GARY: (...) I’ve been doing one heck of a lot of ‘pulling’ lately, because just in the past day or two I’ve had an acute onset of sorrow, or rather I could say an eruption of those bitter-sweet feelings of grief, angst, sorrow, and disappointment, quite unbidden, and yet so, so familiar. Yesterday I felt almost paralysed by these feelings, they were so intense. Again, I am reminded that actualism is about examining and experiencing one’s feelings in the light of a sensuous awareness, not about suppressing or repressing one’s emotions.

I don’t want to ‘get over’ sorrow just to have it come back again. Is one in a sense subjecting oneself to these bouts of emotion? Am I on the wrong track? Are these ‘pity parties’ totally unnecessary or is there some intrinsic value to going through these experiences? What does one need to do to finally and irrevocably break free from these ‘automatic/instinctual predispositions’? I have a sense that your answer is going to be to get back to being happy and harmless just as soon as one can ... which would be a splendid answer ... but I’ll let you answer this yourself.

VINEETO: Recently I was watching a re-run of the Hollywood Cinderella fairy-tale called ‘Pretty Woman’. Once in a while I like to watch some kind of emotive movie just to check if they might trigger an emotional reaction in me. And indeed, almost at the end of the film a small scene between the heroine and the concierge of the hotel she had stayed in caught my attention. For a short moment these two were exchanging what one could call a common bond of sorrow, the mutual acknowledgement that life is not a fairy tale existence, that one should always have dreams but realize that they never come true, that it is pretty tough out there to survive. Their short interchange would be usually considered as friendship, even intimacy, mateship, love or shared compassion but, at a closer look, this ‘precious’ sentimental connection is nothing other than a shared agreement in sorrow, a bond that unites all those who suffer similar hardships like poverty, abuse, disillusionment or disappointment.

This bond of common sorrow is what connects me to humanity at large because everyone is suffering from more or less the same sorrow. Going to bed that night, I was still probing what exactly it is that makes me prone to tapping into the sorrow of other people, for instance while following the news reports or a even watching the occasional soap opera on TV. The next morning I dreamt about being deeply upset that I never had had any children. I was quite surprised about the dream, because I hardly ever have any emotional dreams any more and also never had any regrets at all about my choice of not having children, so I decided to investigate the topic a bit further.

I understood the dream to be closely connected to my bittersweet bond with people suffering the night before in the film. Both, the desire to raise children and feeling sad for a suffering humanity at large stem from the same instinctual passion of nurture, the instinctual drive to perpetuate the species. I could see that nurture and sorrow go hand in glove, so to speak, and that nurture is an integral part of the sticky feeling of belonging to a suffering – and malicious – humanity. I saw that it was the ‘good’ feeling of nurture lurking underneath the bitter-sweetness of sorrow that I had to identify and recognize in order to further loosen the grip that sorrow used to have on me.

The only way I know to get out of sorrow is to completely and utterly understand its ingredients. Once seen and understood the automatic-instinctual program stops being automatic and eventually must fall to pieces.

RESPONDENT: Looking further into my thoughts and feelings about the ‘human condition’ – I realize that what is at the core of my concerns first – ‘my’ children and ‘my’ role in raising them. It would be nice if ‘my’ kids had the ability to grow up without most of the baggage within the ‘human condition’. I notice that I am desperate to believe either that the characterization common on this website of the ‘human condition’ is either wrong or overstated – in order to give room for not only my children, but for all human beings to have a happy life.

VINEETO: The first, and automatic, reaction to an undesirable fact is to deny the fact, attempt to change this fact or to shoot the messenger. However, once you begin to recognize that your reaction to a particular fact is ‘your’ reaction, based on ‘your’ fears and ‘your’ desires, ‘your’ role as a parent or ‘your’ instinct of nurture, then you are beginning to discover your ‘self’ in action. During the process of actualism, whenever I found myself objecting to a fact, I began to question ‘me’, the identity, who was doing the objecting. After all, it is ‘me’ who I aim to uncover and change.

As for ‘give room for not only my children, but for all human beings to have a happy life’ – I don’t see how it makes people happy to describe life within the human condition as happy while wars and murders and rapes and suicides and domestic violence and corruption are going on every day all over the planet. After a life-long search for happiness, I have come to the conclusion that the best I can do for the happiness of others is to stop being a contributor to malice and sorrow – because a PCE made it obvious that the only person ‘I’ can change, and need to change, is ‘me’.

