Others ~ Selected Correspondence

Body

Much thanks for your thoughtful reply to my questions on relation of health and Virtual or Actual Freedom.

...when I came across actualism and decided to investigate my beliefs and emotions, the superstitions about alleged health deficiencies were the first to go, together with my belief in vegetarianism and being a health food freak. It was such a delight to hoe into a good piece of steak, fish, chicken or bacon, to enjoy the superb taste of fresh-brewed coffee without any guilt, to drop all the vitamin supplements that I had taken out of faith and fear, and to simply consider myself healthy unless there were demonstrable symptoms that indicated otherwise.

How refreshing to read this! After a recent somewhat heated exchange with another individual over the supposed benefits and morality of vegetarianism, it is a delight to hear you extol the pleasures of a good steak. It is refreshing to find out that you actualism people are not promulgating dietary and moral codes of behaviour and clobbering those who do not adhere to their way of life. However, at first glimpse it appears a bit hedonistic. I seem to recall in another writing elsewhere a treatment of the differences between a hedonistic life-style and Actual Freedom. I believe this was in Richard’s explication of sensuousness. I shall have to read it again to see if I can find this point, as it is not quite clear in my mind.

Now, back to health. I gather, from what you have said, that investigating the instincts produced almost immediate benefit to you and release from many fears of sickness and from imagined physical ills as well. It is clear too from what you have said that the work you have done has relieved you from suffering over health concerns. I can see that this is no minor thing. The actual physical health problem, whatever that might be, is really often quite easily resolved with medical or alternative therapy. But the tendency to brood and suffer over ills of the physical body, all perhaps traceable to the fear of death, is great in many of us. To have actually experienced a release from this attendant sense of suffering is a great benefit, one that I am sure makes physical recovery much speedier. I recall recently going into the hospital for minor surgery. The procedure I was there for is really quite minor and painless. I have been through it before, and so know there is not much discomfort involved. I also refuse sedatives, as I don’t want to have a muddled head over something so minor. It really is quite funny how the medical personnel almost insist on tranquilization. I think they are more anxious about the whole thing than I am! Also too, I remember a woman in an adjoining bed, how she wailed and cried and carried on so about what she was there for. The great emotion that accompanied her problem could not have made it any easier for her or for the people treating her. Point being that, although the physical problem is often quite minor, the emotional suffering that accompanies it can be severe and can be an impediment to resolving the matter in a speedy fashion. Whether the underlying feelings be those of dread, fear, pity, sorrow, they all complicate the healing process. Then too, the sense of dread makes many actually avoid medical treatment and deny ongoing need for treatment. As you say, and I agree:

Further, I have learned that to be sick and then being fearful, upset, resentful or miserable about being sick would only make matters worse. Overall, I can say that the best I could do for my health was to get rid of my beliefs, superstitions, peer-pressure, societal influence, moods and feelings.

Another point you raised regards the smoke-screen effect of physical symptoms.

As a rule of thumb one could say that it is always the ‘self’ that throws up the smokescreen of such physical symptoms in order to divert from the issue of the investigation, which is ‘me’, my beliefs, my identity, my feelings, my emotions and my instinctual passions. As Richard terms it, ‘I’ am lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning, and it is a fascinating ride to uncover all the trick and ploys that ‘I’ am capable of.

I too have found physical symptoms to be the smoke-screen behind which other issues lurk, although it is hard sometimes to remember this because such symptoms often dominate the picture. Recently I dealt with an episode of choking in my sleep: waking up with my throat seized, unable to get my breath for a period of what seemed like a minute or so. Something that definitely shook me up. I didn’t see a doctor for it and it only happened once. Come to think of it, it occurred during a period when I was experiencing quite a lot of anger and anxiety, and I wonder if again it was the experience of being physically threatened, something (fear?) actually having me by the throat and choking me. Although I did not think of this at the time, your comments here are making me think of it in this light. In any event, the problem has not returned and I don’t feel the anxiety that I did previously over its’ recurrence. Gary to Vineeto

Richard: The universe experiences itself as this flesh and blood body (and the distinction is not trivial).

What is the difference between ‘through’ and ‘as’?

It’s like the difference between –

1. I live in this body.

2. I live as this body.

The first statement implies that there is an entity/actor of some sort (me) which uses something else (this body) as its intermediary. The second does not.

Now take another look at the difference between –

1. I am the universe experiencing itself through a human being.

2. I am the universe experiencing itself as a human being.

Again, the first statement implies that there is a separate entity/actor of some sort (universe), which uses something else (a human being) as its intermediary. In the second statement there is no separation.

Experientially, there is a big difference between experiencing life through the senses (‘me’ gazing out at the world), and experiencing life as the senses (no ‘me’, no separation, just pure sensate/reflective experience of actuality). No 82 to No 90(R), 17.6.2005

Read your reply to my previous post. I am no advocate of hedonism.

Becoming free from the Human Condition of malice and sorrow means to pursue becoming happy and harmless. Whereas traditional Hedonism like the Charvakas have tried to suffocate or at least balance human sorrow by indulging in pleasures and avoiding pain, actualism aims to eliminate the root cause of malice and sorrow, one’s very ‘self’ – the animal instinctual passions with one’s overlaying social identity of beliefs, morals and ethics.

I don’t know anything about Charvakas. What I think I understand from what you have written, however, is that hedonism is an identification with one side of the pleasure-pain polarity, in an attempt to maximize that side and avoid the other. As a philosophy and way of life, it is failed. Actualism, on the other hand, seems to be concerned with eliminating the entity, the ‘self’, that is the cause of malice and sorrow. Malice and sorrow result in the attempt to cling to one side of the polarity – pleasure – in an attempt to avoid the other side. But it doesn’t work because the ‘self’ just keeps popping up and bobbing back and forth between the two sides like a ping-pong ball. Actualism seems to be ‘game over’ time, and an extinction of the player, making way for a sheer sensual enjoyment of the actual world as-it-is.

In any event, these are some reflections on what you wrote. Thanks. Gary to Vineeto

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