|
Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List with Gary
VINEETO: Hi Gary, You say that ‘I think the closest thing I have to a ‘normal relationship’ is my relationship with my partner’ and this coincides with my own experience. When I still had an affective relationship with Peter, I could observe, identify and whittle away all the subtle emotions and feelings that never the less occurred long after we both had recognized that love was not the answer to a peaceful living together. The cozy-good feelings of ‘being connected’, the feeling of belonging, feeling safe and protected from the alien world and not being alone were to persist much longer than the easy to recognize failure of the dream of romantic love. Also I discovered I could quite easily and quickly recognize and nip in the bud the negative emotions of relating such as anger and complaints when they occurred but it took a keen and persistent awareness not to repeat falling into the trap of the sweet rose-coloured moods of connectedness. GARY: Yes, I have been aware of this feeling of safety
in living together. As you pointed out I did live alone for many years, prior to the onset of my current relationship. I had just about given up on ever finding a suitable mate. My living alone years were filled up with compulsive socializing, perhaps as a means of getting away from the gnawing feeling of aloneness. I was not very aware at that time, as I had myself buried in a spiritual program. I think the difference now when I find myself alone (as this week when I am home alone and my mate is at work) is that I am aware of nothing in particular happening in my head and heart. There is not much going on, which is delightful in itself. There is not that sting of feelings of anxious apartness and loneliness, as before. VINEETO: Yes, I have had very similar experiences as those that you describe. The main difference between my experience of life before I discovered actualism and afterwards is that I can now do nothing really well and this ability is due to the fact that the feeling of being lost and lonely has completely disappeared. The non-physical entity that is responsible for craving a meta-physical meaning in life is slowly losing its substance, which in turn has the effect that the emotional ties to humanity are slowing withering away. Even the feeling of boredom is nowhere to be found. When first I became ‘aware of nothing in particular happening in my head and heart’ I was surprised and a bit shocked. The first few times this happened I was aware of conducting a thought-search-mission with thoughts racing through my brain trying to find something to think about that ‘I’ could hang my hat on. I find it kind of cute that I went to the East and studied meditation in order to arrive at ‘no-thought’, which turned out to be a practice of mind-lessness and sense-lessness, and now that ‘nothing in particular [is] happening in my head and heart’, I was at first stunned in disbelief. I consider this stage of virtual freedom to be a time when I get used to the experience that ‘I’ am indeed non-essential and redundant, needed neither for corporeal survival nor for the capability of sensuous reflective enjoyment. Things are so much easier when no feelings or ‘self’-centred thoughts disturb the experience of the exquisiteness of this moment and the delight of simply being here, whatever happens or doesn’t happen. As you say, it then does not diminish the delight if I am alone in the house, the only difference being that I don’t share my thoughts whenever one worth sharing comes to mind. Since Peter works from home, it happens very rarely that I am alone in the house – I am the one who is leaving more often – and the first few times I checked if I wanted to do something I normally don’t do, but then I couldn’t think of anything. It confirmed that I am indeed simply myself, all the time. * VINEETO: As a fact, I have been on my own all my life, however, the marked difference used to be that sometimes I felt lonely, insecure or even abandoned by my parents, friends or partners and sometimes, but more rarely, I felt excited, adventurous and thrilled by the feeling of freedom of not being bound by any relationship. These days I would rather say that ‘I am being on my own’ because I am no longer suffering the feelings and emotions that the world ‘alone’ usually conveys. GARY: I am glad you put the phrase ‘being on my own’ into context. I think the phrase needs to be defined. I can relate to the feeling of being abandoned by parents, friends and partners. Indeed, having had much therapy in preceding years, and I am talking about in the 70’s and 80’s, it was a commonplace understanding that one’s problems as an adult were ultimately traceable to abandonment by one’s parents, or abuse of some sort or other. Some popular therapy gurus, such as John Bradshaw, turned the theme of abandonment, which such a great many people identified with, into a popular cottage industry, selling best-selling books, TV series, etc. Since finding out about Actual Freedom, I am understanding the core experience of abandonment as less of a real experience traceable to childhood abandonment and more of a phenomenon linked to the instinctual entity inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body. ‘I’ am cut off from the splendour and magnificence of this inherently infinite and perfect universe, and so feel a great gnawing of abandonment in my gut. Yet I am part and parcel of everything around me, and there is no actual separation between me (as a flesh and blood body) and the trees, rocks, sky, etc, etc. VINEETO: I too was hung up with the abandonment theme for many years and, following the fashion, made an early childhood experience responsible for all that later felt wrong in life, until I simply grew tired of continuously complaining that nobody loved me. At some point I had worn the abandonment theme to death and its ending was marked by a short PCE wherein I suddenly realized that I am already here and if nobody liked me, so what. But as I had yet to become aware of and thereby understand the mechanism of the social-instinctual programming in me, this experience remained but a pleasant yet exceptional memory and I fell back into creating bonds – and problems – with people in order not to feel so lost, lonely and to give my life meaning and purpose. There is certainly a vast and varied ‘popular cottage industry’ (a wonderful descriptive expression!) and I always consider Oprah Winfrey the most successful queen of this industry of feelings and imaginations – hot air, to be precise. I always chuckle when she urges her audience to ‘remember your Spirit’ because it is obvious that if your spirit were something actual you wouldn’t have to remember it – you don’t have to remember your feet or your legs when you get up and walk out, for instance. People are desperate and gullible to the max for a bit of feel-good offering and are ready to pay a great deal to someone famous to tell them how wonderful they are. Well, since I was in the guru-disciple trap for a long period in my life I know that the only thing that leads out of this addiction is to thoroughly explore what is on offer and undeniably experience that it does not work. Nothing succeeds like utter failure, failure in the real world and especially in the spiritual world. And it’s important to remember in acknowledging this failure that it is not that I have failed, but that it is both materialism and spiritualism that fails to deliver the goods – neither happiness nor harmlessness, neither peace nor harmony within the human species. When I heard Richard explain that ‘sorrow stems from separation’ it made great sense in connection with the PCE I had. To whittle away at the cause of separation makes such imminent sense that I am still surprised sometimes how I could have been so gullible for so long and search for the solutions in the old well-worn directions. But then again, I do acknowledge it’s no little thing to take on board the fact that everybody has got it 180 degrees wrong and then to dare to head off in the opposite direction to all of humanity. GARY: Also the phrase ‘being on my own’ might mean being independent and self-sufficient, an idea that many people might find objectionable, particularly people with close family connections. I seem to come from a rather disengaged type of family: nobody really seems very close to anybody else, so I have always felt on my own in any event. And I think that I always tried in one way or another to fill that void that aloneness left. More recently, I feel less and less inclined to be with other people, and that is not to say that I don’t take pleasure in being with others – quite the contrary, I enjoy being out socially, although I do not have a very active social life. But there is a line I tend to draw in terms of drawing close to other people – I do not wish to be ‘intimate’ with others, in the way that that term is ordinarily used. It is strange in a way, because in actual intimacy once is not busy keeping one’s guard up all the time, and one is actually seeing the person just as they are, warts and all, without any intervening feelings or emotions such as attraction, affection, revulsion, dislike, etc. In actual intimacy, one is a good deal closer to the person than at any other time, in terms of being able to see the person as they are, and in this state, one is indeed ‘on one’s own’. VINEETO: Well said. Being virtually free from the emotional need to relate to others means that I enjoy my own company and the company of my companion and I ceased to be driven to go out of my way in order to socialize with other similarly driven beings. I do, however, enjoy social contact as it happens and when it happens because I now interact with the actual person as he or she is, whereas socializing used to largely consist of commiseration, manipulation, allegiance, on-guard-ness and presenting my favourite ‘self’-image. I was trying to impose ‘my’ needs, expectations, hopes and opinions as well as my ‘self’-image on the other, and therefore my perception of the other was strictly limited in what way he or she fitted into ‘my’ myopic ‘self’-centred scheme. Now that this scheme, and its associated scheming, has pretty much disintegrated and thus makes me autonomous for the first time in my life, I am able to appreciate anyone I meet as what they are – fellow human beings. * VINEETO: In terms of living together with Peter, I am on my own in that I take care of myself – my job, my finances, my clothes and my health – and I spend my time doing what I like to do. Then I have the added bonus of doing things with Peter together that we both enjoy, i.e. cooking food, playing in the garden, going for a walk, having a chat, watching TV and enjoying delicious sumptuous sex. I can simply be me, what I am, without feelings or vibes, hopes or fears and without any image or a social identity to be maintained. In my understanding that does not really fit into the category of having a relationship because a relationship is usually based on emotional components such as expectation, obligation, hope, love, worry, duty, loyalty, fear of loss, resentment or feeling responsible for the other’s feelings. GARY: It is such good fun living in companionship with another human being that I would not want to pass it up. The enjoyment of mutual interests, the pleasantly quiet evenings spent together, as well as the comforting feelings of growing older together and sharing in the great adventure of being alive at this time and in this place I would not want to trade in for any clinging, romantic type of relationship with its reciprocal loyalties and obligations. I have had enough living alone to know about the shoe that is on the other foot, and I can definitely say that living with my partner has been such good fun and a great learning experience too. There is something about human beings the world over which inclines them to pick a partner to spend their lives with. After all we are animals that pick a mate for sex and procreation, and the biological imperative certainly inclines us to pair off, but the exciting opportunity to learn to live in peace and harmony with another human being is unparalleled. VINEETO: Living in peace and harmony with a person of the other sex has been a life-long dream and when I was presented not only with the opportunity of a sincere commitment but also with the tools to make it work, this dream finally came true. I had watched people living together from an early age and already in my twenties I concluded from observation and experience that playing the traditional role as a wife and/or as a mother would not give me the satisfying relationship I was looking for. In my university days I then discovered that feminism as well as conventional therapy also failed to provide suitable answers to the ending of the battle of the sexes and I then turned to the dream of spiritual love. It took a bit longer to sort that one out. During my spiritual years a relationship with a man became secondary and my love for the Guru became primary until inevitably – and fortunately for me – the Guru died and the uselessness of such an ethereal relationship became glaringly obvious. Yes, it is such good fun living together with my best mate now that the habitual instinctual gender battle is but a faint memory of the past. It is pure paradisiacal delight.
VINEETO: Just a short comment on your letter to No 23 about humour before I answer your other post – GARY: I did mean to say to you that our little interchange on the list recently, you know, the one where I said ‘you’re incredible’ and left the little smiley faces, did have me wondering about what is commonly called mirth, laughter, and good humour. I really did find your ‘brain showering’ suggestion extremely funny, and I had a side-splitting good laugh when I read it that morning. But I find myself wondering to what extent having a good laugh is an affective experience. It has been said by some great comedians and satirists that humour stems essentially from sorrow (Mark Twain being one). Being truly happy and harmless does not seem to involve anything that in any way, shape, or form stems from sorrow and unhappiness. Maybe I am beating a dead horse here, but I wonder what other list contributors have discovered about mirth, laughter, and good humour. To what extent are feelings involved? If feelings are involved, is it not then an affective experience? Based on my own PCEs, I do not seem to remember any side-splitting laughter or similar emotions running in me at the time. Any comments? VINEETO: Mark Twain is only partially right in saying that ‘humour stems essentially from sorrow’. Human beings are mostly occupied by malice and sorrow and therefore most humour stems not only from sorrow but even more so from malice. When I took up actualism I found that I incrementally began to loose interest in malicious humour, i.e. humour that is predominantly based on tearing others to pieces but I do enjoy those comedians who are able to poke fun at themselves or the absurdity of the human condition in general. I also noticed that with far less sorrow and misery, disappointment and frustration in my life, hysterical laughter as a vent for tension disappeared almost completely. But I can say that overall I am laughing more than before in my life for the simple reason that I am happier than ever. As I am far less occupied with my own problems because they have pretty much disappeared, I am also far more aware of the many, often hilarious, absurdities of human behaviour in general and of the various forms of social conditioning in particular. Given that there are so few things that engross me emotionally, I can now really ‘look at the bright side of life’ ... and its very sensuous deliciousness makes me often chuckle for no particular reason. So yes, there is a lot more ‘mirth, laughter, and good humour’ in my life than ever before. Richard once said in a correspondence that to his surprise he developed a taste for black humour, which he didn’t have before becoming free from the human condition.
I often can’t laugh about black humour. There is something to it that is too close to the bone. It’s sometimes a real exercise in attentiveness to catch myself when I become affectively involved in the needless violence and endless suffering of humanity. However, here is a piece of information whose black humour really tickled me, considering the general fashion to believe that life in ‘the good old days’ was far better than the safety and comfort of today and that the materialism of technological progress per se is the cause of all evil –
So much for the ‘good old days’.
VINEETO: The main difference between my experience of life before I discovered actualism and afterwards is that I can now do nothing really well and this ability is due to the fact that the feeling of being lost and lonely has completely disappeared. The non-physical entity that is responsible for craving a meta-physical meaning in life is slowly losing its substance, which in turn has the effect that the emotional ties to humanity are slowing withering away. Even the feeling of boredom is nowhere to be found. GARY: Although I find that I can do many things well if I apply myself to them, I can relate to your comment about doing nothing really well. I think what has happened in my case is that the ambition to succeed has diminished a great deal, over a considerable period of time, both before and during my practice of actualism. I am very satisfied to do an adequate and competent job at what I do for work, for instance. Yet I do not feel I do it ‘really well’. VINEETO: I am wondering if there is a misunderstanding about my phrase ‘I can now do nothing really well’. I meant to say that now I am able to enjoy doing nothing – and I do it really well. It was a long process to get to be able to do nothing really well in that I had to examine my guilt for being useless, my neurotic need to be busy, my urge to be someone, my need to socialize, boredom and the restless racing of emotionally-driven thought. But besides doing nothing, for me the ‘really well’ approval is solely my own standard and dependant on my ability to give my full attention to what I do while I do it, which includes doing nothing, because then I do it to the best of my ability. This necessitates me investigating what it is that prevents me from giving my undivided attention to what is happening in this moment – why am I emotionally occupied with something else, why do I want to be somewhere else, why don’t I have fun doing what I do? It goes without saying that this investigation includes the ideals and values that I have taken on board during my life about work ethics and perfectionism, as well as my desires, hopes and fears. GARY: I also have wide-ranging interests outside of work and I like to expand my horizons by delving into subject matters where I have little expertise. This gives me enormous satisfaction and engages my interest, so there is really no reason to be ‘bored’. Yet, I do still find that there are occasional periods when a lacklustre feeling of boredom creeps over me, however fleeting these may be. Like other similar experiences, since I have been practising the actualism method, I have become intrigued and interested to know just what these feelings consist of, what they feel like, what triggered them, and such like questions. And I believe I have traced the feeling of boredom many times to a belief such as this: ‘I am not accomplishing anything’. Too, with the feeling of boredom there is a sense for me of time hanging heavily, a sense of ‘waste’, time slipping through my hands, the hourglass running out, you might say. And I must say, at this point, that this is where I feel actualism is right on in finding that it is the instincts that are laid as a kind of veneer over the pristine and perfect actual world. It seems that the sense of time running out, the feeling of waste and ruin is closely associated with the feeling of boredom. Too, there seems to be a feeling of frustration that one’s desires are not being satisfied, so I think the instinct of desire is involved in experiences of boredom. At least that is what I have found. VINEETO: There were two aspects that I found with the need to achieve. One was the social conditioning of needing to be someone, earning my right to be here, proving my worth and being a useful member of society. Very early on I decided that the path of family and career wasn’t for me, so I went off trying to achieve something in the spiritual world, but the pressure to achieve something stayed the same. When I began to explore the feeling of boredom, and the need to be busy, however, I discovered another layer under the social aspects of the desire to achieve. ‘My’ very existence depends on ‘me’ being busy because without a mission and a meaning in life ‘I’ am superfluous, i.e. ‘I’ have no business in being here. The solution for me was to make becoming free from the human condition my mission in life – this is what I want to achieve and this is what gives my life meaning and significance. The cute thing is that with this mission ‘I’ am writing ‘my’ own death warrant. Now I understand the feeling of boredom as ‘me’ objecting to being redundant and when I agree to becoming redundant, everything is experienced as delicious and fascinating, whether doing something or doing nothing. * VINEETO: When first I became ‘aware of nothing in particular happening in my head and heart’ I was surprised and a bit shocked. The first few times this happened I was aware of conducting a thought-search-mission with thoughts racing through my brain trying to find something to think about that ‘I’ could hang my hat on. I find it kind of cute that I went to the East and studied meditation in order to arrive at ‘no-thought’, which turned out to be a practice of mind-lessness and sense-lessness, and now that ‘nothing in particular [is] happening in my head and heart’, I was at first stunned in disbelief. GARY: What I relate to what you are saying here is that the primitive survival program which consists of the emotions, passions, and instincts, once temporarily suspended, might tend to throw me into a panic, as ‘I’ am filled with dread at the thought that I could be out of a job. With the growing awareness that ‘I’ am indeed not needed any longer, these periods in which there is simple pleasure in being here can be extended indefinitely. I need not be occupied with great thoughts or working on any particular projects in order to enjoy sensately the rush of pleasurable sensations that come from, for example, sitting simply in my easy chair, delighting in the afternoon sun slanting through the windows of a quiet early spring day. Such experiences are anathema to the passion-fuelled, ego-driven survival program of the human being. They are also anathema to my social identity, which often instructs me that I must be perpetually busy and accomplishing something. VINEETO: Exactly. ‘I’ cannot survive for long with nothing to do and nothing to be emotional about. * VINEETO: I consider this stage of virtual freedom to be a time when I get used to the experience that ‘I’ am indeed non-essential and redundant, needed neither for corporeal survival nor for the capability of sensuous reflective enjoyment. Things are so much easier when no feelings or ‘self’-centred thoughts disturb the experience of the exquisiteness of this moment and the delight of simply being here, whatever happens or doesn’t happen. As you say, it then does not diminish the delight if I am alone in the house, the only difference being that I don’t share my thoughts whenever one worth sharing comes to mind. Since Peter works from home, it happens very rarely that I am alone in the house – I am the one who is leaving more often – and the first few times I checked if I wanted to do something I normally don’t do, but then I couldn’t think of anything. It confirmed that I am indeed simply myself, all the time. GARY: It is an incredibly simple and straightforward matter to enjoy being here, to revel in the present moment. However, one’s habitual and instinctual ‘self’ does not take this all lying down easily. I have found the instincts to be very deeply entrenched and resistant to change. Lately I have been having a good deal of trouble, which I am trying presently to sort out. I’m not sure really what it is all about, but the ‘nerves of steel’ part is definitely needed. I feel like I am going through an emotional roller-coaster – all my emotions are right on the surface. There is also a depressed state of mind at work, which makes enjoying the present moment to be very difficult. I know that it is probably silly to think this – but I despair of ever freeing myself from the stranglehold of the Human Condition, which causes me to become discouraged and despondent. I can see easily where one might turn back at this point, but I do not want to. It has indeed seemed a lot lately that ‘I’ am on a very perilous course. There have been alarm warnings going off, telling me there is danger up ahead, that if I keep on the path that I am on right now, I will surely be ruined. What does one do in a situation like this? Have you had these fears yourself? VINEETO: The feelings you describe remind me of What I discovered about these fears connected to the feeling of ‘no return’ was that the fact of ‘no return’ was already established – my identity had become progressively diminished during the process of actualism and I had irrevocably changed to the point where I couldn’t imagine ever going back to either a normal or a spiritual life-style. In other words, only by becoming aware of having gone too far did hell break loose in my feeling department. When I became aware of the feeling of ‘no return’ I eventually discovered that I was also relieved. After all, I had begun the journey of actualism with the intent to go all the way and the recognition that something had irrevocably changed increased my confidence that I would not, and could not, chicken out half way through. I always had the intent that actualism would be a journey of no return and now it had become more factual – i.e. my fears were in fact a sign of success. I remember one time when I seriously doubted that I could ever become free. I had been miserable and fearful for a couple of days and could not work out how to proceed. I asked Richard for advice. I said things such as ‘I think I am too much of a coward, I don’t have enough guts, I cannot possibly ever succeed in becoming free, I am too much ruled by fear’. He listened and then said something like ‘what else are you going to do for the rest of your life?’ The question made me aware that nothing else would ever be good enough because not only had I tasted the purity of the actual world but I was also enjoying the thrill and satisfaction of doing something that is worth committing one’s life to. I knew then that I could never turn back again and occasional bouts of fear, although sometimes extremely uncomfortable, are an inevitable part of the journey to freedom. * VINEETO: I too was hung up with the abandonment theme for many years and, following the fashion, made an early childhood experience responsible for all that later felt wrong in life, until I simply grew tired of continuously complaining that nobody loved me. At some point I had worn the abandonment theme to death and its ending was marked by a short PCE wherein I suddenly realized that I am already here and if nobody liked me, so what. But as I had yet to become aware of and thereby understand the mechanism of the social-instinctual programming in me, this experience remained but a pleasant yet exceptional memory and I fell back into creating bonds – and problems – with people in order not to feel so lost, lonely and to give my life meaning and purpose. GARY: Interesting you should say ‘I fell back into creating bonds – and problems – with people...’ For quite some time, I have been deliberately not forming bonds, not seeking support or comfort from the herd in order not to feel so lost and lonely. This is one of the things that seems so dangerous, yet it is precisely the kind of action which leads to an expansive, penetrating sense of freedom, and a simple delight in being here. Perhaps the danger is only imaginary: ‘I’ imagine all kinds of dreadful, baleful results from my going it alone. I know that one of my fears has been a complete mental collapse with complete madness as the result. I wonder if that is a common fear that people have as they get involved in actualism. Perhaps it is stronger in me based on some early childhood experiences with madness and insanity. Again, the childhood memories that, in part, make up ‘me’ hit the alarm warning button when I get too far away from people and ‘creating bonds’. VINEETO: The incident of the short PCE I was talking about happened years before I came across actualism. Socializing with others was then a strong need lest I would feel lost, lonely and very frightened. But I can relate very well to your fear of ‘mental collapse with complete madness’. Some fifteen years ago, a close friend of mine went through a 3-months period of schizoid madness which scared the hell out of me, but I think, apart from everyone’s individual experiences in that field, the fear of madness is part and parcel of dismantling one’s social identity. After all, you are dismantling all the rules and regulations that have been put in place in order to curb the madness of the instinctual animal passions. I remember a period when I read all the personal accounts of Richard regarding his
period of mental anguish after becoming free and asked a lot of probing questions in order to satisfy myself that leaving my
‘self’ behind was indeed safe in regards to my mental health. I have collected all the relevant quotes under As a result of this probing I took another look at what is generally regarded as sane and insane and it was sometimes quite shocking to realize that there is only a quantitative difference between the two – ‘insane’ people are often those who are less able to control their instinctual passions or who have developed particularly peculiar and socially-unacceptable ways of dealing with them. I began to establish my own definition of what I regard as salubrious and sensible for my life, i.e. what I consider as mental health, and that is nothing short of being completely free of the madness of the instinctual survival passions. * GARY: While we are on the theme of this ‘industry of feelings and imaginations’, I should say that I have been intensely interested with the observation of children and their fantasy life. I am not conducting some type of scientific study. But I have been interested in observing the fascination that some children have for ghosts, goblins, monsters, and such. This fascination takes complete hold of the child’s imagination and becomes an obsession. I have wondered if this kind of intense fantasy activity might not be an accompaniment of severe trauma, such as child abuse. It also seems, from my informal, naturalistic observations of children that the fascination with ghosts and hobgoblins and monsters of various sorts seems to occur co-incident with an emerging consciousness of God and the Spirit world. Such imaginings might of course be accelerated if the children are being taught spiritual or religious teachings at home. I find myself wondering if what is happening is that this fertile imagination is one manifestation of the primitive survival program running in the human child, a program which literally impels one to take on board all types of fantastical notions such as life after death basically because ‘I’ desire immortality and cannot countenance even the thought of death. So in the children I have observed, there is this preoccupation sometimes with morbid themes (death, the grave, dead bodies, etc) and simultaneously a thrill with anything that suggests people can be brought back from the grave, that there is life beyond the grave. One child was completely obsessed with the story of the Frankenstein monster, Mary Shelley’s creation, and sought pictures of the monster and Dr. Frankenstein, who brought his creation back to life. I don’t know if Piaget, for instance, or any of the other psychologists that have studied children’s cognitive or intellectual development have noted these things, and perhaps my observations are somewhat spurious because I am dealing with an abused population, but I just thought I would mention it here. I remember when I myself was 7 years of age, and struggling with the painful loss of a beloved Grandfather, how comforting it was to think of him as a ghost inhabiting my closet at night. Although frightening, at least he was still there, hovering in the background, watching out for me. VINEETO: The fact that the video-game industry is the fastest growing entertainment industry – one that now even exceeds the movie business – is ample evidence that escaping into a fantasy world of one’s own making is highly popular. Indulging in a virtual reality seems to be the easy way out, even more so when one feels powerless to change one’s circumstances in any way. Maybe most of the children you observe feel that way. As for desiring immortality, I cannot remember it being an issue when I was young. Death was not the real problem, life was. But I was certainly fascinated with fairytales and goblins, elves and dragons, the invisible world where luck and power, witchcraft and wizardry changed a miserable world into a magical place and vice versa. And you are right that the human capacity for imaginative thinking that is observable in children is the very breeding ground for religion. The spiritual world I joined in my late twenties was but a slight alteration of my childhood fantasies, the only difference being that I exchanged goblins for demons, fairies for gurus and secret treasures for the prize of enlightenment. The principle stayed the same – hope. I hoped for a magic intervention from some invisible power that would fulfil my wishes if only I did the right things – i.e. ultimately my fate was in someone else’s hands. To hope for a magic intervention is an archaic attitude, coupled with the resentment for having to be here. This attitude is so deep-rooted that most people never become aware of it, but it’s bloody good to be rid of it. As you said in a recent post, becoming free of the human condition ‘involves hard work and ‘effort’’, but at least by my own effort I get to become the master of my own destiny. * VINEETO: To whittle away at the cause of separation makes such imminent sense that I am still surprised sometimes how I could have been so gullible for so long and search for the solutions in the old well-worn directions. GARY: Yes, I can relate to your chagrin at being so gullible. I myself catch myself cringing sometimes (and just recently in fact) at the thought of the ridiculous extremes that I went to in believing in a Spirit world and all manner of spiritual phenomenon. VINEETO: I watched a TV program about alien abduction the other night and it seems to have become quite fashionable in many parts of the Western world. Some researchers reckon that for many people the belief in aliens has replaced the belief in monsters or fairies and consequently many unusual psychic experiences are now being associated with aliens from outer space. It also became obvious in this report that it is an automatic human reaction that any fearful feelings must have an outer cause, i.e. someone or something else must be have caused them. The alternative – that it is only happening in one’s own head – is too unthinkable. * GARY: The depth of people’s malice is truly shocking. The herd instinct and its associated (as you say) ‘commiseration, manipulation, allegiance, on-guardedness...’ etc, is a shockingly brutal process by which people buttress and reinforce their social identities. It is a process, which takes place the world over, and it is a good idea to avoid it entirely, in my opinion. VINEETO: Yes, and the only place where this ‘brutal process’ is totally non-existent is in the actual world. * VINEETO: Living in peace and harmony with a person of the other sex has been a life-long dream and when I was presented not only with the opportunity of a sincere commitment but also with the tools to make it work, this dream finally came true. I had watched people living together from an early age and already in my twenties I concluded from observation and experience that playing the traditional role as a wife and/or as a mother would not give me the satisfying relationship I was looking for. In my university days I then discovered that feminism as well as conventional therapy also failed to provide suitable answers to the ending of the battle of the sexes and I then turned to the dream of spiritual love. It took a bit longer to sort that one out. During my spiritual years a relationship with a man became secondary and my love for the Guru became primary until inevitably – and fortunately for me – the Guru died and the uselessness of such an ethereal relationship became glaringly obvious. GARY: Interesting that you should have mentioned feminism. Feminist theory was all the rage when I attended graduate Social Work school, and I would be interested in your own discoveries of why it ‘failed to provide suitable answers to the ending of the battle of the sexes’. I know that there are various brands of feminism, but I am talking in an overarching way about the feminist movement. VINEETO: The practical benefits I got from the feminism movement were that I learned to confidently take care of myself and to be as equally capable and intelligent as men. Feminism has opened the door to the world for women who were previously confined to the socially-defined roles of ‘cooking, children and church’, as the slogan went. The break up of the traditional confining roles has certainly improved many women’s lives in many ways, particularly in combination with the invention of the pill. My first disappointment with the ideals of feminism happened in my student years when I discovered that women were as bitchy and conniving with each other as men were with women and as men were with each other. When I watched how women related to each other in the feminist movement, I could see that the notion of women ruling the world would not solve the problem of aggression, revenge, back-stabbing and lust for power. Also the idea of excluding half of the population from one’s life in order to avoid relationship problems didn’t appeal to me. When I became a disciple of Rajneesh, feminism was in full swing and Rajneesh’s slogan was ‘to be spiritual is to become feminine’. In his commune in Oregon, he put women in charge and men in subordinate positions. The outcome of this experiment in female overt power is well documented. The top female leaders succumbed to the lust for power and many even indulged in criminal activities – they bugged many buildings, set up an election fraud, poisoned a whole town with salmonella, attempted to poison some disciples who were becoming suspicious and in the end packed up and left with a few million dollars of commune funds. When this was revealed, the shock was enormous, not only because they were spiritual, i.e. supposedly good, people but also because they were women. It proved to me beyond doubt that giving ‘the power to the women’ won’t solve any problems. Although feminism has succeeded in questioning the sensibility of a patriarchal society, it only wants to replace it with a matriarchal system. Feminism’s main focus is on changing the power balance between the genders – it doesn’t question the conflicting social and instinctual identities that are the cause of the battle between the sexes. Men and women are still as much defined by their gender as they were before feminism and the latest fashionable catchphrase that ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus’ depicts the deep divide that basically entrenches the other gender as alien. Men are considered aggressive Martians while women are considered loving Venusians and nowadays it has become politically correct for women to tear down men whereas men making fun of women is considered offensive. In my student days and in my spiritual era I’ve experienced women’s aggression towards men when I attended women’s groups where women complained, bitched and plotted against their men, boyfriends or bosses and discussed the various strategies needed to ‘win the battle’. Any relationship with a man was seen as a constant battle to ‘make him do what I want’. Feminism is certainly not the recipe for living in peace and harmony with the other gender. GARY: Living in peace and harmony with my partner is indeed a tall order, and it is here, in the microcosm of one’s intimate relationship, where one finds the proving ground for being ‘happy and harmless’. It is a terrific dare to live happily and harmlessly with another. It takes all the pure intent I’ve got and more to stick with the work, and it is very hard work too. Right now I must say that it seems like an uphill slog, as my instincts seem to have come to the fore again. VINEETO: It is also enormous fun to live happily and harmlessly with another. But I agree that it does not come easy. To live with Peter in peace and harmony didn’t happen overnight. I had to abandon all my deep seated beliefs about gender – I became a traitor to the women’s camp, I stopped being a woman as society sees it, I questioned my romantic dreams and my archaic suspicions about men, I looked at the instinctual role-play of man as the procreator, provider and protector and woman as the child-bearer, home-maker and nurturer and I examined all my sexual taboos, fears, expectations and instinctive feelings. In hindsight, as I look back on the list of issues, it has been quite a bit of hard work. As for your comment about ‘instincts seem to have come to the fore again’ – I am having an interesting encounter with fear these days. About two week ago I awoke about 3 a.m. on a Saturday night and saw a man standing outside out bedroom on the balcony. There had been a noisy party next door so I wore earplugs while sleeping and I hadn’t heard him coming. His appearance sent me into shock. I got up, hid behind the curtain and, while pulling out my earplugs, I started screaming at him to make him go away. I reacted completely instinctually and without any forethought due to the shock and the fact that I had just awoken from deep sleep. He seemed drunk and after the encounter eventually walked away mumbling something about ‘looking for Julie’. Afterwards I was shocked about my thoughtless instinctual aggressive reaction, defending my territory so to speak, whereas, with benefit of hindsight, the intruder was quite harmless. The incident had opened the door to my core instinctual fear and since then I sometimes lay awake in bed with intense fear, listening to the sounds in the garden, cats or birds rustling through the bushes, apparent footstep on the gravel, wind in the palm leaves. The other night I remembered what I have discovered before – that one automatically searches for an outer cause for one’s fears because ‘the alternative ... is too unthinkable’. As a result I stopped listening to the noises outside and realized that the fear of strangers in the night pointed to a fear that has no external cause – the instinctual passions of fear itself. These experiences are all par for the course of the thrilling adventure to leave one’s ‘self’ behind and I am convinced that I have to experientially know the debilitating nature of all my instinctual passions in order to muster the courage to irrevocably step out of the human condition. It’s been very good to talk again. * VINEETO: PS: You asked Alan about a search facility for The Actual Freedom Trust website and he referred you to me. I would recommend downloading the website, if you haven’t already done so. If you don’t know where the computer has downloaded the website you can find it by clicking ‘Start’ at the bottom left, go to ‘Search’ ‘For Files or Folders’, type in ‘Actualfreedom’ and then you can drag or copy the folder to a place of your choice. Within the downloaded folder you should find sub-folders that contain the various sections of the website. You can now use the search facility of Windows Explorer to find any word or phrase within the website. To do this you open Windows Explorer and click on ‘Folders’ so you have two windows. You can either search the whole website or narrow down your search by choosing the relevant folder inside the Actual Freedom Trust website. To search, you click on the folder you want and then click the ‘Search’ button and enter the word or phrase you are looking for. When the result comes up, double click on the file to open it and search within the file under ‘Edit’, ‘Find’. I tried it and it works fine. If the ‘search’ button is not on your toolbar, you can customize the toolbar under
‘View’, ‘Toolbars’, ‘Customize...’. The instructions for downloading the website are here
VINEETO: Mark Twain is only partially right in saying that ‘humour stems essentially from sorrow’. Human beings are mostly occupied by malice and sorrow and therefore most humour stems not only from sorrow but even more so from malice. When I took up actualism I found that I incrementally began to loose interest in malicious humour, i.e. humour that is predominantly based on tearing others to pieces but I do enjoy those comedians who are able to poke fun at themselves or the absurdity of the human condition in general. I also noticed that with far less sorrow and misery, disappointment and frustration in my life, hysterical laughter as a vent for tension disappeared almost completely. GARY: The Mark Twain quotation or remark was lifted from a PBS television production on the life of Mark Twain. It may not be exact or verbatim, but it was something like that. I found the program interesting in one respect as it showed the ‘private’ side of this great humorist and satirist and world-renowned author. Despite his enormous public appeal and worldwide notoriety, he appears to have been a very unhappy camper, controlling his wife and children and erupting in titanic rages from time to time. In that respect, he would certainly personally know something about how humour is a salve for sorrow. Since I cannot remember the exact quotation, I might have erred in presenting it the way I did. VINEETO: This is what I found about Mark Twain –
I don’t think you erred much in your quotation because Mark Twain’s outlook on life was indeed sorrowful and resentful and humour was therefore a tool to make the burden of life bearable. This type of humour is like crying with one eye while laughing with the other. Just as an aside – when I watched the honour given to the Queen Mother at her funeral, I think that Tom Sawyer, one of Mark Twain’s characters, got it right. He had staged his own death at age 10 so that he could receive the honour at his funeral while still alive. GARY: To summarize what I think about humour and laughter at this point: It does sometimes stem from sorrow and malice, but not always. There is such a thing for me as laughing and being humorous simply because I am in a good mood, I am joyous, and I am taking delight in being alive, and present in this moment. Such laughter and humour lacks the emotive force, as I have termed it, that laughter and humour stemming from sorrow have, what you term the ‘hysterical’ quality of laughter. ‘Hysterical’ laughter can erupt at times of great danger, as a kind of tension release. ‘Gallows humour’ may be of this sort. The kind of laughter and humour I am describing comes from the extremely enervating and refreshing experience of being alive and present in the moment, and is in juxtaposition to laughter and humour that stems from nervous tension or impending danger. Essentially, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with humour and laughter, and the enjoyment of it does a body no harm at all, as long as its malicious or sorrowful elements, if present, are recognized by an alert intelligence. VINEETO: I just watched a re-run of an interview with Billy Conolly, one of my favourite comedians, and he admits using the stage as his place for therapy. He says he tells the truth in his funny and often absurd little episodes about life and he only exaggerates them for the humorous effect. I have always liked this kind of humour best when people are able to take the mickey out of themselves, and thus out of everyone else as well, and it’s a great way of not taking oneself too seriously. While Mark Twain was a passionate pessimist who resented the ugliness of human nature, Billy Connolly is an avowed optimist. Nevertheless, within the human condition laughter is usually despite sorrow, comparable to putting on rose-coloured glasses clipped on over the top of the grey-coloured glasses everybody normally wears. However, as long as I am alert to my feelings of malice and sorrow, there is certainly ‘nothing wrong with humour and laughter’, on the contrary, the less you take yourself seriously, the faster the ‘self’ diminishes due to malnourishment and this process leaves you with the laughter of pure delight. GARY: In short, I am concluding that even the ‘feel good’ experience of laughter and humour can be tapped for information about what makes ‘me’ tick – in other words, ‘my’ feelings and emotions, moods and complexities. The discussion on the list recently about laughter and humour reminds me of the difficulty I have had, and likely still have, in understanding precisely what is meant by ‘the felicitous feelings’, as described in AF writings. I had thought that AF was on about a purely sensorial enjoyment of the present moment, devoid of any trace whatsoever of feeling and emotion. What then are ‘felicitous feelings’ if not emotions? Having been confronted with this apparent contradiction, I have looked into the so-called ‘positive’ emotions, including of course love and sentimentality. VINEETO: Given that ‘I’ am a feeling being, there is no escape from feelings as long as I am a ‘self’. In order to diminish and eventually eliminate the ‘self’ I started my journey by shifting my emphasis towards those affective feelings that don’t feed the ‘self’, which are the felicitous feelings – feeling good, feeling at ease, feeling happy, etc. Therefore the main emphasis in questioning and investigating my feelings has been focussed on examining the ‘good’ feelings of love, hope and trust and the ‘bad’ feelings of malice and sorrow. When I am happy, even when I am affectively happy, ‘I’ have no problem with being here and consequently the ‘self’ has little or nothing to do. However, the more I investigated my malicious and sorrowful feelings as well as all the beliefs that compose my social identity, the more I noticed gaps in my affective reaction to the world around me and consequently more and more often I feel neither sad, nor worried, nor angry, nor needy and nor do I feel affectively happy. By this I mean the feeling of happiness that normal people experience – happiness concocted or contrived as an antidote to grim boring everyday existence. I just remembered an experience I had which first made me aware of this. On New Years Eve of 1999 Peter and I walked home from dinner in town at around 10.30 pm. The streets were filled with people celebrating the coming millennium, several music bands were playing in the streets and people were dancing to the music. As we traversed one of the dancing areas I felt as if I was dipped into a pool of intense frantic happiness that disappeared as soon as we entered quiet streets again. I had almost forgotten the feeling – this was affective happiness, multiplied by hundreds of people, all being happy for this one night of the year, eager to forget the misery and worry of their normal days. This affective happiness is conditional – one is happy about some event, some achievement, some person. I also noticed that most often this feeling of happiness is dependant on other people joining me in my happiness, because it’s more difficult to be happy when alone. The happiness I experience today is rather an absence of any feelings of sorrow and malice, coupled with an increasing sensitivity for the sensuous delights of simply being alive, whether in the company of others or when alone. GARY: Even the so-called felicitous feelings do not escape the spotlight of attentiveness, but that does not mean that I have to retreat into a kind of benumbed feeling-less state, what Alan some time back has called ‘comfortably numb’. VINEETO: ‘The kind of benumbed feeling-less state’ you are talking about is, in fact, also a feeling – it is a feeling standing on its head, and is usually accomplished by repressing and denying one’s unwanted feelings. That’s why it is so important to question one’s moral and ethical values as a first step when taking up actualism, lest one ends up replacing one’s real-world and spiritual-world values with a new ideal of a achieving a no-feeling state. In fact, the no-feeling state is akin to the Buddhist practice of disassociating from one’s unwanted thoughts and feelings. The other thing I noticed was that becoming happy when everyone else in the world insists on having problems was not always an easy task. Both my internal moral judge and the people I interacted with would question why I was having such a good time for no particular reason – something must be wrong with me, I am not taking life seriously enough, I stick my head in the sand, I must be insensitive to other people’s suffering, I must be cynical, neurotic, silly, mad, etc. etc. I found it essential to examine and eradicate this globally accepted social conditioning of ‘never be too happy’, because the question ‘why am I happy?’ is simply the wrong question to ask on the path of becoming free from the human condition. * VINEETO: But I can say that overall I am laughing more than before in my life for the simple reason that I am happier than ever. As I am far less occupied with my own problems because they have pretty much disappeared, I am also far more aware of the many, often hilarious, absurdities of human behaviour in general and of the various forms of social conditioning in particular. Given that there are so few things that engross me emotionally, I can now really ‘look at the bright side of life’ ... and its very sensuous deliciousness makes me often chuckle for no particular reason. So yes, there is a lot more ‘mirth, laughter, and good humour’ in my life than ever before. GARY: Your paragraph here about sums up my present experience of humour. I too am ‘happier than ever’, and less preoccupied with ‘my’ troubles and woes. Spontaneous laughter and seeing the humour in simple, everyday commonalities is not only good fun but need not stem from, as No 13 had termed it, ‘duplicitous stupidity’. Given that the sorrowful and malicious entity in this body has progressively and incrementally shrunken to an exceedingly small percentage of its original size, this then leaves me free to (as you say) look ‘at the bright side of life’, not as a state of denial of my sorrowful state, but because ‘my’ sorrowful state has evaporated, leaving me enjoying, indeed revelling in the present moment. There is only then enjoying the journey, as No 13 had termed it. VINEETO: The only way I could apply the word ‘duplicitous’ is that I have been disloyal and unfaithful to all the clubs I used to belong to – the women’s camp, the German people, the family ties, the bleeding-heart liberalists, the passionate environmentalists, the loyal spiritualists and being a member of a fighting and suffering humanity. There is indeed a cornucopia of humour, including black humour, to be found when one abandons all loyalty for these camps, but this is not ‘stupidity’ but sheer common sense. GARY: Just as a caution, though, because I had read
this morning VINEETO: Yep. I remember that at some point in the journey to freedom I had to consciously shift my attention from unrelentingly ‘searching for feelings to investigate’ to focussing my attention on enjoying being here. There were hardly any problems occurring that would keep me busy investigating, and thus enjoying this moment came more and more to the fore. * VINEETO: Richard once said in a correspondence that to his surprise he developed a taste for black humour, which he didn’t have before becoming free from the human condition.
GARY: I can’t think of an example of ‘black humour’ that I find funny right now and I am not familiar with this ‘Black Adder’ program. Political satire may indeed be funny, depending on the quality of the delivery. Some things in movies and on TV are funny but the things that are the most fun, as far as I am concerned, are some of the moments that my partner and I enjoy together which are spontaneously mirthful, just downright funny. These things may seem nonsensical to someone not acquainted with the situation and not even funny. But I don’t see how laughing at most of the things that we do can ever cause anyone any harm at all. VINEETO: As long as I have no intention to harm or denigrate anyone and be sensitive to issues that people take very seriously, laughing can’t ‘cause anyone any harm at all’. People just might think I’m a little mad because I’m laughing about something they don’t think funny but even that doesn’t cause ‘any harm at all’. You’ve got to have ‘a few screws loose’, as they say, if you are capable of being happy all the time! * VINEETO: However, here is a piece of information whose black humour really tickled me, considering the general fashion to believe that life in ‘the good old days’ was far better than the safety and comfort of today and that the materialism of technological progress per se is the cause of all evil –
So much for the ‘good old days’. GARY: Prehistoric societies were intensely violent, from what I can determine through my reading of articles and watching of TV programs. It is interesting to see that many of the mummified remains of people from long ago were victims of violence. Like Ötzi, the man discovered in the ice on the Italian side of the Alps, he was found to have an arrow point embedded in his back that they had previously overlooked in their autopsy of him after he was first discovered. Then too, many mummies were victims of ritual, religious sacrifices. The long, dreary history of sieges warfare, religious wars, persecutions, pogroms, revolutions, etc, etc, I should think would be enough to point to the terror and fright of living in a long-ago societies, notwithstanding the lack of proper medical facilities, the incidence of disease and pestilence, etc. VINEETO: We do indeed have a lifestyle today that far exceeds the so-called luxury of the old kings and queens, not to mention our vastly increased life-expectancy, overall health and safety. Nevertheless, most human beings turn for salvation to ancient wisdom and seek solace from times gone by, when they imagine ‘life was so much better than the evil and stressful times today’. It is indeed quite hilarious that those who complain about the stressful times of today, including the nature-guru David Suzuki, would often not have survived to their thirties to be able to complain about the loss of the ‘good old days’. GARY: I have not read Lomborg’s book and I doubt that I will. My perusal of the criticisms offered on the list made me a bit sceptical of his position, I must say. VINEETO: When I watched nature programs in the past I always found it quite difficult to distinguish fact from fiction and sensible observations from scare-mongering, particularly when almost every nature program ends with a doomsday Litany about how much damage humans have done to ‘Mother Nature’. I began to understand that environmentalism has become the new modern-day religion, reviving old matriarchal Mother-Earth beliefs and integrating ancient tribal beliefs of worshipping Earth spirits and sacred animals. Environmentalism also blends well with the myth of the Christian-Jewish paradise before the original sin – before human beings polluted the earth by being here – as well as with the Buddhist and Hindu belief that as long as I am ‘in a body’ I am essentially impure. Because of these twisted religious beliefs many now consider the welfare of animals and trees more important than that of human beings and believe that they should faithfully serve the Earth-Goddess who is suffering from the presence of ‘evil’ human beings. Because of the widespread prevalence of Environmentalist propaganda, I find it immensely refreshing to be presented with accountable statistics and global-wide well-researched facts in Lomborg’s book. As for the ‘criticisms offered’ – it may be relevant to consider that if you had judged actualism by the unrelenting criticism Richard’s writings received on the Mailing List B, you would not be where you are today. At least 95% of the writings on the Actual Freedom Trust website consists of actualists’ replies to ‘criticisms offered’. In other words, when someone presents facts that question people’s cherished beliefs, criticism is always ready at hand – yet the strength and ardour of the criticism usually indicates the depth of people’s beliefs and not necessarily that the statements are false. I have come across so much criticism myself for stating that it is possible to live happy and harmless that I am not surprised that Lomborg is so heavily criticised for presenting facts that verify that the world is in a far, far better shape than what the environmentalist doomsayers make us believe. Rather than being surprised he is so criticized, I am more surprised that he had the guts to challenge the fashionable spiritual beliefs of the Environmentalists with reliable verified facts. GARY: Yet there can be no denying that life at present is much, much better, more carefree, more liberated, more abundant, at least for those of us that live in the affluent nations. For many, though, who do not have the benefit of having been born into a civilized country, life is little better than servitude. For instance, I was shocked to read a recent article on slavery in Scientific American, to discover how commonplace slavery still is in certain parts of the world. I can certainly ‘understand’ the anger of people living in poverty, disease, and distress at those more affluent and prosperous nations, including and perhaps exemplified by American culture. This is a whole topic in and of itself, I realize. So perhaps, I’ll leave it until later. VINEETO: Life quality in the last hundred years has not only improved in the affluent nations but also in the so-called developing nations. For instance there are less people starving in the world today – despite a greatly increased population – than 30 years ago. Nevertheless, there is no question that survival in many areas of the world is still a tough business and very often it is aggravated by tribal and/or religious conflicts, corruption, poor education and poor infrastructure. Because I live in one of the wealthy developed countries, I have had to deal with the habit of feeling guilty for being better off than two thirds of the rest of the world. My understanding of their anger was based on my inherent guilt for having enough to eat when thousands were starving and this often resulted in my being angry about the unfairness of life. Because I felt angry, I had to direct my anger at possible causes – corporations, politicians, millionaires or arms dealers. I eventually came to the realization that my guilt and righteous anger did nothing to alleviate anyone else’s situation, it only added to the already abundantly existing resentment and anger. Anger and resentment only serve to obstruct the implementation of sensible solutions to alleviating the remaining remnants of illiteracy, debilitating poverty and rampant disease. In the process of becoming happy and harmless I learnt to have a close look at this deep-seated feeling of guilt, which I sometimes even felt as guilt for taking up space and for being here at all. I found that as long as I had an affective connection to humanity, be it a social connection or an instinctual connection, I could never feel truly happy while others were miserable. In my spiritual years I had tried to solve the problem of feeling guilty by refusing to read the papers and watch the news and thus to diminish the circle of sufferers to the people I knew – the head in the sand approach. Nevertheless there were always the poor Indian rickshaw drivers and the beggars on the streets that made it impossible to forget how much misery there is in the world. When I took up actualism I quickly understood the principle of unilateral action in that I can only change myself, but it takes much longer to comprehend the full implications of ‘being on my own’ in this business we call living. The process of investigating my own malice and sorrow means that I also incrementally sever my emotional ties with the malicious and suffering ‘selves’ that constitute humanity. Not only is no one else responsible for my happiness, or for my feelings of anger, but also I am unable to change anyone else’s lot in life by either supporting their anger or being empathetic with their sorrow. The most caring and practical thing I can do for my fellow human beings is to show by living example that it is possible to be both happy and harmless. Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
Disclaimer |