RESPONDENT: This desire leads ‘me’ to constantly look for the silver lining ... the Good ... etc. but ‘I’ am shot down time and time again when I discover that the ‘Good’ in almost every case includes the ‘Bad’ right along with it.

VINEETO: Yes, the ‘silver lining’ is just that, an antidote to the dark cloud that always hangs over humanity – the imagination of hope glossed over despair. The ‘Good’ only exists to compensate for the ‘Bad’ – take away malice and sorrow and there is no need for love and compassion. Without malice and sorrow I am spontaneously benign and benevolent, gay and carefree.

RESPONDENT: Conscious of the fact that most people spend their entire lives firmly embedded in the ‘human condition’ – ‘I’ wonder if it’s worth it. Why would I want to contribute to the human condition by raising children within it? Of course I know there are things one can do to weaken the claim of the human condition, but it is useless to think that I have complete control over another’s development and the choices they make.

VINEETO: As I see it, the best you can do for your son is to give him a father who is free from malice and sorrow, unburdened by his social identity as a father, a husband, an American, a believer in the ‘Good’ and the ‘Bad’, etc. and free from the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. This unilateral action has two benefits. Not only do you free your son from the burden of ‘you’ and your demands – expectations, confusions, beliefs and passions – but you show your son by living example what is now humanly possible within the human condition – being virtually free of malice and sorrow.

VINEETO: For me, a vital drive has been the – instinctually driven – searching for the ultimate achievement...

ALAN: Can you expand on ‘instinctually driven’. Do you mean that having experienced what is possible, there ain’t no other high – where do the ‘instincts’ come in?

VINEETO: With pleasure. I have spent wonderful hours on the balcony the other night, watching the sky and listening to the different sounds of the night while contemplating about all the different instincts that I have encountered and learnt to understand on the path to freedom. So this is what I have come up with:

Fear – We all know it at nauseam; it includes trickery, cunningness, numbness, confusion, escape, denial, excuses, guilt and beliefs in all kinds of good (helpful) and bad (harming) spirits. And, of course, there are panic, terror and good old dread and the escape into enlightenment. But fear is also the doorway to courage, thrill and excitement to reach closer and closer to one’s destiny.

Aggression – Besides physical attack, aggression has many more subtle nuances: blaming, resentment, verbal abuse, nagging, boredom, being the victim, arrogance, clever-clever, competition, self-destruction and depression. I made use of this instinct for becoming free as a bloody-mindedness, persistence, not to ‘let the buggers get me down’, smugness and refusal to run with the crowd.

Nurture – It took me a while to wade through the ‘good’ feelings and emotions down to the basic instinct of nurture instilled to preserve the species. All the romantic movies thrive on nurture to tug at one’s heart strings, both with the heroic man and the loving but helpless woman. The willingness to kill and die for love for country, justice and religion is continuously adding to the 160,000,000 killed in wars this century alone. Further you find this instincts thriving on all kinds of NDA beliefs and action by attempting to ‘save endangered species’, ‘care for Mother Nature’. When leaving the fold of humanity, I found that I am moving away from this instinct of nurture – the collective belief in the ‘good’.

It is useful for freedom as the sincere intent to have peace-on-earth not only for me but for humanity as well and to sacrifice my ‘self’ for that goal.

Desire – With desire we collect things and strive for power and improvement for ‘survival’ – ceaselessly and endlessly on the go. In the spiritual world this desire is turned into the search for enlightenment, the ticket to immortality and power in the ‘other-world’.

Now I come to the point that I was making: ‘For me, a vital drive has been the – instinctually driven – searching for the ultimate achievement...’ I experienced it as the instinct of desire that has driven me to search for freedom, to clean myself up, to be the best ‘I’ can be.

ALAN: You have both touched on the ‘good’ emotions and instincts in your last postings. A subject well worthy of further exploration and something which has been much occupying me, recently. Over the last few weeks I have been experiencing an emotion which can most closely be described as compassion or empathy. Every time there has been an ‘emotional’ scene on the TV, I have started ‘filling up’ (as Billy Connelly puts it) and the tears have run freely. Attempting to discover the cause of this reaction, I have been unable to trace little or no emotion present, while this was happening. There was no ‘tugging on the heart strings’, no feeling of love – just the tears running down the cheeks and a sniffly nose.

