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Selected Correspondence Vineeto Actual RESPONDENT:
What’s so significant about this? Of course from a human’s perspective, it will always be ‘here’. What universal significance am I missing? VINEETO: When you stop imagining being here and feeling being here then you are able to begin to pay exclusive attention to actually physically sensately being here. That I am actually here is a fact – regardless of what I feel about being here or what I fantasize about being here – and realising this fact sets me free of all the ‘self’-imposed sentiments about such a simple and obvious fact that I am already here. It is the end of wondering why am I here and it is the end of objecting to being here,
too. * RESPONDENT:
What’s so significant about this? Of course from a human’s perspective, it will always be ‘here’. What universal significance am I missing? VINEETO: When you stop imagining being here and feeling being here then you are able to begin to pay exclusive attention to actually physically sensately being here. That I am actually here is a fact – regardless of what I feel about being here or what I fantasize about being here – and realising this fact sets me free of all the ‘self’-imposed sentiments about such a simple and obvious fact that I am already here. RESPONDENT: It wasn’t my question though (it was No 98’s) VINEETO: But it was your question – What’s so significant about understanding that this moment is your only moment of being alive? – not No 98’s which I answered saying –
And when you begin to pay exclusive attention to actually physically sensately being here then you become aware that it is a fact that you are actually physically here – regardless of what you feel about being here or what you fantasize about being here. To realize this fact and to live this realization is of life-changing significance and
is remarkably different to the way most people spend their lives being busy feeling and imagining being here.
VINEETO: To get back to your question, in my own process of disentangling myself from being a disciple I discovered two components to religious belief – one was the lure of ‘immortality, Truth, Timelessness’, and my aspiration to achieve an imaginary perfection in enlightenment, and the other was love and loyalty, my affective belief in the master’s ultimate authority and in my inferiority and thus dependency on his wisdom and compassion. For me, questioning authority itself and tracing it back to my belief in God, by whatever name, was the first step out of the spiritual world, and questioning the authority of the master (either as a God-like figure or a father-like figure or as a bit of both) was the second step. <snip> For me, the end of God was at the same time the end of hope, trust, faith and postponement, the end of debilitating waiting and cowardly pondering, the end of humbling myself in the face of an almighty invisible power, the end of a stupefying fear of God’s judgement of my right and wrong deeds. The end of my belief in God also freed me of the belief/ trust in and the loyalty for God’s earthly representatives such as my former master and all the righteous moral authorities that I had either dutifully followed and/or dutifully rebelled against. The end of my belief in God and my belief in an afterlife marked the beginning of standing on my own two feet with dignity and joy and for the very first time of relying on my intelligence and my common sense to find out the meaning of life for myself. RESPONDENT: I can certainly relate to a lot of what I think you’re saying here – there seems to be in me a stubborn resistance to looking in-depthly at the beliefs I’m holding about God and my authority problem, in fact I’m constantly distracting myself from really looking at it – I can remember when I moved to Byron Bay or around that time thinking ‘well what now, here I am, I can do anything I think of but really I’m just filling in time, waiting to die so in that sense I can see there was a motivation driven by a need to exist and have a sense of permanence and purpose and meaning and this brought about the need to have someone in my life who ‘knew’ – but the love and loyalty and my belief in the master’s ultimate authority and my own inferiority and dependency on some ‘other’ wiser knowing ‘one’ despite what he may have or may not have been saying is keeping me in hell – also I’m familiar with the emotionality and faux feelings of love and hypnotic silences that really have fuck all to do with anything and really feel pretty dead and manufactured – and this thing of defence arises where I want to make excuses for the other and say ‘oh it really didn’t have anything to do with him’ – it was just my failure to understand when really I’m completely pissed off that I fell for the whole fucking show and was such a fucking dependent wimpy fuck who was still looking for a knight in shining armour to take care of me and be my guide and see me as their special charge – and of course my faux feelings of love are rife with feelings of resentment and hostility because he has something I haven’t – it’s all pretty nauseating and pathetic really and wanting to be the innocent one and blame the enlightened one for not helping me and making sure I was seeing clearly what the hell I was doing so it could be undone or seen through might be a better expression – I’m reading where you said ‘I had to look at my feelings towards people I’d ascribed authority too’ and I immediately feel reactive and some sort of pressure rise up in me – there’s definitely feelings of hostility and resentment couple with a sense of sadness and loss – like I’m not going to be loved without those ones – I can’t really be happy without those special ones – like they really have something to offer me – I have to leave off now – I’m going into feeling overwhelmed which I think is probably part of the whole defence strategy when I even think about looking at this whole scenario ... VINEETO: Before you get further overwhelmed by a whole gamut of emotions and feelings about actualism I can only suggest to begin at the beginning – presumably what it was that attracted you to actualism in the first place – and start at the start – presumably what it is that is currently preventing you from devoting your life to becoming happy and harmless in order that you can become actually free of the human condition in toto. For me beginning at the beginning meant that before I was ready to question what I had been believing and intensely practicing all those years I had to take stock of my life so far and then thoroughly examine the new paradigm that was on offer –
To sort out these questions to my satisfaction took about three to six months – the first two questions required a good deal of introspection and self-evaluation of the down-to-earth sensible kind as opposed to the usual spiritual kind of reflection which requires a denial of what I really am – an ageing and very mortal flesh and blood body. And given my attraction to actualism I needed to be 100% sure that I was not falling into another trap of merely believing another’s report and I also needed to be certain that I was ready to leave the spiritual fold that I had belonged to for so long before I could completely abandon spiritualism and move on to something new. This introspection and self-evaluation was often a time of intense emotional upheaval and I needed focus and determination to come back to my original questions and intent to find out the facts beneath the muddy waters of my surging emotions. I also was not content with ‘maybe Richard is right and maybe the Enlightened Ones have failed’ – I wanted nothing less than 100% certainty in order to go ahead and change course. It certainly helped that everything that Richard was reporting from the actual world made sense to me – in other words, what he was saying was simple, sensible, straight-forward, matter of fact and down-to-earth and I could understand it for myself whenever my emotions weren’t interfering in this process of understanding. My determination to get to the bottom of the matter finally resolved when my ‘self’ temporarily disappeared and gave way to a pure consciousness experience, and with it disappeared my uncertainty how to determine what is fact/actual and what is belief/ faith/ metaphysics or spiritual mumbo-jumbo. In fact, it was my burning desire to know for sure what actually exists independent of human feelings and beliefs that brought my inquiry to a peak and caused the bubble of ‘me’ to temporarily burst. In a PCE I experienced, without doubt, for myself, that there is indeed an actual world already here, all the time, and that this actuality exists regardless of whether human beings believe in it, imagine it to be ephemeral/ secondary, object to it, love it or rile against it. The unadulterated, ‘self’-less, experience of the actual world then becomes your
guiding light and you need never to believe anybody anything ever again.
RESPONDENT: Here, far more often than in ‘real life’, I get the feeling that people are trying to fuck me over or thwart my intentions somehow. And ‘just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not havin’ you.’ VINEETO: I am curious as to why you separate writing to fellow human beings on this mailing list as being different to real life? Is it because we are talking about subjects and possibilities on this list that one doesn’t normally talk about with one’s fellow human beings in real-life, topics that are uncomfortable to talk about or matters that are considered as taboo? Could it be that you don’t feel threatened in real life because you are not challenged by such conversations and therefore don’t feel compelled to defend the status quo? The reason I ask this is that ‘I’ often felt very threatened by what Richard was saying when I first met him but I eventually engaged brain, came to my senses and realized that ‘I’ was afraid of becoming free of malice and sorrow because ‘I’ knew it would be the end of ‘me’. What I soon found was that I could not stop myself of heading down the path to becoming happy and harmless because my desire for peace on earth was stronger than my desire for ‘self’-survival. I don’t know what your original intentions were when you came to the list – I assumed you were interested in learning about an entirely new way of experiencing life – the way life is experienced in a PCE. I have answered your queries and have given you information on how the tool of attentiveness works for me. Apparently an actual freedom is not what you have imagined it to be and you repeatedly said that you want to keep your imagination intact and you also suggested putting love and empathy into your version of freedom as well. This list is the only place were there is a discussion happening about the pure actuality as it is experienced when the ‘self’, and with it one’s ‘self’-oriented viewpoint, disappears. To want to mould the purity of actuality according to ‘my’ liking is by its very nature impossible. When you try to change the purity of actuality according to your personal predilections into something that it can never be, then surely you will feel ‘that people are trying to fuck me over’. It is the ‘self’-less actuality you are opposing, not the people who describe it. [...] * RESPONDENT: When I first started reading the Actual Freedom web site, I thought the core ideas sounded really interesting. Then when I started to look into the correspondence, I saw that Richard seems to spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the minutiae, quibbling and quarrelling over trivialities, and seeming to be more interested in defending himself than helping the other. It almost deterred me from the start. I thought, how the hell can this guy have the goods he claims to have when all he does is bicker like the million and one pedantic geezers that hang out in newsgroups and mailing lists. It didn’t fit my impression of what a person who is actually free, beyond enlightenment, living a life of such quality that is unparalleled in human history, ought to be. VINEETO: Of course, the ‘core idea’ can sound ‘really interesting’ in theory. People only begin to quibble and quarrel when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of actually doing the work of looking at their own beliefs and preconceptions, their feelings and passions. A little clear-eyed look at the website will reveal that the journals and articles are forthright, down-to-earth and to the point, whereas the majority of correspondence consists of answers to correspondents who raised objections to what was said. In short it is the correspondents themselves who set the agenda by the content and intent of their criticism. I wonder why you feel Richard is ‘defending himself’ – aren’t his correspondents attacking him, often ad hominem? Do you think it is ‘not exactly consistent with someone who is ‘actually free from the human condition’’ to take the time and make the effort to put the facts straight and explain his experience in detail, over and over again? Do you think Richard should instead be a ‘lie-down-and-let-people- trample-all-over-him-pacifist? Do you think Richard should recant his discovery as Galileo was forced to do simply because the majority of correspondents think and feel he should not be challenging the status quo? Is your idea that Richard should be ‘helping people’ by agreeing with them or pampering to everyone’s individual worldview and personal beliefs or that he should not respond to their concerns and attacks? By ‘helping people’ do you mean refraining from ‘discussing the minutiae, quibbling and quarrelling over trivialities’ that many people find important enough to raise as an issue? * VINEETO: I always found that I first had to sort out my feelings for myself before I could read with both eyes open, ask sensible questions of Richard or have a fruitful discussion that was helpful to me in furthering my inquiry into the human condition. RESPONDENT: May I ask: does the kind of bickering I’ve witnessed here happen a lot in ‘real life’ too, or is it a text-only thing? VINEETO: Ha! Never. I never talk to people about their personal beliefs let alone about the possibility of becoming free from all emotions and passions that constitute the human condition unless they invite me to do so, and even then the conversation soon turns to less threatening topics. If the ‘text-only’ comments on this mailing list were face-to-face group encounters then we actualists may well have been taken out and shot in front of the grateful mob who would have no doubt been glad to see justice done, such is human nature. T’is not for nothing that we choose to discuss these matters with our fellow human beings via the internet. As a hint in case you are interested in less ‘bickering’ conversations –
whenever I was in any way emotionally effected by what my correspondents wrote it has always helped me to look at my own feelings
in the issue and then sleep over my response before I sent it so as to have some time to have a clear-eyed look at what was being
said.
