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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List with Gary
VINEETO: Hi Gary, You wrote to No 46 some time ago – GARY: It hardly seems necessary to go into the specifics to a greater extent or to re-invent the wheel. But suffice it to say that the essence of the method is to thoroughly examine and investigate everything that gets in the way of being happy and harmless. This includes every affective experience, emotion, feeling, and belief. Just to give an example: in the morning I was on the way to work and my partner, in saying ‘goodbye’ to me, stated ‘I love you’ and lightly caressed my hand. In response to this lightly spoken endearment, I experienced a feeling of sadness mingled with regret. The feeling hit me between the eyes, so to speak, and I was interested to look into that feeling and see what I could find out about it, as it would reveal much about ‘me’. One of the things that I came up with was the realization that love in any form is always accompanied by sorrow and sadness, as for instance when love is lost. I think I also experienced a momentary feeling of pity for my partner whose expressions of ‘love’ to me are usually not reciprocated, perhaps in they are in tender expressions of caring but certainly not in word, as I never speak the ‘love’ word anymore. I think there was an irrational belief operating in me at the time that went something like this: ‘What kind of partner are you after all – you should be telling your partner that you love her’. One could easily substitute any number of words in the place of ‘partner’ such as ‘son’, ‘daughter’, ‘friend’, ‘co-worker’, etc. The irrational belief that I ‘should’ be expressing love to these people caused me to feel momentary sadness, regret, and guilt. VINEETO: The longer I observe how I am in relation to other people, the more I find that whenever another person evokes an affective reaction in me then there is some kind of invisible thread or emotional hook also present on my side. I remember a visit from a close relative and how at first I felt guilty for not returning the love, affection and excitement that was offered to me. It was as if a web of invisible, yet sticky vibes was cast out to catch me into feeling loyal to and connected with her. These bonding strings might well be presented as a generous offer of love or friendship, yet – often unbeknownst to the person himself or herself – this offer always contains a request for returned feelings, a demand for support and an obligation for further loyalty. In other words, love is never unconditional, it is always given with conditions and it is only received subject to conditions. In the situation with my relative I was able after a while to understand the nature and source of my guilt by observation and investigation and then, by being free of my feelings of guilt I was able to give her my full attention and care. While we spent time together we were able to talk as fellow human beings, swap stories about how each experiences life and what each had found out so far about the business of being a human being. As for a one-to-one man-woman relationship, I found that the sorrow that you described as being associated with love is due to the inevitable expectation of returned favours and feelings. Love by its very nature cannot stand by itself. Love always needs a giver and a receiver, someone who loves and someone who is eager to be loved. In my ‘past-life’ love-relationships, my dreams of how I wanted to live life were automatically intertwined with the man I loved – as a woman I gave him the responsibility for my happiness and I expected him to do the same. (Then I am also jealously guarding that he is not happy without me!) Soon after I met Peter I found it vital to investigate this dream because it caused me to be miserable whenever we were apart and made my life difficult whenever we were together. When I looked into the love-dream that I had cherished all my life, I was faced with a rather shocking choice – either keep my dream and my identity as a woman and a lover and remain struggling, frustrated and unhappy, or drop all my high-flying ideas and ideals, grow up and take responsibility for my own life. This also meant that I had to put my becoming free from the human condition as number one on my laundry list – above my relationship. That very choice made me not only autonomous for the first time in my life, it also released Peter from the burden of ‘my’ unfulfillable expectations and emotional needs. Nobody else is responsible for my becoming free and nobody is standing in the way of my becoming free. * VINEETO: There was also another part of your post that I can well relate to. You wrote – GARY: I myself have been beset by bouts of anger and aggression which are most disturbing. When this happens, I tend to go through periods where I castigate myself, doubting the method, but then invariably rally and re-commit myself to the goal of self-immolation. It is not an easy thing to rid oneself of malice and sorrow. If I practice the Actualism method diligently, it seems like I invariably run up against pockets of malice deep in the bowels of ‘me’ that are still there, lurking in the shadows. It doesn’t mean that the method doesn’t work, and it doesn’t mean that I am misapplying the method. I think in some ways it is evidence that the method is working because these pockets of malice and sorrow then become available for an intelligent investigation. Clinging to malice and sorrow is not the way I want to live. VINEETO: I also occasionally discover pockets of anger, sorrow and fear, sometimes triggered by what I watch on television but mostly occurring for no particular reason at all. The onset of menopause with its sporadic hormonally triggered emotional spurts is yet another great opportunity to observe bouts of intense feelings that don’t have any other rhyme or reason than to show that ‘I’ am still around. For me attacks of anger or grumpiness pass quickest, whereas sorrow can hang around longer sometimes. Just the other day I had trouble shaking off a deep sadness about the senseless slaughter between human beings, past and present alike and the fact that there is no end in sight. I was reminded of a conversation I had with Richard three years ago on the topic of ‘my’ connection with humanity that runs bone-marrow-deep. He wrote –
‘Is one really going to abandon that which produced one …?’ My occasional bouts of intense feelings give evidence that I have not yet abandoned ‘that which produced me’ but I can also see that I have come a long way since I started on the path to freedom. The more experience I gather the more it becomes clear that belonging to humanity through love and fear, malice and sorrow, is not the ‘way I want to spend my life’, as you say.
VINEETO: In October of last year you wrote to me on the topic of relationships. At the time I had nothing much to add to what I had already written, so I left it at that. However, some incidents in the last few weeks have given me an opportunity to gain some more insight into how I am in relation to other people, so I have taken up the thread of our conversation. You wrote at the time – * VINEETO: The longer I observe how I am in relation to other people, the more I find that whenever another person evokes an affective reaction in me then there is some kind of invisible thread or emotional hook also present on my side. I remember a visit from a close relative and how at first I felt guilty for not returning the love, affection and excitement that was offered to me. It was as if a web of invisible, yet sticky vibes was cast out to catch me into feeling loyal to and connected with her. These bonding strings might well be presented as a generous offer of love or friendship, yet – often unbeknownst to the person himself or herself – this offer always contains a request for returned feelings, a demand for support and an obligation for further loyalty. In other words, love is never unconditional, it is always given with conditions and it is only received subject to conditions. GARY: This is an important observation you are making, as you are pointing not only to the feeling on your side but also the reciprocal ‘hook’ evoked by another person in you. I have seldom thought of it that way, but of course a relationship is a complex emotional attachment between two or more people, with feelings reciprocated among and between the participants to the relationship. Perhaps the crucial thing is not the specific feeling involved but the fact that an emotional connection of some kind has been made. It may be a feeling of ‘friendship’ or it may be a feeling of passionate ‘love’ but nevertheless an ‘affective reaction’ (as you described it) has taken place and an emotional relationship of sorts, perhaps even rudimentary, has been formed. It has also struck me how little this ‘relationship’ has to do with the facts of a situation and how much it has to do with fantasies and imaginings of various sorts. This is particularly clear in marital unions, which are often formed for the most neurotic of reasons. But even in everyday forming of friendships, you might say, between people, there is a strong dose of imagination involved in one’s making of a friend, because I am often forming an image of the person I am in friendship with and am not relating to the actual flesh-and-blood person. I also realized, somewhat after I responded to No 38’s post to me on the same topic, what an enormous step it is to question and investigate these relationships, and in particular the type of ‘love’ relationship that he was talking to me about. For me to tell him, and this list, that the word ‘love’ is not something I tell my partner is tantamount to proclaiming myself to be loveless, something regarded perhaps as a fate worse than death. However, it is impossible for me to imagine being unmoved to some degree by the syrupy feelings of warm affection, nurture, and what is commonly called ‘love’, in the same way that it is impossible for me to imagine what it would be like to live the rest of my life never ever getting angry or annoyed again. VINEETO: Nowadays I hardly notice ‘me’ as an affective identity interfering whenever I relate to people in day-to-day affairs. When I go out to work or chat with the neighbours I am pleasantly anonymous, nobody really knows what I think or feel about life and the universe, and I am simply what I am and what I do – a fellow human being chatting about the garden, a bookkeeper, a customer standing in the queue in the post office or being served at a coffee shop. It therefore came as somewhat of a surprise when I recently found an emotional ‘hook’ in my living together with Peter. I was contemplating about what exactly is standing in the way of ‘self’-immolation and found a bit of an affective identity in action – the ‘me’ who cherished the cozy corner I had in living together peacefully and delightfully. ‘I’ as an identity feel noticed and understood with Peter, he knows the happy ‘me’, the quizzing ‘me’, the puzzled ‘me’, the impatient ‘me’, he knows about ‘my’ aims and fears, ‘my’ quirks and wonderings. And this cozy relationship will certainly cease to be when I become free because then ‘I’ who is doing the relating will cease to be. I explored this particular ‘hook’ on which my identity hung at first tentatively, then more boldly, knowing well that at any time I could discover the core of it and be lost. As part of this investigation I chatted to Peter about my explorations and a few days later to Richard, just to make sure that I would not succumb to the temptation of ‘forgetting’ a topic so close to the bone. My persistent inquiry triggered a pure consciousness experience and with astounding clarity I experienced myself as completely separate from Peter, two flesh-and-blood human beings not at all affectively or psychically connected in any way. It was utterly amazing and magical that two complete strangers – as in not psychically connected – get to interact with each other in utter intimacy. In such intimacy there is no ‘me’ trying to pull the strings, no ‘me’ thinking or feeling about ‘me’ in relationship to the other, and a fresh, unmediated and direct experiencing happens on its own accord. This PCE confirmed that my holding onto a cozy relationship was nevertheless my identity in action. Although my relationship with Peter is founded on felicitous feelings only and I live with him in perfect peace and harmony, I clearly could see that ‘I’ as an identity was preventing something far, far superior to any psychic or psychological connection – an exquisitely delightful direct intimacy with a fellow human being. A couple of days later, when I checked what was left of ‘my’ relationship to Peter, I realized that not only had I lost any sense of my former affective connectedness but also my feelings of competition and comparison had disappeared. I had always regarded Peter as the better and older actualist and the better and more accurate writer and now I found such emotionally-charged comparisons had completely vanished. I also discovered that this entailed that I no longer feel obliged to respectfully wait until he becomes free before I dare the final jump. Now that I don’t relegate myself to a slot in an imaginary queue, nobody can prevent me from becoming free from the human condition. * VINEETO: The second event that shed some light on how I relate to other people happened when I met a former acquaintance from my spiritual era. In the course of our conversation she asked what I have been doing with my life and, knowing she was a fervent spiritual believer, I first attempted to warn her by saying that because I have become a heretic and a traitor I am very cautious nowadays about telling my story so as to not disturb other people’s dearly held beliefs. Nevertheless she insisted, so I told a bit of my story of how I got involved with actualism. As I began to describe my first major PCE, the woman quickly said she knew what I am talking about – this was enlightenment. When I tried to explain the difference between a spiritual experience and a pure consciousness experience I was soon at a loss for words because whatever words I used to describe the quality of a PCE, she insisted that this was exactly how she experienced the world in her outstanding moments of being at one with the Whole, filled with Emptiness and experiencing the Consciousness that connects everything. As I was familiar with this spiritual ‘take over’ from other conversations, her claiming my descriptions of the actual world as being the same as her spiritual experience came as no surprise to me. What somehow surprised me, however, was that I was completely unruffled by this closing of the door to the possibility of something new as I had sometimes been in the past. In fact I enjoyed our discussion immensely. Not only did I know it was not my choice of words that caused her ‘misunderstanding’ but I was also certain about the fact that, despite all her assertions that our differences were only a matter of semantics, we were talking about two diametrically opposite worlds. I was talking about the experience of being what I am, this flesh-and-blood body devoid of ‘me’ as experienced in a PCE, while she was talking about who she felt herself to truly be – a passionate Being, feeling blissful Unity and Oneness. As you have experienced yourself in a PCE, once one knows the actual world by direct experience, the lovey-dovey bliss of spiritual Unity with an imaginary Source holds no attraction at all. This conversation also confirmed that unless someone is sufficiently discontent with their life as it is, their interpretation of what is on offer in actualism will always be inhibited by the framework of their familiar spiritual teachings. * VINEETO: Lastly I recently made an observation that relates to the last part of your letter – GARY: As I am not Actually Free, I can only imagine such a result. However, most definite steps have been taken in terms of demolishing the social identity, a large part of which consists of membership in certain self-protective groupings of one sort or another, and identifying with others based on certain compatible attributes. VINEETO: One of the most important aspects of ‘membership in certain self-protective groupings’ is the social insistence and instinctual craving to belong to a particular group, tribe or nation. The other day I watched a made-for-TV documentary about the siege of Stalingrad by the Germans in WW II, when the Germans almost conquered the city and then got knocked back and enclosed in a surprising counterattack. Both Russian and German survivors of the siege were interviewed and they gave first-hand accounts of tremendous hardship and destitution, of fighting in freezing conditions with meagre supplies, of human beings desperately fighting other human beings in the bombed out rubble of the city. What was new to me from the previous times when I had watched similar reports was that this time I was neither taking sides for ‘my countrymen’ against the enemy nor did I form moral judgements for the poor Russians fighting against the bad Nazis. I was also neither upset nor sad about the enormous suffering inflicted by senseless fighting. I simply listened to this report of the human condition in action and followed with interest the sense that some of the men, fellow human beings, had made of the experiences they went through. I was neither dissociated from the violence as I had tried to be in my spiritual days nor did I associate with the suffering of the people stuck in the desolation and cruelty of war as I had done so many times before. I could watch the report and know for a fact that it is possible to stop being a member of a squabbling and fighting humanity – I can escape my programmed fate, for moments at first and soon forever. Nice to chat again, Gary.
