Please note that Vineeto’s writings below were written by the feeling-being ‘Vineeto’ while ‘she’ lived in a pragmatic (methodological), still-in-control/same-way-of-being Virtual Freedom.

Vineeto ~ Selected Writings

Affective Feelings – Emotions and Passions

Another part of the female agenda was the desire to change the world by nurturing means: education and social work. After I had dismissed revolutionary changes as not applicable, I thought people could be taught to be more happy by ‘right’ education and by changing people’s social conditions. But after working with drug-addicts for two years I had to admit failure. I had nothing to teach them; I was as ignorant as they were, and I had no solutions for society’s misfits, let alone myself.

Along with my social-work studies came an interest in therapy, both for myself and for my work. I tried most of the Human Growth groups available. I expressed and re-evaluated all the different emotions and examined every possible issue but it did not really get to the bottom of the matter. I continued in later years with ‘spiritual’ therapies, where psychological understanding was combined with devotion, awareness and meditation. In terms of freedom I looked for redemption from misery, fear, anger, jealousy, dependency, tension and self-doubt. Every approach had a slightly different answer, though none offered lasting solutions.

The Powerbattle

Women are usually better equipped and more experienced in the ‘psychic world’ of emotions, feelings and intuition, having been trained and conditioned differently than men. Of course, we women use exactly this know-how as our sharpest and most effective weapon to manipulate and control, whinge and whine, scream or sulk, leaving the man baffled and confused as to what exactly he has done wrong.

Also I was usually not able to, or willing to, explain clearly what I was being emotional about. Telling the whole story of my ‘upset’ would take away the mystery that secured my power, and often the man would put down my emotional reaction as inappropriate and irrational, thus adding fuel to the fire. So I wouldn’t talk about the actual issue and consequently didn’t bother to find out for myself what exactly were my emotions and what were the reasons that triggered them.

I can now understand and acknowledge how I had used my psychic and emotional power in all my relationships to win the ‘battle’, if only temporarily, and to take revenge for hurts, disappointments and frustrations.

It was a great step towards an actual freedom and a permanent happiness when I learned for the first time that I could not only explore my emotions to their very core, but actually get rid of them and live without them. But it definitely meant giving up the means of power over men. Since I had already agreed to discard battling as the solution, it was obvious that I had to give up the fight first. If I want peace I can’t wait for the other to start to lay down his arms. This does not work. I have to give up battling because the battle itself is the problem. The solution is not to try and change somebody else, but to look into the very cause of my own unhappiness. Once this condition was understood and agreed upon, we could both cease battling, sit down and talk about any situation that caused disagreement.

Now I would not only ask myself, ‘how do I feel?’ but also question the very necessity of having this feeling. Understanding that emotion itself was a major component of my (female) identity, and of my ‘self’, allowed me to explore what lies behind any upcoming emotion – what thought, what belief, what investment, what instinct. By examining the validity of the underlying cause I was then able to eliminate the subsequent emotions, one by one, including the greatest and holiest of them all: Love itself.

I remember in the past whenever I had talked with girlfriends about the qualities of the future ‘perfect’ man, the worst and most terrible vision was to live with a man who was without feelings and emotions! The only option I could think of then was that he would repress his emotions and eventually explode, or that he would be a robot, a walking computer! At that time it was simply unimaginable that I would be able to relate to, let alone delight in living with such a man. And because my only identity and power had been to feel and express emotions, it was also inconceivable for me to be without them myself.

People might say that I have simply surrendered to the male camp, that I am the man’s clone or carbon copy, repressing my emotions to please the man and have superficial peace. In my experience repression has always failed because it is utterly unreliable. It delivers neither freedom, happiness nor peace, it only causes withdrawal, moodiness, suffering, manipulation, anger, resentment and frustration.

Applying Richard’s method is forcing me to examine and eliminate the very issues and beliefs that are triggering those emotions. It reveals to me that emotions are the crucial part of the ‘self’ – the very cause of my being unhappy and malicious. It enabled me to question the beliefs that both defined and confined me as a woman. Chiselling away my psychological and psychic entity has made emotions and feelings redundant and has left me increasingly free to enjoy every person I meet, every situation that happens and everything that this abundant universe offers. In my ‘role-play’ I am neither a ‘woman’ nor a ‘man’, but simply a human being ... a female, of course!

A major issue that quickly surfaced in our relationship was both my dependence on male authority and the subsequent fight against it – a constant struggle in itself! In my life I had focused on several, mostly male authority figures – naturally starting with my father. I had either loved them, followed them or fought them – often at the same time. This was the main reason not only for the frustrations and ensuing failure of all my relationships in the past, but also for my difficulties in working relations or friendships. Being either subservient to or fighting against authority would constantly spoil my being at ease with people.

Interestingly, I could only get rid of authority by tracing its cause to the very root: What do I want or need authority for in my life? Why do I create authority? What do I get out of it? What was the ultimate authority behind each representative of power? Which version of good and bad, right and wrong was I to follow? Could I consider living without an external or internal authority in my life? And what would be the consequences?

I explored and discovered in myself the underlying belief that there was Someone or Something, who had created the guidelines of good and bad, right and wrong. And what those different authority figures represented was nothing but the particular values of moral – or later spiritual – improvement that I took to be right and necessary. These were the values and inhibitions to be followed on the ‘right’ path to a meaningful life. Simply rebelling against these authority figures did not invalidate the power of their opinions over me – I had tried that since childhood. Again and again I found myself dependent on their approval, their love and their support, but I had never questioned the very values themselves. I had only followed or fought those who represented these values. Usually, when I succeeded freeing myself of one authority figure, I soon found that I had only replaced them with a supposedly better one – but it never solved the problem. Slowly I started to understand that in order to be free from authority I had to eliminate the need for, and support of, those very beliefs and values underlying the authority.

WW II

Watching a film on WW II, I was completely overwhelmed by the feeling of the collective sorrow, guilt, depression and dread that made up the ‘dark part’ of the ‘German soul’. The feeling became so bizarre and threatening that I started to desperately look for something to bring me back here into the actual world. At the same time I was curious to experience and explore this new intensity of feeling. I seemed to be standing at the edge of an immense abyss of hell, which emanated all of the terror and dread of humanity, stretching endlessly into a grey dead infinity with no hope and no way out, ever. My eyes were searching for something physical to anchor on. I stood at the window, repeating to myself, ‘this is a fence, this is grass, this is a flower.’

The bright redness of the bougainvillea outside in the garden penetrated a little into this powerful magnet of dread that was threatening to swallow me for eternity. Above the abyss of dread appeared enlightenment, seductively blinking, promising bliss as the solution to this overwhelming hopelessness and sense of ‘evil’. But as I had seen through the illusion the enlightenment option only a few days before, I was not convinced to go down that land of imaginary bliss – I wanted freedom from illusion, any illusion.

So I fixed my eyes on the red flowers, until slowly, slowly the dread lost some of its power and turned into the familiar feeling of fear. But it was far from being over! I started to look for more actuality, longing for the taste of coffee in my mouth, for sounds in my ear and wind on my skin. Nothing else would get me out of this powerful collective and atavistic passionate dream.

Peter had told me about a similar experience that he had had just a few days earlier and had seen that there is no solution to be had in feeling everyone’s dread, everyone’s hopelessness. So I activated all my willpower to manoeuvre myself back into the physical world of the senses, where neither dread nor enlightenment exist – and I eventually succeeded.

The experience left me shaking for another day, and I am glad to know that the door marked ‘dread’ is as much a delusion as the door marked ‘enlightenment’. Quite a Rocky Horror Picture Show, just more real – and yet, all happening inside one’s own head!

 

Vineeto’s Selected Writings

Library – Affective Feelings and Emotions

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