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Vineeto’s Correspondence on Mailing List C Correspondent No. 1
VINEETO: I like what you wrote on love. It makes things more clear with this multi-facetted word. Just a few comments: RESPONDENT: Does your heart ache and break when they’re sad? Then it’s LOVE! Do you cry for their pain, even when they’re strong? Then it’s LOVE! VINEETO: This definition of love makes it very clear that love is just another word for ‘suffering together’. It is pretty obvious, this is what love is, but I cannot see anything attractive in it, nothing that would add any solution to the problems in the world. RESPONDENT: Do their eyes see your true heart, and touch your soul so deeply it hurts? Then it’s LOVE! But do you stay because a blinding, incomprehensible mix of pain and elation pulls you close and holds you? Then it’s LOVE! VINEETO: Here are two more definitions of love, where love is associated with pain. Yes, that’s what it is, love is only possible – and needed – if there is also pain and suffering. Otherwise, why one would need love, why not just share a good time and enjoy each other’s company? RESPONDENT: Do you pardon their faults because you care about them? Then it’s not only LOVE, its also FRIENDSHIP!! VINEETO: Well, on this one I don’t agree, I think it is called ‘a lousy bargain’: I accept your faults, you accept mine. And you can never pardon someone’s faults forever, all love has its limits, when those friends get on your nerves. The agreement to ‘forget and forgive’ is never possible to uphold, because our emotional memory is very very lasting. Much better to sort out why other people’s ‘faults’ should get on my nerves, find the reason in me and eliminate the cause. Then I don’t need love because I am not offended by ‘faults’ in others. RESPONDENT: Do you accept their faults because they’re a part of who they are? Then it’s LOVE! VINEETO: What a lousy gift, first to see ‘faults’ in others and then to re-affirm someone in their faults by acceptance. And why not change yourself so you won’t be harassed by other’s ‘faults’, and then you don’t have to change them? Then you don’t have to love them for their ‘faults’ either. You can have intimacy with others as they are, unconcerned about their ‘faults’, which is, after all, only their particular expression of the Human Condition which is inherent in all of us. RESPONDENT: ‘You’ve got to dance like nobody’s watching, and love like it’s never going to hurt’. VINEETO: Yes, I too remember when I was dancing ‘like nobody’s watching’, and probably nobody was watching anyway. It was simply good fun. But ‘love like it’s never going to hurt’ implies that it is going to hurt and you know it, you just pretend it won’t – for a while. The backside of love is hurt, as you said in your statements above, it is a double-sided coin. Pretending or imagining that it is otherwise won’t change the fact. Why is it that the idea and the feeling of love are so important, and yet everybody has been hurt through love? I know why it was important for me – ‘love’ was, besides ‘truth’, the highest value that I believed in. But then, when I found out about being here, in the actual world, free of feelings and emotions, without love or hate, I can now be with a person and give my 100% attention, complete care and consideration, freely without bonds, expectation or bargain. I have experienced this alternative as vastly superior and more enjoyable than love, that I never wanted love back. Intimacy between two human beings without feelings and dreams is more than I ever could have imagined. But this intimacy is only possible when one can give oneself 100% into the adventure, boots and all. Past hurts and disappointments sit too ingrained in the emotional memory, either repressed or open, and cause the usual holding back and demonstrative ‘independence’. Only by questioning the concept of love itself and then eliminating the love-related emotions was I able to give this experiment with Peter my 100% and break through to actual intimacy. This intimacy lies beyond all hurts and caution. It has no strings attached whatsoever. Usually we simply project dreams, hopes, fears and concepts of male-female role-play on to the other person, thus using him/her unconsciously as a mere projection screen. Removing this screen by abandoning and eliminating those emotions, feelings and concepts, one can meet the other as the human being he/she is, in perfect intimacy.
RESPONDENT: Why don’t you just tell us how to experience this freedom that you talk about. How to live life in freedom 24 hours a day? You keep on talking about everything but you never share how we, poor ignorant sannyasins can also live in this ‘third alternative’ realm. Isn’t it not the time that you once and for all share the ‘how’ to this thing you are always talking about? VINEETO: I am glad you asked. Also you say: RESPONDENT: A real intelligent person would not have any beliefs. He would be a ‘seeker’ and at the same time rely on his own understanding and not believe. VINEETO: I agree fully with your understanding that it is very good to question all the beliefs that one has. It is the first and most important step to experience the actual world, which is here all the time, only hidden under all the concepts, emotions and beliefs we have piled on top of it. For instance, the moon was for Mr. Gurdjieff not just the piece of rock circling the earth, but the place where all souls would go after death. How could he see the moon as the big piece of rock and grey sand that it factually is? And freedom is a ‘boots and all’ adventure, it is about turning one’s head inside out and upside down, it is re-wiring one’s brain. Slowly, slowly you come to question everything you have ever learned, and on the way you are finding out the extent of what you have been taught! So many ideas and ‘truths’ I had taken for granted, some of which have come with the mother’s milk, or school-teachers, or other ‘respectable’ authorities, and then these ideas and ‘truths’ would, with relentless investigation, turn out to be mere assumptions, beliefs, opinions and not at all facts. So you can brace yourself for many a surprise and, as I say, the safe carpet under your feet will disappear many times. Yes, where to start! The way Peter started, after he understood that Richard had something valuable to offer – he went every day, for six month, and sat in Richard’s lounge-room to absorb this so strange, unheard-of, and bewildering way to see and experience the world. He learned from the spoken word, but he also read Richard’s journal at least a dozen times. There is definitely not a transmission happening, no pass on of ‘energy’. It is possible to understand the flavour of this actual world by words, and there are quite a lot of them available. Personal presence is not at all required – a remarkable difference to the spiritual transmission of ‘Wisdom’. I hung out with Peter, I had more objections and doubts at the start – being a devout sannyasin then – but as I was exposed to Peter’s ravings day by day, some of the bewildering new understandings would stick, some would make sense and then – the first successes became apparent from investigating into my psyche, my behaviour, my emotions... To get a grip on what this actual world outside of beliefs and instincts is about, you can read. Read and read and re-read. Until something in your brain will start shifting, clicking, doubting the old, understanding the ‘here’, and then you will start understanding and sometimes experience for yourself what Richard means by ‘actual’ – actually being here. Whenever your head starts fuming, remember that you are tackling 40 or more years of conditioning, of believing things the way everyone does, of feelings, intuition and passion. And not only are you investigating your own behaviour and conditioning, but also the whole of the Human Condition, which means, everything everybody has believed up to now, the whole of Humanity. It is not a small thing we do. It is a true pioneer’s job, the adventure of a lifetime. One of the first to climb the Mount Everest of evolving into a new species – so to speak, a species without malice and sorrow, a species of happy and harmless human beings. The first thing I had to do after 17 years of spiritual conditioning was to switch my brain back on. I delighted in using my intelligence again, started doubting the old, used scrutiny and discrimination to slowly question everything that I had taken for granted wisdom. What a gullible person I had been, you could have told me any fairy-story of astrology and invisible energies, channelling and chakras, and I was ready to believe it all! Investigating and using my intelligence again, I felt like being back in High school or University, where intellect and intelligence are being trained, where it was o.k. to think, where I learned about facts – though even many of those so-called facts later turned out to be mere assumptions, disguised as scientific theories. I re-discovered the joy of discrimination, of relying on myself instead of authority, of using ‘silly’ and ‘sensible’ instead of moralistic appraisals. And then I encountered fear – fear to leave the familiar fold – my peers, my sannyasin friends and acquaintances, the women’s club with their particular beliefs and feelings, family-sentiments, love-dreams. Most of all, I was fearful to question the authority of Osho, of God, of the divine plan behind it all, and the belief in authority as such. Suddenly I had to realize and acknowledge that I am alone, standing on my own two feet, nobody is there who knows ‘the truth’ and no all-caring and all-powerful ‘Existence’ is ‘taking care of me’. Wow, what a bummer – and then, what a freedom. I can actually do what I want, think sensibly, take care of myself without the concept of any Almighty God and enjoy life, even if everybody else chooses to be miserable for a million and one reason. If you think that the choice where to start with un-conditioning yourself is too big, you can start with something simple like the weather. Weather is something so obviously outside of our control, and yet almost everyone I meet complains about the weather. What a delight, when it is blue sky with vivid colours, what a delight when it rains, wetting the ground, tinkering raindrops on the roof. If the weather annoys you, there is something to look at, maybe it is some emotion surfacing about something completely unrelated to the weather or some conviction being tickled that makes you wobble. How am I experiencing this moment of being alive? This is the core sentence and the method to all of Richard’s discoveries, the key to the actual world. With this sentence you can take apart the whole of your psyche, bit by bit, digging deeper and deeper into your unconscious. Whenever you are not happy now, there is something to look at. And every moment not happy, or not investigating into the reasons of unhappiness, is a wasted moment. There is only now, only this moment; yesterday is but a memory, tomorrow but a fantasy. If I waste this moment of being alive, because I am complaining about something, or I am worried or half-hearted, it is a wasted moment of my life. It is so wonderfully simple, so obvious – and yet, with all our conditioning, beliefs, emotions and instincts in action, it is very difficult to understand and actualize. But now, with this method, you can examine and investigate everything that keeps you from being happy now. Richard has written a whole chapter about this vital issue of VINEETO: Just a short note to your statement: RESPONDENT: People are brainwashed with teachings, religions, conditionings and lots and lots of words that do not mean anything at all (like the THREE EGGHEADS – Peter, Richard and Vineeto). VINEETO: Yes, I agree, I am definitely an ‘egghead’ in a ‘square’ world, continuously saying that the solution lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to where everybody else is seeking it. But 5.8 billion people insists that their particular belief must be the right one, ‘they are just not trying hard enough’ – and they don’t seem to notice that their supposed only true solution has not eliminated the malice and sorrow of the Human Condition.
RESPONDENT to No. 8: Usually when I find people uninteresting, boring or too serious (like my wife and mother) I make fun of their words or a joke. I put some ‘juice’ into them and that makes them laugh and become less serious. Do you call that ‘being vindictive’? You say that you don’t find my jokes funny where I used the names of Peter and Vineeto. Have you forgotten? Osho used to make fun of his sannyasins and everyone used to have a good laugh. Nobody was offended. No wonder you like those two dried-up old fossils, Peter and Vineeto. P.S.: I find that Vineeto still has a little humour left in her. I loved those two pictures she sent. They were funny. VINEETO: It is such a curious business writing to people on the internet. I was convinced you were a woman (I knew a woman with the same name, that’s why) – now, suddenly – for me suddenly – you have a wife. I have thought quite a bit about humour lately and about your statement that there is a little humour left in me. I might be a bit handicapped by my German upbringing – and with English being my second language I am not good with puns. But there is more to it than that. Most jokes I can’t laugh at. Most jokes are built on either the suffering of people or them being malicious. I just can’t find the joke. Also, there is neither boredom nor any other emotional tension that needs to be ‘healed’ or relieved with a joke. Living in delight, laughter is simply part of the day, as are interesting conversations, thrilling investigations, juicy sex and tasty food. Humour may not be something you find much in my writing – but then, my intent to writing something is different. When I write here on the list, my intent is to convey something of the magic I experience being free of beliefs and emotions, and to describe how I got here. And as for boredom, I found that since I eliminated boredom in me, nobody can bore me anymore – I can spend days of doing nothing, hanging out by myself or with Peter and never be bored. Being alive is thrilling, sensuous, bubbly, delicious, enjoyable, magical, sensational – and then you get to do things on top of it! But since humour is the language you seem to know best – here is a fairy story that I have found funny:
RESPONDENT to No. 23: I was wondering why SANNYASINS were getting so worked up and angry at my teasing Peter and Vineeto with some jokes and comments? They don’t seem to be bothered by it, at least I still haven’t heard any comment from them. When I teased Vineeto by calling her ‘egghead’ she responded very well. I appreciate her for it. It seems Peter and Vineeto are more ‘sporty’ then some sannyasins. I wonder if she and Peter have anything to say about the jokes? VINEETO: So you are asking about my response to your jokes? I am not responding to your jokes aimed at Peter and Vineeto (the ones with our names put in) because I find it plain silly. A joke is neither a question nor an objection, so why should I reply? As for ‘sporty’ – it was one of the first things I learned when meeting Richard, that one can become un-insult-able by investigating and removing the ‘me’ who takes offence. This possibility appealed very much to me from the very beginning. What an awful hindrance for communications it has always been for me when I would get insulted by what someone said, and then I could not continue being at ease with that person. And then I was the one who was suffering, feeling insulted, being resentful and withdrawing into loneliness. Actual freedom for me meant that I investigated and in this way eliminated the cause and the root of emotions in me, and after removing the cause they simply don’t occur any more. Whatever the other says, or does, is then his or her business only. What a freedom to be able to be un-insult-able, un-offend-able, completely harmless and without resentment. What a joy to know that I can rely upon myself 100% that I won’t harm anybody, won’t kill anybody for whatever passions or beliefs. I admit, one loses one’s ‘self ‘on the way – but it is well worth it.
RESPONDENT: I am a man, hehehe... SURPRISE!!! I remember Osho saying that German’s have a hard time getting a joke because of what happened to them during Hitler’s time. He said that Germans are very intelligent people but somehow Hitler was able to fool all of them to believe in his stupid idea that Jews were the cause of all the misery and suffering in Germany. Osho used to joke that it takes Germans a few days before they get a joke and start laughing ... is that true, Vineeto? hahaha. VINEETO: What your master said about Germans and what I found out about being conditioned as German is a hell of a difference. Yes, I found the ‘Hitler’ in me after I realised that I would have killed for defending my master and my devotion for him with the same passion that Germans had when they marched to conquer and ‘save the world’. Hitler simply played on the instincts of Germans in a way that they followed him and that they were ready to die for him, for their country, for their Christian belief, for their Arian race – exactly as Osho played on my – and everybody’s – instincts so that I was ready to kill and die for ‘Him’ on the Ranch. There is no point blaming somebody else for my misery or suffering, I am made of the same stuff as any other human being, I am equipped with the same software of instincts, conditioning and sense of ‘self’. And I can do something about it. After I recognised and acknowledged the ‘Hitler’ in me as well as the ‘follower’ in me, it left such an impact that I was determined to eradicate these aspects of the Human Condition in me. And I succeeded. There is not a trace of nationalistic or religious conditioning left today. And I can see this conditioning and the underlying instinctual passions operating in everybody – the Human Condition – with different labels, for different reasons, but nevertheless as power and aggression, fear and willing obedience. When it comes down to the animalistic instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, there is no difference between a German and a Jew, an Indian and a Muslim, a Serb and a Rajneeshee. Everybody, without fail, is inflicted with this disease – the Human Condition. This is what Osho omitted in his discourses. RESPONDENT: I personally think that Humour is a good sign of Intelligence. If a person can laugh at himself and make fun of his mistakes and shortcomings (who doesn’t have any?) then he makes his world somehow lighter and free. Osho himself used to make fun of himself (and I learned this too). There were jokes where Osho dies and goes to heaven and sits on God’s throne, or a joke where Osho scares Saint Peter in heaven. He used to say that he was going to hell because there were more juicy and alive people there. Heaven is boring, full of saints and serious people. I am very happy to see that you have a sense of humour and unlike some sannyasins you don’t seem to get offended or angry at jokes. VINEETO: Yes, I also think that it is a sign of intelligence when one can see the ridiculousness of what one is doing. But most jokes point at others and are at the expense of the shortcomings of others. It is called fun but is almost always badly disguised plain malice. The impression of ‘lighter and free’ comes from a temporary distraction from the misery all around, but jokes do nothing to actually free you from misery. After a short time it hits back with full force. For me, being a seeker has always been about finding out about myself, first about the ego in Sannyas and now about the whole of the Human Condition, the ego and the soul. Searching, for me, is about establishing peace-on-earth in me, and for that, the ‘I who I think I am and the I who I feel I am’ has to die. Only when ‘I’ am completely demolished will I be reliably happy and harmless, all the time. Just making fun of one’s own and other’s shortcomings is nothing but a nice coating over the ‘self’ that wants to stay as it is – and be liked by others on top of it. It has never really appealed to me. I preferred to find a way to be free of being the nice girl, free of needing love, free of any dependency on other people’s opinion about me. Then I am also free to say what is the case instead of being anxious about what others would have liked me to say. It is a wondrous and delightful freedom to be an autonomous, happy and harmless human being. It beats every single joke in the world. Jokes – if they are really good jokes – can only be the cherry on the cream on the cake. (I don’t like icing). PS: Here is a cherry for you –
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