RESPONDENT: I’ve been following the mailing list for a while, but haven’t taken the plunge until now. So here are some of my thoughts about what you have written. I think what you are describing is the witness capacity or witness position. Yes, old meditators would probably be fairly successful at moving into the witness position. In spiritual practice the rule of thumb is that you are not anything that you can observe. So, the trick is if you can see something, a feeling, a thought, etc. as it ‘arises,’ the fact that you are capable of witnessing it means that you are larger than it, not defined by or ultimately identified as the thing (feeling is the best example) that is being witnessed. The problem, as you seem to surmise, is that there continues to be an implied ‘you’ doing this witnessing. The feeling or thought has become an object of consciousness, but the sense persists that there is someone one, some Who doing the witnessing. Of course, this fuels the search for the ‘real’ you. As you mentioned, the ‘watching self’ is very, very passive. It just popped into my mind that this is like a possum, a mammal that avoids danger by playing dead. The witnessing self is free of and thus not identified with the thoughts or feelings that are arising as long as it maintains its position of emotional neutrality. If the emotional neutrality possum stance is overwhelmed either by the strength of the thoughts or feelings being witnessed, or the lack of vigilance by the witnessing self, boom, the self is right back in the throes of being all those feelings and ensuing thoughts about the feelings that were driving it bonkers to begin with. What is referred to in spiritual literature as ‘stable witness’ will ensure a pretty good state of emotional balance, but only pretty good, because a self/Self is still present, and where there is a self there are the primitive, instinctual emotions. It’s a question of when, not if, those emotions will be activated. So, I think that playing possum, i.e. dissociating from feelings and thoughts, can only give one a relative (although nothing to sneeze at) freedom from the sway of emotions, because there is still present a separate self sense, no matter how elevated. In the more modern theories of spiritual process, it is no longer demanded that the state of emotional balance be perfect. However, they all claim the ability to witness the feeling, even while experiencing the feeling. VINEETO: I enjoyed your expertise in this summary on witnessing. A well-described précis of something that I spent years practicing and, upon discovering actualism, many months to comprehend, take apart and see through the whole charade. I particularly liked when you said –
One of the best things that could happen was that spiritual teaching has moved to the West and into the age of information technology – one can now apply detailed scrutiny and comparison and ascertain the facts as to why this Ancient Wisdom has not worked anywhere, at any time. Isn’t it amazing that the whole spiritual empire stands and falls on this one premise –
It sounds logical at first, but once I understood that the brain has the innate ability to observe itself, the whole imagination of a separate self, the watcher, watching my thoughts, feelings and actions lost its foothold and was revealed as the fairytale it is – a passionate make-belief to prove our immortality, the ‘Witness’ that supposedly survives the physical body. No factual evidence can ever be established about a watcher that continues after death. It is the fatal flaw in spirituality, the bodiless spirit itself. It is not actual, per definition. In a Pure Consciousness Experience it is blatantly sparklingly obvious that ‘I’
don’t exist and that there is nothing inside this flesh and blood body to survive physical death. What a relief! * RESPONDENT: Before I fortuitously came across the Actual Freedom website, I had gotten to the point of realizing there was no witness to witness, and as such no self with an existence outside of my material body/mind. Reading and conversing with Richard opened the door to my understanding that the feeling of ‘being’ that I had once interpreted as evidence of a being free of physicality was, in actuality, the activity of the instinctual passions – the instinct for survival magnified into an instinct of survival for a non-corporeal self. VINEETO: It’s cute that once one dares to inquire 180 degrees in the opposite direction of what everyone else is proposing as the solution, it all starts making sense. As you said,
Peter wrote to another list in a witty play of words –
Strangely enough, the simple, actual, sensible approach of Actual Freedom can only appeal to those who have tried all the other nonsensical but highly ‘self’-gratifying approaches to finding freedom, peace and happiness and found them badly wanting. Without an utter discontent with the real world and the spiritual world no self-respecting (great term, Alan!) seeker would appear to be ready and willing to give up hope, faith, trust and the option of divinity. RESPONDENT: For me, the spiritual process carried the seeds of its own demise because it is based on an inherent, though incredibly subtle, duality – spirit and matter. Now that I’m not searching for ‘reality’ or my real self in other realms, I am investigating very intensely this ‘rudimentary self’ that is part and parcel of the instinctual programming. For whatever reason, I was unable to settle for an even subtly split experience, no matter what the payoff in bliss and promised immortality. VINEETO: Today I don’t consider this duality subtle anymore – it is, in fact, very crude and blatantly obvious. In my spiritual years I had to practice much denial and acceptance in order to fit all the fervent beliefs and nonsensical explanations into my poor confused brain and it was a great relief when the bubble of beliefs finally burst. I practiced denial for years, despite evidence and common sense, attempting to transcend my ‘bad’ emotions, my personal thoughts, my association with my physical body and tried to ignore all the real suffering, both my own and that of others around me. In return, I needed a lot of reassurance through feel-good energy, feeling superior by belonging to the Chosen Ones and the daily practice of meditation in the nursery of an isolated Ashram. It is hard work to keep nonsensical belief alive, complete with moral control and the demands of one’s social identity. Although it requires a lot of effort and persistence at the start to investigate and eliminate one’s beliefs, feelings and emotions, living in Actual Freedom doesn’t need any effort at all because the actual world is already always here. One simply needs to remove everything that prevents the actual from becoming apparent. It’s a superb bargain to exchange one’s beliefs, emotions and instinctual passions for the sensate actuality and magical perfection of the actual world. * RESPONDENT: Also, I appreciate the simplicity and commonsense of this approach. The spiritual universe is sooooooo convoluted. VINEETO: Yes, in the actual world there is no duality whatsoever because when
the ‘self’ disappears, the feeling of separation and any notions of duality also disappear. So now, instead of enhancing the
‘Good’ and fighting the ‘Evil’, I trace down both good and bad feelings and instinctual passions and aim for immolating
the very ‘self’ that maintains the feeling of separation and the notion of duality in the first place. I am reminded of poor
Cinderella who had the job to sort out peas into large ones and small ones – now I am simply throwing out the whole lot, all of
me. That’s what makes actualism so simple – for the ones who are daring enough.
VINEETO: In this PCE I could also see that even though a staggering six billion people think, believe, feel and act within these parameters of the Human Condition, the actual world is nevertheless infinite, eternal, perfect, silent and magical. The actual world is always and everywhere present underneath the doom and gloom of our ‘self’-centred perception and can be discovered any moment. In such a PCE I can see that it does not matter that right now there is only Richard who lives in the actual world 24 hours a day, every day. This blithesome, magnificent and benevolent actual world exists always and everywhere around us, it is always here, always now and immediately experienced when I leave all of humanity behind. Out of this and similar experiences, I don’t need ‘to assume’ – I know the Human Condition in its totality, in myself and therefore in everybody, because I can see it from not being afflicted by it for a certain period of time. Such experience is the opposite of ‘egotistical’ because a PCE is only possible when the whole ‘self’ is absent – in spiritual terms, both ego and soul. And yes, such an experience, even for a short period of time is vastly superior to any experience within the Human Condition. That’s why I want to live it every day, 24 hours a day. I don’t need to ‘presume superiority’, I simply write from the memory of the superior state evident in a pure consciousness experience and from the ongoing experience of Virtual Freedom. [...] * VINEETO: The path to Actual Freedom has the advantage that I have a very clear knowledge of what I want to achieve through the experience of selflessness in a PCE. Also, after a relatively short time I can see the actual, tangible and ever-increasing success of a life more and more free of malice and sorrow and eventually reach a state of Virtual Freedom. If everyone lived in Virtual Freedom, there would be peace on earth, even if nobody else managed to become actually free. So Virtual Freedom is not to be dismissed lightly as ‘arrive ... some day if you continue to search and investigate verbally and experientially’. For me, anyway, it is a point of no return. If, however, someone writing from the experience of Virtual Freedom is not enough of a proof that the method to Actual Freedom works, there is always Richard’s writing, if you want to verify or clarify what it is I am saying. RESPONDENT: I must point out that I am not ‘just’ writing, but like you, I am writing from experience. VINEETO: Because Actual Freedom is so new and radically non-spiritual, it often
happens that it is difficult to distinguish between Actual Freedom and the teachings of ‘wisdom’ that have been around for
centuries. Having had several experiences of PCEs and of Altered States of Consciousness I can say that I am an expert on the
pitfalls and seductions of the spiritual world. If you are interested you can read about If by ‘I am writing from experience’, you mean life-experience, it can only be an emotional experience from within the Human Condition and, as such, is worth sharing to enhance the inquiry. If you mean you are writing from an experience of a PCE, I can only go by what you write and your words and descriptions don’t convey the experience of a self-less state. In our exchange before last you used expressions like:
To me these expressions are indicative of a spiritual experience, and are not
describing a pure consciousness experience. In a PCE one is this flesh-and-blood body only with the clear awareness of what is
actual. Everybody who can remember a PCE can recognize when someone describes the purity of the actual world. In a PCE the
‘real’ world does not exist because the ‘real’ world consists of ideas, beliefs, emotions and passions produced in the
head and in the heart. In a PCE there is no ‘emotional ... remembrance’ because emotions are the very substance of the
self.
VINEETO: Tantra has nothing to do with an actual intimacy – Tantra does not questions god, or love, or emotions and has not even begun to acknowledge, let alone question, the instinctual passions as the underlying cause of human behaviour. As for ‘the Actual Intimacy that you are clearly beginning to find in your life’ – There are no capital letters in the actual intimacy that I am talking about, for there
is no god, no love and no affective imagination in my intimacy with others as it is actual, tangible, palpable and not subject to
the whims of emotions. I have found the actuality of such direct intimacy and I am enjoying it hour for hour, day after day, so
much so that I take it for granted now. I even have trouble comprehending why everybody obviously has this need to quarrel and
fight, when they are together. * RESPONDENT: Just so you know... I am already living in a state of ACTUAL FUCKIN’ FREEDOM... * RESPONDENT: It is a difficult one, Vineeto ... as long as one is learning and teaching one is not free... I see no possibility of profitably discussing with you how you, Vineeto, could be actually free as your friend Richard is. But I see immense possibility of continuing this discussion. All I know; Actual Freedom is. It is great you are developing this new religion. We need religions in order to get together and discuss things so that we begin to understand each other. It is a pity that all of the received wisdom of the eastern and western worlds up till now – including the new religion known as actualism – is imperatively and actually wrong, as it does not work. One is Actually Free. VINEETO: May I ask, have you considered listing with the venerated 502 awakened beings that are, for the first time in history, appearing under one ‘roof’ on the world wide web (http://www.wideopenwin.com/alphaover.html)? Being able to expound such profound truths and wisdom you will surely be welcome as equal amongst equals. Further you will be able to offer your own original teaching of AFF (Actual Fuckin’ Freedom), a situation that will give you a unique position amongst all the teachers and masters. Along with ‘Actual Reality’, ‘Actual Intimacy’ and ‘Creative Apperception’ there are many more phrases that can be coined to flesh out this deep and meaningful truth of yours – a vast field of creativity lies ahead. Here are some possible descriptive phrases that I have picked up so far –
RESPONDENT: It is a pity that ... the new religion known as actualism – is imperatively and actually wrong, as it does not work. VINEETO: You might be mislead by the -ism at the end of the word ‘actualism’. The term ‘actualism’ was coined to describe the path to Actual Freedom, using Richard’s method. I know that Richard’s method works for me to extract myself out of the Human Condition and it works for some other people that have reported success. The fact that it does not seem to work for you might have some completely different reasons altogether and might need some further investigation. As for the ‘immense possibility of ... discussion’ – for me, every discussion is an opportunity to discover an aspect of my ‘self’, to investigate any occurring emotions and to dismantle the human condition in me. This may be a discussion on this list, an interaction with a neighbour, a meeting at work, a talk with Peter or reading Richard’s writing. The decisive factor to becoming free from the Human Condition is solely my own sincere intent, my decision to bring about peace-on-earth by putting an end to the suffering and malice in me, permanently. As such, everything that facilitates this exploration into my ‘self’ is welcome – yet I can’t quite understand why someone would make it their business to be more interested my freedom than in their own. Freedom, the actual palpable, permanent non-spiritual freedom that we are talking about on this list, can only be reached by my conscious decision to step out of the way and leave my ‘self’ behind – permanently. This decision has to be taken by each individual who wants to be actually free and can never be brought about by somebody’s pushing or pulling. As Richard said in the interchange below: ‘only you can allow yourself to be taken away’ by the ‘utter fullness’. You see, I made up my mind a long time ago and the adventure of living on the brink of extinction is often breath-takingly thrilling and the coruscating experience of the infinitude often only a hair’s breadth away. Therefore your questioning me is coming too late to change my course. As I said before, you will have to write me off as a lost case. But thanks for the thought. Richard, in his latest correspondence, described the necessary resolution to become free with delicate excellence –
VINEETO: When I first began to dig into the idea of what being spiritual means, I was being tormented for a few weeks as to which was the right path and which was the wrong path and what I was to be believe and follow and what was heresy. Finally I popped my head outside of the world of beliefs and spiritual concepts – the first crack in the door. The psychic world, this intricate net woven in our heads and hearts from both personal and atavistic feelings and beliefs is so dense that it seems to be the only world there is. Here is a bit what I wrote at the time –
Therefore, from my own experience and from the many, many conversations I had in the last years, it is clear that merely by living within the Human Condition one is inevitably spiritual. For some people spiritual values are more religious values, or Eastern religious values, for other people it is saving animals and the planet, for others it is the belief in fairies and earth-spirits or other parallel universe. As I see it, all beliefs and values we are fighting about – or being touchy about – are spiritual beliefs and values, there is no other belief or value than a spiritual belief or value. Our very identity is spiritual, simply by the fact that it is non-actual as in not tangible, palpable, tactile, material or verifiable. All believing is happening in the head and the heart, not as a physical actuality. And once I found out that I was trapped by my beliefs, ideas, concepts and convictions,
that I was producing and continuously reproducing my-’self’, I also knew that they were part of the bondage and could never be
part of the solution. Therefore it was not a question of which belief is the right belief and which spirituality is the right
spirituality, but it was a matter of getting out of all beliefs solely because they are non-factual. * VINEETO: When I came across actualism, the first thing I had to do was dust off my brain and shift it back into thinking gear – discovering how to think, contemplate and inquire in a way that there is some result. I found it useful in my contemplations to always remember to keep coming back to the question or issue, and not – as our usually untrained brains tend to do – get lost in the different alleys and branches of speculation, imagination or irrelevant side issues. I became aware that whenever the subject was too close to the bone, whenever a dearly held belief was questioned, I was usually very quick in changing the subject and steering away from the ‘dangerous’ area. I remember that surprised to discover how roundabout and aversely my way of thinking often had been. Mind and thinking has such a bad press in the spiritual world where one is taught that the gateway to ‘inner peace’ is to ‘follow your feelings, trust you intuition and leave your mind at the door’. When I started on the path to Actual Freedom it was a pleasure and delight to re-instate, lubricate and develop my common sense and intelligence in order to make sense of all the beliefs that I had adopted, the instinctual passions that I was driven by and begin to understand the actual world. It was fascinating to observe and experience my brain clicking into clear function – at first only once in a while with what one would call a ‘striking thought’ and then I noticed that I could actually make sense of a down-to-earth conversation about Actual Freedom I had with either Richard or Peter. Eventually I was able to think straightforward thoughts, unclouded by fear or imagination and come to startlingly obvious conclusions. The outcome of such application of common sense was often very staggering, new, fresh and shockingly different to what I had believed, ‘felt’ or ‘intuited’. Down-to-earth practical common sense, of course, has nothing to do with rational theorizing, useless philosophizing, cerebral masturbation or conceptual imagination. For me, the crucial test of common sense always is – how can I put my understanding
into practice, how can I actualize my realization, how can I act on the ‘striking thought’. In my spiritual days, striking
thoughts would come and go and I did nothing but revel in the feeling of ‘knowing’. Those insights, even when they were
sensible realizations, disappeared without a trace after a few hours or days and didn’t have any impact on solving my problems.
Nowadays, because I am vitally interested in being here, I enjoy the stunning clarity that the human brain is capable of and I
also put my understanding into action – and what excellence, what a thrill!
RESPONDENT: A side thought: Non-emotional but deeply intimate life in a sensuous relationship is a great way to live as a couple. But what would you do if your partner was both sensuous and very emotional? VINEETO: For me, ‘a deeply intimate life in a sensuous relationship’ had been a life-long yearning – to live with a man in peace and harmony, equity and intimacy. It took a great number of years to be able to question the ‘truth’ that love was the answer to a fulfilling relationship. I do like your question and I had to chuckle because in one short sentence you encompass what is both the attraction and the problem for men regarding women while at the same time the ‘sensuous and very emotional’ qualities are the very substance of the covert power that women hold over men. On the path to becoming happy and harmless it can be of great benefit for your investigation into the Human Condition and your discovery of the actual world to have someone around who can trigger both your sensuousness and your emotions. One can be aware of one’s sensuality on one’s own – the sounds around, the breeze
on the skin, the delight of colours or forms, the joy of walking, etc. And it is even more fun to explore sensuousness with your
partner. Sexual play with Peter often initiated a switch in me from philosophizing and worrying to refocusing my attention to
being sensately alive here in this moment in time. Reflective contemplation, sensuality and sensuousness are the doors to
experiencing the actual world, being alive as this flesh-and-blood body only, while the emotions are usually what stops you from
being here in this moment. * As far as ‘the world inhabited by other people’ is concerned – there are some practical safety measures to be considered. When appropriate, I will keep my mouth shut and not talk about Actual Freedom, because people seem to get really upset when their dearly held beliefs are questioned. The Internet for instance, is a much safer place to have a conversation about Actual Freedom. But most of what is considered ‘danger’ is, in fact, merely emotionally perceive and disappears with the thorough investigation of one’s emotions, feelings and instinctual passions – the actual world is an imminently safe place to be. A side-note – once you actively start investigating those hopes and fears whilst experiencing them, you will find out for yourself that they are very real but not actual. Thinking about one’s fears without thoroughly investigating what they are based on will on the other hand merely confirm the mother of all beliefs – that ‘you can’t change the human nature’. Once I started to investigate a fear that arose from changing myself, the next time I found I could not take the fear as serious as before, for I knew that by exploring the fear it would eventually reveal its illusionary nature. With each fear removed, my brain was functioning better and clearer than before and was less restricted by chemically driven irrational hopes and fears. But it takes daring and initiative to start exploring one’s ‘ghosts in the cupboard’, as Alan and I used to call them. Freedom from the Human Condition does not happen by itself and it does not happen overnight. It needs persistent and bloody-minded sincere intent and thorough investigation – and then the rewards are beyond your wildest dreams. I keep saying to Peter that if people only knew what they were missing ... all my dreams have come true, one by one. RESPONDENT: Another side note: in the egoless state there might be no planning and ‘control’ executed by the ‘I’ but it might nevertheless happen because of the brain’s instinct (??) of the body-preservation? Or is the instinct of the prolongation of the life also gone in the ego-less state and one is not concerned when death approaches? VINEETO: I don’t know and I don’t really care. ‘Body-preservation’ without the instincts is none of ‘my’ business because ‘I’ won’t be here anymore... Once the ‘self’ is as weakened as it is now, I am simply doing what is happening. ‘I’ am not needed to keep this body alive, on the contrary, ‘I’ had been continuously interfering with my physical well-being by worrying and fighting, dieting and indulging, being stressed or depressed, fearful or driven. My health and well being are now better than ever, I have stopped worrying about vitamins or minerals, starch or protein, vegetarianism or health-dieting, natural or homeopathic medicine long ago. Also I take it that the medical technology in this country is so advanced as to give me a good chance of staying healthy as long as possible ... and when my time is over I can surely say that I had had a perfect life, every day, 24 hrs a day, for years and years and years. With the ‘self’ the fear of death also dies. Once ‘I’ am gone there won’t be
anybody left to be afraid of death. Of course I can still jump out of the way of an approaching car or an attacking dog.
Intelligence and apperceptive awareness together with the physical startle-response are enough to keep this body alive as long as
is possible. It is the psychological and psychic fear of death that casts shadows of fear and doubt into our lives and prevents us
from experiencing the safety, magnificence and abundant perfection of the actual physical universe. * VINEETO: You see, when one honestly investigates the so-called altruistic feelings of love, there is nothing altruistic about it. Love is utterly selfish and self-centred. Love prevents me from appreciating and meeting the other as a fellow human being because every feeling towards the other, positive or negative, makes me unable to perceive the other as an autonomous human being. Being in love, I create an all-pervasive affective image of the other, consisting of my hopes, needs, fears, dreams and expectations. Only by being an autonomous human being myself can I experience an actual intimacy with my fellow human beings. This is how I described my first experience of actual intimacy –
VINEETO to Alan: You say, ‘there is only one place left to go’ – I
experience the process as coming ever more often here, and hardly ever being lost in a ‘trough’ of instinctually based
feelings and emotions. This idea of going to another place might very well be a remnant of religious belief that there is some
better place to go – either to heaven or to Nirvana-land. Freedom and the actual world are not another ‘place left to
go’, but my job is to keep finding and removing every single obstacle that keeps me from being here, here where the magic
and the perfection are already happening. It’s the discovering, understanding and removing of the obstacles, the occurrences of
the ‘self’, that are the vital, fascinating and thrilling bit of the journey. * VINEETO to Alan: One of the later explorations was experiencing time. By
exploring the emotions and instinctual passions that prevent me from being here, I am more and more able to simply be here, in
this moment. First I realised that the future is slipping away. The past had been gone with all the emotional issues resolved that
had tied me to past memories. It is fascinating to notice how by being here the notion of ‘real’ time – this imagined web of
ideas and feelings about past and future and their supposed implications for this moment – is falling by the wayside and
disappearing with alarming speed, leaving me at times disoriented as if a fairytale has turned into a pumpkin. But as I recovered
from the confusion and its ensuing insecurity the ‘pumpkin’ turns out to be utterly delicious – each moment is a delight
because it is actually happening, it is neither felt nor imagined but happening right this very moment – whatever is happening
is actual. There is such an innate pleasure and satisfaction in the experience of the very actuality of this moment that whatever
I do is a bonus on top of it – what abundance. * VINEETO to Alan: The main fuel for this feeling of impatience comes from the notion that there is something better ‘out there’, in the future – that magic ingredient that will then make life as perfect as the ending of children’s fairytale – and then they lived happily ever after. And yet it is this very feeling of impatience, that particular bit of my ‘self’, that prevents me from the sensate-only experiencing the perfection of this moment. Impatience is the ‘self’ telling the ‘self’ to go away in order for life to be perfect thereafter. What a furphy! Who am I trying to fool? This is what cunningness in action looks like. It is fascinating to see the self splitting itself into two yet again in order to pretend that there is change happening without really having to change anything. Seeing through the charade, I experience the thrill that accompanies the shift from a furphy to an actual experience, from ‘feeling impatient’ to actively dismantling the ‘self’, from stepping out of the ‘real’ world to arriving here. I understand that the only way to approach self-immolation is by welcoming the death of ‘me’ with free will, open arms and a full YES. It is a magic formula, that turning around 180 degrees again, a yes to immolation rather than a no to life as it is. When ‘death’ is welcome with the same thrilling anticipation as a sexual playmate
then I know I am on the right track.
VINEETO: Facts are what is actual, tangible, discernable, provable, practical, and by knowing the facts one can consider what will be the best for everybody involved. Emotions, by their very nature, are always ‘self’-centred and always non-factual – however, the physical symptoms that often accompany the appearance of the emotions make them very real, and it needs great attentiveness and persistent observation to disentangle oneself from their convincing instinctual grip. In your investigations you might come across ancient scary tales, collective
superstitions, nonsense disguised as ancient wisdom, hoary psittacisms, moralistic no-no’s, ethical taboos, fear of ostracism,
weird inner psychic horror movies ... With all those possible ‘ghosts’ emerging from the depth of one’s psyche it is
important to clearly distinguish between fact and feeling. Facts are tangible, constant, reliable, whereas feelings will
invariable fade if one stops feeding them. * RESPONDENT: I’m not having PCEs but I am having direct experiences. I will write when I have more to say. That’s all for now. VINEETO: As I said above, in order to understand what Actual Freedom is about it is essential to remember a pure consciousness experience. It is vital to investigate precisely those ‘direct experiences’ , and determine when and where and how the experience is being polluted by the ‘self’, by the feeling and spirit-ual interpretation of the actual sensate, sensuous experience. It is a fascinating adventure to explore one’s sensate experiences with the magnifying glass of attentiveness and heightened awareness and to discover the ingredients that invariably occur to stop or prevent one’s direct experience of the actual world. Particularly in the beginning I would often be thrown into a turmoil of fears and ‘bad’ feelings when trying to remove the ‘good’ feelings of love, beauty, spiritual meaningfulness or virtue from a sensate experience. Suddenly all hell broke lose, the ‘bad’ feelings of loneliness, starkness, dread or vice would come to the surface. Moral and ethical values would appear as noisy and frightening doubts in my head calling me traitor, whore, evil, animal. But remember, those feelings– as scary as they may look at first – are nothing but the flipside of the coin called morality and can confidently be dismissed along with all the good feelings. The ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ feelings are the rose-coloured and grey-coloured glasses one has to remove from one’s eyes in order to experience the actual world as magnificent as it is. What is left is pure delight. * RESPONDENT: My previous teachings to me are about the actual. For example, a key ingredient of my previous teachings is about having a direct experience of the actual which I feel is necessary to having a PCE. VINEETO: I am curious what ‘direct experience of the actual’ means for you, because all the new-age teachings of self-discovery that I know of, both spiritual and therapeutic, teach you about the experience of the ‘real me’, the ‘true self’, the ‘natural I’ and the ‘original face’. Most people don’t even make a distinction between the experience of sensual feelings like touch, temperature, hunger, sex, sleepiness on one side and affective feelings, moods, emotions and passions on the other side. Whereas the actual is – to quote the glossary –
I have a hunch that you might be talking about ‘Reality’. I am looking forward to hearing from you. * RESPONDENT: I’m sure they could be interpreted as spiritual but this is not my understanding of my previous teachings. VINEETO: For me, Actual Freedom is not a matter of interpretation, nor has my
previous spiritual practice been a matter of interpretation. I am not talking about semantics, but for me the single-most
life-changing insight of my life has been to experientially understand the difference between spiritual and actual. I have
described my first big PCE in Actual Freedom is not a new idea that can be interpreted and integrated into an
existing thought-system, it is a practical, down-to-earth non-spiritual method to eventuate an actual, irrevocable change that
leads to the extinction of ‘who you think and feel you are’. * RESPONDENT:
VINEETO: It took some time until the penny dropped but I have finally understood
that ‘actual change’ and ‘radically new’ are obviously not on your menu. Out of this misunderstanding I have cluttered you
with heaps of irrelevant information, but never mind. In order to ensure no change you are exactly on the right track. You might
remember Peter’s equation that he introduced when reviewing
With the brilliant example of denial and applying the teachings of transcendence that you have given above you will have no trouble avoiding the dreaded actual change. I have always found it fascinating to discover in the course of my correspondence, meeting people and reading New Age publications, that the new fashion in spiritual circles is now introducing words like ‘non-spiritual’, ‘actual’ and even ‘apperception’ into their current vocabulary, because it sounds good and ‘feels right’. The New Age search that started in the ‘sixties now needs a new polishing, as it has become a bit of a well-worn path that hasn’t delivered the desired results for millions of seekers. This re-vamping process can be compared to taking one’s rotten old Ford car, giving it a new paintjob and a flashy bumper-bar and re-naming it ‘Lamborghini’. Now one can show it again, all the while it remains rotten to the core. A face-lift, à la Hollywood, is accomplished by creating a few new terms and labels – and the spiritual search can continue on for another fifty years without being considered out of date. Actualism writings are an excellent source for such face-lift words, particularly when applied in creative combinations. The postmodern Non-Spirituality that is evolving from the New Age Spirituality now reads like this (and most examples are not even invented by me) – Flesh-and-blood body mindfulness, apperceptive presence, non-spiritual reality, direct actual experience of truth, factuality of one’s ordinary self, a feeling of pure consciousness approaching, direct divine experience of the physical universe, non-spiritual self, spiritual ... oops, non-spiritual intimacy, thoughtless perfection, emotional facts, virtual commitment, physical Being, ever improving perfection, extremely free, exploring beyond appearance into ‘actual reality’, the all-consuming universe experiencing the moment, personal sensate-only experience, such sensuous no-mind image, natural non-spiritual living, factual emotional remembrance, timeless sense of actuality, watching without being a watcher, unfragmented observed actuality, virtual facts, greater actuality, beyond the realm of the apperceptive mind-entity. I am sure there are plenty more examples to describe the verbal assimilation that will
take place in the transformation from Eastern Religion to New Age Spirituality to Post-modern Non-Spirituality. A hilarious and
highly entertaining example of such effort can be found in Richard’s correspondence, Richard sums up his experience of years of talking to people like this:
RESPONDENT: My previous teachings to me are about the actual. For example, a key ingredient of my previous teachings is about having a direct experience of the actual which I feel is necessary to having a PCE. VINEETO: I am stunned that you can call Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teaching being ‘about the actual’. If you had followed a bit of Richard’s extensive correspondence with many, many people on this very same teacher’s mailing list, you would at least have noted that Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s concern is the transcendental and nothing but the transcendental. Vis:
In order to be able to say that Mr. Krishnamurti’s teachings to you are ‘about the actual’ you have to either ignore 90% of Krishnamurti’s teachings or twist the meaning of the word ‘actual’ into meaning spiritual and transcendental. ‘The key ingredient of [your] previous teachings is about having a direct experience’ of the divine, not the actual. Vis:
I have no problem with whatever name you might give to your goal and your experiences but denial and transcendence are a sure method of avoiding a Pure Consciousness Experience. For comparison I copied a description of a direct experiencing of the actual.
And just a little bit further in the correspondence files I found a perfect example to demonstrate actuality:
RESPONDENT: My previous teachings to me are about the actual. For example, a key ingredient of my previous teachings is about having a direct experience of the actual which I feel is necessary to having a PCE. VINEETO: If Krishnamurti’s method and other methods of ‘self-discovery’ or ‘self-knowledge’ were able to produce a PCE, it would have happened by now, don’t you think? I acknowledge that to grasp even a glimpse of the actual world is very difficult because normal reality is all we know and spiritual reality is all we imagine. For that very reason it is so vital to remember or to experience a pure consciousness experience. However, changing a few words, applying your previous spiritual methods and denying even being spiritual at all is a sure recipe of cutting yourself off from ever experiencing anything outside of the Human Condition. RESPONDENT: Direct experience of the actual would be being with this monitor without having other thoughts about the past, etc. I’m not into any new age teachings. I clearly see the difference between sensual feelings and affective feelings. VINEETO: As you might have gleaned from Richard’s description, your ‘direct experience of the actual’ and Richard’s direct experience of the actual are two different pairs of shoes. The choice is always yours. * In order to be able to say that Mr. Krishnamurti’s teachings to you are ‘about the actual’ you have to either ignore 90% of Krishnamurti’s teachings or twist the meaning of the word ‘actual’ into meaning spiritual and transcendental. ‘The key ingredient of [your] previous teachings is about having a direct experience’ of the divine, not the actual. Vis:
RESPONDENT: I was talking about the teachings themselves such as being aware of what I am actually doing, thinking and feeling from moment to moment and you have added a quote from his early years and what he may or may not have meant by truth at that period of his life. VINEETO: I find it interesting that you should object to the relevance of the above quote from J. Krishnamurti by saying that it was ‘from his early years’. This is one of the several stock standard responses that were used by several faithful followers of Krishnamurti when Richard introduced quotes on the Mailing List B mailing list to prove a point he was making. Only in September last year Richard had a lengthy discussion with one correspondent about that very same argument ... ‘from his early years’. You were also writing on the list at the same time but maybe you missed the exchange. I have copied the relevant correspondence at the end of this letter. I had posted this particular quote because I know from my thorough investigation into my years of spiritual dependency that you cannot separate the teachings from the teacher and just pick out a some advice that seem worth applying in your life and ignore the rest. The above quote shows clearly, as do many others from his later years, that J. Krishnamurti was a through and through spiritual person – ‘God-intoxicated’ – and his declared purpose was to teach people how to achieve this experience for themselves. Vis.:
Therefore, following his method can, at the most, lead you to what he achieved – becoming yet another spiritual teacher immersed in ‘that which is eternal’ – and not knowing anything about a ‘direct experience with the actual’. * VINEETO: You felt moved to defend your teacher the moment I quoted him in order
to prove that he is concerned only with the spiritual and the divine and not with the actual. This reaction indicates where to
look when you want to ‘see if [you] have any spirituality’. So in order to ‘continue to look and see if [you] have
any spirituality’, you will first and foremost have to consider and investigate your affective relationship to your
‘previous’ teacher and teachings. Otherwise any factual discussion about what Krishnamurti said or meant will be distorted by
the emotions that are instigating automatic instinctual (or, as LeDoux calls them, ‘quick and dirty’) reactions rather than
considered intelligent responses.
VINEETO: It was only when I learnt about Actual Freedom and began investigating
the underlying beliefs, emotions and instinctual passions that form my identity, did I start to understand the reason for my need
of authority and was able to incrementally free myself of this very need for emotional dependency. In order to break free I had to
overcome the fear of standing on my own feet, the need to belong to anyone or any group as well as my innate laziness. I had to
learn to rely on facts rather than beliefs, and to use my capacity to think and investigate for myself rather than feel, trust and
intuit my way in the world. It is an absolute fascinating adventure once one starts to debunk the big authorities, particularly
the Gurus and God-men, and starts finding out for oneself. A whole new, factual and actual, world starts opening up. Knowing the
facts for oneself gives a confidence that makes emotional authority issues utterly redundant. * VINEETO: When I look back to see what it was that gave me the first glimpses of the actual world as opposed to my only-known world of thoughts and feelings, I can say that it was a repetitious reading of Richard’s journal, extensive discussions with Peter to find out what his words actually mean and the desire to find out exactly what it was different to the spiritual teaching that I knew. I was looking for the difference, not for any seeming similarity. I was not satisfied with the outcome of my spiritual search, I was looking for something that worked – and Richard obviously had discovered something that worked. The next vital and essential break-through in understanding was my first major peak experience (PCE). What had started off one evening as ‘a roaming in the vast chambers of my mind’, psychic experiences and an expanded state of consciousness suddenly took a turn from ‘inner reality’ to actuality. It happened when Peter looked at me and said ‘hello, how are you doing?’ I popped out of my inner world of feelings and imagination and, questioning the very validity of all I felt and thought, entered the world beyond beliefs and feelings – the actual world. Here was another human being, a flesh-and-blood person without any particular identity and he wanted to talk to me. And here I was, also a flesh-and-blood person without a particular identity, sitting on an old couch and curious to talk to this man that I was meeting for the first time. I had never met the actual Peter; I had only related to him through the curtain of my expectations and classifications, through the filter of my social identity, through the grey or rose-coloured glasses of my ‘self’. What was initially a shocking surprise quickly turned into fascination and delight to have discovered something so simple and so pure – actual intimacy with another person and the perfection of the actual world. Here we were, two human beings, meeting for the first time, without past or future. No grand feelings, in fact, no feelings at all, but the pleasure of mutual undivided attention as to what the other is going to say next... All my churning questions from the weeks before as to what was right and what was wrong
had disappeared from my tortured head and heart; the experience of the moment was all that mattered. In the course of the evening
and the following night, insight upon insight occurred as the edifice of my beliefs system tumbled – the actual world, the world
beyond belief opened up. Unbeknown to me it had been here all the time, a world where everything was simply obvious, perfect,
pure, delightful, actual, factual and ‘wysiwyg’ (what you see is what you get). No deeper meaning, no God, no soul, no
philosophy – meaning and significance abounds when living this moment without the burden of the ‘self’. A complete
description of this PCE This pure consciousness experience became my reference point for what I wanted to achieve. It was also an essential reference point to understand what Richard was saying and writing. After all, this actual world is the very world he is living in all the time, and my PCE had just demonstrated how this world is usually tucked away behind the normal/ spiritual worldview. When you wrote to Richard on mailing list B, you related an experience of the actual –
The remembrance of this ‘self’-less perfection is the starting point to the dismantling of the ‘self’, first the outer layers of one’s social identity and then the core of one’s being, the instinctual passions. From the reference point of a PCE one is able to distinguish the actual from normal or spiritual, facts from beliefs and sensuous experience from affective feelings. One starts from an experience of the actual and daringly questions every truth, belief, faith, hope, trust and feeling. The clarity of a PCE is vital to distinguish facts from ‘truths’, and the PCE reveals feelings of fear and pride as unnecessary stumbling blocks and exposes the ‘self’ in action that is spoiling the already always-existing perfection. What adventure, what delight, what serendipity.
RESPONDENT:
This is what K means by the actual to me. I don’t see anything divine about this. It is what I am actually thinking, feeling and doing from moment to moment. This is ‘what is’. It is not what I want it to be or what it should be but what I am actually thinking, feeling and doing from moment to moment. What do you say? 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. 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. 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. 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’. 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: What I meant by the actual is this. If I am thinking and feeling in the moment that is what is actual. If there is emptiness that is what is actual. If there is a PCE that is what is actual. I understand that what you mean is the actual world when one is having a PCE. As I am not always having a PCE I have to deal with what is actually happening. I am currently questioning if the instincts actually exist other than the thought I have that they do. VINEETO: The way you are using ‘actual’ is merely an acceptance of whatever is happening in you without having the intent to change it in any way. If that is how you choose to live your life then that indeed requires no further investigation into your thoughts, feelings or instinctual passions. In other words, now that you have re-defined ‘actual’, are you without malice and sorrow in your life? * Just a suggestion as to how to determine what is actual and what is merely ‘self’-centred feelings and worries is to take some time out and sit on a park bench or someplace similar. Just sit and relax and take some time to take in the scene around you. Casually watch and observe the sky, trees, grass, clouds, birds, etc. – whatever physical activity is going on. Check out the smells, listen to all the sounds and feel the air or wind on your skin. This sensate experience is what is actual and you may even begin to experience the innate peacefulness and purity of this verdant planet. Now watch and observe any of the people around you, and you would know by personal experience, that some would be feeling sad, some would be worried, some would be feeling stressed, some would be bored, etc. It is obvious from your observation that these ‘self’-centred feelings and worries are not actual – you can’t see them, touch them, smell them, taste them or hear them – and that these feelings and worries are preventing those people from sensately experiencing the actual world around them. They are ‘self’ obsessed introverted human beings, continually at the mercy of their own feelings and passions. Then you may have an idea of what it is inside your body – ‘you’ as a non-actual
identity with ‘your’ associated feelings – that is preventing you from directly experiencing and delighting in the actual
physical world that is always ever-present.
VINEETO to No 8: Everything that is not actual as in –
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: So why is it that when all physical objects are taken together as a physical universe, suddenly benevolence appears. This is beyond my common sense. Moreover, benevolence isn’t physical, is it. VINEETO: To understand that benevolence is physical you first have to understand the term ‘actual’. Actual means ‘not merely passive’. It describes the experience that nothing in this physical universe is dead, things are continuously evolving and changing. A seed grows into a carrot, when I eat them they turn into my skin, flesh, bones and brain. A timber table has its own life from seed to tree to timber to crafted furniture to aged wood and then it is deteriorating into soil. The continuous movement is a physical one – there is nothing meta-physical in it. It never stops, never ends. Benevolence is the intrinsic movement of the physical universe to be its best. A tree grows the best way it can, using whatever resources are available. Animals have an instinctual capacity to ensure the survival of the fittest, the strongest, the most adaptable. Vegetation and animals on this planet have evolved from the simplest to the most complex. Human beings with our incredibly refined ability to think and make sense of the world are the only intelligent species of the physical universe. This very computer is a visible outcome of the human brain, with colour-screen,
background, sound, storage capacity and all its gimmicks. But this human brain is still restricted and distorted by our animal
instincts in the primitive brain. The benevolence with its urge to be the best it can be has now evolved to a stage where it is
possible to break free of the animal instincts, of the Human Condition. Fed by our intent to be the best we can be the brain can
fix itself up, it can re-wire itself and eliminate the redundant instincts altogether. There is no divine, mystical or ethereal
energy doing it, the urge to be its best is a physical quality of the universe. To put the idea of God into this obvious
perfection and purity is to completely miss the point of the very magnificence happening around us all the time. Should you want
to read a bit more on this issue, Peter’s chapter ‘Universe’ and ‘Evolution’ explain these fact a bit deeper, and
Richard has written about it at length in his journal and correspondence.
Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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