VINEETO to No 12: ‘The spiritual practice of ‘awareness’ only shifts one’s identity to the ‘watcher’, a newly created spiritual identity. When those ‘transcended’ emotions and instincts return because the watcher wasn’t watchful enough, they are raging in full force. Instincts are not being eliminated by transcendence, not even reduced, they are only put aside through dis-identification.

No, not witness – eliminate, remove, extinguish. There is a big difference. Witnessing creates a new entity, the ‘watcher’. One is to identify with and become the ‘watcher’ and dismiss or transcend the rest as imaginary. Body-mind, emotion, thought and senses, as well as the physical world, are considered an illusion, while Consciousness is proclaimed to be one’s true nature.’

RESPONDENT: You’re saying eliminate, how do you apply that in practice? Please tell me more about your approach.

VINEETO: Where have you been? In many of our posts Peter and I have been talking about eliminating emotions and very often described how we did it.

I remember your last mail to Peter where you said:

RESPONDENT: Until now your messages are not making my heart sing. Are you perhaps ‘trying’ too hard?

VINEETO: I don’t think that this letter will make your heart sing, because it is the ‘heart’, the ‘feeling being’, that inhibits experiencing the perfection and purity of the actual world. It is the ‘affective being’ that interprets what is actual with a wide range of emotional responses. Eliminating emotions won’t make your heart sing, it will silence it forever. No longer will you feel sad, desperate, lonely, frightened, melancholic, compassionate (i.e. suffering together), malicious, resentful, insulted, hopeful, jealous, angry, anxious or hateful.

These emotions and instinctual passions will be replaced by something else, something far superior. Pristine purity, perfection and the delight of heightened senses – a smorgasbord of tastes, a cacophony of sounds, a magic range of vivid colours and movements, an abundance of smells. Without ‘self’ you will be able to see and treat other people as your fellow human beings – benevolent and beneficent.

Now to your question: ‘How do you apply that in practice?’

First of all, you have to be a seeker and an investigator and not a believer or a follower.

Then, I had to acknowledge the fact that my emotions are ‘me’ and by eliminating my emotions I am eliminating the very essence of ‘me’. So this recipe for eliminating emotions and instincts is, in fact, a recipe for the self-immolation of the psychological and psychic entity inside of you.

Peter gave a very descriptive report in his journal of how he did it:

Peter: ‘Broadly, what emerged that I could relate to was that I, as a human being, had been programmed since birth with a set of beliefs, which formed my social identity, and that by identifying, challenging and investigating these beliefs they could be eliminated. Further, I had come into the world pre-programmed with a set of instinctual passions, and these instinctual passions too could be similarly eliminated. The ‘I’ that I think I am and that I feel I am, that troublesome psychological and psychic entity, was actually nothing more than the sum total of these beliefs and instinctual passions! And the whole package could be got rid of! Not transcended as in the spiritual world, but actually annihilated. It sounded good to me … if a touch scary.

The essential method was to undertake a total investigation into anything that was preventing me from being happy and harmless now – after all, the point of living is to be happy and harmless now, not at some time in the future, or at some time in the past. The question to ask myself was, ‘How do I experience this moment of being alive?’ Now is, after all, the only time I can experience being happy. Any emotion such as anger, frustration or boredom that is preventing my happiness now, has to be traced back to its cause – the exact incident, thought, expectation or disappointment. At the root of this emotion is inevitably found a belief or an instinctual passion. The ruthless challenging, exposing and understanding of these beliefs and instinctual passions actually weakens their influence on my thoughts and behaviour. The process, if followed diligently and obsessively, will ultimately cause the beliefs to disappear completely and the instinctual passions to be greatly minimized. The idea, of course, is to eliminate the cause of my unhappiness, ‘me’, so that I can experience life at the optimum, here, now.

It soon presents success incrementally, as freedom from these beliefs and instinctual passions will indeed inevitably result in increased peace and harmony for myself and in my relating with those around me. The method does bring up fear and resistance, because one is dismantling one’s very ‘self’, those very beliefs one holds so dearly.

It sounds so simple, but most people who had talked to Richard were not even willing to take a small step along the way. Most people would seemingly like their life to be better, but faced with the prospect of actually having to do something themselves, or having to change the way they are, they soon turned away, only to re-run the ‘tried and failed’ methods. Of course, the major fear is that it will work and the identity will go in toto! For me, I just figured that I had ‘nothing left to lose’; it was either a slow, miserable, painful, death-like life or a quick death of what I saw as the problem – the ‘self’ or ‘psychological and psychic entity’ within.’ Peter’s Journal ‘Introduction’

The core sentence and the key method to eliminating emotions is to ask oneself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ 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 being happy, or not investigating into the reasons of unhappiness, is a wasted moment. There is only now, there is 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 because I am worried or half-hearted, it is a wasted moment of my life. This method is so wonderfully simple, so obvious when you start applying it – and yet, with all our conditioning, beliefs, instinctual passions and emotions in action, it is very difficult to comprehend and actualize. But applying this method diligently and persistently, you can examine and investigate everything that keeps you from being happy now. If you are interested, there is a detailed description on this URL: Richard, Articles, This Moment of Being Alive

Richard gives a wonderful description of the time when the seeking stops and one arrives at one’s destiny:

Richard: The day finally dawns where the definitive moment of being here, right now, conclusively arrives; something irrevocable takes place and every thing and every body and every event is different, somehow, although the same physically; something immutable occurs and every thing and every body and every event is all-of-a-sudden undeniably actual, in and of itself, as a fact; something irreversible happens and an immaculate perfection and a pristine purity permeates every thing and every body and every event; something has changed forever, although it is as if nothing has happened, except that the entire world is a magical fairytale-like playground full of incredible gladness and a delight which is never-ending. ‘My’ demise was as fictitious as ‘my’ apparent presence. I have always been here, I realize, that ‘I’ only imagined that ‘I’ existed. It was all an emotional play in a fertile imagination ... which was, however, fuelled by an actual hormonal substance triggered off from within the brain-stem. Richard’s Journal, Article 18 (edited)

28.1.1999

RESPONDENT: I’ve been here, receiving Sannyas-list e-mail’s every day. I did, however, delete most of the ones coming from you and Peter (without reading them), mainly because I found them too lengthy to get into. <...>

...thank you, Vineeto for your detailed reply and explanation offered. I will take some time to digest this and not comment on it now.

VINEETO: Thank you for your gracious answer.

I am pleased to hear you want to take some time to digest. Contrary to what most people perceive it is something vastly different to what we have been told in Sannyas.

Hoping that I am not causing indigestion, I will still answer your second question – you can always read or comment on it later or not at all. The moment my letters are clicked ‘send’ there are no strings attached. However, I keep all correspondence for future reference should anyone be interested in matters of Actual Freedom.

Now your question:

RESPONDENT: Let me give this another go, in a new packaging. Does, what you call ‘elimination’, happen without effort, or is it something that has to be ‘done’?

VINEETO: While I am taking a particular emotion or belief apart, digging deeper and deeper into its root cause, something is ‘done’, effort is applied. I am using my brain, contemplating, investigating, searching, daring, asking, questioning, doubting, until I get to the bottom of that particular issue. It is part of ‘me’, an alien, but fiercely defended, entity inside my body, for ‘I’ am nothing but my feelings, emotions, beliefs and instinctual passions. Hence ‘I’ will do everything to obstruct this questioning, this investigating and this eliminating, for ‘I’ am terribly afraid to die.

To investigate in spite of that fear requires courage, effort and a burning intent. Only after I have dug deeply into that issue, exposed it to the light of awareness and understanding, it will disappear ‘without effort’, never to rear its ugly head again.

At the same time, removing the filtering veils of beliefs and fears, my senses become heightened, I am more here and less in fear, love, hope, churning emotions or in remote fairy-worlds. I am on this planet, on the chair, the rain pouring on the leaves sounds deliciously in my ears, the fridge is humming, my toes curling in delight. Life is eminently easy and wonder-ful, magically abundant and carefree. Once all discoveries are made, all beliefs dismantled, all instincts laid bare, they go up in smoke and ‘I’ will die the illusory death that ends the existence of the ‘self’. To investigate into the survival instincts of the ‘self’ is effort, living in this actual world is utterly effortless, an ongoing delight.

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