I thought to make a comment given that something I wrote in the glossary was recently quoted in your conversation with Gary.

In the Library:  A feeling is nothing more than an emotion backed thought and as such we can free ourselves of their grip upon us I also see such references elsewhere.

Gary: OK. I stand corrected. I checked the URL you provided and indeed it does state that a feeling is an emotion-backed thought. Also, it states the identical same thing under the section ‘belief’. So, I can see how this can be a bit confusing. I was not aware that in the glossary, the word feeling is being described as an emotion backed thought. I must admit that I do not think of it that way myself. I don't think of feelings as thoughts, although I do think of feelings as having cognitive counterparts.

Indeed there is an inconsistency in the glossary and as I am the author of most the glossary terms and this one in particular, it is my mistake.

Thinking and affective feeling are distinctive activities and the evidence of their difference is readily apparent in a pure consciousness experience when all of the affective feelings such as fear, anger, resentment, sorrow, awe, love and any notions of God or a higher authority disappear, as if by magic. What remains in a pure consciousness experience is a direct sensuous experience of actuality wherein the ability to sensately experience, think and reflect all operate freely and effortlessly, unimpeded by any affective feelings whatsoever.

In ‘normal’ experiencing however, the affective feelings are both impulsive and compulsive and are instinctively ‘self’-centred which means they are so predominant and intrusive that they not only create a feeling entity, ‘who I feel I am deep down inside’ but they also permeate one’s thinking to the extent that they create a thinking entity, ‘who’ I think I am, which then overlays one’s primal instinctive-feeling entity. This permeating and corrupting of intelligence is why most people tend to say what they are thinking rather than being able to distinguish and express clearly what they are feeling. Therefore it would have been much more accurate for me to have written that ‘feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts’, rather than ‘feelings are emotion-backed thoughts’ as they are two distinct activities.

An example of this confusion between thinking and feeling is when someone is worrying about something they usually regard this as a thought, whereas worry always has a feeling component, i.e. if someone is worrying why his or her spouse or companion is late, at the root of this worry may well be the feeling of jealousy. I use this as an example as it was such an incident that enabled me to see the folly and destructive nature of my feelings and to instantly break free of jealousy itself – see Peter’s Journal, Living Together

Some Eastern spiritual teachings advocate ‘right’ thinking as a way of repressing or transcending unwanted or undesirable thoughts, but because they fail to understand that feelings are commonly expressed as thoughts, what they are really advocating is ‘right’ feeling as a way of suppressing unwanted or undesirable feelings. The East religions and philosophies therefore abound with ethical principles and moral platitudes as to what is right and wrong and what is good and bad equally as much as Western religion and philosophy.

Contrary to all of humanity’s wisdom it is affective feelings that are the bane of mankind whereas it is the ability to think clearly – an ability actively cultivated by freeing one’s native intelligence from the shackles of affective instinct-based feeling – that offers the means to become free from the clutches of the human condition.

Yes, I did nothing to either ‘get into’ my feelings, nor to ‘get rid’ of them. An awareness of what I was feeling, an examination of what was occurring, an investigation into what caused the feeling (usually a belief) led to the particular emotion disappearing without, as you say, ‘me’ being aware of it happening. Do you think it is ridding oneself of beliefs that causes the emotions to vanish? Unlike emotions, I was usually aware of the disappearance of a belief – a ‘getting it’, which I have written of previously.

I just wrote to No 3 on this matter as to how I see belief, feeling and emotion. It might be useful and may address your question – let me know if it doesn’t. I would only add that one doesn’t eliminate feelings totally until the ‘lot’ goes – until the fat lady has sung, so to speak. But the ‘vanishing’ of emotions from one’s daily life such that one has a 99% perfect day, day after day, is the base camp for the final event to happen.

The ruthless challenging, exposing and understanding of these beliefs and instincts actually weakens their influence on my thoughts and behaviour. The process, if followed diligently and obsessively, will ultimately cause them to disappear completely. The idea, of course, being to eliminate the cause of my unhappiness, so that I can experience life at the optimum, now.

The answer is neither yes nor no. The purpose of the actualism process is firstly to stop avoiding, denying, suppressing or attempting to transcend one’s own ‘self’-centred instinctual survival passions. The process of becoming aware of these passions in action in your own psyche then leads to you being able to be ‘desensitised’ to these passions, as in ‘Reduce or eliminate the sensitivity of a person to a neurosis, phobia, etc.)’ Oxford Dictionary. You are then no longer prone to be paralysed by fear, overcome by anger, engulfed by nurture or driven by desire – you can become then virtually free of the instinctual passions – virtually happy and harmless.

But the precursor to becoming desensitised is to remove the impediments to becoming sensitive to, and therefore aware of, one’s own fear, anger, nurture and desire in action in one’s own psyche. This first stage is only possible for those who have become free of being enamoured, awed and encumbered by spiritual/religious beliefs, values, ethics and morals – there are no short-cuts to Actual Freedom.

Speaking from experience, I found two major impediments to becoming aware of and labelling my feelings as they arose – my social identity with all my real-world Christian beliefs, morals and ethics and my layered-on-top Eastern spiritual identity with yet another set of beliefs, morals and ethics. Being born a male in a Christian society meant that I was taught to suppress my feelings and being born-again into Eastern religion meant denying my unwanted feelings and solely identifying with goodness and Godliness. What I soon discovered in actualism was that it is impossible to become aware of, let alone label, my fear and aggression while maintaining my spiritual identity of being a holier-than-thou goody-two-shoes.

At one time I did consider that Krishnamurti-ism was a particularly onerous conditioning, as it does seem a very cerebral, detached, feeling-denying-and-suppressing philosophy-religion. But then again, the followers of Rajneeshism, a very emotive, devotional, feeling-expressing philosophy-religion, are seemingly equally unable to be aware of, label and be conscious of their own feelings of malice and sorrow. Whatever nature of spiritual/religious conditioning you have – be it Eastern, Western, Eastern layered on Western, repressive, expressive, devotional, Self-devotional, monotheistic or pantheistic – is irrelevant, because it is impossible to be aware of what is actually happening in the physical corporeal world if you have your head stuck in the clouds in the imaginary spirit-ual world.

If I read you right, you have set yourself a goal in life – to feel good or feel excellent – and then you are investigating whatever stands in the way of your goal. If you started off feeling really good and suddenly noticed as you put your feet up at lunchtime that you have lost it and are feeling a bit low, then put a name on the feeling – say annoyed – and then trace back and remember when you came off feeling good and why. If it was something someone said, have a root around and discover why you became annoyed.

What button was pushed – was it pride, was it guilt, was it your manliness, was it some moral view you held that was offended? When you have milked the event or incident for what it was worth and discovered a bit about yourself and what makes ‘you’ tick, then you get back to feeling good or you even crank up a bit of feeling excellent at having been aware of how you were experiencing that particular moment of being alive and had made some discoveries about yourself.

It is impossible to tackle all the emotions at once, as you said, for this can only be an intellectual-only approach. By all means read and intellectually understand but it is the putting into practice of the method that produces actual change – and the putting into practice of the method means one step at a time. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is a one step at a time approach – one feeling, one moment – right now.

The other discovery you seem to have made is that is vitally important is to set yourself a benchmark for how you want to feel or experience this moment. If your benchmark is ‘normal’ or average or so-so, then running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ will mostly produce a meaningless answer of ‘normal’, average or so-so. By setting a benchmark of feeling good or feeling excellent, then mostly the question will produce at least a not-so-good or below the benchmark average. Then it is easier to be aware of your feeling at the time and much more likely to be able to name it.

I like what you have written, for many people seem to have difficulties in remembering a PCE to uphold as their benchmark whereas everyone can remember feeling excellent and thus be easily able to set this feeling as their benchmark. Perhaps it was a particularly carefree time, a particularly sensual experience, a time of particular joie de vie. Then you use this as your benchmark and aim to keep your head above water for as long as you can and when you become aware that you are sinking or have sunk, then you find out the cause and get back to as close to your benchmark as you can.

Good on ya. It sounds as if your stubborn perseverance is bringing rewards.

The rewards of actualism are beyond belief for they are down-to-earth and actual.

‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is dangerously effective in relentlessly bringing one to one’s senses as both the cerebral and affective perceptions – ‘my’ perceptions as a social identity and instinctual being – fade into insignificance. Not only do they fade but they are experienced in everyday life of virtual freedom as illusionary, i.e. experienced not intellectually dismissed as in the spiritual deceit of ‘I am already perfect, all I have to do is realise it!’. My answer to these people is – ‘do you, in your imagined perfection, live in peace and harmony with another person?’ ‘Do you get sad, melancholic, peeved, irritated, upset, bored, etc.?’

One is constantly confronted with the experiential fact that the actual is far more extraordinary and magical than anything felt in feelings or imagined in thought – it is, after all, actual and all happening this very moment. This very actual-ness – as in experienced by the senses i.e. physical, and not merely passive, as in happening this very moment – will be the death of ‘me’.

And the death of ‘me’ will be a sensate experience accompanied by the last of the cerebral and affective ‘flame-outs’.

Well, since starting this mail I have had an interesting experience of feeling devastated at being a total failure after another experience of standing on the ‘edge’ of the death of ‘me’ and ‘it’ not happening – yet again. It was as though I became ‘me’ again totally and gathered all ‘my’ passionate energy together for an assault on the mountain. Upon reflection it is as though I was trying to evince a passionate end of ‘me’ – feeling ‘my’ way to freedom. Experience has shown that I cannot think my way to freedom, nor feel my way to freedom but I guess I was testing out what I have written above. What is obvious from the experiment is that while sex is a door to being here – i.e. it is a wonderful way to induce a PCE – it is not by itself a door to freedom from the Human Condition.

The whole exercise has served to reinforce my experience that the door to freedom is in the doing of it – is in the living of a virtual freedom to maximum possible – a continual lifting of the bar. To imagine either cerebrally or by feeling a ‘death of me’ is not the way, as I see it – the imagining requires a looking backward, a certain put-up job, a rehearsal if you like. Not that the experience in itself is not valuable – it is certainly most interesting as to what is still possible to ‘conjure up’, but it can ruin your day a bit. It’s such a weird thing to do by both normal and spiritual world standards but, as I drop back to my normal standard of Virtual Freedom, it leaves no ‘scars’, has no emotional memories and the only evidence is a bit of physical strain in the body from the emotional excesses – not to mention the sexual excesses.

Ah, what weird stuff that goes on in the head and the heart on this journey of ours. Still, that is where the weird stuff is, so it has to play out its game.

Meanwhile – toast, Rose’s lime marmalade and fresh brewed coffee await me.

There seems to be a lack of understanding among women of the suffering and sorrow that men experience. This is understandable, as the instinctual male role is one of provider and protector. As such he displays courage, bravado and strength to impress the female. In her selection of a mate this is what she demands, albeit sub-consciously, in many cases. This instinctual behaviour has resulted in the typical male displays of toughness, competitiveness and aggression, essential for the hunter and protector in the past and still played out in sport, business, politics and unfortunately in war. It is simply the male role – as it is the role of the female to procreate, mother and nurture and be protected.

This leads directly to the assumption that all violence is the fault of the male and women are but innocent victims. And yet it is the men who are still expected to die for family or country.

The other common belief is that men are not emotional or feeling ‘beings’. I had thought I had experienced the full gamut of human emotions and wrote a lot about them in my journal, smugly thinking I had not repressed anything. But recently when I stuck my head into fear to see if I was maybe avoiding something I found more. Beyond fear I discovered stark terror, angst and a dread the like of which I have never experienced before or want to experience again. I had previously, at the death of my son, experienced a form of dread that I would describe as personal, but this dread was as though I was experiencing the dread of humanity – every tortured soul, every rape, every horror, every fear. It literally tore my heart out as I realised what lay at the very core of my ‘being’ and every other being – I had tapped the very source of human psychic fear – the psychic opposite of the Divine Love and Bliss of Enlightenment.

So maybe this will illustrate the point as to why I truck little with those who accuse men of having no feelings. Feelings rule and ruin the lives of both men and women equally; this is my experience. After a near fatal illness, my father deliberately went back to work with the avowed intention of at least leaving something to my mother – he died two years later and she got a house. One night I witnessed a car crash. Going to help I was confronted with a seriously injured teenager who muttered over and over through the blood ‘she left me, she left me’. I have suffered from the fear of getting a girl pregnant and of being forced to become a husband and provider in my teens and as such was a fearful bumbling virgin when married. I have suffered heartbreak, jealousy, dependency, loneliness – need I go on?

Only a person who is deeply troubled by emotions will turn against them in anger and try to rid themselves of the whole plethora of emotional experiences. To me they are the palette that I use to paint my every moment on to the canvas of my immediate environment, except that this is 3-dimensional and it depicts more my atmosphere than colours or figures.

This agrees with my experience as well and I see it in others. It is only because I have been ‘deeply troubled’ by grief, anger, jealousy, despair, violence, greed, rape, suicide, love, empathy, sorrow, compassion, loneliness, etc. etc. that I wanted to be rid of them in myself for personal peace as well as to stop inflicting my sorrow and anger on others.

To me compassion is the full understanding through experiencing all the accompanying emotions of a particularly testing aspect of life, that this is what it is to be grieving, or to be angry or to intensely hate or to be desolate, lonely, utterly discouraged in all of life etc. and to accept it as belonging to the all-round human experience in order to become wise. Not that only the so-called negative feelings will grant wisdom; the positive ones can be even more important in that respect!

So your ‘new’ philosophy is based on acceptance of anger and suffering. What is new about it then? This is as good as it gets? No wonder people give up in despair or wish like hell for some better after-life. Surely you can offer something better than acceptance...it hasn’t worked up until now.

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Even when they do play an attacking or defending role with me, I find that I am not disturbed by this at all and therefore emotional reactions simply do not come up any more, so I there is nothing at all that I have to get rid of, exterminate or otherwise repress or suppress. These days I can virtually instantly discern the understandable reaction of the other as a natural human defence of themselves.

Above you had said that you accepted emotions and feelings as good and now you say you don’t have any anyway. Exactly what is your teaching – you seem to have a bet in each way. Are you advocating a middle road – an actual freedom with a bit of belief and femaleness thrown in or is it just a freedom for women only?

As you can see you get no support from me for the philosophy of retaining human conditioning or instincts. I remember being astounded when you said you would seek love again even though you acknowledged it could bring great suffering in the event of your partner dying or leaving. You said you would welcome the suffering. Well, not for me – my chest is still bruised from feeling and suffering the universal dread!

Re: Vitriolic confusion

Wow, some fire has erupted, I read in your e-mail! Despite your vitriolic confusion about me and my new(?), old(?), woman only(?) anti-man(?) philosophy, I couldn’t help chuckling about you here and there and saying ‘fair enough, Peter’.

So I guess if you regard my last letter as vitriolic we are coming to an end of our correspondence. We seem to ground on the major rock of feelings and emotions and we have wide philosophical differences on the matter.

If I can attempt to broadly summarise the positions I see it as the following –

Your stated philosophy from your last post is that of –

1. ‘understanding and not running away from feelings, emotional reactions and deep grudges.’
2. ‘just taking my place in the world, standing proud all by myself and being able to easily rely on all my knowledge, wisdom, understanding and my clean emotional life, that I am very happy to all call me, my character, my personality’.
3. ‘It was never me that was seen as wrong or malicious, it was a question of wrong interpretations and beliefs that proved to be incorrect or mistakenly assumed by powerful authorities.’
4. ‘it isn’t my aim at all, to ‘rid myself’ from the faculty to feel fear.’
5. ‘The understanding of each and every feeling and the careful distinguishing between conditioned and authentic feelings makes emotional reactions (outbursts) redundant.’

Briefly in response to the above points my position is –

1. ... to eliminate feelings, emotional reactions and deep grudges with the desired aim of becoming happy and completely harmless such that I am able to live with fellow human beings in peace and harmony. To actually become, as a human being, as pure, innocent and delightful as the rest of the universe. That’s pretty audacious I realise, and this is an experiment after all, but my experience is it is working so far.
2. ... to push beyond what has been accepted as normal to date to elicit a lasting permanent condition such that malice and sorrow will never occur in me at all. I know that aggression and fear lie at the core of the Human Condition within me and are able to surface at any time with horrendous results. I cannot rely on myself until this disease is gone – until I am rid of this madness in me.
3. ... I see that I am malicious and sorrowful at the core of my being and seek to eliminate that. I saw that I was willing to die or kill for my beliefs or instinctually when I ‘felt’ my survival was at stake; or even more shocking to hate another to the point of wishing they were dead or suffering. (For me the Milgram experiment was shocking in the participants’ willingness to inflict pain on others regardless of the authority element of the experiment. One of the biggest selling computer games in America is one in which the aim is to run over as many pedestrians as possible.)
4. ... I always wanted to be free of fear.
5. ... ‘Authentic’ feelings are those that are natural and in my experience they are fear, aggression, nurture and desire – the instincts. When ‘push comes to shove’ we revert to instinctual behaviour of survival whether the threat is actual or merely felt as threatening. Thus we cower in fear, lash out in aggression, needlessly sacrifice, sexually abuse, etc. Ridding oneself of blind nature’s authentic instincts seems a great idea to me.

So, there seems a gulf so wide that we have nothing in common philosophically. I do understand you have ‘tread the boards’ with all this with Richard for all those years and I hear your warnings. But I figure I’ve got nothing left to lose, so I’ll keep going. Besides, I’m having a grand time and it’s such fun to dig into this stuff about us human beings.

I met a friend of ours lately who has had some inklings that Vineeto and I were ‘doing something different’ with our lives. We got chatting and I said that it was about being happy and harmless. She seemed interested but when I said this meant being free of malice and sorrow she seemed doubtful. When I asked her wouldn’t you want to be free of sorrow she said she really liked to feel sad occasionally. Unperturbed, I asked her about being free of malice and she said that she liked to get angry, to defend herself, to make her point. She said she wouldn’t have survived in her life without her anger. I asked if she had ever been in physical danger and she said no, she just wouldn’t have survived ... And so it was that the conversation rapidly moved on to the weather – (or El Nino as it is now called – all our weather forecasters here talk Spanish now – La clouda, Ill Stormo, colda fronto, etc.)

It is during conversations like that that I realize how far I have come in these last 2 years towards becoming actually free of malice and sorrow and how easy and simple the whole process has been.

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I agree that some of these emotions have their attractiveness but if that is weighed up against all the times one missed out on opportunities because of the negative effects of certain emotions then a strong argument can be made for sacrificing the ones that are found to be somehow enjoyable.

Yep. Tis writ large in the sacred texts of the ‘Human Condition’, sub-section ‘Human Attributes’ – ‘The faculty that distinguishes the human species from other animal species is our ability to feel. In short we are ‘feeling’ beings – take away our feelings and we are but animals or robots’. Of course, this sacred tenet was written in ancient times when the only chance of keeping fear and aggression in reasonable control was to emphasise nurture and desire. Thus it was that ‘good’ and ‘bad’, together with ‘right and wrong’, was chiselled in stone and written on rice paper as the morals and ethics of tribal groups. This was further reinforced by fairy-tales of Gods and Demons, good and bad spirits, and the power and influence of the shamans was set in concrete. To dare to question the Gods and the good was to tempt the Devil, invite the bad to run riot and invoke the wrath of the shamans.

All of this is based on primitive ignorance of modern human biological knowledge only evident this century. Human and animal behavioural studies combined with stunning genetic and neuro-biological knowledge has made the futility of sticking with Ancient and spirit-ual solutions patently obvious.

What we now know is that human beings have an instinctual program of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and that this is located in the hypothalamus primitive lizard brain. Its task is largely the regulation of stereotyped, or instinctive behaviour patterns and responses. In lower animals this response, sometimes known as ‘fight and flight’ is a simple response to sensorial input – sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. In humans with our more complex brain, thought, memory, reflection and self-awareness this simple response becomes an emotional response – an emotion according to Mr. Oxford – Any of the natural instinctive affections of the mind.

Our treasured and dearly-held feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts, firmly rooted in the ‘fight and flight’ instinct of fear and aggression. Hence we are ‘feeling’ beings – we live constantly with the feelings of fear and aggression implanted in us by ‘blind’ nature.

Fear hobbles us with a desperate need to belong to a group, to cling to the past, to hang on to whatever we hold dear to ourselves, to resist change and desperately seek immortality. Aggression causes us to fight for our territory, our possessions, our ‘rights’, our family and our treasured beliefs – seeking power over others.

We seek solace in the so-called ‘good’ feelings, or ‘trip off’ into unbounded imagination and delusionary feelings of the spiritual. Nurture causes us to care, comfort and protect but also leads to dependency, clinging, empathy, sacrifice and needless heroism. Desire drives us to sexual reproduction, avarice, greed, corruption and power over others.

If you think ‘a strong argument can be made for sacrificing the ones that are found to be somehow enjoyable’, do you realise that thinking like that, if actualized, could eventually lead to an end of religions and of religious wars – an end to malice and sorrow.

It is amazing how this human trap can be desirable, even after great suffering.

We do indeed love to suffer and to inflict suffering on others – our ‘entertainment’ is either sad ‘love’ stories and tales of suffering or ‘action’ and violence. We have turned suffering into a virtue and pleasure into a vice. All of the religious and spiritual texts point to the essential and unending human suffering on earth. It is understandable for they knew nought of instinctual programming, and life on earth was a ‘fight and flight’ business – a man eat man business – to put it in its brutal perspective. But it is 1999 after all, and the ‘sacred’ words of Jesus, Buddha and the likes can be seen for what they are – ancient spirit-ridden drivel of no relevance at all to the situation we – you and I, and the others on this list – now find ourselves in.

Or is it that the trap is accepted because the possibility of freedom requires opening a big heavy door and that is too much effort.

Well, up until now only one person has done it, and he did it via Enlightenment. To give up the power, glory and blissful feelings of being Divine and Immortal is indeed a big heavy door and it is extremely doubtful if any of the present lot will repeat the effort. They have ‘feet of clay’ as Richard puts it. But by utilizing the method Richard has devised – to eliminate one’s social identity, who you ‘think’ you are, the ‘ego’ if you like, and then eliminate one’s instinctual self, who you ‘feel’ you are, the ‘soul’ if you like – when you finally get to the door it’s a ‘step through’ job only.

Is it that you are worried about the end of the journey before you even begin?

How is it possible for all the bad stuff to go, those bad emotions etc., how can they go for good?

I assume from your posts that you have had a good grounding in the awareness-watching business, which is a reasonable starting point. You also seem interested in the possibility of getting rid of at least some of the emotions i.e. the bad ones. One of the problems usually with the traditional awareness approach is that one can spread oneself a bit thin on the ground and not zero in on a particular issue. It makes good sense to pick one issue out of the bundle of feelings and emotions that assail one every day.

So what do you do with the other feelings that arise? Do you mean you don’t attempt to go into them and find out more?

I find that I can best concentrate on, and contemplate upon only one thing at a time. I can drive a car while thinking or talking but as far as tasks requiring my full attention and awareness – I do one at a time. So for me at the start, rather than try to spread myself thin by trying to being aware of hundreds of feelings, reactions, doubts, thoughts, emotions I zeroed in on one to study in detail. I always found that there was one particular pertinent issue at any one time that was spoiling my happiness. It was usually the issue that I was avoiding, that bought up most fear, or dominated my thoughts most. This was then the one to ‘tackle’, the one to dig in to, talk over, focus on, contemplate upon, etc., but it was usually obvious.

One intellectual question still comes up even though I may be solving it in practice. Even though I know that feelings are the premature conclusion of fact, once it has been accepted by the body as truth how does the body undo those part truths? My answer would be to review those beliefs & feelings in detail without jumping to conclude at the first emotional impulse and see what happens.

Again, I’m having trouble following you. You say ‘ I know that feelings are the premature conclusion of fact’. For me, it is clear that any feeling that arises is most commonly expressed as an emotion-backed thought. This is evidenced when one identifies a feeling, say annoyance (mild anger), and traces it back to its source – say, something someone said an hour ago. One can clearly see that the feeling, those churning thoughts or worries, are due to an emotional response to what was said. These thoughts can linger on to produce a ‘feeling of annoyance’ that can last hours and days even – ruining any chance of being here. Often people relate feelings to a more dramatic outburst, such as a rush of anger, or a flush of love, while remaining in ignorance of the long term general background of feelings.

A fact has nothing to do with feelings. A fact is a fact, a tree is a tree, a coffee cup is a coffee cup. No doubt, when people discover or read a fact it could produce a feeling response in them – but that is a reaction to the fact. When we point out that, after 5,000 years, and with billions of people following the spiritual path, there is still no peace on earth that is a fact.

Now when one discovers a fact for oneself, acknowledges and realizes it, one can have a realization – a blindingly obvious flash of such intensity that a change is evidenced – one can no longer go back to believing what one believed before. What this will do is eliminate the associated feelings one has in relying on the belief and not the fact.

It is such a painful, confusing and bewildering life most people lead in relying on belief, as one is never confident, able to proceed in any activity or relating with the surety that a sensible reliance on facts can give.

Thinking has had a very bad press in the spiritual world – ‘You are not the mind’, ‘leave your mind at the door’, ‘no-mind’, etc. are all phrases that attest to the spiritual belief that thinking is the problem, while not only letting feelings off scot-free but piously giving full reign to the supposed ‘good’ set. This misinterpretation of the human dilemma is based on the ancient ignorance of the genetically implanted instinctual passions and their subsequent effect on human behaviour. The revered ancients firmly believed that violence, masochism, torture, rape, etc. were the result of being possessed by evil spirits, and you can fully understand this if you have ever felt rage well up from somewhere deep inside you. ‘Something overcame me’, ‘It wasn’t me’ are common expressions used for this experience. For the less spectacular feelings such as sadness, melancholy, irritation and annoyance the ancients pegged thought as the problem – hence the Buddhists’ emphasis on ‘right thought’ and the meditative practices aimed at stopping thought.

Given that it is 1999, our knowledge and understanding, not to mention our physical circumstances, have so dramatically altered that we now can clearly see that these archaic beliefs about the workings of human biology, neurology, genetics and behaviour have no basis in facts. We now know why the spiritual ‘solutions’ didn’t work and why they can never work. The belief in God is an obvious fairy-tale but the belief in Good feelings will be a tough one for many to shake. It appears that good feelings – love, compassion, etc. and the accompanying morality of good and bad, and the ethics of right and wrong, are all that stop humanity from running amok. Indeed, they do a reasonable job – despite the fact that this has been the bloodiest century so far in human history, a substantial number of people have been spared the horrendous experiences of total warfare, me included. It is only from this reasonably comfortable and secure position that we are now able to tackle becoming free of the Human Condition in its entirety.

So, given the failure of God, the failure of ‘transcendence’ and the failure of morals and ethics, we now have discovered a method to eliminate the problem rather than merely seek solutions to the problem. The problem is that our instinctually based emotions contaminate thought and produce in us feelings of malice and sorrow, and, when ‘push comes to shove’, our moral and ethical safeguards rapidly break down to reveal the appalling dread, horror and violence of war and genocide. <snip>

The other part of our ‘normal’ perception are feelings and the trick here is to aim for the felicitous feelings – care, consideration, patience, well-wishing, etc. while tackling the more pernicious ones that prevents one from being happy and harmless. Again the PCE will give invaluable insight as one checks exactly which feelings operate – and what is actual – when our perception is freed of an emotional ‘self’. When back to ‘normal’ again, you are then able to use whatever feelings are running to your advantage, to achieve your goal – passion became fuel for the fire to become free, stubbornness a refusal to give in, power the ambition to be one of the ‘few’, compassion the possibility to actually do something, rather than just feel sad for those fellow humans who suffer horrendously.

Often when faced with raw emotion I have no idea what to do other than ride the tide.

I was browsing the local bookshop yesterday and came across a book by the author of ‘The Primal Scream’, whose name I have forgotten. I think it was one of the influential books of the ‘express your feelings – don’t repress them’ movement that gathered momentum in the 60’s. That Guru (whose name I won’t mention) adopted this philosophy into his active feeling-expressing meditations and America particularly seems to have taken the philosophy on as a national characteristic. ‘To wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve’, Sharing’, ‘Getting it out’, ‘Childhood Traumas’, ‘Re-birthing’, ‘Past-Life Therapy’, ‘Being Sensitive’ etc. – they all point to expressing one’s feelings as a noble pursuit. Not only the current ones but regularly digging into the re-cycling bin for a re-play of past ‘hurts’ if you’re are a bit weak and lack-lustre in the feeling department. This re-living, re-playing, emphasising, stirring up, inventing, re-inventing, empathising, sympathising, getting sympathy and ‘letting go’ simply keeps the whole lot in existence and sometimes can even give a bit of post-adrenalin ‘feel-good’. At best, it can only result in a re-arranging of the furniture on the Titanic. Recent reports from America are that the therapy boom, largely based on expressing one’s emotions, is dwindling – many have spent decades (and thousands of dollars) for zilch results.

No need to say anything about repressing emotions – the failures are well documented and obvious.

This third way is to neither repress nor express. From experience I would say that exactly this doing nothing to dispel, avoid, deny, escape from, repress or express creates a tension and ‘self’-awareness that is the very situation that causes ‘something’ to change. And then that change is not of ‘your’ doing – it happens at a level deeper than your normal consciousness. No need for esoterics – it is a change in the brain’s software programming – the brain becoming free of the pernicious effects of the social identity and instinctual self.

This was very well illustrated by Alan’s recent post about lust disappearing – in hindsight he noticed the feeling had gone! No ‘doing’ that Alan could point to, no specific event – but gone never the less.

Again, a bit of experience from myself and others who are treading this path – besides occasional feelings of confusion, bewilderment, split-personalities, etc. there are often some physical effects such as headaches, bodily tensions and the likes that can occur, but these are ‘par for the course’ for such a radical procedure as re-wiring one’s brain. For me, I just figured that whatever went on, I would wake up the next morning and make breakfast again. Whatever went on in head and heart was okay by me because it meant I was incrementally becoming free of malice and sorrow.

Another thought, are there feelings that are specific to a belief? For example if I believe I am a callous cold person then I seem to be able to create the associated feeling. It seems though, that the feeling is really based on whatever gave the belief its authenticity in the first place.

Aye, indeed. When first one begins to question beliefs a flurry of feelings and deep-seated emotions surface – some very strongly and fiercely. One can experience this from the other end as it were – should one be silly enough to question someone else’s belief. The animosity and vitriol that Vineeto and I experienced on the Sannyas list is testament to this, and the wars fought to defend beliefs and the crusades to impose one’s beliefs on others are the global equivalent. This self-questioning, this questioning of the very beliefs that constituted who ‘I’ felt and thought ‘I’ was as an identity, bought forth the fear of ‘my’ survival and was simultaneously an enormous blow to ‘my’ pride – ‘my’ self-esteem.

‘I’ am my beliefs, my feelings, my imaginations, my dreams, my passions, and they are ‘me’. They are not actual but they are real. What I can do is do everything possible to ensure their demise in order that I, this flesh and blood body may be free.

The trick is to regard it all as the Human Condition, something ‘I’ was taught and programmed to be. Taught as in programmed since birth, programmed as in genetically programmed with a set of survival instincts – fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

As one gets on in life and has sufficient experience on can look with clear eyes at who one is and decide to change if one wants to. To change one’s identity is a relatively simple operation – many change from ‘normal’ to ‘spiritual’ – to change to ‘actual’ simply involves wiping the whole program back to the empty hard drive to discover what one is, not what others decided you should be. In removing the social identity one is able to see that one is a sensate, reflective flesh and blood animal. Eliminate the instinctual animal passions – your animal heritage, and you’re free of malice and sorrow ... you then have achieved your destiny and escaped your fate.

So, in answer to your question, it’s a bit of both. One tends to tackle what is on the plate at the time, what issue is apparent at the time. It may well be sex that is a major issue, relationship, disciple-hood, being ‘good’, or whatever. It is not essential to sort all of it out – a bit of cleaning up can be done after the event but sufficient has to be tackled to give one confidence and surety that life without a ‘self’ – without ‘me’ – is the only alternative you will settle for – to live the Pure Consciousness Experience, 24 hours a day, every day.

Ah, no small feat and definitely not to be dismissed lightly. Life for most people is a vale of tears, a struggle, a constant ‘battle’ fought within and without. I was chatting with Richard the other day about a couple of people who were interested in Actual Freedom for a while but then moved away. It seemed – although I readily admit to bias – that they have now become happier and more able to enjoy the world as-it-is and people as-they-are than they were in their spiritual days when they regarded the world more fearfully. So, it is good to get some similar feedback from you. I recently described the path to Actual Freedom as a journey out of sorrow, but it is not yet appealing for everyone as most people enjoy feeling sad (as well as feeling angry).

Aye, indeed. And until ‘you’ leave the stage your experience of life will be an emotional, feeling interpretation of the actual. It can not be any other way – human beings are wired that way. The amygdala – the primitive lizard brain – is an organ that is designed as an early warning system to quickly scan the sensorial input for any real or perceived danger and react with fear and aggression. This constant ‘on-guardness’ can be seen in any of the animal species, and in the human animal it produces feelings of fear and aggression. The amygdala is also the source of instinctual nurture and desire producing feelings that again actively conspire to ruin our happiness. So it sounds as if you are starting to realize the primary role that feelings play in the Human Condition. ‘You’ as an entity, existing inside the flesh and blood body can only think or feel about the actual world, and the only direct experience possible is when you cease to exist – either temporarily in a PCE, virtually in Virtual Freedom or permanently in Actual Freedom.

Aye, indeed. You, the flesh and blood body called No. 4, can experience this moment sensately – seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling and can think and reflect on the experience. The other thing that is going on inside your flesh and blood body is that there is No. 4, the social identity that others have moulded and shackled to be a fit member of the madhouse called Humanity. Further, being a human animal, blind nature has fitted you No. 4, the flesh and blood body, with a full-on set of animal survival instincts and self, constantly operating and ready, when push comes to shove, to cause you to rage, kill or be killed in defence of yourself or your fellow tribal or family members.

But there is now something that can be done about both these programs – both the social identity and the instinctual passions.

It is interesting that you say that you have been experiencing life as ‘ the feeling which is generated after the experiencing .’ Modern scientific experiments, of the type LeDoux is conducting, all point to feeling being the first and foremost experience. The instinctual physical reaction has been measured at 12 milliseconds, the instinctual emotional reaction – when the hormones flow – is slower at 25 milliseconds, and the sensible sensate reaction (if it happens at all) is far slower as it cannot operate while the hormone-generated feelings are still in action. A bit from the Instinct section of the Library will help to explain this – <snip>

Does that make it any clearer? We humans are programmed to be feeling, emotional beings and it is a fact that cannot be ignored if we are to become free of malice and sorrow. It is only in the last 40 years or so that we are beginning to understand our neuro-biological functioning and even now the investigators have to face the disparagement and lampooning of those folks still fearfully devoted to superstition and tradition.

However, this is still a new concept and I keep on going back to my feeling mode because of habit.

Not because of habit but because you have been programmed by blind nature to function first and foremost on feeling mode – and survival-feeling mode to boot. On top of this you have been programmed by society to play your role in the game of battling it out for survival – to be a group member, a team player, a good man, a good citizen, etc.

Well, I did it the opposite way. I became vitally interested in ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ And if that meant I was feeling angry, sad, melancholy, lacklustre, depressed, then I would track back to find out what it was that bought on that feeling. What was said, what happened, when did it happen? I wanted to understand feelings, their source, how they worked, what caused them to kick in, etc. Only by understanding them, could I begin to get free of their insidious grip. I also knew that until I was rid of the source of feelings entirely – ‘me’ – I would have to live with them. So best to understand them and best to aim for the felicitous ones – and feeling happy and feeling harmless are surely the best one can aim for of the feelings.

The other point is that conducting an active investigation into one’s very psyche is a way of neither expressing nor avoiding feelings – one simply waits with interest and fascination for the next feeling to turn up to be investigated. The very act of observation, investigation, contemplation, understanding and insight is the only way I, this flesh and blood body, can rid myself of the psychic and psychological entity that prevents my sensible, sensate experiencing of the infinitude of the actual world.

So, my experience is to become fascinated with what you are feeling and why you are feeling it. It can be scary business to investigate feelings and emotions, for the Human Condition is an animal instinctual condition but the investigation is actually liberating.

It could be useful to you, at this stage, to read my journal. I’m not flogging my book to sell as I’ve put it on the web-site in total, but it is, to date, the most complete record of the actual process of investigating feelings that has been written. It’s one person’s journey to a Virtual Freedom from malice and sorrow – the stage you have to get to before you can consistently and reliably begin to sensate-only experience this moment of time – not as a vivid exception as in a PCE, but as an everyday ‘normal’ experience. You will see from my journal that the investigation into feelings is not a passive affair, not a mere intellectual understanding, but a life-changing experience. Once started with gusto you will never be the same again. That was the very reason I started – I knew I was ‘as mad’ and ‘as bad’ as everyone else and I wanted to be free of the Human Condition – the lot.

I do like it when anyone begins to look at feelings and the role they play in preventing we humans from being happy and harmless. Your discovery that you experience life by feeling only is crucial, and what you do with the discovery is vital to your being permanently happy and harmless.

And the point I was trying to make is that every spiritual practice ignores the scientifically proven fact that humans are emotional beings and that the primary source of those emotions are the instincts of fear and aggression. Merely to attempt to be good, while a noble ideal, will do nothing to alter this fact. Only a total, radical and complete change will do. As I said in the bit which you snipped – ‘These two facets – reducing the influence of feelings and emotions – both the supposed ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – and demolishing the social identity, the ‘guardian at the gate’ ultimately brings one’s bare awareness to focus on the Amygdala and its instinctual programming. The focus is then on the instincts in operation both in the body and in the brain – with minimal psychological and emotional effects.’

I encourage you to make the journey into your feelings rather than ‘focusing on them less and less’. Actualism is most definitely not a new theory about having no feelings, or that feelings are bad – men have played that game for centuries, whether it be hiding in caves, practicing celibacy, by intellectual wanking or indulging in rationalism. Denial, repression and controlling emotions has failed to work. Indulging, expressing and emotive therapizing has also failed to work.

There is a third alternative for the sincerely curious adventurer.

A bit from Richard about feelings, that I always liked, may be of use to you –

‘Okay, it is all about being here at this moment in time and this place in space ... and if you are not feeling good you have no chance whatsoever of being here. A grumpy person locks themselves out of the perfect purity of this moment and place. If you do not want to be here, then forget it.

Of course, once you get the knack of this, one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy’. And after that: ‘feeling perfect’. These are all feelings, you will notice, this is not perfection personified yet ... but, then again, feeling perfect for twenty three hours and fifty nine minutes a day is way beyond normal human expectations anyway. Also, it is a very tricky way of both getting men fully into their feelings for the first time in their life and getting women to examine their feelings one by one instead of being run by a basketful of them all at once. Richard’s Journal, Appendix 4

For men (and women) this investigation of feelings and emotions is brand-new territory, particularly so for the spiritually-conditioned male who has been trained to suppress the bad feelings and indulge the good feelings – the traditional failed religious approach of both the East and the West.

‘An actualist rapidly moves from learning, thinking, trying, and looking to investigating, pursuing, discovering, uncovering, finding, implementing, activating, challenging and dismantling feelings, emotions, beliefs and instincts. From a mere snorkelling around on the surface to a bit of sincere deep sea diving into one’s own psyche.’

As far as I am concerned, that is the only path. I learned it from Osho via dynamic, you learned it from Richard. We can call it spiritual or non-spiritual, actualists’s or non-actualists’s. Only thing I learned from Osho is: I have to look into myself and I am on my own. Now what came out of writing to you. I saw violence in me, raw violence of the kind I have never seen before. I also observed my tendency to be cruel (malice???). I noticed need-for-love is still working in me. I also saw lots of other things.

It would seem that ‘what came out of writing to me’ is that you have been diving a bit deeper than you have before even with dynamic meditation. It is my experience that many people become quite upset to the point of feeling violent when presented with facts. It is the facts that cause the offence, not who writes of them or how they are presented, for to acknowledge a fact rather than uphold a belief is anathema to one’s very ‘self’. After all, people are willing to kill others or sacrifice themselves for their dearly-held beliefs, such are the deep-seated passions that are unleashed. This is the very reason for all the religious wars, persecutions and bloodshed. To become aware of these raw passions is to do a bit of deep sea diving into one’s own psyche – to be aware of the Human Condition in action, the beliefs, feelings and instinctual passions. This awareness involves neither repressing, nor expressing as in dynamic meditation. To merely indulge in a bit of artificial emoting such as therapy groups, active meditations, etc. is not to be aware of the role that the feelings of malice and sorrow play in ordinary life. As for ‘we can call it spiritual or non-spiritual’ – just because you choose to call different things the same doesn’t make them the same. They may appear to you to be the same, or you may want them to be the same, but they clearly are not. ‘Non’ means ‘a negation, a prohibition’ – as per Oxford dictionary.

It is astounding to think that there is now the possibility of eliminating malice and sorrow to the point that one is incapable of being offended – of having no-thing to defend – no beliefs, no ideals, no principles, no rights to fight for, no ‘me’ who could take offence. And of a happiness that is not dependant on others or on being in an Altered State of Consciousness – a genuine happiness in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. It is so very good to start exploring feelings and emotions – both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ – for the secret to being actually free of malice and sorrow lies in this very exploration – and to investigate the spiritual world is to investigate the ‘good’ in the arbitrary package of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The trick is to understand that your feelings and emotions are part and parcel of the Human Condition and thus not a personal fault, failure, stigma or evil, but something everybody is programmed with by blind nature and society’s imprint. This is an investigation few are prepared to make for many see that if they dare to question the spiritual they will simply end up back in the ‘real’ world that they are trying to avoid or escape from. Some see that to question the spiritual beliefs is to go towards the devil or evil while others see it as ending up in a sort of robotic state of non-feeling. What belies these fears is the PCE where the purity, perfection and benevolence of the actual world becomes magically apparent as having been here all the time... if only ‘I’ wasn’t in the way.

Actual Freedom offers a tried and tested method to eliminate the ‘I’ – both ego and soul – such that what is actual, genuine, unique, pure and perfect can become evidenced and evident.

Indeed Mr. Rajneesh has transcended the ego – he has clearly become an ego-maniac in that he thinks and feels himself to be God. An ego transcended gives full reign to the soul – the ‘feelings’ – and delusion is the obvious result.

Another quote from the Master of deceit –

‘In all the Eastern traditions, before a person starts learning no-mind, there are techniques and much emphasis that he should stop being negative, because if you once attain to no-mind and your trend remains negative, you can become a dangerous force. Before the no-mind is attained, one should become absolutely positive. That is the whole difference between white and black magic.

Black magic is nothing more than when a man has accumulated thought energy without throwing out his negativity beforehand. And white magic is nothing more than when a man has attained too much thought energy, and has based his total being on a positive attitude. The same energy with negativity becomes black; the same energy with positivity becomes white.’ Rajneesh

Interesting first part that clearly points to the emphasis on ‘good’ feelings as opposed to ‘bad’ feelings. I think many people think we make up a story about Eastern mysticism and the dross it is but here it is unambiguously stated. He further introduces a bit of ‘wisdom about black magic that again relates to good and evil spirits or ‘energy’ to use the more modern terminology for spirits. Of course Mr. Rajneesh represents white magic personified. This drivel could not be further from Actual Freedom and the PCE – it is, as we continually state, 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

I remember the feeling of freedom from spiritual belief as being very tangible – I walked taller in the world, as it were, my integrity restored. I remember thinking afterwards – what was all the fuss about? Why did I find it so difficult?

It is fascinating to track a feeling or emotion from the moment it arises until the moment it abates. Sometimes there is an identifiable event that is the cause of the onset but sometimes a mood, emotional pallor or fervour can seep in – seemingly without any cause and then slip away by itself, as it were. These seemingly causeless intrusions are everyday events in ‘normal’ life, even lauded as giving an otherwise boring mundane life some meaning, flavour or colour.

However, when an actualist has feeling good or feeling excellent as his or her bottom-line benchmark in life, an urgent obsession develops to become free of the emotional roller-coaster that passes for a normal life or the surreal delusion that passes for a spiritual life. The first essential step is developing, cultivating and maintaining an ongoing awareness of feelings and emotions – as in ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive –this the only moment I can actually experience?’

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It is common wisdom that suffering is good for you, you get stronger from suffering, that you grow and learn by suffering, etc. By experiencing the bitter-sweet lure of feeling sad, by observing it in action in your life and sufficiently investigating the roots of sorrow and depression, you eventually come to realize that all you get from suffering is more suffering. The feeling of sorrow is a seemingly bottomless pit leading only to utter despair where the only way out of a living hell seems to be suicide.

Indeed a feeling, mood or emotion tends to be very fickle, often coming and going for no apparent reason. Once you begin to understand and experience this coming and going, you can then concentrate your awareness on nipping them in the bud ever earlier in their cycle. Soon you will find you are able to nip them in the bud as they begin to happen – a sort of ‘oops here it comes again’ or ‘ah ha, that one again’. The spiritual aflicionados talk of ‘watching’ the rising and falling of emotions – although they tend to call them thoughts – thereby becoming a dissociated ‘watcher’, very often completely dis-identifying with the undesirable passions by developing a new holier-than-thou identity.

For an actualist the trick is to identify and label each of these feelings and emotions as they arise in order to understand them – not transcend or sublimate the undesirable passions and formulate a new identity centred on desire and narcissism. It is vitally important to not only be aware of the coming and going of emotions, but to understand both the causes and the effects of this debilitating cycle. This very understanding then serves to increase your awareness of how your psyche is programmed to operate – which then means you are able to hit the delete button as soon as you feel yourself slipping down the old familiar paths of being grumpy, resentful, annoyed, lacklustre, morose, worried, anxious, etc. Awareness without understanding is nought but ignorance perpetuated.

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It is such an obvious thing to do – to simplify one’s life so as to reduce stress. Not only does one become physically healthier but by reducing the franticness and busy-ness of continually complicating what is simple, it makes it easier to set aside the necessary time to investigate the real causes of your malice and sorrow. Again be wary of the usual alternatives – deliberately engaging in battle to prove your warrior-worth or deliberately withdrawing form battle to prove your good-ness. No need to add that the third alternative is the common sense approach – eliminate the ‘he’ or ‘she’ who feels stressed-out and/or seeks refuge in feeling blissed-out.

I was talking to a businessman recently about his business and he had several approaches to dealing with stress, all of which were ways of coping with the symptoms and none of which tackled the disease itself. The other common approach is to seek relief by dissociative methods such as meditation, being a watcher, right thinking, yogic exercises, prayer, going ‘inside’, remembering your real self, etc. As you indicate, the sensible approach is tackle the disease itself by actively and incrementally eliminating it.

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