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 Love, Divine Love and Intimacy Actualism Homepage JAMES: I have a new situation to deal with since talking with you last. My Mom is in the hospital and I am spending most of my time taking care of her. This subject of fear is still appropriate in relation to how I am dealing with this situation. The second I start thinking about it I am overwhelmed with fear, worry, etc. However, I find that running the question ‘how am I’ is helping me to deal with the situation. Asking the question has helped me to stay in the moment and what I find is everything is ok in this moment right now. All my fears are in regard to how am I going to manage taking care of her at a future time. Right now at this moment in time she is taken care of. VINEETO: Life seems to have given you a serendipitous opportunity to have a closer look at the instinctual passion of nurture, its correlating feelings of love and belonging and the implications of being a social identity as a family member. Quite an exciting range of possible discoveries that could help answer your earlier question of ‘How do I become intimate with the instincts?’ Love and compassion, sympathy and empathy are our usual ways of relating to family and friends and through the same emotional ‘channel’ we also invite their fears and worries, sorrow and resentment, anger and hatred. There is only one way when one relates to people affectively and that is within the rules and ways of the Human Condition. The moment I feel sympathy for someone I am also swamped by their fears, the moment I am empathic for someone’s suffering I plug into the collective misery of mankind. The need to belong makes one susceptible to everybody’s feelings, be it anger or fear, greed or suffering. This is not just a poetic expression, it is my very experience. In order to become happy and harmless I had to examine my every relationship – to Peter, to my peers, to my work-mates, to my parents and relatives. Whenever I ‘reached out’ emotionally, understanding someone’s sorrow, fear or anger, I could not help being affected – that’s the very idea of ‘sharing’ and the common remedy against feeling lonely in the first place. But there is no choice of feeling just the nice, good feelings with or for someone and disregarding their negative feelings – by the very nature of emotions I am being hooked into the emotional web the moment I choose to go along with affective feelings. The alternative was to consciously and deliberately decide to leave the cozy nest of bitter-sweet feelings, to abandon the ‘squabbling and miserable humanity’ and examine and then eliminate feelings and emotions in myself. I have found that the ‘good’ emotions were even more insidious than the ‘bad’ ones. Many people would like to get rid of anger, sadness and fear, but who would want to abandon love, compassion, beauty and bliss? But once I understood the intrinsic connection between love and fear, compassion and sorrow, empathy and suffering, I decided to get free of the lot. When I love someone I am afraid to lose him or her. In order to have compassion for someone the other needs to be ‘in the pits’ emotionally – otherwise there is no use for my compassion. Empathy is even more insidious – the suffering creeps under the skin and one never quite knows what is happening. And all this sorry-go-round for the sake of not feeling lonely, bored and fearful? I discovered that by examining and eliminating my very identity as an appreciated and valued member of society I eliminated loneliness and boredom at the same time. And not even the closest friendship can ever take away one’s fear of death – for fear to stop the very ‘I’ that generates this fear has to become extinct. Love is not the solution, love is the problem. With love disappearing I could for the first time live in peace and harmony, ease and equity with another human being, day-in, day-out, 24 hrs a day, without bicker or quarrel, crisis or boredom. Without love, actual intimacy and genuine benevolence became possible for the first time. What a serendipitous trade-in! It seems mad to everyone else but they don’t know what I’ve got! * VINEETO: Love and compassion, sympathy and empathy are our usual ways of relating to family and friends and through the same emotional ‘channel’ we also invite their fears and worries, sorrow and resentment, anger and hatred. There is only one way when one relates to people affectively and that is within the rules and ways of the Human Condition. The moment I feel sympathy for someone I am also swamped by their fears, the moment I am empathic for someone’s suffering I plug into the collective misery of mankind. The need to belong makes one susceptible to everybody’s feelings, be it anger or fear, greed or suffering. JAMES: I saw yesterday what you are saying about sympathy and empathy. By not buying in to her suffering I was relieved of my suffering and I was better able to take care of her. Also have seen that ‘I’ am rotten to the core because a lot of my suffering has been worrying about ‘me’ having to take care of her. VINEETO: To examine the so-called ‘good’ emotions of nurture, affective care, sympathy, friendship, duty, love and compassion is a fascinating subject and can only be done by questioning and examining at the same time the morals and ethics of society that forms one’s very social identity. If one wants to be actually free of the Human Condition, one has to examine and recognize that ‘good’ simply means ‘morally acceptable’ and ‘right’ is just another ethical value, both of which vary from tribe to tribe and from society to society. The ‘good’ is a much a bondage as the ‘bad’ – even more so because it seems much more desirable. As humans we don’t want to lose the other’s affection and reassurance, the appreciation of our peers, the cozy safety of being part of a family or group, the comforting knowledge of doing what everyone considers the ‘right’ thing or the ‘good’ deed. Freedom lies in the opposite direction. On the path to actual freedom I did not bother to try to solve the moral or ethical problems of what is ‘good’ or ‘right’ but focussed my attention instead on discovering my own ethical and moral values – my social identity in action. ‘Ah, I’m trying to find out what is right? I’m upset that someone did the ‘wrong’ thing? I’m aiming again to be a ‘good’ person?’ These were indications that my moral identity was in action and I used my awareness to examine this very identity and learned to step out of it. What is now left is a simple sensible solution – and mostly my worries were seen to be an S.E.P.-situation, Someone Else’s Problem. Once I understood that it is only me who can set myself free I also understood that everyone has to do it for themselves as well. What perfect arrangement. It for sure saves one saving people. JAMES: Thank you Vineeto, it is a great pleasure to hear from you. Your posts have helped me to look at things experientially in my life. PS. I wrote all of the above yesterday when I was feeling ‘good’. This morning I went to see my mother and it was my worst nightmare. She is still drinking and falling even though she hasn’t recovered from a badly broken arm that had to be operated on. However, there is something different this time for me. I am not as upset and worrying as much as I have in the past. I am still feeling a low-grade dread and worry but there is a clear indication that the ‘self’ has diminished somewhat. I am not suffering to the same degree as I did before. The question now is ‘can I completely free ‘myself’ from suffering without ignoring her and still make sensible choices as to caring for her?’ This is a vital issue for me because this problem is not likely to go away for quite some time. If I can overcome the ‘self’ in relation to this problem I think I will be well on the way to actual freedom. I can see clearly that the instincts are at the bottom of this but I am not clear as to what to do about it next. VINEETO: How are you doing? Have you found some practical actual answers to your above question of ‘can I completely free ‘myself’ from suffering without ignoring her and still make sensible choices as to caring for her?’ I found that offering so-called practical advice to anyone is never practical, because I know from my own experience on the path to Freedom that although the instinctual part of the Human Condition is identical, everyone’s social condition and life’s circumstance are varied and everyone has to make their own choice of what issue to tackle first. But I can tell you a story that happened to me last week that deepened my understanding – I visited a former girl-friend of mine and she told me in detail how much she is suffering from a recent split from her boyfriend. She asked my advice what to do. Her aim was to get out of her suffering but mainly on the terms that he should change – and how to achieve it? I related my story of how I had tackled the issue of hope and romantic dreams that had really bothered and limited me in the first weeks of meeting Peter. I have described it in my journal. <snip> Well, the conversation with the woman made it clear that she was not keen to leave her dream and hope of love even if the suffering would continue. Talking to Peter later on I realized that there is only one solution to any problem that occurs – only when I have enough of it am I ready to get out of it, I simply stop feeding the feeling and, bingo, the problem disappears with the bit of identity that had kept it in place. It might take a long time until one has had enough – and some people are obviously tough and stubborn sufferers – but once the limit is reached, a curious decision can be made and then it is only a matter of minutes to be free of the burdening feeling. If the understanding and decision is total, that feeling won’t come back. And then, one is able to make sensible responses to the situation, free of affective feelings. Which confirms what Richard has said: Richard: Step out of the real world into the actual world and leave your ‘self’ behind where it belongs! (Richard Articles, Poster). The second story is about love. The other night I watched the film called ‘Mrs. Brown’, the supposed story of Queen Victoria who, after the death of her beloved husband, takes temporary comfort in the relationship with her servant-bodyguard – very well played by Billy Connolly. Yet the queen, being a Victorian Lady and living in court, closely watched by everyone, had obviously not much chance for intimacy with her friend. In one of the short scenes of such intimacy prior to his death the very nature of love became blindingly obvious to me – once again. Love is the longing to bridge separation. Without separation there is no need and no possibility for love. The greater the separation the greater the longing, as is confirmed in all heroic romantic tales. The feeling, the bitter-sweetness of the longing, is very real and very seductive and yet, for love to stay in existence one has to maintain the separation. So, in the very nature of things, love never occurs without its identical twin, loneliness, and in order to actually and permanently get rid of separation one has to get rid of love first – personal love, family love, love for those who suffer, love for humanity, love for the good, love for an imaginary God, etc. Only when I recognized love as the problem, instead of the solution, did actual intimacy have a chance to happen, actual intimacy between two human beings, free of identity and self-centredness. And what a vast difference there is. Love is merely an old chewing-gum compared to the gourmet meal of direct intimacy. I don’t know, if these stories have anything to do with your current query but sensible choices are only possible if one inquires into the nature of one’s former un-sensible, emotional choices. * VINEETO: Love is the longing to bridge separation. Without separation there is no need and no possibility for love. The greater the separation the greater the longing, as is confirmed in all heroic romantic tales. The feeling, the bitter-sweetness of the longing, is very real and very seductive and yet, for love to stay in existence one has to maintain the separation. So, in the very nature of things, love never occurs without its identical twin, loneliness, and in order to actually and permanently get rid of separation one has to get rid of love first – personal love, family love, love for those who suffer, love for humanity, love for the good, love for an imaginary God, etc. Only when I recognized love as the problem, instead of the solution, did actual intimacy have a chance to happen, actual intimacy between two human beings, free of identity and self-centredness. And what a vast difference there is. Love is merely an old chewing-gum compared to the gourmet meal of direct intimacy. JAMES: I hear this but I’m not sure that love is the problem. However, I do recognize the instincts as being the problem. VINEETO: Yes, the instinctual passions are the underlying problem, yet the Human Condition also consists of the various emotionally backed-up beliefs that constitute our social identity. Once one digs into the roots of love and inquires why one has feelings of love in certain situations then it will become clear that love is directly linked to the instinctually based feeling of nurture and the need to belong. When you experiment with ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and follow up the feeling of being shackled and bound by love, you will discover for yourself that love is the problem and not the solution. For actualism to work is it crucial that you don’t just believe what I say, or what we write, but that you verify for yourself that questioning and investigating dearly-held beliefs and affective feelings can free you from malice and sorrow. The Human Condition can only be unveiled step-by-step, belief-by-belief and emotion-by-emotion. Then, one day, a Pure Consciousness Experience occurs and the actual will be startlingly obvious. ALAN: In the light of my current discussion with Richard, it would be interesting to hear of any enlightenment experiences you had. VINEETO: I had only one, which lasted for about three days, because I really wanted to investigate all its implications. It was an experience first of great love and compassion for all, together with the Great Wisdom that I wanted to spread to all those ‘poor’ beings whom I considered needed my advice. (oops, I knew then, that I really had to keep my mouth shut and my hands in my pocket. I did not want to do or say anything I would have to regret later or feel embarrassed about!) With the grandeur came a great satisfaction of finally standing on the same podium that I had put Rajneesh on – now I knew from my own experience from which inner space he was talking and how he had been taking us all for a ride. I felt the power and authority and the wonderful tempting glory of it all. What a grand world it is – you know it all, you feel it all, you can help them all and you are superior to them all. Love pours out of every thought, grandeur is your nature and you swan in timelessness and eternity, forever relieved from the pain and sorrow of the personal little world of the poor mortals you left behind. It was bloody good to have Peter as a landmark for common sense and Richard’s story and warnings as the blinking light-house and so it came that I did not ground on that wonderfully glimmering, seductively promising ‘Rock of Enlightenment’. It took a lot of effort and re-starting my intelligence and common sense to dismantle the glory of Truth and the seduction of Power. I had to use all doubt