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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 60
VINEETO: Hi, RESPONDENT: For brevity’s sake I’m focussing mainly on the points of disagreement / confusion / crossed-purposes. VINEETO: Good idea, I’ll do the same. RESPONDENT: (Having all kinds of problems with topica today. Hope this gets through). VINEETO: You might have already noticed that Topica doesn’t accept posts bigger than 100kb which includes all the formatting kb that might be behind the scenes. RESPONDENT: By the way, in these dialogues I use the old-fashioned usenet conventions, quoting only samples and relying on readers to get the context from the thread. But since ‘topica’ doesn’t provide a threaded interface, would you (all) prefer it if I quote the whole article with original context intact? VINEETO: For me, your replies are fine as they are and I have all the posts saved in my e-mail program if I need any previous reference. For my own ease I usually paste your replies into my previous letter to you when I answer and then delete whatever seems superfluous. * VINEETO: 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. RESPONDENT: Did this first PCE come from practising HAIETMOBA, or was it something you remembered from earlier in life? VINEETO: This first major PCE happened about three months after I had learnt that there is an actual freedom that is beyond enlightenment and began examining my feelings of loyalty in regards to the spiritual master I had been following. After several weeks of intense questioning of what I had believed to be right and true this breakthrough into a PCE eventuated and it settled my burning questions about right and wrong beliefs – I experienced the unquestionable facticity of actuality that is far superior to any belief or any imagination ‘I’ could ever conjure. You may be interested to read about the lead-up and the description of this PCE in After this PCE I knew the flavour of a pure experience and eventually remembered PCEs from earlier in my life, some in my childhood and some in my twenties and thirties. So to answer your question, yes it did. It occurred after an intense period of being aware of the intensity of my feelings and beliefs and of being attentive to how ‘my’ wanting to hold on to these feelings and beliefs stood in the way of me becoming happy and harmless. * VINEETO: This is how you described your experience with the visualisation –
The psyche, which you said was present, is the visualizer. RESPONDENT: No, I’ve tried to make this clear: it is not the ‘doer’, it is not an ‘entity’. The brain is the visualiser, VINEETO: This seems to be the crucial point of disagreement, which I think can only be settled as an experiential answer achieved by meticulous and ongoing observation. From my own experiences of ASCs I can understand why the psyche does not appear to be the ‘doer’. In an altered state of consciousness ‘I’, the doer, makes way for ‘me’, ‘being’ itself, and the feeling of this expansion is so grand, so vast and so impressive that the ‘being’ itself does not even appear to be an entity because one does not see or feel the edge of it. It is not for nothing that before Richard’s discovery of an actual freedom from the human condition, a permanent Altered State of Consciousness, be it spiritual or secular, was considered the summum bonum of human experience. RESPONDENT: … just as the brain (not the ‘self’) is the ‘thinker’. VINEETO: Only in a pure consciousness experience does the ‘self’ not interfere with the brain thinking. RESPONDENT: The brain can produce images of its own accord without ‘me’ painstakingly constructing them in ‘my’ mind. VINEETO: It is the affective faculty born of the instinctual passions that generates ‘images of its own accord’. Imagination is so immediate, automatic and effortless, it is my experience that it takes some practice in observing one’s psyche in action in order to discover that imagination is a function of the affective faculty. RESPONDENT: I guess it comes down to this: I don’t understand the actualist’s distinction between visual thought and non-visual thought. VINEETO: This recent conversation might clarify the issue –
I know from my own observations that visual images connected to words are often so immediate that it appears as if ‘I’ have no part in conjuring the image, that the image appears of its own accord. It took practice in being attentive to all of my feelings before I began to become aware of the myriad of thought processes that ‘I’ can cause to happen in the brain including the capacity for imagination and visualization. RESPONDENT: I understand that, when Richard broke through into ‘actual freedom’, his capacity to imagine or visually recollect disappeared at the same time as his affections. Whether this is cause or correlate is unclear. VINEETO: No, Richard made clear that they correlate –
