VINEETO: Welcome to the Actual Freedom Mailing list.

RESPONDENT: I’ve been reading up on Actual Freedom site since a few months and I’m glad I came across this wonderful practice. I used to meditate in the ‘Ramana Maharishi’ method for about 1.5 years. Later ‘knowledge’ showed the light and I became a materialist/Atheist. I found the AF practice extremely simple and testable. I’ve been successful and happy with my ‘results’ at inducing a PCE mostly when I’m ‘outside’ (i.e. walking on the streets, in the garden, etc.).

VINEETO: Given that you say you ‘became a materialist/Atheist’ – have you been able to understand in what way an actual freedom from the human condition is the *third* alternative to both materialism and spiritualism?

RESPONDENT: My typical experience of PCE is as follows:

Title: Is something wrong with my ‘PCE’?

VINEETO: What is wrong with your PCE is that it is an altered state of consciousness but not a pure consciousness experience.

Let me explain it according to your own description –

1. Beauty is a feeling perception and as such cannot be part of a pure consciousness experience where the identity and with it the whole feeling faculty is absent.

2. In a PCE you *are* the body and there is no-one (no ‘I’) inside the body to feel the body doing things.

3. ‘Thoughtless’ is a quality attempted to achieve in spiritual practice where thoughts are being seen as the culprit whereas in a PCE – and in actual freedom – thoughts may or may not occur. How do you think living in actual freedom is possible (a permanent PCE so to speak) if there were never any thoughts to sort out the practical things in life, to contemplate about current events, to communicate with people such as on this mailing list, and so on?

RESPONDENT: However, when I try to have a PCE in the middle of ‘intellectually demanding’ actions, things start going wrong and thus this post.

VINEETO: Maybe those ‘‘intellectually demanding’ actions’ are really emotionally demanding actions? People often mistake their feelings to be thoughts, not recognizing the affective quality of most of their thoughts.

RESPONDENT: IMO, ‘Intellectualism’ needs modelling a future action + an object within one’s mind and estimating how the ‘model’ behaves for any given decision [snipped link to AI]. I see ‘Intellectuality’ as being in direct conflict with ‘living this moment as a flesh and blood body’. In such a scenario, like when being at work, I only see lips moving and sounds emanating from people. ‘Words’ don’t make ‘meanings’ for the ‘I’ isn’t even around to care. Is this an inherent ‘side effect’ of practicing AF? Or am I doing something wrong? It would be great to hear experienced people’s thoughts on this.

VINEETO: It appears that when you became a materialist/Atheist you nevertheless kept the spiritual idea that thoughts and consequently the content of words are impure and that therefore only a thoughtless body and meaningless sounds can be pure. Rather than it being ‘an inherent ‘side-effect’’ of practicing actualism this unliveable ethic of spiritualists and materialists alike is pure fantasy and can never work in everyday life.

In actualism, I recognize that it is the instinctual passions and the identity arising from these passions that is the problem, not thoughts or words or ‘intellectualism’ per se. When you recognize this fact in theory – as in seeing that it makes sense – then you can begin to put this understanding in practice. This requires that I pay an ongoing attention to how I experience this moment – what do I think, what do I feel and how do I sensately experience this moment of being alive.

This attentiveness alerts me to any of the non-felicitous feelings as and when they arise which allows me to feel the feeling (instead of the usual automatic reaction of repressing or expressing the feeling), in order to be able to label it, inquire as to what triggered it, examine what belief, moral or ethic may be responsible for having triggered it off, and so on. Eventually this attentiveness will result in unravelling all of one’s beliefs, ideas, ideals, philosophies, worldviews and social conditioning and enables one to become acutely aware of the instinctual passions as and when they arise.

Being aware of one’s feelings and instinctual passions will in turn enable you to differentiate between your affective and your non-affective thoughts, the later of which quite commonly occur in PCEs as well as in virtual freedom.

6.8.2006

VINEETO: Given that you say you ‘became a materialist/Atheist’ – have you been able to understand in what way an actual freedom from the human condition is the *third* alternative to both materialism and spiritualism?

RESPONDENT: (from Wordnet) ‘Materialist’: n 1: a desire for wealth and material possessions with little interest in ethical or spiritual matters [syn: {philistinism}] 2: (philosophy) the philosophical theory that matter is the only reality [syn: {physicalism}]

I go by the second idea, that all reality is matter. This mind is a result of this brain (which is matter). However, that doesn’t leave me with anything.

VINEETO: Whereas actualism is the experience that matter is not merely passive. For more information see Frequent Questions No. 54.

RESPONDENT: I have this mind. It gets emotional and unpredictable.

VINEETO: Whereas practicing the actualism method I came to realize that I don’t just ‘have this mind’, but that ‘I’ *am* the identity usurping this body and brain with unpredictable and unreliable feelings and passions.

RESPONDENT: I want to optimise it to make my living joyous. Actual freedom beautifully fits in here and helps me (I’m sure it will!) minimize the suffering.

VINEETO: You may have to reconsider. Actualism is not about optimizing your ‘emotional and unpredictable’ mind but about becoming entirely free from the ‘emotional and unpredictable’ identity altogether, which leaves the mind, the human brain in action in the human skull, free to do what it does best – making sense of the world.

RESPONDENT: After pondering over the issue in my earlier post, I’ve come to the opinion that my ‘inducing a PCE’ was after all wrong. I was still having traces of the spiritual practices and it was coming in the way.

VINEETO: Well, what better way to finding out than doing it. Next time around you know what to avoid.

RESPONDENT: What I still don’t understand is: How does a PCE fit in as a goal for an Actualist?

VINEETO: The PCE gives me an experiential taste of the perfection and delight of the actual world and thus can set the process in motion of doing something in order to be able to permanently live in this actual world.

RESPONDENT: (Talking about which: Don’t you think we need to clearly define a PCE and how it helps an Actualist? (given that I’ve not been clear about it and I’m guessing there have been other people here as well who didn’t understand this aspect) I’m guessing it’s there on the website in one of the many pages about PCE. Maybe the ‘Introduction’ page should have a link? Some friends of mine to whom I’ve talked about AF say the site is too vast and searching through google isn’t easy to ‘start with’. I think the Introduction is a bit too ‘verbose’ and instead could cover the more important topics of ‘How’ the Actualism practice is, What a PCE is, etc.).

VINEETO: This link may help to orientate yourself on the Actual Freedom Trust website. Some of your questions might already been answered in the ‘FAQ’s – Frequently Asked Questions’ and ‘CRO’s – Commonly Raised Objections’.

*

RESPONDENT: Title: Is something wrong with my ‘PCE’?

VINEETO: What is wrong with your PCE is that it is an altered state of consciousness but not a pure consciousness experience. Let me explain it according to your own description –

1. Beauty is a feeling perception and as such cannot be part of a pure consciousness experience where the identity and with it the whole feeling faculty is absent.

RESPONDENT: So one never feels ‘happy’ at the moment of PCE?

VINEETO: ‘Me’ being temporarily absent there is no feeling at all operating in a PCE.

*

VINEETO: How do you think living in actual freedom is possible (a permanent PCE so to speak) if there were never any thoughts to sort out the practical things in life, to contemplate about current events, to communicate with people such as on this mailing list, and so on?

RESPONDENT: Exactly! This is why I was almost sure my experience was ‘incorrect’.

VINEETO: This was always the trouble I had with spiritual experiences, especially when thinking about enlightenment. Who would drive the buses and who would control the traffic if everyone became enlightened and not just a chosen few … and who would be the disciples so essential for maintaining the grand identity of an enlightened master?

10.8.2006

RESPONDENT No 65: They are the hypnotic stirrings of ancient instincts from which Richard says the feeling self springs. Today the human brain has a more developed neo-cortex (reflective thought) with which to observe them, override them and ultimately delete their destructive influence on all life on this planet. Or the feeling self/thinker can just keep entertaining itself with them and perpetuate the suffering they inflict.

RESPONDENT: What you just explained, seems like what my Buddhism friend says Zen is all about.

This still seems like a way to be ‘detached’ – living out there in yet another kind of ‘reality’ called the ‘PCE’, without actually helping end suffering.

VINEETO: Don’t believe everything you read on this mailing list, No 106. Actualism couldn’t be farther away from Buddhism and the spiritual practice of detachment, it is in fact 180 degrees opposite to *all* spiritual beliefs and practices.

You’ll find more accurate information about Buddhism/actualism in The Actual Freedom Trust Library – Library, Topics, Buddhism and Spiritual Teachers and also in the Frequently Answered Questions.

Actualism Homepage

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.