiar circumstances brought about an emotional disturbance. With the method of actualism, I gradually examined and substantially weakened most aspects of my identity and consequently some of my circumstances changed according to what was practical, sensible and beneficent. I gave up my old job, I lost contact with all my former friends and co-seekers, I moved house several times and gave away some of my possessions that had become redundant to me. Yet I still drive a car, live in a house, tend a garden, do a job, but there are no emotional strings attached to that car, that house, that garden or that job. RESPONDENT: It actually makes my head spin a bit ... definitely some ‘opportunities’ to explore. VINEETO: This is a good sign, if I may say so, because when your head begins to ‘spin a bit’ then the familiar identity begins to crack … and through this crack you could snatch a glance of the actual world – magnificent, sparkling, pure and perfect. RESPONDENT: I don’t consider that some of my queries in the past have been answered ‘satisfactorily’, as the questions and answers were formulated in two different languages as it were, but I do have confidence that they will be eventually, if I continue to apply myself diligently. For instance, I am starting to see that the great and mysterious issue of man and woman living in harmony is actually achievable, but to describe that in words was and is difficult. Once again, it’s the process... learning music doesn’t make sense until you’ve learnt music. VINEETO: I am pleased to hear that you are unravelling the mystery of ‘man and woman living in harmony’. For me this was the area where I drew my confidence that actualism worked. The first thing was to stop fighting for ‘my’ rights and battling and blaming the other. One of the astounding discoveries for me was that for every conflict of interest there is in fact a win-win solution, and finding that solution replaced the instinctual battle for survival that only has winners and losers. It was important that situations were resolved as a win for everyone and not as compromises because compromising would only call for more compromises so as to not disturb the delicate power balance. The key, I found, was my commitment for peace and harmony being at the top of my laundry list – right after becoming free from the human condition. This does not mean that I give in or give up nor does it mean that I fight for my rights – it means that I always consider the situation of both parties, mine and the other’s and then put my effort into finding a solution that suits all. The other vital ingredient for a harmonious living together was to dig into my beliefs of male and female conditioning and find out the facts of the situation. The beliefs that form my gender identity needed to be unravelled and investigated and in the course of that investigation I incrementally stopped being a woman and discovered that I am a human being just like any other, be they man or woman. Some scientists have observed that parts of the brain are differently active in men and women, thereby claiming that gender differences are hard wired, but I am rather sceptical of their theories given that social gender conditioning begins the moment any newborn infant is declared to be either a boy or a girl. Furthermore, those scientists themselves are strongly biased in their interpretations of data by their own gender identity. The more you dig into and remove your social identity as a man and your instinctual identity as a male, the more you will find how similar the different genders of human beings really are. I found that, apart from the delicious difference of in-bits and out-bits, there is hardly any actual disparity between male and female human beings – our senses as well as our practical intelligence function in pretty much the same way. * VINEETO: When you say ‘too quick’ I am reminded of the ‘quick and dirty processing pathway’ from the thalamus to the Amygdala that LeDoux and his team discovered (see Library Topics – Instinctual Passions). The emotional-instinctual response by its very nature is ‘too quick’, while a deliberate sensible answer requires thinking and contemplation. RESPONDENT: I found this bit to be a fascinating bit of science when I first read about it, and consistent with my own discoveries. It just takes that split-second of deferring my responses to take the wind out of their sails. This helped enormously with the external aspects of my relationships with others. This is an example of the appeal (to me) of AF... its sound footing in the concrete/actual... no need for spirits/gods/planetary influences/etc. VINEETO: As you say, ‘the external aspects of my relationships with others’ were the first to take care of. For me that meant I became determined to stop expressing any of my angry, sad, resentful, irritated, etc. feelings to the people I interacted with. The more ‘split-seconds’ I learnt to put between experiencing those feeling and expressing a thoughtful response, the less I transmitted these feelings to others. Whilst the first aspect is to stop expressing such feelings to others, it is equally important not to repress them. It is only by not repressing my feelings of anger, sadness or resentment that I am able to experience them and then inquire into the nature of my beliefs and the bits of my identity that triggered those feelings in the first place. Whenever I became aware that I was feeling upset about a comment someone made, I took the opportunity to look for the reason why his or her comment had upset me. As an example – did his or her comment in a conversation question a dearly held belief or opinion of mine? In that case I questioned why it was so important for me to maintain my belief and I looked deeper into the particular belief or opinion that had been disturbed. Slowly, slowly, with effort and diligence, those – touchy – beliefs were replaced by sound facts and simple sensibility which, in turn, enabled a joie de vivre to supplant the former ambience of doom and gloom. RESPONDENT: Over the past year on this list, the subject of relationships resurfaces periodically, and there has been a flurry of postings on that subject lately, so clearly it is presently in the forefront of other’s processing. There has been a great deal of churn in my primary relationship lately, not due in small part to my pursuing this actualism business. For me, the man/woman relationship is one of the hardest areas to understand, hence a cornucopia of opportunities for investigation of the subtle emotions. In some ways, it’s the most difficult of relationships as there is the element of choice... we have some measure of responsibility for our children that is not negotiable (IMO), but life with our partners damn well better be pleasurable as there is no biological necessity. Without going into gory details, recently we arrived at a place that seemed to me to be an irreconcilable impasse. In the past, I’ve been able to wriggle out of these types of situations by ‘logicking’ my way out. I could patch things up crudely by coming up with a plan: If I do this or that, or say this or that, I can escape the painful situation and come out only limping, with my beliefs still held relatively intact. VINEETO: I like how you describe the traditional male role in the man-woman relationship – ‘‘logicking’ my way out’. Usually when I wanted to talk about ‘the relationship’ with my partner, it meant I wanted to talk about my feelings, the unhappy, unsatisfied feelings and expectations that were not being met by the man. Generally, the conflicts were not about particular practical situations that needed solutions but they were about a range of diffuse disgruntled feelings I had that I thought were his responsibility to fix. Apart from the proverbial exceptions to the rule, it is usually the women who play the role of indulging in their feelings in a man-woman relationship, while the men tend to repress their feelings and look for a rational approach to the unpredictable and confusing world of emotions. When I started to practice actualism I broke with that tradition. One after the other I acknowledged my responsibility both for the outspoken charges and, equally important, for my silent accusations. Every wish to find fault with the other was a red flag indicating that I automatically considered my partner responsible for my happiness and my sadness, which in turn meant that I either consciously or unconsciously blamed him for my aggressive vibes and fearful moods. As an actualist I came to realize that it is solely up to me to be happy and harmless and that blaming anyone else for causing my own unhappiness is me being anything but harmless. The one-to-one relationship has been the largest field of inquiry into my beliefs and my passions in order to become free from their miserable grip. RESPONDENT: With this recent episode however, my tools let me down – the situation was so dire that I knew that I was just fooling myself (and her) with this chicanery. So, apparently there was this vast gap between her and I, and no way to bridge it. I spend about a week in this excruciating place, trying to figure out how to engineer my way out, always to come up against the same wall. While my guts were churning away, I couldn’t help but think that somewhere in this impossible struggle lay a very important bit of information, and I was determined to fish it out. Eventually, the clouds parted, and the veils of that third entity, the ‘relationship’ and all its attendant accrued characteristics, dropped away, leaving simply two discrete beings, completely separate. Everything stood out clearly, all the emotional interactions, the unmet needs, the resentment, the control issues. Particularly, I saw in myself an element that Peter captured nicely. I had been ‘holding back’ in an effort to maintain some sort of sanity in this chaotic relationship. It is obvious that it takes as much of an iron grip to hold someone at arm’s length as it does to clutch them tightly to one’s breast. Each is rigid and controlling. VINEETO: Personally, I found ‘holding someone at arm’s length’ particularly tedious as I not only had to fend against the other’s attempts to come closer but also against my own yearning to have a more intimate relationship. I knew that by trying to hold back I was impairing myself as much as the other, depriving myself of the opportunity to find out and to learn something new about how to live in peace with a fellow human being. So when I met Peter and he introduced me to actualism, I jumped in with both feet – I wanted to get to the bottom of why I had never been able to achieve the peace and harmony in a relationship I so yearned for. This meant not only experiencing all the feelings that the relationship brought up but also tracing them deep to their instinctual core – the good feelings as well as the bad feelings, the desired feelings as well as the one’s I used to deny – the whole lot. RESPONDENT: Peter continues with (once again) a very pithy and practical conclusion from this aspect: (Peter, Actual Freedom List, Gary-n, 7.1.2003b). My partner and I then entered into some very good dialog about the fundamental nature of our relationship, which engendered some warmth, a distinct relief after the pain of the episode. While this fostered some good feelings, I had a nagging suspicion that I was merely sliding back into the same old same old, though this time with ‘good’ feelings. Vineeto’s post arrived and really hit home: [Vineeto to Gary]: ... I recently found an emotional ‘hook’ in my living together with Peter. I was contemplating about what exactly is standing in the way of ‘self’-immolation and found a bit of an affective identity in action – the ‘me’ who cherished the cozy corner I had in living together peacefully and delightfully. ‘I’ as an identity feel noticed and understood with Peter, he knows the happy ‘me’, the quizzing ‘me’, the puzzled ‘me’, the impatient ‘me’, he knows about ‘my’ aims and fears, ‘my’ quirks and wonderings. And this cozy relationship will certainly cease to be when I become free because then ‘I’ who is doing the relating will cease to be. (Vineeto, Actual Freedom List, Gary-g, 12.1.2003). and then goes on to coincidentally mirror my own recent discovery about the separateness of the two of us: [Vineeto to Gary]: ... with astounding clarity I experienced myself as completely separate from Peter, two flesh-and-blood human beings not at all affectively or psychically connected in any way. It was utterly amazing and magical that two complete strangers – as in not psychically connected – get to interact with each other in utter intimacy. In such intimacy there is no ‘me’ trying to pull the strings, no ‘me’ thinking or feeling about ‘me’ in relationship to the other, and a fresh, unmediated and direct experiencing happens on its own accord. (Vineeto, Actual Freedom List, Gary-g, 12.1.2003) VINEETO: Just to reiterate something that is essential for an actualist to keep in mind during his or her explorations – the aim and process of actualism is not to suppress feelings and emotions but to become aware of them in order to explore them deeply and exhaustively. The automatic reaction is to wheedle one’s way out of feeling the bad feelings – those that are considered bad and immoral or wrong and unethical – and consequently the essential first step is to be aware of one’s habit of suppressing, avoiding, withdrawing or denying them in order to feel superior, stay cool, be strong, rational or logical. In order for the actualism method to work it is crucial to first get in touch with one’s feelings because if I want to find out about ‘me’ I can’t afford to only investigate the ‘better’ half of my surfacing emotions and ignore, repress or deny the dark side. To allow oneself to experience whatever feeling is happening often needs some investigation into what Peter recently termed the ‘Guardians at the Gate’ – the moral judgements and ethical evaluations that trigger feelings such as guilt, shame, defiance or righteousness whenever one starts to become aware of one’s dark side and feel one’s dark feelings. And of course neither is there the need to express your feelings or wallow in them in order to become aware of them – after all the most important thing for an actualist is to be happy and harmless. As soon as possible get back to feeling good about being here or feeling excellent about being alive. Then you can put your feet up and spend some time contemplating on what it was that triggered you to stop feeling happy or being harmless. You will then find that it is vital to drop that part of your social identity that is causing you to be unhappy, sad, resentful, annoyed, frustrated, jealous, and so on, if you want to really want to be happy and harmless. RESPONDENT: It is a grey drizzly day but there is a warmth in the air. I enjoy these days for being inside able to gaze out the window while I do small tasks that I allow to build up. Writing to the freedom page is one of those things I have been thinking of doing. I infrequently read the pages but I often gain some good pieces of information when I do. VINEETO: It’s good to hear from you again and that you are gaining some good information from the mailing list. If you find you have a particular issue, concern or worry running at some time you can always dip into The Actual Freedom Trust website itself where there is a wealth of information and correspondence, categorized by topic for ease of access. RESPONDENT: Besides all that... I write because I am interested in other people’s thoughts on the understanding of how men traditionally think and how when learning about actual freedom it was best communicated. My partner has just finished reading Peter’s journal and has begun to search deeper within himself about his reactions to life, but as a female I seem to be unable to comprehend some of his views and attitudes as they arise. VINEETO: For me, the path to Actual Freedom began with me conducting an extensive investigation into what exactly constitutes male and female conditioning simply because I figured that this gender conditioning was the main reason that man and woman cannot live together in peace and harmony. In the process of this investigation I have explored what exactly makes me tick as a woman – the program of beliefs and instincts with its resulting feelings and emotions. Along the path to freedom I have gradually evaluated and discarded all of the so-called female attributes and values, which women so proudly claim as their main territory – expressing emotions and feelings, feminine insight and intuition, love, nurture and nourishment. I found that my desperately holding on to these attributes and values caused me to fight a continuous battle within myself, and against others, as to which is right and which is wrong – the male version of demanding, desiring, rationalising and displaying reason or the female version of demanding, desiring, emotionalising and displaying emotions. I have found that both versions – both the male and the female – are silly, useless and redundant. My main focus was to question and examine my own ‘views and attitudes’ as a female in order to arrive at sound, verifiable facts and refreshing non-affective common sense. It was only by relying on down-to-earth facts and common sense that I began to be able to communicate with Peter without emotionally reacting to what he was saying, neither trying to please him nor trying to fight him. I was also interested in how the male half of the world thinks and feels as it had always been somewhat of a mystery to me what went on in ‘the other camp’. I found that as I began to question my own female programming, I naturally became curious as to how the other half were programmed. Whilst I had my very own ‘spy’, or ‘whistleblower’, from the other camp to fill me in, one can also glean the necessary information as to how the other gender is programmed by a process of curiosity, investigation and objective observation as to how men are programmed. However, it is vital to put things in the right order – which is first things first. In order to become free from my female identity, I had to investigate my own restrictive ‘views and attitudes’ first. After all, it is these emotionally charged views and attitudes that stand in the way from my experiencing peace in the world-as-it-is … and with people-as-they-are. The first major breakthrough in becoming free of my female identity was when I investigated my pining for a man’s love and support. This is what I wrote at the time –
> | [Vineeto]: One thing that I particularly didn’t like about falling in love was the pining. Whenever I was not with Peter I felt I was tied to him on a long elastic cord and not able to fully enjoy whatever I was doing by myself. Digging into what could be the reason for my pining, I discovered what I call the ‘Cinderella-syndrome’ – the romantic dream that most women have about the perfect and noble man. We are not only looking for someone who takes care of us when our own strength fails us, but also for someone who gives perspective, meaning, definition and identity to our lives, be it as father of our kids, provider of social status, security or a purpose for life. According to this dream Peter should be the answer to the question which I wasn’t willing to face myself: ‘What do I really want to do with my life?’ I remember a Monday evening after a weekend together, and I had been pining the whole day. I had not enjoyed work as I found myself struggling to get out of this exhausting dependency. Here I was, 44 years old and as silly as a teenager!
After work I took a long walk across rolling hills into a spectacular sunset, trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life. In the end, I had to admit that, whatever it was, it had not the slightest thing to do with anything that Peter could do for me. I wanted to be perfect and I had to do it myself. I still had to clean myself up. Just having found a probable good mate had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t the best I could be; that I wasn’t free. I decided there and then to face the challenge, to abandon the love-dream and go for the actual experience – meeting another human being as intimately as possible instead of looking up to him and waiting for him to be the ‘hero of my dreams’. That very evening the situation changed. My pining stopped. The fog in the head cleared. My expectations disappeared. I could again stand on my own feet and equally enjoy the time when I was by myself. I had recovered my autonomy – my autonomy in the sense that I am the only one in my life who is responsible for my happiness. (A Bit of Vineeto, #love). With this realization I had unmasked the female dream in me and, by my determination to not let it stand in the way of my living with another person in peace and harmony, I rendered the dream impotent. After this event there was a tangible crack in my perception of ‘who’ I thought and felt I was. And once I allowed the first big rift in my female identity, anything was possible. It was a great encouragement to explore further. If I had been on the wrong path with my Cinderella dream, then I could be down the wrong alley in anything that I thought and felt to be right! To examine the remaining aspects of my female identity was not always easy, sometimes even downright scary, but the adventure called me onwards – the adventure to discover actual people in an actual world outside of, and completely independent from, my affective dream world. It is a grand adventure! RESPONDENT: I admit to having been quite rigid about my own opinions but now I allow my self to hear and to allow that which he says to become something which becomes a practical part of my understanding. That is I put it to the test to see if it is real for me or I put it to the test to find the truth of it. VINEETO: It is fascinating when, with increasing ‘self’-awareness, the world begins to look different. There are cracks in one’s ‘rigid … opinions’, the perception softens as one starts to see beyond the morals and ethics of black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. I remember how I was frequently amazed when I began to discover other people as they are, outside of my desires, dreams and fears. Increasingly I was able to perceive them as fellow human beings who went about their business of being alive. The trick was to question my own beliefs and ideas, opinions and principles and replace my morals and ethics with a discernment of what is silly and what is sensible. It takes effort and persistence to nibble away at all of one’s feelings, beliefs and opinions that constitute the social identity but it is certainly an effort well worth making. RESPONDENT: But all that aside I am still not achieving what I think I understand he would like me to, so what is it that I am missing in this communication between us??? So I thank you for sharing your understanding on this topic of communication. VINEETO: The way I came to live in peace and harmony with a man was that I became free from being a woman. First there is the social aspect of being a woman, the female role with its beliefs, sentiments and behaviour we have been trained to adopt since early childhood. It consists of all the shoulds and should nots, the right codes of conduct, the collective accepted behaviour of being a woman and the social taboos that are deemed unquestionable. You can clearly see what is social programming because it varies from culture to culture, depends upon religion and spiritual beliefs, is subject to generational and fashion swings and is imposed and maintained by peer pressure. Then there is the instinctual aspect of being a woman, centred upon instinctual mating and procreation of the species. The program of sexual instinctual passion drove me to search for a man and get pregnant – and then the consequent need to secure the protection of the potential father kicked in. Curiously I found that my decision not to have any children and to be sterilised did not change this underlying instinctual urge at all – I still thought and felt myself to be a woman first and a human being second. I found that as long as both the social and instinctual aspects of my identity had a strong grip on me, communication was impossible. Only when I examined and investigated my own programming was I able to see the other as a fellow human being and only then communication was really possible. As for comprehending another’s ‘views and attitudes’, I have found that despite the fact that I have studied the human condition for several years now, I am still often baffled and bewildered at many of the attitudes and behaviours of human beings. In fact, the more I examined and thusly weakened my own identity, the more incomprehensible it is for me that most other people don’t seem to be interested in achieving the same quality of life for themselves. But I have come to see and begun to understand that this choice is their own cup of tea – it has nothing to do with my own happiness and harmlessness. If I find that I make myself dependant upon another’s happiness, or feel responsible for another’s happiness, then I have something to look at. The wonderful thing about actualism is that everyone can only do it for themselves, in their own time and at their own pace. KONRAD: Jealousy? This one is a little more complex. Jealousy consists of the fear of losing your spouse. But this is also a sign that shows how special she is in your life. This is, why many women are flattered by the fact that their spouse is jealous. The problem with jealousy is not so much the emotion, but how it is shown. If you try to limit your spouse in her actions (by trying to place her in a position whereby she is not able to meet other men) then she will experience this as suffocating. However, if you understand, that vinegar is not the way to attract flies, but honey is, you express this jealousy of yours differently. You do not try to limit her span of activities, but you express your feeling about how special she is more directly. VINEETO: Now, this statement on jealousy is really cunning. I suspect you are quite afraid to tackle that issue. That’s why you turn it round and say that the woman wants you to be jealous. You express your feeling about how special she is not because you mean it but because you want to bind her. You are not openly jealous, just more tricky. Jealousy is part of possessiveness that comes in the packet of instincts to continue the species. It has been the cause of many horrendous crimes and murders. Most impulsive crimes are crimes of jealousy. In my relationship with Peter there is neither possessiveness nor jealousy. We simply live together because we enjoy to. Each is free to do what he/she wants and that is the basis of our peace and harmony. When I felt jealousy I simply had to look for the cause of it, and that cause is fear, fear of being alone, insecure, unprotected, abandoned. Eliminating the fear has made jealousy completely redundant. And why should Peter prove through jealousy that I am special to him. I am, that’s why he lives with me. There is no need for any other proof. If one day he should decide to live alone, or with someone else, I will still be at ease because I have no fear to be on my own. * KONRAD: In fact, my definition of love is: ‘Not putting anything in the way of what your partner wants’. It is a special case of a more general principle: ‘Every individual is there in the first place for him/herself. Therefore it is wrong to ask anything from anybody, or to take anything for granted.’ VINEETO: I agree with you that this would be a good contract to start a harmonious relationship. In my experience though, the moment love with all its conditioning enters, it destroys this wonderful intention. There is simply no way to forever control, i.e. repress emotions, they do surface quite soon in the course of living together, as you can probably testify from your own experience or the evidence your neighbours seem to give you. With love enters inevitably possessiveness, jealousy, expectation for attention, care, admiration, ‘I scratch your back, you scratch my back’, and in no time freedom and harmony are replaced by compromise, discontentment, misunderstanding, battle and defeat. KONRAD: My loved one has had many relationships before she met me. None of them lasted long, because all of these men wanted her to be their servant in one or another form. She was even fed up with men, before she met me. She said that the principal thing she appreciates so much about me is that I do not put any claims on her without her consent, and that I do anything to help her to develop herself in the way she wants. VINEETO: Is she also helping you to develop yourself in the way you want? Or have you already arrived? How can she ever be equal to you if you are her ‘developing aid’? You would always be the superior one. The moment the other starts thinking for him/herself, peace is over. KONRAD: I have written a booklet about the sexual differences between man and woman, and this little booklet has contributed so much understanding between many men and women, that many relationships were improved by it. You will probably think that is because I pleaded for male domination of some sort. But the contrary is the case. This book was completely about how relationships could be built on total mutual respect. It was my aim to end all kinds of subtle manipulations, so that honesty can surface, resulting in total equity. VINEETO: I am interested as to what those sexual differences between man and woman are? Are you talking about physical differences, or those of sensual experience, or differences in the degree of sexual intensity? Difference in the conditioning or factual permanent differences that can supposedly never be eliminated? In my experience there are simply ‘in-bits’ and ‘out-bits’ in us human beings and they fit perfectly. But I did not find any qualitative difference in the enjoyment or intensity of sexual pleasure. To reach to that understanding and experience though, I had to dig deep into the psyche of female sexual conditioning and completely eradicate it. Repression, fear, guilt, morals, shame, fantasies, power-battle, manipulation as well as my cherished love-dreams are only a few examples of what I had to throw out in order to fully enjoy each of our sexual encounters as fresh as if it was the first time – and so did Peter. As long as there is conditioning of any kind operating there are differences, but once I reach the actual experience of the senses, there is no difference in the pleasure that simple friction can produce. Even if you should be opposed to everything else I have been saying up to now, I can tell you, it was well worth cleaning myself up, if only for the tango of sexual pleasure that I now enjoy. The depth of sensual experience deepens with every belief thrown out and there are literally no limits to what a wonderful dance man and woman can have together! It far exceeds any imagination or dream I ever had of what was possible. Should you be interested in what Peter or I have written about our exploration and findings, this is the address: (Actualism, Homepage) and it’s in the chapters ‘Sex’ and ‘A Bit of Vineeto’; who knows, you might find it of interest for you... * VINEETO: And there we come to your part of the story. You answered in an earlier letter to my writing: Women, on the other hand, generally use emotional outbreaks to distract and divert from an issue or subject that scares them. They are conditioned to swim in emotionality rather than sort things out, ie. eliminate the cause, with a strait-forward intelligence. Accordingly, I had used sulking, guilt, stubbornness, being paranoid or angry to not give up my dearly held familiar beliefs and behaviours (often unconscious); even if those beliefs had failed for years. In order to live in peace and harmony, instead of using my well-practiced defence mechanisms, I had to put exactly those female ‘weapons’ under scrutiny and cast them aside. KONRAD: Well, let me tell you that I have been married to a woman using just those techniques you described. The marriage only lasted for 4 years. So I can go along with you here. VINEETO: Now, I have told you I have cleaned myself up from the female parts of the disease called ‘Human Condition’ and you very happily agreed to this being a good idea. But it does not mean that I took on the male parts of that very same disease. This has often been the typical male reaction to Peter’s and my writing: The men would fold their arms, lean back and pass the book on to their girlfriends, saying, ‘look, he has confirmed that you are wrong. Go and change so I can be happy.’ They completely missed the point of the matter! Leaving the ‘female’ and ‘male’ world behind, means that I entered the world of common sense, practical down-to-earth thinking and communication on the basis of facts perceived through the senses and applying my intelligence without the burden of either emotions or rationality. This is the third alternative to ‘male’ or ‘female’ thinking, using common sense to evaluate facts and solutions as either sensible or silly. Mind you, common sense has nothing to do with common knowledge or physicist’s equations. It is the free operation of the intelligence based on the perception of all the senses and unaffected by emotions, feelings or otherwise preconceived ideas. Mind you, the important thing is to take the situation in account with ALL your senses – which gives common sense the down to earth quality that the abstract thinking you are using is lacking so much! The male version of the disease called the Human Condition includes arrogance, superiority, theorising, display of knowledge just to impress or attack, competition, aggression, malice, repression of feelings and emotions and such more. How can one gender be right and the other wrong? Now you did not even consider that men as well have their share of cleaning up to do. Your response quoted above displays very well those male weapons and they were meant to harm, to put me off and to score points. I call this outright malice. How can you claim to be advanced in your ‘process’ when you have not even eliminated the instinct to hurt and attack? And why did most great thinkers, logician, scientists and spiritual gurus need wives or caretakers to look after their physical needs, while they were retreating into a construct of thought, based on either logic or spiritual belief to escape this so terrible world? I take it that you are no different to those escapists, Konrad. VINEETO: I am Vineeto, and I am Peter’s companion. As you brought up the question of possible self-delusion and room for compromise I thought I would write to you of my experience as well. RESPONDENT: I also have a question regarding the fact that your experiment concerns only you and your companion living together in utter peace and harmony. There would be room here for self-delusion should your companion choose to compromise, to go along to get along. VINEETO: The experiment of our relationship could only work because the peace and equity I wanted to achieve did not only concern us ‘living together in utter peace and harmony’ but it also meant that I had to find peace for myself and eliminate the warrior in me. The most practical, intimate test of success, and the most fun when it works, is living with a person of the other gender, another fellow human being, 24 hrs a day, every day. It was one of my deep regrets and a continuing failure in my life that I could not live with a man in peace and harmony – the man and I had always something to fight about. Searching for enlightenment did not change or improve that situation – my solution was to make the guru my lover number one – as is requested in the master-disciple relationship – and thus I was able to revert to the imaginary love affair whenever the real relationship was in trouble. Given that no one I knew had perfect harmony with their lovers, I just thought that that’s the way it is and compromise and resignation is the name of the game of life on earth. When I met Peter and he said he wanted to live with a woman in peace and harmony, equity and intimacy, I was very intrigued and seized the opportunity. We committed ourselves that we would both look at everything that would surface as an obstacle for intimacy between us and this contract implied that each of us had to do it for ourselves. In the course of my search for such everyday and permanent peace I had to question and eliminate a lot of my dearly held beliefs, but at that time I considered my beliefs as part of the ego that I had set out to leave behind when I started on the spiritual path. Later I was to find out that my deep-seated beliefs, ‘knowings’ and feelings were not just part of the ego but originated much deeper, they were my very soul. In order to get to the root of the gender-battle I investigated female conditioning, authority problems, sexual taboos, love and intuition, spiritual beliefs, sacred truths and faithful loyalty. This time I was determined not to let any fear, any dearly held belief, any feeling or emotion stop me from realizing my life-long dream to put into everyday practice what love and poetry always promised but never delivered. This time, with a man who was ready to sincerely discuss and explore every issue, I was willing to dive deep into my psyche and explore the core of what living in peace without compromise is all about. The trick was to consider every upcoming issue – and there were many – as part of the Human Condition, the set of conditionings, beliefs, emotions and instinctual passions that form the habitual and neuro-biological program by which human beings have always operated. This way we could keep the interaction between us free of blame, compromise and resentment, and did not mess in each other’s lives. Then every issue we talked about was an issue of the Human Condition and each could investigate as far as each wanted to. But we were both determined to not stop at second best. With such sincere intent and daring determination from both of us soon brought tangible success and it only made me bolder to explore further. The evident success was that I had glimpses of experiencing an actual intimacy that I had never ever experienced before. At first for brief moments, then for longer and longer periods, the self-centred veil of fears, hopes, expectations and love broke and, freed from it, I could meet the other as a flesh and blood fellow human being. It is as if one sees the other person for the first time, without the shell of personality, identity or self – actual, fresh, a direct intimate experiencing of the other without separation. Such moments of direct intimacy made the exploration of the so-called gender issues easier and easier, and after several months of investigation they amounted to nothing other than social conditioning and instinctual programming. Open discussion replaced overt and covert power battle, facts replaced beliefs, direct intimacy replaced fickle feelings of love and jealousy and sensuous sexual play replaced the mystique and taboos of sexual rituals. I found that by eliminating the social identity of culturally instilled role-playing, conditioning, belief, intuition and morality in me, the gender difference almost completely disappeared. What remained, the female instinctual programming, could then be explored and investigated the same way and it has now completely lost its grip over me. This is only a short description to indicate that my investigation left no ‘room here for self-delusion should [I] choose to compromise, to go along to get along’. The adventure to free myself from gender conditioning and instinctual behaviour was a journey that resulted in complete psychological and psychic independence together with the most astounding and delicious intimacy between two human beings. This exquisite and unique combination is the scrumptious by-product and daily down-to-earth proof of the success of my search for an actual freedom from the instinctual bondage of the human condition. RESPONDENT: Of course it is quite possible that you have indeed proven that two human beings can choose to live in utter peace and harmony, and if two can accomplish this then it would be possible for ‘all’ to do likewise. VINEETO: As I see it, I can only tell my story and state that it is indeed possible to free oneself from gender-issues and disentangle from the insidious power battle that usually spoils every relationship between men and women. Anyone can do it, there are no secrets involved, one only needs a sincere passion for freedom and a stubborn persistence not to stop at second best. On the way one loses not only one’s ego but also one’s feeling soul – but the price attained is actual intimacy. The desire to become free has to be put into action by each person themselves. And who would want to have it any other way! * RESPONDENT: Hello Vineeto, Thank you for responding to my questioning of Peter’s original statement regarding living together with you in utter peace and harmony. It is clarifying to hear of your experience in the relationship as well as your personal experiments with going beyond the conditioned responses and cultural programming and the results you have observed. Do you think that there is a peace of being that is available in the immediacy of the present moment or do you believe that this kind of experimentation and investigation is mandatory to ‘arrive’ at the ideal? VINEETO: I don’t have to ‘believe that this kind of ... investigation is mandatory’. I go by my daily experience. Living together 24hrs a day, every day, without a bicker or disagreement is a delicious sensate and scrumptious by-product of having eliminated beliefs, psittacisms and dimwitticisms, as well as having questioned, explored, investigated and thus eliminated feelings, moods, intuition, love, compassion, beauty and the rest of the emotions. By investigating the animal instincts, the underlying program that is producing and maintaining the ‘self’, being, soul, emotions and feelings, there is now hardly anything left to disturb the peace, a peace that is not an ‘ideal’ but a tangible, palpable experience moment to moment. By probing, examining, scrutinizing, bringing into the open and thus dismantling not only my ego, but my very soul, there is a peace prevailing that is not ‘of being’ but due to diminishing this being to a state where it so little substance that it cannot be maintained much longer. Apperception, the mind’s perception of itself, can function more and more freely and therefore ‘I’ as ‘being’ finds it harder and harder to maintain credibility. ‘I’ am increasingly seen as the usurper, an alien entity inhabiting this body and taking on an identity of its own. Mercilessly exposed in the bright light of awareness – apperception casts no shadows – ‘I’ can no longer find ‘my’ position tenable. ‘I’ can only live in obscuration, where ‘I’ lurk about, creating all sorts of mischief. The ‘immediacy of the present moment’ is experienced moment to moment as no emotion or emotion-backed thought takes me away from experiencing each moment as it happens and as there is no emotional memory of the past moments or any fearful anticipation of future moments, now is the only moment there is. When the shift happens from living in psychological and psychic time, where ‘I’ as self dwell, and I as flesh-and-blood body only arrive in actual time that is only this moment, the brain seems to spin in a confused limbo for some days. After all, one leaves a familiar world behind and enters the actual world of now, moments that have no psychological or psychic continuity anymore. It is a great experience indeed, actually being here in this moment in time, in this place in space. (...) * VINEETO: As for ‘humans want to take a journey ... through relationship ...’ – it has been the longing for a successful, peaceful, intimate, sensual and tangible relationship that motivated me to search for a peace that is applicable in the world of people, things and events and not only in the fantasy of my mind. What is a peace or a silence worth if it is only possible when alone or with like-minded people? Spiritual search offers pseudo-solutions by missing the main event, calling life – living and working with people, scientifically exploring human nature, having sensate fun – a ‘journey’ to pass through while proposing that the real event is finding an ‘inner’ transcended peace, a ‘conscious’ death, dis-identifying from life and an improvement of the soul for a better start in the next life. Stillness is there the moment one turns the machine off but this machine is not the thinking mind as the Eastern religious teachings try to make us believe, but the machine is the feelings and emotions arising from the animal instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Once one turns off this instinctual programming, extinguishes one’s very being, self-immolates ... there is stillness all around for it is the nature of the infinitude of the physical universe. RESPONDENT: Great to hear from you. I am doing very good down here in Tasmania. It’s a very lovely city, with a beautiful harbour, great mountains, lot’s of nature, a little bit European, like my hometown, it’s much colder than Byron. We just made a three-day mountain walk in the wilderness and camping in the snow. Just wonderful with astonishing views and nobody else around. I am back to normal and totally surprised about the ability of my mind, or should I say subconscious mind, to have me run crazy all over the planet. But I must say the whole experience seemed to have changed a few things in me, I am more peaceful and loving. I am playing housewife, gardener, shopper, cook, etc., enjoying the most simple life. I have more or less given up on my job search; it looks very unlikely to catch a job here, which could be a bit of fun. I am not much interested in seeing people, so being here suits me well for the time being. VINEETO: Good to hear that you ‘back to normal’. I take it that this ‘ability’ of your mind to have you ‘run crazy all over the planet’ is something that you choose to have, for whatever reason. Once you choose to find out the reason it eventually stops being ‘subconscious’. RESPONDENT: My partner is happy to have me here, and I am happy to be here with her. But it’s not always just nice and a lot of drama is happening sometimes. Human nature!!!! VINEETO: I had thought that because your partner really liked Peter’s Journal and the idea of living together with a man in peace and harmony, equity and intimacy, that both, you and her, might be inclined to start a similar experiment as did Peter and I, sorting out the gender issues and power plays and the other emotions, conditionings and beliefs, that keep you from living together peacefully and happily, every day. It’s curious, the people I have talked or written to who were interested in Actual Freedom often bemoaned that they did not have a partner with whom to do the exploration into the Human Condition. Personally, as you can read in our journal, I had found our joint adventure a great help and inspiration – not to mention immense fun – to discover the workings of ‘ human nature ’, the Human Condition, together with someone as eager and motivated as myself. And the success is always instant, the liberation obvious, the fun and intimacy palpable and the sex scrumptious, ever-fresh and luscious. Just to water your mouth a bit more, I quote what Peter wrote to a correspondent just two days ago: Peter: By daring to remove the socially-instilled moral and ethical inhibitions that act to shackle and spoil all human sexual play I was able to investigate the base instinctual sexual passions ... whereupon I discovered the very reasons that society imposes its shackles and no-nos in the first place. The human sexual passions are inseparably intertwined with our genetically encoded animal survival instincts, the main ones being fear, aggression, nurture and desire. As such, I discovered deep-down in me the reason men and women are perpetually at war, the source of jealous murderous rage, the rapist in me, the sexual hunter, the sexual animal, the hellish sexual realms, the fear of being consumed, etc. It is a fascinating journey to travel to the depths of one’s very own psyche but it is immensely rewarding for I have faced my demons and found them to be very, very real but not actual. These discoveries have enabled me to free myself of being driven by the instinctual sexual passions and blind, driven sex and what remained is open eyed, luscious, scrumptious, sensuous, sensual, sumptuous, voluptuous, delightful, delicious; sometimes sweet and gentle, and sometimes bawdy and risqué, sometimes a frolic, a gamble a dance, a lark, or a romp – never-ever the same, and never-ever boring. To have broken free of my sexual predatory instincts and from societal mystiques and taboos has made all of the effort, and all of the fears faced, well, well worth it. Sexual play puts a ‘three lemon grin’ on my face every time, to use Vineeto’s term. Sex is one of the most fascinating explorations on the path to freedom for it encapsulates the extent to which human sensuousness is inhibited in the real world and denied in the spiritual world. I wrote about sex in my journal but sex is not something that interests spiritual seekers – it is definitely off the agenda. They do tend to deliberately hide themselves away from sensuousness. What a silly thing to do, for the actual world abounds with sensual delight. (Peter, General Correspondence No. 4, 28.4.2000). (...) * VINEETO: I was just curious how you are doing down in Tasmania. RESPONDENT: I am happy you were curious. VINEETO: Of course, I am curious. I have found such a treasure with this third alternative, such an easy way to be both happy and harmless, to fulfill my highest and purest aspirations and be sensible and sensuous at the same time, that I still cannot comprehend why only very few people are interested in such way of life. Everybody fervently and fearfully holds on to their emotions and beliefs, their spiritual group, their safe suffering, while right under their very noses there is perfection and paradise available, if only one wants it. Your partner seemed thrilled by our story and you were at least impressed by what you heard, so I am naturally curious what becomes of this initial interest. One day, somewhere, there will be another Peter and Vineeto to become pioneers in an actual freedom, exploring and living peace on earth. Cheers to you and your partner RESPONDENT: ... and the second is ... I love you. VINEETO: When I met Peter, and he proposed a living together without love but with a direct intimacy, I thought, ‘what a strange concept’. And then I agreed because I was intrigued. All my relationships based on love had failed, maybe this new ‘concept’ was a solution. It took two months until I dared to question my beliefs and emotions around love. What made it easier was that I could see that love between man and woman had not resulted in a peaceful and harmonious living between any of the couples that I knew. Removing love from the way I related to Peter made it possible for the first time to experience an actual intimacy. Intimacy is seeing the other simply as another human being, without hopes, expectations, interpretation, conditioning, affective appreciation or depreciation. Intimacy is seeing and experiencing the other as he/she actually is. To extend my scrutiny into the nature of ‘love’ to my master-disciple relationship, investigating and questioning ‘Divine Love’, ‘Love Agapé’ and ‘Compassion’ was much more difficult. But then I slowly understood, and later experienced it in an Altered State of Consciousness myself, that the principle of relating to other people is the same in human love and in ‘Divine Love’: a ‘self’, this time the grand ‘Self’, is relating to the other person, the lower ‘self’ who needs love, compassion and help. Both ‘self’ as much as ‘Self’ use the other to confirm themselves in their particular identity. The Awakened One still has an identity in operation: ‘Me’, the glorious ‘Self’ is re-creating itself with each interaction. Love is an affection that is addressed towards someone (human love) or All (Divine Love). It needs people ‘needing’ and ‘wanting’ love for love to be maintained. Therefore it is not actual. A simple experiment will reveal the fact of what I am writing. In a moment of ‘love for all’ stop giving it to someone, or, when alone, stop addressing it to others in your imagination. The feeling of Love won’t be able to stay. It can only be felt when continuously directed towards someone other than oneself. When love and divine love disappear in the light of bare awareness, actual intimacy is possible for the first time. When the loving, compassionate ‘Self’ dies – or is temporarily absent – the actual world becomes apparent. The moment when the one who you ‘think’ and ‘feel’ you are becomes extinct, you are intimate with everyone you meet and everything you experience. See, in this moment I am intimate to you, a fellow human being, writing to you about my experiences and understanding on this particular issue. Sharing with you what I found out about beliefs, about love and divine love. I have experienced the difference between love and intimacy, and intimacy in its directness and purity far exceeds any love. Love can only be a synthetic substitute for the intimacy that we all long for. Without a ‘self’ I am intimate with everything around me and everyone I talk to. We are both fellow human beings, both fascinated to find out about this business of being a human being – after all, we are all here for the first time. When no affections are clouding the conversation, a real and fruitful discussion is possible. * RESPONDENT: So my next question is ‘How did you get stuck with a head-fucker like Peter?’ ;-) VINEETO: Have you ever met a woman who can live in peace and harmony with a ‘head-fucker’? I never have. Every woman complains that ‘men don’t share their feelings’, ‘that they repress their emotions’ and ‘that they withdraw’. Since I am living with Peter in perfect peace and harmony, he cannot be a head-fucker, he must be something else. You can read in Peter’s journal, in the chapter ‘Living Together’ what really happened. Peter was the first man who offered a commitment to look at and eliminate everything that prevented us from living together in peace and harmony, equity and intimacy. We entered a contract that we both would look at everything that would surface as an obstacle for intimacy between us, and it took only eight months to investigate all the issues between us – and since then there has not been a single bickering, an argument or the usual withdrawal, let alone a compromise. We are perfectly at ease with each other as well as on our own and sex is an exciting adventure each night again. In short, living with Peter is beyond my wildest dreams, a delight every hour of the day. And as for ‘ care’ – how much more can you care for human beings on the planet than to sacrifice your ‘self’ to extinguish malice and sorrow in yourself and give an example what can be possible for everyone. RESPONDENT: My wife and I were, and are, constantly examining ourselves and each other. But we don’t do it in a dry, serious way, sitting in a chair thinking about things. It is more like we act out our psychodramas with each other and then we ‘pull each other’s tails’. We find what is obvious, what is sticking out clearly to us about the behaviour of the other and we go deeply into that with each other. We agree to be willing to reveal all thoughts and feelings with each other. We actually do that to an extent I have never seen in anyone else. VINEETO: In my initial contract with Peter, which was that we would look at everything in the road between us, it was also implied that each of us had to do it for ourselves. It was one of the first things that I, and Peter as well, had to work out. I had to cut the ties of making my happiness and search for freedom dependant on him. It was also the first dent into the usually unspoken of ‘love-contract’ that causes most relationship troubles. Peter has described it very well in the ‘Living together’-chapter of his journal. It became clear that my issues are my issues, if I wanted to talk about them, fine, if not, that was solely my business. The same with Peter. If I got upset about a particular behaviour of his, then this was my issue, not his. Why should he change to make me happy? It then would not only be interfering with his life but also make myself dependant on him, I would not be free. This way we could keep the interaction between us free of blame, compromise and resentment, and did not mess in each other’s lives. Then every issue we talked about was an issue of the Human Condition and each could investigate as far as he/she wanted to. But we were both determined to not stop at second best. RESPONDENT: ‘You’ve got to dance like nobody’s watching, and love like it’s never going to hurt’. VINEETO: Yes, I too remember when I was dancing ‘like nobody’s watching’, and probably nobody was watching anyway. It was simply good fun. But ‘love like it’s never going to hurt’ implies that it is going to hurt and you know it, you just pretend it won’t – for a while. The backside of love is hurt, as you said in your statements above, it is a double-sided coin. Pretending or imagining that it is otherwise won’t change the fact. Why is it that the idea and the feeling of love are so important, and yet everybody has been hurt through love? I know why it was important for me – ‘love’ was, besides ‘truth’, the highest value that I believed in. But then, when I found out about being here, in the actual world, free of feelings and emotions, without love or hate, I can now be with a person and give my 100% attention, complete care and consideration, freely without bonds, expectation or bargain. I have experienced this alternative as vastly superior and more enjoyable than love, that I never wanted love back. Intimacy between two human beings without feelings and dreams is more than I ever could have imagined. But this intimacy is only possible when one can give oneself 100% into the adventure, boots and all. Past hurts and disappointments sit too ingrained in the emotional memory, either repressed or open, and cause the usual holding back and demonstrative ‘independence’. Only by questioning the concept of love itself and then eliminating the love-related emotions was I able to give this experiment with Peter my 100% and break through to actual intimacy. This intimacy lies beyond all hurts and caution. It has no strings attached whatsoever. Usually we simply project dreams, hopes, fears and concepts of male-female role-play on to the other person, thus using him/her unconsciously as a mere projection screen. Removing this screen by abandoning and eliminating those emotions, feelings and concepts, one can meet the other as the human being he/she is, in perfect intimacy. RESPONDENT: Are you attracted to having sex with different men? When there is no love or feelings between you and your partner this could happen, I guess. Also, jealousy would not be the issue. VINEETO: Oh good, a down-to-earth question. Sex without love... One of the first things that Peter and I discovered preventing actual intimacy were the feelings of love – that sweet syrup that was usually poured over the spiky, malicious, miserable ‘self’, which one is most of the time! When Peter and I questioned love and threw it out, naturally the question came up in me – ‘without the feeling of love, why would I want to be with him?’ What would be left of me when I didn’t feel love? How could I relate both to Peter and other people, if not with emotion or intuition? What would I have to offer in friendships or conversations, if not sympathy and consolation? My whole edifice of ‘who’ I was, who I believed myself to be, began to fall in a heap as I questioned and demolished the attributes of love and emotion. Now naked of all those characteristics and beliefs, as well as their resultant emotions and behaviour which have kept man and woman apart for millennia, I am experiencing for the first time in my life an actual intimacy with a man. Now there are no dreams, no expectations, no emotions or any other restrictions that could cloud the thrill of meeting another human being. Now instead of random moments of ‘sweet love’ I am able to give Peter my full attention and bare awareness each time we communicate and so does he. I just hang out with him because it is immense fun, all the time. It is as much fun sitting next to each other on our computers, watching TV, commenting on the weather, serving a cup of coffee, cooking dinner, going for a walk into town, having a chat while lying each on our couch or having a rompacious romp. As for jealousy – that disappeared along with the feeling of love. Each of us is free to do what we want to do and so each does what we enjoy most. I have written about sex without love some 12 months ago: [Vineeto]: ‘When Peter and I started to throw out love it had a great impact on my sexual ‘identity’. It was an intense and scary time because right behind the nice, embellishing veil of love lingered all the monsters and demons of being an animal, a whore, a slut, not human and having sex with a ‘stranger’. Enjoying sex without ‘being in love’ is still considered one of the greatest sins of Christian morality. And Eastern spirituality regards sex as the biggest obstacle to enlightenment. Not only had I to face my own personal conditioning about sex, but I was also confronted with the fact of stepping out of the collective accepted behaviour and limits that every woman had been taught. Demons of atavistic fears would present me with their ferocious stories, as though I was still living in the Middle Ages, where women were burnt at the stake for leaving the fold or were expelled for not conforming. It took some effort to understand that both fears and beliefs around sex were simply inherited from other people, they don’t have any actual relevance for me here and now. Digging deeper, stepping outside of the realm of sexual conditioning and beliefs I then discovered their underlying force – the sexual instincts. This inheritance from our animal past is simply installed to blindly ensure the continuity of the species. It has nothing to do with my happiness and inhibits any sensible behaviour. Those blind instincts cause, among other troubles, possessiveness, jealousy, rape, murder and overpopulation. Identified and seen as what they were, these instincts eventually lost their significance and their grip over me. Now I can enjoy the sensibility and pleasure of sex without being driven, free of the need and dependency that used to be the inevitable consequence. I now don’t need to reinforce my female sexual identity or practise my manipulative power over men – hence the need for flirting has disappeared. Relating to men without the restriction of sexual flirtation is indeed a freedom to meet them in a new and fresh way. (A Bit of Vineeto, #sex). With the sexual drive gone, I don’t have any need to flirt or hunt for other men. With the feeling of love gone, I enjoy each moment with Peter as fresh and intimate as if it was the first time. There are neither boredom nor fear, neither expectation nor disappointment, neither mysteries nor secrets, neither bickering nor interference. And what better play-mate could I find! It is ongoing delight. VINEETO to No. 19: When I met Peter and he said he wanted to live with a woman in peace and harmony, I took the opportunity. I had to question and eliminate a lot of my dearly held beliefs in the course of the search for such daily and permanent peace, but I considered those beliefs as part of the ego that I had set out to leave behind when I started on the spiritual path. My primary aim was peace. And being practical I realised that the challenge was to live in peace with one person. That was and is my contribution to peace in the world. If I could not live with one other person in peace and harmony, how could I realistically expect to be peace on the planet? Whatever was in the road between us I would investigate according to what was factual and what was a belief. Based on facts, we could always find a sensible agreement in whatever situation, something that has never been possible on the basis of believing something to be right or wrong, good or bad. Sticking stubbornly and passionately to my beliefs had only resulted in endless fights about opinions in my previous relationships. This is how I came to question one belief after the other, and one of them was the belief in authority. Without the belief in authority I can confidently stand on my own two feet and can examine whatever somebody says according to the content and not to who says it – a man, a woman, a guru, a ‘newcomer’, a heathen. That confidence gives me peace with everyone, I don’t need to attack or defend authority, and I can simply examine facts. You replied to what I wrote to No. 18: [Vineeto]: I actually got off my bum and cleaned myself up from everything that I did not like about myself: anger, jealousy, need, greed, fear, malice, bitching and depression... [Respondent]: Wow! And who is this who doesn’t like these things? Is that you now? Mask = Perfect Person? [endquote]. I think you don’t consider it a possibility that somebody can actually get rid of anger, greed, jealousy etc. You can only interpret it as another mask. I think it is a bit short-sighted, that’s all. I am simply saying that it is possible because I did it, and why not give it a try? My life now is well worth living and so much more fun than with all the problems that the Human Condition in me, like anger, fear, greed, sorrow etc. used to produce. You seem to get rather annoyed when we use the words ‘happy’ and ‘harmless’. I could also call it ‘not miserable’ and ‘not vindictive’. RESPONDENT to No. 4: Why do you allow yourself to be in any way affected by this person’s poison, this person is quite obviously a mind dweller and mind dwellers love to mind fuck, it is their expertise. Just watch these experts disappear up their own arses if you just give them enough rope. Vineeto can always surrender to ‘that’, but that is really up to existence, she or he is just playing in a play they think they are running. To wake that play up would take a Master and unfortunately for them the Master is dead! VINEETO: What you call ‘this person’s poison’, ‘mind dwellers’ and so on, is, for instance, the ability to live with a man in peace, harmony and equity for 24 hours a day, every day. It sounds very simple, yet, I have not met anyone or talked to anyone who was able to confirm that they did just that. This possibility – to be able to live with a man in peace and harmony – was one of the things that attracted me to Actual Freedom, and already within 6 months time it worked. This success alone far exceeded what I had been able to achieve through meditation and therapy, and for me, it speaks for itself. Because to live with one person of the opposite sex in permanent peace, harmony and equity proves that it is possible for everyone – and therefore peace on earth is possible. For me, it is the fire test. RESPONDENT: Dear Night, If your offering your head and I don’t in any way believe you really are, I will take it for you. love and piracy VINEETO: No, I don’t offer my head, I appreciate my brain, my intelligence and my apperceptiveness. I have got rid of my heart, my conditioning and many of my instinctual passions, but it is too late to offer them to you. The garbage man has emptied the bin already. You will need to hunt somewhere else.
Vineeto’s Selected Correspondence | Library – Living Together
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