VINEETO: Hi,

Only because I was deeply fed up with the havoc that my feelings created in my life and the life of others around me, was I able to see the sense in questioning all of my feelings – because examining my feelings is a tangible step to being able to be intimate with all of my fellow human beings regardless of their gender. It’s a lonely business being trapped on either side of the gender divide.

RESPONDENT: The constant state of tension brought by the animal hunger of the male for the female, and the female’s control of that situation, has long been a painful place for me.

VINEETO: I can tell you that ‘the female’s control of that situation’ is only perceived as such on the male’s end. For instance, the whole movement of women’s liberation was born of the idea that the men had control over the women’s lives. In other words, each side in the battle of the sexes sees the other side as being the controller, being more dominant, being more manipulative, being unable to understand the other, and so on. The idea that someone else is in control of my life is in itself part of the automatic instinctual battle for power between the sexes and the first step to become free of feeling controlled and being controlled was for me to admit that, and find out how, I was driven by my own instinctual passions and shackled by my own imbibed social identity of being a woman.

The more I discovered that the cards were distributed equally, i.e. equally restrictive for both genders, the more my defensiveness and my idea of being a victim dropped and I was then able to explore precisely what convictions and conventions, roles and rules I had taken on board about what it is supposed to mean to be a woman. The way I began to unravel the mystery of the eternal battle between the genders was easy – whenever I got upset about anything Peter or another man said to me or about me, I had something to look at. Whenever I found myself about to defend my convictions about what women are or what they should do or how they could be, I became aware that there was a piece of my identity as a woman in it as well. Whenever I dared to replace such a dearly held idea, passion or dream with facts a piece of my identity as a woman also went down the drain.

After a few initial fears and hesitations and as those roles and rules were slowly uncovered and discarded, it became increasingly delightful to find out that the differences that I had imagined existed between genders were disappearing. A few months into our relationship and into my explorations about my conditioning I suddenly looked at Peter and saw him without perceiving him as a man and my lover and all that it entailed. It was such a shock at first because I had never been able to look at him without simultaneously overlaying an image of what I wanted or feared or dreamt of. Suddenly there was a human being sitting next to me – and I had never seen that human being before, because I had been so busy with what I felt and thought about him. It is a delicious magic when the curtain of instinctual ‘self’-centredness breaks, if only for a few moments at first, and gives way to experiencing an intimate meeting with another fellow human being.

RESPONDENT: I agree with all of what you say, but it doesn’t seem complete. It works for individual relationships, ...

VINEETO: As you say ‘I agree with all of what you say’ – I take it that you understand that it is possible for you to change the immediate world in which you live as far as living together with your companion is concerned. If you can see that the actualism method works for your ‘individual relationship’ then you can also see that your becoming happy and harmless will contribute significantly to the peace and harmony in your house. Somebody has to be amongst the first to turn around 180 degrees and stop perpetuating malice and sorrow in the world.

RESPONDENT: ... but what of influences from more faceless powers? If there was a certain job you wanted, and you lost it because of your gender, how would you react?

VINEETO: When I was in my twenties, I also believed in ‘faceless powers’, and I passionately believed that one needs to fight against those ‘faceless powers’ whether it be capitalism, male chauvinism, consumerism or whatever else was the fashionable faceless evil. I went to the streets with others who shared my anger and frustration and there I saw that the demonstrators were as equally stricken with malice and sorrow as the people of the establishment they were demonstrating against. I saw people beating each other up; I saw rocks thrown into windows and, because everyone was busy fighting for their cause, none of the demonstrators, including me, was able to consider the policemen as fellow human beings who were doing their job – just as the policemen could not consider the demonstrators as their fellow human beings.

There are no ‘faceless powers’ in the world – the political concept of evil, by whatever name, is as much a passionate fairytale as the belief in an almighty god. The belief in ‘faceless powers’ is born of an innate resentment of being here and is expressed as anger for those who supposedly made the world one finds oneself in. The feeling that one is but a hapless victim of circumstances is just that – a feeling – and once I admit that it is ‘my’ feeling and not a fact, then it can be investigated and eradicated in me.

Just to repeat something that is often skipped over and not fully taken on board – actualism is the method devised to become happy and harmless in the world-as-it-is with people-as they are.

If I apply for a job and the employer declines to employ me because I am female, or 48 years old, or white, or raised in Germany or black-haired or not pretty enough, then that is a fact, i.e. that is the world-as-it-is. When I took up actualism, I made it my single-pointed mission to be happy and harmless regardless of any given situation. The more I explored the human condition in me and in others, the more it became glaringly obvious that there is no solution to be had within the human condition, nor is there any way to change the human condition – the only solution is to get out, to cut the ties, to leave the fold – and this can only be done by individuals. I do understand that in the beginning it is a scary decision to strike out on your own and to change yourself while everyone keeps blaming someone else or something else for their misery. But I came to consider each moment that I am not happy a moment wasted and I decided to reduce that waste to nil.

It is possible.

14.4.2002

VINEETO: You commented on Gary’s post to me –

I often can’t laugh about black humour. There is something to it that is too close to the bone. It’s sometimes a real exercise in attentiveness to catch myself when I become affectively involved in the needless violence and endless suffering of humanity.

GARY: I can’t think of an example of ‘black humour’ that I find funny right now and I am not familiar with this ‘Black Adder’ program. Political satire may indeed be funny, depending on the quality of the delivery. Some things in movies and on TV are funny but the things that are the most fun, as far as I am concerned, are some of the moments that my partner and I enjoy together which are spontaneously mirthful, just downright funny. These things may seem nonsensical to someone not acquainted with the situation and not even funny. But I don’t how laughing at most of the things that we do can ever cause anyone any harm at all. Re: Humour, 1.4.2002

RESPONDENT: Humour definitely has an odour to it – it’s mean-spirited, or it’s not. If you pay attention to your reactions, it’s usually quite obvious. This goes for black/ white/ purple-stripe humour. The show Richard refers to falls in the black humour category, but it’s hardly pain-inflicting. There was a story a while back comparing the brands offered by David Letterman and Jay Leno. While they both poked fun in similar fashion, Leno invites you to laugh with him, while Letterman is laughing at you. Humour done right can convey a lot of information about the human condition in a small package, and you do have to admit, we’re really a silly lot.

VINEETO: Yes, human behaviour is often silly and it is fun to laugh about it once in a while. But all this laughing about the human silliness did not change my outlook on life until I began to examine how and why I was behaving just as silly as the other people I laughed about.

When I began to practice actualism, I began to ‘get the joke’ of how I was trapped within the human condition and that is when humour takes on a whole new quality. When one begins to observe one’s own automatic and senseless emotional reactions then humour ceases to be cynical or malicious at the expense of others or an antidote to one’s own sorrow. Observing and examining my own beliefs and feelings enabled me to study my own emotional reactions and behaviour from a scientific observer’s point of view and what I saw was often irrepressively funny. And the more I am stepping out of the human condition and the less I am part of humanity’s woes and conflicts, the more I can see the joke of defending and holding on to an identity that brings nothing but pain and misery to myself and others.

*

VINEETO: So much for the ‘good old days’.

GARY: Prehistoric societies were intensely violent, from what I can determine through my reading of articles and watching of TV programs. It is interesting to see that many of the mummified remains of people from long ago were victims of violence. Like Ötzi, the man discovered in the ice on the Italian side of the Alps, he was found to have an arrow point embedded in his back that they had previously overlooked in their autopsy of him after he was first discovered. Then too, many mummies were victims of ritual, religious sacrifices. The long, dreary history of sieges warfare, religious wars, persecutions, pogroms, revolutions, etc, etc I should think would be enough to point to the terror and fright of living in a long-ago societies, notwithstanding the lack of proper medical facilities, the incidence of disease and pestilence, etc.

I have not read Lomborg’s book and I doubt that I will. My perusal of the criticisms offered on the list made me a bit sceptical of his position, I must say. Yet there can be no denying that life at present is much, much better, more carefree, more liberated, more abundant, at least for those of us that live in the affluent nations. For many, though, who do not have the benefit of having been born into a civilized country, life is little better than servitude. For instance, I was shocked to read a recent article on slavery in Scientific American, to discover how common place slavery still is in certain parts of the world. I can certainly ‘understand’ the anger of people living in poverty, disease, and distress at those more affluent and prosperous nations, including and perhaps exemplified by American culture. This is a whole topic in and of itself, I realize. So perhaps, I’ll leave it until later. Re: Humour, 1.4.2002

RESPONDENT: I prefer to abbreviate V’s statement to So much for the ‘god’. The ‘god’ is one of the most fantastic concoctions that humans cook up. Due to dashed hopes, the future never turns out quite as rosy as imagined. Rather than settle for the present, revisionist history takes over. Take the nuclear family ... we have built such a myth out of that, yet it’s been less than a hundred years since children gained more stature than simple farm animals, or pets. The present, despite its problems (mostly self-induced of course), is the best time to be alive in human history, hands down. I heard recently (unsubstantiated) that by some estimates, the world population is actually starting to drop. All it takes is a very small improvement in the standard of living for someone who has nothing other than their multitude of progeny, to raise the importance of quality over quantity.

VINEETO: The curious thing is that ‘the most fantastic concoction’ of the good old days is not at all a recent invention but as old as human history. For instance, Sal Baron wrote in his book about the history of Jews that any prophet who made optimistic predictions was automatically considered to be a false prophet.

When I took up actualism I began to be very attentive to my insidious habit of trying to blame someone or something whenever something ‘went wrong’ because it stood in the way of a clear-eyed assessment of the particular situation. Interestingly I found that blaming myself was as much of a hindrance – or a safety belt for real change – as blaming others. But once I was able to prize apart my emotional reaction – blame or guilt – from what actually happened, it was relatively easy not only to fix the problem but also to avoid making the same mistake again.

In a pure consciousness experience it is palpably clear that ‘I’ am the problem – my emotional reactions are ‘my’ problem and my passionate beliefs are ‘my’ problem and nobody else can fix me up but me.

RESPONDENT: And, after this winter, I’m all for global warming!

VINEETO: You enjoy your spring in the northern hemisphere while here in the southern we have mild autumn days with a softer-than-summer light, and the rainy season combined with the agreeable warmth is the perfect growing weather for all plants in gardens and forests. This planet is indeed a marvellous abundantly lush paradise.

17.4.2002

RESPONDENT: Humour definitely has an odour to it – it’s mean-spirited, or it’s not. If you pay attention to your reactions, it’s usually quite obvious. This goes for black/ white/ purple-stripe humour. The show Richard refers to falls in the black humour category, but it’s hardly pain-inflicting. There was a story a while back comparing the brands offered by David Letterman and Jay Leno. While they both poked fun in similar fashion, Leno invites you to laugh with him, while Letterman is laughing at you. Humour done right can convey a lot of information about the human condition in a small package, and you do have to admit, we’re really a silly lot.

VINEETO: Yes, human behaviour is often silly and it is fun to laugh about it once in a while. But all this laughing about the human silliness did not change my outlook on life until I began to examine how and why I was behaving just as silly as the other people I laughed about.

When I began to practice actualism, I began to ‘get the joke’ of how I was trapped within the human condition and that is when humour takes on a whole new quality. When one begins to observe one’s own automatic and senseless emotional reactions then humour ceases to be cynical or malicious at the expense of others or an antidote to one’s own sorrow. Observing and examining my own beliefs and feelings enabled me to study my own emotional reactions and behaviour from a scientific observer’s point of view and what I saw was often irrepressively funny. And the more I am stepping out of the human condition and the less I am part of humanity’s woes and conflicts, the more I can see the joke of defending and holding on to an identity that brings nothing but pain and misery to myself and others.

