VINEETO: Hi Alan,

Thank you for your recent private post.

ALAN: I have just found your copies of your correspondence with Konrad – he is as verbose as ever! Have not read much yet, as I am still catching up on the mailing list posts. The quality of the posts has certainly improved over the last few months and there are a couple of things I want to comment on. I will wait until I am up to date with my reading, though.

VINEETO: As you can see from the copy I sent you today I have added yet another response to Konrad’s repetitive list of objections. I am having good fun to sort out all his various philosophies and spiritual psittacisms and in the process of answering I have learnt a lot more about the brain, too.

ALAN: As you will have seen from my post to the list it was a fruitful time in the Algarve and heart flutters and pains at the base of the skull have been common for the past couple of weeks. ‘I’ came up with some lovely excuses for not proceeding – ‘you don’t want to be carted off to some foreign hospital – wait till you get home’ and ‘suppose <name deleted> reacts like the last time and you are both stuck in this tiny cottage – wait till you get home’.

VINEETO: I pondered for a few days over my last post to you and think that I may have been a trifle too definitive in my response re your ‘heart flutters and pains’. In fact, there is so little data about physical occurrences from practicing actualists and in what way they may relate to the practice of the method, that so far one has to consider all reports as idiosyncratic to individual actualists. We might not be able to have enough data from enough actualists to be definitive for a long time to come.

The main point of my post was to not get seduced into believing that the physical events per se are ‘the real thing’, whereas I consider the tangible signs of an ever diminishing ‘self’ to be much more potent evidence of success on the path to freedom. And how much my ‘self’ has been diminished can easily be assessed by answering ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and ‘how am I in relation to other people?

I have had some physical symptoms of fear and even terror mounting in the last few days, which were so strong that I even considered visiting a doctor to check out if my brain was all right. Each night the bed seemed to vibrate as if someone was walking on the floorboards, setting off an intense fear. My heart seemed to go faster and yet my pulse rate stayed the same. It took me a while to sort out that there was no intruder ‘walking on the floor boards’ but that all of this was produced within my own head because whenever I got up and switched on the light or had a walk around the house, my feeling of fear ceased. The moment I went back to bed, however, all the physical symptoms and feelings were back again.

Today I read again your early correspondence with Richard and found some interesting comments. Vis:

Richard: If you look carefully at a panic attack you will see that they go nowhere. Nothing happens other than the panic – which can climb to a crescendo – but if one stays doing whatever is the normal thing to do at this time of the day, nothing untoward will occur. I became very adept at handling panic attacks – however unpleasant – by doing nothing about them whatsoever. They were simply a nuisance and did not mean anything intrinsic at all ... though one can hang them on to whatever one wishes to at the time and get into all of a sweat about nothing at all. They eventually pass if left to their own devices ... it pays not to feed them with any fuel whatsoever. Doubt is the biggest enemy to face. It is helpful to remember that doubt is a feeling and not a fact. Bear in mind the quality of your numerous PCEs and just know that if this is what one must go through to be free of the Human Condition ... then so be it. It is all stupid, I know, but so is war and murder and rape and torture and domestic violence and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicide. This is the situation we humans find ourselves in and it is not necessarily a breeze to get out of it. If it were, no doubt many people would have done it before, eh? Richard, General Correspondence, No 4

This piece of writing pleasantly confirmed what I had suspected – fear and panic, however significant it may seem at the time, leads nowhere and has no intrinsic value to my process of becoming free. Equipped with this reassurance I am confident that, whenever these now so familiar panic attacks reoccur, I can learn to not only observe them with interest but also eventually nip them in the bud by not fuelling them or believing they have any significance.

What I got out of these experiences is the encouragement that feelings of doubt did not enter the picture. There was terror and fascination but there was never a thought that I wanted to stop, or turn around, or that I didn’t have enough guts to proceed. Well, I think for that realization the experiences were worth it, but enough is enough. I am ready to have a good night’s sleep again, undisturbed by any fancy panic attacks.

ALAN: Well, now I am home and will have to find some new excuses. All quite a gas and ‘bloody good fun’, as I think Peter would say. Good to be back in the game.

VINEETO: Yes, Alan, it’s great to have you back writing again. As for finding ‘some new excuses’ – if it was all easy to become free it wouldn’t be a task worthwhile doing, don’t you think. It is indeed ‘bloody good fun’.