|
Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 86
VINEETO: Seeing that you are having difficulty attempting to understand the core
issue of what an actual freedom from the human condition is all about * RESPONDENT to Richard: So you were still alive when you entered what had previously been thought of as unattainable before death. How does that reveal that nobody had been there before? RICHARD: Perhaps if it were to be put sequentially: 1. In order for that which had previously been considered as unattainable before death (a dimension, by whatever name, where there is no suffering) to become apparent, whilst the flesh and blood body is still alive, ‘Being’ itself ceases. RESPONDENT to Richard: Okay. Got that. The ‘spirit’ or the ‘enlightened state’ which many claim is the source of truth, available now some say, but only in its oceanic full version after death, that has to go. Right. RICHARD: 2. That ‘Being’ is what was previously considered to be that which ‘quits the body’, at the physical death of an Enlightened Being/Awakened One, and which attains to that dimension, by whatever name, where there is no suffering. RESPONDENT to Richard: Right. The thing which has to go, was thought to quit the body when you die and become one with the full monty. Right. Familiar with that. RICHARD: 3. As there is no such ‘Being’ in actuality
it is patently obvious that physical death is the end, finish. Kaput. RESPONDENT to Richard: Er. Nope. Why is it ‘patently obvious’. It’s not at all patently obvious to me. It’s not patently obvious that nothing which in some way I am does not continue after death. It is not patently obvious to me that, without mind, body and spirit I am still, somehow, That. VINEETO: Can you see that exactly this point is the crux of the matter? For Richard it is patently obvious that there is no ‘Being’ surviving physical death because Richard’s ‘Being’ is extinguished … before physical death. As he lives this experience of being a flesh-and-blood-body-sans-identity day and night he knows without a doubt that there is no resemblance of any ‘Being’ whatsoever found in his physical body. Whereas for you it seems impossible to even consider this as a possibility RESPONDENT to Richard: But anyway, moving on. VINEETO: Your ‘but anyway, moving on’ is a throw-away line apparently said in order to avoid sorting this issue. Your circulatory correspondence on this topic seems to demonstrate that you cannot ‘move on’ until you genuinely consider, and take on board, the fact that *all* of one’s ‘being’ is indeed extinguished at physical death. Only then is it possible to ‘move on’ to contemplating the possibility that one’s ‘being’ can self-immolate *before* physical death. It is not for nothing that the first line on the Actual Freedom website reads –
RICHARD: 3. As there is no such ‘Being’ in actuality
it is patently obvious that physical death is the end, finish. Kaput. RESPONDENT to Richard: Er. Nope. Why is it ‘patently obvious’. It’s not at all patently obvious to me. It’s not patently obvious that nothing which in some way I am does not continue after death. It is not patently obvious to me that, without mind, body and spirit I am still, somehow, That. VINEETO: Can you see that exactly this point is the crux of the matter? RESPONDENT: No. VINEETO: Can you understand that your idea that ‘nothing which in some way I am does not continue after death’ is a spiritual belief, a belief in a spirit-being which will be able to continue after physical death – when *what you are* ceases to be alive, when the lungs stop breathing in air, when the blood ceases to circulate, when the brain ceases to function and when consciousness ceases and when decay and decomposition inevitably begins? If you can understand that, then the next step is to grasp the fact that a spirit-being has no existence in actuality. * VINEETO: For Richard it is patently obvious that there is no ‘Being’ surviving physical death because Richard’s ‘Being’ is extinguished … before physical death. As he lives this experience of being a flesh-and-blood-body-sans-identity day and night he knows without a doubt that there is no resemblance of any ‘Being’ whatsoever found in his physical body. RESPONDENT: I understand that. VINEETO: If you understand that then why do you go on to say, further below, that ‘I doubt that Richard’s being is indeed extinguished’? * VINEETO: Whereas for you it seems impossible to even consider this as a
possibility RESPONDENT: Not at all. I am quite willing to consider that as a possibility. VINEETO: This is what you said only 11 days ago –
Are you now saying that this is no longer valid? RESPONDENT: But, again, let me make sure I’ve got that possibility straight – Richard’s flesh, blood, brain and spirit being died. VINEETO: Richard’s ‘flesh, blood, brain’ did not die – obviously. What did die in 1992, as in ceased to be, was his spirit being. It’s all very simple really – spiritual belief has it that the death of the ego is sufficient to become ‘who you really are’, which is ‘me’ at the core of my being. Whereas actual freedom involves the death of both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul in order that I become what I am – this flesh and blood body only. RESPONDENT: That being is dead already. From the death of that state it is obvious to Richard that there’s nothing left but matter. I can dig that. How to extinguish that identity remains mysterious to me, as do a couple of other matters. VINEETO: The ‘how to’ only makes sense to contemplate when you have come to the conclusion, for yourself, that you *want to* extinguish ‘that identity’, whereas you presently still maintain that ‘perhaps I find the idea of extinction terrifying’. * VINEETO: … and therefore you are bound to doubt that Richard’s Being is indeed extinguished RESPONDENT: I doubt that Richard’s being is indeed extinguished VINEETO: Now here is a question for you – if you doubt that Richard’s being is extinguished, i.e. doubt that Richard is actually free from the human condition, then why did you ask him –
RESPONDENT: ... because blindly accepting someone’s pronouncements on the nature of things, no matter how appealing (and Richard’s pronouncements are indeed very appealing), is obviously a stupid thing to do. I want to explore as many nooks and crannies, especially sort of fundamental ones, before I toss my eggs in. That makes sense to me. If you can identify exactly why this investigation is more likely to conceal than reveal what Richard is saying, I’m all ears. VINEETO: When I came across actualism I was fed up with the normal, the therapeutical, the philosophical and the spiritual solutions that society had to offer to the big questions in life and I was ready for something new. That meant that I was ready and willing to question my own ideas, convictions, truths, opinions and beliefs because I already knew that they were counterproductive to making me happy and harmless. To merely question other people, in this case Richard, without simultaneously questioning your own so-called ‘knowledge’ will not bring about any change in your life, if that is what you are looking for. * VINEETO: […you are bound to doubt that Richard’s Being is indeed extinguished] and consequently that his condition is something entirely new to human history. RESPONDENT: Yes, now again we get to this ‘consequently’ bit. Here it makes no sense whatsoever. As I keep on asking, how does having no identity make it clear that nobody has ever had no identity before? Richard seems to base his knowledge on an enlightened picking up or not picking up of psychic footprints. (…) VINEETO: Of course, the ‘consequently’ makes no sense to you … you haven’t resolved the first issue which is to investigate if your belief in a life after death, in whatever form, is fact or fiction. Once you resolve this issue to your own satisfaction, you will be in a much better position to understand for yourself what Richard means when he says his being is extinguished. * RESPONDENT to Richard: But anyway, moving on. VINEETO: Your ‘but anyway, moving on’ is a throw-away line apparently said in order to avoid sorting this issue. RESPONDENT: You might be right. My reaction is; ‘hardly!’ I would very much like to ‘sort the issue’. VINEETO: If you do, then why not start at the beginning and stay at the beginning before moving on – can you see that the belief in a life after death is a spirit-ual belief because it is based on the assumption that something non-physical (a spirit) will survive physical death? The issue of a belief in a life after death is fundamental to actualism – if you believe in a life after death or if you want to remain ‘open’ to a life after death then spiritualism is for you, if you think a belief in life after death is non-sensical then you will have a firm footing from which to understand what actualism is about – if you are interested in peace on earth that is. * VINEETO: Your circulatory correspondence on this topic … RESPONDENT: It seems to me that my correspondence is circulatory because I’m not getting a straight answer to my questions. I am quite willing to accept that it is my crooked reasoning that is warping what is too straight for me to see. But I need to see my crooked reasoning. VINEETO: Your reasoning is ‘crooked’ because on one hand you want to maintain a belief in life after death while on the other hand you want to understand how one’s being – the very being that supposedly survives physical death – can be extinguished whilst still being alive. RESPONDENT: Accusing me of tergiversating, asking pointless ‘yes-but-why’ style questions, circulating around the matter at hand and so forth is all well and good. You might be right. But I need to see exactly what point I’m missing and how I can accept it as plain and obvious and how that might lead to the answers to all the other questions I have. VINEETO: There is no accusation – you are entirely free to arrange your thoughts the way you want to about the issues that concern you. You were merely made aware of the fact that you are tergiversating and circulating around the issues under discussion. Straight thinking as opposed to circulatory thinking means to begin at the start and only ‘move on’ when the first point is understood and resolved. To reiterate for emphasis – the issue at hand is the belief in life after death. I know from experience that at first it takes guts and determination to even consider that physical death is the end but I discovered, the more I looked into the matter, that I, along with everyone else had been sold a dummy and it was a great relief when I finally stopped worrying about a life after death. The way I sorted out the issue of my beliefs in life after death was experientially,
not intellectually, i.e. I investigated the *feelings* I had around the issue which allowed me to replace my beliefs with
straightforward facts. Descriptions of this process can be found A New and Non-Spiritual Down-to-Earth Freedom means exactly what it says, new, non-spiritual and down-to-earth.
RICHARD: 3. As there is no such ‘Being’ in actuality it is patently obvious that physical death is the end, finish. Kaput. RESPONDENT to Richard: Er. Nope. Why is it ‘patently obvious’. It’s not at all patently obvious to me. It’s not patently obvious that nothing which in some way I am does not continue after death. It is not patently obvious to me that, without mind, body and spirit I am still, somehow, That. VINEETO: Can you see that exactly this point is the crux of the matter? RESPONDENT: No. VINEETO: Can you understand that your idea that ‘nothing which in some way I am does not continue after death’ is a spiritual belief, a belief in a spirit-being which will be able to continue after physical death – when *what you are* ceases to be alive, when the lungs stop breathing in air, when the blood ceases to circulate, when the brain ceases to function and when consciousness ceases and when decay and decomposition inevitably begins? RESPONDENT: Firstly it may not be a belief. The electric aliveness that doesn’t seem to be completely me, and yet is here, is not a belief, and it doesn’t seem to be just meat. Richard may have extinguished his psyche-spirit, but I don’t see why that strange-yet-actual life isn’t something different to the vagaries of spirit, that it wasn’t always here, and that it won’t always, in some way, be here. Secondly, I don’t believe in anything that I don’t know as experience. At least I do my best not to. But not believing in something does not mean that it doesn’t exist. (…) VINEETO: I know many people who proudly wear their openness on their sleeve – a little introspection on my part revealed that having such an attitude was but a form of intellectual arrogance. What these people fail to understand is that being ‘open’ means that they always have to remain closed to the facts of the matter in order to maintain their philosophy of being open one way or the other. But then again were they to be open to discovering the conclusive facts of the matter for themselves, they would find quickly themselves outside of the mainstream of those who believe in whatever beliefs are currently fashionable. * VINEETO: If you can understand that, then the next step is to grasp the fact that a spirit-being has no existence in actuality. RESPONDENT: But a benevolent, scintillating, infinite, eternal, ever-present, serendipity-inducing, actively-alive actuality, which is beyond imagination, beyond reality and beyond emotion, does have existence. I accept that something spiritual, something benevolent, scintillating, infinite, eternal, ever-present, serendipity-inducing, actively-alive, beyond imagination, beyond reality and beyond emotion, is still a personal identity, only refined and mystified, and therefore fraudulent. But they do sound rather similar sometimes... It still strikes me as incredible that nobody ever has ever described or known actuality in its fullness apart from Richard, that nothing that anyone has ever said is at all in any way the same as this actuality which Richard describes. And I still don’t get how he can know that nobody ever, even those unrecorded, was ever actually free. VINEETO: How in your perception does a ‘benevolent, scintillating, infinite, eternal (…) actively-alive actuality’ suddenly becomes something spiritual? To wit – the instinctual identity, be it of the spiritualist or a materialist kind, invariably experiences the physical universe as a fearful and daunting place, wherein one has to be literally on one’s guard at all times. When this identity is in abeyance in a pure consciousness experience, it suddenly becomes obvious that the physical universe is not malicious and sorrowful but that it is benevolent, pure and scintillating and it is only the passionate identity within this physical body that has painted those malicious and sorrowful qualities over the sparkling actuality of the physical universe. In other words, when the entity inside this flesh-and-blood body disappears and the identity-induced distorted view of the universe falls away then the underlying benevolent and scintillating quality of the actuality of the universe becomes stunningly apparent. RESPONDENT: It still strikes me as incredible that nobody ever has ever described or known actuality in its fullness apart from Richard, that nothing that anyone has ever said is at all in any way the same as this actuality which Richard describes. And I still don’t get how he can know that nobody ever, even those unrecorded, was ever actually free. VINEETO: I find it rather amusing that on one hand you, like many others before you, cannot grasp the self-less experience that Richard describes as his ongoing experience, let alone report having had a memory of such an experience – yet in the same breath you say that it strikes you as incredible that this experience is indeed entirely new to human experience. * VINEETO: For Richard it is patently obvious that there is no ‘Being’ surviving physical death because Richard’s ‘Being’ is extinguished … before physical death. As he lives this experience of being a flesh-and-blood-body-sans-identity day and night he knows without a doubt that there is no resemblance of any ‘Being’ whatsoever found in his physical body. RESPONDENT: Yet there is a benevolent, scintillating, infinite, eternal, ever-present, serendipity-inducing, actively-alive actuality, which is beyond imagination, beyond reality and beyond emotion. As far as I can see, although usurpers may have dirtied the name, that is Being. Or God. Or whatever you want to call it. The great beyond. The big happy. The golden cigar in the sky. VINEETO: And not only do many current religious and spiritual movements preach
such an anthropocentric and theomorphic view of the physical universe but one can trace such beliefs back to the very earliest
religion we know of, Pantheism * VINEETO: For Richard it is patently obvious that there is no ‘Being’ surviving physical death because Richard’s ‘Being’ is extinguished … before physical death. As he lives this experience of being a flesh-and-blood-body-sans-identity day and night he knows without a doubt that there is no resemblance of any ‘Being’ whatsoever found in his physical body. RESPONDENT: I understand that. VINEETO: If you understand that then why do you go on to say, further below, that ‘I doubt that Richard’s being is indeed extinguished’? RESPONDENT: Understanding does not mean completely accepting. I understand, while doubting. Like I understand the big bang theory (more or less) without completely accepting it. VINEETO: Then the next obvious question for you to answer to yourself is – what do you need to do in order to turn your understanding into an indubitable fact, or, to be more precise – what do you need to do in order to turn this understanding into experiential certainty? Assuming that finding the answer is vitally important to you, that is. * VINEETO: It’s all very simple really – spiritual belief has it that the death of the ego is sufficient to become ‘who you really are’, which is ‘me’ at the core of my being. Whereas actual freedom involves the death of both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul in order that I become what I am – this flesh and blood body only. RESPONDENT: That being is dead already. From the death of that state it is obvious to Richard that there’s nothing left but matter. I can dig that. How to extinguish that identity remains mysterious to me, as do a couple of other matters. VINEETO: The ‘how to’ only makes sense to contemplate when you have come to the conclusion, for yourself, that you *want to* extinguish ‘that identity’, whereas you presently still maintain that ‘perhaps I find the idea of extinction terrifying’. RESPONDENT: I want to extinguish my identity completely. I don’t find that terrifying. What I find terrifying (actually I’m not even sure that I do find it that terrifying – rather it seems to logically follow that it does induce fear – or at least apocalyptically huge pointlessness) is not my identity being destroyed now (leaving a benevolent, scintillating, infinite, eternal, ever-present, serendipity-inducing, actively-alive actuality, which is beyond imagination, beyond reality and beyond emotion), but everything which in some way I am one day being completely and utterly destroyed, along with a benevolent, scintillating, infinite, eternal, ever-present, serendipity-inducing, actively-alive actuality, which is beyond imagination, beyond reality and beyond emotion. Or anything like it. VINEETO: Do you realize that this identity which you want to completely extinguish is the very same identity that you believe somehow survives your physical death? Can you now see why investigating one’s belief in, or abandoning one’s agnostic stance of remaining open to, a life after death is instrumental to understanding what this business of extinguishing one’s identity entails? * VINEETO: … and therefore you are bound to doubt that Richard’s Being is indeed extinguished. RESPONDENT: No. I doubt Richard’s Being is extinguished because it is sensible to doubt the kind of pronouncements being made by Richard. Totally accepting something like this as true which I haven’t investigated beforehand is obviously insane. VINEETO: In my personal experience merely doubting has no value at all. What I did when I came across actualism was to make a sensible judgement of Richard’s report by firstly taking it at face value and then establishing a prima facie case as to its sensibility from all the information I could gather. From there I took up the challenge to *experientially* verify for myself the facts of the situation. However, this required that I stopped relying on belief – and its stable-mate agnosticism – and instead investigated each belief, conviction, opinion and truth that I had taken on in my life in order to replace them with solid facts and experiential evidence. * VINEETO: … and therefore you are bound to doubt that Richard’s Being is indeed extinguished. RESPONDENT: I doubt that Richard’s being is indeed extinguished VINEETO: Now here is a question for you – if you doubt that Richard’s being is extinguished, i.e. doubt that Richard is actually free from the human condition, then why did you ask him –
RESPONDENT: Because I don’t understand, even if he was actually free from the human condition, how he could know such an outstanding thing. When I say I doubt Richard is actually free from the human condition it doesn’t mean that I think he isn’t. Rather I do not completely one hundred percent accept that he is – much less that he is the first ever and that nobody, ever, even those unrecorded, have ever been it. It seems to me a sensible way to proceed, given that I do not completely 100% accept what Richard says, to ask questions such as I am asking. One of which being, ‘assuming that you are what you say you are, how is it then true that...’ If this line of approach is fundamentally flawed, please point out how. VINEETO: Again what you are saying comes down to the point that you need to *experientially* verify for yourself the facts of the situation. Otherwise you will vacillate between doubt and acceptance until the cows come home. By the way, you don’t need to ask questions of Richard – you can read what Richard is saying, ask the same questions of yourself, and nut out your own answer to the question, keeping your feet firmly on the ground by verifying it with your own life experience, and then see if it accords with what Richard has discovered about the particular matter you are interested in. This way you abandon the generally life-long habit of merely believing what others say or having to accept or reject what others tell you. * VINEETO: When I came across actualism I was fed up with the normal, the therapeutical, the philosophical and the spiritual solutions that society had to offer to the big questions in life and I was ready for something new. That meant that I was ready and willing to question my own ideas, convictions, truths, opinions and beliefs because I already knew that they were counterproductive to making me happy and harmless. To merely question other people, in this case Richard, without simultaneously questioning your own so-called ‘knowledge’ will not bring about any change in your life, if that is what you are looking for. RESPONDENT: I am quite willing to question my own ideas, convictions, truths, opinions and beliefs. But … VINEETO: Ok, then, before you devaluate your willingness to question with the obligatory ‘but’ – may I ask which of your own ‘ideas, convictions, truths, opinions and beliefs’ you have questioned since you came across this mailing list? RESPONDENT: [But] obviously if someone comes along like Richard, making the kind of claims he is making, I’m going to question him too. Just to accept what people say – and I mean particularly what people say about the big questions – can lead to rarefied arrogance, extremely subtle frustration, blindness, and denial. I know this from experience. VINEETO: Richard simply states that an actual freedom is entirely new to human experience. It is now up to you to *experientially* verify for yourself that this is so – or provide factual evidence that this is not so. Otherwise you will vacillate between doubt and acceptance (belief) until the cows come home. Incidentally, have you noticed a predilection amongst many correspondents to focus their attention on Richard per se and to completely ignore the content of what he has discovered? Have you ever considered that most of us humans enjoy the benefit of having energy in the form of electrical current flowing into our houses and work places but the discoverer of electricity is long since dead and his name is now but of historical interest? Likewise that most of us human beings can now be vaccinated against many contagious diseases that were fatal to past generations and yet the discovers of these processes are now by and large dead and their names are but of historical interest? What Richard has discovered is that, contrary to current belief, it is now possible to radically and irrevocably change human nature such that human beings no longer need to be instinctually passionate beings – perpetually driven to malice and constantly susceptible to being seduced by sorrow. This is a radical discovery to put it mildly but a discovery whose time is obviously ripe given the current circumstances of the human species whereupon the instinctual struggle for survival is passé for an increasing majority of human beings on the planet. In exactly the same way as other discoveries, one day people will also take this discovery for granted such that the discoverer of the process whereby this was initially made possible will be long dead and his name will be but of historical interest? In other words, would it not be more pertinent to focus your attention on *what* is being offered rather than *who* is offering it, particularly as you too one day will be history … as in dead? * VINEETO: […you are bound to doubt that Richard’s Being is indeed extinguished] and consequently that his condition is something entirely new to human history. RESPONDENT: Yes, now again we get to this ‘consequently’ bit. Here it makes no sense whatsoever. As I keep on asking, how does having no identity make it clear that nobody has ever had no identity before? Richard seems to base his knowledge on an enlightened picking up or not picking up of psychic footprints. (…) VINEETO: Of course, the ‘consequently’ makes no sense to you … you haven’t resolved the first issue which is to investigate if your belief in a life after death, in whatever form, is fact or fiction. Once you resolve this issue to your own satisfaction, you will be in a much better position to understand for yourself what Richard means when he says his being is extinguished. RESPONDENT: What do I have to resolve? Do I have to accept that death is the end of absolutely everything that in some way I am? This would amount to a belief to me. Just as it would amount to a belief to accept that the opposite is true. I accept neither 100 per cent until it is definitively revealed to me one way or another. It seems more likely that something in some way that I am continues. Does this have to change to a ‘more likely that something in some way that I am does not continue’? What do I need to do to ‘resolve’ this. Please inform. VINEETO: You don’t have to do anything. But if you want to stop vacillating between belief and doubt about an actual freedom being entirely new to human experience, then a useful starting point is your belief, or more to the point your agnostic stance, about life after death. And a belief, any belief, is only satisfactorily resolved one way or the other when you find out for yourself the solid and conclusive fact of the matter. * RESPONDENT to Richard: But anyway, moving on. VINEETO: Your ‘but anyway, moving on’ is a throw-away line apparently said in order to avoid sorting this issue. RESPONDENT: You might be right. My reaction is; ‘hardly!’ I would very much like to ‘sort the issue’. VINEETO: If you do, then why not start at the beginning and stay at the beginning before moving on – can you see that the belief in a life after death is a spirit-ual belief because it is based on the assumption that something non-physical (a spirit) will survive physical death? RESPONDENT: Yes, I see that. But it also seems to me to be a non-spirit-ual belief that nothing survives. How can you know? I mean how can YOU Vineeto know? I can just about get it that Richard knows, he’s arrived, but surely for you, as you still have identity, it is just a belief? VINEETO: Ha, there are many, many facts one can find out as definitive facts whilst still being an identity. Incidentally, a major part of the process of actualism consists of replacing one’s beliefs, convictions, worldviews, feelings and intuitive hunches with facts and actuality. In this particular case sincere and diligent contemplation and a pure consciousness experience reveal that the whole eons-old fantasy of a life after death is naught but a product of human passionate imagination and that it has nothing whatsoever to with the actuality of the physical universe. * VINEETO: The issue of a belief in a life after death is fundamental to actualism – if you believe in a life after death or if you want to remain ‘open’ to a life after death then spiritualism is for you, if you think a belief in life after death is non-sensical then you will have a firm footing from which to understand what actualism is about – if you are interested in peace on earth that is. RESPONDENT: So I have to intellectually accept this life after death thing before a PCE will come? Somehow my willingness to accept that when my brain-spirit-body dies something which in some way I am will remain is blocking a PCE? How? Moreover, … VINEETO: Before you add more questions onto this line of thought, it would make sense to first make sure that your premise is indeed based on what I actually said. Nowhere did I say that you have to ‘intellectually accept’ that there is no life after death. Nowhere did I say that this intellectual acceptance is a preliminary for a pure consciousness experience. To quickly jump to conclusions based upon one’s familiar way of thinking is a common trait of the human condition – that’s why paying attention to this moment of being alive, particularly to one’s feelings and thoughts, is so crucial when one is embarking upon finding out about something new, particularly when it is entirely new to human experience. RESPONDENT: [Moreover,] how do I get rid of that willingness. I can see that my brain-body-psyche/spirit will die for good when the time comes. I can see that. Isn’t that good enough? I’m willing to accept that something that is not brain-body-psyche/spirit something benevolent, scintillating, infinite, eternal, ever-present, serendipity-inducing, actively-alive actuality, which is beyond imagination, beyond reality and beyond emotion, which in SOME way I am WILL survive. But I’m not that attached to the idea. It’s only a willingness after all. If, when the head snaps back and the brain dies and actual freedom floods over me and I find out for sure it’s not true, I’ll give it up, no problem. Even though it does seem it might auger fear and despair. So what do I have to do? Give up the willingness. No problem. It’s just a thought anyway. VINEETO: What I did in order to rid myself of belief was to meticulously discover the facts about the things I had taken on board as the truth. Seeing the fact will make any belief redundant … and any doubt as well. This * VINEETO: Your circulatory correspondence on this topic … RESPONDENT: It seems to me that my correspondence is circulatory because I’m not getting a straight answer to my questions. I am quite willing to accept that it is my crooked reasoning that is warping what is too straight for me to see. But I need to see my crooked reasoning. VINEETO: Your reasoning is ‘crooked’ because on one hand you want to maintain a belief in life after death … RESPONDENT: No I don’t. I don’t want to completely reject it. But it’s not a big deal. VINEETO: This is what you said (additionally) on this subject at the top to this letter –
This is what dancing around the subject before finally turning one’s back to it looks like in print –
It obviously is ‘not a big deal’ to you, otherwise you would get straight to the task of finding out the facts about life after death. To remain an agnostic about the big questions in life is to chicken out on experientially discovering the answers to the difficult questions of life but it also means that you will never get a satisfying, definitive, conclusive, i.e. experiential, answer about what it is to be a human being. * VINEETO: … while on the other hand you want to understand how one’s being – the very being that supposedly survives physical death – can be extinguished whilst still being alive. RESPONDENT: What I really want to know is how Richard can know that everyone who has ever lived, even those who left no record, were definitely not actually free from the human condition. VINEETO: Given that this question has been asked by at least 25 other correspondents (on the link provided to you) and several times already by yourself, and has been answered at length, has it not occurred to you that the only answer that will ultimately be satisfactory to you is to *really know* the answer experientially? As a possible starting point I suggested to begin your inquiry by investigating your beliefs about life after death, including the sources from whom you got them from, in order to establish whether or not it makes sense to you that ‘you’ as a psychological/psychic non-physical identity can survive physical death. Once you have resolved this issue to your own satisfaction, one way or the other, you will be in a much better position to understand for yourself what Richard means when he says his being is extinguished and you will also be in a much better position to understand why this experience – to live sans identity as this flesh-and-blood body only – is something entirely new to human experience. When I first came across actualism I made up my mind not to remain a fence-sitter about the big questions in life any more – I wanted to find out the answers … come what may. I can’t recommend abandoning the habit of believing highly enough – the very process of doing so is the way and the means to becoming both happy and harmless. * RESPONDENT: Accusing me of tergiversating, asking pointless ‘yes-but-why’ style questions, circulating around the matter at hand and so forth is all well and good. You might be right. But I need to see exactly what point I’m missing and how I can accept it as plain and obvious and how that might lead to the answers to all the other questions I have. VINEETO: There is no accusation – you are entirely free to arrange your thoughts the way you want to about the issues that concern you. You were merely made aware of the fact that you are tergiversating and circulating around the issues under discussion. RESPONDENT: ‘Made aware of a fault’ is pretty much ‘accusation’ in my book. VINEETO: I said ‘you were merely made aware of the *fact* that you are tergiversating’ which you have turned into ‘made aware of a *fault*’ – in other words, you added your personal ethical evaluation (that this is a fault) to my pointing out the fact that you are tergiversating. I also made it perfectly clear that ‘you are entirely free to arrange your thoughts the way you want to’, i.e. that what you think and how you think is entirely your business. By accusing me of making an ‘accusation’ you are using the well-worn tactic of shooting the messenger thereby tergiversating from investigating the fact of your tergiversation. Don’t you find it fascinating to discover how the human condition works in practice in yourself? * VINEETO: Straight thinking as opposed to circulatory thinking means to begin at the start and only ‘move on’ when the first point is understood and resolved. To reiterate for emphasis – the issue at hand is the belief in life after death. RESPONDENT: Right-o. It’s taken me this long to find out that this is the starting point. And that’s only because you told me. Why other questions I have asked have not been the starting point may become clear later. VINEETO: The reason why I suggested that this is the starting point for you is because you are having difficulty in understanding how one’s being – the very being that supposedly survives physical death – can be extinguished whilst still being alive and furthermore, why this extinction of one’s being is entirely new to human history. In an attempt to make this even clearer, and more pertinent to you, I will point out that you have already said in this post –
If you are sincere in saying this, and I don’t doubt that you are, the question then becomes a matter of when … if you believe ‘you’ as an identity can survive physical death then you obviously cannot extinguish your identity whilst alive. If you, however, totally abandon your belief that ‘you’ as an identity will survive physical death then your intent to become free of your identity in this lifetime becomes very palpable indeed. * VINEETO: I know from experience that at first it takes guts and determination to even consider that physical death is the end … RESPONDENT: I am quite willing to consider that. VINEETO: O.k. Are you also willing to find out with 100% certainty that physical death is the end? * VINEETO: … but I discovered, the more I looked into the matter, that I, along with everyone else had been sold a dummy and it was a great relief when I finally stopped worrying about a life after death. The way I sorted out the issue of my beliefs in life after death was experientially, not intellectually, i.e. I investigated the *feelings* I had around the issue which allowed me to replace my beliefs with straightforward facts. RESPONDENT: I’m certainly not worrying about it. I hardly give it a second’s thought. And if I do it seems stupid to think about something I have absolutely no idea about. And if there are any good ideas about it, they surely can’t apply when the idea-machine is dead. VINEETO: Yet in order to find out with 100% certainty whether physical death is the end or not the end of ‘you’, you will have to give it much more than ‘a second’s thought’ – much, much more.
RESPONDENT: For the next month or so I will assume (while still perhaps debating it with you, as above, playing devils advocate) that everything goes, even the most subtle non-spiritual, non-physical, non-mental part of me. See what happens. I find it very very very hard to understand how this trivial decision will reveal the answer to all the questions I have asked you and Richard about Actualism, but well, we’ll see. Perhaps in the meantime you can have a go at explaining it to me. VINEETO: Given that you also said that you don’t have an identity, that you consider your ‘openness’ towards a belief in a life after death a trivial matter and say you are playing the devil’s advocate anyway, I’ll decline. I’ve got far better things to do with my time and life’s too short to fritter away with feigned debates masquerading as genuine discussions. May the Spirit-Force of your choice be with you. Farewell.
RESPONDENT: For the next month or so I will assume (while still perhaps debating it with you, as above, playing devils advocate) that everything goes, even the most subtle non-spiritual, non-physical, non-mental part of me. See what happens. I find it very very very hard to understand how this trivial decision will reveal the answer to all the questions I have asked you and Richard about Actualism, but well, we’ll see. Perhaps in the meantime you can have a go at explaining it to me. VINEETO: Given that you also said that you don’t have an identity, that you consider your ‘openness’ towards a belief in a life after death a trivial matter and say you are playing the devil’s advocate anyway, I’ll decline. I’ve got far better things to do with my time and life’s too short to fritter away with feigned debates masquerading as genuine discussions. May the Spirit-Force of your choice be with you. Farewell. RESPONDENT: Hmm, how very convenient and easy for you to dismiss me this way. You have taken three selected bits of my last mail out of context and reassembled them in order to provide yourself with a good reason not to have to engage with the questions I ask and the points I make. VINEETO: If you go back to your original post from the 27th of August, you will see that I have done nothing of that sort – your quote above is exactly as you wrote it, three sentences precisely in the order that you wrote them. Firstly a trivially transparent dismissal of any attempt of having a sincere discussion with me followed with a blatant attempt at condescension. In other words, you have invited dismissal by frantically back peddling and then cried wolf when I took up your offer. As I said above, I simply prefer spending my time talking to someone who is sincerely and genuinely interested in finding out about how to become free from their malice and sorrow and, naturally, a devil’s advocate (whichever devil you are advocating) is by definition not interested in the ending of malice and sorrow – it would be the end of both the devil and his advocate. RESPONDENT: Given your side-stepping of previous points and questions, I suppose that it was inevitable you would come to the same conclusion that Jehovas Witnesses, Scientologists, Hare Krishnas, Muslims and the like come to when they engage me in debate. From my side it looks like you are afraid of tackling my many difficult questions, from your side I suppose it looks (you have chosen to make it look) like I am not being serious, that my mind is closed, that I am damned, lost, bound by illusion, etc, etc. As you have been approved by Richard as being a standard of Actualism, I imagine he also approves of your approach here. This makes sense, as he seems to have avoided difficult questions I have asked him in much the same way as you, to the point now where, it seems, he has taken the same position as you and chosen to ignore me. So be it. VINEETO: If you consider sticking to one topic until it is resolved being a ‘side-stepping of previous points and questions’ then you have obviously a different reason for asking questions than I do. Personally, I apply a straightforward way of thinking in order to resolve my questions, namely to start at the beginning and to only move on to the next-in-line question when I had sorted out the first one otherwise I’d be lost in a swamp of random disconnected questions that only serve to muddy the waters. But then, maybe, as your reference to ‘Jehovas Witnesses, Scientologists, Hare Krishnas, Muslims and the like’ indicates, you only came to this list in order to prove that actualists, like others you have challenged before are ‘afraid of tackling my many difficult questions’. Personally, I have tackled the difficult questions for myself and resolved them in my life, not by debating in a devil’s-advocate-manner but by stopping blaming others for my feelings and sorting out my lack of sensibility by focussing my attention on my own feelings and my own confusions. RESPONDENT: I will soon be leaving this list, as there is obviously nothing more to ask that will be answered (unless I get some answers soon). VINEETO: Only yesterday I re-read some of the answers you have been given by Richard (he wrote 25 posts to answer one single question of yours so far) and for the life of me I cannot understand how you can say that you have not received a straightforward answer to your (‘quick’) question. If you failed to understand it, of course, that would be another matter, but then you obviously need to gather some preliminary information and do some preparatory groundwork exploration for yourself on the matter of spiritual enlightenment in order to understand his reply. RESPONDENT: Before I go, I will post my ‘Respondent 90s selected correspondence with Richard, Vineeto and Richard’ and distribute it to a few friends who have only read the HIGHLY selected correspondence that makes its way onto the website. I’m sure you won’t begrudge me a little balance. VINEETO: There is no ‘balance’ needed as *all* the correspondence with Richard, Peter and myself is posted on the Actual Freedom Trust website. The only thing that could be considered as ‘HIGHLY selected’ is that in answering your posts I have chosen to stick to the issue of a belief in a life after death that I know is crucial for understanding the non-spiritual nature of actualism instead of being drawn into your myriad other questions which only serve to divert from the topic at hand. I have noticed that you since posted what you presumably consider ‘a little balance’ in the form of a list of unanswered questions – presumably the same list that you are going to distribute to your friends. If this is the case, it may be pertinent to point out to them that the correspondence you present is ‘HIGHLY selected’ in that it consists of only 73 of your own questions that supposedly await an answer whereas Richard had counted 325 questions of yours by July 21, not to mention those that followed in consequent posts. I counted 52 questions alone in portion that I snipped above from your post to me on August 27. If you are interested in ‘balance’ as you say you are, why be so selective about quantity when the quantity of unanswered questions is precisely the point that you are making? Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer |
