VINEETO: Matter/energy is not only primary but it is all there is. That’s what makes it so magical. The universe is a physical material universe and there are no disembodied spirits anywhere to be found except in the hearts and minds of human beings who yearn for immortality. Nor was the universe created according to humanly conceived mathematical formulas or models – such beliefs arise from the stifling anthropocentric thinking and self-centred feelings that continue to inhibit the possibility of clear thinking from operating.

RESPONDENT: Statements like ‘Matter/energy is not only primary but it is all there is’ make me questioning the Actualist’s ‘Weltanschauung’. How do you know that this is not just another belief as bad [maybe worse] as believing in ‘disembodied spirits’ or a creation of the universe ‘according to humanly conceived mathematical formulas and models’?

VINEETO: I know because I am reporting the direct experience that is possible each time when the ‘self’ goes temporarily in abeyance. (…)

RESPONDENT: I am asking because these terms ‘matter’ and ‘energy’ themselves have no meaning whatsoever outside of the physical theories that are used to describe them – as one can easily find out for oneself. I will just requote the physicist Metanomski who joined ‘the branch of Einstein’s team opened in Warsaw Mathematical Institute by Infeld, where [he] worked on Relativity’. ‘Mass and Energy are pure constructs of mind having no autonomous phenomenal meaning.’ <snipped rest of the quote>

VINEETO: Given that ‘matter’ and ‘energy’ existed long before human beings existed ...

RESPONDENT: That is incorrect. ‘Matter’ and ‘energy’ are words used to describe the behaviour of physical systems inside of physical theories. These words are meaningless outside of the theories that define them. When you use the word ‘matter’ as synonym for ‘substance’ or ‘a solid thing’ that’s fine but don’t believe that you know what it is you are talking about. All you do is renaming your sense perceptions and using words out of their proper context.

VINEETO: Instead of telling me that usage of words is ‘incorrect’, I suggest that you write to all the dictionary makers around the world and tell them what the words matter and energy means in ‘their proper context’ in the world according to No 81.

RESPONDENT: With regard to what existed long before human beings existed – that is not something that you or anybody else can directly know because it simply cannot become part of your experiences. It has to be theorized.

VINEETO: Common sense would have it that the matter of this planet existed before human beings existed such that they could walk upon the earth … or are you seriously proposing that human beings wafted around in space waiting for the matter that is the planet to come into existence? Your thoughtless knee-jerk objections to everything and anything that is said, based as they are on a potpourri of spiritual beliefs, metaphysical concepts and pseudo-scientific theories simply make no sense at all.

RESPONDENT: And based on our current understanding of quantum physics we cannot say that something that is not perceived by the senses is actually existing. There is only ‘sense data’ and what is outside of sense data cannot be termed as ‘existing’ in the proper sense of the word. And that is not claimed by Eastern Spirituality. That is claimed to be a fact by modern physics. Quantum physicists calls it ‘probability wave’ or whatever, but that is altogether different from how you understand of ‘matter’ and ‘energy’.

Modern physics doesn’t support you case.

VINEETO: Yes, I know, nor do I take many of the current theories of theoretical physics to be facts.

Despite your denial, modern physics has been heavily influenced by Eastern Spirituality, as has a good deal of what passes for scientific thinking for more than a century now.

And given that you keep quoting quantum physics to support your case, you might want to contemplate on the fact that quantum physics is a theory based upon a mathematical device (Mr. Max Planck’s ‘quanta’) initially designed to solve the hypothetical problem of infinite ultra-violet radiation from a non-existent perfect ‘black-box’ radiator – in other words, a lot of hot air about nothing …

RESPONDENT: Physicists have actually coined a term for your world-view [and it is a world-view regardless whether Richard defines it away or not]. They call it ‘naïve realism’.

VINEETO: Ah, you hit the nail on the head – naiveté is the key that allows you to slip out of the armour of your social identity and become unstuck from the grip of your instinctual identity and discover the actual world with a child’s eyes (but with adult sensibilities) – a prerequisite to stepping out of the real world into the actual world where you belong and leave your ‘self’ behind.

RESPONDENT: And correct me if I am wrong but one cannot go and use scientific claims to support one’s case if they conveniently fit into one’s world-view and blame scientists for being mistaken if their claims don’t support one’s case. I mean, sure, one can but that would be intellectual dishonest and in conflict with ‘happy and harmless’ [at least how I understand it].

VINEETO: Oh, but I am not doing what you say I am doing. I have inquired into the so-called ‘scientific claims’ that contradict my experience of the actual world and I have always found them to be theories, assumptions, concepts or speculations only, often based on false premises and made seemingly plausible by a combination of pride, faith, passion. … and cognitive dissonance.

*

VINEETO: [Given that ‘matter’ and ‘energy’ existed long before human beings existed] and that human beings have coined the words matter and energy to describe the physical phenomena that they have observed, …

RESPONDENT: The physicists that have coined these words ‘matter’ and ‘energy’ don’t know what these words mean outside of their theories. These words are void of meaning.

VINEETO: Physicists have not ‘coined’ the words ‘matter’ and ‘energy’ – rather they have redefined them to fit their ever-evolving theories.

RESPONDENT: The only thing you have are your sense perceptions which tell you that you are holding a cup in your right hand. And if you smell, lick, and look at the cup you will realise that it is ‘solid’ and made of a ‘substance’, which, you are told, is called ‘porcelain.’ If you ask further and want to know what that is you are at your wits end. The chemist might tell you some interesting facts about porcelain with regard to its chemical composition but s/he won’t be able to tell you what it is. Therefore, you go on and meet a physicist who will tell you all sorts of other interesting facts with regard to its physical properties but s/he is also at their wits end with regard to the question what it is. S/he will then start talking about ‘SINGULARITY AREAS of the gravity field’ which s/he doesn’t know what it is etc.

VINEETO: To repeat for emphasis – when the ‘self’ who is claiming to ‘have’ senses is absent then I am aware that I am the senses. Of course, the people you mention are ‘at their wits end’ because everyone, being afflicted with the human condition, they experience themselves as a feeling entity who consequently feel themselves to be separate from the actual world of the senses.

The whole point of actualism is to be rid of ‘me’ who think myself to be separate from the world of people, things and events.

*

VINEETO: [Given that ‘matter’ and ‘energy’ existed long before human beings existed and that human beings have coined the words matter and energy to describe the physical phenomena that they have observed,] do you not think it preposterous (‘having last what should be first’ Oxford Dictionary) to propose that the words matter and energy have ‘no meaning whatsoever outside of the physical theories that are used to describe them’?

RESPONDENT: No I don’t think it is preposterous. It is actually a fact.

VINEETO: Let me try and get this one right – in the world according to No 81, I cannot call the cup that you hold in your hand matter because in the world according to No 81 the word matter does not refer to an actual thing but rather refers to the physical theories that are used to define matter. By sleight of hand, a swift redefinition and a bit of double speak, t’is only a short step to proposing that the cup in your hand is not a physical substance occupying space as the dictionary defines the word matter but that the cup is matter as a few men in ivory towers and academic institutions would have us believe – insubstantial and ephemeral.

You may not see it right now … but there was life (and matter) before theoretical physics.

*

VINEETO: As for ‘as one can easily find out for oneself’ – for an actualist the finding out for oneself consists of sensate empirical observations combined with sensible down-to-earth autonomous thinking – it does not consist of quoting what one physicist of Einstein’s team believes to be the truth.

RESPONDENT: He is not talking about the truth. He is talking about what words like ‘matter’, ‘energy’ and ‘mass’ mean as defined by the physical theories. And they don’t mean much and not at all what you think that they mean.

VINEETO: To you, that is. I will stick with my own experience of matter and energy, after all actualism is experiential and down-to-earth.

RESPONDENT: With regard to sensate empirical observations – all you have are your sense perceptions and you can invent words to describe them but you won’t never ever know what it is that you describe with these words except that it is your sense perceptions. And that is called a circular reference.

VINEETO: First of all, I do not invent words, as the words matter and energy existed and meant what they mean long before theoretical physicists hijacked and redefined them – you need to make your complaints to the dictionary writers. Secondly, because sensate perception is primary and bare awareness of sensate perception is unmediated, I know exactly what it is my senses perceive when I pay attention to it. Words serve to communicate one’s perception to others but they are not needed in order to be aware of one’s sensate experiencing.

To put it into plain language, of course the word is not the thing, but human beings have coined many words to describe the many things that exist in the world. The word cup refers to an actual thing we call a cup, the actual thing is actual whether we call it a cup or not. The thing that we call a cup exists in its own right, it has a quality that we call substance in that it had been fashioned from the rocks of the earth and it autonomously exists in space regardless of whether anyone is touching it or looking at it.

Nothing circular about that at all – it’s all straightforward really, unless you are a solipsist, that is.

RESPONDENT: [And that is called a circular reference.] That’s how consciousness works. A sense perception is derivative of consciousness.

VINEETO: To propose that ‘a sense perception is derivative of consciousness’ is, yet again, to put the cart before the horse. Consciousness, the condition of being conscious – as in being alive, not dead, awake, not asleep, and sensible, not insensible (comatose) – is a by-product of animate matter in sentient beings.

RESPONDENT: Is this so difficult to understand?

VINEETO: Oh, I understand you all too well. It is the anthropocentric self-centred spiritual paradigm – that which is 180 degrees opposite to actualism. I’ve been there, done that and even got the robes and the mala (the initiation-necklace), but in your case your intellectual understanding of spiritualism has apparently led you to the utter isolation of solipsism.

*

VINEETO: To propose that ‘Mass and Energy’, which are palpable, tangible, tactile, corporeal, physical and material

RESPONDENT: That’s is just plain wrong. ‘Mass’ and ‘energy’ have no autonomous phenomenal existence. The phenomena which you refer to are your sense perceptions, not ‘mass’ and ‘energy’.

VINEETO: We’ve been at this point before. For lack of a better definition I call this attitude ‘Denial of Direct Perception’. One person who was enamoured with this belief went as far as telling me recently that the chair he was sitting on did not in fact exist but was only a sense perception. I was actually surprised it never disappeared from under him when he stopped looking at it or being aware that he was sitting on it.

You said in a recent post that ‘…‘the Truth’ cannot be known … I don’t see a way how to get out of this trap. I also don’t see Richard and the actualists out of this trap’. (Statement of mind, 12.4.2005)

I recommend doing a simple experiment Richard devised that will get you out of this trap because it demonstrates the actualness of physicality in a way that a thousand words would not:

*

VINEETO: [To propose that ‘Mass and Energy’, which are palpable, tangible, tactile, corporeal, physical and material] and can be experienced by the physical senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch ...

RESPONDENT: That’s just not correct. ‘Mass’ and ‘energy’ are not words that refer to any sense data of yours.

VINEETO: Maybe not to one who has been indoctrinated by philosophy, spiritualism and theoretical physics and whose sensibility is presently blinkered by narrow-minded definitions of quantum quackery. To me matter and energy refer to actual things and actual phenomena that this body can see, and/or touch and/or smell and/or taste and/or hear, as do other bodies.

As you may well have gathered by now, actualism is not a philosophy – it is rooted in common sense.

*

VINEETO: ... (it is a fact that the sun exists in that we can both see it, see the energy in the form of light that it gives off and feel the energy in the form of heat that it gives off on our skin),

RESPONDENT: You are not seeing the ‘energy’. You see light. It is incorrect to say ‘energy in form of light’. You are also not feeling the ‘energy’ on your skin. You feel heat. It is, again, incorrect to say ‘energy in form of heat’. There is a sense perception [feeling ‘heat’] and there is another sense perception [seeing ‘light’] but the word ‘energy’ as understood by the physicist is meaningless in the context of your description of what your sense perception are [seeing light and feeling heat].

VINEETO: I am reminded of a discussion I had with a solipsist who dismissed my report of direct perception with repeated ‘this is wrong thought’ statements. There is simply no way to have a sensible discussion with someone who is utterly convinced that actuality – in you case ‘matter’ and ‘energy’ – ‘have no autonomous phenomenal existence’.

RESPONDENT: All you do is having sense perceptions and coining words for them. Some words make sense [like the word heat and light] because they stand for [symbolize] specific sense perceptions, other words make no sense [like the word energy and mass] because their meaningful use [with regard to sense data] is limited to the context of the theories that define them and even then they are sometimes meaningless [like the word matter], that is, they don’t refer to any sense data whatsoever and also not to anything else in the context of the theories which would not have been already coined with different terms like ‘singularity areas of the gravity field’.

VINEETO: Oh dear me, how silly can a grown man get? Are you seriously proposing that unless I use words defined as ‘meaningful’ by the theoretical physicists you quote, that I cannot experience the thermal energy from the sun or the kinetic energy from the wind, the touch of my fingers on the matter of the keys of the keyboard or the sounds from the humming computer next to me? Should you indeed be serious in your assertion then I can only suggest that now would be a good time to leave your ivory tower of cerebral-only activity, lie outside in the grass and smell the fragrance of springtime in order to extend your range of perception a bit.

*

VINEETO: ... should be ‘pure constructs of mind’ is clear indication that Eastern spiritualism has muddled the mind of many a scientist who in turn have muddled the minds of many a layman.

RESPONDENT: It is a very bad style of communication to confuse the proper use of words [mass and energy] and mix them with unrelated topics [Eastern spiritualism] in order to suggest something. That is actually harmful. You simply don’t get that the words ‘mass’ and ‘energy’ don’t stand for [symbolise] any sense data.

VINEETO: It was you who suggested that my use of words was not ‘proper’ because I used the words as per the dictionary definitions and not in accordance with the current theories of theoretical physicists. You also introduced the notion that consciousness is primary and sense perception is secondary (‘a sense perception is derivative of consciousness’) and that ‘matter’ and ‘energy’ ‘have no autonomous phenomenal existence’ – a concept which is a purely spirit-ual concept, i.e. it states that spirit (aka consciousness aka the Transcendent, etc.) is primary and matter is a mere derivative of it.

I don’t see how pointing out to you that what you are doing on this mailing list is peddling a spiritual concept could be harmful. I do acknowledge that having one’s beliefs challenged can be confronting for those who hold such beliefs, but I would point out that this is something that one could reasonably expect given that you are attempting to teach spiritual beliefs on a non-spiritual mailing list.

Personally, it was only because Peter and Richard pointed out to me the spiritual-ness of my beliefs that I was able to question, understand and eventually abandon them which in turn enabled me to perceive the magical physical world without the blinkers of my spiritually-thwarted perception.

VINEETO: Additionally, a fact remains a fact whoever speaks it and common sense is equally universal for those able to recognize and apply it.

RESPONDENT: Yes. Unfortunately, postmodernism has warped some people’s mind into thinking that objective facts are questionable at best or even impossible.

VINEETO: I don’t know much about postmodernism except that it is mainly used to describe a particular style of art and architecture and a fashion of deconstructing literature. However, I know the phenomenon you are pointing to very well because it is the basic tenet of Eastern Mysticism and the most important prerequisite and main ingredient for the delusion of spiritual Enlightenment.

I am reminded of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with someone who is currently practicing and teaching dissociation. After a preliminary chit-chat about the weather and mutual acquaintances we came to his favourite topic – the concept that all that exists is only a product of one’s mind, that nothing exists in actuality. I warned him that the conversation would prove to be futile as he and I live in completely different, incompatible worlds but he insisted on continuing our conversation.

I pointed out that he was sitting in a material chair, that exists as an object independent from his thoughts, beliefs and feelings, that his feet firmly were placed on the timber decking that existed well before he entered the veranda, that I was here before he came and supposedly created me with his thoughts, beliefs and feelings, that the cup of coffee I made for him has the flavour it has because the coffee beans have been roasted and infused with hot water and not because he is ‘creating’ the flavour, and so on.

Undeterred he changed tack by saying that after he left, our conversation will be but a memory whereupon I responded that he is shifting the topic because what we are talking about is what he is experiencing right here, right now. Whatever I said that the physical world surrounding us was actual, he kept insisting that he and I were creating what we saw with our thoughts and that if it was not for our thoughts, we would not be here nor would there be the house in which we were sitting nor a the garden outside. However, when he recognized that he couldn’t convince me to see the world his way, he abruptly left without as much as a good bye.

The strange thing was that I was left feeling that someone had just tried to seriously mess with my mind, and it felt like an almost physical twist of my brain. I then remembered that I had had a similar feeling when I first came across actualism, although then it was me trying to twist my brain in order to understand what Richard was saying. At that time I had myself passionately believed many weird concepts, spiritual and philosophical, including the belief that ‘I’ create at least some of the physical world ‘I’ live in but actualism made eminent sense to me and this sense gradually turned my upside-down mind the right way up.

It’s not for nothing that one ultimately needs to experience the actual world in a PCE in order to fully comprehend the diametrical difference between spiritual/philosophical beliefs and actuality and to be able to withstand the manipulations of those trying to pull one back into the fold. (...)

RESPONDENT: Ya, there are no friendly faces (accept No 32’s – lol) when coming out of the af closet. This will be worse than when I came out of the atheist closet. I can see an atheist friend of mine ‘so your goal is to have no self and emotions ... um ... what about love? ... well I don’t know about this ...’.

VINEETO: If you talk about this mailing list, I’d say there is more than one friendly voice …

RESPONDENT: True – on this list. T’is only a list though, not the flesh and blood bodies with clever entities all around me (and inside me) in my actual life.

VINEETO: Ah, when you say ‘t’is only a list though’ you are indicating that people on this list are something other than flesh-and-blood bodies.

Personally I know that I am flesh and blood and the same is the case for everyone writing on the mailing list – there is simply no other way these words can appear on my screen every day. When I write, I write to actual people, I don’t just reply to words appearing on my screen, even though I don’t know what the writers look like, whether they are African, Asian, Indian or Caucasian, male or female, young or old.

To regard and treat people on this mailing list in a different way to those one meets in person just because one does not see their faces or hears their voices is a dissociative trick that many people on the net seem to engage in. Haven’t you noticed that these ‘faceless’ people can evoke the same intense emotional reactions via the written word as someone you can see and touch can do when talking to you directly? Haven’t you received useful, in fact life-changing, information on this list that only a flesh and blood human being can pass on to another flesh and blood human being?

VINEETO: Often it would take me days to discover that I had once again fallen for ‘my’ tricks, that I had believed ‘my’ reasoning as to why ‘I’ needed to run the show.

RESPONDENT: Ok, but while ever you are in ‘virtual freedom’ rather than ‘actual freedom’, you are indeed running the show.

VINEETO: The wonderful thing about being virtually free of malice and sorrow is that ‘I’ have become increasingly redundant – less and less am ‘I’ experienced as running the show or needing to be in control.

RESPONDENT: And part of the ‘you’ who is running the show is a ‘belief’ (for want of a better word) that ‘you’ as a psychic entity must disappear entirely in order to allow the already-existing purity and perfection of the actual world to manifest itself.

VINEETO: No. It was the ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience itself which revealed that normally there is an ‘I’ who thinks and feels she is running the show all the time and it also reveals that in order to allow the already-existing purity and perfection of the actual world to manifest itself ‘I’ have to disappear. This is not ‘a belief’ but recognition of a fact via direct perception.

RESPONDENT: Regardless of the validity of this belief, it is still a product of ‘you’; but you regard this belief/goal/whatever as not being ‘one of your tricks’.

VINEETO: Facts are not a product of ‘me’; facts exist in their own right. It is one of the most cunning constructs of Eastern spiritual mythology – and unfortunately one that is growing in popularity – that all human perception can always only be a belief. In absence of a word to describe it I have called this erroneous concept DDP – Denial of Direct Perception.

DDP has now moved into Western society and has also infiltrated modern theoretical science, particularly the part of theoretical physics known as quantum theory, which proposes that you can never know something as a fact because the observer always influences the observed. Considering that prominent physicists and mathematicians like Albert Einstein, David Bohm and Darryl Reanney were believers in mysticism themselves it is no wonder that their perception and their theories were distorted by their beliefs.

However, if one aspires to allow the already-existing purity and perfection of the actual world to manifest itself, it is essential to recognize and acknowledge the difference between fact, which is objective, repeatable, verifiable and so for everyone, and belief, which is subjective, based on feelings and tradition and only true for a certain group of believers. It is equally important to make a clear distinction between direct perception as experienced in a ‘self’-less PCE and the perception distorted by the affective-imaginative psychological and psychic entity who ‘resides’ inside the body.