RESPONDENT: It is a grey drizzly day but there is a warmth in the air. I enjoy these days for being inside able to gaze out the window while I do small tasks that I allow to build up. Writing to the freedom page is one of those things I have been thinking of doing. I infrequently read the pages but I often gain some good pieces of information when I do.

VINEETO: It’s good to hear from you again and that you are gaining some good information from the mailing list. If you find you have a particular issue, concern or worry running at some time you can always dip into The Actual Freedom Trust website itself where there is a wealth of information and correspondence, categorized by topic for ease of access.

RESPONDENT: Besides all that... I write because I am interested in other people’s thoughts on the understanding of how men traditionally think and how when learning about actual freedom it was best communicated. My partner has just finished reading Peter’s journal and has begun to search deeper within himself about his reactions to life, but as a female I seem to be unable to comprehend some of his views and attitudes as they arise.

VINEETO: For me, the path to Actual Freedom began with me conducting an extensive investigation into what exactly constitutes male and female conditioning simply because I figured that this gender conditioning was the main reason that man and woman cannot live together in peace and harmony. In the process of this investigation I have explored what exactly makes me tick as a woman – the program of beliefs and instincts with its resulting feelings and emotions. Along the path to freedom I have gradually evaluated and discarded all of the so-called female attributes and values, which women so proudly claim as their main territory – expressing emotions and feelings, feminine insight and intuition, love, nurture and nourishment. I found that my desperately holding on to these attributes and values caused me to fight a continuous battle within myself, and against others, as to which is right and which is wrong – the male version of demanding, desiring, rationalising and displaying reason or the female version of demanding, desiring, emotionalising and displaying emotions. I have found that both versions – both the male and the female – are silly, useless and redundant.

My main focus was to question and examine my own ‘views and attitudes’ as a female in order to arrive at sound, verifiable facts and refreshing non-affective common sense. It was only by relying on down-to-earth facts and common sense that I began to be able to communicate with Peter without emotionally reacting to what he was saying, neither trying to please him nor trying to fight him.

I was also interested in how the male half of the world thinks and feels as it had always been somewhat of a mystery to me what went on in ‘the other camp’. I found that as I began to question my own female programming, I naturally became curious as to how the other half were programmed. Whilst I had my very own ‘spy’, or ‘whistleblower’, from the other camp to fill me in, one can also glean the necessary information as to how the other gender is programmed by a process of curiosity, investigation and objective observation as to how men are programmed.

However, it is vital to put things in the right order – which is first things first. In order to become free from my female identity, I had to investigate my own restrictive ‘views and attitudes’ first. After all, it is these emotionally charged views and attitudes that stand in the way from my experiencing peace in the world-as-it-is … and with people-as-they-are.

The first major breakthrough in becoming free of my female identity was when I investigated my pining for a man’s love and support. This is what I wrote at the time –

[Vineeto]: One thing that I particularly didn’t like about falling in love was the pining. Whenever I was not with Peter I felt I was tied to him on a long elastic cord and not able to fully enjoy whatever I was doing by myself. Digging into what could be the reason for my pining, I discovered what I call the ‘Cinderella-syndrome’ – the romantic dream that most women have about the perfect and noble man. We are not only looking for someone who takes care of us when our own strength fails us, but also for someone who gives perspective, meaning, definition and identity to our lives, be it as father of our kids, provider of social status, security or a purpose for life. According to this dream Peter should be the answer to the question which I wasn’t willing to face myself: ‘What do I really want to do with my life?’ I remember a Monday evening after a weekend together, and I had been pining the whole day. I had not enjoyed work as I found myself struggling to get out of this exhausting dependency. Here I was, 44 years old and as silly as a teenager!

After work I took a long walk across rolling hills into a spectacular sunset, trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life. In the end, I had to admit that, whatever it was, it had not the slightest thing to do with anything that Peter could do for me.

I wanted to be perfect and I had to do it myself. I still had to clean myself up. Just having found a probable good mate had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t the best I could be; that I wasn’t free. I decided there and then to face the challenge, to abandon the love-dream and go for the actual experience – meeting another human being as intimately as possible instead of looking up to him and waiting for him to be the ‘hero of my dreams’.

That very evening the situation changed. My pining stopped. The fog in the head cleared. My expectations disappeared. I could again stand on my own feet and equally enjoy the time when I was by myself. I had recovered my autonomy – my autonomy in the sense that I am the only one in my life who is responsible for my happiness. A Bit of Vineeto

With this realization I had unmasked the female dream in me and, by my determination to not let it stand in the way of my living with another person in peace and harmony, I rendered the dream impotent.

After this event there was a tangible crack in my perception of ‘who’ I thought and felt I was. And once I allowed the first big rift in my female identity, anything was possible. It was a great encouragement to explore further. If I had been on the wrong path with my Cinderella dream, then I could be down the wrong alley in anything that I thought and felt to be right! To examine the remaining aspects of my female identity was not always easy, sometimes even downright scary, but the adventure called me onwards – the adventure to discover actual people in an actual world outside of, and completely independent from, my affective dream world.

It is a grand adventure!

RESPONDENT: I admit to having been quite rigid about my own opinions but now I allow my self to hear and to allow that which he says to become something which becomes a practical part of my understanding. That is I put it to the test to see if it is real for me or I put it to the test to find the truth of it.

VINEETO: It is fascinating when, with increasing ‘self’-awareness, the world begins to look different. There are cracks in one’s ‘rigid … opinions’, the perception softens as one starts to see beyond the morals and ethics of black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. I remember how I was frequently amazed when I began to discover other people as they are, outside of my desires, dreams and fears. Increasingly I was able to perceive them as fellow human beings who went about their business of being alive. The trick was to question my own beliefs and ideas, opinions and principles and replace my morals and ethics with a discernment of what is silly and what is sensible.

It takes effort and persistence to nibble away at all of one’s feelings, beliefs and opinions that constitute the social identity but it is certainly an effort well worth making.

RESPONDENT: But all that aside I am still not achieving what I think I understand he would like me to, so what is it that I am missing in this communication between us??? So I thank you for sharing your understanding on this topic of communication.

VINEETO: The way I came to live in peace and harmony with a man was that I became free from being a woman.

First there is the social aspect of being a woman, the female role with its beliefs, sentiments and behaviour we have been trained to adopt since early childhood. It consists of all the shoulds and should nots, the right codes of conduct, the collective accepted behaviour of being a woman and the social taboos that are deemed unquestionable. You can clearly see what is social programming because it varies from culture to culture, depends upon religion and spiritual beliefs, is subject to generational and fashion swings and is imposed and maintained by peer pressure.

Then there is the instinctual aspect of being a woman, centred upon instinctual mating and procreation of the species. The program of sexual instinctual passion drove me to search for a man and get pregnant – and then the consequent need to secure the protection of the potential father kicked in. Curiously I found that my decision not to have any children and to be sterilised did not change this underlying instinctual urge at all – I still thought and felt myself to be a woman first and a human being second.

I found that as long as both the social and instinctual aspects of my identity had a strong grip on me, communication was impossible. Only when I examined and investigated my own programming was I able to see the other as a fellow human being and only then communication was really possible.

As for comprehending another’s ‘views and attitudes’, I have found that despite the fact that I have studied the human condition for several years now, I am still often baffled and bewildered at many of the attitudes and behaviours of human beings. In fact, the more I examined and thusly weakened my own identity, the more incomprehensible it is for me that most other people don’t seem to be interested in achieving the same quality of life for themselves. But I have come to see and begun to understand that this choice is their own cup of tea – it has nothing to do with my own happiness and harmlessness. If I find that I make myself dependant upon another’s happiness, or feel responsible for another’s happiness, then I have something to look at.

The wonderful thing about actualism is that everyone can only do it for themselves, in their own time and at their own pace.

RESPONDENT: I am emailing you again to please you to not answer me. I know what you will tell me. You will brake down my email sentence by sentence and than here we are again.

V: Here in actual freedom does not... You said that… You better look in the following link... I have nothing to defend... Fear? There is no fear here to... You did not understood... I never said that... Oxford dictionary...

VINEETO: I can understand that you object to answers I have provided to your questions but your attempt to gag me by telling me not to respond to your allegations about me simply won’t wash. I have come across this situation several times before when writing about actualism – when people don’t like the content of what I am saying they start to accuse me of all sorts of things. This tactic does nothing to substantiate their statements, beliefs and opinions. It only signals that they have run out of sensible things to say.

RESPONDENT: How can somebody fight with a female energy especially when is passionate about something? I give up.

VINEETO: It appears that this is one of the typical strategies of any identity – psychologizing or criticizing the messenger instead of considering the content of the message. This strategy is used by men and women equally and is usually a sign that no further sensible discussion can be had about the topic at hand because the main issue is winning the argument and not in having a fruitful discussion in order to find out the facts. If the whole issue of having a discussion with me is to win a fight then facts are clearly not your concern.

As for ‘female energy’ – I am obviously a female but, as I have described the process in ‘A Bit of Vineeto’ and in various correspondences, I have freed myself from my female identity. I have left the female camp behind and with it the weaponry often used by women, SNAGs and new-age therapists, namely emotional manipulation, psychologizing, undermining, speculative accusations, etc. Here is something I wrote about becoming free from being a woman –

[Vineeto]: The way I came to live in peace and harmony with a man was that I became free from being a woman.

First there is the social aspect of being a woman, the female role with its beliefs, sentiments and behaviour we have been trained to adopt since early childhood. It consists of all the shoulds and should nots, the right codes of conduct, the collective accepted behaviour of being a woman and the social taboos that are deemed unquestionable. You can clearly see what is social programming because it varies from culture to culture, depends upon religion and spiritual beliefs, is subject to generational and fashion swings and is imposed and maintained by peer pressure.

Then there is the instinctual aspect of being a woman, centred upon instinctual mating and procreation of the species. The program of sexual instinctual passion drove me to search for a man and get pregnant – and then the consequent need to secure the protection of the potential father kicked in. Curiously I found that my decision not to have any children and to be sterilised did not change this underlying instinctual urge at all – I still thought and felt myself to be a woman first and a human being second. Vineeto, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, No 17, 30.11.2002

RESPONDENT: From now on I will communicate only with Richard.

VINEETO: Richard is certainly the best correspondent you can choose if you want to understand what Actual Freedom is all about, whereas my expertise lies more in the field of the doing of actualism. The only question is – are you at all interested in either?

RESPONDENT: And just to create a little bit lighter atmosphere, one advice to Peter. Why you don’t send her here to the Greek islands for a couple of months, so when she comes back you will be free from the human condition and from her as well?

Laugh. Just a joke as defined in oxford dictionary. I embrace you both.

VINEETO: It is good that you said it was a joke ‘as defined in oxford dictionary’ because you have left out the funny part.

You apparently have not read Peter’s Journal otherwise you would know what Peter would say to your proposition –

Peter: I now enjoy an actual intimacy, a direct experience and knowledge of another human being with whom I have shared this amazing, tangible unravelling of myths, beliefs and instincts. Here is a woman with whom I not only bared my dark side – I eliminated it, together with the ‘good’ side as well. Not the emotions and feelings merely paraded out in some sort of superficial ‘sharing’ but an honest and thorough investigation to root out the source of all that stood in the way of our living together in peace, harmony and equity Deep sea diving, if you like. Boots and all, no holds barred, the full monty, all the way. Together we systematically removed all that was in the road between us – the whole lot!

And the rewards are extraordinary – I have complete freedom to be ‘me as I am’, and for Vineeto it is likewise. No expectations, no bonds, no wanting to change the other – why should we? She is perfect; she has made herself that way by ‘cleaning herself up’. And what a delight to meet equal intelligence, equal common sense and an equally sexual being! We experience equity as two human beings and delight in the physical differences, as those differences allow us to enjoy delicious, lusty sex! The hours and hours of talking, discussing and dissecting the Human Condition; the ‘What it is to be a man or a woman’; the ‘What’s going on for me’; the ‘Oh! That’s how you see it?’ – the fascination of discovery! It is astounding to actually meet another human being, naked of pretence and defence. It leaves temporary fickleness of love for dead! A lot of magic happens on this wide and wondrous path to freedom! Peter’s Journal, Living Together

I will refrain from quoting Peter from his next chapter (Sex) so as to not give you a hard time.

RESPONDENT: I am sending you a photo of mine so to make the virtual reality of the computer a little more actual. Be happy.

VINEETO: Thank you and I am already happy, because I am harmless as well.

VINEETO: [Are you really suggesting that it is ok to off-load ‘flak’ – ridicule, fabrications, lies, mendacity, sexual innuendo and verbal abuse – on people if they ‘can handle [it]’?] By your standards does it then follow that those who break down and beg for mercy should then be spared?

RESPONDENT: The only way this would ‘follow’ (by my standards) is if I’d said it’s OK to abuse Vineeto because she can handle it. I didn’t say that, or mean that. What I meant was that I find some of the hostility directed at you quite over the top, and you seem to get more unprovoked shit than most. And no, your being able to look after yourself does not make that ‘OK’, in the old-fashioned way.

VINEETO: Your use of the phrase ‘OK, in the old fashioned way’ reminds me of what is often deemed to be OK in the new-fashioned way, as in New Age spiritual way, whereby people fondly imagine themselves to be ‘free’ by rejecting the conventional morality and ethics of society and letting their resentments and hostility out on other people. To imagine that this petty act of rebellion is freedom is a nonsense as all one is doing is blindly following yet another social convention.

RESPONDENT: I added the ‘but she can obviously handle herself’ for a rather pathetic reason: I did not want it to seem as if I was making out that you were weak and in need of special treatment on account of being female.

VINEETO: The irony is that I in fact do receive the ‘special treatment on account of being female’ by those old-fashioned (or New Age) misogynists on this list for whom actualists, especially when female, are considered ‘fair prey’. This may well be the reason that I am still the only female actualist who choses to write on this list – the others I have talked to regard much of the behaviour of the naysayers on this list to be male-troglodytic.

VINEETO: It therefore came as somewhat of a surprise when I recently found an emotional ‘hook’ in my living together with Peter. I was contemplating about what exactly is standing in the way of ‘self’-immolation and found a bit of an affective identity in action – the ‘me’ who cherished the cozy corner I had in living together peacefully and delightfully. ‘I’ as an identity feel noticed and understood with Peter, he knows the happy ‘me’, the quizzing ‘me’, the puzzled ‘me’, the impatient ‘me’, he knows about ‘my’ aims and fears, ‘my’ quirks and wonderings. And this cozy relationship will certainly cease to be when I become free because then ‘I’ who is doing the relating will cease to be.

GARY: I had discovered much the same thing a few months ago. I was acutely aware of ‘my’ need to create a cozy nest and cling to my relationship with my partner. My attention seemed to be particularly attracted to the aging process in both she and myself. And I found myself forming a sharp demarcation between being ‘in’ the relationship, and at home, and being ‘out’ there in the ‘Real World’. Connected to this, I discovered morbid fears of growing old and dying, along with anxieties of losing this cozy relationship I was clinging to. I don’t know what triggered all this but it may have been happening around the time that there was so much talk of war with Iraq in the air. I realized that human beings usually all create this comfortable and peaceful corner of reality in their homes as a means of warding off or keeping out the harshness and cruelty of the outside world. This seems to be an instinctive pattern of behaviour, harkening back to the time when our ancestors hunkered in deep caves for protection against predators and other perils of the night.

VINEETO: From my own explorations I know that a relationship with a partner has many layers that are worth examining. One of the first issues to be sorted out for me was my female identity – my belonging to the women’s camp as opposed to the men’s club. Part of this female identity was the continuous battle as to who is right and who is wrong – men or women. What I discovered was an unbridgeable gulf between the masculine and feminine version of interpreting the world and that the only way to ensure peace and harmony was to eliminate the gulf, whereas common wisdom has it that the gulf is a given and that one should bridge the gulf with the feeling of love or move closer to the other camp by becoming more feminine or more masculine. Needless to say eliminating the gulf meant eliminating my precious identity as a woman and all that entailed.

Once I had sorted out this aspect of my identity, the next obstacle to actualizing peace were my spiritual beliefs and my feelings of loyalty towards the guru and his followers. It soon became obvious to me that as long as I was busy defending my spiritual beliefs, I was again involved in yet another battle as to whose beliefs are right and whose beliefs are wrong. Only by questioning my own beliefs could I begin to find out the facts and thus establish a fact-based common ground for communication. In the same vein, I had to investigate my faith in my much-valued female intuition, for to continue to rely on it prevented me from distinguishing between the fact of the matter and my feelings about the matter.

Another issue that quickly emerged was my sexual social conditioning and its instinctual counterpart – the deeply entrenched instinctual patterns that have to do solely with the survival of the human species, the dissemination of the genes of the most successful fighters in the battle for survival. As I became more familiar with the process of investigating my beliefs and feelings, I noticed that each issue was successfully resolved only when I was able to trace my feelings and emotions back to their instinctual core – the primeval survival program that gives rise to all feelings, emotions, moods and vibes in the human animal. This instinctual programming was forged ‘when our ancestors hunkered in deep caves for protection’, but the roots of this programming stretch way back to when the first faunal creatures began to populate the earth. It is therefore essential to dig deep in one’s investigations into one’s own psyche in order to feel, experience and understand the instinctual core of one’s feelings and emotions in order to become free of their insidious grip.

*

VINEETO: One of the first issues to be sorted out for me was my female identity – my belonging to the women’s camp as opposed to the men’s club. Part of this female identity was the continuous battle as to who is right and who is wrong – men or women. What I discovered was an unbridgeable gulf between the masculine and feminine version of interpreting the world and that the only way to ensure peace and harmony was to eliminate the gulf, whereas common wisdom has it that the gulf is a given and that one should bridge the gulf with the feeling of love or move closer to the other camp by becoming more feminine or more masculine. Needless to say eliminating the gulf meant eliminating my precious identity as a woman and all that entailed.

GARY: Recently I was working with a small group at a professional training. I was the only male in the group, there being three female participants besides myself. The exercise we were working on required giving a potential emotional reaction to various scenarios involving sexuality. After I had disclosed my reactions to these scenarios the other participants remarked that, of course, I had reacted that way ‘because you are a man’. I was a bit surprised at their perception in this regard. It had crossed my mind that perhaps I was reacting from a gender bias. But their remarks too struck me as dismissive in the sense that they consigned my reactions to the ‘male camp’ and disregarded that they might have been made on some other basis than gender conditioning. Besides discovering that I dislike being pegged in this way as either ‘male’, ‘white’, etc (in itself an instinctual reaction), I realized too how seldom I make these kinds of judgements and comparisons of others. It seems to me that only a female identity would be capable of making a judgement that someone is reacting on a ‘male’ basis, or vice versa.

VINEETO: Oh yes, you have encountered one of the typical fighting strategies of any identity – attacking the messenger instead of considering the content of the message. This strategy is used by men and women equally and is usually a sign that no further sensible discussion can be had about the topic at hand because the main issue is winning the argument and not having a fruitful discussion in order to find out the facts.

As I see it, ‘being pegged in this way as either ‘male’, ‘white’’ is both a reaction of the social identity – being pegged as a member of a family, gender, race, nationality or profession – as well as an instinctual reaction to being classified as either friend or foe. Nowadays if someone accuses me of being ‘female’, ‘white’ or ‘German’, I just laugh because I know for sure that whatever it is they are accusing me of is their problem, not mine.

VINEETO: Living in peace and harmony with a person of the other sex has been a life-long dream and when I was presented not only with the opportunity of a sincere commitment but also with the tools to make it work, this dream finally came true. I had watched people living together from an early age and already in my twenties I concluded from observation and experience that playing the traditional role as a wife and/or as a mother would not give me the satisfying relationship I was looking for. In my university days I then discovered that feminism as well as conventional therapy also failed to provide suitable answers to the ending of the battle of the sexes and I then turned to the dream of spiritual love. It took a bit longer to sort that one out. During my spiritual years a relationship with a man became secondary and my love for the Guru became primary until inevitably – and fortunately for me – the Guru died and the uselessness of such an ethereal relationship became glaringly obvious.

GARY: Interesting that you should have mentioned feminism. Feminist theory was all the rage when I attended graduate Social Work school, and I would be interested in your own discoveries of why it ‘failed to provide suitable answers to the ending of the battle of the sexes’. I know that there are various brands of feminism, but I am talking in an overarching way about the feminist movement.

VINEETO: The practical benefits I got from the feminism movement were that I learned to confidently take care of myself and to be as equally capable and intelligent as men. Feminism has opened the door to the world for women who were previously confined to the socially-defined roles of ‘cooking, children and church’, as the slogan went. The break up of the traditional confining roles has certainly improved many women’s lives in many ways, particularly in combination with the invention of the pill.

My first disappointment with the ideals of feminism happened in my student years when I discovered that women were as bitchy and conniving with each other as men were with women and as men were with each other. When I watched how women related to each other in the feminist movement, I could see that the notion of women ruling the world would not solve the problem of aggression, revenge, back-stabbing and lust for power. Also the idea of excluding half of the population from one’s life in order to avoid relationship problems didn’t appeal to me.

When I became a disciple of Rajneesh, feminism was in full swing and Rajneesh’s slogan was ‘to be spiritual is to become feminine’. In his commune in Oregon, he put women in charge and men in subordinate positions. The outcome of this experiment in female overt power is well documented. The top female leaders succumbed to the lust for power and many even indulged in criminal activities – they bugged many buildings, set up an election fraud, poisoned a whole town with salmonella, attempted to poison some disciples who were becoming suspicious and in the end packed up and left with a few million dollars of commune funds. When this was revealed, the shock was enormous, not only because they were spiritual, i.e. supposedly good, people but also because they were women. It proved to me beyond doubt that giving ‘the power to the women’ won’t solve any problems.

Although feminism has succeeded in questioning the sensibility of a patriarchal society, it only wants to replace it with a matriarchal system. Feminism’s main focus is on changing the power balance between the genders – it doesn’t question the conflicting social and instinctual identities that are the cause of the battle between the sexes. Men and women are still as much defined by their gender as they were before feminism and the latest fashionable catchphrase that ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus’ depicts the deep divide that basically entrenches the other gender as alien. Men are considered aggressive Martians while women are considered loving Venusians and nowadays it has become politically correct for women to tear down men whereas men making fun of women is considered offensive. In my student days and in my spiritual era I’ve experienced women’s aggression towards men when I attended women’s groups where women complained, bitched and plotted against their men, boyfriends or bosses and discussed the various strategies needed to ‘win the battle’. Any relationship with a man was seen as a constant battle to ‘make him do what I want’.

Feminism is certainly not the recipe for living in peace and harmony with the other gender.

RESPONDENT to Gary: I’m starting to realize that AF presents a very radical shift, despite its apparent simplicity. I was talking with my wife, who is an intelligent person, about some of the genetic and cultural programs running in our brains and was surprised at how resistant she was to exploring their nature. While she admitted that they existed, she didn’t believe they could be modified, and more importantly, believed they were valuable, if not a key component of her very self. To lose them would be to lose her ‘self’. That’s scary.

VINEETO: In my explorations I found that my social conditioning as a woman was deeply connected to the instinctual female role of a child-bearer and nest-maker. Women are encouraged to be more emotional while men are expected to be successful hunters and providers in the world for which one needs to use brawns and brains more than feelings and emotions. Consequently, expressing feelings and knowing how to put them to use was my most valuable asset for yielding power over others in order to get what I wanted, particularly in my relationships with men. But apart from being a power-tool, feelings were also the main ingredient of my identity as a woman – ‘I’ am first and foremost my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’.

Only because I was deeply fed up with the havoc that my feelings created in my life and the life of others around me, was I able to see the sense in questioning all of my feelings – because examining my feelings is a tangible step to being able to be intimate with all of my fellow human beings regardless of their gender. It’s a lonely business being trapped on either side of the gender divide.

RESPONDENT: The constant state of tension brought by the animal hunger of the male for the female, and the female’s control of that situation, has long been a painful place for me.

VINEETO: I can tell you that ‘the female’s control of that situation’ is only perceived as such on the male’s end. For instance, the whole movement of women’s liberation was born of the idea that the men had control over the women’s lives. In other words, each side in the battle of the sexes sees the other side as being the controller, being more dominant, being more manipulative, being unable to understand the other, and so on. The idea that someone else is in control of my life is in itself part of the automatic instinctual battle for power between the sexes and the first step to become free of feeling controlled and being controlled was for me to admit that, and find out how, I was driven by my own instinctual passions and shackled by my own imbibed social identity of being a woman.

The more I discovered that the cards were distributed equally, i.e. equally restrictive for both genders, the more my defensiveness and my idea of being a victim dropped and I was then able to explore precisely what convictions and conventions, roles and rules I had taken on board about what it is supposed to mean to be a woman. The way I began to unravel the mystery of the eternal battle between the genders was easy – whenever I got upset about anything Peter or another man said to me or about me, I had something to look at. Whenever I found myself about to defend my convictions about what women are or what they should do or how they could be, I became aware that there was a piece of my identity as a woman in it as well. Whenever I dared to replace such a dearly held idea, passion or dream with facts a piece of my identity as a woman also went down the drain.

After a few initial fears and hesitations, and as those roles and rules were slowly uncovered and discarded, it became increasingly delightful to find out that the differences that I had imagined existed between genders were disappearing. A few months into our relationship and into my explorations about my conditioning I suddenly looked at Peter and saw him without perceiving him as a man and my lover and all that it entailed. It was such a shock at first because I had never been able to look at him without simultaneously overlaying an image of what I wanted or feared or dreamt of. Suddenly there was a human being sitting next to me – and I had never seen that human being before, because I had been so busy with what I felt and thought about him. It is a delicious magic when the curtain of instinctual ‘self’-centredness breaks, if only for a few moments at first, and gives way to experiencing an intimate meeting with another fellow human being.

RESPONDENT: I have spent a long time wading through my smorgasbord of feelings and can honestly say that that effort resulted in the dissipation of the vast majority of them. Your post has some interesting timing as just the other day my wife expressed a feeling of loss for the passion that infused the earlier days of our relationship. While that was a lot of fun, I wouldn’t for a second ask for it back, since it comes bundled with all those other miserable feelings. I woke up this morning thinking about what she had said, and felt an immense feeling of relief. This is not suppression ... the feelings are genuinely gone, for the most part. I see our relationship in a much clearer light, and I am no longer beholden to her.

This puts me/us in an interesting spot, which we’ve touched on a bit: when the biological/hormonal imperative is removed, what form does the male/female relationship take? I would hope there could grow some genuine intimacy, but I guess we’ll see how that evolves.

VINEETO: The process of actualism is to investigate the feelings that prevent you from being happy and harmless. In order to investigate those feelings it is vital that you not only think about them but that you experience those particular feelings as they occur – otherwise you won’t be able to experientially understand how ‘you’ tick and discover what underlies those feelings. In order to do that, I first had to backtrack from the conditioning that I picked up in my spiritual years of being detached and dis-identified as in ‘I am not my body, I am not my feelings’. An actualist does the opposite to spiritual transcendence – when I discover a feeling, I completely identify with it because ‘I’ am my feelings and each feeling is yet another aspect of ‘me’ in action – the very identity that I want to examine and explore, uncover and investigate.

As for ‘when the biological/hormonal imperative is removed’ – my experience was that while my hormonal imperative may have waned over the years that only meant that I searched for other ways to express my identity. In the East it is common practice that when a man’s sexual drive disappears with old age, he turns to spirituality, becomes a monk or a sannyasin and seeks immortality. In a similar vein, women in the West desperately search for a new meaningful identity when menopause sets in, depriving them of their identity as a sexually attractive person and a mother. The need to ‘be’ does not automatically disappear with old age, as some religions have us believe, but it often shifts the focus of one’s passion from achievements in this world to achievements in the other ethereal world. When I came across actualism I began to understand that actual freedom is not about replacing one ‘me’ with another ‘higher’ or purer ‘me’ but that it is indeed a method that aims for eliminating any ‘self’ whatsoever.

In order to totally remove ‘the biological/hormonal imperative’ I found it necessary to explore the full extent of my sexual conditioning that I had imbibed from both my Christian upbringing and my Eastern spiritual conditioning. After all, both my conditioning and my instinctual drive stood in the way of a free enjoyment of sex, the most sensual and sensuous interaction two human beings can share. This is what I wrote about my discoveries at the time –

[Vineeto]: When Peter and I started to throw out love it had a great impact on my sexual ‘identity’. It was an intense and scary time because right behind the nice, embellishing veil of love lingered all the monsters and demons of being an animal, a whore, a slut, not human and having sex with a ‘stranger’. Enjoying sex without ‘being in love’ is still considered one of the greatest sins of Christian morality. And Eastern spirituality regards any kind of sex as the biggest obstacle to enlightenment.

Not only had I to face my own personal conditioning about sex but I was also confronted with the fact of stepping out of the collective accepted behaviour and limits that every woman had been taught. Demons of atavistic fears would present me with their ferocious stories, as though I was still living in the Middle Ages, where women were burnt at the stake for leaving the fold or were expelled for not conforming. It took some effort to understand that both fears and beliefs around sex were simply inherited from other people, they don’t have any actual relevance for me. Digging deeper, stepping outside of the realm of sexual conditioning and beliefs I then discovered their underlying force – the sexual instincts.

This inheritance from our animal past is simply installed to blindly ensure the continuity of the species. It has nothing to do with my happiness and inhibits any sensible behaviour. Those blind instincts cause, among other troubles, possessiveness, jealousy, rape, murder and overpopulation. Identified and seen as what they were, these instincts eventually lost their significance and their grip over me. Now I can enjoy the sensibility and pleasure of sex without being driven, free of the need and dependency that used to be the inevitable consequence. I now don’t need to reinforce my female sexual identity or practise my manipulative power over men – hence the need for flirting has disappeared. Relating to men without the restriction of sexual flirtation is indeed a freedom to meet them in a new and fresh way. A Bit of Vineeto

As I see it, nothing ‘evolves’ unless you have the passion to find out why you are not intimate, why you are not happy and harmless 24 hrs a day. The intimacy that I experience in relating to others is not dependant on how intimate they are with me but is solely based on the fact that neither any conditioning nor any feeling interferes with me being intimately present, giving 100% attention to the other. Again, achieving intimacy is a unilateral action – I remove every obstacle that prevents me meeting the other as a fellow flesh-and-blood human being.

The intimacy that has emerged after exploring all the impediments – my female role-play, my sexual repression and conditioning, my dream of love and my spiritual beliefs – is far beyond my wildest dreams. Not only do I enjoy an ongoing peaceful and harmonious living together but also a sensuous sexual play that far exceeds anything I ever experienced when I was still driven by sexual passions.

RESPONDENT: From my own experience with spirituality I know that it needs painful honesty to admit that one has not really managed to become free from their elementary social conditioning (not condition) let alone be free of the much more deeper ingrained conditioning.

VINEETO: The male and female conditioning was the first issue Peter and I investigated when we started living together. To live in peace and harmony was at the top of my laundry list and consequently I was all set to investigate every skerrick of my own conditioning that prevented peace and harmony between us. After years of failed relationships here was a man who offered to investigate with me peace between man and woman and agreed with eager anticipation for the new adventure. The way we conducted our discoveries in each upcoming issue was to weigh what we felt and believed against what we found out to be the facts. It soon became obvious that it was the facts we could both agree on while feelings and beliefs always were prone to discrepancies.

In this way I questioned one bit of my female conditioning after the other and I found more and more that the ‘fundamental difference between the male and female psyche’ was comprised of mere beliefs and my social training. I found that all this female identity I had been so proud of consisted of nothing but hot air – everything that my mother and my peers had taught me as to how I should think, feel and act as a woman and all it entailed – my need to be different, my lust for power, my fear of being controlled, my collection of hopes and disappointments and my social role in the ‘women’s club’. What also complicates the investigation is that men are taught what women are like and women are taught what men are like and these images have nothing to do with the facts. As such, one needs to investigate and understand both side of the gender equation, male and female conditioning. Then and only then one can safely observe and understand the animal instinctual gender programming in oneself.

When you say ‘man tries to catch female and female plays ‘hard’ to get’, you are exactly pointing to the instinctual role between man and woman – the instinctual drive to procreate that underpins all social conditioning and behaviour, which is indeed different for man and woman. Woman as the child-bearer instinctually looks for security and permanence whereas the man is instinctually driven to spread his semen as far and wide as possible. These gender differences are inherent in everybody – this is the default programming of our instinctual animal software implanted to ensure the procreation, propagation and survival of the species.

In order to get to the bottom of this instinctual programming I first needed to observe, then investigate and finally eliminate all of my moral, ethical and spiritual conditioning as to what I had been taught it means to be a woman. When stripped of those attributes of my identity I discovered that I was simply a human being, exactly as Peter was simply a human being, and our only difference is in the plumbing and not the wiring.

One of the earliest and utterly delightful rewards of my diligent in-depth investigation into the gender programming was the enjoyment of free and pure sensuous sexual pleasure – unrestricted of guilt and freed from the instinctual animal drive. For that outcome alone it is be well worth practicing the method of actualism.

RESPONDENT: So... at this point I’d rather acknowledged you and Peter as experts in the field of gender conditioning for starters. As I find this issue all over the place wherever I move my ass so to speak. So with this I give a hint into the direction that I have some understanding of the urge that the so-called social female and male identity become dismantled. Being a man I have taken full responsibility to take the male part as far as it concerns this flesh-blood-body named No 23/ No 23(Sannyas name). Talking about that in previous posts you have explained the reason why you have kept your name Vineeto for practical purpose.

VINEETO: Yes, gender conditioning is indeed one of the outstanding features of everyone’s identity. Broadly speaking, a woman considers herself first as a woman and then as a human being. Similarly, a man considers himself first as a man and then as a human being. So, to see and treat others as one’s fellow human beings, one needs to investigate all the beliefs, feelings and instinctual passions that form one’s gender conditioning.

But what a delight it is to be free from being a woman and to be free from having to play all the silly games of the male-female role-play!

You wrote some more on this topic in your letter to No 38 –

[Respondent]: Most of my life I have put the ‘blame’ on the male part of humanity for making such a mess of this planet, hence my relationship with men always carried subtly traces of either finding them guilty or feeling myself guilty but because of my ‘awareness’ that women were better I always found myself a little better so less guilty.

From this feeling better I never was able to ‘compete’ like so called real man do and found the way they generally treated women repulsive. No 23 to No 38, 22.8.2002

You have described very well the common belief of the post-women’s-lib-era – the belief that women are the ‘better’ gender and that ‘sensitive’ men should accommodate women by becoming SNAGs (sensitive new-age guys) in order to fit into this new world order. Quite a few men have adopted the female-generated belief that women are naturally more caring whilst men are instinctually more aggressive and that if women ran the world everything would be hunky-dory.

I am presently revisiting the early writings on the Actual Freedom mailing list and in several correspondences Richard and Peter have discussed these issues with Irene. I could recognize many of my own former gender beliefs in her points of view. Archives 10-1998

RESPONDENT: I enjoy the conversations that I have read on this list. I’ve especially enjoyed your writings on gender issues on the website. One of my big gripes with spiritualities is the prevailing belief that existence is divided into masculine and feminine, or any other duality for that matter – and then there is all the ensuing gobbledygook, which I was taken in by as much as anyone, I suppose.

VINEETO: I am curious as to what you have found out so far concerning gender issues. For me, actualism started with the investigations into the supposed differences of gender because they were the most obvious issues that prevented our living together in peace and harmony. At the start of our relationship, Peter and I had plenty of vigorous discussions about the subject of male and female and we wouldn’t rest until we were both satisfied with the facts that we discovered underneath our beliefs, conditionings and ensuing feelings. Soon I was to find out that ‘gender’ was only the prelude to my questioning all that I had held true and right and good – love, intuition, beauty, music, sexual taboos and conditioning, compassion, gratitude, faith, trust, honesty, loyalty, authority, spiritual beliefs, etc. It’s good that I have written about most of this adventure in the last chapter of Peter’s Journal because by now almost everything is wiped from my memory. This enterprise leaves no emotional scars whatsoever.

It’s a marvellous journey and it delivers instant incremental success. My relationship with Peter is based on parity, equity, harmony and actual intimacy and there is no bickering or resentment, complaint or withdrawal, compromise or manipulation. In short, the power battles, so obvious and prevalent in all human interactions, has disappeared without a trace.

Of course, I am a female and Peter is a male body, and what a delicious difference that is! But I know exactly what he means when we talk, and so does he, because we both have the same human sense organs and the same human intelligence. After we removed the programming of the male and female social identity and the instinctual conflicts of the male and female reproductive program, we are simply two human beings, immensely enjoying each other’s company.

*

RESPONDENT: Re: gender issues. I am a human first, secondarily a woman. I enjoy being female and have no problem with the idea that there are some real bio/chemical distinctions between males and females, but I differ strongly with the idea that there is a masculine and feminine side to existence, a cosmic tantric dance of masculine & feminine forces that is the key to the meaning of existence. From a scientific point of view, sexual reproduction of any type is a pretty recent development in the history of the cosmos as we know it, and the presence of humans in the sexual scheme of things is the briefest of all. So, to think that the universe is founded on a masculine/feminine principle is, well, very primitive, to say the least.

VINEETO: A good point, I never looked at it that way. In my investigation into my social identity I was not so much concerned about the alleged masculine/ feminine principle of the universe but I was much more interested in the differences of conditioning, beliefs, behavioural and emotional patterns and the continuous power battle between man and women, no matter how subtle or covert. New age therapy blurred the distinctions of the roles a bit on the surface but underneath one’s ‘flirtation’ with the so-called inner male or female is hidden an instinctual desperate battle for power which has up to now prevented couples from peacefully living together in equity, parity and intimacy. I had to dig into my identity of what I felt and instinctually knew I was as a woman, and investigate and eradicate each single idea, notion, belief and feeling of ‘woman-ness’ in order to experience the actual intimacy with a member from ‘the other camp’ that we now enjoy. After an initial rocky time, Peter and I were able to put a permanent halt to the battle of the sexes and had immense fun in comparing notes, having ‘a spy in the other camp’, so to speak, and digging deeper and deeper into the so-called mystery of gender and the supposed mystique of sex.

RESPONDENT: Last night I was out with the visiting relatives in a country setting. The sky was brilliant with stars, much clearer than what I can see at home with city lights, etc. I wondered what I would make of the stars if I hadn’t learned that they were similar to our sun, burning masses of unbelievably hot gases, that warmed the solar systems around them, etc. What if I had no knowledge about those heavenly bodies, what would I make of them? Probably something akin to what ‘ancient wisdom’ came up with.

VINEETO: As a second stage, underneath the obvious socially and religiously / spiritually learnt differences between the sexes, I discovered the workings of male and female instincts. It was utterly fascinating to observe the sexual instincts in me in action, after the sexual taboos, the moral limitations and feelings of love and authority had been stripped away. It was daunting and bewildering at first, perceiving myself as nothing but a female animal wanting to become pregnant, to be filled with the male’s sperm to fulfill my instinctual destiny – the fact that I had been sterilized fifteen years earlier did not change that urge at all. Exploring these instinctual passions to their full extent, and comparing notes with Peter, I finally understood the dilemma of male-female instinctual behaviour that spoils every relationship. While males, besides fatherly care, are instinctually driven to spread their semen as far and prolific as possible for the benefit of the species, females are programmed to search for and then hold on to one reliable protector to care for them and their offspring. It is one thing to have read about those instinctual differences, amongst other theoretical, psychological and spiritual deliberations, it is quite something else to experientially explore one’s instinctual sexual core – there is nothing refined or intelligent about our core passions. Blind nature does not care a bit about anybody’s well-being, natural forces are merely concerned about the survival of the species, and this happens by the traditional recipe which has worked for other mammals for millions of years. Possessiveness, jealousy and rape are all part and parcel of this instinctual animal drive for reproduction.

Love is merely a human invention to cover the embarrassment of being animal at one’s very core.

RESPONDENT: Now, to move from the broader picture to the more personal picture: I was about 40 years old before it ever occurred to me that sex could simply be for sex. I don’t want to give the impression that I was dysfunctional, everything worked fine, but there was always a more primary purpose for sex than just enjoyment. As a young Catholic girl, you were told to hold out on sex for marriage. As a member of the 60’s generation, there was lots of sex, but the payoff was love, sex for love. As a married person, sex was to improve the relationship. As a person involved in spiritual discovery, sex was a tool towards enlightenment. Every cultural/spiritual influence of my life has said sex is for something else, besides yummy, delicious enjoyment. Just like life itself is the journey to heaven, or bliss, or freedom from the wheel of birth and death, etc.

VINEETO: I was raised a Catholic and I know the implications. Sex was always dimmed by the dark shadow of guilt, sometimes enhancing the thrill but always keeping me within the boundaries of society’s values. In my twenties I explored emotions via primal therapy but sex was strictly excluded from the explorations. The early years in Poona in Rajneesh’s ashram were a wide field of sexual experiments for me, but as you say, I always wanted more than sexual pleasure – attention, affection, love, recognition, being part of a group, etc., etc. Only when I came across Actual Freedom, I came to understand that one has to remove one’s identity completely in order to enjoy sex for the pure sensuousness of it – ‘I’ will always feel abused and neglected when ‘I’ am not recognized with affection, love and gratitude.

Sex as a ‘tool towards enlightenment’ was a theory and/or practice so full of contradictions, hypocrisy and loopholes that in the end I could not make any sense of it anymore. As I said to No 8, investigating and enjoying sex as integral part of a journey towards purity and perfection was for me one of the first attractions of Actual Freedom.

*

RESPONDENT: However, into my 40’s I started looking at this ‘gift’ and realized that my feeling into a person was a way to protect myself, to know ahead of time how a person would most likely act and react, so that there would be no unpleasant surprises. I found I had a strong need to ‘know ahead of time’ so that I wouldn’t find myself in situations where I would feel vulnerable and not know what to do to keep the situation under control, to keep myself intact, unharmed, safe. I pretty much stopped my deliberate reading of people when I began to see it not as a gift, or power, but as a strategy for protecting a very demanding and voracious self.

VINEETO: The most I learnt about using and misusing power was in my longstanding relationship with my former boyfriend, as in a man-woman relationship there are usually no holds barred and our extensive power battles were rather overt than covert. By using every psychic weapon to win a battle I came to know about my female psychic weaponry, consisting of my instinctive intuition to create emotional confusion, to blackmail with guilt, to make unsubstantiated accusations and to use my seduction. Needless to say moments of intimacy were very rare.

It was painful to see myself over and over again trapped in the same instinctual reactions of jealousy, fear, hate, comparison, resentment, etc. and, despite years of spiritual group-therapy and meditation, there was no sign of resolving my re-occurring instinctual reactions. When we finally, after 11 years, we both gave up trying and separated, I vowed to never ever have this kind of power battle again with a man. This determination to find a peaceful way of living with a man gave me the necessary backpressure to question love itself and to leave the old familiar spiritual environment. (...)

RESPONDENT: I’m finding that so much of my interactions with people is based on maintaining a comfortable feeling state for myself. For instance, I can readily sense when my husband is upset with me, even if it is out of the blue, with no obvious situation to explain it. I feel very comfortable when he is angry or upset with me, and I immediately begin to manipulate the situation to make him feel better, so that I feel better. Does this me that is upset really care how he is feeling? I think what I primarily care about is how I feel, and what I really care about is how he feels makes me feel. In fact, that exact situation came up just yesterday, and I told him exactly what I was doing and why. It was almost like giving up a secret weapon. But, maybe I’m getting to where I’d rather deal with my discomfort straight on, than to keep playing games.

VINEETO: Did you mean to say you ‘feel very comfortable when he is angry’ or ‘very uncomfortable’?

I found giving up my secret weapons was the first step and good fun, too. Once I became aware what I was doing, each of my secret weapons became useless, because I couldn’t use it anymore without blushing for being so silly.

Consequently I had to find an alternative to be comfortable with people as they are – and the challenge became to find out what is needed to not feel uncomfortable when someone is angry or sad. I eventually wanted to become emotionally un-affected by others, not just trying to ‘accept’ them, which is only putting a feeling of acceptance on top of the feeling of aversion. Well, I found that it was always my own anger, my own sorrow and my own fear that others stirred up in me. The good news is that as I dealt with my own anger, sorrow and fear I ended up not needing any psychic power over others or psychic defences – which makes life a great lot easier and enables me to have peace and harmony with the other person.

VINEETO to Alan: Today is Monday and I am finishing one of the delightful 3-day weekends, where I can devote every hour of the day to delight and to finding out more about freedom and the human or typical female obstacles to it. This weekend, for instance, I discovered that I was safely hiding behind Peter, him having written the journal and being more of an authority about freedom, because he met Richard first. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had decided to wait for Peter to be completely free first before I would dare to consider it for myself – not the virtual freedom that I am enjoying most of the time, but the actual irreversible freedom that Richard is experiencing 24 hours a day. So armed with this understanding about the typical female role of staying in the shadow of the man – like I have seen most women do with Rajneesh and others, I went to Peter and told him, ‘we are on a race now, watch out, I might be first!’ Funny, hey. Of course it is not a race in the usual sense, but I have come out behind the oven, so to speak!

This understanding changed gear in my life in terms of intensity, it put me more into this moment than before, it broke a restricting veil and gave me the courage to write something in Peter’s journal. I’ll put it on the website, as soon as it is finished, if you are interested. So the printing press is been put on hold until I finished my chapter. Will be a bummer for all the former friends of the sannyas ‘club med’ who are still hanging out with the Rajneesh religion, but what can I do, I have moved away from them already.

*

VINEETO to Alan: Last night I watched another movie, 1960’s, a red-neck American Western. A woman trying to survive with her son after her husband had died, without becoming a prostitute or just marrying for protection’s sake. She wanted to have a cattle-farm, an unheard-of outrage in those days for a woman to do. Every single man in town tried to put her off, some were quite fiercely threatening her. The pain of having been born as a woman hit me with full force. The obstructions, the arrogance, the insults, the suffering, but also the violence, the fights, the fears, seeking protection and emotional support, dependency and resentment – the whole drama of female identity.

It is so damn good to leave all that behind, to dare and stop being a woman, to peel off that skin of conditioning, both personal and collective, and to be free just to be a human being, enjoying other human beings, be they male or female. Life is definitely delightful beyond my wildest dreams, and the remains of the ‘self’ are wilting like a plucked flower. Absolutely perfect!

*

ALAN: The emotion I had most difficulty with was guilt. Guilt at ‘leaving’ my wife behind, guilt at being happy and guilt for making her unhappy.

VINEETO: Yes, guilt is a bummer! Not only did I find it rooted in my social or cultural conditioning, but also in the religious upbringing (catholic and even deeper, Jewish as the basis belief of Christianity). And underneath I found the instinct: Peter and I talked a lot about the male and female versions of the instinct of nurture and how they express. The man instinctually has to take care of his woman and child, secure their survival and work his whole life for it. Further he has to be strong and go out and fight should the family – or country – be in real or assumed danger. So guilt could also be rooted in not acting according to that instinct. We wrote a good definition on male and female instincts in Peter’s glossary.