VINEETO: Hi,

Welcome to the Actual Freedom mailing list.

RESPONDENT: I’m new to actualism. My questions are of a more prosaic and personal dimensionality, and I would appreciate any assistance or commentary. When I pose the question, ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive, some of what’s been elicited at less than flattering moments, has been that a lot of my motivation in this realm has been based on anger, malice, disgust at living on ‘planet of the apes’. It’s been to find a way to not be affected and remain happy and financial to support myself in a world of ‘scoundrels’.

VINEETO: Like you I had tried for years to ‘not be affected and remain happy’ ‘in a world of ‘scoundrels’’. In my spiritual years I had hidden away in an Indian Ashram, refused to read newspapers, watch television or even to pursue a career. I had lived in the sheltered oasis of a spiritual commune, had tried desperately to stay unaffected by the starving and fighting world ‘outside’ and sat every night in meditation, closing my eyes in order to build a dream world ‘inside’ to replace the awful world ‘outside’. It was not easy then for me to admit that such prolonged and extensive effort to find peace and happiness had failed but when I was honest with myself I could not deny that it had not worked. The fact that I still experienced ‘anger, malice, disgust’ proved all too well that seventeen years of devoted practice of Eastern Mysticism had done nothing to make me a better person.

The next question I had to ask myself was ‘why’ it failed. I, like everyone else, either blamed the commune leaders, the stupidity of other fellow meditators, the organization or I blamed myself – I had not been total enough, I had gone off the right track, I had too many bad thoughts, I had too many worldly desires, and so on.

It was not until I came across actualism that other alternative questions came into view – maybe the teacher was wrong, and, even more frightening, maybe the teachings were wrong. At first these options were unthinkable. How could the man I had worshipped as God on Earth be wrong? And how could such ancient teachings be wrong? How could all the followers, monks and Sannyasins who adhered to these teachings over 5000 years be wrong?

In the end my common sense got the upper hand. Either I remain miserable for the rest of my life because the spiritual teachings had obviously failed to make me happy, let alone harmless ... or Richard was right and there was indeed a third alternative to normal beliefs and spiritual beliefs, a world that was pure and perfect. The prospect of a third alternative was thrilling, to say the least, and I began to examine and study this alternative with the passionate urge to really understand what this actual world really was. It had to be better than my spiritual life, and not only better – it had to be the perfection I was seeking, because for less than perfect I was not willing to question the beliefs that had become my second skin.

When I applied the question ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and examined why I was not happy and harmless, I found eventually that I had to come off my spiritual high horse of self-righteous beliefs and look at what I had attempted to ignore or repress, the dark side of my soul. And then it was not too difficult to remember moments of pure rage, uninhibited jealousy, bitchy malice and mean gossip that happened all through my spiritual years. The acknowledgement that I was as mad and as bad as everyone else urged me to investigate the whole holier-than-thou business of Eastern mysticism in general and my spiritual beliefs in particular.

This action of prizing apart and eradicating my spiritual identity was for me the most difficult part of the journey. I was torn apart between the terror of leaving a familiar world and the fascination and common sense of actualism. The psychological tension of not knowing which was the ‘right thing’ to do became so strong that for a short period my normal-spiritual worldview gave way and I had a pure consciousness experience. I discovered the world that Richard had talked about; I discovered a world beyond my beliefs, anybody’s beliefs – the actual world.

The actual world is this physical material world when you see it with eyes untainted by feelings and beliefs, unpolluted by passionate ‘self’-centredness. It is vibrant and alive, magical and abundant, infinite and unblemished. This actual world is always here, always now and once you enter it you recognize it immediately as your destiny.

Your entry ticket to the actual world – question everything, particularly your own beliefs and passions, the human condition in action as yourself.

It is a grand adventure.

24.4.2002

VINEETO: When I applied the question ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and examined why I was not happy and harmless, I found eventually that I had to come off my spiritual high horse of self-righteous beliefs and look at what I had attempted to ignore or repress, the dark side of my soul. And then it was not too difficult to remember moments of pure rage, uninhibited jealousy, bitchy malice and mean gossip that happened all through my spiritual years. The acknowledgement that I was as mad and as bad as everyone else urged me to investigate the whole holier-than-thou business of Eastern mysticism in general and my spiritual beliefs in particular.

This action of prizing apart and eradicating my spiritual identity was for me the most difficult part of the journey. I was torn apart between the terror of leaving a familiar world and the fascination and common sense of actualism. The psychological tension of not knowing which was the ‘right thing’ to do became so strong that for a short period my normal-spiritual worldview gave way and I had a pure consciousness experience. I discovered the world that Richard had talked about; I discovered a world beyond my beliefs, anybody’s beliefs – the actual world.

The actual world is this physical material world when you see it with eyes untainted by feelings and beliefs, unpolluted by passionate ‘self’-centredness. It is vibrant and alive, magical and abundant, infinite and unblemished. This actual world is always here, always now and once you enter it you recognize it immediately.

Your entry ticket to the actual world – question everything, particularly your own beliefs and passions, the human condition in action as yourself. It is a grand adventure.

RESPONDENT: Thanks for your response. I’m very grateful for all of the info on the site and all of your efforts. It’s wonderful stuff!!!

VINEETO: You are welcome. Whenever I tell my story of the process of actualism it is to entice another to try it out for themselves. If I can achieve a Virtual Freedom from the human condition, then anybody can – the only thing it takes is sincere intent to be happy and harmless and a stubborn determination not to settle for second best.

RESPONDENT: Rajneesh personally sent me a letter cause I cracked him up. I said I could never become a sannyasin because my coloring is winter, and orange just doesn’t work for me!! When I read some of these posts where the person is in a long-term feud with Peter I find it incredibly funny. I read their posts with either the voice of ‘HAL the computer from 2001’, or the voice of the computer from the original Star Trek. Especially when they start with ‘Archimedes Theory of Consciousness.’ I’m kidding. Yet to come on the actualism site and go into these long diatribes of intellectual masturbation of ‘paradise engineering’, as such when it’s not even your personal experience is hysterically funny! <snip>

Enough of my rambling. Thanks to all of you. I’ve got a ton of more space now that all my New Age literature has been put on a funeral pyre. Lots more available cash because I’ve no more interest in meditation, growth groups, most holistic practices, etc. etc. etc.

VINEETO: I know of several people who have used the reports from actualists as motivation to abandon their spiritual pursuits and to dethrone their former spiritual authorities. It is certainly a great sense of relief when one experiences formerly revered authorities of Ancient Wisdom as losing their glamour and glitz. One might even be lulled into a feeling that ‘I am all right as I am and everyone else is a fool because they still follow spiritual teachers’. But the action of prizing apart and eradicating one’s spiritual identity involves much more than throwing out one’s spiritual books and ridiculing the famed and feared spiritual leaders and their obsequious followers.

Unless you simultaneously question your own part that you play in the authority-game, the game of first creating and then rebelling against authorities, you will only end up replacing old authorities with new ones and substituting old beliefs with new ones. To take on actualism as a new belief is to miss the point entirely and then your actualism books will end up on the same ‘funeral pyre’ as did your spiritual books. By doing so, you would miss the unique opportunity to discover a way to free yourself from all authorities and beliefs for the first time in your life.

The actualism method is designed to do the opposite of blindly following or thoughtlessly riling against authority – you become aware of, investigate, understand and become free from the feelings of admiration, awe, devotion and/or envy, hate and resentment in your own psyche. Then you are able to see the facts as opposed to simply carrying on believing what everyone else believes.

When I first began to question my spiritual beliefs, I deliberately revisited the spiritual books and even rented some video footage so as to find out exactly what was the content of the teachings that I had previously believed to be the Truth. With the sincere intent of questioning everything in order to become free of all my beliefs, I began to listen again to Rajneesh’s statements and stories and was surprised at the blatant nonsense they contained – they were indeed just means to lull the listener into an unquestioning blissful feeling-state. It was, in fact, quite embarrassing to admit that all those years I had been sold a dummy under the guise of ‘self’-realization.

In the following years, I took apart more and more of what spirituality consists of and studied not only my own former guru but most of the other religions and spiritual teachings that are fashionable today. I examined closely what attracted me and still attracts others to the fairytales of life after death and the promises of unending bliss and what traps them into the search for a Greater Reality and for the grand feelings of Love and Compassion. My experience is that if you want to become free of the human condition, you first have to discover what the human condition is and how it operates to ensnare people into a slavery of malice and sorrow. This means an active investigation of the spiritual world and the nature of spiritual teachings and not a summary dismissal or a swapping of one set of beliefs for another.

It is no small feat to dare to take apart one’s own psyche and look for the beliefs and passionate feelings inside one’s own skull because with each belief a bit of my identity also disappears. This is why everyone has to do this journey by themselves and for themselves.

And who would want it any other way.

PS: You might find some useful information in the selected correspondence on authority.

2.5.2002

RESPONDENT: I have some long-standing tax and credit problems, which I find make it difficult to free myself from identity issues. I owe tens of thousands in taxes and creditors and they want their money. I would appreciate any advice you have regarding dealing with pragmatics like debts and finances incurred before my interest in actualism. When I ask myself ‘the question’ regarding these matters, I feel angry and afraid that I will have a good part of my money taken from me and also have to do disagreeable jobs in order to rectify the situation.

VINEETO: When I became a practicing actualist, I found it vital to sort out the practicalities of living because I can’t be happy as long as I have debilitating financial worries and I can’t be harmless if I withhold other people’s money or property. As for ‘I will have a good part of my money taken’ – when you owe money to other people it is not really yours, is it?

Spiritualists attempt to spend as much time as possible in their imaginary feel-good world in order to escape having to solve the pragmatic problems of their life. An actualist wants to be here in this physical world as totally as possible and that focus precipitates and involves sorting out one’s day-to-day life in the most sensible and straightforward manner.

As for ‘disagreeable jobs’ – it is a fact for most people that they have to work for money for food, shelter and clothes. When you ask how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and find yourself objecting to the fact of having to do a certain job, then you know that there is something to look at. It was only by slowly whittling away at my objections to the facts of life – the facts of the world-as-it-is and people-as-they-are – that I have incrementally succeeded in becoming happy and harmless.

RESPONDENT: I would appreciate advice from Richard, Peter, Vineeto or anyone for that matter regarding meeting a potential partner. I’ve never found anyone remotely like Vineeto or Devika to even start the conversation with.

VINEETO: I can’t give you ‘advice … regarding meeting a potential partner’ – all I know is how to become free from malice and sorrow. As an actualist I am, and always have been, committed to change myself and only myself and that is something anybody can do, should they be so inclined.

RESPONDENT: The least potential candidates were actually from New Age circles or holistic groups. You guys describe the meeting of your partners like you were walking along the road, and then you met an attractive partner and proposed the idea of let’s just ‘go for it’; total togetherness, a leave no stone unturned relationship, with a commitment to not bail out, not use any revelations against one another, and most of all not to fall in ‘love.’

In the last five years I’ve been I sometimes wondered why none of my former friends became interested in actualism, as I did. It seemed such an obvious choice to me, after my years of struggle in the spiritual business had produced no tangible results. The only explanation I have is that I had clearly underestimated the stranglehold that the feelings of love and hope have over people.

As for ‘the idea of let’s just ‘go for it’’ – before I met Peter I had lived without a partner for about 3 years. In this time I had observed relationships and contemplated about living together in peace and harmony with a man and as time went on I became more and more determined to do anything I could to make it work. That meant that I was then ready to review all of my ideas of who was the ‘right’ man, how he should be, how he should look, what he should believe, what he should do, etc. I was ready to undergo a questioning of all my beliefs and expectations in order for a peaceful and harmonious relationship to succeed.

In other words, this intent existed in the period preceding my meeting Peter. Living in peace and harmony with a man had advanced to the very top of my laundry list – it was at that stage the most important thing in my life. As it turned out, this determination was absolutely necessary, because I did indeed have to question everything I ever believed and I examine anything I ever belonged to, and only my sincere intent made me to overcome the obstacles and chasms that appeared on the road to perfect harmony.

RESPONDENT: I don’t know anyone who would want to be involved without the ‘love potentiality’, unless they had done a goodly amount of reading on the site.

VINEETO: The question is not if anyone else ‘would want to be involved without the ‘love potentiality’’ but if you are ready to question all your cherished beliefs and investigate your favourite and familiar feelings in order to become completely happy and harmless. Only a happy and harmless person can live with a partner in peace and harmony – it is an impossibility for a miserable and grumpy person. First things first.

2.5.2002

RESPONDENT: The other day the front-page newspaper of the newspaper had a story of 5-year-old girl shot in the head by a terrorist. I asked myself, how I am experiencing this moment of being alive? Mostly what came up was the thought of how can anyone do something like that, but I was aware of a significant lack of emotive valence. I would appreciate comments from Richard, Peter, Vineeto or anyone who has been involved with actualism for awhile as to what’s it like when they read or experience adversity.

VINEETO: One reason I joined the spiritual search was because I was appalled by what human beings do to human beings. By becoming spiritual, I tried to distance myself from my emotional reactions by sticking my head in the sand and dis-associating myself from my unwanted feelings, and by practicing meditation as in ‘you are not your body, you are not your emotions’ I was able to achieve a certain ‘lack of emotive valence’.

However, it was not until I discovered, and was ready to admit, that I was capable of violent thoughts and feelings myself to the point that I was ready to kill and die for my spiritual teacher and ready to kill my boyfriend in a fit of jealousy, that I knew I was as bad and as mad as everyone else. In other words, I came to understand that deep down inside I had feelings of malice that, when push came to shove, could lead to the willful killing of others as well as feelings of sorrow that when push came to shove, could lead me to kill myself.

This understanding led me not to focus my attention on the malice and sorrow of others, and to have the sincere intent to devote myself to expunging these feelings in this flesh and blood body. If this meant ‘self’-immolation, then so be it.

Actualism is the method to pay attention to your own feelings of sorrow and ‘adversity’ and bring them to the light of awareness so as to render them impotent. Actualism is the method to eliminate the identity, ‘me’, who harbours those feelings and instinctual passions. I don’t distance myself from my feelings but I recognize and experience that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’. In order to examine my emotions I have to experience them in detail and pay obsessive attention to whatever prevents me from being happy and harmless. (for more information see The Actual Freedom Trust Library, Affective Feelings and related correspondence).

6.5.2002

RESPONDENT: The other day the front-page newspaper of the newspaper had a story of 5-year-old girl shot in the head by a terrorist. I asked myself, how I am experiencing this moment of being alive? Mostly what came up was the thought of how can anyone do something like that, but I was aware of a significant lack of emotive valence. I would appreciate comments from Richard, Peter, Vineeto or anyone who has been involved with actualism for awhile as to what’s it like when they read or experience adversity.

VINEETO: Actualism is the method to pay attention to your own feelings of sorrow and ‘adversity’ and bring them to the light of awareness so as to render them impotent. Actualism is the method to eliminate the identity, ‘me’, who harbours those feelings and instinctual passions. I don’t distance myself from my feelings but I recognize and experience that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’. In order to examine my emotions I have to experience them in detail and pay obsessive attention to whatever prevents me from being happy and harmless. (for more information see The Actual Freedom Trust Library, Affective Feelings and related correspondence).

RESPONDENT: I asked because I usually would have gone on a rant for a while and was aware of not doing that. I didn’t make anything of it but it was a different reaction. Sometimes I’ve become aware of not getting caught up in a lot of insipid conversation, and inane subject matter, that I did even a month ago when I first started reading the site. When Richard writes of not having any emotions anymore, I was just curious if any of you had a reaction when you see or read of a five year old girl getting her brains blown out.

VINEETO: Since I became a practicing actualist my previous helpless and angry reaction towards violence, murder, rape, war and genocide has changed in that my reaction is now a determined and purposeful resolve to do something practical about the malice and sorrow in the world. Actualism doesn’t mean that you become dis-passionate about the world-as-it-is and people-as-they-are. What I did was actively and consciously turn my helpless and angry reaction into passionate, yet sensible obsession – I proceed to extinguish violence and suffering in myself.

Whenever I see acts of war and terrorism on TV, I am appalled at how human beings treat their fellow human beings but I am no longer helplessly suffering with the victims nor am I angry at the aggressors. I have discovered the sufferer in me and I have found the aggressor in me – the human condition is common to all. By committing myself to a method that inevitably leads to ‘self’-immolation, I know that I am doing everything possible to bring an end to malice and sorrow – in me, the only person I am able to change.

RESPONDENT: Like the other day I was sitting in a restaurant with a co-worker and a rat ran by. She jumped and was visibly distressed. I didn’t actually see the rat so I didn’t respond. I was just wondering if something like that phases you or Peter anymore. If there is no ‘I’ inside, what is your reaction? I’m not going copy it (as if I could) but just wondered if there is no identity anymore how do you react to things like death, violence, vermin etc?

VINEETO: Firstly, there is a great difference between murder, war and terrorism and a rat in a restaurant. The first is the appalling situation of the human condition and the second is simply a nuisance, admittedly an unhygienic nuisance.

Secondly, until (psychic) death does us part, there is still an ‘I’ inside this body.

However, I’m not jumping or screaming when I see a rat and I never have. I find cockroaches far more eeky. But whenever I do have an emotional reaction to a situation, which is far more rare than it used to be before I started actualism, then I notice, label and trace the emotion to find out exactly where it is coming from. It might be social conditioning, as No 38 suggested, or it has its source in the deeper layer of the animal survival instincts. Whatever it is, every such situation is a wonderful opportunity to see my ‘self’ in action and learn more about it in order to free myself from its grip.

RESPONDENT: I don’t know anyone personally like that so I am curious as to what it is like to just have a sensate experience of these things devoid of emotive content or identity.

VINEETO: It might help to be attentive to simple sensate experiences such as taking a hot shower, stretching out on the bed, feeling sunrays warming your skin or wind caressing your face – experiences that usually don’t have an affective connotation to it, so much so that we usually don’t notice them happening at all.

The more you are asking yourself how you are experiencing this moment of being alive, the more you will notice a distinct difference between a sensate experience and an affective experience. In the beginning the affective response both arrogates and dominates sensate experience but with practice the gap will become bigger and the difference will be more noticeable. You might become aware of the sensate input, for instance when you first taste some favourite food, and seconds afterwards you notice the affective response when the identity kicks in and ‘I’ claim the experience as ‘mine’. The difference is remarkable, and you will more and more notice that it does not need an identity to be aware of the sensuous experiencing of this moment of being alive.

RESPONDENT: On a lighter note when you have no identity do you still have predilections for chocolate vs. vanilla? If there is no I how does one ascertain who they are attracted to or what they prefer? Doesn’t that preclude having an identity?

VINEETO: As I said, I still do have an identity, albeit substantially weakened. I also have predilections – sometimes for chocolate, sometimes for vanilla, but every day for the delightful taste of fresh-brewed coffee. My senses delight in a great variety of tastes, and much more so since they are almost unhampered by an emotional identity running the show. To be aware of these eyes seeing and this tongue tasting does not need an identity at all.

13.5.2002

RESPONDENT: First Up – Thanks Richard, Vineeto, Peter for the referrals to the sections on I As Identity, I As Being, the sections on feelings, calentures. Thanks 1000x...

Today when I was reading the section mentioned above, ‘I’ as Identity, ‘I’ as Being, there was a passage where Richard made the point that a detached self is still a self. I starting questioning as to whether what I was thinking was a PCE or Apperceptive Awareness, was in fact a guised ‘Feeling Self’. I surmised that in fact as long as I remain with some form of ‘being identity’ that I didn’t have an ego, but was in effect ‘an ego’.

VINEETO: Yes, it is more accurate to say that ‘I’ am ‘an ego’ rather than I have an ego, and ‘I’ am a soul as well, as long there is an identity thriving within the flesh-and-blood-body called No. 39. To recognize that this identity permeates all that you think and constitutes all you feel and tints all of your sensate perception is a great step towards recognizing this identity in action. In actualism you do the opposite to common spiritual practice, which consists of dis-identifying and distancing oneself from one’s unwanted thoughts and feelings – in actualism you identify the feelings as ‘you’, label them and milk them for all the information you can get about how ‘you’ tick.

RESPONDENT: I started thinking that close only counts in horseshoes. I started thinking that if Richard was the only one free of ego, how could any of us ascertain the terrain accurately. Even if 0.00001 ego remained, wasn’t missing by an inch missing by a mile? Hmmm. Now I hope this is all clear because I was going over this with innocence, earnest but not with deadly seriousness.

VINEETO: In a pure consciousness experience you know without doubt that you are, albeit temporarily, utterly free from both your ego and your soul. As long as there is a doubt that ‘I’ might be about, it is not a pure consciousness experience. But once you have had a PCE you can ‘ascertain the terrain accurately’ because you then know by your own experience the difference between normal experiencing, spiritual delusion and the perfection and purity of the actual world.

RESPONDENT: I surmised the PCEs that I described were in effect PCEs as nobody made any commentary to the contrary.

VINEETO: Nobody but you can be the arbiter of your experiences and that includes pure consciousness experiences. Only you can determine if your experience was non-affective and ‘self’-less or an experience of feeling excellent with heightened awareness or a delusionary altered state of consciousness. There are some guidelines and descriptions on the website but in the end it is you who assesses your own experience.

RESPONDENT: I thought of the days when we use to say I’m trying to find my self. How would you know you were lost? How would you know you were found, since you didn’t have a self in the first place?

VINEETO: This body knows when it is free from the inhibiting and pernicious self – it is such an exuberant experience of liberation when the ‘self’ temporarily disappears – one’s senses are perceiving with unprecedented intensity and the brain is functioning with exceptional clarity.

However, once the ‘self’ returns, the first thing that often happens is an attempt to dismiss, belittle and question the experience of purity and perfection in order for the ‘self’ to regain control. With practice you become experienced enough in your ‘self’-awareness to recognize these doubts as the very survival mechanism of the ‘self’.

RESPONDENT: I started contemplating what is the criteria that one would know if they were no more? How does one recognize non-identity? Or the innocence of apperceptive awareness and will, as opposed to some subtle form of soul or egoic identity. I couldn’t wait to get to my office to write this e-mail. It was about 5:00 AM when I was at this. Still I questioned who would be ascertaining and determining that looking under every psychic nook and cranny was not some form of thinking/feeling identity? Well I kept asking the question, and was real excited about getting it over to you folks hoping Richard and the senior folks would comment.

VINEETO: The ‘self’ is like a viral disease. This body knows when it is free of disease – it doesn’t need a confirmation from the ‘virus’ to know that there is no virus.

RESPONDENT: My train ride is about an hour. I stayed with this topic and noticed less separation between existence and the question (What am I experiencing). Things became subtler and subtler. I noticed that actuality is very fast. Actuality is warp drive and I had to slow down considerably to consolidate having an ‘I’.

VINEETO: My experience is that in a state of heightened awareness unhampered by my identity my senses are able to perceive my surroundings with more far detail and more depth. Un-interfered by my emotions I can think about the human condition or about some practical problem clearer and sharper. It is not that ‘actuality is very fast’ but that my sensual perception is not slowed down by fear and other ‘self’-centred survival instincts. And as you described, ‘I’ put the breaks on to stay in existence, and that is usually experienced as caution, fear or mental confusion.

RESPONDENT: In my initial criticisms of Richard based on my own ignorance, I had made reference to what I thought was some form of detached self in Richard, especially when he would use adjectives describing the topography according to the only maps that I knew. Is there a clear demarcation point, that those of us with egos extant can be sure we are coming from apperceptive awareness, PCE as opposed to some form of self?

VINEETO: For me the demarcation line between my nowadays normal state of feeling excellent and a pure consciousness experience is that in a PCE everything has an additional magical quality. There is a marked silence in my head as the identity suddenly stops generating subtle feelings and any emotional ‘connectedness’ to or wariness of people, things and events ceases. In a PCE, I am aware of an additional depth in my perception in that trees for instance are not only their shape, colour, movement and form but also their history, so to speak – they were a seedling, they have grown, they might be furniture or fertilizer one day. The same goes for computers, furniture, buildings or food – in this heightened awareness of a PCE one experiences that nothing is merely passive, everything changes, moves, grows or dies, is manufactured or is falling apart.

The other very obvious difference is that in a PCE I have no feeling of separation at all – it is not that I feel ‘one’ with everything as in a spiritual experience but that the very feeling of separateness has disappeared together with the identity who feels separate. It is then obvious that I am as much the universe as people and things around me with the added bonus that I am capable of being exquisitely aware of all its wonder and magnificence.

RESPONDENT: That’s what I didn’t understand about Richard’s comments about ‘perfection, coolness of the breeze etc. I thought those were examples of what Richard was talking about a ‘detached self’.

VINEETO: A ‘self’ cannot imagine that a ‘self’-less – or ‘Self’-less – existence is possible. But the more you collect information from your pure consciousness experiences, the less convincing will be the ‘self’s’ claims that everyone needs a ‘self’ to survive and to sensately experience the actual world we humans live in.

RESPONDENT: I’ve enjoyed this post and welcome resolution. Commentary most welcome.

VINEETO: I am enjoying your vivacious posts and it’s a pleasure to talk to you.

21.5.2002

VINEETO: This is the third version of my letter to you because my hard drive crashed, then recovered and three days ago finally ‘died’. I had to get my computer back up and running again before I was able to complete what was rescued from my former hard drive. Computers are great tools but sometimes they fail like any other mechanical device.

RESPONDENT: Thanks – Your responses help immensely. The other night I was laying in bed realizing how much less reactive I’ve been in recent weeks. It’s funny because for so long my therapeutic Gods were in Primal Therapy, Reichian and bodywork. No matter how deep you went there was intrauterine feelings, past life, whatever, that needed to be explored + resolved to overcome the blocks in your body-mind dynamic. The works purpose was to get through traumas so that you could be fully present with all resources at your disposal in the present. The cornerstone was to get to your true ‘feeling self’. This was the truest essence of what you intuitively knew to be the right course of action to take. I did become aware of my feelings and opted to express rather than repress but rarely just felt them.

VINEETO: Yes, I know those ‘cornerstones’ of therapy well, I have studied psychology and social work at university and later taken part in a great many variety of therapies in order to fix up my ‘self’. The Rajneesh Ashram in Poona used to be the Mecca of therapy and every latest fashion in Western therapy was on offer. For years I threw myself into therapies in order to become a better ‘me’ but only became more sophisticated in verbalizing and emotionally expressing my emotional problems. Only after many years of failure did it dawn on me that I was not the only one who failed to resolve my primigenial problems and that maybe it was therapy itself that was at fault.

RESPONDENT: When I truly explore the question of how am I experiencing this moment of being alive it does bring me back to my senses. It grounds me in the present.

VINEETO: The method of actualism can bring your attention to your senses, however if you are experiencing an emotion in this moment of being alive, the actualism method is designed to help you identify, label and explore the emotion and trace it back to the part of your identity that produces and maintains it. Once you have found the part of your identity that produces your emotion, you can cut the cord, dissolve the root cause of this particular emotion and return to being happy and harmless. This attentiveness can cut the roots of identity quite quickly for easy issues, but for more difficult deeply rooted issues the process may well take months, if not years – which is why persistence and patience are necessary attributes for an actualist.

RESPONDENT: I seem to lose the present, and all semblance of connection with the question when I sexually fantasize, when I seem to go unconscious and have a drink, smoke pot, take a hit of ecstasy or go looking for sex. At these times things seem to go on the shelf. I’m wanting a pleasure from these experiences and then I see my folly afterwards as I see how none of my partying has resulted in bringing me peace or satisfaction.

VINEETO: This very dissatisfaction with normal-world solutions is what provides you with the driving force to search for a genuine peace and an unblemished purity. The more I investigated my beliefs and emotions, the less I was inclined to look for an escape from being here in this actual physical world because the very reasons for wanting to escape – being angry, resentful or sad – were less and less occurring my life.

The desire for sex is a complex issue in that it is both socially conditioned and instinctually ingrained. Instinctually the male seeks to spread his semen as far and wide as possible whereas the female looks for a strong, faithful and controllable partner to raise the offspring. Both on the social and on the instinctual level, this programming is responsible for the systemic misunderstanding, disappointment and dissatisfaction between the genders. Because the instinctual sexual drives are accompanied by powerful chemical processes in the brain, the battle between the sexes is so endemic.

At first it is difficult to observe these instinctual passions while they are happening but the more you neither repress nor express your emotions and passions and simply observe and examine your feelings, you’ll slowly get the hang of it – they are, after all, feelings and can be observed, labelled and explored as such. Finding out about one’s sexual social role conditioning as well as one’s sexual instinctual drive is a fascinating business once you learn not to act on the impulse but sit with the experience and milk it for all the information about ‘you’ that you can.

You might also find some useful information in Peter’s Journal, Chapters ‘Sex’ and ‘A Bit of Vineeto’ and in the The Actual Freedom Trust Library.

RESPONDENT: I don’t mean to ramble. I don’t talk about Actualism with anyone but on my postings. I’m not interested in converting people and I don’t know anyone who really wants to explore the terrain. I want the pleasure of sex and usually have that relegated to masturbation as I find relations with any potential partners seems fraught with compromise. I didn’t intend to go here but this is how I get out of the present and feel upset and desirous. I know what I want and it seems the truth of the matter is sometimes I’m unhappy without a partner.

VINEETO: If you remember your pure consciousness experience, there was neither the feeling of being lonely without a partner nor a feeling of dissatisfaction for lack of sexual activity. This proves that all your feelings of need, dissatisfaction and unhappiness arise from your identity – they are but the hallmarks of your social-instinctual identity in action.

RESPONDENT: The same is true with the work I’m doing. Outside of paying to put a roof over my head, and food in my belly I am just existing. My walking around identity keeps telling me that I’m kidding myself. That the truth is that I do miss sex. That I basically have a real dissatisfaction with my life that needs resolution.

VINEETO: I remember your description some time ago of what you called ‘PCE1’ –

[Respondent]: On (PCE1) I started off furious! I was tired of the way this guy was acting at work and fed up that my bosses weren’t doing anything about it. When I asked how I was experiencing this moment, my answer was that I was enraged! I went on with my soap opera, recycling it in my head for a few minutes, and then decided to get off the train I had been riding. I was committed to one thing! Peace! My intention was that I would sit down and not resume my commute to work until I was truly at peace!

I know you and others have talked of this being possible regardless of external circumstances, or illness, whether your alone, unloved etc. Pretty much everything that society gives you the allowance to walk around being pissed at! ‘I’m going to sit on this bench till I’m fine!’ It was to be a small step towards the larger goal of a lifetime of living happily and at peace.

Next I began to look around at various objects in the environment. I just looked without any labelling that something was a bench, or a woman, or a bird.

Next I heard sounds without identifying what they were.

I felt body sensations with the only commentary being a subtle noticing of pressures, of heat and cold. I smelled the air and felt that bench against my ‘tushy’ (just having some fun with my PCE).

I left my mind and came back to my senses !!! I stopped ‘putting on [No 39]’ and I giggled and giggled some more, and I smirked and I knew. In a most grounded delight, I realized everything was fine ! Actually everything was just dandy !! You could have called me any name in the book ! You could have thrown me in jail. You could have done anything you wanted. Everything was all right, and yet nothing was any different in the world. ‘I never arrived at work that day.’ I realized on this journey ‘I’ was never going to arrive ! Thankfully ! Re: Identity, 22.4.2002

So you do know what to do – observe and investigate every emotion that spoils your peace, happiness and harmlessness until you can identify its source – until you find the social and/or instinctual identity underlying your emotions. It is now a matter of doing it, persistently and stubbornly, until you become free from malice and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: That when you’re hungry you need food.

VINEETO: Needing food and wanting sex are two different urges – the first is necessary for physical survival while the second is only necessary for the survival of the species. If you observe your hunger for food and don’t act on it, you’ll eventually die for lack of nourishment, whereas you can easily survive without sex.

RESPONDENT: When you’re horny you need a partner. When I’m bored or angry at work I need to find something of interest. This is the argument that I (my current thinking/ feeling) identity makes. That the question is helpful but that I’m wanting. I’m not sure what I’m experiencing. Any comments appreciated.

VINEETO: As an instinctually-programmed identity you have the continual impulse to act on your feelings of being horny, bored or annoyed. As an actualist, whenever you feel horny, bored or angry, you have something to look at and something to investigate.

When you read more of the correspondence about ‘How to Become Free from the Human Condition’ in The Actual Freedom Trust Library, you will find that ‘the question’ is not merely designed to bring your attention to your senses – the main thrust at the beginning of the process is to investigate every feeling that prevents you from sensuously enjoying this moment of being alive. You dig into the beliefs behind your emotion, you discover your moral and ethical values that prevent you from finding out more about your feelings and by doing so you eventually run up against the instinctual passions, as Gary put it recently.

In therapy you may well have made acquaintance with your feelings, in actualism it is a matter of accurately discriminating and identifying your feelings as and when they are happening in daily life, of tracing them back to their instinctual source and as such eliminating the associated identity step by step.

Once you experience that the method works, it is a great thrill.

28.5.2002

RESPONDENT: When I use the question I had made reference to the fastest most complete awareness happens when I have a sensate based energetic awareness. I described having to ‘slow down’ to have an emotive backed identity that reflects and goes ‘I’ am upset, afraid, etc. etc. I have detailed the process of ‘putting on [Respondent]’ or emotive backed identity awareness seems to occur when this Identity – (who I think I am) – lets me know I’m bothered by something. I can see as I’m writing this with a certain detachment.

VINEETO: When you say ‘this Identity … lets me know I’m bothered by something’ you seem to indicate that you are someone other than ‘this Identity’. However, your only chance to dismantling ‘this Identity’ is to recognize and admit that ‘this Identity’ is you, all of the time, the only exception being pure consciousness experiences where ‘I’, ‘this Identity’, is temporarily in abeyance.

‘A certain detachment’ does not alter this situation because this is merely the identity ‘playing detached’. The whole movement of spiritualism, where one aims via detachment to slip out of ‘this Identity’ into the ‘Real Me’ or ‘Higher Self’, blithely ignores the fact that a spiritual being is still an Identity, only wearing a different name.

The process of actualism consists of identifying, discovering and examining ‘me’, my social and instinctual identity. As I become aware of and fully comprehend one part of ‘me’, then this part of ‘me’ is exposed to the bright light of awareness and withers away. ‘I’ cannot survive for long in the bright light of awareness.

RESPONDENT: The truth is being bothered, is being bothered. I don’t mean to ramble. I am endeavouring to give the most accurate description I can. It seems I have an option on what I can pay attention to at any moment. I can pay attention to sights, sounds, kinaesthetic sensations, tastes and smells. When that is the case there is never any problem. Emotions are not a continual second by second experience like a sensation is. They demand reflections, interpretations and are discontinuous. I was modelling myself on the way you guys exist which is devoid of emotions, and identity. So I’ve focused on sensation based experience, which is always neutral (factual). I was letting the emotional stuff just flow through and I think I was not dealing with things, trusting they would pass just like a sensation. I’ve kind of thought the PCE experience analogous to a ‘drug or energetic experience’, also comes and goes.

While it gives you a goal it allows you to ignore issues and problems that are extant. I was doing the same with the question. I could just focus on sensations and a lot of pernicious beliefs would just go by like clouds passing in the sky. I would appreciate any comments on the above. Vineeto has been especially helpful in the past.

VINEETO: The method of actualism is to use the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ in order to develop a non-discriminatory attentiveness of what goes on in your head and your heart each moment again. The significant word is ‘non-discriminatory’ in that I pay attention to everything that is going on, not just to the pleasant or trouble-free physical sensations, but also, and particularly, to the emotions and feelings that prevent me from being happy and harmless.

The point is not to avoid emotions and feelings or ‘trust… they would pass’ but to examine and explore those emotions and feelings, otherwise one will always live in apprehension of them returning and spoiling the sensate experiencing. Personally, I wanted to know why I kept getting angry, irritated, sad or depressed, why these feelings and emotions had continued to spoil both my interactions with others and my time on my own.

Richard’s article on Attentiveness is a very good description of this process of becoming attentive to both one’s feelings and sensations.

RESPONDENT: In addition when I’ve uncovered certain beliefs I’ve said to myself that I still believe this to be true even though they detract from my happiness and wellbeing. How would you advise dealing with this without lying or deluding myself?

VINEETO: You would be ‘lying or deluding’ yourself if you pretended not to have those ‘certain beliefs’ that you uncovered. However, if you have the sincere intent to become happy and harmless, you set about to question, examine and investigate why you have those beliefs and what are their underlying causes.

What makes encountering and examining ‘certain beliefs’ such a challenging business is one’s emotional investment that my beliefs are ‘truths’. To fervently believe something ‘to be true’, however, does not make it a fact. With the method of actualism you begin to probe into which underlying emotions uphold your beliefs and this enables you to become aware of the workings of your identity.

RESPONDENT: Let me give you an example that I could really use help with. I saw that I have a great deal of hostility toward woman. I thought, ‘gee it must be great to think that you are such a prize, that a guy ought to thank his lucky stars that he can get the opportunity to support you. To be a woman is to have the ‘divine right of Queens simply because you have tits and a vagina.’ I wasn’t thrilled that I have this belief but it is true for me. I would be lying to say I have vanquished it or am neutral. I know it doesn’t serve me and is unfair yet it is still the truth. So what is the best course of action in terms of dissolution of beliefs?

VINEETO: You say ‘this belief […] is true for me’ which is another way of saying that this is how you feel towards women. In contrast to the spiritual search for the ‘Truth’, i.e. what feels true for you, in actualism what feels true is not the end of the search but rather the beginning of your investigation.

While experiencing these feelings towards women – neither expressing or repressing them – you can at the same time observe them and probe deeper into the structure of your identity. As you experientially observe those feelings and accompanying thoughts, incrementally you are likely to uncover their underlying causes – first the various aspects of your social conditioning as a man and beneath that your instinctual passions as a male.

It is utterly exciting and rewarding to get to the root of the gender-battle in oneself because for the first time in your life it opens up the possibility of seeing, and relating to, all women as fellow human beings – an essential prerequisite for living in peace and harmony with the other gender.

*

PS: In The Actual Freedom Trust Library you might be interested in the topics and their respective correspondence on ‘Male and Female Conditioning’ and ‘Living Together’.

1.6.2002

RESPONDENT: Wow ... … It’s amazing the resources here!!! Wow...

I’m re-reading the PCE section again and it is amazing what I missed; that and sections on identity, feelings, calentures. Is there sections in my own self-study that you recommend immersing yourself in repeatedly.

VINEETO: I don’t know if you have discovered the illustrated ‘Introducing Actual Freedom’ yet, as it is intended to give a complete introduction to actual freedom for newcomers.

RESPONDENT: Is there any further recommendations you folks can make regarding the most efficacious way to tackle all the subject matter on the site? I’m amazed how you readily footnote and make exacting references. You folks blow my sockets out!!! Thank You 10000000000000x ... ...

VINEETO: I tried to create an overview of the website by copying bits of the conversations from various mailing lists and cataloguing them into various topics in the library, which are listed on the library homepage. However, the website has grown and the topics have become so many that you will have to choose the topic that’s relevant for you at the time. A map of The Actual Freedom Trust website is also provided to help you find what you are interested in.

For my own process I have simply read Richard’s Journal and then followed his on-going conversations on the various mailing lists, and the more I read the more I began to grasp the chasm between the normal world of my everyday experience – the human condition – and the actual world of utter purity and magnificence. The remaining task is practicing the method until it develops into an ongoing silent attentiveness to one’s every thoughts and/or feelings with the aim of becoming free from malice and sorrow, 24 hours a day.

Happy reading.

PS: You might be interested to take advantage of the option of IE 5 or IE 6 to download and store substantial parts of The Actual Freedom Trust website on your computer for leisurely off-line reading. If you don’t already know this – when you are on line and on The Actual Freedom Trust homepage, you can click under ‘Favourites’, select ‘add to favourite’ and then tick ‘make available off line’ . Then click ‘customize’ in order to choose the settings for either 2 or 3 layers deep. Four layers deep should suffice to download the whole of the website. To update what you already downloaded, under ‘Tools’ click ‘synchronize’. The first time it will probably take 50 – 90 min. to download the whole website given that it is quite big by now. There is also an Actual Freedom website-Lite available for quicker download.

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