RESPONDENT: BLANK MESSAGE FROM ...

VINEETO: Very interesting message. Do you have something more to tell, maybe?

I am curious to hear.

25.4.1999

RESPONDENT: Yes you have my permission to answer me on the Actual Freedom List. Can you explain to me how it works. I’m a member.

VINEETO: Welcome to the Actual Freedom list. I am curious how you found the web-sites? You ask how it works? You send your mail to the list, maybe with the name of the addressee in the subject-line and send it to the list: actualfreedom@listbot.com. From their computer your mail is then sent to all participants. Usually the person you have written to replies but sometimes others are tickled to join the conversation. When you click on the subscribe-button, you can also get to the archives and find out more about what has been written lately.

The purpose of this list is to have a sincere discussion about life, the universe and what it is to be a human being and to share our experiences in order to understand, and become free, of the Human Condition of malice and sorrow. Actual Freedom is a new, non-spiritual down-to-earth freedom and it is not an easy thing to grasp, because all of the so-called freedoms and solutions to the Human Condition offered up to now have been philosophical and/or spiritual.

RESPONDENT: That was a very quick message from you about my blank message. Yes I have something to tell you. I’m Dutch so if I make some mistakes in the English language you know what’s the cause of it. I found the web-page of the actual freedom trust some while ago. There was indeed a message of great importance. Everybody has got it 180 degrees wrong! I am a seeker, I admit. I’m not that experienced as you and Peter and some others. But for instance I read a great deal of the Jiddu Krishnamurti-writings, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Alan Watts, Jean Klein, Adi Da and more of that kind. The only thing I got out of it was pure frustration about the fact that I couldn’t ‘get’ what they got. Call it ignorance or whatever. I think that if one does not deal with this kind of stuff one can be (psychologically) damaged. If I look back over time, I can really say that my life (will) slipped through my hands.

VINEETO: I think what you describe about your search and your life are very valuable ingredients for you to be vitally interested in Actual Freedom. Otherwise how could you be attracted by or understand the sentence ‘Everybody has got it 180 degrees wrong’? One has to have personal experience about the peddlers of snake oil, the gurus, to suspect that they are only peddlers of snake oil. And one has to have enough confidence to doubt that it is, in fact, enlightenment and the spiritual teachings that are wrong and that it is not the fault of the individual seeker. This insidious belief that the seeker is always wrong has kept the gurus in power over millennia.

It is a great moment when one turns around for the first time and questions the revered wisdom of the ages; the wisdom one has chased all one’s life.

• ‘How come it does not work?’
• ‘How come only so very few people ‘get’ it?’
• ‘How come every enlightened one has only disciples and cannot behave like a normal human being?’
• ‘How come none of the enlightened ones lives with a partner in peace, harmony and equity?’
• ‘How come after 3000 years of spiritual teachings there is still no peace on earth?’
• ‘How come that the teachings have proved to be unliveable, even by the teachers?’

... there are many more questions and the spiritual world fails to provide any satisfying and successful answers. Taking this into consideration, then it starts to make sense – as Richard has discovered by questioning his own state of enlightenment – that getting rid of the ego is only half the job and, in fact, creates more havoc than benefit. The real culprit is the ‘soul’, all our feelings, emotions, passionate beliefs and instinctual driven behaviour that is inherent in all human beings. We call it the Human Condition.

RESPONDENT: If you start to think that everything is an illusion, you give away your control over your life. I got the feeling I have. In Richard’s journal he tells something similar, he had to fight to get his will back working. And then I found you guys. Well, to come short, I’ve ‘practised’ with the method of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ for about a month now. It’s to short to say if there is ‘something happening.’ If you have something to recommend please do. I’m determined to go on, that’s for sure. Sorry I talk so much about myself but that’s the only way to give an image of my ‘reality’. You know what’s the worst one can do: to say that you can be happy all the time and then lead people on a road to nowhere by talking Chinese. As if happiness is only for the ‘wise and intelligent people.’ I’m not stupid but I don’t understand Ramana Maharshi at all.

VINEETO: Your last sentence I enjoyed the most. Yes, it needs people to be bold enough to stand up to the gods and gurus and expose them for the frauds they are. Richard says they have feet of clay because they did not dare to go all the way and eliminate all of their identity instead of only getting rid of the ego. Consequently their identity shifts from ego to soul and is blown up into insane proportions.

It took me at least 6 months to question and take apart all my dearly held beliefs, reverence, love, devotion and hope that I had towards the Master (Rajneesh), because admitting that the master was wrong then made me a fool to have followed him. But what a liberation and relief when I understood the whole intricate net of the master-disciple-relationship, when I saw through the half-truths and mysteries, the fairy-stories and Eastern gobble-de-gook. What a freedom now to think for myself, to use my intelligence freed of fear and hope, and to walk upright for the first time in my life – beholden to no one.

I am curious to hear more about ‘how you are experiencing this moment of being alive’. Of course, you have to talk about yourself, how else to have a sensible discussion about how it is for you to be a human being? I guess you have found the page on that How to Become Free from the Human Condition with all the related links of correspondences. Peter wrote to No 3 a very simple example of how to start examining your feelings that keep you from being happy and harmless ... and there is much much more ...

Richard had a long correspondence with someone who was convinced that everything is but an illusion. You might find it interesting, enlivening and amusing to see how Richard dismantled each of his illusionary arguments: Richard, List B, No. 22.

RESPONDENT: Sincere greetings.

VINEETO: And to you, No 15. It is a pleasure talking to you.

8.5.1999

VINEETO: Good to hear from you. So you have been reading the web-sites and experimenting enough to come up with some very precise questions.

First, it is good to get some method in one’s way of thinking. When I met Richard, this is what I remember as one of the first things we talked about – how to think, contemplate and inquire in a way that there is some result. He told me that it is useful to always come back to the question or topic from where I started and not – as our untrained brains tend to do – get lost in the different alleys and branches of speculation, imagination or irrelevant side-issues. Particularly when the subject is emotionally challenging, when a dearly-held belief is questioned and when fear arises, we are usually very quick in changing the subject and steering away from the ‘dangerous’ area. But when investigating the Human Condition in oneself, there will be lots of ‘dangerous’ areas of contemplation, there will be beliefs to be dismantled and emotions to unveil. That’s the whole purpose of the investigation in the first place, to discover the underlying beliefs and instinctual passions of a certain behaviour or emotional reaction, to uncover and eliminate one’s very ‘self’.

So, you made a good start with listing your queries. I will play the librarian and give you directions where you will find Richard’s, Peter’s or my writing and correspondence on the topic. You wrote:

RESPONDENT: Here are some questions that I have:

• What are the questions if you actively challenge your beliefs, feelings, emotions and instincts. How to deal with them. How can you ‘see’ through them all. If one has dismantled one belief then all the others can be too, in the same way, or not?

VINEETO: The main question, that works for all of the Human Condition is ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ We composed a whole page, called ‘How to Become Free of the Human Condition’ on the topic with many links of writing and correspondence of how to apply this ongoing question in your daily life.

I started with the understanding that it is only me who I can change, and that very understanding applies to everybody I meet, live with, work with and to the world at large. So, if anything in the day evoked an emotional reaction, I would start digging around and look for the cause in me, what belief, feeling and instinctual passion caused me to feel annoyed, fearful, angry, righteous, insecure, disgusted, loving, elusive, tired, etc.

The first beliefs that I had to investigate were about male and female conditioning, my female identity, the belief in the ‘right to be emotional’, the ‘truth’ of intuition etc. Along with gender-issues came the problem of believing or fighting a supposed authority, which had been an emotionally charged topic since my early years.

Usually under every emotional reaction I would find a firmly held belief in some ‘truth’ which I then, in due course, questioned and replaced with actual facts, investigated through reading, contemplating or talking with Peter and Richard, instead of simply taking on what others had told me to believe. It can sometimes be a fascinating and sometimes be a frightening adventure, after all, it is your very identity that you are taking apart, who you believe and feel yourself to be.

When one belief was seen in its complexity with all its implications on various areas in my life, when I understood it to be merely a passionate thought and not factual, this belief disappeared. It’s like the fairy story of Sinterclaas (or Father Christmas) – once you know that he is only the neighbour with a false beard, the whole myth falls to pieces and you are never able to believe it again. But each belief has to be investigated on its own ... there is not a mathematical magic formula that deletes them all at once. Eventually you see through the whole lot – and what a relief and liberation that is!

RESPONDENT:

• I can’t remember a PCE, is that a problem.

VINEETO: There is another topic-page on Pure Consciousness Experiences, that I have put together. It contains descriptions and definitions of PCEs, how to recognize a PCE and distinguish it from an Altered State of Consciousness, and suggestions of how to induce a PCE.

I myself didn’t have a PCE until four month of intense investigations into actual freedom, but I had enough understanding that the old solutions didn’t work and I had the intent to investigate something new.

However, to become actually free it is very helpful, and eventually vital, to remember a PCE in order for you to have clear experiences of the freedom that you are aiming for. But don’t let the worry of not remembering one right now spoil your enjoyment of the moment or diminish the intent of your investigation into your emotions and beliefs. Sooner or later, if you are sincerely, honestly and persistently inquiring, a PCE will sneak up on you, possibly after you have seen through a particularly ‘dense’ belief. When it happens, it is good to look out for the ‘good’ emotions of gratefulness, bliss, love and beauty so they do not to take over, thus inviting the ‘self’ back in and destroying the purity of the peak experience.

RESPONDENT:

• I read many insights from other people. I got the feeling that they don’t come up with me spontaneously. Is this a matter of patience?

VINEETO: The so-called insights of the spiritual and psychic world are nothing but passionate fantasies, picked up intuitively from Ancient Wisdom (Akashic Records). Once someone has removed himself from the real world through meditation and other spiritual practice, imagination can run riot. So, you can consider yourself lucky not to have had those spiritual insights. You must be a reasonably practical and down-to-earth person despite your years of spiritual search.

The insights that happen when one starts investigating into the Human Condition are another matter, and they usually don’t come spontaneously. They are the result of sincere and persistent inquiry into the facts of a particular situation until those facts become blindingly obvious. Take the belief in God or Existence or whatever other name He goes by. Every single fact points to that God does not exist in actuality as verifiable by the senses, and that ‘He’ is but a mere collectively produced projection of a fearful humanity. Take away the fear and it becomes so obvious – you would not even call it an insight, it is simply an acknowledgment of the case. But in order to see it so clearly, it takes a persistent digging into one’s beliefs – and fears – to dare to undertake an investigation that people regard as blasphemous and iconoclastic. The main tricks are not to let anything stop you from finding out the facts, and never to settle for second best.

RESPONDENT:

• I got the feeling that I influence my observations on myself, that I can steer them anyway I like. I don’t really know what is happening.

VINEETO: Can you describe a bit more in detail how you influence your observations on yourself?

I know, that when I get close to a discovery, I sometimes become fearful and try to avoid the next step. But then my intent always catches up with me and in the end I cannot cheat myself or settle for second best. Once you find the thrilling aspect of fear, you can ride on the thrill and come out the other end, free of yet another feeling, emotion or belief...

RESPONDENT:

• Is there a method of observation?

VINEETO: For me, the only method is to move from speculation to facts, from beliefs to facts, from emotional reaction to considering the silly and the sensible options. What is keeping me from being happy and harmless now, here, in this very moment of being alive? If I am not happy, there is always an observation to be done.

RESPONDENT:

• Is it possible for people for whom ‘the method’ works to write a guide for other people?

VINEETO: Peter and I have done nothing else ever since we found out that the method works. The correspondence on ‘Mailing List C’, both from Peter and myself, is mainly dealing with all kinds of objections to being happy and harmless. You may find some of your own fears and objections answered when browsing through. The correspondence on the Actual Freedom mailing list is more a description of how to do it, what traps to avoid, what fears may come up and what discoveries we found on the way. But our writing can only be a guide in a very loose way because everyone has to discover his or her own freedom and the obstacles for this freedom for themselves. Everyone may have slightly different beliefs, objections, reactions and a slightly different social conditioning – and their own order of what to tackle first.

Richards writings and his correspondence are a veritable goldmine of information on Actual Freedom. He is dismantling all kinds of spiritual belief systems as well as describing the delights of daily life in Actual Freedom. Since you found us through searching for Krishnamurti you might be interested to know that Richard had extensive correspondence with the Krishnamurti-list for a year and is still writing on and off.

RESPONDENT: For the brain works the same in all human beings. Is it not the question: How does the brain work at this very moment?

VINEETO: The brain is a strange thing: Everybody comes into the world with the brain already wired with the instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, which are overlaid by a social identity, imposed on us in the childhood years. Here is a definition of the Human Condition from the Library:

Peter: The Human Condition is that set of beliefs, conditionings and instincts that forms the habitual and neuro-biological program by which human beings currently operate and have done so, with few significant changes, ever since the first recorded civilizations. It can be likened to the ‘rules of the game’, defining the parameters and limits of what it is to be a human being that have been established and embellished, over tens of thousands of years. These rules ‘set in concrete’ both our instinct-based behaviour and the overlaying beliefs that form our gender, tribal, spirit-ual and world concepts.

Thus it is established that ‘we are the way we are, because this is the way we are’ and further – ‘this is the way we will always be, because this is the way we have always been’ – simply translated as ‘You can’t change Human Nature’. Bitter experience of continuous failure to curb instinctual animal fear and aggression, combined with the continual failure of morals , ethics and ideals has beget either cynical acceptance or fanciful denial as the prime mechanisms of coping with the Human Condition.

The very base of the ‘rules of the game’ that encodes and enshrines the Human Condition is what is known as Ancient Wisdom – that set of beliefs, myths, morals, ethics and psittacisms that has been passed on from generation to generation and venerated as the inviolate essence of what it is to be human. In the days of the ancients, the manifestations of instinctual fear and aggression were seen as being caused by evil spirits possessing the body and were appeased or exorcised by reverence, worship or sacrifice to the good spirits or Gods. There was no knowledge or understanding of the role that instincts play in human behaviour, as there is today. The imposition by enticement or discipline of a tribal role or social identity was a survival necessity both for the group and individual. Nowadays this same social conditioning can clearly be seen as creating and perpetuating the separate, distinct war-mongering groups of the past, be they ethnic, territorial or religious based. Thus the Human Condition is built upon an archaic and inane set of ethics, morals, beliefs and false assumptions that have no relevance at all in this modern world. No wonder there is no solution to the human dilemma of malice and sorrow, given that we fervently insist on looking for a solution within the Human Condition – and then base our search for solutions on the wisdom and knowledge of our primordial ancestors.

The only way to become free from the Human Condition is to facilitate and actualize an end to both one’s social identity and one’s instinctual based ‘self ’. The elimination of the ‘identity’ in its entirety is simultaneously the demise of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ within oneself. Then ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ vanish forever along with the dissolution of the psyche itself ... that is the only place where they can live in. Because there is neither good nor evil in the actual world of sensual delight – where I live as this flesh and blood body – one lives freely in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are, free of the Human Condition of malice and sorrow. The Actual Freedom Trust Library

Each single emotion, feeling, belief or instinct influences the way you think. When you say ‘the brain works the same in all human beings’ then it is the Human Condition in the brain that works the same in all human beings. But sincere inquiry, intent and contemplation can set a process in motion of un-wiring the brain so that one’s native intelligence can start functioning for the very first time. So the question that worked for me was to thoroughly and scientifically investigate into my feelings, emotions and beliefs that were hindering the free-flowing intelligent functioning of the brain like dams, rocks and mud are hindering the flow of a river. One has to remove the dams and the big rocks one by one – once the brain is freed to a certain degree, the removal becomes easier and turns into a delightful and thrilling adventure.

RESPONDENT: I’d like a personal view from you over these matters. It is all a little bit dark for me right now. I haven’t got a kind of a structure in my investigations and my questions. I hope that will change along the way.

VINEETO: Peter has written to No. 3 a good description of how to start the investigation. But it is inevitable, when you say ‘it is all a bit dark for [you] right now.’ Actual Freedom lies, in fact, 180 degrees in the opposite direction to everything that we have been programmed to believe as true for decades. And not only our generation but human beings for millennia have been programmed with the Human Condition – and therefore it takes a fair amount of reading to slowly get a grip and an understanding of what Actual Freedom is all about.

The whole journey to Actual Freedom basically consists of reading, contemplating, talking about one’s queries and discoveries, experimenting for oneself, digging into one’s psyche, reading again, comparing notes, having a realisation, reading again and so on. It is purely an individual’s search for an actual (not imaginary or theoretical) freedom that each of us does on our own, some passing on log-books for people who come after us.

I remember when I understood the word ‘spirit-ual’ for the first time. I had been with Peter for about 2 month and he had continuously questioned the spiritual teachers, the spiritual approach, the spiritual world. At the time I was still a convinced disciple of Rajneesh and could not understand his ‘obsession’, as I thought of it then, against the spiritual. Suddenly, one evening, I ‘got’ it – ‘spiritual’ means invented by the spirit, i.e. a fantasy, a imagination, a feeling, but not experienced by the physical senses. Up until then, for me, ‘spiritual’ had simply meant aspiring for the highest value, the ‘good’, enlightenment, Moksha. But that evening I understood its spirit-ual nature, non-actual by its very definition. It was one of my first break-throughs from the ‘dark’ confusion and widened the crack in the door to investigate further, overcoming my ‘spiritual’ objections.

The Actual World is the world of people, things and events, experienced as a sensate and reflective physical body and brain.

Because of the Human Condition we experience this actual world as overlaid and distorted by feelings, emotions, beliefs, intuition, imagination and theories – a world that we regard as ‘real’ but that is not actual.

The ‘real’ world and the actual world are two completely different worlds.

In order to be free, you step out of the real world (of the Human Condition) into the actual world and leave your ‘self’ behind where ‘you’ belong. (See Richard’s printable poster).

It is not a surprise that everything seems topsy-turvy to you – it is. It is like having done a head-stand all your life and starting to walk upright...

RESPONDENT: You were curious how I did find the web-sites. A search-engine and the word to find was ‘Krishnamurti’. So I arrived at the page of ‘links for background-information’. From there on I got to your homepage and further.

VINEETO: I am glad you found us and got intrigued, and I hope to have added some clarity in answering your questions. You are very welcome to ‘pick my brains’ or tell your story any time. I thoroughly enjoy our conversation.

22.6.1999

VINEETO: Good to hear from you.

I hear there has been a pretty hot summer over in Europe. Here in Australia it is full Winter, which means temperatures that I know from Germany as being spring and autumn, but cold enough to have the heater running half the day and all evening. The rainy season has more or less finished and the days are sparkling sunny, with shiny leaves and these wonderful psychedelic colours at sunset – pink and light blue in the East and peach, yellow, lead-blue and orange in the West. They are all in pastel except when there is a cloudy sunset and the whole sky seems to be on fire in bright red-orange, purple and dark blue.

Both Peter and I have got new monitors with 17-inch screens, brightly humming away, exotic fish swimming on the screen as a screensaver. I don’t know how they save the screen, maybe by eating away the ‘screen-bugs’ like other fish eat algae. It is so much more fun sitting at the computer and looking at this crisp picture – my old screen was losing its sharpness day by day so that I thought I was slowly going blind. At the same time we re-formatted our computers, i.e. wiped the whole hard disk clean and started from scratch. That was surely a day of adventure! Richard, the computer wizard, had fun with us for 8 hours, re-loading the new programs (Office 2000) and fiddling with the connections to get it all going again. I lost a few files, which I forgot to save, but that is par for the course. Several things we had to do twice because we didn’t get it right the first time. It was so much fun finding out how to do it so that the computer does the right thing in the end. It is no small job but it cleans up the hard drive and everything works so much smoother. Now it takes some time to get used to the new set of programs, FrontPage has a few quirks, which I am not yet familiar with and so does the Outlook e-mail program. But slowly, slowly, I find my way through all the options and formats, properties and tool bars, re-establish the address book and the personalized settings. We just don’t yet know how to put me back online, so I am receiving and mailing everything through Peter’s computer at the moment. (Editor’s note: The screensaver is no longer available due to its incompatibility with Windows 8)

Now to your questions –

RESPONDENT: Long time, no read. I’m wrestling with some questions about religion. I can understand the facts that are against any form of religion = (belief). I know God = religion = war, separation and all that comes with it. I know on a personal basis that religion (belief) feeling guilty, taboos, = struggle and loss of freedom. Intellectually I do understand that any kind of religion doesn’t work. That also means no religion, no god to believe in.

VINEETO: In my experience it is one thing to understand intellectually the personal facts and global consequences of believing in god and religion, and it is another step to actualize this understanding in my life. It is already a daring step to question the sensible-ness of all the religions, of the (imaginary) existence of God and the oh so holy belief in a ‘higher entity’ running the show and rewarding or punishing us for good or bad deeds. It is vital to gather your own information – facts and figures, so to speak – in order to make it blindingly obvious how much harm this belief in an absolute authority and an eternal soul has caused throughout human history. Once you have enough information for a ‘prima facie case’ then you can proceed with investigating what it is that still makes you want to believe in a Messiah, a Guru, Ancient Wisdom or Ancient Ethics.

In my own experience, a mere intellectual understanding was only the beginning of my investigation and it proved insufficient to get rid of guilt, fear, insecurity, taboos or the psychological need to rely on an ultimate authority. To eliminate the belief itself, in my case the belief in the superiority of an enlightened master, I had to dig deep into my psyche, examine the admiration, love and need to belong, investigate the source of the emotions and find the underlying passionate conviction. A great part of this conviction was made up of cultural conditioning (Christianity and Western ethics) as well as later acquired beliefs, such as the bundle of Eastern mystical beliefs. In questioning the validity and sensibility of all these morals and rules, beliefs and superstitions, I discovered an even deeper layer – my need to belong to a group, a religion, a tribe. I discovered the need to have a personal idol who I admired, worshipped, sought advice from (in books, Osho’s discourses or imagined conversations), who gave me reassurance and a feeling of ‘doing the right thing’. I knew ‘somehow’ that all this didn’t work very well – it produced neither personal happiness nor peace at large – but I was too scared not to have the guidance from those ‘authority’ figures.

RESPONDENT: But I wonder where a figure like Jesus does or doesn’t fit in. What is the message? How about the bible? Is there nothing true about it? Are there only fairytales in it? I mean is there nothing practical to get from?

VINEETO: This is ‘where a figure like Jesus does fit in’. He, exactly like all the other Gurus and Messiahs, provides us with a set of messy guidelines to live your life by. These guidelines, enforced by the greed for heaven and fear of hell, are meant to protect us from the consequences of our innate animal instincts. They do keep a lid on things, but when push comes to shove, those guidelines always fail. Covering up loneliness with love, sorrow with compassion and anger with worship is, when you take stock, a messy job. But once you apply ‘silly’ and ‘sensible’ rather than ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ you will notice that it works, that you can rely on your observation and intelligence rather than on the atavistic belief system of ancient fools and Dead White Men. The trick is to get rid of the problem, the whole ‘self’, instead of attempting to repress or transcend the instinctual passions.

Jesus was, after all, just a Jewish carpenter with a mental aberration, thinking he was the only begotten Son of God. The collected myths around Jesus make so little sense that one should be surprised they have survived this long. A virgin birth and walking on water – how more non-actual can one get! If you like, you can look at an in-depth research that someone has undertaken to prove that all the mystical features attributed to Jesus are the same for Krishna and fourteen other major saviours of Mankind. It is a big document, but in skimming through you might get picture that Jesus was a mystical character and not an actual person, born at year zero. The myth about him is nothing but an expression of the collective need for a certified saviour, and one can find his type mirrored in every major religion of the world.

This need is part and parcel of our instinctual heritage of fear and aggression, nurture and desire, and harks back to the time when early humans worshipped to appease the powerful forces of nature and the planet-gods in the sky. In order to dismantle this instinctual heritage we actualists investigate our beliefs, feelings, emotions and instincts. And none of the ‘saviours’ and ‘wise men’ has even mentioned the possibility of getting rid of this instinctual self. They all got stuck in the grand and glorious ‘warm fuzzy feeling’ of being one with god, one with everything and having love for all. That this love for all and feeling one with everything hasn’t produced the solution to eliminating malice and sorrow is blindingly obvious when one dares to acknowledge the facts of history and one’s personal fleeting and fickle happiness and harmlessness.

RESPONDENT: Or was it at that moment the best that one could get.

I hope you know what I mean.

VINEETO: It has been considered the best, because one would feel better hanging out with enlightened people, god’s messengers or just with their ‘holy’ words. Religion, mysticism and spirituality are nothing but an escape from the ‘oh so terrible’ life on planet earth. One can escape from the hardships of life by contemplating divine love, by imagining a protective and loving god, by believing in a reward after death. But why not become happy and harmless – then you won’t need any synthetic consolation of god’s love or life after death. Again, there is a third alternative – getting rid of the problem instead of trying – and failing – to solve it by spiritual or moral means.

When, for the first time, I not only contemplated but also really understood that an actual physical infinite universe has no physical place for god who, by definition, resides outside of the universe, it blew my whole belief of a higher force to pieces. It then became all too obvious how many other beliefs were feeding from this one imaginary and passionate assumption that there is something ‘higher’ than human beings that is running the show. Bang, here I was, suddenly realizing that I was all by myself, alone and lonely, frightened and unprotected, but free of that imagined authority that had controlled my life. For an hour I experienced in a pure consciousness experience the delicious perfection of this purely physical, utterly un-spiritual universe. I delighted in my autonomous intelligence, the freedom to sort out my life all by myself and for myself and experienced the awareness of this marvellous, magnificent physical universe. I have written about it a year ago:

[Vineeto]: Finally one evening, when talking and musing about the universe, I fully comprehended that this physical universe is actually infinite. The universe being without boundaries or an edge means that it is impossible, practically, for God to exist. In order to have created the universe or to be in control of it God would have to exist outside of it – and there is no outside! This insight hit me like a thunderbolt. My fear of God and of his representatives collapsed and lost its very substance by this obvious realization In fact, there can be no one outside of this infinite universe who is pulling the strings of punishment and reward, heaven and hell – or, according to Eastern tradition, granting enlightenment or leaving me with the eternal karma of endless lives in misery.

This insight presupposes, of course, that there is no place other than the physical universe, no celestial, mystical realm where gods and ghosts exist. It also implies that there is no life before or after death and that the body simply dies when it dies. I needed quite some courage to face and accept this simple fact – to give up all beliefs in an after-life or a ‘spirit-life’. But I could easily observe that as soon as I gave up the idea of any imaginary existence other than the tangible, physical universe, everything, which had seemed so complicated and impossible to understand became graspable, evident, obvious and imminently clear.

When the enormous consequence and implication of slipping out of this insidious belief in any God or Higher Being dawned on me, I was at the same time free of anybody’s authority. I was free of the fear that had been spoiling every relationship with every man in my life: father, brothers, male friends and boyfriends, employers, teachers and Master.

Now I am my own authority, deciding what is silly and sensible, using the common and practical intelligence of the human brain. I am responsible for every action in my life and I can acknowledge that now. However, this means that from now on I cannot blame anybody for making me jealous, miserable, grumpy, afraid, angry or frustrated over any petty issue. Now there is no more excuse, no more hiding place. They are my reactions and my behaviour, which I have to face and change in order to be free. A Bit of Vineeto

Now I am responsible for my life and for my life only – without a belief in any bodiless existence before birth or after death. I am neither beholden to any higher authority, nor to any man-made unliveable morals or ethics. And I am free from guilt and the fear of god’s wrath – a fear that became quite apparent when I struggled to ditch the belief in god, heaven and hell.

RESPONDENT: But I wonder were a figure like Jesus does or doesn’t fit in. What is the message? How about the bible? Is there nothing true about it? Are there only fairytales in it? I mean is there nothing practical to get from.

VINEETO: Is there anything practical that you get from the bible? Does it give you something that works in your life, something that makes you happy and harmless, reliably, all the time, in every situation? Are the stories and rules sensible or are they silly? Are they applicable? Have they brought peace for humankind, or at least for Christians?

For me, where it starts is that all these mystical tales require believing – an imaginary god-father, a miracle-working ancient prophet, an ascension to heaven, etc., etc. And then it begs the question why do I feel the need to believe something? What hinders me from acknowledging the facts and living my life accordingly? What makes me hold on to something that I consider silly? Then the investigation becomes really interesting...

It is great to have you joining the discussion. Let me know what you make of it all.

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Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

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