VINEETO: Dear No 10,

RESPONDENT: Hi Vineeto, Books were delivered yesterday, Tuesday. Thank-you. Have begun reading Richard’s Journal 1^st. Wondering at applying ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ to present circumstances of life with partner and 2 young children (and concurrent mayhem!)

VINEETO: Personally I found that I had to make myself fully acquainted with what actualism and an Actual Freedom from the human condition was all about before I began to practice the method. Over the past few years I have talked to quite a few people who began to practice what they understood to be the actualism method after a brief skimming of the Actual Freedom Trust website and I found that more often than not they had laid their previous spiritual-philosophical-religious concept over the actualists’ reports and attempted to mix and matched them … which, as you might guess, resulted in confusion and misunderstanding.

In essence the actualism method is to increase one’s attentiveness to being alive with the sincere intent to become as happy and as harmless as humanly possible. In principle this is a very simple recipe but as you proceed you will find that in practice it is a challenging project in that one gets to radically (at their roots) question whatever one has so far been taught as being right and just and good and wrong and unjust and bad.

As for ‘life with partner and 2 young children’ – when Richard began to practice his self-devise method to become free from the human condition he lived with a partner and four young children.

RESPONDENT: Must put foremost intent to be free of malice/sorrow and to be happy and harmless.

VINEETO: The recipe for success is to make being happy and harmless the most important thing in your life – anything less will only court failure. I found that my sincerity and integrity were enough to awaken my sincere intent which in combination with naiveté enabled me to have a ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience where I experientially understood how radical a departure from my previous worldview actualism really is. From then on this PCE has been my guiding light and soon others followed to confirm that I was on the right track.

RESPONDENT: Have visited the website and mailing list. Am intimidated by mailing list as writings have an intellectual flavor which seems beyond me. Just looking to keep it simple.

VINEETO: Ah, I understand completely. It seems all too common on male-oriented mailing lists that correspondents indulge in intellectual head butting, but why let this prevent you from talking about the practical application of the actualism method!

I would enjoy such a conversation with you on the list, if you care to subscribe. It might even be an encouragement for others to enter into a discussion about the doing of becoming free from one’s beliefs and conditioning.

20.4.2005

RESPONDENT: Thank-you for having patience with me. I truly do not know what happened to the correspondence which I did send (nevermind....) What I do see is that I am to ‘stay in the mold’...

VINEETO: I don’t follow – who is telling you to ‘stay in the mold’?

RESPONDENT: Simply not agreeing seems to anger some.

VINEETO: I still don’t understand, who are ‘some’?

Personally, once I found out something to be a fact – and not just my personal belief – then others not agreeing with me was no longer an issue. Just as Galileo is reported to have said to the Pope who ordered him to recant that the Earth moves around the Sun (my paraphrasing) – ‘I can recant but the Earth still moves around the Sun.’

RESPONDENT: Am I one of those without another?

VINEETO: Well, who are ‘those’ and who is ‘another’ you say you are ‘without’?

RESPONDENT: I read Richard’s words... I attempt in a feeble way to apply... To some amazement there is success.

Ah, it does take effort at the start to apply the actualism method in order to increase one’s attentiveness to the experience of this moment of being alive but it is my experience that sincere intent and diligent application bring enormous success – if you dare to commit yourself to the change that letting go of one’s beliefs inevitably will bring about.

There is a wide range of correspondence available on the Actual Freedom Trust website from those who have walked a good bit of the path and, of course, there is Richard’s report of his ongoing experience from the actual world – where no ‘self’ distorts the pure sensate and sensuous experience of being here in this amazing universe.

RESPONDENT: There are actually some brave enough to believe in no thing...

VINEETO: I don’t see it that way. When I came across actualism I already doubted aspects of my beliefs and the fact that Richard had gone all the way and had abandoned not only his beliefs but the identity who creates and maintains all of one’s beliefs and feelings, gave me enough encouragement to look for the non-subjective reality that lies beneath, or outside, of one’s beliefs. It took some digging and questioning and soul-searching … and after a couple of months I had a ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience (more information in the The Actual Freedom Trust Library) – I had found the world outside of beliefs that we call the actual world.

From then on I did not need ‘to believe in no thing’, I only needed to remember – and be guided by – the actual physical ‘self’-less actuality that becomes apparent when ‘I’ step out of the way.

24.4.2005

RESPONDENT: Just finished reading Peter’s Journal through for the 1^st time. Makes a lot of sense. I do not sense objections coming from inside or intellectual arguments. My ‘yes but’s’ stem from fears that ‘I’ will not be able to get out of ‘my own’ way. The mountains I have created in life through ignorance, malice and sorrow appear staggering. It ‘feels’ as though I sometimes cannot even summon the energy to ask/face the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ – especially when the depressed mode is in control.

VINEETO: This particular part from Peter’s Journal comes to mind –

Peter: I remember lying in bed one night and seeing all of this programming as a huge mountain that loomed over me – vast and impossible to climb. Then I went to sleep, forgot about it, and the next day found I was busy demolishing some particular part of it. It reminded me of how I would deal with fear in my life. I would stop my mind from going off into all the worst possibilities and just do the next thing that needed to be done. Applied to the process I was involved in, it worked well, and if it sometimes didn’t, it just meant waiting for the fear to wear itself out – which it always does – and then getting on with the job. So, I found myself using my own intelligence to re-wire my brain. With correct intent, diligence, and a reliance on ‘silly and sensible’, I found that I could challenge beliefs with the facts of the situation. It is plainly silly to continue to believe something when the facts of the situation prove the belief to be without substance.

If it doesn’t work, and I couldn’t make it work after all those years and after all that trying, then ‘get rid of it – try something new’, became my approach. Particularly when that belief is causing me to suffer or causing me to inflict suffering on others! Peter’s Journal

I know, at first it’s not always easy to break an old habit such as giving control to ‘the depressed mode’ and instead getting one’s attentiveness up and running – but then again, you have a fresh opportunity each moment again and after a few successes the motivation to keep going increases which brings even more success.

RESPONDENT: Anyway, I do not wish to be putting out the vibes for nurture/compassion, as even I can see the foibles of such in my drama. (I do not understand as yet how to look at this whole nurture thing in my life with my own young children.)

Thank-you and Peter and Richard for making this material available.

VINEETO: Personally I started applying the actualism method on the things that I clearly understood such as my gender beliefs and my spiritual/ religious beliefs and this inevitably then lead me to investigate the feelings and beliefs that I had around the feelings of love and nurture. Once I dismantled the beliefs and morals/ ethics of what society considers the ‘good’ and ‘right’ thing to do and to feel, I then could more easily see the ramifications of the instinctual passions of love and nurture – what people do to each other in the name, and feeling, of love and what the blind passion of nurture drives individuals as well as nations to do.

You might also find this section of the Actual Freedom Trust website useful ( ../sundry/frequentquestions/faqindex.htm), in this case the question of ‘What is the difference between feeling-caring and actually caring?’ at the bottom of the index page.

RESPONDENT: I have recently visited the web pages for your site. I do not understand the difference between the ‘mailing list’ where persons are identifiable by name and the ‘correspondence’ pages where numbers are used.

VINEETO: The mailing list in a live, ongoing public forum, set up to assist in elucidating just what is entailed in becoming free of the human condition. All correspondence from Richard, Peter and me is then posted on the Actual Freedom website for the benefit of those with similar queries or objections and this is done anonymously – the only exceptions are people who have either agreed, or particularly requested, to be mentioned by name. The Actual Freedom mailing list was established as an uncensored forum in order that people can openly talk about and discuss the often sensitive and always controversial issues raised on the website and as such the posts that are archived on the website are done so anonymously in order to focus the attention of the reader on the subject being discussed rather than on who is discussing it.

I would appreciate if we could continue this conversation on the mailing list as I have neither the time nor the inclination for long private conversations but prefer to talk about the practical application of actualism on the mailing list in order that others might also benefit from the topics of our conversation. After all, it’s the human condition we are talking about and that is applicable to everyone.