RESPONDENT: Suppose I have a toaster and a radio plugged into the same power point with a double adapter. I flick off the power switch, and both radio and toaster cease to work. Would I now be justified in saying that the music I heard a few minutes ago was an epiphenomenon of the toaster? For all I know, Richard may be exactly right – but I would like to know once and for all, what basis is there for saying that the brain’s capacity to generate images is an epiphenomenon of an affective ‘self’? VINEETO: The basis is apperception. RESPONDENT: Is it just that the two disappeared simultaneously, or is there a more solid factual basis for claiming that one is caused by the other? VINEETO: If one takes notice of the reports of others and relates the data from the PCEs (no imagination, no ‘self’) to one’s normal day experiences (imagination, ‘self’) and to an ASC (extra-ordinary imagination, ‘Self’) there is a strong indication that ‘self’ and imagination are correlated. These contrasting experiences are indication for a prima facie case to be made such that can eventually be verified by your own experience. Then there is your own pure consciousness experience – you yourself reported no imaginative activity happening in an experience in which the ‘self’ is temporarily absent. This is experiential, empirical evidence. * VINEETO: 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. RESPONDENT: Is the ‘self’ is the very motor for ‘thoughts’? Your experience (and mine too) confirms: no. But try explaining that to someone who hasn’t experienced the temporary abeyance of ‘self’. They’d assume the self is still there, you’re just unconscious of it, or something of the sort. VINEETO: The ‘self’ – the psychological and psychic entity arising from the instinctual passions – is the ‘very motor’ for emotional thoughts, also known as feelings. However, many people don’t bother to make a distinction between their feelings and their thoughts and this includes all the spiritual authorities that have been so influential in Western society in the last half-century. * VINEETO: 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. RESPONDENT: So how are ‘reflective thoughts’ occurring without ‘psyche’? VINEETO: Thoughts are an activity of the human brain. When the ‘self’ or psyche is temporarily absent in a PCE then thoughts are no longer influenced by impulses from the amygdala and the limbic systems and intelligence can function unimpeded. RESPONDENT: I asked Richard to clarify the difference between ‘mind’ and ‘psyche’ as he uses the terms, and his answer was quite clear: his description of ‘psyche’ was a supernatural ‘life-force’ of sorts, a ghostly metaphysical entity or presence or power or force that is assumed to inhabit the flesh and blood body. VINEETO: When you use words such as ‘of sorts’, ‘ghostly’ or ‘is assumed to’ you indicate that Richard’s description that the psyche is a meta-physical entity inhabiting the flesh-and-blood body is not your experience. However, this is how you described your PCE –
This ‘invisible membrane’ that you seemed to ‘had walked through’ *is* your psyche and this entity, presence, power or force is experienced as something very real when one leaves it behind in a PCE – there is nothing ‘of sorts’, ‘ghostly’ or ‘assumed’ about it at all prior to or subsequent to a PCE.
As you said yourself, past this ‘invisible membrane’ the world is then perceived as perfection and ‘the ‘me’ who had set out for a walk … seemed to be aeons ago’. This ‘me’ is your psyche – so palpable as to be experienced as real and so all-consuming that it produces it’s own self-centred reality. However, when the PCE fades and one is back to normal, it is inevitable that most of the experience is forgotten. That’s when paying attention to one’s thoughts and feelings comes into play because only by paying ongoing attention to how one experiences this moment of being alive can one begin to observe and understand the psyche in action and become familiar with all of its aspects. And to pay attention to one’s psyche in action is part and parcel of fully leaving it behind. RESPONDENT: What I am calling ‘psyche’ is not in any way separate from the brain or the flesh and blood body. VINEETO: It seems that you are making a case for your second experience (the ‘interesting experience’ with a psyche present) to be not only equivalent to but better than a pure consciousness experience. Your claim that ‘psyche’ is not in any way separate from the brain or the flesh and blood body’ contradicts your own experience that in a PCE there was no psyche present – therefore it must be possible to separate the two. RESPONDENT: The only difference is that in my mind/ psyche, images are not evidence of a ‘self’, whereas for you (for reasons still unexplained), images (but not ‘thoughts’ or words or actions) are a manifestation of a ‘self’. VINEETO: From the perspective of the psyche images are not ‘evidence of a ‘self’’ because the psyche is the ‘self’. In a PCE, however, when the psyche is entirely absent and with it the action of imaging, apperception is freed to operate and the full scope of one’s psyche can become apparent if one is observant. Then, when one returns to ‘normal’ and begins to practice being attentive to one’s feelings and thoughts the various aspects of the ‘self’ will gradually become more apparent. RESPONDENT: I am not knocking you in any way for putting this in the ‘too hard basket’, but the sensible response to that would be to maintain a provisional opinion pending further information. VINEETO: But it is not in the ‘too hard basket’ for me any more. I know by observation and experience that ‘images are a manifestation of a ‘self’’. This is what I said –
I also said in another post –
RESPONDENT: However, you are arguing as if this has already been established as a fact. Is it? VINEETO: Yes, for me it has because I have spent a good deal of time being attentive as to how and why the human psyche (my psyche) operates as it does. To try to make sense of contrasting experiences is impossible unless one begins to understand how one’s own psyche has been conditioned to operate and is genetically-encoded to react – anything less than this hands-on experience can in the end only lead to assumptions and opinions. Now it is your turn to establish by your own experience the facts of how and why the human psyche operates. This is the dare implicit in actualism.
VINEETO: Part 2 of our conversation – 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. RESPONDENT: I do understand your intent here, and FWIW I do appreciate it. As far as indubitable benchmarks are concerned, it is the ASC (not the PCE) that has started to reveal itself through HAIETMOBA, VINEETO: The way you described your using the method it appears that you have created your own adapted version of the actualism method–
You also said –
This is not the method of actualism as described on the Actual Freedom Trust website. When I pay undivided attention to how I am experiencing this moment of being alive I do not consider my thoughts, beliefs and feelings ‘as something that is valid and authentic in its own right’ because from the benchmark of a PCE I know that ‘my’ perception is distorted by my beliefs, my feelings and my instinctual passions. When I pay undivided attentiveness I do this with the aim of uncovering any beliefs and disempowering any feelings which are standing in the way of experiencing the already existing perfection of the actual world. Whereas to allow oneself ‘to experience the world in my own way’ and to give ‘free reign’ to one’s consciousness is a ‘self’-oriented and ‘self’-aggrandizing enterprise – a recipe for producing an Altered State of Consciousness. RESPONDENT: … and as far as I can tell at this stage (early days, obviously), there is not a single disadvantage or danger to be found in the presence of ‘psyche’ as I’ve been experiencing it. VINEETO: This obviously depends on what is your aim is in life. The main difference between what you are doing and the process of actualism is that in a PCE one’s ‘self’ is in abeyance, which allows the always already existing actuality to become apparent, whereas in an ASC you ‘experience the world in my own way’. By doing so you are indulging in personal imagination and there are as many personal visualizations of perfection as there are people in this world. If however you have the aim of living in peace and harmony with your fellow human beings, then using one’s personal visualizations as one’s benchmark is certainly a ‘disadvantage or danger’ to this aim. RESPONDENT: See, the ‘self’ is a virtual entity, right? VINEETO: More correctly, the ‘self’ is an entity arising from the genetically encoded instinctual programming, something all humans are endowed with. In that the ‘self’ is experienced as the core of one’s ‘being’ and as such very, very real. One’s ‘self’ is as real as your anger is, as real as your fear is, as real as your nurture is and as real as your desire is. To leap to an intellectual understanding that the ‘self’ is virtual is to miss the fact that one’s own feelings that are the very substance of one’s instinctual ‘self’. RESPONDENT: If one can directly perceive not only the ‘stuff’ of which this virtual entity is made, but also perceive the medium in which this and other virtual entities are formed, the very perception of this virtual entity seems to render it harmless. Time will tell though. I’m not going to put on blinkers. What will be will be, and if I find out I’m kidding myself, I won’t be embarrassed to acknowledge it. (Once again, I agree that the ‘self’ can be very cunning indeed, and I don’t believe ‘I’ am immune to its wiles – but as yet I see no reason to suspect that this is the case here). VINEETO: When I use the term ‘direct perception’ or ‘direct experience’ I talk about ‘self’-less perception – one’s sensory perception is not intercepted, interpreted, distorted or enhanced by the ‘self’. In an ASC, as you said, with the presence of an ‘image generating / image-hosting psychic medium’, the ‘self’ has not yet been fully seen in its totality because the moment the ‘self’ is seen in its totality, it disappears. In an ASC one only perceives part of the ‘self’ while the other part, that you called ‘psyche’, remains intact and gets blown out of proportion, hence one’s ‘self’ feels transformed and one’s perception becomes proportionately distorted. * RESPONDENT: Ok, but while ever you are in ‘virtual freedom’ rather than ‘actual freedom’, you are indeed running the show. 