|
Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 38
VINEETO: Hi No 38, Although this post is somewhat out of date I nevertheless wanted to respond to two points you raised – * RESPONDENT: Wouldn’t the social conditioning be the software programming, and the instinctual passions be the hardware programming? I’m mincing words here, but I am an engineer after all and tend to go a bit overboard on deconstructing things. Or maybe you hadn’t noticed ;-) VINEETO: The idea that ‘the social conditioning be the software programming, and the instinctual passions be the hardware programming’ is instilled by spiritual teachings and psychological theories that lay the blame of all the ills of mankind on social conditioning. The uniqueness of Richard’s discovery is that he proved by example that one’s instinctual passions are permanently deleteable and therefore as much software as one’s social conditioning. One need not trust Richard that this is so because everyone has had a PCE at some time in their life when both ‘I’ as ego – one’s social identity – and ‘me’ a being – one’s instinctual identity – are temporarily in abeyance. In a PCE both ‘software programs’ crash simultaneously, leaving this body free of any identity whatsoever – as such, a PCE is experiential evidence that the instinctual passions are not hardwired. RESPONDENT: Understood. I am guilty of over-deconstuctionism. VINEETO: Ha! I like your sense of humour. You probably know from your own explorations and contemplations that when there is no intent to be happy and harmless then doubting and questioning one’s own beliefs inevitably ends in meaningless ‘deconstructionism’ and can ultimately lead to resignation, depression and nihilism. The single purpose of questioning and investigating beliefs, my own beliefs, is that I want to be happy and harmless. Without my intent for peace-here-on-earth my investigations into my psyche would be meaningless. * RESPONDENT: Isn’t self-preservation one of the instinctual survival passions? I recall reading Richard (who has lost those passions) stating that it would not be a problem to defend himself from bodily harm. Why did that not go with the other instincts? Does it simply resolve to choosing to live... I can die, or I can live and enjoy the universe. Simply a matter of preference? VINEETO: Your question appears to be induced by instinctual ‘self’-preservation which cannot conceive that this body would be able to survive, or maybe not even choose to survive, without ‘my’ instinctive survival program. I as this flesh-and-blood body do not ‘resolve to choosing to live’ – I am already alive. The ‘preference’ to not be alive for a body sans identity would presumably only ever arise if one was incapable of enjoying being alive as in the case of a debilitating incurable disease that caused chronic pain. To defend oneself from bodily harm is pure common sense – you cannot ‘enjoy the universe’ when you are dead. Here is an excerpt of Richard’s response to a similar question –
RESPONDENT: The common element in both your response and Richard’s snip is ‘intelligence’. The Actual Freedom Trust Library defines it thus:
Intelligence is a developed faculty, ignoring the notion of ‘native’ intelligence for now. That’s why AF is not an activity for children, or those with physiological brain damage... they haven’t accumulated the experience necessary for sufficient intelligence (aka common sense) to develop. So, when ‘I’ leave the stage, this is free to run unfettered. This makes sense to me, and goes far to answer some lingering questions I’ve had. So unless, you have other comments or corrections, I’m satisfied. VINEETO: I would describe it that intelligence is developed the same way as all of this body is developed beginning with the meeting of a sperm and an egg. Your term ‘‘native’ intelligence’ then points to the fact that intelligence is an integral part of the blueprint for the human body. And yes, human intelligence, when freed of the instinctual passions, does a far, far better job in sustaining life in harmony with one’s fellow human beings with the added bonus that a freed intelligence is not only sensible, i.e. non-affective, but sensate as well. RESPONDENT: I could suggest that the developed intelligence has a cultural bias, and hence is affected by conditioning, but that’s starting to get a bit nitpicky and probably not worthy of pursuit. VINEETO: Why should exploring the link between intelligence and social conditioning be ‘nitpicky’ on a list dedicated to exploring the human condition? On the contrary, it’s absolutely ‘worthy of pursuit’ to investigate how one can free one’s intelligence from one’s inevitably acquired ‘cultural bias’, which is not part of intelligence per se. As such, any of my cultural bias that prevents me from harmoniously living with my fellow human beings needs to be eliminated. To give you an example – when I was a young student I believed that certain German traits were common to all humans on the planet until I came to India and discovered that Indians lived by a whole different set of traits, often quite opposite to those I had learned. My ‘self’-oriented horizon widened even more when, living in an international community, I had opportunity to study all sorts of national cultural traits. I also discovered that whilst I could easily let go of some of my acquired traits, other traits were deeply rooted in who I thought and felt I was. To separate intelligence from its cultural bias is fairly easy in practice – whenever you are not happy and harmless, then it is either your social identity or your instinctual identity that is interfering with the free operation of your intelligence.
RESPONDENT: I could suggest that the developed intelligence has a cultural bias, and hence is affected by conditioning, but that’s starting to get a bit nitpicky and probably not worthy of pursuit. VINEETO: Why should exploring the link between intelligence and social conditioning be ‘nitpicky’ on a list dedicated to exploring the human condition? On the contrary, it’s absolutely ‘worthy of pursuit’ to investigate how one can free one’s intelligence from one’s inevitably acquired ‘cultural bias’, which is not part of intelligence per se. As such any of my cultural bias, which prevents me from harmoniously living with my fellow human beings, needs to be eliminated. To give you an example – when I was a young student I believed that certain German traits were common to all humans on the planet until I came to India and discovered that Indians lived by a whole different set of traits, often quite opposite to those I had learned. My ‘self’-oriented horizon widened even more when, living in an international community, I had opportunity to study all sorts of national cultural traits. I also discovered that whilst I could easily let go of some of my acquired traits, other traits were deeply rooted in who I thought and felt I was. To separate intelligence from its cultural bias is fairly easy in practice – whenever you are not happy and harmless, then it is either your social identity or your instinctual identity that is interfering with the free operation of your intelligence. RESPONDENT: The point I was making was that our intelligence is a developed faculty and is biased by our upbringing. The boy who is raised by wolves exhibits intelligence, but it has a wolf-ish flavour. If the wolf boy were to practice actualism and succeeded in deleting the wolf-cultural bias and the instinctual programming, the remaining intelligence would still have been shaped by his upbringing. It would not remotely be the same as yours, or mine. VINEETO: I wonder what’s the point of your point, i.e. what’s the relevance of this hypothetical example. My experience with the various aspects of my social identity, such as spiritual beliefs, belonging to a nation, a group, a family, a gender or a work-related social club, was that particular aspects of my social identity, when investigated and understood, disappeared without a trace – often I had trouble remembering what it was that I had hung unto so desperately or what had been so important and defining ‘me’ just a little while ago. Each aspect of one’s identity, when understood in its totality, vanishes without leaving as much as a scar or even a memory. It all becomes clear in the doing. As for your example of a man having grown up amongst wild animals – when a person is actually free then he or she is completely free from his or her instinctual passions as well as from his or her social identity – no matter what the content of his or her previous identity had been. Therefore the intelligence in a person free from the human condition is unencumbered by their former identity. You could safely assume that just as my previous German social conditioning does not bias my intelligence today, his belonging to the wolf-tribe wouldn’t bias his intelligence. In that sense his intelligence would indeed be similar to yours or mine – intelligence being solely a function of the brain, an organ of the flesh and blood body – provided all three were free from the human condition. Something Peter wrote in his Journal goes along with this assumption –
As for a person’s sensuous preferences, choices, particular behaviour or personal quirks, when free from the human condition, one can only speculate and such speculations are of no relevance to the actualism practice. If you want to experientially discover in what ways your intelligence would benefit from actualism, you will need to abandon philosophizing about what would happen if a ‘wolf boy were to practice actualism and succeeded in deleting the wolf-cultural bias and the instinctual programming’ and begin to actively inquire into your own cultural bias, i.e. into you own dearest beliefs. You will then discover that intelligence improves in direct correlation to the diminishing of beliefs.
RESPONDENT: Goodness gracious ... I’m having trouble discerning anything of value arriving from the AF list. We have the believers, who recite the same old litanies, and the snipers, who have nothing other than criticisms to offer. Is this genuine or generic viagra, ummm, I mean actualism? I guess that’s the way it’s set up, because, really, there’s no room for true dialogue in AF, only repetition of the dogma, … VINEETO: Believers and snipers, eh. Seeing that you have named only two categories of players on The Actual Freedom Mailing List, I wonder which team you assigned yourself to? Within a few weeks of corresponding on this list you made it quite clear that you prefer to remain loyal to your conviction of ‘I’m an agnostic’, someone who maintains ‘that matters such as the infinitude of the universe are fundamentally unknowable’. Re: The Magic of It All, 25.3.2003. Given that an agnostic is someone who believes that there are certain things that cannot be definitely known as facts, your ideology ensures that you have no way of establishing the difference between a belief and a fact or the difference between a believer and someone who has established a fact. To put it succinctly – just because you believe that there are no facts doesn’t mean that there are no facts. What I report as a fact, for you can only be a ‘dogma’, a firm belief. What I report as the experiencing of the actual world, for you can only be a ‘worldview’ because according to your agnostic attitude there is no such thing as a fact because for you any and all of the matters that actualism addresses are ‘fundamentally unknowable’. Thus by holding to your agnosticism you gag your intelligence, you put a stop to further inquiry, you stifle the desire to find out and prevent yourself from ever achieving definitive results. As a consequence you lock yourself out from ever experiencing the actual world in a pure consciousness experience. It is indeed ‘the way it’s set up’ – not by actualists, but by the parameters you have set yourself. RESPONDENT: … and correction of the acolyte’s interpretation. Rinse and repeat. It must be wonderful for everyone to be so sure of things ... no need for that nasty ambiguity in your life. <snip> VINEETO: The reason I write is to entice you to have a close look at the parameter set by your stance that certain matters ‘are fundamentally unknowable’ because I know by experience that a whole new world can open up – it happened to me, it can happen to you. My intent in our correspondence has always been to tempt you to probe further, to find out for yourself, to lift the ‘self’-inflicted restrictions of the hoary belief that ‘one can never know for sure’ – I know that one can know for sure. I find it telling that you use the word ‘acolyte’ which has an ecclesiastical meaning –
You also asked for a ‘badge’ for your anniversary in participation on this list –
whereby ‘neophyte’ also has an ecclesiastical meaning –
And just lately, in the same line, you made comment to No 45 that there has been no graduation –
The reason I find it worth mentioning is that your choice of words points to a perception that has been there all along, maybe unnoticed and certainly unexamined – a perception that you were entering a club with somewhat spiritual rules, goals and achievements. And now that the ‘graduation’ has not come forth, you quit with a few snide remarks. In actualism, the only ‘graduation’ there can be when you come to certify for yourself, experientially, in a pure consciousness experience, that what Richard and other practicing actualists are reporting is factual. Then you can stand on your own feet, then you have to rely neither on faith nor on belief, neither on hope nor on trust. Then you know for yourself, by your own experience, that the actual world indeed exists, is already always here and is only obscured by your own passionate beliefs and instinctual ‘self’. However as you never considered questioning your agnostic belief that certain matters are ‘fundamentally unknowable’ this ‘graduation’ to independence could never take place and there is nobody to blame but yourself. * VINEETO: You made your contempt of definitive results even more clear in your second post titled ‘Dialogue … or Spam?’ – RESPONDENT: I am content with ambiguity, as Peter/Vineeto et al shall likely find for themselves. VINEETO: The actual world is unambiguous and a PCE confirm this fact. RESPONDENT: I think actualism is a wonderful thing and will continue to practice such. VINEETO: In order to practice actualism you would first have to remove the tight leash that you have put on your inquiry, the leash that certain matters are ‘fundamentally unknowable’? Unless you do so you will continue to practice agnosticism, not actualism. Further, as your parting posts demonstrate, you blame others for the frustration you felt on this mailing list and thus make it clear that being harmless is not included in your practice. The ‘actualism’ you are practicing is certainly not the method described on this mailing list and on the Actual Freedom Trust website. RESPONDENT: What I find repulsive is Actual Freedom, Inc., with it’s rigid dogmatism, and anal obsession to correct spelling and content for cultural differences. VINEETO: Someone who is ‘content with ambiguity’ cannot but dismiss clarity and facticity as ‘rigid dogmatism’, if only to defend their own vagueness. Sincerity and naiveté would change your perspective by 180 degrees. What you call ‘anal obsession to correct spelling’ is simply the sensible use of the auto formatting and spell-checking functions of a computer’s word processing program to enable an easier understanding of the correspondence published on the website. If you find English spelling and grammar ‘anal’ then that is your sphincter fixation, not mine. RESPONDENT: Clearly my time here has come to an end. I have learned a lot, for which I am grateful, but you are only offering part of the picture. Sincerely (and I do mean that), thank you, and thanks for all the fish. VINEETO: Have you ever wondered that it could be you who is only seeing ‘part of the picture’ … if only for the sake of keeping alive the fiction that maybe there is a ‘Restaurant At The End Of The Universe’ after all?
RESPONDENT to No 23: The point I was trying to make was that actualism is fundamentally an intellectual process used for a non-intellectual end. HAIETMOBA is essentially a parlour trick in an attempt to bootstrap the mind into a PCE. VINEETO: The point you are trying to make is clearly erroneous, as it is a misrepresentation of what has been elucidated on the Actual Freedom Trust website many times over. This is how the actualism process is described –
How you can make this into ‘fundamentally an intellectual process’ has got me beat. When I use the actualism method as described above it is not intellectual at all but a process of being aware of whatever is preventing me from feeling happy and being harmless right now. Put succinctly, the actualism practice is something one does and, as you know, doing something is not the same thing as thinking about doing something. Asking myself how I am experiencing this moment of being alive is not ‘a parlour trick in an attempt to bootstrap the mind into a PCE’ – it is a method undertaken with the sincere intent to rid myself of the feelings of malice and sorrow in order to bring about peace on earth. A PCE can happen as a result when diligent and persistent attentiveness causes a crack in the bubble of one’s normal ‘self’-centred perception and the ‘self’ spontaneously and temporarily goes into abeyance. RESPONDENT: It’s really just a mantra. The problem I had with this (and maybe others) is that my mind gets stuck in the mantra, and it becomes the end in itself. VINEETO: Of course, when you reconstruct the actualism method into an intellectual exercise for selfish purposes (solely to induce an other-than-normal-experience) then it is no wonder that you have turned it into a meaningless mantra. Has it ever occurred to you that the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is not merely a sequence of letters (‘HAIETMOBA’) but that it is a genuine question that demands a sincere answer, which requires that one is vitally interested in being here? RESPONDENT: I’ve done enough reading and discussion now to realize that I’m just repeating myself. Think about it – what can be said on the 4 million words on the AF site that can’t be written in 1 or 2 pages? (that’s why I like the Advaita writings... the books are thin). Are we all so thick that we need to be fed the same material over and over again in slightly different variations? The answer is, of course, yes. VINEETO: The biggest obstacle to understanding actualism is that sincere seekers who come to this site are already conditioned, trained and indoctrinated with spiritual/ philosophical concepts, which have already been integrated as a central part of their identity and thus actualism is at first merely seen as another version of the familiar Tried and Failed. I had the same difficulty when I first encountered actualism but I also had sufficient discontent, disappointment and doubt about the spiritualism process I had practiced for almost 2 decades that I was keenly interested in finding out if there was something fundamentally new in what Richard was saying even if that meant abandoning all I believed to be true and right. The other night I had a realization about the way essential changes happen in my life and that is by determining the direction and then taking a leap. Determining the direction in which I want to go often takes some time because I need to investigate the various alternatives and then determine which of them I am sure I don’t want to do. It is a process of elimination whereby the only certainty is that I know that I am dissatisfied with things as they are, that I know where I don’t want to go and that the new will only become apparent after I have taken the leap of abandoning the old. The reason why doing something new is so frightening is because in order to take the jump I have to take both my feet off the ground – there is no slow motion and no certainty what the new will be like. I am doing it for the first time and more information and understanding will only be available after I have taken the leap. Yet I also know that unless I want to remain frozen in fear or compromise by being comfortably numb there is no way of avoiding such radical jumps into new territory. Examples of such leaps were when I left home at 18, when I got divorced at 23, when I quit my first job as a drug counsellor at 25, when I sold all my possessions to go to India and live in the commune of a spiritual master, when I left the spiritual commune to come to Australia, when I irrevocably abandoned my Cinderella dream of love in order to be able to relate to a flesh and blood male human being instead of a dream prince, when I quit my job with the Sannyas community, when I irretrievably abandoned my belief in a divine Existence and its unfathomable mysteries only to discover that the actual is magical beyond my wildest imagination. The point I am trying to make is that unless you are willing to question and throw out everything you
have practiced so far – because you can recognize and acknowledge that your present philosophy hasn’t delivered the goods and because you are
vitally interested in peace on earth – you cannot help but misunderstand and misconstrue what actualism is about and how the process works in
practice. The RESPONDENT: That’s the human learning process, same as e.g. mathematics. Personally, I’m at the point where I’m not reading or thinking anything new, so my intellect is full up. VINEETO: If that means that you don’t want to engage your brain in order to learn and understand something entirely new to human history then actualism is clearly not for you. An actual freedom is utterly unnatural in that it goes against one’s intuition, one’s feelings and one’s basic instincts, and it is absolutely unfamiliar (unless one manages to remember a PCE). In order to understand what an actual freedom is about you would need to be sufficiently motivated to make the effort and have the patience to try to clearly comprehend what is been talked about – not because it is difficult per se but because it is contra-intuitive and threatening to one’s very being. RESPONDENT: Since it’s obvious I’m not going to think my way to awareness (or whatever), a more visceral approach is needed. I think No 60 is saying roughly the same thing in his response. VINEETO: Intuiting what is right and wrong, good and bad, true and false (the ‘visceral approach’) will only reinforce what human beings have been doing all along because intuition itself is sourced in the instinctual passions. Actualism is neither an intellectual exercise nor a visceral discernment of what is right and wrong but
a method designed to increase one’s attentiveness of the three ways one experiences life – cerebral (thoughts); The actualism practice is amazingly simple and it works like a charm.
VINEETO: I’d like to clarify some of your misconceptions about actualism in your recent letter to No 58 – RESPONDENT to No 58: And don’t forget about wanting to be happy and harmless. The above strikes me as being kind of arbitrary, a shopping list of trinkets to acquire. At this point, I might have said do whatever you want if it makes you happy, but I’m starting to think that the whole notion of happiness (and it’s evil twin unhappiness) is merely another trinket, an external, artificial object to be gained. No 30 got happiness, Richard got happiness, Peter got happiness, Vineeto got happiness, but it seems to me they are all clever metaprogramming (with possible exception of Richard... we’ll never really get inside his head) – ‘I’ve defined what happiness is and I’m going to do my damndest to convince myself I am it’. VINEETO: For me as an actualist, becoming happy means that I investigate everything that stands in the way of being happy. In other words I begin by becoming aware of the causes of my unhappiness – feelings such as grumpiness, anger, irritation, sadness, moodiness, anxiety, etc. and then I take a clear-eyed look at the causes of my unhappiness and do whatever is necessary to prevent it from occurring again. When this attentiveness becomes on-going, the feelings that are an impediment to my happiness are disempowered. Furthermore, a genuine happiness is inextricably intertwined with becoming harmless – it is impossible to be happy unless one is harmless – something that is being overlooked again and again. You’ve raised this question before and you have indicated that you have understood that becoming happy and harmless in actualism is definitely not being ‘merely another trinket, an external, artificial object to be gained’. Vis –
What you call ‘clever metaprogramming’ is your own misinterpretation of actualism and it was one of the first issues you raised when you came to this list –
Maybe this is an apt moment to reiterate something that is essential for an actualist to keep in mind during his or her explorations – the aim and process of actualism is not to suppress feelings and emotions in order to achieve ‘merely another trinket, an external, artificial object to be gained’, as you perceive it, but to become aware of one’s feelings and emotions in order to be able to explore them deeply and exhaustively. The automatic socially-conditioned reaction is to wheedle one’s way out of feeling the bad feelings – those that are considered bad and immoral or wrong and unethical – by repressing the feelings and if this doesn’t work we have leant to revert to denial and/or deceit. Consequently the essential first step in becoming aware of one’s invidious feelings is to be aware of one’s habit of suppressing, avoiding or denying them. In order for the actualism method to work it is crucial to first get in touch with one’s feelings (a common expression meaning to become aware of one’s feelings) because if I want to find out about ‘me’ in all of my guises I can’t afford to only investigate the ‘better’ half of my emotions and ignore, repress or deny ‘my’ dark side. To allow oneself to experience whatever feeling is happening often needs some investigation into what Peter has termed the ‘guardians at the gate’ – the moral judgements and ethical evaluations that trigger feelings such as guilt, shame, defiance or righteousness whenever one starts to become aware of one’s dark side and begins to feel one’s dark feelings. It is important to remember that one needs to neither express one’s non-felicitous feelings nor wallow in them in order to become aware of them – after all the most important thing for an actualist is to be happy and harmless – and the aim is always, as soon as possible, to get back to feeling good about being here or feeling excellent about being alive. When you do get back to feeling happy and being harmless then you can put your feet up and spend some time contemplating on what it was that triggered you to stop feeling happy or being harmless. If you sincerely want to be happy and harmless you will then find that it is vital to drop that part of your social identity, be it a belief, a moral, an ethic, a value, a concept, a habit, that is causing you to be unhappy, sad, resentful, annoyed, frustrated, jealous, and so on. As you can see, actualism is all about diminishing one’s identity to the point where one becomes virtually happy and harmless such that ‘self’-immolation can happen – it has nothing to do with re-programming, re-interpreting, re-defining, re-labelling, re-shuffling, acquiring trinkets or replacing one part of one’s identity with another more shiny outfit – if applied with sincerity and intent the method of actualism will evoke actual change and that’s why many apparently find it too frightening to commit to. But once you get over the hump, it’s the best game to play in town.
RESPONDENT to No 58: And don’t forget about wanting to be happy and harmless. The above strikes me as being kind of arbitrary, a shopping list of trinkets to acquire. At this point, I might have said do whatever you want if it makes you happy, but I’m starting to think that the whole notion of happiness (and it’s evil twin unhappiness) is merely another trinket, an external, artificial object to be gained. No 30 got happiness, Richard got happiness, Peter got happiness, Vineeto got happiness, but it seems to me they are all clever metaprogramming (with possible exception of Richard... we’ll never really get inside his head) – ‘I’ve defined what happiness is and I’m going to do my damndest to convince myself I am it’. VINEETO: For me as an actualist, becoming happy means that I investigate everything that stands in the way of being happy. In other words I begin by becoming aware of the causes of my unhappiness – feelings such as grumpiness, anger, irritation, sadness, moodiness, anxiety, etc. and then I take a clear-eyed look at the causes of my unhappiness and do whatever is necessary to prevent it from occurring again. When this attentiveness becomes on-going, the feelings that are an impediment to my happiness are disempowered. Furthermore, a genuine happiness is inextricably intertwined with becoming harmless – it is impossible to be happy unless one is harmless – something that is being overlooked again and again. RESPONDENT: Sure, I understand that basic premise of actualism, and that you have a strong desire/intent to be happy. VINEETO: I have the sincere intent to become unconditionally harmless and happy. Harmless always comes first with me, as it is impossible to be happy unless one is harmless. RESPONDENT: Knock yourself out. My question was more general in nature, and I didn’t expect an answer from you or P or R any different than the one you gave. VINEETO: As long as you make comments on this mailing list about what you imagine Peter and Richard and Vineeto are doing, and what you imagine actualism is about, you will likely get an answer from actualists whether you like it or not. RESPONDENT: The essence of my question is in a response to No 60:
This question is not pertinent to a real actualist, but I think it’s interesting nonetheless. However, in light of the recent ‘spiritual’ thread, in which it becomes clear that P uses that term in a much broader sense than most others, I must ask how you all define ‘happy’? VINEETO: Your question of ‘how you all define happy?’ is equivalent to asking what is the meaning of ‘feeling good’. Richard has explained that ‘feeling good’ is an unambiguous term more than once –
Have you never felt happy in your life such that you have difficulty understanding the meaning of ‘happy’? Have you never had a moment of spontaneous uncaused happiness because if you had, then you are able to answer the above hypothetical question for yourself. * VINEETO: You’ve raised this question before and you have indicated that you have understood that becoming happy and harmless in actualism is definitely not being ‘merely another trinket, an external, artificial object to be gained’. Vis –
RESPONDENT: And I have also indicated that I reserve the right to change my mind and/or appear inconsistent. VINEETO: It does appear that you have turned your back on your own insight that ‘‘I’ have a vested interest in making sure that the fundamental experience of the actual never happens’ and have now settled back ‘to rationalize AF in terms that make sense to ‘I’’. Was there a particular event or issue that caused you to change your mind? The reason I ask is that I could relate to the insight that you had because it accorded with my own when I first understood what actualism is really about. * VINEETO: What you call ‘clever metaprogramming’ is your own misinterpretation of actualism … RESPONDENT: No, I understand actualism very well. I just happen to think it’s faulty. VINEETO: As long as you now call actualism ‘clever metaprogramming’ you are not understanding it at all. That you have now turned your back on your insight as to what actualism is about is also apparent in your recent post to No 67 where you suggest that actualism is equivalent to self-analysis –
There is no ‘‘searcher interfering with the searched’ thing’ in the method of actualism at all – when one is guided by pure intent to be happy and harmless and willingly and knowingly embarks on a journey to ‘self’-immolation there is no conflict at all because this guidance serves as a continuous reminder that ‘I’ am standing in the way of the purity of the actual universe to become apparent. Of course, if this pure intent is not activated, the ‘self’ has a vested interest in interfering with the search in every possible way even to the extend of waiting for ‘grace’. * VINEETO: …and it was one of the first issues you raised when you came to this list –
RESPONDENT: You have way too much spare time for this sort of attention to minutiae. Are you sure you are not trapped by your 4+Mwords of history? VINEETO: No, the reason I am spending my time writing to you is that you once did understand what actualism is about and you had an insight that ‘‘I’ have a vested interest in making sure that the fundamental experience of the actual never happens’ – and this is no little thing to understand. I know from my own experience that such insights are easily forgotten unless they serve as a constant reminder of what actualism is about. Now if you have forgotten the insight then that is one thing but if you have deliberately turned your back on that insight and decided that actualism is not for you then that is another thing. If you have changed your mind about actualism, then I am curious as to why you choose to remain subscribed to this mailing list and denigrate and misinterpret actualism and actualists and take sides with the naysayers?
VINEETO: What you call ‘clever metaprogramming’ is your own misinterpretation of actualism and it was one of the first issues you raised when you came to this list – <snipped quote> RESPONDENT: You have way too much spare time for this sort of attention to minutiae. Are you sure you are not trapped by your 4+Mwords of history? VINEETO: No, the reason I am spending my time writing to you is that you once did understand what actualism is about and you had an insight that ‘‘I’ have a vested interest in making sure that the fundamental experience of the actual never happens’ – and this is no little thing to understand. RESPONDENT: That statement still stands and has great significance to me. However, actualism doesn’t have a monopoly on it... in fact, it’s common as dirt. VINEETO: The only ‘fundamental experience of the actual’ that we are talking about on this list is the pure and perfect actuality that only becomes apparent when the ‘self’, in its totality, disappears along with all of the animal survival passions. Actualism is indeed unique in that neither Buddhism nor Jiddu Krishnamurti, neither U.G. Krishnamurti nor any of the many Advaita teachers and sages nor any other spiritual teaching come anywhere close to comprehending that the root cause of the human condition is genetically-encoded as a rough and ready survival package. Nowhere else will you find this being talked about. * VINEETO: I know from my own experience that such insights are easily forgotten unless they serve as a constant reminder of what actualism is about. Now if you have forgotten the insight then that is one thing but if you have deliberately turned your back on that insight and decided that actualism is not for you then that is another thing. RESPONDENT: That insight has permeated my core and is with me constantly. And actualism is not for me. VINEETO: Yet you said to a co-respondent just recently –
If actualism is ‘as common as dirt’, as you say, then why are you attracted to this piece of dirt rather than all the other pieces of dirt? I have one suggestion, if I may. When you read the Actual Freedom Trust website, instead of automatically thinking that the words ‘actual’ and ‘actuality’ mean something you are familiar with from your previous teachings, such as ‘the unmoving, unchanging reality behind it all’ or some such thing, why not treat them as words describing something entirely new, something of which you have no memory yet of having experienced it. Maybe that can open the door to a new understanding of what we are talking about on the Actual Freedom Trust website. * VINEETO: If you have changed your mind about actualism, then I am curious as to why you choose to remain subscribed to this mailing list and denigrate and misinterpret actualism and actualists and take sides with the naysayers? RESPONDENT: I happen to enjoy some of the discourse with the naysayers... some have a better grasp of the operation of the universe than the GoT. I try to keep the denigration to a minimum though I do succumb to the occasional cheap shot. But, damn, sometimes you make a lovely target up there in your ivory tower. If you call my unwillingness to swallow actualism hook, line, and sinker, ‘misinterpretation’, you severely underestimate my ability to grasp basic concepts. VINEETO: However, your ‘ability to grasp basic concepts’ has yet to produce an experiential understanding of what actualism is about. To give you an example from my own experience – when I first discovered that there exists an actuality outside of all of ‘my’ thoughts and ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ ‘self’-created world, it was tremendously staggering and mind-boggling. The morning after I had discovered the ‘self’-less always-existing actuality in a PCE I visited the local market and more than once my knees buckled as the enormous implications of this discovery were brought home to me. I saw with a clarity beyond doubt that not only had I been trapped in a spirit-ridden world but so was each and every vendor on the market, as well as their customers. All where living in a bubble of their particular spiritual/ metaphysical outlook and entirely oblivious to the actuality that is right under everyone’s nose. This is what I wrote at the time –
VINEETO: No, the reason I am spending my time writing to you is that you once did understand what actualism is about and you had an insight that ‘‘I’ have a vested interest in making sure that the fundamental experience of the actual never happens’ – and this is no little thing to understand. RESPONDENT: That statement still stands and has great significance to me. However, actualism doesn’t have a monopoly on it... in fact, it’s common as dirt. VINEETO: The only ‘fundamental experience of the actual’ that we are talking about on this list is the pure and perfect actuality that only becomes apparent when the ‘self’, in its totality, disappears along with all of the animal survival passions. Actualism is indeed unique in that neither Buddhism nor Jiddu Krishnamurti, neither U.G. Krishnamurti nor any of the many Advaita teachers and sages nor any other spiritual teaching come anywhere close to comprehending that the root cause of the human condition is genetically-encoded as a rough and ready survival package. Nowhere else will you find this being talked about. RESPONDENT: It’s Psych 101. VINEETO: You must be joking. I have studied psychology in my university days and I am also experientially acquainted with a multitude of psychotherapy methods. Nowhere in psychology or in psychotherapy is there any reference to the fact that the pure and perfect actuality only becomes apparent when the ‘self’, in its totality, disappears along with all of the animal survival passions. None of the various schools of psychology propose that the solution to the root cause of all human misery and aggression lies in altruistic ‘self’-immolation, let alone propose a method as how to achieve it. The practice of psychology is concerned with ensuring that people maintain a socially acceptable state of normalcy – not eliminating the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. If you want to discuss this matter more fully I would encourage you to look into psychological theory and practice and bring any evidence that contradicts what I am saying so that we can discuss the matter. This is precisely the way I demolished the beliefs and notions I held – I looked into the facts of the matter and if the facts contradicted my belief and notions then I saw that it was silly to keep believing what I believed – simply because it is a belief or a notion and not a fact. It is apparent that your insight – ‘‘I’ have a vested interest in making sure that the fundamental experience of the actual never happens’ – is not about the ‘self’-less actuality that is talked about on this list, but more likely the affective everyday reality that Jiddu Krishnamurti calls ‘the actual’ –
* VINEETO: I know from my own experience that such insights are easily forgotten unless they serve as a constant reminder of what actualism is about. Now if you have forgotten the insight then that is one thing but if you have deliberately turned your back on that insight and decided that actualism is not for you then that is another thing. RESPONDENT: That insight has permeated my core and is with me constantly. And actualism is not for me. VINEETO: Yet you said to a corespondent just recently –
If actualism is ‘as common as dirt’, as you say, then why are you attracted to this piece of dirt rather than all the other pieces of dirt? RESPONDENT: I said that ‘‘I’ have a vested interest in making sure that the fundamental experience of the actual never happens’ is as common as dirt... you restated that as ‘actualism’. More word games. It grows tiresome. VINEETO: As I explained above, ‘the fundamental experience of the actual’ that we are talking about on this list is the pure and perfect actuality that only becomes apparent when the ‘self’, in its totality, disappears along with all of the animal survival passions – which is the essence of actualism. Maybe this is an apt time to point out that not one person who has claimed that actualism is ‘as common as dirt’ – and there have been literally hundreds who have done so over the past 6 years – have yet to come up with any factual evidence that supports their claim. Doesn’t this strike you as at least a little bit odd? However, if you apply a different meaning to ‘the fundamental experience of the actual’ then misunderstanding is bound to happen. RESPONDENT: As far as my note to No 58, I was referring to actualism methods, rather than Actualism, Inc. VINEETO: Yep, it is quite safe to apply what you refer to as the ‘actualism methods’ without having the intent to become harmless and happy but this is not actualism and never will be actualism. Such a practice will never lead to a virtual freedom from the human condition, let alone an actual freedom from the instinctual survival passions. As you know very well there is no such thing as ‘Actualism, Inc.’ – what there is, is the
legal entity of * VINEETO: When I first discovered that there exists an actuality outside of all of ‘my’ thoughts and ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ ‘self’-created world, it was tremendously staggering and mind-boggling. The morning after I had discovered the ‘self’-less always-existing actuality in a PCE I visited the local market and more than once my knees buckled as the enormous implications of this discovery were brought home to me. I saw with a clarity beyond doubt that not only had I been trapped in a spirit-ridden world but so was each and every vendor on the market, as well as their customers. All where living in a bubble of their particular spiritual/metaphysical outlook and entirely oblivious to the actuality that is right under everyone’s nose. <snipped quote> RESPONDENT: You really think all those people are living in spiritual bubbles, and that maybe some of them were just playing, having fun? You were projecting your own spiritual anxieties big time, and still are. VINEETO: I see that despite all you have read on this list and on the Actual Freedom Trust website in the last 2 years you are still convinced that actualism is nothing other than another form of spiritualism and that a ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience is nothing other than a spiritual experience. RESPONDENT: Oh, fuck it, this is a waste of time talking to you. VINEETO: It sure is as long as you insist on watering down actualists’ experiential reports to being nothing but ‘common as dirt’ ‘self’-appeasing pop-spirituality.
VINEETO to No 66: U.G. Krishnamurti’s statement that ‘any ‘freedom’ is an illusion’ is a statement based on his own illusionary freedom and merely goes to show that he has yet to find a non-illusionary actual freedom – a freedom from one’s social conditioning as well as one’s genetically-encoded instinctual passions. RESPONDENT No 45: She does not discus the statement. The statement is ‘A priori’ wrong. It in not in the line of actual freedom. <…> At least U.G is authentic, speaks out of his experience and not out of believing, because if I had never taste sugar and I am saying that is a nice thing, means I believed somebody else. VINEETO to No 45: Tell me, what is ‘‘a priori’ wrong’ about saying that U.G. Krishnamurti’s statement that ‘any ‘freedom’ is an illusion’ is a statement based on his own illusionary freedom? You yourself say U.G. Krishnamurti ‘speaks out of his experience’ and he himself called ‘any freedom ... an illusion’. I simply pointed out that contrary to U.G. Krishnamurti’s belief that ‘any ‘freedom’ is an illusion’ that a way has now been found to an actual freedom from the human condition, something that surpasses any illusionary freedom of any kind of altered states of consciousness for the simple reason that this freedom is actual. What many people don’t seem to like about an actual freedom is that in order to get onto the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom one has to actively roll up one’s sleeves and irrevocably change oneself and for many that is too much of a shift from their present comfortable belief that ‘I only need to stop desiring freedom and then I will at least not have to be bothered doing anything at all about my unhappiness, let alone my acrimony’ RESPONDENT: Don’t you see how illusory your actual freedom is? How fabricated? Don’t get me wrong... I think you should give it your best if it makes you happy. But it’s still an illusion. VINEETO: Ah, but from the point of view that you keep presenting to this list – you called it once ‘Advaita land’ – there is no such thing as an objective reality, objective reality is at best an assumption. According to this point of view everything – one’s own thoughts and feelings, including the world of things, events and people – are nothing but an illusion and the only thing that is not an illusion is one’s own capital-A Awareness. For you to state that actual freedom is illusory or that I am living in a bubble is merely a reinstatement of your belief that everything is Maya. Given that you posted a definition of consciousness with a link to the ‘Course in Consciousness’, your definition of consciousness and ‘capital-C Consciousness’ apparently is in accord with that of Stanley Sobottka, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Virginia. Mr. Sobottka starts with the following hypothesis –
How a Professor Emeritus in physics who presumably has devoted his life to study the physical world can propose that this material physical world he touches, smells, sees, hears, tastes and lives in is only an assumption which ‘cannot be proved’ is beyond my comprehension. His hypothesis implies that, for instance, the very keyboard he writes his thesis on is an assumption that ‘cannot be proved’, that his senses perceiving his keyboard and the senses of his readers seeing the pixels of his thesis appear on their monitors are only perceiving ‘mental images’ – and yet apparently Professor Sobottka assumes without questioning that his readers, all of whom he perceives as being mere ‘mental images’, are in fact reading the words he has written on their assumed monitors that he typed out on his assumed keyboard. It does beg the question as to why he would bother to write to other human beings informing them that he cannot prove that they are anything other than mental images arising out of his own perception. Given that Mr. Sobottka starts with these solipsistic
Apparently Mr. Sobottka has no qualms in taking Nisargadatta Maharaj’s word for it that a ‘changeless state of pure awareness’ does in fact exist – presumably this is an assumption that can be proved – and from this assumption it is only a hop and a jump to the following conclusions –
And from these conclusions that ‘Awareness … is the fundamental Reality’ he reaches the following solution … and it comes to no surprise that this solution is the ancient-old recipe of disidentification and dissociation –
Or to say it in Mr. Sobottka’s spiritual teacher’s own words –
‘That to which it owes its own existence’ is another way of saying that I as Awareness am the creator of the ‘external’ world of people, things and events – Awareness is all there is and the objective, i.e. physical, world is but an illusion, at best an assumption that ‘cannot be proved’. This is what ‘capital-C Consciousness’ is according to the Advaita teachings. Given that you said that –
– I would appreciate if you could explain to me how you come to believe that this ‘capital-C Consciousness’ is ‘in fact the same thing’ as an actual freedom from the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire or is ‘in fact the same thing’ as the ongoing direct, as in non-affective and non-imaginary, experience of the actuality of the physical material world when the identity in toto, ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul, has ceased to exist.
VINEETO: This is what ‘capital-C Consciousness’ is according to the Advaita teachings. Given that you said that –
– I would appreciate if you could explain to me how you come to believe that this ‘capital-C Consciousness’ is ‘in fact the same thing’ as an actual freedom from the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire or is ‘in fact the same thing’ as the ongoing direct, as in non-affective and non-imaginary, experience of the actuality of the physical material world when the identity in toto, ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul, has ceased to exist. RESPONDENT: Just out of curiosity, why do you bother to respond in the ways you do? VINEETO: It was no bother at all, on the contrary, I enjoyed discovering how Mr. Sobottka understands and explains ‘capital-C Consciousness’. Nowadays there is a wealth of material freely available about Eastern religion and philosophy which makes clear what was once obscure, untranslated and shrouded in mystique but a century ago. RESPONDENT: It’s not for dialog as far as I can see. VINEETO: You gave an opinion, I responded and asked you a question – how is that ‘not for dialog’? I did ask you a genuine question and I am still interested to know how you come to believe that this ‘capital-C Consciousness’ is ‘in fact the same thing’ as an actual freedom from the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire – provided you want to dialogue, that is. RESPONDENT: Are you preaching to the masses? VINEETO: It seems to have escaped your attention yet again that this is a voluntary un-moderated mailing list and as such your query as to whether I am preaching to the masses is nonsense. I wrote to you because you have given your so far unsubstantiated opinions about what you think of actualists and actualism for several months and I wanted to engage you in an open discussion about the differences between ‘capital-C Consciousness and capital-A Actual’. It seems that after two years of reading the actual freedom mailing list and website you are still unclear about the vital differences between the two. I also think that the ‘Discourse on Consciousness’ from Mr. Sobottka makes the teachings of Advaita very transparent and easy to understand for Westerners who are not trained in deciphering the deliberately mystifying ways and purposely bewildering paradoxes of Eastern mysticism. RESPONDENT: Are you trying to reinforce your convictions by repetition? VINEETO: Repetition was certainly useful and necessary for me when I learned about actualism, considering that it is something entirely new to human history but I don’t quite understand your question as I have never before written about Mr. Sobottka and his teaching which attempts to marry relativistic theoretical physics and Eastern mysticism.
RESPONDENT No. 93: Can you identify what went wrong, and are you still trying? Did you get to a stage where you could live with gay abandon (so to speak) without harming yourself or being dangerous to others? RESPONDENT: Nothing really went wrong, it just didn’t go right. The goal of being happy and harmless just seems contrived (not that there’s anything wrong with it). I’m more interested in pulling the curtain from all illusions, good bad or ugly. The reductionist approach works... eviscerate everything that isn’t true, and what remains is by definition truth. Clues to this come from many sources. At this point I think I am no longer particularly harmful to myself or others ... VINEETO: I wonder what would happen if you abandoned what you call ‘not being particularly
harmful’ RESPONDENT: ... but I am hardly gaily abandoned. The notion of which is of course another of the untruths. Or, I have my head way up my ass. VINEETO: If this (telling yourself that ‘the notion of which is of course another of the untruths’) is the ‘reductionist approach’ you are speaking of then such an approach can indeed easily result in the alternative option you provided. ‘The notion of which is of course another of the untruths’ reminds me how a cunning solipsist once described his path of self-deception as the method to his success –
Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer |
