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Selected Correspondence Vineeto Affective Feelings – Emotions and Passions RESPONDENT: I think the main problem for me and also probably for most people is to overcome the habit of following emotions or impulses that habitually arise in one’s psyche. For a simple example if I sense an itch on my arm I usually scratch the itch instead of paying attention to the itch, investigating the sensation behind it. I think the itch is a good example because, at least in my case, when I start paying attention to it the itch intensifies before it goes away. Likewise when I feel unappreciated at work I tend to compensate with food or sometimes (especially in the past year) meditation!!! I would feel really calm and good after Vipassana. Chocolate and coffee with ice cream make me feel great, too. Speaking of which I have to run to the kitchen to brew us a couple of cups of this ‘divine’ liquid. VINEETO: This question of yours fits in with the issue of the other letter about Vipassana, so I will combine the two letters. Today I find it strange that none of all the ‘oh so wise’ spiritual teachers really were able to make a distinction between sensations and feelings. I myself only learned to be precise when I came across Actual Freedom, and now the difference seems so obvious that I don’t know how I could have ever mixed the two! Peter has already explained the difference very well in his letter to No. 3 the other day: The consciousness of perceiving or seeming to perceive some state or condition of one’s body or its parts or of the senses; an instance of such consciousness; (a) perception by the senses, (a) physical feeling. b The faculty of perceiving by the senses, esp. by physical feeling. Oxford Dictionary Peter: The three ways a person can experience the world are:
The aim of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is to become aware of exactly how one is experiencing the world and to investigate what is preventing one from being happy and harmless in this moment. It is therefore important to discriminate between the pure sensate sensual experiences, as in sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and the cerebral thought and affective feeling experiences that are sourced in the instinctual animal survival passions. Feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts – thoughts arising in response to the flooding of chemicals that originate from the animal instinctual brain, the amygdala. As the amygdala quick-scans the incoming sensorial input it is programmed to automatically respond with an instinctual reaction – essentially those of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. The instinctual reaction is such that response-chemicals are almost instantly pumped into the body and neo-cortex and are most usually ‘felt’ in the head, heart and stomach areas. Fear produces hormones which quicken the heartbeat, tenses the muscles, and heightens the senses – ready for either ‘fight or flight’. When neither option is exercised one ‘freezes’ and the ongoing chemical input results in feelings of helplessness, doubt, angst, depression or dread. Jealousy, based on the nurture instinct, prepares the body to attack one’s competitor. Sexual desire similarly causes well-known reactions in the sexual organs, and so on. It is important to recognize that these reactions, while felt in the body as sensations, and interpreted by the brain as feelings, are actually instinctual passions in action – they are the very substance of ‘who’ we feel ourselves to be, deep down at a bodily level, in both heart and gut. It is this emotional ‘self’-centred experiencing that prevents our direct sensate-only sensuous experience of the actual world of sensual delight, purity and perfection. ‘Who’ one thinks and feels oneself to be is but an elaborate extrapolation of this instinctual, fear-full animal ‘self’. This emotional, feeling interpretation – based on the sensations of chemicals flowing in the body and brain – results in feelings of loneliness, separateness and alienation from the world as it is. It is as though there is a veil or film over the actual that one yearns to break through – to become free of – in order to be fully alive, to actually be here, now. It is entirely new territory to dare to question feelings, both those we arbitrarily denote as ‘good’ and those we label ‘bad’, but there is a fail-safe method of navigation through the maze of sensations produced by instinctual passions. The aim is always to facilitate in oneself peace and harmony – to become happy and harmless – and this sincere intent will prevent one from settling for anything less than the genuine article. The genuine article is you, the flesh-and-blood-body-only you, that seeks freedom from the feelings of malice and sorrow that ruin your happiness. The path to Actual Freedom now offers a realizable and actual freedom from the insidious grip of
instinctual passions. Sensations are everything we perceive with our senses – touch, smell, taste, colour, form, sound, itch, pain, moisture, temperature, sexual pleasure, etc. Feelings are affective reactions to our surroundings. When you have chocolate and coffee with ice-cream you mix sensation and feeling, the pleasure of the
senses tasting sweet and bitter and then, consequently, you are ‘feeling’ good. But one doesn’t need ‘feeling’ to fully enjoy a cup of
coffee with ice-cream, on the contrary, ‘me’ as a feeling identity acts as a buffer to the intensity of the sensate pleasure. ‘Feeling’ is
only there as long as a ‘me’ is alive. ‘I’ am feelings and feelings are ‘me’, ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’, ‘I’ am love
and love is ‘me’. Check it out for yourself. You might find that you are conscious of the sensation and a split second later you have a
feeling – or mixed feelings – about it. But in that split second you were aware only of the physical sensation.
RESPONDENT: I had a wonderful flight from San Jose to Newark. I loved watching the clouds from above. It was very pleasant to fly above these white and very bright puffy popcorn-like clouds. After some time tears came to my eyes because of the light intensity but mainly due to some tender emotions caused by the experience. VINEETO: You really get the chance to experience the full range of emotions and investigate them as far and deep as you want to go. Tender emotions are by their very nature the ones that we want to feel and keep and are therefore a bit more tricky to observe and investigate. Yet, the tender emotions are inextricably intertwined with the fearful and aggressive emotions and instinctual passions and one cannot get rid of the ‘bad’ ones without investigating love, sympathy, empathy, compassion, gratitude, belonging, pining, hope and desire. RESPONDENT: As far as my relationship, I have been attracted (mutual attraction) to a very sensuous and wise single woman who is, by the way, also very emotional and honest with me in conveying her both positive and negative emotions. (She is very much in love with me). She is very expressive, a rare combination of an artist-extrovert and a retrospective scientist. This has been an interesting experience for me for several reasons: First, I am still married (although I told my wife about my attraction to that woman). Secondly, that woman, with whom I spend hours on the phone almost every day lives in North Carolina while I live in New Jersey. Thirdly, I discovered that as much as I want to make the situation simple by separating with my wife, with whom I have not been intimate for 9 months, I still feel somehow painfully attached to due to probably the common cultural background and the memory of all the years of undergraduate and graduate school together and of the general life's ups and downs that we have endured in the past. The emotion arising as I am trying to resolve the issue and quit my marriage could be described as some irrational fear of ‘messing it all up’. I am writing about it here in hope of clarification it for myself by the virtue of just putting it on paper, or to be more accurate, on the list, and thus sharing my experience. It is needless to say that I have been very busy recently on the emotional front of my life. VINEETO: A serendipitous wide-ranging field for investigation into the Human Condition indeed. I wrote in my last post –
The more I understood the impact and the ripples that each of my feelings, emotions and instinctual passions and its ensuing action was having on me and people around me, the more my intent grew to investigate those feelings and emotions and change my behaviour in order not to cause any more of those ripples. The intent for peace, to become completely harmless, made me look not only in the direction of the obviously uncomfortable emotions like guilt, anger and fear, but also at the cherished ones like hope, love and euphoria. The more I dug into each of the feelings that I experienced at the time, the more I understood the self-centred nature of each of them. When I am drowned in emotions I cannot sensibly consider other people and the impact my behaviour has on other people around me. So, in order to become happy – free of guilt and remorse, apologies and resentment – I also had to
change myself to become harmless and stop causing ripples in people’s lives. One does not work without the other. * VINEETO: ‘I’ am not needed at all. Virtual Freedom is the ongoing increasing experience of ‘my’ redundancy, kind of getting used to not interfering with perfection. The way I see it now is that death is simply an extension of this continuing discovery of ‘me’, the spoiler, being redundant, turning 98% redundancy to 99% and 99% to 100% ... ... pop. RESPONDENT: Will this ‘I’-less state result in being slow, lethargic or will our natural body system of being active – passive self-regulate into a balanced state? There will be no more ‘I’ to psychologically motivate us and to influence the body to ‘get up and do something’ rather then, for example, to sit and enjoy a sunset. Or is being slow and lethargic an emotional state that will be weeded out by then? VINEETO: If in asking the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ I get the answer ‘ lethargic’, I know that there is a feeling to be looked at and investigated. In my experience, lethargy was a reluctance to investigate a scary issue, to question a deep-seated dearly held belief, to sort out peer-group pressure and explore what I had deemed to be the truth for many years. Lethargy, for me, is the same feeling that Alan calls ‘stuckness’, a seemingly non-feeling dull state where feelings are kept under the carpet because they are too scary to acknowledge and explore. Lethargy is simply another word for not wanting to be here, for whatever reason. What got me out of lethargy or stuckness or denial or melancholy was always the sensible thought that it is my time and my life that I am wasting and that the issue will not go away by itself – nothing will change unless I change. Enjoying being lazy is something different altogether. Doing nothing really well is an art that needs to be learned like every other ingredient of being happy and harmless. Doing nothing when there is nothing to do instead of running around frantically because ‘I’ need to add ‘meaning’ to life was an issue that I had to investigate over many months. For me, being capable of doing nothing involved exploring the fear and guilt of being useless, the need to belong to the group that was ‘doing something useful in life’ and the need of ‘me’, the identity, to assure my importance to others and to ‘myself’ with something that ‘I’ had produced. Additionally, there was the fear of boredom, the fear of being ostracized, the fear of loneliness, the fear of depression when there won’t be another meaningful task to get me out of bed the next day. All these fears were very real when experienced but none of them had actual validity for my physical survival. The only thing I need to do is earn a living, pay the rent, fill the fridge and obey the laws of the land – the rest is a free choice of what pleasure to do next... There simply are no other rules as to what one has to do in life. And once I eliminated the need for, and the bondage of, the societal and religious morals and ethics, I am free to choose the best – which is to devote my life to becoming free from the Human Condition. When I can enjoy doing nothing really well, I can also distinguish the difference between lethargy and
laziness, guilt and hedonism, the feeling that I ‘should’ do something and the pleasure of getting my teeth stuck into an engaging project or
issue. Investigating the Human Condition always boils down to ‘what feeling is preventing me now from being happy and harmless?’ – and then
doing whatever is needed to change to becoming more happy and more harmless, until all of ‘me’ is eliminated in the final ‘pop’. * RESPONDENT: Thanks for your email. Yes, the instincts of nurture, desire, malice, fear and the related feelings of longing, anger, hate, depression, love, attachment, etc should be thoroughly investigated in one’s psyche so that when they arise next time they lose their grip on my behaviour. VINEETO: To come to the understanding and conclusion that the package of instinctual passions and their subsequent emotions is worth investigating and eliminating is truly a big step towards actual freedom. This understanding is breaking with the traditional approach of covering up and balancing out the ‘bad’ feelings of ‘anger, hate, depression’ with a layer of ‘good’ feelings of ‘longing, love, attachment’, often spiced up with a bit of positive thinking that ‘maybe it’s not so bad after all.’ When you follow an emotion back to its origin as it arises and pin it down to an event, a memory, a belief, a fear, a part of your identity and finally the instinctual passion – then you can see it in the bright light of awareness and the emotion will lose its urgency and conviction and is seen for what it is – a bit of the software programming in the brain that can be re-wired and deleted. The next time, when the same emotion arises, it will be less convincing, the connection in the brain will slowly weaken and each time you investigate a particular feeling or belief, it will become weaker until the relevant connection in the brain is broken and replaced by intelligence and common sense. The important thing is not to act on the feeling impulse, to ‘keep your hands in your pocket’ – and I found that this applies for both the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ emotions. (...) * RESPONDENT: It takes lots of vigilance to investigate this since often it is very difficult to makes sense of things. I think that labelling feelings helps a lot in the process. VINEETO: Yes, ‘often it is very difficult to makes sense of things’ when one’s previous parameters of good and bad and right and wrong are falling by the wayside. Sometimes I had the feeling as if the ground was shifting under my feet. But then I could always stick to
As you say, ‘labelling feelings helps a lot in the process’ and works to distinguish the feelings, beliefs and facts of each situation. In contrast to Eastern teachings like Vipassana, which teaches you to name the feeling and then disidentify from it, actualism goes much deeper than merely snorkelling of the surface. The making sense for me happened when I had detected the belief behind the particular feeling or emotion and was thus able to determine that it was part of my conditioning, my religious / spiritual conviction, my accumulated behaviour from my peer-group, my gender or my national identity, etc. This way I have been able to dismantle, one by one, my beliefs, feelings and emotions and my identity has become thinner and thinner. Now, without a social identity, it is a continuous pleasure to be here and life is easy, carefree and delightful. RESPONDENT: Is it easy for you to differentiate between the feeling of love and dependency and the sensation of fulfillment, freedom and happiness that comes when two people share intimacy? VINEETO: I like your question. For an actualist, to investigate the good emotions of love, beauty and compassion is as essential as examining the bad emotions of anger, fear, resentment and depression. In order to investigate the feeling of love and all its accompanying emotions, I had to sharpen my awareness and become persistently alert to detect when love was kicking in. Love is, after all, the most honoured and appreciated of all human emotions, and one is very easily tempted to brush over the nice sweet feeling when it happens. Investigating and dismantling the good feelings is a real detective adventure game, because, as you mentioned to No 8,
Our identity thrives on feelings, it cannot exist without feelings and emotions – therefore detecting the emotion ‘plastered on any simple sensation’ is to separate out and successively eliminate your very identity – ‘who’ you think and feel yourself to be. In the beginning, my guiding light was the memory of the pure consciousness experience when there was
clearly no emotion happening, as well as the first brief moments of actual intimacy with Peter that occasionally occurred.