VINEETO: Nowadays I hardly notice ‘me’ as an affective identity interfering whenever I relate to people in day-to-day affairs. When I go out to work or chat with the neighbours I am pleasantly anonymous, nobody really knows what I think or feel about life and the universe, and I am simply what I am and what I do – a fellow human being chatting about the garden, a bookkeeper, a customer standing in the queue in the post office or being served at a coffee shop. GARY: This pleasant anonymity is delightful. It is release from obligations, affiliations, and identifications. I come and go with complete ease, whether about town, in the food store, at work, or in the neighbourhood, freed from anxieties about who I am going to meet, what they might think of me, etc. I am ‘another Bozo on the bus’ so to speak, a phrase used by Albert Ellis. With identity effectively diminished, although not eliminated in entirety, there is not that evaluation and comparison with others that stems from the social identity. VINEETO: Yes, and not only that – my instinctual reactions to previously dangerous or fearful encounters have also greatly diminished and if they should occur for some reason, I can observe them, analyze them if necessary, and keep my hands in my pocket until the impassioned inner assault is over. * VINEETO: It therefore came as somewhat of a surprise when I recently found an emotional ‘hook’ in my living together with Peter. I was contemplating about what exactly is standing in the way of ‘self’-immolation and found a bit of an affective identity in action – the ‘me’ who cherished the cozy corner I had in living together peacefully and delightfully. ‘I’ as an identity feel noticed and understood with Peter, he knows the happy ‘me’, the quizzing ‘me’, the puzzled ‘me’, the impatient ‘me’, he knows about ‘my’ aims and fears, ‘my’ quirks and wonderings. And this cozy relationship will certainly cease to be when I become free because then ‘I’ who is doing the relating will cease to be. GARY: I had discovered much the same thing a few months ago. I was acutely aware of ‘my’ need to create a cozy nest and cling to my relationship with my partner. My attention seemed to be particularly attracted to the aging process in both she and myself. And I found myself forming a sharp demarcation between being ‘in’ the relationship, and at home, and being ‘out’ there in the ‘Real World’. Connected to this, I discovered morbid fears of growing old and dying, along with anxieties of losing this cozy relationship I was clinging to. I don’t know what triggered all this but it may have been happening around the time that there was so much talk of war with Iraq in the air. I realized that human beings usually all create this comfortable and peaceful corner of reality in their homes as a means of warding off or keeping out the harshness and cruelty of the outside world. This seems to be an instinctive pattern of behaviour, harkening back to the time when our ancestors hunkered in deep caves for protection against predators and other perils of the night. VINEETO: From my own explorations I know that a relationship with a partner has many layers that are worth examining. One of the first issues to be sorted out for me was my female identity – my belonging to the women’s camp as opposed to the men’s club. Part of this female identity was the continuous battle as to who is right and who is wrong – men or women. What I discovered was an unbridgeable gulf between the masculine and feminine version of interpreting the world and that the only way to ensure peace and harmony was to eliminate the gulf, whereas common wisdom has it that the gulf is a given and that one should bridge the gulf with the feeling of love or move closer to the other camp by becoming more feminine or more masculine. Needless to say eliminating the gulf meant eliminating my precious identity as a woman and all that entailed. Once I had sorted out this aspect of my identity, the next obstacle to actualizing peace were my spiritual beliefs and my feelings of loyalty towards the guru and his followers. It soon became obvious to me that as long as I was busy defending my spiritual beliefs, I was again involved in yet another battle as to whose beliefs are right and whose beliefs are wrong. Only by questioning my own beliefs could I begin to find out the facts and thus establish a fact-based common ground for communication. In the same vein, I had to investigate my faith in my much-valued female intuition, for to continue to rely on it prevented me from distinguishing between the fact of the matter and my feelings about the matter. Another issue that quickly emerged was my sexual social conditioning and its instinctual counterpart – the deeply entrenched instinctual patterns that have to do solely with the survival of the human species, the dissemination of the genes of the most successful fighters in the battle for survival. As I became more familiar with the process of investigating my beliefs and feelings, I noticed that each issue was successfully resolved only when I was able to trace my feelings and emotions back to their instinctual core – the primeval survival program that gives rise to all feelings, emotions, moods and vibes in the human animal. This instinctual programming was forged ‘when our ancestors hunkered in deep caves for protection’, but the roots of this programming stretch way back to when the first faunal creatures began to populate the earth. It is therefore essential to dig deep in one’s investigations into one’s own psyche in order to feel, experience and understand the instinctual core of one’s feelings and emotions in order to become free of their insidious grip. * VINEETO: I explored this particular ‘hook’ on which my identity hung at first tentatively, then more boldly, knowing well that at any time I could discover the core of it and be lost. As part of this investigation I chatted to Peter about my explorations and a few days later to Richard, just to make sure that I would not succumb to the temptation of ‘forgetting’ a topic so close to the bone. My persistent inquiry triggered a pure consciousness experience and with astounding clarity I experienced myself as completely separate from Peter, two flesh-and-blood human beings not at all affectively or psychically connected in any way. It was utterly amazing and magical that two complete strangers – as in not psychically connected – get to interact with each other in utter intimacy. In such intimacy there is no ‘me’ trying to pull the strings, no ‘me’ thinking or feeling about ‘me’ in relationship to the other, and a fresh, unmediated and direct experiencing happens on its own accord. GARY: It is most striking when determined and ‘persistent inquiry’ of this sort triggers a PCE. Each time this happens, I see with renewed clarity how the affective and psychic entity prevents and precludes the experiencing of the purity and pristineness of the actual world. VINEETO: Yes, at such times it is often like going deep into a dark tunnel of unexplored passions and then suddenly coming out the other end where everything has always been perfect and benign. It is my ongoing conundrum how not only to weaken but to permanently switch off the magnetic force that inevitably sucks be back into being ‘me’ after a PCE. * VINEETO: This PCE confirmed that my holding onto a cozy relationship was nevertheless my identity in action. Although my relationship with Peter is founded on felicitous feelings only and I live with him in perfect peace and harmony, I clearly could see that ‘I’ as an identity was preventing something far, far superior to any psychic or psychological connection – an exquisitely delightful direct intimacy with a fellow human being. A couple of days later, when I checked what was left of ‘my’ relationship to Peter, I realized that not only had I lost any sense of my former affective connectedness but also my feelings of competition and comparison had disappeared. I had always regarded Peter as the better and older actualist and the better and more accurate writer and now I found such emotionally-charged comparisons had completely vanished. I also discovered that this entailed that I no longer feel obliged to respectfully wait until he becomes free before I dare the final jump. Now that I don’t relegate myself to a slot in an imaginary queue, nobody can prevent me from becoming free from the human condition. GARY: Seeing my identity in action in a similar way to you can fuel my intent, can it not? If I see clearly what is getting in the way of living in peace and harmony, in other words the ‘downside’ to affective feelings, then would that not tend to spur my intent to be free from those very things that get in the way? VINEETO: The comparison between a pure consciousness experience and my every day living
experience certainly spurs me on. Seeing and understanding, over and over, the ‘‘downside’ to affective feelings’, as you say, does
indeed weaken the magnetism of being ‘me’. However, I think that you need to have the firm intent to live in genuine peace, whatever the
price, in order to be motivated to question and explore your identity and find out ‘what is getting in the way of living in peace and
harmony’ . Then the potent combination of sincerity, naiveté and wonder will tip the balance towards making ‘the already always
existing peace-on-earth become apparent’, as Seeing similarities between your social/instinctual identity and others certainly gives you confidence as to the accuracy and veracity of your investigations, but what spurred me on was success in becoming more happy and, even more importantly, more harmless. Experiencing that the actualism practice demonstrably works over a substantial period of time and in all down-to-earth conditions then incrementally turns confidence into surety. GARY: Does the intent lead to a PCE or do you think something else is happening? VINEETO: There are the spontaneous PCEs that everyone experiences at some point in their lives, which I explain as a spontaneous temporary glitch in the instinctual programming that allows the perception to be purely sensate and thinking to be free from any affective influences. These PCEs seem to be more frequent in childhood when the identity is not yet set in concrete, so to speak. However, when a person has a good dose of sincerity, sufficient enough to re-awaken his or her naiveté, then he or she may develop an intent to live the purity, peace and wonder they have experienced in such rare moments of ‘self’-lessness as often as possible – i.e. it takes naiveté to devote one’s life to becoming happy and harmless. Only then, the memory of a spontaneously occurring PCE spurs me on to demolish the elaborate and firmly consolidated edifice of my ‘self’ in order to facilitate pure consciousness experiences happening again and again. You could compare it to living in a securely air-tightened bunker when suddenly a crack appears in the wall and brings in some pure sweet fresh air … and suddenly the whole bunker disappears along with ‘me’. The bunker eventually reassembles itself and the crack is automatically repaired – a process due to the ‘self’-sustaining nature of the social-instinctual programming. It is then up to ‘me’, the one who thinks and feels to be in that bunker, to either wait for another accidental crack – akin to waiting for Godot – or to actively do something so as to experience the magical actual world again. In other words, when the PCE fades, ‘I’ then have to get on with the moment-to-moment business at hand – to demolish the very structure that is ‘me’. A weakened and less ‘self’-centred structure of ‘me’ certainly provides more opportunities for ‘cracks’, i.e. PCEs, but all of ‘me’ needs to be extinguished in order that those ‘cracks’ don’t automatically ‘self’-repair and yet again shut out the splendour and purity of the actual world. GARY: I am also interested in what happens when investigation of particular affective feeling leads to the disappearance of that feeling and what causes it to come back. In my experience, it seems that certain issues come up again and again at times. I keep thinking that because they come back, I must have missed something in my investigation into them. VINEETO: When I thoroughly investigate a particular issue, i.e. when I trace it from a mood to a belief to a moral-ethical value to a deep feeling and then right down to the instinctual passions from where it hinges, then it does indeed disappear once I experience and understand it in its totality. As you described above, your ‘need to create a cozy nest and cling to my relationship with my partner’ could eventually be traced back to an instinctual fear ‘harkening back to the time when our ancestors hunkered in deep caves for protection’. When you experientially understand that your instinctual passions are driving you to mindlessly seek protection and fight off invaders, then that awareness of how ‘you’ tick stops you ‘ticking’ this way … and a bit of ‘self’ dies away. In the case of the issue returning, I often find that it is a different aspect of the issue, a
different triggering mechanism, or a deeper layer to it that then comes to the fore. For instance, my contemplations as to whether there is a God
or not was only conclusively understood when I grasped the fact that in an eternal and infinite universe there is no outside to it where any God
could reside and from where He, She or It could rule. As I have described in However, despite this breakthrough, I still had to examine other aspects of my beliefs in anything at all spiritual, supernatural or divine. At the time, this meant that, whilst my guru was not a divine being and there wasn’t an ‘other-world’, the issue on the table then became my spiritual loyalty and my belief in the truth of his teachings. Despite the fact that I had experienced in a PCE a completely non-spiritual material-only universe that was utterly majestic and magnificent, I still had to whittle away at a lot of aspects of my belief in something other than this physical actual world. In fact, I am still at it because ‘I’ am, by my very nature, non-physical, non-actual and therefore spiritual. In the beginning I also often thought that I had missed something when a feeling or an issue returned but the longer I study the human condition in me, and the more I observe other people, the more I come to understand the perversity and the deeply ingrained structure of ‘me’, the psychological/psychic being that is a direct product of this ancient animal survival program. An estimated one million years of human history – dependent upon somewhat whimsical speculations as to the transition from animal-only to animal-human – is an enormous heritage to unravel. In the light of the extent and density of this programming, when a bit of the million-year old social programming or the billions-of-years old animal instinctual programming resurfaces, I came to understand that I haven’t necessarily missed something, I simply can’t understand it all or take it all in, at once. You could also say that one inevitably misses something the first time round in an investigation because particular issues have many aspects and many layers that are not all apparent at the first examination. GARY: This would seem to have a lot to do with sincerity. If one sincerely wants to get rid of something, then one will put the time and energy into doing just that, rather than settling complacently for something less than total elimination of the troubling issue. VINEETO: Yes, I agree, it has all to do with sincerity. Only I know if it is a fact that I have wiped out a particular aspect of my social identity or if I only believe I have or if I am pretending I have – that’s why actualism is a do-it-myself job only, and that is why nobody can do it for me. * I had better stop here and answer the rest of your post in part 2.
VINEETO: This conversation also confirmed that unless someone is sufficiently discontent with their life as it is, their interpretation of what is on offer in actualism will always be inhibited by the framework of their familiar spiritual teachings. GARY: I think people will interpret and translate new information into their customary cognitive or experiential framework, much as your spiritual acquaintance did. Recently I had mentioned to someone at work something about not wanting to dwell in emotion about something or preferring not to make a fuss of something or other, and the person stated that I was being ‘philosophical’ about it all. I did not think I was being ‘philosophical’ at all, but I merely made a mental note of what the person said and mulled it all over afterward. I think if one is clinging passionately to one’s identity, and nursing malice and sorrow, the only way to approach living in peace and harmony with other humans is to be ‘philosophical’, in other words live one’s life in accordance to some type of philosophy and religious or moral system by which one creates compartments between how one actually feels and how one conducts oneself in society. This is not what actualism is about at all. VINEETO: Yes, I had similar commentaries from people. In a conversation with a neighbour I responded to some environmental doomsday scenarios that were being promoted as ‘most likely to happen’ by saying that most of them are driven by fear rather than fact and was met with the comment ‘you rationalize everything away, don’t you?’ I also liked No 38’s comment when he said –
Not only it is considered ‘a deficiency to actually pay attention’ to one’s emotions and
beliefs in order to diminish and finally eliminate one’s automatic instinctual programming but this very process also sets you on the path to a
condition considered to be a severe mental disorder within the human condition. After Richard succeeded to become free from the human condition, It’s such a hoot … and proof that an actual freedom from the human condition is indeed the departure from all the values of the human condition. Being sane means being able to function reasonably well within the human condition and being sane also entails being sad, lonely, anxious, cynical, grumpy, jealous, righteous, angry and cunning. When ‘I’ cease to exist, not only temporarily in a PCE but permanently as in an actual freedom, then this state will not and can not be categorized as being sane by those who are deeply convinced that the current human condition is the end and the culmination of the evolutionary process. * VINEETO: One of the most important aspects of ‘membership in certain self-protective groupings’ is the social insistence and instinctual craving to belong to a particular group, tribe or nation. The other day I watched a made-for-TV documentary about the siege of Stalingrad by the Germans in WW II, when the Germans almost conquered the city and then got knocked back and enclosed in a surprising counterattack. <snip> I could watch the report and know as a fact that it is possible to stop being a member of a squabbling and fighting humanity – I can escape my programmed fate, for moments at first and soon forever. GARY: I watched a TV program recently on the Robert Scott expedition to Antarctica. Robert Scott is the British explorer who raced to the South Pole, only to find that Raoule Amundsen and his men had gotten there and planted the Norwegian flag there first. In any event, I was fascinated by this story because it illustrated what people will do in service of an ideal, and in service to their country. These men, owing to a tragic mistake and miscalculation of the weather forecast, sacrificed their lives in the most needless fashion, enduring incredible suffering before they died. VINEETO: Peter found a story in the newspaper today that told about a young 23-year-old who had trekked over the ice of the Antarctica in order to be the youngest to have walked to the South pole. When he got there he couldn’t believe his eyes – in the scientific research station at the pole there was a gift shop selling T-shirts with ‘I have been to the South pole’ written on the front. Not only that, his record was broken some months later when someone even younger completed the same trek. The article also told of a Russian icebreaker that was in the business of taking tourists on an US$ 800.00 a day holiday trip along the Antarctic coast. What had once been a perilous adventure for the intrepid explorer has now become an enterprise for paying tourists, similar to the pay-for-a-spot climbing of Mount Everest. GARY: When they reached the part where the men knew finally that they were going to die and in their last letters to their loved ones, I was struck by how they spoke of an afterlife and their souls continuing on after their demise. I did, however, at this point in the program feel some tears jerking inside, so I think there is something there to look into. It was a story about a hero’s journey, in much the same way that people approach going to war, but it was also a story of ruin and waste, of dreams unfulfilled, of hopes shattered. In much the same way that you did, I ‘followed with interest’ this account of a heroic endeavour that went tragic. It really is amazing what humans will do to achieve an imagined immortality ... all the loftiest dreams of humanity as well as the most crushing degradations seem contained in the desire for immortality. VINEETO: Yes, I think you are right – the desire for immortality is woven into most of what humans do. I have come to experience the instinctual part of the drive for immortality – the inbuilt program of fighting for the survival of the species, a genetic programming we naturally share with all animate life. The fact that humans are conscious of this programming has caused a thinking and feeling identity to evolve – ‘I’ and the act of being conscious become one and the same. Given that ‘I’ am an integral product of this instinctual programming whose only purpose is the ongoing procreation and preservation of the species at-any-cost, ‘I’ therefore imagine my ‘self’ to be ongoing and never-ending – i.e. eternal and immortal. As such any hint or innuendo of the fact that what I am is a flesh and blood body only, with a definitive physical beginning – the fertilizing of an egg – and an inevitable physical end – the rotting of the body – is too daunting a thought for most people to even contemplate.
GARY: This pleasant anonymity is delightful. It is release from obligations, affiliations, and identifications. I come and go with complete ease, whether about town, in the food store, at work, or in the neighbourhood, freed from anxieties about who I am going to meet, what they might think of me, etc. I am ‘another Bozo on the bus’ so to speak, a phrase used by Albert Ellis. With identity effectively diminished, although not eliminated in entirety, there is not that evaluation and comparison with others that stems from the social identity. VINEETO: Yes, and not only that – my instinctual reactions to previously dangerous or fearful encounters have also greatly diminished and if they should occur for some reason, I can observe them, analyze them if necessary, and keep my hands in my pocket until the impassioned inner assault is over. GARY: ‘Greatly diminished’ is a good way to describe it and goes for me as well. Driving to work one morning this week, a car quickly backed into the road between two large snow banks, causing me to rapidly swerve. The car narrowly missed barging into me broadside. I muttered some curse words under my breath and experienced some anger. But I must say the reaction itself was curiously diminished and in a moment vanished. Although the swerving, defensive driving was there, naturally in order to avoid a collision, and an accompanying feeling of outrage or indignation for a split second, I am enough practiced at attentiveness to be able to nip these reactions in the bud. VINEETO: Recently Peter and I were talking about this very quality of virtual freedom – after sufficient explorations into the human condition I am now able to ‘nip these reactions in the bud’ shortly after they appear and many events that usually would have triggered an angry or sad response in the past now fail to do so. At my stage of the process the job now is to remember to stop the once essential but now redundant habit of rummaging around in my psyche in order to regurgitate issues that I have already explored, resolved and understood so as to get on with being happy and harmless as soon and as uninterruptedly as possible. Strangely enough that leaves ‘me’ increasingly with nothing to do, which in itself sometimes stirs the uncomfortable feeling of being redundant – a sure sign that my efforts of actively diminishing ‘me’ have had tangible effect. GARY: I recall when I approached the AF list, that I had these questions about ‘self’-defence: whether one would be able to ‘defend themselves’ without having the instinctual passions running ... the familiar adrenalin-fuelled ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction. The persistence of the view that such primitive reactions are necessary in order to physically survive in the world is commonplace. I again found it recently stated in the synopsis of a book on Stress on the Internet, the view that not only is the ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction normal but definitely necessary for survival ... that without it one would not physically survive. I think this needs to be challenged, and the propagation of this view rarely takes into the account the other side of the coin: that the ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction poses a great risk to human survival itself due to the aggressiveness at its core. VINEETO: Yes, history is littered with proof that the ‘fight-or-flight reaction poses a great risk to human survival itself’, particularly when it befalls not only an individual but whole tribes and nations. The enormity of human warfare is brought home to me each time I watch documentaries on the history of the last 50 years, a history I have lived through, which has been a continuous instinctually driven battle for dominance with horrendous and devastating effects. Recently I saw a documentary on the life of the Libyan leader Gaddafi that I found interesting – there was a man with the philosophy and passion of a rebel and freedom fighter, who manoeuvred himself into a position that actually allowed him to turn his dreams into reality. Not only did he succeed in becoming the leader of his country, but he also had enormous financial resources to attempt to put into practice his ideology for changing the world. I recognized many of the political philosophies from my own student rebel days when I was riling against materialistic imperialism, the corruption of the establishment, the domination of the rich over the poor and the ruling class over the working class, and demanding freedom for the masses, redistribution of wealth, equal power to everyone, etc, etc. Gaddafi has been in power long enough to demonstrate how these so - popular - with-the-angry socialistic ideals look like when put into practice. He actively supported various rebel and terrorist movements supplying them with training, money, arms and shelter and established a strictly government-controlled economy that very soon failed to deliver the promised goods. At the same time he promoted a political philosophy that, whilst purportedly encouraging democratic decision-making, was in fact a sure recipe for chaos and incompetence, which in turn kept the people dependant upon his leadership. His life’s work is a brilliant example of the chaos and senseless mayhem that a young rebel flogging an old cause will inflict if he or she imposes their ideas and ideals on others. GARY: It seems like without adrenalin-fuelled reactions, one thinks much more clearly and rationally about sensible courses of action. Considered action to address the situation is then the result. One is then neither anxiously fleeing nor aggressively attacking the perceived locus of the threat. The more attentive I am at recognizing my own life situation and reactions to everyday events, the more I think that the ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction is totally unnecessary. VINEETO: Yes, and it is remarkable how very little real threat to my both health and my safety there is when my perception is not clouded by instinctual ‘self’-preservation and when my life-style is not run by senseless pursuit of power, wealth, fame or excitement – in one word ‘self’-importance. GARY: The only situation I can think of where adrenalin would serve a useful purpose would be some great calamity, where assistance or help is needed immediately: for instance, if I vehicle were to roll over someone and they were trapped and could not get out, someone under the influence of adrenalin might perform feats of superhuman strength, whereas the absence of this emotive force would require other measures that would not be readily available. What are your thoughts on this issue? VINEETO: As I don’t know much about what chemical reactions happen in the brain, I looked up the Encyclopaedia Britannica –
From the word ‘effects’ I conclude that an increased output of adrenalin and other chemical
neuro-transmitters does not necessarily require feelings of anxiety for ‘increased mental alertness’ to occur. In other words, the effects can
be two separate effects and it is quite apparent that in a dangerous situation one functions better if the affective reaction can be eliminated. * VINEETO: From my own explorations I know that a relationship with a partner has many layers that are worth examining. GARY: Yes. That is certainly so. A ‘relationship’ involves need, dependency, closeness, nurture, aggression, so on and so forth. Perhaps like yourself, I have been investigating emotional closeness. This involves dependency and the need, indeed, the drive to nurture and be nurtured. An emotionally close relationship is a prolonged type of infancy and childhood in which one seeks the closeness of ‘someone who understands’. VINEETO: If you mean ‘someone who understands’ me emotionally, I fully agree with you as my former relationships and friendships have certainly been formed on that basis. Nowadays, I am the only person who needs to understand me emotionally, seeking understanding not for the purpose of commiseration or confirmation but in order to get to the bottom of ‘me’. However, it is nevertheless very refreshing and delightful to talk to ‘someone who understands’ common sense and with whom I can share the sense that I made of the world of people, things and events. GARY: Contained in this emotionally close relationship, which is considered the hallmark of adult maturity and independence, is contained the contrary states of it’s absence: abject loneliness, despair, clinging, cloying dependency, fear, and other such negative states. All of humanity’s most lofty ideals and dreams are enacted in one’s primary relationship, whereas as this flesh-and-blood body, apperceptively aware, I am incapable of emotional closeness of any kind. VINEETO: Yes, given that the ‘self’, the alien entity inside this flesh-and-blood body, is the very source and reason for feeling lost, lonely and frightened, the natural reaction is to seek emotional closeness, love and nurture. When I investigated my need for emotional closeness I inevitably uncovered my lost, lonely and frightened ‘self’ and have proceeded to whittle away at it ever since. * VINEETO: One of the first issues to be sorted out for me was my female identity – my belonging to the women’s camp as opposed to the men’s club. Part of this female identity was the continuous battle as to who is right and who is wrong – men or women. What I discovered was an unbridgeable gulf between the masculine and feminine version of interpreting the world and that the only way to ensure peace and harmony was to eliminate the gulf, whereas common wisdom has it that the gulf is a given and that one should bridge the gulf with the feeling of love or move closer to the other camp by becoming more feminine or more masculine. Needless to say eliminating the gulf meant eliminating my precious identity as a woman and all that entailed. GARY: Recently I was working with a small group at a professional training. I was the only male in the group, there being three female participants besides myself. The exercise we were working on required giving a potential emotional reaction to various scenarios involving sexuality. After I had disclosed my reactions to these scenarios the other participants remarked that, of course, I had reacted that way ‘because you are a man’. I was a bit surprised at their perception in this regard. It had crossed my mind that perhaps I was reacting from a gender bias. But their remarks too struck me as dismissive in the sense that they consigned my reactions to the ‘male camp’ and disregarded that they might have been made on some other basis than gender conditioning. Besides discovering that I dislike being pegged in this way as either ‘male’, ‘white’, etc (in itself an instinctual reaction), I realized too how seldom I make these kinds of judgements and comparisons of others. It seems to me that only a female identity would be capable of making a judgement that someone is reacting on a ‘male’ basis, or vice versa. VINEETO: Oh yes, you have encountered one of the typical fighting strategies of any identity – attacking the messenger instead of considering the content of the message. This strategy is used by men and women equally and is usually a sign that no further sensible discussion can be had about the topic at hand because the main issue is winning the argument and not having a fruitful discussion in order to find out the facts. As I see it, ‘being pegged in this way as either ‘male’, ‘white’’ is both a reaction of the social identity – being pegged as a member of a family, gender, race, nationality or profession – as well as an instinctual reaction to being classified as either friend or foe. Nowadays if someone accuses me of being ‘female’, ‘white’ or ‘German’, I just laugh because I know for sure that whatever it is they are accusing me of is their problem, not mine. * VINEETO: As I became more familiar with the process of investigating my beliefs and feelings, I noticed that each issue was successfully resolved only when I was able to trace my feelings and emotions back to their instinctual core – the primeval survival program that gives rise to all feelings, emotions, moods and vibes in the human animal. This instinctual programming was forged ‘when our ancestors hunkered in deep caves for protection’, but the roots of this programming stretch way back to when the first faunal creatures began to populate the earth. It is therefore essential to dig deep in one’s investigations into one’s own psyche in order to feel, experience and understand the instinctual core of one’s feelings and emotions in order to become free of their insidious grip. GARY: It is well to remember the primeval roots of this instinctual programming, stretching back into the mists of time, back all the way to unicellular organisms. That instinctual passions are deeply encoded and ‘self’ perpetuating is a hard point for many to lay ahold of ... unless they have had that ‘taste of the instinctual passions’ themselves. And in order to have that, the social identity must have been sufficiently weakened so that the ordinary constant backdrop of the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘shouldn’ts’ is no longer running. Then the instinctual passions themselves can be experienced much more clearly and directly. I have experienced these sometimes as bestial urges to kill and devour. These are not acted on in any way, shape, or form. But one comes into direct contact with that which has been hidden and obscured, denied and covered up, dreaded and forbidden. The instinctual passions are then weakened in some manner by the very direct experiencing of them. VINEETO: Well said. The manner the instinctual passions are weakened is that what was previously lurking in dark corners has been subjected to the bright light of unencumbered awareness. There is nothing mystical to it but it is certainly magical. * GARY: It is most striking when determined and ‘persistent inquiry’ of this sort triggers a PCE. Each time this happens, I see with renewed clarity how the affective and psychic entity prevents and precludes the experiencing of the purity and pristineness of the actual world. VINEETO: Yes, at such times it is often like going deep into a dark tunnel of unexplored passions and then suddenly coming out the other end where everything has always been perfect and benign. GARY: I have this experience quite often. It is the sort of thing that I would not have noticed in my early days using the method. But it is much more apparent to me now. Whenever passions are explored and experienced at depth, this actual world as experienced by the senses comes rushing back in. VINEETO: As an example, I remember back before I started actualism I had hardly noticed what the weather was like unless it annoyed me for one reason or the other. If I did manage to look at leisure at a blue sky with wispy clouds it would only set me off day-dreaming about love or god or freedom whereas nowadays when I gaze out the window I simply enjoy the fascinating array of ever-changing forms and colours, be it hot or cool, sunny or raining, windy or still. * VINEETO: It is my ongoing conundrum how not only to weaken but to permanently switch off the magnetic force that inevitably sucks me back into being ‘me’ after a PCE. GARY: I was curious about your use of the word ‘conundrum’, but I see that it is indeed a puzzle of the highest sort. Peter advised me to pay particular attention to what happens during a PCE to cause it to diminish and fade. This has been most difficult to do, but it can be done. It is an ongoing ‘work in progress’. VINEETO: Is this the piece of Peter’s posts that you are referring to?
Peter suggested investigating what causes a period of feeling excellent to fade, not what causes a PCE to fade. A PCE by its very nature is a temporary experience, i.e. such experiences inevitably fade, they don’t need a cause to fade. As such, I can never determine what exactly causes a PCE to fade; I simply experience this fading as the unavoidable effect of being a ‘self’ – the ‘magnetic force’ of ‘me’. It is one thing to experience ‘self’-lessness for a temporary period of time as in a PCE, it is quite another to permanently abdicate the throne. The act of ‘self’-immolation is not the act of prolonging a PCE indefinitely – they are two distinctly separate experiences. A PCE is a temporary-only experience of the actual world whereas ‘self’-immolation is a once-only event that brings an irrevocable end to my very ‘being’. * GARY: Firm intent, ‘whatever the price’, is what it takes. It’s a bit like getting out the door to go to work after a long holiday weekend. The bootstraps come into play here. It is important again and again to realize that this is one’s only moment of being alive and this is the only place, right here, right now. Another pleasing development has occurred to me along the way ... the core of ‘self’ hatred that always seethed and writhed within ‘me’ has virtually dried up. With the diminishment of the social identity, the constant ‘self’ flagellation and ‘self’ punishment has virtually gone away. This is a most striking development in itself. VINEETO: Yes, self-punishment, the result of the enforcement and internalization of strict religious and societal morals and ethics only adds to the sorrow of living within the human condition. Life became far easier and much more fun when I succeeded in replacing those internal judges with common sense and the firm intent to become happy and harmless. * VINEETO: You could compare it [a spontaneous PCE] to living in a securely air-tightened bunker when suddenly a crack appears in the wall and brings in some pure sweet fresh air ... and suddenly the whole bunker disappears along with ‘me’. The bunker eventually reassembles itself and the crack is automatically repaired – a process due to the ‘self’-sustaining nature of the social-instinctual programming. It is then up to ‘me’, the one who thinks and feels to be in that bunker, to either wait for another accidental crack – akin to waiting for Godot – or to actively do something so as to experience the magical actual world again. In other words, when the PCE fades, ‘I’ then have to get on with the moment-to-moment business at hand – to demolish the very structure that is ‘me’. A weakened and less ‘self’-centred structure of ‘me’ certainly provides more opportunities for ‘cracks’, i.e. PCEs, but all of ‘me’ needs to be extinguished in order that those ‘cracks’ don’t automatically ‘self’-repair and yet again shut out the splendour and purity of the actual world. GARY: I find your bunker analogy to be more than apt for ‘me’ given ‘my’ concern for ‘my’ security. Saddam Hussein could do no better job with his bunker construction than ‘I’ do with my megalomaniacal need to be in control. VINEETO: When I read in your last post to Peter how you are presently experiencing life I cannot take your ‘megalomaniacal need to be in control’ too seriously –
* GARY: I am also interested in what happens when investigation of particular affective feeling leads to the disappearance of that feeling and what causes it to come back. In my experience, it seems that certain issues come up again and again at times. I keep thinking that because they come back, I must have missed something in my investigation into them. VINEETO: Despite the fact that I had experienced in a PCE a completely non-spiritual material-only universe that was utterly majestic and magnificent, I still had to whittle away at a lot of aspects of my belief in something other than this physical actual world. In fact, I am still at it because ‘I’ am, by my very nature, non-physical, non-actual and therefore spiritual. In the beginning I also often thought that I had missed something when a feeling or an issue returned but the longer I study the human condition in me, and the more I observe other people, the more I come to understand the perversity and the deeply ingrained structure of ‘me’, the psychological/psychic being that is a direct product of this ancient animal survival program. An estimated one million years of human history – dependent upon somewhat whimsical speculations as to the transition from animal-only to animal-human is an enormous heritage to unravel. In the light of the extent and density of this programming, when a bit of the million-year old social programming or the billions-of-years old animal instinctual programming resurfaces, I came to understand that I haven’t necessarily missed something, I simply can’t understand it all or take it all in, at once. You could also say that one inevitably misses something the first time round in an investigation because particular issues have many aspects and many layers that are not all apparent at the first examination. GARY: Your thoughts on this are most helpful. It is a hard thing for me to pinpoint what happens to cause a PCE to dimmer and fade, but essentially it always involves some ‘self’-centred, egocentric experience to take the fore, whether by dint of fear, apprehensiveness, and often (I think) a deep and abiding terror of extinction. Once ‘I’ realize that I am no longer needed, ‘I’ dig my heels in ever deeper and cling passionately to my ‘job’ which is to survive. There are indeed many layers to this thing, and as usual I think I may have berated myself for ‘missing’ something, when the many layers and the density of this programming is to a large extent unconscious and hidden from view. Many of my discoveries while practising Actualism have been serendipitous ... a bit like spontaneous happenings, and sudden realizations in unguarded moments about the nature of ‘me’ and how ‘I’ stand in the way of perfection. This is not to say that there has not been hard effort and diligent persistence involved – a bit like wresting civilization from the wilderness, a deliberate hacking away and toiling to clear the ground. It seems to work in tandem. VINEETO: I can very well relate to what you describe as ‘a deep and abiding terror of extinction’. The trick that often helps me turn this terror into excitement is to remember that ‘I’ have a voluntary mission which is far more dignifying that ‘my’ survival – ‘I’ am to bring about peace-on-earth by vacating the throne, permanently. And although sometimes I feel as though I am only inching my way closer to ‘my’ destiny, I do recognize that I am making progress. I only need to look back at how I used to experience life a few years back to know this is a fact. And yes, unexpected insights and PCEs and deliberate exploration of ‘me’ do indeed ‘work in tandem.’ The serendipitous events happen when I again and again discover the already existing peace on earth in this wondrous and magnificent and not-passive universe. As the master wordsmith describes –
* GARY: This would seem to have a lot to do with sincerity. If one sincerely wants to get rid of something, then one will put the time and energy into doing just that, rather than settling complacently for something less than total elimination of the troubling issue. VINEETO: Yes, I agree, it has all to do with sincerity. Only I know if it is a fact that I have wiped out a particular aspect of my social identity or if I only believe I have or if I am pretending I have – that’s why actualism is a do-it-myself job only, and that is why nobody can do it for me. GARY: Yes, there’s nothing to really sign on to or live up to. And I can quit any time I want ... not that I would want to. It’s such a fascinating journey ... and so much fun to boot. So much for now. I shall have to turn to your next post, although it will take a while before it gets here. VINEETO: Actualism is not a university study course and there are no exams or grades to achieve, if that is what you mean. I’m not so sure about the quitting ‘any time’ you want – I am certainly hooked for life.
VINEETO: Hi Gary, Some observations on the topic ‘how am I in relation to other people’ – GARY: to Richard: One of the most striking things to happen to me since I started practising Actualism is the diminishment of emotional connections to other human beings. I cannot say that there are absolutely no connections to others, as it is obvious to me in my relationship with my partner that a sense of connectedness comes up from time to time in various ways. And no doubt this happens with other people as well. However, I have noticed for a long period that when people want to be ‘friends’ with me, for instance, and make certain friendly overtures, these are generally not at all reciprocated on my part. In other words, the offer to ‘make a friend’ or ‘be a friend’ or such similar things as happen in the social world usually fall completely flat on my part. I have sometimes gotten the impression, gleaned from body language and other cues, that this irritates people. Overtures of this type just do not seem to ‘take’ with me. It is difficult to describe but I am sure that the other practiced Actualists on this list know what I am talking about. Another obvious sign of the diminishment of emotional connections is in the ‘need’ to affiliate. I seem to have no need to affiliate with others, in the sense that that word is commonly used. This is not to say that I am rude or inconsiderate towards others, but as I feel little need or drive to ‘socialize’, pair off with, or otherwise ‘bond’ with others, there is little in an active social sense that is going on with me. Which brings me to a point: in my investigations of what it means to be a human being, I have been struck with how much of human socializing is based on commiseration – sharing a common plight and grievance, and additionally sharing feelings and emotions: whether it be returning to work on Monday, the state of the economy, the price of gasoline, how unfairly the work place is treating you, etc., etc. Human beings seems to revel in their complaints and gripes, and a sense of resentment is the cement that seems to bind people together in many social situations. Indeed, it is the raison d’etre for political groups and political causes of various types. VINEETO: You are right; ‘the ‘need’ to affiliate’ is a sticky business. I remember clearly when I saw Peter for the first time not as an affiliate of any kind but as a separate-from-me fellow human being. In an instant of clear perception, all ‘my’ sticky psychic tentacles that automatically reach out both to objects and to people around me had fallen away. From this particular insight I gained an understanding about what usually happens in interaction with others. I began to see, and unravel, the connections that ‘I’ spun with others, the deals ‘I’ struck, the bargains ‘I’ committed to and the mutual obligations ‘I’ engaged in during my daily interactions with people, particularly those I considered ‘my friends’. I am reminded of another insight about ‘connectedness’ from my early days of actualism. As I walked
into town one day, I noticed a tree at a street corner and with surprise I also noticed that in that moment I did not feel connected with that
tree in any way. I was surprised because, by the very absence of connectedness, I became aware of ‘my’ psychic tentacles and how they normally
engulfed everything as belonging to ‘my’ milieu – not only this particular tree but most things in my close environment. ‘I’ considered
everything as being related to me, either giving reassurance or posing a threat – I either liked it or disliked it, it was part of ‘my’
territory, or it was part of, as Throughout the process of actualism I have become aware of, and incrementally dissolved, my ‘connections’ to things in my close environment and I investigated my affiliations and friendships with people. As you pointed out, most sharing between people consists of commiseration, but as I continued with the actualism practice I had less and less to complain about my own life, which meant I had less and less common misery with people. The wonderful outcome of this ‘unconnectedness’ is that I am more and more able to meet and treat people as fellow human beings – that means I recognize and treat them as what they are instead of relating to them as bit players in ‘my’ game, subjects of ‘my’ moral judgements and demands, projections of ‘my’ fears and desires. GARY: However, not to get too far afield and to return again to the theme of emotional ‘connection’, I have sometimes in past months been aghast at my lack of emotional, social connection to others. There has been the fright that I am suffering from a serious mental disorder. In that one’s emotional connections with others are a prime indicator of one’s mental health, that may certainly be the case, although I carry no official diagnosis (not having come into contact with mental health professionals in any capacity that relates to me personally). There has been something at times like anxiety and shock to recognize that I am no longer moved by a need to affiliate and identify with others. This fear reminds me of the fears I first encountered in Actualism – atavistic fears relating to being an ‘outcast’, ie. falling off the plate of humanity, so to speak. However, the fears have taken on a somewhat different spin, at times feeling myself to be the object of derision or discrimination. Whatever it is, and although there may be a slightly paranoid flavour at times, I am unable to return to what once was a habitual mode of operation socially – to seek out ‘relationships’ with others, whether they be friendships, kinship with family members, or groups to identify with. VINEETO: What you describe as being ‘aghast at my lack of emotional, social connection to others’ I would describe in my experience as the natural reaction, sometimes fearful, sometimes merely surprised, at seeing how radically I have changed as I am extracting myself more and more from my social and instinctual connection with humanity. During the recent years of living in virtual freedom I could verify again and again that I am not only capable of physically surviving without those ‘emotional, social connections’ but I am far, far better off than I was ever before – I am virtually free from any mood swings, I am feeling excellent almost all the time and I genuinely enjoy the company of anybody with whom I interact, whatever the occasion. Now that I don’t have a ‘social connection’ with a few specifically chosen friends it becomes apparent that my daily life is full of social interactions – I have pleasant and friendly interactions with my various clients, agreeable chats when I answer the phone, a little gossip with the checkout person in the supermarket, with the waitress in the coffee shop, with a neighbour, and so on. These are all social interactions that I used to dismiss as unwanted time-consuming distractions as opposed to the ‘real’ interactions with my chosen friends. And then there are interactions on the Actual Freedom Mailing list – talking about my favourite topic with other practicing actualists and people interested in, or objecting to, becoming happy and harmless. GARY: As I write these words, I am thinking that these fears are basic atavistic fears related to the demolishment of one’s identity, as well as fears that indicate the presence of the identity in the first place. These fears have largely settled down at the present time. I would welcome any comments either you or other participants have about the topic currently under discussion. VINEETO: I think you have summed it up very neatly. It is ‘me’, the identity, who needs emotional so-called meaningful interactions with people in order for ‘me’ to exist. Without the constant confirmation from others of my identity ‘I’ feel rather weak, insecure and become increasingly feeble. The other night I had a very clear perception that ‘who I am’ is almost entirely made up of my affective instinctual connection with other people – both with those whom I meet face-to-face and with humanity at large. In that particular moment of understanding ‘my’ affective extensions that reach out to the world around me were once again temporarily disengaged and I was here, as what I am, this physical flesh and blood body, not obligated to anybody and free to leave the herd. It didn’t last – but it confirmed the direction.
GARY: Nice to talk again. Following a lengthy hiatus from the list, I am finally getting back to writing again. Recently you wrote: VINEETO: Yes, nice to talk again. Did you have a pleasant hiatus caused by summertime outdoor activities or was it something else? * GARY: One of the most striking things to happen to me since I started practising Actualism is the diminishment of emotional connections to other human beings. VINEETO: You are right; ‘the ‘need’ to affiliate’ is a sticky business. I remember clearly when I saw Peter for the first time not as an affiliate of any kind but as a separate-from-me fellow human being. In an instant of clear perception, all ‘my’ sticky psychic tentacles that automatically reach out both to objects and to people around me had fallen away. From this particular insight I gained an understanding about what usually happens in interaction with others. I began to see, and unravel, the connections that ‘I’ spun with others, the deals ‘I’ struck, the bargains ‘I’ committed to and the mutual obligations ‘I’ engaged in during my daily interactions with people, particularly those I considered ‘my friends’. GARY: A great deal of what happens in day-to-day life consists of instinctual behaviour, which stems from the more primitive areas of the brain. The longer I have been at Actualism, the more pervasive the primitive survival program of the human species, located in the mid-brain regions, appears to be. This holds true I think for all kinds of emotional connections with others, whether they be mutual obligations, hierarchical types of interactions with others such as dominant and subservient behaviour, ingratiating, cow-towing, gossiping, worshipping, etc. – the list goes on and on ... all these types of social behaviour have their root in ‘my’ need to survive as an instinctual entity, find a suitable mate to disseminate my seed, fight off rivals, etc. Perhaps I am too reductionist in seeing the hand of the instincts in all these myriad forms of behaviour and feelings. I have questioned whether I was getting tunnel vision in that respect. However, be that as it may, in Actualism one applies attentiveness as a discipline to one’s own inner world – the world of the feelings, passions, and calentures – and by extension, with the Human Condition as it exists in each and every human being currently alive. And the conventional wisdom, endlessly repeated ad nauseam, is that human beings ‘need’ one another – that ‘no man is an island’ – and other such sentiments. VINEETO: You are certainly right when you say you are ‘seeing the hand of the instincts in all these myriad forms of behaviour and feelings’. The first layer of my feelings and behaviour towards other people was mainly due to social role-play, defined and governed by the social identity ‘I’ thought and felt ‘I’ was. As a social identity, I was a member of a spiritual belief system and mostly intermingled with other believers, I was a sister to women friends, I was flirting with men I felt attracted to and suspicious towards every other man. The more I unravelled my social identity – the spiritual part being the most tenacious to take apart and leave behind – the more the underlying instinctual feelings that were the source of my emotions and attitudes towards other people became apparent. GARY: To begin to unravel the ‘sticky business’ of one’s affiliation and social needs is to undertake a hazardous enterprise – hazardous chiefly because it spells the beginning of the end of ‘me’, as I am largely a social creature – raised from my inception to have a place in a social hierarchy, be a member of a particular racial, ethnic, and tribal identity, have ‘my’ loves and hates, ‘my’ attractions and repulsions, all of which serve to fix me in a particular niche in society, make me useful to that society as well as expendable. VINEETO: Yes, and the good part is that when you make yourself ‘expendable’ to society you then become able to enjoy the freedom from the straightjacket of the social patterns as well as the reciprocal expectations and demands that go along with belonging to a certain group in particular, and to society at large. It used to be essential to ‘me’ to be useful to society because this usefulness provided ‘me’ with meaning, with a moral right to be here, the right to take up space so to speak. As I investigated whatever I felt was preventing me from being happy and harmless, I quickly came to question and explore my need to derive meaning from belonging to a group and being useful to society. Again and again I found this need to be sourced in the need to justify ‘my’ existence, ‘my’ very survival. Nowadays the idea of needing to earn my ‘right to be here’ is patently silly because, as this physical body, I am already here. It is exquisitely enjoyable to be ‘expendable’ to society because the meaning of life is not to be found in attaining a particular place or status in society’s ranks but is to be found in ‘self’-less experiencing and delighting in the purity and splendour of the actual world. GARY: However, in my own ‘self’-investigations perhaps most revealing of all, once I began to unravel my emotional connections with others, was the seemingly bottomless malice and contempt that I discovered buried under layers of appropriate social conduct. This instinctual malice presented itself irregardless of whom I was with and I could well appreciate, given the depth and force of this instinct, the so-called ‘crimes of passion’ that occur when people go ballistic, run amok, and kill or maim their lovers or close, intimate associates, not to speak their own children. The thing about Actualism that differs radically from other approaches, spiritual included, is that one gets a first-hand, up front, down and dirty taste of the inveterate malice at the heart of my existence as an instinctual entity, as well as really doing something about it in a hands-on way. VINEETO: It strikes me that there must be a ‘seemingly bottomless’ wellspring of altruism that has caused you to doing something hands-on in order to free your fellow human beings from the consequences of your feelings of malice and contempt. Personally, since I started actualism I only remember a few instances of intense malice and aggression surfacing but I discovered ample feelings of resentment at being here accompanied by feelings of contempt, annoyance, irritation and indignation towards others. * VINEETO: I am reminded of another insight about ‘connectedness’ from my early days of actualism. As I walked into town one day, I noticed a tree at a street corner and with surprise I also noticed that in that moment I did not feel connected with that tree in any way. I was surprised because, by the very absence of connectedness, I became aware of ‘my’ psychic tentacles and how they normally engulfed everything as belonging to ‘my’ milieu – not only this particular tree but most things in my close environment. ‘I’ considered everything as being related to me, either giving reassurance or posing a threat – I either liked it or disliked it, it was part of ‘my’ territory, or it was part of, as No 45 lately called it, ‘my universe’. This meant that whenever anything in ‘my’ territory changed alarm bells rang – I became confused, if not upset, disturbed, hurt, annoyed, resentful, angry or sad. GARY: In the moment of pure sensuousness, when a fascinated attentiveness basks in the wonder of being here in this moment in time, there is no latching onto the feelings of relatedness or belonging. Attentiveness is a clear slate of sensory datum and pure, immediate perception, devoid of affective feeling, as well as the incipient attractions and repulsions to or against others as are operative in one’s ordinary sense of social being. In attentiveness, I am as apt to be without a feeling of connectedness in dealing with my fellow human beings as I am in not feeling connected to the tree, as were you. Attentiveness however also notices the psychic tentacles with the same fascination that it notices the exquisite patterns of light and shadow falling across the bark of the tree, and I nevertheless ‘keep hands in pockets’ when examining and noticing these feelings of connectedness without giving into the feelings or being impelled to action by them. VINEETO: Yes, it is absolutely astounding that this one methods works to progressively dismantle all my problems. Whenever I notice an affective reaction to whatever someone says or does – I inquire why that is so – I discover a certain expectation or fear – I inquire why that is so – I notice the nature of my ‘psychic tentacles’ that automatically weave their web – I inquire what is the underlying purpose in having that particular bond – and bingo, brought to the light of awareness, my ‘psychic tentacles’ can no longer hold their grip. * VINEETO: Throughout the process of actualism I have become aware of, and incrementally dissolved, my ‘connections’ to things in my close environment and I investigated my affiliations and friendships with people. As you pointed out, most sharing between people consists of commiseration, but as I continued with the actualism practice I had less and less to complain about my own life, which meant I had less and less common misery with people. The wonderful outcome of this ‘unconnectedness’ is that I am more and more able to meet and treat people as fellow human beings – that means I recognize and treat them as what they are instead of relating to them as bit players in ‘my’ game, subjects of ‘my’ moral judgements and demands, projections of ‘my’ fears and desires. GARY: I certainly agree with the part where you say that you have less and less to complain about with your own life. I hardly feel it is a service to my fellow human to gripe about commonplace goings-on, although it is an all-too-human characteristic. I am less inclined to gripe or complain since I investigated into the basis of such commonly held complaints as the Monday morning blues, upsets about the weather, complaints about one’s political leaders, as well as many other commonplace ills too numerous to mention. VINEETO: With attentiveness operating almost seamlessly, I am able to clearly see any complaints and worries I have about the world as-it-is and people as-they-are for they are expressions of either malice or sorrow. Attentiveness also enabled me to be sensible enough to sort out the practical circumstances of my life such that I stopped doing many of the silly, stressful and time-consuming things I used to do solely in order to be ‘someone’ in the world and to be recognized as such. Once I made these practical changes the only task then left was to wear out and finally stop the habit of complaining that every human being engages in. Some complaints however, such as the knee-jerk rages against authority and authority figures or feeling sad and sorry for a blighted humanity run very deep and as such take a bit more digging into in order to fully understand and undo. Such complaints are rooted deeply in the core feeling of ‘we are all in the same boat’ which gives rise to the nonsensical belief that ‘we can only become free together all at once’. It is obvious that there are no practical lifestyle changes that I can make to diminish these complaints other than cutting the cord each time these feelings arise and, each time again, step out from humanity, the sad and sorry cesspool of malice and sorrow. GARY: A welcome change is that since practising Actualism I have a much keener appreciation of the marvel and wonder of human beings – that most intelligent creature in the world, that fabulously sensitive and finely attuned pinnacle of evolutionary creation. Even the dullest human being is a marvellous creature to behold. And a lot of this sense of wonder and appreciation is directly due to the falling away and demolishment of the deeply conditioned judgements of others owing to their social class, status, background, or perceived worth or valuelessness. VINEETO: By getting rid of my own complaints, boredom, annoyance and irritation I succeeded in enjoying my own company and I increasingly became aware that I like my fellow human beings. With this liking comes hand-in-glove an appreciation of my fellow human beings and an admiration of the astounding human ingenuity and caring in many fields of science, engineering, health and safety. One thing that played a major part in my increasingly liking people-as-they-are was the acknowledgement of my own malice and sorrow, that I recognized it as being due to the human condition and that I understood that everybody, through no fault of their own, is born into the same human condition. I then put this intellectual understanding into daily practice whenever I interacted directly with people, read or heard of other people or read or heard of other people’s views of other people. Nevertheless, I am often left bewildered at the fact that most people prefer to remain in the situation they find themselves in. But then again, most people I know choose to spend their lives as they do – my aim is to live in peace and harmony with people-as-they-are, without exception. * VINEETO: What you describe as being ‘aghast at my lack of emotional, social connection to others’ I would describe in my experience as the natural reaction, sometimes fearful, sometimes merely surprised, at seeing how radically I have changed as I am extracting myself more and more from my social and instinctual connection with humanity. During the recent years of living in virtual freedom I could verify again and again that I am not only capable of physically surviving without those ‘emotional, social connections’ but I am far, far better off than I was ever before – I am virtually free from any mood swings, I am feeling excellent almost all the time and I genuinely enjoy the company of anybody with whom I interact, whatever the occasion. GARY: I cannot honestly say that I truly enjoy the company of interacting with people, often feeling disinclined to interact socially. You may notice that I said feeling disinclined, which should be enough of a tip-off that I am dealing with ‘me’ again here. VINEETO: ‘Feeling disinclined’ may simply be a preference of your individual disposition and not necessarily an expression of your identity in action. In other words, apart from the wants and needs of ‘me’, the social-instinctual identity, there are also individual inclinations, temperament and foibles of this me, the flesh-and-blood body, which determine how I prefer to spend my time. GARY: I know what it is like from PCEs that I have had that social interaction is free, easy, a delight, and involves no effort at all, nor anything but delight in simply being in another person’s company. But ordinarily I do not take much pleasure in interacting socially with others. Your own pleasure is, however, quite clear. By temperament and disposition, I am usually quite happy to be a loner and a hermit. However, these solitary tendencies do not serve one well in the marketplace where there is a premium on acquired social ‘skills’. VINEETO: Just to clarify – when I said that ‘I genuinely enjoy the company of anybody with whom I interact’ I did not mean to indicate that my day is filled with social interactions. I have far less interactions than I used to have in my days of needing to belong to social groups. I take pleasure in being at home where I enjoy my own company as well as Peter’s. The terms ‘loner’ or ‘hermit’ usually carry an implication of social values that I no longer subscribe to – values that apply ‘in the marketplace where there is a premium on acquired social ‘skills’’, as you say. I may be a ‘hermit’ in other people’s eyes because I don’t frequent the pub or go to social gatherings but I am not ‘hermit’ who retreats from the world despising the company of others. With no social identity to maintain and no social ladder to climb I am now free to set my own pace as to how I like to spend my time – except for the time that I sell for a living, in which case the pace is set by those who employ me. * VINEETO: Now that I don’t have a ‘social connection’ with a few specifically chosen friends it becomes apparent that my daily life is full of social interactions – I have pleasant and friendly interactions with my various clients, agreeable chats when I answer the phone, a little gossip with the checkout person in the supermarket, with the waitress in the coffee shop, with a neighbour, and so on. These are all social interactions that I used to dismiss as unwanted time-consuming distractions as opposed to the ‘real’ interactions with my chosen friends. GARY: I have been taking a renewed pleasure in these simple interactions with others since I have been thinking alot about my ‘connections’ or lack of connections (I might better say) with others. I had a damn good laugh with the man in the store when I stopped for coffee on the way to work this morning. The unrestrained mirth was a tonic to my system. VINEETO: Yes, when ‘I’ am out of the equation, then ‘the man in the store’, or the taxi driver, or a waiter, or an employer is a fellow human being, not a suspicious stranger, a business opportunity or a non-believer as they were for ‘me’. Then being with others, whatever the occasion, is usually good fun, particularly so if the other is not stricken by feelings of malice or sorrow at the time. * VINEETO: And then there are interactions on the Actual Freedom Mailing list – talking about my favourite topic with other practicing actualists and people interested in, or objecting to, becoming happy and harmless. GARY: Your writings are always as clear as a bell. I have appreciated our acquaintanceship during the time I have participated in this list. Your commitment to the list and to Actualism has not gone unnoticed. I think it is commendable the consistency with which you and Peter have written to the various and sundry people who have frequented the list, both as regulars and ‘drop ins’. VINEETO: Thanks for the feedback. I also enjoy your refreshing and sensible posts on the list. Additionally, it is a delight to see the simple method of actualism so successfully working for someone on the other side of the planet who has been able to glean the essence of the actualism method via the written word only. As you once said of the actualism business, one ingredient is essential – the recognition that …
* VINEETO: The other night I had a very clear perception that ‘who I am’ is almost entirely made up of my affective instinctual connection with other people – both with those whom I meet face-to-face and with humanity at large. In that particular moment of understanding ‘my’ affective extensions that reach out to the world around me were once again temporarily disengaged and I was here, as what I am, this physical flesh and blood body, not obligated to anybody and free to leave the herd. It didn’t last – but it confirmed the direction. GARY: Since being involved in Actualism, I have found going back and visiting old friends and family members has led to very clear perceptions of the depth of change that has taken place. What were once troubled and painful relationships filled with bittersweet memories from the past have taken on a new ease and a surprising conviviality. With the drastic ‘self’-reduction plan I entered into since becoming involved in Actualism, affective extensions have largely dried up, replaced by a common sense, down-to-earth approach. This is not to say that there is no on-going investigation into ‘my’ relationships with others, but as I continue to do so, I notice an increasing confidence with being, as you say... ‘here, as what I am...’. VINEETO: Being here as what I am leaves me as this physical body and its senses, free to delight in this perfect infinite universe as a sensate human being. It is a glorious morning on this, the south-side, of the planet. The leaves are slightly moving in the breeze and glitter and shine in the early winter morning sun and fine silvery trails of spider web are dangling in mid air. Rainbow lorikeets perform precarious aerobics on the grevillea flowers to extract sweet nectar and the dew is still dazzling on the grass blades. It is marvellous to be alive. It’s a pleasure to chat with you, Gary.
VINEETO: Yes, nice to talk again. Did you have a pleasant hiatus caused by summertime outdoor activities or was it something else? GARY: Well, both. I was camping for a few days recently and was away from my PC. But my hiatuses have more to do with the usual process by which I write to the list in fits and starts, or so it seems to me. I will write a couple of times and then drop out for awhile, just monitoring posts until something really grabs me. Sometimes it is difficult to get a toe-hold back into writing again, after a prolonged absence. In any event, I sometimes take too long in preparing a reply to a correspondent and then find myself losing interest in responding in the first place. VINEETO: Writing on the list has been a great pleasure and an excellent tool for me from the very start. I enjoy the fellowship of sharing with others who are interested in my personal discoveries of the workings of the human condition and how to become free from it. The process of putting my experiences into words adds an additional degree of clarity to each issue at hand. To write about a topic or to answer questions requires me to reflect and contemplate about an issue, to question if I am harbouring a belief or a feeling about the issue, to sometimes do some research in order to talk about the issue at hand more comprehensively, to sum up and to summarize my experience and understanding – in all, it aids the process of self-exploration and understanding immensely. The latest discussions on the infinite nature of the universe gave me many opportunities to not only contemplate but to experience again and again the peerless infinity of the universe and to put my experiential understanding in words such that others could also make sense of the nature of this physical universe. Therefore, even when a post takes a week or more to be completed, I always assume that others on the list will benefit from the writing. GARY: Working full-time and having other interests undoubtedly plays a role in this, although I am sure that both you and Peter probably work full-time and somehow find the time to be both very consistent and involved in writing to the list, with brief periods of silence from time to time. VINEETO: My present job as a self-employed bookkeeper allows me to work ‘in fits and starts’, not according to my whims but according to the requirements of my various clients. Some clients need weekly work but many only need a monthly or even a quarterly visit. But because the quarterly added value tax reports are due for everyone at the same time, those months are always very busy. Right now I am working full time but, come the end of July, I will have only half-time employment until the next busy season. After I quit my full-time job some four years ago, I discovered that I could reduce my work time simply by reducing my expenses. In fact, the more I unravelled my social identity the less I needed to spend on fashionable accessories in order to be ‘someone’, and the more I became happy the less I needed to buy things to make me happy. To work for sufficient money to provide shelter, food, clothing and a few toys like a computer, a TV and running a small car still leaves me with a good deal of free time to enjoy doing nothing really well. * VINEETO: The more I unravelled my social identity – the spiritual part being the most tenacious to take apart and leave behind – the more the underlying instinctual feelings that were the source of my emotions and attitudes towards other people became apparent. GARY: My own experience was that the entire rotten edifice pretty much came tumbling down like a house of cards in short order once I made the decisive step, which for me was to abandon the Krishnamurti-esque façade of belief, throw in the towel on [Mailing List B], and commence to make the most earnest inquiries into Actualism. I think for quite a time I had done my share of fence-sitting and questioning my beliefs, as well as outspokenly questioning the beliefs of other spiritual adherents (undoubtedly always easier to do than question your own beliefs). All this fence-sitting was but a preliminary step to falling right off the cliff and abandoning all forms of spiritual belief and embracing the eminent sensibility of Actualism. VINEETO: Ah, fence sitting is certainly not the most comfortable of positions to be in. It took an active decision on my part to stop holding onto the cliff before I ‘was falling right off’ one fine evening. GARY: At first, I thought that Richard’s holding of the great spiritual teachers of history responsible for all the murder and mayhem that had occurred for thousands of years was going a bit too far, for I thought that surely there must be some good in these belief systems by virtue of the fact that so many people routinely signed-on to these spiritual and religious forms. It took me awhile, then, to completely demolish every last vestige of spiritual belief. But once the decisive steps were taken, the rest fell into place very quickly. At this point in time, it is difficult to fathom that I once was so deluded. VINEETO: One of my clients has recently become a devoted disciple of a spiritual teacher and has remodelled her company according to her teacher’s every whim and wish, i.e. she has abandoned any semblance of common sense and follows her Master’s spiritual intuition and guidance. I find it rather hilarious that five years ago I left Eastern Mysticism and spiritual communities behind and now I see others becoming involved in yet another version of a spiritual commune. The difference is that I now observe with bemusement the delusion in which I was once a willing participant. The otherworldly drama that is displayed before my very eyes clearly reveals the mayhem and misery that spiritual teachers create and perpetuate sucking gullible disciples into the vortex of their own personal power and glory. * GARY: To begin to unravel the ‘sticky business’ of one’s affiliation and social needs is to undertake a hazardous enterprise – hazardous chiefly because it spells the beginning of the end of ‘me’, as I am largely a social creature – raised from my inception to have a place in a social hierarchy, be a member of a particular racial, ethnic, and tribal identity, have ‘my’ loves and hates, ‘my’ attractions and repulsions, all of which serve to fix me in a particular niche in society, make me useful to that society as well as expendable . VINEETO: Yes, and the good part is that when you make yourself ‘expendable’ to society you then become able to enjoy the freedom from the straightjacket of the social patterns as well as the reciprocal expectations and demands that go along with belonging to a certain group in particular, and to society at large. It used to be essential to ‘me’ to be useful to society because this usefulness provided ‘me’ with meaning, with a moral right to be here, the right to take up space so to speak. As I investigated whatever I felt was preventing me from being happy and harmless, I quickly came to question and explore my need to derive meaning from belonging to a group and being useful to society. Again and again I found this need to be sourced in the need to justify ‘my’ existence, ‘my’ very survival. Nowadays the idea of needing to earn my ‘right to be here’ is patently silly because, as this physical body, I am already here. It is exquisitely enjoyable to be ‘expendable’ to society because the meaning of life is not to be found in attaining a particular place or status in society’s ranks but is to be found in ‘self’-less experiencing and delighting in the purity and splendour of the actual world. GARY: While we are on the subject, I would like to touch on the whole business of being an outcast. I used to feel the greatest anxiety about being labelled or branded an outcast. It is something that I once strenuously resisted and actively feared. I felt that without my emotional entanglements and without the affection and approval of others, I would quickly go right off the rails and be annihilated. Now, at the present time, it is abundantly clear to me that I am, by any definition of the word, an outcast. But I no longer feel the level of dread and angst that I used to. I suppose another meaning to the word ‘expendable’ is ‘not needed’. No longer do I as this flesh-and-blood body need ‘me’, but I am freed from the senseless and endless crazy-making of the Human Condition. To me, a major part of this crazy-making is the futile attempt to make other people responsible for my own happiness. The longer I have practiced Actualism, the more clearly I have seen the deeply imbedded nature of this tendency to hold others responsible for my moods, feelings, and actions. Naturally, the reason for this is that the affective feelings in and of themselves are essentially ‘self’-centred in this way. VINEETO: I found that this tendency to make others responsible for my happiness or my misery has a flipside – I also used to feel responsible for the happiness, and guilty for the misery, of the people close to me. Nowadays I don’t consider myself to be an outcast of society at all, rather a lucky escapee. Apart from a few rare occasions I no longer buy into the affective web of people’s weelings and dealings, which allows me the pleasure to interact with fellow human beings instead of phantoms of ‘my’ own making. * GARY: However, in my own ‘self’-investigations perhaps most revealing of all, once I began to unravel my emotional connections with others, was the seemingly bottomless malice and contempt that I discovered buried under layers of appropriate social conduct. This instinctual malice presented itself irregardless of whom I was with and I could well appreciate, given the depth and force of this instinct, the so-called ‘crimes of passion’ that occur when people go ballistic, run amok, and kill or maim their lovers or close, intimate associates, not to speak their own children. The thing about Actualism that differs radically from other approaches, spiritual included, is that one gets a first-hand, up front, down and dirty taste of the inveterate malice at the heart of my existence as an instinctual entity, as well as really doing something about it in a hands-on way. VINEETO: It strikes me that there must be a ‘seemingly bottomless’ wellspring of altruism that has caused you to doing something hands-on in order to free your fellow human beings from the consequences of your feelings of malice and contempt. Personally, since I started actualism I only remember a few instances of intense malice and aggression surfacing but I discovered ample feelings of resentment at being here accompanied by feelings of contempt, annoyance, irritation and indignation towards others. GARY: I have not usually thought about it this way – a bottomless well of altruism. Given the experience of malice is usually quite self-centred and extremely aversive, it is easy I suppose to overlook one’s deeper reasons. VINEETO: When I said ‘bottomless wellspring of altruism’ I used altruism in the sense of benevolence in action, the action of becoming happy and harmless in order to free one’s fellow human beings from one’s own malice and sorrow. The final altruistic act in the literal, more accurate, sense of the word will happen when ‘I’ irrevocably disappear, never ever to return.
GARY: One that really got my attention recently was an increased sensitivity to my partner’s moods and behaviour and how ‘my’ mood affect her. There was a recent frank discussion of this without the usual mumbled apologies and misgivings that was quite satisfying. ‘My’ feelings always make waves with those around me. VINEETO: What I found amazing is that the more I examined my feelings so that they could no longer make ‘waves with those around me’, the less I was affected by the waves of other people’s moods. Whilst feeling connections work both ways, it is entirely in my hands to sever those emotional ties – for the sake of my happiness and for the sake of the happiness of those with whom I come in contact with … or as Richard puts it, ‘for the sake of this body and that body and every body’. Not only do I now not feel responsible for other people’s moods – because I know that ‘I’ had nothing to do with other’s moods – I am also increasingly unaware of subtle vibes and emotional moods unless people tell me about them or are overtly emotional. A recent event springs to mind that illustrates this change quite well. At a social occasion I met a man who I knew and we began chatting. After a while I found it odd that he stood physically close to me and moved even closer in the course of our conversation. I noticed this because I couldn’t wave my arms while talking. I didn’t think more of the event until Peter and I returned home that evening and I was telling him of my odd observation. Only then did it occur to me that maybe the man was ‘coming onto me’ as he was known as a ‘philanderer’. I had not felt any vibes or detected any emotional messages at all and the meaning of his ‘body-language’ had passed me by completely. That I had no desire whatsoever for sexual hunting, or for being hunted, made me insensitive to his feelings such that I was able to have a pleasant chat with him about life and being alive. * VINEETO: With attentiveness operating almost seamlessly, I am able to clearly see any complaints and worries I have about the world as-it-is and people as-they-are for they are expressions of either malice or sorrow. Attentiveness also enabled me to be sensible enough to sort out the practical circumstances of my life such that I stopped doing many of the silly, stressful and time-consuming things I used to do solely in order to be ‘someone’ in the world and to be recognized as such. Once I made these practical changes the only task then left was to wear out and finally stop the habit of complaining that every human being engages in. GARY: One of the things I used to do was compulsively take care of or try to control the people around me. Many years ago, I once underwent a period of unemployment, which literally put me into a panic because I had nobody to ‘help’. With the increasing ease that has been ushered in by the dismantlement of my personal, social, and professional roles and identities, I am less and less invested in trying to ‘help’ and change others, less inclined to feel morally superior to others, and more and more satisfied with being where I am and living my life freed from the interference of busy-bodies and missionaries. VINEETO: I know the ‘social worker syndrome’ well from my own years as a social worker. After I recognized that I had no solutions to offer for the problems of others I went off to the East to change the world by following the dream of Rajneesh’s ‘New Man’. His vision had to literally fall to pieces before I could even consider questioning, let alone abandoning, the spiritual world-saving better-than-thou power trip I was on. What serendipity that I finally found the real McCoy way of changing myself – a down-to-earth process which everyone can do for themselves and by themselves. * VINEETO: Some complaints however, such as the knee-jerk rages against authority and authority figures or feeling sad and sorry for a blighted humanity run very deep and as such take a bit more digging into in order to fully understand and undo. Such complaints are rooted deeply in the core feeling of ‘we are all in the same boat’ which gives rise to the nonsensical belief that ‘we can only become free together all at once’. It is obvious that there are no practical lifestyle changes that I can make to diminish these complaints other than cutting the cord each time these feelings arise and, each time again, step out from humanity, the sad and sorry cesspool of malice and sorrow. GARY: While I don’t often have rages against authority, I often regard myself as a moral authority to be reckoned with and am liable to fly into rages when others defy my imagined authority. This pattern, once blatant and destructive of personal and professional relationships, is progressively drying up. But it still takes quite a bit of ferreting out what underlies these difficulties and I do not mean to imply that I am free from these insidious passions. There has been progress but not perfection, as ‘I’ am still in evidence. VINEETO: Yes, having expertise in certain areas is one thing but an emotional claim to authority certainly spells trouble. To fight for one’s place in the pecking order of rank and honour is not only an issue of ‘my’ social identity but the fight has its roots in the instinctual need to define and defend ‘my’ territory. My intent to abandon this pecking-order fight taught me to rely on facts instead of my opinions, which in turn diminished the urge to defend my knowledge and/or authority. * VINEETO: One thing that played a major part in my increasingly liking people-as-they-are was the acknowledgement of my own malice and sorrow, that I recognized it as being due to the human condition and that I understood that everybody, through no fault of their own, is born into the same human condition. I then put this intellectual understanding into daily practice whenever I interacted directly with people, read or heard of other people or read or heard of other people’s views of other people. Nevertheless, I am often left bewildered at the fact that most people prefer to remain in the situation they find themselves in. But then again, most people I know choose to spend their lives as they do – my aim is to live in peace and harmony with people-as-they-are, without exception. GARY: Do you find that you always ‘liked’ people, even in your spiritual days? Or has this changed for you since practising Actualism? I find that I often don’t like people. The basic fear of people is something that I am still inquiring into. It still has a strong grip on me. VINEETO: I had to think about this a bit. ‘Liking’ people meant something completely different in my pre-actualist days. In those days I liked people if I felt that they were members of ‘my’ club, i.e. that we were ‘like-feeling’ beings. I needed people to define and reinforce ‘me’ as a social identity, or as a fellow social outsider, and ‘I’ was dependant on their approval and emotional support, or disapproval and emotional rejection. Maybe my liking people could be described in that my ‘basic fear of people’ was often overruled by my basic need of people. Generally I could have been described as more of a social type, more afraid of loneliness than of being with people – after all, I chose to live in a spiritual commune for years and my days were filled with communal activity. Nowadays I am neither afraid of being alone nor afraid of meeting people. I am more often ‘what I am’ rather than ‘who I am’ – I as this flesh-and-blood body neither need to be defended nor validated – I am here because I am here. GARY: I am not a social person, and I am not ordinarily very sociable. As a child growing up, I was downright under-socialized. The matter of individual disposition has not always been exactly clear to me, but I feel there is a component to this that is my identity in action and a part that is my individual disposition. So, teasing out those factors is something that I think will take me a bit more time. VINEETO: I was wondering if your ‘basic fear of people’ could have something to do with the need to ‘compulsively take care of or try to control the people around me’ that you mentioned above? I am asking because I often found that there were some particular fears I could not tackle directly by abandoning a habit or by stopping doing some silly action but that I had to explore and dismantle the components that maintained or were related to that particular fear. As for ‘teasing out’ one’s individual disposition – I found that as both my own and society’s demands of ‘who I should be’ disappeared with the dismantling of my social identity, what remained was my individual disposition as to how I want to spend my time. My only guideline is that I want to be happy and harmless … or, if life is not fun then there is something to look at. GARY: Having ‘no social identity to maintain’ is really a most delightful situation to be in. I was thinking one morning recently, when I was sitting quietly before leaving for work, that all the battles have already been fought, all the strivings have been stroven for ... it really was a sublime sense of being ‘retired’ from all of that, and in no immediate need of changing anything about myself or my life. It was a wonderful sense of completion and coming full-circle to the place where I find myself, with nothing that I would want to improve or anything that I would like to change. VINEETO: Well said. It is superb to have these periods of feeling retired from the struggles of my humanity and being able to revel in the delights of being alive – the opposite to what I practiced for so many years, sitting crossed-legged with my eyes closed trying to be ‘here’ as ‘me’. * GARY: I was reminded of my successful application of Actualism just today when I read Peter’s most recent post. In it he stated unequivocally that he knows that Actualism works, and I thought ... so do I too. Nothing could be simpler than the hands-on experience gained in using the method to achieve the incremental elimination of the instinctual passions from one’s life. My life has become far simpler and carefree – some would say ‘too’ carefree. VINEETO: Yes. Inherent to the human condition is the universal belief that life on earth is essentially a suffering existence and this belief runs deep as it is constantly reinforced by the instinctual survival passions. To be carefree is to be a traitor to those who insist on fighting the good fight. GARY: There has been the release from what were once onerous responsibilities and obligations, as I am not compulsively going around trying to ‘help’ others, and no longer do I see myself as on a mission to convert others to worn-out ideals and beliefs. That ‘vast stillness’ that Richard writes about is becoming more and more an ever present fact of life for me. VINEETO: It is wonderful to read of your successful escape from being in the ‘trenches’ of humanity to walking the wide and wondrous path to actual freedom – and it also heralds the impending fact that actual freedom is going to be spread like a chain-letter in the centuries to come. * VINEETO: Being here as what I am leaves me as this physical body and its senses, free to delight in this perfect infinite universe as a sensate human being. It is a glorious morning on this, the south-side, of the planet. The leaves are slightly moving in the breeze and glitter and shine in the early winter morning sun and fine silvery trails of spider web are dangling in mid air. Rainbow lorikeets perform precarious aerobics on the grevillea flowers to extract sweet nectar and the due is still dazzling on the grass blades. It is marvellous to be alive. GARY: Yes, the world as it is is indeed a wondrous fairy-tale play-land beckoning each moment again and again. There is no place that I would rather be than right here, right now. Complaining about being bored and unhappy, and squandering the precious moments being alive, activities which are endemic to the Human Condition, ... these are not something I want to participate in. It is indeed marvellous being alive, and if I am bored, restless, distracted, asking myself the ‘How am I...’ question gives me a jump-start to being here and getting back to the present moment. Could anything possibly be more important than that? VINEETO: Nothing, ever.
VINEETO: Hi Gary, I am pleased to hear from you again. How have you been?
GARY: You had asked how I am doing. I am very well. I am returning to the list after a lengthy hiatus during which time I mainly lurked, reading the posts occasionally, and sometimes in depth. I had rather lost my interest in writing to the list, but had not lost my interest in Actualism. VINEETO: I can relate to this, as I am now in a phase where I seem to have lost interest in writing to the list unless there is some sensible conversation to be had about practical experiences. But no matter if I write or not, I never cease to be vitally interested in this moment of being alive and in what prevents me from being actually free. There is a commitment that happened deep down inside a few months after I came across actualism, after I experienced what being free from ‘me’ is like. It is a commitment that is irreversible, unlike the new-year’s resolutions that are abandoned days after they were made. I think I have told the story before but it signifies for me the day I realized that I was hooked for life. At one time I was particularly troubled by doubts and fears so much so that after a couple of miserable days I decided to talk to Richard about it. I said to him that the way I feel now I don’t think I am able to go through with becoming free, I am too much of a coward, I don’t have the strength and saying it I felt as despondent and scared as one can be. Richard listened attentively as he always does and then said, okay, if that is so, what are you going to do with the rest of your life, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and so on? I didn’t have to think long, it was pretty obvious that although I was in the grip of my feelings at the time that they wouldn’t last forever and then I would not be able to resist pursuing the freedom I knew to be the genuine article. There simply was, and still is, nothing else I want to do with my life. The other day someone asked if Peter and Vineeto ever take a holiday from actualism to which I could only say ‘holiday to where’. I am pleased to be here, I enjoy being here, I am vitally interested in being alive, I am aware of what I do, think, feel and sensately experience – why on earth should I want to take leave from that? It took me much effort to get this awareness going to the point were it happens by itself and now it is impossible to switch it off. The alternative could only be to deliberately do something to dull down, to get lost in imagination, to wallow in feelings, to be half-conscious or drugged and to pretend not to be here. The capacity to be aware of being aware is exactly what makes the human species unique amongst sentient beings and to work towards ridding this awareness of selfism – in any form – is a great adventure. GARY: Instead, I have continued to apply myself to demolition work. I use that short-hand phrase to signify using the method to dismantle the social identity and expose the underlying instinctual passions. Then I have been able to get at the buggers. However, I have had long periods during which nothing much seemed to be happening. Getting a ‘taste of the instincts’ has sometimes seemed like a prolonged forced feeding at the pig trough of the Human Condition. But then, nobody is forcing me, are they? I realize in retrospect what has been lacking has been sustained, unremitting attentiveness on my part and sometimes simply the pure intent to proceed further. VINEETO: There is something else that helps me and that is to remember to be friends with myself and rather than being down on myself for being irritated or fearful to instead give myself a pat on the back for noticing that I was. This way it’s much easier to pull myself up by my bootstraps and to get back to being happy again in no time. It’s a persistent habit to break, this telling myself off for not being perfectly happy for 24hrs a day, but I do notice it much quicker these days than I used to. Then it is not so much a matter of weening myself off the ‘trough of the Human Condition’, as you call it, but more a slipping out of ‘my’ skin and sensately – and sensuously – enjoying being here. I also had to realize that after I’ve been through certain intense feelings and passions there is nothing further to be learned from staying in the feeling. I used to be suspicious of Richard’s expression of ‘nipping the feeling in the bud’, ostensibly for the reason that it could be confused with repressing the feeling. But now I realized that I was also avoiding the technique itself because ‘I’ wanted to hang onto being ‘the explorer’ of deep passions whenever they occurred and I can see now that there is neither meaning nor value in ceaselessly examining an instinctual passion over and over and over again. In other words I have come to understand that no valuable insight is to be gained from deeply and repeatedly feeling fear – the most prominent of the passions for me – and this understanding has greatly helped to simply notice and label the feeling, in this case my fear of oblivion, and then get on with enjoying this moment of being alive, which is after all the point of actualism. GARY: I can tell you this: that I have during this period of time always used the Actualism method and have not found it necessary nor desirable to take side-detours or short cuts. I have never found it necessary to find add-ons to supplement my use of the Actualism question. Unremitting attentiveness and cranking up my pure intent have been the keys to pulling through what have seemed like unbearable onslaughts of deep dread and fear. VINEETO: It’s so simple, isn’t it and yet almost everyone feels the urge to concoct their personal addenda in order to avoid its ‘self’-diminishing effects. GARY: But along with complacency and a relative backing-off from the deeper sources of resistance at times, there has been for a long time steady progress too. I think of a graphic presentation of in which there are peaks and valleys, and regressive movement, but on the average a steady overall increase in happiness and harmlessness. VINEETO: Yep, and with the increase of being happy and considerate towards others comes a waning of ‘me’ because ‘I’ need an arena of problems and passions in order to thrive. GARY: I do think that one of the very interesting things here on the list is the vital opportunity for so many different people to share experiences with one another. I think experiences with Actualism are going to be variable. And of course unlike the snake oil salesmen and charlatans, no guarantee is offered or otherwise implied. Naturally different people have different life experiences, different personalities and constitutions, different temperaments, different motivations, etc. Sometimes it seems like the issues that I have struggled most greatly with have been the issues that I have struggled with my entire life. VINEETO: I can’t quite see how experiences with practicing actualism are going to be essentially variable at core if one fully commits oneself to becoming free from malice and sorrow. The result, if intent and effort are genuine, can only be a decrease in malice and sorrow and the progress is conditional to each actualist’s own effort and intent. Once I got my attentiveness up and running eventually all of the issues that I had struggled with in my life have come to the surface, as you observed happened with you, and this is where the intent born of a PCE always leads me to take the particular action that I know I need to do in order to become free of each of these issues. GARY: In other words, it is ‘me’ and to a large extent it is senseless to struggle with ‘myself’, as I cannot rid me of myself (pardon the hyperbole here). VINEETO: No, I can’t ‘rid me of myself’, but what I can do is pay attention to, and become aware of, ‘me’ in action, thus interrupting the automatic quick and dirty neural pathway, which in turn stops ‘me’ feeding ‘me’ – then inevitably atrophy sets in until one day ‘I’ willingly and happily give myself permission to let go of the controls and agree to ‘my’ demise. And in the meantime I have a great time being alive. GARY: What happens when I crank up the attentiveness and pure intent knobs is that these ‘struggles’ vanish in a twinkling. VINEETO: Yes, it works like a charm. GARY: I am sure others have had that experience. It’s a bit like shovelling yourself out after a massive snowstorm and once again the sun is shining. The whole world is bright and aglow again. VINEETO: Currently the popular vote on the list is to ignore, or dissociate from, one’s ‘struggles’ by pretending that there is nothing to be gained by making an effort. GARY: Speaking of snowstorms, we are approaching the tail end of what has been a long and cold winter. I am looking forward to a cruise through the Caribbean in late Spring. VINEETO: I just had an evening walk along the beach under a canopy of she-oaks with hundreds of feeding rainbow lorikeets, a soft southerly breeze caressing the skin in the late summer’s sun – it’s coming into the latter stages of summer here and the wind from the south is a cool wind, not warm like in the northern hemisphere. These opposites still boggle my mind whenever I think of it. What a wonderful globe we’re living on. Good to chat again, Gary. Have a lovely cruise. Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer |
