RESPONDENT: How are you?

VINEETO: I’m excellent, thank you.

RESPONDENT: I’m just making sure to take advantage of the line here. Anyways, I have a couple questions for you pertaining to ‘virtual freedom.’ I know, from observing myself at this moment, that I am not experiencing life as being perfect, excellent, great, or even that good – to be honest. My ongoing condition is a kind of ‘neutral mood.’ Not a bad experience, but then a not too good one either.

VINEETO: Would ‘being comfortably numb’ describe how you are generally experiencing yourself. You’ll find that Peter used this phrase quite often in his journal to describe the state he was living in for most of his life. He also described what he did to lift himself out of this state of inertia –

Peter: Acceptance is deemed the last stage in the usual reaction to imminent death. It seems to me that a more accurate description of this state would be resignation. I remember my father going back to his particular church for a time after he had his first heart attack, to make his peace with God. He lasted for a few months before giving up and lapsing back into what I now see as resignation. People’s acceptance of life and its inherent suffering is summed up in phrases such as ‘making the best of it’ or ‘that’s life’, or the classic ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’. The description I used for myself when in this state, was of being ‘comfortably numb’. Peter’s Journal, Death

And:

Peter: Of course spiritualism failed – there was nothing new in it at all, now that I look back. How could the solution lie in the past? There would have been peace and happiness in the world by now if it worked – it has had at least 3000 years to prove itself. So when the social revolution and the promised spiritual solution failed, I was back in ‘comfortably numb’ normal, but I couldn’t rest there – that naivety was still burning within me, that refusal to accept that this was all there was to life. I am amazed to see that so many people of my generation have reverted to ‘comfortably numb’ – have lost their naivety. Surely the purpose in life is to be the best I can – to be the best possible.

I remember a major turning point came for me when I realised I was causing ‘ripples’ for other people by my every action: however subtle sometimes, however unintentional, however well meaning, but ‘ripples’ nevertheless. And by seeing it I wanted it to stop! It became yet another motivation to do all I could to aim to eliminate my ‘self’. I wanted not only peace for myself, but for others too. Peter’s Journal, Peace

RESPONDENT: Of course, I’m always trying to upgrade my ‘bottom line.’ What is your bottom line and how long has it been that way? In other words, what is the predominant mood you are in throughout the majority of your day?

VINEETO: My bottom line is ‘very good’ / ‘excellent’ and that’s generally how I feel. It’s not so much a mood, but rather the absence of all sorts of moods that I used to have as reactions to outside events. However, this is not to say that I still need to up my bottom line to being in gay abandon, in wonder and amazement all the time.

RESPONDENT: When you started practicing the actual freedom method, what was your situation and state of well-being then?

VINEETO: Comfortably numb with bouts of feeling sad, irritated or worried.

RESPONDENT: Thanks for answering,

VINEETO: You are very welcome.

30.1.2007

RESPONDENT: I have a couple questions for you pertaining to ‘virtual freedom.’ I know, from observing myself at this moment, that I am not experiencing life as being perfect, excellent, great, or even that good – to be honest. My ongoing condition is a kind of ‘neutral mood.’ Not a bad experience, but then a not too good one either.

VINEETO: Would ‘being comfortably numb’ describe how you are generally experiencing yourself. You’ll find that Peter used this phrase quite often in his journal to describe the state he was living in for most of his life. He also described what he did to lift himself out of this state of inertia – <snipped quotes>

RESPONDENT: No, not quite (going by Peter’s description of what being ‘comfortably numb’ is about). There is no ‘resignation’ or an ‘acceptance of life and its inherent suffering’ in me at all actually. It’s been a plague and a blessing to have this constant ‘pushing’ in me, telling me to ‘never, ever give up, goddammit.’ It’s been a long time coming since I started trying to figure the whole mess out but I can finally say that my ongoing bottom line nowadays is ‘neutral’ to ‘pretty good.’ Just a couple of years ago, my bottom line was ‘a world of shit.’ Life, a couple of years ago, was just plain horrible for me. I could never accept, and this is before coming across Richard’s writings, that my life was not going to be perfect. I made it my goal, about five years ago, that I would somehow, someway never suffer again. I still can’t accept this ‘neutral’ to ‘pretty good’ state that I’m in.

VINEETO: Of course not, that would be defeatism.

RESPONDENT: Yeah, it’s much better than being depressed all the time but it’s still wanting. It’s not perfect by a long shot. And to be honest, if I had not come across Richard’s writings, I would still be horribly depressed. See, back then, I had it in my head that the way to happiness/ fulfillment was through SUFFERING … and loads of it. So, I allowed it in … I tolerated the suffering, the pains, the anguishes, the anxieties, all in the hopes of one day being free from it all. I theorized, with absolutely no concrete evidence to support (I was largely following my feelings and intuition), that if I were to experience as much suffering as was humanly possible, my ‘being’ would somehow short-circuit, die and be born again, and would rise form the ashes as a ‘being’ that could not be harmed by anything, anymore.

VINEETO: Your theory was, of course, an extreme interpretation on what you have been taught by your parents, teachers and peers – the general Christian belief that only after patiently suffering on earth you can earn your place in heaven – a theme one can find, in a slightly different context, in Eastern mysticism.

RESPONDENT: Well, after about two and a half years of taking that tortuous path, I gave up my path and my goal of being a ‘being’ that couldn’t be harmed by anything for something seemingly much better … an actual freedom with no ‘being’ at all. And not only that, the path to being actually free is by being HAPPY & HARMLESS rather than my previous path to enlightenment by being a MISERABLE & MALICIOUS identity. Good stuff.

VINEETO: Ha, the way you have put it shows clearly why Richard keeps saying that an actual freedom is 180 degrees opposite to all spiritual beliefs.

RESPONDENT: By the way, would you know anything about the ‘path of suffering’ towards spiritual enlightenment? Have you come across anything like it or do you have experiential knowledge of it?

VINEETO: Yes. Western and Eastern religious religions are very much alike in their teaching that only suffering will lead to redemption / salvation / liberation and I have plenty of experiential knowledge from both my Christian upbringing and my years of spiritual search.

Maybe you have heard of the ‘dark night of the soul’, which for many religious seekers has been the jumping point into an epiphany, a God-realization or for whom it had been the seminal precursor to the permanent delusion called spiritual Enlightenment. You may be interested to study some autobiographies of genuinely enlightened people who describe the events that led up to their moment of becoming enlightened. If I remember rightly they have all gone through at least one dark and desperate period and particularly immediately before their breakthrough into Greater Reality.

Personally, in the first year of practicing actualism, I had an experience of dread, i.e. an altered state of extreme darkness and anxiety, where I felt to be sucked into a bottomless abyss of hopeless desperation, unopposed fear and endless suffering. This is how I described it at the time –

[Vineeto]: The feeling [of dread] became so bizarre and threatening that I started to desperately look for something to bring me back here into the actual world. At the same time I was curious to experience and explore this new intensity of feeling. I seemed to be standing at the edge of an immense abyss of hell, which emanated all of the terror and dread of humanity, stretching endlessly into a grey dead infinity with no hope and no way out, ever. My eyes were searching for something physical to anchor on. I stood at the window, repeating to myself, ‘this is a fence, this is grass, this is a flower.’ The bright redness of the bougainvillea outside in the garden penetrated a little into this powerful magnet of dread that was threatening to swallow me for eternity.

Above the abyss of dread appeared enlightenment, seductively blinking, promising bliss as the solution to this overwhelming hopelessness and sense of ‘evil’. But it was far from being over! I started to look for more actuality, longing for the taste of coffee in my mouth, for sounds in my ear and wind on my skin. Nothing else would get me out of this powerful collective and atavistic passionate dream.

Peter had told me about a similar experience that he had had just a few days earlier and had seen that there is no solution to be had in feeling everyone’s dread, everyone’s hopelessness. So I activated all my willpower to manoeuvre myself back into the physical world of the senses, where neither dread nor enlightenment exist – and I eventually succeeded. The experience left me shaking for another day, and I am glad to know that the door marked ‘dread’ is as much a dead-end-road as the door marked ‘enlightenment’. Vineeto, Exploring Death and Altered States of Consciousness

Through extensive studies of near-death experiences it has been discovered that in moments of extreme danger/ fear of death/ unbearable suffering the brain produces certain chemicals but it also produces chemicals to counteract the impact of the first chemicals and these ‘counter-chemicals’ often result in a blissful altered state of consciousness. For an excerpt on the scientific findings of what happens during NDEs I refer you to Richard, General Correspondence, No 4, 10 July 1998

However, there is neither value in nor necessity for such an experience in order to become happy and harmless – it is enough to know that indulging in extreme fear, in collective sorrow, guilt or shame and in unabashed misery is a ‘self’-aggravating and ‘self’-aggrandising dead-end road that will only lead you further and further away from being able to experience this actual world.

Here is what Richard has to say about the dark night of the soul –

Richard: The ‘dark night of the soul’ is only experienced by religious and spiritual seekers, who wish to perpetuate themselves for all eternity. I suggest that this is a very selfish and self-centred approach to life on earth – something that all religiosity and spirituality is guilty of. The quest to secure one’s place in ‘Eternity’ is unambiguously selfish ... peace-on-earth is readily sacrificed for the supposed continuation of the imagined soul after physical death. So much for the humanitarian ideals of peace, goodness, altruism, philanthropy and humaneness. All Religious and Spiritual Quests amount to nothing more than a self-centred urge to exist for ever and a day. All Religious and Spiritual Leaders fall foul of this existential dilemma. They pay lip-service to the notion of self-sacrifice – weeping crocodile tears at noble martyrdom – whilst selfishly pursuing Immortality. The root cause of all the ills of humankind can be sheeted home to this single, basic fact: the overriding importance of the survival of self as a soul. Richard, List B, No 32, 16.2.1998

And –

Richard: The mystics (self-realised spiritualists) advise vippayutta (dissociation), wherein painful reality is transformed into a bad dream, as being the most effective means to deal with all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides and the such-like. Just as a traumatised victim of an horrific and terrifying event makes the experience unreal in order to cope with the ordeal, the sages and seers, the gurus and god-men/goddess-women, the masters and messiahs, the saviours and saints, have desperately done precisely this thing (during what is sometimes called ‘the dark night of the soul’). Mystics have been transmogrifying the real world ‘reality’ into an unreal ‘Greater Reality’ via the epiphenomenal imaginative/intuitive facility born of the psyche (which is formed by the instinctual passions genetically endowed by blind nature for survival purposes) for millennia.

Such dissociation is a psychotic sickness culturally institutionalised into a head-in-the-sand escapist ‘solution’ to all the ills of humankind ... hence the divine perpetuation of all the misery and mayhem across the millennia through a belief in maya and/or samsara and/or karma or some-such metaphysical fantasy being the cause of such aberrant behaviour. Mysticism is nothing more and nothing less than a frantic coping-mechanism, institutionalised into a cultural metaphysics over thousands and thousands of years ... especially if accompanied by dissociative states such as ‘derealisation ’ or ‘alternate personality disorder’ and others. It is also known as ‘disassociation’, or ‘disassociative identity disorder’ and dissociative reactions are attempts to escape from excessive trauma tension and anxiety by separating off parts of personality function from the rest of cognition as an attempt to isolate something that arouses anxiety and gain distance from it. Richard, Dissociation and Trauma

RESPONDENT: Also, would you perhaps be able to forward to Richard the previous paragraph as maybe he can shed some light on just why one might feel that a path OF suffering eventuates in a sort of freedom FROM suffering?

VINEETO: I did, as soon as your mail came in.

23.2.2007

RESPONDENT: Yeah, it’s much better than being depressed all the time but it’s still wanting. It’s not perfect by a long shot. And to be honest, if I had not come across Richard’s writings, I would still be horribly depressed. See, back then, I had it in my head that the way to happiness/ fulfillment was through SUFFERING … and loads of it. So, I allowed it in … I tolerated the suffering, the pains, the anguishes, the anxieties, all in the hopes of one day being free from it all. I theorized, with absolutely no concrete evidence to support (I was largely following my feelings and intuition), that if I were to experience as much suffering as was humanly possible, my ‘being’ would somehow short-circuit, die and be born again, and would rise form the ashes as a ‘being’ that could not be harmed by anything, anymore.

VINEETO: Your theory was, of course, an extreme interpretation on what you have been taught by your parents, teachers and peers – the general Christian belief that only after patiently suffering on earth you can earn your place in heaven – a theme one can find, in a slightly different context, in Eastern mysticism.

RESPONDENT: Indeed, that does make sense. Christianity tells you to be like Jesus ... and what did Jesus do mostly? He suffered. He suffered and died on the cross for us and that was the most noble thing anyone could do. And look it, he suffered so much that he died and was reborn and became one with God. No wonder I felt like I was on the right path. I was trying to pull a ‘Jesus Christ’.

VINEETO: You didn’t follow Jesus’ lifestyle of his first 33 years though – if a man by this name and with this biography ever lived, that is. You were only pulling ‘a ‘Jesus Christ’’ as he supposedly experienced it in the last week before his legendary death! My point being that even in this glorified famous myth the man was not suffering day by day but at some point in his life had to bear the consequence for declaring himself to be the only Son of God. In short, there is no merit in his suffering at all.

*

RESPONDENT: Well, after about two and a half years of taking that tortuous path, I gave up my path and my goal of being a ‘being’ that couldn’t be harmed by anything for something seemingly much better … an actual freedom with no ‘being’ at all. And not only that, the path to being actually free is by being HAPPY&HARMLESS rather than my previous path to enlightenment by being a MISERABLE&MALICIOUS identity. Good stuff.

VINEETO: Ha, the way you have put it shows clearly why Richard keeps saying that an actual freedom is 180 degrees opposite to all spiritual beliefs.

RESPONDENT: It’s funny because in my mind (meaning it might not be an actuality), I am retracing my steps and trying to get back, using the actual freedom method, to where I was before I started my spiritual path.

VINEETO: What I did with the actualism method was not ‘retracing my steps’ but become aware of and then abandon whatever I had taken on in my spiritual beliefs. Once I got rid of my Eastern spiritual beliefs, it became apparent that the underlying Christian conditioning and all my original socialization was still in tact. It was then much easier to become aware of them and become free from them as well.

*

RESPONDENT: By the way, would you know anything about the ‘path of suffering’ towards spiritual enlightenment? Have you come across anything like it or do you have experiential knowledge of it?

VINEETO: Yes. Western and Eastern religious religions are very much alike in their teaching that only suffering will lead to redemption / salvation / liberation and I have plenty of experiential knowledge from both my Christian upbringing and my years of spiritual search. Maybe you have heard of the ‘dark night of the soul’, which for many religious seekers has been the jumping point into an epiphany, a God-realization or for whom it had been the seminal precursor to the permanent delusion called spiritual Enlightenment. You may be interested to study some autobiographies of genuinely enlightened people who describe the events that led up to their moment of becoming enlightened. If I remember rightly they have all gone through at least one dark and desperate period and particularly immediately before their breakthrough into Greater Reality.

RESPONDENT: Actually, I have heard of ‘the dark night of the soul.’ I was constantly waiting for the BIG one to happen. It never did. Maybe I didn’t suffer enough?

VINEETO: In my spiritual years I had always wondered what prevented me from becoming enlightened as I considered myself to be quite a devout meditator. In hindsight I think I retained too much sensibility to be able to fully abandon common sense and imagine myself to be ‘That’.

RESPONDENT: It doesn’t matter much for me now, really. A moment of suffering nowadays is a moment that I could’ve spent being carefree. And I would be extremely interested to look at ‘some autobiographies of genuinely enlightened people who describe the events that led up to their moment of becoming enlightened.’ Any that you’d recommend?

VINEETO: For starters you can access the following URL and go to the question:

[Respondent]: Who would you recognise as enlightened?

Richard’s answer should give you enough information to start a more comprehensive search on the web using a good search engine.

*

VINEETO: Personally, in the first year of practicing actualism, I had an experience of dread, i.e. an altered state of extreme darkness and anxiety, where I felt to be sucked into a bottomless abyss of hopeless desperation, unopposed fear and endless suffering. This is how I described it at the time – <snipped for space>

RESPONDENT: What you describe there was my daily life for about two years. It was a nightmare. And when I discovered the actualism method and tried to apply it when I was going through one of those episodes I would also try and be my senses. But, like in your situation, ‘Nothing else would get me out of this powerful collective and atavistic passionate dream’. It was hopeless. Happily, those episodes are now much rarer. You said you had ‘an experience’ (meaning one). Do you still have such experiences from time to time?

VINEETO: I had only one experience of extreme dread as I described in my last email. That gave me enough confidence that dread is a dead end road that neither leads to happiness nor purity. In the first year of practicing actualism I had several altered states of consciousness with varying degrees of intensity and a wide range of intense feelings but the more I managed to free myself from the grip of my belief and my instinctual passions, the less those ASCs occurred. I simply lost interest in them after I had thoroughly explored them and found them badly wanting in comparison to my PCEs.

*

VINEETO: Through extensive studies of near-death experiences it has been discovered that in moments of extreme danger/ fear of death/ unbearable suffering the brain produces certain chemicals but it also produces chemicals to counteract the impact of the first chemicals and these ‘counter-chemicals’ often result in a blissful altered state of consciousness. For an excerpt on the scientific findings of what happens during NDEs I refer you to Richard, General Correspondence, No 4, 10 July 1998

However, there is neither value in nor necessity for such an experience in order to become happy and harmless – it is enough to know that indulging in extreme fear, in collective sorrow, guilt or shame and in unabashed misery is a ‘self’-aggravating and ‘self’-aggrandising dead-end road that will only lead you further and further away from being able to experience this actual world.

RESPONDENT: It is a curious occurrence for people to ‘indulge’ in ‘extreme fear, collective sorrow, guilt or shame ...’ It is freakin’ bizarre.

VINEETO: And yet you just said above that ‘What you describe there [an experience of extreme dread] was my daily life for about two years’ … Is this not the same as ‘indulging’ in ‘extreme fear, collective sorrow, guilt or shame’?

RESPONDENT: I have had the notion, after those episodes of dread and angst, that I was indulging in suffering, in hurting myself. Why do ‘we’ hurt ‘ourselves’? It’s like ‘I’ can’t help it.

VINEETO: Of course you can help it but you will first have to get rid of the notion that you can’t change human nature!

RESPONDENT: Maybe hurting ‘myself’ brings ‘me’ closer to god?

VINEETO: Which god? Whose god?

RESPONDENT: Maybe not.

VINEETO: As there is no god in actuality nothing you do can ever bring you closer to something that does not exist.

*

VINEETO: An in a second post you wrote –

RESPONDENT: I’d like to bring to your attention something Richard wrote:

Richard: There is a rapid (and sudden) way to actual freedom and a gradual (then sudden) way ... and the rapid (and sudden) way does by-pass self-examination. There are certain dangers inherent:

Richard: ‘After living in the condition of virtual freedom for sufficient time to absorb all the ramifications of a blithesome life, it is highly likely that the ultimate condition can happen. ‘I’ do not make it happen, because ‘I’ cannot make it happen. What is more ... ‘I’ am not required to make it happen. An actual freedom happens of itself only when one is fully ready, and not before. One has to become acclimatised to benignity, benevolence and blitheness, because the purity of the actual is so powerful that it would ‘blow the fuses’ if one was to venture into this territory ill-prepared. To precipitously apprehend the vast stillness of infinitude would be too much, too fast, too soon ... one could go mad with the super-abundance of pleasure that pours forth’. (‘Richard’s Journal’ © 1997 The Actual Freedom Trust. Page: 150).

The rapid (and sudden) way is certainly possible – given sufficient pure intent – yet even so there needs to be an tidying-up of social mores and habitual patterns ‘after the event’ anyway ... an actual freedom does not miraculously remove every little detail. It does make the fine-tuning a breeze, though.

VINEETO: So from the way of suffering you now want to jump horses in full gallop and ‘tamper with this ‘rapid (and sudden) way to actual freedom’ despite the warning by Richard’.

Have you had some long-lasting PCEs to know what you are aiming for?

RESPONDENT: Do you know more about this?

VINEETO: Ah, I’ve been trying for the sudden way to actual freedom ever since my first long PCE eight years ago. The question for me was, however, what to do in the meantime. Personally, in the meantime I have a very good time being virtually free from malice and sorrow.

9.3.2007

VINEETO: You didn’t follow Jesus’ lifestyle of his first 33 years though – if a man by this name and with this biography ever lived, that is. You were only pulling ‘a ‘Jesus Christ’’ as he supposedly experienced it in the last week before his legendary death! My point being that even in this glorified famous myth the man was not suffering day by day but at some point in his life had to bear the consequence for declaring himself to be the only Son of God. In short, there is no merit in his suffering at all.

RESPONDENT: You say he eventually ‘had to bear the consequence for declaring himself to be the only Son of God’. Are you referencing what the gospel says about him stating that as the Son of God he was on a mission and in that mission he was going to be betrayed, tortured, and die on the cross, in short TO SUFFER in order to save us from hell or whatever? Are those the consequences he had to bear by saying he was the only Son of God?

VINEETO: History has quite a few stories about people who declared themselves to be God and who had to suffer the punishment of being in competition with the god of the country they lived in – in Jesus’ case the God of the Jews. The people who put Jesus to trial and ultimately to death, according to the bible, were not the rulers of Judah, the Romans, but the Jewish high priests.

RESPONDENT: What do you mean ‘there is no merit in his suffering at all’?

VINEETO: Given that God does not exist in actuality but only in the hearts and minds of believers then it follows that there is no merit whatsoever in the suffering of a man who was under the delusion to be the son of this imaginary God.

*

VINEETO: What I did with the actualism method was not ‘retracing my steps’ but become aware of and then abandon whatever I had taken on in my spiritual beliefs. Once I got rid of my Eastern spiritual beliefs, it became apparent that the underlying Christian conditioning and all my original socialization was still in tact. It was then much easier to become aware of them and become free from them as well.

RESPONDENT: Cool. When I came across actualism, I recall that I dropped the bulk of my acquired spiritual beliefs (or at least my loyalty, reverence, and trust in them) like a hot potato.

VINEETO: And yet you ask me why there is no merit in Jesus’ suffering.

RESPONDENT: From then on, I’ve been keeping a close eye on any spiritual baggage that I still carry. Spirituality’s an odd item though. It can disguise itself quite subtly. I’ve noticed old spiritual tendencies in my carrying on and practicing of actualism. It’s so subtle that I barely detect it sometimes. I guess it’s true that one is going to always be spiritual as long as one still has a spirit operating inside of one.

VINEETO: Despite the fact that there is a ‘self’ operating inside this body I have no spiritual beliefs left at all – and this certainty is marvellous.

*

VINEETO: An in a second post you wrote –

RESPONDENT: I’d like to bring to your attention something Richard wrote:

Richard: There is a rapid (and sudden) way to actual freedom and a gradual (then sudden) way ... and the rapid (and sudden) way does by-pass self-examination. There are certain dangers inherent:

Richard: ‘After living in the condition of virtual freedom for sufficient time to absorb all the ramifications of a blithesome life, it is highly likely that the ultimate condition can happen. ‘I’ do not make it happen, because ‘I’ cannot make it happen. What is more ... ‘I’ am not required to make it happen. An actual freedom happens of itself only when one is fully ready, and not before. One has to become acclimatised to benignity, benevolence and blitheness, because the purity of the actual is so powerful that it would ‘blow the fuses’ if one was to venture into this territory ill-prepared. To precipitously apprehend the vast stillness of infinitude would be too much, too fast, too soon ... one could go mad with the super-abundance of pleasure that pours forth’. (‘Richard’s Journal’ © 1997 The Actual Freedom Trust. Page: 150).

The rapid (and sudden) way is certainly possible – given sufficient pure intent – yet even so there needs to be an tidying-up of social mores and habitual patterns ‘after the event’ anyway ... an actual freedom does not miraculously remove every little detail. It does make the fine-tuning a breeze, though.

VINEETO: So from the way of suffering you now want to jump horses in full gallop and ‘tamper with this ‘rapid (and sudden) way to actual freedom’ despite the warning by Richard’.

RESPONDENT: You’re damn right. Well, I did say I wanted to have more information. If the risks outweigh the reward too much then I won’t do it. For instance: will this madness that might occur after precipitously apprehending the vast stillness of infinitude be permanent or only temporary? Basically, I want to know about the method of bypassing self-examination and heading straight into actuality, a permanent PCE.

VINEETO: I can only say that presently there is no information and no method – Richard became actually free by self-examination and Peter and I became virtually free by self-examination. Richard only mentions the sudden way because it cannot be excluded as a possibility.

Don’t you find it interesting that you (‘you’) choose to concentrate on this small paragraph out of about 4 million words that explicitly describe how one can become gradually free from malice and sorrow via self-examination?

*

VINEETO: Have you had some long-lasting PCEs to know what you are aiming for?

RESPONDENT: Yes and no. ‘Yes’ in that what I am aiming for is what is written about actuality throughout the website. ‘No’ in that I haven’t had any long-lasting PCEs. I did have a short PCE (lasting several minutes) a couple years ago that just happened out of the blue one day on the busy streets of downtown New York. It ended up turning into a huge ASC though and a large part of the experience was an ASC. The whole thing lasted about an hour or so (I lost my sense of time) and I think I swayed back and forth into ASCs and PCEs with the ASC taking the majority of the spotlight. But at first, it definitely was a PCE and I can remember that part.

VINEETO: I am asking because without a PCE as a clear and unambiguous guide your choice for the unexplored sudden way to an actual freedom is somewhat a shot in the dark, given the lack of pioneer report. As such there are no guidelines that could prevent you from going around in circles, falling for the myriad of tricks of the cunning entity inside.

*

RESPONDENT: Do you know more about this?

VINEETO: Ah, I’ve been trying for the sudden way to actual freedom ever since my first long PCE eight years ago. The question for me was, however, what to do in the meantime. Personally, in the meantime I have a very good time being virtually free from malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: So are you trying to bypass self-examination?

VINEETO: No. I found self-examination an invaluable tool and a practical application for becoming free from malice and sorrow.

*

PS: This will be my last post to you. I find that my inclination to write has all but disappeared and that all that can be said about being virtually free has already been said.