VINEETO: Un-conditional love was there in front of me like the unreachable carrot, the dream that one day, by the magic of devotion, meditation and the Grace of Existence, my desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness would turn into the fairytale of ‘true’, divine love for ever. But it was a dream, an ideal, only very rarely experienced under extremely positive conditions. RESPONDENT: Here I don’t agree with you. I am watching my desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness originated by thinking processes and then I find myself not controlled by them (desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness). VINEETO: ‘Watching’ is a spiritual term and means that you dis-associate yourself from these particular feelings (which spiritual people insist on calling thoughts), and in an imaginary process you move your identity away from those feelings to a realm where ‘you are not your feelings’. Consequently, from that imaginary realm of ‘being’, you imagine that you are ‘not controlled by them’. This has nothing to do with actually getting rid of those feelings, and it is proven by the fact that feelings keep appearing again and again. To actually, and permanently, get rid of ‘desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness’ one has to investigate into the root cause of those feelings and discover the instinctual passions from where they keep arising. This means dismantling one’s identity – because ‘I’ am my feelings and instincts – and results in a process of ‘self’-immolation. The very existence of the ‘self’ is being investigated and threatened by the questioning of emotions and feelings, and it is not something everyone is ready to undertake. It is so much easier to imagine that one is not those ‘desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness’, and as such one keeps the head in the clouds and the dirt under the carpet. (...) * VINEETO: Being happy and harmless is not a coating over one’s grotty ‘self’, over the Human Condition in us. Being happy and harmless is only possible when you actively remove the feelings, emotions and instinctual passions that the ‘self’ consists of – what then remains is a happy and harmless human being. What remains is the delight of a perfect universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being. RESPONDENT: Here I have a question. As I said I am now experiencing being happy and harmless as feelings. This is my ‘good’ feelings. And I don’t understand the difference between this ‘good’ feelings and feeling good which is used at asking ‘how are you experiencing this moment of being alive’ Is this the difference between virtual freedom and actual freedom? I want to hear around these points from anyone. VINEETO: The ‘difference between the good feelings and feeling good’ is the difference between hanging on to love and devotion as one’s highest goal (good feelings) and questioning everything that is an hindrance to being actually happy and harmless (feeling good), as in factually, in thought, feeling and deed, with everybody around you, even your wife and your children, your boss and your girlfriend. Feeling good is the first step to feeling happy, then being happy, as in gradually becoming free of malice and sorrow. To understand the difference is only difficult when you make a philosophy out of it, it is not difficult when you investigate into your being sad and angry. Being happy and harmless is not a feeling. Being harmless is being without any feelings of annoyance, anger, impatience, competitiveness, ambition, being insulted, wanting to hurt or get back at someone, craving for attention, etc. When all those emotions and feelings and their underlying instinctual passions have been investigated and understood, and are consequently eliminated, then you are harmless. Feeling harmless sounds very nice, but it is just a cheap cop-out without having to do something about one’s Human Condition. The same applies to ‘feeling happy’. You can feel happy for a particular reason, something worked out fine, some feared event did not happen, someone said he or she loved you, etc. But to be happy you have to get rid of everything that makes you unhappy, sad, lonely, terrified, angry, compassionate, guilty, restless, bored, tired, resistant, resentful, etc., in short, your very ‘self’. To be happy you have to ‘self’-immolate, because all you are made of are your emotions, feelings, beliefs and instinctual passions. The ‘difference between virtual freedom and actual freedom’ is the difference between being happy and harmless 99% of the time, having a perfectly cleaned up ‘self’ which only pops its ugly head up on rare occasions (virtual freedom), and having no ‘self’ at all (actual freedom). In Actual Freedom you won’t even be capable of having a feeling, even if your life depended on it. In Actual Freedom ‘you’ have disappeared completely. You said in your letter to Alan: RESPONDENT to Alan: I am for being here and now with this life in this body. <snip> My priority here is to get my own Actual Freedom. VINEETO: As your ‘priority is to get [your] own Actual Freedom’, these differences
are of great importance. By simply feeling happy or feeling harmless you will stay in the realm of imagination and never get to the
actual living of freedom from the Human Condition. Removing what makes you unhappy or harmful to others is the first step to an actual (as opposed
to imaginary) freedom.
VINEETO: Hi Everybody, There has been such good writing lately in both Peter’s and Richard’s latest correspondence with paragraph upon paragraph of accurate descriptions of what actualism and Actual Freedom are all about. As the self-appointed librarian I wish there were adequate ‘exhibition rooms’ in order to not have those words disappear in the vastness of the website. Yesterday I found in Richard’s latest correspondence a description of the self in action that I found so excellent and brilliant in its accuracy and preciseness that, in view of our latest discussions about emotions on the list, I will post it here.
‘Pushing away’ and ‘grasping’ – these are indeed the two opposite actions that I observe as ‘me’, the ‘self’ in action, depending on the emotion that is arising at the time. And in this very description of the ‘primitive self structure’ there also lies the solution for catching the bugger and moving closer towards self-immolation. To stop pushing away bad, fearful, angry and sorrowful feelings and to stop grasping the good, loving and blissful feelings leaves ‘me’ with nothing to hang my hat on – an absolute fascinating experience when put into practice. There is a quality of suspense when I not let feelings take me on a ride, be they ‘good’ or ‘bad’, a thrill of doing the unfamiliar, an aliveness that is experienced just before popping through into the actual world in a PCE. The other fascinating observation was that refusing to go along with any emotion in one direction – ie fear – the temptation then appears to draw me into the opposite direction – ie feeling on cloud nine. Considering that instinctual passions and chemical reactions in the brain go hand in hand the pairing of emotions makes sense because to counteract a strong fear the amygdala will pump a strong dose of chemicals producing ecstatic feeling in order to overcome the fear to ensure one’s survival. In order to permanently get rid of the bad feelings, at the same time I will have to examine and get rid of the accompanying good feeling as well. Peter said it well in his recent letter to mailing list B:
Contemplating further I realized that to stop pushing away and stop grasping might at first look similar to the Buddhist practice of ‘neti-neti’, ‘neither this nor that’. The approach of Buddhists and all other meditators is to remove the self from the source of trouble which at the same time removes one from the experience of the sensuousness of being alive. Spiritualism moves away from sensate and affective feelings in order to not be here while an actualist questions and eliminates affective feelings because they prevent me from being here, being the senses-only experiencing the delight of being alive in this actual perfect abundant magical world. But Buddhists are exercising a technique to remove themselves, to dis-identify and finally to dissociate from either this or that feeling, implying that there is a true self, which they want to keep, that can remove itself from this or that feeling or thought. In actualism the emotion is experienced by neither repressing nor expressing, neither pushing nor grasping and thus one is able to examine it in reflective contemplation so as to explore the very nature of this emotion. One does not remove the self from the emotion but whittles away at the self which is the very program producing the emotion in the first place. This process, if undertaken diligently and persistently, will inevitably lead to self-immolation. Actual Freedom lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to all religious practice and belief.
RESPONDENT: Yes, I have considered this. It is always a hurdle getting out of struggling and the agitated state of objection to an emotion. So when that state of struggling ends it does feel like a reward of sorts. My solution is a permanent ‘no objection at all’. That at the present is not a one off and requires continual effort of inquiry. VINEETO: When an emotion is happening, for instance anger, it is harmful in two ways. Firstly I am not happy because I am angry and second I am angry at someone else and may cause harm to that person, be it by snide remarks, withdrawal or any other action. Of course I don’t want to be angry. If the aim is to be happy and harmless then I no longer tolerate anger in my life. One does everything possible to eliminate it and not merely watches its rising and falling in the mind or heart. But the only way to successfully get rid of anger is to examine the root cause of me getting angry in that particular situation, find the expectation, the frustration, the ‘self’ in operation. Once I found the root cause and ‘got it’ – as Alan says – it is immensely rewarding, a great relief and a joy to have dismantled yet another obstacle to being free. And with every success there was more eagerness to find the next hurdle. The obsession for freedom takes a life of its own, wearing down the original objections. And then it is like Mark was writing on the list a few days ago:
And:
Your ‘permanent solution’ of ‘no objection at all’ sounds a pretty dry experience
to me. Freedom from the churning emotions, feelings, beliefs and instincts, which is freedom from ‘me’, results in a delicious, sensuous
continuous enjoyment moment after moment, fresh each time, rich and magnificent, crisp and perfect. An ongoing delight to be alive. * RESPONDENT: Yes, the ‘I got it’ though does not always mean the emotion is finished within its entirety, but that in that particular circumstance it is finished with. The fact that one has released that it must go is what assures its eventual end. The realization for me is not that ‘it must go’. Actual freedom has been an understanding, evidenced by various peak experiences, that ‘I’, the psychological and psychic entity within this body, inhibit the experience of the already existent perfection and purity of the physical universe. So ‘I’ decide to self-immolate, ‘self’-sacrifice for the perfection to become apparent in this life, on this planet. The growing comprehensive realization of what this ‘I’ consists of, all my emotions, feelings, beliefs and instincts has been an ongoing discovery and understanding. Elimination happens when I fully comprehend the passionate imaginative nature of an emotion as opposed to the delight of direct intimacy. The same applies when I understand the collective imagination of a belief as opposed to the actuality of facts. Then there is only the obvious to do, then there is no choice at all.
RESPONDENT: What a nice trinket. I have been wondering myself about whether my rejection of emotional behaviour was lacking rational analysis. At times I have found it difficult to displace my emotional state by working through it rationally i.e. couldn’t find any more information and found that the direct approach of discarding it more effective. VINEETO: I am fascinated by your expression of ‘rejection of emotional behaviour’. Do you literally mean ‘rejection’ as in repressing it and not letting it come to the surface, or ‘rejection’ as in not giving it any attention, or ‘rejection’ as in sitting it out without much ado about it? Does ‘rational analysis’ mean you ‘reject’ the emotion or does ‘rational analysis’ include investigating the upcoming emotion? I am curious to learn what works best for you. RESPONDENT: You mean I get to choose A, B or C. C sounds pretty good. Rational analysis means working through any supporting arguments for keeping an emotion and evaluating the supposedly factual content which usually turns out to be based on more emotions. VINEETO: No, I didn’t mean that you ‘get to choose A, B or C’. I was asking what you meant by the phrase ‘rejection of emotional behaviour’ and suggested three possibilities. Are you saying that your method is ‘sitting it out without much ado about it’? Of course you can choose any method, the question is which one works. Does method ‘C’ work for you in that the emotion does not come back or are you sometimes faced with the same emotion (over the same cause) again and again? After rational analysis of the situation, the next step for me was to investigate further into the cause and deeper into the nature of the particular emotion happening at the time. In order to determine the underlying cause of the emotion I would search to uncover the next layer, the ‘deeper’ reason for my upset, the belief and passion underneath the apparent first disturbance. Often I would detect a fear much more far-reaching than the first apparent reason, for example, a general feeling of insecurity or an atavistic feeling of fear that seems to have no obvious or rational cause. To discover a deeper layer underneath the first apparent reason is a more daring exercise but immensely rewarding because it helps to uncover the basic passions that constitute the Human Condition. By experiencing the emotion on a deeper layer I could then begin to understand the intricate web of human behaviour in general and my repeated feelings and behaviour in particular and this very experiential understanding was another nail in the coffin of ‘me’, the lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning entity inside. Bringing the emotion at its core out in the open, seeing it for what it is, invariably diminishes and successively eliminates its influence on my life and thus reduces the oh so convincing power of the passionate ‘self’. * VINEETO: And then, how does ‘the direct approach of discarding it’ actually work? Again, I am not sure if ‘discard’ means throwing it away – and does it stay away? Or is it more a ‘disregard’ because you already know everything about this particular emotion and it just keeps coming back as a bad habit? For instance, I have found my ‘sticky self-doubt’ coming back again and again despite extensive investigation until I realised that is consisted of nothing more than a bad habit. RESPONDENT: It seems that the support for the keeping of emotions in general has diminished to the point that I have no argument for keeping them. Even Love and Compassion have a sweet but painful attachment to bad emotions about them. When one arises an automatic check is made to see if there is any reason for keeping it, if no but it persists then it is regarded as a bad habit. It just occurs to me that I have not looked into what exactly constitutes a bad habit as opposed to a belief habit. Is it only a bad habit when it is found to have no supporting belief or are there other identifiable qualities? VINEETO: It is a great start when investigating affective feelings and emotions to know that there is no practical reason or sensible argument for keeping them. This understanding surely helps to explore the emotions on a deeper level in order to become permanently happy and harmless. However, having emotions is not just a ‘bad habit’ that one could reject like an unwanted behaviour pattern. Emotions have their roots in the instinctual passions that constitute our very being, the one ‘who we feel we are’, the core of our identity by whatever name. Therefore a mere ‘rejection’ on the basis of ‘rational analysis’ is helpful in reducing and removing the top-layer of emotional disturbances and irritations as well as the unwanted habitual behaviour patterns that one has accumulated since earliest childhood. Yet a deeper exploration is needed in order to uncover and experientially understand the underlying instinctual passions. I had a simple rule of thumb – those emotions and feelings that didn’t go away by rational
reasoning and sensible practicality surely had their root in social conditioning, atavistic fears, the need to belong or other basic survival
instincts. Those emotions needed repeated exploration, talking, reading, inner search-and-destroy missions and clarifying insights. I found such
exploration beyond my former surface snorkelling of spiritual practice and therapy such a fascinating and exhilarating enterprise!
VINEETO to No 61: I found that to effectively explore emotions to the point of (virtually) eliminating them I had to experience them fully. Only by neither repressing, nor expressing, nor in any way rationally twisting the emotional experience could I meticulously observe, become fully aware of and sensibly contemplate on what is happening in my head, heart and guts and thus investigate the root cause of that particular emotion. Knowing that every emotion is part of the Human Condition relieved me from blaming myself or being resentful for having an emotion in the first place. In order to eliminate the particular emotion such that it would not return again and again, it was essential to explore it deeply at its core and to understand experientially how each emotion originated in my social identity and/or in my very sense of ‘being’. Once having seen the emotion in operation and understood its ramifications to their full extent there was no way I could feel the same way about a particular issue or situation – by having understood this specific piece of my identity it had been extinguished. Needless to say, this method has not the slightest thing to do with plain rationalization or spiritual dis-identification – proven by the very fact that it works, that it gets rid of the emotion permanently while increasingly allowing the sensual sensuousness and the pure delight of being alive. I know well the ‘occasional reluctance to explore’, yet the frustration of obviously going round in silly circles has always given me courage to stop wasting my time, to face the fear and ‘reluctance’ and do whatever was necessary to return to being happy and harmless. RESPONDENT: This brings up a dilemma in my mind. One of influence and existence. Sometimes I seem happy just to have removed an emotion’s substantial influence without trying to get to the core of it. I find it difficult going into emotions when I’m working so I guess that is why I only attempt to draw on what I have discovered about them to stay out of the spell of any arising emotions. I’m sure there is more to it than that though. For example I think self-doubt needs more investigating as I find sometimes that considering another’s point of view, the basis of some confusion. VINEETO: Fair enough, you only go as far as you want as fast as you want. As long as you ‘seem happy’ then that seems to work. I simply suggested a way to explore further in case the option to ‘stay out of the spell of any arising emotion’ is not enough for you. RESPONDENT: Actually it is not really good enough and I keep persisting even after many failed attempts to get at the root of an emotion. Being free to use bare awareness and not be caught by the emotions is I feel an important step and one which I seem to be gradually, getting the knack of. VINEETO: Yes, ‘to use bare awareness and not be caught by the emotions’ is absolutely essential for becoming actually free from the Human Condition. Emotions, feelings and beliefs (passionate convictions) are how one sees one’s instinctual passions in operation. They form the layer of our social conditioning which needs to be explored and removed – both for a happy and harmless life in Virtual Freedom and for an experiential understanding of the raw instinctual passions at our very core. And you probably have experienced the instant gratifications when a belief disappears, an emotion doesn’t turn up anymore, a snide remark from someone else falls flat and as being alive becomes gradually a play and a pleasure. RESPONDENT: Although, the suggested method of trying to recall a PCE to get out of stuckness only helped in that it brought the obstacle into focus. VINEETO: This is great success, don’t you think? To have ‘brought the obstacle into focus’ and to know what the obstacle is about which keeps you in ‘stuckness’ is an excellent starting position for investigation. Now this obstacle can be identified, labelled and experientially explored, using apperceptiveness to detect its reasons, connections, source and implications. This has nothing to do with the Buddhist method (Vipassana) of labelling a feeling and then dis-identifying from it. 180 degrees opposite again. An actualist labels the feeling to get the bugger by the throat, to explore it as a scientist, to check out its silliness or sensibility, to determine how it is part of the Human Condition and then, when all is said and done, to permanently step out of having that emotion. This final stepping out often results in a pure consciousness experience. Last night I was contemplating about Alan’s description of his ‘reflective contemplations’, ‘practising the actual’ and arriving here in the actual world and how this records with my experience. Further Alan says:
Recalling step by step my own process into a PCE last night I found that contemplation serves to focus on the direction – being happy, dismantling the self, comprehending enough of the real world in order to see the self in operation and to step out of it. Contemplation always helps to focus on and remove obstacles and then, with no feeling or belief interfering I can build up the sensuous awareness of this moment of being alive. The wind on the skin, the sounds around, the wiggling of my toe, visual delights, tastes and smells ... Increasing sensuousness tips over into gay abandon, the self as both the controller and the feeler are abandoned and bingo ... I am experiencing what I had previously only reflectively contemplated about – this moment of being alive as a flesh and blood body only. The gay abandon can, of course, also happen without the reflective part, as a nature experience, in sex or any time when sensual pleasure is sensuous enough to tip over into the self-less experience of being alive as a flesh and blood body only. RESPONDENT: Many times I find that an emotion withers away before I get a good look at it. It’s almost as if it is avoiding a detailed look. Up to now I’ve been unable to find a reason for this and guess that all that is required is more attempts and that it will eventually become clear. VINEETO: Emotions are a slippery lot. They build the basis for our identity, which is as cunning as all get out. Yet the actualism method can be applied to discover every trick – whatever the feeling or emotion that keeps me from being happy here, now, needs to be examined and understood and then, presto, I go back to being happy again. I find that emotions can wither for different reasons. Either I understand that it is silly to be emotional and make a deliberate choice to move on and ‘smell the coffee’ instead. Or the emotion has been investigated in detail and is just a leftover bad habit to be thrown out and then I can go back to enjoying the moment. If I have avoided an emotion it will for sure come back in a similar situation and thus give me another opportunity to notice it, feel it, face it, label it, explore it, understand it and step out of it. RESPONDENT: Sometimes I experience a quick deep understanding which is gone in a flash and I don’t even remember what I understood. What I do notice is that certain reactions don’t occur any more. VINEETO: These moments of a ‘quick deep understanding which is gone in a flash’ might
well be the flash of a pure consciousness experience and are as such worth extending or recalling. The fact that ‘certain reactions don’t
occur any more’ points to that possibility. What do you think?
RESPONDENT: Lastly, I’d like to learn more about what is meant by ‘not suppressing or expressing’ strong emotions. Normally, the example given is anger. We commonly make a division between the feeling of anger and taking it out on someone – so that seems an obvious example. But what about emotions like empathy or compassion or feeling beauty? Take playing the guitar for example. The feeling of beautiful music while playing is the very same as it’s expression. I don’t feel the beauty without actually playing the musical instrument. So it’s difficult to divorce feeling and expression in a context like that – so that it seems like not expressing in that context is none other than repression – which would mean NOT to allow oneself to pickup the guitar or be ‘tempted’ by beauty. Or do you mean by ‘expressing emotion’ – ‘to take it out on somebody or something’? Also, with empathy – are we to hold ourselves back from expressing empathy because we don’t yet know the dividing line between ‘feeling empathy’ and ‘being benevolent’? That to me, seems to verge on repression. I suppose I’d like to see a little more carefully detailed explanation of what exactly is meant by ‘not suppressing or expressing’ emotion – since it seems to me that some emotions only arise when expressed – or are in danger of being repressed if not expressed in some way. I look forward to hearing of your explorations and how they might help along the way. Happiness and Harmlessness to all VINEETO: Personally, I found that by continuously running the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ with sincere intent I was unable to repress any emotion for long – by focussing my awareness on what went on inside my head and heart, all my beliefs and feelings came to the surface, one after the other. However, I first had to inquire into my spiritual, moral and ethical values that had taught me to consider some emotions as ‘good’ and worth expressing and some emotions as ‘bad’ and requiring repression. Only by examining and becoming free of the social-spiritual straightjacket of automatically classifying feelings as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ was I able to clearly experience and scientifically investigate each emotion as it arose. As I had set my aim to become free from malice and sorrow, the first obvious thing to do was to stop expressing my malice and to stop imposing my sorrow on others. As for expressing the ‘good’ emotions like love, compassion, empathy, hope and trust – in a sincere inquiry you will soon find out that when expressing ‘good’ emotions one is as much driven by one’s instinctual passions as when expressing ‘bad’ emotions. We have been taught that the alternative to expressing emotions is to repress them – however, there is now a third alternative. Whenever an emotion occurred, I usually stopped in my tracks, took notice, labelled the emotion, found out when the emotion started, what triggered it and whether any beliefs, moral and ethical values were the cause of triggering the feeling. In the first year of actualism I spent a lot of time on the couch thinking and contemplating about one or another belief or emotion, I talked with Peter about the issue, wrote about my discoveries and attempted to more and more understand the human condition in action. Often I found ‘good’ emotions like desire, hope, trust, attachment, loyalty, compassion and love also triggered off the ‘bad’ emotions and this discovery of the inter-connectedness and interdependence of good and bad then spurred me on to continue questioning the ‘good’ and ‘right’ values I had unquestioningly swallowed. As for the ‘the dividing line between ‘feeling empathy’ and ‘being benevolent’’ – empathy makes you suffer with the other person, which can clearly be experienced as an emotion. You then either wallow with the other in their suffering or you have an emotional investment in attempting to alleviate the other’s emotional suffering in order to relieve your own co-suffering, i.e. com-passion. Then you subsequently become eager to impose your solution to their problem. The benevolence that an actualist experiences it not a feeling at all but happens on its own accord
when one’s ‘self’-centredness ceases to dominate one’s every thought and feeling. Benevolence arises out of the experience and
understanding that we are all fellow human beings doing this business of being alive on this perfect lush and verdant planet earth. * RESPONDENT: Quite simply... What is meant by ‘not suppressing or expressing’ emotion? I understand that the method of actualism does not encourage to stop feeling – but to use its method of inquiring into how one is experiencing this moment. By not suppressing or expressing emotion – are you talking about ‘strong’ emotions? Are you talking of the extremes only? Love and trust and sorrow and malice? VINEETO: No, in my first post to you I was talking about becoming aware of all of one’s feelings and emotions as they occur. Of course the strong emotions are usually noticed first and as such these are best to start with. If you set your sights on becoming happy and harmless then emotions such as anger, jealousy and resentment are good things to watch out for and observe as they are happening. Once you get the hang of it and begin to explore how you are experiencing this moment of being alive on a regular basis, you will become aware of your more subtle emotions like annoyance, irritation, dismissal, cynicism, touchiness, melancholy, gloominess, listlessness, boredom, disinterest, guilt, shame, withdrawal, sullenness, etc. RESPONDENT: There is a spectrum of ‘expressing emotion’. You can look at my face and body language and determine how I am feeling. So it is impossible for me to not express emotion. Also, it seems much better for me if I am feeling stressed or upset – to exercise or do whatever I need to do to work the stress out of my body. VINEETO: Yes, at the beginning of applying the method of actualism feeling an emotion and expressing it is pretty much happening at the same time. LeDoux has empirically measured the feeling response to sensorial input by the instinctual part of the brain, the amygdala, as only 12 milliseconds. However, with sincere intent and a little practice you become more and more aware of your emotions right when they are happening and then, rather than expressing or suppressing the emotion, as we have been taught to do, you can observe it, be attentive to it, trace it to its source and completely understand it. I simply began to consider the journey into my psyche a scientific investigation and as such every emotion I experience has become a vital source of information. My attitude became more and more – wow, that’s fascinating, I wonder why I feel this – rather than the seesaw of ‘damn, another bad emotion again’ or ‘whoopee, another good emotion’. Every emotion occurring is valuable material to find out more about my identity, how ‘I’ tick, what social program I have been taught to follow and what instinctual program drives me to think, feel and act – and then I get to enjoy the process of both discovery and success as I irrevocably change towards being more happy and more harmless. As for ‘feeling stressed’ – in the beginning of my investigation my emotions sometimes ran high and, because I was determined not to express or suppress them but to be attentive to them, I sometimes felt like a tiger in a cage. What helped best in those situations was to go for a long walk, through the forest or along the beach. The first half hour I was often busy relieving the physical tension that accompanied the emotion but afterwards I was able to think about what was happening and began to make sense of it. When I got home after an hour or two, I was then able to communicate what I had experienced and what sense I had made of it and often I explored the emotional event yet a little deeper in a further discussion with Peter. The key to success for me was my intent. I was determined not to let any emotion slip by unnoticed and not to stop the investigation until I had traced the particular feeling to its source, which was either a belief, a moral-ethical value or a bare instinctual passion. RESPONDENT: Or even if I am upset with someone – to be clear with them that I am getting upset – not that I have to ‘take it out on them’, but it seems better to communicate or express feeling rather than suppressing it. VINEETO: Speaking personally, I soon discovered that my wanting to express to someone that they were making me upset was simply a way of blaming the other for my feeling upset – a convenient way of avoiding investigating my own feelings and discovering why other people’s acts or words upset me. In other words, I came to realize that if I didn’t stop the cycle of blaming others then I would never experience peace on earth. Every emotion I have is ‘my’ identity expressing itself because ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’. In order to eliminate ‘me’, all of the activities of this identity, i.e. beliefs, emotions and passions, are gradually brought to the light of awareness. Therefore whatever emotion is triggered, it is always ‘me’ in action and my interest lies in finding out about and incrementally eliminating the malicious and sorrowful ‘me’. As such, I have taken full responsibility for all of my feelings in that I accepted the challenge to eliminate the cause of my feelings in me. For example if I felt insulted because someone was calling me an idiot or blaming me for something, my normal reaction had been to either grumpily swallow it or to tell the other off, depending on who was the stronger one in the situation. In actualism I investigated why I felt insulted in the first place and examined the reasons that lay behind this feeling. Personally I found that pride, self-image and righteousness were the most apparent reasons for such an emotional reaction. Once I discovered the root of the emotion I was then able to decide that I would much rather live without those examples of my identity and the feeling of insult also disappeared. The advantage of this approach is that nowadays nobody can insult me anymore. RESPONDENT: So – just how does this ‘third alternative’ deal with ‘low levels’ of emotion. Where do I draw the line between what is advantageous for me to express and what is not? Just what is meant by ‘not expressing’ emotion anyway? VINEETO: You don’t have to draw a line – not expressing one’s emotions means not expressing. The longer you practice the method of actualism the better you become in not expressing or suppressing the emotion when it comes up. I found that even slight expressions of my emotions, say irritation or displeasure, would cause uncontrollable ripples and repercussions in my interactions with people and, because my aim is to be harmless, I don’t want to create ripples. If I express to another person that they are upsetting me, then I am blaming them for causing my anger and a careful observation of expressing my upset will reveal that it can never be expressed harmlessly. Similarly, if one expresses one’s sorrow to another, a careful observation will reveal that this does nothing but maintain and perpetuate sorrow in the world. I also found it immensely freeing when I realized that my emotions are solely my problem to deal with
and, when I am sure that there is no malice in what I say or do, other people’s emotions are their problem. This understanding makes all
interactions with people incredibly easy, particularly when living together with someone else. You get to live in peace and harmony with the other
without having to even try and change the other person in the slightest way. * RESPONDENT: I have only a few minutes to respond right now. I do find your comments helpful, yet I’m not hearing my concerns addressed regarding the pervasiveness of our expression of emotion. For example, your walks on the beach I’m sure were quite helpful. But that’s an expression of emotion . VINEETO: No, that’s taking time out by myself in order to sort out my emotions and investigate them. RESPONDENT: What I’m trying to point out is that ‘expression’ can be anything from ‘taking out anger on someone’ to a frown, to the way I dress, and the food I eat, or what I do to ‘clear my head’. If we are to stop ‘all expression’ of emotion immediately upon venturing down the AF road, it would seem somewhat of a nightmare. I’m not prepared to completely ‘lock myself’ up. VINEETO: If you translate the method of actualism as having to ‘lock myself up’, then you erroneously understand it as replacing one moral rule with another. Actualism is not about proposing a new set of morals, ethics and values – in actualism you set out on your own volition to remove all of the programming that generates malice and sorrow. ‘You’ are at root a passionate feeling being and everything ‘you’ do is expression of a belief, an emotion or an instinctual passion in one way or another. Therefore following the current fashion of overtly expressing my emotions is strengthening ‘me’ whereas questioning and investigating my emotions is pulling the rug out from under ‘my’ feet. That’s why the method of investigating one’s feelings by neither expressing nor suppressing the emotion is so effective in diminishing ‘me’. I think when you have the single-pointed intent to become happy and harmless, then the answer to the question about expressing emotions will be very simple. For me, the intent to become harmless meant that I did not want to express any of my mean and malicious ‘self’ to anyone because I wanted to stop causing ripples, pressurizing others, creating guilt, or manipulating others in any way – in short, I decided not to pass on my malice. In exactly the same way and for the same reason, I decided not to pass on my sorrow in any way, be it by sharing my hurts and disappointments, airing my moods or commiserating with others about life being a bitch. Similarly, actualism is not about repressing your emotions, as in ‘locking yourself up’. The
aim of the actualism practice is not to become an emotionless zombie but to eliminate the insidious good and the invidious bad emotions and aim
for the felicitous/ innocuous feelings. RESPONDENT: I’m trying to point out that it’s not entirely clear to me just what an ‘expression’ of emotion is. It seems to me that you have circumscribed only a part of ‘expression’ of emotion. It seems you are really talking about ...
VINEETO: Yes, that is exactly what I mean. The longer I applied the method the easier it became to sit with the emotion that occurred, ponder it over, trace it to its source and, upon complete understanding, step out of it completely. RESPONDENT: It seems more authentic for me to communicate with others what I am upset about if I am getting upset. This is not to put a demand upon them or tell them that their behaviour must change. It is to openly communicate where my buttons are – not an attempt to blame others for my feelings – while I continue to investigate and clean myself up. VINEETO: I found that ‘me’ being ‘authentic’ was just as ‘self’-serving as being hypocritical. Being authentic is the new-age version of letting everyone around have a piece of one’s feelings. If you look at today’s authenticity-gurus such as Oprah Winfrey then you can see that the core of their teaching is how to be authentically ‘me’. That’s what people have always done down through the ages – the only difference now is that it has the modern stamp of approval by calling it loving your ‘true self’ – a shoddy mixture of Eastern spiritualism and pop psychology. What is the real purpose of being authentic? What is the underlying reason for wanting to air my feelings? Why do I want someone else to know where my ‘buttons’ are? Why do I want others to be sensitive towards ‘me’? Rather than being authentic towards others, I found it invaluable and imperative to be honest with myself, because without honesty and integrity I would have never found out ‘my’ tricks and cunning. ‘Me’ being honest and authentic with others invariably means that I am sharing my sad and grotty ‘self’ with others, which only serves to justify, maintain and perpetuate ‘me’. The decision to clean oneself up is a unilateral decision – it involves no one else but me. As long as I expect respect, comfort, support, understanding or agreement from others in order to start the journey, I will be waiting forever. Actualism is a do it yourself and do it by yourself method. It is an immense freedom to realize that you are not beholden to anyone else to begin the actualism practice but that you can become free at your own pace and do so in complete autonomy and anonymity. RESPONDENT: It is not a solution to hold back all communication of emotion. So here’s a difference between expressing emotion in the sense of communicating it and acknowledging it – which is entirely different from bottling it up, then venting on someone. VINEETO: It is entirely up to you what you consider ‘a solution’ – if your solution means you are happy and harmless, then fine. I am simply sharing my experience with the actualism method of investigating my feelings and reporting what has worked for me to make me virtually free from malice and sorrow. In my experience ‘communication of emotion’ has always been an expression of my ‘self’ in action, whereas I am solely interested in questioning and reducing my ‘self’ to the point of ‘self’-extinction. As for the ‘difference between expressing emotion in the sense of communicating it and acknowledging it’ – you will be able to decide for yourself provided you have the sincere intent to uncover your social and instinctual program in order to become free from it. You will then become the most sincere judge of what you are communicating – whether you are sharing your emotion in order to manipulate, blame, pay back, compete, voice sorrow, battle loneliness or avoid looking at what’s going on – or whether you are communicating with a fellow human being about your scientific investigations, sharing the pure joy and happiness about what you have discovered about yourself. RESPONDENT: So I’m asking that you look more closely at just what you mean by ‘expressing emotion’. VINEETO: Personally, I have stopped expressing my emotions to others completely simply because I
cannot find any good reason to do so. Besides, practicing actualism for several years has left me almost bare of any emotion to express except for
the sheer delight of, and continuous wonder about, being alive, right here and right now.
RESPONDENT: It seems more authentic for me to communicate with others what I am upset about if I am getting upset. This is not to put a demand upon them or tell them that their behaviour must change. It is to openly communicate where my buttons are – not an attempt to blame others for my feelings – while I continue to investigate and clean myself up. VINEETO: I found that ‘me ’ being ‘authentic’ was just as ‘self’-serving as being hypocritical. Being authentic is the new-age version of letting everyone around have a piece of one’s feelings. If you look at today’s authenticity-gurus such as Oprah Winfrey then you can see that the core of their teaching is how to be authentically ‘me’. That’s what people have always done down through the ages – the only difference now is that it has the modern stamp of approval by calling it loving your ‘true self’ – a shoddy mixture of Eastern spiritualism and pop psychology. What is the real purpose of being authentic? What is the underlying reason for wanting to air my feelings? Why do I want someone else to know where my ‘buttons’ are? Why do I want others to be sensitive towards ‘me’? Rather than being authentic towards others, I found it invaluable and imperative to be honest with myself, because without honesty and integrity I would have never found out ‘my’ tricks and cunning. ‘Me’ being honest and authentic with others invariably means that I am sharing my sad and grotty ‘self’ with others, which only serves to justify, maintain and perpetuate ‘me’. The decision to clean oneself up is a unilateral decision – it involves no one else but me. As long as I expect respect, comfort, support, understanding or agreement from others in order to start the journey, I will be waiting forever. Actualism is a do it yourself and do it by yourself method. It is an immense freedom to realize that you are not beholden to anyone else to begin the actualism practice but that you can become free at your own pace and do so in complete autonomy and anonymity. RESPONDENT: What you say about the attempt to be ‘authentic’ rings mostly true. But what are we trying to do with the method of AF if not be more authentic to what is actual? Not ‘authentic’ in the sense of ‘feeling and expressing our emotions’ more accurately, but being authentic as in being actually present and truthful. VINEETO: I think it is important not to confuse the issue here. You first used the word ‘authentic’ as it is commonly used nowadays meaning communicating your feelings as in ‘more authentic for me to communicate with others what I am upset about’. Now you have used the very same word to describe something completely different, a practice that only muddies the waters of communication and understanding. If we stick with your original use of the word then your statement ‘but being authentic as in being actually present’ is impossible because feelings are never actual – they may be felt as real but they are not actual as in palpable, tangible, tactile, corporeal, physical and material. Actually present then means physically present, giving your full attention to the person or situation – you can never do that when you are emotional because then you are busy being emotional. This may seem to you like nitpicking about the meaning of words but I have found it an immense help both in thinking things out for myself and in communication with others to be precise in labelling my thoughts and feelings and make a clear distinction between the two. The word ‘truthful’ is similarly laden with either spiritual or emotional content – you may have noticed that the truth is different for everyone, it is ‘my truth’ against ‘your truth’ and this generally translates as ‘my feeling’ against ‘your feeling’ and ‘my belief’ against ‘your belief’. Therefore, as an actualist, I am not interested in truth but in facts because a fact is obvious for everyone, it is verifiable, objective actuality. A fact is patently true, manifestly clear. A fact is what is ascertained sensately and thus demonstrably factual. (...) * RESPONDENT: For example, I may feel angry towards someone. I notice the anger and stop myself from expressing anger towards that person. I don’t stop the feeling – I examine it intensely. But, I’m still here interacting with this person I am angry with. (I cannot always get away from the situation easily – actual life isn’t that kind in allowing us to leave a situation that easily.) So, I’ve stopped my expression of anger toward this person, but suddenly I’m a bit more withdrawn. I’m feeling angry and not taking it out on them, but I’m not feeling happy with them anymore, so I’m expressing emotion subtly – not by taking out my anger on them, but by feeling more withdrawn. So it seems to me that there are ‘clear-cut’ cases of emotion that we can stop expressing and examine. I believe these are what you are referring to, Vineeto. By ‘clear-cut’ I don’t mean specifically ‘strong’ emotions. Irritability, cynicism, boredom, disinterest, for example, can also be ‘clear-cut’ as in easily detectable. But my point is that since we continue to engage other people and can’t take a walk on the beach every instance an emotion arises, that we must accept at least subtle expression of emotion. This subtle expression may be virtually undetectable to some people, but it is still there. Gradually, no doubt, even the subtle expression of emotion will disappear. But it seems to me that this is more the goal than the way of getting there. I don’t think that one can start the method of AF and simply turn off ALL expression of emotion immediately. I find it impossible to stop all expression of emotion – that is what I mean by ‘locking up.’ One must start small and tackle the ‘clear cut’ emotions first – allowing that they may be expressed, but more subtly. That is not to say that we let them rest there unexamined. Eventually, we can begin to investigate the more subtle expressions of emotion which will gradually disappear – leaving one happy and harmless. I’m also not saying we shouldn’t investigate the more subtle expressions of emotion – just that they are much more difficult to both distinguish and to ‘stop expressing’. VINEETO: Yes, I started with the ‘clear-cut’ emotions and then became more and more
attentive to the subtler expressions of ‘me’. Anger is an obvious place to start and by becoming attentive to any feelings of anger as they
arise you are also becoming attentive to being harmless. Once you apply the method of asking yourself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of
being alive?’ you then go one step at a time and become aware of one feeling at a time as it arises. This way you never get more than you can
handle at a time. It seems quite daunting at first – given that actualism is brand-new territory – but if you do it for a while you will
notice that the results are quite remarkable and that your interactions with people will indeed become increasingly harmless.
RESPONDENT: I have only a few minutes to respond right now. I do find your comments helpful, yet I’m not hearing my concerns addressed regarding the pervasiveness of our expression of emotion. For example, your walks on the beach I’m sure were quite helpful. But that’s an expression of emotion . VINEETO: No, that’s taking time out by myself in order to sort out my emotions and investigate them. RESPONDENT: In light of the fact that you say that taking a walk on the beach or the forest for you to clear your head or investigate your emotions is not an ‘expression of emotion,’ I’d like to ask a clarifying question. I don’t want to debate whether taking a walk is really an ‘emotional expression’ or not – I don’t really care either way – I just want to understand what you mean. The type of ‘expression’ we’ve been talking mostly about has to do with ‘expressing’ towards someone else. I also think about ‘expressing’ emotion as just the bodily expression of that emotion – not even taking into account the other. I can feel angry at someone – then go hit some pillows to get out the anger. I can feel depressed – then go exercise or lift weights to get out the built up stress to the body. Alone in a car – a nice yell or two can relieve a stress headache. And crying can (at least temporarily) relieve the stress of a deeply felt sorrow. Admittedly, none of these can cure one from sorrow and malice without accompanying it with an investigation of what is being felt. I’m curious, which of these (if any) are ‘expressions of emotion’ in the AF sense? What else did you find helpful (other than what you’ve already told me) and which did you steer away from? These are just a few examples how people might deal with emotions while not ‘expressing’ them towards someone...
This is partly what I mean when I ask – ‘where do I draw the line between what is ‘expressing’ and what is ‘not expressing’’? I view all of the above activities as an expression of emotion in some sense – but if ‘expression’ is taken as ‘expressing towards another,’ then I’ll be glad to say these are not examples of ‘expressing emotion.’ Bottom line, is there anything in this ‘not expressing’ emotion business that allows an emotion to be absolutely and completely felt and expressed through the body – yet not towards another? VINEETO: I use the term ‘expressing emotion’ for every word or action that consciously expresses your present emotion. The current New Age fashion is to feel free to express your emotions by sharing them with others, be they malicious feelings or sorrowful feelings. Another fashionable way of expressing emotions is to do so privately but either way is indulging in malice or wallowing in sorrow. In my twenties and later in my spiritual years I did a lot of therapy groups where expressing emotions was hailed as the solution to a happier life, but I always found the emotional high of the group would wear off after a few days and dealing with my emotions had not become easier at all. The proof that expressing emotions didn’t work to solve my problems was the fact that I, like most others, kept coming back time and time again to do more groups. I found the belief that an expressed emotion will disappear only temporarily true – eventually I had to admit that doing therapy groups was certainly not a remedy, but rather a waste of time, money and energy. The fact that expressing emotions does not bring permanent relief has also been confirmed by empirical studies on therapy patients – and yet despite this evidence the belief still lingers on, particularly in spiritual circles where belief, faith and feelings are always given greater credence than fact and common sense. When I took up actualism, I first and foremost became wary of expressing my emotions towards others because my primary aim was to become happy and harmless, which obviously meant not passing on my malice or my sorrow to others. It was a tough habit to break at first because by becoming aware of my feelings, I came to see and understand that most of what passes for communication between human beings is sharing of malicious and sorrowful feelings. I also found in the course of investigating my feelings that any kind of deliberately expressing of my emotions was not helpful to my investigations. Expressing emotions only enhanced the present emotions, left me unable to be attentive to experiencing the emotion while it was happening, and left me exhausted and confused. The best way for me to find out what was going on emotionally was to sit with the feeling, experience and be aware of the surge of chemicals rushing through my head and my body and systematically ask myself questions that would lead me to discover the underlying causes for my feelings. For the method of actualism to work it is vital to experience the feeling so that you can find out what triggered it and what part of your identity is linked to your feeling. Ultimately, to unthinkingly continue on with one’s past habits of either repressing or expressing the feeling stands in the way of a fruitful straightforward investigation. It is not an easy task and it does take conscious determination to shift one’s attitude from the
automatic programming of blaming people, things and events for one’s own feelings – even if one is not expressing them – towards wanting to
discover in each and every instance what part of my social or instinctual programming is making me feel angry or feel sad in the first place. It
also takes effort to concentrate on becoming aware of one’s feelings in the first place because men in particular are socially conditioned to
brush their feelings aside. As Richard says, the method of actualism is an excellent tool and ‘a very tricky way of both
getting men fully into their feelings for the first time in their life and getting women to examine their feelings one by one instead of being run
by a basketful of them all at once’.
RESPONDENT: I’d like to revisit something that I’ve been reflecting on since Vineeto addressed it. It has to do with a difference that I was pointing out between expressing emotion and communicating about emotion. First, I think we will all agree that there is a lot of talk or communication about emotion on this list. So talking about emotion is not the same thing as ‘expressing’ emotion – though it can be. VINEETO: Yes, there is a vast difference between expressing one’s emotions to other people and communicating about one’s awareness and observation of emotions on this list. The first is ‘me’ in action, whilst the second is a report based on the awareness that ‘my’ emotions are solely a sign of ‘me’ in action and have nothing to do with anyone else. RESPONDENT: I’ve been reflecting on just why I continue to talk to my wife, kids, and other people about what I am feeling. I am not saying expressing emotion. Please understand this – it’s one thing to express emotion verbally – then quite another to verbally express emotion. ‘Expression’ can be an emotion being acted out or expressed. Or it may be purely a verbal ‘expression’ in the sense of talking about emotion. Now, it does seem important to me to verbally express some emotion – as long as emotions are still being experienced. VINEETO: It is well worth contemplating as to why you think it is important for you to communicate ‘to my wife, kids, and other people about what [you are] feeling’. As one can clearly experience in a PCE, where ‘me’ and my feelings are temporarily absent, feelings are always my identity in action and any identity, by its very nature, is always ‘self’-centred. So the question is why should it be of importance for anyone to express one’s social-instinctual identity in action? The sole intent in actualism is to become happy and harmless – and that’s the reason why I question and investigate my feelings and emotions. The aim of actualism is not to get rid one’s emotions because one would then only choose to keep the good emotions while suppressing, denying or sublimating the bad emotions – and this enterprise has been tried and demonstrably failed for centuries. When I started to practice actualism, I soon found out that expressing any of my emotions verbally, through action or through psychic vibes and moods, always caused ripples for other people – in other words, I was not harmless. To express my feelings to others only served to support and enhance the ‘self’-centredness inherent in feelings, whereas the practice of neither expressing nor repressing one’s feelings puts them into a bind, as it were. I am then able to become aware of what I feel and think and thus don’t perpetuate my ‘self’-centred problems by passing them on to others. RESPONDENT: Now, to make a case. Take a situation say, where I have a headache. Well, I can do just fine with the headache on my own – take my meds, etc. But if I’m having a headache in the morning and wind up bedridden and my wife asks what’s happening – I find it valuable to ‘express’ to her that I have a headache. I’m not asking her to be overly sensitive to my needs – just providing information for her to do what she wants with. Now, the source of my headache may have been stress at work, for example. Just say I realize that I can control the stress, so I plan to investigate how I can ‘do better’ at minimizing stress so that I don’t wind up in this same position again. So, I ask her for help getting the pain med or calling the doctor. She can do whatever she wants with that information. But, she normally opts to help out. What I want to say is that the verbal expression of emotion can be very similar to this kind of situation. I realize that I don’t have to feel frustrated, angry, or whatever. But say I’m doing my best to investigate why I feel a certain way and applying attentiveness, etc. But I’ve still managed to get frustrated. Say this frustration is a result of my wife going away for several weekends and neglecting to help me care for our child. Now, I know that I don’t have to feel frustrated about that – and I’m investigating just why I feel frustrated, but the fact is that I’m feeling frustrated about the situation. Now, I could take that frustration out on her – but I choose not to. What I decide to do instead is to communicate to her that we may want to consider a change – that I ‘feel’ like I’d like her to help out with the kids more and live up to her end of our ‘contract.’ Now this is not done with the ‘vibe’ of frustration, rather a calm, sincere tone. I’m not demanding or even needing her to change. I’m just letting her know where things begin to get stressful for me – I’m not defending my stress – I know that I could do better – just haven’t completely figured out how just yet. Is the analogy with the headache evident? VINEETO: I remember the last time when I tried to influence others by ‘sharing’ what I felt. I did some work for an old acquaintance who lived in a town about 25 km away. As a favour she asked me if someone could drop off a parcel at my house so that I could then deliver it to her. However, when this person rang very early in the morning to ask when it would be convenient to drop off the parcel, I became a little upset. I thought how dare he be so inconsiderate as to wake me up so early for something that wasn’t even urgent. When I later delivered the parcel to my colleague, I mentioned that her friend had rung me up very early in the morning. She profusely apologized to me and then became really upset herself. She said she had instructed him not to ring before 9am and that she would immediately ring her friend to tell him off. At this point I realized that my seemingly calm mentioning of my emotional reaction to receiving an early morning phone call had created palpable ripples in two other people’s lives and that it was now out of my control and irreversible in its consequences. This incident demonstrated very clearly that sharing my emotions, even in a calm way, inevitably caused ripples in other people’s lives and that I could never be harmless as long as I involved other people in my problems by sharing my emotional reactions. RESPONDENT: I’m also concerned about verbal expression of emotion when it comes to my children. I want them to be able to accurately communicate what they are feeling. I don’t plan to have them indulge or ‘be authentic’ by expressing their feelings or taking them out on others in anyway, but it seems of vital importance that they learn to communicate emotion accurately, since they will be feeling and dealing with emotion. I also think that verbal expression of emotion is important when it comes to social rules and laws. A situation at my workplace happened recently where many people were feeling like the corporation was treating them like children, tightening the performance metrics, and making them feel like they hated their jobs. Now, I understand that that no-one is ‘made to feel’ a certain way, but I am glad that people speak up when things can be improved and that any sort of emotional badgering that occurs is countered. I agree that an emotional exchange usually isn’t productive, but a calm, sincere, accurate rendering of what is occurring and why people are feeling they hate their jobs is entirely appropriate – plus, it delivers the results much better than an emotional exchange. Now, I have considered getting rid of any communication about emotion, since it is so often done to place blame, request pity, vent frustration, manipulate, etc – but then I have no means to communicate how I and others can actually improve our situation without verbally expressing information about emotion. I just don’t see how we could live as equals in our society and have just reasonable expectations that people don’t rape, steal, and kill without communicating the emotions behind those malicious events. Why not kill someone? Well, first it’s a malicious thing to do. Second, it causes suffering to all involved. There – that’s communication about emotion – and it’s one of the reasons we have laws and codes of conduct. VINEETO: You don’t have to make an argument for communicating emotions – it’s the very status quo of what makes human beings who they are. The world is awash with emotional sharing, either covertly by silent means or overtly through words and actions. The jealous man or woman can either think about revenge, feel like taking revenge, verbally threaten revenge or put his or her thoughts and feelings into action. Similarly a man or woman can think about stealing, feel like stealing or put his or her thoughts and feelings into action. Such malicious thoughts and feelings are, even if they are not put into action, palpable signs that ‘I’ am malicious at core and in a similar way sorrowful thoughts and feelings are palpable signs that ‘I’ am sorrowful at core. The method of actualism is not about putting a moral lid on one’s malicious and sorrowful thoughts and feelings but it addresses the very core of the problem – recognizing and whittling away at my malicious and sorrowful social-instinctual identity. * RESPONDENT: Having said that, here’s a clip from a conversation between No 37 and Vineeto...
That may be the case with how it was for you ‘being authentic.’ I do see the ‘temptation’ to do that, but I don’t find those as my current motivations at all. It seems you are lumping me in with the other ‘authentic’ people you know. Please don’t confuse me with them. What I mean by ‘authentic’ is merely accurately investigating and reporting the emotion occurring in me. VINEETO: Human beings have always valued their feelings, emotions and passions as their highest evolutionary achievement, and consider them something that makes them truly human. However the fact is, what makes human beings unique in comparison to other animals is not their inclination for emotions and passions but their ability to think, reflect and plan and the distinctive capacity of the human brain to be aware of itself. Whether ‘you’ regard it as authentic or not authentic, ‘reporting the emotion occurring in me’ is acting out ‘me’, the social-instinctual entity inside this flesh-and-blood body, because ‘I’ am my emotions and my emotions are ‘me’. Personally, I decided to stop burdening others with ‘my’ authenticity, my emotions and my ‘self’-centredness. I made my emotions and my feelings my business only. * RESPONDENT:
This is what I addressed above. My ‘buttons’ are being disarmed, but they are still there – so they sometimes need communication, or I am actively leaving out information that might be helpful for others. I’m not using this as a copout – I am merely saying that if I don’t sometimes communicate where my ‘buttons’ are (just pure information), then I risk bottling up emotion until it feels like I need to vent. So communicating emotion is also a way of allowing others to know ‘where it can hurt’ – they can do what they want with the information. VINEETO: Any communication with others as to ‘where it can hurt’ is habitually passed on for the sole purpose of pointing out that the other should change his or her behaviour so as not to hurt ‘me’. It’s the normal cut and thrust, defend and parry of the psychological and psychic battle that human beings constantly engage in and euphemistically call communication. When I took up actualism and I discovered ‘where it can hurt’, I welcomed this information as a valuable indication of my ‘self’ coming to the foreground and it showed me where to look for my tricky identity. I welcomed every opportunity to find out what caused me to feel hurt, insulted, frustrated, annoyed, etc., despite my occasional resistance, fear, uneasiness or laziness to be aware of exactly what I was thinking or feeling. Whenever I felt hurt I knew that this must be ‘me’, my ‘self’, defending my precious feelings, my pride, my prized personality and individuality. It is only because sore spots have been hit time and again in communication with other people, that I have been able to find out about how ‘I’ tick and only by this process have I been able to slowly whittle away at my identity. What’s the point of telling others when and where they hurt me and expecting them to change, when this chronic habit only prevents me from becoming aware of exactly what I need to change in me if I am to become unconditionally happy and unconditionally harmless towards my fellow human beings. (...) * VINEETO: Personally, I have stopped expressing my emotions to others completely simply because I
cannot find any good reason to do so. Besides, practicing actualism for several years has left me almost bare of any emotion to express except for
the sheer delight of, and continuous wonder about, being alive, right here and right now. RESPONDENT: This is indeed my goal as well – to get to a place where communicating emotion is superfluous and unnecessary (for me). But until I get there, as I am dismantling myself, I do see the necessity and vital importance of communicating information about emotion. VINEETO: The only way ‘to get to a place where communicating emotion is superfluous’ is to become aware of precisely what your identity consists of and then actively whittle away at all of its content. What you see as the ‘necessity and vital importance of communicating information about emotion’ – for instance communicating ‘where it can hurt’ – is in fact your feeling and thus an aspect of your identity on guard. RESPONDENT: I also prefer that others communicate their emotion with me in a purely informative way. If my son is frightened of a bully at school, for example – I want him to tell me he is frightened and why – so that we can do something about it. So there you have it – the importance of communicating about emotion. VINEETO: When you have a close relationship to someone – in this case your son – then everything the other feels also has a direct emotional effect on you, which means your son’s emotions are directly connected to your identity as a father. In order to become free from the debilitating effect that emotions had on me, I made it my single-pointed aim to become aware of each and every emotion that arose before I even considered acting on it. However, if you prefer valuing ‘the importance of communicating about emotion’ then that is, of course, entirely your choice. Needless to say, actualism is purely voluntary.
RESPONDENT: I considered responding in detail to each point raised by you, Vineeto, but the post was already getting long, so I thought I’d start fresh.
No doubt this is true – I would be deluding myself if I said otherwise, but I have never stated any differently. The point I am trying to make (hopefully with some increasing clarity) is that communicating ‘where it can hurt’ is merely an ‘interim solution.’ That is, I find it useful occasionally to communicate (and this really doesn’t happen often) ‘where it can hurt’ while I am still a self. I find (by experiment) that if I become totally non-communicative about what I am feeling, then my upset, frustration, etc. tends to ‘bottle up’ until the result can be even worse. So instead of making a ‘mountain out of a mole-hill’ I find it much easier and more useful to deal merely with my ‘mole-hills.’ Mostly, I tend to state my preferences in non-emotional language which has greatly enhanced my interactions with other people, but the times that I have felt like I can’t/ shouldn’t/better not express any frustration or upset have been far from happy and harmless. What I am saying (and I don’t think this is merely for me) is that this whole business of ‘whittling’ away seems like one has to find one’s own pace. VINEETO: In order to successfully apply the method of actualism it is vital to understand that unless you radically break with the automatic and traditionally accepted habit of expressing or suppressing your emotions, the third alternative of experiencing, becoming aware of and investigating one’s emotions as they arise won’t even come into view. ‘Communicating ‘where it can hurt’’, even as an ‘interim solution’, is to continue on the tried and failed ways of the human condition of malice and sorrow. If you want to stop being malicious, at least you have to have the intent to stop – no intent, no chance of result. As far as investigating emotions is concerned, desperately trying to keep your mountains the size of ‘mole-hills’ does nothing to eliminate the cause of your emotion, it is simply the normal way of dealing with the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. RESPONDENT: I remember you saying that when you started AF, that you often felt like a ‘tiger in a cage’. Maybe that’s how you felt – I prefer not to make myself feel that way – I prefer to find my own pace and put happiness as priority. VINEETO: Yes, in the beginning of taking up actualism I ‘often felt like a tiger in a cage’, but it was a cage entirely of my own making in that I had made it my aim not to let out my feelings on anyone else. I was not content with the normal solution of expressing my feelings once in a while (letting the tiger loose on someone else or something else) so that I would then be temporarily happy. I wanted to become aware of the ‘tiger’ of my instinctual passions, not just tame them or feel I had transcended them – I aimed at getting rid of the ‘tiger’, ‘me’, altogether. I had spent years expressing my emotions, intentionally in therapy groups and accidentally in daily life, and it had made me neither happy nor harmless. It was only because I stopped what I had done for so long and began to closely observe and scientifically investigate my psyche in action that I was able to slowly whittle away at ‘me’. If you ‘prefer not to make myself feel that way’ that is fair enough. It is not everyone’s cup of tea to be a pioneer in radically breaking with the social-spiritual traditions and going against the animal-instinctual imperative by putting one’s harmlessness first. RESPONDENT: Now, what I’ve outlined first I would say is communicating small amounts of frustration – in order that they don’t grow out of proportion. Now I only use this when I feel like I can’t get an immediate solution with the ‘third alternative.’ And the day when I need/want this as a crutch may not be far away, since AF is working some ‘magic’ in me. Secondly, what I am trying to say is that there are many contexts in which communicating how I am feeling is not to expect others to change. VINEETO: We’ve talked about this before – in my experience the only underlying motive for telling others about my frustration for instance, is that they then do something about it. My practice of actualism began when I really understood that others have naught to do with what I feel – they only provide the trigger, they are not the cause. It is the social and instinctual programming in me that causes my frustration, my anger, my resentment, my sorrow and my fear. Once I understood this vital point, I stopped looking for the solution of my feelings outside of me and thus relieved the people around me from the burden of shame and blame for having triggered my feelings. It is enormously liberating to put this realization into everyday practice. RESPONDENT: At one point you said ...
This question applies to what I said above about using expressing emotion as a crutch – to keep mole-hills mole-hills and prevent them from becoming mountains – until I have the leisure and ability to disarm my emotions with attentiveness. (This stuff doesn’t happen overnight, after all). Again, there are contexts, like this list for example where emotions are expressed without expecting them to ‘change’ others. VINEETO: Again, I am not expressing my emotions on this list but I am reporting my experience of how I have dealt with my emotions and what I have learnt from experientially investigating them. Expressing emotions is passing on one’s feelings, be it in calm words or agitated gestures, acting on the belief that others could and should do something about how one feels – otherwise one would not express one’s feelings towards people. RESPONDENT: Take another example where I may become embarrassed or self-conscious. Maybe I spilled spaghetti sauce on my shirt or something in another’s presence (whatever). I find it happier and more harmless to acknowledge to them that I’m feeling embarrassed – and I know they are not MAKING be feel that way – just like if I am doing public speaking, acknowledging to myself and others that I am nervous helps expose the feeling to the light of day. And this second sense – information only – NOT expecting someone else to change – is what I am calling of vital importance. I find that if I stop myself from expressing my feelings in the above scenarios, that I only become more withdrawn. Bringing the emotion to light (which in these cases involves another person) means that it is diffused. VINEETO: In actualism my aim is not to diffuse an occurring emotion by expressing it, as is the traditional way, but to become aware of it to such an extent that I can identify how this emotion forms an integral part of my identity – i.e. each and every feeling and emotion observed is a gateway to see how ‘I’ operate. As long as I am busy expressing, suppressing, controlling or diffusing my emotion, I have no means of being attentive to the underlying identity in action. In other words, the aim of actualism is to detect the programming that causes each feeling, whereas acquiescing to one’s desire to diffuse unwanted feelings is to simply remain a compliant victim of this programming itself. RESPONDENT: I have great conversations with my wife where I am basically analyzing myself, concepts like love, emotion, patriotism, etc where I’m trying to pick them apart. It is of immense help and oh so much fun to have a decent conversation about all that stuff. If that wonderful fun is being discouraged in AF – then I don’t have any desire for that. VINEETO: Yes, part of the process of actualism is that one questions one’s concepts and beliefs and in the course of doing so you discover the underlying feelings and passions that hold your concepts and beliefs in place. Unless you discover those underlying feelings and how they relate to your identity, you will only replace those concepts with other, more fashionable, concepts and a different design of your identity. This practice of investigating one’s beliefs and concepts and their underlying feelings is not at all discouraged on this list – investigating one’s psyche is the very basis of actualism. What is essential, however, is the sincere intent to be unconditionally harmless, or, as No 38 put it recently
Unless you are ready to take on board the whole package, you won’t be able to even begin to recognize your own malicious and sorrowful programming in action. RESPONDENT: Again, another concern of mine is how others are feeling. I highly prefer that others tell me how they are feeling, rather than acting it out. If my son is being threatened by a bully at school – I want to know that he is feeling threatened. I don’t expect him to know how to dismantle himself using the AF method. Turning the tables, if my son is the bully at school – I want to know that other kids are afraid of him – so that something can be done to remedy the situation. So these are the contexts where ‘communicating about emotion’ is vital –
VINEETO: You have made it very clear that the way you prefer to deal with your emotions is expressing your emotions in interaction with others and I can understand this very well given that it is feelings and passions that tie human beings together. Actualism, however, is a unilateral decision to do something about my emotions and passions in me, the only person I can change. In actualism I set out on a course to leave my ‘self’ behind and along with it, my ties to humanity. RESPONDENT: Lastly, I’d like to point out something that seems like an absurdity to me sometimes. Take these two premises:
from which it follows that everyone is completely ‘responsible’ for their own emotions. VINEETO: What is, in fact, responsible for my emotions is my social-instinctual programming that every human being is endowed with. I, for one, decided to take responsibility for my emotions and used the actualism method to eliminate my programming because I wanted to live in unrestricted peace and harmony with my fellow human beings. RESPONDENT:
Now these two are contradictory. I personally, accept the first premise but not the second. Vineeto, you stated that you wanted to ‘stop the ripples’ of frustration and upset feelings in the case where you mentioned you were contacted by phone at an early hour of the morning. Now why should you make yourself responsible for how someone else reacts to information you provide? Why not just tell them calmly that you prefer not being contacted quite that early and leave it at that? Why would you ‘take responsibility’ for how the other person reacts to that information? VINEETO: This is the incident you are referring to –
In this incident I did not merely provide practical information about the phone call but I passed on emotionally loaded information. It made no difference that this information was given in a calm voice, it nevertheless transmitted the emotional information that was inherent in my experience with the early morning phone call. The other’s reaction made me realize that I had tricked myself and the other, by thinking I was calm, rational and entirely justified, when I had still blamed them for my being upset and thus my action was the cause for the ripples created. RESPONDENT: Now, I take it that you weren’t really ‘taking responsibility’ for how someone else felt – rather realizing that you really do care about their feelings and the ripples that eventuate. (And how would you know about their emotions had they not ‘communicated them to you?’ Wouldn’t you say that information was vitally important to you?) VINEETO: I did take responsibility for the fact that my passed on feelings created ripples in other people’s lives. I care enough for my fellow human beings that I do not want to add my own malice and sorrow to whatever other feelings people are already having. That they communicated their emotions to me was not ‘vitally important’ to me because there are enough opportunities to observe one’s own feelings when one is behaving maliciously towards others, provided one has the sincere intent to find out, that is. RESPONDENT: You ask me why I want others to be ‘sensitive’ to me? I ask you why should you or I be ‘sensitive’ to others? My answer to this is that it’s not that I’m requiring or demanding that others be ‘sensitive’ to my needs – rather that I do realize that generally people are well meaning and benevolent, so that I don’t see any reason why sharing information about how I am feeling should be seen as a ‘demand’ placed upon them. It’s merely information that they are free to do with whatever they want. Giving information about how I feel, or have felt in a purely informative way only allows them to understand me – which allows their natural benevolence to be better directed. VINEETO: It is a myth that human beings have ‘natural benevolence’ – every human being is born with mother nature’s rather clumsy soft-ware package of the animal instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and this programming is responsible for the human condition that is epitomized by malice and sorrow. What looks like beneficial behaviour to you is the social conditioning in which humans are taught to emphasize and highly value their ‘good’ instinctual passions and repress and control their ‘savage’ passions. However, we still have to rely on lawyers and laws, courts and jails, police, armies and guns to ultimately enforce law and order – a pathetic substitute for an actual peace and harmony between human beings. Why would you feel the need to ‘better direct’ people’s supposed ‘natural benevolence’? Why do you feel a fear of being emotionally hurt by others if everyone has a ‘natural benevolence’? It’s a spiritual fairy-tale that priests and gurus want us to believe that human nature is essentially benevolent, that babies are born innocent and that they have only been misguided and corrupted by their upbringing. One only needs to take a closer look at 5,000 years of recorded history to see that this duplicitous belief is neither factual nor makes any sense. RESPONDENT: I also refuse to ‘take responsibility’ for how others respond to information about how I am feeling (should I feel a desire to talk about it) – that is entirely up to them. I can’t ‘hold the whole world’ in my hands – that’s too painful. But, since I really do care about other’s feelings, then I am very willing to listen to others feelings and talk about my own experiences (past and present) so that further light can be shed on ‘how we tick.’ VINEETO: As long as one is entrapped within the Human Condition and faithfully follows its rules and tenets, not much light ‘can be shed on how we tick’. Only when I become aware and step outside of the normal human way, which is the way of feelings and passions, am I able to investigate and report about how the lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning entity ‘ticks’ inside this flesh-and-blood body. RESPONDENT: In my experience, only by becoming Happy first – can I also become Harmless. This is not to neglect Harmlessness, rather to notice that if I try to be to vigilant – ‘taking responsibility’ for how my emotions cause ripples in other people, then I become a ‘tiger in a cage’ – i.e., unhappy. Granted, both happiness are harmlessness depend on each other, but happiness seems to be the horse carrying the harmlessness cart – and not the other way around. I don’t have motivation to be harmless, if I’m not happy. At least – that’s my experience. VINEETO: If by ‘becoming Happy first’ one could ‘also become Harmless’, the whole world would be happy and harmless by now. The pursuit of happiness is as old as humankind but it still has not produced anything remotely resembling harmlessness, let alone harmony. Actualism breaks with the instinctual compulsion of human beings to put their own happiness first and
put harmlessness second – as a socially conditioned afterthought, so to speak. As long as I put my happiness above being harmless, my outlook
towards others is inevitably ‘self’-centred, which means that I cannot consider others as equitable fellow human beings.
RESPONDENT: The ‘diffusion’ I am talking about here is of a different variety than to what you refer, I think. Take an example where I play music in public. Maybe I look nervous or even flushed. After the performance, my wife asks me, ‘were you nervous?’ I prefer not ignoring the question – rather responding directly to the question by acknowledging it and saying ‘yes, I was.’ I’m not commiserating, not asking for pity or empathy. I realize this same behaviour can be done wanting to diffuse the emotion in the sense of finding empathy or connection with the other. I’m not talking about needing to express it – I’m talking here about acknowledging to myself and others – if another is involved. The ‘diffusion’ that takes place (this is not some psychological theory, but my own experience) is very similar (if not the same) sort of ‘diffusion’ that attentiveness allows – bringing to attention and investigating... ‘why would I be nervous?’ ‘what is it about performance that I get self-conscious?’ It is to open to what is happening and bring my attention to it – while not attempting to deny it to someone else (due to some overriding principle of ‘not expressing emotion.) VINEETO: Personally, I find discussions of imaginary situations can at best lead to some form of theoretical understanding but the only way to really understand the nature and power of feelings and emotions is for you to do your own explorations in real situations as they are happening. However, in the hypothetical situation you offer, you have communicated some information to your wife about an emotional situation where she wasn’t involved. If she had been involved – as in telling her that it was she who had made you feel nervous – then this would be an example of expressing an emotion. What happens when people express their emotions is that they make no distinction between the trigger for their own feelings or emotions and the person or persons who deliver the trigger – the person who made some comment, who did something or didn’t do something, who has a viewpoint different than yours, who espouses different morals or ethics and so on. To express your feelings to someone who is but the deliverer of the trigger of your feelings is to shoot the messenger. No matter how cunningly or cleverly this is done, expressing emotions in this way always means you are missing the opportunity of attentively experiencing the emotion and of understanding the nuts and bolts of how ‘you’ operate. To express emotion is to verbally and/or non-verbally turn the ‘emotional hose’ towards the person who supposedly triggered your feelings, or who happens to be nearby when one wants to emotionally unload, and drench them in one’s feelings. As Richard explained recently: ‘an emotion ... wants to express, communicate or convey itself either verbally (which may be merely tone of voice), physically (which may be merely facial expression or bodily stance) or as a ‘vibe’ – to use a ‘60’s term – which can be picked-up psychically (and is arguably the most pernicious of all expression).’ * RESPONDENT: So these are the contexts where ‘communicating about emotion’ is vital –
You have convinced me to take back No 2. I no longer see No 2 as vital. But I do think that allowing oneself ‘space’ to ‘slip-up’ is crucial – not castigating, but investigating. VINEETO: Good on you. When you have the sincere intent to be happy and harmless, you don’t need the ‘crutch’ of expressing your emotions verbally, physically or psychically. You simply have the intent to be as harmless as can be and with each little success you raise the bar as you go along. As you become more and more familiar with the territory and the cunning of your psyche, you become increasingly able to discover and observe the emotion before it ‘slips out’, i.e. before it is expressed in any way whatsoever. And if you do ‘slip up’, another opportunity will soon come along – it is not easy to break a lifetime’s habit, particularly when everyone else on the planet is busily involved in mindlessly expressing their emotions. * RESPONDENT: You ask me why I want others to be ‘sensitive’ to me? I ask you why should you or I be ‘sensitive’ to others? My answer to this is that it’s not that I’m requiring or demanding that others be ‘sensitive’ to my needs – rather that I do realize that generally people are well meaning and benevolent, so that I don’t see any reason why sharing information about how I am feeling should be seen as a ‘demand’ placed upon them. It’s merely information that they are free to do with whatever they want. Giving information about how I feel, or have felt in a purely informative way only allows them to understand me – which allows their natural benevolence to be better directed. VINEETO: It is a myth that human beings have ‘natural benevolence’ – every human being is born with mother nature’s rather clumsy soft-ware package of the animal instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and this programming is responsible for the human condition that is epitomized by malice and sorrow. What looks like beneficial behaviour to you is the social conditioning in which humans are taught to emphasize and highly value their ‘good’ instinctual passions and repress and control their ‘savage’ passions. However, we still have to rely on lawyers and laws, courts and jails, police, armies and guns to ultimately enforce law and order – a pathetic substitute for an actual peace and harmony between human beings. Why would you feel the need to ‘better direct’ people’s supposed ‘natural benevolence’? Why do you feel a fear of being emotionally hurt by others if everyone has a ‘natural benevolence’? It’s a spiritual fairy-tale that priests and gurus want us to believe that human nature is essentially benevolent, that babies are born innocent and that they have only been misguided and corrupted by their upbringing. One only needs to take a closer look at 5,000 years of recorded history to see that this duplicitous belief is neither factual nor makes any sense. RESPONDENT: I do not mean to imply that humans are ONLY ‘naturally benevolent.’ No doubt you are correct in your assertion that complete innocence is a fairy tale. Your comments are aimed at a target that I don’t intend to defend. I agree that we are endowed with the ‘instinctual passions’ of ‘fear, aggression, nurture and desire’. But, I also see altruism and benevolence – though normally mixed (if not eclipsed sometimes) by the instinctual passions you refer to. All I mean is that people are generally well meaning. Maybe it’s best not to combine the word ‘natural’ and ‘benevolence’. Probably ‘good-intentioned’ is a better rendering – or ‘well-meaning.’ VINEETO: It is certainly ‘best not to combine the word ‘natural’ and ‘benevolence’’ because it is the instinctual passions that are natural and consequently come to the surface with often horrendous results when the social rules fail to curb the excesses. Children before about age two are ‘natural’ and so are animals – children at this age don’t yet have a social conscience and, as such, are run entirely by their instinctual passions. What you said, however, is that you wanted to appeal to and direct people’s ‘natural
benevolence’ so that they’d be ‘sensitive’ towards you and won’t emotionally hurt you. But apart from the fact that ‘natural
benevolence’ is a myth, an actualist aims to become unconditionally happy and harmless, i.e. happy and harmless with people as they are. In
order to become unconditionally harmless, I had to stop trying to direct people to live up to ‘my’ preferences and sensitive spots and instead
I investigated ‘my’ instinctive need to be in control and change people according to ‘my’ self-centred ideas and feelings. The result is
that now I am not only harmless but also happy regardless of what people say to me, or about me, because I removed the cause of my feeling hurt
– and the cause is not in others, but in me.
VINEETO: I enjoyed your report of your experience with actualism you wrote to No 38. One part of it I could particularly relate to – RESPONDENT to No 38: Yes, in the sense that my ‘search’ for truth has ended – and that is quite a relief. Also, my ‘relationships’ and dealings with people are virtually free of emotional entanglement, so they are much, much smoother. No, in the sense that actualism and the recognition of the human condition has brought some unanticipated downsides that I am still working through. Briefly, the downside I am referring to could be summarized like this: ‘I’ resent being here, and ‘I’ know it. So, I cannot definitively say that I am happier overall. VINEETO: If I understand you correctly, I can relate to your observation that ‘‘I’ resent being here, and ‘I’ know it’. When I discovered actualism and came to understand that the instinctual passions are the root cause of all human malice and sorrow I started to deliberately break my ingrained habits of dis-identifying and dissociating from my feelings and emotions – habits which had been part of my previous spiritual practice. I also began to watch television and read the newspapers to see what was going on in the world and to take notice of how I was in relation to other people. It wasn’t easy at the start because what I found was often not very pretty. When I took off my rose-colored glasses of dis-identification and dissociation I was at first overwhelmed with sorrow about the way people are with each other and, more importantly, I was shocked and appalled at the dark emotions I found within myself despite all my diligent spiritual practice and all my good intentions. In short, I discovered that I was as bad and as mad as everyone else, to paraphrase Peter’s description. One of the first of my previously-hidden feelings I became aware of was ‘my’ resentment of being here and the constant effort required to be ‘me’ and yet I was determined and committed to not let these negative emotions slip away into the background again, but I wanted to actively investigate these feelings, look for the reasons for my resentment, consider and apply any practical changes if possible and where necessary, break my habit of carelessly lapsing back into these feelings – in short do whatever was needed to break the back of this insidious spoiler of my enjoyment of this moment. I found that the commitment to enjoy this perpetual moment of being alive was already half the battle and stubborn determination to not let fear, confusion or doubt stop me, the other half. The practical and efficient tool – the actualism method – allowed me to not only become aware of my
dark emotions but to examine them and incrementally disempower them, or, to put it differently, a tool that enabled me to become increasingly more
happy and more harmless the more I uncovered the beliefs, morals, ethics, feelings and passions that prevented me from being happy and harmless.
This tool, combined with Richard’s report of successfully applying it, meant that I increasingly dared to stop turning away from the dark side
of the human condition, and to explore the darker recesses of my psyche in order that I could investigate the instinctual passions and then do
whatever was necessary and appropriate in order to disempower them.
Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved.
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