TARIN: I hadn’t replied to your email, or Richard's, in two months because to do so required me to think deeply about things, which I put off doing, and to date, still haven’t done... and am still not doing. my life is okay (though far from the perfect that I ‘know it could be’). I’ve lost that focus that I had during the initial months of practising actualism, which was a prerequisite for engaging in any meaningful dialogue with actualists.. focus, think, write. I don’t know when I’ll start to do that again... but I hope you will be available for correspondence again when. Hmm. all the best til then.

VINEETO: I know times when things as they are and me as I am are just fine and I don’t (or didn’t) want to rock the boat, so to speak, by paying too much attention to any faint trouble-spots. There are also times when a few insights, realizations I had needed to be implemented and when those changes I made in my life needed to settle and fall into place. And when I feel good most of the time, what’s the hurry? And eventually, hardly perceptible at first, but slowly and steadily an urge grows again to raise the bar, to address one or two issues that repeatedly troubled me and then I ‘kick-start’ my attentiveness into focussing on those issues and sort them out.

What I am trying to say is that I’ve experienced this sorting myself out business as a rhythm of slack tide and intensity depending on my content or discontent about how I experience this moment in general and ‘just cruising’ when you’re feeling good is as much part of it as investigating and changing habits and attitudes when you’re not.

Happy cruising.

3.12.2006

TARIN: Do you think there’s any value or potential value in experiencing negative emotions, like anxiety?

VINEETO: No.

TARIN: I just went through a bout of anxiety just now, and when it receded I wondered if I hadn’t missed something, like there was something about it I could have learnt or understood in order to put a more final end to it, and that it’s no longer there not because the trigger for it has been dismantled/eliminated but because I got distracted and now its just gone out of focus or changed into something else… and I find myself feeling like I want it to come back, instead of ‘getting on with it’ (which is what I was doing because I didn’t know what else to do).

VINEETO: In my experience I can only learn something from an intense feeling *after* it subsided. Then I am able to assess what triggered it, what caused it, what pattern may lie behind it, what hidden agenda might be there. When in the grip of a feeling such as fear I am not able to think and observe clearly but after the feeling subsides I am able to reflect on the situation and see what scared me (if it was something in particular) or if the fear was maybe one of those free-floating anxiety attacks that feeling beings notoriously have.

If I find that I was afraid of something in particular then I can explore what it is I am afraid of and why and what needs doing or understanding in order to prevent this particular fear from occurring again. Here is one example where I examined and resolved a particular fear – in this case I actually had to do something about it –

[Vineeto]: ‘I am reminded of a time when I had investigated Actual Freedom to the point that I was getting some tangible results. At the time I worked in a company owned and run by Sannyasins and was reasonably happy in my job as secretary and bookkeeper. However, the more I started questioning my former spiritual beliefs and understood that it was impossible to marry the search for enlightenment with the discoveries of Actual Freedom, the more I became fearful that soon I would be exposed as a traitor and a heretic. My fear became so overpowering that one morning while driving to work I decided to face this particular fear once and for all – and, to my own surprise, arriving at work I gave notice. At the time I did not know any other solution to get rid of my fear than to precipitate what I feared most – losing my job. Since then I have worked occasionally in this company for holiday replacement and whenever they were short of staff, but never again full time. My sudden notice had created a certain shock for the others, but after this had worn off I had no problem relating to them as I had made my non-spiritual position quite clear and they had agreed to employ me again anyway. For me it had been important to openly take a stand in order to be able to disentangle myself from the grip that the spiritual world had on me.’ Actual Freedom mailing list Correspondence, Gary, 18.8.2000

Sometimes fear is brought on by certain desires, hopes or expectations and then I need to proceed by investigating those desires, hopes and expectations. Sometimes fear arises because with actualism (the process of becoming free from the human condition) I am doing something that goes against the very grain of human nature and the familiarity of having done things before and this fear is part and parcel of the process of becoming free – recognized as what it is it eventually subsides and then I can get on with doing what I want to do – become free from the patterns, the habits and the beliefs that tie me down.

