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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 5
VINEETO: Thank you for your mail. As you can see, the subject of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ enjoys great consideration already on the list. But there can never be said enough about it, this method being the key to an actual freedom – if pursued with sincerity and diligence. RESPONDENT: Something has been on my mind for a while so in the spirit of this list, ‘How am I...’, I will speak up. I got off the sannyas list after there was so much noise when everybody there was fighting with you and Peter. I was unhappy with both of you in the beginning. What bothered me at the time was that, for me, your messages were largely content-less and highly verbose. VINEETO: What is wrong with being verbose or prolific? After all, on this internet, we have ‘only’ words to communicate with each other, and I for my part find it more informative, more satisfactory than all the hugging and ‘yes I know how you feel’-communications that I had in my Sannyas year. Not that those exchanges was all there was, but it did not help me to get to the bottom of my ‘self’. As for content-less – I am writing about how I have radically changed my life in the last 18 months, but if that is content-less for you, I am at a loss. I don’t know what kind of ‘content’ you have in mind – poems? I am glad you found at least one content (How am I experiencing this moment of being alive) to have a discussion about. RESPONDENT: Once I came to know what you and Peter were so excited about, Richard’s technique, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’, I was mad with you. Because there is nothing new in the technique. I have been doing it more rigorously for a year and, in my opinion, a lot of people who are not in any spiritual search do it in their life too. In my case, it just happened to me that I started doing this technique after 6 months of dynamic and 6 months of Kundalini. It was a simple outcome of cleaning up performed by dynamic and Kundalini. VINEETO: Maybe you could describe how you use this technique. I don’t understand how you can do it in the way Richard describes it and still be mad at me, or us. For me, using this ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ has helped me to get rid of all my emotions, feelings, beliefs and underlying instincts. I simply understood that it is not worth blaming anybody for my feelings, since they are my feelings, they arise in me. And I can see now that everybody is stricken with the same Human Condition that I have been so shackled with. As the easiest and most effective way I decided to clean myself up instead of blaming or trying to change other people. It was especially helpful and obviously effective in my relationship with Peter, but it is applicable in the same way for all my interactions with people, even with things like the weather and events. Whenever anything would get me upset, I looked in myself for the cause. It was my anger, after all, or my upset, my fear, my worry, my sadness, that I wanted to get rid of. And it worked, miraculously so. After 12 months of intense investigation I am free of emotions, beliefs and most of my instinctual reactions, apart from an occasional little stirring, which gets investigated and cleaned out whenever it occurs. RESPONDENT: What surprised me, however, was that you and Peter went in so much lengths to trash Osho in particular and eastern religions in general. And for what, a simple technique which perhaps everyone knows, at least, I believe, everyone on the sannyas list does. VINEETO: Doing the ‘technique’ has helped me to get rid of my issues with ‘authority’ – wanting and needing someone, for instance Mr. Rajneesh, to tell me what is right and wrong – or rebelling against a supposed authority. I am free now and fully capable to judge silly and sensible for myself. Questioning and eliminating the emotion and the belief in love and Love was another consequence of applying this method sincerely and diligently. This grand and to much praised emotion could no longer hold its credibility in the light of honest investigation and awareness, it is, after all, just the cover-up and band-aid for the instincts and ‘bad’ emotions that trouble everyone so much. But in order to ‘trash’ a master of 17 years, one needs to be ready to look afresh, to question every dearly-held belief and dare to stand alone on one’s own feet, without a group or a master. Without the ‘support’ of my belief in authority and my need for love and the hope for Divine Love I was then able to really check out what Osho what proposing, offering and delivering. And I found it very wanting and intentionally confusing, to say the least. As Richard said to you, when you start ‘seeing without sannyas eyes’ you will discover the full benefit and life-changing consequence of this question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ and you will find out that what you and supposedly everyone on the sannyas list does is something completely different. It is not just noticing or ‘watching’ feelings and thus creating a new identity – the watcher. With the ‘watcher’ you transcend feelings, usually for the time being. They are not eliminated, they return. With a ‘watcher’ you can pretend this body installed with the Human Condition is not really ‘it’, but you are ‘Consciousness, eternal and pure’. You detach yourself from the body and its imminent emotions, feelings and thought and live as this new identity, the ‘watcher’ or ‘Consciousness’. If successfully applied one ends in the delusion or an Altered State of Consciousness aka enlightenment. Richard’s method, on the other hand, is designed to question and eliminate every single emotion, belief and instinct in order to be completely free of ego and soul, ‘self’ and ‘Self’. Then one can live in this actual physical world and delight in its infinitude, magnificence, perfection and purity. Then one can be ‘the universe experiencing itself as a sensate human being’ – not a small outcome. RESPONDENT: In my opinion, all those wars, which Richard is so critical of, start because some idiots find a technique, taught to them by a self-realized man / their master/ ..., so exciting that then they go on to ‘talk about’ their new revelation to others. In my opinion, Vineeto, you and Peter acted like two idiots who tried to do the same on the sannyas list. VINEETO: A lot of opinion – which is nothing but an emotional backed thought. I do appreciate your suspicion against masters, though. How come you don’t apply this suspicion to all the masters? RESPONDENT: In fact, if you spent 10-20 years with Osho and/or eastern religions and you missed the bottom-line, which is no different from what Richard is saying, don’t blame Osho or eastern religion or any other religion. But blame yourself that you missed it!! VINEETO: I spent 17 years with Osho, I listened to almost every of his discourses and I thoroughly and intensely tried to make sense of what he was saying and apply it to my life. I did a lot of therapy and meditation groups to deepen my understanding. But after 17 years I was not happier that when I had started, I still had all my emotions intact, meaning, they would pop up once in a while and give me a hard time. And none of my friends had ‘got it’ either. I cannot see where I missed the bottom-line, because the bottom-line was meditation. The very bottom-line was transcending this world, including all the senses, and rise into ‘Consciousness’ where you are detached from everything that is happening to you or other people – including the wars, rapes and murders. The bottom line is ‘you are not the body, but eternal Consciousness’, and thus we were all trying to do the impossible – meditate and still live in the marketplace, be happy and transcend it all, ‘have’ a body and not be in it. Once I stopped blaming myself for the failure of those unsuccessful years, which had not brought me closer to the purity and happiness I was looking for, I was shocked when I started to see the vastness of the spiritual plot, that traps people in their misery. Alan put it very well when he said:
Maybe you want to consider for yourself that it is not your fault that you missed it – unless you got it? – and start to question the revered teachings, so insidious instilled in all of us. In the beginning it is hard to see the forest for all the trees, but it is well worth a turn-around, in fact 180 degrees in the opposite direction of what Osho and the Eastern religions are trying to sell us.
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
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 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.
VINEETO: I’m taking a long time to answer these days because I started working again for 4 days a week. It is good fun going back to my previous job, meeting the people I used to work with for a few years and seeing if anything is stirring me up. Not much is. But sometimes the psychic strings get re-activated and give me a chance to discover and cut any psychic connection or ‘belonging’ that is still lurking inside of me. * VINEETO: 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. RESPONDENT: I am not sure about this but I am doing my experiments right around here. VINEETO: What form do your experiments take? Are you saying that you conduct experiments to experience divine love or are you trying to induce a peak experience? As I said before, to have a sensible conversation, it is extremely helpful to understand the terms so we know that we are talking about the same issue. * VINEETO: 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
RESPONDENT: It is an individual’s responsibility to do the work and individual’s fault if one does not remain alert to look into oneself. It can happen anywhere. I could do the same on this list and be greedy for ‘Actual Freedom’ without working for it. In addition, my interest at present is: to see what love does to me. VINEETO: Sure, it is the individual’s responsibility to look into themselves. But you can only effectively look into yourself without the guidelines of those gurus, teachers, Enlightened Beings, ‘Mr. Wise Guys’ and Masters who tell you to look into yourself according to their particular ‘Truth’ or belief-system. As long as you are lead astray on a path of fairy-tale and fantasy, glory and immortality, good feelings and bliss, how can you clearly and honestly look into your ‘self’? You will only be moving deck-chairs on the Titanic again, rearranging feelings – good ones to the right and bad ones to the left – and then end up with a polished, but same old identity of No 5. To investigate thoroughly and sincerely into your ‘self’ you will need to investigate into those who have programmed you – parents and peers, teachers and Masters, and you will have to question all of their passed-down values. For Actual Freedom you will have to investigate into your spiritual identity as much as into your moral or ethical identity – the whole lot. There is no other way to clean up the Human Condition in oneself other than to first question those whose authority one holds in high esteem. Otherwise you will simply remain a believer. This is not a small thing we are doing. * VINEETO: 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, No 5, 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. I am interested of what you find out. RESPONDENT: Yes, I will have to experience each and everything by myself and then make my own decisions. Sure. I will write more when I read some more and/or find something new. VINEETO: I am interested to hear of the report of your experiments.
VINEETO: Thank you for your mails. I am pleased to hear that you take me for a ‘fellow English’ woman, because English is my second language. My first one is German. Your comment means to me that my writing in English is improving and Peter’s editing is slowly showing the wished-for results. RESPONDENT: Have your read books written by fellow English man, I thought you were English, Roger Penrose. He is a mathematician interested in consciousness. He came to give a talk here and said he was not giving a ‘religious’ account of consciousness. VINEETO: As for Mr. Penrose – what I read from and about him on the internet, he is, as Peter pointed out already, much more of a mystically oriented person than a proper scientist. So his view on consciousness lies rather in the category of spiritual imagination compared to scientific research into the functioning of the brain. A pity, because I think there could be much more discovered than what we know up to now. You wrote to No 14 about him:
No wonder, you find his books dense and hard to read. Already the bits from the internet that Peter quoted in his letter to you were so twisted with false deductions and outright imaginations that one ends up being more confused than ‘enlightened’ after reading his beliefs. RESPONDENT: If you are busy we can stop this thread here. I also do not have much to contribute, I am sort of stuck these days. I am doing something wrong. Once I figure it out, I will write about it. VINEETO: I am still busy during the week, probably like most people, but I am very happy to pursue our thread. When you say you must be doing something wrong because you are ‘stuck’, it might also be that you did something ‘right’ and then hit a major issue which might generate fear. I remember on several occasions that the emotion that I investigated was connected to a belief which made up an important part of my identity. The fear that arose out of that investigation sometimes got me stuck for several days, or even weeks, until I gathered enough courage and intent to pursue the investigation further, and each time a considerable part of the identity-scaffold collapsed, leaving me bewildered at first and then more and more delighted about the freedom gained. So, being stuck for me often meant a particularly dense part of my identity that was about to be laid bare – it might very well be a hot trail that you are pursuing... * VINEETO: 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. RESPONDENT: I am not sure about this but I am doing my experiments right around here. VINEETO: What form do your experiments take? Are you saying that you conduct experiments to experience divine love or are you trying to induce a peak experience? As I said before, to have a sensible conversation, it is extremely helpful to understand the terms so we know that we are talking about the same issue. RESPONDENT: No, Vineeto, I am not inducing love or PCEs by external means i.e drugs or Osho’s active meditations or any other means. You had mentioned love and not PCE so I was talking about love and not PCEs. I did not think there was any confusion about terms. I guess experiment was an inappropriate word to use. I am simply trying to see, among other things, what is the origin of love. VINEETO: I am interested to hear of the report of your experiments. 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.
VINEETO: Thank you for your response. I am enjoying our discussion about investigating emotions. I can say that I am quite an expert on experiential therapy, since I have done many New Age therapies, beginning in 1978. I started with Arthur Janov’s primal scream groups and later continued therapy in Poona doing all there was on offer – encounter, Tantra, Reichian bio-energetics, Hypnosis and the Fischer-Hoffmann-process. I not only participated in the last mentioned group, called the ‘AFH’ in Poona, but repeated it as an assistant six times. It is an intense kind of primal group, focussing on negative feelings from childhood, however far back one can extract or concoct a memory, acting out any ‘anger’ and ‘past hurts’ to the point of exhaustion and then forgiving one’s ‘poor ignorant’ parents. Nobody seemed to be bothered that this group, like all therapy, is purely staged in the imaginary world of past emotional memories, where facts don’t really matter, as long as ‘valuable’ emotions are expressed – ‘vented’ – and then transformed into love and forgiveness. There is neither concern if these events really happened nor is there evidence that those supposedly transformed emotions are improving one’s everyday life. Consequently, after the group-high wanes, one is back to the troubles of daily life and is left yearning for another emoting experience. One is, in fact, often enticed into even more expressing or emoting in order to feel alive and to feel the calm and ‘peacefulness’ afterwards. The aim of those primal therapies is to make the individual feel better, temporarily relieved from the excess of accumulated emotions. The aim is not to permanently get rid of anger, sadness, fear and malice or how to live in peace with one’s fellow human beings. I certainly learned how to notice and/or create emotions, sometimes shifting them from feeling sad to feeling angry, to feeling loving, to feeling lonely – whatever I unconsciously believed appropriate in the moment. But this apparent ‘control’ did not enable me to live my life peacefully, it did not eliminate hate, jealousy, loneliness, anger, resentment, neediness, despair and depression. On the contrary, because I had spent so much of my time in a therapy-environment, a big part of my identity thrived on having emotions, thinking about them, feeling them, expressing them and justifying them with all kinds of NDA-beliefs like astrology, chakras, the ‘mood of the day’, numerology and such nonsense. Looking back on what practical improvement therapy has contributed to my life, I see that it has been nothing but moving furniture on the Titanic, i.e. fiddling with bits while the main problem, the ‘self’, stayed alive and kicking. In fact, the ‘self’ gets even more strengthened by boosting one’s emotional identity. * VINEETO: When you say you must be doing something wrong because you are ‘stuck’, it might also be that you did something ‘right’ and then hit a major issue which might generate fear. RESPONDENT: You have got this one right, Vineeto. There is an undercurrent of fear/sadness still there. I am going against it head on two ways: first, going to the daily life situations in which I would have dreaded to go into, 3-5 years ago, and apprehensive of going for them about 1-2 years ago. Second, keeping my eyes open to look for causes which brought this fear in the first place. This one is a difficult one as, to best of knowledge, I cleaned myself of fears arising from the incidents from the age of 3 years-now. But I remember I had this undercurrent of fear/sadness at the age of ~4 years too. So, the causes for this fear/sadness must have their origins before the age of 3 years. The best I can think of is that my mother might have beaten the crap out of me before the age of 3, but I cannot have any memory of that. I am not sure how to go about it but I am working on it. VINEETO: In my spiritual years I believed that I was ‘cleaning myself of fears’ by doing lots of Dynamic Meditation and lots of therapy but I gradually noticed that fear had only shifted to other issues, but it never disappeared or even diminished. I would not be afraid of one particular situation, but nevertheless apprehensive of another, fearful of change, of being alone, of being raped, of not getting what I desired or of not being appreciated by others. Yet, knowing no other alternative at the time, I kept going. So, from my experience, I can say that digging into the past will never wipe out the causes of fear. Only when I met Richard was I able to understand the reason for it. It is a common belief that human beings are born innocent, ‘tabula rasa’, a clean slate, without any malice and sorrow, and that all evil – fear, anger, sadness – is only created by bad treatment in our childhood years – or maybe by ‘repressed memories’ of bad past lives. The very premise of that belief is wrong. Human beings are born with certain distinguishing instincts, the main ones being fear, aggression, nurture and desire. These instincts are blind Nature’s rather clumsy software package designed to give one a start in life and to ensure the survival of the species. So despite our good intentions and moral codes, we are relentlessly driven to act instinctually in each and every situation in our lives and this is the base cause of all our angst, suffering and confusion. We, as human beings, also have a highly developed sense of self, overlaid with a social identity, consisting of the beliefs that had been instilled in us from the time when we were first rewarded for ‘good’, or punished for ‘bad’, behaviour. This identity includes the morals, values and ethics that ensure that we are a fit member of the particular society into which we are born. We then take on these beliefs and develop them as our ‘own’ identity. This innate sense of self, reinforced by our social identity, is the very ‘guardian at the gate’, sabotaging any well-meaning, but inevitably futile, attempts at fundamentally and radically changing the Human Condition of malice and sorrow within us. When I put away my pride and dared to question this emotional, therapy-enhanced, yet utterly useless and harmful identity, I had to acknowledge the reason why the concept of therapy had never worked. One never gets to permanently experience the ‘innocence’ of a baby after digging into one’s memories of birth- or childhood-traumas – because the baby has never been innocent and without fear in the first place! Geneticists are now finding neurological evidence of those innate instincts, yet nobody except Richard has devised a method to get rid of those insidious buggers. RESPONDENT: There is an undercurrent of fear/sadness still there. I am going against it head on two ways: first, going to the daily life situations in which I would have dreaded to go into, 3-5 years ago, and apprehensive of going for them about 1-2 years