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: What I was on about was the day to day dismantling of the self. But never mind, I understand what you’re saying and why, and it makes sense. VINEETO: Okay, in the ‘day to day dismantling of the self’ I am guided by the memory of my PCE, which has always been my benchmark for determining the difference between what is actual and what are ‘my’ creations, my feelings, my beliefs and my passions. Furthermore, the method of actualism is designed to reveal each instance when I am missing out on experiencing the already existing perfection because I am feeling what it is like to be here instead of actually being here – when I am feeling bored, feeling sad, feeling angry, feeling upset, feeling grand, feeling antagonistic, feeling dissociated and so on. These feelings are ‘me’ and whenever I notice any of those feelings, both the affectionate and desirable feelings and the hostile and invidious feelings then I bring them to the bright light of awareness where they eventually disappear along with the aspect of my identity related to those feelings. In this way I minimise the ‘good’ feelings along with ‘bad’ feelings, whilst encouraging the felicitous/ innocuous feelings, which in turn minimizes the influence and substance of ‘me’. Guided by the pure intent gleaned from the PCE ‘I’ have no chance of remaining undetected. * 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: Yes, that is very clear. (But see how it reads if you substitute ‘mind’ for ‘psychic experiences’ in the above passage.) VINEETO: Okay, this is how it reads now –
The fact remains that you are talking about ‘your’ visualizations produced by ‘your’ mind – and not the activity of the brain when the ‘self’ is absent. Also, it is obvious that the visualizations of ‘your’ mind are not common to all flesh and blood bodies – we wouldn’t be having this conversation if they were. To replace a word to make the experience appear more actual is not going to do the trick – and you said yourself that there was a distinct difference between your PCE and your ASC. You even gave your experience a new name – ‘Neo-Virtualism’ – which you described as
* 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 –
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’ …? RESPONDENT: Oh, not at all. If I implied that the PCE was itself ‘a trick’, I did not intend to. I meant that the apportionment of the highest value to the PCE, and the means of pursuing it in perpetuity while being in a relatively normal frame of mind, is a ‘trick’. (Which is to say nothing whatsoever about the merits of it). VINEETO: Before I discovered actualism I had ample experience of chasing enlightenment and after 17 years of it I had to admit that it did not deliver the goods. In this time I had plenty of opportunity to observe people who lived an ASC 24/7 including how they were in daily life situations and how they were with other people and when I had my own ASCs I found it confirmed that there is something substantially rotten about this revered state. My life-long dream had always been to live with a man in peace and harmony and those living in an ASC proved to be incapable of it, neither in their man-woman relationships nor with others who had found their own Truth, and this was also the case with those following in their footsteps. When I had my PCE and discovered that peace already exists and that it is ‘me’ who is the problem, there was no question about my course of action – I set out to do whatever is needed to live in this paradisiacal actuality for the rest of my life. In other words, ‘the apportionment of the highest value to the PCE’ comes from the fact that in a PCE it is self-evidently obvious that peace and perfection are already here and that ‘I’ don’t have to create, build, imagine, enhance my own peace and perfection – all ‘I’ have to do is undo ‘me’. * VINEETO: 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. RESPONDENT: Yes. I think the main difference between us at this stage is that I’m experiencing a certain something which you suggest is caused by ‘me’, whereas I experience it as something that is a perception of me (or rather, something in the brain which generates this virtual ‘me’) rather than something which ‘I’ do. Regardless of whether we agree on the value of this, am I at least making it clear what I mean? VINEETO: Yes, you do make it clear and in much of your descriptions I recognize my own altered states regardless of the fact that mine were full-on spiritual experiences and yours appear to be, at this stage at least, a bit more secular. And I also understand from my own experiences the overwhelming attraction of these extra-ordinary experiences, if only because the feeling of expansion from one’s normal day experience of being shackled feels so fulfilling and feels so liberating. The ‘certain something’ that you experience is indeed rather something that you are instead of something that you do. In an ASC the identity shifts its focus from ‘I’ the doer to ‘me’ the ‘being’ which is experienced as something like ‘one’s true nature’, the real Me, pure being, the One behind the throne – the expressions vary according to culture but essentially point to the same experience. If you are sufficiently motivated to explore your experiences then earnest and diligent observation will eventually reveal experientially that this ‘certain something’ is indeed ‘caused by ‘me’’, the instinctual identity.
