VINEETO: Hi,

I am Vineeto, and I am Peter’s companion. As you brought up the question of possible self-delusion and room for compromise I thought I would write to you of my experience as well.

RESPONDENT: I also have a question regarding the fact that your experiment concerns only you and your companion living together in utter peace and harmony. There would be room here for self-delusion should your companion choose to compromise, to go along to get along.

VINEETO: The experiment of our relationship could only work because the peace and equity I wanted to achieve did not only concern us ‘living together in utter peace and harmony’ but it also meant that I had to find peace for myself and eliminate the warrior in me. The most practical, intimate test of success, and the most fun when it works, is living with a person of the other gender, another fellow human being, 24 hrs a day, every day.

It was one of my deep regrets and a continuing failure in my life that I could not live with a man in peace and harmony – the man and I had always something to fight about. Searching for enlightenment did not change or improve that situation – my solution was to make the guru my lover number one – as is requested in the master-disciple relationship – and thus I was able to revert to the imaginary love affair whenever the real relationship was in trouble. Given that no one I knew had perfect harmony with their lovers, I just thought that that’s the way it is and compromise and resignation is the name of the game of life on earth.

When I met Peter and he said he wanted to live with a woman in peace and harmony, equity and intimacy, I was very intrigued and seized the opportunity. We committed ourselves that we would both look at everything that would surface as an obstacle for intimacy between us and this contract implied that each of us had to do it for ourselves. In the course of my search for such everyday and permanent peace I had to question and eliminate a lot of my dearly held beliefs, but at that time I considered my beliefs as part of the ego that I had set out to leave behind when I started on the spiritual path. Later I was to find out that my deep-seated beliefs, ‘knowings’ and feelings were not just part of the ego but originated much deeper, they were my very soul.

In order to get to the root of the gender-battle I investigated female conditioning, authority problems, sexual taboos, love and intuition, spiritual beliefs, sacred truths and faithful loyalty. This time I was determined not to let any fear, any dearly held belief, any feeling or emotion stop me from realizing my life-long dream to put into everyday practice what love and poetry always promised but never delivered. This time, with a man who was ready to sincerely discuss and explore every issue, I was willing to dive deep into my psyche and explore the core of what living in peace without compromise is all about.

The trick was to consider every upcoming issue – and there were many – as part of the Human Condition, the set of conditionings, beliefs, emotions and instinctual passions that form the habitual and neuro-biological program by which human beings have always operated. This way we could keep the interaction between us free of blame, compromise and resentment, and did not mess in each other’s lives. Then every issue we talked about was an issue of the Human Condition and each could investigate as far as each wanted to. But we were both determined to not stop at second best.

With such sincere intent and daring determination from both of us soon brought tangible success and it only made me bolder to explore further. The evident success was that I had glimpses of experiencing an actual intimacy that I had never ever experienced before. At first for brief moments, then for longer and longer periods, the self-centred veil of fears, hopes, expectations and love broke and, freed from it, I could meet the other as a flesh and blood fellow human being. It is as if one sees the other person for the first time, without the shell of personality, identity or self – actual, fresh, a direct intimate experiencing of the other without separation.

Such moments of direct intimacy made the exploration of the so-called gender issues easier and easier, and after several months of investigation they amounted to nothing other than social conditioning and instinctual programming. Open discussion replaced overt and covert power battle, facts replaced beliefs, direct intimacy replaced fickle feelings of love and jealousy and sensuous sexual play replaced the mystique and taboos of sexual rituals. I found that by eliminating the social identity of culturally instilled role-playing, conditioning, belief, intuition and morality in me, the gender difference almost completely disappeared. What remained, the female instinctual programming, could then be explored and investigated the same way and it has now completely lost its grip over me.

This is only a short description to indicate that my investigation left no ‘room here for self-delusion should [I] choose to compromise, to go along to get along’. The adventure to free myself from gender conditioning and instinctual behaviour was a journey that resulted in complete psychological and psychic independence together with the most astounding and delicious intimacy between two human beings. This exquisite and unique combination is the scrumptious by-product and daily down-to-earth proof of the success of my search for an actual freedom from the instinctual bondage of the human condition.

RESPONDENT: Of course it is quite possible that you have indeed proven that two human beings can choose to live in utter peace and harmony, and if two can accomplish this then it would be possible for ‘all’ to do likewise.

VINEETO: As I see it, I can only tell my story and state that it is indeed possible to free oneself from gender-issues and disentangle from the insidious power battle that usually spoils every relationship between men and women. Anyone can do it, there are no secrets involved, one only needs a sincere passion for freedom and a stubborn persistence not to stop at second best. On the way one loses not only one’s ego but also one’s feeling soul – but the price attained is actual intimacy. The desire to become free has to be put into action by each person themselves. And who would want to have it any other way!

28.4.2000

VINEETO: Good to hear from you.

I will break up the reply to you into two parts to follow the new directive of brevity.

RESPONDENT: Hello Vineeto, Thank you for responding to my questioning of Peter’s original statement regarding living together with you in utter peace and harmony. It is clarifying to hear of your experience in the relationship as well as your personal experiments with going beyond the conditioned responses and cultural programming and the results you have observed.

Do you think that there is a peace of being that is available in the immediacy of the present moment or do you believe that this kind of experimentation and investigation is mandatory to ‘arrive’ at the ideal?

VINEETO: I don’t have to ‘believe that this kind of ... investigation is mandatory’. I go by my daily experience. Living together 24hrs a day, every day, without a bicker or disagreement is a delicious sensate and scrumptious by-product of having eliminated beliefs, psittacisms and dimwitticisms, as well as having questioned, explored, investigated and thus eliminated feelings, moods, intuition, love, compassion, beauty and the rest of the emotions. By investigating the animal instincts, the underlying program that is producing and maintaining the ‘self’, being, soul, emotions and feelings, there is now hardly anything left to disturb the peace, a peace that is not an ‘ideal’ but a tangible, palpable experience moment to moment. By probing, examining, scrutinizing, bringing into the open and thus dismantling not only my ego, but my very soul, there is a peace prevailing that is not ‘of being’ but due to diminishing this being to a state where it so little substance that it cannot be maintained much longer.

Apperception, the mind’s perception of itself, can function more and more freely and therefore ‘I’ as ‘being’ finds it harder and harder to maintain credibility. ‘I’ am increasingly seen as the usurper, an alien entity inhabiting this body and taking on an identity of its own. Mercilessly exposed in the bright light of awareness – apperception casts no shadows – ‘I’ can no longer find ‘my’ position tenable. ‘I’ can only live in obscuration, where ‘I’ lurk about, creating all sorts of mischief.

The ‘immediacy of the present moment’ is experienced moment to moment as no emotion or emotion-backed thought takes me away from experiencing each moment as it happens and as there is no emotional memory of the past moments or any fearful anticipation of future moments, now is the only moment there is. When the shift happens from living in psychological and psychic time, where ‘I’ as self dwell, and I as flesh-and-blood body only arrive in actual time that is only this moment, the brain seems to spin in a confused limbo for some days. After all, one leaves a familiar world behind and enters the actual world of now, moments that have no psychological or psychic continuity anymore. It is a great experience indeed, actually being here in this moment in time, in this place in space.

RESPONDENT: It seems like we humans want to take a journey ... through the mind, through relationship, through some form of practice, through imagination, through religion or science etc. etc. etc. Having spent over 30 years on a spiritual quest for truth, I have also experienced many of these journeys. During the past year or so, there has been a drastic change in my experience. My attention has been captured by the NOW and I am finding an opening that envelopes everything. It is very hard to describe, but words like Stillness, Silence, Presence, Surrender ... come close.

VINEETO: When on the spiritual path, I have experienced this ‘NOW’ the teachers talk about, but it seemed ever fleeting and took great effort, therapy or meditation to catch a glimpse of NOW, as I had to continually resist being torn away by the ever-present undercurrent of feelings produced by the instinctual passions. Visiting U.G. Krishnamurti once I experienced that our usual experience of time is like a string of pearls with each moment firmly connected to all the ones before and all the anticipated ones coming. On reflection, his experience seems rather that of a broken string with lose pearls all over the place.

Discovering the third alternative I have come to explore the nature of the string that holds those moments together in fervent passion and endless imagination, creating an illusionary string that prevents me from the sensate-only experience of this moment as it is happening. The string that binds the feeling experience of life’s moments together as if ‘set in concrete’ needs to be disintegrated – ego and soul need to be both extinguished – in order to experience the exquisiteness of moment by moment, un-stringed, unhinged, ever now, ever fresh. While this string, the instinctual identity, is still intact, the NOW that is experienced can only be of a feeling nature. The actual world can only become apparent with the extinction of being or, in a pure consciousness experience, with the temporary absence of the self.

