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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 26
VINEETO: Hi, RESPONDENT to No 20: I discovered by chance yesterday the Actual Freedom Mailing List and tonight I read your dialogue with the actualism-pope. Let me tell you I am very much interested by your questioning and points of view and I feel very close to your interests and positions. And, not knowing who is your Australian correspondent, let me tell you also I feel sorry for the ending of the dialogue with the last arguments given, which are if needed a sufficient prove the ego may not be totally erased... smile... VINEETO: You say that ‘I discovered by chance yesterday the Actual Freedom Mailing List’ – and yet , according to the Listbot Archives, you sent your first post to this list on September 23, 1999 and the second on November 30, 2000. You also use the phrase ‘not knowing who is your Australian correspondent’ (One can’t have it both ways, 14.6.2001) and yet you have read at least parts of our website because you have asked for a link that did not work. Vis:
In your second post on November 30, 2000 you wrote to No 20, saying how you appreciated
the way she put down Richard. Richard, the supposedly unknown ‘Australian correspondent’, then replied to you with 1058
words and 22 paragraphs. Therefore you do know well who is
You then concluded your letter with the statement –
According to your letter today you have now obviously made up your mind what ‘Actually Being Here and Now!’ means for you – RESPONDENT: Maybe you read that book ‘cutting through spiritual materialism’? Chogyam Trungpa shows that self-immolation is experienced by the... self, of course! and that’s its the most glorious day for the self to attend its own so-called erasure. According to the actualism-pope, the self ‘belongs to the land of lament’, but in those spiritual days the self can as well ‘belong to the land of pure contentment’. Another example: according to a recent quote by Alan, an Englishman who seems to be one of the actualism-bishops, he says how happy he feels helping others on the way to actual freedom... have you ever heard Nisargadatha saying such a thing?... and afterwards Richard writes you without laughing ‘needless to say there are no emotions or passions or subjectivity here’! Theme closed. Yes, No. 00, I am sure you’ll agree sadly with me that so many people in those areas just play with concepts of themselves, a way of manipulating oneself and inducing probably certain states of mind which can be RELATIVELY interesting... but differ from what is REALLY interesting: the possibility of enlightenment like Aurobindo, Nisargadatha or Ramana yesterday (or U.G. Krishnamurti today). The chance of meeting genuine enlightened beings give in fact some insights on the nature of consciousness, and on the difference between self-consciousness and its way out: un-self-consciousness. VINEETO: So far, in some 5000 years of written history, none of the revered spiritual teachings have succeeded in bringing anything remotely resembling peace on earth. Thousands upon thousands of teachers have expounded the Truth and millions upon millions of disciples have diligently applied the teachings of the Truth and still there is fighting and squabbling, murdering and raping, torturing and suiciding. Once one stops one’s cherished beliefs standing in the way of the facts, it becomes blindingly obvious that the Revered Teachings of the Enlightened Ones do stuff all for peace on earth, in fact they add even more passion to the religious and spiritual fervour that flames conflict and animosity, despair and denial, hostilities and persecution – as is made evident by the spiritual correspondents on this list. But if you are still convinced that enlightenment will deliver the goods – whatever that means for you – then surely it is good to abandon the ‘real’ world and get on with the business of pursuing the subject of spiritual enlightenment rather than waste your time and spleen on this list. Get out of the real world and get right into the middle of the spiritual world and make your own observations and have your own experiences. This is exactly what I did and the view from the inside is not at all pretty. For instance, none of the Enlightened Ones has ever been reported as living with a woman in peace and harmony, equity and parity – it is not even on