VINEETO: I am joining in the discussion, as I had a thought about something you have written to Peter in your last letter –

RESPONDENT: I did get caught up in the urge of wanting it this week which I think could have been the desire instinct being activated. This very desire of wanting it was keeping me from enjoying the now moment.

VINEETO: One of the first things on the path to Actual Freedom which I had to investigate and eliminate was that hoary old spiritual belief that if only one stops wanting something, it will be granted by the Grace of Existence. After 17 years of spiritual search without results I was finally suspicious enough to question the very belief itself.

When I, for the sake of clarity, replaced the word ‘freedom’ with something material, like a car or money, it became blindingly obvious that by stopping to want it I would also prevent myself from getting it. When I ask myself the question ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and I get the answer that I am not happy because I am not 100% free, then the next question is how to proceed from here. I had to be careful not to deceive myself by thinking that I only have to stop the urge for freedom in order to be happy again as it only served to stop me right in my tracks, leaving me with nothing I could do to reach my goal except wait and hope.

What I do is to find out why I am not 100% happy with my present situation, what little feeling, or emotional churning there is that spoils this moment. Then it is not just ‘not-being-free’ that is bothering me but some particular feeling, some particular emotion about something that maybe happened an hour ago. This more specific component of ‘not-being-free’ can then be examined, investigated and removed without stifling the desire and intent for freedom, which is my fuel and guideline to keep asking the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’, to keep investigating into how I experience the Human Condition in me.

Richard has written heaps on ‘desire’, to be found under his Selected Correspondence, sorted by subjects, on his website.

There is definitely no short-cut to actual freedom by stopping to want freedom, and then bingo, you are ‘That’ – it is the other way round. I want actual freedom like I never wanted anything in my life, it is my one and only desire, it is that very desire that motivates me to dive into the ‘cupboard’ of my psyche, my identity, my feelings and passions over and over and over, to sweep out all the cobwebs that I can find. This desire fuels my intent and makes sure that I never dishonestly settle for second best, for an imaginary freedom instead of the genuine, actual, tangible article.

VINEETO: I am asking because when I investigated my expectations and desires that I knew by past experience would inevitably lead to disappointment and sorrow, I was then able to chuck both my expectation and disappointment, both my desire and sorrow out the window. And once I stopped doing what caused me to feel sorrowful, then the fear of this sorrow re-occurring also disappeared. Given that my aim was to become free of malice and sorrow, it became obvious to me that I also had to become free from the dreams, hopes, desires and greed that were the cause of my sorrow.

RESPONDENT: It doesn’t seem practical to stop doing it as that is what I do for a living. There is greed involved to a certain extent in wanting to hit a homerun. I could become more conservative at it which would involve less or no greed. What I am trying to get at is there is still fear underneath the greed. The answer doesn’t seem to be to stop what I do for a living in order to avoid the fear and subsequent sorrow. I see what you are saying in that greed is causing the fear. This may be what I am trying to get at.

VINEETO: I did not propose that you stop what you do for a living but suggested that you investigate what other emotions besides fear you have when you are doing it and to look at the role that the greed to ‘hit a homerun’ has in the fear to not ‘hit a homerun’ .

RESPONDENT: That brings up the question of: Can I do it without being greedy? I am a risk taker in a lot of ways so maybe I am addicted to the fear. The root problem still seems to be fear itself and not superficial greed or other desires, etc.

VINEETO: I do find it interesting that you call any other passion but fear ‘superficial’ as part of your theory that fear is the predominant passion. How can you scientifically examine your emotions, feelings and passions if you already dismiss everything other than fear as being superficial? Is it not time to question everything, including this unproven presumption along with your emotional investment in it?

You can easily find out for yourself that gambling without being greedy or fearful is possible when you replace ‘money’ with ‘bubblegum’ – gambling for bubblegum would certainly be without the emotional input of greed and there would be no fear to lose either – but then gambling may lose all attraction.

The question for me was what part of ‘me’ would have to disappear or die in order not to feel the greed and desire for something I desperately wanted. In my case one of the greatest desires I had to inquire into was the longing for the unconditional love of my spiritual teacher. In order for this desire to disappear, Vineeto the loyal disciple had to disappear. On another occasion it was the desire for the unconditional love of a lover, which caused me a lot of pining, anxiety and fear. In order to get rid of the anxiety that accompanied my desire I had to inquire into the romantic dream that lay behind my longing for love. The outcome of this inquiry was that the dreamer Vineeto disappeared together with ‘her’ anxieties about not achieving the dream. At the time this felt like an amputation of a vital and integral part of the woman I felt myself to be, but it sure did the trick. Both my desire and my fear around this subject disappeared miraculously. The romantic dreamer had irreplaceably disappeared.

Given that you say ‘maybe I am addicted to the fear’ then that would also mean that the No. 16 you are today would have to disappear in order for ‘his’ fear to cease.

RESPONDENT: I have been wondering what’s missing for me? I completely understand how all this works yet there is some missing ingredient. For example, I am involved in a situation that is causing constant fear and worry in my life. I see what is causing the fear right to the core but it still doesn’t go away. I am working on the cause by seeing what my options are and taking appropriate steps. The only way the fear would stop is if I extricate myself completely from the situation but that is not something I want to do.

VINEETO: You might recall that you had a conversation with both Gary and me about this same topic on this list some 18 months ago –

[Respondent to Gary]: On a personal note I am looking at making additional investments in the stock market and there is fear associated with this because I know there is a risk of losing as I have lost a lot before. I know that if I do lose again there will be sorrow and grief. Hence, my fear of losing may lead to sorrow and grief if I actually do lose.

[Gary]: Nothing is absolutely without risk. I myself do not invest in any stocks or what-have-you, preferring the relative security of bank deposits. If you lose, there doesn’t necessarily have to be any sorrow or grief about it, does there?

[Respondent to Gary]: This is true. There doesn’t have to be any sorrow or grief about it but based on my past experience there could be sorrow or grief about it. That is why I am looking at the fear associated with the possible loss in order to rid myself of possible suffering that may occur.

[Vineeto]: Did you ever pause to question what might be the practical cause for your anticipated loss and subsequent sorrow or grief in the above-mentioned situation? Did you ever wonder what might be the driving passion behind an expectation to win in a gambling situation where reportedly about 75% of the players lose, subsequently suffering disappointment, sorrow and grief? You seem to be asking for fearlessness in a situation where the odds are heavily stacked against you.

I am only asking because when I investigated my expectations and desires that I knew by past experience would inevitably lead to disappointment and sorrow, I was then able to chuck both my expectation and disappointment, both my desire and sorrow out the window. And once I stopped doing what caused me to feel sorrowful, then the fear of this sorrow re-occurring also disappeared. Given that my aim was to become free of malice and sorrow, it became obvious to me that I also had to become free from the dreams, hopes, desires and greed that were the cause of my sorrow. Vineeto, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, No 16, 10.12.2001

If you already know that the most sensible thing would be to stop doing what you are doing –

[Respondent]: ‘obviously I don’t want to do the most sensible thing because of greed which is tied to the fear (‘me’). If I see that it is greed which keeps me in this situation and is causing the fear then it would be prudent to stop.’

– then why do you ask what to do? To stop being silly is a DIY project – doing what is sensible is in your hands and in your hands alone.

*

VINEETO: [...] If you already know that the most sensible thing would be to stop doing what you are doing –

[Respondent]: ‘obviously I don’t want to do the most sensible thing because of greed which is tied to the fear (‘me’). If I see that it is greed which keeps me in this situation and is causing the fear then it would be prudent to stop.’

– then why do you ask what to do? To stop being silly is a DIY project – doing what is sensible is in your hands and in your hands alone.

RESPONDENT: I was asking myself and also looking for any helpful feedback. There is no need for anyone to answer.

VINEETO: Was the feedback helpful?

RESPONDENT: If I run from every sticky situation or jam that I get myself in then I don’t see how I am going to make progress toward eliminating the ‘me’ that is causing the fear. As you said above I was in a similar situation some 18 months ago and it has come up again although the current situation is much more dangerous and could have much more dire consequences.

VINEETO: If you examine the situation you find yourself in then you might notice that it was greed that brought you into this situation in the first place and it is greed that keeps you in a situation that ‘is much more dangerous and could have much more dire consequences’. Vis –

[Respondent]: ‘obviously I don’t want to do the most sensible thing because of greed which is tied to the fear (‘me’). If I see that it is greed which keeps me in this situation and is causing the fear then it would be prudent to stop.’

