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 VINEETO to Richard: The subject of the instinctual software package is indeed a fascinating one and the sufficient understanding is crucial and instrumental in cutting the cord both from ‘humanity’ and ‘me’. In the last days I started to understand about the nature of the instinctual programming that is ‘me’ which I would classify as ‘having glimpsed the end of the tunnel called the Human Condition’. Peter had described to No. 5 very accurately the process of examining one’s feeling, sliding deeper and deeper into emotion, then into instinctual passion until, with persistence, one is able to ‘dispassionately observe’ the very functioning of the particular core instinct in action. This method had always served me when I explored feelings and their underlying beliefs, emotions and their underlying ‘truth’, including the above mentioned ‘loyalty back when you and I first met’. Yet up until now I had only felt and experienced a particular emotion, sometimes it in all its devastation like the universal sorrow I described in my last letter, suffered it through, so to speak. I had not yet dared to stay with a surging instinctual passion all the way without objection, looking it straight in the eye to recognize and experience the naked ‘me’ in action in a dispassionate way. While reading through your latest correspondence I found two paragraphs that enticed me to try out where you described to the respondent what to do with fear: Richard: Whilst the word ‘fear’ is not the feeling itself, the feeling is very, very real whilst it is happening (like ‘I’ am). Speaking personally, what ‘I’ would do, all those years ago, was to ‘sit with it’ as it were (being with it), whilst it was happening. By ‘being with it’ – without moving in any direction whatsoever – ‘I’ would come to experience ‘being it’ (‘I’ was fear and fear was ‘me’). Thus ‘I’ came to experience ‘myself’ in all ‘my’ nakedness. All ‘I’ was, was that fear ... and fear is but one of the instinctual passions that blind nature bestows on all sentient beings at birth (at conception). Instincts are genetically encoded in the genes ... ‘I’ am the end-point of myriads of survivors passing on their genes. ‘I’ am the product of the ‘success story’ of blind nature’s fear and aggression and nurture and desire. Being born of the biologically inherited instincts genetically encoded in the germ cells of the spermatozoa and the ova, ‘I’ am – genetically – umpteen tens of thousands of years old ... ‘my’ origins are lost in the mists of pre-history. ‘I’ am so anciently old that ‘I’ may well have always existed ... carried along on the reproductive cell-line, over countless millennia, from generation to generation. And ‘I’ am thus passed on into an inconceivably open-ended and hereditably transmissible future. In other words: ‘I am fear and fear is ‘me’ (and aggression and nurture and desire). Co-Respondent: The statement pertains to the process of listening itself. In listening to that actuality of experience, sometimes there is ‘fear’. The ‘word’ is not the thing implies that the ‘word’ represents a distraction from listening. As you listen, words get thrown out in the brain. There is a constant translation of that experience in terms that we know and speak. And then we remain attached to those words, we hold on to those words for fear of losing them because then we will not be able to talk in the future. But that is not the living essence of listening. We are not concerned just with semantics of the ‘word is not the thing’. Richard: Honestly ... I cannot make sense of this that you write here. May I suggest, instead, that the next time fear happens that you ‘be with it’ without moving in any direction whatsoever until it becomes apparent that ‘you are fear and fear is you’? It is so much easier than all this intellectualising ... and far more rewarding. Because it will be the end of ‘you’. (Richard, List B, No. 31a, 3 October 1999). Of course, the last sentence got my full attention. I took the emotion at the time – fierce frustration about not ‘getting the point’ – and lay on the couch for experimenting and contemplating. The outcome was fascinating, to say the least. Digging myself to the very core of the feeling I discovered frustration as just being a cunning distraction from the underlying fear and, even deeper, found the mother of all instincts: ‘I don’t want to die’, which includes ‘I as species have to perpetuate. So here I found again what you said, Richard, that ‘I’ am ‘the many’ and ‘the many’ is ‘me’. Ignoring all the flashing stop-signs I reached to the stunningly clear perception of what ‘I’ consist of – a software survival program, causing emotion-producing chemicals and kept alive through the notion that this is me, all of me. The process of seeing the program of ‘me’, the ‘self’, in action was like lifting it from its nourishing soil, airing it, so to speak, and thus depriving it from its very life-source – even if only for a short time. That alien entity ‘me’ that I had been taking examining since so long was finally seen and experienced as something other than this physical body. These moments of apperception, of the bare awareness of ‘who I am’ now rock the boat and create all kinds of mental and physical nuisance like headache and angst, only to confirm that this experience was not just a dream. Since then I had another fascinating experiential insight into the nature of ‘desire’. In the early morning hours of a sleepless night I watched a procession of thoughts turn into a mental nightmare of need, growing into greed, amounting to wanting to devour anything or anybody that would come into my reach. For a short time this instinct took over all of my thinking like a mental rape, and I felt no different to a hungry lion or a python ready to strike. Curiously I was reminded of the compulsive eating disorder of bulimia and I could understand what might happen to people who suffer from it. I experienced the instinct of desire gone completely out of control – and if one would take action there would later be shame, guilt and despair for having ‘lost control’ with ensuing remorse and self-punishment in an endless cycle of self-destruction. What an exciting and fascinating set-up, being my own lab, my own guinea-pig and my own scientist all in one – and getting describable, repeatable and comparable results. Factual. Actual. And great fun. VINEETO: Good to hear from you. So you have been reading the web-sites and experimenting enough to come up with some very precise questions. First, it is good to get some method in one’s way of thinking. When I met Richard, this is what I remember as one of the first things we talked about – how to think, contemplate and inquire in a way that there is some result. He told me that it is useful to always come back to the question or topic from where I started and not – as our untrained brains tend to do – get lost in the different alleys and branches of speculation, imagination or irrelevant side-issues. Particularly when the subject is emotionally challenging, when a dearly-held belief is questioned and when fear arises, we are usually very quick in changing the subject and steering away from the ‘dangerous’ area. But when investigating the Human Condition in oneself, there will be lots of ‘dangerous’ areas of contemplation, there will be beliefs to be dismantled and emotions to unveil. That’s the whole purpose of the investigation in the first place, to discover the underlying beliefs and instinctual passions of a certain behaviour or emotional reaction, to uncover and eliminate one’s very ‘self’. So, you made a good start with listing your queries. I will play the librarian and give you directions where you will find Richard’s, Peter’s or my writing and correspondence on the topic. You wrote: RESPONDENT: Here are some questions that I have: What are the questions if you actively challenge your beliefs, feelings, emotions and instincts. How to deal with them. How can you ‘see’ through them all. If one has dismantled one belief then all the others can be too, in the same way, or not? VINEETO: The main question, that works for all of the Human Condition is ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ We composed a whole page, called ‘How to Become Free of the Human Condition’ on the topic with many links of writing and correspondence of how to apply this ongoing question in your daily life. I started with the understanding that it is only me who I can change, and that very understanding applies to everybody I meet, live with, work with and to the world at large. So, if anything in the day evoked an emotional reaction, I would start digging around and look for the cause in me, what belief, feeling and instinctual passion caused me to feel annoyed, fearful, angry, righteous, insecure, disgusted, loving, elusive, tired, etc. The first beliefs that I had to investigate were about male and female conditioning, my female identity, the belief in the ‘right to be emotional’, the ‘truth’ of intuition etc. Along with gender-issues came the problem of believing or fighting a supposed authority, which had been an emotionally charged topic since my early years. Usually under every emotional reaction I would find a firmly held belief in some ‘truth’ which I then, in due course, questioned and replaced with actual facts, investigated through reading, contemplating or talking with Peter and Richard, instead of simply taking on what others had told me to believe. It can sometimes be a fascinating and sometimes be a frightening adventure, after all, it is your very identity that you are taking apart, who you believe and feel yourself to be. When one belief was seen in its complexity with all its implications on various areas in my life, when I understood it to be merely a passionate thought and not factual, this belief disappeared. It’s like the fairy story of Sinterclaas (or Father Christmas) – once you know that he is only the neighbour with a false beard, the whole myth falls to pieces and you are never able to believe it again. But each belief has to be investigated on its own ... there is not a mathematical magic formula that deletes them all at once. Eventually you see through the whole lot – and what a relief and liberation that is! (...) RESPONDENT: Is there a method of observation? VINEETO: For me, the only method is to move from speculation to facts, from beliefs to facts, from emotional reaction to considering the silly and the sensible options. What is keeping me from being happy and harmless now, here, in this very moment of being alive? If I am not happy, there is always an observation to be done. RESPONDENT: It is a very brief description of the ‘social identity’ and it happened to me to be removed in a short period of time. VINEETO: What you have described in your first letter was not only a removal of your social identity but from your description it was evident that this temporary vacuum was immediately filled with emotion – it became an affective experience of ‘godliness’, also known as an Altered State of Consciousness. In such an ASC one feels that one knows the Truth, one feels oneself to be all-knowing, all-powerful, one-with-everything, filled with Love for all, compassionate to every living being and above and beyond all normal human experience. I once had such a powerful ASC that lasted for two days, and having learnt from Richard about its pitfalls, I used the experience to investigate exactly how my intelligence and my sensibility was devastatingly effected by these aggrandizing emotions. I was relieved when the experience was finally over and I was able to again think clearly and reasonably without being driven by feelings of grandeur and delusion. You can find the full description of the experience on our web-site. You have described the experience ‘to be removed’ from your social identity in an earlier post – [Respondent]: My highest state occurred in July 1997 after reading Tao Te King by Lao Tse and ever since I’m searching... <snip> My experience is that of being a man no.6, a state in which I had acquired real I, a Being made of light, state in which I was Everything within the Earth’s atmosphere limit, a God. My real I resembles a 900 years old child, extremely powerful and intelligent yet vulnerable. VORTEX is the word I like most. The experience of the state is like that of an atomic bomb detonated over your head, an atomic bomb made of love, bliss, freedom, will and extraordinary ecstasy (like your most powerful orgasm x 10000000). Everyone around you is literally dead, whether a spiritual man, a scientist or a savage from Africa. (Respondent, 30.7.2001). In contrast to such altered states of consciousness, a pure consciousness experience is a non-affective ‘self’-less pure sensate experience where all of ‘me’, both ego and soul, both my social identity and my instinctual being are temporarily in abeyance. In a PCE there is no identity present to feel like a God living in an ethereal other-worldly realm. God, although everyone on the planet believes in him (or her) in some way or other, is nothing but a passionate imagination that only exists in people’s heads and hearts. In a pure consciousness experience one is one’s sense organs brimming with delight, wallowing in the enormous abundance of sensual experience that is perpetually here while one is at the same time fully aware of being an aware sensate and reflective human being. This bare awareness of being aware, apperception, is the fundamental key to a pure consciousness experience – both coincide with each other. With an investigative awareness running – how am I experiencing this moment of being alive? – one is able to examines one’s affective feelings, emotions and instinctual passions as they occur. The longer one practices such investigative awareness, the less one’s feelings, emotions and passions interfere with one’s sensuous attentiveness of being alive at this very moment – an awareness that simply registers sensate experiencing. This sensate awareness is not something one can practice or cultivate in isolation from removing the affective feelings that interfere with the simple delight of being alive. Given sufficient practice of the actualism method, an ongoing idle sensate attentiveness to being alive can momentarily turn into an awareness of being aware, which is apperception, and a pure consciousness experience takes place. And then you are hooked. RESPONDENT: Vineeto says ‘...one can either focus on sensate experiencing, thereby avoiding undesirable affective experiencing – trying to become an un-feeling ‘self’...’ (Actualism, Vineeto, Selected Correspondence, Method-6). Is ‘coming to your senses’ an avoidance technique? What are the differences and similarities between haietmoba and ‘coming to your senses’? VINEETO: As No. 108 (R) and No. 66 have already pointed out, coming to one’s senses is not the same as focussing (only) on sensate experiencing whilst simultaneously neglecting, avoiding, denying, repressing or dissociating from whatever affective feelings are going on at the time. This makes no sense. Here is the text you quoted in context – [Vineeto]: ‘How’, not ‘what’ is indeed the clue to the difference between attentiveness with pure intent and the passive awareness of Eastern tradition. It had never occurred to me that it is this word that signifies the vital difference, but now that you said it is perfectly obvious – ‘how’ inquires into the quality of the experience and then the sincere intent to improve the quality of this moment to be both more happy and more harmless indicates what needs to be done. Whereas ‘what’ simply takes stock of the content of one’s experience and by doing so one can either focus on sensate experiencing, thereby avoiding undesirable affective experiencing – trying to become an un-feeling ‘self’ – or one can focus on desirable affective experiencing, thereby regarding what one sensately experiences as being secondary or even illusionary – trying to become a non-thinking, dissociated ‘self’. (Vineeto, Actual Freedom List, No. 37c, 12.5.2004). As becomes obvious when the quote is read in full, I was talking about the danger of slipping into a non-thinking, dissociated and un-feeling ‘self’ by mistaking the actualism method as being yet another version of the passive/selective awareness of Eastern mysticism – passive as in evoking no fundamental change and selective as in avoiding the dark side that is present in every instinctual being. More than a few people have mis-interpreted the actualism method as a tool for ignoring or dissociating from one’s affective feelings by focussing on and identifying with one’s senses and then wondering why this scheme did not work to evince the desired happiness and innocuousness. As Richard only recently pointed out – Richard: ‘The phrase ‘nipping them in the bud’ is not to be confused with either suppression/ repression or ignoring/ avoiding ... it is to be consciously and deliberatively – with knowledge aforethought – declining oh-so-sensibly to futilely go down that well-trodden path to nowhere fruitful yet again.’ (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Rick-a, 4 March 2006). When I ask myself how am I experiencing this moment of being alive then this question automatically focuses my attention both on my senses and on the feelings and emotions which prevent me from fully enjoying the sensate delights of being alive. By being constantly aware what it is that is preventing me from enjoying being alive now I am actively coming to my senses, literally and figuratively. Or to put it another way – actualism does require that you engage brain to come to your senses, as in not being so silly of wasting this moment by not being happy while doing whatever you happen to be doing and/or by not being harmless towards your fellow human beings. * VINEETO to Tarin: ‘When you practice the actualism method, it’s important to remember to examine the feeling in question only after you managed to get back to feeling good’ RESPONDENT: Remembering the triggers and examining the feeling are hard to do while in the grip of the listlessness or resentment. I know of no other way to get back to feeling good though. VINEETO: Have you ever watched a child getting upset when their favourite toy is taken away by another child for instance and then the mother or teacher steps in and diverts their attention by pointing to a bird flying by or a showing them a fragrant colourful flower or inviting them to join a different game that’s going on. Young children are usually able to very quickly forget their previous upset and accept the nudge to being happy again whereas adults often insist on the seriousness/ importance of their own particular problem and/or feeling and choose to continue to feel bad. When you set your aim to become happy and harmless you enter into an agreement with yourself, so to speak, to not let anything stand in the way of getting back to feeling good – in other words you make a conscious decision to make feeling good about being here, right now, your default feeling state. This intent in turn helps to re-kindle one’s own long-lost naiveté which then helps you to return to feeling good for no other reason than that you are alive and conscious in this spectacular abundant universe. As an adult you have the added bonus of being able to take note of the triggers that had caused you to stop feeling good in order to avoid this particular pitfall the next time round. * VINEETO: When you set your aim to become happy and harmless you enter into an agreement with yourself, so to speak, to not let anything stand in the way of getting back to feeling good – in other words you make a conscious decision to make feeling good about being here, right now, your default feeling state. This intent in turn helps to re-kindle one’s own long-lost naiveté which then helps you to return to feeling good for no other reason than that you are alive and conscious in this spectacular abundant universe. As an adult you have the added bonus of being able to take note of the triggers that had caused you to stop feeling good in order to avoid this particular pitfall the next time round. RESPONDENT: [quote] Peter: … you have set yourself a goal in life – to feel good or feel excellent – and then you are investigating whatever stands in the way of your goal. If you started off feeling really good and suddenly noticed as you put your feet up at lunchtime that you have lost it and are feeling a bit low, then put a name on the feeling – say annoyed – and then trace back and remember when you came off feeling good and why. If it was something someone said, have a root around and discover why you became annoyed. What button was pushed – was it pride, was it guilt, was it your manliness, was it some moral view you held that was offended? When you have milked the event or incident for what it was worth and discovered a bit about yourself and what makes ‘you’ tick, then you get back to feeling good or you even crank up a bit of feeling excellent at having been aware of how you were experiencing that particular moment of being alive and had made some discoveries about yourself. (Peter, Actual Freedom List, No. 3c, 16.4.2001). I wonder if this is a point of disagreement between yourself then and Peter because this again shows the ‘contradiction’ No. 92 pointed out. Peter seems to be saying here that getting back to feeling good is what happens as a result of the investigation – as Richard also seems to say. VINEETO: You’ve discussed this point before in a previous correspondence with Richard – Respondent: So far, tracking back and investigating has not made me feel any better. Richard: In a nutshell: one cannot examine something fully if one is busy denying its existence. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 110, Re: Getting Back To Feeling Good, Tue 28/03/2006 9:50 AM). Getting back to feeling good is not ‘a result of the investigation’ but is a result of one’s intent to be as happy and harmless as humanly possible – ‘happiness has to be chosen by focussing on felicity’, as No. 37 wrote. The result of investigating your beliefs and feelings is a continued and increasingly uninterrupted happiness and harmlessness for the simple reason that less and less events will trigger any non-felicitous feelings. As you have probably noticed yourself, when you are in the clasp of depression or in a fit of rage or gripped by fear it is impossible to think straight, let alone to sort out the underlying reasons, beliefs, convictions and/or expectations as to why you feeling the way you are feeling? The only thing you can do is note the feelings that are happening and note what triggered those feelings. This is what actualists sometimes call ‘milking the feeling for what it’s worth’ or getting all the information you need to out of the situation for later examination. Once you have the information you want you get yourself out of feeling bad as quickly as possible. When you are back to feeling good then you can sit down, put up your feet and reflect on what happened, what pattern was played out, what possible belief, worldview, opinion, principle or habit, caused you to automatically respond to a situation in this way, i.e. which aspect of your identity stuffed up your being happy, in order to avoid falling into the same trap next time. There is nothing contradictory at all about Peter’s and my descriptions about putting the actualism method into practice (I know because living with Peter we regularly talk about everything pertaining to our daily lives and haven’t had a disagreement on how we are practicing actualism yet). You will come to find out for yourself when you will put the actualism method into practice for yourself instead of finding apparent contradictions as ‘arguments for the purpose of greater intellectual understanding of AF’. RESPONDENT: Anyway, I understand your point about intent being the way to getting back to feeling good and then investigating afterwards. Both seem to be correct but I feel like I need the two points to be acknowledged as differing. VINEETO: If you still think they are two points instead of one then why don’t you try out both the apparently differing ways when you inquire into your feelings of ‘dull listlessness and resentment of being here’, for instance. I’ll be interested to hear of your experiential report as to what works best for you. RESPONDENT: How long was it for you to dispense with the haietmoba for a ‘wordless’ approach? And do you think a haietm or even ‘how am I feeling?’ could work as well? VINEETO: The moment I fully committed myself to the aim of actualism – the extinction of my ‘self’ in toto, ego and soul – the method became an ongoing wordless approach. RESPONDENT: So, do you still employ the haietmoba? VINEETO: Of course, a wordless attentiveness is most times operating … once you make the effort to switch it on it is nigh on impossible to switch it off again, and it would be silly too. Nowadays being attentive to how I am experiencing this moment of being alive is a delight and not the effort it used to be in the beginning. * RESPONDENT: Sometimes (like No. 60) I find the whole haietmoba tiring. No. 37 claims to be using a wordless approach but he has not giving us any details so I don’t know what exactly he is doing. I am determined to dig, but sometimes I wonder if my shovel is just to heavy for me to wield. I just can’t comprehend how you and Peter became virtually free in a scant 2 years doing this. VINEETO: Yep, it’s all about the strength of one’s intent and commitment to the task at hand. Once I comprehended what was at stake it was all systems go. To merely try the actualism method for a year or two in order to see if anything happened was never an option for me. RESPONDENT: Which probably describes why No. 23, then No. 60 and now me are not reaping the full benefits that the af method can provide. I’m still holding back, not wanting to commit to another possible ‘rabbit chase’. Compared to the zeal and hours of time I spent meditating, praying, contemplatively reading scripture, and chanting, my ‘practice’ of af method has been pathetic. Nonetheless, merely removing spirituality from my life and half-assedly paying attention to my emotions has been helpful already. VINEETO: I found that it was useful to remind myself that what I was doing was going in the opposite direction to everyone else and because of this I found it is far more productive to pat oneself on the back for what one has already achieved in terms of becoming happy and harmless. Change happens one step at a time. There was much involved in extrac RESPONDENT: Sometimes (like No. 60) I find the whole haietmoba tiring. No. 37 claims to be using a wordless approach but he has not giving us any details so I don’t know what exactly he is doing. I am determined to dig, but sometimes I wonder if my shovel is just to heavy for me to wield. I just can’t comprehend how you and Peter became virtually free in a scant 2 years doing this. VINEETO: Yep, it’s all about the strength of one’s intent and commitment to the task at hand. Once I comprehended what was at stake it was all systems go. To merely try the actualism method for a year or two in order to see if anything happened was never an option for me. RESPONDENT: Which probably describes why No. 23, then No. 60 and now me are not reaping the full benefits that the af method can provide. I’m still holding back, not wanting to commit to another possible ‘rabbit chase’. Compared to the zeal and hours of time I spent meditating, praying, contemplatively reading scripture, and chanting, my ‘practice’ of af method has been pathetic. Nonetheless, merely removing spirituality from my life and half-assedly paying attention to my emotions has been helpful already. VINEETO: I found that it was useful to remind myself that what I was doing was going in the opposite direction to everyone else and because of this I found it is far more productive to pat oneself on the back for what one has already achieved in terms of becoming happy and harmless. Change happens one step at a time. There was much involved in extracting myself from the resinaceous world of spiritual beliefs – abandoning my spiritual tribe, many of my friends and acquaintances, quitting my job, losing my customary social entertainment. Such was the change that it took some time to fully digest and integrate and for the consequences to fall away. Then one morning I woke up and realized I was neither hurting about my loss nor could I remember what I was supposedly missing, and that was the moment when I realized I was ready for the next challenge whatever it might be. Once you take the first step in the right direction on the path out of the human condition, each of the following steps one needs to take becomes apparent along the way. * RESPONDENT: I also wonder about the fact that you and Peter were virtually free around 1999 and seemed close to actual freedom. Yet 5 years later and no dice. VINEETO: My explanation is – and there is really no precedent to this direct route of becoming actually free via avoiding enlightenment – that it was relatively easy to get rid of my negative feelings such as anger, resentment and sadness, the freedom from which resulted in a virtual freedom, while the good emotions such as compassion, sympathy, empathy, loyalty and belonging to humanity at large are far tougher nuts to crack and as such take far longer to identify, understand and become free of. RESPONDENT: So, do you think it’s best to ‘go after’ both the positive and negative emotions or mostly focus on the unpleasant ones at first? VINEETO: Whichever one is preventing me from being harmless and happy right now. Having said that, I found that putting being harmless first meant that I initially became aware of feelings such as irritation, anger, resentment, frustration, blame and so on. * RESPONDENT: Have the last 5 years been a stalemate? No changes? VINEETO: A stalemate? Not at all, although sometimes, when I grow impatient, it may feel that way. RESPONDENT: Do you still grow impatient? Or is that the past? VINEETO: Yes, I do. I am bound to as becoming actually free is the overarching passion to which all other instinctual passions have become deferential. Yet each time when I experienced a bout of impatience I have come to realize that it never serves to speed up the process, on the contrary, impatience, if left unchecked, can fester into doubt and throw me off the wide and wondrous path. So I have learnt to recognize the symptoms of impatience earlier and quicker in order that I can nip them in the bud more easily before the feeling takes over entirely. What remains is the determination see it through and the confidence that an actual freedom is bound to happen simply because ‘I’ do no longer have a choice in the matter. RESPONDENT: ... and there is this part is me that wants to go for it and that doer force was a few days ago squeezing my head trying to force it to happen, quite dangerous. So what is he trying to sell to ‘me’, why is the question ‘How am I...’ not enough. VINEETO: When you say, ‘that doer force’ that was ‘squeezing my head’, it sounds like it it somebody other than you forcing you to do something you don’t really want to do? I have found it a general practice in spiritual circles – and have done it myself quite a lot too – to refer to emotions or ‘forces’ as if I had no input and no control over ‘it’. To my delight I found out that I have! All the control and all the responsibility is mine! When I don’t like something, like pushing myself into misery, I can see it and stop it, because there is nobody else that is creating the misery but me. Of course, to be able to sort out between the ‘forces’ inside my head – or heart – I have to be clear with my intent, where I am heading and what I want to achieve. With a peak-experience as landmark I can judge the different on goings – with me they were usually emotions – and sift the chaff from the wheat. I understand from your mail that you seem to make Richard responsible for your forcing yourself ‘dangerously’. But nobody is responsible but you, you choose what you do, that is the wonderful thing in actual freedom. There is no authority and nobody gets the credits when you reap the rewards. It is all in your hands. Nobody can stop you either. * RESPONDENT: Could you share your ‘how am I experiencing this moment...’ It seem more relevant than digging up memories. So ‘how am I ...’, Hmm having difficulty coming up with suitable descriptive words. I am not feeling great though... pain in the head front and back, stomach discomfort and through this there is a mild sense of clarity. There is also the sense of ‘me’ trying to hang on and keep control. VINEETO: (...) I have tried to convey in the last mail how I am using the question to discover whatever emotions were going on at the time, using the example of authority. I’ll post it again, this time broken into the different steps, in case you did not recognize the method. This is not just digging old memories, as you say, but a detailed description of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ To get rid, permanently, of a certain emotion, what I did was – investigate the underlying reasons – why do I have this fear, what is the belief that supports it? In this case I found that wanting approval – or pretending to reject it – was, for me, based on the belief in authority. I believed that I was not authority enough to judge my actions or in-actions, or judge certain behaviour as silly or sensible. As a woman I had this issue especially with men and this had spoiled all my relationships with men. It took quite a bit of digging into the causes of why I believed everybody else more competent to judge what is right and wrong for me. One thing is, authority is a strong part of everyone’s upbringing. But underneath that conditioning I found an immense fear to stand on my own feet, alone, by myself – the survival instinct of a. belonging to a group, b. or a strong person. I was continuously looking for an authority to a. protect me, b. guide me, c. love me, d. to be part of a group around those authority figures. The struggle looks silly to me now, but at the time it produced immense fear-attacks, days of wanting to hide, to run away, a nightmare to decide between Richard/Peter as the supposed authority figures or Rajneesh and his disciples as the guiding principle. To dissolve the nightmare I decided to not stop until I had found the root cause. And the root cause was, strangely enough, a belief in God. I had thought I had dismissed God years ago, when I went to Poona and left Christianity behind. But then the Christian God was just replaced by Rajneesh. Questioning and understanding my fear as the belief in and the fear of a judging and punishing God made it all very clear. Finally I could step out of the circle of a. creating and consequently b. fighting human authorities (God’s representatives) and simply decide for myself, with my own intelligence and common sense, what I wanted to do with my life, in each particular moment, in each situation. I have done this process of tracing with every single irritation, emotion and belief that I found lurking inside ‘my soul’ and in this way have reduced ‘my soul’ to a very small percentage of its original size. With it my troubles, worries, fears and irritations have also been reduced to a very small percentage of their original appearance. It works, immediately – and that, for many, is the scary bit. One actually diminishes and eliminates one’s soul and one’s identity. But unless one investigates one’s emotions, one’s beliefs and at last one’s instincts at the root of a physical unpleasantness, tension or sensation, there is no way to get to the bottom of the matter. It will stay a sorry-go-round of ‘noticing’ and disappearing, reappearing and ‘noticing’ again ad nauseam. Richard has described the method very well in an earlier correspondence with you: Richard: Affectively, of course ... that is how you are experiencing this moment. Look, let us not unnecessarily complicate things here. The ‘how’ simply means ‘what feeling am I experiencing right now with’ ... which is: ‘Am I bored?’, ‘Am I resentful?’, ‘Am I at ease?’, ‘Am I glad?’, ‘Am I sad?’ and so on. You see, peace-on-earth is here right now – the perfection of the infinitude of this universe is happening at this moment – and you are missing out on it because you are feeling what it is like to be here instead of actually being here. Hence: ‘How am I experiencing this moment’ means ‘What feeling is preventing the on-going experiencing of peace-on-earth?’ Before applying the actualism method – the ongoing enjoyment and appreciation of this moment of being alive – it is essential for success to grasp the fact that this very moment which is happening now is your only moment of being alive. The past, although it did happen, is not actual now. The future, though it will happen, is not actual now. Only now is actual. Yesterday’s happiness and harmlessness does not mean a thing if one is miserable and malicious now and a hoped-for happiness and harmlessness tomorrow is to but waste this moment of being alive in waiting. All one gets by waiting is more waiting. Thus any ‘change’ can only happen now. The jumping in point is always here; it is at this moment in time and this place in space. Thus, if one misses it this time around, hey presto, one has another chance immediately. Life is excellent at providing opportunities like this. (...) This perpetual enjoyment and appreciation is facilitated by feeling as happy and as harmless as is humanly possible. And this (affective) felicity/ innocuity is potently enabled via minimisation of both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ feelings. An affective awareness is the key to maximising felicity and innocuity over all those alternate feelings inasmuch the slightest diminishment of enjoyment and appreciation automatically activates attentiveness. Attentiveness to the cause of diminished enjoyment and appreciation restores felicity and innocuity. The habituation of actualistic awareness and attentiveness requires a persistent initialisation; persistent initialisation segues into a wordless approach, a non-verbal attitude towards life. It delivers the goods just here, right now, and not off into some indeterminate future. Plus the successes are repeatable – virtually on demand – and thus satisfy the ‘scientific method’. So, ‘I’ asked myself, each moment again: ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’? As one knows from the pure consciousness experiences (PCE’s), which are moments of perfection everybody has at some stage in their life, that it is possible to experience this moment in time and this place in space as perfection personified, ‘I’ set the minimum standard of experience for myself: feeling good. 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). Thus, by asking ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ the reward is immediate; by finding out what triggered off the loss of feeling good, one commences another period of enjoying this moment of being alive. It is all about being here at this moment in time and this place in space ... and if you are not feeling good you have no chance whatsoever of being here in this actual world. (A grumpy person locks themselves out of the perfect purity of this moment and place). Of course, once you get the knack of this, one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy’. And after that: ‘feeling perfect’. These are all feelings, this is not perfection personified yet ... but then again, feeling perfect for twenty three hours and fifty nine minutes a day is way beyond normal human expectations anyway. Also, it is a very tricky way of both getting men fully into their feelings for the first time in their life and getting women to examine their feelings one by one instead of being run by a basketful of them all at once. One starts to feel ‘alive’ for the first time in one’s life. Being ‘alive’ is to be paying attention – exclusive attention – to this moment in time and this place in space. This attention becomes fascination ... and fascination leads to reflective contemplation. Then – and only then – apperception can occur. (Richard, List B, No. 26, 14 November 1998). Richard: (...) but it requires the 100% cooperation of the other. I cannot be more interested in another’s freedom than they are. Having had nigh on eighteen years experience of talking to recalcitrant egos I have no intention of inspiring, enthusing or exhilarating anyone. I am more than happy to participate in another’s enquiry until they ‘get it’ and begin their voyage of discovery into their psyche – which is the human psyche – but it is their energy that is needed to vitalise their search. (Richard, List B, No. 26, 7 November 1998). This 100%, boots and all-approach is my experience too. Until I had decided to give it a go, because I had to acknowledge that nothing else had worked in my life to my satisfaction, there was only miserable pondering, cerebral torture and emotional distress. Once I decided to dare to give it a try, things became easier, I became focused, clear and determined. It has been so ever since. Nothing can stop me becoming completely free in one of these moments. It is a great adventure! * VINEETO: Today you get a short one, how about that? RESPONDENT: An added note: this question ‘how am I...’ causes me to examine the contents of consciousness moment to moment. I am not aware of a method or needing one because when it occurs it is an immediate and actual freedom. VINEETO: With the question ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ I examine the contents of what is in the road of bare awareness, all the contents of the Human Condition, which are mainly emotions and underlying emotional backed up thought, meaning ‘beliefs’. When you are feeling good, it’s great. When you are not feeling good, that is when one needs to look at the reasons, why one is not feeling good in this moment. When you are feeling good most of the time, you raise the bar – feeling excellent. Did you ever try to trace down such an obstacle to bare awareness? What did you find? As Alan said so aptly: ‘I tell you, the sound of one hand clapping is a piece of cake compared to this.’ (Alan to No. 3, 9.1.1999). * RESPONDENT: Yes, I experience this as the sense of everything fitting in its place, like a wonderful sense of order and balance. At times when there is a sense of stuckness or forcing I realize there is ‘I’ attempting to ‘do’ and the question running in my mind has taken a break. VINEETO: In my investigation into the Human Condition, I didn’t bother much about the differences between the various ‘I’s’ that were trying to take charge, I preferred to focus my attention on my feelings and emotions. I had understood that feelings and emotions are definitely part of the Human Condition, and being conditioned as a woman to express emotions made that even more obvious to me. From there I could proceed to examine the different feelings and emotions and un-cover the underlying beliefs. Whenever I attempted to cerebrally sort out which ‘I’ was telling me what to do, or which is the real aware ‘I’ and which the watcher, or perhaps the actual I, there was only hopeless confusion. The spiritual training of creating a distant ‘I’ had made me a confusing ‘I’ behind the ‘I’ behind the ‘I’. So identifying which feeling I am experiencing, be they sadness, distance, listlessness or boredom, is a much better landmark from where to unravel the Human Condition than finding which ‘I’ is attempting’ to do what. VINEETO: I found that to effectively explore emotions to the point of (virtually) eliminating them I had to experience them fully. Only by neither repressing, nor expressing, nor in any way rationally twisting the emotional experience could I meticulously observe, become fully aware of and sensibly contemplate on what is happening in my head, heart and guts and thus investigate the root cause of that particular emotion. Knowing that every emotion is part of the Human Condition relieved me from blaming myself or being resentful for having an emotion in the first place. In order to eliminate the particular emotion such that it would not return again and again, it was essential to explore it deeply at its core and to understand experientially how each emotion originated in my social identity and/or in my very sense of ‘being’. Once having seen the emotion in operation and understood its ramifications to their full extent there was no way I could feel the same way about a particular issue or situation – by having understood this specific piece of my identity it had been extinguished. Needless to say, this method has not the slightest thing to do with plain rationalization or spiritual dis-identification – proven by the very fact that it works, that it gets rid of the emotion permanently while increasingly allowing the sensual sensuousness and the pure delight of being alive. I know well the ‘occasional reluctance to explore’, yet the frustration of obviously going round in silly circles has always given me courage to stop wasting my time, to face the fear and ‘reluctance’ and do whatever was necessary to return to being happy and harmless. RESPONDENT: This brings up a dilemma in my mind. One of influence and existence. Sometimes I seem happy just to have removed an emotion’s substantial influence without trying to get to the core of it. I find it difficult going into emotions when I’m working so I guess that is why I only attempt to draw on what I have discovered about them to stay out of the spell of any arising emotions. I’m sure there is more to it than that though. For example I think self-doubt needs more investigating as I find sometimes that considering another’s point of view, the basis of some confusion. VINEETO: Fair enough, you only go as far as you want as fast as you want. As long as you ‘seem happy’ then that seems to work. I simply suggested a way to explore further in case the option to ‘stay out of the spell of any arising emotion’ is not enough for you. RESPONDENT: Actually it is not really good enough and I keep persisting even after many failed attempts to get at the root of an emotion. Being free to use bare awareness and not be caught by the emotions is I feel an important step and one which I seem to be gradually, getting the knack of. VINEETO: Yes, ‘to use bare awareness and not be caught by the emotions’ is absolutely essential for becoming actually free from the Human Condition. Emotions, feelings and beliefs (passionate convictions) are how one sees one’s instinctual passions in operation. They form the layer of our social conditioning which needs to be explored and removed – both for a happy and harmless life in Virtual Freedom and for an experiential understanding of the raw instinctual passions at our very core. And you probably have experienced the instant gratifications when a belief disappears, an emotion doesn’t turn up anymore, a snide remark from someone else falls flat and as being alive becomes gradually a play and a pleasure. RESPONDENT: Although, the suggested method of trying to recall a PCE to get out of stuckness only helped in that it brought the obstacle into focus. VINEETO: This is great success, don’t you think? To have ‘brought the obstacle into focus’ and to know what the obstacle is about which keeps you in ‘stuckness’ is an excellent starting position for investigation. Now this obstacle can be identified, labelled and experientially explored, using apperceptiveness to detect its reasons, connections, source and implications. This has nothing to do with the Buddhist method (Vipassana) of labelling a feeling and then dis-identifying from it. 180 degrees opposite again. An actualist labels the feeling to get the bugger by the throat, to explore it as a scientist, to check out its silliness or sensibility, to determine how it is part of the Human Condition and then, when all is said and done, to permanently step out of having that emotion. This final stepping out often results in a pure consciousness experience. Last night I was contemplating about Alan’s description of his ‘reflective contemplations’, ‘practising the actual’ and arriving here in the actual world and how this records with my experience. Further Alan says: [Alan to Vineeto]: ‘Reflective contemplation’ is the way to not only get out of stuckness but also to discover what is preventing one experiencing this moment. I realised that this is what had occasioned all of my PCEs – this is what leads to wonder at the joy of it all. (Alan to Vineeto, 29.4.2000). Recalling step by step my own process into a PCE last night I found that contemplation serves to focus on the direction – being happy, dismantling the self, comprehending enough of the real world in order to see the self in operation and to step out of it. Contemplation always helps to focus on and remove obstacles and then, with no feeling or belief interfering I can build up the sensuous awareness of this moment of being alive. The wind on the skin, the sounds around, the wiggling of my toe, visual delights, tastes and smells ... Increasing sensuousness tips over into gay abandon, the self as both the controller and the feeler are abandoned and bingo ... I am experiencing what I had previously only reflectively contemplated about – this moment of being alive as a flesh and blood body only. The gay abandon can, of course, also happen without the reflective part, as a nature experience, in sex or any time when sensual pleasure is sensuous enough to tip over into the self-less experience of being alive as a flesh and blood body only. RESPONDENT: Many times I find that an emotion withers away before I get a good look at it. It’s almost as if it is avoiding a detailed look. Up to now I’ve been unable to find a reason for this and guess that all that is required is more attempts and that it will eventually become clear. VINEETO: Emotions are a slippery lot. They build the basis for our identity, which is as cunning as all get out. Yet the actualism method can be applied to discover every trick – whatever the feeling or emotion that keeps me from being happy here, now, needs to be examined and understood and then, presto, I go back to being happy again. I find that emotions can wither for different reasons. Either I understand that it is silly to be emotional and make a deliberate choice to move on and ‘smell the coffee’ instead. Or the emotion has been investigated in detail and is just a leftover bad habit to be thrown out and then I can go back to enjoying the moment. If I have avoided an emotion it will for sure come back in a similar situation and thus give me another opportunity to notice it, feel it, face it, label it, explore it, understand it and step out of it. RESPONDENT: Sometimes I experience a quick deep understanding which is gone in a flash and I don’t even remember what I understood. What I do notice is that certain reactions don’t occur any more. VINEETO: These moments of a ‘quick deep understanding which is gone in a flash’ might well be the flash of a pure consciousness experience and are as such worth extending or recalling. The fact that ‘certain reactions don’t occur any more’ points to that possibility. What do you think? IRENE: (...) So, to come back to my proposal in the beginning of this email, I would like to call my game ‘being natural and authentic’ (with the understanding and wise use of feelings, intuition and instincts). I suggest that we call your game ‘extirpate the natural and the authentic’ (with the emphasis on feelings, intuition and instincts). As I said before this is something that I suggest in order to come to an agreement between you and me, so your agreement or disagreement or your choice of names to our games is equally valid as mine, as long as we can agree both! What we have in common in this is not yet clear to me, but I hope that you can detect something in this email to which you can say: ‘Yes, I do see that myself too’ or ‘Yes, in this respect Irene and I see eye to eye’. I sincerely hope that we find something more in common than living in the same town and the few people we both know, but if that proves not to be the case then that is how it is, isn’t it? VINEETO: The reason I write is to ultimately to find out about myself. If I get upset about something, annoyed, repulsed or angry, it means there is something in me that is not squeaky clean. And my game is called ‘actual freedom’ and that means being free of anything that prevents me from experiencing the actual world as-it-is. And as long as there is any feeling or emotion triggered in me, I will never experience how this actual world really is! Therapists have found a part of this understanding – they call it ‘projection’. Projection means, I see something in someone else that I have in myself. The say, ‘forget about the other.’ Why does it annoy me? Oh, because I reject it in me. Aha, I am dishonest, that’s why I am annoyed that the other is maybe dishonest (or a Hitler, or authority-fixed, or proselytizing, etc.)? So then, what I do is search in me for the reason for feeling dishonest. In what terms am I dishonest with myself? Am I believing something that I have already experienced to be otherwise? So then, why do I want to hold on to this belief, which I have already experienced as false? Fear? Yes, of course, fear! All my fear is fear of death. Fear that denies the fact of death. One day ‘I’ will have to die. Full stop. See, Irene, this is how I deal with what you call might ‘intuition’. I turn it on myself. ‘I’ am the only person I am interested in because it is this ‘I’ that stands in the way of my happiness. It is ‘I’ who has to be eliminated. Full stop. And that fear of death creates all the tricks, throwing up issues, ‘truths’ and beliefs, emotions and disharmony. It can be traced down to that basic fear. Always! So I have decided to be free of that fear. I have decided for the unnatural solution, 180 degrees away from the instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. All of them are based on the fear of death. And those instincts are the fundamental corner stone, the very reason for all of humanity’s values, be they ethical, moralistic, religious or spiritual values. In their very nature those instincts are destructive. The instincts only ‘care’ for the survival of the species, the strongest, the most aggressive, the crudest. I have experienced a lot of time without this destructive ‘I’, the self. I know that there is something vastly better than this petty life of fears and deceit that I have lived during most of my life. There is no destiny in this picture of petty morals. There is no freedom. The only freedom there is lies outside of instincts. And for that freedom ‘I’ have to die. Full stop! Then I can taste the sweet as-is-ness of the actual world, the as-is-ness of people, events and things. That ambrosial, magical, magnificent sweetness pulls me further and further into what looks like death on the side of ‘self’. But in the face of that delicious sweetness all objections slowly, slowly melt into insignificance... Irene, if you don’t see it this way, then you will do something else with your life. If you don’t remember and rely upon your own peak-experiences because of what they implicate, then this is what you choose to do. Most other people I know would agree with you. But the actuality of my own sensuous experience is too obvious, too tempting, too delicious. If you say you do not want to acknowledge or follow that taste of your peak experiences because Richard has experienced actual freedom first – a man in general and Richard in particular – then that is your personal objection. I have smelled, tasted, seen, heard, touched it so often myself, and so closely, that I am now obsessed with it ... the delicious is-ness of it all, because there is nobody inside is separate, who objects... It sure beats Love, Divine Love or Compassion, which are all no strangers to me, so I can say that with full authority. Why should I settle for second best? RESPONDENT: (...) And have also recently realized that the only place in the world where there is cruelty – fear – and sadness is within myself. But I have a lot of both, especially the sadness. They are what got me looking. Is there something else to be done besides pay attention to them? How is this identity dismantled? VINEETO: ‘Paying attention’ is something that I have heard the Enlightened Ones use a lot. The idea is to step outside of that particular emotion and ‘rise above’ it where the problem does not exist. Unfortunately it only works for a very short time. As soon as one comes back into ‘the world’, ‘the marketplace’ and the body, those problems are all waiting. Peter describes it at length in his journal in ‘Spiritual Search’ and ‘God’. What I found fascinating with Richard’s method is that you can actually eliminate the problem and it will never return. Asking myself the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’, I can quickly find out what is not perfect. Tracking the particular emotion, mood or feeling back to its source I usually found the underlying conditioning, belief and fear. When I questioned the belief and checked against the facts of the situation, the belief cannot hold water. Some actions or emotions I could simply stop applying because they were obviously silly. Others I had to investigate deeper and tackle the fear involved when dismantling a dear held value, a chunk of identity or a ‘holy cow’. Another very powerful question was: ‘who am I in relation to other people?’ It brought the point home to me that everything I think myself to be is in someway or other related to other people. Once I found the cause for a particular behaviour and the underlying fear, I could then easily decide what is ‘silly’ and what is ‘sensible’. It becomes a fascinating journey into the intricate web of one’s psyche, untangling oneself from one string after the other, may they be personal or collective held beliefs. RESPONDENT: I am alone, have no companion with intentions similar to mine. VINEETO: Whenever I needed to sort something out and got stuck with it, it was and is indeed very helpful to talk to a like-minded person. But as well as talking to Peter I used writing as a tool for clarification, either writing down my story or posting a letter to the mailing list. Just to have to put it into words for someone else to understand and to be ruthlessly honest with myself in my investigations were already the first acts of clarifying my inner mess. Slowly my scientific scrutiny has improved as I became more daring, ie the brain started functioning more and more with clarity and purity and less distorted and clouded by ‘self’-produced emotions and beliefs, as it had been trained to. After I had decided that I actually wanted to clean myself up from being malicious and sorrowful, my intent made me use every situation as indicator to ‘get the bugger by the throat’. Sorting myself out at work – I work in a sannyas-company, my former spiritual peer-group – was as much part as of it as checking out the gender differences in the relationship. Cleaning oneself up results in seeing the world and other people with different eyes, less driven by the miserable interpretation of one’s sorrow and fear and more receptive to seeing it as the delightful place it is. And who knows, someone might be attracted by the results you are achieving in your daily life... * RESPONDENT: The obvious question is a ‘how’ question, and my experience has been that all ‘how’ questions come from the sense of self itself and are based in the usual motivation of the sense of self, that being of course, fear, and are nothing more than an announcement of the presence of the sense of self. VINEETO: I think you are stepping on your own tail with this roundabout thinking, and then wonder that you stumble. You cannot exhaust the ‘sense of self’ by thinking, but you have to actively eliminate it bit by bit. It is not fear that searches for the way out, but the memory of the PCE, where no fear exists. The intent is to have that PCE-like state for 24 hours a day. With success you become more bold and keep investigating in yet another belief which cause you suffering... RESPONDENT: Are you asserting the belief in a state of fearlessness that can be achieved through fearful means? VINEETO: You take your PCE – the experience of no ‘self’ and no fear – and try and imitate it as closely as possible in your daily life, by the simple and effective question: ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’. You can start by not complaining about the weather, by actually tasting the coffee you are drinking, by feeling the legs and feet walking on the corridors or by stopping another ingrained habit of complaining ... whatever you like to start with. This is about getting down from the thinking-it-out-chair and getting dirty, ie. you experiment with your life and find out if it works for you. I can only say it worked for me. There is no short-cut, no thinking, thinking, thinking, and then pop! This method is about cleaning yourself up practically, diligently and persistently by removing one cause of unhappiness and malice after the other. (...) Unless you have established for yourself a life in peace and harmony, with the basic needs taken care of, a life of Virtual Freedom, full of delight and joy, there is no basis to face the ‘big instinctual fears’. At least, this is my experience. If I tried to face death before I am firmly settled in ‘Virtual Freedom’ there is great danger to end in dread, madness or the delusion of enlightenment. Not recommended... * RESPONDENT: The obvious question is a ‘how’ question, and my experience has been that all ‘how’ questions come from the sense of self itself and are based in the usual motivation of the sense of self, that being of course, fear, and are nothing more than an announcement of the presence of the sense of self. VINEETO: See, the ‘how’ question-explanation is just used by the ‘self’ to avoid the looking. You prove to yourself that it is a hopeless exercise and then you are back in ‘safe’ desperation and searching. It reminds me of Richard’s expression: ‘the psychological and psychic entity is a lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning entity.’ The frightened produces the very cunning; you have to find out your tricks. If you ask, ‘where am I maintaining a belief instead of investigating facts’ and ‘why’, there might be an honest answer. And the knack is to start with the ‘good’ beliefs, the positive ones, the ones we want to keep because they seem so right, so nice, so sweet, so cozy, so honourable. It is belief itself that is the problem, not merely a matter of which belief is right or wrong. RESPONDENT: We screw up the world and ourselves with our ‘me’s’ and now we are going to fix everything within us with our ‘me’s’? VINEETO: See, another trick, you prove to yourself again that it cannot work. And then you say, ‘clarity does not arise’! Somebody has to clean yourself up, and nobody else is going to do it. I take it that you are ‘most earnestly looking here’. I think you just fell for your own trick again. RESPONDENT: What is doing the active elimination? VINEETO: Well it will have to be you, whoever you find inside of you who wants to do the job. Most probably he is called No. 2. There is no God and no Divine Grace who will honour your efforts by waving the magic wand. And as I said, it is the ‘good’ beliefs, which will show you your ‘soul’, your ‘self’. You could consider questioning the belief in ‘real love’? Or being a protector? Or an idea that you have how someone else should be or behave... RESPONDENT: My experience with PCEs is that they are a rather sudden, intense, seeing all the way through to the heart of the matter, cutting through all fear, all identity, all sense of ‘me’ and its associated purposefulness and with them there is a sense of completeness and belonging to the universe, just as actually I am, without any resistance whatsoever. VINEETO: PCEs are the flashlights in a basement of rubbish. One can enjoy being relieved from the misery and confusion, which is a wonderful thing to have. But when you have the PCE you can also look at the Human Condition from the clarity you have then and find out which particular bit stands out and needs to be tackled next. The clarity from the PCE always helped me to work out in which way I am obstructing perfection and that understanding then became my work-line. RESPONDENT: If ‘I’ knew of a button to push to bring it about continuously, I would push that button right now. VINEETO: There is no button, sorry. I found only heaps of rubbish obstructing this pure consciousness perception of the actual world on a permanent basis and that rubbish needed facing, questioning, abandoning, changing behaviour, losing identities, losing friends, losing the very ground I thought and felt I was standing on. Yes, wouldn’t it be nice, someone could push the button and then it’s all over? But the satisfaction from each belief I freed myself from was such a joy that it made every day of the journey fascinating and still does. RESPONDENT: And that is the problem. While there is any button pusher left, there can be no PCE. VINEETO: It is much more than just the ‘button pusher’ that is in the way. It is all that humanity has believed in up to now that needs to be investigated and eliminated – it is the very psychic and ‘self’-ish world we are living in, the way we see, feel, imagine, evaluate, reject everything we perceive. RESPONDENT: One would seem to be left with watching it intently. As I do now. VINEETO: Watching intently is not enough. One needs to investigate into each and every belief and why one wants to keep it, when this perfectly functioning world does not need any belief for growing trees, raining, thundering or turning carrots and potatoes into blood and bones. Why do we human think we cannot live without making everything into a picture or our own making? Imagination in its very nature is madly unlimited – and the very obstacle, for the world is already perfect – except for human beings, that is. ‘What is my objection to being happy and harmless?’ was one of the most effective questions that I would continually ask myself. RESPONDENT: Perhaps freedom will occur. The intention is certainly present. VINEETO: Freedom does not simply occur. You go about on the journey into yourself with a torch and a scalpel. It is an amazing and thrilling enterprise, I can tell you that. And each time you have operated successfully, there is a joy, a dance, an outbreak of freedom and perfection which makes it all worthwhile. In my experience it is so much more exciting and gratifying than just watching intently. And for a change – it works. RESPONDENT: Because I am exposed mostly only to eastern wisdom, I conclude that it should be because of that. However I don’t want to waste too much time and efforts to argue over whether it is new or not. Even if it is not new, it appeals to me and I would like to give it a try. VINEETO: When I took Sannyas I had been raised and conditioned as a catholic middle-class German. In order to understand Rajneesh I had to at least question those conditionings. But then I was ready to question the old, because life wasn’t all that wonderful, burdened as I was with those primary conditionings. I attempted to leave ‘normal’ behind and became ‘spiritual’. On the path to 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 outcome I was hoping for. This second de-conditioning went much, much deeper than the first, it eliminated ‘all of me’, ego and soul, emotions and beliefs, instincts and ‘spiritual achievements’. It leaves me as this physical body and its senses, free to delight in this perfect infinite universe as a sensate human being. Nothing more, nothing less. To investigate my beliefs it took a lot of time to question, ask, discuss, read, turn them round and round, and look at them again from a different angle. It is not at all a waste of time. To be able to see a belief ‘from the outside’ in its complexity and functioning it needs time and investigation. This is exactly how you give it a try. * RESPONDENT: Now coming to the method. I tried asking ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’. Most of the time I get the answer ‘happy’, or when I stress upon ‘this moment’, I get blank with no answer, because in this moment there is no feeling. The feeling is only in the moment just passed by. But still ‘I’ do not have that experience all the time. Because ‘I’ is the heap of all the passed moments! VINEETO: I found that the interesting thing started when I got the answer ‘not happy’ or ‘no feeling’. I knew then I had something to look at. Upon closer look I always found a lurking feeling or fear disguised as ‘no feeling’ – the cunning entity inventing whatever trick to keep me from exposing it. It takes a lot of persistence, bloody-mindedness and ruthless honesty with oneself to dismantle one trick after the other. Sometimes I would sit days with that ‘no-feeling’ of numbness until I gathered courage and determination to examine it deeper. This process may take months until you are free of one particular emotion. But with the pure consciousness experience in mind you always have a comparison that keeps you going. Richard describes it at length in his correspondence: Richard: Apperceptive awareness can be evoked by paying exclusive attention to being alive now. This moment is your only moment of being alive ... one is never alive at any other time than now. And, wherever you are, one is always here ... even if you start walking over to there, along the way to there you are always here ... and when you arrive ‘there’, it too is here. Thus attention becomes a fascination with the fact that one is always here ... and that it is already now. Fascination leads to reflective contemplation. As one is already here, and it is always now ... then one has arrived before one starts. The potent combination of attention, fascination, reflection and contemplation produces apperception, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself. Apperception is an awareness of consciousness. It is not ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious; it is the mind’s awareness of itself. Apperception – a way of seeing that is arrived at by reflective and fascinating contemplative thought – is when ‘I’ cease thinking and thinking takes place of its own accord. Such a mind, being free of the thinker and the feeler – ‘I’ as ego and soul – is capable of immense clarity and purity. All this is born only out of pure intent. Pure intent is derived from the PCE experienced during a peak experience, which all humans have had at some stage in their life. A peak experience is when ‘I’ spontaneously cease to ‘be’, temporarily, and this moment is. Everything is seen to be perfect as-it-is. Diligent attention paid to the peak experience gives rise to pure intent. With pure intent running as a ‘golden thread’ through one’s life, reflective contemplation rapidly becomes more and more fascinating. When one is totally fascinated, reflective contemplation becomes pure awareness ... and then apperception happens of itself. With apperception operating more or less continuously in ‘my’ day-to-day life, ‘I’ find 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. ‘My’ time is speedily coming to an end, ‘I’ can barely maintain ‘myself’ any longer. (Richard, List B, No. 19, 15 March 1998). RESPONDENT: Now in this state, when I use actualism method, I look for any feelings which drive me out of the ‘reasonably happy’ state and I come back to my ‘reasonably happy’ state in a reasonably short time on most occasions. I am not too sure if other people who report success with actualism method are in the same state because for me this doesn’t look to be anything spectacular or fundamentally different than normal life one could live. This is very well within human condition. RESPONDENT No. 38: Again, if ‘reasonable’ is adequate, so be it. Apparently, it’s not, otherwise you wouldn’t be bothering with this discourse, right? RESPONDENT: Right. But what is doubtful is the level of my intent (for example compared to yours) in going all the way. The reason for this is perhaps because I don’t have a direct experience of what is on offer. So my take on this discussion is that you should have a PCE before you try out actualist method because otherwise you will not have full and pure intent and therefore can not succeed or at most can reach only ‘reasonably happy’ state. VINEETO: When I first came across actualism, and its implicit challenge to devote my life to becoming happy and harmless, it was the harmless part that grabbed my attention – i.e. I could see that to be ‘reasonably happy’ was relatively easy but to become actually harmless was the real challenge that actualism offered to me. Because of the way human beings are socially and instinctually programmed, the time-honoured pursuits of happiness – be it via the accumulation of material possessions or the acquisition of spiritual brownie-points – is inadvertently and inevitably a ‘self’-centred enterprise. When ‘I’ pursue ‘my’ happiness in either of these worlds I am necessarily putting ‘me’ and ‘my’ insatiable wants and needs first. This means that ‘my’ happiness is always conditional upon ‘my’ position in the real-world pecking order, or if one is so inclined, ‘my’ position in the spiritual world pecking order. Either way, happiness such as this is dependant upon doing battle with one’s fellow human beings in some way or other. There is a way out of this apparent dilemma and this is the third alternative to the traditional choices – being ‘reasonably happy’ in the real world or being blissfully dissociated in an imaginary spiritual world. The solution is to change the focus of your attention and effort and aim to become happy by becoming unconditionally harmless towards each and every fellow human being that you come in contact with. Such an aim will automatically make you consider the benefit of your fellow human beings as being equal and equitable to your own – which in turn will lead you to seek outcomes that are of mutual benefit to both parties as distinct from the pursuit of ‘self’-centred profits and ‘self-indulgent feelings. Similarly, in interactions with your fellow human beings the aim to be harmless will ensure that you rate other people’s happiness as much as your own, simply because if you harbour acrimonious feelings towards another, neither they nor you can be happy in such a situation. The more you actively pursue harmlessness and investigate the social and instinctual mechanisms that cause you to have aggressive, resentful, insulting, blaming, sorrowful and anxious feelings, the less ‘self’-centred, more considerate and more benevolent you are towards all of your fellow human beings. Of course, you will very quickly experience, if you are scrupulously sincere in your pursuit, that one invariably feels happy whenever one notices that one is spontaneously harmless. Such a happiness only needs enough intent to make the first commitment – to become unconditionally harmless and do whatever is necessarily to attain and maintain such harmlessness. Then the more harmless you are towards your fellow human beings, the more happy you become and this results in even more harmlessness and even more happiness – i.e. success breeds more success. The recent discovery of actualism now makes it clear that the best contribution one can make to peace-on-earth is to free oneself and others from the burden of one’s animal instinctual passions – and the obvious place to start such a process is to focus on the elimination of invidious passions that cause harm to one’s fellow human beings. * RESPONDENT: I would consider myself ‘reasonably harmless’ as well as most of the time I do not carry acrimonious feelings towards my fellow human beings. For me the major attraction towards actual freedom is the description of the actual world and the simplicity of it and the fact that both real and spiritual worlds are not actual. VINEETO: Because of the way human beings are socially and instinctually programmed, the time-honoured pursuits of happiness – be it via the accumulation of material possessions or the acquisition of spiritual brownie-points – is inadvertently and inevitably a ‘self’-centred enterprise. When ‘I’ pursue ‘my’ happiness in either of these worlds I am necessarily putting ‘me’ and ‘my’ insatiable wants and needs first. This means that ‘my’ happiness is always conditional upon ‘my’ position in the real-world pecking order, or if one is so inclined, ‘my’ position in the spiritual world pecking order. Either way, happiness such as this is dependant upon doing battle with one’s fellow human beings in some way or other. There is a way out of this apparent dilemma and this is the third alternative to the traditional choices – being ‘reasonably happy’ in the real world or being blissfully dissociated in an imaginary spiritual world. The solution is to change the focus of your attention and effort and aim to become happy by becoming unconditionally harmless towards each and every fellow human being that you come in contact with. Such an aim will automatically make you consider the benefit of your fellow human beings as being equal and equitable to your own – which in turn will lead you to seek outcomes that are of mutual benefit to both parties as distinct from the pursuit of ‘self’-centred profits and ‘self-indulgent feelings. RESPONDENT: While I am in real world, where else can I pursue my happiness? My understanding of the actualism method is that you target to become happy (and of course also harmless) each moment again in this very real world. This is achieved by removing your beliefs one and one and consequently dismantling your ‘self’ and your ‘Self’ in a gradual manner. VINEETO: It appears that you have not fully understood my suggestion to change the focus of your attention from settling for being ‘reasonably happy’ to focussing on becoming actually and unconditionally harmless. Let me return to your initial query – [Respondent]: I am not too sure if other people who report success with actualism method are in the same state because for me this doesn’t look to be anything spectacular or fundamentally different than normal life one could live. This is very well within human condition. [endquote]. First let me say that your current description of your daily life – ‘I am reasonably happy most of the time. I think I am also reasonably innocent and content, most of the time’ – strikes me as qualitatively different to the description you have reported in your last post to me – [Respondent]: For me, while it is easy (comparatively) to label and handle obvious feelings like anger, malice, compassion, hope, I find it more difficult to label not-so-apparent feelings. These feelings create a neither-happy-nor-sad kind of state. I remember you talked of dullness in one of your mails. But I find that this dullness or boredom is not the same every time it happens and it happens very frequently. (Respondent to Vineeto 13.6.2002). From the way you describe how you are currently experiencing life you seem to be somewhat more happy, less bored, less dull than you were last year. Therefore when you now say that ‘this doesn’t look to be anything spectacular or fundamentally different than normal life’ you seem to have not taken into account how you previously experienced normal life. Taking your words at face value, you seem to be belittling whatever success you may have had, seem stuck at being reasonably happy and reasonably harmless and are now saying ‘this doesn’t look to be anything spectacular’ as though the actualism method itself is somehow lacking. However, if you want to further investigate why ‘this doesn’t look to be anything spectacular’ it might be appropriate to look at the post that you have written on the same day to No. 3, in which you describe how and when you apply the method of actualism – [Respondent]: On priority, I completely agree with you. Unless being happy and harmless is priority number 1, I am busy in other things and many hours are lost. But as Richard says, life is so good in giving opportunities that you get another fresh moment again whenever you remember what is your priority number 1. However the question is why does ‘I’ forget what is priority number 1. Sometimes, what I get a reason for this is that what I am doing right now (for example preparing for a presentation in my office) is urgent and can not be done at any other time, whereas the awareness of feelings can be done at any time later, so let me focus now on my current job. And I end up focussing on awareness only while going to sleep or when I have nothing else to do. [Emphasis by me]. (Respondent to No. 3, 13.6.2002). This is clearly not the actualism method as Richard has explained it to you – Richard: There is a wide and wondrous path to actual freedom: One asks oneself, each moment again, ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’? This gives rise to apperception. Apperception is the outcome of the exclusive attention paid to being alive right here and now. Apperception is to be the senses as a bare awareness, a pure consciousness experience (PCE) of the world as-it-is, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself. Apperception is an awareness of consciousness. It is not ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious; it is the mind’s awareness of itself. [Emphasis by me]. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 4, 14 January 1999). And again a month later – Richard: By asking ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ the reward is immediate; by finding out what triggered off the loss of feeling good, one commences another period of enjoying this moment of being alive. It is all about being here now at this moment in time and this place in space ... and if you are not feeling good you have no chance whatsoever of being here now in this actual world. (A grumpy person locks themselves out of the perfect purity of this moment and place). Of course, once you get the knack of this, one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom-line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy’. And after that: ‘feeling perfect’. These are all feelings, this is not perfection personified yet ... but then again, feeling perfect for twenty three hours and fifty nine minutes a day is way beyond ‘normal’ human expectations anyway. Also, it is a very tricky way of both getting men fully into their feelings for the first time in their life and getting women to examine their feelings one by one instead of being run by a basketful of them all at once. One starts to feel ‘alive’ for the first time in one’s life. [Emphasis by me]. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 4, 19 February 1999). Has it not occurred to you that the reason you had such limited success with actualism – ‘this doesn’t look to be anything spectacular’ – is that you are not using the actualism method as it has been described to you? Cultivating the attentiveness required for the actualism method to be successful is not akin to some sort of meditation that you do ‘while going to sleep or when [you] have nothing else to do’. If you want to change your life from feeling ‘reasonably happy’ to feeling good to feeling happy to feeling perfect, then attentiveness needs to be applied each moment again, regardless of what it is you are doing at this moment and regardless of where you are at this moment. To use the example you related to No. 3, when ‘preparing for a presentation’ you focus your attentiveness on how you are experiencing this moment of being alive whilst doing the research and activities for the presentation and in doing so you become aware of what causes you to have sad, anxious or irritated feelings during this activity. When cooking dinner, you ask yourself how you are experiencing this moment cooking dinner, when driving a car you pay exclusive attention as to how you are experiencing this moment while diving along the road, and so on. And if you forget to be attentive as to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive at some time during your daily activities then not to worry, for the very action of becoming aware that you forgot to be attentive brings you right back to being attentive again. If you cultivate the habit of paying more and more exclusive attention to this moment, each moment again, you will begin to be able to recognize and experience feelings such as sorrow or resentment the very moment they arise before they have a chance to fester into long periods of grumpiness, boredom, Grübelsucht or misery. Should such sorrowful or resentful feelings persist then it is obvious that you need to examine their cause, investigate the underlying persistent belief and initiate the necessary changes. And this brings me to the last sentence of your initial query – ‘I am not able to figure out how to take a leap from here into PCE’. Actualism does not require great leaps of imagination – what is needed is simple step-by-step application. The more you pay exclusive attention to this moment of being alive, the more you will be able to incrementally minimise the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and the more you will be able to activate the felicitous feelings and cultivate sensuousness. Then the ensuing sense of amazement, marvel and wonder can result in apperceptiveness – which is a pure, i.e. non-affective, ‘self’-less experience of this moment of being alive. This is not something you have to figure out for yourself as Richard has already figured it out. As for ‘to take a leap’ – you need to make the bold decision to ‘take a leap’ from merely settling for being ‘reasonably happy’ – with ‘reasonably harmless’ thrown in as an afterthought – to making the necessary effort required to pay exclusive attention to how you are experiencing each moment of being alive. Making this effort will not only enable you to become more happy and more considerate of others but this exclusive attentiveness will also enable you to become more and more aware of your sensate experiencing – and this awareness is the necessary ingredient to be able to delight in the sheer sensuousness of being alive on this verdant planet. To expect to leap from being ‘reasonably happy’ to a PCE is to remain stuck in wishful thinking but ‘tis only a small step from sensual delighting in being here in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are to having a PCE. VINEETO: Has it not occurred to you that the reason you had such limited success with actualism – ‘this doesn’t look to be anything spectacular’ – is that you are not using the actualism method as it has been described to you? RESPONDENT: May be, you are right. I have two problems. One, when you say ‘by finding out what triggered off the loss of feeling good, one commences another period of enjoying this moment of being alive’. I do not exactly know what do you mean precisely by ‘enjoying this moment of being alive’. Is ‘being reasonable happy’ to enjoy the life? Let me clarify that I do not mean material comfort and worldly success by ‘reasonable happiness’. I am reasonably happy when I am content and peaceful. In other words I have no serious complain with life, I have no need to change anything and I do not carry any acrimonious feeling towards others. Do you call being in this state to be ‘enjoying the life’? If yes, then I am enjoying the life most of the time. However why I call this state as only ‘reasonably happy’ is because I find that this is a negative definition. This is basically an absence of bad (and good) and acrimonious feelings. To give you an example – when I compare this state to the state when I fell in love for the first time – some twenty years ago, I find this state to be a bit dull. Now, I am not saying that I am looking for the same feeling of ‘falling in love for the first time’, because I know now that it is a false and foolish state to be in and consequences of that are disastrous. I am just giving you an example of the intensity of the experience. On the other hand when I read people describing their PCEs, I find those to be very intense experiences. VINEETO: I wonder why you are wondering about the degree of success you are having using the actualism method when you say – [Respondent]: I am reasonably happy when I am content and peaceful. In other words I have no serious complain with life, I have no need to change anything and I do not carry any acrimonious feeling towards others’. [endquote]. If you are happy being ‘reasonably happy’ and if, when you are feeling ‘reasonably happy’, you feel you ‘have no need to change anything’, then actualism is clearly not your cup of tea. However, if you are inspired by ‘people describing their PCEs’ and you would like to live a ‘self’-less PCE 24 hours a day, everyday, then you will need to change. You will need to make being harmless and happy priority number one in your life – the very top of your laundry list. Being ‘reasonably happy’ can generally be achieved either by repressing one’s unwanted feelings, obeying the social-religious morals and ethics, or by detaching from one’s unwanted feelings, following the spiritual practice of dissociation. If you are interested in experiencing the dazzling splendour and peerless pristine excellence of the actual world then you would have to investigate why you would settle for feeling ‘reasonably happy’ – reasonably as in ‘moderately, modestly, cheaply, within one’s means, tolerably, passably, acceptable, average’. Oxford Thesaurus In order to lift the bar to feeling excellent you would have to ask yourself the question – why do I not feel perfect, which feelings interfere with my feeling perfect and reduce my experience of life to merely feeling ‘reasonable happy’, which, as you said yourself, isn’t ‘anything spectacular’? RESPONDENT: The other problem is how do I graduate from feeling good (which is what perhaps I am, most of the time) to feeling ‘happy’ and then to feeling ‘perfect’. What is the difference between feeling ‘good’ and feeling happy? My take on this is that feeling happy would have something positive. It will have some of the element of PCE – may be in lesser intensity. This brings me to another question on sensual delight. Do you experience the sensual delight even when you are not in a PCE? If yes, then perhaps this is the part I am missing and perhaps this is the ‘positive’ part of the happiness. Am I right? VINEETO: Before I go into the nitty-gritty of degrees of being harmless and happy, the unresolved question is whether being harmless and happy is priority numero uno in your life. If it is, then settling for second best will be out of the question for you. If it is, then you will automatically lift your game from being ‘reasonably happy’ to feeling happy to feeling perfect to sensual delighting in being here and you will know for yourself what feeling perfect means without needing to compare it with anyone else’s feeling perfect. Perfect means the best and needs no comparison. * VINEETO: Cultivating the attentiveness required for the actualism method to be successful is not akin to some sort of meditation that you do ‘while going to sleep or when [you] have nothing else to do’. If you want to change your life from feeling ‘reasonably happy’ to feeling good to feeling happy to feeling perfect, then attentiveness needs to be applied each moment again, regardless of what it is you are doing at this moment and regardless of where you are at this moment. To use the example you related to No. 3, when ‘preparing for a presentation’ you focus your attentiveness on how you are experiencing this moment of being alive whilst doing the research and activities for the presentation and in doing so you become aware of what causes you to have sad, anxious or irritated feelings during this activity. When cooking dinner, you ask yourself to how you are experiencing this moment cooking dinner, when driving a car you pay exclusive attention as to how you are experiencing this moment while diving along the road, and so on. RESPONDENT: I am somehow unable to follow this approach. When I am preparing a presentation or writing a mail or reading a book, I cannot focus my attentiveness to how I am experiencing this moment of being alive, because these tasks require exclusive attention for themselves. Yes, while cooking dinner or while driving I can focus my attention on how I am experiencing this moment, because these jobs do not require exclusive attention. I think there are two different things we are talking about. I would like to understand how you can have exclusive attention to two attentiveness oriented tasks at the same time. VINEETO: Actualism, being non-spiritual, non-philosophical and down-to-earth, is like any other pursuit in life. For example, if your aim is to win the Olympic gold medal in the 5000m marathon, then you will spend your days training and exercising until you are confident of reaching your goal – you will stream-line your whole life, putting all other desires aside, to make sure you reach your goal and you won’t let off until you have perfected your skills. But if you only want to do a little bit of jogging to see if you like it or not, then you won’t need to practice, you won’t need to change your life, you won’t need to perfect your running style. As for ‘how you can have exclusive attention to two attentiveness oriented tasks at the same time’ – if your attention is exclusively focused on the task at hand, then you can become attentive to the fact that you are absorbed in the doing of the task. Very often when the doing of the task is totally enjoyable you have no time for feeling sad, dull, resentful, irritated or apprehensive and then you become aware that you are feeling perfect accomplishing your task. If, however you become attentive to the fact that your attention is not exclusively focused on the task, then you can become attentive as to why not. If you become aware of feeling annoyed or frustrated whilst doing the task then it is obvious that you are not feeling happy and then you can become attentive as to why this is so. Of course, attentiveness is acquired like any other skill in life – you begin with the easy and graduate to the more difficult. First you begin being attentive as to how you experience this moment of being alive when brushing your teeth, getting dressed, having breakfast, waiting for the bus, driving a car, standing in the elevator, cooking a meal, watching television, and so on. When your attentiveness increases through practice, you advance to the more involved and more emotionally charged occupations of your day. Again, it all depends on your intent – no interest, no effort, no result. RESPONDENT: Once I came to know what you and Peter were so excited about, Richard’s technique, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’, I was mad with you. Because there is nothing new in the technique. I have been doing it more rigorously for a year and, in my opinion, a lot of people who are not in any spiritual search do it in their life too. In my case, it just happened to me that I started doing this technique after 6 months of dynamic and 6 months of Kundalini. It was a simple outcome of cleaning up performed by dynamic and Kundalini. VINEETO: Maybe you could describe how you use this technique. I don’t understand how you can do it in the way Richard describes it and still be mad at me, or us. For me, using this ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ has helped me to get rid of all my emotions, feelings, beliefs and underlying instincts. I simply understood that it is not worth blaming anybody for my feelings, since they are my feelings, they arise in me. And I can see now that everybody is stricken with the same Human Condition that I have been so shackled with. As the easiest and most effective way I decided to clean myself up instead of blaming or trying to change other people. It was especially helpful and obviously effective in my relationship with Peter, but it is applicable in the same way for all my interactions with people, even with things like the weather and events. Whenever anything would get me upset, I looked in myself for the cause. It was my anger, after all, or my upset, my fear, my worry, my sadness, that I wanted to get rid of. And it worked, miraculously so. After 12 months of intense investigation I am free of emotions, beliefs and most of my instinctual reactions, apart from an occasional little stirring, which gets investigated and cleaned out whenever it occurs. RESPONDENT: What surprised me, however, was that you and Peter went in so much lengths to trash Osho in particular and eastern religions in general. And for what, a simple technique which perhaps everyone knows, at least, I believe, everyone on the sannyas list does. VINEETO: Doing the ‘technique’ has helped me to get rid of my issues with ‘authority’ – wanting and needing someone, for instance Mr. Rajneesh, to tell me what is right and wrong – or rebelling against a supposed authority. I am free now and fully capable to judge silly and sensible for myself. Questioning and eliminating the emotion and the belief in love and Love was another consequence of applying this method sincerely and diligently. This grand and to much praised emotion could no longer hold its credibility in the light of honest investigation and awareness, it is, after all, just the cover-up and band-aid for the instincts and ‘bad’ emotions that trouble everyone so much. But in order to ‘trash’ a master of 17 years, one needs to be ready to look afresh, to question every dearly-held belief and dare to stand alone on one’s own feet, without a group or a master. Without the ‘support’ of my belief in authority and my need for love and the hope for Divine Love I was then able to really check out what Osho what proposing, offering and delivering. And I found it very wanting and intentionally confusing, to say the least. As Richard said to you, when you start ‘seeing without sannyas eyes’ you will discover the full benefit and life-changing consequence of this question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ and you will find out that what you and supposedly everyone on the sannyas list does is something completely different. It is not just noticing or ‘watching’ feelings and thus creating a new identity – the watcher. With the ‘watcher’ you transcend feelings, usually for the time being. They are not eliminated, they return. With a ‘watcher’ you can pretend this body installed with the Human Condition is not really ‘it’, but you are ‘Consciousness, eternal and pure’. You detach yourself from the body and its imminent emotions, feelings and thought and live as this new identity, the ‘watcher’ or ‘Consciousness’. If successfully applied one ends in the delusion or an Altered State of Consciousness aka enlightenment. Richard’s method, on the other hand, is designed to question and eliminate every single emotion, belief and instinct in order to be completely free of ego and soul, ‘self’ and ‘Self’. Then one can live in this actual physical world and delight in its infinitude, magnificence, perfection and purity. Then one can be ‘the universe experiencing itself as a sensate human being’ – not a small outcome.
This Topic Continued
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