their agenda. The girlfriend of Mohan Rajneesh was so depressed in the end that she committed suicide whereas he is known to have indulged in blow jobs from a number of female disciples, Franklin Jones aka Da Free John is notoriously famous for his sexual orgies that included under-aged young girls, Jiddu Krishnamurti is reported to have had a longstanding secret affair with his best friend’s wife, a globe trotting guru from the town where I live has just separated from his wife and two children because of too many domestics, married man John deRuiter is said to have invited two additional wives into his home because the Truth told him so ... The list of dysfunctional human relations in the master-disciple-world goes on and on, if one is at all ready to see with both eyes open what a rotten and corrupt profession the guru business really is. This mailing list is set up for those who are genuinely interested in investigating exactly the nature of those passions that the Revered Masters of the East have not had the guts to look at in themselves – the blind instinctual passions of fear and aggression as well as nurture and desire. As a woman I found it particularly revealing and revolting that none of the oh so wise gurus had tackled even the first step of peace in action – to live with one other person in utter peace and harmony. And as for their expounded wisdom – neither meditation nor therapy has offered any useful advice for a satisfying peaceful relationship and nobody can say that I haven’t tried hard enough. But after seventeen years I finally threw in the towel and admitted failure and started to question the revered teachings themselves. Actualism has offered me the tool to achieve this life-long goal of living with a man in peace and harmony and I know from my own experience that it works, 100%. There is not a single bickering, no trace of resentment or even a compromise in my relationship with Peter. There is no dependency, no jealousy, no disappointments, no scoring points, no neediness and no fear of loneliness – living together is simply great fun, day after delicious day. Sex is an ever-fresh innocent sensual play whenever the opportunity arises, a physical-only sensational delight that leaves any wild fantasy for dead. Gone are the days when I was plagued by worry, fear, guilt, shame, expectation, complaint, dissatisfaction or the undignifying need for sex. I never think of sex during the day or the night, I never fantasize and I never miss it, I no longer look at men as desirable sexual objects or would-be predators – I simply see fellow human beings regardless of gender. Why, if you are so convinced that spiritual enlightenment works for you, have you hung out for almost two years on a mailing list that is set up to facilitate investigating one’s spiritual beliefs along with one’s emotions and feelings – both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’? Are you a rebel without a cause just lurking about in the comfort of cyberspace with the other spiritualists, ever ready to leap out and cheer on the next God, Goddess or Wannabe who comes to strut their truth, as in –
... and tell us actualists where we have got it wrong?
There are hundreds, if not thousands of lists that are dedicated to the spiritual teachings of one, or other, or all of the spiritual teachers and enlightened beings with plenty of room to discuss siddhis and karma, afterlife and dharma, Buddha and Bodhidharma. Your choice of words (‘the actualism-bishops, the actualism-pope’) clearly shows that your myopic spiritual outlook on life keeps preventing you from seeing people as anything other than a spiritual agent in a spiritual hierarchy. Why do you choose to come to the only mailing list that dares to question spiritual beliefs and then start deriding those who are prepared to sincerely and actively do something about their own malice and sorrow? RESPONDENT: Incidentally, it seems to be the greatest desire of our kind to get rid of this unwelcome doubling and return to the pure living, being animal. VINEETO: If you desire to ‘being animal’, considering it ‘the pure living’ then that is entirely your own business. This list, however, is set up for those who want to move beyond the Tried and Failed wisdom of old and are ready to discuss how to eliminate the animal instinctual passions in themselves together with the ‘self’ that generates them.
VINEETO: You wrote, giving the following reasons for joining the Actual Freedom Trust mailing list – RESPONDENT: Why did I join? It was obviously because I am still questioning what was all this ‘actual Freedom path’ all about. I am still trying to understand what is ‘actually being here and now’ for you. It’s true that apparently I feel very close to the type of questions you raise, freedom beyond beliefs, what we are instead of who we are, free will or not, the link between personal identity and action, and so on... It’s true also that certain aspects of your literature are contradictory with certain other aspects, but maybe it’s common problems using words... and because you remain a sort of riddle, puzzle, enigma for me, I wanted to have a new check at it, are you Okay with that? VINEETO: In order to understand what we are on about, anyone coming from the spiritual world would need to suspend disbelief and prejudice, otherwise it won’t be possible to listen to what is being said, let alone understand what is being said ... and your interest will die in the bum within half an hour. As you might have gleaned from Richard’s letter to you, actualism is completely new in human history and lies 180 degrees opposite to all spiritual belief – therefore you will need to have both your ears and eyes open in order to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond both the real and spiritual world with their set-in-concrete beliefs and passionate imaginations. RESPONDENT: I don’t write that to defend religions or the spiritual world, in fact I am closer to you than you think, but there should be more crucial arguments against religions than the hypocrisy of certain gurus. More theoretical arguments, I mean. VINEETO: Instead of merely entering into ‘more theoretical arguments’ I will give you a guided tour into a practical application of actualism on the topic of ‘trying to understand’. Just as a warning beforehand – this is not an attack on what you are saying in particular, I am simply using your words as a live example of how to investigate the Human Condition of malice and sorrow as it is manifest in oneself. Then you can decide for yourself at the end of this letter if actualism is of further interest to you, or not. When you understand that the Human Condition by its very definition is common to all, then the trap of feeling wrong, bad, accused or insulted can easily be avoided. * RESPONDENT: ‘If a man is talking alone in the middle of a forest and there’s no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?’ <snip> Thank you for taking time to develop the long message I just received on the mailing-list. And thank you for your sincerity. VINEETO: Your ‘joke’ points to the first requirement of learning something new – you will have to consider it possible that somebody, and even worse, a female, knows more about this subject than you do. Otherwise this common male resentment towards females, that causes you to preface your post with a non-too subtle attack on the messenger instead of listening to the message, will be the first reason to close the shutters, or more to the point, prevent you from even opening them in the first place. However, if you genuinely consider what I write to be sincere, as you indicated, then this might help you overcome this initial obstacle to learning about the Human Condition. * VINEETO: The second requirement of learning something new is to become aware of and reign in one’s initial automatic reaction of ‘self’-defence, which sabotages any intelligent inquiry into facts before one has even started. Despite your assertion further down in your letter that ‘our thoughts come first’, empirical scientific evidence has proven in repeated experiments that the input stream to the Amygdala, the lizard brain, is quicker – 12 milliseconds as opposed to 25 milliseconds to the neo-cortex, the thinking brain. The first information goes to the Amygdala – it operates as a quick scan to check for danger. Indeed, the Amygdala is regarded as the alarm system, and its function is perhaps better described as being concerned with bodily safety – hence this lightning-quick scan of sensory input involuntarily produces a flow of chemicals to the body’s vital organs – a reaction that is commonly known as the automatic instinctual ‘fight or flight’ response. This instinctual almost-instantaneous reaction is always thoughtless, as it is
activated prior to the possibility of any thinking happening, be the thinking sensible or otherwise. This ‘quick and dirty
processing pathway’ results not only in a direct automatic bodily response, but the Amygdala’s direct connection to the
neo-cortex is much slower – causing us to then emotionally experience the instinctually-perceived danger – i.e. we feel the
fear a split-second later than the bodily reaction. This is crucial to understand in order to be able to gather some factual information as opposed to merely having an intuitive-instinctual thoughtless gut-feeling of what feels ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. In order to be able to think clearly – free from the grip of one’s own instinctual passions – one first needs to decide to let one’s initial instinctual thoughtless reactions pass by and then assess carefully the facts of what is being said. As an example, when you say, right after thanking me for my sincerity –
... then you have obviously already decided that I must have ‘a certain aggressive mood’. If your instincts tell you I am being aggressive we might as well give up the whole business right here. Instead of observing the fact that ‘I feel attacked’ and maybe investigate why you have this feeling and how often it occurs, you have jumped to a pre-programmed conclusion as in ‘I feel attacked – therefore the other must be aggressive’. First you make the assumption that it must be the other who is aggressive which then gives you the ‘self’-gratifying option of informing me that you will ‘not react to a certain aggressive mood’. Further you have rendered your own offer hypocritical by the reproachful joke you put at the top of your response –
... and another opportunity to investigate your own feelings has passed. However, if you genuinely consider what I write to be sincere, as you indicated, then this might help you overcome this particular obstacle to learning about the Human Condition. In actualism one understands that the only person one can reliably experience, observe in action, examine in depth, understand in context and change in any meaningful way is ‘me’. Therefore in actualism one’s attentiveness is utterly and completely directed towards one’s own feelings and beliefs, one’s own automatic reactions to what others say and do. * VINEETO: The third requirement of learning something new becomes apparent in your response when I described the nature of this list – The self can’t generate anything, 16.6.2001 Before you have even begun to find out and investigate what actualism is all about, you propound the borrowed wisdom of Eastern spiritualism, already absolutely convinced that we actualists have got it all wrong. If you want to insist that ‘the self is not an actor’, then that is entirely your business. But if you already know, why do you make-believe that you are ‘trying to understand’? Obviously, in order to learn something new you will have put aside the insistence that you already know and that you are right and maybe consider the possibility that you have been on the wrong track all along. This is, of course, a devastating blow to one’s pride but, then again, the question is ... would you let pride stand in the way of learning something new about the human condition? In order to understand actualism it is vital that you are open to the possibility that all of humanity has got it 180 degrees wrong. It is vital to understand that the word ‘wrong’ has nothing to do with a moral or ethical judgement as in ‘you have been a bad person’ but that it is a simple statement of fact that none of the traditional real-world methods or spiritual beliefs and teachings has brought peace on earth, i.e. they are wrong in that they don’t work. Despite their perpetual promises, none of the religious and spiritual movements, none of the self-help-therapies and none of the revered philosophies has come up with a practical down-to-earth, workable solution to eliminate malice and sorrow in human existence. Their solutions do not work, pas du tout. As for your statement ‘the self can’t generate anything’ – if you don’t even want to consider that you, i.e. your ‘self’, is responsible for your words and actions, then you certainly are on the wrong mailing list, as you have firmly shut the door to taking your life into your own hands. I am not going to discuss with you the borrowed beliefs about what the self is or not – beliefs that originated in a time when Wisdom had it that the earth was flat and the sky above was a dome populated by Gods and Demons. To believe this ancient wisdom to be the irrefutable Truth is to remain Neanderthaloid in one’s thinking and to be in blatant denial of modern scientifically proven facts. Have you never experienced a rush of anger and wondered where it came from, have you never been overwhelmed by sadness and wondered where it came from, have you never felt a shiver of fear literally running up your spine and wondered where it came from, have you never felt a gut-wrenching despair and wondered where it came from. Have you ever wondered what enrages human beings so much that they would kill, rape, maim and torture other human beings or wondered why people become so despairing that they would kill themselves. Have you ever wondered ‘who’ or ‘what’ generates these passions that directly cause all this mayhem and suffering? Have you ever wondered why in all Eastern philosophy suffering is considered intrinsic to being human and the only escape is to become a divine Self? I just wondered if you had ever wondered about these things before you accepted the Wisdom of the East as being the inviolable and unquestionable Truth? I have examined all my beliefs and thrown them all overboard. I have stopped believing long ago. No belief can hold water when confronted with facts. I rely solely on facts and on my own thorough examination of myself. I have numerous times experienced how ‘me’, the alien entity inside this flesh and blood body, generates my emotions and feelings and therefore I do know exactly what I am talking about. In various ‘self’-less pure consciousness experiences I have also experienced that this sensate and reflective body can live very well without a ‘self’ and as such, my confidence is based on facts and experience. So, if you genuinely consider what I write to be sincere, as you indicated, then this might help you overcome this particular legendary obstacle to learning about the Human Condition. * VINEETO: The forth requirement of learning something new is to dust off and polish one’s somewhat rusty capacity to think and reflect in a less ‘self’-centred manner, to contemplate and question, to inquire and explore, in short, to develop one’s non-affective intelligence. Whereas you declare –
This psittacine dimwitticism Upon discovering actualism, the first thing I had to re-learn was how to think, to contemplate and inquire in a way that produced some tangible result. For instance I learnt that it is useful to always come back to the question or issue from where I started and not – as our usually untrained brains tend to do – get lost in the different alleys and branches of speculation, imagination or irrelevant side issues. Prior to discovering actualism, I was usually very quick in inadvertently changing the subject and steering away from ‘dangerous’ areas, particularly when one of my dearly held beliefs was in question. When I started investigating the Human Condition in myself, there were lots of ‘dangerous’ areas of contemplation, beliefs to be dismantled and feelings to be unveiled, lots of issues to be avoided at all costs. I remember I was literally stunned by the outcome of applying straightforward objective thinking and I was also surprised to find out how roundabout my way of thinking often had been, particularly as I had been so totally influenced by the Eastern ‘above all, do not think’ belief. Thinking has such a bad press in the spiritual world where one is taught that the gateway to heaven is to ‘follow your feelings, trust you intuition and leave your mind at the door’. When I started on the path to Actual Freedom it was an adventure and a delight to re-instate, lubricate and develop my common sense, autonomous thinking and intelligence in order to understand the actual and factual world, to make sense of all the beliefs that I had adopted and to study and examine the instinctual passions I was driven by. It was fascinating to observe and experience my brain clicking into crystal clear functioning – at first only once in a while with what one would call a ‘striking thought’ and then I noticed that I could actually make sense of the down-to-earth conversations about Actual Freedom I had with Richard or Peter. Eventually I was able to think straightforward thoughts, unclouded by fear or imagination and come to startlingly obvious conclusions and realizations. The outcome of such application of common sense was often very staggering, new, fresh, shockingly different to what I had believed, ‘felt’ or ‘intuitively known’ to be true. Down-to-earth practical common sense, of course, has nothing to do with theoretical rationalisation, useless philosophizing, cerebral masturbation and conceptual imagination. For me, the crucial test always is – how can I put my sensible understanding into practice, how can I put my realization into practice, how can I act on the ‘striking thought’. I enjoy the astonishing clarity that the human brain is capable of and I have applied it to my behaviour in order to become free from malice and sorrow. The outcome is dazzling, to say the least. * VINEETO: Now to the rest of your letter – RESPONDENT: I discovered by chance yesterday the Actual Freedom Mailing List and tonight I read your dialogue with the actualism-pope. Let me tell you I am very much interested by your questioning and points of view and I feel very close to your interests and positions. And, not knowing who is your Australian correspondent, let me tell you also I feel sorry for the ending of the dialogue with the last arguments given, which are if needed a sufficient prove the ego may not be totally erased... smile... VINEETO: You say that ‘I discovered by chance yesterday the Actual Freedom Mailing List’ – and yet, according to the Listbot Archives, you sent your first post to this list on September 23, 1999 and the second on November 30, 2000. You also use the phrase ‘not knowing who is your Australian correspondent’ and yet you have read at least parts of our website because you have asked for a link that did not work. Vis: <snip> In your second post on November 30, 2000 you wrote to No 20, saying how you appreciated
the way she put down Richard. Richard, the supposedly unknown ‘Australian correspondent’, then replied to you with 1058
words and 22 paragraphs. Therefore you do know well who is
RESPONDENT: What you write is exactly true. I came already in 1999 on the site, visiting it several times since, but no more in 2001. It’s true also that I exchanged one or two messages with Richard, I think it was about U.G. Krishnamurti (please don’t make a confusion with Jiddu Krishnamurti, it’s not the same guy), I may be wrong, I never keep e-mails. VINEETO: So, why then did you use the phrase ‘not knowing who is your Australian correspondent’ when despite the fact that you ‘never keep e-mails’ you remember well that you had ‘exchanged one or two messages with Richard’ ‘about U.G. Krishnamurti’? * VINEETO: For instance, none of the Enlightened Ones has ever been reported as living with a woman in peace and harmony, equity and parity – it is not even on their agenda. The girlfriend of Mohan Rajneesh was so depressed in the end that she committed suicide whereas he is known to have indulged in blow jobs from a number of female disciples, Franklin Jones aka Da Free John is notoriously famous for his sexual orgies that included under-aged young girls, Jiddu Krishnamurti is reported to have had a longstanding secret affair with his best friend’s wife, a globe trotting guru from the town where I live has just separated from his wife and two children because of too many domestics, married man John deRuiter is said to have invited two additional wives into his home because the Truth told him so ... The list of dysfunctional human relations in the master-disciple-world goes on and on, if one is at all ready to see with both eyes open what a rotten and corrupt profession the guru business really is.
To be able to say this with unwavering conviction one needs to have put one’s heart and soul with 100% commitment into a live, hands-on investigation of the spiritual principles, methods and directives – otherwise one only ends up questioning and doubting one’s effort instead of the teachings and the teacher. With Richard’s encouragement to go all the way in questioning the Tried and obviously Failed, I not only questioned my own teacher Rajneesh but all the antiquated wisdom from which Rajneesh drew his religious eloquence. Upon extensive investigation I found there to be hardly any difference in principle between Advaita and Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, Sufism and Christianity – in the end it is always God, by whatever name, that one tries to please and that one relies on. Take the Metaphysical Caretaker out of the equation and every spiritual belief pops like a balloon – hot air and nothing to hold it together. RESPONDENT: Like people judging the whole Christian civilization only from the Inquisition, the Opus Dei and the Borgia popes. I mention Ramana, Nisargadatta and Aurobindo and you reply with the ‘enlightened Ones Rajneesh, Da Free John and John deRuiter’. Please be honest enough to consider they don’t play in the same category. Please be honest to acknowledge you use caricatures. VINEETO: Why do you think that Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj and Aurobindo Ghoose don’t play in the same category as Mohan Rajneesh, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Franklin Jones and John deRuiter’? Are they not all declaring themselves to be enlightened and are they not all offering their teaching as the solution to a suffering mankind? Do you think there is ‘good’ Enlightenment and ‘bad’ Enlightenment? Usually people have one or several pet gurus and a particular pet teaching, which is, of course, ‘better than everybody else’s belief’ in the typical competitive style common to all beliefs. However, in order to investigate what those teachings have practically contributed to peace on earth, one needs to step back and look at the whole guru business per se. Upon honest inquiry you will find that no spiritual master has ever lived in peace, harmony, equity and parity with a woman and no Goddess has ever lived in peace, harmony, equity and parity with a man because of the holier-than-thou nature of Enlightenment itself. The companion of a master, if He or She chooses to have one, will always be a devoted disciple and willing servant, humbling and belittling themselves to earn shares in good karma by serving and pleasing God’s latest representative or God’s latest incarnation. I am not using particular ‘caricatures’ but well-known teachers – or do you consider Jiddu Krishnamurti being a caricature as opposed to ‘Beedi Baba’ as Nisagadatta used to be called? It seems to me that you are stretching your case a bit thin here. However, if you investigate the Holy Men’s and Women’s lives you will become shockingly aware that living in peace and harmony with a partner is not even on their spiritual agenda – it is not part of God’s message, it is part of the ‘Maya’ that has to be transcended. The very principle of Eastern spiritual teaching is rotten to the core – every enlightened teacher is a caricature of a mythical non-existent God as in ‘an exaggerated or debased imitation or version (of), naturally or unintentionally ludicrous’ Oxford Dictionary. To say that some are better than others is to defend the indefensible. Of course, at first, it is an enormous blow to one’s pride to have bet on the wrong horse, but then again, to be spiritual has been the only alternative so far to being normal. Now that there is a third alternative available, anyone who is willing can put God and his/her mind-numbing devotion for God’s Go-Betweens into the dustbin where they belong and get on with the business of becoming free from malice and sorrow. It is so good to be free from spiritual belief. Not just Rajneeshism, but free from all spiritual belief – all belief in any God by whatever name, in life after death, in good and evil spirits or in the supposedly theomorphic nature of our planet. This freedom from all spiritual belief gives one dignity for the first time in one’s life. * RESPONDENT: Incidentally, it seems to be the greatest desire of our kind to get rid of this unwelcome doubling and return to the pure living, being animal. VINEETO: If you desire to ‘being animal’, considering it ‘the pure living’ then that is entirely your own business. This list, however, is set up for those who want to move beyond the Tried and Failed wisdom of old and are ready to discuss how to eliminate the animal instinctual passions in themselves together with the ‘self’ that generates them. RESPONDENT: The nature of the self is one of my favourite topics and I’ll be happy to go further discussing this topic with you. First, I can’t agree with the possibility that the self can generate anything. The self can’t generate anything. The self is a delusion. And this very delusion works in our mind to make us believe that the self is at the origin of our thoughts, of our action, and even – as you say – of our animal drives. It’s wrong. Our thoughts come first. And, as a result of the thinking process, the self is created or reinforced afterwards. The self comes second, at the end of action. It’s not at the source of action. Action takes place without the self. The self is not an actor, just a sub-product, a subsequent reaction. VINEETO: How can you say that ‘the nature of the self is one of my favourite topics and I’ll be happy to go further discussing this topic with you’ and in the same breath ‘first, I can’t agree with the possibility that the self can generate anything’ and then ‘it’s wrong. Our thoughts come first’? If you already know about ‘the nature of the self’ then how can there be a discussion or even a ‘trying to understand’ something entirely new and different? You said ‘our thoughts come first. And, as a result of the thinking process, the self is created or reinforced afterwards.’ – whereas there is overwhelming scientific and observational evidence that at birth all humans come genetically pre-coded with an instinctual ‘self’ that is then fully developed by the age of about 2 years. This development coincides with the first obvious signs of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire in every infant’s behaviour. With the first signs of the emergence of this instinctual behaviour we begin to be instilled by our peers with a social identity consisting of morals – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – and ethics – ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – together with a full set of social beliefs and psittacisms. Eastern belief has a bet each way in that it is sometimes held that material existence corrupts a pure soul and sometimes that one comes to earth pre-karma-ed and this karma needs to be worked off. Whichever version is believed, neither recognizes or acknowledges the pivotal role that the genetically-encoded instinctual passions play in giving rise to human malice and sorrow. RESPONDENT: Simple prove: A very young child does not have any self, he already has animal drives and so on. VINEETO: Given that you have said above – ‘the self is at the origin of our thoughts, of our action, and even – as you say – of our animal drives’, you now seemed to have changed your mind such that someone who has yet to have a self already has animal drives. This is an interesting thread should you want to discuss it further. RESPONDENT: It seems that in the evolutionary process, mother nature has given our species this tool (among other sophisticated neo-cortex tools chimps don’t have) to allow a continuity in our actions but this tool has taken little by little such an importance, that we try to limit its nasty effects or even to get totally rid of it, if such a thing can be possible. VINEETO: By tool, are you talking about a self? There are ample studies that indicate that chimps have a rudimentary animal ‘self’ very similar to that exhibited by an infant human. In Eastern belief this tool or self is given such importance that it eventually becomes a totally narcissistic ‘Self’, thus overwhelming any chance of sensible thinking in the neo-cortex. The puerile belief, that one can sublimate one’s savage instinctual passions while giving full unfettered reign to the tender instinctual passions so as to transcend being a mortal human and becoming an immortal Spirit, has to be abandoned if one is to become what one can potentially be – a flesh and blood mortal body free of all instinctual passions. And ‘such a thing’ is indeed possible. * VINEETO: You said in your introduction – RESPONDENT: I am still trying to understand what is ‘actually being here and now’ for you ... VINEETO: On this list you have the opportunity to investigate hands-on and practically, and not merely theoretically, something utterly down-to-earth and entirely new to the history of consciousness, should you be ready to suspend both belief and disbelief and look into the facts. I know that the phrase ‘entirely new’ is something that every Guru proud of his profession uses but a glimpse of an experience of the world outside of belief – the actual world in its marvellous scintillating purity and perfection – will immediately belie the spiritual rehash that runs under the name of ‘entirely new’. It’s the ‘down-to-earthness that is 180 degrees opposed to the spiritual world, the matter-of-factness, the sensate delightful actuality of experiencing this world, here in this place and now in this moment. There is no other here and no other now – the metaphysical Here and Now is in fact ‘there’ in a world of no-time, no-space and no-form. The metaphysical Here and Now is merely a product of fervent fantasy, albeit a fairytale of global proportions. And further you said in your point No 2 – RESPONDENT: I don’t write that to defend religions or the spiritual world, in fact I am closer to you than you think ... VINEETO: Indeed, you are not defending religions or the spiritual world – you are presenting the spiritual viewpoint as being the inviolate Truth – the truth that does not need defending as it is unquestionably right. If, however, your words ‘closer to you than you think’ indicate that you already have some doubts about the effectivity of the spiritual-world beliefs and methods to bring about peace-on-earth, then ... then hey, fill your tank and get ready for a thrilling journey into your own psyche. It is the adventure of a lifetime, the only game to play in town. Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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