If you want to ‘make progress toward eliminating the ‘me’ that is causing the fear’ you will have to take into account that greed is as much an instinctual passion that constitutes ‘me’ as fear is. If you want to ‘make progress’ then you need to make the same progress ‘toward eliminating the ‘me’ that is causing’ the greed.

The way I made ‘progress toward eliminating the ‘me’ that is causing the fear’ was that I stopped trying to suppress, sublimate or eliminate my unwanted feelings, and hoping for a world as-I-wanted-it-to-be as I had in my spiritual years, and set my goal in life at being happy and harmless in the world-as-it-is, with people as-they-are. I made the effort to become aware of my beliefs and my good and bad feelings when and as they were happening and I emphasized my felicitous feelings to the point that I could actually begin to enjoy be here for the first time in my life. With resentment gone from my life I found that I stopped blaming others for my moods and stopped using them as an excuse for my malice, which meant that I also found myself becoming more benign.

Becoming aware of what I feel and believe each moment again gives me the option of making a choice each moment again – away from automatically opting for actions determined by my instinctual programming (fear, aggression, nurture and desire) towards a sensible and intelligent decision as to how to avoid dangerous or stressful situations, and how to be at ease and enjoy life so as to be more happy and to be more harmonious with other people.

RESPONDENT: You said above ‘And once I stopped doing what caused me to feel sorrowful, then the fear of this sorrow re-occurring also disappeared.’ I am not sure about this because stopping what causes fear in a given situation is not going to eliminate the fear from reoccurring. It will stop the current fear in the current situation but it won’t end fear (‘me’). This sounds more like an avoidance of fear (‘me’).

VINEETO: We’ve been at this point before. If I may remind you of the discussion in question –

[Respondent]: The point is that there is substantial risk. It looks like confronting fear itself is the way to overcome fear and not to avoid situations that cause fear.

[Vineeto]: It is, of course, entirely your choice and your business how you are assessing the odds – I was simply reporting the general figures of stock market gambling which are evaluated at 75% or more losers compared to 25% or less winners.

As for ‘confronting fear’ – people have tried for centuries to tackle their fear of physical danger by confronting it and many of the early pioneers discovered remote and dangerous areas of the planet only because they confronted their fears and left home despite their fears. Nowadays, in the absence of sufficient real physical dangers and explorations, highly dangerous adventure sports are promoted for people to satisfy their need of boosting their adrenalin and their ego – activities such as car and motorbike racing, Everest climbing for tourists, wild water rafting, cave diving, meeting man-eating sharks in plain dive suits, parachute and bungee jumping, etc., etc. There are also those who seek the same rush from other less physically dangerous activities such as playing video games, gambling or watching other people performing dangerous or violent activities.

What I am saying is that the idea of confronting one’s fears is nothing new, it is part and parcel of the human condition and has not resulted in any change towards more benevolence and happiness in human behaviour. People who confront their fear are in no way less malicious or less sorrowful despite the sometimes-enormous effort and time they invest trying to get rid of their fear. In your specific case you seem to want to tackle fear with more risk-taking, i.e. with greater desire, whereas in my experience it is the desire to ‘hit a homerun’ as you say further down, that generates the fear of loss in the first place.

The way I tackled fear was firstly to be sensible in practical situations thereby reducing the risk of actual danger or loss, which served to stop fuelling the fires of passion. Then I set about enquiring into the reasons that lay behind my various fears. My aim in actualism has never been to be free from fear only, but to become free from my malicious and sorrowful feelings and behaviour – and this enterprise initially generated a lot of fear. As I questioned my dearly held beliefs, my spiritual loyalty, my friendships, my role as a worker, as a woman, as a part of a social group – in short my entire social conditioning – the fear sometimes seemed completely overwhelming.

This fear I overcame by simply doing what I had decided to do despite my fears. This is not confronting the feeling of fear itself but simply setting oneself a goal in life and getting on with doing it. This way I did something useful with the fear by turning the feeling of fear into the thrill of discovery. I also did a similar thing with desire – I used it as the desire to succeed in my newfound life’s aim. Nurture was similarly utilized in wanting to be part of the ending to human suffering, and aggression was channelled into a quiet stubbornness and determination to succeed.

To only seek to become fearless is in itself a selfish aim and only serves to enhance and embellish the ‘self’, the lost, lonely and cunning entity inside this body. Those who pursue fearlessness without also investigating their aggression, nurture and desire often succeed in attaining a self-enhancing and self-aggrandizing altered state of consciousness, known in the East as Satori, or if the state becomes permanent, spiritual enlightenment. Vineeto, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, No 16, 13.12.2001

The actualism method is about becoming happy and harmless – this means sensibly avoiding causing sorrow and harm to oneself as well as to others. This would make sense to anyone but a compulsive masochist.

RESPONDENT: PS: As I said above, what’s keeping me from stopping is ‘I’ don’t want to stop. ‘I’ want to keep doing what I am doing without the fear and worry. Iow, I want to have my cake and eat it too.

VINEETO: Yes, you are making it very clear that you’re not aiming for eliminating ‘me’ but you want remain an identity without the inconvenient painful side effects, namely worry and fear – in other words, you do not want to change.

Given that even enlightened people do not manage to eliminate anger and anguish – they merely sublimate it and designate it as being ‘Divine Anger’ and ‘Divine Sorrow’ – I do wonder what plans you have and what method you want to use in order to accomplish your aim of having ‘the cake and eat it too’?

Personally I can report that it is absolutely marvellous whenever I am not being a feeling being – pristine and pringling – something that can never be experienced when being a ‘me’.

RESPONDENT No 71: [Vineeto]: … a pure consciousness experience is my touch stone and my guiding light, so to speak, so as to know what I want, which direction I am heading and what I need to do to achieve my goal. A PCE is the one and only experience that makes me aware of and allows me to experience the actual world that lies hidden beneath the elaborate, confusing and ever-changing chimera created by the identity inside this body and a PCE is the one and only experience that can clearly guide me towards an actual freedom from the human condition. [endquote].

(Note: Am I the only one who recognizes in the above passage traits bordering on altar worship?)

RESPONDENT: No, you’re not the only one. Just replace PCE in the above passage with God.

VINEETO: As I already pointed out to No 71 you conveniently omitted my qualifier in the first part of my post in order to mount your objection – <snipped rest of explanation>

RESPONDENT: Any religious worshiper could have written that. This phrase is especially telling: ‘because ‘God’ is my touch stone and my guiding light, so to speak, so as to know what I want and which direction I am heading.’ ‘touchstone’ and ‘guiding light’ are three words that any religious worshiper can identify with.

RESPONDENT No 65: Yeah but ... then one could also replace it with:

Which reminds me. I think it was Timothy Leary who wrote ‘Simulations of God’ showing how it can be applied to what ever is one’s latest obsession.

RESPONDENT: This seems to speak to my point. What is the difference in being obsessed with a PCE or with God? An obsession is an obsession, no? It sounds exactly the same in the passage that V wrote.

VINEETO: During my process of actualism there was a time when I watched the biography of many people who made it to being famous enough to have a biography report made about them. I wanted to find out what exactly it is that made people successful in what they wanted to achieve in life, be it a gold medal in an Olympic sport or the winner of the Tour de France, be it a successful business entrepreneur or a famous dancer or painter, be it a well-known architect or a renowned author or inventor or, in the spiritual realm of achievements, become an enlightened master. What all these people had in common was a burning passion to be successful at their chosen field of interest and an unwavering determination to do whatever it takes to reach their goal.

The same requirements I found to be necessary in actualism – it only works because I made becoming free from the human condition the single-most important issue in my life which rendered everything else to secondary importance. This may be the reason why you think my dedication to actualism to be an obsession – I would rather call it single-pointed commitment to becoming free.

The idea that one should be ‘cool’ about things, stifle one’s desires and strive to be mentally and emotionally removed from life in all circumstances is something that spiritual teachers have been preaching since Buddha’s time – in fact, it is the basic premise of Buddhism that desire is the sole cause of human suffering and that ‘in order to stop disappointment and suffering one must stop desiring’.

I for one have done that long enough – now it’s time to go full sails ahoy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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