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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 37
VINEETO: Hi, RESPONDENT: As the ‘wide and wondrous path’ is about minimizing the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emotions and activating the felicitous feelings – I’d like to hear a bit more about those felicitous feelings. Are we still in the realm of the ‘affective’ with felicitous feelings? We are using the word ‘feelings’ after all. VINEETO: Yes, the method of actualism is to become aware of and minimize the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emotions in order to be happy and harmless. One cannot be emotionless as long as one is a ‘self’ and to try and be emotionless means you would only end up repressing your feelings. Felicitous/ innocuous feelings are affective feelings but only by feeling good, happy, cheerful and so on is it possible to enjoy and appreciate being here now for as much as is possible. Minimizing the good and bad emotions frees you up to feel happy and harmless and at the same time frees you to develop a delicious sensuousness of the world around you – when you are less busy with feeling sad or grumpy you become more aware of the visual delights, the multi-layered sounds, the delicate smells, the moisture and temperature in the air, the marvellous variety of tastes and so on. And once you succeed in feeling happy most of the time you then raise the bar to feeling excellent most of the time. RESPONDENT: I suppose I understand ‘felicitous’ as being similar to what is meant by ‘delight’. I think sensate delight is fairly clear, but it’s difficult to see many times when an experience is verging on emotional, rather than just delightful. VINEETO: I wouldn’t worry too much about anything when you are feeling happy and delighted – it’s the habit of worrying that serves to end your experience of happiness and prepares the stage for sadness, grumpiness, annoyance and irritation to enter again. RESPONDENT: Would it be correct to say that anything emotional would somehow involve a feeling of sorrow? VINEETO: No, there are also the feelings of aggression and malice that do not necessarily involve a feeling of sorrow. RESPONDENT: While being ‘felicitous’ does not involve sorrow directly? VINEETO: I am only felicitous when there is no sorrow present at all, neither directly nor indirectly. Also, even more importantly, I am only felicitous when there is no malice present at all. RESPONDENT: Take ‘enthusiasm’ for example per my last post. It seems to me that there is enthusiasm designed to counter sorrow – like rallying to a ‘cause’ of some sort. VINEETO: ‘Enthusiasm designed to counter sorrow’ is what Richard described as putting on rose-coloured glasses over the grey-coloured glasses everyone normally wears. The method of actualism is designed to take both glasses off. ‘Rallying to a cause’ most often involves fighting for a cause, which invariably involves malice, which inevitably produces yet more sorrow. The method of actualism is designed to become aware of that cycle and break free of it. RESPONDENT: Then there is a purer enthusiasm born of just enjoying the here and now. VINEETO: That’s what I call pure delight. RESPONDENT: I suppose part of my wondering about this comes from seeing that the ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ of emotion I will gladly give up. VINEETO: Yes, I found that the ‘highs’ of emotion, like adrenaline rushes, also came with an inherent fear of falling off the desperately sought-after ‘high’. Sometimes I even experienced a fear of getting punished for being too happy. This is all part of the hands-on exploration and you might have already discovered that the very instance you become aware of a feeling you deflate it or take the wind out of it and thus it becomes easier to examine your particular feeling further. RESPONDENT: Is there such a thing as a ‘high’ of pure delight? VINEETO: No, the ‘pure delight’ I describe and experience is a sensuous experience that happens when neither high nor low emotions are interfering with appreciating the delight of being here. RESPONDENT: I guess the best way to put this is that along with questioning ‘emotion’ – I also find myself questioning ‘excitement,’ ‘enthusiasm,’ when it seems to get very ‘high’ – due to its association for me with ‘emotion.’ VINEETO: As I see it, it only makes sense to question my excitement or enthusiasm when it takes me away from being happy and harmless. After all, unless you are enthusiastic about becoming happy and harmless, nothing will make you roll up your sleeves and do it. RESPONDENT: But it’s a real pain to question the ‘high’ I get from what is felicitous. VINEETO: Yes, I agree. It does sound a painful business to harass yourself for being happy. Why not stick to the actualism method of firstly becoming aware of and questioning the deleterious ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emotions that may be preventing you from happily and harmlessly enjoying this moment of being alive. Like any new enterprise, it’s always best to start with the simplest, easiest and most obvious things. * VINEETO: PS. If you are interested in reading a bit more about the topic
of exploring feelings on the website, the library pages of ‘Affective Feelings’ and ‘How to Become Free from the Human Condition?’
together with their related discussions may be a good start. There is You might also be interested to take advantage of the option of IE 5 to download and store substantial parts of the Actual Freedom Trust website on your computer for leisurely off-line reading. If you don’t already know this – when you are on line and on The Actual Freedom Trust homepage, you can click under ‘Favourites’, select ‘add to favourite’ and then tick ‘make available off line’. Then click ‘customize’ in order to choose the settings as you like for 2 or 3 layers deep. To update what you already downloaded, under ‘Tools’ click ‘synchronize’. The first time it will probably take 50 – 100 min. to download the whole website since it is quite big by now.
RESPONDENT: I’d like to revisit something that I’ve been reflecting on since Vineeto addressed it. It has to do with a difference that I was pointing out between expressing emotion and communicating about emotion. First, I think we will all agree that there is a lot of talk or communication about emotion on this list. So talking about emotion is not the same thing as ‘expressing’ emotion – though it can be. VINEETO: Yes, there is a vast difference between expressing one’s emotions to other people and communicating about one’s awareness and observation of emotions on this list. The first is ‘me’ in action, whilst the second is a report based on the awareness that ‘my’ emotions are solely a sign of ‘me’ in action and have nothing to do with anyone else. RESPONDENT: I’ve been reflecting on just why I continue to talk to my wife, kids, and other people about what I am feeling. I am not saying expressing emotion. Please understand this – it’s one thing to express emotion verbally – then quite another to verbally express emotion. ‘Expression’ can be an emotion being acted out or expressed. Or it may be purely a verbal ‘expression’ in the sense of talking about emotion. Now, it does seem important to me to verbally express some emotion – as long as emotions are still being experienced. VINEETO: It is well worth contemplating as to why you think it is important for you to communicate ‘to my wife, kids, and other people about what [you are] feeling’. As one can clearly experience in a PCE, where ‘me’ and my feelings are temporarily absent, feelings are always my identity in action and any identity, by its very nature, is always ‘self’-centred. So the question is why should it be of importance for anyone to express one’s social-instinctual identity in action? The sole intent in actualism is to become happy and harmless – and that’s the reason why I question and investigate my feelings and emotions. The aim of actualism is not to get rid one’s emotions because one would then only choose to keep the good emotions while suppressing, denying or sublimating the bad emotions – and this enterprise has been tried and demonstrably failed for centuries. When I started to practice actualism, I soon found out that expressing any of my emotions verbally, through action or through psychic vibes and moods, always caused ripples for other people – in other words, I was not harmless. To express my feelings to others only served to support and enhance the ‘self’-centredness inherent in feelings, whereas the practice of neither expressing nor repressing one’s feelings puts them into a bind, as it were. I am then able to become aware of what I feel and think and thus don’t perpetuate my ‘self’-centred problems by passing them on to others. RESPONDENT: Now, to make a case. Take a situation say, where I have a headache. Well, I can do just fine with the headache on my own – take my meds, etc. But if I’m having a headache in the morning and wind up bedridden and my wife asks what’s happening – I find it valuable to ‘express’ to her that I have a headache. I’m not asking her to be overly sensitive to my needs – just providing information for her to do what she wants with. Now, the source of my headache may have been stress at work, for example. Just say I realize that I can control the stress, so I plan to investigate how I can ‘do better’ at minimizing stress so that I don’t wind up in this same position again. So, I ask her for help getting the pain med or calling the doctor. She can do whatever she wants with that information. But, she normally opts to help out. What I want to say is that the verbal expression of emotion can be very similar to this kind of situation. I realize that I don’t have to feel frustrated, angry, or whatever. But say I’m doing my best to investigate why I feel a certain way and applying attentiveness, etc. But I’ve still managed to get frustrated. Say this frustration is a result of my wife going away for several weekends and neglecting to help me care for our child. Now, I know that I don’t have to feel frustrated about that – and I’m investigating just why I feel frustrated, but the fact is that I’m feeling frustrated about the situation. Now, I could take that frustration out on her – but I choose not to. What I decide to do instead is to communicate to her that we may want to consider a change – that I ‘feel’ like I’d like her to help out with the kids more and live up to her end of our ‘contract.’ Now this is not done with the ‘vibe’ of frustration, rather a calm, sincere tone. I’m not demanding or even needing her to change. I’m just letting her know where things begin to get stressful for me – I’m not defending my stress – I know that I could do better – just haven’t completely figured out how just yet. Is the analogy with the headache evident? VINEETO: I remember the last time when I tried to influence others by ‘sharing’ what I felt. I did some work for an old acquaintance who lived in a town about 25 km away. As a favour she asked me if someone could drop off a parcel at my house so that I could then deliver it to her. However, when this person rang very early in the morning to ask when it would be convenient to drop off the parcel, I became a little upset. I thought how dare he be so inconsiderate as to wake me up so early for something that wasn’t even urgent. When I later delivered the parcel to my colleague, I mentioned that her friend had rung me up very early in the morning. She profusely apologized to me and then became really upset herself. She said she had instructed him not to ring before 9am and that she would immediately ring her friend to tell him off. At this point I realized that my seemingly calm mentioning of my emotional reaction to receiving an early morning phone call had created palpable ripples in two other people’s lives and that it was now out of my control and irreversible in its consequences. This incident demonstrated very clearly that sharing my emotions, even in a calm way, inevitably caused ripples in other people’s lives and that I could never be harmless as long as I involved other people in my problems by sharing my emotional reactions. RESPONDENT: I’m also concerned about verbal expression of emotion when it comes to my children. I want them to be able to accurately communicate what they are feeling. I don’t plan to have them indulge or ‘be authentic’ by expressing their feelings or taking them out on others in anyway, but it seems of vital importance that they learn to communicate emotion accurately, since they will be feeling and dealing with emotion. I also think that verbal expression of emotion is important when it comes to social rules and laws. A situation at my workplace happened recently where many people were feeling like the corporation was treating them like children, tightening the performance metrics, and making them feel like they hated their jobs. Now, I understand that that no-one is ‘made to feel’ a certain way, but I am glad that people speak up when things can be improved and that any sort of emotional badgering that occurs is countered. I agree that an emotional exchange usually isn’t productive, but a calm, sincere, accurate rendering of what is occurring and why people are feeling they hate their jobs is entirely appropriate – plus, it delivers the results much better than an emotional exchange. Now, I have considered getting rid of any communication about emotion, since it is so often done to place blame, request pity, vent frustration, manipulate, etc – but then I have no means to communicate how I and others can actually improve our situation without verbally expressing information about emotion. I just don’t see how we could live as equals in our society and have just reasonable expectations that people don’t rape, steal, and kill without communicating the emotions behind those malicious events. Why not kill someone? Well, first it’s a malicious thing to do. Second, it causes suffering to all involved. There – that’s communication about emotion – and it’s one of the reasons we have laws and codes of conduct. VINEETO: You don’t have to make an argument for communicating emotions – it’s the very status quo of what makes human beings who they are. The world is awash with emotional sharing, either covertly by silent means or overtly through words and actions. The jealous man or woman can either think about revenge, feel like taking revenge, verbally threaten revenge or put his or her thoughts and feelings into action. Similarly a man or woman can think about stealing, feel like stealing or put his or her thoughts and feelings into action. Such malicious thoughts and feelings are, even if they are not put into action, palpable signs that ‘I’ am malicious at core and in a similar way sorrowful thoughts and feelings are palpable signs that ‘I’ am sorrowful at core. The method of actualism is not about putting a moral lid on one’s malicious and sorrowful thoughts and feelings but it addresses the very core of the problem – recognizing and whittling away at my malicious and sorrowful social-instinctual identity. * RESPONDENT: Having said that, here’s a clip from a conversation between No 37 and Vineeto...
That may be the case with how it was for you ‘being authentic.’ I do see the ‘temptation’ to do that, but I don’t find those as my current motivations at all. It seems you are lumping me in with the other ‘authentic’ people you know. Please don’t confuse me with them. What I mean by ‘authentic’ is merely accurately investigating and reporting the emotion occurring in me. VINEETO: Human beings have always valued their feelings, emotions and passions as their highest evolutionary achievement, and consider them something that makes them truly human. However the fact is, what makes human beings unique in comparison to other animals is not their inclination for emotions and passions but their ability to think, reflect and plan and the distinctive capacity of the human brain to be aware of itself. Whether ‘you’ regard it as authentic or not authentic, ‘reporting the emotion occurring in me’ is acting out ‘me’, the social-instinctual entity inside this flesh-and-blood body, because ‘I’ am my emotions and my emotions are ‘me’. Personally, I decided to stop burdening others with ‘my’ authenticity, my emotions and my ‘self’-centredness. I made my emotions and my feelings my business only. * RESPONDENT:
This is what I addressed above. My ‘buttons’ are being disarmed, but they are still there – so they sometimes need communication, or I am actively leaving out information that might be helpful for others. I’m not using this as a copout – I am merely saying that if I don’t sometimes communicate where my ‘buttons’ are (just pure information), then I risk bottling up emotion until it feels like I need to vent. So communicating emotion is also a way of allowing others to know ‘where it can hurt’ – they can do what they want with the information. VINEETO: Any communication with others as to ‘where it can hurt’ is habitually passed on for the sole purpose of pointing out that the other should change his or her behaviour so as not to hurt ‘me’. It’s the normal cut and thrust, defend and parry of the psychological and psychic battle that human beings constantly engage in and euphemistically call communication. When I took up actualism and I discovered ‘where it can hurt’, I welcomed this information as a valuable indication of my ‘self’ coming to the foreground and it showed me where to look for my tricky identity. I welcomed every opportunity to find out what caused me to feel hurt, insulted, frustrated, annoyed, etc., despite my occasional resistance, fear, uneasiness or laziness to be aware of exactly what I was thinking or feeling. Whenever I felt hurt I knew that this must be ‘me’, my ‘self’, defending my precious feelings, my pride, my prized personality and individuality. It is only because sore spots have been hit time and again in communication with other people, that I have been able to find out about how ‘I’ tick and only by this process have I been able to slowly whittle away at my identity. What’s the point of telling others when and where they hurt me and expecting them to change, when this chronic habit only prevents me from becoming aware of exactly what I need to change in me if I am to become unconditionally happy and unconditionally harmless towards my fellow human beings. * VINEETO: Rather than being authentic towards others, I found it invaluable and imperative to be honest with myself, because without honesty and integrity I would have never found out ‘my’ tricks and cunning. ‘Me’ being honest and authentic with others invariably means that I am sharing my sad and grotty ‘self’ with others, which only serves to justify, maintain and perpetuate ‘me’. The decision to clean oneself up is a unilateral decision – it involves no one else but me. As long as I expect respect, comfort, support, understanding or agreement from others in order to start the journey, I will be waiting forever. Actualism is a do it yourself and do it by yourself method. It is an immense freedom to realize that you are not beholden to anyone else to begin the actualism practice but that you can become free at your own pace and do so in complete autonomy and anonymity. RESPONDENT: It is not a solution to hold back all communication of emotion. So here’s a difference between expressing emotion in the sense of communicating it and acknowledging it – which is entirely different from bottling it up, then venting on someone. VINEETO: It is entirely up to you what you consider ‘a solution’ – if your solution means you are happy and harmless, then fine. I am simply sharing my experience with the actualism method of investigating my feelings and reporting what has worked for me to make me virtually free from malice and sorrow. In my experience ‘communication of emotion’ has always been an expression of my ‘self’ in action, whereas I am solely interested in questioning and reducing my ‘self’ to the point of ‘self’-extinction. As for the ‘difference between expressing emotion in the sense of communicating it and acknowledging it’ – you will be able to decide for yourself provided you have pure intent guiding your uncovering your social and instinctual program in order to become free from it. You will then become the most sincere judge of what you are communicating – whether you are sharing your emotion in order to manipulate, blame, pay back, compete, voice sorrow, battle loneliness or avoid looking at what’s going on – or whether you are communicating with a fellow human being about your scientific investigations, sharing the sheer joy and happiness about what you have discovered about yourself. RESPONDENT: So I’m asking that you look more closely at just what you mean by ‘expressing emotion’. VINEETO: Personally, I have stopped expressing my emotions to others completely simply because I
cannot find any good reason to do so. Besides, practicing actualism for several years has left me almost bare of any emotion to express except for
the sheer delight of, and continuous wonder about, being alive, right here and right now. RESPONDENT: This is indeed my goal as well – to get to a place where communicating emotion is superfluous and unnecessary (for me). But until I get there, as I am dismantling myself, I do see the necessity and vital importance of communicating information about emotion. VINEETO: The only way ‘to get to a place where communicating emotion is superfluous’ is to become aware of precisely what your identity consists of and then actively whittle away at all of its content. What you see as the ‘necessity and vital importance of communicating information about emotion’ – for instance communicating ‘where it can hurt’ – is in fact your feeling and thus an aspect of your identity on guard. RESPONDENT: I also prefer that others communicate their emotion with me in a purely informative way. If my son is frightened of a bully at school, for example – I want him to tell me he is frightened and why – so that we can do something about it. So there you have it – the importance of communicating about emotion. VINEETO: When you have a close relationship to someone – in this case your son – then everything the other feels also has a direct emotional effect on you, which means your son’s emotions are directly connected to your identity as a father. In order to become free from the debilitating effect that emotions had on me, I made it my single-pointed aim to become aware of each and every emotion that arose before I even considered acting on it. However, if you prefer valuing ‘the importance of communicating about emotion’ then that is, of course, entirely your choice. Needless to say, actualism is purely voluntary.
RESPONDENT: I considered responding in detail to each point raised by you, Vineeto, but the post was already getting long, so I thought I’d start fresh.
No doubt this is true – I would be deluding myself if I said otherwise, but I have never stated any differently. The point I am trying to make (hopefully with some increasing clarity) is that communicating ‘where it can hurt’ is merely an ‘interim solution.’ That is, I find it useful occasionally to communicate (and this really doesn’t happen often) ‘where it can hurt’ while I am still a self. I find (by experiment) that if I become totally non-communicative about what I am feeling, then my upset, frustration, etc. tends to ‘bottle up’ until the result can be even worse. So instead of making a ‘mountain out of a mole-hill’ I find it much easier and more useful to deal merely with my ‘mole-hills.’ Mostly, I tend to state my preferences in non-emotional language which has greatly enhanced my interactions with other people, but the times that I have felt like I can’t/ shouldn’t/better not express any frustration or upset have been far from happy and harmless. What I am saying (and I don’t think this is merely for me) is that this whole business of ‘whittling’ away seems like one has to find one’s own pace. VINEETO: In order to successfully apply the method of actualism it is vital to understand that unless you radically break with the automatic and traditionally accepted habit of expressing or suppressing your emotions, the third alternative of experiencing, becoming aware of and investigating one’s emotions as they arise won’t even come into view. ‘Communicating ‘where it can hurt’’, even as an ‘interim solution’, is to continue on the tried and failed ways of the human condition of malice and sorrow. If you want to stop being malicious, at least you have to have the intent to stop – no intent, no chance of result. As far as investigating emotions is concerned, desperately trying to keep your mountains the size of ‘mole-hills’ does nothing to eliminate the cause of your emotion, it is simply the normal way of dealing with the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. RESPONDENT: I remember you saying that when you started AF, that you often felt like a ‘tiger in a cage’. Maybe that’s how you felt – I prefer not to make myself feel that way – I prefer to find my own pace and put happiness as priority. VINEETO: Yes, in the beginning of taking up actualism I ‘often felt like a tiger in a cage’, but it was a cage entirely of my own making in that I had made it my aim not to let out my feelings on anyone else. I was not content with the normal solution of expressing my feelings once in a while (letting the tiger loose on someone else or something else) so that I would then be temporarily happy. I wanted to become aware of the ‘tiger’ of my instinctual passions, not just tame them or feel I had transcended them – I aimed at getting rid of the ‘tiger’, ‘me’, altogether. I had spent years expressing my emotions, intentionally in therapy groups and accidentally in daily life, and it had made me neither happy nor harmless. It was only because I stopped what I had done for so long and began to closely observe and scientifically investigate my psyche in action that I was able to slowly whittle away at ‘me’. If you ‘prefer not to make myself feel that way’ that is fair enough. It is not everyone’s cup of tea to be a pioneer in radically breaking with the social-spiritual traditions and going against the animal-instinctual imperative by putting one’s harmlessness first. RESPONDENT: Now, what I’ve outlined first I would say is communicating small amounts of frustration – in order that they don’t grow out of proportion. Now I only use this when I feel like I can’t get an immediate solution with the ‘third alternative.’ And the day when I need/want this as a crutch may not be far away, since AF is working some ‘magic’ in me. Secondly, what I am trying to say is that there are many contexts in which communicating how I am feeling is not to expect others to change. VINEETO: We’ve talked about this before – in my experience the only underlying motive for telling others about my frustration for instance, is that they then do something about it. My practice of actualism began when I really understood that others have naught to do with what I feel – they only provide the trigger, they are not the cause. It is the social and instinctual programming in me that causes my frustration, my anger, my resentment, my sorrow and my fear. Once I understood this vital point, I stopped looking for the solution of my feelings outside of me and thus relieved the people around me from the burden of shame and blame for having triggered my feelings. It is enormously liberating to put this realization into everyday practice. RESPONDENT: At one point you said ...
This question applies to what I said above about using expressing emotion as a crutch – to keep mole-hills mole-hills and prevent them from becoming mountains – until I have the leisure and ability to disarm my emotions with attentiveness. (This stuff doesn’t happen overnight, after all). Again, there are contexts, like this list for example where emotions are expressed without expecting them to ‘change’ others. VINEETO: Again, I am not expressing my emotions on this list but I am reporting my experience of how I have dealt with my emotions and what I have learnt from experientially investigating them. Expressing emotions is passing on one’s feelings, be it in calm words or agitated gestures, acting on the belief that others could and should do something about how one feels – otherwise one would not express one’s feelings towards people. RESPONDENT: Take another example where I may become embarrassed or self-conscious. Maybe I spilled spaghetti sauce on my shirt or something in another’s presence (whatever). I find it happier and more harmless to acknowledge to them that I’m feeling embarrassed – and I know they are not MAKING be feel that way – just like if I am doing public speaking, acknowledging to myself and others that I am nervous helps expose the feeling to the light of day. And this second sense – information only – NOT expecting someone else to change – is what I am calling of vital importance. I find that if I stop myself from expressing my feelings in the above scenarios, that I only become more withdrawn. Bringing the emotion to light (which in these cases involves another person) means that it is diffused. VINEETO: In actualism my aim is not to diffuse an occurring emotion by expressing it, as is the traditional way, but to become aware of it to such an extent that I can identify how this emotion forms an integral part of my identity – i.e. each and every feeling and emotion observed is a gateway to see how ‘I’ operate. As long as I am busy expressing, suppressing, controlling or diffusing my emotion, I have no means of being attentive to the underlying identity in action. In other words, the aim of actualism is to detect the programming that causes each feeling, whereas acquiescing to one’s desire to diffuse unwanted feelings is to simply remain a compliant victim of this programming itself. RESPONDENT: I have great conversations with my wife where I am basically analyzing myself, concepts like love, emotion, patriotism, etc where I’m trying to pick them apart. It is of immense help and oh so much fun to have a decent conversation about all that stuff. If that wonderful fun is being discouraged in AF – then I don’t have any desire for that. VINEETO: Yes, part of the process of actualism is that one questions one’s concepts and beliefs and in the course of doing so you discover the underlying feelings and passions that hold your concepts and beliefs in place. Unless you discover those underlying feelings and how they relate to your identity, you will only replace those concepts with other, more fashionable, concepts and a different design of your identity. This practice of investigating one’s beliefs and concepts and their underlying feelings is not at all discouraged on this list – investigating one’s psyche is the very basis of actualism. What is essential, however, is the sincere intent to be unconditionally harmless, or, as No 38 put it recently
Unless you are ready to take on board the whole package, you won’t be able to even begin to recognize your own malicious and sorrowful programming in action. RESPONDENT: Again, another concern of mine is how others are feeling. I highly prefer that others tell me how they are feeling, rather than acting it out. If my son is being threatened by a bully at school – I want to know that he is feeling threatened. I don’t expect him to know how to dismantle himself using the AF method. Turning the tables, if my son is the bully at school – I want to know that other kids are afraid of him – so that something can be done to remedy the situation. So these are the contexts where ‘communicating about emotion’ is vital –
VINEETO: You have made it very clear that the way you prefer to deal with your emotions is expressing your emotions in interaction with others and I can understand this very well given that it is feelings and passions that tie human beings together. Actualism, however, is a unilateral decision to do something about my emotions and passions in me, the only person I can change. In actualism I set out on a course to leave my ‘self’ behind and along with it, my ties to humanity. RESPONDENT: Lastly, I’d like to point out something that seems like an absurdity to me sometimes. Take these two premises:
from which it follows that everyone is completely ‘responsible’ for their own emotions. VINEETO: What is, in fact, responsible for my emotions is my social-instinctual programming that every human being is endowed with. I, for one, decided to take responsibility for my emotions and used the actualism method to eliminate my programming because I wanted to live in unrestricted peace and harmony with my fellow human beings. RESPONDENT:
Now these two are contradictory. I personally, accept the first premise but not the second. Vineeto, you stated that you wanted to ‘stop the ripples’ of frustration and upset feelings in the case where you mentioned you were contacted by phone at an early hour of the morning. Now why should you make yourself responsible for how someone else reacts to information you provide? Why not just tell them calmly that you prefer not being contacted quite that early and leave it at that? Why would you ‘take responsibility’ for how the other person reacts to that information? VINEETO: This is the incident you are referring to –
In this incident I did not merely provide practical information about the phone call but I passed on emotionally loaded information. It made no difference that this information was given in a calm voice, it nevertheless transmitted the emotional information that was inherent in my experience with the early morning phone call. The other’s reaction made me realize that I had tricked myself and the other, by thinking I was calm, rational and entirely justified, when I had still blamed them for my being upset and thus my action was the cause for the ripples created. RESPONDENT: Now, I take it that you weren’t really ‘taking responsibility’ for how someone else felt – rather realizing that you really do care about their feelings and the ripples that eventuate. (And how would you know about their emotions had they not ‘communicated them to you?’ Wouldn’t you say that information was vitally important to you?) VINEETO: I did take responsibility for the fact that my passed on feelings created ripples in other people’s lives. I care enough for my fellow human beings that I do not want to add my own malice and sorrow to whatever other feelings people are already having. That they communicated their emotions to me was not ‘vitally important’ to me because there are enough opportunities to observe one’s own feelings when one is behaving maliciously towards others, provided one has the sincere intent to find out, that is. RESPONDENT: You ask me why I want others to be ‘sensitive’ to me? I ask you why should you or I be ‘sensitive’ to others? My answer to this is that it’s not that I’m requiring or demanding that others be ‘sensitive’ to my needs – rather that I do realize that generally people are well meaning and benevolent, so that I don’t see any reason why sharing information about how I am feeling should be seen as a ‘demand’ placed upon them. It’s merely information that they are free to do with whatever they want. Giving information about how I feel, or have felt in a purely informative way only allows them to understand me – which allows their natural benevolence to be better directed. VINEETO: It is a myth that human beings have ‘natural benevolence’ – every human being is born with mother nature’s rather clumsy soft-ware package of the animal instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and this programming is responsible for the human condition that is epitomized by malice and sorrow. What looks like beneficial behaviour to you is the social conditioning in which humans are taught to emphasize and highly value their ‘good’ instinctual passions and repress and control their ‘savage’ passions. However, we still have to rely on lawyers and laws, courts and jails, police, armies and guns to ultimately enforce law and order – a pathetic substitute for an actual peace and harmony between human beings. Why would you feel the need to ‘better direct’ people’s supposed ‘natural benevolence’? Why do you feel a fear of being emotionally hurt by others if everyone has a ‘natural benevolence’? It’s a spiritual fairy-tale that priests and gurus want us to believe that human nature is essentially benevolent, that babies are born innocent and that they have only been misguided and corrupted by their upbringing. One only needs to take a closer look at 5,000 years of recorded history to see that this duplicitous belief is neither factual nor makes any sense. RESPONDENT: I also refuse to ‘take responsibility’ for how others respond to information about how I am feeling (should I feel a desire to talk about it) – that is entirely up to them. I can’t ‘hold the whole world’ in my hands – that’s too painful. But, since I really do care about other’s feelings, then I am very willing to listen to others feelings and talk about my own experiences (past and present) so that further light can be shed on ‘how we tick.’ VINEETO: As long as one is entrapped within the Human Condition and faithfully follows its rules and tenets, not much light ‘can be shed on how we tick’. Only when I become aware and step outside of the normal human way, which is the way of feelings and passions, am I able to investigate and report about how the lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning entity ‘ticks’ inside this flesh-and-blood body. RESPONDENT: In my experience, only by becoming Happy first – can I also become Harmless. This is not to neglect Harmlessness, rather to notice that if I try to be to vigilant – ‘taking responsibility’ for how my emotions cause ripples in other people, then I become a ‘tiger in a cage’ – i.e., unhappy. Granted, both happiness are harmlessness depend on each other, but happiness seems to be the horse carrying the harmlessness cart – and not the other way around. I don’t have motivation to be harmless, if I’m not happy. At least – that’s my experience. VINEETO: If by ‘becoming Happy first’ one could ‘also become Harmless’, the whole world would be happy and harmless by now. The pursuit of happiness is as old as humankind but it still has not produced anything remotely resembling harmlessness, let alone harmony. Actualism breaks with the instinctual compulsion of human beings to put their own happiness first and put harmlessness second – as a socially conditioned afterthought, so to speak. As long as I put my happiness above being harmless, my outlook towards others is inevitably ‘self’-centred, which means that I cannot consider others as equitable fellow human beings.
VINEETO: As I see, it there are basically two issues that we are discussing. One is the sincere intent to be happy and harmless and the other is the difference between expressing your emotions and communicating to others your observations about your emotions. * In order to successfully apply the method of actualism it is vital to understand that unless you radically break with the automatic and traditionally accepted habit of expressing or suppressing your emotions, the third alternative of experiencing, becoming aware of and investigating one’s emotions as they arise won’t even come into view. ‘Communicating ‘where it can hurt’’, even as an ‘interim solution’, is to continue on the tried and failed ways of the human condition of malice and sorrow. If you want to stop being malicious, at least you have to have the intent to stop – no intent, no chance of result. As far as investigating emotions is concerned, desperately trying to keep your mountains the size of ‘mole-hills’ does nothing to eliminate the cause of your emotion, it is simply the normal way of dealing with the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. RESPONDENT: Yes, I think I do understand that Actualism is quite a radical break from what’s traditionally known as ‘expressing emotion’. Maybe I can change a bit what I’m trying to say... I suppose I don’t have to use any ‘expression of emotion’ as an ‘interim solution’. Looking into the matter, I find that the reason I find that is important so that I don’t feel ‘run over’ by others. I do see now that my preferences can be stated non-emotionally and that any sort of emotional language (and expression) can be effectively deleted. And all the better for it. Maybe what I’ve been calling a ‘crutch’ or ‘interim solution’ can be better expressed by saying that I’m not perfect. I do realize that even though I now have the intent (and a method) of becoming happy and harmless, I’m not perfect – that inevitably an emotion will occasionally slip out. Yes, I welcome those as opportunities to apply attentiveness. But, at times, I have basically castigated myself for the expression of an emotion and was looking for some way of recognizing that ‘slipping up’ is inevitable. I don’t mean to justify ‘slipping up’ – only to say that it is going to happen – but that gives me opportunity to investigate the emotion that slips. I don’t really mean to ‘condone’ emotional expression or say that it is ‘vital’ in some sense. What is ‘vital’ is that we not castigate ourselves (myself) for the inevitable slip-up – rather investigate that particular emotion. VINEETO: Okay, this is where it is useful to make a clear distinction between one’s social conditioning of needing to be perfect according to some set of social rules or standards and one’s sincere intent to become happy and harmless. By becoming an actualist you set becoming happy and harmless as your aim in life and by doing so you set your own standards of what you want to achieve. These standards are far beyond the normal moral and ethical values of what society considers being ‘good’ or ‘right’. Social standards are variable, what is good for one social or spiritual group is bad for another, what is right for one group is wrong for another, what is perfect for some is flawed for others, what is true for some is false for others. Not only do these standards vary from group to group, but they are also subject to vagaries – what is deemed to be socially appropriate behaviour changes cyclically according to cultural fashions and whims. The variations and vagaries of social standards are the cause of so many differences of opinion, debates, arguments, conflicts, public machinations and self-flagellations that it is a wonder these standards have any credibility left at all. It goes without saying that the aim of becoming happy and harmless is not reached in a day or a month but that it takes a pioneering attitude, stubborn determination and diligent application to find your way through the maze of your social conditioning and your instinctual programming and all the emotional confusion that this process entails. * RESPONDENT: I remember you saying that when you started AF, that you often felt like a ‘tiger in a cage’. Maybe that’s how you felt – I prefer not to make myself feel that way – I prefer to find my own pace and put happiness as priority. VINEETO: Yes, in the beginning of taking up actualism I ‘often felt like a tiger in a cage’, but it was a cage entirely of my own making in that I had made it my aim not to let out my feelings on anyone else. <snip> If you ‘prefer not to make myself feel that way’ that is fair enough. It is not everyone’s cup of tea to be a pioneer in radically breaking with the social-spiritual traditions and going against the animal-instinctual imperative by putting one’s harmlessness first. RESPONDENT: Oh, but it is my ‘cup of tea’. I’m just looking for the most appropriate and effective way of putting into practice. VINEETO: ‘The most appropriate and effective way of putting [this aim] into practice’ is to ask yourself each moment again ‘How am I experience this moment of being alive?’ And when you investigate what exactly it is each moment that prevents you from being happy and harmless, you encounter the various obstacles on the path, one of them being, as you indicated above, that you ‘castigate’ yourself for not being perfect. Blaming yourself for not being perfect according to other people’s standards is, however, the quintessence of your social identity, the ‘noisy chap in the head’ as Gary named ‘him’. This inner critic is the social part of the entity inside the flesh-and-blood body called No 37 – ‘he’ who has imbibed all the rules and regulations as to how to be a fit member of society, fulfilling and expressing what is ‘right’ and ‘good’, avoiding and suppressing what is ‘wrong’ and ‘bad’. By using the method of actualism, I dissected those social rules, ethical values and moral standards one by one, examining them to see if they were silly or sensible in accordance of my own chosen aim of becoming unconditionally happy and unconditionally harmless. I just found a good description from Peter about investigating emotions using anger as an example and
it might be useful for your query. You can find the whole article in
* RESPONDENT: Take another example where I may become embarrassed or self-conscious. Maybe I spilled spaghetti sauce on my shirt or something in another’s presence (whatever). I find it happier and more harmless to acknowledge to them that I’m feeling embarrassed – and I know they are not MAKING be feel that way – just like if I am doing public speaking, acknowledging to myself and others that I am nervous helps expose the feeling to the light of day. And this second sense – information only – NOT expecting someone else to change – is what I am calling of vital importance. I find that if I stop myself from expressing my feelings in the above scenarios, that I only become more withdrawn. Bringing the emotion to light (which in these cases involves another person) means that it is diffused. VINEETO: In actualism my aim is not to diffuse an occurring emotion by expressing it, as is the traditional way, but to become aware of it to such an extent that I can identify how this emotion forms an integral part of my identity – i.e. each and every feeling and emotion observed is a gateway to see how ‘I’ operate. As long as I am busy expressing, suppressing, controlling or diffusing my emotion, I have no means of being attentive to the underlying identity in action. In other words, the aim of actualism is to detect the programming that causes each feeling, whereas acquiescing to one’s desire to diffuse unwanted feelings is to simply remain a compliant victim of this programming itself. RESPONDENT: The ‘diffusion’ I am talking about here is of a different variety than to what you refer, I think. Take an example where I play music in public. Maybe I look nervous or even flushed. After the performance, my wife asks me, ‘were you nervous?’ I prefer not ignoring the question – rather responding directly to the question by acknowledging it and saying ‘yes, I was.’ I’m not commiserating, not asking for pity or empathy. I realize this same behaviour can be done wanting to diffuse the emotion in the sense of finding empathy or connection with the other. I’m not talking about needing to express it – I’m talking here about acknowledging to myself and others – if another is involved. The ‘diffusion’ that takes place (this is not some psychological theory, but my own experience) is very similar (if not the same) sort of ‘diffusion’ that attentiveness allows – bringing to attention and investigating... ‘why would I be nervous?’ ‘what is it about performance that I get self-conscious?’ It is to open to what is happening and bring my attention to it – while not attempting to deny it to someone else (due to some overriding principle of ‘not expressing emotion.) VINEETO: Personally, I find discussions of imaginary situations can at best lead to some form of theoretical understanding but the only way to really understand the nature and power of feelings and emotions is for you to do your own explorations in real situations as they are happening. However, in the hypothetical situation you offer, you have communicated some information to your wife about an emotional situation where she wasn’t involved. If she had been involved – as in telling her that it was she who had made you feel nervous – then this would be an example of expressing an emotion. What happens when people express their emotions is that they make no distinction between the trigger for their own feelings or emotions and the person or persons who deliver the trigger – the person who made some comment, who did something or didn’t do something, who has a viewpoint different than yours, who espouses different morals or ethics and so on. To express your feelings to someone who is but the deliverer of the trigger of your feelings is to shoot the messenger. No matter how cunningly or cleverly this is done, expressing emotions in this way always means you are missing the opportunity of attentively experiencing the emotion and of understanding the nuts and bolts of how ‘you’ operate. To express emotion is to verbally and/or non-verbally turn the ‘emotional hose’ towards the person who supposedly triggered your feelings, or who happens to be nearby when one wants to emotionally unload, and drench them in one’s feelings. As Richard explained recently: ‘an emotion ... wants to express, communicate or convey itself either verbally (which may be merely tone of voice), physically (which may be merely facial expression or bodily stance) or as a ‘vibe’ – to use a ‘60’s term – which can be picked-up psychically (and is arguably the most pernicious of all expression).’ * RESPONDENT: So these are the contexts where ‘communicating about emotion’ is vital –
You have convinced me to take back No 2. I no longer see No 2 as vital. But I do think that allowing oneself ‘space’ to ‘slip-up’ is crucial – not castigating, but investigating. VINEETO: Good on you. When you have the sincere intent to be happy and harmless, you don’t need the ‘crutch’ of expressing your emotions verbally, physically or psychically. You simply have the intent to be as harmless as can be and with each little success you raise the bar as you go along. As you become more and more familiar with the territory and the cunning of your psyche, you become increasingly able to discover and observe the emotion before it ‘slips out’, i.e. before it is expressed in any way whatsoever. And if you do ‘slip up’, another opportunity will soon come along – it is not easy to break a lifetime’s habit, particularly when everyone else on the planet is busily involved in mindlessly expressing their emotions. * RESPONDENT: You ask me why I want others to be ‘sensitive’ to me? I ask you why should you or I be ‘sensitive’ to others? My answer to this is that it’s not that I’m requiring or demanding that others be ‘sensitive’ to my needs – rather that I do realize that generally people are well meaning and benevolent, so that I don’t see any reason why sharing information about how I am feeling should be seen as a ‘demand’ placed upon them. It’s merely information that they are free to do with whatever they want. Giving information about how I feel, or have felt in a purely informative way only allows them to understand me – which allows their natural benevolence to be better directed. VINEETO: It is a myth that human beings have ‘natural benevolence’ – every human being is born with mother nature’s rather clumsy soft-ware package of the animal instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and this programming is responsible for the human condition that is epitomized by malice and sorrow. What looks like beneficial behaviour to you is the social conditioning in which humans are taught to emphasize and highly value their ‘good’ instinctual passions and repress and control their ‘savage’ passions. However, we still have to rely on lawyers and laws, courts and jails, police, armies and guns to ultimately enforce law and order – a pathetic substitute for an actual peace and harmony between human beings. Why would you feel the need to ‘better direct’ people’s supposed ‘natural benevolence’? Why do you feel a fear of being emotionally hurt by others if everyone has a ‘natural benevolence’? It’s a spiritual fairy-tale that priests and gurus want us to believe that human nature is essentially benevolent, that babies are born innocent and that they have only been misguided and corrupted by their upbringing. One only needs to take a closer look at 5,000 years of recorded history to see that this duplicitous belief is neither factual nor makes any sense. RESPONDENT: I do not mean to imply that humans are ONLY ‘naturally benevolent.’ No doubt you are correct in your assertion that complete innocence is a fairy tale. Your comments are aimed at a target that I don’t intend to defend. I agree that we are endowed with the ‘instinctual passions’ of ‘fear, aggression, nurture and desire’. But, I also see altruism and benevolence – though normally mixed (if not eclipsed sometimes) by the instinctual passions you refer to. All I mean is that people are generally well meaning. Maybe it’s best not to combine the word ‘natural’ and ‘benevolence’. Probably ‘good-intentioned’ is a better rendering – or ‘well-meaning.’ VINEETO: It is certainly ‘best not to combine the word ‘natural’ and ‘benevolence’’ because it is the instinctual passions that are natural and consequently come to the surface with often horrendous results when the social rules fail to curb the excesses. Children before about age two are ‘natural’ and so are animals – children at this age don’t yet have a social conscience and, as such, are run entirely by their instinctual passions. What you said, however, is that you wanted to appeal to and direct people’s ‘natural benevolence’ so that they’d be ‘sensitive’ towards you and won’t emotionally hurt you. But apart from the fact that ‘natural benevolence’ is a myth, an actualist aims to become unconditionally happy and harmless, i.e. happy and harmless with people as they are. In order to become unconditionally harmless, I had to stop trying to direct people to live up to ‘my’ preferences and sensitive spots and instead I investigated ‘my’ instinctive need to be in control and change people according to ‘my’ self-centred ideas and feelings. The result is that now I am not only harmless but also happy regardless of what people say to me, or about me, because I removed the cause of my feeling hurt – and the cause is not in others, but in me. * RESPONDENT: In my experience, only by becoming Happy first – can I also become Harmless. This is not to neglect Harmlessness, rather to notice that if I try to be to vigilant – ‘taking responsibility’ for how my emotions cause ripples in other people, then I become a ‘tiger in a cage’ – i.e., unhappy. Granted, both happiness are harmlessness depend on each other, but happiness seems to be the horse carrying the harmlessness cart – and not the other way around. I don’t have motivation to be harmless, if I’m not happy. At least – that’s my experience. VINEETO: If by ‘becoming Happy first’ one could ‘also become Harmless’, the whole world would be happy and harmless by now. The pursuit of happiness is as old as humankind but it still has not produced anything remotely resembling harmlessness, let alone harmony. Actualism breaks with the instinctual compulsion of human beings to put their own happiness first and put harmlessness second – as a socially conditioned afterthought, so to speak. As long as I put my happiness above being harmless, my outlook towards others is inevitably ‘self’-centred, which means that I cannot consider others as equitable fellow human beings. RESPONDENT: I do not mean to imply that happiness and harmlessness are exclusive of each other. I also am not asserting that one can become happy without being concerned with harmlessness. I recognize the two are dependents and intertwined together. I am just as concerned with harmlessness as happiness – my experience just tells me that if I become overly concerned with harmlessness and begin to castigate myself for it, then I don’t have a chance at being either happy or harmless. VINEETO: The challenge in actualism is to resist the temptation to compromise your aim and your sincere intent when you are not perfect at the first attempt, but instead investigate the ‘little man in the head’ who is doing the castigating. Given that the inner critic is your social identity, ‘he’ is nothing other than the conglomerate of all the beliefs, morals, ethics, values, principles and psittacisms that ‘he’ has been programmed with since birth. Your social identity also determines how you automatically relate to other people and how you expect and demand other people to perceive you. In order to eliminate one’s social identity one needs to replace the moral and ethical arbitrary judgments of good and bad and right and wrong with an open-eyed evaluation and intelligent judgment based on what is sensible and what is silly. One also needs to replace the beliefs and psittacisms one has been instilled with in childhood, or has later chosen as one’s own, with observable and verifiable facts. By choosing to become happy and harmless I set my goal far higher than the societal values of ‘right’ and ‘good’ and, as such, the nagging ‘little woman in the head’ eventually ran out of objections of me being happy and harmless. It is the intent to be harmless that is the crucial difference between a spiritualist and an actualist because everyone wants to be happy but very few are ready to commit themselves to the truly benevolent aim of becoming harmless.
RESPONDENT: I’ve been increasingly concerned about something I can’t quite put my finger on. I’d like to say a few things about it, without biasing myself to a premature conclusion. Feedback is welcome – and maybe we can have a good discussion. The concern is regarding how the term ‘human condition’ is used on this website. I don’t wish to object to the term itself, rather it’s juxtaposition with virtual/actual freedom. I can think of numerous examples where it is stated that the ‘human condition’ is one of misery and suffering. Now, I don’t disagree with this in principle, indeed – there is much misery and suffering in the ‘human condition.’ The ‘human condition’ is a set of beliefs, rules of the road, instinctual passions, emotion, etc. – lived by the vast majority of the human ‘species.’ But insofar as the ‘human condition’ is a quite variegated set of beliefs and realities... I doubt that it is completely incarnated in any individual. Surely, there are plenty of people that don’t swallow the ‘human condition’ hook, line, and sinker – for example, there are a good number of males who have never completely identified with the societal male gender. Gender conditioning is a fact that many if not most ‘educated’ adults are well aware of. So it is possible for one to be free of parts of the ‘human condition’ without ever investigating AF. Now, my concern is that the juxtaposition of the ‘human condition’ versus a virtual or actual freedom produces a sort of falsification of the actual. It seems to me that each individual, depending on age, sex, culture, socio-economic status, and numerous other variables may only partially live in the ‘real’ world. Take for example, a 4 year old who knows almost nothing about death, God, murder, and is relatively naive regarding violence – well, that 4 year old is only ‘partly plugged in’ to the human condition – though I do acknowledge the obvious instinctual passions. The life of my 4 year old, for example, is mostly wonderful – he does have the whole survival package, but when that survival package is not an issue – I have no doubt that he is happier than most adults. I suppose the bottom line is this – I don’t experience most of my peers as ‘miserable’ human beings because they live in the ‘human condition.’ Yes, I’m sure they have their fair share of misery – but that’s not all the ‘human condition’ is made up of. There is room for enjoyment, interests, and the underlying perfection of life to shine through on occasion. The ‘human condition’ is bad – sometimes really bad, but setting up the polarity that the ‘human condition’ is miserable for every human being, versus a virtual/actual freedom lived by a handful on the planet seems to me to falsify what is actually the case. Don’t get me wrong – why would anyone be satisfied with the ‘human condition?’ Indeed it would be to settle for ‘2nd best.’ But is ‘2nd Best’ necessarily miserable? An unsatisfied hunger seeks satisfaction, but an unsatisfied hunger doesn’t always make me miserable either. VINEETO: The human condition is a fact for every human being on the planet – all human beings are genetically instilled with a set of animal instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. These instinctual passions are then overlaid by a social identity consisting of the morals, ethics and values that are programmed into us by parents, teachers and others to ensure that we will become a fit, useful, and loyal member of the particular society into which we were born. It is up to everyone to choose what to do about this situation one finds oneself in – one can ignore it, deny it, rephrase it, object to it, be angry or resentful about it, be hopeful or sad about it, accept it and somehow get along with it or one can decide that being inflicted with the human condition is not so bad after all. Speaking personally, settling for somehow coping with the human condition of malice and sorrow was not good enough. After I found that both materialism and spiritualism had failed to make me happy and harmless, I seized the opportunity of applying a method to become completely free from the human condition. Indeed, only if you find by experience that ‘the human condition is miserable’ for you, will you be motivated enough to do something radical about it and have the intent to making becoming happy and harmless the number one mission in your life. It is indeed radical to set out on a path to become free from the human condition because your very intent to become free from this ancient social-instinctual programming sets you apart from your peers and your kin. Even to acknowledge that ‘I am afflicted with a disease and I want to become free of it’ takes tremendous courage and this act of acknowledgement alone will set you apart from your peers who remain content with the way things are. And this acknowledgement is only the first step. Each time you are investigating one of your beliefs, or one of your moral or ethical codes, your curiosity and determination will distinguish you from your peers and kin, friends and colleagues. The process of actualism is a personal journey out of humanity, away from humanity, away from the common pattern of malice and sorrow and its panaceas of love, consolation and compassion. As an actualist you are utterly on your own … that’s why a pure consciousness experience is so important. The memory of a pure consciousness experience is your guiding light – it shows you what is possible when the ‘self’ disappears. A PCE makes it startlingly evident why normal every-day life within the human condition is not the be all and end all to living on this verdant planet. When one is haunted by the memory of the purity and perfection of this infinite and eternal physical universe, then settling for second best is impossible. Then a journey begins that is absolutely wondrous and sensuous, thrilling and scintillating. Then ‘my’ life has both purpose and meaning.
RESPONDENT: Looking further into my thoughts and feelings about the ‘human condition’ – I realize that what is at the core of my concerns first – ‘my’ children and ‘my’ role in raising them. It would be nice if ‘my’ kids had the ability to grow up without most of the baggage within the ‘human condition’. I notice that I am desperate to believe either that the characterization common on this website of the ‘human condition’ is either wrong or overstated – in order to give room for not only my children, but for all human beings to have a happy life. VINEETO: The first, and automatic, reaction to an undesirable fact is to deny the fact, attempt to change this fact or to shoot the messenger. However, once you begin to recognize that your reaction to a particular fact is ‘your’ reaction, based on ‘your’ fears and ‘your’ desires, ‘your’ role as a parent or ‘your’ instinct of nurture, then you are beginning to discover your ‘self’ in action. During the process of actualism, whenever I found myself objecting to a fact, I began to question ‘me’, the identity, who was doing the objecting. After all, it is ‘me’ who I aim to uncover and change. As for ‘give room for not only my children, but for all human beings to have a happy life’ – I don’t see how it makes people happy to describe life within the human condition as happy while wars and murders and rapes and suicides and domestic violence and corruption are going on every day all over the planet. After a life-long search for happiness, I have come to the conclusion that the best I can do for the happiness of others is to stop being a contributor to malice and sorrow – because a PCE made it obvious that the only person ‘I’ can change, and need to change, is ‘me’. RESPONDENT: This desire leads ‘me’ to constantly look for the silver lining ... the Good ... etc. but ‘I’ am shot down time and time again when I discover that the ‘Good’ in almost every case includes the ‘Bad’ right along with it. VINEETO: Yes, the ‘silver lining’ is just that, an antidote to the dark cloud that always hangs over humanity – the imagination of hope glossed over despair. The ‘Good’ only exists to compensate for the ‘Bad’ – take away malice and sorrow and there is no need for love and compassion. Without malice and sorrow I am spontaneously benign and benevolent, gay and carefree. RESPONDENT: Conscious of the fact that most people spend their entire lives firmly embedded in the ‘human condition’ – ‘I’ wonder if it’s worth it. Why would I want to contribute to the human condition by raising children within it? Of course I know there are things one can do to weaken the claim of the human condition, but it is useless to think that I have complete control over another’s development and the choices they make. VINEETO: As I see it, the best you can do for your son is to give him a father who is free from malice and sorrow, unburdened by his social identity as a father, a husband, an American, a believer in the ‘Good’ and the ‘Bad’, etc. and free from the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. This unilateral action has two benefits. Not only do you free your son from the burden of ‘you’ and your demands – expectations, confusions, beliefs and passions – but you show your son by living example what is now humanly possible within the human condition – being virtually free of malice and sorrow. RESPONDENT: Maybe the problem isn’t so much the description of the ‘human condition’ as being miserable, but believing it one way or the other. Recognizing this is true in description only means that the actual case will always transcend any description. So this doesn’t mean that my kids have a great shot at escaping the ‘human condition’ – rather, that even if they can’t escape it – that whatever quality their lives take, it cannot be completely described by some belief that the ‘human condition’ is either ‘wonderful’ or ‘miserable.’ This goes not only for ‘my’ kids – but for virtually the whole ‘human race.’ It seems that I can recognize a relatively accurate description without allowing the description to replace the actual state of affairs. What precedes any belief in ‘truth’ is the very living of life itself. So maybe one can nod with the actualists saying that ‘reality’ sucks or the ‘human condition’ is a miserable state of affairs – while realizing that no mere ‘truth’ or description should replace the actual living itself – which escapes accurate description just as a ‘picture is worth a thousand words.’ One can describe the ‘human condition’ as positive or negative just as one can describe a book, a meal, or music as either positive or negative, but one word descriptions fall far short of what it is actually like. VINEETO: Personally, I was utterly sick of the way human beings treat each other, and the more I watched the news and reports on television, the more sick of it I became. This revulsion included how I treated my fellow human beings and no amount of re-definition or obscuration, denial or transcendence – sticking my head in the sand or walking around with my head in the clouds – could disguise the fact that human beings kill, rape, murder, plunder, wage war, commit suicide and can’t even remotely live in peace and harmony with each other. The response to the fact of the horrendous results of human condition may be a matter of personal taste or viewpoint, as you say ‘believing it one way or the other’ … ‘one can describe the human condition as positive or negative’. To me, observing the human condition in action in me and in others left a decidedly foul taste in my mouth. This foul taste still drives me on to not rest until ‘I’ have completely disappeared from this flesh-and-blood body. RESPONDENT: I’m especially curious how other actualists approach this issue of on the one hand describing the ‘human condition’ as something of a nightmare, yet caring intensely about the concerns of those who are in it? Do you see your caring for others humans as merely alleviating their suffering or somehow wonderful and really beneficial? In other words, do you really see their lives as valuable for them? Or that they are merely a ‘menace’ to their bodies? VINEETO: To be born with instinctual passion and programmed with a social identity is nobody’s fault. The reason I am reporting my experiences with the process of becoming free from this default setting is because my experience proves that is possible for anyone who is sufficiently motivated to become virtually free from malice and sorrow – a state way beyond normal human expectations and any spiritual delusionary states. But I can do nothing for others to ‘alleviate their suffering’ because everyone has to do the work of becoming free by themselves. I once watched a TV report about a tribe in the South American jungle in which everyone over the age of ten was afflicted with blindness, transmitted by mosquitos. Yet when a white doctor arrived, he could only convince one member of the tribe to take the cure. The others decided to remain within the ‘safe’ parameters of their present experience. If you want to ‘describe the ‘human condition’ as positive’ then that is entirely your business. Just remember that, should you change your mind, there is a way out, and a well-documented one at that.
RESPONDENT: My apologies – I clicked ‘send’ on the last post before properly ‘cleaning it up.’ I would have like to have organized it a bit better – and there are a few (should be obvious to you) misleading areas where it looks like you wrote something I actually said. I know you normally edit quite freely – please do so on the latter post. ‘I’ was pressing ‘myself’ for time :o) VINEETO: Just for clarification – I noticed you mentioned that I ‘normally edit quite freely’. What I do is to format the posts with colour, italic, so as to clarify who has written what, and occasionally I correct a spelling mistake that my spellchecker complains about. Sometimes I post a bit of the previous conversation back into the letter in order to maintain the continuity of discussion about the topic. And sometimes I only respond to part of a post in order to focus on essential points. This editing is purely functional and is in no way meant to alter, modify or re-phrase any correspondent’s writing to the list. Any omissions or snipping are only done on rare occasions and only for brevity or clarity. The list itself is completely uncensored and unmoderated, as are the Topica-list archives. The only editing done is in posting to the web-site archives but even here it is common practice to post the correspondent’s letter in full in nearly every case. As the ‘librarian’ for much of the correspondence on the list I thought it appropriate to state the editorial policy.
RESPONDENT: I appreciate your careful consideration – thanks :o) VINEETO: You are welcome. RESPONDENT: Looking further into my thoughts and feelings about the ‘human condition’ – I realize that what is at the core of my concerns first – ‘my’ children and ‘my’ role in raising them. It would be nice if ‘my’ kids had the ability to grow up without most of the baggage within the ‘human condition’. I notice that I am desperate to believe either that the characterization common on this website of the ‘human condition’ is either wrong or overstated – in order to give room for not only my children, but for all human beings to have a happy life. VINEETO: The first, and automatic, reaction to an undesirable fact is to deny the fact, attempt to change this fact or to shoot the messenger. However, once you begin to recognize that your reaction to a particular fact is ‘your’ reaction, based on ‘your’ fears and ‘your’ desires, ‘your’ role as a parent or ‘your’ instinct of nurture, then you are beginning to discover your ‘self’ in action. During the process of actualism, whenever I found myself objecting to a fact, I began to question ‘me’, the identity, who was doing the objecting. After all, it is ‘me’ who I aim to uncover and change. As for ‘give room for not only my children, but for all human beings to have a happy life’ – I don’t see how it makes people happy to describe life within the human condition as happy while wars and murders and rapes and suicides and domestic violence and corruption are going on every day all over the planet. After a life-long search for happiness, I have come to the conclusion that the best I can do for the happiness of others is to stop being a contributor to malice and sorrow – because a PCE made it obvious that the only person ‘I’ can change, and need to change, is ‘me’. RESPONDENT: I’m now thinking a bit differently about the ‘human condition’. You are absolutely right that to put a gloss over the ‘human condition’ is not going to get anyone anywhere. What I see now is that talking about the ‘human condition’ is already to talk about the diseased parts of it otherwise it wouldn’t be a ‘condition’. VINEETO: The longer I investigated my beliefs, feelings and emotions, the more I came to realize that all of the human condition is a disease – not only ‘diseased parts’, but all of it. To be genetically programmed with a complimentary and conflicting set of instinctual survival passions that then need to be controlled and/or suppressed via the imposition of social conditioning is a diseased state, however way I looked at it. I also found that the ‘good’ parts and the ‘bad’ parts of the instinctual programming were inseparably bound together in the one package and that the age-long ambition to have the ‘good’ without the ‘bad’ parts is therefore doomed to fail. RESPONDENT: What I think was happening is that I was interpreting the ‘human condition’ as ‘what it’s like for every human being’. The ‘human condition’ is already a generalized term which is designed to focus on the essentially negative aspects of being ‘human’. I do realize that misery is essential to being ‘human’ – but I think I was objecting to that characterization because it seemed to be ‘out of balance’ with the facts. Humans don’t walk around constantly feeling miserable. There is an essential misery that humans carry around with them, but it doesn’t have to engulf one with despair. Even in the ‘human’ state of affairs – there is a buoyancy that keeps arising – even in the darkest moments of one’s life. So – while I can agree that the ‘human condition’ is essentially a miserable one, and thus extremely desirable to ‘get out of’. It doesn’t have to generate despairing histrionics in everyone. VINEETO: The tried and failed solution to the human condition is to fight or balance the bad feelings with good feelings, i.e. balance depression with hope and resilience, anxiety with optimism, fear with bravado, sorrow with compassion, aggression with love, despair with bliss and loneliness with belonging. In actualism I learnt to investigate my feelings and their underlying beliefs, morals and ethics with the aim to examine and understand ‘me’, the passionate identity that produces and maintains my feelings and beliefs in the first place. Because this process of investigation is scientific in nature and non-judgemental as to rights or wrongs, goods or bads, I have no need to counteract, cover up or neutralize any bad feelings with good feelings but can give full reign to the felicitous/ innocuous feelings of happiness, delight, bonhomie, amiablity and the pure enjoyment to be alive. * VINEETO: As I see it, the best you can do for your son is to give him a father who is free from malice and sorrow, unburdened by his social identity as a father, a husband, an American, a believer in the ‘Good’ and the ‘Bad’, etc. and free from the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. This unilateral action has two benefits. Not only do you free your son from the burden of ‘you’ and your demands – expectations, confusions, beliefs and passions – but you show your son by living example what is now humanly possible within the human condition – being virtually free of malice and sorrow. RESPONDENT: I agree completely. The ‘balancing act’ for me has been to on the one hand, admit the fact of the misery of the ‘human condition’ while on the other hand maintaining a zest or enthusiasm for my life and that of others. The ‘human condition’ is indeed a generalization that gives one a picture of human beings much like one you would get just by watching the evening news. Unless you get out of your house and interact with the actual humans themselves – you would never know that the ‘human condition’ is not all there is to being human. This constant experience of most people being relatively happy is enough to restore my confidence in the value of life itself – though it also doesn’t compromise the insight that the ‘human condition’ is indeed a miserable state of affairs which one is best rid of. VINEETO: It was only when I became aware of, and fully admitted, that I was capable of the same malice and sorrow I saw in ‘the evening news’ that I subsequently realized that I was inflicted with exactly the same human condition as the warmongers, the murderers, the thieves, the corrupt and the greedy. It was this awareness and this realization that motivated ‘me’ to get off my bum and do something radical and practical about the human condition in me. As long I considered the wars and rapes and murders as other people’s misery and violence, I would always find reasons to think that the human condition was not so bad after all. Only being utterly fed up with the situation I found myself in gave me the necessary impetus to change. * RESPONDENT: I’m especially curious how other actualists approach this issue of on the one hand describing the ‘human condition’ as something of a nightmare, yet caring intensely about the concerns of those who are in it? Do you see your caring for others humans as merely alleviating their suffering or somehow wonderful and really beneficial? In other words, do you really see their lives as valuable for them? Or that they are merely a ‘menace’ to their bodies? VINEETO: To be born with instinctual passion and programmed with a social identity is nobody’s fault. The reason I am reporting my experiences with the process of becoming free from this default setting is because my experience proves that is possible for anyone who is sufficiently motivated to become virtually free from malice and sorrow – a state way beyond normal human expectations and any spiritual delusionary states. But I can do nothing for others to ‘alleviate their suffering’ because everyone has to do the work of becoming free by themselves. RESPONDENT: Thanks. I shall continue to happily dismantle myself. I knew there were bound to be bumps on the way. VINEETO: I found that it helps to remember that the ‘bumps on the way’ are ‘me’ in action, defending ‘my’ passionate identity. This way I neither have to blame something or someone else for the ‘bumps on the way’ nor do I have to fall back into blaming myself about being inflicted with the human condition. However, this process of questioning, investigating and understanding is often not a comfortable business for ‘I’, as a social and instinctual identity, am made up of nothing other than the beliefs ‘I’ was taught and the passions I experience as being ‘me’. RESPONDENT: Demons have a way of exorcizing themselves once they are brought into full light. VINEETO: I would put it differently. Despite everyone’s belief, demons have no actual existence – they are ‘my’ imagination and instinctual passions in action. Therefore demons do not exorcize themselves of their own accord but in the process of actively questioning and investigating my passionate beliefs, ‘they are brought into full light’, as you say, where they lose their power and credibility and eventually vanish into thin air. By undertaking this process, ‘I’ am doing the work of dismantling ‘me’, ‘I’ am staging my own exit.
VINEETO: The longer I investigated my beliefs, feelings and emotions, the more I came to realize that all of the human condition is a disease – not only ‘diseased parts’, but all of it. To be genetically programmed with a complimentary and conflicting set of instinctual survival passions that then need to be controlled and/or suppressed via the imposition of social conditioning is a diseased state, however way I looked at it. I also found that the ‘good’ parts and the ‘bad’ parts of the instinctual programming were inseparably bound together in the one package and that the age-long ambition to have the ‘good’ without the ‘bad’ parts is therefore doomed to fail. RESPONDENT: By ‘human condition’ I mean the disease that does indeed infect all human beings. But, just as a disease like arthritis can ‘flare up’ or abate – it’s quite similar with the ‘human condition.’ VINEETO: You may have noticed that recently Richard quite accurately compared the human condition to heroin addiction –
As with alcohol or drug addiction one needs to recognize the disease in its full extent in order to want to be free of it so that the cure can be effective. * RESPONDENT: The point that I am trying to make is that the human condition is not without worth. There is much of the felicitous feelings to be had – even within the ‘human condition’. Painting all of the ‘human’ with the brush of misery in the human condition completely ignores the fact that there is much felicity to be had even within the human condition. This is not speculation on my part. If you can’t see it – turn on an episode of ‘Who’s Line is it Anyway?’ Or notice the ‘relative innocence’ that is often available in children. Now, the response I normally read when people speak of ‘innocence’ is that for an actualist – ‘innocence’ only exists in the actual world. But, to be fair, one must admit that children are often ‘closer’ to the actual world than many adults (not always – often). To ignore the existence of ‘felicity’ even within the ‘human condition’ is to misrepresent the facts. VINEETO: You seem to be mixing two separate issues here. VINEETO: One issue is making an assessment of the human social-instinctual programming. A clear look at any period of human history will reveal that there has never been peace-on-earth, i.e. malice and sorrow have always be the norm both on a domestic and a global scale. This assessment of the human condition is not a condemnation of the worth of the lives of 6 billion people but a statement of fact. The question I asked myself was what to do about it? Only because I came to the conclusion that staying within the human condition was the pits, did I have the intent and impetus to meet the challenge to question everything I had ever valued, taken for granted and dearly believed to be true. The second issue is the way to get from A to B, from the human condition to a permanent actual freedom. The method of dismantling the human condition is to question and investigate, and subsequently minimize, both the good and bad feelings and activate one’s felicitous/ innocuous feelings. Once I knew that my aim was to become completely free from the human condition, the next step was to activate everything that would help me to reach my goal – intent, determination, stubbornness, humour, delight, excitement, altruism, spontaneity, naiveté, joie de vivre, curiosity, etc. For additional information on the actualism method see Richard’s
selected correspondence on RESPONDENT: Again, using the metaphor of arthritis – when people are able to relax their instinctual passions – most people naturally experience an earthy kind of felicity. Some people are obviously better than others at having fun within the ‘human condition’ – but my concern is that this seems to be often glossed over by actualists. Richard has recently stated the ‘worthwhileness’ of even a human existence. You obviously aren’t recommending actual suicide or homicide – only ‘psychological’ or ‘psychic’ suicide. My point in steering away from seeing the human condition as just pure ‘doom and gloom’ is not to present an empty optimism – but to remember the facts. There is an ease – yes, resilience or buoyancy even in the human condition that is not related to belief, hope, or even future orientation. Yet this ease is somewhat fickle in its comings and goings – so that it is desirable to investigate and ‘get out’ of the human condition. But, it’s not all bad all the time. Delight is not only available to an ‘actualist’. VINEETO: I don’t quite understand your point. Only when something is assessed as not worthwhile continuing do I make the effort of freeing myself from it. Or, to put it the other way round, if you can see the ‘worthwhileness’ of living within the human condition, why would you contemplate making the effort to become free from it? To use your metaphor of arthritis – why take a medicine to eliminate arthritis, if you find practicing relaxation brings you sufficient relief? * VINEETO: It was only when I became aware of, and fully admitted, that I was capable of the same malice and sorrow I saw in ‘the evening news’ that I subsequently realized that I was inflicted with exactly the same human condition as the warmongers, the murderers, the thieves, the corrupt and the greedy. It was this awareness and this realization that motivated ‘me’ to get off my bum and do something radical and practical about the human condition in me. As long I considered the wars and rapes and murders as other people’s misery and violence, I would always find reasons to think that the human condition was not so bad after all. Only being utterly fed up with the situation I found myself in gave me the necessary impetus to change. RESPONDENT: The ‘evening news’ shows one normally only the despicable and miserable aspects of being human. Yet, the ‘evening news’ approach to the ‘human condition’ is a distortion. Yes, the root of the ‘evening news’ lies within each human being – ‘devil inside,’ if you will. But, it’s not all the devil inside. Yes, ‘I’ am capable of performing atrocities – and for that reason am motivated to dismantle my ‘self.’ But, when one is relatively stressfree – there is legitimate delight and wonder available. Now, I’m not speculating – I’m reporting from my own experience and what I can gather from others. VINEETO: Of course, once I had determined that I wanted to become free from the human condition in toto, the next step was to set as my minimum standard ‘feeling good’ … and set about examining whatever was in the way of feeling good. Then I raised the bar to ‘feeling excellent’ and again investigated whatever was in the way of feeling excellent. Vis –
You seem to be putting the cart before the horse, which is to seek out the possible happy aspects of the human condition in order to achieve ‘feeling good’ whilst continuing to deny, repress or dissociate from any bad feelings and their consequences. It’s your life but such an approach to living life has a zero record of success in bringing an end to human malice and sorrow.
RESPONDENT: I’m increasingly perplexed by what some people on the list are pointing out is your ‘aggressive’ style. I have experienced this ‘aggressive’ style over the past 7 months in your posts for me and for others on the list. Let me say I detect your overriding care and genuine concern for your interlocuter, but I wonder just what are you accomplishing with the aggression? Multiple occasions I have had the impression you are looking merely for catch phrases that can be attacked or overturned. Numerous instances, I’ve been astonished by your interpretations of what I’ve said that launch in a direction completely unintended by me – merely constructing a strawman. I’m convinced of your genuine concern for others, yet I can’t understand your intentions when you use what is interpreted as an aggressive style. Do you intend to challenge the other by prodding them into becoming upset – thus dealing with their ‘self’ that appears in the transaction? If so, this seems to be a basic guru trick... ‘oh that hurt? well, that’s your problem, now isn’t it?’ approach. Where does the line between ‘triggering’ beneficial harm in another stop and actually being harmful? Maybe you see yourself as just stating the facts? And who cares if the other doesn’t see the ‘facts’ as you do? Isn’t there a less aggressive more benevolent – way of communicating? The recent comment to No 23 about Richard as ‘mystic’ was factually correct – but the quip about both eyes being closed (reading meditatively) was over the top – unnecessary. The ‘full-stop’ shock you appear to intend only alienates the other person. VINEETO: I cannot comment on your general impression – you will need to give me specific examples where I have used an ‘aggressive style’. However, I can comment on your example of my post to No 42 – where I commented ‘about Richard as mystic’. Vis –
You may interpret my response as ‘over the top’ ‘alienating’ and an example of my ‘aggressive style’ but I did use the words ‘meditatively’ and ‘eyes closed’ deliberately and for good reason. No 42 has not only reported that he spent 40 years on the spiritual path following first G. Gurdjieff and then M. Rajneesh, but he also clearly stated his predilection for the spiritual virtue of ‘not-knowing’ in lieu of a genuine freedom from malice and sorrow –
Given that No 42 has been subscribed to the Actual Freedom mailing list for a while now and is still presenting Richard as a mystic, at best that means that he read the ongoing posts about actualism with both eyes closed. If he has read with open eyes, then his reading was certainly meditative – in the spirit of ‘not-knowing’ and not wanting to know. I can well understand when people do not want to know about becoming free from the human condition, because I know from experience that the process of investigating the human condition can sometimes be a daunting enterprise. What I cannot understand, however, is why someone is still misinterpreting actualism as spiritualism when it has been clearly stated many times that actualism is about questioning all beliefs. RESPONDENT: I can think of numerous cases where list members have requested no longer to engage you in conversation. I can’t think of any cases where this has happened with Richard (though there may be some that I’m unaware of – especially outside my time here). What do you make of their feedback? Normally, I would keep the following to myself, but I mention only for your consideration. I find Richard mostly understanding and quite concerned about putting the interlocuter in the best of lights – giving their question or statement the best possible rendering and response. In some cases he will use a similar prodding method to jar someone – but normally only once they have demonstrated an obstinacy in looking into something for themselves or possibly after stating some absurdity (he is in a sense, ‘playing their game’). It seems to me the prodding approach is entirely appropriate in such cases – but I find your ready, gleeful use of the prodding, aggressive style distasteful – and mildly harmful. VINEETO: A few days ago I wrote to you –
– an observation that was based on personal experience of my own process of investigation. It would appear that your finding my writing ‘aggressive’ and ‘distasteful’ signals the end of sensible discussion. By the way, there are many cases where correspondents have ceased engaging Richard in conversation – over a hundred in fact – and many incidents where he has been accused of being aggressive. There are also cases where correspondents exhibit a fawning reverence towards Richard, which serves only to degrade his reports about becoming free of the human condition into the normal guru-type Wisdom. This action of revering Richard as a Guru is a perfect means for the correspondents concerned to avoid following Richard’s example in a practical down-to-earth way – becoming actually free from the human condition themselves. RESPONDENT: You may now show me where I have gone wrong if you wish. VINEETO: As it is your life you are living, it is entirely your business to investigate where you are going ‘wrong’ or not. I only ever intend to share my experience in using a method that works to evince a genuine and complete freedom from the human condition with those who are interested, for as long as they maintain their interest.
RESPONDENT: I’m increasingly perplexed by what some people on the list are pointing out is your ‘aggressive’ style. I have experienced this ‘aggressive’ style over the past 7 months in your posts for me and for others on the list. Let me say I detect your overriding care and genuine concern for your interlocuter, but I wonder just what are you accomplishing with the aggression? Multiple occasions I have had the impression you are looking merely for catch phrases that can be attacked or overturned. Numerous instances, I’ve been astonished by your interpretations of what I’ve said that launch in a direction completely unintended by me – merely constructing a strawman. I’m convinced of your genuine concern for others, yet I can’t understand your intentions when you use what is interpreted as an aggressive style. Do you intend to challenge the other by prodding them into becoming upset – thus dealing with their ‘self’ that appears in the transaction? If so, this seems to be a basic guru trick... ‘oh that hurt? well, that’s your problem, now isn’t it?’ approach. Where does the line between ‘triggering’ beneficial harm in another stop and actually being harmful? Maybe you see yourself as just stating the facts? And who cares if the other doesn’t see the ‘facts’ as you do? Isn’t there a less aggressive more benevolent – way of communicating? <snip> I can think of numerous cases where list members have requested no longer to engage you in conversation. I can’t think of any cases where this has happened with Richard (though there may be some that I’m unaware of – especially outside my time here). What do you make of their feedback? Normally, I would keep the following to myself, but I mention only for your consideration. I find Richard mostly understanding and quite concerned about putting the interlocuter in the best of lights – giving their question or statement the best possible rendering and response. In some cases he will use a similar prodding method to jar someone – but normally only once they have demonstrated an obstinacy in looking into something for themselves or possibly after stating some absurdity (he is in a sense, ‘playing their game’). It seems to me the prodding approach is entirely appropriate in such cases – but I find your ready, gleeful use of the prodding, aggressive style distasteful – and mildly harmful. VINEETO: A few days ago I wrote to you –
– an observation that was based on personal experience of my own process of investigation. It would appear that your finding my writing ‘aggressive’ and ‘distasteful’ signals the end of sensible discussion. By the way, there are many cases where correspondents have ceased engaging Richard in conversation – over a hundred in fact – and many incidents where he has been accused of being aggressive. There are also cases where correspondents exhibit a fawning reverence towards Richard, which serves only to degrade his reports about becoming free of the human condition into the normal guru-type Wisdom. This action of revering Richard as a Guru is a perfect means for the correspondents concerned to avoid following Richard’s example in a practical down-to-earth way – becoming actually free from the human condition themselves. RESPONDENT: What I don’t understand is why noticing an ‘aggressive’ style (whether it’s a correct or incorrect impression) would necessarily lead to an end of ‘sensible’ discussion. Unfortunately, the written word seems to have much more room for misunderstanding than person-to-person contact. If you interpret what I said about an ‘aggressive’ style as an accusation or demand for change – then it would seem to be the end of sensible discussion. I don’t wish to ‘drive a wedge’ that stops ‘sensible discussion.’ Is it not possible to disagree about what can easily be interpreted as an ‘aggressive’ style and maintain sensible discussion? VINEETO: When you first raised the subject you said –
I understood this to a statement that you felt offended about what I was saying ‘over the past 7 months … for me and for others on the list’. I know that I am not writing aggressively but I have learnt to bail out of conversations at this point as I have no interest in offending people. As I see it, there is no necessity to engage in conversation on this list unless both parties enjoy the discussion and obviously you don’t. As to your query –
Haven’t you noticed that all discussions cease being sensible when one or the other party feels offended?
VINEETO: I don’t quite understand your point. Only when something is assessed as not worthwhile continuing do I make the effort of freeing myself from it. Or, to put it the other way round, if you can see the ‘worthwhileness’ of living within the human condition, why would you contemplate making the effort to become free from it? RESPONDENT: ‘Worthwhileness’ can be used as a relative term. Once one is aware of an alternative – it may not be ‘worthwhile’ to continue doing something the old way – but, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t ‘worthwhile’ the old way. My wife and I recently bought a mini-van. The old car was a wagon. The old car was sufficient, but the mini-van is better. It’s not worthwhile driving the old car when we can drive the new one. But, the old car served it’s purpose and was worthwhile. In the same way, an actual freedom can be worthwhile to pursue – but that doesn’t make the ‘human condition’ worthless. I know you aren’t saying that the lives of those in the ‘human condition’ are worthless. I’m saying that polarizing virtual/actual freedom on the one hand with the ‘miserable human condition’ on the other can create the wrong impression. Would you want to live your life at all if you thought that all you could ever be is ‘miserable?’ What would you think about giving life to others? Raising children? Might you begin to wonder whether others should prefer to be shot like a dying horse in pain? Since all they can ever be is ‘miserable’ anyway? Or that maybe it would be better if the world never existed at all? These sorts of issues are the crux of why I think it is necessary for an ‘actualist’ to think carefully about how they represent the ‘human condition.’ It is of vital importance to not leave people with the wrong impression. Most of the people on this planet never have and never will have access to either a virtual or actual freedom. Is this your picture of a wonderful, vibrant world? One where a handful of people can live their virtual or actual freedom – while 6.0 billion live merely ‘miserable’ lives? So it is important to see what good – what felicity did actually exist in the ‘human condition.’ None of this is meant to negate the desirability of freeing oneself as best possible. VINEETO: Let me put it this way – if I hadn’t been utterly and completely – as opposed to ‘relatively’ – fed up with the human condition as I experienced it in me and in the way human beings treat each other ever day, I would have never dared to inquire into the possibility to question the human condition, let alone abandon humanity. The human condition is not like a glove one can casually take off at one’s own volition, it is a program that pervades every nook and corner of one’s being. I was only motivated to begin the enterprise of scrutinizing the very core of my being because I was utterly disgusted and fed up with all the human condition results in – ongoing wars and genocides, rapes and domestic violence, child-abuse and gender-battle, corruption and murder, despair and suicide. And this condition of being fed up was not alleviated by the conditional comings and goings of joy or happiness because the overall picture remained the same – that human beings, and that include me, could not and cannot even remotely live together in peace and harmony whilst remaining within the human condition. The possibility that there was a solution to all the devastating shortcomings of the human condition made my life-long search for the meaning of life on this planet worthwhile because the experience of being temporarily free from my instinctual programming experienced in a PCE proved beyond doubt that life is not a vale of tears. * VINEETO: To use your metaphor of arthritis – why take a medicine to eliminate arthritis, if you find practicing relaxation brings you sufficient relief? RESPONDENT: The answer is in the use of the word ‘sufficient.’ It is preferable to eliminate one’s arthritis when the appropriate medication is available. One needn’t claim that you must reach a miserable state or even become disgusted with the arthritis in order to seek out medication either. One doesn’t have to look very far to know that the ‘human condition’ is a miserable state of affairs on a global level. This is what one sees on the ‘evening news.’ Thus, given the appropriate medication is available, it is entirely desirable to remedy the problem. And yes, it is essential to properly diagnose the problem – which is why is it also important to me to remember the ‘worthwhileness’ of the lives of those living in the ‘human condition.’ I acknowledge that virtually every cognitively mature person asks themselves sometimes ‘is this all there is to life?’ as Richard says he used to ask himself. So, yes, we are all dissatisfied with the ‘human condition.’ But that dissatisfaction doesn’t exclude relative satisfaction. VINEETO: The ‘appropriate medication’, as you call actualism, is not something that deals with the symptoms – the method of actualism is aiming at removing the root cause of the disease, ‘me’. In my five years of experience with the process of taking my ‘self’ apart, I have noticed again and again that whenever ‘I’ find any reason to stay in existence, ‘I’ will fight to hold on to it tooth and nail. Only a stubborn determination to not settle for second best drives me on to whittle away at what ‘I’ hold most dear, ‘me’ as a social identity and as an instinctual being. RESPONDENT: You can be dissatisfied with your arthritis enough to take medication – but it doesn’t have to make you miserable first. Maybe that’s what it took for you, Vineeto, but it would be unjustified to assume that it will be the same for everyone else. VINEETO: So far you and I have only discussed what’s wrong with actualism, with actualists, with their style and their presentation of the human condition and what is ‘worthwhile’ about the human condition. Thus far everyone who has begun to practice actualism has done so because they are totally fed up with the human condition and with remaining ensnared within it, so much so that they desperately want to be free of it. Until someone proves otherwise, my assumption seems safely rooted in fact. Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer |
