Others ~ Selected Correspondence

Sorrow

Thank You A Lot! Ha Ha (This is so much fun!) No. 82(R) to Richard, 31.12.2005

No 60: <snip> And so it goes. Another few days of noble, masochistic sorrow. It passes after a few days, and I’m the same old shitbag, right back where I started.

I had a similar experience. I called it High Powered Giant Sorrow. Once I have a name for it, I could see how, when it sets in; I can see the destructive power of this tendency. And it has absolutely no meaning as far as I am concerned: only a spoiler – which fuels my status quo by inventing illusions and explanations and strategies – and it can go on and on.

Such is my reasoning and such a conclusion was possible for me because: I have named it, identified it, seen it in action and seen that I want to move on. That’s why I would not say that ‘I’m the same old shitbag, right back where I started’ – as I have understood it, and I know that its effect is weakened – though I can’t guarantee at this point that it will never come back – but I am fully prepared to meet it. And the ‘it’ is me – it is the core of me!

I am getting to know myself! No 33 to No 60

I posted a quote that was descriptive of the physical sensations that can sometimes accompany radical change –

One time I remember clearly, the experience was like cutting a thick cord that appeared to run from the bottom of my spine to his, like a telephone cord of sharing delight. Afterwards it felt like my very bone marrow was being drained out of me, most of my strength, determination and will to ‘fight for freedom’. A very strange experience, I was almost physically curling back into my self and became autonomous, not relying on him. Any need for emotional support vanished with that event. List AF, Alan, 12.1.1999 [emphases added]

However it is good to keep in mind that the impression of something physical happening is most likely due to psychosomatic processes, i.e. bodily responses to feelings and imagination.

Perfecto! I more than once found the psychosomatic nature... my depression/tiredness is more psychological than bodily.... realizing thus I have more energy and more happiness. There is a mental component of the body which is the ‘owner’ of the body which is probably the closest one gets to body... the ‘feeling’ of the body... the ‘feeler’ itself disguising as the body... which can do lot of tricks as if the body is having problems. Realizing this ends most of the illnesses that are not really there! No 33 to Vineeto, 31.5.2005

I also think that our fundamental resentment as human beings of being here – being born and being in this world – as the resentment has been identified – underlies much of malcontent, misery, unhappiness, and ineffectiveness that many people experience.

Perhaps I should speak of myself here. One can be perfectly aware of one’s tendency to feel sorry for oneself, ‘bitch’ or grouse about various injustices, and just plain be unhappy and discontent. Many of times in my own experience I am able to identify that I am simply resentful about having to be where I am at the time and doing what I am doing. This morning it went like this ‘Poor me, I have so much to do ... when will I ever get it all done?’

I agree. Were it not for the sorrow of humanity, there would not be the attraction of the supernatural world or the spiritual world. This is very clear to me at this time.

It is extremely rewarding to be progressively and incrementally experiencing freedom from the grip of this age-old sorrow of the human race. But as soon as one begins on this road, someone pops up saying ‘You can’t do that – it’s insanity’ or starts in preaching to you about the dire consequences of becoming free from the Human Condition.

One is essentially standing outside of this vast enterprise called humanity and one is seeing clearly, perhaps for the first time, the madness and insanity of what passes for ‘life’ for most people. One needs a discerning, critical, and freed intellect to be able to see the insanity of ‘normality’. Then one can stand on one’s own feet and make a choice – what’s it going to be – do I want to be free from all of this or do I want to go on treading all those tried and failed paths? Gary to Peter

Basically, poverty is a multifaceted issue and quite often has many complicated causes.

However, having said that, I think we can often identify malice as the main cause. If a person ended malice in themselves, then there would no longer be any reason to be greedy or to deliberately deny to another person the resources one is so intent on maintaining for themselves. Greed is a major factor in poverty as it is in the hunger problem. Hunger results directly from poverty. There is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone many times over.

If every human being was free from malice and sorrow, there would hardly be any reason for poverty to exist because there would be enough of everything for everyone to go around. There would be no greed, avarice, or hoarding of resources. There would be no cause for one person to maliciously dominate another person or group of people by denying them resources. For instance, it is probably redundant to point out that much poverty results from oppression, and the major forms of oppression are the ‘isms’: racism, sexism, class-ism, so on and so forth. Human beings oppress other human beings basically as a means of having power over them and controlling them. In other words, quite simply oppression is a ‘power trip’. One need not chronicle every instance of oppression down through the ages to realize that man’s inhumanity to man is legendary. Every single instance of oppression, either in intimate relationships as mental cruelty or violence or collectively as a nation or country to oppress other countries, is an example of unmitigated malice in action.

Sorrow is no doubt related to this. Sorrow is a consequence of poverty, and in turn sows the seeds for malice. But this relationship need not be a necessary cause-and-effect relationship, as a person living in Actual Freedom would be incapable of experiencing malice or feeling sorrow. Thus, one need only look at the ‘lessons of history’ to see that quite often the roles of being victim and persecutor are conveniently interchanged. So poverty would not lead to sorrow for one who is living in Actual Freedom. Effectively, the cause-effect relationship would be broken. Parenthetically, I find it interesting that in the present debate over the Iraq crisis, the old countries of Europe, once the primary Imperial powers, oppressors, and disturbers of world peace, have now taken the moral high-ground in the debate, lampooning the US as a demonic, militaristic superpower.

This is like, as my grandmother put it: ‘the frying pan calling the kettle black’. But I digress.

I don’t think poverty is always the result of malice however. For instance, there was a man, recently deceased, who lived on our road in an appallingly dilapidated trailer, who always looked like he was half-starving. He was an extreme hermit, and I always thought that he must have some serious mental disorder like Schizophrenia. He had a lot of medical problems and eventually died. I don’t think he was being oppressed because he looked and talked like everyone else. But he may have experienced discrimination as a result of his mental condition, and been unable to care for himself. I think this does bring up the issue as to why in a country so rich as ours some citizens live in shockingly primitive conditions with scarcely the resources to maintain life. Obviously there are great inequities in the distribution of resources in society, which permit these conditions to exist, and I think these can often be sheeted home to malice, pure and simple. Gary to No 48

By asking, ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’...I have ‘gone into’ the feelings of sorrow without blocking, or distracting, myself from their horror. I have felt over-whelming pangs of sorrow, too. Spontaneously, on one occasion, eleven years ago, I saw that there was no purpose to it all.

If sorrow is the glue that binds humanity together, as Peter stated in one of his posts, then indeed there is a purpose to it. It is part of the primitive survival program, rooted in the instinctual passions, of the human species. It’s purpose is survival. By perpetuating, feeding, or wallowing in grief and sorrow, one is perpetuating the Tried and Failed ways of humanity, clinging to a second-rate life, whose purpose is the perpetuation and survival of the species. If you mean by saying that there is no purpose to it all that you have surpassed sorrow and have grasped with both hands the futility of feelings of sorrow, then I am with you on this. My recent brief bout of sorrow was a revealing glimpse at ‘me’ as an instinctual being with ‘his’ naked survival program going full blast. There was no fear of ‘going into it’ and no particular desire to block it or suppress it. But it made no sense at all to prolong my suffering by wallowing in the experience. Gary to No 13

I’d like to go back to a previous thread about sorrow – back on October 6, to be precise. The subject matter is sorrow. You had this to say, among other things, about the experience of sorrow –

I’ve been doing one heck of a lot of ‘pulling’ lately, because just in the past day or two I’ve had an acute onset of sorrow, or rather I could say an eruption of those bitter-sweet feelings of grief, angst, sorrow, and disappointment, quite unbidden, and yet so, so familiar. Yesterday I felt almost paralysed by these feelings, they were so intense. Again, I am reminded that actualism is about examining and experiencing one’s feelings in the light of a sensuous awareness, not about suppressing or repressing one’s emotions.

