RESPONDENT: I have been spiritual in my life but I am not spiritual now. Truth to me is what I am actually doing, thinking and feeling from moment to moment. I’m sorry if I have wasted your time. I will continue to look and see if I have any spirituality.

VINEETO: Personally, I was never attracted to J. Krishnamurti or his teachings as I considered them too dry and theoretical at the time of my spiritual involvement. Instead, I got sucked into the emotional indulgence and the escalating esoteric extravagance of Mr. Mohan Rajneesh. Yet the relationship that I had to him as my master differs not from the relationship that other followers have to their particular master – is it invariably epitomized by unquestioning adoration, deep felt loyalty, a love that excuses and defends the master’s every word or deed and the pride of being a disciple of such rare outstanding and powerful personality. Krishnamurti’s claim that he did not want to be a master nor want his followers to be devotees only created an apparent intellectual coolness but it never altered the fervent emotional ties that each of his followers had, and still has, with him. If you take the time and read through some of Richard’s correspondence with mailing list B you will quickly understand what I mean.

Before I could learn, explore or even consider that there was any new approach to life I had to question this highly emotional relationship to the one teacher that I had considered to be the only authority and fountain of wisdom. My worldview was coloured and measured against the authority of his words and teachings. If others stated similar views and ‘wisdoms’, I considered them right, if not, they were wrong. My judgements had nothing to do with my personal investigation of facts at all; it was solely a ‘feeling right’ decision according to my preconceived convictions solely derived from the master’s viewpoint – and the fact that he had been dead for 10 years did not change my emotional dependency on his authority at all.

An honest and in-depth investigation of the facts of the situation was only possible after I ‘tore Rajneesh out of my heart’, became a traitor to his message and his ‘sangha’ and thus became independent of his imagined approval or condemnation. Only then was I able to listen to his discourses and judge with my newly freed intelligence instead of ‘my heart’ and to discover his mindless twaddle and ‘compassionate lies’, his manipulation and deceit, his outright distortions and underlying ancient rotten Indian belief-system. Now I could start the long and fascinating journey of unravelling the intricate web of the psychic world – the Eastern spiritual fears of endless karma, the hope for transcendence, the reverence for intuition, love, compassion, bliss and enlightenment. Once one starts to see the psychic world and how it functions, the word ‘spiritual’ is revealed in its fuller and more comprehensive meaning.

You felt moved to defend your teacher the moment I quoted him in order to prove that he is concerned only with the spiritual and the divine and not with the actual. This reaction indicates where to look when you want to ‘see if [you] have any spirituality’. So in order to ‘continue to look and see if [you] have any spirituality’, you will first and foremost have to consider and investigate your affective relationship to your ‘previous’ teacher and teachings. Otherwise any factual discussion about what Krishnamurti said or meant will be distorted by the emotions that are instigating automatic instinctual (or, as LeDoux calls them, ‘quick and dirty’) reactions rather than considered intelligent responses.

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

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

*

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

RESPONDENT: So what? Many people are disenchanted and discontented with themselves. That is why religion-new aged or otherwise – philosophy, politics and all other forms of self-escape are so universal. Drugs are also mind-blowing. I am just asking why you feel that you, who are presently learning about yourself, can presume, within the imperfections of a learning mind, to be so haughty and ‘verbally absolutist’ – as if you are already ‘there’ or wherever you think you are going? The practical energy of a clear mind is humility, not assertion and dominance.

VINEETO: Ah, I am beginning to understand what your ethics are – humility, is that the problem? I am not demonstratively humble as one should be according to the commonly held religious/ spiritual ethics. ‘Be the last and you will be the first’ was one of my first social conditionings that I learnt from parents, priests and teachers. Now this religious and ethical rule is being reintroduced as the height of Eastern wisdom. Now I am told that ‘don’t dare report your successes to others’, ‘stay a humble learning mind’, your silence is ‘long overdue’, ‘you are too haughty’, ‘you are arrogant’, etc. etc. The humility you preach is nothing but pride standing on its head; it is as much an affective feeling as pride.

In the beginning on this new path to freedom, pride was one of my major stumbling blocks as an actual freedom lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to the tried and failed concepts. Actualism involved the demolition of my feeling of pride – and most particularly my spiritual pride – as I recognized that everything that I had believed and held dear was nothing but an elaborate fairy-story taught from birth and given false credence by Ancient spiritual teachings. To admit that I had been hoodwinked – and willingly at that – was such a blow to my pride that I now understand why people who get a whiff of the consequences of actualism usually turn away to re-run the ‘tried and failed’ yet again. (...)

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RESPONDENT: First of all, I regard Krishnamurti’s words as art, as literature: nothing more. As I said above someplace, I wanted to challenge your cock-sureness that your actualistic ideas are some kind of Truth, which all other poor, unfortunate human beings have missed out on. You see, all philosophy is the ‘tried and failed’.

VINEETO: Ah, now you finally reveal your motivation for this conversation. You are not writing to another human being in order to compare notes and convey experiences, you merely want to ‘challenge [my] cock-sureness’ in order to cut me down to size, to subdue me into ‘long overdue silence’, to put me in my place and teach me the ethics of spiritual humbleness. I must acknowledge that you are putting a good deal of effort into cutting me down to size.

This attitude against anything new that is not ‘corroborated by others’, as you said before, reminds me of Galileo Galilei who stood trial for his empirical confirmation that the earth, in fact, moves around the sun and not, as was generally believed in those days, the sun around the earth.

[quote]: ‘His position represented such a radical departure from accepted thought that he was tried by the Inquisition in Rome, ordered to recant, and forced to spend the last eight years of his life under house arrest.’ Encyclopaedia Britannica

VINEETO: Galileo was ‘cock-sure’ because he had factual evidence of Copernicus’ mathematical calculations, but it took another 350 years before the leader of the Catholic Church would acknowledge these findings as factual.

*

RESPONDENT: Something that is actual cannot ever be put into words. Words can only describe it. Words can also deceive you when you use them to tell yourself that you are living in actuality, when, in fact, you are living through a philosophy of actualism. Ah! But of course, actualism is REAL, whereas, universal consciousness is only a troubled theory, right? What I am describing is what cannot be known because it is not of thought. The eyes never know what they are and what they see. The hands never know what they are and what they feel. The whole body doesn’t know what it, itself IS. Nor does it actually know what anything is. And when you so live in the body, that is, when the body is YOU and not the you of thought, what is operating that body is the intelligence that operates all other bodies. It is not your intelligence. Now if you can see that much, it will become clear to you that such presence of living is living ACTUALLY, not living through actualism. That means that your actualism is a synonym for the god you so heartily reject. If the body is living itself without your interference, why would it need actualism, or any other beliefs and methods to ‘become alive’? So you are ‘actualism intoxicated’. Ring a bell? Now if I call ‘the body living itself without interference from you’, transformed or universal consciousness, then I am not using the word consciousness meta-physically. It is another term for ‘body in harmony with all other life’.

Or it may be referred to as ‘being totally down to earth’.

VINEETO: As you insist on having your own meta-physical interpretation of the word actual and therefore of what the term actualism means to you, I again see, as a fact and not a feeling, the futility of any further communication. To try to talk sense to someone who is proud of being ignorant – as in not knowing and most definitely not wanting to know, let alone listen – is nonsense.

As you said to No 1 –

[Respondent]: Not knowing it is the only sane and truthful way to talk. It’s futile only to the one who wants to ‘know’ what you’re talking about. If somebody says ‘it’s impossible to know’, and you’re really listening to that and SEE the impossibility, how can the search to ‘know’ continue? It would be instantly clear – but not to ‘you’. [endquote].

Ah, No 8, we do indeed live in two completely different worlds.

I, for one, wanted to know, I wasn’t content with the kafuffle that the spiritual teaching presented – ‘Thou Art That’ in many colourful variations, invented by ancient soma-drinking Vedic ‘seers’, regurgitated by hundreds of sages, and presented in yet another ‘new and originally’ phrased language, shrouded in mystery to hide its fallacy. No. After seventeen years I started to doubt, things did not add up, meditators couldn’t live happily in the marketplace, wars did not stop, petty fights between followers did not stop, religious rites and fights sprung up the moment the master died – all of this did not make sense.

Strangely enough, the simple, actual, sensible approach of Actual Freedom can only appeal to those who have tried all the other nonsensical but highly ‘self’-gratifying approaches to finding freedom, peace and happiness and found them badly wanting. Unless one has an utter discontent with both the real world and the spiritual world, proud and self-respecting seekers are not ready and willing to give up faith, trust and the hope of attaining ‘supreme intelligence’.

So, even if you clearly understood what Actual Freedom is about, it would not be for you, as you seem proud and happy with what you have found and experienced so far.

*

VINEETO: So, even if you clearly understood what Actual Freedom is about, it would not be for you, as you seem proud and happy with what you have found and experienced so far.

RESPONDENT: You are correct. Actual Freedom – the belief – is not for me.

VINEETO: Wrong premise – Actual Freedom is only a belief for you but not for me. I have tasted it, lived it in PCEs and aim to live it 24 hrs. a day, every day. It is everyone’s birthright. Maybe you care to reinvestigate.

RESPONDENT: And for me, there is nothing to be proud about.

VINEETO: Are you saying you are being humble, as you have suggested that I should become humble as in ‘the practical energy of a clear mind is humility’. I read a very good description of humility from a self-realized being the other day –

[quote]: Humility is when you look out of your eyes and recognize that everything you behold, is you... [endquote].

Does it ring a bell?