VINEETO: Part 3 … 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? RESPONDENT: No, a psyche which is as pure as the actual world. (And no ‘me’ there to ‘have’ it). Rather, it is the very thing that generates the virtual ‘me’. VINEETO: The psyche, the generator of ‘the ‘virtual ‘me’’ is the very thing that generates the human condition. Whereas this generator of ‘the ‘virtual ‘me’’ is temporarily switched off in a PCE, which is a temporary experience of being free from the human condition in toto. You yourself reported that there is a complete absence of any psyche whatsoever, be it pure or impure, in a PCE. RESPONDENT: To put it another way, ‘I’ am an epiphenomenon of ‘it’ (which is nothing more than the brain in operation), rather than ‘it’ being an epiphenomenon of ‘me’. VINEETO: You are correct when you say ‘‘I’ am an epiphenomenon of ‘it’’ because ‘it’ is one’s innermost ‘being’ expanded thin and wide to such a degree that ‘it’ can appear to be as vast as the universe in which case one can feel oneself to be the universe experiencing itself. In this state ‘I’, the small s ‘self’, is experienced to be an epiphenomenon of ‘it’, the large s ‘Self’, also known as ‘the Ground of Being’. * VINEETO: In other words you want to be ‘self’-less whilst remaining a ‘self’. RESPONDENT: No, but I can see why you would conclude that. I hope I’m getting somewhere in trying to clarify this. VINEETO: Only meticulous observation and the comparison with your PCE can experientially reveal that an experience of ‘it’, no matter how pure it feels, is still an experience within the human condition. * VINEETO: You can certainly entertain this as a philosophy but never live it as an actuality. RESPONDENT: I honestly don’t see why not. It would be great if we could walk in each other’s shoes for a day to get around all these words and see directly what each of us is on about. VINEETO: But I do know what you are ‘on about’ – I had had several ASCs myself and I spent half my life with someone who was talking about nothing else morning and evening. Your dilemma is that you have cast aside your PCE as less interesting than your latest experience and as such you are missing the benchmark for determining the difference between an experience of ‘Being’ or of a ‘virtual me’ and a genuine ‘self’-less experience. RESPONDENT: In the meantime I’m continuing to practise HAIETMOBA without trying to make a principle of anything I experience. It’s just that all objections to what has happened so far seem (to me) to be without substance. VINEETO: To clarify, I am not objecting to your experience – it is entirely up to you what you choose to make your aim in life. I am simply reporting to you, based on my experiential knowledge, that your second experience is not genuinely ‘self’-less while you are trying to make out that it was, despite your own reported differences between your PCE and your second experience. * VINEETO: 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. RESPONDENT: No, that’s the thing: there really is not a great difference between them. In one state the self is absent, invisible, gone, and the purity and perfection of the actual world is all there to be enjoyed, freely, without any taint whatsoever, and it’s fantastic. In the other state there is all of that, plus an awareness of the psyche that generates the virtual ‘self’. These experiences have much more in common than they differ, I assure you. VINEETO: History has shown that for those who are pursuing an ASC, the ‘self’-less experience of a PCE not only becomes unattractive but even the memory of it vanishes completely out of sight. It is not for nothing that it took until 1992 before the first human being broke free from the grip of the grand delusion that is the altered state of consciousness into an actual freedom. Like it or not but it is a fact that you can only pursue one experience or the other experience because an actual freedom requires the elimination of ‘self’. RESPONDENT: I think because we’re discussing the points of contention, the underlying similarities have been overshadowed. In both states the entire burden of self (and all its capacity for mischief and misery) is gone. And that is wonderful. VINEETO: History has also shown that in an ASC the ‘self’s’ ‘capacity for mischief and misery’ is not gone at all. Because the instinctual passions are not eliminated in an ASC havoc can strike at any time – and then it strikes Big Time. * 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. RESPONDENT: No, not ‘psyche manifest in mind as well as world’. Rather, purity and perfection manifest in mind as well as world. VINEETO: Okay, I have read you wrong here. What still stands, however, is that ‘the presence of a mind-medium’ seems to be what is responsible for ‘this ‘pattern matching’ or ‘symbol-generating’ or ‘plasticity’’ – the very events that differ from your PCE. * VINEETO: 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: Yeah, I think that’s the very factor that Jaynes proposed as the cause of the ‘breakdown’. So many different peoples and tribes came together in great numbers, and their conflicting and incompatible visions, which had previously been collectively (tribally) shared, now became untenable and thus fragmented into individual subjective consciousness. VINEETO: Can you see a parallel between the ‘conflicting and incompatible visions’ of God arising from the visualizations of the ancient seers and the personal ‘‘pattern matching’ or ‘symbol-generating’’ visualizations of your psyche / ‘mind-medium’ which you find difficult to explain to others? * 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 ‘looking through’ –
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. RESPONDENT: Certainly no more ‘metaphysical’ than ‘thought’. VINEETO: Not so. Thought, when unimpeded by feelings and passions, is a function of the physical brain just as seeing is a function of the physical eyes and hearing a function of the physical ears. * VINEETO: 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. RESPONDENT: Is that so? I didn’t know that. VINEETO: There is lots of information on various Eastern methodologies of dissociation and
transcendence available and if you are interested then * VINEETO: And, as Peter put it in his journal –
The picture next to it RESPONDENT: LOL! There is no ‘Above and Beyond’ here, just a body-mind looking at itself and the world. If I do happen to become God, I’ll send you a postcard from the asylum ;-) VINEETO: At least you can’t say you haven’t been warned.
RESPONDENT: Only got time for a quick response right now, but this little passage has turned on a huge light bulb for me:
Thank you! That this ‘invisible membrane’ actually is my psyche had not occurred to me. It has a genuine ring of truth about it. VINEETO: This is excellent because now you know a bit more about the nature of the difference between a PCE and your second experience. This is good news indeed.
RESPONDENT: Only got time for a quick response right now, but this little passage has turned on a huge light bulb for me:
Thank you! That this ‘invisible membrane’ actually is my psyche had not occurred to me. It has a genuine ring of truth about it. VINEETO: This is excellent because now you know a bit more about the nature of the difference between a PCE and your second experience. This is good news indeed. RESPONDENT: Yeah, I think so. Let’s see how this sounds ... In a ‘normal’ state of mind, I walk around in the ‘real world’ that most people share. In this state, I experience the mind/psyche as a bundle of personal thoughts, memories, feelings, desires, fantasies, etc, all emanating from ‘my’ brain, all revolving around ‘me’ and ‘my’ world. This is ‘reality’. Walking out of this felt like walking through an invisible membrane, right out of the (comparatively) grim, grey, miserable world of reality and right into the sparkling clear, brilliant, wide open spaces of the actual world. VINEETO: Yes. And as Richard puts it, in doing so, you leave your ‘self’ behind. RESPONDENT: I’d always thought of ‘me’ as something contained wholly within the body; I didn’t realise that the miserable bugger actually creates a virtual bubble of ‘reality’ that encapsulates and distorts the whole of the ‘real’ world as I experience it – but it’s obvious now. When I walked out of that, I walked out of ‘me’. In hindsight it makes a lot of sense. (As Richard said, not ‘into a bubble of perfection’ but ‘out of a bubble of imperfection’). VINEETO: Yes. Not that anybody did the ‘walking’. I would describe my transition into a PCE more as if a curtain rips, a bubble bursts, a shell breaks, and then suddenly I, this body only, am here in this sparkling actuality, which has been right here all the time. And when the PCE fades ‘I’ know that ‘I’ have work to do, the work of thinning, diminishing, weakening the shell that ‘I’ at the centre create and which in turn separates me, this body, from experiencing the sparkling ever-present actuality. RESPONDENT: It also sheds some light on the ASC. In the ASC, the personal self, the ego, is gone – but the psyche remains. In that state, the psyche has a wholly different experiential character. It is experienced as something impersonal, something ‘I’ could never produce. And yet it is not actual, not physical, not available to anybody else’s gaze, therefore it is specific to this brain. VINEETO: Yes, any ASC experience is ‘specific to this brain’ because it is produced by the affective/instinctual part of the brain, the limbic system. RESPONDENT: It is experienced as a jelly-like medium in which thoughts and images arise. I think the images that arise from this ‘medium’ are probably what Jung called the archetypes of the collective unconscious, but Jung was mainly interested in their mythological meaning … VINEETO: When I explored my instinctual passions, loosely classifiable as fear, aggression, nurture and desire, I recognized quite a few of what Jung described as archetypal features and a few more to boot – they are the basic emotional patterns that everybody has regardless of cultural differences or idiosyncratic predispositions. Given that in the altered state of consciousness only the ego is temporarily absent, the archetypal instinctual features come to the fore, stripped of the moral and ethical limitations acquired in one’s conditioning. In an ASC the personal ego and its associated notions of what is right and wrong, good and bad is no longer functioning, which means that all of one’s instinctual passions are then perceived in a new light. With guilt and shame, fear of punishment and hope for reward no longer functioning, an ego-less person then re-interprets all of their instinctual passions as being good, beneficial, justified and/or glorified by the Divine. If you study the lives of people who permanently live or have lived in such altered states of consciousness – Ramesh Balsekar, Da Free John, Mohan Rajneesh, Jiddu and U.G. Krishnamurti or those who occasionally experienced an altered state by chemical stimulation such as Timothy Leary or other drug researchers – you will find that they not only espouse the tender instinctual passions but also defend their savage instinctual passions as not only necessary, but right and just – a clear indication that an altered state of being is within the grip of the passions that underpin the human condition. RESPONDENT: …whereas, for me, any mythological meaning (including the whole ‘human drama’) was entirely eclipsed by the ‘psychedelic’, geometrical, mathematically perfect structure of the medium in which they arose, and of the actual world in which this body was moving about. (I am quite certain that these ‘structures’ are direct experiences of actual neural mechanisms that underpin perception and cognition; they are not produced by imagination. The similarity of ‘psychedelic’ experiences across cultures and eras tends to bear this out too). VINEETO: Although your psyche felt itself to be impersonal, it nevertheless overlaid, tainted and re-interpreted the physical world ‘in which this body was moving about’ and thus actuality was as much distorted as it is in normal reality. ‘The similarity of ‘psychedelic’ experiences across cultures and eras’ is due to the fact that the psyche of all humans produces similar images and feelings in similar circumstances – the very basis for Jung’s observation of archetypal emotional patterns ‘across cultures and eras’. It might be useful to reflect on the fact that your PCE accorded with those that others describe as being a brief glimpse of being actually free from the human condition, whereas your psychedelic experience accords with those who take psychedelic drugs in order to temporarily escape grim reality. RESPONDENT: This is my current (tentative, provisional) model of self/world: To extend the physical metaphor of the membrane for a sec, bearing in mind that it’s only a model ... consider a virtual egg. The yolk is the normal self, wherein ‘I’ and ‘me’ exist. Surrounding the yolk is the clear jelly-like goo which is the medium of the impersonal psyche. VINEETO: I think the egg is an excellent metaphor. Generally I use the terms ‘I’ and ‘me’ according to how they are used in other consciousness studies whereby ‘I’ stands for ego or the small-s ‘self’ and ‘me’ stands for soul, psyche or the higher, big-S ‘Self’. In an altered state of consciousness one experiences that the centre, the yolk in your metaphor, has disappeared which results in a feeling of freedom and an expansion of consciousness. But only in a pure, both ‘self’-less and ‘Self’-less, consciousness experience can it become apparent that there is another part to the human condition, the very core in fact, the ‘jelly-like goo’ of the egg-white, which is as much contained within the hard shell of the egg as is the yolk. RESPONDENT: Outside the shell is the actual universe as experienced in the PCE. VINEETO: Yes. RESPONDENT: In the ASC, the centre of experience/ awareness/ cognition is situated not in the yolk or outside the shell, but in the jelly. VINEETO: Yes, or more accurate, one experiences oneself to be centre-less – without a centre as in not having a personal ego or identity but affectively experiencing oneself as boundlessly living in one’s own version of a perfect world. RESPONDENT: From there, it is possible to look outward to the clear open spaces of the actual world, without any distortion (just as in a PCE), VINEETO: No, the ‘the clear open spaces of the actual world’ are images ‘I’ project on the inside of the eggshell, not a direct perception. The ‘jelly-like goo’, the sticky instinctual substance of the psyche, prevents any direct perception of the actual world outside of the shell, while it simultaneously creates the feeling of boundless freedom. RESPONDENT: … or to look ‘inwards’ at the virtual entities emerging from the yolk. VINEETO: The one who is looking ‘‘inwards’ at the virtual entities emerging from the yolk’ as well as looking outwards its projected image of ‘the clear open spaces of the actual world’ is but another aspect of ‘me’ … and the most cunning of them all. RESPONDENT: I understand that the goal of actual freedom lies outside the ‘egg’ altogether. VINEETO: O.K. Do you also understand why? RESPONDENT: I am still not 100% sure, but I suspect that being outside the ‘yolk’ is sufficient to enjoy the same results with fewer compromises (and perhaps even some as-yet-undiscovered benefits). VINEETO: With this assessment you are in agreement with all of Eastern mysticism, Western mysticism, Sufism and the secular branches of human consciousness studies. The search for ‘some as-yet-undiscovered benefits’ of altered states of being within the human condition has been going on for at least 5000 years of human history, so you will find the supposed benefits listed in the literature of spiritualism and mysticism as well as in the results of psychedelic experimentation. As is apparent from the way human beings, nations and cultural and racial tribes relate to each other, peace-on-earth is not amongst the benefits of ‘being outside the ‘yolk’’. RESPONDENT: It seems to me, and this is the key point, that the instinctual passions are operative only within the ‘yolk’, but I need more experiences to make sure. VINEETO: What is not operative ‘outside the ‘yolk’’ are the morals and ethics that one normally uses to assess one’s instinctual passions and this is what causes the deception that the instinctual passions themselves are not operating. However, the more you become attentive to, and familiar with, the cunning disguises of the identity and the more you become sensitive to the feelings hiding beneath denial and transcendence – a well-known toxic side-effect of an altered state of being – the more you will come to experience for yourself that the instinctual passions are fully operating ‘outside the ‘yolk’’. Richard has lived an altered state of consciousness –‘outside the ‘yolk’’ – for eleven years without interruption and he was able to step out of the ‘Self’ into the purity and perfection of actuality only by systematically investigating the instinctual passions, particularly the tender instinctual passions. RESPONDENT: If I’m wrong about that, the whole egg is shattered, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can all go home. VINEETO: In order to find out that I was wrong about my favourite beliefs I needed a good reason to doubt them and the only reason good enough to doubt my identity-sustaining beliefs was my passion for peace-on-earth – something which all of my well-meaning beliefs had not been able to deliver. In my experience, the process of becoming actually free from the human condition is not a matter of hoping for a one-day sudden shattering realization but it is a steady effort to firstly acknowledge, become aware of, discover and diminish and then to successively abandon one’s beliefs and feelings of malice and sorrow, one’s schemes and dreams, one’s hopes and fears that prevent me from being harmless and happy. Then, one day, with apperception more and more in operation, the last of the weakened ‘me’ will simply wither of starvation. It being an actual and not an imagined felt freedom there is neither a leap nor a short-cut. I think No 32 put is very well when he said to No 58 –
Nothing’s for free, not even freedom. Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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