VINEETO: The last weeks or months I could describe as a time for me where almost nothing of significance seemed to happen and therefore there was nothing worth reporting. Yet the process of investigating ‘good’ and ‘right’ and ‘nurture’ that went on very quietly and almost unnoticed is as significant as investigating the more obvious emotions. I found, like you, that the grip of being part of Humanity is far more sticky through the good feelings than the bad ones.

ALAN: My investigations, so far, lead me to ‘guess’ that I am touching on the basic instinct of nurture (though I am only seeing it as compassion or empathy, at the moment) and I am finding it very difficult to ‘get the bugger by the throat’ – hence my writing of this mail, to further my deliberations. I also have a sense that it is very much tied up with ‘belonging to humanity’ – and the mere act of writing these words has produced the ‘slight tug on the heartstring’ Vineeto mentioned, above. So, I guess I am on the right track. Yep, what I have been experiencing is a ‘pathos’ for humanity, a desire to see the ‘good’ and ‘loving’ in the actions of others – a desperate attempt to cling to the belief that humanity is not all bad and is worth holding on to. ‘I’ believe that there is something worth saving, that there is something ‘noble’ in sacrifice for others, that humanity is ultimately ‘good’.

VINEETO: Sometimes I was looking for indications that I could share others’ ideas of ‘good’, of ethical values, and of similar goals so as to stay part of the great family of Humanity. I noticed tucks on my heartstrings when watching ‘good’ events experienced by a large group of people like the ending of WW II or the fall of the Berlin Wall, times of immense relief after long periods of suffering. Also I noticed sometimes an emotional reverence for outstanding human achievements like a breakthrough in medical science or engineering triumphs such as the building of the London Underground in the 19^th century. Human beings are indeed capable of amazing achievements despite the lead-weights of the Human Condition but beneath my honest respect for such accomplishments there lurked a desire to belong – just for a few seconds, but long enough to be noticed.

What I have discovered is that if ‘I’ can find any reason to feel that Humanity is ‘good’, then there is no reason for me to leave it behind. The more I meticulously questioned those ‘good’ feelings whenever they get triggered and I investigated the facts of the so-called ‘good’ intentions, ‘good’ deeds and ‘good’ morals, the more I noticed that I cannot hold on to the feeling of belonging. This stepping out of humanity sometimes makes me feel estranged – as if I belong to a different species altogether.

Films, particularly the American goody-goody type are a great source of investigation. The other day I had an opportunity to look into the feeling of love in a movie depicting the tumultuous friendship between a pregnant young woman and her gay ‘best friend’ who is living with her. ‘The Object of My Affection’ describes the romantic disaster of mixed up relationships with possessiveness and jealousy, loneliness and insecurity, social mores and old hurts, both from the heterosexual and gay point of view – very transparent. One can easily see that love is nothing other than a combination of loneliness, insecurity, sexual attraction and nurture instincts – the woman was looking for a man to protect her baby, the man was doing his moral duty. Recognizing yet again what love consists of is a good anchor point when bitter-sweet feelings of ‘caring’ responsibility, love for all, compassion or empathy are triggered. These feelings ain’t nothing but a failed remedy for loneliness.

ALAN: I think I have also been examining the (for me) final unexplored instinct of nurture. I think I previously wrote that I had been having emotional reactions to certain scenes on television – tears running freely, without there being any obvious feeling extant. It seemed to occur when people were doing things which ‘brought out the best’ in humanity. At one stage, I even considered whether it could be some manifestation of Divine Love trying to sneak in by the back door, so to speak. But, I could detect little in common with my previous experiences of Divine Love – other perhaps than pathos and the fact that I would also then have wept at the same scenes.

VINEETO: I found that the instinct of nurture shows up in many, slightly varying, expressions once one gets past the more obvious feelings of love, friendship, relationship, compassion and Divine Love. Watching human beings in all sorts of enterprises and mischief on the planet via television is and has been a great source of exploring my subtle and not so subtle ‘good’ instinctual feelings that all serve only one purpose – to keep me tied and connected to humanity as a suffering and malicious species. Having an opinion and affective response about what is supposedly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ gets me going round in circles, while looking for the facts of a situation makes it obvious what is silly and what is sensible. And then, in most cases, my opinion and assessment is not required at all and taking sides only serves that ‘I’ stay in existence – emotionally engaged and connected to Humanity.