ago. Second, keeping my eyes open to look for causes which brought this fear in the first place. VINEETO: This is how I started to tackle fear after I had understood that fear is the very substance of ‘me’, the ‘self’: Each time I encountered fear, I would do the reality-check, that is, check out the actual dangers of the situation. ‘What is the worst that can happen’? was always a good question. And in discovering that most fears are only in my head – or guts – and had nothing to do with actual danger, I could go ahead and face them. The other part of the approach was to find out the cause of that fear. Since my favourite pet-excuse, childhood traumas, had proven to be a myth, I started to look for other reasons, closer to here and now. What I mainly found were beliefs that formed my identity – beliefs, when threatened in certain situations, caused the same reaction in me as if I was physically threatened. The ‘self’ doesn’t distinguish between an imaginary danger to the identity and an actual danger to the body. As such, a threat to one’s beliefs is as passionately felt as a threat to one’s life. Then the real discovery started. By investigating and dismantling one belief after another, this identity became thinner and thinner, fewer situations would threaten the existence of the ‘self’. I had dismantled so many beliefs myself that my fear of people, who could question my beliefs, diminished considerably. And whenever such a fear arose, there was something for me to discover, there was another cause for fear to be removed. After the first successes started to show, I more and more enjoyed the game – finally I had a method that worked, and I could do it all by myself. Neither Guru nor therapist needed. * 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: I remember well when you described to Richard a few weeks back a pure consciousness experience that you had:
No 5, I just wonder if, in the heat of your discussions about dearly-held beliefs and loyalty and everybody’s supposed ‘beef’, this memory of the exquisite and delicious purity of your experience, the magnificence and perfection of this actual physical universe has been forgotten. I take it that the memory of this event, or of similar experiences, was what has attracted you to this list in the first place. Why defend the indefensible, why not start at the other end and begin to discriminate your own beliefs from verifiable facts, thus removing the hybris and rubbish that prevents one from experiencing such delicious purity over and over again? I found that there are so much more sensible things to do with one’s time and intelligence than fighting a petty competition instead of investigating what creates the need to fight and deny in the first place. Don’t you want to find out how to become happy and harmless? This mailing list can be an immense support in examining one’s beliefs, feelings, emotions and instinctual passions that every human being is inflicted with. Once one has taken the first hurdle of overcoming one’s pride, the investigation can become a sport and a delicious and thrilling discovery journey that beats every other adventure there is on this planet. In my letter to Alan I have just mapped out again how the path to Actual Freedom is paved with facts and success, when one successively and incrementally diminishes one’s social identity, eliminates all of one’s beliefs and examines one’s instinctual passions. From being driven and troubled by emotions, feelings and instinctual rages I have now succeeded, in a remarkably short time, to disentangle myself from the psychological and psychic web of Humanity’s beliefs and feelings, from ‘who I thought and felt I was’, and live now in an almost permanent PCE-like state of Virtual Freedom. Is that not something that could intrigue you to try the same?
VINEETO: Thank you for your post. First I would like to respond to something you wrote to Peter because I found it very informative and fascinating. You said to Peter:
And in the next post:
I find it valuable information to get feedback as to what you make of our writing, and I am fascinated to read that you find it shocking. I can hardly remember how it has been for me in the beginning with Actual Freedom, but looking back I can confirm that what I encountered was indeed very shocking on many occasions. Every single statement of fact by Richard had at first been a shockwave to the very ground I believed I was standing on, they questioned my emotions and beliefs that formed my reality. Yet here was a man who confidently and happily stated and proved by living actual freedom all the time that all 6 billion people, including me at the time, has got it 180 degrees wrong! Often people have such a thick skin that they turn away or duck before it even shocks them or could stop them in their tracks! So, I consider it intriguing to hear that you are shocked. Not that I would want to shock, but the challenging of beliefs by stating the facts of the situation is unavoidably shocking. It reminds me of someone living on a melting iceberg, where every piece breaking away is another shockwave.
That brings me to the second part of your comment – of course, one does not like such a situation. The trick for me was to move on from the emotional barrier of ‘disliking’ to being curious to find out the facts, then to fascination, exploration, discovery, thrill and obsession. I decided to replace ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ with ‘oh, isn’t that interesting’ and move from there into the deeper investigation of my psyche. I wanted to find out the root cause of my objection and work on removing that very cause. And that’s what I have been doing ever since. And instead of ‘keep quiet about’ what you ‘have no proof ... is wrong’, why not investigate the facts for yourself, read and distinguish, judge by silly and sensible, judge by what works and produces results, instead of settling for an intuitive, emotional, moral or spiritual like or dislike. That will relieve you from having to believe what Peter, Richard and I say about life, the gurus, the universe and the world we live in but your own investigation may give you the confidence you need to instigate action. Some two years ago I said to Peter: ‘If it is really the case that Rajneesh had got it all wrong and I have believed the wrong man, then I don’t want to throw him out just to take on another belief, another guru. I will only give up my favourite conviction if there is something that is more convincing than belief.’ At the time I decided to go slow on questioning my spiritual belief but went full steam in investigating issues like male-female conditioning, the cause of power battles, my need for and conflict with authority and my belief in love. These issues were plenty to rock the boat, to send me into a whirlwind of confusion, anxiety, fascination and exciting discoveries. I found that I gained confidence by discovering facts for myself instead of believing the pre-chewed wisdom of others. I enjoyed questioning my own gullibility, however embarrassing the discovery sometimes was. To break the insidious and generally accepted fashionable habit of complaints, power battles and attempts to fix my problem by changing the other person I needed a burning discontent with my present situation, a dash of naiveté, a good handful of intent and a fierce determination to not continue in my old habitual way. Now to your questions: RESPONDENT: Vineeto, I am not sure what you were trying to say in this post. What did you find ‘objectionable’ in my response to Peter’s post Legacy of Gurus. I am not sure what you had in mind about dearly held beliefs and loyalty. But I know one thing, beliefs are easy, they are piece of cake. I can do research and find out that something is a belief and hence not care about it. But that process in my opinion (experience) is not very useful. I would rather watch out for and check out the feelings which act as glue for the beliefs. Checking out the feelings are fun. Same is true for the loyalty too. VINEETO: Just as a point of accuracy, I didn’t use the word ‘objectionable’. I wrote to indicate that maybe you find emotions hidden underneath your questions and objections to Peter, as I know from my own objections and battles that I had often a hidden agenda when I was defending my own status quo. That’s the meaning of ‘Why defend the indefensible?’ Once I decided that I wanted to become happy and harmless I went for the cause of my objecting or fighting by turning the torchlight on to myself. I got particularly suspicious about my intentions when I wanted to use harsh words, wanted to hurt, became tricky, became emotional, defensive, sad, fearful, angry, sarcastic or played stupid – all tools that I had used in previous battles whenever I felt cornered. But given that I was on a ‘battle’ with my own ‘self’, I wanted to discover the bugger that causes misery and suffering, disharmony and suspicion. I wanted to eliminate the root cause of battling in me. I had enough of petty ‘right and wrong’ discussions, man-woman disagreements, good and bad opinions and shouting or sulking arguments. I wasn’t interested anymore in winning an argument – I was only interested to find my own ‘original face’, even if it was dead ugly. And it is rotten and ugly, to say the least!
RESPONDENT: As for everybody’s supposed ‘beef’. I used the word beef in a response to Richard and another to Peter. To have a beef means to have a complaint, that is all. For my taste, it was appropriate to use in those two responses. Obviously, you had something else in mind. I do not know what though. VINEETO: To dismiss what Richard and Peter said as simply a ‘beef’ is to miss the point entirely. Their description of spiritual beliefs is neither an opinion nor a complaint. It is an opportunity to investigate your own beliefs, morals and loyalties in order to discover the perfect and delicious actual world underneath. RESPONDENT: What do you think was petty competition? Peter addressed me and I responded. Yes, I could have ignored Peter’s post as I normally do. Yes, I think Peter is pissed, most likely at Osho, or something else and using Osho for his ‘pissedness’ to come out. That is my opinion of Peter but that is the best I can do from his posts. If you think that is petty, nothing much I can do about it. His post Legacy of Gurus does not make any other sense to me. Does it make sense to you? If yes, please explain it to me. VINEETO: I think once you start to question your master’s authority and competence you will be pretty surprised what you find when you read with ‘non-Sannyas eyes’. One has not to be ‘pissed’ about Rajneesh to state the fact that his
And:
Once you investigate the facts for yourself and scrutinize objectively, you will find that the above are merely statements of facts. Rajneeshism is already pretty thin on the ground, and if the Sannyas list and Poona are to been seen as the representative of his religion – what a legacy! For me, it had been the best on offer at the time he was alive; at least it was fun and more alive than other spiritual communes, but now it is definitely nothing but a dead man’s religion. If you have an honest look at Rajneesh’s discourses, if you read them as if with someone else’s eyes, without feelings of love, gratitude, hope or faith, then you may well be surprised how silly it all is. There is something so much more sensible discovered by Richard, available for everyone who dares to find out for themselves. So, it has been great fun again to write to you. I do like the discussions about beliefs and facts, investigation and shocking discoveries. I’m looking forward to your response. Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer |
