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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 48
VINEETO: Hi, RESPONDENT: What things can you do to induce a PCE on a daily basis? Thanks very much VINEETO: As for what you ‘can do to induce a PCE on a daily basis’ – there is no such thing as a telephone number, group or meditation where you can order seven PCEs for a weekly supply. A pure consciousness experience can be a life-changing event, particularly if you are able to remember it afterwards – after your ‘self’ has returned. A PCE is to experience, for one moment or a longer period, what it is to experience the world without ‘self’ or ‘Self’. The consequence of having a PCE for me was that I couldn’t help but devote my life to take my ‘self’ apart, willingly and actively, so that one day I can live without ‘me’ for the rest of my life. So be careful what you are wishing for. There is more than enough information on the website in the I can only say from my experience that as I applied the method of actualism diligently and persistently, and questioned whatever feelings and beliefs interfered with me being happy and harmless, those beliefs and feelings became less and less convincing and more and more shonky. My willingness to question everything and my determination to find out the facts rather than continue to unquestioningly believe what everyone else believes to be truths or the ‘Truth’ were vital ingredients for the first crack in the door – my first PCE.
RESPONDENT: I was wondering if you’d like to make a comment on these articles on the 16 basic desires. www.acs.ohio-state.edu/units/research/archive/whoami.htm, www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s150712.htm, www.mindpub.com/art387.htm,www.mtsu.edu/~socwork/frost/crazy/happinesstest.htm Do you desire any of these desires? That last question should be ‘Do you think it OK to have any of the 16 desires?’ VINEETO: Here is an excerpt from the website listing the proposed 16 basic desires for reference –
In his list of desires Professor Reiss missed the biggest of them all – the desire to believe in an afterlife, to believe in a God, or, if you follow Eastern religion, to become that God and be all-powerful and immortal. To seek to become God, aka Spiritual Enlightenment, is desire run amok into gigantic and megalomaniacal proportions. Desire is but one aspect of the instinctual survival passions that every human being is genetically programmed with, the others being fear, nurture and aggression. To pick out some manifestations of the instinctual passion of desire as being desirable whilst trying to avoid other forms of desire – those that are socially or culturally undesirable – only indicates that human beings have been socially programmed to repress some cravings and passionate ambitions and indulge in others. The current first tentative moves by sociologists, psychiatrists, behaviourists and the like to acknowledge that human behaviour may have a genetic basis simply follows the traditional social-spiritual ethical-moral divide – separating human emotions into good and bad emotions, and human behaviour into good and bad behaviour. Instead of good and bad behaviour being the result of Good and Evil forces, they would have us believe that the battle betwixt good and evil is caused by good genes and bad genes. What Professor Reiss is not aware of, neither intellectually nor experientially, is that the instinctual passions come as an integrated and indivisible package. The human history of interminable warfare and unmitigated sorrow is testament that the idea of picking and choosing between instinctual passions or suppressing the good and enhancing the bad does not work … and can never work. In actualism the question is not which desires to throw away and which desire to keep. As an actualist I have recognized, experienced and understood that all of the genetically encoded instinctual passions that constitute my ‘self’ prevent me from experiencing the purity and perfection of this physical universe. Therefore my aim is to whittle away at my social-instinctual identity so as to facilitate ‘my’ extinction, permanently. Then, without being driven by the instinctual passions that constitute the ‘self’, one is free to enjoy the abundance of sensate pleasures and cognitive delights that being a human being on this verdant planet has to offer. Given that each and every actualist starts off with his or her instinctual passions completely intact and totally unexplored, there is an obvious use to be made of the instinctual passion of desire. Personally I asked myself what I wanted to do with my life and the desire at the top of my list was to live in perfect peace and harmony with a man. My commitment of living with a man in peace and harmony very soon grew into an intent to be free from malice and sorrow entirely because I understood that peace and harmony cannot end at the front door if this peace is to be genuine. And thus I ended up in a far bigger adventure than I had originally anticipated. My desire for peace and harmony eventually led me to investigate not only all of my other desires, but also the other instinctual passions – my fear, my aggression and my instinct of nurture.
RESPONDENT: Just wandering if anyone’s tried Doyletics? www.doyletics.com VINEETO: Let me ask you a question for a change: in all of your wandering wonderings have you tried actualism yet?
RESPONDENT: My wanderings help me to increase my understanding of Actual Freedom I suppose. VINEETO: I can understand that you want to check out what is on offer elsewhere. It’s just that I can’t recommend what I have clearly seen and experienced as second best – all the time-honoured solutions to the human dilemma that insist there must somehow be an answer within the human condition and all the fairy-stories founded on the belief that human beings are really immortal spirit-beings trapped within a flesh and blood body. Serendipitously I have come across actualism and found it to be the only sensible and workable – i.e. the only possible – solution to bringing about peace-on-earth. It ‘is not an overnight process’ as No 38 rightly pointed out, far from it, but it is an adventure worth taking on if you want to become happy and harmless – the obvious precursory condition to becoming free of malice and sorrow. RESPONDENT: I haven’t seen a problem through with the Actual Freedom process yet because I have doubts that it works. I gave it a go, my problem became worse, & I didn’t continue because I couldn’t seem to go any further with it, except in a direction I didn’t want to go i.e. worse. I imagine that quite a few people would have this experience with the process. I asked a question about what to do when getting stuck happens (or something like that) & didn’t receive an answer. VINEETO: You might consider that a problem can often appear to be worse when you pay attention to it. This does not necessarily mean that the problem is getting worse, rather it can be a sign of the problems I am usually unaware of, simply because I have been programmed and trained to either suppress, avoid or deny the very existence of such problems. All humans are born with the genetically encoded survival passions and culturally instilled with a social identity that slightly varies between different national and religious groups. When you begin to pay attention to what goes on in your head and your guts then the misery and mayhem inherent to the human condition naturally becomes more apparent. However, now there is a wide and wondrous path to becoming actually free from the human condition and a method that allows you to investigate this programming in order to become free from it – if the direction you want to go is to become happy and harmless. If becoming happy and harmless is number one on your priority list, then you will have both the intent and the enthusiasm to conduct an investigation into your psyche by beginning to acknowledge and pay attention to whatever it is that prevents you from being happy and harmless right now. With this sincere and ‘self’-motivated process of investigation in operation, discovering your socio-instinctual programming is not seen as ‘things getting worse’ but as the necessary stock take of what is happening in your psyche in order to begin the initial task at hand – questioning examining the beliefs and the moral and ethical values that cause you to be unhappy, sad, resentful, annoyed, frustrated, jealous, and so on. And when you get stuck or no one is answering your question, you can always obtain help and detailed information from the four million words on the Actual Freedom Trust website. On the Actual Freedom Trust website you will find many questions asked and answered about the process of actualism because, as you said yourself, ‘quite a few people would have this experience with the process’.
RESPONDENT: I have found something that enables me to map out what is in my mind – www.neurosemantics.com, www.neurosemantics.com/Neuro-Semantics/7-Matrices_files/frame.htm If I investigated everything according to this model, I still can’t see how anything would change (although I don’t think I understand it fully). Could you please tell me what else you think should be added & where would it be located in the model? VINEETO: What you want to change in your life depends what you make your aim in life. If you want to learn ‘self’-mastery’ then neurosemantics is one of hundreds of recipes that professes to teach you how to master your ‘self’ –
It’s a model for those who want to embellish, empower and aggrandize their ‘self’. ‘Self’-aggrandizement is an instinctual desire of all human beings and has been taught as wisdom in the East where ‘Self’-realized Godmen are two bob a dozen. Its results can clearly be studied in the hundreds of enlightened beings, the self-help gurus and the new age therapists that spread their message of spiritual superiority to a gullible audience. There are plenty of references to the spiritual teachings of ‘self’-improvement on
the Actual Freedom Trust website and most of these can be accessed via Actual Freedom, however, has nothing at all to do with ‘self’-empowerment or ‘self’-aggrandizement – it is in fact 180 degrees opposite. Actual Freedom is achieved when ‘I’, the ‘self’, recognize that all that is standing in the way of perfection is ‘me’, the ‘self’, and out of this understanding ‘I’ willingly set out on a path of ‘self’-immolation. When you look up the word ‘immolation’ in the dictionary – ‘Deliberate destruction or loss for the sake of something else’ Oxford Dictionary, then you might grasp the fact that actualism is indeed the opposite of ‘self’-mastery and all that this entails. As an actualist I have thrown out all the models that are on offer in the normal and in the spiritual world because their aim is contrary to my aim – I want to live the perfection of the actual universe via ‘self’-immolation whereas neurosemantics and similar models teach you to strengthen, enhance and perfect the ‘self’ thereby cutting yourself off even further from the already existing purity and perfection that is the physical universe. I don’t quite understand your repeated questions about various new-age models to this list. You have written earlier about your doubts that actualism works for you –
If you doubt that the actualism aim and method is right for you then why do you ask those who are practicing actualism for their opinion on spiritual aims and methods that you found on the ‘self’-improvement market? If actualism is not what you want, then an actualist can hardly give you the answer you want to hear. If you want to find out what works for your specific aim in life then you have to stop arm chair philosophizing, try out the method of your choice for yourself, apply it practically and determine if it works or not, i.e. if it brings you the desired results or not. I am an expert in actualism, I have applied the method to become happy and harmless and I know that it works. If you have a different aim in life or if you have doubts about actualism then you have to do the practical research for alternatives for yourself – there is nobody who can do the job but you.
RESPONDENT: Is the memory of a PCE necessary to deal with those issues that seem to be a catch 22? VINEETO: Yes. RESPONDENT: e.g. Don’t touch, it’s dirty What proof is there that it’s dirty? None, but other people have been touching it, and it’s safe to say that there is a high probability that a few of those hands are dirty Otherwise no evidence? (unless there’s a microscope handy) None, but other people have been touching it, and... VINEETO: I take it that you are referring to Richard’s expression about the pristineness of the actual world –
And Richard makes it very clear what he means by ‘dirty’ … the malice and sorrow that people inflicted with the human condition nurse in their bosom. In order to discover one’s malice and sorrow a microscope is useless – one needs the sincerity to acknowledge that one nurses malice and sorrow in one’s bosom just like everyone else. And with the sincere acknowledgement that one is as bad and as mad as everyone else, there is a chance that one could be interested in to become free from malice and sorrow.
RESPONDENT: This is a stupid question according to Actualists, however, what is happiness? When I think of it from an evolution perspective, I get happy when I’m on the track to ensuring my survival, and my genes’ survival. Simply getting back to a state of happiness doesn’t make much sense from this perspective. If I have no reason to be happy (not on track), then I’m neutral or starting to feel bad. I know that if I did absolutely nothing and had no survival skills, then I’d feel very crappy, since death would be close. Life triggers the state of happiness when I’m on track. Actualism seems to say to drop off the evolutionary ladder and somehow get back to being happy (before you start experiencing PCEs). I have the belief that happiness is a state and that trying to trigger it without a reason over an extended period gets extremely tiring since it is not homeostasis. VINEETO: Happiness is a feeling, therefore to theorize, philosophize or speculate about happiness doesn’t help to understand what happiness is, nor will it help you to feel happy – you will only arrive at various beliefs about happiness, but no genuine understanding that could help you to be happy. If you get stuck with the word happiness, try experimenting with feeling good. Feeling good, as the word indicates, is a feeling and the only way to understand what ‘feeling good’ means is by feeling it. The way to do this is by deliberately getting in touch with your feelings and observe them in operation and the best way to do this is by asking yourself each moment again ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ If you feel good, then fine, if not then you determine which feeling you now have that is preventing you from feeling good. You may find sadness, grumpiness, resentment, numbness, listlessness, boredom, cynicism, hate, despair, anger, love, greed, dependency, loneliness, fear, hopelessness, wariness or some other feeling and then you set about to investigate what most recently caused you to feel this way in order to get back to feeling good as soon as possible. In other words, you investigate your ‘bad’ feelings as well as your ‘good’ feelings with the sincere intent to be as harmless and as happy as possible. And yes, you will find that it is initially hard work to feel good or feel happy for extended periods of time as you will find a myriad of excuses and so-called justified reasons for being annoyed, feeling sad, being bored and so on. This is why understanding that this moment is the only moment you can experience being alive is vitally important because then you will be less inclined to waste this moment by frittering it away by not feeling good about being here. You are here anyway, and it is now, and it can only ever be now, so why not make it your business to enjoy being here? You also wrote in a different post – RESPONDENT: When you have something that you can’t
seem to conclude because you know your gene programming will make you feel bad if you don’t do it VINEETO: In most societies, there is an etiquette and quite often laws regarding wearing clothes in public that are considered decent in this particular society and if you don’t follow the laws, social rules and etiquette of the country you are living in you will cause trouble for yourself – you will be punished, ostracized or inconvenienced in some way or other. Therefore, wearing clothes in public is simply a matter of common sense.
RESPONDENT: When you have something that you can’t
seem to conclude because you know your gene programming will make you feel bad if you don’t do it VINEETO: In most societies, there is an etiquette and quite often laws, regarding wearing clothes in public that are considered decent in this particular society and if you don’t follow the laws, social rules and etiquette of the country you are living in, you will cause trouble for yourself – you will be punished, ostracized or inconvenienced in some way or other. Therefore, wearing clothes in public is simply a matter of common sense. RESPONDENT: Yes, it is common sense. However, if I did find myself without clothes, would I feel OK about it? How would I go about getting back to feeling good while wearing nothing in public? VINEETO: I am missing a bit of information here – why would you find yourself without clothes in public in the first place? I vaguely remember having had some nightmares in my teenage years of suddenly being naked in the middle of town but it never happened in real life. Are you talking about a dream you had, a fantasy, a desire or an actual situation you found yourself in at some time? RESPONDENT: When I do come across something this difficult, after investigating it, is it a matter of ploughing through the bad feelings as you would with a fear that has no basis for its existence, such as a phobia of not being able to touch the bottom of a pool? VINEETO: Well, I can tell you what I do about dreams for a start. If fear is happening during sleep I make every effort to wake up. I found that it was important to recognize and remember that I couldn’t solve a scary situation while asleep, I had to slip out of it by waking up. This was at first not an easy task and before going to sleep I needed to gather determination and intent that I would make every effort of waking up as soon as possible when the nightmare began. In this way I set an inner alarm clock, so to speak, that created a stir when those particular dreams happened. At times when I woke up from a bad dream I found it useful to then walk around in the house and have a glass of water in order to break the spell of the dream such that it wouldn’t continue from where I left off, and if the dream returned I woke myself up again. After I began practicing actualism I was no longer interested in analysing my dreams because most of the time they do not make sense at all. Even if they present themselves in a somewhat coherent story, the situations are so removed from real life that there is nothing to discover as far as my identity is concerned. I simply examined those feelings that prevented me from feeling happy and being benign that I had while fully awake and the issues that I resolved in daytime then stopped bothering me at night. Your apparently hypothetical fear of ‘wearing nothing in public’ reminds me of the fears I had at the beginning of the process of questioning my social identity because with every bit of ‘me’ that I examined and abandoned ‘I’ felt more and more naked and exposed. In other words, in the process of dismantling ‘who’ I thought and felt I was I had less and less social masks, ready-made appearances and stereotype facades to present to others and to hide behind, I was more and more directly and impromptu experiencing whatever situation I found myself in. While I welcomed this increasing liberation from the straightjacket of my various ‘personas’ I had previously been I was nevertheless sometimes gripped with the fear that people would recognize and expose me for the traitor I had become. However, whenever I weigh the gains of becoming incrementally free from the burden of societal beliefs, morals and ethics and the grip of my instinctual passions against the occasional bouts of fear my choice is always clear – it is so good to become more and more ‘naked’ such that I am able to sensuously and sensately experience the delight and wonder of being alive.
RESPONDENT: Hello, I’m new to this list. I need help remembering a PCE. Richard wrote that he’s helped many people recall at least one PCE? How did he induce this recall? (…) VINEETO: Welcome to the Actual Freedom mailing list. In order to search where Richard, Peter or I have written about inducing a PCE you type the following phrase into Google –
You should get about 150 links. As for the link presented in your second post – http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/Lehar.html – Steve Lehar makes it very clear in his writing that his ‘radical new theory of mind and brain’ is based on the premise that –
With this premise Steve Lehar has a priori excluded himself from ever experiencing or acknowledging having ever experienced this actual world directly, without the interference of his ‘being’ / his ‘self’.
RESPONDENT: It’s a good thing this website and mailing list is up and running, otherwise I would get very lazy with the method. And by the way, Richard and Vineeto, if that guy I gave you his link is correct then couldn’t it be that you are being actual within a virtual reality? VINEETO: Are you suggesting that I am ‘being actual’ within that-guy-you-gave-his-link’s ‘virtual reality’? RESPONDENT: And want to know why you do anything at all if you aren’t motivated by the pleasure/pain cycle. How is this body motivated to do anything at all if there is no feeling? VINEETO: Yes, apart from life’s necessities and from enjoying the delights of being alive I am not motivated to much these days – as you can see from the length of this post. Live is so simple when one is no longer driven by the instinctual passions. You may have to look for the motivation to not ‘get very lazy with the method’ more closer to home, possibly by becoming more acutely aware of your own ‘pain/pleasure cycle’ and how to become free from it.
RESPONDENT: Like every person, except for the ones living in virtual or actual freedom, I am emotional when it comes to money. It seems like a good idea … VINEETO: Personally I found it a better idea to discover why I was, and on rare occasions am, emotional when it comes to money. I learnt what originated my disdain for money (usually other people’s), what jump-started my fear of not having enough money, and what caused my desire for having more money/goods. Not surprisingly all these emotions about money arose directly from the instinctual survival passions which, when brought to the bright light of awareness, rapidly lost their intensity and their grip. RESPONDENT: [It seems like a good idea] to establish an income that comes in with very minimal/no work so that if I become unable to work, I can still pay for what I need. VINEETO: Your suggestion merely tackles the symptom (money) and not the root cause (the instinctual survival passions). Of all the people I know who are sufficiently well off to pay for what they need even if they stopped working, none have stopped being emotional about money. RESPONDENT: My question is for those in virtual/actual freedom, what is the investment vehicle and strategy that creates this kind of income, that makes the most sense? VINEETO: The ‘investment vehicle’ for me is to put my attention and effort into eliminating the cause of any worry about money and let my intelligence take care of the practical needs as and when they occur. Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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