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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 14
RESPONDENT: Hi Irene, Peter, Vineeto, Thank you all for your each authenticities. Love, peace, respect. P.S. I visited Hiroshima this week ends. The place of peace. VINEETO: Maybe you have a different idea how the Human Condition should be discussed in the mailing list. I don’t really know how to understand your use of the word ‘authenticities’. Do you mind explaining?
RESPONDENT: OK, I will try to explain in my poor japanese English.;-) We Japanese usually think harmony and peace is the best values in relation. So sometimes, or often, we suppress our thinking to avoid disagreement , especially among the intimates. We are too much conditioned by the concept of harmony and peace and we often mistake disagreement as disharmony or anti-peace in relation. And then we miss the possibility to discuss more which maybe leads to go into deeper harmony and peace, and hung in the superficial harmony and peace or pretend to be in harmony and peace. From this Japanese cultural background, all of your positions to discuss look authentic to me, that is not to suppress one’s own thinking while knowing the possibility of absolute disagreement which may leads to disharmony in relations. I hope it will make sense to you. VINEETO: Thank you for your explanation. What I understood in the course of my explorations in life is that I can only do something about my own harmony and peace. Everything else I tried in changing the other to whatever ideal has continuously failed. So, whenever my peace is disturbed I look into reasons on my side, what disturbs my peace. At the start, I found heaps of emotions in me that were simply triggered by the other. Now, that happens very rarely any more. This is the peace I have found and that’s how I have become a non-contributor to the violence and war in the world.
VINEETO: Thank you for your reply. Welcome back to the list. For general understanding I repeat part of our conversation from [List C] –
So, now that you know that you ‘passionately want to be happy and harmless’, what is the next step? There is lots of information on both Richard’s web-site and our website. Richard’s article on ‘This moment of being alive’ is perfect to get started and have an understanding how to become happy and harmless. Both Peter and I have answered a question from the Sannyas list on ‘how to do it?’ You will find the letters under Peter’s and my correspondence, search ‘how to experience’. But, all in all, you are on your own – your own explorations, your own discoveries, your own successes, your own freedom. Looking forward to hearing from you
VINEETO: Good on you to keep inquiring about being happy and harmless. What I had to acknowledge quite in the beginning of my investigation about love was the fact that my ideas and ideals about love and with it the so-called true or un-conditioned love where just ideas and ideals and had nothing to do with the reality of the feelings I had. The feelings of love that I had had in my life were always poisoned by possessiveness, jealousy, fear of abandonment, anger, insecurity, competitiveness and – in case of rejected love – they turned into hate. 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. When you say: RESPONDENT: ...And love, Love are kind of feelings. Then what is happy and harmless? I am experiencing being happy and harmless as a kind of feeling right now. VINEETO: I think here you are applying your ideal of love rather than what is actually happening. I remember the discourses in Poona, where every night there was a hushed competition who would sit closest to the Master, who would get a look from him or even be talked about. There was a tough competition going on – far from happy and harmless. And Rajneesh was as much part of that game as us, his disciples. He would stir the fire of competition, fancy some and neglect others, while all the while telling us to drop desire. Now, that the Master is dead, ‘spread all over Existence’, it is much easier to dream of his Un-conditional Love, and that one day you would attain it. The daily check on reality is but nil. But it is all ‘in the head’ or in the feeling, ‘spirit’-ual, it is not actuality. Being happy and harmless is not a coating over one’s grotty ‘self’, over the Human Condition in us. Being happy and harmless is only possible when you actively remove the feelings, emotions and instinctual passions that the ‘self’ consists of – what then remains is a happy and harmless human being. What remains is the delight of a perfect universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being. RESPONDENT: About your question whether I feel his (Rajneesh’s) presence now. My answer is I am grateful for him still now. And maybe I must add to say that this gratefulness has no demand for the return. VINEETO: Well, as I see it, the first thing is to stop dreaming and imagining and looking honestly at what emotions, feelings, beliefs, fears, loyalty, faith, passions there are that rule your everyday life. What’s the point of feeling gratitude for half an hour a day, dreaming of the perfect unconditional love to a long-dead old Indian philosophy professor, who thought he was God, when the rest of the time one is annoyed, grotty, angry, resentful, peeved, frustrated, sad, hopeful, ambitions, competitive, tense, fearful, stressed out or bored? Both, being busy with emotions and busy with imagined dreams is not being here, now, where life is actually happening. RESPONDENT: And about your last question, my answer is just be happy right now with my full intention. VINEETO: Happy and harmless belong together, you cannot be happy without being harmless. And you cannot be harmless without looking deep into your psyche to discover and investigate all the beliefs, emotions and instinctual passions that cause suffering and harm to others and to yourself. Actual freedom is not about matching words with what you already believe, actual freedom is to actually do something so you become free of the Human Condition. And once you made up your mind, there is plenty of information on both Richards and our website how to
go about it. Just have a look at the library, under
VINEETO: Good on you to keep inquiring about being happy and harmless. RESPONDENT: Thanks and I become used to the terms of actual freedom gradually. And my questions become clearer to myself. VINEETO: I am really curious what you mean by ‘becoming used to the terms of actual freedom gradually’? Do you mean that you are successful in gradually translating the terms of Actual Freedom into your existing belief-system, into your spiritual experiences and into what you have heard Rajneesh talk about? That you replace ‘satori’ with ‘PCE’ – like No 5 did – and ‘happy and harmless’ with ‘feeling groovy’ or ‘blissed out’? Or do you mean that you take one of the terms, say ‘happy and harmless’, look up the words in the
dictionary, read what Richard, Peter and I have written about being actually happy (which by definition includes being completely harmless), and
then sort out for yourself in which situations you not are happy and harmless and why. The Without investigation as to what it is that we are saying, all communication is useless, it won’t lead anywhere and you will just replace the word ‘chewing-gum’ for ‘rubber boots’ and think it means the same thing. * 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. RESPONDENT: Here I don’t agree with you. I am watching my desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness originated by thinking processes and then I find myself not controlled by them (desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness). VINEETO: ‘Watching’ is a spiritual term and means that you dis-associate yourself from these particular feelings (which spiritual people insist on calling thoughts), and in an imaginary process you move your identity away from those feelings to a realm where ‘you are not your feelings’. Consequently, from that imaginary realm of ‘being’, you imagine that you are ‘not controlled by them’. This has nothing to do with actually getting rid of those feelings, and it is proven by the fact that feelings keep appearing again and again. To actually, and permanently, get rid of ‘desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness’ one has to investigate into the root cause of those feelings and discover the instinctual passions from where they keep arising. This means dismantling one’s identity – because ‘I’ am my feelings and instincts – and results in a process of ‘self’-immolation. The very existence of the ‘self’ is being investigated and threatened by the questioning of emotions and feelings, and it is not something everyone is ready to undertake. It is so much easier to imagine that one is not those ‘desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness’, and as such one keeps the head in the clouds and the dirt under the carpet. * VINEETO: I think here you are applying your ideal of love rather than what is actually happening. I remember the discourses in Poona, where every night there was a hushed competition who would sit closest to the Master, who would get a look from him or even be talked about. There was a tough competition going on – far from happy and harmless. And Rajneesh was as much part of that game as us, his disciples. He would stir the fire of competition, fancy some and neglect others, while all the while telling us to drop desire. Now, that the Master is dead, ‘spread all over Existence’, it is much easier to dream of his Un-conditional Love, and that one day you would attain it. The daily check on reality is but nil. But it is all ‘in the head’ or in the feeling, ‘spirit’-ual, it is not actuality. RESPONDENT: As I said before, I think this is not my case. VINEETO: Could you explain further, why you ‘think this is not [your] case’? Did you check your thinking with the actual fact, ie what particular improvement a certain advice of Rajneesh has brought to your daily life? Did you inquire into the nature of your feelings for Rajneesh to find out which feelings and passions, hopes and desires lay behind the dream of ‘unconditional love’? When I dared to investigate into the devotional relationship that I had to ‘the Master of Masters’ I found several instinctual passions rampantly operating:
I had to investigate all of those underlying instinctual passions first before I could make a definitive and honest assessment about my relationship to Rajneesh. Well, that investigation proved to be the ending of my love, my devotion and my dependence on the Indian philosophy professor who thought he was God and who had gathered thousands of people around him who still think he is God. * VINEETO: Being happy and harmless is not a coating over one’s grotty ‘self’, over the Human Condition in us. Being happy and harmless is only possible when you actively remove the feelings, emotions and instinctual passions that the ‘self’ consists of – what then remains is a happy and harmless human being. What remains is the delight of a perfect universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being. RESPONDENT: Here I have a question. As I said I am now experiencing being happy and harmless as feelings. This is my ‘good’ feelings. And I don’t understand the difference between this ‘good’ feelings and feeling good which is used at asking ‘how are you experiencing this moment of being alive’ Is this the difference between virtual freedom and actual freedom? I want to hear around these points from anyone. VINEETO: The ‘difference between the good feelings and feeling good’ is the difference between hanging on to love and devotion as one’s highest goal (good feelings) and questioning everything that is an hindrance to being actually happy and harmless (feeling good), as in factually, in thought, feeling and deed, with everybody around you, even your wife and your children, your boss and your girlfriend. Feeling good is the first step to feeling happy, then being happy, as in gradually becoming free of malice and sorrow. To understand the difference is only difficult when you make a philosophy out of it, it is not difficult when you investigate into your being sad and angry. Being happy and harmless is not a feeling. Being harmless is being without any feelings of annoyance, anger, impatience, competitiveness, ambition, being insulted, wanting to hurt or get back at someone, craving for attention, etc. When all those emotions and feelings and their underlying instinctual passions have been investigated and understood, and are consequently eliminated, then you are harmless. Feeling harmless sounds very nice, but it is just a cheap cop-out without having to do something about one’s Human Condition. The same applies to ‘feeling happy’. You can feel happy for a particular reason, something worked out fine, some feared event did not happen, someone said he or she loved you, etc. But to be happy you have to get rid of everything that makes you unhappy, sad, lonely, terrified, angry, compassionate, guilty, restless, bored, tired, resistant, resentful, etc., in short, your very ‘self’. To be happy you have to ‘self’-immolate, because all you are made of are your emotions, feelings, beliefs and instinctual passions. The ‘difference between virtual freedom and actual freedom’ is the difference between being happy and harmless 99% of the time, having a perfectly cleaned up ‘self’ which only pops its ugly head up on rare occasions (virtual freedom), and having no ‘self’ at all (actual freedom). In Actual Freedom you won’t even be capable of having a feeling, even if your life depended on it. In Actual Freedom ‘you’ have disappeared completely. You said in your letter to Alan: RESPONDENT to Alan: I am for being here and now with this life in this body. <snip> My priority here is to get my own Actual Freedom. VINEETO: As your ‘priority is to get [your] own Actual Freedom’, these differences are of great importance. By simply feeling happy or feeling harmless you will stay in the realm of imagination and never get to the actual living of freedom from the Human Condition. Removing what makes you unhappy or harmful to others is the first step to an actual (as opposed to imaginary) freedom.
VINEETO: You can find a description of my experience in RESPONDENT: I tried to access to this URL but failed. happy and harmless VINEETO: So, happily and harmlessly, you found a little loop-hole, a mistake, did you? As for the failed link, just in case that it would not work, I gave the full description of how you can find it on our web-site: www.actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/vineeto/list-c/c-corr12a.htm#Itallstarted But if you are not even getting this far in your investigation, how do you ever want to find out about the Human Condition in you? Because to investigate the tricks and cunning of one’s lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning entity one will need all the intent and determination one can muster. So, I am curious, if you find it. Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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