and scepticism available to be able to discover the Truth-production machine in my head. The next thing to deal with was the attraction to power and glory. But without being able to rely on Truth, which was now impossible, how much power can you keep up? ( full description) (...) I knew it was time to gather all my intent and my common sense and get out of this elusive, imaginary state of swanning in imaginary bliss and ‘being’. It was time to leave the wonder-full magician-castle in the clouds and enter the actual world of senses, sex and coffee. IRENE: A person who despises love has a reason to repress love, either because of the absence of love in his/her life or because of deep disappointment in love-affairs, which says nothing about love itself but everything about the experiencer, who could be just incapable of loving or is angry with it as it proved to be different from lust, owning, possessing, using the other and expecting the other to be available. VINEETO: First of all, what you are saying is illogical. A person in whom love is absent does not have to repress it. Second, the continuing disappointments in love-affairs have triggered doubts about the validity of love as the highest considered value of humankind. Only because of my disappointments and the failure in both my love affairs and in those of other people who I have closely observed, was I open to Peter’s proposing an alternative for our relationship – no love but intimacy, examining and eliminating everything that would be in the road between us. And it is for the first time that living with a man is not a disappointment but an immense joy. I am very glad that I am not capable of dreaming the ideal love-dream anymore. Experiencing actual intimacy day after day is far, far superior to love. IRENE: ... feelings of affection, warmth, so essential for humour, playing music with pleasure and delightful human interactions is to me as valuable as sexual pleasure and orgasms, why do you see feelings in such a negative way only? To me it sounds like nothing more than another ‘religiously’ followed tenet, like all other masters see sex as something to transcend or get rid of ... VINEETO: I understood from the conversations with you that you consider emotions including love and sorrow necessary and valuable, and that you want to give women more power because they have the better solution for the world’s problems. How can one gender be right and the other be wrong? How illogical! To me it looks just the reverse of what the Christians and other male oriented religions have been preaching. The problem remains: dominance and slavery of one gender over the other! If men are wrong, so are women. Men have to rid themselves of their male conditioning and women have to rid themselves of their female conditioning. I can only repeat what I already wrote to Konrad: [Vineeto to Konrad]; When a woman dares to stop being a woman and a man dares to stop being a man, two human beings can meet in direct, tangible, delicious intimacy. [endquote]. It is a daring and it requires courage to step out of the identity that I have been born with and to leave the safe place of the ‘women’s camp’. But I have found it the only way to live in peace and harmony with a man and to be free of the petty fights between the two genders. And out of that understanding I am ready to go all the way, taking occasional fear-attacks as par for the course. Women’s liberation – yes, liberation from being woman. Liberation from woman’s conditioning, from woman’s beliefs in authority, woman’s ideas of being a victim and therefore fighting for dominance, from the notion of being a second class citizen, from the need to compare, from the nurturing instinct and subsequent bondage, suffering and self-sacrifice, from the drive to have babies as the meaning of life... RESPONDENT: ‘Love’ hits me where it hurts. I think you are right. It has produced the deepest suffering I have known. So I look at it with everything I've got, which I can’t help, it hurts so much I have to look. It is quite selfish. I would find it difficult not to look at a freshly amputated limb as well. In the dictionary is a definition based in desire and attachment, and perhaps a sense of ‘caring’ may be referred to. ‘An intense affectionate concern for another person’ or ‘Intense sexual desire for another person’ American Heritage dictionary. Essentially a definition based on a feeling the self has of connection, desire, and attachment for a person, situation, or thing. Always referring to possession, ‘my wife, my son’. Of course, it is ridiculous to use a dictionary for such a thing when we may look within ourselves. VINEETO: Yes, I understand from where you are coming from. Love hurts, not only while it is happening with its anxiety, dependence, and resulting petty arguments and revenge. But it hurts even more when the other suddenly terminates the relationship for whatever reason. And one would rather take all the blame for its failure than to doubt and question the very idea of ‘love’, humanity’s strongest hope in the face of loneliness, separation, aggression, sorrow and desperation. Just the hope that there is a solution to all those devastatingly destructive human instincts is so soothing. I like it that you looked in the dictionary as well as asking yourself what love consists of. After all, ‘love’ is a dream shared by everyone else on the planet. RESPONDENT: As you and the other Actual Freedomers have stated, ‘love’ creates suffering. I will sign in here. It does because of the falseness of the ego. The falseness occurs in at least three ways. The first is the level wherein we think we are loving ‘someone else’ when in fact what we are ‘loving’ is an image of that person, not that flesh and blood person at all, and that image we think we are loving is part of us. This is mistake number one. The second falseness arises when we are with a person but see the person either partially or completely through the image we retain, even when we are actually together, so that we have ideas of how they ‘should’ behave based on our mental representation of them, and we always do have expectations when we see another through the eyes of the ego. Thus we are not free to see the person as they actually are. Spouses may call this, for instance ‘Taking me for granted,’ as I recall. We make the concept of the person more important than the person, then we don’t have to look. This is mistake number two. VINEETO: Yes, you are spot on. When love is in operation, there is only love’s picture that one can see. That very picture is the reason why one can’t be intimate with the person one is with. Love is the very emotion – or the very package of emotions – that makes it impossible to experience direct intimacy with the other human being. When I met Peter he made a proposition: lets live together in peace and harmony, without love, but in intimacy. At the time I had no idea what he was talking about, but was intrigued by his readiness for commitment and by the word ‘intimacy’. In long years of past relationship I had learned that love had failed again and again. Also I had lived with a woman for some time whose husband had just died after what everyone considered the perfect relationship. She felt herself to be as ‘amputated’ as you describe yourself. So even if love had worked between a man and a woman, there was still the horror that one of them will die first. There is always one who dies first, or leaves. There is always one who is left behind. Nevertheless, I kept up the hope and belief into the ‘Higher’ or ‘Ideal’ Love, that the Gurus talk about. Although I had been a devoted meditator for some 15 years, I had never reached that state of ‘pure love’ relating to my fellow human beings, it remained but an unreachable cloud of hope, a far away goal to be achieved one day... It took a few months of thorough investigation into the different beliefs around love until I understood and experienced, that every concept, belief and feeling I hold, positive or negative, keeps me from experiencing the world and another human being as he/she is. It was quite stunning and shocking when intimacy happened for the first time. Delicious in its experience it was nevertheless shocking in its implications for me. I could not deny the experience of intimacy that I had at the time and had to acknowledge the facts of why it was so direct and intimate – but now I had to question all my relating to other people, friends, the spiritual peer-group, parents, acquaintances and work-mates. And, most important of all, this experience of intimacy questioned my relationship to the Master which had been solely based on love and devotion and had held no intimacy at all. Experiencing another human being directly, without my ‘self’ in action i.e. without preconceived ideas, beliefs, feelings of appreciation or rejection, without structure and time plan, as if for the first time, was such a delicious, ambrosial and obviously superior experience to any highs I had ever experienced in love. Mad and daring, I decided I wanted more of this, even if it would cost me all my friends, all my beliefs, everything I had considered of value up to then. And I did lose them all. But the intimacy and resulting peace and harmony that I live with Peter every day, 24 hours a day for the last 12 months without any disagreement, sulking, nagging, compromise, role-play or restriction is worth any sacrifice of hopes, beliefs and ideas. Further, I can also relate to people as they are, with no preconceived hopes or fear which allows an intimacy unexperienced in the times of ‘love’. (...) * VINEETO: During my spiritual search, it has never been easy for me to locate this ego, to completely understand what it is I have to get rid of in order to become happy (enlightened). Once I came across Richard’s explanation, derived from his being enlightened and seen through the delusion it was, things suddenly made shocking sense: getting rid of the ego means wanting to keep the ‘good bits’ and throw away the ‘bad bits’. And the sorting out the ‘good bits’ from the ‘bad bits’ made it so confusing. Slowly I began to understand that the ‘good bits’ – love – are only there to heal, cover up and balance out the ‘bad bits’. Once I really get rid of the ‘bad bits’, the ‘good bits’ are redundant as well. They both prevent me from seeing a tree as a tree, a dog as a dog and a human being as a human being. Those overlaid emotions never let me experience the world as it is, there is always a ‘self’-related colouring that veils the clear perception. And once those both veils are taken off my eyes I can see the magnificence and magic in every tree, creature and human being. No emotion is needed to glorify it. This actual world is already perfect, it doesn’t need any enhancement by the ‘self’, the very sum of all our instinctual passions, emotions and beliefs, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Once I stop doing, feeling, proposing, interpreting, in short messing around, with the world as-it is, then everything is simply perfect. It is ‘I’ who is at the core of all the trouble. And this ‘I’ consists of ‘ego’ and ‘soul’, concepts and emotions, everything non-actual, everything that is not touchable, visible, audible, tastable or smell-able. Pretty radical, isn’t it! RESPONDENT: Where we may differ, I think, is that I don’t want to reject love, I just want to reject the cultural definition we have been stuck with for so long. Substitute ‘ego attachment’ for that. I think there is another love. I like another definition. The word cries for it. And I’m not talking about some Love Agapé belief. I think Richard has spelled it out, although he doesn’t seem to like the word love because it has many religious associations. There is something that occurs only with complete attention that is without any demand of the self. As in PCEs. Complete attention with no condition whatever, no intention, no seeking, no goal, no purpose other than to see, to listen, to fully attend. I want to call this state of actual attending ‘love’ but not to label it just to pretend to ‘know’ what it is. It isn’t ‘Compassion,’ as you say. It isn’t ‘feeding the babies’. It isn’t ‘serving the poor’. It isn’t ‘healing the sick’. And it certainly has nothing to do with the contract of marriage, although perhaps it could arise within a marriage, maybe similar to what you and Peter have. Yet this complete attention to what is actually so [Can we lend it the name love for a moment if that isn’t too disturbing, just to please me? Thank you, you may have the word back in just a minute, to dispose of as you wish.] can occur at any time and under any circumstances. Including the jump from a balcony, sitting in the sunlight, or sexual embrace. And anyone can love, none ‘better’ than any other. One doesn’t need words or ‘understanding’ for it! I think it is what we are meant to do. ‘The universe being aware of itself’ without condition. I think that is right on target. And I want to call it love. Perhaps out of sheer perversity I don’t want to squander the word love on what we normally use it for! Perhaps because it hurt me so much. Or perhaps I have some sense it is better used this way. I don’t know, but I have nothing to prove, it’s just how I see it. It may be that one loves continually in Richard’s actualized state, it sounds as if it might be so. It is the only thing that really matters. There is either complete attention, which I call love for just one more minute, thank you, or there is not, which is the state of being in the ego, or unconscious, or dead. And when we are love we are free, ‘actually free’ is a fine way to put it, if you wish, and we love like the sunlight, and the rain, and the wind, and the earth – because we are one. VINEETO: Complete attention is only possible if there is no personal investment in you whatsoever, in that moment. This complete attention is not something ‘I’ do, this attention is what is left when there is nothing else that distracts that attention or apperception. Then you simply delight in the very is-ness of things, people and events, without directing, feeling, fearing, inventing, controlling, planning or hoping. So in my experience, it is freedom from the ‘self’, freedom from ‘me’, the feeler and believer, that has to come first and then you don’t need any love. Without malice and sorrow one is simply benevolent, magnanimous, intimate with everyone and swimming in delight. You probably remember this from your PCEs. RESPONDENT: I want to keep love. – Now, you may have ‘love’ back. VINEETO: It struck me that when you say, ‘I want to keep love’, you already admit that it not actual. It is something you decide to keep or throw, it does not exist without your doing. But I do understand that ‘you’ want to keep it, it is an essential part of your identity, of ‘who you feel you are’. * VINEETO: I’ve been thinking about your letter in the last few days and I wanted to tell you just another story about ‘love’... Love is like an appendix. As a doctor I’m sure you can appreciate the comparison. What I gather from your writing, your appendix is clearly infected, and badly so. And, I guess you agree, one never fixes up an appendix, it needs to be removed, actually often to save the patient’s life. Now, in the case of love, you are the doctor and you are the patient and there is no chloroform. The only operating knife you got is your intelligence. And when you cut, you need to be precise and careful, not to let any infected part of the appendix stay in the body. Ok, what I mean by appendix is the particular passionate dream we have with love. Men dreaming one kind of dream, women dreaming another kind. I have written about the dream and how I got rid of it in ‘A Bit of Vineeto’. I copied that part for you here.
> | [Vineeto]: One thing that I particularly didn’t like about falling in love was the pining. Whenever I was not with Peter I felt I was tied to him on a long elastic cord and not able to fully enjoy whatever I was doing by myself. Digging into what could be the reason for my pining, I discovered what I call the ‘Cinderella-syndrome’ – the romantic dream that most women have about the perfect and noble man. We are not only looking for someone who takes care of us when our own strength fails us, but also for someone who gives perspective, meaning, definition and identity to our lives, be it as father of our kids, provider of social status, security or a purpose for life. According to this dream Peter should be the answer to the question which I wasn’t willing to face myself: ‘What do I really want to do with my life?’ I remember a Monday evening after a weekend together, and I had been pining the whole day. I had not enjoyed work as I found myself struggling to get out of this exhausting dependency. Here I was, 44 years old and as silly as a teenager!
After work I took a long walk across rolling hills into a spectacular sunset, trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life. In the end, I had to admit that, whatever it was, it had not the slightest thing to do with anything Peter could do for me. I wanted to be perfect and I had to do it myself. I still had to clean myself up. Just having found a probable good mate had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t the best I could be; that I wasn’t free. I decided there and then to face the challenge, to abandon the love-dream and go for the actual experience – meeting another human being as intimately as possible instead of looking up to him and waiting for him to be the ‘hero of my dreams’. That very evening the situation changed. My pining stopped. The fog in the head cleared. My expectations disappeared. I could again stand on my own feet and equally enjoy the time when I was by myself. I had recovered my autonomy – my autonomy in the sense that I am the only one in my life who is responsible for my happiness. Detecting and debunking the romantic dream placed the first big dent into the wobbling monster of love. Now it was much easier to look at what it was in my ‘self’ that cried out for this love. It has been quite scary at times, to rid myself of the very identity I had as a woman. What would be left of me when I didn’t feel love? How could I relate both to Peter and other people, if not with emotion or intuition? What would I have to offer in friendships or conversations, if not sympathy and consolation? My whole edifice of ‘who’ I was, who I believed myself to be, began to crumble in a heap as I questioned and demolished the attributes of love and emotion. Now naked of all those characteristics and beliefs as well as their resultant emotions and behaviour, which have kept man and woman apart for millennia, I am experiencing for the first time in my life actual intimacy with a man. Now there are no dreams, no expectations, no emotions or any other restrictions that could cloud the thrill of meeting another human being. Now instead of random moments of ‘sweet love’ I am able to give Peter my full attention and bare awareness each time we communicate and so does he. (A Bit of Vineeto, #love). I guess, the man’s dream of love looks a little bit different to complement the female dream. I guess you know it pretty well by now. In my experience it was the dream – the longing, the frustration, the hope and despair, the loneliness – which hurt, not the actual being or not being with Peter. And it worked immediately. Psychically it might look like a cord, reaching out or being connected to a particular person and in my imagination I simply and boldly cut that cord. It is a sharp psychic pain or fear of pain and then it is over. The trick is then not to build up that cord of dreams again... Let me know if it works. * RESPONDENT: Months after the shock wore off and I began to explore the amputation, I discovered there were two very different components to what I had previously thought of as ‘love.’ I now think of them as ‘ego attachment’ and ‘real love.’ We have discussed the ego attachment part in previous exchanges and I think we are in basic agreement about the nature of it, give or take a few terms and minor differences in word usages and definitions. The ‘real love’ that I saw left after all the elements of ego attachment were identified, is something completely unconditional, something that does not care whether she does or does not do as I wish, an awareness and regard that does not measure, assess, judge, possess, or expect. I believe it to be connected in a direct way to the kind of observing you describe as ‘my full attention and bare awareness each time we communicate.’ It is what I believe to be ‘real love.’ (Or ‘actual love’ if you wish!) What you and Peter are experiencing when you are free to interact this way. What do you think? VINEETO: See, you make a difference between ‘ego’ (something to get rid of) and ‘real love’ (something you want to keep). And then you say, ‘clarity does not arise’. How can it arise? Throwing away the ‘bad’ and keeping the ‘good’ has not worked for thousands of years. Humanity is still waging as many wars as 2000 years ago. Every Enlightened Master created yet another religion, and the religious wars are the most horrific ones. Last night I saw a re-run of ‘Oh! What a Lovely War’, a black-humour musical about the First World War. Seeing the soldiers in the trenches, used as canon-fodder for the game of numbers that the generals were playing was devastating, and all the soldiers were dying and killing for love. Men die for love of country, love for the family, to protect the ones they love, unconditionally. And after the war is over, the surviving men don’t talk about the horrors they lived through so as not to upset the ones they love. A continuum of malice and suffering – and it is called ‘real love’. No one ever puts these facts in one line and acknowledges that they are interrelated. I could still feel the impact of the horrors those men went through. They stand for all of the suffering and devastation humans go through in the course of the centuries. Seeing the facts of what causes the suffering made it clear once again that I want to do something about this horrendous situation, which is continuing today as horrendously as in the First World War. And the only thing I can do about it is to eradicate every trace of ‘self’ in me, and that includes the instinct of love, eliminate every reason why I would kill, hurt or even insult any other human being. And I know, as long as there is a trace of ‘me’ inside, I am still capable of violence when ‘push comes to shove’. RESPONDENT: ...is something completely unconditional, something that does not care whether she does or does not do as I wish ... (Or ‘actual love’ if you wish!) VINEETO: There is no actual love. Love is an emotion, created by our instinctual passions and beliefs and felt as hormonal surges in the physical body as well. But when love is unrequited it is easy to imagine it as unconditional because there is no fire-test in daily life. There is always a gain for the identity in feeling ‘unconditional love’. Heroic suffering is food for the ‘self’. Suffering keeps the identity intact. And one would still kill, if needed, to protect the object of one’s unconditional love. One suffers but one can stay as one is. In this way one is continuing what every human being has tried to do up to now: to keep the emotions and instincts and still be ‘good’. If you look around it has not brought any peace and happiness to the planet in thousand of years. VINEETO: If that is so, then you have found the first ‘key’ to eliminating anger – seeing the actual situation, sensibly considering everyone involved and understanding that your particular feelings will do nothing to help the situation, on the contrary, they are harmful. You can apply the same understanding to any other emotion arising, be it love, gratitude, resentment, doubt, anguish, sadness, etc. None of our so-called precious feelings are useful for dealing with practical, every-day situations. Care, consideration, attention, intelligence and common sense can do the job much better. The trick is to question the ‘good’ feelings as well as the ‘bad’ feelings and a great part of the social identity will disappear, issue by issue. RESPONDENT: Well, eliminating the ‘good’ feelings is being a little tricky for me. Whereas I could see through common sense that ‘bad’ feelings like anger are harmful, I could not see the same thing for love (for example), partly because of my latent faith in the revered wisdom. Now I am beginning to understand the cunningness of this entity ‘I’, which just changes its shape from anger to love. For me just this realization that it is false is enough to determine to eliminate it, though I am also beginning to understand that love may also be harmful and perhaps may result into a war when it is for one’s country or faith. Even if it is love (or Love) for all, it is still ‘I’ and so not different from anger at its very root.. VINEETO: In order to question ‘good’ feelings I had to experience that any so-called ‘good’ feeling, particularly love, is just the other side of the coin of human emotions, ie the Human Condition. Love is produced in order to cover up disgust, hate, anger, indifference, self-centeredness and loneliness. Without all the negative emotions, what would you need love for? And at the next layer of investigation I discovered that love consists of nothing but a very self-centred system consisting of control, image, identity, power, bargain and smugness, particularly when feeling Love for All. How much more powerful can you feel when you feel big enough to love all of humanity?! Stripped of its glittering costume of people’s beliefs and needs, love is nothing other than our instinct of nurture, in-built to ensure the survival of the species – and embellished with great ideals and values. But the ideal of love cannot belie the facts of the atrocities caused by malice and sorrow that happen amongst human beings, often in the name of that same love, devotion, faith and loyalty. (...) * RESPONDENT: Even before knowing about actual freedom, I was reasonably happy and peaceful as I could get rid of (I would not use word ‘eliminate’ here because that would not be honest) anger, envy, malice etc. to a large extent, but now I am discovering the roots of good feelings like love, gratitude, humility etc. VINEETO: After seventeen years on the spiritual path, including lots of therapy and new-age discussions, I had still experienced myself to be in utter confusion as to how to deal with emotions. Some emotions were to be kept, some to be transformed, but then most of them would reappear without invitation and did not disappear permanently by ‘watching’. Then again, I was not only to rise above the bad thoughts and emotions but also to dis-identify from ‘being the body’ all together, which ultimately proved to be neither possible nor an option. So it was a great revelation when I first discovered that to be alive and happy I don’t need to have emotions at all – in fact, the emotions were the very thing that prevented me from being fully alive and permanently happy. Sorting my emotions into good and bad always reminded me of poor Cinderella who had to sort out peas by their size, ending up totally exhausted and bewildered. What a relief and how much easier, to start to eliminate all the peas, ie. emotions. Of course, that proposition rocked me at the very core, but I was desperate and daring enough to give it a go. And the more I stripped away the ‘good’ feelings like love, gratitude, humility, unselfish-ness, compassion and belonging, the more I discovered the genuine article underneath the emotions and beliefs – actual intimacy and delight. See, the quality of the actual world is delight. The very actual-ness of everything is pure delight. Actualism is ‘the experiential understanding that nothing physical is merely passive; the personal experience of the universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being as opposed to a cerebral or affective perception.’ For instance, listening without the layer of emotions, morals, values, beliefs and instincts, to the hum of the fridge, the sound of cars passing by, the rumbling of the computer doing its thing, is delighting in being alive and this very hearing is one function of being alive. No love is needed to layer on top of the very happening of things, it only destroys the purity and perfection, it only binds it into a man-made system of conditions, belonging, control and fear. If you love one sound, you reject another. To love silence is to despise and be upset by noisy business. Love would utterly spoil the game of being happy, here, now, each moment again, for no other reason than being alive, fully and sensately experiencing the universe around me. Without the self being sorrowful and malicious, fearful and lonely, loving and belonging, compassionate and grateful – nothing else is needed to delight in each moment again. VINEETO: Un-conditional love was there in front of me like the unreachable carrot, the dream that one day, by the magic of devotion, meditation and the Grace of Existence, my desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness would turn into the fairytale of ‘true’, divine love for ever. But it was a dream, an ideal, only very rarely experienced under extremely positive conditions. With this understanding it was much easier to investigate further into the components of my ‘good’ feelings called love. RESPONDENT: I liked this, Vineeto. Even though I cannot say with certainty that divine love is ‘only very rarely experienced under extremely positive conditions.’, I am willing to accept that this is something to be looked into. VINEETO: This is what they call a ‘prima-facie case’ in legal language, meaning there is enough evidence to keep going with the investigation. So, you say that for you there is enough common sense in my statement about unconditional love that you are ready to investigate further. Great. Even if you take only your own experience with Divine Love you might come to the conclusion that those few glorious experiences are not enough to build a happy and harmless life upon. Furthermore, if you investigate the ramifications and consequences of Divine Love and see what is has done to people’s lives who were devoting themselves to attaining this Divine Love – you might find that the lives of those people are far from happy and harmless. Both in their daily living together in a ‘sangha’ and in their arrogant behaviour towards all the millions of others who they regard as non-believers, the seekers are as competitive, malicious, frustrated, greedy, sad and emotional as everybody else. So, this Divine Love is only very rarely experienced under extremely positive conditions, and also it is making people neither happy nor harmless 24 hours a day. I have experienced this Divine Love genuinely and long enough for several times and have investigated it thoroughly – and I wouldn’t want to live it even if someone paid me a million dollars. You can find a description of my experience in (Exploration of Death and Altered States of Consciousness). Now, that there is a third alternative, who would want to get lost in a delusion of insane dimensions where one can have the delights of the actual world instead of mad imaginations, where one can have the ease of being with fellow human beings instead of having to satisfy crazy worshippers and needy disciples, where one can live in this world-as-it-is with people-as-they-are in perfect peace and harmony instead of being driven to convince everyone of one’s particular version of deluded divinity. But, it is your life and your peace-on-earth that is the issue of your investigation. I have given you a few reasons why I decided for Actual Freedom and against Enlightenment and Divine Love, but you will have to find out for yourself. And as well as a clear-eyed look at your own experiences and observations you have close to a million words already written about actual freedom to assist your exploration. Check out the new page on the ‘Altered State of Consciousness aka Enlightenment’ that will be on our web-site in a few days. I am interested of what you find out. * RESPONDENT: Again, I apologize for the word experiment in this context. But I will give you a short report on something old. When in January, I snapped at you. I knew there was something behind it. So I focussed on why I snapped at you. This led to my need for love, turned into jealousy and turned into competition. For a month, it was fun to find out various things about myself. I will write about my present stuckness when I get out of it. VINEETO: This is a good train of observations. This need for love is such an insidious feeling, spoiling the easy, enjoyable interaction with people again and again. Particularly my memory of being outraged because of jealousy was a strong factor of never wanting to experience that rage again in whatever situation, whatever the cost. Peter and I had a mutual contract to investigate and eliminate everything that was in the road between us, and jealousy was definitely on the list of the emotions to be investigated first – I was determined to get to the bottom of it. What I found beneath my need for love, jealousy and the resulting competition with other women was my strong belief in love as the ultimate value, that love was something ‘holy’ to uphold, aspire to, to want from others and try to achieve in myself. I had always blamed myself for not being loving or still being jealous, but I had never before questioned the need of the emotion of love itself. It is such a ‘holy cow’, both in Western and Eastern culture and religion, that it had been simply unthinkable not to want love or want to give love in exchange. When Richard said that everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong and that this included love, I started to investigate the very value of love for the first time. Suddenly it made sense why not only I had failed to achieve unconditional love, but everyone around me had not much of a success either. Most of the displayed love was selfishness standing on its head, mixed with a good dose of hypocrisy. I discovered that, by the very nature of emotions and feelings, one cannot feel love without power, possessiveness, jealousy or competition. One cannot have the good emotions without the bad ones. Love is part of our instinctual programming of nurture, of ensuring the survival of the species and of the need to belong to a group in order to survive. Given that the feeling of love is instinctually based, naturally there is power, territorial fights, hierarchy and fear of losing this much-wanted love. Watching animal programs I could learn a lot about instinctual behaviour because animals have the same rudimentary survival instincts as human, without the overlaying morals and ethics of humans. For this reason their instincts are very easy to observe. Just today I watched a program on ants where the commentator raised the question, ‘how come ants have an altruistic behaviour, sacrificing themselves for the tribe, there must be an altruistic gene somewhere?’ It might look altruistic but it is simply the instinctual program to ensure the survival of the species, whatsoever the cost. To come back to the subject – investigating my need and high regard for love I found out that, factually, it is much safer and more sensible to rely on my intelligence for my physical survival, instead of relying on the supposed security of love-based relationships with others. Sitting out the fear that came with questioning such a basic instinctual programming I could eventually free myself of its insidious grip and all the ensuing problems that relationships based on love, sympathy, compassion, need, belonging and fear inevitably bring about. Now I can meet and enjoy people as they are, engage in pleasant communication if it happens and have no regrets when they don’t happen. I noticed in the last weeks of work how easy and intimate and actual my relating to people is, now that neither instinctual passions nor the hypocrisy and inhibitions of ‘my’ moral and ethical codes are interfering with the direct response to whatever situation arises. Life is so much better without love. It is well worth working oneself through ‘stuckness’, doubt or fear. I am interested to hear what you are finding out. * RESPONDENT: My need-for-love is, I think, based on need to be nurtured at the age of 3 years and younger. Since I have no memory before the age of 3 years, it especially makes it hard. I am not sure what to do. Until recently I used to think that to solve these kinds of problems, eg. need-for-love in me, I need to know their source/origin, but may be there are other ways to solve them too. I can’t say much at present as I am in the middle of it and trying to get rid of need-for-love and fear associated with the similar causes. I agree with you, however, that this need-for-love is quite insidious VINEETO: As I said before, in my experience, working out childhood or past-life situations is a dead-end road, in that one will never get to the bottom of all the real or imagined hurts, resentments, exasperations or fears. The same is the case for the need-for-love. It is part of the instinctual package that we are born with. Just now, I watched a film-report made by the famous Jane Goodall, where a 6 year old monkey died of grief three weeks after his mother was killed. He couldn’t survive, missing his source for ‘love’ and care. Everybody, whatever childhood they had, is troubled by their need for love, troubled by their instincts, inflicted with the Human Condition. Only by examining my beliefs supporting love as well as my (imagined) fears of what would happen if I wasn’t loved, could I dismantle this instinct for being loved, which is common to all human beings. In the actual world there is neither love nor need for love. I-as-this-body know perfectly well how to physically survive, how to enjoy being alive and, without the burden of separation and loneliness that the presence of the ‘self’ inevitably produces, simply delight in experiencing the universe around me. It is the ‘self’ that is the culprit – ego and soul combined. This genetically inherited and collectively reinforced passionate imagination of a separate self in each human being is responsible for every single feeling and act of sorrow and malice on this planet. And now it is possible to get rid of it, to become free from the Human Condition. And isn’t it a worthy and thrilling adventure to devote one’s life to! I immensely enjoy the virtual freedom that I have already gained from investigating into the Human Condition. VINEETO: What I had to acknowledge quite in the beginning of my investigation about love was the fact that my ideas and ideals about love and with it the so-called true or un-conditioned love where just ideas and ideals and had nothing to do with the reality of the feelings I had. The feelings of love that I had had in my life were always poisoned by possessiveness, jealousy, fear of abandonment, anger, insecurity, competitiveness and – in case of rejected love – they turned into hate. Un-conditional love was there in front of me like the unreachable carrot, the dream that one day, by the magic of devotion, meditation and the Grace of Existence, my desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness would turn into the fairytale of ‘true’, divine love for ever. But it was a dream, an ideal, only very rarely experienced under extremely positive conditions. With this understanding it was much easier to investigate further into the components of my ‘good’ feelings called love. When you say: RESPONDENT: ...And love, Love are kind of feelings. Then what is happy and harmless? I am experiencing being happy and harmless as a kind of feeling right now. VINEETO: I think here you are applying your ideal of love rather than what is actually happening. I remember the discourses in Poona, where every night there was a hushed competition who would sit closest to the Master, who would get a look from him or even be talked about. There was a tough competition going on – far from happy and harmless. And Rajneesh was as much part of that game as us, his disciples. He would stir the fire of competition, fancy some and neglect others, while all the while telling us to drop desire. Now, that the Master is dead, ‘spread all over Existence’, it is much easier to dream of his Un-conditional Love, and that one day you would attain it. The daily check on reality is but nil. But it is all ‘in the head’ or in the feeling, ‘spirit’-ual, it is not actuality. Being happy and harmless is not a coating over one’s grotty ‘self’, over the Human Condition in us. Being happy and harmless is only possible when you actively remove the feelings, emotions and instinctual passions that the ‘self’ consists of – what then remains is a happy and harmless human being. What remains is the delight of a perfect universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being. RESPONDENT: About your question whether I feel his (Rajneesh’s) presence now. My answer is I am grateful for him still now. And maybe I must add to say that this gratefulness has no demand for the return. VINEETO: Well, as I see it, the first thing is to stop dreaming and imagining and looking honestly at what emotions, feelings, beliefs, fears, loyalty, faith, passions there are that rule your everyday life. What’s the point of feeling gratitude for half an hour a day, dreaming of the perfect unconditional love to a long-dead old Indian philosophy professor, who thought he was God, when the rest of the time one is annoyed, grotty, angry, resentful, peeved, frustrated, sad, hopeful, ambitions, competitive, tense, fearful, stressed out or bored? Both, being busy with emotions and busy with imagined dreams is not being here, now, where life is actually happening. * VINEETO: I think here you are applying your ideal of love rather than what is actually happening. I remember the discourses in Poona, where every night there was a hushed competition who would sit closest to the Master, who would get a look from him or even be talked about. There was a tough competition going on – far from happy and harmless. And Rajneesh was as much part of that game as us, his disciples. He would stir the fire of competition, fancy some and neglect others, while all the while telling us to drop desire. Now, that the Master is dead, ‘spread all over Existence’, it is much easier to dream of his Un-conditional Love, and that one day you would attain it. The daily check on reality is but nil. But it is all ‘in the head’ or in the feeling, ‘spirit’-ual, it is not actuality. RESPONDENT: As I said before, I think this is not my case. VINEETO: Could you explain further, why you ‘think this is not [your] case’? Did you check your thinking with the actual fact, i.e. what particular improvement a certain advice of Rajneesh has brought to your daily life? Did you inquire into the nature of your feelings for Rajneesh to find out which feelings and passions, hopes and desires lay behind the dream of ‘unconditional love’? When I dared to investigate into the devotional relationship that I had to ‘the Master of Masters’ I found several instinctual passions rampantly operating: the instinct to herd together – gathering in a group of like-minded people who – in this case – think they are better than anybody else, the instinct to seek a strong father-figure who would protect me against the evils of life, the need for some authority to map out and guide my life, the need for someone to love and be loved by in order not to be alone in this hostile world, the need to have a high ideal and an unquestionable meaning in life (in that sense Rajneesh replaced the belief in God as the ultimate matrix) the desire to be one day as happy, carefree, blissed out and powerful as he seemed to be. I had to investigate all of those underlying instinctual passions first before I could make a definitive and honest assessment about my relationship to Rajneesh. Well, that investigation proved to be the ending of my love, my devotion and my dependence on the Indian philosophy professor who thought he was God and who had gathered thousands of people around him who still think he is God. GARY: Recently the issue of ‘love’ came up in our relationship. My partner expressed the fear that I would lose interest in her and pass on, presumably to someone else, if this method eventuated with my demise. She expressed the fear of losing our relationship. I have had these very fears myself. However, I have often questioned when either she or I say ‘I love you’. Just what exactly does that mean? She agreed that I have been changing and have been a lot happy and more at ease since starting in this. I assured her that I enjoy her company greatly and that I have no intention of leaving her or losing interest in her. I, somewhat reticently, suggested she might read a section of your correspondence on the website about love, which she did, and she said there were quite a few things that she related to personally. I do not feel that I am ‘in love’ although I care a great deal about my partner and want us to have a good relationship. VINEETO: Upon investigating love I found that the feeling of love in a relationship has many symptoms and facets – possessiveness, jealousy, gratitude, idealizing and beautifying the other, resentment, expectation, seeking attention, taking for granted, being hurt, demand, guilt, dependency, authority, favouritism and an unspoken unclear contract with many, many conditions. One does not necessarily always feel love for the other but that immediately changes when the relationship seems threatened and jealousy and dependency kick in. When feeling love I projected my feelings and my fantasy images on to the other and was thus not able to even notice the human being in front of me, let alone be intimate moment to moment. I found love one of the stickiest of my emotions – being in the category of ‘good’ – and in later stages I discovered subtler versions of love like admiration, gratitude, a rose-coloured mood, missing his company or seeking special attention. I guess you have read all about my explorations on the subject already in ‘my bit’ of Peter’s Journal. Overcoming the romantic dream and the initial shock of questioning the highest of human values was the biggest step – after that, it’s a lot of tidying up one’s habitual beliefs and conditioning about one’s gender identity and moral-ethical convictions. It took several months of thoroughly checking out all the ingredients of gender, love, authority and dependency before the first glimpses of actual intimacy sparked and opened a whole new world of relating to Peter and consequently to others. * VINEETO: Upon investigating love I found that the feeling of love in a relationship has many symptoms and facets – possessiveness, jealousy, gratitude, idealizing and beautifying the other, resentment, expectation, seeking attention, taking for granted, being hurt, demand, guilt, dependency, authority, favouritism and an unspoken unclear contract with many, many conditions. One does not necessarily always feel love for the other but that immediately changes when the relationship seems threatened and jealousy and dependency kick in. GARY: Love has been all these things from my own experience and that is why I always question it. In my family, we never said ‘I love you’, and it is just as well because love is undependable. In fact, it is a fiction. It is only dependency in disguise, jealousy, possessiveness, etc. So I don’t tell my partner that I love her and I do not get the feeling that she expects it of me. Things are much better that way. I have no hold on her and would not wish to do so. Since this issue of ‘love’ came up between us, I can honestly say that it doesn’t seem to be an issue any longer. Since getting involved with actualism, many so-called issues are that way: they come up, are investigated into, and then are laid to rest. There is no sense of them lingering behind the scenes. At other times in my life, I seemed to deal with issues by going over them over and over again like a broken record. Now I feel that some basic issues are getting resolved (perhaps ‘resolved’ is a poor choice of words – I wonder if there is a better one, maybe ‘dissolved’) and then laid to rest. I wonder if you have noticed this too? I don’t know if I am describing it well. VINEETO: It might well be that you are investigating the nurture part of human relationship via the negative feelings of jealousy, dependency, possessiveness and exploring the desire part via sexual passions and taboos. In exploring what male and female conditioning consisted of I learnt a lot about male conditioning – by having a companion who was a eager and willing to tell me about the secrets of the other camp and who assisted my understanding of this former ‘alien’ species. I was keen to learn about the ingredients of a relationship between a man and woman when they live together. What were the issues that arise from living together when the covering layer of love was questioned because it had not worked? Apart from the very obvious power struggle between man and woman I found that what is called ‘love’ or ‘in love’ is merely a generic term for the combination of surging feelings of sexual passion, differing male and female nurture instincts, proprietorial demands on the other, dreams of fulfillment, moral and ethical gender-specific conditioning and a confusing array of spiritual ideals. Each of those issues I had to investigate separately as they arose – and they only came to the surface because I had questioned the very ideal of loving the other as the pinnacle of human relating. Love is such a pure substitute for the sparkling, fascinating and ever fresh intimacy that is possible between human beings. * VINEETO: When feeling love I projected my feelings and my fantasy images on to the other and was thus not able to even notice the human being in front of me, let alone be intimate moment to moment. I found love one of the stickiest of my emotions – being in the category of ‘good’ – and in later stages I discovered subtler versions of love like admiration, gratitude, a rose-coloured mood, missing his company or seeking special attention. I guess you have read all about my explorations on the subject already in ‘my bit’ of Peter’s Journal. Overcoming the romantic dream and the initial shock of questioning the highest of human values was the biggest step – after that, it’s a lot of tidying up one’s habitual beliefs and conditioning about one’s gender identity and moral-ethical convictions. It took several months of thoroughly checking out all the ingredients of gender, love, authority and dependency before the first glimpses of actual intimacy sparked and opened a whole new world of relating to Peter and consequently to others. GARY: Human love is pretty much a self-evident lie to me. Divine Love, on the other hand, is something few dare to question. The idea that there is a loving god or a loving force that permeates the universe is an idea that is so entrenched in our thinking and takes so much nerve to begin to question and reject. I still see my thinking going along those lines, kind of automatically, and when that happens, I am alert and on guard to see where this is taking me. The idea that there is a loving god or such a thing as God’s Love to make this veil of sorrow bearable is an idea that has a firm hold on humanity. To dare to question this and reject the notion that there is a Czar of the heavens, is very heady stuff indeed. There is still for me, I think, that cautious sense of ‘Oops, I’m in trouble now’ by rejecting God and all that other spiritual baloney. And really in a way, ‘I’ am in deep do-do. In fact, ‘I’ am doomed. VINEETO: I found that my dream of ‘human love’ and my search for ‘divine love’ had the same source – my feelings of separation due to me being an the alien entity inside this body and my feelings of desperation for ‘having to be here’. When human love failed I went off to the East to look for the master’s love, which was seen and felt as God’s love in a man’s body. My relationship with my partner turned into a triangle, for the love for my master was always priority. One could compare one’s love for the master to unrequited love because the ideal of one’s feelings is never tested in day-to-day life and can therefore easily be maintained in its idealistic glory. To ‘reject the notion’ that there is a God is the beginning of questioning your belief. However, when you persist questioning and explore further, common sense will facilitate seeing that a physical universe that is eternal and infinite has no outside to it. So where is God then? Where would the ‘creator and ruler of the world’ sit? He would have to sit outside of his creation, don’t you think? As there exists no such place for his chair above or outside of an infinite universe, the only place where God can exist is in human passionate imagination. And human passionate imagination ceases to exist the moment I ask myself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and bring my awareness to whatever feeling or imagination is happening. Bingo. Poof. But you are right – you are in deep trouble when you irrevocably stop believing in God, when the belief resolves in the light of facts. A part of your social identity flies out the window and because of this, some instinctual fear is activated and causes yet another storm in the teacup. For me, the end of God was at the same time the end of hope, trust, faith and postponement, the end of debilitating waiting and cowardly pondering, the end of humbling myself in the face of an almighty invisible power, the end of a stupefying fear of God’s judgement of my right and wrong deeds. The end of my belief in God also freed me of the belief in and loyalty for His representatives, my former master and all the moral authorities that I had followed and/or rebelled against. The end of my belief in God and an afterlife marked the beginning of standing on my own two feet with dignity and relying on my intelligence and common sense to find out what is silly and sensible. Ah, what serendipity. GARY: I don’t know what to say to my partner now when she tells me ‘I love you’. My most recent response is a kind of uncomfortable silence. I then sometimes respond with such endearments as ‘I care for you’, ‘I want to be with you’ (which is true). I do not feel what is called ‘love’, which, as you point out, is an emotion-laden and hormonally-saturated substitute for actual intimacy. Love is certainly not all it is cracked up to be. It seems lately too that all around me I perceive the enormous investment that human beings have made in the ideal of Love. It is written into all our most cherished ballads, stories, movies, songs. It is there as the ultimate pinnacle to which human beings can attain, either in its secular setting in male-female and (not to alienate gay/lesbian friends) male-male and female-female relationships, in short, in terms of coupling sexually and emotionally with another human being. Love, the antidote for sorrow, has such a powerful hold on humanity. VINEETO: The other night we watched a program on animal emotions. Although they had the issue upside down, trying to prove how ‘human’ animals are rather than how animal humans are, it was interesting to learn that female mammals seem to release a hormone called oxytocin when they give birth. The release of this chemical is believed to be responsible for parenting behaviour, like feeding, protecting and taking care of newborns, whereas another chemical, dopamine is considered to stimulate the pleasure centre both in mammals and in humans. In my twenties and thirties I had often wondered how much of ‘love’ was merely a chemical reaction of varying hormones and how much was so-called true love – now the more I learn about the function of hormones, the more I understand that love is nothing but a feeling produced by hormones that are triggered by our instinctual reactions. It is one thing to not let oneself be ‘overtaken’ by a feeling of love because one has rationally understood its reasons and implications, and quite another to deliberately and consciously allow the feeling to happen in order to fully understand and explore it experientially. I needed to observe myself many times when being overtaken and overwhelmed by affection and love to detect ‘me’ who was producing and maintaining this sweet feeling of being connected. I wrote in ‘A Bit of Vineeto’ about the later stages of investigating the offshoots of love – [Vineeto]: Even after dismissing love as a concept or an option of relating, I still had to be watchful of my ‘love-attacks’, as I called them. They would come through the backdoor, seduce me with a rose-colored mood and appear so nice and cosy – such a temptation to surrender back into loving Peter instead of meeting him directly. However, I had understood and experienced often enough that any feeling for the other, howsoever sweet and soothing, would only make him a projected imaginary figure on my own screen of emotions, which can so easily change at the slightest whim. It had nothing to do with the actual person or situation. Being vigilant and persistently nibbling away at my habit of falling back into love proved to be a long process. After all, love and empathy are praised as woman’s greatest virtues! Later, love changed into the subtler version of feeling ‘connected’ to Peter, of having, through him, some kind of identity in my life. I caught myself wanting to use him as an outline for my own existence, as an anchor to define me as ‘person-in-relation’, a ‘self’. Examining it closer I discovered that this need for an anchor derives from the female instinctual need for protection. Only when I feel ‘connected’ to a person can I keep up the illusion that I can rely on this person for ‘bad times’. However, whenever I managed not to fall into the trap of love – what a delight then to discover the actual person, thrilling, alive, meeting for the first time and not knowing what either of us is going to say or do next! Love was then replaced by this delicious state of crisp and exquisite awareness, where I am utterly by myself, there is no relationship between us whatsoever, and the next moment is unpredictable and without continuity to any past or future. Remembering again and again the joy of those wonder-filled moments always gave me the necessary intent and courage to keep removing any feelings that the ‘self’ kept producing. (A Bit of Vineeto, #love2). GARY: To question it is one thing, and I am sure that most people do that to some extent. But to reject it totally is almost to proclaim oneself to be apart from humanity. Then again we get into the outcast thing again. But to get back to what is happening in my partnership relationship, I am aware at times of stirrings of insecurity, the feeling of needing reassurance, of seeking comfort, or desiring nurturance, etc., and I look at these things and see instead of ‘Love’ the claim and demand for what the very self is made of – affirmation and validation of its existence, in other words, that there is a ‘me’ present that needs these supplies and either coyly or quite brazenly goes about pulling or teasing these things from her. VINEETO: For me it was not that I rejected love – it was that I came to understand experientially that feeling love is in the way of meeting the other as the human being he or she is. Love is always self-serving; it is to supply me with the nice feeling that I belong, that I am a loving person – that I am not alone, that if I give I shall receive. Intimacy is the very opposite – I am interested in the other and in what is happening this moment between us, not for my security or gratification, but for the sake of meeting a fellow human being as he/she is in this very moment. * VINEETO: When feeling love I projected my feelings and my fantasy images on to the other and was thus not able to even notice the human being in front of me, let alone be intimate moment to moment. I found love one of the stickiest of my emotions – being in the category of ‘good’ – and in later stages I discovered subtler versions of love like admiration, gratitude, a rose-coloured mood, missing his company or seeking special attention. I guess you have read all about my explorations on the subject already in ‘my bit’ of Peter’s Journal. Overcoming the romantic dream and the initial shock of questioning the highest of human values was the biggest step – after that, it’s a lot of tidying up one’s habitual beliefs and conditioning about one’s gender identity and moral-ethical convictions. It took several months of thoroughly checking out all the ingredients of gender, love, authority and dependency before the first glimpses of actual intimacy sparked and opened a whole new world of relating to Peter and consequently to others. GARY: My question at this point is this: if one has a paradigm of a relationship based on desire, nurturance, and need to couple (whether it be with a man or a woman), and one discovers that one can free oneself from this genetically encoded behaviour, what happens to the relationship? Is there any relationship? Is there something intrinsic about coupling with the human species that makes its imperative so strong? If one achieves an Actual Freedom, or even if one is living in a Virtual Freedom, would there be any need or desire for a couple relationship? In what would it consist? Do you follow my question? VINEETO: Oh yes, I follow your question. When investigating love, that was always the question for me – what will be left? Why am I with Peter, if I don’t love him? Well, what I found out pretty early in the investigation was that there is a sparkling intimacy of two fellow human beings meeting without the veil of self-serving feelings separating them. Living with Peter is much more fun than living on my own, I enjoy his company immensely as he does mine – talking, watching TV together, cooking, shopping, serving cups of coffee, walking, silently writing on the computer until one starts a conversation again ...and then there is sex, a delightful pleasure not to be dismissed. Humans are a social species, we humans would enjoy each other’s company immensely if we wouldn’t have reason to fear it, i.e. if the instinctual passions didn’t get in the way. And man and woman have such perfect plumbing for mutual pleasure... GARY: My partner and I have only just scratched the surface in questioning what our relationship is about, and I must admit to a feeling that it is economically advantageous to share living quarters with another person, as well as having the companionship and company. We are not passionately in love. I am not passionately anything at this point. It is rewarding to mutually explore life and together enjoy the wonder of this natural world. We are both like-minded to a certain extent. I sometimes feel that the only thing that holds us together is the very thing that I want to get rid of: namely, the animal instincts. So there is this push-pull conflict to a certain extent with this issue as there is with others. I well know from a very long period of being on my own with no mate that it is not only possible to live alone but to be quite happy doing so. VINEETO: The thing with actual intimacy is that you can only discover its purity when you question what has been the glue of the relationship up to now. You might have glimpses of it in your PCEs when relating to people without a ‘self’ was imminently easy, delightful, direct, simple and innocent. I remember you described looking at stones as they became ‘amazingly interesting and wonderful’. This same naive non-affective fascination you can have with human beings except there is the added bonus that human beings are alive, can communicate, share interests, report experiences, have insights ... GARY: But I still feel that if my mate came to me and told me she has decided I must go, that I would feel sad and perhaps somewhat broken up inside. So I have not freed myself from the attachment to the relationship and I am not sure, to be quite honest, that I want to. Is what I am saying making any sense? VINEETO: Yes, I understand what you mean. However, I pricked my ears at the word ‘attachment’ because it has such a familiar spiritual ring to it. Actualism is not about becoming unattached as in stifling or rejecting feelings as something wrong. It took a lot to understand that ‘I’ am my feelings until I finally ‘self’-immolate, there is no way around it. The way I can facilitate this ‘self’-immolation is to find all the hooks that tie me to humanity, not stifle my feelings and emotions for intellectual reasons but investigate in order to take ‘me’, the feeler out of the situation. In the case of my attachment to Peter that ‘unhooking process’ meant that I explored the related morals, dreams, investments, desires, fears, my social identity and my sexual drive that were all part of my attachment to him. Once I saw the dream, for instance, I had a choice – do I want to keep my sweet ‘female’ love-dream or do I want the real thing, actual intimacy? It wasn’t really a choice at all; it was so obvious for me when the love-dream was seen as a dream. Of course, one can see one dream and replace it with another – but with honesty and insistence the hidden dream-maker will be found out along with the dreams and passions. * VINEETO: I found that my dream of ‘human love’ and my search for ‘divine love’ had the same source – my feelings of separation due to me being an alien entity inside this body and my feelings of desperation for ‘having to be here’. When human love failed I went off to the East to look for the master’s love, which was seen and felt as God’s love in a man’s body. My relationship with my partner turned into a triangle, for the love for my master was always priority. One could compare one’s love for the master to unrequited love because the ideal of one’s feelings is never tested in day-to-day life and can therefore easily be maintained in its idealistic glory. GARY: Yes, I think that when many reach a certain age, usually in their 30s and 40s and they find that their intimate relationships have been shipwrecked, the religious or spiritual quest becomes all the more attractive as a way of reaffirming their identity. I think it was this way for me. The love of the Master (in my case the Christian Jesus) replaced the missing love of the wife who was long gone, the father’s love, the family, etc. It seemed so stimulating to think that I was loved by Jesus and even known by him personally, that I had a direct line to the love of God, to put it plainly. It was so self-evidently self-aggrandizing, I can see that now, but I could not see it then. But yes, there is the underlying feeling of separation that fuels this search for Love. Now, I must say, I do not feel that way. I know there is a wonderful actual world there, and even if I am not intensely experiencing it at the moment, ‘I’ am getting in the way and only need let go of the controls and get out of the way to have the actual world rise to my sight. VINEETO: It is fascinating to read your ‘It was so self-evidently self-aggrandizing’ – such a simple statement about a simple fact. Everyone else I am corresponding with at present is frantically defending Love, Beauty, Supreme Intelligence, Compassion, the Unknown, universal Consciousness and whatever other names they have invented for their God. To acknowledge the fact that god is a mere figment of passionate imagination is more than most will bear. * VINEETO: I had a bit of a think about what I wanted to reply to you because I have already said or written everything about love that I have discovered and I did not want to copy and paste from my previous writings as you might have found it already yourself on the website. GARY: I found myself recently ‘slipping’ and telling my partner ‘I love you’. It was during one of those ‘nice and cosy’ periods, like you describe (below). It really felt like it just slipped out and that I didn’t really mean it. It also seemed like it is just a reflexive habit, you know, when one is in such moods to give utterance to such endearments. And there really is no difference between saying ‘I love you’ and saying ‘I care for you’ or ‘I want to be with you’. All these sentiments pretty much add up to the same thing. When I first read this post, I was having trouble grasping just what you meant by ‘consciously allow the feeling to happen in order to fully understand and explore it experientially’. I think I have been kind of regarding Love as a no-no and quashing the feelings when they come up rather than simply allowing them and exploring them when they do. I think I’ll give that a try. <snip> Yes! When one is feeling ‘love’ or any of those other deep and tender feelings, it is like a screen between you and what is actually there. And it so often turns to hate and maliciousness in its stead. <snip> As a male member of the species, I think I see the corresponding need to be a protector – you know – guard the castle against attack, bring home the bacon, and protect my ‘little woman’. It was quite an upset when my partner started making more money than I a couple of years ago – we had quite a few good laughs about how I had been ‘dethroned’ from my position of former imagined dominance. Now, however, I am back ‘on top’ again and not enjoying it at all! Maybe I’ve been a bit too hasty in my rejection of love. I have actually felt sorry for my mate that she is with me and have thought perhaps she would be better off with someone who will give her what she wants, but I know that this kind of self-pity is not the right approach either. <snip> I still get caught up in malicious mind-games with my partner, berating her verbally, for instance. And she can dish it out as well as take it too. Just so that I don’t paint too rosy a picture of how things actually are, she recently told me that she thinks I am cruel because of the things I say. I don’t like to see ‘myself’ that way but it is true. I still have a mean streak that comes out in our relationship. So, I’ve got a lot of work to do, for sure. VINEETO: Contemplation and insights are valuable tools in understanding more about the Human Condition, but until and unless I actualized and applied my insights to daily life, they faded into ‘great’ impotent thoughts. Whenever I got myself in a knot by contemplating too long on one issue, for instance did I want to keep love or throw it out, I had to tackle it from a different angle. What did I want practically? What is my aim and what is prevents me from that aim? The answer of ‘I want to be free’ was not enough – it had to be an actual practical freedom from something, i.e. fighting with others, and freedom to be intimate with others. I knew from my pure consciousness experience that I wanted intimacy – the innocent ever-fresh fascination that I experienced first in those moments with Peter, not knowing what he is going to say or do next and being unconditionally curious and attentive. This goal of actual intimacy was my guiding line, this is the quality in which I want to relate to people. Therefore I was eager and willing to find out how I can live this actual intimacy that I experienced in my PCE.
| In the course of applying naiveté, fascination and unconditional attentiveness I also found the stumbling blocks that prevented them – my expectations, dreams, jealousy, desire, power issues, ‘I am different’, ‘you don’t understand me’, habitual assessments, guilt, being a traitor, sexual taboos, the fear of losing my image, malice, competition, keeping a distance, having a secret, wanting ‘space’, shame, trust and mistrust, hope, loyalty, role-play, authority issues, spiritual beliefs, etc. ... Love is then clearly experienced as one of the major obstacles for an actual intimacy, and in the course of removing what prevents the sparkling, tantalizing and delightful play of intimacy, love is just one of the babies that gets thrown out with the bathwater. Actualizing one’s insights and findings about relating, love and intimacy consists of seemingly small things – moments of deliberate full attention whatever the topic, sincerity about a little secret one has kept or the decision to stop battling whatever the cause. As I wanted peace and harmony above all, stopping my power games whenever I caught myself became my priority. Of course, repressing my power games would only result in resentment – I had to take apart the feeling and issue at hand, experienced and investigated every nook and corner and dug for the underlying causes. (picture adapted from P. Livingston, The Flacco Files, Allen & Unwin 1999).
VINEETO: I have been enjoying your posts immensely. You are describing eloquently and in detail your process and success of dismantling the Human Condition in you. Many of your discoveries ring a bell, sometimes reminding me of my own findings on the wide and wondrous path. The last part of your latest post to Peter has intrigued me to write to you and relate some of my experiences as to how am I in relation to other people. GARY: Death has lost most of its terrifying aspect to me. I would not say that there is absolutely no fear of death, but if there is, it is scarcely conscious. One can, I think, relate one’s own fear of dying to the fear of losing ‘loved ones’, people who one is close to. For instance, at times I realize I am quite attached to my partner and I would be utterly bereft were she to die and leave me ‘alone’. Then I realize that I am emotionally dependent on her, through the ties of love or sympathy, and that I don’t want her to die and that I could not bear to see her get ill or suffer. This then seems like an important realization for I am looking at what I am in relation to the people around me, and looking at what they mean to me. It is a rather sobering sort of reflection. There is that connection, I don’t know what to call it, ‘bond’ I suppose is a good word, that one forms to people throughout life – one’s parents, one’s children, one’s husband or wife. I think for me I fear their demise more than I fear my own. Picturing my own demise has little effect on me but sometimes I am filled with fear for the demise of these ‘loved ones’. In this connection, I am reminded of the important question that Richard posed in his Journal to himself of ‘What am I in relation to the people around me’ and how he kept this question burning in his consciousness for a long time. That question has repeatedly occurred to me over the course of looking at these emotional dependencies, these emotional ties of love or sympathy, even ties of antipathy or hatred, to family or ‘loved ones’. Could you perhaps explore with me what it has been like for you to examine your ties to people in your life through running this question? Do you find yourself forming ties to others? How can I use this question ‘What am I in relation...’ to further important understandings of ‘me’ so that ‘me’ can be ended? I think at this point I am going to end. I really would like to pursue this issue of one’s relationship with other people in one’s life. It may be interesting the kinds of fears that crop up as one begins the process of dismantling one’s identity. The fear, indeed the dread, of leaving everything and everyone, all the comfortable and familiar things that inhabit one’s ‘normal’ world is an interesting subject in its’ own right. VINEETO: For me, the question about losing a ‘loved one’ by death or change of circumstances was an important issue in the beginning of my relationship with Peter. I had known jealousy and fear of abandonment in the wild ups and downs of my previous relationships and knew that I did not want to repeat the same dramas any more. Further, a close friend of mine had lost her partner after many years of a relationship that I had always considered the best possible within the Human Condition and she pined for him for years, convinced such luck is granted only once in a lifetime. Given my intent to find a way of living with a man in peace and harmony without being stricken by my emotional dependency, I pricked up my ears when, at our first meeting, Peter proposed something new for our relationship – intimacy instead of love and the commitment to work out all the arising obstacles between us. In the course of our living together we have indeed worked out all the differences that arose due to gender conditioning and cultural upbringing and then dug into the instinctual differences between man and woman, particularly love and sex, i.e. nurture and desire. Our living together soon became so peaceful, delightful and harmonious that I certainly had no reason or trigger to worry about being abandoned or feeling jealous. For a start, it gave me great confidence that I practically and financially stood on my own two feet. Whenever fear arose of losing Peter or when I noticed that I started depending on his company for my happiness, I looked into those emotions to understand what exactly it was that I was afraid of. I could easily detect that my cherished tender instincts, my feelings of love, belonging and affection were the very cause of my fear and dependency. I found that I had to question every single one of my ideals and dreams about relationship, as well as my imaginations and hopes, expectations and principles to be able to become free of fear and to begin to become autonomous. The fairy-tales that I had loved as a child and the heroic legends that I had read as a youth – all talked about love as the primary fulfilment in life and the ultimate goal ... after the princess found prince charming ‘they lived happily ever after’. All the poetry that is written about love conveys the same picture, the bittersweet longing and a fulfilment that gives content and meaning to life. In reality I found that love meant that I wanted the other to determine, colour and fulfill my life and to guarantee my happiness – an obvious relegation of my responsibility for my own life and happiness. As an aside, even Rajneesh in his so-called divine love affair with his Sannyasins blamed them for not doing enough to fulfill his personal megalomaniacal dreams of a Rajneesh-centric world. Love also promised that I would belong to someone, that I would be protected from loneliness and meaninglessness, and the expectation that someone would be there for ‘me’ when I was sad and grumpy, fearful and ailing. There is nothing altruistic about love at all – it is always defined by the needs of the ‘self’. The very presence of the range of emotions called love creates a ‘self’-centred image of the other that has nothing to do with the flesh-and-blood person that stands in front of me. By definition, all ‘I’ am capable of is being ‘self’-ish and that prevents me from experiencing the other directly and intimately. Being driven by love I found that all I was doing was projecting ‘my’ dreams, ideals, desires, expectations and hopes on to the other and thus I only interacted with my own film-hero or nasty villain image instead of relating to the fellow human being in front of me. It is interesting that my first Pure Consciousness Experience started with the most stunning discovery that there was an actual flesh-and-blood human being behind ‘my’ projected ideas and it was utter surprise and delight to meet him so intimately for the first time. There’s a curious thing about emotions and instinctual passions – if you want to be genuinely free of the negative or ‘bad’ emotions you will have to question the positive or ‘good’ emotions first. If you want to become free of feeling insulted and blamed by others you will have to abandon seeking the praise of others, if you want to become free of the fear of losing a cherished item or job you will have to investigate the desire, affection and attachment for that item or job, and if you want to become free of the fear of the loss of ‘loved ones’ you will have to inquire into your of desire to belong and your feelings of dependency and love. GARY: Thank you for your thoughtfully written post addressing freedom from love. I have been regarding your post ruminatively for awhile now, and would like to respond to a few of the points that jumped out at me in particular. You wrote: VINEETO: For me, the question about losing a ‘loved one’ by death or change of circumstances was an important issue in the beginning of my relationship with Peter. I had known jealousy and fear of abandonment in the wild ups and downs of my previous relationships and knew that I did not want to repeat the same dramas any more. GARY: I certainly relate to not wanting to repeat the same patterns over again in my present relationship with my partner. I went through a distinct period, after I finally gave up alcohol and drugs, 15 years ago, of remaining solitary – in other words, not getting involved significantly with anyone, and this period went on for a few years. I had a great fear of becoming ‘too dependent’ on another person which naturally led to the fear of abandonment you mentioned. When I did get involved again, I went through some of the familiar patterns again with the difference that they did not seem to be as wildly emotional for me. I went through the familiar stage of forming a ‘love’ relationship, offering tender assurances to the other person, and eventually proclaiming to the other that ‘I love you’. It seems almost universal that these stages take place in human intimate relationships. I was greatly reluctant to offer the assurance of ‘love’ and I would often question my partner as to what she meant when she assured me that she loved me. VINEETO: I have found that men seem more ‘reluctant’, as you say, to talk about love and relationship, but they are nevertheless as dependant, loyal, protective, worried, resentful and full of unspoken expectations towards their partners and children as women are. For me, being conditioned as a woman, relationship was an important ingredient for ‘my’ meaning in life and therefore it was always a great struggle to either deny or counteract my resultant dependency on the other by affirming and demonstrating my ‘independence’ – ‘taking space’, having my own opinions, having exclusive ‘girls nights’, living in a separate flat, etc., etc. And yet, despite all those ‘independent’ actions, deep down I knew damn well that I was unfulfilled, lost, lonely and frightened and always dreaming of the perfect relationship with a man. When Peter and I met, he had grasped enough from Richard’s radical discovery to not want to fall in love again. And yet, as he has described it in his Journal,, falling in love happened despite all good intentions, inevitably unfolding all the typical emotions between man and woman within the Human Condition. To get a handle on the overwhelming impact of my tender emotions, I had to feel, experience, acknowledge, label and investigate each and every single emotion of the bundle called love in order to understand what love consists of. There was sexual attraction, fear of loneliness, my personal dreams and fantasies, my emotional dependency, my expectations of the other, the male and female conditioning, constant mistrust, fear, jealousy, worry and feelings of inadequacy that I tried to overcome by anticipating, attempting to interpret and empathizing with the other’s moods and feelings. As I successively became aware of and understood one feeling after the other, I first had glimpses and then increasingly longer periods where neither tender nor savage emotions would interfere in the delightful magic of a direct unimpeded peaceful interaction with another human being. It became more and more obvious that love is nothing but a shield of ‘my’ projected feelings that act to keep me at a safe distance and therefore love only stands in the way of intimate interaction with others. GARY: It was not until I became involved with actualism that I began to understand what it means to question myself rigorously about the feelings, emotions, and passions that come into play in my relationships with others. With the intent to become free from the disabling patterns and feelings that accompany ordinary human relationships, I could turn my attention to understanding what this business of relating is all about and understand why my previous unions with other human beings had failed miserably. In actualism, something entirely new is on offer: freedom from the entire emotional/instinctual package with which human beings are genetically endowed. This is so radically different from other approaches to dealing with relationships that it scarcely needs mentioning. But perhaps it needs repeating because unless or until the instinctual passions are eliminated in toto one is always at danger of repeating the same patterns that led to misery in the first place. Not only do I see this happening in my present relationship with my partner, but I also experience the thrill of being free from those self-same patterns and the realization that it need not be so. VINEETO: The more I have taken responsibility and stopped both blaming the other and expecting them to fix my problems, the more my relating to people has become simple and easy. At first relating seemed an impenetrable web of reasoning, feeling, empathizing, guilt, demand and fear, but when I started to pull a few fundamental strings and investigate a few basic premises, the mystery and complexity of emotional relating soon began to unravel and disappear. I remember a particular afternoon about four years ago, when I took a close hard look at my pining, which inevitably occurs when love and affection are involved. That day I took a walk in the fields, determined to put a stop to the debilitating gut-sinking feeling of missing the other and I listed all the ingredients that made up this emotional dependency. I remember it as a seminal turning point as to how I wanted to live my life – according to my dreams and everyone else’s ideas of an ideal relationship or being in accord with what is actually happening here in this moment with the actual human being I have opted for as a companion. It was clear to me that in order to experience the other ‘in flesh’, in actuality, none of my dreams was of any use – on the contrary, they were the very smokescreen preventing a direct meeting – and it was obvious that I could only gain by abandoning my cherished dreams. The other thing I understood on that afternoon was that nobody could live my life for me and nobody, however close, could fulfil my dreams of happiness and freedom for me. A freedom that one can receive from others always carries the fear that the other can possibly take his or her gift away at any time – by its very definition this is non-freedom. This includes, of course, the spiritual freedom offered by the Gurus and Godmen and the deceptive feeling of freedom created by feeling grateful to a mythical God or Existence. This understanding about freedom proved to be the foundation to allow me to break my dependency from Peter and later from Rajneesh, because the real thing – an actual freedom – as opposed to the dreamt-up feeling-only freedom, lies in my hands and in my hands only. * VINEETO: For a start, it gave me great confidence that I practically and financially stood on my own two feet. Whenever fear arose of losing Peter or when I noticed that I started depending on his company for my happiness, I looked into those emotions to understand what exactly it was that I was afraid of. I could easily detect that my cherished tender instincts, my feelings of love, belonging and affection were the very cause of my fear and dependency. I found that I had to question every single one of my ideals and dreams about relationship, as well as my imaginations and hopes, expectations and principles to be able to become free of fear and to begin to become autonomous. GARY: This is an important point because you are pointing to an integral link between the tender passions and the so-called savage passions. In actualism, it is understood that the genetically endowed tender instincts are needed to offset, ameliorate or protect from the savage instincts. One cannot have one side of the instinctual equation without having the other side. The feeling of love is always accompanied by fear, dependency, possessiveness, jealousy, etc, at least in my experience. If one idealizes the feeling of love, as many do, one will be unable to see that the feeling of love not only is spawned by fear and aggression but causes these experiences in turn. It seems to work both ways. The entity or identity is insecure and fearful and seeks to attach itself to another as a means of survival. The entity needs this constant source of love and affirmation in order to survive, and without it, withers and fades away. Most people I have talked to about love idealize the feeling of love, and are unwilling to see that the feeling of love automatically evokes its opposite. VINEETO: Yes, the fact that in actualism we not only investigate the savage but also the tender passions is the very reason that makes it so highly unpopular. At first, Actual Freedom seems to be a very daring, even megalomaniacal, thing to take on – to break away from the wisdom of thousands of years. Only those who are honest enough to admit that love has failed as a solution to the underlying instinctual fear and aggression and yet have maintained sufficient naiveté to not settle for a second-rate relationship will be willing to discover the facts and actuality behind the feelings and dreams. GARY: Another thing that I have been ruminating about in connection with the topic of love is the long period of dependency of the human infant and child. The mammals, in particular out of the animal kingdom, nurture and protect the offspring for a long, long time. With the human, this long period of physical, and then leading to psychological and psychic incubation seems to be required in order to thoroughly inculcate the growing child with a social and cultural identity. One can easily spend a lifetime being conditioned by society and conditioning oneself, and others in turn. In actualism, one begins to dismantle this social identity, and one of the first things to emerge is fear, anxiety, and dread, because one is questioning the very things that one spent so long a period cementing in place. To begin to question these ideals, expectations, hopes, etc. sets the whole process on its head. One was conditioned in the first place with the reward being the affection, admiration, affirmation, and ‘love’ of parents, teachers, peers, neighbours, etc. Psychically and psychologically, ‘love’ is needed by the alien entity that inhabits this flesh-and-blood body because the entity was nurtured and grew in an atmosphere of ‘love’, acceptance, and affection. It seems, then, that to question deeply the meaning and basis of ‘love’ is to question the entire structure and foundation of the ‘self’. The resultant turmoil is enough to send even the most determined investigators scurrying for cover. Yet, as you point out, to be free from the feeling of love is also to be free from fear, because the emotions go together in an essential way. VINEETO: Yes, here you have pinpointed the very reason that keeps all the Enlightened Ones trapped in their delusionary state of divine Love – to question love itself is to demolish ‘the entire structure and foundation of the ‘self’’. Richard wasn’t content with the patently evident non-perfection of Unconditional Love and this discontent with imperfection led him to investigate the tender passions, which eventually landed him on the other side of enlightenment and outside of Humanity as a whole with no ‘self’ left to ever run amok again. So our social conditioning is only the top-layer of the Human Condition, covering over and forever attempting to reign in the instinctual passions, and even the most considerate upbringing cannot save one from being an instinctually driven ‘self’. * VINEETO: The fairy-tales that I had loved as a child and the heroic legends that I had read as a youth – all talked about love as the primary fulfilment in life and the ultimate goal ... GARY: This is so true. I have found in my discussions with people that love, both in its romantic/sexual expression, and in its transcendent garb as Eternal Love, is the great fixation of many, probably all peoples. I had been seduced back in the 70s and 80s, when these ideas were in popular currency, to feel that the cause of my unhappiness in life was an unhappy childhood with not enough so-called ‘unconditional love’ from my parents. I built up an identity of a person who was a victim – someone who never had enough and thus my obsession became to find and get this nebulous and rare ‘unconditional love’ substance that I so desperately craved. I now feel that this kind of love is a chimera – that love is always conditional and intimately tied into and ultimately leading to the savage instinctual part of the human equation. If one craves the supposedly unconditional variant of love, one is much more likely to be duped by the promise of an Eternal Love, a Love that is beyond space and time. It seems to be the foundation of every sort of spiritual and religious belief that there is a source of Super-Human Caring, a kind of benevolent or punitive Great Parent in the Sky that either makes our life a hell or a heaven by turns. These, of course, are nothing but fairy-tales for adults. VINEETO: Blaming others for one’s feelings and misgivings seems to be one of the primary self-protective features of the Human Condition. Whoever one listens to, be it the younger generation, the oldies, the rich, the spiritual people, the rednecks, the rebels or the well adapted, everyone blames someone else and something else for their misery and failure. When all search for scapegoats fails, it is invariably God’s will that one has to surrender to. Being a victim is a universal feeling that keeps everyone trapped in being miserable and malicious. Only when I had enough of feeling powerless because I was always making others responsible for my own misery did I take the decision to actively change myself in order to become happy and harmless. * VINEETO: There’s a curious thing about emotions and instinctual passions – if you want to be genuinely free of the negative or ‘bad’ emotions you will have to question the positive or ‘good’ emotions first. If you want to become free of feeling insulted and blamed by others you will have to abandon seeking the praise of others, if you want to become free of the fear of losing a cherished item or job you will have to investigate the desire, affection and attachment for that item or job, and if you want to become free of the fear of the loss of ‘loved ones’ you will have to inquire into your of desire to belong and your feelings of dependency and love. GARY: So it appears that initially the intent to be free of the negative or ‘bad’ emotions is what fuels the investigation into the instinctual passions. But one finds out relatively quickly, going back to a seminal point that Richard talks about, that one cannot be a ‘stripped down self’. I did not really understand this at first but as I continue using the method of actualism I see with increasing clarity that this is true. One cannot eliminate the negative, invidious passions without the positive, ‘loving’ emotions, and this is a major point at which one may well balk. What I have found to be true of myself, at the current stage, is that I may fondly imagine that I am free from being shackled to the influence of others, I may imagine that I am free from the attachment to the job or the praise of the supervisor, but I am not. And each one of these startling glimpses into the way ‘I’ operate leads to a greater freedom from ‘my’ habitual clinging and holding of people, places, and things. Merely wanting to be free from these things is, of course, not enough. One has to be able to experience the ‘me’ in action, see ‘me’ in all my cunningness, duplicity, and dishonesty. One needs to be neither in love with love, or embittered and disillusioned by love’s failures. One needs to see oneself for who one is, and when I use the word ‘one’ I am referring to the alien entity inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body. When one really sees oneself for who one is, one is free to be what one is. VINEETO: The closer I looked into the so-called positive feelings that I had cherished for so long, the more I discovered that love had no tangible benefits, only fleeting emotions and un-kept promises. Inevitably attachment would lead to resentment, fear and jealousy, the desire for unconditional love would lead to unconditional, as in unquestioning, dependency and the desire to appear unconditionally loving would lead to self-contempt, hypocrisy and an emotional and physical withdrawal from the so-called bad world. So ‘disillusionment’, as in acknowledging that love has failed to bring an actual peace and harmony between human beings, is a necessary starting point as one dismantles imagination and discovers the facts. When you say ‘one needs to see oneself for who one is’ I was reminded of this quote from Richard about seeing facts, and it has helped me a few times to overcome fear and do what was obviously the next step – Richard: Is not ‘understanding’ something the same thing as ‘analysing’ something? To understand something is to intellectually grasp a concept successfully. This may be the activity of ‘I’ thinking as clearly as ‘I’ can possibly think, yet it is not the same clarity as the clear seeing obtained in an insight ... and an insight is seeing the fact. When one sees the fact there is action ... and this action is the actualising of the insight so that one’s personality is changed, irrevocably. This change is the beginning of the ending of the ‘self’ one was born with. ‘I’ can not stand exposure to the bright light of awareness for too long without crumpling like a leaky balloon. ‘I’ survive only by being able to lurk around in the shadows of inattention and obfuscation. ‘I’ was born with the instinct to survive, and ‘I’ will do anything to stay in existence, for it is in ‘my’ nature to do so. Intellectually grasping a concept and calling it an insight is part ‘my’ game plan. The seeing of this fact is a direct experience of the actuality of the Human Condition. ... this is actual wisdom. And out of that wisdom there is the essential intensity for the actualisation. This actualisation is the ending of ‘me’ in ‘my’ entirety. (Richard, List B, No. 12, 16 February 1998). * VINEETO: Only when I started to apply the method of actualism could I begin to dare to really acknowledge what was going on in my feeling department, because now I had the tools to investigate and eliminate the cause of my anxiety, my dependency, my sorrow, my anger, my insecurity and my loneliness. Neither suppressing nor expressing my emotions but becoming aware and investigating the cause of the feelings did the trick – it stopped me running away from my bad feelings and stopped me chasing the good feelings. The vividness and a magical splendour of actuality that becomes apparent when both bad and good feelings disappear, is far superior to any ‘feeling good’ that drugs, love, praise or Divine Love can every deliver. GARY: Like yourself, I have come to see that ‘love’ comprises a whole constellation of moods, emotions, behaviours, and beliefs. At its most fundamental, there are the tender instincts of nurture and desire. These fundamental instincts are then further articulated and elaborated through the process of conditioning and learning into the whole complex constellation of human drives and emotions. I have found that it is impossible to refrain from love, which is a bit like trying to outrun my shadow – a patent impossibility. But I can investigate these various emotions, moods and passions, and it is a fascinating and engaging work indeed. Eventually ‘I’ am becoming a bit threadbare – the moods and emotions are not running my life, nor am I blindly careering about looking for love and acceptance. This ties in with autonomy – I am becoming more and more autonomous. At an earlier point in my explorations, I naively thought that by expunging the word ‘love’ from my vocabulary, I would be eliminating the emotional hold these emotions have on me. I have not found that to be the case. The moods and feelings arise from time to time, but the difference is that they are noticed and there is this self-questioning process always going on. My partner still tells me, just about every morning, that she loves me. I do not say the words back, but neither do I cringe or recoil in embarrassment. She still evidently believes in the promise of love, from what I can tell, whereas I do not. That doesn’t mean that we cannot enjoy each other’s company and continue to share our lives and our cosy little home together. But the curious thing is the surreptitious thrill of delight to hear the words spoken, something that many, if not most, people living in the Human Condition feel they cannot do without. Again, there is the recognition and awareness that these words ‘I love you’ are the soul’s balm. They are music to my soul’s ears: ‘I’ stand up and take notice emphatically when offered love and acceptance by others, whether employer, co-workers, partner, etc. But again, one asks oneself ‘why’? And at what cost? VINEETO: I like it when you say [Gary]: ‘I naively thought that by expunging the word ‘love’ from my vocabulary, I would be eliminating the emotional hold these emotions have on me. I have not found that to be the case’. because this is exactly my experience. To not believe in the promise of love is one thing, but to actually investigate the feelings of love one has to keep the word ‘love’ in one’s vocabulary. I found love, and its big brother ‘compassion for all’, a much more sticky emotion than, for instance, anger. Love lets you belong – to a person, to a group, to a nation and to humanity as a whole. Investigating love and the tender instincts is all about examining the feeling of belonging and the fear of standing on my own feet. Your expression ‘these words ‘I love you’ are the soul’s balm. They are music to my soul’s ears’ hit the nail on the head. My ‘soul’, this passionate imaginary ‘me’, needs continuous emotional affirmation from others or needs to feel connected to others in order to stay alive – for ‘I’ am non-actual, ‘I’ do not exist other than by feeling and imagination. You might have noticed that when you accept people’s praise or love, you are at the same time susceptible to their critiques and condemnations as well – one cannot have one without the other. With nobody to love me or hate me, and with nobody to love or hate, my soul eventually withers away and I become anonymous. Actual Freedom is about getting rid of the soul altogether, so it neither flourishes nor suffers. This is when I become autonomous. GARY: It hardly seems necessary to go into the specifics to a greater extent or to re-invent the wheel. But suffice it to say that the essence of the method is to thoroughly examine and investigate everything that gets in the way of being happy and harmless. This includes every affective experience, emotion, feeling, and belief. Just to give an example: in the morning I was on the way to work and my partner, in saying ‘goodbye’ to me, stated ‘I love you’ and lightly caressed my hand. In response to this lightly spoken endearment, I experienced a feeling of sadness mingled with regret. The feeling hit me between the eyes, so to speak, and I was interested to look into that feeling and see what I could find out about it, as it would reveal much about ‘me’. One of the things that I came up with was the realization that love in any form is always accompanied by sorrow and sadness, as for instance when love is lost. I think I also experienced a momentary feeling of pity for my partner whose expressions of ‘love’ to me are usually not reciprocated, perhaps in they are in tender expressions of caring but certainly not in word, as I never speak the ‘love’ word anymore. I think there was an irrational belief operating in me at the time that went something like this: ‘What kind of partner are you after all – you should be telling your partner that you love her’. One could easily substitute any number of words in the place of ‘partner’ such as ‘son’, ‘daughter’, ‘friend’, ‘co-worker’, etc. The irrational belief that I ‘should’ be expressing love to these people caused me to feel momentary sadness, regret, and guilt. VINEETO: The longer I observe how I am in relation to other people, the more I find that whenever another person evokes an affective reaction in me then there is some kind of invisible thread or emotional hook also present on my side. I remember a visit from a close relative and how at first I felt guilty for not returning the love, affection and excitement that was offered to me. It was as if a web of invisible, yet sticky vibes was cast out to catch me into feeling loyal to and connected with her. These bonding strings might well be presented as a generous offer of love or friendship, yet – often unbeknownst to the person himself or herself – this offer always contains a request for returned feelings, a demand for support and an obligation for further loyalty. In other words, love is never unconditional, it is always given with conditions and it is only received subject to conditions. In the situation with my relative I was able after a while to understand the nature and source of my guilt by observation and investigation and then, by being free of my feelings of guilt I was able to give her my full attention and care. While we spent time together we were able to talk as fellow human beings, swap stories about how each experiences life and what each had found out so far about the business of being a human being. As for a one-to-one man-woman relationship, I found that the sorrow that you described as being associated with love is due to the inevitable expectation of returned favours and feelings. Love by its very nature cannot stand by itself. Love always needs a giver and a receiver, someone who loves and someone who is eager to be loved. In my ‘past-life’ love-relationships, my dreams of how I wanted to live life were automatically intertwined with the man I loved – as a woman I gave him the responsibility for my happiness and I expected him to do the same. (Then I am also jealously guarding that he is not happy without me!) Soon after I met Peter I found it vital to investigate this dream because it caused me to be miserable whenever we were apart and made my life difficult whenever we were together. When I looked into the love-dream that I had cherished all my life, I was faced with a rather shocking choice – either keep my dream and my identity as a woman and a lover and remain struggling, frustrated and unhappy, or drop all my high-flying ideas and ideals, grow up and take responsibility for my own life. This also meant that I had to put my becoming free from the human condition as number one on my laundry list – above my relationship. That very choice made me not only autonomous for the first time in my life, it also released Peter from the burden of ‘my’ unfulfillable expectations and emotional needs. Nobody else is responsible for my becoming free and nobody is standing in the way of my becoming free. VINEETO: From my own explorations I know that a relationship with a partner has many layers that are worth examining. GARY: Yes. That is certainly so. A ‘relationship’ involves need, dependency, closeness, nurture, aggression, so on and so forth. Perhaps like yourself, I have been investigating emotional closeness. This involves dependency and the need, indeed, the drive to nurture and be nurtured. An emotionally close relationship is a prolonged type of infancy and childhood in which one seeks the closeness of ‘someone who understands’. VINEETO: If you mean ‘someone who understands’ me emotionally, I fully agree with you as my former relationships and friendships have certainly been formed on that basis. Nowadays, I am the only person who needs to understand me emotionally, seeking understanding not for the purpose of commiseration or confirmation but in order to get to the bottom of ‘me’. However, it is nevertheless very refreshing and delightful to talk to ‘someone who understands’ common sense and with whom I can share the sense that I made of the world of people, things and events. GARY: Contained in this emotionally close relationship, which is considered the hallmark of adult maturity and independence, is contained the contrary states of it’s absence: abject loneliness, despair, clinging, cloying dependency, fear, and other such negative states. All of humanity’s most lofty ideals and dreams are enacted in one’s primary relationship, whereas as this flesh-and-blood body, apperceptively aware, I am incapable of emotional closeness of any kind. VINEETO: Yes, given that the ‘self’, the alien entity inside this flesh-and-blood body, is the very source and reason for feeling lost, lonely and frightened, the natural reaction is to seek emotional closeness, love and nurture. When I investigated my need for emotional closeness I inevitably uncovered my lost, lonely and frightened ‘self’ and have proceeded to whittle away at it ever since.
This Topic Continued | Vineeto’s Selected Correspondence | Library – Love
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