Whenever I was moved by watching heroic acts of compassion or sentimental stories of hope and love for all, I made it a point to investigate the facts of the situation that are so rosily presented. I always found the loopholes, the unmentioned malice, the hidden selfishness, the suffering necessary for good deeds to happen and the inherent sickness of the genetically encoded program we call the Human Condition. There is no good without evil – or, as No 22 likes to call evil ‘the tortured good’. If one digs really deep one finds that both doing good and doing evil are nothing other than malice and sorrow in action.

The instinct of nurture has the sole function of keeping the species thoughtlessly producing yet more of the same, just as aggression, fear and desire have the function to keep the human species fighting against extinction. There is neither intelligence nor any other inherent value in our blind instinctual drive to nurture, it is the same drive that makes us attack others, defend our territory, fear the stronger ones and grab all one can grab in blind desire. I found Accidental Hero, the movie you mentioned, an excellent example of what can develop out of a sensible response to an emergency situation when the hero’s instincts and ‘self’-preservation catch up with him and everyone else’s ‘self’-centred passions make a confusing emotional drama out of a simple humane response. Lately we had here on the news 3 small children declared as national heroes for dragging their drowning grandfather out of the family swimming pool, whereas they just did the obvious thing in that particular moment.

RESPONDENT: I have a new situation to deal with since talking with you last. My Mom is in the hospital and I am spending most of my time taking care of her. This subject of fear is still appropriate in relation to how I am dealing with this situation. The second I start thinking about it I am overwhelmed with fear, worry, etc.

However, I find that running the question ‘how am I’ is helping me to deal with the situation. Asking the question has helped me to stay in the moment and what I find is everything is ok in this moment right now. All my fears are in regard to how am I going to manage taking care of her at a future time. Right now at this moment in time she is taken care of.

VINEETO: Life seems to have given you a serendipitous opportunity to have a closer look at the instinctual passion of nurture, its correlating feelings of love and belonging and the implications of being a social identity as a family member. Quite an exciting range of possible discoveries that could help answer your earlier question of ‘How do I become intimate with the instincts?’

Love and compassion, sympathy and empathy are our usual ways of relating to family and friends and through the same emotional ‘channel’ we also invite their fears and worries, sorrow and resentment, anger and hatred. There is only one way when one relates to people affectively and that is within the rules and ways of the Human Condition. The moment I feel sympathy for someone I am also swamped by their fears, the moment I am empathic for someone’s suffering I plug into the collective misery of mankind. The need to belong makes one susceptible to everybody’s feelings, be it anger or fear, greed or suffering.

This is not just a poetic expression, it is my very experience. In order to become happy and harmless I had to examine my every relationship – to Peter, to my peers, to my work-mates, to my parents and relatives. Whenever I ‘reached out’ emotionally, understanding someone’s sorrow, fear or anger, I could not help being affected – that’s the very idea of ‘sharing’ and the common remedy against feeling lonely in the first place. But there is no choice of feeling just the nice, good feelings with or for someone and disregarding their negative feelings – by the very nature of emotions I am being hooked into the emotional web the moment I choose to go along with affective feelings.

The alternative was to consciously and deliberately decide to leave the cozy nest of bitter-sweet feelings, to abandon the ‘squabbling and miserable humanity’ and examine and then eliminate feelings and emotions in myself. I have found that the ‘good’ emotions were even more insidious than the ‘bad’ ones. Many people would like to get rid of anger, sadness and fear, but who would want to abandon love, compassion, beauty and bliss? But once I understood the intrinsic connection between love and fear, compassion and sorrow, empathy and suffering, I decided to get free of the lot.

When I love someone I am afraid to lose him or her. In order to have compassion for someone the other needs to be ‘in the pits’ emotionally – otherwise there is no use for my compassion. Empathy is even more insidious – the suffering creeps under the skin and one never quite knows what is happening. And all this sorry-go-round for the sake of not feeling lonely, bored and fearful? I discovered that by examining and eliminating my very identity as an appreciated and valued member of society I eliminated loneliness and boredom at the same time. And not even the closest friendship can ever take away one’s fear of death – for fear to stop the very ‘I’ that generates this fear has to become extinct.

Love is not the solution, love is the problem. With love disappearing I could for the first time live in peace and harmony, ease and equity with another human being, day-in, day-out, 24 hrs a day, without bicker or quarrel, crisis or boredom. Without love, actual intimacy and genuine benevolence became possible for the first time. What a serendipitous trade-in!

It seems mad to everyone else but they don’t know what I’ve got!

*

VINEETO: Love and compassion, sympathy and empathy are our usual ways of relating to family and friends and through the same emotional ‘channel’ we also invite their fears and worries, sorrow and resentment, anger and hatred. There is only one way when one relates to people affectively and that is within the rules and ways of the Human Condition. The moment I feel sympathy for someone I am also swamped by their fears, the moment I am empathic for someone’s suffering I plug into the collective misery of mankind. The need to belong makes one susceptible to everybody’s feelings, be it anger or fear, greed or suffering.

RESPONDENT: I saw yesterday what you are saying about sympathy and empathy. By not buying in to her suffering I was relieved of my suffering and I was better able to take care of her. Also have seen that ‘I’ am rotten to the core because a lot of my suffering has been worrying about ‘me’ having to take care of her.

VINEETO: To examine the so-called ‘good’ emotions of nurture, affective care, sympathy, friendship, duty, love and compassion is a fascinating subject and can only be done by questioning and examining at the same time the morals and ethics of society that forms one’s very social identity. If one wants to be actually free of the Human Condition, one has to examine and recognize that ‘good’ simply means ‘morally acceptable’ and ‘right’ is just another ethical value, both of which vary from tribe to tribe and from society to society. The ‘good’ is a much a bondage as the ‘bad’ – even more so because it seems much more desirable. As humans we don’t want to lose the other’s affection and reassurance, the appreciation of our peers, the cozy safety of being part of a family or group, the comforting knowledge of doing what everyone considers the ‘right’ thing or the ‘good’ deed.

Freedom lies in the opposite direction. On the path to actual freedom I did not bother to try to solve the moral or ethical problems of what is ‘good’ or ‘right’ but focussed my attention instead on discovering my own ethical and moral values – my social identity in action. ‘Ah, I’m trying to find out what is right? I’m upset that someone did the ‘wrong’ thing? I’m aiming again to be a ‘good’ person?’ These were indications that my moral identity was in action and I used my awareness to examine this very identity and learned to step out of it. What is now left is a simple sensible solution – and mostly my worries were seen to be an S.E.P.-situation, Someone Else’s Problem.

Once I understood that it is only me who can set myself free I also understood that everyone has to do it for themselves as well. What perfect arrangement. It for sure saves one saving people.

*

VINEETO: What a perfect arrangement actuality is, I am still astounded every day about the perfection of it all.

RESPONDENT: I’m not experiencing the perfection of it all right now. I feel close but ‘I’ am getting in the way. What is it? What is keeping me from it right now? Ok, I see what is in the way right now and it is worry about someone else’s problem. An S. E. P. as you stated above. Worrying about my mom’s problem is not going to help her or me. Without worrying about it I can simply make sensible choices.

VINEETO: In order that all the S.E.P. can really be someone else’s problem, I had to incrementally disentangle myself from the psychological and psychic web of peers and relatives, friends and acquaintances. I had to step out of humanity itself. For this I traced each feeling that someone would evoke in me back to its source and investigated the emotion and instinctual passion in me. Brought to light and understood the psychic connection lost its mysterious power.

Feeling for someone always has its source in me and that’s what I can change. Nurture is as much part of our instinctual survival package as are desire, fear and aggression. Deciding to stop feeling for someone was often not enough. I had to dig into the reason why those feeling would occur again and again and find the underlying cause, my own survival instincts and my fears of being alone.

In the actual world I am already always alone and it is simply a fact. Yet there is neither any feeling of loneliness nor any need for love because loneliness and love are inevitable attributes of a separate ‘self’. Richard described it perfectly well:

Richard: As this flesh and blood body, I am most definitely on my own (unless I am a Siamese twin), but I am not alone. This physical world of animal, vegetable and mineral is the self-same stuff as this body ... indeed this body is the very stuff of this material universe. As this body, I am walking through a magical paradise of veritable similitude. But as an ‘I’ inside this body (either in the head or in the heart), ‘I’ am indeed alone ... ‘I’ am lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning. ‘I’ will do anything in order to end ‘my’ aloneness whilst staying in existence, nevertheless. ‘I’ will invent all manner of psychic adumbrations with which to seek union with and thus create an illusion of ending separation through oneness. In fact, ‘I’ will go to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate ‘my’ very ‘being’ for all eternity. ‘I’ will realise ‘my’ ‘True Self’ and thus gain a spurious immortality and some relative fame or notoriety. ‘I’ desire confirmation, endorsement, recognition and – ultimately – adulation.

‘I’ am a bit of a berk, actually.

There is no ‘me’ inside this body to be alone or to seek unity. With ‘my’ complete demise – ‘I’ as both ego and soul – ‘unity’ vanishes. ‘Oneness’ was merely a concept created by ‘I’ to perpetuate ‘my’ existence as a soul ... now transmogrified into a ‘Timeless Self’.

It is delicious to live freely in this actual world of sensual delight. Richard, List B, No 12, 5.3.1998

VINEETO: If that is so, then you have found the first ‘key’ to eliminating anger – seeing the actual situation, sensibly considering everyone involved and understanding that your particular feelings will do nothing to help the situation, on the contrary, they are harmful. You can apply the same understanding to any other emotion arising, be it love, gratitude, resentment, doubt, anguish, sadness, etc. None of our so-called precious feelings are useful for dealing with practical, every-day situations. Care, consideration, attention, intelligence and common sense can do the job much better. The trick is to question the ‘good’ feelings as well as the ‘bad’ feelings and a great part of the social identity will disappear, issue by issue.

RESPONDENT: Well, eliminating the ‘good’ feelings is being a little tricky for me. Whereas I could see through common sense that ‘bad’ feelings like anger are harmful, I could not see the same thing for love (for example), partly because of my latent faith in the revered wisdom. Now I am beginning to understand the cunningness of this entity ‘I’, which just changes its shape from anger to love. For me just this realization that it is false is enough to determine to eliminate it, though I am also beginning to understand that love may also be harmful and perhaps may result into a war when it is for one’s country or faith. Even if it is love (or Love) for all, it is still ‘I’ and so not different from anger at its very root..

VINEETO: In order to question ‘good’ feelings I had to experience that any so-called ‘good’ feeling, particularly love, is just the other side of the coin of human emotions, ie the Human Condition. Love is produced in order to cover up disgust, hate, anger, indifference, self-centeredness and loneliness. Without all the negative emotions, what would you need love for? And at the next layer of investigation I discovered that love consists of nothing but a very self-centred system consisting of control, image, identity, power, bargain and smugness, particularly when feeling Love for All. How much more powerful can you feel when you feel big enough to love all of humanity?! Stripped of its glittering costume of people’s beliefs and needs, love is nothing other than our instinct of nurture, in-built to ensure the survival of the species – and embellished with great ideals and values. But the ideal of love cannot belie the facts of the atrocities caused by malice and sorrow that happen amongst human beings, often in the name of that same love, devotion, faith and loyalty.

RESPONDENT: My need-for-love is, I think, based on need to be nurtured at the age of 3 years and younger. Since I have no memory before the age of 3 years, it especially makes it hard. I am not sure what to do. Until recently I used to think that to solve these kinds of problems, eg. need-for-love in me, I need to know their source/origin, but may be there are other ways to solve them too. I can’t say much at present as I am in the middle of it and trying to get rid of need-for-love and fear associated with the similar causes. I agree with you, however, that this need-for-love is quite insidious

VINEETO: As I said before, in my experience, working out childhood or past-life situations is a dead-end road, in that one will never get to the bottom of all the real or imagined hurts, resentments, exasperations or fears. The same is the case for the need-for-love. It is part of the instinctual package that we are born with. Just now, I watched a film-report made by the famous Jane Goodall, where a 6 year old monkey died of grief three weeks after his mother was killed. He couldn’t survive, missing his source for ‘love’ and care. Everybody, whatever childhood they had, is troubled by their need for love, troubled by their instincts, inflicted with the Human Condition.

Only by examining my beliefs supporting love as well as my (imagined) fears of what would happen if I wasn’t loved, could I dismantle this instinct for being loved, which is common to all human beings. In the actual world there is neither love nor need for love. I-as-this-body know perfectly well how to physically survive, how to enjoy being alive and, without the burden of separation and loneliness that the presence of the ‘self’ inevitably produces, simply delight in experiencing the universe around me.

It is the ‘self’ that is the culprit – ego and soul combined. This genetically inherited and collectively reinforced passionate imagination of a separate self in each human being is responsible for every single feeling and act of sorrow and malice on this planet.

And now it is possible to get rid of it, to become free from the Human Condition. And isn’t it a worthy and thrilling adventure to devote one’s life to! I immensely enjoy the virtual freedom that I have already gained from investigating into the Human Condition.

VINEETO: I think here you are applying your ideal of love rather than what is actually happening. I remember the discourses in Poona, where every night there was a hushed competition who would sit closest to the Master, who would get a look from him or even be talked about. There was a tough competition going on – far from happy and harmless. And Rajneesh was as much part of that game as us, his disciples. He would stir the fire of competition, fancy some and neglect others, while all the while telling us to drop desire. Now, that the Master is dead, ‘spread all over Existence’, it is much easier to dream of his Un-conditional Love, and that one day you would attain it. The daily check on reality is but nil. But it is all ‘in the head’ or in the feeling, ‘spirit’-ual, it is not actuality.

RESPONDENT: As I said before, I think this is not my case.

VINEETO: Could you explain further, why you ‘think this is not [your] case’? Did you check your thinking with the actual fact, ie what particular improvement a certain advice of Rajneesh has brought to your daily life? Did you inquire into the nature of your feelings for Rajneesh to find out which feelings and passions, hopes and desires lay behind the dream of ‘unconditional love’?

When I dared to investigate into the devotional relationship that I had to ‘the Master of Masters’ I found several instinctual passions rampantly operating:

• the instinct to herd together – gathering in a group of like-minded people who – in this case – think they are better than anybody else,
• the instinct to seek a strong father-figure who would protect me against the evils of life,
• the need for some authority to map out and guide my life,
• the need for someone to love and be loved by in order not to be alone in this hostile world,
• the need to have a high ideal and an unquestionable meaning in life (in that sense Rajneesh replaced the belief in God as the ultimate matrix)
• the desire to be one day as happy, carefree, blissed out and powerful as he seemed to be.

I had to investigate all of those underlying instinctual passions first before I could make a definitive and honest assessment about my relationship to Rajneesh. Well, that investigation proved to be the ending of my love, my devotion and my dependence on the Indian philosophy professor who thought he was God and who had gathered thousands of people around him who still think he is God.

RESPONDENT: Also, the word or feeling of fear cannot be used in conjunction with love because fear is actually the antithesis of love ... Therefore if I feel fear, I cannot be in a state of love – One negates the other!

VINEETO: Yes, I agree. Love is used as the antidote to fear. With sufficient love one feels no fear. I experienced fear being transformed from the tension in the stomach into a feeling of relief and warmth and then a heat rising into the heart area until it filled my whole chest, providing me with this new identity – the ‘one who feels love continuously’. Although it was a very seductive experience, I could not forget the intimacy I had during my peak-experiences. Intimacy was impossible in this state of Love. My relating then was tinted by this ‘filled to the top’-being that needed to pour her ‘wisdom’ and love into someone, embracing all of humanity in a mad state of pitying compassion. Fortunately my common sense and my intent for a pure and actual freedom helped me to overcome this delusive calenture.

Richard: Actual intimacy – being here – does not come from love, for love stems from separation. The illusion of intimacy that love produces is only a poor imitation of this direct experience of the actual. To be actually intimate is to be without separation ... and therefore free from the need for love with its ever un-filled promise of Peace-On-Earth. Richard’s Journal, Introduction

As humans, we are born with the instinct to survive, consisting of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. It takes deep investigation and courage to dismantle fear and its remedy ‘love’ for what it is – the instinct of the ‘self’ to survive. So, you see, out of my peak-experience my approach has been to eliminate this instinctual fear whenever it surfaced, thus digging deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of ‘self’ and ‘being’, eventually eradicating the very reasons for fear. Every time fear is recognized it loses its grip over me, becoming weaker and weaker, dissolving like a fog, leaving me unrestricted and free to experience life again as the crisp, clear, delicious and intimate adventure that it actually is. And with fear gone, who needs the ‘self’-enhancing feeling of love or Divine Love, which is yet another feeling preventing actual intimacy from happening.

Now I can give everyone I meet, and spend time with, my 100% undivided attention, being here with them for as long as the meeting lasts. There is neither an expectation nor an investment, neither a need to ‘give’ nor to ‘receive’, but simply the joy in meeting another human being. No love or Love can offer such freedom and delight.