VINEETO: The actualism method is certainly a very powerful tool and, as Richard emphasizes throughout his writings, the only danger on the wide and wondrous path is that one can become stranded on the Rock of Enlightenment, as Peter called it – or fall into any other permanent state of delusion.

RESPONDENT: I do see the potential for this. It must seem as if I’m being quite defensive about the ‘validity’ of my ‘interesting experience’, but what I’m actually trying to do is firstly express it as clearly as possible, and secondly figure out where it belongs in the scheme of things. I do appreciate the feedback.

VINEETO: You are welcome. I know from my own experience with actualism that feedback from other people’s experience can only go so far – I gained both reassurance and warning from Richard’s reports of his experiences but in the end I had to sort out my experiences for myself … and my benchmark for that was always my first major PCE. It was the experience of which I had the clearest memory simply because the difference to my normal day experience was so incredibly stunning and at the same time so unquestionably obvious.

*

VINEETO: Or if one tries to induce a PCE as a deliberate repeat of a serendipitous event, ‘I’ want to remain on the stage in order to posses the experience as ‘my’ own.

RESPONDENT: This is true I guess, but what it felt like was not exactly a conscious desire to possess it as my own (though I do see the potential for that happening), but rather a desire to play around with it aesthetically, like a kid with a kaleidoscope. I suppose one can desire to ‘possess’ something for two different motives, either as a way of empowering and glorifying one’s ego, or as a way of entertaining oneself. I think the latter is probably what made this PCE into an ASC. (But I can accept that the self is very cunning indeed).

VINEETO: ‘A way of entertaining oneself’ implies that being here is experienced as needing some more entertainment, …

RESPONDENT: No, not exactly ‘needing’ entertainment, rather delighting in possibilities that were not there before.

VINEETO: Yes, exploration often starts as curiosity but ‘I’, i.e. my desires and my fears, determine both the direction of the exploration and the interpretation of its results. Over the years I have explored different aspects of life – various forms of relationships and ways of living together communally, attempting to understand emotions in therapy groups, practicing meditation techniques, diets, alternative medicine and other superstitions, and many of them I explored just for the sake of exploring and experiencing, for curiosity’s sake and because it gave me something to do. However, whenever I took stock after years of such idle exploration I found that I had gathered experiences of all sorts but in terms of benefits I came out with very little result – in short, I still didn’t know how to live in utter peace and harmony with a companion and with all of my fellow human beings.

When I came in contact with actualism I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to find out in my explorations, and the clearer I became about my intent the more focussed I became as to which alleys to explore and which ones to ignore because they were dead-end streets in terms of my aim. The task of becoming genuinely happy and harmless was challenging enough in itself to keep me ‘entertained’ for years and the journey is not only utterly thrilling, it also gives ‘my’ life a purpose and a meaning.

*

VINEETO: … which is an assessment that ‘I’ make because there is no role for ‘me’ to play in the stunning clarity and sensuous delight of being right here in this moment in time.

RESPONDENT: Well that really depends on what is meant by ‘I’ and ‘me’, doesn’t it? Being right here in this moment in time, can there be any sense of intention? In my experience, the answer is yes, for sure.

VINEETO: When I am right here in a ‘self’-less PCE there is no intent, I am already experiencing perfection. The intent comes in when the PCE ends and ‘I’ make an assessment what it is that ‘I’ need to do in order to live this experience 24/7.

RESPONDENT: In a PCE ‘who’ is it that dips his/her toes into a cool stream just for the joy of it? Dipping one’s toes in the stream doesn’t mean that ‘I’ and ‘me’ are there with all their status-seeking and emotional baggage, but the action happens. In a PCE there can be an ‘intent’, without there being an ‘intender’.

VINEETO: In a PCE there is no ‘who’ to ‘dipping one’s toes in the stream’ but ‘what’ – this body delights in the coolness of the stream on a hot day. ‘Who’ is the psychological and psychic entity who thinks and feels ‘he’ or ‘she’ is in control, whilst in a PCE this controller is temporarily absent. There is no intent in a PCE for I am simply the doing and experiencing of what is happening.

RESPONDENT: There can be thought without a thinker.

VINEETO: Yes. In a PCE thoughts happen or don’t happen depending on the situation.

RESPONDENT: And, in my experience at least, there can be visualisation without a visualiser, and no accompanying loss of the perfection and purity of the actual world.

VINEETO: This is how you described your experience with the visualisation –

[Respondent]: For one thing, there was definitely a psyche present, even though there was no trace of emotion. In fact, the presence of psyche was an intimate and intricate part of the perfection (which had been lacking – or rather, invisible – earlier in my walk). I thought about the ‘Human Condition’ and wondered whether it was still applicable here, and the answer was: no. There is a pure, clean, fully functional psyche here, but it contains no trace of the Human Drama. That is, the psyche was a pure medium in which images and symbols could form and dissipate (including images of the Human Drama), without disturbing the purity and perfection of the totality. <…> it was the actual universe going about its business, and this psyche was a part of it, though now wholly beyond the ‘Human Drama’. Interesting Experience, 11.12.2003

The psyche, which you said was ‘definitely’ present, is the visualizer. Whereas in a PCE the ‘self’ /the psyche, which is not only the ‘Human Drama’ but the very motor for ‘images and symbols’ is absent. In a PCE I am this psyche-less flesh-and-blood body only, apperceptively aware of the sensual delights and reflective thoughts while they are happening on their own accord.

The reason why I am so persistent about keeping a clear distinction between the quality of a ‘self’-less experience as compared to the quality of an altered state with ‘a psyche present’ is because if anyone decides to want to become free from the Human Condition in toto then he or she needs to have an indubitable benchmark and therefore make a clear distinction between the two experiences. Otherwise one would waste one’s time chasing an Altered States of Consciousness instead of an actual freedom from the human condition.

*

VINEETO: The more I paid attention to how I experience this moment of being alive the more I began to learn about how cunning ‘I’ am, how many ways and reasons ‘I’ invent and present in order for ‘me’ to stay in existence.

RESPONDENT: Understood. The same thing may well happen to me, but at this stage I have absolutely no reason to think that the existence of a mind-as-medium that can maintain abstract representations of phenomena is a feature of ‘I’ (as social identity), or ‘me’ (as feeling self). It seems to me that the visualising faculty is very much a part of the ‘new brain’, not the ‘old lizard brain’. But I ain’t gonna be dogmatic about it. I don’t have enough experience or knowledge to be sure.

VINEETO: When I came across actualism and began to examine if this was what I wanted to do, I put some of my queries in the ‘too hard for now’ basket and questions about imagination and visualizations were amongst them. Instead I focussed on down-to-earth matters such as finding out about my own very obvious gender conditioning and my own noticeable spiritual beliefs because they were the main obstacles to my living in peace and harmony with Peter. These conditionings and beliefs were relatively easy to check out against facts – once I got over the emotional humps of my pride and fear – and they served to verify what Richard was saying by my own experience. Once I got more skilled in paying undivided and non-selective attention to how I experience this moment of being alive and discovered some of the previously hidden aspects of my psyche in action, I was then better able to experientially answer those ‘too hard for now’ queries.

*

VINEETO: Often it would take me days to discover that I had once again fallen for ‘my’ tricks, that I had believed ‘my’ reasoning as to why ‘I’ needed to run the show.

RESPONDENT: Ok, but while ever you are in ‘virtual freedom’ rather than ‘actual freedom’, you are indeed running the show.

VINEETO: The wonderful thing about being virtually free of malice and sorrow is that ‘I’ have become increasingly redundant – less and less am ‘I’ experienced as running the show or needing to be in control.

RESPONDENT: And part of the ‘you’ who is running the show is a ‘belief’ (for want of a better word) that ‘you’ as a psychic entity must disappear entirely in order to allow the already-existing purity and perfection of the actual world to manifest itself.

VINEETO: No. It was the ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience itself which revealed that normally there is an ‘I’ who thinks and feels she is running the show all the time and it also reveals that in order to allow the already-existing purity and perfection of the actual world to manifest itself ‘I’ have to disappear. This is not ‘a belief’ but recognition of a fact via direct perception.

RESPONDENT: Regardless of the validity of this belief, it is still a product of ‘you’; but you regard this belief/goal/whatever as not being ‘one of your tricks’.

VINEETO: Facts are not a product of ‘me’; facts exist in their own right. It is one of the most cunning constructs of Eastern spiritual mythology – and unfortunately one that is growing in popularity – that all human perception can always only be a belief. In absence of a word to describe it I have called this erroneous concept DDP – Denial of Direct Perception.

DDP has now moved into Western society and has also infiltrated modern theoretical science, particularly the part of theoretical physics known as quantum theory, which proposes that you can never know something as a fact because the observer always influences the observed. Considering that prominent physicists and mathematicians like Albert Einstein, David Bohm and Darryl Reanney were believers in mysticism themselves it is no wonder that their perception and their theories were distorted by their beliefs.

However, if one aspires to allow the already-existing purity and perfection of the actual world to manifest itself, it is essential to recognize and acknowledge the difference between fact, which is objective, repeatable, verifiable and so for everyone, and belief, which is subjective, based on feelings and tradition and only true for a certain group of believers. It is equally important to make a clear distinction between direct perception as experienced in a ‘self’-less PCE and the perception distorted by the affective-imaginative psychological and psychic entity who ‘resides’ inside the body.

RESPONDENT: I would argue (not to be contrary, and not to suggest that you are wrong to do so, but simply because it seems like the truth to me) that it is indeed ‘one of your tricks’ to treat as ultimately valid only those experiences in which ‘you’ are entirely absent. Within the terms of your goal (actual freedom), this is understandable. But that goal is necessarily ‘one of your tricks’, even if you choose to define it as the only thing that is not a trick.

VINEETO: What you are arguing is that ‘my’ experiences of ‘my’ psyche are as equally valid as the only experience that is common to all flesh and blood bodies – the pure consciousness experience of the already-existing purity and perfection of the actual world. I can only suggest that you contemplate on the fact that it is precisely because everyone values their own psychic experiences so highly that peace on earth between human beings remains but a pipe-dream.

RESPONDENT: Not trying to be a smartarse, but after virtually all of your social identity has disappeared, there remains ‘Vineeto the actualist’ (which is not itself actual). I know this doesn’t matter to you personally, but I say it nonetheless: I am not trying to criticise you in any way, just saying it as I see it.

VINEETO: Four weeks ago you described a pure consciousness experience –

[Respondent]: There was no trace of ‘mysticism’ or ‘spirituality’ about it; just enjoyment of being present in a perfect bubble of real time and real space and real things. PCE / ASC / Psilocybin, 7.11.2003

When you described the experience of ‘being present in a perfect bubble of real time and real space and real things’ – did you have any doubt that this experience was ‘one of your tricks’ or did you know beyond doubt that this was one of those rare events where your ‘self’ was absent and you were experiencing actuality as it is?

I know, it is hard to remember what a PCE was like when one returns back to normal and often one begins to doubt that the experience was only a dream. But during a PCE I know with absolute certainty that this actual universe has always been here – I only missed it whilst I was busy being ‘me’. And the realization and recognition of this very fact is what has become my benchmark for determining how to proceed in the process of becoming free of malice and sorrow. In this process ‘I’ willingly decide to instigate ‘my’ own demise and then it is simply a matter of applying attentiveness – something that anyone can cultivate if they so desire.

*

VINEETO: At first I had only Richard’s report that he has no imagination whatsoever and that imagination is an affective faculty of the psyche – later in the actualism practice I could confirm this report by my own experience in that my imagination more and more disappeared and nowadays I have a hard time to activate it, for instance when I try to visualize objects others talk about that I have never seen. I don’t miss it though – it is one less distraction from sensually experiencing what is right here.

RESPONDENT: Right. I can understand this because in the PCE on a country walk I thought idly about where I was in relation to the town and river, found I could not construct a mental map, and did not give a damn. It didn’t matter in the slightest; it had no relevance. I was ‘here’, and that was all I needed to know. Besides, I was too busy perceiving to worry about creating some internal shorthand sketch of what was all around me in all its splendour. I do know what you’re talking about in this respect.

VINEETO: Good. And I take it that there was also no ‘desire to play around with it aesthetically, like a kid with a kaleidoscope’ as there was in your ASC. Interesting Experience, 15.12.2003

RESPONDENT: However, I am now starting to think that one can have one’s cake and eat it too.

VINEETO: Before you get carried away with this thought let me ask you how you think this would work in practice. The cake we are talking about is an actual freedom from the Human Condition, a ‘self’-less flesh-and-blood body living a pure consciousness experience 24/7. To ‘eat it too’ means to simultaneously have a psyche, which perceives the world as ‘pure’ in images and symbols? In other words you want to be ‘self’-less whilst remaining a ‘self’.

You can certainly entertain this as a philosophy but never live it as an actuality.

RESPONDENT: I do not currently accept that the presence of an image generating / image-hosting psychic medium (‘psychic’ = ‘supernatural’) is necessarily identity-bound because I have no reason to think so. It seems to me now that the ASC I described (and I’ve had more echoes of it subsequently) is no less ‘pure’ than a PCE. (It is indeed much harder to convey the purity in words, because ordinary ‘imagination’ is a very shoddy thing by comparison, but the purity and perfection are there in abundance). In the ordinary state, the ‘world’ is (for me) divided into what I call ‘worldspace’ and ‘mindspace’. Worldspace is the actual physical world of three dimensions that we all share and move around in. Mindspace is a private ‘inner’ ‘space’ which has no dimensions, mass, substance, or physical location. The phantom ‘objects’ in this mindspace are not actual, in that they have no substance, mass, location, dimensions, etc. If I conjure up a winged tortoise with a pink shell and Santa Claus riding him, white beard a-blowing in the breeze, it’s pretty easy and it takes only a split second. Where does the image exist? It is caused by electrochemical impulses in brain, no doubt, but it is not these electrochemical impulses, any more than these words are the electrical impulses that cause them to appear on your screen. The cause of the image is my brain, but the image is not in my brain. It is not in the room either. Where the hell is it? It’s not anywhere, it has no location at all, but I experience it right enough. There is no question of believing it to be ‘real’, it is obviously a ‘psychic’ (clearly not ‘supernatural’) phenomenon. That’s ordinary imagination as I know it. Nothing special there. The kind of ‘psychic’ (but not ‘supernatural’) phenomena I’ve been talking about are not even similar to ordinary imagination. It has the quality of perception. It is as different from ordinary ‘imagination’ as the actual world (as experienced in a PCE) is different from the ‘real’ world (as experienced ‘normally’).

VINEETO: From you description it appears that ‘mindspace’ is the experience of normal consciousness while ‘worldspace’ is the experience of altered consciousness. I do acknowledge that ASCs can be experienced as an extremely pleasant and desirable state – that’s their very lure. Words like grand, clean, beautiful, vast, open, good, powerful, in order, stunning, great, cosmic, wholesome, luxurious, wonderful, miraculous, mysterious, inexplicable, deep, fulfilling, oscillating, greatly enhanced, gratifying, majestic and so on come to mind when I think of my past ASCs. An ASC may even appear as ‘no less ‘pure’ than a PCE’ particularly when one wants to ‘have one’s cake and eat it too’.

My only point in this discussion is that there is an enormous and vital difference between the two and that the twain shall never meet.

*

VINEETO: The question as to whether an actual freedom from the human condition ‘is actually possible for all people’ can only be answered on an individual basis because to achieve this freedom requires that an individual makes it the most important thing in his or her own life. Thus far I have met or have corresponded with very few people who are interested in doing so. If, however, you want empirical proof that an actual freedom does not require ‘a biological configuration unique to Richard’ then you will have to wait until a second, or third, person becomes actually free from the human condition. Personally, I didn’t want to waste my time waiting for that, I’ll rather be part of the proof.

RESPONDENT: Yeah, I’m with you there. I dunno whether our paths will diverge or converge in the end, but having set off on the journey it’s very unlikely that I’ll turn back. I know it seems to you that I’m playing a different ‘game’, a self-centred game in which I’m desperately clinging to some cunning disguised form of ‘self’ as ‘psyche-as-medium’ in order to stay in existence, but it’s really not how it seems to me.

VINEETO: The marvellous thing about actuality is that one cannot make it up, destroy it or alter it in any way – it is already here exactly as it is. Nobody can add to it, take anything away from it, shape it or diminish it, possess it for themselves or hide it from others and therefore nobody needs to hold it up or defend it – it is always here in all its splendour and perfection readily apparent whenever the bubble of the ‘self’ bursts.

RESPONDENT: I see some early differences, in that it seems to me that perfection, peace, purity requires absolutely zero compromise w.r.t high-level mental faculties, including visualisation. Who knows? In any case, I’m glad we have this mailing list to trade notes.

VINEETO: Yes, the notes can only be potential aids for your own hands-on exploration. It is entirely up to you which of the paths you wish to explore.

*

VINEETO: When I read your deliberations about the experience, two things come to mind. Firstly it is clear that you have no doubt that this ‘interesting experience’, as you called it, was an ASC and not a ‘self’-less PCE, so the difference is very obvious to you.

RESPONDENT: Yep. The PCE I had last summer had none of this ‘pattern matching’ or ‘symbol-generating’, or ‘plasticity’, and the psyche was not ‘visible’ at all. There was an underlying similarity though that I can’t quite put my finger on, except to say that both seemed to have had a pure and perfect basis.

VINEETO: Would it be right to say that the first was a pure, i.e. ‘self’-less, experience while the other was an image of a pure experience created by your psyche?

RESPONDENT: Not quite. The other was an experience in which psyche was present, but it was not created out of or by the psyche. In both cases there was an underlying purity and perfection; in the latter case it was manifest in mind as well as in world. And the presence of a mind-medium (unlike ordinary ‘imagination’) did not in any way diminish the perfection and purity of the actual world as experienced by the senses.

VINEETO: The purity of the actual world means that there is no ‘self’ or psyche present and it is the affective ‘self’ or psyche that distorts the clear perception of what is actual.

If you decide to reinterpret ‘the perfection and purity of the actual world’ as being an experience of the psyche ‘manifest in mind as well as in world’ then we are talking about two different things. It does make communication a little confusing though.

*

VINEETO: By the way, I think this is the very reason that human beings have invented a God by whatever name who then plays the role of someone who not only comprehends everything – is omniscient – but who is also capable of controlling it all – is omnipotent.

RESPONDENT: Probably. Another possibility is that people once ‘experienced’ God or gods as a daily ‘reality’. There was a character called Julian Jaynes who hypothesised that subjective consciousness is a relatively new phenomenon; that until about 3,000 – 1,500 years ago people experienced their own thoughts as (mainly auditory) hallucinations coming from outside them. (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind). Not sure, but plausible I guess.

VINEETO: Jaynes’ theory accords with observations I made while recently watching a TV documentary called ‘The History of God’. It described the various stages and quality changes that the Jewish-Christian God has undergone since his very first appearance as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The early patriarchs had very personal communications with their God, an authority figure who apparently both protected and guided them in important daily affairs. In later generations God’s qualities became more and more vague, mysterious, distant and inexplicable – a necessary adjustive transformation of a hallucination that now needs to cater to the individual whims of billions of people. After all, a hallucination, however grand, is a product of the affective faculty and is therefore purely subjective.

*

RESPONDENT: I’m not a mathematician or a scientist, by the way, so I have no idea why the universe chose to present itself to me this way on LSD ;-)

VINEETO: The universe doesn’t ‘chose to present itself’ to you this way – ‘you’ chose to take LSD and its effects led you to interpret the universe this way. And from what I have read of such experiences there is as much of a culture around such experiences as there is around spiritual experiences, which makes it difficult to ascertain whether what one is experiencing isn’t merely a culturally-influenced experience.

RESPONDENT: Definitely not in my case. It was completely unlike anything I had expected or could have imagined. On the other hand, once you’re in there the mind is extremely suggestible.

VINEETO: You also said that ‘it was an LSD flashback, to be sure’ –

[Respondent]: It was an ASC rather than a PCE, but of a rather different character from any kind of religious experience that I’ve heard or read about. (It was an LSD flashback, to be sure. I find it extremely interesting that it could be invoked at will, and I’m keen to understand what is actually happening here.) Interesting Experience, 12.12.2003

*

VINEETO: It is telling that Christians ‘see’ Christ in their visions and not Mr. Buddha and that LSD imbibers ‘see’ psychedelic imagery whilst those who imbibe peyote ‘see’ ‘The Great Spirit’. Despite what human beings believe, the scope of human imagination is always limited by, and influenced by, cultural conditioning.

RESPONDENT: Biological too. I think on LSD the culturally conditioned content of the imagery (striking as it is) is less striking than the structure of it. I think it must be a physiological thing; you’re watching the brain itself organise information into patterns, and those patterns are geometrical/ fractal, which gives it its ‘psychedelic’ quality.

(Anyway, I think I’ve done this topic to death recently. No more!)

VINEETO: On the contrary – judging by your recent posts you seem to be more and more warming to it.

*

RESPONDENT: Absolutely, a psyche was present, and if the presence of psyche makes it an ASC, then that’s what it was. But as I said to No 23, the psychic ‘entity’ seemed less like an ‘entity’ and more like a plastic medium in which events unfold. Not a personal thing at all, but also not a ‘divine’ thing either.

VINEETO: Yep, it only goes to show that people who don’t believe in God can have far-out Altered States of Consciousness as easily as a spiritualists can.

RESPONDENT: Aye, but enjoying some of the strange manifestations of one’s own nervous system, and seeing that it actually contains the same structures as the actual world, is rather different from believing in gods.

VINEETO: I don’t experience that ‘geometrical/ fractal’ patterns are ‘the same structures as the actual world’. I know that a snowflake contains geometrical patterns and that pyrite minerals for instance have very a regular cubic structure, but plant cells and animal/ human cells have an entirely different structure. A diagram of a bacterial cell structure can be found here: http://www.cellsalive.com/cells/bactcell.htm and an animal cell from the same website: http://www.cellsalive.com/cells/animcell.htm

Those ‘strange manifestations of one’s own nervous system’ are manifestations of the affective/ imaginative faculty of the brain. Of course, there is nothing wrong with enjoying them but they are neither pure nor actual.

*

VINEETO: Actuality is magical not because there is a hidden meaning or mystery but because everything is palpable, tangible, actual, not passive and right here and this actuality is available to each and everyone in the same magical vibrant coruscating way – if and when the obstructing blinkers of the human psyche are removed.

RESPONDENT: Or, it seems to me (so far), looked through rather than from.

VINEETO: In your latest post you made it clearer what you mean by ‘looked through’ –

[Respondent]: … this representational system which generates the sense of self and world is none other than the thing that I was looking at, rather than through. I spoke of it as being like an amphibian who sees the water that a fish cannot see. In other words, psyche (and its self-and-world generative mechanisms) itself somehow became visible in a way that is usually completely transparent. The hidden infrastructure of the psyche became exposed, and what was most interesting was not the content of psyche but the structure of psyche as medium which is normally invisible. (I tried to emphasise that there was nothing ‘metaphysical’ about it, but it seems that anything non-actual can easily be taken for a a cunningly disguised form of something ‘spiritual’). All of this happened on top of the pure substrate of the PCE, and did not taint its purity or distort its clarity it in any way. (Quite the contrary). <…>

It is possible to experience (temporarily at least) all of the above benefits of actualism without any permanent self-immolation or loss of any mental faculties. If one can clearly look at the self-generating psyche which one normally looks through or from, then it becomes unnecessary to actually eliminate it. It is rendered harmless by becoming explicit (and plastic and malleable) instead of being a ‘fictitious fixed point’ as it ‘normally’ is. Neo-Virtualism, 27.12.2003

Despite the fact that you stress that there ‘was nothing ‘metaphysical’ about it’, the ‘psyche as medium’ is non-physical, non-material and as such non-actual, which is exactly what the word ‘meta-physical’ means. And bit of research into the methodology of Eastern Mysticism will reveal that the technique to ‘clearly look at the self-generating psyche’ instead of ‘through or from’ is precisely the technique of dissociating from the ‘self’ in order to transcend it. And, as Peter put it in his journal –

Peter: Transcending, per definition, is to ‘go above and beyond’, which is really ‘Above and Beyond’, as we all know. Peter’s Journal, Time

The picture next to it speaks for itself.

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