VINEETO: Hi No 8

RESPONDENT No 2: [J Krishnamurti]: Observing thought I must love the very thing I am studying. If you want to understand a child, you must love and not condemn him. You must play with him, watch his movements, his idiosyncrasies, his ways of behaviour; but if you merely condemn, resist or blame him, there is no comprehension of the child. Similarly, to understand what is, one must observe what one thinks, feels and does from moment to moment. That is the actual. J. Krishnamurti, from: The Book of Life

VINEETO: The actual that is evidenced by a pure consciousness experience is what is left when the ‘believer’, the ‘feeler’ and the ‘thinker’ – all of the ‘self’ – is in abeyance, when all ‘my’ input has ceased. Then a tree is simply a tree, a coffee cup is a coffee cup and street noise is simply street noise without any emotional or spiritual relevance to the eyes seeing and the ears hearing. There is no malice and sorrow, no love and condemnation, no affective or philosophical meaning in anything actual. This is the actual world, which only becomes apparent in its utter magic and ever-fresh exuberance when the ‘self’ is either temporarily absent or permanently extinct.

RESPONDENT: Yes. I agree.

VINEETO: Are you agreeing that a pure consciousness experience is when all of the ‘self’ is in abeyance?

Are you saying you agree that the ‘feeler’, the one who experiences love, compassion, beauty, deathlessness or universal energy is included in the ‘self’ who stands in the way of purity and perfection?

*

VINEETO: Krishnamurti’s ‘actual’ is a different experience – it is polluted by love. His imperative is ‘you must love’ in order to ‘understand what is’. This ‘observing thought’, according to Krishnamurti’s imperative, is actually an observation of feelings and he is making a preconditioned judgement of what is to be considered good and what is to be considered bad, as in ‘you must love and not condemn him’. According to Krishnamurti one must love ‘what one thinks, feels and does from moment to moment’. Thus the lover as an identity does not disappear but is only strengthened by this highly conditional method of observation. Therefore the understanding and experience of ‘what is’ is not the pure ‘self’-less actuality of this moment – it is the traditional love-enhanced viewpoint, the divine Reality of ‘What Is’, overlaying and corrupting the experience of the purity and perfection of the physical universe.

RESPONDENT: Here I feel that since you don’t have the benefit of discussing with Krishnamurti directly, it is very easy to impose on to his utterances your own interpretations which are based, naturally, on those concepts which shape your own belief. For example, you are defining his use of the word ‘love’ according to your own definition of that term.

I am not defining ‘love’ at all. It is a very clearly defined word all over the English-speaking world and doesn’t need the special definition of No. 8 at all. Vis:

1 That state of feeling with regard to a person which manifests itself in concern for the person’s welfare, pleasure in his or her presence, and often also desire for his or her approval; deep affection, strong emotional attachment b An instance of affection (now rare). Formerly also, an act of kindness. c Affectionate greetings 2 In Christian use: the benevolence and affection of God; the affectionate devotion due to God; regard and consideration prompted by a sense of a common relationship to God. 3 Strong predilection, liking, or fondness for, or devotion to something. 4 That feeling of attachment, which is based on sexual qualities; sexual passion combined with liking and concern for the other. b An instance of being in love; in pl., amatory relations, love affairs. Oxford Dictionary

Come on No. 8, we all know there are two types of love – human love which has failed to manifest peace in the real world and Divine Love which is but an escapist fantasy, usually for those for who have suffered the devastating effects of the failure of human love.

RESPONDENT: You quoted the statement: ‘you must love in order to ‘understand what is’’. Then you went on to explain that statement according to your own reasoning and beliefs.

VINEETO: No. I merely made clear that someone who says ‘you must love’ still has an identity as a lover, albeit a divine lover, and is passing this time-honoured failed belief that love is the answer to ending human malice and sorrow on to his disciples.

RESPONDENT: From what I have read of Krishnamurti – which is not that much – the statement above is not an imperative at all.

VINEETO: All right, if you must say so. However, in order that your objection has some credibility, perhaps you could indicate whereabouts in your limited reading you have found that when Krishnamurti says ‘must’ he really means ‘you do not have to’.

RESPONDENT: Neither is it suggestive of good and bad.

VINEETO: ‘Must love and not condemn’ is a clear advice of what to do and what not to do. Is he not saying it is good to love and bad to condemn? Is this not the sort of moral advice that parents, teachers, etc. offer as to what is good or right as opposed to bad or wrong? You know – ‘you must love your sister and not just thump her when she says something nasty to you.’

RESPONDENT: He may be stating the fact as HE saw it. What he calls love, for example, may be the absence of consciousness contracted as self-image, with its related ‘feelings’. Without the decrease in energy, which that contraction imposes, there is pure consciousness, which he metaphorically calls ‘love’. If in fact, that state of uncontracted consciousness was the state of his mind, he would have been uniquely qualified to make the statement that he made because he lived it. I’m not saying that he did, as I am also not saying that you do or don’t.

VINEETO: ‘May be stating the fact’, ‘may be the absence’, ‘if, in fact’ ‘metaphorically calls’... ‘he would’ – are several statements of conjecture. Another word for conjecture is interpretation.

If you are ‘not saying that he did’, what are you actually saying? You qualify all of your statements so heavily, they end up totally meaningless and devoid of any substance whatsoever. From where I come from this is known as wimping out.

*

RESPONDENT: Further, to ‘love what one thinks and feels from moment to moment’ does not imply an entity which considers itself there, present, loving, and observing something different from what it regards as itself.

VINEETO: Well, you just haven’t discovered that quality of your alien entity yet that ‘loves what one thinks and feels’. It is a very convincing trick of this passionate entity to make one feel and believe that it is non-existent because it is ‘uncontracted’.

Someone who loves their own thoughts and feelings moment to moment and observes everything they see around them as nothing other than themselves has obviously got a very bad case of self-love and myopic introversion. Can you imagine a planet full of such people all saying ‘you are not you at all, you are a projection of Me’. ‘How can that be, you are not you at all, you are Me.’ ‘No I’m not’. ‘Yes I am’. ‘No, you are just an image of Me.’ ‘No, you are Me, not you ... you only think you are you.’ ‘No, I am me and you together for we are not separate.’ ‘Well, that’s all very well for you to say but I ‘know’ I am Me whereas you obviously only think you are you and haven’t yet recognized that you are Me.’ ‘Well you may be right ... but I’m interested in becoming Me because then you can be Me.’ ‘Ah, that’s better, now come and sit at my feet with the others and I’ll tell you how good it is to feel this ‘Me’-ness.’

RESPONDENT: It simply involves a mind which is quiet, not analyzing itself, not attempting to affect itself, to even understand itself. There is no interruption of what the mind is doing. For once, what is happening completely unfolds itself, whereas, usually, the mind is busy applying some approach, technique, practice, etc., which prevents the full comprehension of the self. Such uninterrupted unfoldment of psychological and physical reaction then, is causeless; there is no cause occurring, which is leading to an effect. In that case, it is pure consciousness which perceives its own limitations, its own tendency to project from both genetically based reaction, as well as from its social conditioning. There is, therefore, no effort required for self-comprehension.

VINEETO: No, what you describe is not pure consciousness, because pure consciousness is consciousness unpolluted by any self whatsoever. Only an instinctual and social entity has the ‘tendency to project from both genetically based reaction, as well as from its social conditioning’. You obviously live your teachings about a non-analyzing mind, for you have made no attempt at all to understand how your mind works, to what extent your intelligence is clouded by feelings and emotions, nor have you observed how all human beings are affected and driven by the genetically-encoded instinctual passions and to what extremes they will go to in order to deny this simple fact.

RESPONDENT: It is only necessary for the mind – the ‘me’ or ‘you’ of the mind – to totally grasp the absolute futility and meaninglessness of its own incessant reactions.

VINEETO: Human mind is a human brain in action in a human skull. The ‘mind’ that is ‘the ‘me’ or ‘you’ of the mind’ is your highly affective spiritual idea of ‘Intelligence’ or ‘Consciousness’ as Divine Energy. Spiritual language is so conveniently slippery – mind in the first half of your sentence means something else than mind in the second half of your sentence. In this way you can easily blow with the wind, or with the mind...

What you suggest is that the mind inside your skull has only to grasp the reality that any worries, concerns, doubts, fears, or feelings of loneliness, sadness, anger, depression, melancholy, etc. are not ‘me’ at all – they are just futile and meaningless. Your teachings are that there is a real ‘me’ inside my skull, which feels very real and has meaning, especially because I can feel this ‘me’ in my chest – I get enormous chemical rushes whenever I think about how real and good this other ‘me’ is. Eventually if I carry this practice on long enough with sufficient intensity this real ‘me’ becomes so strong, so big and so grand, it can even blot out the other ‘me’ totally, and in a blinding flash of light I suddenly realize I am God after all – which was something I always felt all along but never dared to say out loud.

RESPONDENT: There is nothing then, ‘overlaying and corrupting the experience of the purity and perfection of the physical universe.’ It is the energy of that universe itself as the human mind, which is ‘cleansing’ itself of the contamination of both genetically and socially based cause/effect reaction; or – using Krishnamurti’s metaphor for the occurrence – there has been a mutation of the brain itself, the same occurrence we see anywhere else in nature when some obstruction to the most optimum capacity of organismic function has reversed itself or has developed out of its own disease or imbalance.

VINEETO: ‘That universe itself’ ... ‘cleansing itself of the contamination’ is the perfect expression for God, which in Eastern religion is an aggrandized ‘Me’ that feels itself to be the universe itself, cleansing itself. This perverted and ‘self’-centred view of the workings of the physical universe is the result of the spiritual practice of dissociation and identification with the greater whole.

Whereas what I said was that I investigate into the genetic/instinctual and social/spiritual programming in me that is overlaying and corrupting the experience of the purity and perfection of the physical universe.

Therefore my statement and your idea of ‘Krishnamurti’s metaphor’ are 180 degrees opposite – I, this flesh and blood body, am actively dismantling both my social and instinctual ‘self’ while you are suggesting that the ‘the energy of that universe’ aka God ‘is cleansing itself’.

*

VINEETO: If you want to conduct a sincere and fruitful investigation into your instinctual passions you will have to abandon any preconditioned and preconceived ideas of what is right or wrong, good or bad.

RESPONDENT: That is so.

VINEETO: As you cannot even acknowledge that Krishnamurti labels clearly what is right and wrong by advising that you ‘must love and not condemn’, I doubt that you have abandoned all preconditioned and preconceived ideas of what is right or wrong, good or bad. It is common knowledge that followers are very blind when it comes to question or investigate the teachings of their own teacher.

*

VINEETO: To discover the actual world beyond my beliefs, feeling and instinctual passions I don’t merely observe what I think, feel and do from moment to moment, but I actively and unconditionally investigate into the cause, the core, the root, the why and how and when of ‘who’ I think, feel and instinctually know ‘I’ am. When I arrive at the root of an emotion or emotion-backed thought and see the passionate investment of my identity wanting to stay in existence through feeling and emotion, I can then deliberately abandon my investment and step out of this particular aspect of ‘me’.

RESPONDENT: You see, the ‘I [who] actively and unconditionally investigate(s) into the cause, the core, the root, the why and how...’ is nothing other than the core, the root itself, projecting itself as the ‘investigator’. What else can it be but that, but conditioning itself calling itself ‘you’ or ‘me’? If that was not so, there would already be total clarity. So if there is something to investigate, there must be an investigator, which is projecting that ‘something’. Perhaps that is the most difficult of all illusions that the mind has to comprehend. Also, a ‘deliberate’ erasure of the root of psychological existence is a contradiction in terms. Again, that implies a movement of consciousness, which is separate from itself, is divided, and through the illusion of that division, imagines itself as capable of erasing itself.

VINEETO: Wrong, in fact. When I actively and unconditionally investigate I make use of the brain’s ability to be aware of itself and therefore I can, with sincerity, persistence and diligence, become aware of my brain’s own programming.

The modern scientific empirical discoveries of neuro-biology and genetics, with regard to the human brain and how it functions, have revealed that the brain is programmable in the same way a computer is programmable. The program is formed by physical connections or pathways between neurons, and this program is mostly formed after birth. These pathways (synapse) are capable of being changed at any time. The old connection simply ‘dies’ for lack of use and a new one is formed.

Further, the human brain is programmed, via a genetic code, with a set of instinctual or base operating functions, located in the primitive brain system which causes automatic robot-like animal reactions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire to be transmitted via chemical messages to various parts of the body including the neo-cortex. Physiological alterations as an adaptation to changed circumstances are well documented even within the lifetime of individual members of a species.

‘Self’-awareness is possible in human beings in that we have the ability to develop and cultivate an awareness of both the social conditioning of beliefs, morals and ethics and the feelings and emotions that result from the chemical surges of the instinctual passions in operation. What one is ultimately attempting to do is to achieve a pure ‘self’-less state and this involves observing, investigating and eliminating ‘who’ one thinks, one is ‘who’ one feels oneself to be and ‘who’ one instinctually knows oneself to be – a radical procedure, to say the least.

It is possible, after all, to change human nature and erase one’s instinctual programming.

RESPONDENT: The mind can dwell in that illusion and even affect the nervous system with the singularity of focus such an illusion requires, even to the extent that there is some experience which seems to be free of self-centeredness. Such an experience may last for an hour or for years. But it is not a PCE, as a PCE is not an experience. It is the unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness. So there is never anything that is formed and limited as such, which can experience what is not limited. And this is not a ‘spiritual’ account by the mind of itself. It is the consciousness of a brain unclogged with the mechanical and arbitrary reaction of self-centeredness. It is the human brain at its fullest point of development within nature.

VINEETO: At the top of the page I said that

[Vineeto]: the actual that is evidenced by a pure consciousness experience is what is left when the ‘believer’, the ‘feeler’ and the ‘thinker’ – all of the ‘self’ – is in abeyance [endquote].

and you agreed. I find it cute that now you are trying to tell me that a Pure Consciousness Experience (PCE) is not an experience and further that it means something else all together. I am beginning to grasp the absolute futility and meaninglessness of having a conversation with someone who has a mind that vows it should never, ever try to ‘analyz[e] itself, not attempting to affect itself, to even understand itself’.

You are talking about ‘universal consciousness’, another word for God, which is but a passionate fairy-tale created by a lonely ‘self’ imagining itself to be connected to a ‘universal consciousness’ or, if fully deluded, to be universal consciousness (God) itself. If you indeed believe that this state ‘is the human brain at its fullest point of development within nature’ then that is where your investigation necessarily begins and ends – as in going round in circles – and then you stop questioning ‘who’ is this entity called No. 8, who believes, feels and ‘instinctually knows’ to be this universal consciousness.

I am curious as to why you would want to use actualism terms to describe your own teachings – like ‘pure consciousness experience’, ‘the purity and perfection of the physical universe’, ‘genetically and socially based reactions’? Can what you teach not stand on its own two feet or be described by its own terms? What is it that attracts you about this third alternative that now you seem to be trying to clip on to your outdated wisdom?

After 17 years on the spiritual path I simply became dissatisfied with having to maintain and defend my spiritual universe with my beliefs, feelings and occasional spiritual experiences, and I inquired into that which lies beyond my beliefs and beyond my impassioned feelings, both personal and universal. What I found was mind-blowing and beyond my wildest dreams.

*

VINEETO: Once you do this with diligence, honesty and persistence for a year or so, there is not much left of ‘you’, neither the loving ‘you’ nor the condemning ‘you’. Already this much is a truly remarkable freedom.

RESPONDENT: Perhaps the honest facing of the mind as confused and anxious, which is what it usually is, ‘may’ lead to a more deep comprehension of selfishness; however, I don’t feel that the journey to organismic freedom can be gauged as ‘not much left’ etc. That is because consciousness that is uncontracted as ‘me’ or ‘you’ can only occur instantly, as this moment – which is the only moment possible. If it takes time or is gradual, it is ‘dependent’, that is to say, it is cumulative – the past building on itself towards a future, which is obviously nothing but thought trying to establish itself as ‘free’. That is the height of self-deception. And it is that height of self-deception which characterizes all organized religion, philosophy, and the various ‘isms’ of human imagination.

VINEETO: When you say that ‘you don’t feel that the journey to organismic freedom ... can be gauged’, you are talking about the journey to spiritual freedom which has been written about as a blinding flash of God-realization by countless sages, shamans and Gurus over millennia. I am talking about an actual freedom where the ‘self’, both ego and soul, has to be dismantled incrementally, step by painstaking step.

Further, ‘uncontracted consciousness’, as in a mind unbounded by any common sense whatsoever, where the ‘feeler’ is very much alive and strutting the stage, has nothing at all to do with a pure consciousness or an apperceptive awareness that is free from feelings and instinctual passions – in fact they are 180 degrees apart.

Hence with your judgement of ‘self-deception’ you are only shooting yourself in the foot, as you have built your teachings on an Eastern religious philosophy that has accumulated and been widely promulgated for over 3,000 years. Your teachings may be unorganized, but they are nevertheless Eastern religious philosophy.

First you must carefully read what is written rather than rewrite what is written so that it suits your own teachings and wisdom. Your carelessness keeps you stuck to the Tried and Failed methods of Krishnamurti’s teachings and prevents you from carefully considering the third alternative that is being offered. I do understand that you might still not quite understand what is being offered for it took me months and months of careful considered word for word reading and a good deal of reflecting, contemplating and nutting out to begin to get a glimpse of the vast poles-apart difference between what is spiritual and what is actual. But the rewards of abandoning the Tried and Failed spiritual path and applying the method has resulted in a freedom, peace and happiness that is already beyond my wildest dreams. The result far surpasses anything offered or achieved in the spiritual world, for this freedom, peace and happiness is actual, palpable, tangible and eminently liveable in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are.

7.9.2000

RESPONDENT No 1 to No 10: In that state of pure consciousness, there is truly no one there to have sex. Of course, there is no possible way to stay in that pure consciousness state and physically exist. <snip> I think I had one (maybe two/three) pure consciousness experience, and I even communicated it to the list if you will remember. I was in a ‘session’ with a friend who is a licensed therapist, into all kinds of alternative healing, K reader, and Buddha practitioner, and as I was talking to him, me, myself, and I psychologically and physically disappeared – diffused. There was a voice talking, but it was not me, for I was not there, and the words were not my words, but obviously they came from a physical source of which I was not aware. Then, as [my friend] began to gather light and turn into particles, I came back – into time.

VINEETO to No 1: I find it really cute that before Richard introduced the term ‘pure consciousness experience’ (PCE) to describe a non-affective experience where one is this flesh-and-blood-body only with the ‘self’, both ego and soul, being temporarily absent – the expression did not exist before.

RESPONDENT: Then your use of it is just as second-handed – since you didn’t originate it – as everybody else’s. Correctamundo?

VINEETO: Despite the fact that it is common in spiritual circles to insist that the word is not the thing, it is nevertheless common in human to human communication to use words to describe a thing and as such the thing and the word become inseparable in any sensible communication. Thus a tree is a tree, you know, it grows in the ground with trunk and leaves, whereas a car has a motor, usually 4 wheels and is used to transport people around. Thus a PCE is a term that Richard introduced to this list to describe a body-only non-affective experience. As I also have had non-affective self-less experiences, I used the same term to describe the same experience. Do I need to invent a new word for every experience I have? What about the term ‘universal consciousness’? Did you ‘originate it’ or is it ‘just as second-handed’?

*

VINEETO: But his reports must have left a lasting impression because now on this list the PCE has magically been transformed into a body-less spiritual experience, such as an ‘unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’ (No 8), and now you call it a state where one cannot ‘stay in that pure consciousness state and physically exist’.

RESPONDENT: Your audacity seriously approaches lying. I did not associate what I call ‘unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’, with PCE, although at first glance I originally did feel that the term PCE had some merit.

VINEETO: Given that you label me ‘seriously approach[ing] lying’, maybe you should revisit your post to me –

[Respondent]: The mind can dwell in that illusion and even affect the nervous system with the singularity of focus such an illusion requires, even to the extent that there is some experience which seems to be free of self-centeredness. Such an experience may last for an hour or for years. But it is not a PCE, as a PCE is not an experience. It is the unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness. So there is never anything that is formed and limited as such, which can experience what is not limited. And this is not a ‘spiritual’ account by the mind of itself. It is the consciousness of a brain unclogged with the mechanical and arbitrary reaction of self-centeredness. It is the human brain at its fullest point of development within nature. [endquote].

As I read the paragraph you first explain ‘there is some experience which seems to be free of self-centredness ’ . Then you say ‘but it is not a PCE, as a PCE is not an experience. It is the...’. At face value this ‘it’ refers to PCE and reads as if you explain what a PCE really is, after you described what a PCE is not.

But now you are trying to tell me that you didn’t mean to say that ‘a PCE is not an experience. It is the unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’? Are you now indicating that you maybe meant something entirely different? However, to call me ‘seriously approach[ing] lying’ because you meant something other than you wrote does go a bit far in the art of obfuscating, don’t you think?

RESPONDENT: But in fact, and as I said to you more than once, I have serious doubts about the validity of PCE since I feel that the phrase is itself a contradiction in terms. Don’t then laud your master’s inventions as some universal truth that everybody is just dying to emulate.

VINEETO: No No 8. You have only written to me once before this post and in that post you had not yet talked about your ‘serious doubts about the validity of PCE’.

What you call a ‘contradiction in terms’ is your own private interpretation of the word consciousness in ‘pure consciousness experience’, which you understand as meaning ‘Consciousness’, or, in your own words –

[Respondent]: Consciousness is the energy of thought that is the thinking of the entire species. It is the energy that the brain produces as a species. [endquote].

That type of collective Consciousness has nothing to do with consciousness, the capacity of the individual human brain to be aware of one’s actions, sensations, feelings and thoughts.

Further, I am not assuming that ‘everybody is just dying to emulate’ – I am well aware that nobody is interested in finding out about a body-only non-affective pure consciousness experience. The ‘universal truth’ is entirely your territory, as in ‘the unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’.

*

VINEETO: To merely call an affective spiritual experience a pure consciousness experience does not change the fact that what is being talked about on this list are affective spiritual/ psychic experiences. Such is the cunning of the alien entity inside the human flesh-and-blood-body with its unconscious ‘self’-defensive and ‘self’-sustaining capacity...

RESPONDENT: And to call any experience a non-affective’ ‘flesh-and-blood’, ‘without self – ego and soul’ experience does not make that experience less philosophical and ego infused than any other verbalized or intellectual description by thought of itself. There is nothing more cunning than the withdrawal of intellectual attachment from one belief system and the repositing of it to another intellectual system of equally delusory energy. Call it spiritual or flesh and blood: you are just as self-deluded, and the descriptions are just as mythological. You are simply too involved and attached to your beliefs to have the clarity and caring necessary to learn very deeply and see things originally.

VINEETO: Ok, how would you suggest to verbalize a non-affective ‘self’-less experience so that you also can understand that it is in fact a non-affective ‘self’-less experience? Or are you now telling me what kind of experiences I am having because you already decided that there is only one kind of experience that one can have? Does your ‘unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’ go so far that you can ascertain the type of experience someone has on the other side of the globe?

Your sweeping statements about me make any further communication a mere monologue, for whatever I am saying is already pre-seen and pre-understood by your ‘unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’. I think this cuts short any seeing of ‘things originally’ and rather exposes the rhetoric in your post to another poster on this list –

[Respondent]: You know, over the years, both on and offline, people have pointed out things to me that, at the time, I wouldn’t – not couldn’t – hear. But as I observed myself in action in my daily living, I discovered that their words sometimes carried some truth. If they were wrong, it didn’t matter. But their words did prod me to observe, and for that I was and am thankful. [endquote].

You seem to have arrived at the peak of the spiritual world and have therefore ceased this process of observation and discovery. However, I for one was prodded out of my complacency and acceptance that spiritual experiences were the pinnacle of human experience by Richard’s stubborn refusal to cease his process of observation and discovery even when he was Enlightened. In fact this was how he discovered what is actual, as opposed to what is spirit-ual, be it illusionary or delusionary.

12.9.2000

RESPONDENT No 2: [quote] Observing thought I must love the very thing I am studying. If you want to understand a child, you must love and not condemn him. You must play with him, watch his movements, his idiosyncrasies, his ways of behaviour; but if you merely condemn, resist or blame him, there is no comprehension of the child. Similarly, to understand what is, one must observe what one thinks, feels and does from moment to moment. That is the actual. J. Krishnamurti, from: The Book of Life

VINEETO: The actual that is evidenced by a pure consciousness experience is what is left when the ‘believer’, the ‘feeler’ and the ‘thinker’ – all of the ‘self’ – is in abeyance, when all ‘my’ input has ceased. Then a tree is simply a tree, a coffee cup is a coffee cup and street noise is simply street noise without any emotional or spiritual relevance to the eyes seeing and the ears hearing. There is no malice and sorrow, no love and condemnation, no affective or philosophical meaning in anything actual. This is the actual world, which only becomes apparent in its utter magic and ever-fresh exuberance when the ‘self’ is either temporarily absent or permanently extinct.

RESPONDENT: Yes. I agree.

VINEETO: Are you agreeing that a pure consciousness experience is when all of the ‘self’ is in abeyance?

Are you saying you agree that the ‘feeler’, the one who experiences love, compassion, beauty, deathlessness or universal energy is included in the ‘self’ who stands in the way of purity and perfection?

RESPONDENT: I am saying that the ‘feeler’, the one who ‘experiences’ love, compassion, beauty, deathlessness or universal energy, pure consciousness, actualism, observation, are all included in the ‘self’ which really doesn’t exist and can stand in the way of anything. I would also throw in purity and perfection as projections of this same, fictional self.

VINEETO: If you talk about a feeling of purity and a feeling of perfection then you certainly have a point. However, an experience without a ‘self’ is non-affective, i.e. without any emotion, therefore the purity is actual and the perfection is the perfection of the actual infinitude of the physical universe. May I suggest that a mere theoretical approach won’t give you a sufficient understanding in that matter, because it is limited by its cerebral-only stance. Only a direct experience of the utter purity of ‘self’-lessness can give you the full understanding of ‘self’-lessness. If you had such an experience of ‘self’-lessness, without ‘feeling’ or ‘knowing’ yourself to be whatever your latest version is of who you really are, then you would have experienced that this physical universe is perfect, pure, infinite and eternal.

From your statement above, where you blithely dismiss everything and anything, you are beginning to sound like a nihilist who denies the existence of everything and anything.

*

VINEETO: Krishnamurti’s ‘actual’ is a different experience – it is polluted by love. His imperative is ‘ you must love’ in order to ‘understand what is’. This ‘observing thought’, according to Krishnamurti’s imperative, is actually an observation of feelings and he is making a preconditioned judgement of what is to be considered good and what is to be considered bad, as in ‘you must love and not condemn him’. According to Krishnamurti one must love ‘what one thinks, feels and does from moment to moment’. Thus the lover as an identity does not disappear but is only strengthened by this highly conditional method of observation. Therefore the understanding and experience of ‘what is’ is not the pure ‘self’-less actuality of this moment – it is the traditional love-enhanced viewpoint, the divine Reality of ‘What Is’, overlaying and corrupting the experience of the purity and perfection of the physical universe.

RESPONDENT: Here I feel that since you don’t have the benefit of discussing with Krishnamurti directly, it is very easy to impose on to his utterances your own interpretations which are based, naturally, on those concepts which shape your own belief. For example, you are defining his use of the word ‘love’ according to your own definition of that term.

VINEETO: I am not defining ‘love’ at all. It is a very clearly defined word all over the English-speaking world and doesn’t need the special definition of No 8 at all. Vis: <snip>

Come on No 8, we all know there are two types of love – human love which has failed to manifest peace in the real world and Divine Love which is but an escapist fantasy, usually for those for who have suffered the devastating effects of the failure of human love.

RESPONDENT: No, we don’t all know that there are two types of love. When love is just a word, an idea that you can look up in the dictionary, then of course you can argue either for or against the dictionary definitions. Any word or concept can be argued back and forth.

VINEETO: Do you mean to say that words that is listed in the dictionary cannot be used to describe an experience purely because they has been listed in the dictionary? If that is so, then for every experience you would have to continuously invent your own personal language, which no one except you will be able to understand – otherwise the experience is just a mere word? So someone feeling love or frustration or anger, as per the dictionary definition, is really just experiencing a word or concept that ‘can be argued back and forth’? No wonder you imagine feelings are just thoughts. Have you never experienced feelings and emotions as something other than thoughts or words or concepts that ‘can be argued back and forth’?

No wonder you have such difficulty in understanding that it is the feelings and emotions that arise from both the tender and savage instinctual passions that are the root cause of human malice and sorrow. For you, a feeling or an emotion is just a word in a dictionary.

I am talking about the two types of love, human love and divine or universal love, as I have experienced them and as I have found them in countless descriptions of many, many people. Of course, if you take these experiences, dismiss them as being mere words and turn them into concept to ‘be argued back and forth’, then the discussion is purely theoretical, liable to distortion, and rather useless.

RESPONDENT: I could argue that actualism is just another concept which has failed to manifest peace in the real world and that it, like the concept love, has attained in the minds of those who believe in it, the status of divinity, and that it, too, is an escapist fantasy usually for those who have suffered the devastating effects of the failure of some other philosophy. But I am not concerned with either philosophy or with religious and secular belief.

VINEETO: Exactly my point. To think that actualism is a ‘philosophy’ or a ‘religious or secular belief’ results in turning the applied method of actualism into a concept to ‘be argued back and forth’. Then the discussion is purely theoretical, liable to distortion and rather useless.

RESPONDENT: I am concerned with the nature of the mind when it is not caught in any kind of verbal and ideological entrapment, and the nature of those reactions which prohibit such a mind from operating within the human organism. The word I use to describe the action and nature of the uninhibited mind is love. In that sense, I have redefined the word to represent an action which is neither socially nor organismically typical.

VINEETO: I think I will start a dictionary called ‘No. 8’s words’ for further correspondence with you, because ‘love’ is only one of six words that you have redefined in this post alone. Nevertheless, ‘since you don’t have the benefit of discussing with Krishnamurti directly’ you cannot possibly know if your personal definition of love is also his understanding of love in his sentence of ‘you must love and not condemn.’

Just for my collection of ‘No. 8’s words’ – what is the meaning of ‘organismically’?

However, I don’t follow your logic that you are ‘concerned with the nature of the mind when it is not caught in any kind of verbal and ideological entrapment’ when you yourself are making up your own words and redefining others to describe your experience and worldview. Further, when explaining those unique words and definitions to others you still have to use those despised dictionary words that mere ordinary mortals can understand.

*

RESPONDENT: You quoted the statement: ‘you must love in order to ‘understand what is’’. Then you went on to explain that statement according to your own reasoning and beliefs.

VINEETO: No. I merely made clear that someone who says ‘you must love’ still has an identity as a lover, albeit a divine lover, and is passing this time-honoured failed belief that love is the answer to ending human malice and sorrow on to his disciples.

RESPONDENT: Why should someone who says ‘you must love’ have an identity? To say ‘you must love’ may, to the contrary, mean ‘you must cease to exist as you’, since, as it seems to me, that is the way K uses the word love: as that action of living which is characterized by the absence of identity. So neither an explicit nor implicit ‘lover’ is offered as something divine, time-honoured, failed, nor as an answer to the ending of human malice for either anybody who envisions him/herself as somebody’s disciple or as ‘self-liberated’.

VINEETO: The quote from Krishnamurti was about his use of the word ‘actual’ which he qualified by ‘must love and not condemn’ ... ‘in order to understand what is’ ... ‘what one thinks, feels and does from moment to moment’. I simply pointed out that the way Krishnamurti defined the term actual is diametrically opposite to the actual that is palpable, tangible, smellable, tastable, audible and visible – because it contains feeling and love.

You agreed when I defined actual as experienced in a self-less non-affective PCE.

[Vineeto]: The actual that is evidenced by a pure consciousness experience is what is left when the ‘believer’, the ‘feeler’ and the ‘thinker’ – all of the ‘self’ – is in abeyance, when all ‘my’ input has ceased. Then a tree is simply a tree, a coffee cup is a coffee cup and street noise is simply street noise without any emotional or spiritual relevance to the eyes seeing and the ears hearing. There is no malice and sorrow, no love and condemnation, no affective or philosophical meaning in anything actual. This is the actual world, which only becomes apparent in its utter magic and ever-fresh exuberance when the ‘self’ is either temporarily absent or permanently extinct.’ [endquote]

[Respondent]: Yes I agree. [endquote].

What is your problem with this definition of actual, now that it becomes obvious that Krishnamurti is talking about an entirely different ‘actual’? Krishnamurti’s ‘actual’ clearly has love in it and love, despite all your blustering to the contrary, is an affective experience. You know, No 8, love, or Love, is felt in the heart, it is a feeling, not ‘a word or concept’ to be ‘be argued back and forth’.

*

RESPONDENT: From what I have read of Krishnamurti – which is not that much – the statement above is not an imperative at all.

VINEETO: All right, if you must say so. However, in order that your objection has some credibility, perhaps you could indicate whereabouts in your limited reading you have found that when Krishnamurti says ‘must’ he really means ‘you do not have to’.

RESPONDENT: If one is to see clearly, one MUST open one’s eyes. And if humanity is to move past its own homicidal and suicidal tendencies, it MUST comprehend and evolve out of its deadly psychological energy habits. When there is no alternative to an impending, deadly crisis, must simply means must; that is to say, if you don’t see that what you’re doing is killing you, your ass is grass. That seems to be the impetus of Krishnamurti’s ‘must’.

VINEETO: There is no choice one can make when one really sees the brick falling above. One MUST duck or one is just crazy, but not for long, depending on when the brick makes contact. When you see you are nothing but a social automaton, that your mind is a slave of the group, that seeing itself is the ‘must’ the drives ‘you’ out of ‘your’ mind.

Ah, if I understand you right, ‘must’ in No. 8’s dictionary means seeing a fact that is blatantly obvious, right?

When I took apart my social identity piece by piece and saw that I was ‘nothing but a social automaton’ I simply stopped being a social automaton. The vital difference is that spiritual seekers have simply swapped their social programming from real-world/religious to the fashionable spiritual world/religious – whereas I stepped out of both. The mere seeing of the fact each time I discovered a piece of being ‘a social automaton’ was enough to make me stop in my tracks. The very nature of awareness is seeing a fact as a fact, with neither love nor condemnation. Upon seeing a fact as a fact, there is action and there is change. Conversely, denying facts entraps one in one’s social identity as a fervent believer, safely ensconced within a group of like-minded believers.

However, the Krishnamurti’s admonition still is that ‘you must love and not condemn’ – which, according to you, is to love yourself and not condemn yourself in the face of humanity’s ‘impending, deadly crisis’.

*

RESPONDENT: Neither is it suggestive of good and bad.

VINEETO: ‘Must love and not condemn’ is a clear advice of what to do and what not to do. Is he not saying it is good to love and bad to condemn? Is this not the sort of moral advice that parents, teachers, etc. offer as to what is good or right as opposed to bad or wrong? You know – ‘you must love your sister and not just thump her when she says something nasty to you.’

RESPONDENT: When did ‘must’ translate into good and bad? If you would live beyond a few days, you ‘must’ eat food. If you don’t, you won’t have committed any bad or good act. You will simply be dead in the near future. No. He is not, as I see it, saying it is good to love and bad to condemn. I hear him saying that when love, or the absence of self-centeredness is the actual state of the mind, judgement is not possible. But if the mind is in fact self-centred, in order for that mind to love, it must comprehend its self-centeredness in all of its psychological and behavioural manifestations. Condemnation is just one manifestation of lovelessness – i.e., self-existence and self-absorption.

VINEETO: ‘Must’ is not translated into good and bad, but ‘must love and not condemn’ clearly indicates making a choice. You are reverting to cheap straw-man arguments, No 8.

And now you are saying that love is not good and condemning is not bad, as in judgement is not possible? So now you have moved your reinterpretation or ‘hearing’ of Krishnamurti’s words to being neither an imperative as in ‘ must ’, nor a judgement as in good and bad. But when love, ‘love ... the absence of self-centredness’ is not good, then self-centredness must be not bad, for judgement is not possible? So why should you say that ‘in order for that mind to love, it must comprehend its self-centeredness’, if love is not considered good and self-centredness is not considered bad?

*

RESPONDENT: He may be stating the fact as HE saw it. What he calls love, for example, may be the absence of consciousness contracted as self-image, with its related ‘feelings’. Without the decrease in energy, which that contraction imposes, there is pure consciousness, which he metaphorically calls ‘love’. If in fact, that state of uncontracted consciousness was the state of his mind, he would have been uniquely qualified to make the statement that he made because he lived it. I’m not saying that he did, as I am also not saying that you do or don’t.

VINEETO: ‘May be stating the fact’, ‘may be the absence’, ‘if, in fact’ ‘metaphorically calls’... ‘he would’ – are several statements of conjecture. Another word for conjecture is interpretation. If you are ‘not saying that he did’, what are you actually saying? You qualify all of your statements so heavily, they end up totally meaningless and devoid of any substance whatsoever. From where I come from this is known as wimping out.

RESPONDENT: I wouldn’t deny that. But since that also applies to your own interpretations and conjectures, then may I expect that you will set aside both your interpretations of Krishnamurti’s ideas as well as those borrowed from actualism, and speak originally, if that is possible?

VINEETO: Thank you. I am happy to stop talking about Krishnamurti’s definitions of what is actual and instead talk about your ideas of what is actual. It might make the conversation a touch easier.

However, you might not have noticed in your swift defence of Krishnamurti that I am not talking about ‘borrowed [ideas] from actualism’ but ‘speak originally’ from my experiences arising from applying the method of actualism. I am willing and quite capable of speaking from my own experience – I only have to report how I experience living on this planet at this very moment. It is because you who have turned actualism into a concept to ‘be argued back and forth’ that you fail to even begin to let in the fact that there might be such a thing as a pure consciousness experience that has not a skerrick of spiritual affectation in it. That there might be something new under the sun other than ancient 3,500 year old concepts and affective experiences.

*

RESPONDENT: Further, to ‘love what one thinks and feels from moment to moment’ does not imply an entity which considers itself there, present, loving, and observing something different from what it regards as itself.

VINEETO: Well, you just haven’t discovered that quality of your alien entity yet that ‘loves what one thinks and feels’. It is a very convincing trick of this passionate entity to make one feel and believe that it is non-existent because it is ‘uncontracted’. <snip>

RESPONDENT: So now you want to determine for me what I ‘just haven’t discovered’. You see, that kind of arrogance usually follows when one’s beliefs aren’t automatically corroborated by others. How do you know the state of another’s mind? Because their words do not reflect what you believe and worship?

VINEETO: Ah, so now are you claiming that my words and experiences are invalid because they ‘aren’t automatically corroborated by others’, and therefore I am labelled arrogant. You have tried that one on Richard as well, as in

[Respondent]: It is rather arrogant to assume that your own perspective of life is some basis for defining the encounters of others. [endquote].

– yet when I corroborate what Richard has written about and verify his experience I am either called arrogant or merely Richard’s disciple. Do you have a number of corroborations in mind when you might deign what you dismiss as mere belief to be worthy of consideration or even investigation? Not that the corroboration of others concerns me, for I have ceased being a social automaton and a slave of the group.

As for the state of your mind, I only go by what you write. For you, ‘the action and nature of the uninhibited mind’ is love. You also propagate a love that involves a mind that does not attempt to understand itself. Vis –

[Respondent]: Further, to ‘love what one thinks and feels from moment to moment’ does not imply an entity which considers itself there, present, loving, and observing something different from what it regards as itself. It simply involves a mind which is quiet, not analyzing itself, not attempting to affect itself, to even understand itself. [endquote].

Further you say that

[Respondent]: the unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness. ... It is the human brain at its fullest point of development within nature. [endquote].

As this ‘universal consciousness’ is seen as the ‘fullest point of development within nature’, and it can only be reached by ‘not attempting’ ‘to understand itself’, I can only conclude that you have not yet ventured beyond the meta-physical universal consciousness and have not experienced the innate purity and direct intimacy of the actual world.

Everything that is not actual as in –

existing in fact as evidenced by the physical senses, in action or existence at this time, existing in act and not merely potentially or apparently. Oxford Dictionary –

needs an entity maintain it, i.e. a ‘self’ or a ‘Self’. For instance, a ‘universal consciousness’ needs a feeling identity to experience it and maintain it, because ‘universal consciousness’ is not actual, evidenced by the physical senses. The moment you stop feeling or believing or instinctually knowing ‘universal consciousness’, it vanishes – it never existed in the first place, other than in the heads and hearts of those human beings who believe in it.

RESPONDENT: I could just as easily say that you ‘just haven’t discovered’ that your actualism and your PCEs are delusions of a mind in need of the false security of ‘the final solution’.

VINEETO: Of course you could say that – you could and do say anything. However, it just is not factual. You only need to take a good look around to see that the Eastern spiritual solution – the loyal and persistent pursuit of an ‘unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’ – has not brought any peace to earth in 3,500 years. Billions of people have applied the teachings of Eastern philosophy and religion and yet the wars, rapes, murders, corruption, sorrow and malice arising out of the genetically-encoded instinctual passions have not been diminished, to the contrary, the last century was the bloodiest of them all.

Don’t you think that this feeling of ‘unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness’ is worth further and deeper investigation in terms of a more tangible result for human peace on earth?

Actualism is the very antidote to delusion because it is only based on that which is actual – ‘existing in fact as evidenced by the physical senses, in action or existence at this time, existing in act and not merely potentially or apparently’. I only write about facts and tangible provable repeatable experiences. In the last three years I have investigated every skerrick of belief, every notion of feeling and emotion and every bit of my social identity and replaced them with hard facts. This process has greatly diminished the alien entity that is my ‘self’, which has not existence other than beliefs, feelings and instinctual passions. The inevitable outcome of this persistent diminishing of ‘me’ is extinction, ‘self’-immolation.

There is no security whatsoever, either false or true, in the ‘final solution’ of ‘self’-immolation. It is the scariest and most thrilling enterprise one can ever undertake in one’s life. It is the pinnacle of what human consciousness is capable of – to delete one’s own social and instinctual programming.

12.9.2000

RESPONDENT: Further, to ‘love what one thinks and feels from moment to moment’ does not imply an entity which considers itself there, present, loving, and observing something different from what it regards as itself.

VINEETO: Someone who loves their own thoughts and feelings moment to moment and observes everything they see around them as nothing other than themselves has obviously got a very bad case of self-love and myopic introversion.

Can you imagine a planet full of such people all saying ‘you are not you at all, you are a projection of Me’. ‘How can that be, you are not you at all, you are Me.’ ‘No I’m not’. ‘Yes I am’. ‘No, you are just an image of Me.’ ‘No, you are Me, not you ... you only think you are you.’ ‘No, I am me and you together for we are not separate.’ ‘Well, that’s all very well for you to say but I ‘know’ I am Me whereas you obviously only think you are you and haven’t yet recognized that you are Me.’ ‘Well you may be right ... but I’m interested in becoming Me because then you can be Me.’ ‘Ah, that’s better, now come and sit at my feet with the others and I’ll tell you how good it is to feel this ‘Me’-ness.’

RESPONDENT: Someone who believes that they have become extinct but continue either sporadically or consistently in some athetic state of organismic actual or other ‘ism’, is obviously playing a heavy dangerous and confused psychological self-game of ‘extinct self-continuity’. I think you slightly missed my point. When there is nothing present that is psychologically identifiable as you, there is also nothing present that ‘you’ can psychologically identify as an ‘other’. In that case, being unable to choose this over that, your actions are wholly beneficial to your own body as well as all other bodies. There is no reaction manifesting that can block such wholistic intelligence from responding to all life without malice/generosity and any other cause-effect contradictions.

VINEETO: You might have ‘slightly missed my point’ in that I have never said that I ‘have become extinct’. You even refer to this fact further down in your letter as ‘you, who are presently learning about yourself’. I wouldn’t go as far as saying you are ‘obviously playing a heavy dangerous and confused psychological self-game’, but you are certainly rapidly shifting the ground and twisting the facts in your argumentation.

Further, your categorizing me as being in an ‘athetic state of organismic actual’ is your very own non-sensical invention. Then you proceed in knocking down your own invention. Where I come from that is called cerebral self-gratification or straw-man argumentation. I wonder who is really ‘missing your point’! Neither athetic nor organismic are words that have any meaning to me. Is this some sort of schoolyard prank where you make up names to call the other – sort of a pseudo-intellectual name-calling?

Also, actualism is not only about the extinction of the psychological entity aka ego, but – and this is where you and I are talking of different things – about also the extinction of the psychic entity aka soul. With the extinction, or more correctly transcendence, of the psychological entity only, one is then free to expand one’s feeling identity into feeling Oneness as in ‘there is also nothing present that ‘you’ can psychologically identify as an ‘other’’. Whereas with the extinction of both the psychological and psychic entity, both ego and soul, there is no ‘me’ that can possibly feel to be tapping into some imaginary ‘wholistic intelligence’.

This play-safe, only-do-half-the-job approach of the traditional spiritual path has proved a lamentable failure in manifesting anything remotely resembling peace on earth.

I see you have coined the phrase ‘wholistic intelligence’ to mean Higher Intelligence or God by another name. There seems no limit to the inventiveness of religious/ spiritual people’s use of words to describe or denote a Big Daddy of some description that is looking after everything in general and ‘me’ in particular.

*

RESPONDENT: It simply involves a mind which is quiet, not analyzing itself, not attempting to affect itself, to even understand itself. There is no interruption of what the mind is doing. For once, what is happening completely unfolds itself, whereas, usually, the mind is busy applying some approach, technique, practice, etc., which prevents the full comprehension of the self. Such uninterrupted unfoldment of psychological and physical reaction then, is causeless; there is no cause occurring, which is leading to an effect. In that case, it is pure consciousness which perceives its own limitations, its own tendency to project from both genetically based reaction, as well as from its social conditioning. There is, therefore, no effort required for self-comprehension.

VINEETO: No, what you describe is not pure consciousness, because pure consciousness is consciousness unpolluted by any self whatsoever. Only an instinctual and social entity has the ‘tendency to project from both genetically based reaction, as well as from its social conditioning’. You obviously live your teachings about a non-analyzing mind, for you have made no attempt at all to understand how your mind works, to what extent your intelligence is clouded by feelings and emotions, nor have you observed how all human beings are affected and driven by the genetically-encoded instinctual passions and to what extremes they will go to in order to deny this simple fact.

RESPONDENT: ‘It simply involves a mind which is quiet, not analyzing itself, not attempting to affect itself, to even understand itself’. Here, the word ‘itself’ is not referring to ‘A’ self. I have heard that one action of intelligence is the ability to ‘read between the lines’.

VINEETO: No, No. 8, the ‘ability’ to read between the lines is called intuition – and intuition, despite the common belief to the contrary, does not produce better results than guesswork – about fifty percent.

RESPONDENT: You may want to give some attention to your tendency to use the word obvious. Often that word means ‘according to the way I see what you’re saying’. It is quite arrogant for you to presume, and even call it ‘obvious’, that you know the state of my mind and what attempts I have or have not made. And worse, your conclusions are based on your misreading or incomprehension of my comments. I said that a quiet mind doesn’t need to employ all the techniques and efforts which plague and distort a mind intent on ‘self-understanding’. If you can hear the actual meaning of that statement, it would be clear that such a quiet mind would not be clouded by feelings and emotions; that it would contain no barriers to full comprehension of the social mind and its behaviour; and that there could be no ‘instinctual passions’ operating and driving confused consciousness in any direction and for any reason. The actual operation of a quiet mind is simplicity itself.

VINEETO: Prey tell, how does a mind observing thought without ‘analyzing itself, not attempting to affect itself, to even understand itself’ manage to rid itself of feelings, emotions and instinctual passions while it still maintains the capacity to love as in ‘the action and nature of the uninhibited mind is love’? Is this ‘love’ purely sensate, as there are no feelings, emotions and passions operating? Or is it a cerebral-only love? Are you now claiming to be totally free of instinctual passions? If so, how did this happen? Was it a singular event? Or was it a two-stage event such as Richard’s. Did you not feel an instinctual grab for ‘self’-survival such that a Grand and Glorious ‘Me’ survived what otherwise would be obvious as extinction and oblivion?

What you are describing as ‘the actual operation of a quiet mind’ sounds very similar to the Actual Freedom that Richard describes, given that you claim

[Respondent]: that such a quiet mind would not be clouded by feelings and emotions; that it would contain no barriers to full comprehension of the social mind and its behaviour; and that there could be no ‘instinctual passions’ operating. [endquote].

Further, if such a ‘quiet mind’ is in its description the same as Richard’s description of Actual Freedom, why do you make all this fuss to refute actualism?

But I am confused that ‘there could be no ‘instinctual passions’ operating’ – as you were just 12 days ago writing to No. 3 about your instincts. Your quiet mind doesn’t seem to fulfill its own conditions –

[Respondent No 3]: Yeah, being a woman is fantastic. I love the smooth silky feel of it. I love slipping on tiny underclothes and enveloping my body in beautiful fabrics. I love the perfumes and delicate shoes. I love keeping my skin smooth and clear, my body firm and slim, my hair long and shiny. I LOVE driving men mad.

[Respondent]: TEASE!!!!

[Respondent No 3]: Damn! ... trust you to get it. Hahahaha. This had to be the most wanton fun I’ve had on this list since ... well since our last romp No 8, [...], [...], LOL. Bliss pure bliss. The instincts made me do it.

[Respondent]: And who were those crazy people who were talking about extinguishing the instincts? Isn’t wantonness fun? Sordidness is a little more daring, but I’m working on it. Have to keep my dirty old man image alive. [endquote].

Do I take it that you are now one of those crazy people who are talking about extinguishing the instincts. Or does it mean that your instinctual passions have only ceased operating in the last twelve days?

Your post does raise many questions.

*

RESPONDENT: It is only necessary for the mind – the ‘me’ or ‘you’ of the mind – to totally grasp the absolute futility and meaninglessness of its own incessant reactions.

VINEETO: Human mind is a human brain in action in a human skull. The ‘mind’ that is ‘the ‘me’ or ‘you’ of the mind’ is your highly affective spiritual idea of ‘Intelligence’ or ‘Consciousness’ as Divine Energy. Spiritual language is so conveniently slippery – mind in the first half of your sentence means something else than mind in the second half of your sentence. In this way you can easily blow with the wind, or with the mind...

What you suggest is that the mind inside your skull has only to grasp the reality that any worries, concerns, doubts, fears, or feelings of loneliness, sadness, anger, depression, melancholy, etc. are not ‘me’ at all – they are just futile and meaningless. Your teachings are that there is a real ‘me’ inside my skull, which feels very real and has meaning, especially because I can feel this ‘me’ in my chest – I get enormous chemical rushes whenever I think about how real and good this other ‘me’ is. Eventually if I carry this practice on long enough with sufficient intensity this real ‘me’ becomes so strong, so big and so grand, it can even blot out the other ‘me’ totally, and in a blinding flash of light I suddenly realize I am God after all – which was something I always felt all along but never dared to say out loud.

RESPONDENT: There you go again defining prior to listening thoroughly to what was said. In pointing out the presence of the fictional ‘me’ and ‘you’ of psychological reaction, and in saying that it is necessary for the mind to comprehend or perceive this limited movement of itself, it is understood that the ‘mind’ is all-inclusive, that is to say that the mind IS the organism itself, as there is no mind that is separate from the body. More broadly, the mind to me is the universe itself, the energy that makes formed life intelligent within its physical limitations.

VINEETO: I can only go by what you write. I have left my psychic abilities behind, if that is what you mean by ‘ listening thoroughly ’. When you say ‘the ‘me’ or ‘you’ of the mind’, then that is straight English. If you meant ‘fictional ‘me’ or ‘you’’, why not say it clearly? Now you come back, after accusing me of not ‘listening thoroughly’ and explain that the mind ‘is the universe itself’ – another new definition for ‘No 8’s dictionary’, unless you change your mind or your definition tomorrow.

So now No 8, you claim your mind is not separate from your body, so for all intents and purposes we could substitute the word body for mind. Now further you are saying the mind/body ‘to me is the universe itself’ with a small u not a big U. Now you seem to be claiming that you, as mind/body, are the universe experiencing itself as a mind/body. You seem to be parroting what Richard has been saying on this list for some 3 years now – ‘what I am is the universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective flesh and blood body’.

It does seem that your stance has become so broad that it now miraculously straddles both actualism and spiritualism. Well done, No 8.

RESPONDENT: You see, one function of a discussion is to explore what we both are saying, not to make conclusions based on what we think the other is saying. You do that when you feel that what you have to say is always and inherently correct not only for yourself but for another. Perhaps it might be you who are hung up on divinity since you see it so much in what I say. What is divinity? I’ve never ascribed to such. But it could be that your actualism has become divine to you, albeit unconsciously, and that the discussion of others naturally becomes demonic and ‘impure’ by comparison.

VINEETO: Well, from the amount of straw-man arguments in this post, you have not explored much of what I am saying. And as you have this aversion to words that are well explained in dictionaries and continuously present your own changeable, interpretations of words, I have no reliable basis to understand the words that are not the words of other English-speaking people. So if you want me to explore what you are saying, you will need to say what you mean and mean what you say.

Divinity is

‘the character or quality of being God or sharing the nature of God; godhood’. Oxford Dictionary

and you may be denying the fact, but ‘the unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’ has an awful lot in common with the ‘ the character or quality of being God or sharing the nature of God ’ because God and ‘universal consciousness’ are one and the same name. But if you do not like the word ‘divinity’ I can simply say that ‘universal consciousness’ is meta-physical and not actual because it is not perceivable by the physical senses for it is psychic in nature.

From your previous comments above, it would seem that it is you who is trying to make actualism fit your experience and worldview, whereas I completely and utterly reject the notion of a universal Big Daddy consciousness that is looking after everything in general and ‘me’ in particular. If you are so convinced of your stance why not stick to it? Why befuddle your pure and loving message of ‘universal consciousness’ with something that is propagated by crazy people?

*

RESPONDENT: There is nothing then, ‘overlaying and corrupting the experience of the purity and perfection of the physical universe.’ It is the energy of that universe itself as the human mind, which is ‘cleansing’ itself of the contamination of both genetically and socially based cause/effect reaction; or – using Krishnamurti’s metaphor for the occurrence – there has been a mutation of the brain itself, the same occurrence we see anywhere else in nature when some obstruction to the most optimum capacity of organismic function has reversed itself or has developed out of its own disease or imbalance.

VINEETO: ‘That universe itself’ ... ‘cleansing itself of the contamination’ is the perfect expression for God, which in Eastern religion is an aggrandized ‘Me’ that feels itself to be the universe itself, cleansing itself. This perverted and ‘self’-centred view of the workings of the physical universe is the result of the spiritual practice of dissociation and identification with the greater whole. Whereas what I said was that I investigate into the genetic/instinctual and social/spiritual programming in me that is overlaying and corrupting the experience of the purity and perfection of the physical universe. Therefore my statement and your idea of ‘Krishnamurti’s metaphor’ are 180 degrees opposite – I, this flesh and blood body, am actively dismantling both my social and instinctual ‘self’ while you are suggesting that the ‘the energy of that universe’ aka God ‘is cleansing itself’.

RESPONDENT: It is god to you when you are conceptualizing it. When it is What you ARE it is simply what is happening, it is simply consciousness without the illusion of separateness, of division, such as PCE, actualism, atheism, etc. You expend far too much energy trying to define what you hear in your own terms, which terms themselves are nothing but ‘eastern religion’ reduced to ‘this flesh and blood body’ which is what YOUR god is.

VINEETO: No, No. 8, there is not conceptualizing needed. An illusion can be seen as what it is when one is not caught up in the feeling of being ‘that universe itself’ ... ‘cleansing itself of the contamination’. Just as one can recognize an unconscious behaviour by diligently observing oneself and then step out of it, it is also possible to recognize a passionate belief as nonsensical and non-actual and step out of it. When I investigated that overwhelming feeling of ‘What you ARE’, I had to admit that, although very convincing and gratifying, it was only meta-physical and thus I was able to step out of it and leave that part of my ‘Self’ behind. This is not replacing one belief with another; this is removing the believer and entering the actual world of sensate and reflective experiencing.

RESPONDENT: You want to escape suffering so badly that your psychology has adjusted itself to the belief that the affectiveless body makes you immune to suffering. But the hysteria of emotion shines through glaringly in your in- ability to hear anything else but what you feel protects you from your own vulnerabilities. Yes. This time I am analyzing YOU.

VINEETO: But No. 8, you yourself said ‘that the ‘mind’ is all-inclusive, that is to say that the mind IS the organism itself, as there is no mind that is separate from the body’. And you yourself said ‘a quiet mind would not be clouded by feelings and emotions’ which can only mean you are an ‘affectiveless’ mind or, to put it more broadly, an ‘affectiveless body’. And yet, you now accuse me that ‘you want to escape suffering so badly that your psychology has adjusted itself to the belief that the affectiveless body makes you immune to suffering’.

*

VINEETO: If you want to conduct a sincere and fruitful investigation into your instinctual passions you will have to abandon any preconditioned and preconceived ideas of what is right or wrong, good or bad.

RESPONDENT: That is so.

VINEETO: As you cannot even acknowledge that Krishnamurti labels clearly what is right and wrong by advising that you ‘must love and not condemn’, I doubt that you have abandoned all preconditioned and preconceived ideas of what is right or wrong, good or bad. It is common knowledge that followers are very blind when it comes to question or investigate the teachings of their own teacher.

RESPONDENT: As you cannot even acknowledge that some philosophy of actualism is informing what you think of as your ‘flesh and blood’, selfless existence, I doubt that you have abandoned all preconditioned and preconceived ideas of what is right or wrong, good or bad. It is common knowledge that followers are very blind when it comes to question or investigate the teachings of their own teacher. See the immediate resemblance? I’ll bet you don’t, or won’t. I have no teachers.

VINEETO: You say you have no teachers and yet you jumped into the discussion that I had with No 2 when I was questioning and investigating what Krishnamurti means by the word ‘actual’, and you mounted an effusive defence and interpretation of his teachings. To justify your interpretation you even had to twist straight-forward English words and redefine love as ‘the action and nature of the uninhibited mind’, Krishnamurti’s ‘you must’ as ‘no choice one can make when one really sees the brick falling above’, ‘must love and not condemn’ as non-suggestive instead of the imperative moral statement it is. Whereas I fully acknowledge that I am drawing of Richard’s expertise and apply his method in order to become free of the Human Condition in me. Didn’t you notice that I am continuously being accused as Richard’s disciple for drawing on his expertise?

RESPONDENT: I joined in this discussion only because I saw the cultist tendency you displayed of trying to debunk everybody else’s contributions to the literature of self-knowledge with the overt and sole intention of propagating your own.

VINEETO: You are right that I am propagating only my own experiences and not interpreting someone else’s opinions, be they gurus or wise men or long dead entities. In that I am also ‘debunk[ing] everybody else’s contributions to the literature of self-knowledge’ because their contributions have had enough time to prove their metal and they have all failed in bringing peace to this marvellous blue planet. Just as 3,500 years ago, people are still killing each other viciously, attacking and maiming, warring and committing suicide, raping and suffering, complaining and escaping into fantasy-worlds. ‘Everybody else’s contributions to the literature of self-knowledge’ has failed. It is time someone dares to stand up and debunk them for the passionate dreamers they are. This so-called ‘self-knowledge’ is nothing other than a recipe for ‘self’-aggrandizement where the personal ‘self’ gets so much blown out of all proportions that one cannot see the forest for the trees and feels that ‘I am It’, the ‘the unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’.

However, this is not a ‘cultist tendency’ as a cult means

‘worship; reverential homage rendered to a divine being, a system of religious worship’ Oxford Dictionary

There is no belief involved in actualism, I am atheistic through and through and no homage is paid to a divine being for there is no divine being, by whatever name. At this point in time there are only a handful of intrepid pioneers involved in a brand-new enterprise daring to question the ancient search for ‘ self-knowledge’ or ‘Self-knowledge ’ and setting out to venture beyond the self-gratifying delusion of Enlightenment.

12.9.2000

VINEETO: To discover the actual world beyond my beliefs, feeling and instinctual passions I don’t merely observe what I think, feel and do from moment to moment, but I actively and unconditionally investigate into the cause, the core, the root, the why and how and when of ‘who’ I think, feel and instinctually know ‘I’ am. When I arrive at the root of an emotion or emotion-backed thought and see the passionate investment of my identity wanting to stay in existence through feeling and emotion, I can then deliberately abandon my investment and step out of this particular aspect of ‘me’.

RESPONDENT: You see, the ‘I [who] actively and unconditionally investigate(s) into the cause, the core, the root, the why and how...’ is nothing other than the core, the root itself, projecting itself as the ‘investigator’. What else can it be but that, but conditioning itself calling itself ‘you’ or ‘me’? If that was not so, there would already be total clarity. So if there is something to investigate, there must be an investigator, which is projecting that ‘something’. Perhaps that is the most difficult of all illusions that the mind has to comprehend. Also, a ‘deliberate’ erasure of the root of psychological existence is a contradiction in terms. Again, that implies a movement of consciousness, which is separate from itself, is divided, and through the illusion of that division, imagines itself as capable of erasing itself.

VINEETO: Wrong, in fact. When I actively and unconditionally investigate I make use of the brain’s ability to be aware of itself and therefore I can, with sincerity, persistence and diligence, become aware of my brain’s own programming.

RESPONDENT: Here is the contradiction. How can you ‘unconditionally’ investigate anything when you yourself admitted that you are socially and genetically programmed – which is what conditioning IS? ‘You’ cannot ‘make use’ of the brain’s abilities at all, because ‘you’ are part of the sickness that is the disability of the brain. If there is no actual awareness, there can be no ‘becoming’ aware. It is all just the same confusion going from one ideological pole of itself to the other. And persistence and diligence won’t help you because both imply effort, ‘you’ who are the programming ‘diligently’ and ‘persistently’ trying to end itself. You can’t end yourself because you must always be there ‘persisting’ – diligently.

VINEETO: If you had taken the time to read the whole paragraph before you conclude that it is a contradiction, you might have understood the nature of ‘self’-awareness. When you say that ‘‘You’ cannot ‘make use’ of the brain’s abilities at all’ it is because you have a metaphysical notion of consciousness. You have defined ‘consciousness [as] the energy of thought that is the thinking of the entire species’ which means you are denying the very capacity of the individual human brain to be aware both of its own functioning and of its capacity to be aware of being aware – apperceptive awareness. If you start off with the belief that your own consciousness is the core, the root of ‘all that is’ i.e. God-consciousness, then you are stymied from making any sort of investigation other than finding union with the Undivided Consciousness. This is neither awareness in operation nor an unconditional investigation – this is a fait à complit, based on finding out what you want to find out – seek and ye shall find God, by whatever other name.

*

VINEETO: The modern scientific empirical discoveries of neuro-biology and genetics, with regard to the human brain and how it functions, have revealed that the brain is programmable in the same way a computer is programmable. The program is formed by physical connections or pathways between neurons, and this program is mostly formed after birth. These pathways (synapse) are capable of being changed at any time. The old connection simply ‘dies’ for lack of use and a new one is formed.

RESPONDENT: That may be so, but ‘you’ ARE the program, and as such, can only prolong it, not end it. ‘IT’ is YOU.

VINEETO: Yes, ‘I’ am the program, but there are three I’s and only one is actual –

Peter:

• normal I – A psychological and psychic entity residing within the flesh and blood body comprising both the ego (who you think you are) and the soul (who you feel you are).

• spiritual I – A Grand identity wherein the ego is not eliminated, but escapes into a massive delusion (ego-trip) of grandeur and Divine Splendour, Oneness and Immortality, while the soul is given free reign to indulge in psychic powers and blissful imagination.

• actual I – What I am is this flesh and blood body being apperceptively aware. The first person pronoun is not used here to refer to any psychological or psychic identity because in actuality there is nothing other than the physical – this carbon-based life-form being conscious. There is a consistent quality of perfection – an unvarying purity. Here is an on-going innocence, an ever-fresh magnanimity, which ensures a nobility in character that is vitalized as an endless benevolence – all effortlessly happening of its own accord. Thus probity is bestowed gratuitously – dispensing forever with the effort-filled vigilance to gain and maintain righteous virtue. One is free to be me as-I-am, benign and beneficial in disposition. One is able to be a model citizen, fulfilling all the intentions of the idealistic and unattainable moral strictures of ‘The Good’: being humane, being philanthropic, being altruistic, being beneficent, being considerate and so on. All this is achieved in a manner any ‘I’ could never foresee, for it comes effortlessly and spontaneously, doing away with the necessity for morality and ethicality completely. One is swimming in largesse. The Actual Freedom Trust Library

‘What I am’ is experienced in a non-affective pure consciousness experience, when both the normal ‘I’ and the spiritual ‘I’ are in abeyance. In a PCE one is startlingly aware of what is different, the absence of one’s own social/spiritual and instinctual programming. After returning to normal one can then proceed to do whatever is necessary to take apart and diminish one’s programming with the effective tool of ‘self’-awareness.

Again, if you start with the Eastern religious premise that ‘who you really are’ is the ‘unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’ then you won’t even bother about investigating your own human consciousness. You simply observe it, suppress it, deny it and transcend it such that you eventually convince yourself that you really are the ‘unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’. Therefore ‘I’ am no longer that tacky, normal, mortal, program – I am this grand and glorious universal program. This practice of swapping programs or identities is the very substance of all spiritual teachings.

I am surprised that someone who speaks with such confidence about the ‘unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness’ does not even have the slightest experience and knowledge about the practical down-to-earth application of awareness. By observing and exploring one’s own thoughts, feelings and actions one applies awareness to examine one’s ‘self’. By questioning, examining and persistently investigating one can, in fact, deliberately change one’s actions, for instance stop being malicious, and consecutively eliminate one’s feelings, emotions and instinctual passions.

*

VINEETO: Further, the human brain is programmed, via a genetic code, with a set of instinctual or base operating functions, located in the primitive brain system which causes automatic robot-like animal reactions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire to be transmitted via chemical messages to various parts of the body including the neo-cortex. Physiological alterations as an adaptation to changed circumstances are well documented even within the lifetime of individual members of a species.

RESPONDENT: But ‘you’ can’t delete the program. You ARE the program, the dysfunction. There is NO EXIT. Now if you can see that clearly, you will naturally become absolutely silent because there is NOTHING ‘you’ can do about ‘you’. That realization by the brain is the ending of its disease, that is, the ending of ‘you’.

VINEETO: By merely repeating the same superstition over and over again it does not become a fact. You may fervently believe that there is ‘NO EXIT’ to the prison of our instinctual programming and social conditioning, but I have experienced over the last three years that there is a successful method to disentangle myself from the insipid social conditioning, from passionate beliefs, from emotions and passions. However, the first step to do so is to forsake the passionate belief in some ‘unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness’, God-consciousness, and in ‘the energy of that universe itself as the human mind, which is ‘cleansing’ itself of the contamination of both genetically and socially based cause/effect reaction’, God’s will. The deletion of ‘my’ program has to be done by me by myself, for there is no energy and no universe that will do it for me.

This passionate belief that the ‘the energy of that universe itself’ ... ‘is cleansing itself of the contamination’ is the very reason that you are so convinced that there is ‘NO EXIT’ to the prison of the program that ‘you’ are. This belief in God-consciousness and God’s will has entrapped human beings for millennia in the concept that it is not possible to change oneself.

*

VINEETO: ‘Self’-awareness is possible in human beings in that we have the ability to develop and cultivate an awareness of both the social conditioning of beliefs, morals and ethics and the feelings and emotions that result from the chemical surges of the instinctual passions in operation. What one is ultimately attempting to do is to achieve a pure ‘self’-less state and this involves observing, investigating and eliminating ‘who’ one thinks, one is ‘who’ one feels oneself to be and ‘who’ one instinctually knows oneself to be – a radical procedure, to say the least.

RESPONDENT: ‘We’ have no ability at all to develop and cultivate awareness, as awareness is what we are NOT. And ‘awareness’ is nothing but another idea, something ‘you’ or ‘we’ want to BE. But we identify with our own projection-awareness-and feel, in doing that, that we are evolving, achieving, hurling ourselves out of ourselves into ‘that’. Cultivation, achieving, becoming, are all the reactions of cause and effect, of self-thinking splitting itself up into ‘me as the past’ which wants to become ‘me as the future’-freedom, or ‘this flesh and blood body’ and all other kinds of nonsense. The same old illusions-different concepts. That’s all.

VINEETO: By redefining awareness (redefined word number 5) you have successfully rendered yourself useless to do something about the mess in the world – in yourself. By the simple action of redefining awareness as ‘awareness is what we are NOT’ you have passed on the responsibility for your own malice and sorrow on to some imaginary force, a higher entity, a divine intelligence or some ‘universal consciousness’. Now you simply perpetuate the belief and pontificate to others that nobody can change themselves. Maintaining this belief is indeed keeping one trapped in non-action, in useless contemplation, in circular cerebral self-indulgence, in hopeful never-ending waiting that the ‘universal consciousness’ will do its thing. It’s an utterly degrading and undignifying business for an intelligent human being capable of common sense to first invent some higher power and then wait for that power to liberate oneself, in order to identify with or become at one with that higher power.

It is all very simple, really. Awareness is the capacity of the human brain to be aware of its thoughts, feelings, sensual perceptions and actions. This awareness can be used to become aware of, thoroughly investigate and change one’s innate programming, if one is so inclined. It’s time to acknowledge that there is no universal power by whatever name to save us, and it’s time to start doing the job we are here to do – to liberate this flesh and blood body from ‘me’, my ‘self’, and actualise a genuine peace on earth.

*

VINEETO: It is possible, after all, to change human nature and erase one’s instinctual programming.

RESPONDENT: I think not. Possibility is just a form of hope. If one can imagine what is possible, one can avoid dealing with what is real. It is just common self-delusion.

VINEETO: You would have to say that as the logical conclusion and rational deduction from your belief that –

[Respondent]: such uninterrupted unfoldment of psychological and physical reaction then, is causeless; there is no cause occurring, which is leading to an effect. In that case, it is pure consciousness, which perceives its own limitations, its own tendency to project from both genetically based reaction, as well as from its social conditioning. There is, therefore, no effort required for self-comprehension . [endquote].

If I read what you are saying in simpler language, you are claiming that you are causeless, beyond cause and effect – therefore you are irreproachable as to your own limitations and genetically based reactions, because what or who you really are is ‘universal consciousness’. In my book that is avoiding dealing with what is real, no matter how you care to word it.

However, I am simply talking from my own experience. I have erased my social conditioning and my instinctual passions to a degree that I can live in perfect peace and harmony with another human being for 24 hrs a day, seven days a week. I am having a perfect day 99% of the time. This quality of life is a marked difference to my life only 3 years ago and a marked difference to everybody else’s life that I know of. Therefore I can say with confidence and certainty that it is, in fact, possible to change human nature.

*

RESPONDENT: The mind can dwell in that illusion and even affect the nervous system with the singularity of focus such an illusion requires, even to the extent that there is some experience which seems to be free of self-centeredness. Such an experience may last for an hour or for years. But it is not a PCE, as a PCE is not an experience. It is the unseparated, uncorrupted consciousness that is the universal consciousness itself moving as human consciousness. So there is never anything that is formed and limited as such, which can experience what is not limited. And this is not a ‘spiritual’ account by the mind of itself. It is the consciousness of a brain unclogged with the mechanical and arbitrary reaction of self-centeredness. It is the human brain at its fullest point of development within nature.

VINEETO: At the top of the page I said that

[Vineeto]: the actual that is evidenced by a pure consciousness experience is what is left when the ‘believer’, the ‘feeler’ and the ‘thinker’ – all of the ‘self’ – is in abeyance [endquote].

and you agreed. I find it cute that now you are trying to tell me that a Pure Consciousness Experience (PCE) is not an experience and further that it means something else all together. I am beginning to grasp the absolute futility and meaninglessness of having a conversation with someone who has a mind that vows it should never, ever try to ‘analyz[e] itself, not attempting to affect itself, to even understand itself’.

RESPONDENT: Yes. I agreed, but not that that description fitted you.

VINEETO: Maybe you can be a bit more explicit in what you say. You simply said that you agreed. You also told me that PCE is not the right description because it is ‘a contradiction in terms’. In all your bluff and bluster, what is it then that you have agreed with? Maybe you should put a note on your computer never to agree with Vineeto again as a principle ... it might save a lot of confusion and back peddling.

RESPONDENT: Further, since you are recalling, I also said that I question the idea of PCE as experienceable.

VINEETO: You do not understand. You have redefined what a PCE is and then declared that is not ‘experienceable’ – I am simply reporting my experience of a temporary ‘self’-less state. I know as a fact that a non-affective pure consciousness experience exists, that one can be without any identity whatsoever, even if only for a short period of time – a temporary glitch in the program of the brain, so to speak. Many people have reported similar ‘self’-less non-affective experiences with very accurate descriptions so I can ascertain that we indeed talk about the same type of experience.

RESPONDENT: I can well understand your feelings of futility. When you chance upon a mind, which you can’t control or convert, it brings into question the power and validity of your own beliefs. The common reaction is to run away-through self-justified excuses of some sort such as, ‘I can’t reach you’, etc. And, of course, that is one’s choice. It doesn’t matter to me what you do. It’s up to you alone. Go ahead. Analyze away.

VINEETO: I have no ‘feelings of futility’ – that is your interpretation. I said ‘I am beginning to grasp the absolute futility’, which means that I am beginning to see that is in fact futile to talk sense to someone who has a mind so utterly committed to ‘not analyz[e] itself, not attempting to affect itself, to even understand itself’.

Further, I have no intentions whatsoever to ‘control or convert’ – it was in fact you who intercepted my conversation with No 2:

[Respondent]: because [you] saw the cultist tendency [I] displayed of trying to debunk everybody else’s contributions to the literature of self-knowledge . [endquote].

I clearly see why you wrote to me in the first place, and I now see the absolute futility in you continuing to do so.

*

RESPONDENT: Perhaps at some point when the futility of chasing your own tail dawns on you, you will be shocked by the suddeness and finality of it, into a long overdue silence.

VINEETO: ‘A long overdue silence’, eh! So you think it is long overdue that I should shut up! Well, No 8, if that is your conviction, you can easily save your time and thoughts and send me an appropriate song... You will find it under this address: http://www.twistedtunes.com/frames/dedication_frame.asp?werydui=107296 : I wish you weren't with us).

*

VINEETO: You are talking about ‘universal consciousness’, another word for God, which is but a passionate fairy-tale created by a lonely ‘self’ imagining itself to be connected to a ‘universal consciousness’ or, if fully deluded, to be universal consciousness (God) itself. If you indeed believe that this state ‘is the human brain at its fullest point of development within nature’ then that is where your investigation necessarily begins and ends – as in going round in circles – and then you stop questioning ‘who’ is this entity called No. 8, who believes, feels and ‘instinctually knows’ to be this universal consciousness.

RESPONDENT: You are talking about ‘actualism’, another word for god intellectually stripped down to a philosophy of ‘the flesh and blood body experience’. Also, why do you think that actualism, as an ‘ism’, is not a fairy tale? Because it employs a less metaphorical language? Because you have replaced traditional language with your own? You yourself said that you were conditioned, yet you want to propose to me that you are clear enough to live what is actual? And you simply won’t stop changing my words into your own ideas: Another example of the intransigence of self-protective belief. How do you know that what I term universal consciousness is not a term that represents something which, in itself, cannot be put into words but is nonetheless actual? You don’t, do you? You can only see what I say from within your own, self-professed conditioning.

VINEETO: If you are having trouble describing the meaning of the term ‘universal consciousness’ then it cannot be that it ‘represents something which, in itself, cannot be put into words but is nonetheless actual’. Something that is actual as in palpable, tangible, tactile, corporeal, physical and material can easily be put into words by using one or more of the 650,000 words of the English language.

Every human being has five physical senses that function in a very similar way in each of us, and the sensate experience of those senses can be put into a language that is understandable by others. The faculty of fanciful imaginary and affective thought, however, is literally unlimited in its capacity to produce ideas, concepts, ideologies, philosophies, viewpoints, beliefs, meanings and psychic worlds that are so personal and subjective that they cannot be accurately or succinctly described to someone else. Hence the reliance on metaphors, poetry, imagery, feelings and mutual affirmations to make what is purely meta-physical and ethereal appear real and of significance. The common fashion in spiritual circles is to invent or co-opt new terms for saying the same old thing so that it appears to be original and fresh as opposed to borrowed and hackneyed.

It is wonderful to be out of the spiritual world of belief.

RESPONDENT: When thought is no longer the dominant feature of human living, what else is operating but nature expressed in its most fully developed action as unobstructed human consciousness? Is it the word consciousness that bothers you? Then throw it away. The word is not what is actual anyway.

VINEETO: Your sentence above belies the your definition of consciousness as ‘the actual operation of a quiet mind’ that you have given before –

[Respondent]: that such a quiet mind would not be clouded by feelings and emotions; that it would contain no barriers to full comprehension of the social mind and its behaviour; and that there could be no ‘instinctual passions’ operating. [endquote].

Despite the fact that it is common in spiritual circles to insist that the word is not the thing, it is nevertheless common in human-to-human communication to use words to describe a thing and as such the actual thing and the word used to describe it become inseparable in any sensible communication. But you might just as well throw the word ‘consciousness’ into the rubbish bin, as you do not know at all what you want to make of it. Vis:

[Respondent]: Consciousness therefore, is its content, but when the content is aware of its limitations as the content, that is the transformation of that same consciousness. Yet that same consciousness was always there/here, forever unknown, unknowable, causeless, untouched even by its own outer shell of knowledge.

[Respondent No 1]: How do you know that?

[Respondent]: I don’t. How can it be known? [endquote].

Thus to you, consciousness cannot be adequately described in words, cannot be known, is generally unaware that it is limitless, contains no barriers and is only discovered when thinking is no longer dominant. What you are describing is the dream-like state of a universal consciousness that feels itself to be timeless, ineffable, pure and absolute. This universal consciousness is a god-intoxicated consciousness and 180 degrees opposite to the pure consciousness of a non-affective PCE.

Actualism Homepage

Vineeto’s Writings and Correspondence