I wonder if, as one is breaking free of the Human Condition, one is liable to experience fresh onslaughts of the ‘automatic/instinctual predisposition(s)’? I remember reading in Richard’s Journal the kind of scary, intensely abnormal and psychotic state that he experienced as he was on the verge of self-immolation, the description of which should be enough to deter any but the most serious of inquirers. I don’t want to suggest necessarily that that is what I am going through. But I have noted that the further and further I go my own way, depending on nobody, practicing attentiveness and sensuousness, and demolishing the social identities I have formed since birth, the more intensely do I seem to experience the raw survival program of the human species. So, last night, as I commenced to get a grip on my boot straps, a fascinated awareness reflected on ‘So this is human sorrow and suffering – this is the bitter-sweet feeling of sorrow, so deeply embedded, so ancient, so much a part of being a human being that it is in a sense my very life. It is what my life has been about, never very far around the corner, always lurking in the background, something I have tried to ameliorate through compassion and acts of pity and helpfulness, something I have tried to assuage by loving others and being loved, through being comforted and comforting in turn’.

I don’t want to ‘get over’ sorrow just to have it come back again. Is one in a sense subjecting oneself to these bouts of emotion? Am I on the wrong track? Are these ‘pity parties’ totally unnecessary or is there some intrinsic value to going through these experiences? What does one need to do to finally and irrevocably break free from these ‘automatic/instinctual predispositions’? I have a sense that your answer is going to be to get back to being happy and harmless just as soon as one can ... which would be a splendid answer ... but I’ll let you answer this yourself. Gary to Peter

Hello Peter...

Something you wrote seemed right on – it was the following:

This accords with my own recent bout of morbidness. I realized on some level, at least, that the grief was part and parcel of ‘my’ very identity – it is a large part of who I think ‘Gary’ is. It is a very old, familiar emotion that heralds to the early years of life, and perhaps goes back a good deal further. It is tied up with my mother’s tragic illness and subsequent devastating disability, the sadness and grief of a small child, along with all the sympathy and well-meaning endeavours of a number of relatives and close family friends, later worn as a kind of badge of honour and used to justify the most malicious actions, and by the age of 7, I am sure, became a very part of my personality and modus operandi in the world.

To experience this grief again, unhindered by the social identity with its conceptions of what is right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and to be able to see the effect that this emotional state had on my close, live-in partner, along with its unspoken demand for attention, nurturance, as well as the imposition of my moods and emotions on another, and the hurt that this caused in her, was a revealing glimpse at ‘me’ – the passionate identity – going full blast.

It did not do to tell myself that I ‘should not’ feel this way, or be this way. No, it took much longer to sort it all out, but also to make the shift to a sensuous awareness of the feeling and emotion and what it felt like, as well as a forfeiture of the claim of uniqueness – that this grief was ‘my’ own, but rather, looking at it as human grief and sadness, and the effect that this emotion is having on this present-day world of people in their inter-connectedness. As the shift came and happened, it seemed to be a short hop, skip, and jump to pulling myself up by my bootstraps and determining to pull myself out of the welter of sad emotions and get on with the business of living my life to the best of my ability – happy and harmless again. It was not a wrenching experience, which would imply a kind of suppression or repression, but it was a shift easily made when I realized the futility of remaining a sorrowful and suffering person.

So there it is: Just a few thoughts for now. Gary to Peter

The richness, the depth of each human feeling reveals the understanding of what it is to be a human being in such an empirical, intimate way that it is later instantly recognized in a fellow human being who is going through the same emotional, human experience and who can then be met by compassion, that very kind understanding that you will have enjoyed with another, not only when life was being particularly difficult or sad, but also when you wanted to share your utmost joy or love.

Now my experience over the last several days is that compassion only served to perpetuate sorrow, so I would ask Irene how her compassion (assuming she is feeling such for me over the loss of my friend) is going to assist me?