As for ‘humans want to take a journey ... through relationship ...’ – it has been the longing for a successful, peaceful, intimate, sensual and tangible relationship that motivated me to search for a peace that is applicable in the world of people, things and events and not only in the fantasy of my mind. What is a peace or a silence worth if it is only possible when alone or with like-minded people? Spiritual search offers pseudo-solutions by missing the main event, calling life – living and working with people, scientifically exploring human nature, having sensate fun – a ‘journey’ to pass through while proposing that the real event is finding an ‘inner’ transcended peace, a ‘conscious’ death, dis-identifying from life and an improvement of the soul for a better start in the next life.

Stillness is there the moment one turns the machine off but this machine is not the thinking mind as the Eastern religious teachings try to make us believe, but the machine is the feelings and emotions arising from the animal instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Once one turns off this instinctual programming, extinguishes one’s very being, self-immolates ... there is stillness all around for it is the nature of the infinitude of the physical universe.

28.4.2000

To continue our discussion –

RESPONDENT: From this awareness of being conscious NOW, there is acceptance and appropriate response to whatever presents itself and no need for attack or defence. I do not have a sense of ‘knowing’ anything and my desire to ‘figure it all out’ has fallen away, but in the quietness that remains there is deep peace. I have the distinct impression that there is nowhere to ‘go’ and nothing to ‘do’ to realize the Truth of Being.

VINEETO: Yep, to realize ‘the Truth of Being’ there is nowhere to go but in, because it is our very instinctual nature. As all the old wise men have said since millennia one has but to follow one’s feeling, stop thinking sensibly and be ‘who one has always been’ – which is nothing other than a human being genetically programmed with instinctual passions. Of course, the ancient wise men left the last essential bit out because nobody knew about instincts at the time. The only thing one has to do is to identify with the good instincts while transcending and sublimating the bad instincts – thus the feeling of ‘nowhere to go and nothing to do to realize the Truth of Being’.

It’s just that sublimating and transcending instinctual passions by emotionally disidentifying from the world is not the same as extinguishing them and with them one’s very being, in fact, it is 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Unless fear and aggression, nurture and desire are completely eliminated, peace on earth in everyday life with people-as-they-are is not possible. When push comes to shove, all religious and spiritual people and their leaders have proven to have bleed-throughs and flair ups of ‘bad’ instinctual passions. Shifting to the good emotions has not stopped people from murdering, raping, blaming, controlling, grabbing, fighting, suiciding and torturing. Some chosen few have been mad enough to completely dissociate from their flesh-and-blood body, their perception of the corporeal world and their fellow human beings and have moved into a timeless spaceless silence. But that does not change the wars, murders and child abuses anywhere in the world, disagreements about whose belief is the ‘true’ belief and whose ‘Truth of Being’ is the right Truth, only gives their followers something to fight about. Peace on earth is not on the spiritual agenda and it has never been. The East, the cradle of spiritual teachings, is in no way a more peaceful place than the West.

RESPONDENT: This has resulted in my life becoming very ordinary and sometimes almost ‘boring’. I noticed that this boredom was one thing I was particularly afraid of ... it was very uncomfortable. For some reason I did not try to escape or fill it in with drama or adventure and it just kept deepening into peace. Perhaps it is the peace that awaits our discarding of all the false layers of conditioning and belief structures... or perhaps It can just open up right where we are, in the midst of our condition, whatever it may be. There does not seem to be any cause that I can discern. It just Is. This is why I am having the urge to question any division or stepping away into the duality of cause and effect.

VINEETO: You seem to be happy with the results of your search and I can see that after 30 years of spiritual search you would not want to start looking at something new again. For me, just so many things didn’t add up – relationship was one issue, sex another, not being able to live ‘meditatively’ ie undisturbed in the market place a third, and much of the teachings, despite faith and devotion just did not make sense. On top of it, I found that I had to avoid watching TV or reading the news, because the suffering all around is simply horrendous.

With all those questions still running, one night, upon sincere, almost torturous inquiry, I popped through the clouds of belief itself and – oh shit! – there I found a world that I had never seen before, right under my very nose, a world that is self-evident without anybody believing anything – the actual world.

Previous to this experience, I had wandered off into the vast spaces of my imagination, exploring the ‘psychic world’, as I tried to make sense of the diametrically opposed options that had presented themselves in my life. I seemed to perceive my questions in a wider context and had intense sensations about pains and processes in different parts of my body. Watching the people around me I had a deeper understanding of their behaviour and how they related to each other. I could even see the ‘energy-lines’ between the people relating to each other. Each presented a protective shield of a particular personal image, and this ‘image’ would act and operate, relating to the others while the actual, fearful and aggressive person remained hidden.

At the same time that I was watching this I was distinctly aware of my thinking and my journeying in this magical ‘inner’ world. At one stage I even experienced what it is to be mad. I understood the temptation of staying forever in an easy, illusory world of psychedelic wonders, where the mad person is the magician in his own world enjoying the power and safety of his dream. But anybody who dares to question this dream has to be considered a deadly enemy. However, I was always aware that I had the choice to stay in this imaginary world or not.

When I tried to tell Peter about my experiences and insights his simple response gave me quite a shock. ‘But all this is just inside your mind, it is simply your own interpretation, it may appear to be real, but it is not actual.’ Yes, that was true. I could easily see that I was inside the ‘mind’, roaming about in the different chambers of my assembled beliefs-systems, trying to find the one that was ‘right’ and ‘true’ – while in fact, I was just having a little grander and unusually complex perception of this huge labyrinth of thoughts and feelings! I could see more of my ideas or concepts and other people’s ideas, but they were simply ideas and feelings. None of them had any relevance to the actuality of the physical world!

In seeing the fact, everything stood still and the whole construct of beliefs suddenly disappeared. Then, for the first time in all my years of the spiritual search, I experienced several hours outside of the ‘psychic world’. Being outside, I could see that this ‘world’ is a huge, all-encompassing construct, created and held in place by the dreams, beliefs, bonds, power-battles, emotions and different spiritual ideas of all of humanity. Everyone is part of it, weaving and reproducing bits of this ‘psychic carpet’. The more people believe in one particular version the more that version becomes ‘real’ or ‘true’. Intuitive or ‘psychic’ people are simply a little better acquainted with the rules and occurrences of this ‘other-world’. It is never actual though, because it relies on constant re-creation through imagination and belief. The moment people cease to believe in a particular religion, idea or value, that very concept eventually disappears from the earth. Actual, on the contrary, is what is already here without anybody applying a feeling, an interpretation, a belief or any other ‘psychic effort’. It is simply here, visual, tangible, audible and tastable.

That night I had stuck my head beyond the blanket of beliefs – including good and bad, right and wrong, love and evil. In the first moments, with the ‘psychic world’ disappearing, this new place was stark, black, scary, a big hole and a bottomless abyss. Suddenly the ground under my feet wavered as the very existence of beliefs ceased.

You see, No 5, since that night, nothing was ever the same again. Once seen through a belief, one cannot start believing again. There were many scary days to follow as I dismantled every single one of my cherished beliefs but it brought me here, into this thriving, alive, sparkling, delightful, sensuous, overflowing and magnificent actuality of living each moment as it is happening, ever fresh and never the same twice.

RESPONDENT: I am enjoying this list very much. We all see and experience the same thing differently!

It is very interesting.

VINEETO: Yes, I enjoy our conversation too knowing that we not all see and experience the same thing. The actual world and the spiritual world are 180 degrees apart.

It is a fascinating business to be a pioneer.

3.5.2000

RESPONDENT: Hi Vineeto, Well here we go again! We are not really meeting in our dialogue due to misinterpretation. I will try to clarify.

VINEETO: You may insist to call this ‘not really meeting’ a mere mis-interpretation – on my side, of course – whilst I maintain that the actual freedom from the human condition of malice and sorrow, that I am talking about, lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to all spiritual beliefs. In other words, everybody has got it 180 degrees wrong.

In a pure consciousness experience (PCE) where the complete self, both who we think and feel we are, is temporarily absent one can clearly see that the spiritual world is merely a product of the vivid and passionate imagination, fuelled by the primitive instinctual passions. I had pursued the spiritual path for 17 years with enthusiastic and loyal devotion and only now, by abandoning the spiritual belief-system and by diligent and persistent examination of all beliefs and feelings, am I able to see through it and step out of this illusory psychic world. The first major break-through experience of this stepping out of the spiritual world I have described to you in my last post. Vis:

In seeing the fact, everything stood still and the whole construct of beliefs suddenly disappeared. Then, for the first time in all my years of the spiritual search, I experienced several hours outside of the ‘psychic world’. Being outside, I could see that this ‘world’ is a huge, all-encompassing construct, created and held in place by the dreams, beliefs, bonds, power-battles, emotions and different spiritual ideas of all of humanity.

To avoid continuing the tis/ tisn’t style of this conversation I will outline a number of statements outlining the third alternative. Should your experience match all those points without exception, then we know that we are talking about the same thing. This test should settle the question of ‘misinterpretation’ very easily.

Richard:

• Time and space and form are actual (the timeless, spaceless and formless reality is a dream).
• This physical universe is infinite and eternal (boundless and limitless).
• This physical universe is beginningless and endless (unborn and undying).
• This physical universe is the source of human life (matter gives rise to consciousness).
• One is this flesh and blood body only.
• Physical death is the end, finish: mortality.
• The soul (by whatever name) is an illusion.
• Based on facts substantiated by rigorous empirical objectivity (individualistic commonality).
• Peace-on-earth is possible as this flesh and blood body.
• Suffering is eliminated (via immolation).
• Both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul are extinguished.
• Any ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ dichotomy is not actual.
• Love and compassion only exist as long as malice and sorrow exists (both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ become extinct).
• The facts are the key to success and are to be sensately found in the actual.
• A sensate-feeling experience (sensation only) empirically experienced as a body-mind only (human consciousness).
• A temporary pure consciousness experience (PCE) such as a peak experience provides a glimpse of one’s actual destiny.
• By being born a separative ‘self’ one lives in a painful reality (being detached from actuality) and sensuousness ends this detachment with the resultant apperception revealing the actual world.
• Total elimination of the rudimentary ‘self’ born of the instinctual survival passions (due to the altruism inherent in the survival instincts).
• Belief, faith, trust and hope play no part.
• Intuition, imagination, visualisation, prescience, clairvoyance, telepathy and divination are non-existent in actual freedom.
• Actual freedom is consistent: it is neither contradictory nor hypocritical.
• Through methodical moment-to-moment examination of feeling-fed beliefs disguised as ‘truths’ there is incremental success.
• Autonomy and independence (through altruistic ‘self’-sacrifice) are the hallmarks of actual freedom.
• Gratitude is a hindrance on the path to an actual freedom.
• Dignity is both the means to the end and the end in actual freedom. excerpt from Richard’s Article, 180 opposite

RESPONDENT: I have the distinct impression that there is nowhere to ‘go’ and nothing to ‘do’ to realize the Truth of Being

VINEETO: The only thing one has to do is to identify with the good instincts while transcending and sublimating the bad instincts – thus the feeling of ‘nowhere to go and nothing to do to realize the Truth of Being’.

It’s just that sublimating and transcending instinctual passions by emotionally dis-identifying from the world is not the same as extinguishing them and with them one’s very being, in fact, it is 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

RESPONDENT: I am not talking about identifying, transcending or sublimating.

I am in no way interested in sublimating or transcending instinctual passions by emotionally dis-identifying from the world or by extinguishing them. I am not speaking of shifting to good emotions or avoiding ‘bad’ emotions, and I am certainly not speaking about complete disassociation from the flesh-and-blood body. If anything, I am more alive in the body than ever before, definitely grounded in my present and very real experience... open, vulnerable and ready to respond.

VINEETO: OK, if you do neither dis-identify nor transcend nor sublimate, what is it then that you do with your instinctual passions when they arise. What do you do when you get irritated, annoyed, bored, lacklustre, dissatisfied, angry, sad, terrified, loving euphoric, compassionate, lonely, needy, or tense? Are you saying that by ‘ doing nothing ’ those instinctual passions disappear of their own accord, never to return again?

The other question I have is about being ‘vulnerable’. Who is it that is vulnerable, who can be hurt or wounded? According to the Oxford Dictionary vulnerable means:

2 Able to be wounded; (of a person) able to be physically or emotionally hurt; liable to damage or harm, esp. from aggression or attack, assailable. Oxford Dictionary

In a pure consciousness experience, with the self in temporarily abeyance, there is nobody to be hurt or emotionally wounded, there is no psychic entity to affectively feel anything, be it good, open, vulnerable, surrendered or present. From these experiences of purity and perfection I glean my intent and direction to attempt to live that state 24h a day, every day.

*

VINEETO: At the same time that I was watching this I was distinctly aware of my thinking and my journeying in this magical ‘inner’ world. At one stage I even experienced what it is to be mad. I understood the temptation of staying forever in an easy, illusory world of psychedelic wonders, where the mad person is the magician in his own world enjoying the power and safety of his dream. But anybody who dares to question this dream has to be considered a deadly enemy. However, I was always aware that I had the choice to stay in this imaginary world or not.

When I tried to tell Peter about my experiences and insights his simple response gave me quite a shock. ‘But all this is just inside your mind, it is simply your own interpretation, it may appear to be real, but it is not actual.’ Yes, that was true. I could easily see that I was inside the ‘mind’, roaming about in the different chambers of my assembled beliefs-systems, trying to find the one that was ‘right’ and ‘true’ – while in fact, I was just having a little grander and unusually complex perception of this huge labyrinth of thoughts and feelings! I could see more of my ideas or concepts and other people’s ideas, but they were simply ideas and feelings. None of them had any relevance to the actuality of the physical world!

In seeing the fact, everything stood still and the whole construct of beliefs suddenly disappeared. Then, for the first time in all my years of the spiritual search, I experienced several hours outside of the ‘psychic world’. Being outside, I could see that this ‘world’ is a huge, all-encompassing construct, created and held in place by the dreams, beliefs, bonds, power-battles, emotions and different spiritual ideas of all of humanity. Everyone is part of it, weaving and reproducing bits of this ‘psychic carpet’.

RESPONDENT: In regards to your description of your psychic nightmare I agree with Peter here. All the madness is inside the mind. Human beings are all walking around in a cloud of mental noise and madness.

VINEETO: You seem to have conveniently overlooked that I was describing a pure consciousness experience, after I stepped out of the ‘psychic nightmare’:

[Vineeto]: In seeing the fact, everything stood still and the whole construct of beliefs suddenly disappeared. Then, for the first time in all my years of the spiritual search, I experienced several hours outside of the ‘psychic world’. [endquote].

A pure consciousness experience is when fear, generated by the instinctual programmed self, stops and is not replaced by any other feeling, be they bliss, gratitude, being present, Grace, Oneness, Truth, Love, Compassion, ‘Surrender’, Beauty or Wholeness. Simply because the self is temporarily absent, because all feelings have ceased, one is able to experience the magnificence, magic and abundance of the actuality of it all. One then is the universe experiencing itself as a flesh-and-blood sensate and reflective human being. There is no sense of ‘being’ whatsoever. There is only this actual world and the overlaying real world and spiritual world of feelings, imaginations and instinctual passions can clearly been seen for what it is – a passionate illusion.

From the self-less perspective of a PCE, the self can be seen, labelled, explored and discriminated as the overlaying chemical-induced self-centred structure that encapsulates each human being in a shell of survival fear and the ensuing instinctual passions and emotions. In these moments one can thoroughly understand what one’s psychic structure consists of – an intricate web of conditioning, feelings, beliefs and fervent passions complete with vivid imagination.

The ‘madness’ that everyone considers to be only ‘in the mind’ is, in fact, both in the mind and in the heart. This ‘madness’   has its source in the animal instinctual passions, seated in the ancient brain, the amygdala, which floods the brain with chemicals producing passionate thoughts, fervent imagination, desperate beliefs and overwhelming emotions. At the very core, these instinctual passions are experienced either as intense fear, lust to kill and universal sorrow – the core of the ‘bad’ instincts – or as the ‘Truth of Being’, as gratitude to a ‘greater whole’ and as ‘Oneness’ – the core of the ‘good’ instincts.

The solution that Eastern religion is proposing is to try and escape this genetically inherited structure by overlaying it with a passionate belief that I am not this (the real world’s experience of malice and sorrow), but That (the spiritual other-world’s reality of Beauty, Compassion, Oneness, Surrender, inner Peace and Love Agape. However, this ‘cover-up’ doesn’t cut the root of the instinctual passions, it doesn’t eliminate the genetic animal programming. If one is honest sincere and thorough in one’s quest for purity one finds the diabolic side of the instinctual passions still lurking about underneath this ‘Truth of Being’ and ‘Stillness and Surrender’ – as you have previously described your experience. Reading about the lives of enlightened masters you can find bleed-throughs and outbreaks of anger and sadness.

*

RESPONDENT: But rather than trying to figure out all the self-created madness and judging or condemning others for their views, we can accept the unconsciousness when it appears and remain focussed and conscious ourselves. Fighting is what the ego loves. Saying ‘yes’ to whatever appears on the inner or outer fields of our experience and then watching as the correct response occurs spontaneously through the clarity of awareness is what I am experiencing.

VINEETO: I am not ‘condemning others for their views’, I am presenting a scientific and experientially verified third alternative to being morally ‘good’ or spiritually ‘beyond it all’.

It is a common belief, particular in spiritual circles, that human beings are born innocent, ‘tabula rasa’, a clean slate, without any malice and sorrow, and that all evil – fear, anger, sadness – is only created by bad treatment or ‘misunderstandings’ in our childhood years called conditioning – or maybe by ‘memories’ of bad past lives. The very premise of that belief is factually wrong.

Peter: All sentient beings are born with certain distinguishing instinctual passions, the main ones being fear, aggression, nurture and desire. They are blind nature’s rather clumsy software package designed to ensure the survival of the species. These species-specific instinctual survival passions were absolutely essential in the primitive days of free-roaming man-eating animals, rampant disease and high infant mortality and yet despite the fact that the species has not only survived but flourished, these same instinctual survival passions have transformed into a personal psychological and psychic ‘will to survive’. Thus it is that currently over 6 billion humans are still actively involved in a grim and desperate battle for survival against their fellow human beings – a senseless ongoing competitive battle solely fuelled by the brutish animal instinctual passions. Introduction to Actual Freedom, The Human Condition

So on the premise that we are not born innocent but with a full set of animal survival instincts it becomes clear that ‘saying ‘yes’ to whatever appears on the inner and outer fields’ is not going to do the trick of ridding myself from this instinctual programming. ‘Saying yes’ is exactly the technique designed to ‘sublimating or transcending instinctual passions by emotionally disidentifying’ even if you say that you are not interested in doing so. How can you say ‘yes’ to murder, rape, suicide, war, child abuse, chemical weapons, corruption, poverty, torture and domestic violence without distancing yourself? How can you say ‘yes’ to what human beings do to other human beings?

The approach of Buddhist religion and all Eastern spiritual practices is to remove the self from the source of trouble which at the same time removes one from the experience of the sensuousness of being alive. Spiritualism moves away from sensate and affective feelings in order to not be here while I as an actualist question and eliminate affective feelings because they prevent me from being here, being the senses-only, the flesh-and-blood body only, experiencing the delight of being alive in this actual perfect abundant magical world.

Spiritualists are exercising a technique to remove themselves, to dis-identify and finally to dissociate from either unwanted feelings and emotions, implying that there is a true self, which one wants to keep and which says ‘yes’ to the wanted feelings. In actualism, good and bad emotions are experienced by neither repressing nor expressing, neither pushing nor grasping and thus one is able to examine it in reflective contemplation so as to explore the very nature of this emotion. One does not remove the self from the emotion but whittles away at the self which is the very program producing the emotion in the first place. This process, if undertaken diligently and persistently, will inevitably lead to self-immolation.

As you can see, the third alternative lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to all religious practice and belief.

RESPONDENT: I am speaking of being alive, awake, present and clear...right here, right now in the very actual world.

VINEETO: See, I don’t doubt that you have found what you were looking for and believe that you have arrived where you wanted to arrive and I have no doubt at all that your experiences are real and convincing for I have had many spiritual experiences myself.

From what you write I know that we are not talking of the same experiences – I talk of the actual world, as in palpable, tangible, tactile, corporeal, physical and material. The world which you are experiencing includes ‘Truth of Being’, ‘Presence’, ‘Isness’ ‘openness’, ‘distinct impression’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘acceptance’ and ‘surrender’. Those terms indicate feeling, intuition, trust and the belief in something greater than yourself that you surrender to, feel its presence and accept its terms.

Those two worlds will never meet. One can only abandon one in order to live in the other.

I have headed off in the opposite direction to tackle the illusion of darkness and Evil rather than settle for transcendence into Truth and God. The only reason I was able to do this was because I acknowledged the failure of any form of ‘saying yes’ and ‘watching’ to bring peace, on this earth, in this lifetime ... and I found something that works in that it confronts and eliminates all illusion.

My choice is the spirit-less sensuous physical world and my aim to abandon anything that is not perceivable by the senses ie. all beliefs, feelings, emotions – the very self. This actual world has neither Presence nor Being and there is clearly nothing that survives my physical death.

If you can be content with the fact that there is a markedly different third alternative on offer and you don’t want to investigate it, then we can call it a completed game. Otherwise ... your turn.

It has been a great pleasure writing to you.