Sometimes, as I mentioned above, fear arises as a free-floating anxiety, apparently for no reason at all, and I found it the most unsatisfying of the fears because there is nothing to discover about it except that it is the nature of being a feeling being – and being a ‘being’ means to be fearful – fear is the very stuff that maintains and sustains one’s being. Over time I learnt not to feed the fear when it arises, not to get sucked into its grip, not to be hypnotized by it, but rather become aware that fear is happening and then disregard it as an uninteresting object or a boring, as in repetitive, piece of drama and get on with enjoying the far more enjoyable things in life such as the sensuous awareness of the air on my skin, the colours perceived by my eyes, the gentle sounds in my surrounding and the pleasure of being here as I am. Eventually such fear goes away similar to a silly dog when you don’t pay attention to its silly performances.

In any case, if there was any information in the feeling of fear you were distracted from then it will be revealed the next time round when you reflect on the situation after the fear subsides. Nothing can go wrong when you keep paying attention to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive.

20.12.2006

TARIN: I got quite stoned last night (for the first time in many years) and was quickly reminded of the prominence of the soul. How ‘me’ is such a presence, and influence. At the same time, I was more aware of what I was thinking and feeling, and instinctually responding. It was an altered state of consciousness, but it lent a lot of insight into how ‘i’ am the way ‘I’ am. The things I fear, I desire, and how others are as well. I was questioned about childhood, and relations with my family, and I remembered some things I had forgotten, and felt some things I had suppressed and somewhat avoided feeling before.

I remember reading somewhere that Peter and you used to (do you still?) smoke pot to talk more openly. I wonder about the ‘open-ness’ that happens. Is it different for different people?

VINEETO: From what I’ve been told experiences are different for different people. What it did for me at the beginning of practicing actualism was to allow me to become more aware of the magic and wonder of being alive and the possibility of taking life as the adventure and the discovery it actually is. The important thing was not to let myself get ‘stoned’ but to maintain awareness throughout and then it enabled me to distinguish between the various emotions that occurred without being overrun by them. Once I got the hang of it, I was then able to recognize, discern and, if necessary investigate, my emotions without the use of THC.

TARIN: My experience last night was that I was ‘talking from the heart’, really ‘baring my soul’, exploring, and discovering, what I really felt about things. Is that what it was like for you?

VINEETO: You may remember Peter writing in his journal –

Peter: I now enjoy a near-actual intimacy, a direct experience and knowledge of another human being with whom I have shared this amazing, tangible unravelling of myths, beliefs and instinctual passions. Here is a woman with whom I not only bared my dark side – I virtually eliminated it, together with the ‘good’ side as well. Not the emotions and feelings merely paraded out in some sort of superficial ‘sharing’ but an honest and thorough investigation to root out the source of all that stood in the way of our living together in peace, harmony and equity Deep sea diving, if you like. Boots and all, no holds barred, the full Monty, all the way. Peter’s Journal, ‘Living Together’

TARIN: I didn’t believe what I was feeling and saying to be factual – simply that I felt it strongly. Was it ever that way for you?

VINEETO: Yes, when I am adding awareness to my feelings as they happen, it is obvious that feelings are not actual and factual but it is also obvious, when I am being attentive to the feelings whilst they are happening that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’ – in other words, my feelings are my very soul.

TARIN: The experience showed me how powerful people’s feelings are for them, and how sometimes, self-belief (or Self-belief) is really convincing.

VINEETO: There is no need to either believe in one’s feelings or in one’s ‘self’ in order to make them real – as an entity I *am* my feelings/ my ‘self’, and believing or not believing does not alter this fact. It takes much more than dis-belief in order to disempower the grip emotions have on us.

TARIN: Prior to actualism shaking my mind clean of some cobwebs (and clearing some resentment out of my life), I was inclined to believe in the primacy of the self because there was a kind of comfort in it. And the way it made sense really made sense, because when you are a psyche, living in a world of self-projections, being ‘tuned in’ is better than being kind of normal and ignorant of all these sub-currents. And it was very convincing. Last night, I remembered how convincing it was, and marvelled and how I had somehow in the course of the year after starting to practise actualism, somehow had forgotten this. I wonder now if I had ever shaken self-belief, or if I had just repressed it?

VINEETO: First, ‘I’ am not merely a ‘self-belief’ but an all-encompassing entity arising of, comprised of and maintained by the powerful instinctual survival passions that we humans share with all sentient beings. You will find that replacing a ‘self-belief’ with a ‘self-disbelief’ will not do the trick to make you free from malice and sorrow. ‘Self-disbelief’ is just another form of detachment from one’s ‘self’ and practicing it will only make it more difficult to discover how you tick. You *are* a psyche, as you say, all the time (except in a PCE) and I found it very helpful to become aware of all my psyche’s currents and sub-currents. By bringing those sub-currents out into the bright light of awareness they lost their murky power and eventually disappeared.