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It looks as though I may be getting back to writing after a bit of a zombie period, so I am replying to your mail of two weeks ago. I do not think you did answer my question – which was ‘in what circumstances you consider sympathy and compassion do not perpetuate sorrow and what beneficial effect they may have on the other’.

The remarks you made about ‘genuine’ sympathy were:

1. ‘To be given genuine sympathy for a genuine misfortune or heart-ache is very precious and has always an immediate and soothing effect, therefore the suffering has been lessened indeed’

2. ‘But for sympathy to be beneficial to both people involved they are already regarding each other as fully equal and is then always appreciated as an intimate and very pleasant exchange by both’

My recent experience was that sympathy did not lessen suffering – indeed it increased it. So, perhaps I have not experienced what you mean by ‘genuine’ sympathy. I certainly think my wife and I (and a few others) expressed what I think you mean – it did no good, only encouraged a wallowing in pain and sorrow. If you are meaning ‘Divine Compassion’ (by whatever name), I have experienced this in the past. As I am not experiencing it now, I can only go by memory but, from what I can remember, it did nothing to alleviate suffering – it only meant that I could share and ‘take on’ the suffering of the other – it had no beneficial effect on them whatsoever. Thinking about it now, the only effect ‘divine compassion’ had was to encourage the other to rely on me as an authority in some sort of ‘guru’ role – hey, I had not got this until now! Isn’t it great how discussing these things leads to personal discoveries. Alan to Irene

All of the misery and suffering is completely unnecessary – all of it! Oh sure I have read it before and even written about it and Richard continually ‘bangs his drum’ about all of the wars and the rapes and the murders and the child abuse and the domestic disputes and the suicides. But, this morning it really hit home to me. Read the words and take them in – all of the misery and suffering are 100% unnecessary. Don’t just read and move on saying ‘yeah, I agree, they are unnecessary’. Take in the fact – get your teeth into it – examine it until it sinks home – all of human suffering need not happen. This is a fact of such staggering enormity that it beggars belief – and therein lies the problem, for ‘I’ will never believe it to be true. It has to be experienced. So, ponder on it further and do not wander from the subject. Try to believe it. Imagine every single instant of misery, suffered by every person in the world, for countless millennia – all of it need not have happened. And all that is required to stop it happening is a bit of intestinal fortitude to see the evidence. And, none of the metaphysical nonsense of ‘suffering does not exist’. It does. It is all too real. However, it does not have to exist.

These are only suggestions, mind you. Everyone is completely free to continue suffering to their heart’s content – or, should it perhaps be heart’s discontent? Similarly, it is of no avail me telling anyone what is so – except, if it is said often enough and long enough, a few facts may penetrate and someone may decide to experience for themselves what is fact and what is belief. Alan

To try to make a long story short, I have been investigating the animal instinctual passion of sorrow. I noticed that when I pulled up in my car to park in front of the office yesterday, that there was a familiar let-down kind of feeling, a feeling of like ‘Oh Boy, here we go again’. Since I have been running the ‘How am I....’ question pretty frequently, it really got my attention when that feeling crept in. The feeling or emotion itself was one of sorrow. It is something that I know very well. I have only recently really been questioning and looking in to these things. It has been easier for me to understand malice, I mean understand in the sense of where it comes from, what its’ evolutionary function would be: to attack and destroy one’s enemies in order to survive and propagate the species. But it has been harder for me to understand where sorrow fits into the picture.

I read about Sorrow in the AF glossary pages. One thing that rang my bell, in particular, was when it said:

‘This instinct, implanted by blind nature to ensure the survival of the species, pumps the body with chemicals that induce the feeling of fear whenever one is straying too far away from the herd, abandoning other members of the family or group or being on one’s own.’ AF Glossary

Oh Boy, does that hit the mark. That seems exactly like what is happening. I feel like I have done something wrong and am being corrected, disciplined in no uncertain terms, brought back into the fold. I have strayed far, far away from the herd. Whilst I haven’t abandoned my family completely, I maintain considerable distance, and I am unaffected by any feeling of loyalty to my family or tribe. I also am on my own a good deal. I do not see myself as keeping any friends at work or being concerned to make any allies. That does not mean that I am blatantly unfriendly, but I just don’t seem to have the kind of relationship with co-workers that I see others having.

So what I am seeing here, from the reading in the glossary and thinking about it on my own, is that sorrow is a pre-birth programmed instinct to keep one in line with one’s group, tribe, work group, family group, etc. It is a way to insure that humans will conform with the wretched status quo even if that means being peevish, unhappy, or malevolent. Everything about sorrow says to me ‘You will never leave us. You will always carry this sadness around with you. You cannot be happy. Whatever you do in life or no matter how far you travel, you will always have me to remind you of who you are’.

A little further on in the glossary, it says the following:

‘From my investigations and experiences it is obvious that ‘who’ I think and feel I am – ‘me’ at the core – encompasses both a deep-set feeling of separateness from others and the world as perceived by the senses as well as a deep-set feeling of needing to ‘belong’.’

‘This over-arching feeling of separateness – of being a ‘separate self’, who is forever yearning to ‘belong’ – is the root cause of personal sorrow and the all encompassing ‘ocean’ of human sorrow in the world.’ AF Glossary

It is hard for me to admit that I want to belong, that I am not free from this herding instinct. Perhaps outwardly I behave as if it does not affect me that much, but the fears that I experienced when ‘I’ am under scrutiny for apparently not ‘fitting in’ are telling a different story. I think that it will be important for me to investigate this instinct. So, the basic thrust of the instinct, as I understand it so far, is to ensure loyalty and conformity to the group? Is that it? Or is there something that I am missing? I would welcome feedback from anybody who has dealt with or is dealing with this sort of thing. I have wondered if what I am experiencing is the ostracization or rejection by the group that others talk about, you know, the ‘you just don’t seem like everybody else here – what’s the matter with you?’ How have other people dealt with this? Gary

Yes, as far as I can see, an Actual Intimacy is far superior to the sense of separation that causes one to pick and choose among people to fill various roles such as ‘friend’, ‘best friend’, ‘lover’, ‘ally’, etc. These distinctions are arbitrary and stem from the artificial and fictitious self, with his/her need to belong, to be ‘in love’, and have special friends and allies to help assuage the very sense of being lonely, frightened, and cut off from the magnificence of the actual world. This Actual Intimacy causes me to be connected to everyone and everything. As with you, I am less inclined to seek friendship with others, although there is a corresponding fear sometimes that I am getting ‘too detached’, ‘too isolative’, too ‘on my own’.

Well said indeed. This is exactly what I am talking about. There is so much on the menu of life now that one does not have to settle for the Soupe Du Jour (malice, sorrow, nurture, desire). To be cut off from the immensity and purity of the infinite physical universe is indeed a sticky sorrow-soup. I am less clear, however, on the distinction between sorrow and the need to belong. I tend to link them together in my mind at this point in time. I shall have to think on that one a little more.

I do not relate strongly to the feeling of compassion. Perhaps a little bit though. I have become more aware of the extent of people’s unhappiness. It has struck me often how unhappy people look at they go about their business. If you even just look at the faces around you, you will see how miserable, unhappy, depressed, or angry people look. As I have become more aware of these feelings, emotions, and their associated basic instincts in myself, I seem to see it more in other people. Gary to Vineeto

Personally I see no point in suffering. Having said that I see no point in it does not mean, however, that I am free from it. I have experienced, since I quit my job, ‘utter despair’ on a number of occasions. I have investigated into these feelings but I can’t say I understand them fully or comprehensively. If there is a ‘bitter-sweet lure of feeling sad’, I am not sure what it is. Perhaps it just confirms that there is a ‘me’ there. I know that I sometimes punish myself terribly. It has happened a couple of times recently, within the last week or so, that I was suffering so from anxiety and depression – I felt I could not bear it any more. I remained in the state of awareness, questioning myself about the feelings and emotions, and telling myself that it was utterly futile to be suffering like this. A couple of times a curious thing happened: all of a sudden I was free from the crushing emotions I had had. It was so sudden and it seemed like nothing that ‘I’ had done to bring this about. The anxious and depressed feelings simply abated and went away, to be followed by a wonderful feeling of relief. This has happened a couple of times, so I know that the process of awareness and ‘self’-investigation works, but there is definitely nothing easy or comfortable about it. It seems that it is the light of awareness that shines away the gloomy feelings and gloomy moods and not anything that I have done. On one occasion, the feelings dissipated so completely and so suddenly that I found myself hardly recognizing that it had happened. And when I did reflect on what had happened, I was astounded by it.

I think there is a lot of variance in what people experience based on their life circumstances, their ‘personality’, physical constitution, life experiences, etc, etc. If other people can get through pain and suffering more quickly than I, then my hat is off to them.

I do have the sense sometimes of banging my head into a brick wall. I don’t think it is necessary to go to the utter limit and experience the feelings and passions to their fullest all the time. Sometimes I just get to a state of being numb, and I can’t take any further investigation into it. Sometimes it’s a good idea to break it off and have a laugh at yourself, take walk outside, get some fresh air, or whatever turns you on.

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Perhaps I should mention now that I have become very interested in knowing what causes pain – I mean emotional pain. Conversely, it is an interesting question what causes emotional feel-good feelings. But I seem to be more focused on emotional pain. This is another aspect of my ‘self’-investigations. I have sometimes mused ‘Why is this (what I am experiencing right now) so painful? What is this about? What is making this painful? Etc, etc. I have noticed the element of time looms large in any emotional pain I experience: there is either the regret or shame or guilt over something that has happened in the past, ie. the belief that I have failed to measure up in terms of some hope or expectation, or perhaps a fixation of anger or resentment about something that has happened and the re-experiencing of these emotions again and again. There is also the element of a fearful or worried projection into the future – what if...? When I feel anxious, my mind and emotions are drawn to play out in my imagination events which have not happened but which I fear are going to happen. I have noticed that when I am in emotional pain, it is usually a seesawing between the past or the future. Alternatively, there is no pain in what is happening right now. There is no pain as this flesh-and-blood body with these sensations right now at this moment in time. It is curious how the feelings, the emotions, and the beliefs are founded on this illusion of either past or present, which of course seems at the time to be very real but is not. Underneath this fixation with either the past or the future, of course, is the instincts – there is an instinctive fear or dread sometimes of the future, which, when it kicks in, causes one to fearfully anticipate or project into the future, and there is this aggression turned against oneself (you described it this way once in a post awhile back) when one feels guilty, ashamed, depressed, aggrieved, etc. I have noticed when in great emotional pain, there is the constant swinging back and forth between past and present, past and present. It may seem like an insignificant point but I really feel I have made an important discovery about myself. Gary to Peter

Something else you wrote in your recent post to me caught my attention. You said:

Just as an aside. I hear a lot of people categorize fear as the major factor in their life but it is my experience that sorrow is the predominant and hallowed emotion and it is sorrow that begets malice.

Reflection on this observation of yours results in the realization that this is so. It seems that fear and anxiety are much more on the surface layer, if you will, of consciousness, whereas sorrow is a deeper-down rudimentary emotion. There is a bittersweet feeling of sorrow associated with the self – the ‘who’ I think I am. There have been times in the not-long-ago past when, reviewing my life, this emotion came to the fore and caused me to tear up at the eye, while contemplating ‘my’ life. It is much the same feeling I have had while watching a sad part in a movie and welling up with tears momentarily. I have found these emotions to be most interesting opportunities to observe ‘me’ in action. I think the underlying deep sorrow is about the supposed ‘tragedy’ that life comes to an end – a kind of funereal experience. Of course in some cultures one’s death is accompanied by the most unrestrained jollity, but that seems to be the exception.

I wonder if it is correct to speak of layers of consciousness? I think sorrow is on a deeper layer than fear and anxiety, at least in my experience. The anxiety and the fear seem to be more associated with the social identity – the ‘who’ I am that craves security, position, status, ‘respect’ from others, to do the ‘right’ thing, etc. The fragility of life, the evanescence of life – that is something that most wish to push away, or completely deny by wishful fantasies of everlasting life in a supernatural realm. Gary to Peter

Maybe I have it wrong but it looks to me like sorrow comes from fear. For example, if there is a fear of not surviving then there will be sorrow. In other words, isn’t fear underlying the sorrow? Can either one of you comment on that?

I am not sure sorrow ‘comes from fear’ as you say but I think it is certainly akin to fear. I think it might be more correct to say that sorrow comes from the same source as fear. Namely, the primitive survival program of the human species rooted in the instinctual passions. And, as you state, if there is a fear of not surviving there is usually sorrow.

Personally, sorrow to me doesn’t feel like fear. In sorrow, I have noticed there is an aching pain in the heart region. Hence, the common usage of the phrase ‘broken-hearted’ is derived. Fear is usually a feeling located in the pit of the stomach.

I think you are correct, though, in saying that if there is a fear of not surviving there is usually sorrow. I have noticed that the failure to embrace death results in a sorrowful state. The passionate entity that inhabits this flesh-and-blood body is concerned with its’ survival at all costs. The thought of death, or the realization of death, can trigger the quick down-loading of sorrowful feelings that may be felt as a kind of dread, foreboding, terror, etc, etc.

I think sorrow, at least to my way of thinking, is more akin to grief than it is to fear, strictly speaking. When one is sorrowful, one is in effect grieving. One may be anticipating one’s own end and hence grieving one’s demise – this fills one with a kind of foreboding, or one may be grieving the loss of many ‘loved ones’ over the course of one’s life – parents, children, friends, associates, etc. When one is grieving, one is often inconsolable.

Whatever it is, sorrow sucks. Yes, there was a wallowing in it for me that was totally ridiculous. Sorrow is not inevitable, nor must one accept it as a part of life. It seems to me that actualism is the process of directly realizing the greatest pipe dream of all: the banishing of sorrow from one’s life – never to ever feel the pangs of sorrow, hurt, and suffering again. Gary to No 16

What I am trying to get at and I may be confused about is that fear is underlying all of it including sorrow and grief. For example, if one is grieving the loss of ‘loved ones’, this is because I am afraid of being alone or of not being loved. In other words, isn’t sorrow and grief caused by the underlying instinct of fear? As sorrow and grief are not instincts themselves then aren’t they generated by the instinct of fear? Sorry for the repetition but this seems like an important point to me because if I am feeling sorrow and grief then I should be looking at the fear that is associated with it.

I’m not sure if fear is underlying it all. But I think I see your point. In order to simplify it in my mind, I am thinking of an infant human being. The infant cries out in distress and this is a signal to the mother to come and feed it. The infant may be crying out in rage and pain, and so there is anger associated with the plaintive pleas of the infant for feeding. Or, if the infant is abandoned by the caretakers, as has been exhaustively studied by investigators and theorists such as Bowlby, there may be an apathy, dullness and un-responsiveness that sets in, as among some orphan children. This numb, ‘shutting down’ emotionally state is akin to sorrow and is a form of suffering. And I am not sure that we can always say that fear underlies it all. There probably is some mixture of fear in any sorrowful emotional state, but I don’t think of sorrow necessarily as always coming from fear. This is just my way of thinking on the subject.

If I am grieving ‘loved ones’ death, I am feeling keenly the pain of loss, and it is a sadness, a heartbrokenness, a pining away, in some cases, and I don’t always think there is fear underlying this state, although there may be. I am not discounting in any way what you are saying, as you alone can speak to your own investigations of the instincts. Fear certainly is a pervasive emotion and instinct, certainly in ‘my’ case, but I don’t think that sorrow and grief always ‘come from’ fear. Gary to No 16

I am glad you put the phrase ‘being on my own’ into context. I think the phrase needs to be defined. I can relate to the feeling of being abandoned by parents, friends and partners. Indeed, having had much therapy in preceding years, and I am talking about in the 70’s and 80’s, it was a commonplace understanding that one’s problems as an adult were ultimately traceable to abandonment by one’s parents, or abuse of some sort or other. Some popular therapy gurus, such as John Bradshaw, turned the theme of abandonment, which such a great many people identified with, into a popular cottage industry, selling best-selling books, TV series, etc. Since finding out about Actual Freedom, I am understanding the core experience of abandonment as less of a real experience traceable to childhood abandonment and more of a phenomenon linked to the instinctual entity inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body. ‘I’ am cut off from the splendour and magnificence of this inherently infinite and perfect universe, and so feel a great gnawing of abandonment in my gut. Yet I am part and parcel of everything around me, and there is no actual separation between me (as a flesh and blood body) and the trees, rocks, sky, etc, etc.

Also the phrase ‘being on my own’ might mean being independent and self-sufficient, an idea that many people might find objectionable, particularly people with close family connections. I seem to come from a rather disengaged type of family: nobody really seems very close to anybody else, so I have always felt on my own in any event. And I think that I always tried in one way or another to fill that void that aloneness left. More recently, I feel less and less inclined to be with other people, and that is not to say that I don’t take pleasure in being with others – quite the contrary, I enjoy being out socially, although I do not have a very active social life. But there is a line I tend to draw in terms of drawing close to other people – I do not wish to be ‘intimate’ with others, in the way that that term is ordinarily used. It is strange in a way, because in actual intimacy once is not busy keeping one’s guard up all the time, and one is actually seeing the person just as they are, warts and all, without any intervening feelings or emotions such as attraction, affection, revulsion, dislike, etc. In actual intimacy, one is a good deal closer to the person than at any other time, in terms of being able to see the person as they are, and in this state, one is indeed ‘on one’s own’. Gary to Vineeto

For me there is definitely the ‘preference’ for actuality, which by your description roughly corresponds to what you are calling factuality. However, you also seem to be describing what is known as sensuality and I wonder if you have read any of the material on the Actual Freedom website regarding the qualities of sensuality, attentiveness, and the Pure Consciousness Experience? I really must say that since I am not living in the condition of Actual Freedom, my comments ought not to be taken as indicative of this condition. I still have feelings and emotions running at times, and sometimes quite strongly ... as for instance I recently had strong feelings of anger and aggression. But overall I think there has been steady some diminution of the feelings and emotions over the time since I have been an Actualist, leaving me free to experience first-hand sheer sensuality. I like what you describe as the hypnotic quality of emotions. I think there really is something hypnotic about strong emotions, whether they be of the constellation of emotions and experiences occurring in malice or sorrow.

Recently we have had a great deal of press coverage of the 9/11 atrocity and whilst watching a program about the New York firemen, I found myself experiencing sorrow, not quite aware precisely of what content in the program triggered this feeling, but nevertheless experiencing a feeling of heavy sadness, grief, etc. all rolled into one and it was a good opportunity to experience these emotions first-hand. There was no attempt to push these feelings away or exert control over them, rather I was interested to experience them and be attentive to how the feelings felt and what the associated thoughts and beliefs were. One of the things that I came away from this experience with was the realization that collective sorrow and grief in institutional forms is a form of mass hypnosis, which can easily lead to mass hysteria. Feelings such as these really are ‘the pits’ when compared to the purity and pristine-ness of actually being here. Gary to No 46

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