RESPONDENT: As I said, there’s a ‘taste’ to the humour, and if one is paying attention, it’s clear what’s malice-causing and what’s not. Certainly the former is rooted in the basic human situation.

VINEETO: The problem with human beings is not their humour but their malice and sorrow and to question humour in general is to start the investigation at the wrong end. In the process of actualism the question for me was which feeling in me made me react to certain jokes and not to others, why did I like to laugh about others’ misery, why did I feel as if I was above everyone else’s stupidity. I also began to pay attention to my own intentions and feelings when I made a joke or a funny comment. I wanted to find out if I was being malicious, when I was letting off steam, when I was trying to hurt, put down, fend off the other or skip over an uncomfortable topic before it could get under my skin.

I wanted to find out about – and change – the ‘basic human situation’ in me.

RESPONDENT: I’m sometimes pondered why the latter is ‘funny’.

VINEETO: The method of actualism is to increase the felicitous/ innocuous feelings while investigating both the good and bad feelings. Therefore I was not concerned about humour as such – pure humour is simply delightful – but whether my humour contained elements of malice, hate, cynicism, satire, detachment, superiority or plain ridicule. My focus of attention is how to become free from the human condition, i.e. I question my beliefs and my good and bad feelings, and at the beginning I also noticed that my humour was full of those beliefs and feelings. As I whittled away at my beliefs and as my good and bad feelings diminished, humour became not only pure but also far more prevalent than it used to be. Life is not a vale of tears. Life is utterly delightful and pure humour, that is devoid of malice and sorrow, is an integral part of apperceptive awareness.

RESPONDENT: There’s no denying the silliness of humans (have you ever seen them make love – what a hoot!), but why that makes us smile and laugh is not clear to me.

VINEETO: The most common form of laughing at the silliness of others is cynicism and the feeling of superiority that they are stupid but I am not. There might also be a dose of unadmitted embarrassment in it, knowing that we humans are all alike when it comes to being driven by instinctual passions. Personally, I found I had to step down from my lofty heights of moral and ethical superiority and admit with crumbling pride that I was just as mad and as bad as everyone else and that my years of training in spiritual detachment had only served to increase my arrogance and my blinkers.

As for ‘have you ever seen them make love – what a hoot!’ – I am reminded of Mohan Rajneesh making endless jokes about the silliness of humans having sex. His teaching of free sex was aimed at reaching true celibacy when we would finally be fed up with the silly sex. The sexual drive has always been the toughest obstacle for those who aspired to the purity of divine spirituality and, going by the numerous reports about many enlightened masters and their mistresses, they have yet to succeed to overcome this obstacle.

Nowadays, for me sex is not silly at all, but utterly delightful and sensuously scrumptious and it is worth all the effort of having investigated my gender indoctrination, shame, guilt, detachment, denial, greed and fear that used to spoil the fun.

RESPONDENT: So, could that be some sort of genetic programmed response?

VINEETO: One could consider the human body as an array and interaction of genetic programs – the immune system, the motoric functions, the nervous system, the digestive system, the blood circulation, etc., etc.

The genetic program I am interested in as an actualist are the instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that give rise to the ‘self’-centred entity inside this flesh-and-blood body. Just as thinking is usually polluted and distorted by these instinctual passions, so is humour. In a pure consciousness experience one can experience for a short time how both thinking and humour function brilliantly without the interference of the passionate ‘self’.

RESPONDENT: If so, then is AF being selective about the programs it suggests we eliminate?

VINEETO: I don’t suggest anything. Unless you are discontent with the human condition in you there is no need to change.

The aim of the actualism method is to extinguish the ‘self’, the psychological and psychic entity inside this body, – not all the physical programs, as you seem to suggest. It is the imaginary identity, ‘who’ you think and feel yourself to be, that an actualist aims to eliminate in order that what you are can emerge.

I can report from my experience that the actualism method has been a very successful tool that allows me to question and eliminate my social-spiritual programming and investigate and observe my instinctual passions in action such that they are incrementally diminished to the point where the ‘self’ will eventually collapse.

RESPONDENT: Note that an answer of ‘yes’ is reasonable here.

VINEETO: Note that it is always useful to ask a genuine question when you want to learn something you don’t already know.

24.4.2002

RESPONDENT: If so, then is AF being selective about the programs it suggests we eliminate?

VINEETO: I don’t suggest anything. Unless you are discontent with the human condition in you there is no need to change. The aim of the actualism method is to extinguish the ‘self’, the psychological and psychic entity inside this body – not all the physical programs, as you seem to suggest. It is the imaginary identity, ‘who’ you think and feel yourself to be, that an actualist aims to eliminate in order that what you are can emerge. I can report from my experience that the actualism method has been a very successful tool that allows me to question and eliminate my social-spiritual programming and investigate and observe my instinctual passions in action such that they are incrementally diminished to the point where the ‘self’ will eventually collapse.

RESPONDENT: Note that an answer of ‘yes’ is reasonable here.

VINEETO: Note that it is always useful to ask a genuine question when you want to learn something you don’t already know.

RESPONDENT: Well, from my POV, this was a valid question. It just happened to have more than one ‘acceptable’ answer. I’m not presuming anything about the AF premise, just trying to understand it a little better by poking around with a stick.

VINEETO: Thank you for the explanation. I just did not know why you were suggesting an answer to your own question. I take it that this is your way of trying to make sense of what you are reading on the website.

RESPONDENT: The process from this end is bipolar ... a hybrid of intellectual reasoning coupled with direct experience, when the intellect gets out of the way.

VINEETO: When I came across actualism, the first thing I had to do was dust off my brain and shift it back into thinking gear – discovering how to think, contemplate and inquire in a way that there is some result. I found it useful in my contemplations to always remember to keep coming back to the question or issue, and not – as our usually untrained brains tend to do – get lost in the different alleys and branches of speculation, imagination or irrelevant side issues. I became aware that whenever the subject was too close to the bone, whenever a dearly held belief was questioned, I was usually very quick in changing the subject and steering away from the ‘dangerous’ area. I remember being surprised to discover how roundabout and aversely my way of thinking often had been.

Mind and thinking has such a bad press in the spiritual world where one is taught that the gateway to ‘inner peace’ is to ‘follow your feelings, trust you intuition and leave your mind at the door’. When I started on the path to Actual Freedom it was a pleasure and delight to re-instate, lubricate and develop my common sense and intelligence in order to make sense of all the beliefs that I had adopted, the instinctual passions that I was driven by and begin to understand the actual world.

It was fascinating to observe and experience my brain clicking into clear function – at first only once in a while with what one would call a ‘striking thought’ and then I noticed that I could actually make sense of a down-to-earth conversation about Actual Freedom I had with either Richard or Peter. Eventually I was able to think straightforward thoughts, unclouded by fear or imagination and come to startlingly obvious conclusions. The outcome of such application of common sense was often very staggering, new, fresh and shockingly different to what I had believed, ‘felt’ or ‘intuited’.

Down-to-earth practical common sense, of course, has nothing to do with rational theorizing, useless philosophizing, cerebral masturbation or conceptual imagination.

For me, the crucial test of common sense always is – how can I put my understanding into practice, how can I actualize my realization, how can I act on the ‘striking thought’. In my spiritual days, striking thoughts would come and go and I did nothing but revel in the feeling of ‘knowing’. Those insights, even when they were sensible realizations, disappeared without a trace after a few hours or days and didn’t have any impact on solving my problems. Nowadays, because I am vitally interested in being here, I enjoy the stunning clarity that the human brain is capable of and I also put my understanding into action – and what excellence, what a thrill!

RESPONDENT: So, the intellectual part asks questions about the nature of the programs. Some programs are completely obvious, others not so, and it’s difficult at times to differentiate between the elemental physical responses, and the learned reactions.

VINEETO: Yes, some programs are ‘completely obvious’, and at first it was far easier for me to observe them in other people. The trick, implicit in the actualism method, however was to search for the same programs in myself because the human condition is common to all and that includes ‘me’.

The ‘learned reactions’ are those that make up the social identity – my identity as a male or female, a member of a family, profession, peer group, nation, ethnic group, religion, political and ideological orientation. Each of these aspects of your social identity gives plenty of opportunities for ‘self’-investigation. By examining what is preventing you from being happy and harmless now you are successively questioning and challenging your ‘learned reactions’ and feelings that arise from being a social identity.

The elimination of one’s social identity requires the replacement of 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. The beliefs and psittacisms one has been instilled with in childhood, or has later taken on as one’s own, need to be replaced with observable and verifiable facts.

The actualism method allows you to separate ‘elemental physical responses’ such as hunger, thirst, cold, heat, physical pain, discomfort and so on from your instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. The more you investigate into your social identity and peel the layers of your beliefs and feelings associated with the ‘learned reactions’, the more those ‘elemental’ instinctual responses will come to the surface where they can be experienced and observed. To keep it simple and less confusing – first work first, and that is investigating the social identity.

RESPONDENT: The direct half did have a glimmer today though ... I grokked for a moment how I have been interpreting ‘How am I experiencing...’ as ‘What am I experiencing...’, which is a whole different kettle of fish.

VINEETO: When I looked up the word ‘grok’, the Oxford dictionary defined it as ‘understand intuitively or by empathy’. Spiritualism teaches that intuitive understanding is always ‘right’ and that intellectual understanding is at best incomplete, and mostly ‘wrong’. In actualism I learned to question my learned notions of right and wrong, good and bad and slowly replaced them with a common sense assessments of what is silly and what is sensible. Instead of intuition and gut feelings I looked for the unmistakable certainty of facts, which is far more accurate than any intuition can ever be.

But you are right that ‘what am I experiencing’ is indeed a different kettle of fish. Using the actualism method is a matter of intent – what is my aim, what do I want to achieve by questioning how I experience this moment? Sometimes I would get lost in following my affective experiences down the garden path, making them bigger and more intense the more I provided indulging attention. But whenever I remembered my goal to become free from malice and sorrow, my wandering observations changed into the search to find out how to get out of this insidious ‘self’-centredness of feeling-experiences and come back to being happy and the sensate experiencing of being alive. Unless you have an intent or reason for asking how am I experiencing this moment of being alive you will have neither the motivation to make it your first priority in life nor the impetus to overcome the reluctance to admit to unpleasant or undesirable answers.

The cute thing is that you don’t learn anything new but rather unlearn everything you’ve been told since the day you were born and then you even get to undo the genetic program of the instinctual survival passions. It is a fascinating journey, full of wonderful adventures, thrilling realizations and life-changing discoveries.

12.5.2002

VINEETO: I would like to comment on something you recently wrote to No 39 –

RESPONDENT No 39: I’m not an advocate of any spiritual teacher or practice! Since this is something unique here-to-fore unexperienced in the annals of humanity I have had some difficulties. When I first encountered the works of Rajneesh, either of the Krishnamurti’s etc. and so on I was initially very excited about the potentiality for myself. <snip>

RESPONDENT to No 39: I’m as sceptical as they come (except for a couple of embarrassing minor detours), and have to say that this bunch is about as ego-less as they come.

VINEETO: With reference to your expression ‘embarrassing minor detours’ I found that my initial embarrassment over discovering that I had been on the wrong track only served to prevent me from investigating further so as to find out exactly what had attracted me to the spiritual path. In order to proceed to examine the nature of my spiritual beliefs, I first had to have a good look at my feeling of embarrassment, which was based on ideas and feelings of what is right and wrong according to my moral and ethical codebook.

This codebook is what acts to prevent an in-depth investigation of spiritual beliefs because this very investigation itself is held to be a taboo under spiritual codes. On the spiritual path, ‘I’ wanted to be good, ‘I’ wanted to be right and ‘I’ wanted to be perfect, whereas in actualism ‘I’ learn how to get out of the way so that the already existing perfection can become apparent.

When embarrassment is understood for what it is, you might find that by investigating the ‘minor detours’ you will discover that they contain quite valuable information about how ‘you’ tick.

RESPONDENT to No 39: Consider...

Does this sound like a bunch of gurus? Not. There’s simply a wealth of information and a group of generous individuals. There seems to be some commonality between yours and mine (and many others) initial approach to this new subject, but hang with it a bit. The veils start to lift when the observed ‘I’ starts to quieten down.

VINEETO: Yes, you are right, there is a wealth of information – not theoretical knowledge but common sense and lived experience that anyone who wants to can take advantage of.

However, your last sentence caught my attention. Your expression of ‘the observed ‘I’ starts to quieten down’ reminds me of J. Krishnamurti’s ‘the observer becomes the observed’. The traditional Buddhist and Advaita teachings that so many of our generation follow, is to observe the ‘I’ and then disidentify from one’s feelings and thoughts in order to quieten and transcend the observed ‘I’ and strengthen and empower one’s higher self.

In actualism I do the opposite – I experience, label and then actively investigate each feeling as it occurs in order to find out where it comes from, how my moral and ethical beliefs conspire to feed my emotions until I am eventually able to experience the underlying bare instinctual passions. Every emotional upset is an excellent opportunity to gather information about my identity – and each part of the identity that is understood in its entirety will disappear without a trace. In this process it becomes apparent that a quietened ‘I’ cannot be investigated.

This difference between quieting down the ‘I’ and investigating each emotion and their respective beliefs is not a matter of semantics. It took me about a year of unrelenting examination to uncover layer upon layer of my spiritual beliefs such that I could clearly understand the difference between spiritualism and actualism. I found that even supposed ‘non-beliefs’ like agnosticism, indifference, detachment, acceptance, tolerance, dismissal or denial were manoeuvres within my belief system – they were strategies to prevent me from leaving my comfort zone and probing deeper into the core of my beliefs.

In short, I had to question everything that I did not know for a fact, i.e. that was obvious, tangible, a provable certainty. Actualism is a scientific moment-to-moment non-discriminatory investigation of one’s own psyche in action. It is not a matter of adopting a right-thinking, right-feeling, right-behaviour belief system such as Buddhism is.

On the website you find a diagram depicting the diametrically opposite nature of actualism and spiritualism.

16.5.2002

RESPONDENT to No 39: The veils start to lift when the observed ‘I’ starts to quieten down.

VINEETO: In this process it becomes apparent that a quietened ‘I’ cannot be investigated. This difference between quieting down the ‘I’ and investigating each emotion and their respective beliefs is not a matter of semantics. It took me about a year of unrelenting examination to uncover layer upon layer of my spiritual beliefs such that I could clearly understand the difference between spiritualism and actualism. I found that even supposed ‘non-beliefs’ like agnosticism, indifference, detachment, acceptance, tolerance, dismissal or denial were manoeuvres within my belief system – they were strategies to prevent me from leaving my comfort zone and probing deeper into the core of my beliefs.

RESPONDENT: Agreed 100%. But, I was careful in my statement to imply outcome rather than action. It reads ‘the veils start to lift when the observed ‘I’ starts to quieten down’ not ‘the veils start to lift when I quieten down the observed ‘I’’.

VINEETO: O.K.

RESPONDENT: I have found over the years that the latter approach simply replaces one belief system with another, whereas the former is the natural outcome of following a process similar to what you describe.

VINEETO: Whatever process you have been following, there is no such thing as ‘similar’ to actualism as no process ever has questioned the identity in total, both ego and soul, the deepest core of one’s ‘being’. In order to profit from what actualism has to offer it pays to look for the differences to former practices rather than similarities.

RESPONDENT: On another note, my brother and his family visited with us this weekend, including two young children to entertain. Needless to say, this presented many opportunities to investigate feelings and reactions. It’s one thing to follow this process when it’s quiet, quite another when there’s kids and dogs running around like crazed animals. I suppose it’s a matter of continually ‘practicing’ when the moment is conducive, and as it seeps into the bones, there are less and less situations where I can’t ‘stick with the program’ and lapse to the old set of reactions.

VINEETO: Yes, I found that as my commitment grew, the asking of the actualist question became an uninterrupted obsessive silent questioning. First I observed and examined my gross emotions like anger, sadness, anxiety and love – later the investigated feelings were more subtle, feelings such as disturbance, irritation, solitariness, weariness, cheerlessness or dullness. It was quite a shock when I first discovered that I could no longer switch off from being here, no matter what the circumstances – there was no place left to hide into the former cozy dream-world of sweet feelings and snug imagination. Now, of course, I don’t want to be anywhere but here and I am continuously fascinated by the experiencing of being alive.

RESPONDENT: My sister-in-law (who has a visceral revulsion to religion) stayed up to until 2am yakking about these matters. Her mother has been diagnosed with ALS and will need a lot of care for the remaining year of her life. This of course is a difficult matter to deal with as it brings up all sorts of issues, those of her mother, and those of the other family members. She wondered how to deal with the specific issues and I was at a loss to offer much concrete help. The next day it dawned on me that these sorts of predicaments don’t have ‘answers’, and all we can do is attend to the moment. Humans (including myself) by and large have a need to ‘fix’ pain and suffering as it comes up, and this is an impossible task.

VINEETO: When I ask myself how am I experiencing this moment of being alive and get the answer that I suffer or empathize with someone else’s physical or emotional pain, then the next question for me was why. From whence comes this, seemingly automatic, connectedness with someone in distress that makes me want to fix him or her up in order to ease my own co-suffering. Consequently I searched for the hook in me that ties me to other people’s feelings.

One significant reason for my empathy I found in the deeply ingrained belief that life is essentially suffering – and that the best one can do is alleviate the suffering. Every single religion and spiritual pursuit is built upon the basic premise that ‘life is a bitch and then you die’. I had to find this deep-seated conviction in me and deliberately root it out, discovering that I had indeed a choice to change and become incrementally free from the human condition of malice and sorrow. And if I can become free then anybody has that choice as well – human beings are not inextricably trapped in misery, as they so fervently believe.

RESPONDENT: Hence we ask ‘how am I...’ and things turn out the way they turn out.

VINEETO: How am I experiencing this moment of being alive? is not to be confused with a mantra that bridges bad moments until luck changes – this question is designed to be a piercing tool, an excavator, a well-digger and I apply it to uncover deeper and deeper layers of my unhappiness and my unfriendliness until I reach to the core of my identity. My suffering with the poor and downtrodden, the victims of war and violence, starvation and corruption was a longstanding issue – whenever I saw a contemporary report on television I would either be angry or sad and I had to look closely into my feeling connection with humanity in order to become gradually free from ‘my’ empathy and compassion, ‘my’ righteousness and idealism.

I experienced my psychic connection with people as emotional strings consisting of thousands of single strands – beliefs, values and instinctual passions – which I had to unhook one by one. Sometimes a whole bunch of them were loosened at once, and what a realization, but often it was a matter of tracing one feeling to its core and finding all the little ties and knots that connected me with the feelings and beliefs of other people. Often I was shocked when such a tie broke, particularly when I ‘unhooked’ my affective connection to a person close to me such as a family member or formerly close friends.

To become free from being connected with people is not a matter of cool detachment – as in ‘it doesn’t concern me’. What I discovered as I questioned my spiritual beliefs was that many suppressed feelings came to the surface, and I particularly became aware of the suffering of others as I no longer hid behind my feeling of righteous detachment. I began to understand that another’s feeling, when it resonates in me, is my social-instinctual identity in action. ‘I’ am humanity and humanity is ‘me’ and there is no way of escaping the fact as long as I am an identity. To step out of humanity is to leave ‘me’ behind.

25.5.2002

RESPONDENT: I’ve been unearthing ever more subtle feelings. The other night, I was out to dinner with my wife, and we got to a place that we’ve been many times. Without going into boring details, the next day it really hit me how I had been acting, and it wasn’t the way ‘I’ was telling myself. I am easily irritated by seemingly minor things. I think it harkens back to being raised as better than others, hence having minimal patience for less-than-perfection

VINEETO: I found that the feeling of superiority had been one of the major reasons why I hung unto spiritualism for so long. However, once I realized without doubt that I was no better than everyone else despite my high ideals and holy practices, my feelings of superiority quickly disintegrated.

As I dug deeper into the human condition I discovered that feeling superior is common amongst human beings and each tribal and/or religious group has their particular venerated story why they are special, why they are ‘the chosen ones’ or superior to others. Once I experientially examined the social aspects of my feeling superior and its counterpart of feeling inferior, I found these divisions of higher and lower ranking to be an expression of the instinctual power battle inherent in the animal vigilance of ‘what can I eat and what can eat me?’

RESPONDENT: (psychoanalysis = OFF).

VINEETO: You are spot on that psychoanalysis is of no use as a fruitful investigation into one’s psyche – I found that it only served to explain away, justify and/or excuse my shortcomings, such as irritability, anger, arrogance, selfishness or misery, instead of providing a solution as to how to eliminate the problems.

RESPONDENT: Regardless, the next day it was completely obvious to me what had happened, which really sat me upright. And it was a relief to see it, and for a moment be free of it. Now I just have to get the time delay down to something less than 12 hours.

VINEETO: Once it began to filter through that my behaviour did not at all match my idealized picture of me – or as you put it ‘it wasn’t the way ‘I’ was telling myself’ – I was appalled by my often rude and uncaring behaviour towards others, which in turn fired my intent to do something radical about really changing myself. In spiritualism I had done nothing but change my ideals, in actualism I finally had the necessary tools to change my actions by eradicating their underlying causes. All I needed to provide was the passionate intent.

The time delay of 12 hours will lessen as you gradually remove the moral and ethical safeguards that are instilled by the process of socialization. These safeguards are meant to curb the bare instinctual passions and consequently they act to shield one from discovering the instinctual passions in action.

*

VINEETO: I experienced my psychic connection with people as emotional strings consisting of thousands of single strands – beliefs, values and instinctual passions – which I had to unhook one by one. Sometimes a whole bunch of them were loosened at once, and what a realization, but often it was a matter of tracing one feeling to its core and finding all the little ties and knots that connected me with the feelings and beliefs of other people. Often I was shocked when such a tie broke, particularly when I ‘unhooked’ my affective connection to a person close to me such as a family member or formerly close friends.

To become free from being connected with people is not a matter of cool detachment – as in ‘it doesn’t concern me’. What I discovered as I questioned my spiritual beliefs was that many suppressed feelings came to the surface, and I particularly became aware of the suffering of others as I no longer hid behind my feeling of righteous detachment. I began to understand that another’s feeling, when it resonates in me, is my social-instinctual identity in action. ‘I’ am humanity and humanity is ‘me’ and there is no way of escaping the fact as long as I am an identity. To step out of humanity is to leave ‘me’ behind.

RESPONDENT: Interesting analogy re thousands of strands, that’s really what it’s like. They connect us and constrain us.

VINEETO: Yes and I had to recognize and examine both the ‘strands’ that ‘connect us and constrain us’ or, in other words, both the desirable and the undesirable feelings that bound me to other people. Personally, I found love and loyalty amongst the hardest to let go of.

RESPONDENT: I’ve been down the detachment path too, but found it didn’t cut the mustard at all either. Seemed like the baby with the bath water.

VINEETO: Cute that you should use this analogy for the practice of detachment, as Richard has often been accused of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The reason is that in actualism one not only investigates one’s ego (the little man/woman in the head) but also one’s soul (the little fellow in the heart) and almost no one is willing or even interested to question one’s passionate identity, one’s soul. On our website we used an adapted illustration from P. Livingston to demonstrate this radical procedure.

RESPONDENT: I like this approach better. I’ve become convinced lately that this approach is the only way that makes sense. I’ve been applying effort in that regard and think that there are some tangible results. It’s to the point where I know I have to apply myself even more seriously, or get off the pot. Part of my psyche is excessive worry. This of course is focused on future events, with their unknown outcomes. Intellectually I’ve known it’s a total waste of time, but it recurs. I’ve found that when asking ‘How am I…’, time sort of disappears (??), or shrinks. It’s hard to describe exactly, but the future definitely isn’t even a consideration. Interesting.

VINEETO: Yes, intellectual reasoning by itself does not eliminate emotional worries, they will always bleed through or pop up like a balloon that you try keeping under water. I had to find the ‘worrier’, the part of my identity that was afraid of being alive, and question why I kept feeding and pampering her, so as to be able to put a dent into my automatic worrying.

You can use the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ to bring your attention to this moment. However, if the worry is continuously taking your attention away from this moment then you can also pay close attention to identify the part of your identity that is doing the worrying. ‘Self’-immolation is all about luring the identity out of hiding and convincing him/her to exit the stage for the benefit of this body, that body and every body.

RESPONDENT: On a lighter note, I was rummaging for something to read the other day, and I came across Autobiography of a Yogi, which I’d bought a few years ago and never read. This is fabulously entertaining, almost a Star Wars or Lord of the Rings type of fantasy. To think that anyone could actually swallow this stuff??? No wonder we’re in such a mess.

Thanks again

VINEETO: Nowadays I find reading spiritual articles or watching some superstitious practice on television often quite hilarious and I am constantly amazed by the astounding power of belief that pervades each and every field of human experience – topics such as diet, exercise, healthcare, education, politics, warfare, biology, history, astronomy, ecology and relationships. Human beings make their assessments and judgements primarily via feelings and emotions, i.e. what ‘feels right’ or ‘feels wrong’. All beliefs are emotion-backed, i.e. emotion-based thoughts, which is why beliefs have such a stranglehold over humanity.

As for ‘to think that anyone could actually swallow this stuff’ – I swallowed similar nonsense. It took me many years until I finally had to admit that my spiritual beliefs did not work to make me happy, let alone harmless. Nobody can avoid being a believer because beliefs are fed into us with mother’s milk and, as such, are an essential part of the feeling identity that is ‘me’. But what I could do, and did do, was question everything I felt and thought in order to check out if it was a belief or a fact, if it was a feeling or a clear sensible thought. And by this method I slowly, slowly managed to escape the all-engulfing power of beliefs.

Now the mess is over.

30.5.2002

RESPONDENT: Regardless, the next day it was completely obvious to me what had happened, which really sat me upright. And it was a relief to see it, and for a moment be free of it. Now I just have to get the time delay down to something less than 12 hours.

VINEETO: Once it began to filter through that my behaviour did not at all match my idealized picture of me – or as you put it ‘it wasn’t the way ‘I’ was telling myself’ – I was appalled by my often rude and uncaring behaviour towards others, which in turn fired my intent to do something radical about really changing myself. In spiritualism I had done nothing but change my ideals, in actualism I finally had the necessary tools to change my actions by eradicating their underlying causes. All I needed to provide was the passionate intent. The time delay of 12 hours will lessen as you gradually remove the moral and ethical safeguards that are instilled by the process of socialization. These safeguards are meant to curb the bare instinctual passions and consequently they act to shield one from discovering the instinctual passions in action.

RESPONDENT: Yes, I see. I’m amazed sometimes at the subtle complexities ... there are many layers to this onion. It’s a funny process this, at once abhorrent to stare into the muck, and yet exhilarating to root out and dissect the little beasties.

VINEETO: Yep, you described it well. Discovering ‘the little beasties’ becomes easier with two factors. One factor is obviously discovering and dismissing one’s pride at being different and better than others. The second factor is the clear understanding that what you are investigating is the human condition, i.e. the aspects of your identity are not your personal flaws or shortcomings but the default setting for every human being born on the planet. Then the ‘abhorrent … stare into the muck’ becomes the scientific enterprise of studying the human condition in action.

RESPONDENT: It’s somewhat scary to consider removing the ‘moral and ethical safeguards’, which presumably exposes the ‘bare instinctual passions’ in all their power. I can only presume that if/when I reach that point, I have adequate tools gained during the initial dismantlement. The contributors to this list don’t strike me as being particularly monstrous.

VINEETO: The only tools that you muster, polish and apply ‘during the initial dismantlement’ are pure intent coupled with attentiveness and reflection. An actualist’s values are far above normal societal morals and ethics – as an actualist I want to become perfectly happy and completely harmless 24 hours a day, whereas normal societal rules only aim to curb the instinctual passions, not to eliminate them.

I incrementally replaced all my judgements of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with the keen assessment of what is silly and what is sensible. In the process of questioning these moral and ethical safeguards, I soon hit upon the very source of all moral and ethical codes – the belief in a God or Higher Power who enforces good and bad, rights and wrongs by a system of divine reward and punishment. Being good and right brings the reward of good karma, good fortune, respectability and a permanent berth in Parinirvana or Heaven, and being bad and wrong brings punishment of bad karma, bad luck and condemnation to suffer endless rebirths or to plunge into the abyss of Hell.

When I began to replace these fear-ridden spiritual beliefs with facts, most of my fears began to permanently disappear. My emotion-based and spiritual-based values were gradually replaced with intelligent judgement of facts and practicality, which was an excellent standpoint to observe the instinctual passions when and as they occurred, neither expressing them nor repressing them.

*

RESPONDENT: I’ve been down the detachment path too, but found it didn’t cut the mustard at all either. Seemed like the baby with the bath water.

VINEETO: On our website we used an adapted illustration from P. Livingston to demonstrate this radical procedure.

RESPONDENT: Every time I go spelunking in the site, something interesting pops up. You mention love as being one of the hardest to let go of, and this is a real tough spot for me too. I’ve been in a very long-term relationship, which has been strained of late. This whole notion of love is a difficult one, but there’s some interesting dialog you had with Gary at the above link. Before I stumbled on to the AF site, I had determined in my own way that what passes for love seems mostly indistinguishable from mutually interlocking neuroses. OK, that’s fine, but I asked myself if there wasn’t a possibility for man and woman to live together in peace? Well, that’s certainly been answered here, but can I live in peace with this particular woman of many years relationship? That shall come out in the wash, but in the meantime I have no choice but to do this work myself, with strong emphasis on eliminating malice. It has been too easy over the years to build up a nice collection of barbs that I can shoot at her during my own moments of misery.

VINEETO: When I observed my own feelings of love, as well as love stories and soap operas on television, it became obvious that love is the one and only solution that people generate in order to smooth over and cover up all the nasty daily incidents in a relationship. When the going gets tough you can be certain that man and woman profess how much they love each other. The other thing is that love inevitably comes with a whole range of feelings that make life together either a living hell or a second-rate compromise – possessiveness, jealousy, disrespect, ruthlessness, blame and demands for attention, comfort and support.

To become aware of and investigate the feelings of love can be a first step towards genuine intimacy. The secret of living in peace with another person is not love, as is universally believed, but investigating – and eliminating – everything in you that is responsible for causing disharmony, resentment, retreat, detachment, disagreement and misery. You can do this investigation together with the other person – if she is interested – but it works just as well to do it on your own. What had impressed me when I first met Peter was that he was willing to give the experiment of our peaceful living together a hundred percent commitment and that he was, just a I was, determined not to blame or change the other.

RESPONDENT: This bit from Gary registered:

[Gary]: I found myself recently ‘slipping’ and telling my partner ‘I love you’. It was during one of those ‘nice and cosy’ periods, like you describe (below). It really felt like it just slipped out and that I didn’t really mean it. It also seemed like it is just a reflexive habit, you know, when one is in such moods to give utterance to such endearments. And there really is no difference between saying ‘I love you’ and saying ‘I care for you’ or ‘I want to be with you’. All these sentiments pretty much add up to the same thing. When I first read this post, I was having trouble grasping just what you meant by ‘consciously allow the feeling to happen in order to fully understand and explore it experientially’. I think I have been kind of regarding Love as a no-no and quashing the feelings when they come up rather than simply allowing them and exploring them when they do. I think I’ll give that a try. Re: Love, 21.9.2000

I had a good chuckle, esp. ‘‘slipping’ and telling my partner ‘I love you’’. I’ve been there quite a few times, the words pop out, then I’m something like the deer in the headlights, trying to make sense of what I just said. I’ve been considering love a no-no too, so perhaps taking his tack would be an interesting approach. (Was it, Gary?)

VINEETO: This is a good example of how an ‘ethical safe-guard’ can prevent you from becoming aware of and acknowledging a feeling. By considering the feeling of love a no-no, you might ignore, deny or avoid the feeling of love whenever it occurs and thus you are hampered in investigating it further. For a successful investigation you need an honest and all-inclusive stocktaking.

RESPONDENT: While all this is well and good as a practical bit, I know I run a real risk of the relationship ending. I’m willing to take that as it’s become clear that there are no alternatives. This raises a whole flurry of feelings, around responsibility, shared history, relationship with the progeny, who gets the dog, bla bla bla.

VINEETO: Here is a bit from Peter’s Journal that might be relevant in your situation –

Peter: The other vital ingredients to guarantee success were intent and peak experiences. We both had intent. I was willing to give it everything I could, and Vineeto likewise. The point was that I was doing it for me, I wanted to make it work and I would do everything I could to make it work. I regarded this as my last, and therefore only, chance to prove that it was possible for me to live with a woman in perfect peace and harmony – nothing less would do. Then, even if it did fail, I wouldn’t be left with that feeling that I had held back; that I could have done more, that the ‘shackles’ had won out again. Peter’s Journal, ‘Living Together’

RESPONDENT: So, while poking around in the above vein, I ran across this bit from Richard on Alan’s site:

Richard: Speaking personally, ‘I’ lost everything. ‘My’ wife, ‘my’ children, ‘my’ business, ‘my’ house, ‘my’ car ... the lot. But, most importantly, I lost ‘me’ ... and they were ‘his’ wife, children, business, house, car and so on, anyway ... not mine. I inherited all ‘his’ stuff when ‘he’ disappeared, and I took five years to taper-off all of ‘his’ legacy. Nowadays, being me as-I-am, I have an entirely new life that is infinitely better ... vastly superior. That lifestyle was ‘his’ choice, not mine, and suited ‘his’ temperament only. Richard’s Journal, Article 36

The good catholic boy in me reacted to this. I have been such a responsible being all my life that this POV is incomprehensible. This is abdication of ALL GOOD CHRISTIAN/ HUMAN PRINCIPLES. Yet at the same time I see the utter plain truth of this.

VINEETO: Personally, everything I owned, did or said and every person I was in contact with had great emotional significance to me as an identity and therefore every change in my familiar circumstances brought about an emotional disturbance. With the method of actualism, I gradually examined and substantially weakened most aspects of my identity and consequently some of my circumstances changed according to what was practical, sensible and beneficent. I gave up my old job, I lost contact with all my former friends and co-seekers, I moved house several times and gave away some of my possessions that had become redundant to me. Yet I still drive a car, live in a house, tend a garden, do a job, but there are no emotional strings attached to that car, that house, that garden or that job.

RESPONDENT: It actually makes my head spin a bit ... definitely some ‘opportunities’ to explore.

VINEETO: This is a good sign, if I may say so, because when your head begins to ‘spin a bit’ then the familiar identity begins to crack … and through this crack you could snatch a glance of the actual world – magnificent, sparkling, pure and perfect.

5.6.2002