Second – a common misunderstanding about actualism, which I fell for myself, is that one attempts to live with a stripped-down ‘self’ of no-feelings. Richard says is so well that I refrain from reformulating it –

Richard: Often people who read about actual freedom gain the impression that I am asking people to stop feeling ... which I am not. My whole point is to cease ‘being’ – psychologically and psychically self-immolate – which means that the entire affective faculty is extirpated. That is, the biological instinctual package handed out by blind nature is deleted like a computer software program (but with no ‘Recycle Bin’ to retrieve it from) so that the psyche itself is no more. Then – and only then – are there no feelings. It is impossible to be a ‘stripped-down’ self – divested of feelings – for ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’. Anyone who attempts this absurdity would wind up being somewhat like what is known in psychiatric terminology as a ‘sociopathic personality’ (popularly know as ‘psychopath’). Such a person still has feelings – ‘cold’, ‘callous’, ‘indifferent’ – and has repressed the others (‘repressed’ not ‘suppressed’). In a PCE the feelings play no part at all – the self is in abeyance – but can come rushing in, if one is not alert, resulting in the PCE devolving into an ASC ... complete with a super-self. Indeed, this demonstrates that it is impossible for there to be no feelings whilst there is a self – in this case a Self – thus it is the ‘being’ that has to go first ... not the feelings. What actualism – the wide and wondrous path to actual freedom – is on about is a ‘virtual freedom’ (which is not to be confused with cyber-space’s ‘virtual reality’) wherein the ‘good’ feelings – the affectionate and desirable emotions and passions (those that are loving and trusting) are minimized along with the ‘bad’ feelings – the hostile and invidious emotions and passions (those that are hateful and fearful) – so that one is free to feel good, feel happy and feel perfect for 99% of the time. I make this very clear in my writing:

‘By asking ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ the reward is immediate; by finding out what triggered off the loss of feeling good, one commences another period of enjoying this moment of being alive. It is all about being here now at this moment in time and this place in space ... and if you are not feeling good you have no chance whatsoever of being here now in this actual world. (A grumpy person locks themselves out of the perfect purity of this moment and place). Of course, once you get the knack of this, one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom-line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy’. And after that: ‘feeling perfect’. These are all feelings, this is not perfection personified yet ... but then again, feeling perfect for twenty three hours and fifty nine minutes a day is way beyond ‘normal’ human expectations anyway. Also, it is a very tricky way of both getting men fully into their feelings for the first time in their life and getting women to examine their feelings one by one instead of being run by a basketful of them all at once. One starts to feel ‘alive’ for the first time in one’s life ... ... It is really important to understand about the soul ... getting into feelings like this – ‘perfect’ feelings – leaves one in imminent danger of the seductive snare of Love and Beauty, and, conveniently ignoring their opposites, becoming enlightened, or at least illuminated. ‘Me’ – that intuition of ‘being’ that I call the soul – sugar coats itself with Love and Compassion and Beauty and Truth and swans along in a state of Blissful Euphoria. Thus one then goes off into some mystical State of ‘Being’ in some metaphysical world and misses out on the clean and clear perfection of this actual world. It is very, very difficult to get out of the enlightened state and go ‘beyond it’ into this actual world of the senses’. ‘Richard’s Journal’ © ‘The Actual Freedom Trust’ 1997; pages 257-258)

TARIN: All through the time that I was stoned (and now, over 12 hours later, I still feel its effects), I thought ‘hmm I’m really open and unconstricted right now, I’m tuned in to the flow of my psyche. But this isn’t the PCE, not at all. What would it take for this to be absent completely?’ It wasn’t like a PCE but it had something in common with it. Well, more like it had something equally not-in-common with ordinary consciousness. In the way that the PCE is the absence of conflict by being the absence of psyche, this way that I was when I was stoned was like a relaxation of conflict by un-entangling and un-enforcing (via a relaxing of identity) instinctual passions. Just feeling them as they are instead of trying to control them. It was kind of like an excellence experience. I think I was, relative to the normal conflicts that besiege passionate social identities, pretty happy and harmless. Not totally, as I experienced the suffering emotions, but relatively, because I didn’t act upon them. I didn’t perpetuate them needlessly.

