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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 16
VINEETO: Hi, I just woke up from one of those wonderful light after-dinner naps and the memory is still so remarkably fresh that I thought of describing this little PCE to you. It was fascinating and delightful to have thoughts and half-thoughts while drifting in and out of sleep like in and out of water and at the same time the brain was aware of itself being half asleep and doing its fluid thinking. What an extraordinary thing our human brain is, I thought while dreaming along, that it can unwind its thoughts from the day, be aware of it at the same time and this all while I am on the couch taking a nap, and listening to Peter clicking away on the keyboard! Such a nap beats any sort of meditation by a country mile! RESPONDENT: I have taken to actual freedom like a duck to water. I relate to it very well. I had a PCE from what Richard said about living as the senses and this got my interest in actual freedom. I have since taken Richard’s suggestion to live with the question: ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and it is producing remarkable results. VINEETO: Welcome to the Actual Freedom List. It is great to see a ‘duck taking to water’, as you say. As you go along you will find that the method is not only devastatingly simple, but also ruthlessly effective. I have been ‘at it’ for nearly 3 years now and I can recognize neither the old Vineeto nor the life that I used to live compared to what I am enjoying now. Neither beliefs nor instinctual passions disappear on their own, if they would, every body would be free today. For me, when beliefs and emotions surfaced and became obvious in the light of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ I dealt with them as they appeared. Lots of my beliefs had been disguised as truths and firm convictions, of course. It has been amazing to see one ‘Empire State Building’ of sturdy conviction tumble after the other, and then to discover each time again – after recovery from the shock – that the actual world is a safe and delightful place. So it will be that the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ not only has ‘an amazing quietening effect on the mind’, as you said to No. 3, but will also be an effective tool for identity-shaking and identity-blowing discoveries and insights into the nature of the Human Condition. This is all par for the course of becoming free from the Human Condition, from ‘who’ we think and feel we are. RESPONDENT: I am not clear on how one eliminates the instincts. Does this happen on its own or is there something that ‘I’ need to do? VINEETO: As for eliminating instincts, I found that the method works as effectively for discovering, experiencing, investigating and eliminating instincts as it does for investigating the beliefs, morals, ethics and values that shape our social identity. Personally, I had to get rid of my moral, ethical and spiritual restrictions first in order to be able to admit to, acknowledge and recognize the ‘gross’ instinctual passions that lie at the core of my ‘self’. First I had to question my ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, before I was able to recognize and investigate my own raw survival instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. A week ago I discovered in a National Geographic magazine from 1989 an article from Jane Goodall about the life of chimpanzees in the wild. She observed them over years and describes in detail their social behaviour. I found the article very relevant to the Human Condition. Being busy with the topic for a few days gave me plenty of time to ponder over the remarkable similarity between humans and chimps, which are our closest genetic cousins with their DNA-structure being 98% identical to humans. One night the realization hit that at ‘my’ core that ‘I’ am the same makeup as a chimp, an instinctually driven creature, but fortunately equipped with the capability of self-awareness. I can now see that the instinctual program in humans is no different to the instinctual survival program of chimps or gorillas. The understanding has been stunning, to say the least. I suddenly saw how simple it all is. ‘Me’, the chimpanzee, ‘me’, the instinctual survival program is the very core of my identity. This is what has to die. Guided by pure intent and self-awareness I have removed the imprinted ethics and morals of my social and spiritual identity that kept the lid on those primary instinctual passions, and now I am able to see those bare instincts operating in me. Neither expressing nor repressing any emotions really does the trick and sets the magic in motion that carries me through again into the actual world of delight and perfection. Does this answer some of your question? Further, there is a plethora of writing on our website, you can either go to the
VINEETO: Thank you for your post. Good to hear that you like the web-site. It is such a gold-mine of information, the only question is where to start reading, isn’t it? * I just woke up from one of those wonderful light after-dinner naps and the memory is still so remarkably fresh that I thought of describing this little PCE to you. It was fascinating and delightful to have thoughts and half-thoughts while drifting in and out of sleep like in and out of water and at the same time the brain was aware of itself being half asleep and doing its fluid thinking. What an extraordinary thing our human brain is, I thought while dreaming along, that it can unwind its thoughts from the day, be aware of it at the same time and this all while I am on the couch taking a nap, and listening to Peter clicking away on the keyboard! Such a nap beats any sort of meditation by a country mile! RESPONDENT: I agree, there is nothing like a good nap. VINEETO: I did not talk about just having a good nap. I was trying to describe to you a pure consciousness experience that happened while I was in that hypnogogic state where one is asleep and aware of being asleep at the same time. From this utter relaxation it is very easy to watch the brain thinking – or, as Richard put it:
* RESPONDENT: I understand the part about neither expressing or repressing the emotions. As I stated above I’m trying to actually understand what it is to be intimate with the instincts. This may be what I have been calling the thing itself which is what’s left when I stay with the feeling without naming it. VINEETO: ‘Neither expression or repression emotions’ is not a question of ‘not naming’ a feeling. I personally found it very important to name, distinguish, judge, discriminate, evaluate and investigate each feeling and what has triggered it, in order to get to the source of that feeling. The aim of the game is to replace feeling with actuality, belief with fact and discover ‘who’ one thinks and feels one is. In this way, more and more beliefs have evaporated into thin air as being simply silly and the accompanying feelings of fear, guilt, loyalty, worry, sorrow, etc. disappeared with them. It takes courage, persistence and bloody-mindedness to not only watch one’s affective feeling rise and fall, but to actually investigate and eliminate them. They constitute the major part of our identity, ‘who’ we feel we are. Then, and only then, your instincts will come to the surface. * VINEETO: As for eliminating instincts, I found that the method works as effectively for discovering, experiencing, investigating and eliminating instincts as it does for investigating the beliefs, morals, ethics and values that shape our social identity. Personally, I had to get rid of my moral, ethical and spiritual restrictions first, in order to be able to admit to, acknowledge and recognize the ‘gross’ instinctual passions that lie at the core of my ‘self’. First I had to question my ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, before I was able to recognize and investigate my own raw survival instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. RESPONDENT: My understanding of what you have said is to keep using the method and deal with issues as they come up. Although I have been working on beliefs and emotions for a long time this area of instincts is new to me so I don’t know exactly where I’m at with it. For instance, if I don’t name a feeling and stay with it there is an energy that seems to be in the area of the old brain. Is this an instinct that is producing this energy? How do I become intimate with the instincts? VINEETO: Having been programmed first with the Christian and later with Eastern religious belief, the fact that humans are born with a set of instincts – and not born ‘innocent’ – has been quite a new discovery for me. Christians say that one is born with original sin because of Adam’s disobedience, and in a way they come close to the fact that without moral and ethical restraint, we humans behave no differently than wild animals, instinctually driven. Slowly, slowly, after I removed the layers of moralistic and ethical values I could dare to acknowledge and experientially discover that ‘me’, at the very core, consists of nothing else but crude and cruel survival instincts – fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Discovering and seeing in action each of these instincts was an adventure by itself, thrilling, fascinating and very revealing into the human nature. First one removes the ‘truths’, convictions, intuitions and feelings that were instilled in us to make us a fit member of society – a man, a woman, a wife, a husband, a scientist, a clerk, an American, a follower or a ‘true’ believer. And it is great fun to dismantle those identities and eventually become an anonymous nobody. Then, on honest investigation, you will be able to recognize these instinctual passions as ‘you’, all of ‘you’. It is not a matter of having an ‘ intimate ’ relationship with one’s instincts, but to acknowledge, feel and experience that ‘I’ am my instinctual passions, nothing else. ‘I’ am rotten to the very core. That experiential acknowledgment that underlying one’s precious feelings are the animal instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, gives one the motivation and sincere intent to actively devote one’s life to irrevocably changing oneself.
VINEETO: I am joining in the discussion, as I had a thought about something you have written to Peter in your last letter – RESPONDENT: I did get caught up in the urge of wanting it this week which I think could have been the desire instinct being activated. This very desire of wanting it was keeping me from enjoying the now moment. VINEETO: One of the first things on the path to Actual Freedom which I had to investigate and eliminate was that hoary old spiritual belief that if only one stops wanting something, it will be granted by the Grace of Existence. After 17 years of spiritual search without results I was finally suspicious enough to question the very belief itself. When I, for the sake of clarity, replaced the word ‘freedom’ with something material, like a car or money, it became blindingly obvious that by stopping to want it I would also prevent myself from getting it. When I ask myself the question ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and I get the answer that I am not happy because I am not 100% free, then the next question is how to proceed from here. I had to be careful not to deceive myself by thinking that I only have to stop the urge for freedom in order to be happy again as it only served to stop me right in my tracks, leaving me with nothing I could do to reach my goal except wait and hope. What I do is to find out why I am not 100% happy with my present situation, what little feeling, or emotional churning there is that spoils this moment. Then it is not just ‘not-being-free’ that is bothering me but some particular feeling, some particular emotion about something that maybe happened an hour ago. This more specific component of ‘not-being-free’ can then be examined, investigated and removed without stifling the desire and intent for freedom, which is my fuel and guideline to keep asking the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’, to keep investigating into how I experience the Human Condition in me. Richard has written heaps on There is definitely no short-cut to actual freedom by stopping to want freedom, and then bingo, you are ‘That’ – it is the other way round. I want actual freedom like I never wanted anything in my life, it is my one and only desire, it is that very desire that motivates me to dive into the ‘cupboard’ of my psyche, my identity, my feelings and passions over and over and over, to sweep out all the cobwebs that I can find. This desire fuels my intent and makes sure that I never dishonestly settle for second best, for an imaginary freedom instead of the genuine, actual, tangible article. The following two paragraphs are from the bit that I have written for our diagram of
On the path to Actual Freedom the ‘bad news’ is that I have to get off my bum, investigate every idea and imagination, every dream, hope and faith as much as every bout of anger, impatience, complaint, fear, love and compassion. It is the opposite of meditation because I actively pursue every obstacle to being happy now, here, and for that I use my capacity to think, contemplate, reflect, judge and investigate in order to find and eliminate the Human Condition in me, bit by bit. The ‘good news’ is that there is nobody who can speed up or prevent my progress on the path to Actual Freedom except myself – it is all in my own hands. I am my own judge whether I am happy or not, honest or not, free of particular beliefs and morals or not. Nobody is interfering with this process and nobody can. And it is a journey of a lifetime – with imminent and incrementally increasing rewards of more and more freedom from bondage, malice and sorrow. Life is so good, that I keep wondering what all the fuss that I made and others are still making about this ‘oh so terrible life’. According to my old real-world standards and values I have definitely gone mad. And it is utterly worth it.
VINEETO: The last weeks I have been fully occupied with the delicious task to ‘translate’
the PowerPoint presentation of an So now, having completed this project, I re-enter the discussion again. Something you wrote to No. 3 the other day has made me prick my ears. RESPONDENT: I agree that the task for ‘me’ is to push the button to start the process of self-immolation. The truth for me right now is I am dedicated but I am not 100% committed. I have intent but it is not pure intent. What would it take for me to make the leap to be 100% committed with pure intent? Can I make this leap? Can I become 100% committed with pure intent? What is stopping me? Obviously it is the ‘me’ that is stopping me and like you said it is up to the ‘me’ to keep the question ‘how am I’ going. As you said it is up to ‘me’ and ‘I’ to bring about the process of ending themselves. The best that ‘I’ can do right now is to keep the question ‘how am I’ going. I am dedicated to that. VINEETO: To understand my intent for freedom I firstly had to take an honest and extensive stock of my life so far. I reviewed all the paths that I had tried, all the adventures I had taken as well as my intentions behind them. I found that as a youth I had marched for peace, freedom, equity and various ideas of a better world. I had been involved in Women’s liberation, only to find women as incapable of living in peace and harmony with each other as men. I then turned to changing society by education, studied social work and was full of ideals to ‘heal’ society. Yet, working as a social worker for heroin addicts I quickly discovered that I had no solution to offer for any of these ‘drop-out’, on the contrary – I could understand their reasons for turning their backs on a society that I saw as corrupt and hypocritical, restrictive and compromising. For several years I got involved in primal therapy, which claimed that the solution lay in experiencing and expressing emotions under ‘nursery conditions’ and then all will be well. I learned to identify my emotions more in detail, but merely expressing them did nothing to resolve them, they kept appearing again and again without fail. Life did not become easier through therapy, only more expensive. The next solution on offer was Eastern spirituality. Combined with a plethora of new-age therapies, the cozy security of a newfound family it seemed the best on offer. The intention now was to change myself rather than changing the world. For the next 17 years I got gullibly sucked into the rich imaginary fairy stories of Eastern beliefs, new-age superstitions and serious meditation. To make a long story short – none of my enterprises brought me freedom, peace and happiness. It didn’t teach me how to live with a man in peace and harmony. I knew only too well that I was still enjoying fight, spite and bittersweet sadness and I still felt lonely and fearful. To acknowledge failure was enough to fuel my intent to explore something new, something practical. Also, I wanted to live with a man in peace and harmony, 24 hrs a day, every day. For that goal I was willing to question my dearly held beliefs of gender identity, social morals and values, spiritual beliefs and convictions. To live not only in peace but to share a life of fun and adventure, intimacy and harmony, I considered more valuable than anything else I had done up to now. All these considerations gave me enough drive to investigate, question, discover and turn beliefs upside down to find out about them and compare them with verifiable facts. It was all very confusing in the beginning to say the least, but the thrill of investigating why all those beliefs had never worked kept me digging deeper and deeper into the very substance of my identity. And every success, every result, every belief replaced by facts drove me further into more inquiries, encouraged me to identify, trace back and investigate my ‘precious’ feelings and emotions. You see, intent does not grow in a day or is instantly 100% at the start, it gets bigger and more and more purified with increasing discoveries about the Human Condition in oneself. To acknowledge malice and sorrow in action in oneself, day by day, gives one the firm intention to factually do something about it, to actually and irrevocably change oneself. And then, with persistent and honest investigation into one’s beliefs and feelings, with rocking ‘the boat’ of one’s identity to the limits, there is bound to be a pure consciousness experience. Asking myself the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of beings alive?’ never had a calming effect on me – on the contrary. To investigate a surfacing emotion, to label and define it and trace its root and underlying belief usually intensified the thrill until I triumphantly got the bugger by the throat and bingo – there lay dead another dearly held ‘truth’ or conviction, value or loyalty. To break through to the very core of one particular emotion leaves me with the actual and that often brings about a PCE. To give you an example of what I mean I post you a bit that I wrote at the time of one particular discovery –
Daring to question ‘God’ by whatever name had eliminated one of the major columns my identity-structure was based on and caused the whole construct to tumble – for a few hours. Then I could experience the actual world as it is, without the restricting and fearful guardian of the ‘self’ in operation – which in turn fuelled my intent for more such discoveries. The serendipitous spiral of actual freedom is set in motion. On the path to actual – as opposed to imaginary – freedom I found that the only way to end fear was to face it and investigate it, and the only way to end pain was to find and eliminate its cause, for ever. And it works. ‘Knowing full well the cost’, as No. 3 said, which is ‘me’ in my entirety, it is gloriously delicious to be amongst the forerunners of human evolution. To be able to successively and irrevocably free oneself from the ancient animal heritage of the instinctual passions that are but a redundant remnant of thousands of years of malice and suffering is the best I can ever do with my life. Living at the cutting edge of the discovery to a new, non-spiritual, down-to-earth and actual freedom from the Human Condition takes on an exquisite momentum by itself that makes life exquisitely thrilling and wondrously delicious, day after day. And it all is available by sincerely asking the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’
RESPONDENT: Good to hear from you. I am glad you can now re-enter the discussion. I have read the new ‘Introduction to Actual Freedom’ and I was quite impressed. I found it to be excellent. Actually I think it is perfect. VINEETO: Thank you for your feedback on the introduction. I agree that Peter did an excellent job in putting it together and I find it exactly the coherent preamble that can give newcomers an overview and entry into Actual Freedom. It probably needs reading more than once given that an actual freedom flies in the face of all normal solutions and traditional beliefs. Did you notice that I forgot to put a link ‘back to homepage’? Once one enters the introduction, one is trapped to read it again and again and again... RESPONDENT: You have brought up this subject of pure intent at a good time because I really don’t want to look at it right now. I have gotten in touch with the bare awareness of fear and it seems hopeless right now. I see it and I feel it but I don’t want to mess with it. I just want to calm it down and leave it alone. A PCE seems very remote. I am not concerned about a PCE. I just don’t want to upset ‘me’ anymore. VINEETO: This reminds me of a day when I was so badly in the grip of fear that I couldn’t think straight, didn’t know how to get myself out of this overwhelming feeling and could hardly talk for my cluttering teeth. I thought that I will never gather enough gumption to become free, I am just too much of a coward. Telling my story to Richard he said something to the effect of: ‘what else would you want to do with your life – be miserable like right now for the next 30 odd years? Seems pretty impossible to me. Of course, you will keep going.’ On the path to freedom from the Human Condition I have encountered fear lots of time, firstly because I
decided not to run from it anymore and secondly because questioning ancient wisdom and inherited instincts is not a familiar thing to do, to say
the least. When you read But then, I have been fearful all my life. I have been running from fear for as long as I can remember, trying half-hearted solutions, distractions, movies, food, company, music, commune-life, work, meditation, mantras, security in boring or distressing relationships, being occupied with this or that and much more. Nothing has worked to permanently get rid of fear. Fears kept popping up and spoiling my days, making inner peace impossible. By asking ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ I have learnt to face my fears and dig into them until I find their very core. In the beginning of my inquiries, my fears where concerned with my social identity. ‘Who’ am I in other people’s eyes, can I survive without their approval, without the support of my peers, without the company and security of the social spiritual club that I called my friends? Well, I discovered that I could. Facing my fears, questioning dearly held beliefs and investigating the facts of each situation has improved my confidence and surety, which in turn facilitated my next encounter with fear. As I said – the serendipitous spiral of actual freedom was set in motion. RESPONDENT: As I ask the question ‘how am I’ the answer I get is cautiously. The belief I have right now is that I really can’t do anything about it. I have been on this path of self-discovery for 30 yrs now and this is where I’m at. I am directly in contact with my core right now. ‘Me’ at my core right now seems so rock solid that I couldn’t blast it out with dynamite. VINEETO: Thirty years of spiritual search do indeed show a persistence not to settle for second best. You don’t seem to give up at the first scare. Yet, whatever teachings you have picked up on the way need to be discovered, questioned, investigated, examined and eradicated. The diagram ‘the path of self-aggrandizement’ in the ‘method’-part of the introduction shows clearly the direction in which spiritual beliefs and Eastern religions have guided us. As I have told you, I had been gullibly sucked into Eastern religious myths and it took extensive questioning of all the sweet spiritual fairytales to uncover the lies, deceits, beliefs and underlying intentions of the spiritual endeavour. Actual Freedom, being actual and not spirit-ridden (spiritual) lies indeed 180 degrees in the opposite direction to all spiritual teachings, present, past and future. You will find out for yourself as you go along. RESPONDENT: Realizing that I have the belief that I can’t do anything about it is beginning to make a difference. Actually the ‘me’ is dissipating now as I am typing this. Ok Vineeto, reading your post got me to look at the belief that I was having about it and I now realize that the belief that I can’t do anything about the ‘me’ was holding it in place. As I now ask the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ The answer I am getting is peacefully. VINEETO: You have just described how you discovered and questioned the mother of all beliefs – ‘that you can’t change human nature’, or, as you say, one ‘can’t do anything about’ one’s instinctual passions. As you have experienced, even the slightest doubting of this ‘Truth’ diminishes its solidity and veracity. Gathering courage after a fear-attack one resumes the questioning, each time with a little more suspicion towards and awareness about one’s own beliefs, each time with the memory that a fear directly encountered and questioned cannot last. Another day, another victory. PS As the self-appointed librarian I cannot resist to tell you about the library page of
RESPONDENT: I have a new situation to deal with since talking with you last. My Mom is in the hospital and I am spending most of my time taking care of her. This subject of fear is still appropriate in relation to how I am dealing with this situation. The second I start thinking about it I am overwhelmed with fear, worry, etc. However, I find that running the question ‘how am I’ is helping me to deal with the situation. Asking the question has helped me to stay in the moment and what I find is everything is ok in this moment right now. All my fears are in regard to how am I going to manage taking care of her at a future time. Right now at this moment in time she is taken care of. VINEETO: Life seems to have given you a serendipitous opportunity to have a closer look at the instinctual passion of nurture, its correlating feelings of love and belonging and the implications of being a social identity as a family member. Quite an exciting range of possible discoveries that could help answer your earlier question of ‘How do I become intimate with the instincts?’ Love and compassion, sympathy and empathy are our usual ways of relating to family and friends and through the same emotional ‘channel’ we also invite their fears and worries, sorrow and resentment, anger and hatred. There is only one way when one relates to people affectively and that is within the rules and ways of the Human Condition. The moment I feel sympathy for someone I am also swamped by their fears, the moment I am empathic for someone’s suffering I plug into the collective misery of mankind. The need to belong makes one susceptible to everybody’s feelings, be it anger or fear, greed or suffering. This is not just a poetic expression, it is my very experience. In order to become happy and harmless I had to examine my every relationship – to Peter, to my peers, to my work-mates, to my parents and relatives. Whenever I ‘reached out’ emotionally, understanding someone’s sorrow, fear or anger, I could not help being affected – that’s the very idea of ‘sharing’ and the common remedy against feeling lonely in the first place. But there is no choice of feeling just the nice, good feelings with or for someone and disregarding their negative feelings – by the very nature of emotions I am being hooked into the emotional web the moment I choose to go along with affective feelings. The alternative was to consciously and deliberately decide to leave the cozy nest of bitter-sweet feelings, to abandon the ‘squabbling and miserable humanity’ and examine and then eliminate feelings and emotions in myself. I have found that the ‘good’ emotions were even more insidious than the ‘bad’ ones. Many people would like to get rid of anger, sadness and fear, but who would want to abandon love, compassion, beauty and bliss? But once I understood the intrinsic connection between love and fear, compassion and sorrow, empathy and suffering, I decided to get free of the lot. When I love someone I am afraid to lose him or her. In order to have compassion for someone the other needs to be ‘in the pits’ emotionally – otherwise there is no use for my compassion. Empathy is even more insidious – the suffering creeps under the skin and one never quite knows what is happening. And all this sorry-go-round for the sake of not feeling lonely, bored and fearful? I discovered that by examining and eliminating my very identity as an appreciated and valued member of society I eliminated loneliness and boredom at the same time. And not even the closest friendship can ever take away one’s fear of death – for fear to stop the very ‘I’ that generates this fear has to become extinct. Love is not the solution, love is the problem. With love disappearing I could for the first time live in peace and harmony, ease and equity with another human being, day-in, day-out, 24 hrs a day, without bicker or quarrel, crisis or boredom. Without love, actual intimacy and genuine benevolence became possible for the first time. What a serendipitous trade-in! It seems mad to everyone else but they don’t know what I’ve got! RESPONDENT: Actually, I have found that everything is always ok at this moment right now and running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ is a great tool for keeping me in this moment. That’s all for now. Thanks for being there and thanks to all of you for making this list and this website available and for your willingness to help. VINEETO: The question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ is not only ‘a great tool for keeping me in this moment’ but it is also the precise method to remove every single obstacle that prevents one from experiencing this moment as perfect. You see, with this method you can do much more than calming yourself or be ‘in this moment’ – you can become actually and permanently free of all the worries and fears, depression and resentment, sorrow and malice, free from the Human Condition altogether. With this method you can examine and investigate what keeps you from being happy and harmless in this very moment and remove the disturbing element, ‘me’, ‘ego’ and ‘soul’, irrevocably and forever. Of course, this enterprise is not for the ‘faint of heart and weak of knees’ as Richard usually puts it, but it is the best that I have ever done in my life. What adventure, what delight.
VINEETO: In the last week I have been lost in space, so to speak. We discovered a new screen-saver which presents photos of one’s own choice like a perpetual slide show presentation. On their website they also offer heaps of photos for downloading. If anyone wants to try it out, you can find it under http://www.webshots.com/. I took the opportunity of making a private slideshow of the universe and went on the NASA site for space-shots. The amount and quality of what is presented there is amazing and fantastic. Photos of nebulae and galaxies, exploding suns and planets, swirling clouds of gas in all possible colours comes with detailed information about the number or name, area, size and the changing formations of this ‘universal matter’ and all the human presumptions and hypothesis. But to see and learn so much of the magnificent infinitude of the universe leaves me continuously in amazement and wonder. For instance, there is Betelgeuse, the top left star in the constellation called Orion, recognizable by the three bright stars in his ‘belt’ – the diameter of this single star is bigger than the orbit of Jupiter around the sun!! Unimaginable vastness, and that is only one star of a huge nebular galaxy, of billions that are known – and billions that are not known (yet). The infinite variety of matter leaves me gasping for breath, the magnificence and perfection are fascinating, to say the least – and I am the bit of the universe that says: ‘Wow, how phantasmagorical, how magical!’ Whoever wants to prove with silly mathematics that this universe is not infinite is just a fool. The instinctual need for a creator and the fervent belief in an immortal soul continuously mess up the clear-eyed perception of the obvious. And mathematicians and theoretical scientists are no exception. And there is no difference when I get off the computer and come ‘back’ to earth. The sky in its endlessly changing colourful design is as brilliant as distant nebulae, the sounds are a delightful background, the smells of the summer flowers are deliciously sweet, the air is soft, moist and warm... the splendour is everywhere and life is an ongoing delight. It was fun to spend most of New Year’s Day in front of the television, watching the world responding to the ‘important’ date change, and around the clock around the world we were watching a continual cascade of fireworks blowing up in one city after another. Every nation and town was displaying their exotic and exuberant celebration and the people were happy for a few hours a year – or a century? – before the misery of every-day life was catching up again. So many were disappointed that the prophesized doom and disasters did not occur, that nothing broke down and that they had to get on with their lives as usual. While in the land of freedom everything is already always well, nothing can go wrong because everything is actual. Without emotions and instinctual passions I simply respond to what is happening, choose what is sensible and enjoy every moment as it lives me. It is all so easy once the ‘self’ is not in command and the instincts are but a faint rumble sometimes before they will finally wither away completely. Now to your letter – * VINEETO: Love and compassion, sympathy and empathy are our usual ways of relating to family and friends and through the same emotional ‘channel’ we also invite their fears and worries, sorrow and resentment, anger and hatred. There is only one way when one relates to people affectively and that is within the rules and ways of the Human Condition. The moment I feel sympathy for someone I am also swamped by their fears, the moment I am empathic for someone’s suffering I plug into the collective misery of mankind. The need to belong makes one susceptible to everybody’s feelings, be it anger or fear, greed or suffering. RESPONDENT: I saw yesterday what you are saying about sympathy and empathy. By not buying in to her suffering I was relieved of my suffering and I was better able to take care of her. Also have seen that ‘I’ am rotten to the core because a lot of my suffering has been worrying about ‘me’ having to take care of her. VINEETO: To examine the so-called ‘good’ emotions of nurture, affective care, sympathy, friendship, duty, love and compassion is a fascinating subject and can only be done by questioning and examining at the same time the morals and ethics of society that forms one’s very social identity. If one wants to be actually free of the Human Condition, one has to examine and recognize that ‘good’ simply means ‘morally acceptable’ and ‘right’ is just another ethical value, both of which vary from tribe to tribe and from society to society. The ‘good’ is a much a bondage as the ‘bad’ – even more so because it seems much more desirable. As humans we don’t want to lose the other’s affection and reassurance, the appreciation of our peers, the cozy safety of being part of a family or group, the comforting knowledge of doing what everyone considers the ‘right’ thing or the ‘good’ deed. Freedom lies in the opposite direction. On the path to actual freedom I did not bother to try to solve the moral or ethical problems of what is ‘good’ or ‘right’ but focussed my attention instead on discovering my own ethical and moral values – my social identity in action. ‘Ah, I’m trying to find out what is right? I’m upset that someone did the ‘wrong’ thing? I’m aiming again to be a ‘good’ person?’ These were indications that my moral identity was in action and I used my awareness to examine this very identity and learned to step out of it. What is now left is a simple sensible solution – and mostly my worries were seen to be an S.E.P.-situation, Someone Else’s Problem. Once I understood that it is only me who can set myself free I also understood that everyone has to do it for themselves as well. What perfect arrangement. It for sure saves one saving people. I paste you the bit that Peter has written on morals in the library, it might clarify the issue a bit further –
* VINEETO: You see, with this method you can do much more than calming yourself or be ‘in this moment’ – you can become actually and permanently free of all the worries and fears, depression and resentment, sorrow and malice, free from the Human Condition altogether. With this method you can examine and investigate what keeps you from being happy and harmless in this very moment and remove the disturbing element, ‘me’, ‘ego’ and ‘soul’, irrevocably and forever. RESPONDENT: Have had my doubts but am now seeing that it is possible. Have a happy and harmless new year, VINEETO: Not only possible but absolutely recommendable too. Once one starts changing one’s actions according to the findings of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ in order to become more happy and harmless, the benefits are blindingly obvious. And one incrementally loses bits of one’s ‘self’ on the way. What a perfect arrangement actuality is, I am still astounded every day about the perfection of it all.
VINEETO: Good to hear from you and good to talk to you ... I am still enjoying downloading pictures of nebulae, galaxies and clusters from different web-sites and editing them into screen size. Sometimes I change the background of planets, assemble the moons around Jupiter or Saturn and add a few stars when the picture is not wide enough. It is a very pleasant play with forms and colours, the paint-program lets me shade and clone, lighten and intensify, and I can make as many mistakes as I like and revert to earlier stages. Not like painting in the old days, where every stroke was final and every mistake would cost canvas and paint. Demand for work has not started again in the new millennium – the beginning of the noughties, or naughties – and I enjoy the hours without numbers and days without names. The other day I noticed with astonishment, and a little bit of disorientation, that I would look at things and no thoughts occurred, just the visual intake of colours and forms, shades and movements. Even trying to crank up a train of thought was not very successful. Life just isn’t that complicated that I have to think about it very much. I remember from my spiritual days that I would have given an arm and a leg for hours without thought – and then, when I occasionally succeeded, I was not only afraid to lose it any minute but I would also be very dazed and foggy – and filled with ‘good’ feelings, of course. Now, thinking is available when necessary or when I want to nut out something but the rest of the time I simply enjoy being alive. Such marvellous excellence! Now to your letter – For instance, there is Betelgeuse, the top left star in the constellation called Orion, recognizable by the three bright stars in his ‘belt’ – the diameter of this single star is bigger than the orbit of Jupiter around the sun!! Unimaginable vastness, and that is only one star of a huge nebular galaxy, of billions that are known – and billions that are not known (yet). The infinite variety of matter leaves me gasping for breath, the magnificence and perfection are fascinating, to say the least – and I am the bit of the universe that says: ‘Wow, how phantasmagorical, how magical!’ RESPONDENT: Makes ‘me’ seem very insignificant. VINEETO: ‘Significant’ or insignificant are only words relative to our human values. Of course, the infinitude of the universe puts every ‘self’-centred vision into perspective and belies one’s imagination as to one’s self-importance. When the actual world becomes an everyday experience, there is neither significance nor insignificance, only facts and delight. Yet, to become free from the Human Condition in order to experience the actual world has been the most significant thing in my life. Every bit that I cleaned up in myself was significant for it changed my life for the better and stopped creating ripples of malice and sorrow in other people’s lives. The only significant thing that ‘I’ can do is to get out of the road. * VINEETO: While in the land of freedom everything is already always well, nothing can go wrong because everything is actual. Without emotions and instinctual passions I simply respond to what is happening, choose what is sensible and enjoy every moment as it lives me. It is all so easy once the ‘self’ is not in command and the instincts are but a faint rumble sometimes before they will finally wither away completely. RESPONDENT: This says it all and my ‘belief’ about it is I don’t have it. I am choosing more sensible solutions but it seems as if the ‘self’ is still in command. I know the actual is always here now but the ‘self’ is keeping me from it. The ‘self’ is a barrier between me and the actual. I can see that this is just a belief and all I have to do is give up this belief and the actual will be revealed. The question that arises is ‘why can’t I give up this belief?’ What am ‘I’ hanging on to? VINEETO: If the ‘self’ was ‘just a belief’ , as you say – and as all the Eastern religions say – one could simply believe that one is not the ‘self’ and every problem would be solved... But the Human Condition in each of us is not just a belief. At the core, ‘I’ am the instinctual passions. Peter said it very well in his rave to Alan the other day ...
It is not a matter of giving ‘up this belief’ but a matter of ‘self’-immolation. The ‘self’ is not ‘a barrier between me and the actual’, the ‘self’ is all that ‘I’ am and ‘I’ am ‘hanging on to’ dear life. ‘I’ know that in order to live the perfection that I have experienced in numerous Pure Consciousness Experiences, ‘I’ have to disappear in toto. This ‘clear eyed view of the obvious’, this understanding of the inevitable then gives enough drive to actively pursue the investigation and elimination of the social, emotional-instinctual entity. What a thrill! * VINEETO: On the path to actual freedom I did not bother to try to solve the moral or ethical problems of what is ‘good’ or ‘right’ but focussed my attention instead on discovering my own ethical and moral values – my social identity in action. ‘Ah, I’m trying to find out what is right? I’m upset that someone did the ‘wrong’ thing? I’m aiming again to be a ‘good’ person?’ These were indications that my moral identity was in action and I used my awareness to examine this very identity and learned to step out of it. What is now left is a simple sensible solution – and mostly my worries were seen to be an S.E.P.-situation, Someone Else’s Problem. Once I understood that it is only me who can set myself free I also understood that everyone has to do it for themselves as well. What perfect arrangement. It for sure saves one saving people. RESPONDENT: It is clear that the only one I can change is me. VINEETO: What I was trying to clarify is that the first thing to change was my perception of what had to change. All my life I had tried to change for the better, first according to the Christian standards of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ –heaven and hell – and later according to the spiritual standards of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – nirvana and bad karma. What I needed to understand was that both are only slightly different standards of morals and ethics, and to shift one’s inbuilt instinctual passions from aggression to compassion, from sorrow to devotion, from fear to hope and from bondage to dis-identification is nothing other than rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The structure of one’s being is not changed – the ‘feeling being’ itself needs to be questioned and investigated, uncovered and eliminated. * VINEETO: Once one starts changing one’s actions according to the findings of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ in order to become more happy and harmless, the benefits are blindingly obvious. And one incrementally loses bits of one’s ‘self’ on the way. RESPONDENT: Yes, I can see that this is happening. My previous belief was that it happens instantaneously but I can now see that it is happening incrementally. VINEETO: To discover the different cunning disguises and workings of this instinctual ‘self’ has been the adventure of a lifetime, better than any Agatha Christie thriller could ever be. It becomes a sport, a hunt, a puzzle, as one re-wires one’s brain according to facts rather than relying on feelings and beliefs. * VINEETO: What a perfect arrangement actuality is, I am still astounded every day about the perfection of it all. RESPONDENT: I’m not experiencing the perfection of it all right now. I feel close but ‘I’ am getting in the way. What is it? What is keeping me from it right now? Ok, I see what is in the way right now and it is worry about someone else’s problem. An S. E. P. as you stated above. Worrying about my mom’s problem is not going to help her or me. Without worrying about it I can simply make sensible choices. VINEETO: In order that all the S.E.P. can really be someone else’s problem, I had to incrementally disentangle myself from the psychological and psychic web of peers and relatives, friends and acquaintances. I had to step out of humanity itself. For this I traced each feeling that someone would evoke in me back to its source and investigated the emotion and instinctual passion in me. Brought to light and understood the psychic connection lost its mysterious power. Feeling for someone always has its source in me and that’s what I can change. Nurture is as much part of our instinctual survival package as are desire, fear and aggression. Deciding to stop feeling for someone was often not enough. I had to dig into the reason why those feeling would occur again and again and find the underlying cause, my own survival instincts and my fears of being alone. In the actual world I am already always alone and it is simply a fact. Yet there is neither any feeling of loneliness nor any need for love because loneliness and love are inevitable attributes of a separate ‘self’. Richard described it perfectly well:
VINEETO: Hi, So you have had a close encounter with your instincts, particularly with fear and it appears that it has got you stumped, to say the least. As I remember, this was what you wanted to find out when you said a couple of months ago:
The result of your inquiry has brought you to experience the software of the Human Condition first hand. * VINEETO: Yet, to become free from the Human Condition in order to experience the actual world has been the most significant thing in my life. Every bit that I cleaned up in myself was significant for it changed my life for the better and stopped creating ripples of malice and sorrow in other people’s lives. The only significant thing that ‘I’ can do is to get out of the road. RESPONDENT: ‘I’ have the road completely barricaded right now and it would be significant to get out of the road. ‘I’ feel miserable. VINEETO: But the Human Condition in each of us is not just a belief. At the core, ‘I’ am the instinctual passions. RESPONDENT: Yes I agree that this is so. The scientific evidence is indisputable. ‘I’ am the instinctual passions and I don’t like it but right now I’m tired of becoming. ‘I’ just feel like accepting the fact that ‘I’ am my instincts and be done with it. <snip> I don’t have any drive left. <snip> I feel like just staying with the ‘feeling being ‘and quit trying to change it. I feel bogged down and stuck. VINEETO: In moments of extreme fear and doubt, these feeling seem to be the only thing that
exists and they seem to last forever. The very nature of instincts is that they are utterly convincing and trigger an overwhelming automatic
‘quick and dirty’ reaction, if you remember the findings of Josef LeDoux’. (You’ll find relevant information under In the beginning it is often only some time after the ‘attack of the instincts’ that is one able to look at the situation with awareness, common sense and intelligence. You may then question if the response to stop the inquiry because of fear was really your best shot. But if you prefer to stay ‘with the ‘feeling being’ and quit trying to change it’, at least you are not alone – six billion people prefer to stay with the Tried and Failed. Being a ‘feeling being’ usually means feeling ‘miserable’, ‘bogged down and stuck’, ‘helpless and hopeless’, not to mention anger, hate, malice, resentment, jealousy, insecurity, fear, neediness, greed, loneliness and sorrow. RESPONDENT: I have a sense of abandoning humanity but I have no energy left for investigating. I have doubt like all of this investigating is what is bogging me down. <snip> I get the message loud and clear that my own survival instincts are the underlying cause but I feel helpless and hopeless to do anything about it. It even seems right now that the effort to do something about it is the cause of the problem. The actual world of sensual delight seems like the memory of a fairy tale. I have lost it. VINEETO: No 3 says it perfectly well: ‘Do these feelings really serve you in any real beneficial way, what are the practicalities of doing away with this, that says this is your limit you will not venture past this. The main thing is, if it is controlling you, then you are believing it. Let’s face it, emotion is truth but not fact, truth is not freedom, fact is, as can be directly perceived or deduced with reason.’ [endquote]. RESPONDENT: I’m up against the mother of all beliefs that I can’t do anything about it. I can’t change the instincts. This belief is so strong that it looks like a fact so what looks best to do is accept the fact that I am my instincts. This seems like the only possible relief. VINEETO: Your reply shows that you are taking this ‘mother of all beliefs’ as a reality that you won’t question and therefore you accept that you cannot change. Fair enough, it is a deeply ingrained insidious belief, not only repeated for thousands of years by millions of people as the only wisdom but also deeply rooted in our genetic instinctual heritage. It needs sincere intent, courage and awareness to start questioning the ‘truth of our ancestors’. The moment I questioned anything that I had believed all my life I was up against a whirlpool of fear, belief being the very substance of my identity. There are only two ways to respond to that fear – to go back to being miserable without possibility for change, or to stop running, face the fear and start investigating. The first was not a long-term option for me – knowing about Actual Freedom and not pursuing it meant that I would never be able to face myself in the mirror again with dignity. Whenever I gathered enough courage to stop running and face the fear I was up for a surprise – the biggest part of fear was being afraid of fear itself. The moment I stopped avoiding fear, the remaining fear was substantially reduced. Still big enough to make me shake – but I had understood enough to know that I could not run forever. Fear, the very core of our software, the Human Condition, will only disappear as that software is being eliminated, anything else will only be a postponement or an avoidance. So whenever fear hits me I ‘hold on to the mast and let the storm pass’, not make any decisions because of fear but sit it out. It always passes. Of course, one has to acknowledge that ‘I am my instincts’. But serendipity has it that we are not only inflicted with instinctual passions but are also equipped with intelligence and the ability to be aware of what is happening. It is these very qualities that have the potential to separate us from the other animals. These are the tools to re-wire the brain, to slowly, slowly shift the balance from passionate beliefs to clear facts, from automatic instinctual reactions to considered, sensible, appropriate action and sensual delight. I leave you with a recipe from Richard to get out of stuckness, Alan’s favourite piece of writing – by the way, Alan, how are you doing?
VINEETO: I have become so deliciously lazy that I have taken three days to start a letter and another three to finish it. Pretty good for a formerly well-adjusted workaholic with proper German conditioning, don’t you think? RESPONDENT: Yes, the situation with my mother has brought me face to face with my instincts. The question that arises now is ‘am I 100% committed to eliminating them?’ The answer is I am not 100% committed to eliminating them because I have doubt as to the possibility of doing it. Can I become 100% committed? What would it take? I have survived the ‘attack of the instincts’ and am now feeling pretty good. I am not stopping the inquiry. I am now inquiring into can I become 100% committed to eliminating the instincts now that I have become intimate with them? VINEETO: I like your approach. First you make an experiential enquiry into the nature of your ‘adversary’, the core of the Human Condition, and then you move on to the next question – ‘do I really want to take up the adventure of eliminating this ‘adversary’?’ In fact, there are two questions that you have raised:
Personally, I can answer the first question in the affirmative – for me Actual Freedom works, every day, incrementally and increasingly and irreversibly. And that is probably what scares most people. One really changes oneself, not just one’s ideas about oneself. Doubt is, in fact, part of the protection scheme of one’s ‘self’ in order to stay unscathed, unchanged and unquestioned. In order for you to find out if it works you will have to give it a go. You take the tool of asking the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and apply it to a simple issue in your life. It is better to start with a small issue and be successful than to want to tackle a major instinct right away and get scared and doubtful. Peter suggested to No 3 last year to start with one issue like driving a car without getting irritated.
Only by experiencing that the method works can you be confident that Actual Freedom is possible. Then you will have to neither believe nor doubt, it will simply be your own experience. One turns a theory into a fact only by proving that it works with observable, verifiable and repeatable experimentation. Answering the second question of commitment needs some ‘soul-searching’. As I have written before, I needed to take honest stock of my life and acknowledge that all my past effort to be happy and harmless had failed. Already in my spiritual years I had made it my goal to get rid of the source of the problem in me – then I believed it to be the ego. Once I fully comprehended that the problem consisted of both the social identity (the ego) and the instinctual passions (the soul), I went full steam ahead with the investigation. I simply refused to settle for second best, now that a clear method, pioneered by Richard, was available. I know many people who are on the spiritual path because ‘normal’ life in society was unbearable for them, so they left it behind. But now they are contented with imagined solutions, feeling ‘good’, feeling ‘spiritual’ and feeling compassionate when, in fact, their behaviour has often only changed from selfish to superior selfish, from sad and grumpy to detached and ‘above it all’. Such imagined solutions are available cheap and easy but they do not produce actual happiness and actual harmlessness. Actual Freedom, on the other hand, produces actual change – one actively and incrementally changes one’s outlook on life and one’s actions such that one becomes more happy and more harmless every day and thus finds one’s ‘self’ diminishing with every problem, belief or emotion disappearing. These are the two options – spiritual pseudo-freedom and actual freedom – and they lie 180 degrees in opposite directions. It is purely a matter of what you want to do with your life. In order that you can have a taste of what is possible, I suggest reading about * VINEETO: But if you prefer to stay ‘with the ‘feeling being’ and quit trying to change it’, at least you are not alone – six billion people prefer to stay with the Tried and Failed. Being a ‘feeling being’ usually means feeling ‘miserable’, ‘bogged down and stuck’, ‘helpless and hopeless’, not to mention anger, hate, malice, resentment, jealousy, insecurity, fear, neediness, greed, loneliness and sorrow. RESPONDENT: I did experience a lot of anger. This was not a pleasant thing. VINEETO: The only two options up till now to deal with anger have been to either express or to repress it. Neither way do you get rid of anger, it will surely come up at the next opportunity. Now there is a third alternative – one neither expresses, nor represses, but experiences it, observes
it, investigates it and keeps one’s hands in one’s pocket. Such strong emotion like anger is always an excellent opportunity for an actualist
to dig deeper into one’s psyche and discover and uproot another bit of the ‘self’. Some of
* RESPONDENT: I am not accepting that I cannot change but I don’t know if I can change. This leaves the possibility open. I have awareness but pure intent and courage seem clouded by doubt. VINEETO: Doubt is an interesting phenomenon. The other day I talked to a woman who confided in me that she was continuously tortured by doubt if she was doing the right thing. When I asked who it was she ultimately needed to please, she said, ‘my mother’. I was rather surprised – the woman has grown-up children herself and her mother has been dead for many, many years. When she asked what was my solution to doubt, I simply said that I follow my own – very high – standards and that doubts have disappeared out of my life. I then realized that in order to follow my own standards of silly and sensible I first had to get rid of the emotional issue of authority, I had to investigate and abolish every belief in authority that had ruled my life until then, including the Almighty, All-knowing and punishing God. At the time, that was quite an amputation by itself! The other implication of following my own standards is that I am always ruthlessly honest, so when I find some feeling lurking beneath the seemingly smooth surface, I have to ‘get off my bum’, on to the couch to contemplate and root around until I have investigated the emotion in question. My guiding light is the purity and perfection of the actual world experienced in a PCE and the way to live in the actual world permanently is to whittle away at the ‘self’ until it self-immolates. In the clarity of a pure consciousness experience I could see doubt for what it is – my ‘self’ scurrying for cover. So again, intent and courage grow and multiply by taking action and gathering confidence from the ensuing success. One simply has to start somewhere – to merely think about possible victories and failures only feeds doubt. Courage only happens in the doing of the action, not before, and intent grows out of the determination not to settle for second best. Of course, one can use the method also to do some minor adjustments to one’s social identity, clean out some bad habits, get rid of some particularly troubling problems and then stop further investigation. I know quite a few people who have done exactly that and who are now a little bit happier with their lives than before. The outcome is not Actual Freedom, but a little bit more sensibility, less gullibility and a little bit more freedom from one’s burdening social role-play. It is purely a matter of what you want to do with your life. Personally, I function differently. I can’t stop halfway down the road when I know what is possible. Whenever I have encountered fear, I also experience a stubborn bloody-mindedness that has initially surprised me. When I looked back on my life from where I drew the strength and courage to pursue I recognized that all my major turning points had to do with one desire – to be free. Freedom had different notions and definitions in the course of the years, but the desire to discover the best freedom possible always kept me going. Now that I know what I want and how to get there, any obstacle is turned into a challenge, a research and an adventure – the adventure of a lifetime. * VINEETO: So whenever fear hits me I ‘hold on to the mast and let the storm pass’, not make any decisions because of fear but sit it out. It always passes. RESPONDENT: I think that accepting the fact that ‘I’ am my instincts was facing the fear. This freed me up to see the actual. I am not having a PCE but there is a kind of peacefulness now. When I was talking to my friend on the phone I realized that what was actual was I was sitting here and talking to him. Everything else was made up (imagined). VINEETO: Fear is never imagined. Emotions are never imagined although imagination can add fuel to the initial emotion. The physical reactions that accompany particular emotions ensure that you experience them as very real at the time. Instinctual passions are not mere imagination as one would imagine a bag of potato chips – they are the result of the chemical flows that are automatically produced by our genetically encoded software. When you were overwhelmed by fear or anger you did not experience it as imagination but as a very real situation. Nothing will change if one only regards instinctual passions as imaginary. The solution lies in a scientific and experiential exploration of the Human Condition. And once I understood a belief or an affective feeling in its totality, I was able to leave it behind. One thinks and feels oneself to be locked up in a small world as a restricted and myopic ‘self’ and that seems to be the only world there is. But once one diligently and persistently examines the ‘self’, each particular belief, feeling and instinctual passion that it consists of, one discovers the door and dares to walk out, leaving one’s self behind. In the beginning there are only short moments of freedom, fleeting experiences of the perfection that is possible, then those moments increase until it becomes obvious that the only sensible way to live is as experienced in the PCE, every day. It is possible, but one needs to make freedom the most important thing in one’s life. It is purely a matter of what you want to do with your life. It’s again been great pleasure writing to you.
RESPONDENT: Thank you Vineeto, it is a great pleasure to hear from you. Your posts have helped me to look at things experientially in my life. PS. I wrote all of the above yesterday when I was feeling ‘good’. This morning I went to see my mother and it was my worst nightmare. She is still drinking and falling even though she hasn’t recovered from a badly broken arm that had to be operated on. However, there is something different this time for me. I am not as upset and worrying as much as I have in the past. I am still feeling a low-grade dread and worry but there is a clear indication that the ‘self’ has diminished somewhat. I am not suffering to the same degree as I did before. The question now is ‘can I completely free ‘myself’ from suffering without ignoring her and still make sensible choices as to caring for her?’ This is a vital issue for me because this problem is not likely to go away for quite some time. If I can overcome the ‘self’ in relation to this problem I think I will be well on the way to actual freedom. I can see clearly that the instincts are at the bottom of this but I am not clear as to what to do about it next. VINEETO: How are you doing? Have you found some practical actual answers to your above question of ‘can I completely free ‘myself’ from suffering without ignoring her and still make sensible choices as to caring for her?’ I found that offering so-called practical advice to anyone is never practical, because I know from my own experience on the path to Freedom that although the instinctual part of the Human Condition is identical, everyone’s social condition and life’s circumstance are varied and everyone has to make their own choice of what issue to tackle first. But I can tell you a story that happened to me last week that deepened my understanding – I visited a former girl-friend of mine and she told me in detail how much she is suffering from a recent split from her boyfriend. She asked my advice what to do. Her aim was to get out of her suffering but mainly on the terms that he should change – and how to achieve it? I related my story of how I had tackled the issue of hope and romantic dreams that had really bothered and limited me in the first weeks of meeting Peter. I have described it in my journal:
Well, the conversation with the woman made it clear that she was not keen to leave her dream and hope of love even if the suffering would continue. Talking to Peter later on I realized that there is only one solution to any problem that occurs – only when I have enough of it am I ready to get out of it, I simply stop feeding the feeling and, bingo, the problem disappears with the bit of identity that had kept it in place. It might take a long time until one has had enough – and some people are obviously tough and stubborn sufferers – but once the limit is reached, a curious decision can be made and then it is only a matter of minutes to be free of the burdening feeling. If the understanding and decision is total, that feeling won’t come back. And then, one is able to make sensible responses to the situation, free of affective feelings. Which confirms what Richard has said:
The second story is about love. The other night I watched the film called ‘Mrs. Brown’, the supposed story of Queen Victoria who, after the death of her beloved husband, takes temporary comfort in the relationship with her servant-bodyguard – very well played by Billy Connolly. Yet the queen, being a Victorian Lady and living in court, closely watched by everyone, had obviously not much chance for intimacy with her friend. In one of the short scenes of such intimacy prior to his death the very nature of love became blindingly obvious to me – once again. Love is the longing to bridge separation. Without separation there is no need and no possibility for love. The greater the separation the greater the longing, as is confirmed in all heroic romantic tales. The feeling, the bitter-sweetness of the longing, is very real and very seductive and yet, for love to stay in existence one has to maintain the separation. So, in the very nature of things, love never occurs without its identical twin, loneliness, and in order to actually and permanently get rid of separation one has to get rid of love first – personal love, family love, love for those who suffer, love for humanity, love for the good, love for an imaginary God, etc. Only when I recognized love as the problem, instead of the solution, did actual intimacy have a chance to happen, actual intimacy between two human beings, free of identity and self-centredness. And what a vast difference there is. Love is merely an old chewing-gum compared to the gourmet meal of direct intimacy. I don’t know, No. 16, if these stories have anything to do with your current query but sensible choices are only possible if one inquires into the nature of one’s former un-sensible, emotional choices.
RESPONDENT: I would say that I am doing ok which is a relative term. I wouldn’t call it good but I would call it ok. When I look at my total situation it seems that I ‘have it made’ except for the problem with my mother. I realize that the real issue is the instincts because if this problem didn’t exist then I am sure that other issues would most likely arise. VINEETO: People’s automatic response is always to see their own fear, aggression, sadness or misery as being caused by the other person or the particular circumstances. I considered it a great step in my exploration when I could see that, whatever the ‘problem’, it had to do with me. And you are absolutely spot on – ‘that other issues would most likely arise’ – so best to examine the one that is so readily presenting itself... Whenever I had an issue that bothered me and that I wanted to get rid of, I would dig into the cause of the disturbance layer by layer with the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ The first response was usually a superficial one like: ‘I don’t want to do what the other wants me to do’ or ‘I don’t like what the other just said’ or a similar resentment. Prodding further I’d come across stronger emotions such as anger, guilt, duty, shame, authority, pride or fear – or a mix of several ones. Each such emotion was worth a deeper inquiry as to the underlying rules, beliefs, morals and ethics that triggered and constituted those emotions and distorted my relationship to the particular person. It was often scary but always a great adventure to question my fixed perception and behaviour and explore a solution 180 degrees in the other direction to my familiar reactions. By being suspicious about my automatic belief of what is ‘true’, ‘good’ and ‘right’, I was then able to start assessing the facts of the situation rather than indulging in, or fighting against, my emotional reactions to what was happening. Facts are what is actual, tangible, discernable, provable, practical, and by knowing the facts one can consider what will be the best for everybody involved. Emotions, by their very nature, are always ‘self’-centred and always non-factual – however, the physical symptoms that often accompany the appearance of the emotions make them very real, and it needs great attentiveness and persistent observation to disentangle oneself from their convincing instinctual grip. In your investigations you might come across ancient scary tales, collective superstitions, nonsense disguised as ancient wisdom, hoary psittacisms, moralistic no-no’s, ethical taboos, fear of ostracism, weird inner psychic horror movies ... With all those possible ‘ghosts’ emerging from the depth of one’s psyche it is important to clearly distinguish between fact and feeling. Facts are tangible, constant, reliable, whereas feelings will invariable fade if one stops feeding them. By tracing each of the upcoming emotions to their very roots I was then able to determine that they had nothing to do with the practical facts of the situation, but were the chemically induced and socially established reactions of the instinctual survival system. It was, however, essential that I gained this insight experientially in order to replace the emotion with contemplation and sensibility rather than merely suppressing it. Suppressing emotion is sheer postponement and a sure way to accumulate problems until they become unbearable. Once I had extracted every bit of necessary information by experiencing the emotions I could then make sensible judgements and appropriate changes in my behaviour such that I could resume being happy and harmless again. In * VINEETO: Have you found some practical actual answers to your above question of ‘can I completely free ‘myself’ from suffering without ignoring her and still make sensible choices as to caring for her?’ RESPONDENT: Asking ‘Who is it that is suffering?’ offers relief and then I just do what is necessary at the time to care for her. VINEETO: ‘Asking ‘Who is it that is suffering?’’ might easily lead to the ‘other’, higher identity of ‘the watcher of it all’, the spirit, who dis-identifies from the suffering and transcends its ‘mere’ bodily existence. This other identity can indeed offer temporary relief but keeps one trapped in the dichotomy of good and evil, a life torn between developing a higher ‘self’ and resentment towards having to perform the duties of everyday life ‘in the marketplace’. In order to make the distinction between the old familiar spirit-ual practice (spirit being the imaginary entity inside the body) and actualism, it is essential to replace ‘who am I’ with ‘what am I?’ Asking ‘who’ always indicates an identity while ‘what’ clearly points to the factual flesh-and-blood body without any social or instinctual identity whatsoever. Asking ‘what am I’ will also bring to surface the particular aspects of one’s identity that pollute and obstruct the experience of the purity of what I am – a flesh-and-blood body experiencing the always present perfection of this magnificent universe. Thus the question is not ‘who is it that is suffering’ but what is the cause of this suffering, where does it come from, what triggered it, when did it start, what are its roots? By investigating what hinders me to be happy and harmless in this moment, the ‘who’ I am will incrementally and noticeably diminish while ‘what’ I am will become more and more apparent until one day you know that you have always been here. You might want to revisit the * VINEETO: Talking to Peter later on I realized that there is only one solution to any problem that occurs – only when I have enough of it am I ready to get out of it, I simply stop feeding the feeling and, bingo, the problem disappears with the bit of identity that had kept it in place. It might take a long time until one has had enough – and some people are obviously tough and stubborn sufferers – but once the limit is reached, a curious decision can be made and then it is only a matter of minutes to be free of the burdening feeling. If the understanding and decision is total, that feeling won’t come back. And then, one is able to make sensible responses to the situation, free of affective feelings. RESPONDENT: If this is true then obviously I haven’t had enough. I am suffering right now. VINEETO: Actual Freedom is not a miraculous event that will one day appear all by itself and then all suffering will be over. Actualism, the process to becoming actually free, is a verified method which provides one with the means and tools to investigate the nitty-gritty of the Human Condition in oneself and – when applied with persistence, sincerity, diligence and pure intent – one can successively and permanently free oneself from one’s social identity and then from one’s instinctual passions. The first thing to investigate is one’s social identity. Unless one has freed oneself from the social mores and ethical rules, from the various role-models that we have learned and adopted throughout our life time it will be impossible to tackle the deeper layers of the instinctual passions. Richard has outlined the social identity in his last letter to No 13 –
* VINEETO: Which confirms what Richard has said:
RESPONDENT: I’m not there right now but I am going to be with why I am not ready to leave the ‘self’ behind. VINEETO: Alan once called a similar attempt the 64,000-dollar question. Why not start with the easier task of tackling your identity as a son, as a man, as an American, etc. There is a plethora of social (and spiritual) rules and regulations to discover, and there is an immense freedom to be gained when leaving those various identities behind. I copied the original correspondence for you because I think Alan described the situation very well –
* VINEETO: Love is the longing to bridge separation. Without separation there is no need and no possibility for love. The greater the separation the greater the longing, as is confirmed in all heroic romantic tales. The feeling, the bitter-sweetness of the longing, is very real and very seductive and yet, for love to stay in existence one has to maintain the separation. So, in the very nature of things, love never occurs without its identical twin, loneliness, and in order to actually and permanently get rid of separation one has to get rid of love first – personal love, family love, love for those who suffer, love for humanity, love for the good, love for an imaginary God, etc. Only when I recognized love as the problem, instead of the solution, did actual intimacy have a chance to happen, actual intimacy between two human beings, free of identity and self-centredness. And what a vast difference there is. Love is merely an old chewing-gum compared to the gourmet meal of direct intimacy. RESPONDENT: I hear this but I’m not sure that love is the problem. However, I do recognize the instincts as being the problem. VINEETO: Yes, the instinctual passions are the underlying problem, yet the Human Condition also consists of the various emotionally backed-up beliefs that constitute our social identity. Once one digs into the roots of love and inquires why one has feelings of love in certain situations then it will become clear that love is directly linked to the instinctually based feeling of nurture and the need to belong. When you experiment with ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and follow up the feeling of being shackled and bound by love, you will discover for yourself that love is the problem and not the solution. For actualism to work is it crucial that you don’t just believe what I say, or what we write, but that you verify for yourself that questioning and investigating dearly-held beliefs and affective feelings can free you from malice and sorrow. The Human Condition can only be unveiled step-by-step, belief-by-belief and emotion-by-emotion. Then, one day, a Pure Consciousness Experience occurs and the actual will be startlingly obvious. * VINEETO: I don’t know if these stories have anything to do with your current query but sensible choices are only possible if one inquires into the nature of one’s former un-sensible, emotional choices. RESPONDENT: These stories are helpful. They have given me something to look at and to answer which helps to keep me engaged in the investigation. When will I have enough of suffering? When will I leave ‘myself’ behind? Who is it that is suffering? VINEETO: I have found out that there is only one moment available – now. If I am not fed up with my suffering now, and start investigating what is causing my suffering in this very moment, then I am simply wasting this moment. And in the very action of the investigation I am leaving another bit of my ‘self’ behind. When suffering appears again, I investigate again, and so on. Actual Freedom is not an event that might or might not happen in the future – in the very process of unravelling my ‘self’ I am becoming more and more free ... now. The question is ‘what is causing my suffering now?’ ‘What is preventing me from being happy now?’
Or, as Alan says, ‘Ain’t it a blast!’
VINEETO: By tracing each of the upcoming emotions to their very roots I was then able to determine that they had nothing to do with the practical facts of the situation, but were the chemically induced and socially established reactions of the instinctual survival system. RESPONDENT: I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’m in never-never land. VINEETO: I don’t know what ‘never-never land’ represents for you, but I am reminded of Peter Pan’s dreamland for children, where one is transported from the misery and dullness of the ‘real’ world into the unreal land of imagination, where one never has to become a grown-up. In order to pursue the path to an ACTUAL freedom, as opposed to the imagined freedom of the spiritual world, it is essential to remember a Pure Consciousness Experience. Otherwise one won’t know what one is looking for and will only translate a few of the words and terms describing Actual Freedom into the spiritual belief-system that has been one’s familiar environment for many years. There is plenty written about Personally, it took two months and a lot of discussions with Peter until I finally understood experientially, what the term ‘spiritual’ stands for. For me, ‘spiritual’ had implied the ‘godly’ way of life, following the highest aspirations of mankind, a dedication to be good, to be part of the group of people who also aspire to the same goal. The day I finally understood the literal meaning of the word ‘spirit-ual’, a whole new world opened up. Suddenly the spiritual world was not the only alternate world to the ‘real’ world, not even the best world. Suddenly I understood that I – like everyone else – was producing this world in my head and heart – with my very spirit, so to speak – and this world consisted of spiritual morals, ethics, ideas, beliefs, emotions, loyalties, pride and the belief in the immortality of the soul. A major distinguishing factor between the spiritual approach to life and the path to an actual freedom is that spirituality teaches one to enhance the ‘good’ affective feelings. One is to indulge one’s intuition, trust, belief, faith, hope, guesswork and is encouraged to sense (as in feel out) a situation. Whereas, on the path to Actual Freedom, one explores actuality by applying thought, common sense, contemplation, practicality, intelligence and undertakes an investigation into verifiable facts of the situation. In order to clearly distinguish spiritual terms from actual terms, Peter has written a
RESPONDENT: I have a strong sense of abandoning humanity. VINEETO: In order to abandon humanity as an actuality and not as a feeling or fantasy one needs to know one’s humanity, one’s beliefs, emotions and instinctual passions through and through because ‘I’ am humanity and humanity is ‘me’. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is the way to come to know all the ingredients of this ‘humanity’ in oneself. Whenever I am not happy there is something to investigate and this ‘something’, these emotion-backed thoughts and vague feelings are the stuff that constitute ‘I’ and ‘me’. ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul are nothing other than all the beliefs, emotions and instinctual passions that, in due course, one will encounter and discover in oneself on the path to becoming happy and harmless. Investigating one’s beliefs and emotions, one by one, will enable one to leave them behind, one by one. Then, without a social identity, life is a pleasure and a delight and the ongoing experience of Virtual Freedom gives one the necessary backbone to encounter the underlying instinctual passions. Abandoning humanity is only possible after one has rid oneself of one’s social identity first and thus has the confirmation and confidence that the method works. Moreover, without experiencing the purity, magnificence and perfection of the actual world in a pure consciousness experience one’s abandoning humanity can only lead to feelings of dread and despair or the grand delusion of Oneness. RESPONDENT: I even feel as if I am abandoning Actual Freedom. VINEETO: Okey, dokey, that seems to be more likely and it surely is easier than ‘abandoning humanity’. For obvious reasons Actual Freedom is not everyone’s cup of tea and it requires – as Peter wrote to someone earlier –
It is everyone’s freedom and choice as to what they want to do with their lives and only a few seem to be dissatisfied and frustrated enough with the results of their spiritual search to be vitally interested in the Third Alternative. Being vitally interested in Actual Freedom and peace-on-earth will give one the courage and sincere intent to actually and irrevocably change one’s direction of thought, and one’s actions, in order to become happy and harmless, 24 hrs a day, every day. The first time I discovered that it is, in fact, possible to change one’s action I was rather shocked. Peter and I had just started our relationship and Peter had discovered that he had been battling me to change according to his ideas. Peter wrote about it in ‘Living Together’ –
When Peter decided to stop battling me I reacted in disbelief. Everybody, particularly spiritual authorities and famous group leaders, had emphasized that it is not possible to change one’s behaviour in such a radical and irrevocable manner, just by mere decision. One would need long meditative practice or extensive therapy experience that could possibly ‘heal the wounds’ which supposedly caused such behaviour in the first place. Furthermore, Eastern spirituality teaches that it is entirely unnecessary to change one’s behaviour because one merely needs to transcend one’s ego and ‘realize’ that all is but a dream. So I observed Peter very carefully for the next few days to see if he was merely suppressing the desire to ‘battle’ or just changing his manipulation-strategy. To my shock and surprise I had to acknowledge that he had actually changed his behaviour, by one definite and radical decision. The ‘bad’ news was that now I had no excuse to postpone putting my ‘good intentions’ into action instead of wanking about how nice it would be if one could only change oneself. The good news was that I finally had ‘live’ proof, through Peter’s changed behaviour, that one can indeed change Human Nature and thus can begin to put an end to all the sorrow and malice that is going on in the world – in one person, myself. It was now simply a matter of confidence and courage, because changing oneself based on intelligent thought, insight and subsequent action is irrevocable – and it irrevocably diminishes one’s ‘self’ each time, bit by bit. RESPONDENT: I’m not having PCEs but I am having direct experiences. I will write when I have more to say. That’s all for now. VINEETO: As I said above, in order to understand what Actual Freedom is about it is essential to remember a pure consciousness experience. It is vital to investigate precisely those ‘direct experiences’, and determine when and where and how the experience is being polluted by the ‘self’, by the feeling and spirit-ual interpretation of the actual sensate, sensuous experience. It is a fascinating adventure to explore one’s sensate experiences with the magnifying glass of attentiveness and heightened awareness and to discover the ingredients that invariably occur to stop or prevent one’s direct experience of the actual world. Particularly in the beginning I would often be thrown into a turmoil of fears and ‘bad’ feelings when trying to remove the ‘good’ feelings of love, beauty, spiritual meaningfulness or virtue from a sensate experience. Suddenly all hell broke lose, the ‘bad’ feelings of loneliness, starkness, dread or vice would come to the surface. Moral and ethical values would appear as noisy and frightening doubts in my head calling me traitor, whore, evil, animal. But remember, those feelings – as scary as they may look at first – are nothing but the flipside of the coin called morality and can confidently be dismissed along with all the good feelings. The ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ feelings are the rose-coloured and grey-coloured glasses one has to remove from one’s eyes in order to experience the actual world as magnificent as it is. What is left is pure delight. Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer |
