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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 32
RESPONDENT: Hello, First of all I want to tell you that I hate every word that ends in -ism. Every time I pronounce such a word my body produces all kind of negative reactions such as shivering, cold and sweeting. VINEETO: Maybe you had not read Richard’s post to No 23 before you filed your complaint –
Why don’t you check out the following words for the same physical effect –
actinism, algorism, altruism, amorphism, anabolism, anatocism, asterism, Atticism, auto-eroticism, biomagnetism, biprism,
bradyseism, catabolism, chemism, chemotropism, daltonism, diachronism, diamagnetism, dichronism,. Dynamism, ebullism, echoism,
embolism, empiricism, endomorphism, epimorphism, erotism, galvanism, geomagnetism, geotropism, haptotropism, heliotropism,
heteromorphism, heurism, homoeomorphism, homomorphism, immediatism, isochromism, isomerism, isomorphism, jism, journalism,
magnetism, mechanism, melanism, metabolism, metachromism, metamerism, metamorphism, metasomatism, monomorphism, monosyllabism,
morphism, motorism, neologism, nephalism, nudism, optimism, organism, parallelism, paramagnetism, pentaprism, photorealism,
phototropism, pianism, pleochronism, polymerism, polymorphism, polytypism, pragmatism, prism, professionalism, putanism,
rheumatism, satellitism, seism, sensism, tourism, transformism, traumatism, trichroism, triolism, ventriloquism, vicarism,
vicinism, vocalism, volcanism, voltaism, voltinism, volunteerism, vulcanism, witticism (not to be mixed up with dimwitticism RESPONDENT: I’ve observed that such reactions occur when I lie myself or speak with others about things that I know only in theory. In the world today there are all sorts of currents (a normal thing for a big ocean such as our world) like spiritualism, which includes the monk-yogi-fakir-subways, individualism, collectivism, communism, Methodism, actualism all these -ism having in common the end. These are only the currents but there are many sub currents also like you name it. Each one of them has its own special ingredients like belief, system, knowledge, education, future, special, great, better, etc which in turn make every human being less normal and separating one from his original identity. VINEETO: None of the above quoted words fits the characterism you assign to all –ism-words as in ‘currents’, ‘theory’, ‘belief, system, knowledge, education, future, special, great, better’. In your generalism you are getting certainly close to dogmatism yourself. As for the ‘special ingredients’ of –ism-words making ‘every human being less normal and separating one from his original identity’ – this description perfectly portrays the much vaunted but schism-creating craving for individualism, ‘the doctrine that reality is constituted of individual entities’ Oxford Dictionary Therefore your reactions to the ending -ism could be seen as being rooted in pedantism and scepticism, generalism and dramatism, maybe even simplism and absolutism, certainly some kind of literal formalism. Calling ‘our world’ ‘a big ocean’ is clearly reductionism on your part, as our world obviously consists of both land and ocean, otherwise we might live like Kevin Costner in Hollywood’s Water World. RESPONDENT: So, in order for a swimming ‘something’ both to stay alive and to reach its destination among all this unnecessary stuff it needs to be a very good swimmer and/or to have great luck. VINEETO: Your symbolism reeks of traditionalism, even fatalism – as in we need to strive to reach a destination that is invariably somewhere else and sometime else rather than tackling the obstacles to living the perfection and purity of this very moment in actuality. Are you sure you are not ‘swimming’ in an ocean called spiritualism heading for a further shore à la escapism? RESPONDENT: My aim is to be myself and the beginning of real work requires mostly eliminating this stuff from one’s psyche. I wonder what are your practical experiences in coming face to face with the human (social) legacy. VINEETO: I have followed the doctrine to ‘be myself’ or ‘be who I Really am’ for 17 years and it sucks. My aim is to become completely free from being my ‘self’ as I have numerous times experienced in a pure consciousness experience that it is ‘me’ who is standing in the way of experiencing the peace and perfection that is already always here. Actualism is the specifically designed and tested method to reach this goal. Facilitating self-immolation requires much, much more than mere ‘eliminating this stuff from one’s psyche’. First it requires investigating the facts of one’s sweeping generalisations and emotional reactions in order to understand what benefits one could in fact draw from actualism. If you are already so affected by the sound of a simple descriptive label that you are unable to find out what it means then that is indeed the first obstacle that needs to be removed. The next requirement, if you want to come ‘face to face with the human (social)
legacy’, is to turn the B.S. detector To publicly announce that ‘I hate every word that ends in -ism’ is to merely parrot borrowed psittacisms and pass the responsibility for your personal antagonism on to others. Humorism is certainly a useful and delightful asset that can assist you on your way to getting rid of your identity in toto.
VINEETO: You wrote some time ago – RESPONDENT: Dear unknown friends, I’m one of those who try to figure out what actualism really is and most of all what real living means. What I’ve found until now it’s a lack of practical ‘things’ one must/must not do in order to become free from the human Condition-ing and let’s say some actual methods. Also about the so-called apperception (Richard) I want some details. I suppose it’s something in which you’re both aware of yourself and the outside world...??? Apart from the words I’m more interested in the way you live your lives, the real strengths and weaknesses you gained, your attitudes and most of all PCEs or states created by all those ingredients. To resume, what has changed in you and in your lives? VINEETO: I am surprised that you find ‘a lack of practical ‘things’’ on
this list or on our website because the main topic in many posts is about how to investigate the human condition in oneself. But
if you find the website too confusingly big, there is a page in the library called If you want to learn about what effects the application of the actualism method has had
on our lives, then you might be interested in reading As for ‘apart from the words’ – if you follow the school of thought that the word is not the thing and that learning needs to happen through personal energy transmission, then I am at a loss as to how to communicate to you about the way I am living my life, because all I can use to describe the way I live my life are words. Words can describe facts and sensuous experience accurately and precisely and are sufficient in themselves to allow anyone interested in actualism to make a prima facie case for or against what is on offer. Then it is up to you to try the method out for yourself or not. RESPONDENT: Also, I’d like to know what do you think about Zorba – the man, was he an actualist? Of course, only if you’ve read the book. VINEETO: As I understand it, Zorba was a mythical character in a fiction book, so by definition he fails every criterion for being an actualist. In my youth I used to like the crazy, passionate Zorba and the lively Greek music made the film all the more popular. The spiritual teacher I followed for many years used to make a big thing out of combining Zorba the man and Buddha the God. Amongst Rajneeshees ‘Zorba the Buddha’ was a fashionable slogan and at some point I co-managed a Sannyas Restaurant that bore that name. Today I see that the fictitious character of Zorba was as much inflicted with the human condition and driven by his instinctual passions as everyone else on the planet and the freedom he used to represent for me in my youth I now understand to be blindly living out his passions. To love yourself and to love life, however seductive, is a narcissistic passion nevertheless. Actual liberation happens when I free myself from the shackles of ‘who’ I think and feel I am, liberate myself from being driven to automatically react according to my survival instinctual passions, in order to more and more enjoy the sensuousness of being alive as what I am, a soul-less flesh-and-blood human being. RESPONDENT: My reaction about -isms I would explain it by having (please use commonsense, not stick to the words) no appreciation about borrowed things, theoretics, imitations, opinions, smarties we got for free and not even on our request, etc. things that form that something like a crust which I would called it our false personality. It was painful and it feels like pulling out an evil tree out of the ground, the roots go as deep as we cannot imagine into our being sucking the vital energy and using it for its purposes. It’s no easy task to pull it out and it’s for sure not one that can be accomplished on a mailing list. The ways I’ve tried until now where merely trying to cut it down or to put it other way for a better understanding when you have a bad smell you can use a perfume or you may try to find the dysfunction and correct it. VINEETO: I understand why you react to -isms although I still think it is an emotion-based generalisation that blinds you to clear investigation, because actualism, despite having -ism at the end of the word, is none of the above ‘borrowed things, theoretics, imitations, opinions, smarties we got for free and not even on our request’. Actualism is the doing of becoming free from both one’s social identity and from the underlying instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, both from one’s ego and one’s soul – something that is completely new to human history. When you say ‘please use commonsense, not stick to the words’, you may also find that it is very useful to stick to the words, particularly when reading Richard, for the words are literally dripping with common sense. RESPONDENT: It is a very brief description of the ‘social identity’ and it happened to me to be removed in a short period of time. VINEETO: What you have described in your first letter was not only a removal of
your social identity but from your description it was evident that this temporary vacuum was immediately filled with emotion –
it became an affective experience of ‘godliness’, also known as an Altered State of Consciousness. In such an ASC one feels
that one knows the Truth, one feels oneself to be all-knowing, all-powerful, one-with-everything, filled with Love for all,
compassionate to every living being and above and beyond all normal human experience. I once had such a powerful ASC that lasted
for two days, and having learnt from Richard about its pitfalls, I used the experience to investigate exactly how my intelligence
and my sensibility was devastatingly effected by these aggrandizing emotions. I was relieved when the experience was finally over
and I was able to again think clearly and reasonably without being driven by feelings of grandeur and delusion. You can find You have described the experience ‘to be removed’ from your social identity in an earlier post –
In contrast to such altered states of consciousness, a pure consciousness experience is a non-affective ‘self’-less pure sensate experience where all of ‘me’, both ego and soul, both my social identity and my instinctual being are temporarily in abeyance. In a PCE there is no identity present to feel like a God living in an ethereal other-worldly realm. God, although everyone on the planet believes in him (or her) in some way or other, is nothing but a passionate imagination that only exists in people’s heads and hearts. In a pure consciousness experience one is one’s sense organs brimming with delight, wallowing in the enormous abundance of sensual experience that is perpetually here while one is at the same time fully aware of being an aware sensate and reflective human being. This bare awareness of being aware, apperception, is the fundamental key to a pure consciousness experience – both coincide with each other. With an investigative awareness running – how am I experiencing this moment of being alive? – one is able to examines one’s affective feelings, emotions and instinctual passions as they occur. The longer one practices such investigative awareness, the less one’s feelings, emotions and passions interfere with one’s sensuous attentiveness of being alive at this very moment – an awareness that simply registers sensate experiencing. This sensate awareness is not something one can practice or cultivate in isolation from removing the affective feelings that interfere with the simple delight of being alive. Given sufficient practice of the actualism method, an ongoing idle sensate attentiveness to being alive can momentarily turn into an awareness of being aware, which is apperception, and a pure consciousness experience takes place. And then you are hooked.
RESPONDENT: I was wondering if you’re aware of the fact that many of the principles and ideas evoked by AF can be found in other practices, and when I say that I refer to fourth-way ideas. For me they are strikingly familiar. VINEETO: Allow me to answer this question at the end of this post. RESPONDENT: Apart from this, I cannot figure out how Richard managed to ‘escape’ from his real ‘I’ (here in the sense of God, Self, etc.), that is if he has had One (which is the equivalent of saying one’s enlightened). So if you please can explain. I had the experience of being enlightened, although for only three hours, and it seems to me to be Impossible to exist something beyond that, as this state contains all possibilities. VINEETO: Yes, I know RESPONDENT: Another aspect of that experience was that the ‘I’ was not mine, but belonged to a person I very much loved; the identity called No 32 was not there during the period. VINEETO: Could ‘a person I very much loved’ by chance be another name for God, the glorious ‘Being’ who replaced ‘the identity called No 32’? That would make you about God number 5872. RESPONDENT: Was not this a PCE, as in my memory it has all + many more of the characteristics attributed by AF language for a PCE? I must say I don’t know which were the exact causes for that, maybe the collapse of my identity, or maybe the suffering involved, or maybe the love played an important part in the process. VINEETO: The description of your ‘experience of being enlightened’ that it had ‘all + many more of the characteristics attributed by AF language for a PCE’ together with your comment that ‘‘I’ … belonged to a person I very much loved’ clearly point to an affective ‘Self’-loving experience whereas a pure consciousness experience is a non-affective ‘self’-less (and ‘Self’-less) experience. Your comments about feeling the collapse of ‘Suffering’ and the importance of ‘love’ are also words that describe an affective experience. RESPONDENT: All I know is that it Happened and was real. VINEETO: Such an experience seems very, very real while it is happening – all
the good feelings come rushing in and seem to overpower the bad feelings … and these feelings are so much grander than ‘my’
normal experiencing that they are experienced as very real. However, Enlightenment, although experienced as very real, is a
feeling and not actual. (see The Actual Freedom Trust Library for descriptions of RESPONDENT: What I don’t understand about AF is why do you ignore the fact (for me) that when this identity collapses, someone else gradually takes the space, and that is our true Self. VINEETO: The writings of actualism do not ‘ignore the fact … that when this identity collapses, someone else gradually takes the space, and that is our true Self.’ It’s just that a ‘Self’, by whatever name, is a delusion born out of an illusionary self – or to put it another way – the idea of God is nothing but a fairy tale and to imagine oneself to be a God is to live in a ‘self’-created dream-like state. RESPONDENT: Why do you ignore the Self? VINEETO: I have come to know the ‘Self’ in an extensive Altered State of Consciousness but I have also had numerous pure consciousness experiences when the ‘Self’ and the ‘self’ (the identity) is temporarily absent. An actualist does not ‘ignore the Self’ but knows by experience that there is a Third Alternative to being normal or being spiritual. RESPONDENT: Before having that experience I knew nothing about religion or have anything in common with any spiritual practice. I’ve read your posts (and I fully agree with you) about some spiritual teachers, about their pretences, the lies and the hypocrisy involved as I was also part of a group. It must be made a clear difference about what each one of us understands by the term ‘enlightenment’, as this term has been widely used and may now signify many different things. The best description I can find is in the term ‘4th state of consciousness’ as described in fourth-way terminology. I would also like to ask Richard if he understands the same this as I do by ‘enlightenment’? (google, yahoo ::: ‘fourth way’, ‘4th state’). VINEETO: ‘The 4th state of consciousness’ is another description for enlightenment. To search for the ‘true Self’ is spiritual, meta-physical practice because it involves the belief in something non-physical – the Self. RESPONDENT: What I’ve found out was the truth that none of these present self-named, entitled enlightened beings are at present in such a state, at best in an altered state of consciousness. VINEETO: Given that ‘self’-aggrandizement is the very core of enlightenment, it is common amongst enlightened people or wannabe enlightened people to dismiss all other enlightened beings as ‘not quite enlightened’. ‘My Truth’ is a highly affective experience, and a very competitive one at that. RESPONDENT: What I want to say is that this so-called Self, Absolute, I, God really exists, it’s alive and kicking and that the state in which you discover him is not an altered state of consciousness but the ultimate state available for humans. To be or not to be a bee? VINEETO: There is no doubt that according to ancient wisdom and common belief the experience of enlightenment is ‘the ultimate state available for humans’. Nevertheless, this ancient 5000-year-old experiment of achieving Higher Consciousness or God-consciousness is significantly flawed, i.e. it has failed to bring anything resembling peace on earth between human beings, and all the wars and murders and domestic violence and torture keep going on. To recognize and admit to this long history of continual failure is to begin to initiate a change in one’s perception – a 180 degrees turn, away from all the ‘self’-aggrandizing spiritual beliefs and practices towards a down-to-earth investigation into one’s beliefs, feelings and instinctual passions that make ‘me’ tick. * VINEETO: Now in response to your first question – RESPONDENT: I was wondering if you’re aware of the fact that many of the principles and ideas evoked by AF can be found in other practices, and when I say that I refer to fourth-way ideas. For me they are strikingly familiar. VINEETO: Given that you said that ‘this so-called Self, Absolute, I, God really exists’ and that this is ‘the ultimate state available for humans’, it is understandable that you don’t consider a third alternative possible. A third alternative to being normal or being spiritual only comes into view when one is deeply dissatisfied with either of the traditional ‘self’-centred and ‘self’-obsessed states of consciousness . For those who are dissatisfied with their life as-it-is and who are suss of the spiritual world, the Actual Freedom website points to the fact that there is an actual world right here under our very noses, a world which can only be discovered when one leaves the self and the Self behind.
VINEETO: I enjoyed your clarifying post on U.G. Krishnamurti and I fully agree with you when you say –
I had several ASCs myself that lasted for several hours each and only then did I experientially understand the condition Rajneesh and other enlightened masters described themselves to be in. My altered-state experiences left no doubt that the enlightened state is indeed a different state of being but by the time I had these experiences I no longer had the desire to live such a delusion because I had previously experienced the unparalleled purity of a ‘self’-less PCE. Just for the record, I would like to rectify the following –
I have never said that I believe ‘that Richard is the only atheist dead and/or alive’. I have only found two quotes where I refer to Richard as an atheist –
And …
As I am a thorough-going atheist myself, belief does not enter the picture when I say that Richard is a thorough-going atheist – I know both intellectually and experientially that Richard harbours no notion of any spiritual beings whatsoever. Only an instinctual-affective being is capable of believing in Gods, Goddesses or disembodied Higher Powers and Richard’s ‘being’ has been extinct since October 1992. Your phrase ‘Richard is the only atheist dead and/or alive’ may well be a reinterpretation of what Peter wrote in his Journal –
RESPONDENT: The early Peter wrote:
First I want to say that I agree with this. Is this still valid now for you? VINEETO: Since becoming an actualist I have found it useful to qualify my use of the word atheist as most people tend to be very selective in the meaning they ascribe to the word. Some people restrict the word atheist to mean someone who has been raised in a society that doesn’t worship a personal God à la Christianity or Judaism, or as someone who is a follower of a spiritual teacher who rejects the belief in a personal God. As such many followers of spiritual teachers such as Buddha, a Jain Teerthankara, Mohan Rajneesh, Jiddu Krishnamurti or UG Krishnamurti blithely imagine themselves to be atheists. Similarly many people who are pantheists, believe in astrology, homeopathy, the Wholeness of Mother Earth, the healing power of psychic forces, the Higher Intelligence of the Universe, a disembodied Energy that holds the universe together also call themselves atheists, all of which serves to make the common usage of the word atheist almost meaningless. For this reason both Peter and I have since replaced the term ‘atheist’ with the more descriptive expression of ‘thorough-going atheist’ whilst Richard uses the term ‘thorough-going atheist through-and-through’. A thorough-going atheist to me is someone who has stopped wondering if there is a Divine Force or a life after death, who is no longer prone to being seduced by the latest spiritual fad, who has no doubt at all that any and all spiritual, metaphysical and mystical endeavour is a waste of time and who does so because he or she knows experientially that God, gods, goddesses, spirits, ghosts and fairies have no existence in the actual world. Richard is no longer the only thorough-going atheist – there are a handful of people, myself included, who know without a smidgen of a doubt that any God, any spirit and any metaphysical belief is a fiction of passionate human imagination. RESPONDENT: And if yes, are actualists the only ones worthy to be called atheists? VINEETO: As I said above, because of the current trend to water-down or deliberately distort the meaning of the word atheist, it is more accurate to call actualists thorough-going atheists. And the reason for this is very clear. Only the actualism method provides the rigorous examination that is necessary if one is to rid oneself of the apparent, as well as the not so apparent, insidious beliefs in divine intervention, mysterious energies, mystifying metaphysical phenomena, psychic energies and forces and the many other fairy tales that continue to enthral instinctual human beings. In the light of the current discussions about atheism on the mailing list it is pertinent to remember that atheism is not synonymous with actualism – i.e. they are not the same thing at all. To throw out one’s belief in God or gods is only the beginning of the journey on the wondrous path of uncovering that which is actual. RESPONDENT: Are there no materialists dead or alive that deserve the name atheists? I ask this as in materialism (for what I understand) is implicit that there is no God, that he is merely a human invention. VINEETO: Some materialists are indeed atheists given the current loose usage of the word. RESPONDENT: They believe that there is no God in the same way as the 99.9999 percent of spiritualists believe that there is one. They don’t speak from their own personal experience, so they can always switch sides (as any belief creates doubts). VINEETO: Exactly. You would know this yourself because although you were apparently born and raised in an atheistic society you nevertheless were seduced by your altered state of consciousness and attracted by the promises of Gurdjieff’s spiritual teachings. For me, once I had a pure consciousness experience and fully understood and took on board its implications – that ‘I’ am but a passionate phantom and so are ‘my’ passionate creations such as God, Divine Energy and such like – I could no longer maintain the belief that God or the Supernatural exist as actualities. Nevertheless, it took me several months to fully digest and get accustomed to the implications of no longer believing in a Higher Power – I had to tackle my feelings of loyalty to my Guru and my spiritual friends and my pride in having been sucked into an elaborate fairy-tale, my security in belonging to a group of like-minded and similarly-feeling people, my fear arising from the obvious gap that would be left if I abandoned my precious spiritual identity. It was disorienting and scary at the start but hey, I’m glad I didn’t let my feelings stand in the way of enjoying the current freedom I now enjoy – it’s so grand to be free of all of one’s spiritual beliefs. RESPONDENT: So my question goes like this: can someone who hasn’t experienced that state of Being, may call himself an atheist (a definitive stand, with no potential to switch sides)? VINEETO: From my own experience I can’t determine if someone else can become a thorough-going atheist without having personally experienced an altered state of consciousness because I did have a few ASCs which helped me to experientially understand spiritualism. I think just as PCEs are going to inevitably occur once one begins to sincerely peel away one’s layers of identity, so are altered states of some kind or other – ASCs are a natural defence mechanism of ‘me’ wanting to stay in existence and will inevitably occur when ‘I’ feel deeply threatened. For a thorough-going atheist they are the ultimate fire-test. RESPONDENT: I would say no, because if he says so, that would be only a belief based on his shallow exploration of the psyche. If he goes deeper, enjoys an ecstasy or two, he will have a definite chance to become an ‘authentic’ spiritualist. VINEETO: I take it you are talking of your own experience. I take it that what you are saying is that there is a vast difference between believing something to be fact or fiction and knowing by direct experience that something is indeed fact or fiction, i.e. an atheist does not believe in God or gods, whereas a thorough-going atheist knows from his or her own pure consciousness experience that God and gods are but a figment of human imagination. And, from your comment, you would say that a spiritualist regards or interprets things from a spiritual point of view whereas an ‘‘authentic’ spiritualist’ is someone who has had an altered state of consciousness experience of the delusionary state of spiritual realization. Personally I would not use the term authentic in this case as the term ‘an authentic delusion’ is somewhat of an oxymoron. RESPONDENT: As for me, I’ve managed to break-free from the spiritual dreams and schemes and now they are of zero interest. VINEETO: I remember I was immensely relieved when the full implications sank in that there is no omnipotent omniscient God, no Divine Judge, no mysterious Power running the show and consequently no Life after Death to plan for. It was as if I got my life back, I could finally live now instead of worrying about my mythical non-physical life and the ‘health’ and virtue of my spirit and my soul. A huge burden fell off me and with it my fear of divine punishment disappeared which in turn freed me from my fear of human authorities – everyone became just like me, a fellow human being, living their life for the first and only time just like me. It’s not that I abandoned the belief in a Greater reality and fell back into grim reality because I had set my course on becoming unconditionally happy and harmless – the best possible thing I could do for my fellow human beings. RESPONDENT: That’s a definitive gain, if it were not for this alternative I would have remained a spiritual student-expert for the rest of my life. This would have happened as there would have been no alternative for the answer/solution provided by the altered states of consciousness that could fully interest me. VINEETO: Yes, I can relate to this one. In my early twenties I had dismissed the notion that the pursuits of materialism would bring fulfilment and soon after I found spiritualism. Although I became more and more disillusioned with the results of spiritual practice there was nothing better on offer until I met Richard who introduced me to the possibility of an actual freedom from the human condition. RESPONDENT: The spiritual world seems hilarious now, an aberration, but I remember it hasn’t always been like that. VINEETO: Yes, if it wasn’t for the fact that people are either killing, maiming and dying for their beliefs or turning away and retreating ‘inside’ it would all be a comic entertainment. What I find most hilarious is that some people really believe that they can gain freedom by redefining the meaning of the word freedom, for example ‘I am already free, I only need to stop searching’. Another popular fallacy is the idea that one can become free from one’s spiritual beliefs by merely redefining the word spiritual or that one can become happy by watering down the meaning of the word happiness. RESPONDENT: Many of my former spiritual friends are still entangled in the intricate psychic web of deceit, fear and power waived and sustained both by themselves and by those seeking all sorts of benefits from them. VINEETO: Yes, the difference between how I experienced the world then and how I experience it now is quite astounding. At some point I described the process of investigating my beliefs and their resulting feelings as finding and removing ‘invisible hooks’ which psychically linked me to others who shared the same feelings and beliefs – the more I recognized and uncovered my beliefs the less I was exposed to the psychic web of humanity. Interestingly enough, when the connection of shared beliefs ceased, the friendship also ceased. I simply had no beliefs in common with my former spiritual friends – the benefit being that I no longer had like-believing friends and non-believing foes which then allowed me to experience an intimacy with all of my fellow human beings, not as an ideal but as an actuality. Good to chat with you.
RESPONDENT:
‘This is a godless universe and it thrills me that I have the chance to ride along with it, even if only for my few decades of awareness. Many people turn to religion saying, ‘But there has to be more to it all than this.’ To them I say, ‘Look around you! What more could you ask for?’ In terms of Truth, Beauty and Wonder, all the world’s religions cannot compete with a clear, cold, moonless night.’ The person that wrote the above believes in black holes and pulsars (as concepts) but it’s clear that he has no spiritual beliefs. Is he an atheist according to you? VINEETO: As I said in my last letter to you, because of the current trend to water-down the meaning of the word atheist, both on this list and elsewhere, it is more accurate to call actualists thorough-going atheists. This expression indicates that they now hold no religious, spiritual, mystical or metaphysical beliefs whatsoever because they have thoroughly investigated and eliminated all of their religious, spiritual, mystical or metaphysical beliefs. As such whether or not someone else calls himself or herself an atheist is a side-issue. For instance the person you quoted has replaced God with ‘Truth, Beauty and Wonder’. Truth with a capital T generally denotes an unquestionable higher value or universal meaning or a non-physical energy, which either permeates or underlies the physical world. Put plainly, he is considering himself to be an atheist because he sees the universe as ‘godless’ and yet he proclaims a spiritual value he calls Truth. In contrast, someone who has examined and abandoned all their spiritual beliefs knows with absolute certainty that neither God, nor Divinity, nor any kind of metaphysical energy exists in this ‘godless universe’ and as such he/she also knows that there is no such thing as ‘Truth’ in ‘a clear, cold, moonless night’ nor are they to be found in any other aspect of the physical universe. The same is the case with beauty – beauty is in the eye of the beholder, i.e. it is a subjective, affective feeling and like all affective feelings it has a diametric opposite, in this case ugliness. When it is written with a capital B, it is often valued as pointing to the Truth. In the Upanishad, the holy scriptures of Eastern mysticism, the ultimate experience of enlightenment is described as Satyam, Shivam, Sunderam – Truth, Goodness and Beauty. Indian mystics described God as being the source of all that is true, good and beautiful. I am not saying this particular self-declared atheist is an adherent to Eastern spirituality but that he, like millions of others, is doing no more than inflating or aggrandizing his affective experience of the magnificence of this paradisiacal planet to be absolute values (‘Truth, Beauty and Wonder’). This habit of aggrandizing one’s own feelings is a universal phenomenon that exists across all cultures, religions and philosophies and its only interest to an actualist is that it is evidence of the universality of affective/ instinctive experiences. The person you quoted also gives his own definition as to what he considers atheism to be on his webpage –
Skimming through his website it appears he is mainly concerned with addressing Christian beliefs and apparently remains unconcerned with the beliefs of the so-called godless religions of the East and the wide range of Eastern mysticism that have permeated all levels of Western society over the last century. Whilst taking this initial step of questioning the monotheistic God or even dismissing the polytheistic Gods is a sensible first step, such a person would still be susceptible to either having an experience of Godliness, such as you had in the ASC you described, or to gullibly follow the teachings of a guru who negates a creator God while simultaneously advocating the search for one’s inner divinity and becoming one with the divinity of the Universe, such as I did. It is relatively easy to reject a belief in a creator god – something I did myself when I was 24 – but this is but the tip of the iceberg if one sincerely aspires to be a harmless and happy thorough-going atheist. A thorough-going-atheist is one who knows by personal experience that the tempting succour of spiritual and metaphysical beliefs as well as the lure of glorious spiritual and metaphysical experiences are nought but impassioned beliefs and atavistic fantasies that arise from the instinctual survival passions of his or her own psyche. RESPONDENT: Do you think that the spiritual believers group is included in the metaphysical group and not vice-versa? VINEETO: Honestly, I don’t care one way or the other. It is mainly a matter how each believer chooses to define his or her beliefs. As an actualist I was concerned with eradicating each and every belief in me, be they religious, spiritual, supernatural, mystical, metaphysical, philosophical, or whatever. RESPONDENT: What are the differences in your opinion between the psyche, the metaphysical and the spiritual? VINEETO: Richard in a recent post to No 37 made it clear that metaphysics originally had been concerned with ‘Being’, i.e. the fundamental nature of reality and being. Metaphysics has its roots in spiritualism and he went on to say –
For me, I have set my goal to become free from having a psyche – the instinctual ‘being’ arising from the instinctual passions of fear aggression, nurture and desire – and as a part of this process I found I was compelled to investigate and eliminate all of my beliefs, be they related to my gender, nationality, culture, religion, spirituality, metaphysics, materialistic values, societal morals, dietary mythology, health myths or sexual taboos. The very action of daring to examine and expose all of one’s beliefs significantly weakens one’s identity such that one comes to directly experience the raw instinctual passions that lay hidden beneath this outer layer of cultural conditioning that constitutes one’s social identity and thus one is able to get a clearer understanding of what it is that generates one’s ‘being’ or psyche. The next step is to leave instinctually-driven Humanity behind. RESPONDENT: I wanted to ask you some time ago (as Osho has advised his students in the USA to attend Gurdjieff-Ouspensky groups after the closure of his Oregon branch) if you have experimented with ‘self-remembering’? VINEETO: I wasn’t aware of such advice although I was at the Oregon ranch when it folded. However Osho aka Mohan Rajneesh embraced all kinds of spiritual techniques and traditions, knitting them into his own teachings whenever it suited him, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. I have heard it said that some of the futile, thoughtless and demeaning tasks that Rajneesh set for some of his followers were reminiscent of some of Gurdjieff’s techniques but I can’t attest to Gurdjieff having influenced Rajneesh’s teachings or methodologies. When I looked up where Rajneesh mentions ‘self’-remembering I found that he considered it to be the same as Buddha’s ‘right mindfulness’ or Jiddu Krishnamurti’s ‘awareness’. He also said –
As for ‘self’-remembering, I usually called my practice awareness, which was noticing or watching my thoughts and feelings, arising with them the aim of distancing myself from my unwanted or undesirably feelings and thoughts. Needless to say, this practice of distancing or dis-identifying or dissociating did nothing to aid me when it came to living happy and harmoniously in the world-as-it-is with people-as-they-are. RESPONDENT: Great to hear from you, VINEETO: Nice to chat again.
VINEETO: Whilst taking this initial step of questioning the monotheistic God or even dismissing the polytheistic Gods is a sensible first step, such a person would still be susceptible to either having an experience of Godliness, such as you had in the ASC you described, or to gullibly follow the teachings of a guru who negates a creator God while simultaneously advocating the search for one’s inner divinity and becoming one with the divinity of the Universe, such as I did. It is relatively easy to reject a belief in a creator god – something I did myself when I was 24 – but this is but the tip of the iceberg if one sincerely aspires to be a harmless and happy thorough-going atheist. A thorough-going-atheist is one who knows by personal experience that the tempting succour of spiritual and metaphysical beliefs as well as the lure of glorious spiritual and metaphysical experiences are nought but impassioned beliefs and atavistic fantasies that arise from the instinctual survival passions of his or her own psyche. RESPONDENT: Thanks for clarifying the difference between ‘atheist’ (‘has no belief in any deity’), thorough-going atheist (‘no religious, spiritual, mystical or metaphysical beliefs’) and a thorough-going-atheist-through-and-through (‘no religious, spiritual, mystical or metaphysical beliefs together with no potential for spiritual and metaphysical experiences’). Am I understanding you correctly? VINEETO: That’s reasonable enough, but I would add a few qualifications. Atheism means having no belief in a god or gods, hence it includes monotheism, polytheism and pantheism – something that those raised in monotheist religions seem to ignore. When I use the term thorough-going atheist I mean someone who does not merely disbelieve in the existence of god or gods but who knows by direct experience that all gods are a figment of the human imagination because he or she remembers a PCE and has actively divested themselves of all of their own religious, spiritual, mystical and metaphysical beliefs. Richard goes one step further in that he calls himself a thorough-going atheist through-and-through in that he is actually free of the human condition, which means he lives in the actual world where no god or gods in fact exist. * VINEETO: For me, I have set my goal to become free from having a psyche – the instinctual ‘being’ arising from the instinctual passions of fear aggression, nurture and desire – and as a part of this process I found I was compelled to investigate and eliminate all of my beliefs, be they related to my gender, nationality, culture, religion, spirituality, metaphysics, materialistic values, societal morals, dietary mythology, health myths or sexual taboos. The very action of daring to examine and expose all of one’s beliefs significantly weakens one’s identity such that one comes to directly experience the raw instinctual passions that lay hidden beneath this outer layer of cultural conditioning that constitutes one’s social identity and thus one is able to get a clearer understanding of what it is that generates one’s ‘being’ or psyche. The next step is to leave instinctually-driven Humanity behind. RESPONDENT: It’s not so easy to deal with the seductive powers of love, wonder and beauty in comparison to the ‘bad’ passions triggered by fear and aggression. VINEETO: To clarify – the ability to wonder is not necessarily one of the ‘seductive’ good emotions because it can also be the felicitous fascinated perception of the fairytale-like marvel of the actual world. Having said that, I can also understand that it does take a good deal of attentiveness in order to separate wonder from emotions such as awe, love and beauty –
RESPONDENT: As an example, my current partner is an open, beautiful, kind and compassionate human being, she’s very much centred on the ‘good’ side. She’s also very practical and intelligent and I’m having a hard time to point out any flaws in her and I wonder whether that’s because I love her. VINEETO: And why would you want to point out any flaws in your companion? When I made the commitment to look at everything that is in the road of my having a happy and harmonious companionship with Peter I only needed to look at my ‘flaws’, my grumpiness, my neediness, my demands, my moods, my resentments, my complaints, etc. and then I set about changing myself in order to become as flawless as one can be whilst still being a ‘being’. RESPONDENT: I should also say that I’m not a romantic, my life-attitudes and interests are better described by the Dune series of Frank Herbert. But when I look into her clear and beautiful green eyes there’s something I would definitely call wonder... It’s like I’m looking into her ‘soul’ and it’s so ...pure. It seems that no ‘evil’ could ever lie dormant there. VINEETO: When one is in love there is no assessment of ‘silly’ and ‘sensible’ – one judges with one’s feelings and the other is either good, beautiful, lovable, adorable and pure or bad, unappealing, repulsive or ‘evil’. In love one is in the grip of intense passion and as such what you ‘definitely call wonder’ seems more likely to be feelings such as love, beauty, awe and adulation. I am reminded of the story of how Richard was able to see the other face of Love –
RESPONDENT: I find the above harder to investigate as it is the ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ side of Being, that part that is so pleasing and fascinating to be with. It’s also hard not to reciprocate the other’s feelings when the other is standing ‘naked’ in front of you (without the usual barriers, fears or defences), that complete and genuine openness that is possible in the intimacy of a relationship. It invites... love from my part. VINEETO: When I met Peter I soon fell in love with him and then I began to
inquire into the pros and cons of this intense feeling. For me the major set-back to the feeling of love that I encountered was
pining – I soon came to be aware that the feeling of pining I experienced deep in my belly whenever Peter wasn’t around was
deleterious because it meant that I could not be happy whenever I was on my own. I also realized that pining meant I wasn’t able
to be fully here in this place in this moment of time enjoying whatever I was doing because I was busy dreaming about either some
past time when I was with him or anticipating some future time with him. Being a practical person I decided not to let this pining
spoil my life, even if I had to let go of something I thought as being precious to me – and I’ve told the story in Another aspect of love that soon became clear to me was that being in love was inextricably intertwined with me perceiving another person as being an extension of ‘my’ world – he was ‘my man’ and consequently I wanted to mould him according to ‘my’ image, fitting into ‘my world’. Of course this was aggravated by the fact that in past relationships the other, being in love with me, felt exactly the same way – he wanted me to fit into his ‘extended world’. I remembered how this mutual desire for the other to fit one’s inevitable image of ‘the loved one’ had resulted in ongoing disappointment, disagreement and endless power struggles and I was determined to finally put a stop to this whole scenario by stopping playing my part in the game. Yes, I know that at first ‘it’s also hard not to reciprocate the other’s feelings’ but I found it was only hard as long as I myself had not made a sincere inquiry into the nature of my feelings of love and traced them to their core. Once I recognized that my feelings of love were arising from the instinctual passions of nurture and desire, I saw that love is in fact purely ‘self’-serving in that it serves my identity of being a lover and of being loved. I began to see how I squeezed the other into an image of my dreams – in fact I never got to meet the actual person as long as I was intoxicated by my feelings of love. Actual intimacy, the direct experience of the other, only happens when love is out of the way because then and only then I am capable of seeing the other as a fellow human being and only then will I perceive what of my feelings and actions are harmful or beneficial to the other. RESPONDENT: What ‘to do’ when I get in touch with my companion ‘soul’? It’s clear that I cannot make it disappear ... and it’s hungry for affection. VINEETO: When you truly care you will dare to offer her actual care and consideration and an actual intimacy instead of the usual feeling substitutes in the form of love and affection. RESPONDENT: What I want to say is that I sometimes feel imprisoned in our relationship despite the fact that I cannot find any major flaws in my partner’s character. I wonder why I feel so? Is it because this ‘good’ side of Being has its own unwritten conditions, demands and expectations that are projected onto the other and thus ‘trap’ him into a role to play? Or is it because of my own ‘inner’ constraints? VINEETO: It is love itself that is the trap – love inevitably has ‘unwritten conditions, demands and expectations’ – invisible and unspoken strings that tie you to the one you love and it is these strings that result in feelings of entrapment or imprisonment. I experienced them as an instinctual bond similar to an umbilical cord that connected the core of my ‘being’ to the other’s ‘being’ and even with the best of intentions I could not help but being directly connected to the other’s various feelings and moods, vibes and impulses and directly pass on my own feelings and moods, vibes and impulses to the other. When I became aware of the extent of the reciprocal strings of love, it was clear that I could not remain in love and be harmless at the same time. * VINEETO: As for ‘self’-remembering, I usually called my practice awareness, which was noticing or watching my thoughts and feelings, arising with them the aim of distancing myself from my unwanted or undesirably feelings and thoughts. Needless to say, this practice of distancing or dis-identifying or dissociating did nothing to aid me when it came to living happy and harmoniously in the world-as-it-is with people-as-they-are. RESPONDENT: I used to term the above ‘observing’ and it was aimed to be as ‘objective’ as possible, but again, it proved to be value-loaded (affective fuelled) and thus extremely subjective (it’s main function was to differentiate between what was ‘true’ and ‘false’). There is nothing more subjective then a subjectivity that strongly believes itself to be objective. VINEETO: Yes, and like a self-fulfilling prophesy a difficult one to crack. What did the trick for me was when I began to realise that I had to change my search for the absolute truth into a straightforward and pragmatic inquiry of what is factual and this shift was a shift from feeling what is true to sensibly assessing what is factual and sensately discovering what is actual.
RESPONDENT No 16: Anyway, if you can’t read the writings of P & V and see any religious beliefs in it then there is probably nothing else I could say that would convince you and I am no longer interested in going into it anyway. Here’s one quote you can ponder: Vineeto: ‘it is a fact that Actualism will spread like a chain letter for centuries to come’. RESPONDENT: Frankly, this quote was the hardest to digest for me and I did ponder what the actual method for spreading would be, apart from an actual chain letter. There was an extensive discussion about it if I remember correctly. VINEETO: This is the quote in question –
In case you are still having a hard time to digest this quote, I’ll expand on what the phrase ‘spread like a chain-letter’ means to me. My comment was made to someone who not only took up practicing actualism but who, going by his own words, has become substantially free from malice and sorrow by doing so – and that this success was achieved by him reading and understanding the written words of actualism. It made me once again aware of the fact that in actualism there are no communal meetings, no satsangs, no meditations, no therapies, no healings, no dietary regimes, no ethical principles or moralistic injunctions, no sitting at the feet of the Master, no preachings from the pulpit, no monetary obligations, no peer group pressures, no hierarchical organizations or any such like – there is nought but the written reports of fellow human beings. The passing of information in written form in the way of the website, books, by word of mouth or by written letters from individual to individual is the only means of disseminating actualism – the news that there now exists an alternative to being normal or being spiritual. This passing on of information from one person to the next is what is meant by the phrase ‘spread like a chain-letter’. This first-hand one-to-one passing on of information will remain both the way and the means that actualism spreads in the foreseeable future because actualism is something one always has to do for oneself, by oneself – by its very nature a personal freedom from the human condition can never be a mass event. The example you give below is a confirmation of the way that actualism is spreading at the moment and will continue to spread in the foreseeable future – RESPONDENT: Speaking from personal experience: I told a former spiritual friend about this alternative a few weeks ago and we accidentally met again only to tell me that he’s really impressed with the site, that it’s now in ‘His favorites’ folder. But I have no interest in talking/meeting him to discuss the Teaching ... it’s absurd. VINEETO: And what your former spiritual friend makes of the words that are written on the Actual Freedom website will be entirely up to him of course … but the point is that it demonstrates that actualism does, in fact, ‘spread like a chain-letter’. For those reading these words who perceive actualism as being a religious belief and a Teaching might find the following enlightening – http://www.actualism.org/ Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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