VINEETO: It would be more precise to call your experience an altered state of consciousness. An excellence experience is ‘the best one can be while the ‘self’ is still present’, it is the experience when the ‘self’ is greatly diminished – whereas you seem to describe an experience of giving full reign to your psyche (presently without acting on it).

TARIN: What it did, it seems, was gave me some space to breathe more easily, and reflect on things more. I’m often in such a hurry in my mind, that I don’t just enjoy things for their own sake. And because it’s hard to enjoy things, it’s hard to get things done too, because it’s such a struggle to do things.

VINEETO: Yes, to stop repressing, or to stop distancing oneself, from one’s feelings gives great relief and releases one’s energy to observe the feelings exactly as they are happening. That’s why it is so important *to neither express nor repress* the feelings when and as they are happening in order for the third alternative to take effect. You are then able to make a deliberate choice to minimize the ‘good’ feelings – the affectionate and desirable emotions and passions (those that are loving and trusting) along with the ‘bad’ feelings – the hostile and invidious emotions and passions (those that are hateful and fearful) – and opt for the felicitous/ innocuous feelings (happiness, delight, joie de vivre/ bonhomie, friendliness, amiablity and so on). (Adapted from A Précis of Actual Freedom)

TARIN: The effects of the joint last night were rather encouraging. But I wondered a few times whether it could really lead me to happiness the way Richard describes it, and the way I’ve experienced it temporarily, cleanly, purely.

VINEETO: No, an actual freedom lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to the kind of altered state of consciousness you describe.

TARIN: There seems to be a lot to get lost in an altered state of consciousness. But there seems to be a lot of freedom in seeing it so clearly too, even if you’re seeing it from the inside (being a self, after all).

VINEETO: Here you put your finger right on the nub why Altered States of Consciousness, and the search for permanent ASCs known as Enlightenment, is so attractive to people. The lure is to just stop struggling and ‘be Who-You-Really-Are’, your feelings freed from the social conscience that normally keeps them in check. However, when you look at the actions and teachings of people that live in states of Altered States of Consciousness /Enlightenment you’ll discover the extreme narcissism that underlies their state as well as all of their actions – they proclaim that ‘I am the only arbiter of what I experience, what I do and what I teach’, ‘I am the center of the universe’, even ‘I am the Creator of all that surrounds me’.

I recommend to look up ‘solipsism’ on the Actual Freedom Trust website which describes the final result of pulling out all the stops of common sense and letting one’s psyche reign supreme.

TARIN: What was (or is) marijuana smoking like for you? Did it ever lead you into an altered consciousness that you recognised to be such? I don’t know if I should smoke again. I guess I feel a little uneasy about it.

VINEETO: In combination with practicing actualism it did lead to several altered states of consciousness which allowed me to experientially explore this state (that I had previously been aspiring to for so many years on the spiritual path) and to recognize and explore its traps and pitfalls to my satisfaction. It’s good to know what to avoid when embarking on a journey into one’s psyche in order to leave it behind. If you are interested here is where I wrote about these experiences on the website.

25.12.2006

TARIN: I didn’t believe what I was feeling and saying to be factual – simply that I felt it strongly. Was it ever that way for you?

VINEETO: Yes, when I am adding awareness to my feelings as they happen, it is obvious that feelings are not actual and factual but it is also obvious, when I am being attentive to the feelings whilst they are happening that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’ – in other words, my feelings are my very soul.

TARIN: The experience showed me how powerful people’s feelings are for them, and how sometimes, self-belief (or Self-belief) is really convincing.

VINEETO: There is no need to either believe in one’s feelings or in one’s ‘self’ in order to make them real – as an entity I *am* my feelings/ my ‘self’, and believing or not believing does not alter this fact. It takes much more than dis-belief in order to disempower the grip emotions have on us.

TARIN: Hmm. But what I meant by self-belief is feeling – and operating on the feeling – that the self is actual (which is what I do when I am a social identity and am not experiencing this moment of being alive), and what I  mean by Self-belief is feeling that the soul is actual (which is what I would have done in the past when I was stoned, had I not come across actualism/ had a PCE/retained its memory).

VINEETO: Yes, I understand that. It was my experience in some altered states of consciousness that the social identity disappeared and with it the morals and ethics that I had taken on board in the course of my life, the doubts, guilt and shame and the usual rationalizations and justifications, and at the beginning of actualism these morals and ethics included my *philosophy* of actualism as well. This absence of my social identity brought the ‘real me’, my bare soul, fully to the surface and made it all the easier to discover and explore how ‘I’ operate as a soul, as the instinctual passions, in all their glory and all their menace.

In the paragraph above I was merely stressing the point, because many people in past correspondences have misunderstood or missed this point, that to stop believing in a ‘self’ or a ‘Self’ does nothing at all to become free from one’s ‘self’ and ‘Self’ nor does it rid you of any of the accompanying feelings and actions. Disbelieving one’s deep-seated feelings obviously makes it more difficult to bring them to the light of awareness.

TARIN: That night’s experience was such a strong sense of I am this soul, this is the ‘true self’. Although right now, as I sit here, I know I am my feelings, it’s such a different relationship from feelings as when being an egoless soul. I knew that I was my feelings so much more immediately.

It was funny because I’d experienced it so many times before, but not for years… and I’d really almost completely forgotten about it so that when I first read the Actual Freedom Trust website, the break-through happened when it shook my complacency (which was kind of like wishing and waiting for the Absolute to come back) and made me stop believing in the power of the absolute. But when I was stoned and was completely the soul, I was feeling all these things that are discussed on the Actual Freedom Trust website that I’d never seen before. It was like having scoured a map for a whole year then getting seeing a territory that it referred to for the first time, and being able to recognise references to it. Such as the in-your-face psychic currents, the preoccupation with the after-death (immortal) state… but not the absence of things like malice and sorrow (which were experienced quietly, in a way that didn’t really bother me like they can often, when I am a social identity), nor the supremacy of love and compassion (which were experienced only in the form of empathic understanding of others’ feelings). I speculate that if I had generated love and compassion in that state, maybe I could have overrun the malice and sorrow, but I had no interest in it. I was fascinated enough at how I was experiencing everything, and also aware of how all this isn’t actual and I don’t want to perpetuate it or make ‘i’ any stronger than ‘I’ already am.

VINEETO: I suppose you can now understand why actualists have stressed the importance of diminishing one’s social identity first in order to be able to dive deeper into the stygian depth of one’s psyche. And the only safe way to diminish one’s social identity (the morals and ethics imprinted by society) is to make being happy and particularly being harmless the number one priority in one’s life.

TARIN: Also, I wondered often during the night how it could be possible to go from being this soul to not being at all. It can’t be impossible, because Richard’s done it, hasn’t he? After he realised his enlightenment was a delusion, and prior to ‘his’ total extirpation, he still had no ego, did he not? So it was from an altered state of consciousness straight into extirpation.

VINEETO: You’ll have to remember that Richard’s was a *permanent* Altered State of Consciousness, his ego became extinct in 1981 – he could not have gone back to being normal even if he wished. The other thing is that Richard had nobody to show him the way; he stumbled in the dark, so to speak, except for his own PCEs that indicated that there was something fundamentally wrong with the state of enlightenment. And if you read personal reports of enlightened people, for instance Da Free John, you will find that they are still prone to negative feelings such as jealousy, panic, ‘divine’ anger, sexual urges, intense frustration and such like.

The problem with endeavouring to become actually free via Enlightenment – and Richard has talked about it many times – is that the ‘Self’, the instinctual passions, are expanded like all get out with no social identity to keep a lid on them, which in turn makes them more powerful and less transparent. You may be interested in a conversation Richard had on this topic with No 16 and a few days later with No 60.

From my own experiences with altered states of consciousness, where common sense was pushed way back into the background, I know that it will be much easier to become actually free when both the social identity and the instinctual passions are diminished than when the instinctual passions are in full swing. The path to an actual freedom via virtual freedom is indeed wide and wondrous because by bringing beliefs, morals and ethics to the bright light of awareness they successively disappear and by bringing your instinctual passions to the bright light of awareness they are disempowered and can easily be channelled into the felicitous/ innocuous feelings of amazement, marvel and wonder. Feeling felicitous/ innocuous life becomes more and more easy, sensate and sensuous awareness prevail, naiveté flourishes and apperceptiveness almost happens on its own accord.

*

VINEETO: Second – a common misunderstanding about actualism, which I fell for myself, is that one attempts to live with a stripped-down ‘self’ of no-feelings. Richard says is so well that I refrain from reformulating it –

TARIN: I think I did too. Or I was just as resistant in acknowledging my undercurrents as I was before I started practising actualism, I don’t know. But the difference between how aware of my feelings I was when I smoked a joint, and ordinarily, was really immense. Ordinarily I spend so much energy refusing to acknowledge my feelings, and enforcing the notions of what they should be. And I do this without realising it, because I just get used to doing it and eventually it just becomes part of the woodwork of ‘me’…

VINEETO: Well, now that you had this experience you may be more easily be able to focus your attention detecting when you do ‘refuse to acknowledge you feelings’ and when you do ‘enforce the notions of what they should be’. T’is the only way to come in contact with, and be able to become aware of and examine, what you really feel, instead of feeling what others (or you yourself) tell you to feel. As Richard pointed out, actualism ‘it is a very tricky way of both getting men fully into their feelings for the first time in their life and getting women to examine their feelings one by one instead of being run by a basketful of them all at once. One starts to feel ‘alive’.’ Richard, Articles, This Moment of Being Alive

*

VINEETO: It would be more precise to call your experience an altered state of consciousness. An excellence experience is ‘the best one can be while the ‘self’ is still present’, it is the experience when the ‘self’ is greatly diminished – whereas you seem to describe an experience of giving full reign to your psyche (presently without acting on it).

TARIN: Yes, it was an altered state of consciousness, when I said ‘it was kind of like an excellence experience’, I was comparing it to excellence experiences I’ve had. It’s more similar to an excellence experience than it is to ordinary consciousness, or to a PCE, because it has that diminishment of ego (but not diminishment of soul – the feelings are very much in everything). So while in an excellence experience all feelings are very light, which is different from the altered state, I say they still have something in common because of the absence of the burden of social identity/ego and its conflicting feelings, and thus both are a more comfortable form of being. What do you mean by ‘presently without acting on it’?

VINEETO: Isn’t it obvious, when you look at the lives and teachings of enlightened people or even those who are only self-realized, that there is no way an aggrandized ‘Self’ can keep quiet and *not* act on their feelings?

*

TARIN: There seems to be a lot to get lost in an altered state of consciousness. But there seems to be a lot of freedom in seeing it so clearly too, even if you’re seeing it from the inside (being a self, after all).

VINEETO: Here you put your finger right on the nub why Altered States of Consciousness, and the search for permanent ASCs known as Enlightenment, is so attractive to people. The lure is to just stop struggling and ‘be Who-You-Really-Are’, your feelings freed from the social conscience that normally keeps them in check. However, when you look at the actions and teachings of people that live in states of Altered States of Consciousness /Enlightenment you’ll discover the extreme narcissism that underlies their state as well as all of their actions – they proclaim that ‘I am the only arbiter of what I experience, what I do and what I teach’, ‘I am the center of the universe’, even ‘I am the Creator of all that surrounds me’. I recommend to look up ‘solipsism’ on the Actual Freedom Trust website which describes the final result of pulling out all the stops of common sense and letting one’s psyche reign supreme.

TARIN: I haven’t read this yet but will in a little bit... just want to get the email out to you while I know clearly what I write. It’s not often i can write thoughtful, feeling-relevant letters like this because I don’t always experience my feelings directly and clearly enough to write my responses directly... when I don’t, they often get mediated by secondary or tertiary social identity type responses that end up being kind of irrelevant and distracting.

VINEETO: Yes, for an actualist it is vital to whittle away at the restraints and controls of one’s social identity in order to be able to fully experience and explore the underlying raw instinctual passions.

*

TARIN: What was (or is) marijuana smoking like for you? Did it ever lead you into an altered consciousness that you recognised to be such? I don’t know if I should smoke again. I guess I feel a little uneasy about it.

VINEETO: In combination with practicing actualism it did lead to several altered states of consciousness which allowed me to experientially explore this state (that I had previously been aspiring to for so many years on the spiritual path) and to recognize and explore its traps and pitfalls to my satisfaction. It’s good to know what to avoid when embarking on a journey into one’s psyche in order to leave it behind. If you are interested here is where I wrote about these experiences on the website.

TARIN: Did all these experiences happen while you were feeling the effects of smoking marijuana?

VINEETO: Some of the experiences I described where THC-induced and some of them just happened because I inquired intensely and sincerely how I was experiencing this moment. The deciding factor was that I wanted to know how ‘I’ tick – otherwise those experiences would either not have happened or remained mere curiosities and not the revelations about the human condition that helped me to become free from it.

TARIN: Another question… there’s another part of the site, I think its the descriptions of PCE page, where Peter talks about that PCE of his many years ago that resulted after taking MDMA, which also appears in the journal. But on that page, the parts that reference the drug were removed… How come?

VINEETO: The collection of PCE descriptions was put together for people to be able to determine if their experience is a PCE or some altered state of consciousness. For that purpose I took the description of Peter’s PCE only and not the circumstances that initiated the experience. A PCE is not dependant on taking drugs and many PCEs happen without people taking any substances at all.

The full description of this particular event is published in Peter’s selected writings.

31.1.2007

TARIN: About a month ago, I was in an altered state of consciousness, and wrote the below with the intention of sharing it with you for your responses:

I’m pretty sure already, but I think I should ask for clarification anyway at this point in case I misunderstand: given what is written on the actualism site about it, I think you would consider the experience of being a feeling being, but not feeling that ‘I’ am ‘my’ mind or ‘my’ body an ASC. Such an experience where ‘I’ am simply experiencing what is happening (as different from either being the doer of what is happening – as when the ego is present, or there being no I at all – as in a PCE or actual freedom). Is this correct? I’m excited because I’m thinking for myself a lot here, which is something I have trouble doing sometimes.

VINEETO: What you are endeavouring to tell me, with so many words, is that the altered state of consciousness you were experiencing and of which you say ‘all these un-real (as well as un-actual) things are here’, should be a better way (for you anyway) to become actually free than via the route of becoming virtually free from malice and sorrow. You suggest that it would be better (for you anyway) to become free via an altered state of consciousness (because you were experiencing one and you liked it) whilst blithely ignoring what Richard, with the benefit of hindsight, has to say about the subject – the only man who has actually succeeded in becoming free.

Isn’t this a perfect example how your ‘Self’ cunningly operates when in an altered state and from the memory of your altered state? Isn’t this a perfect example of unbridled passions arguing against intelligence and common sense? Please note that in an altered state what you call felicitous feelings are much more likely to be blissful feelings.

To sum it up, according to Richard’s report and especially according to my personal experiences with altered states I am the last person to ask for endorsing your idea of approaching an actual freedom via a delusional state of unrestrained feelings and passions.

25.5.2007

TARIN: I’m still mulling over your last email to me in January about altered states. Man, I’ve missed corresponding with you. I just read your correspondence with No. 11.

2. Extreme sensitivity to psychic currents and vibes – is this not possible without it being in an undesirable ASC? The world that ‘I’ live in is reality, a psychic place, and instinctual place. ‘I’ am composed of, emanate and am surrounded by psychic currents and vibes. My goal is to change the psychic currents that I am by changing the feelings that I experience – I diminish the positive and negative feelings, and pay more attention to and have more felicitous feelings. How is it that being more sensitive to what ‘I’ am experiencing is an undesirable thing towards this end? Richard somewhere talks about shining the bright light of awareness on my passions and feelings in order to dispel them – wouldn’t feeling the currents and vibes more clearly be a good thing towards this end? And if not, how can it be avoided? As I pay more attention to how I experience this moment of being alive, I become more aware of and attentive to these vibes and currents. How am I supposed to not? I understand that they sometimes diminish when attended to (and good when they do), but when they’re there I don’t know why you advise me to avoid them, or how I can successfully do it while remaining attentive to what I’m actually experiencing (which, in your words, is ‘a delusional state of unrestrained feelings and passions’). [‘... I am the last person to ask for endorsing your idea of approaching an actual freedom via a delusional state of unrestrained feelings and passions.’]

VINEETO: I appreciate and understand your desire to talk to an experienced actualist but unfortunately for you I have essentially forgotten how to write. Words don’t come as easy and precise as when I wrote regularly on the mailing list and my inclination to search for them has all but disappeared. In the past nine years I have written close to a million words or more about the process and the pitfalls of becoming virtually free from the human condition and it’s all recorded on the Actual Freedom Trust website. There is also Peter’s Journal and his writings about his process of becoming virtually free, not to mention Richard’s extensive writings and reports. At this point I have nothing more to say, it would merely be a repetition of what I have said earlier, and much better, before.

When you take the memory of your PCE or several PCEs and knock a peg in the ground for recognition and reference, then the attached thread makes an excellent guideline that will give you all the experiential clues and lived information about the actual world that you need and will reveal in what remarkable way the actual world is diametrically different to the real world of good and bad feelings and savage and tender instinctual passions.

If you remember to be guided by your PCEs you can’t possibly miss.

see also Latest Announcement, Addendum 6