An extraordinary freedom comes when any memory recall begins to be free of ‘my’ psychological and psychic interpretations, when past memories become free of any emotional pains or colourings, whatsoever. This lack of emotional memories is a clear sign of ‘my’ demise, a practical example of the fact that ‘I’ have no past existence other than as psychological and psychic memories. It is experiential down to earth evidence that ‘I’ am an illusion – whose days are numbered.

I have few occasions to recall any events in the past unless I am twigged to recall an experience, as in writing to you for example. Then my memory of an event is of the matter of fact type without any emotional content such as embarrassment, guilt, shame, pride, anger or angst. You may have noticed that I often revert to posting something out of my journal when replying to you because it was written fresh after the initial tumultuous stages of demolishing my social and instinctual identity. I could not write my journal now, firstly because my recall would not be as accurate now as it was when I wrote it and secondly because I could not describe the experiences as the passionate tumultuous events they were.

This lack of emotional past memories is a most curious phenomenon and I don’t have a complete hindsight explanation for it at the moment. It is one of the few times I have been stuck for words that give a complete description, for it is something that is still in process. If I had to describe it in neuro-biological terms, it is as though some circuitry that used to operate doesn’t operate anymore. To use a simile, it is a bit like looking at a movie without the emotional dramatic soundtrack. It is not that past memories belong to someone else as though I have become a new identity or have become reborn. Nor is it that I am denying that there were times when I was malicious, angry, sad, manipulative or selfish, it is just as though this was some weird emotional turmoil that was overlaid over the actual events. It would be all a joke except for the fact that this overlay caused me not only to suffer but also to harm others. Even with this understanding of the harm I have done, there is no guilt associated with this because this is what it is to be born an instinctual human being and this awareness of harming others provided the fuel for me to bring an end to these passions.

Just to make it clear that this process has yet to come to a completion, but I am attempting to describe as accurately as possible what has happened to my past memories. I suspect I am becoming acclimatized to living without the past emotional memories and future emotional worries that give substance to ‘me’ as a psychological social identity and as a psychic instinctual being. I had a glimpse some months ago of the enormity of living in the permanent ‘self’-less state that Richard does – a glimpse of Actual Freedom. This was not a PCE which is a temporary state but a glimpse of the permanent state which is quite a different experience for there is no back door, no turning back and no phoenix new identity to arise from the ashes. There is no doubt that anyone would need sufficient preparation and the practical assurance of acclimatization to living without a social identity and being bereft of any emotional defence and attack system whatsoever.

I recognize major parts of the concept or method, described in Actual Freedom, from a book I read about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). This book (only available in Swedish and not very scientific, more practical) also recognizes the phenomena of pure consciousness experience (PCE), as something important. Even more interesting is that the described approach to ease fear and psychological pain is almost identical compared with the methods described on the Actual Freedoms web site. Actual Freedom has as I see it a much more radical goal. What I find interesting is the similarities in method. CBT have a good reputation as a proven effective treatment method. This gives credibility also for Actual Freedom’s method, despite the methods different goals.

The similarities seem to be in the fact that both are pragmatic approaches and both address the issue of one’s immediate anxieties, emotions and behaviour in the world of people, things and events. The aim of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is to reign in the excesses of emotions so as to return the patient to normal – i.e. normally aggressive and normally sad. The aim of actualism is to eliminate the whole psychological and psychic structure – ‘who’ I think I am and ‘who’ I instinctually feel I am, as opposed to what I am – so as to completely eradicate the root cause of malice and sorrow. I know little about how cognitive therapy is used and applied by the hands-on practitioners in the field but this more practical approach to therapy does seem to be having more success than the previous approaches based on moral and ethical reconditioning, emotive expression, self-acceptance, self-love, shamanism and mysticism, chemical restraints, etc.

In order to explore the differences between the method of actualism and cognitive behavioural therapy, not only in intent but also in the processes, I have accessed a brief summary of CBT from the Net.

Cognitive therapy is a widely used form of psychotherapy that focuses on changing dysfunctional cognitions (thoughts), emotions, and behaviour. Cognitive therapy is based on the theory that individuals with depression, anxiety, and other emotional disorders have maladaptive patterns of information processing and related behavioural difficulties.

One of the primary targets of cognitive therapy is the identification of negative or distorted automatic thoughts. These cognitions are the relatively autonomous thoughts that occur rapidly while an individual is in the midst of a particular situation or is recalling significant events from the past. info@mindstreet.com

‘Negative or distorted automatic thoughts’ is simply another way of saying feelings and emotions. Close and constant observation will reveal that feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts. Thinking, when freed of the automatic influence of the emotions that arise from one’s instinctual passions, is a benign functional activity. Eastern religion and mysticism has always laid the blame of evil on thinking per se, while giving full vent to the so-called good emotions to run wild, unrestrained by any sense whatsoever. It would appear that CBT adopts a similar stance and lays the ills of the patient at the door of wrong thinking. It is inappropriate in the real world to question the instinctual passions themselves, for human beings hold their passions dearly to their bosoms, stubbornly and deliberately maintaining their blindness to the fact that these passions are none other than savage and brutal animal survival passions.

Just a note about the feelings and emotions that one notices by running the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’

Many men in particular, because of their gender programming, have great difficulties in getting in touch with their feelings. As this is generally the case, then it may be useful to begin with observing what you are thinking in this moment of being alive. If you describe your thinking as a bit dull for instance, it may be that you are feeling lackluster. If you are thinking about what someone said or didn’t say to you, it may well be that you feel annoyed which is a mild form of anger. If you are thinking that someone has wronged you, then it is useful to label and identify the feeling that is happening in that moment – be it resentment, indignance, righteousness, envy, etc.

For women this process of investigation is identical, but given that they have usually been taught to identify more strongly with their emotions, their difficulty can be in sorting through a bewildering array of unrestrained input. Again, momentary awareness is the first thing – to catch the feeling while it is happening – and then to label the feeling is the next step. Then complete the investigation by finding the cause, the trigger, of the feeling or emotion that is ruining, clouding or standing in the way of you feeling good right now. This awareness is an experiential awareness of how ‘you’, as an entity, have been programmed to react to the world of people, things and events. This is 180 degrees different to practicing spiritual awareness, which is to either accept, ignore or deny one’s reactions to the world of people things and events and retreat into an inner world of one’s own imagination. Spiritual awareness leads to the ‘self’-centred psychotic states of dissociation or the more extreme state of solipsism whereas the actualism method is an ongoing self-investigation that breaks the stranglehold the psychological and psychic entity, eventually leading to a ‘self’-less pure consciousness.

Patients with depression and anxiety have many more negative or fearful automatic thoughts than control subjects, and these distorted cognitions stimulate painful emotional reactions. In addition, negative automatic thoughts can be associated with behaviours (e.g., helplessness, withdrawal, or avoidance) that make the problem worse. In depression or anxiety disorders, there is often a ‘vicious cycle’ of dysfunctional cognitions, emotions, and behaviours. info@mindstreet.com

Again we have ‘negative or fearful automatic thoughts’ or ‘distorted cognitions’ that ‘stimulate painful emotional reactions’, as though it is wrong thinking that causes emotional suffering. It’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse but then again, CBT is concerned about treating and reducing the symptoms and not about acknowledging the source of emotional suffering, let alone finding a permanent cure.

Automatic thoughts are frequently based on faulty logic or errors in reasoning. Cognitive therapy is directed, in part, at helping patients recognize and change these cognitive errors (sometimes called cognitive distortions). Some of the commonly described cognitive errors include: all or nothing thinking, personalization, ignoring the evidence, and overgeneralization. In cognitive therapy, patients are usually taught how to detect cognitive errors and to use this skill in developing a more rational style of thinking. info@mindstreet.com

What initially twigged my interest in CBT was a television program, which showed a patient being treated for agoraphobia. The treatment was very matter-of-fact and not at all esoteric or airy-fairy. The patient, at her own pace, was allowed to experientially discover for herself that her psychological and psychic fear was nothing other than a feeling, i.e. while it may have felt very real it was not a fact. By becoming aware of her fear, labelling it, discussing it, and thinking about it she was gradually able to desensitize herself to its influence. In her case the fear was not eliminated but it was reduced to tolerable levels such that she could function reasonably normally. Another patient had a fear of a particular insect and by increasingly prolonged contact he was able to become desensitized to the fear, thus replacing the feeling of fear with the fact that he was not being hurt. I don’t see this as a triumph of rational thinking over irrational thinking, I see this as a triumph of fact over feeling.

I have just realized I have assumed from your name that you are male and that was why I commented about feelings most commonly being expressed as emotion-backed thoughts. Anyway, for either sex it is useful to be aware that our feelings are most often cunningly disguised as, or described as, thoughts – unless you are overcome with rage, gripped by fear, overwhelmed by nurture or beset by desire, in which case the feelings are obvious as the chemical surges are so intense.

Well enough for now, it’s dinner time. I just wanted to say hello, reply to your comment about CBT and to have a bit of a dig around in that field.

My experience has taught me that the first prerequisite of true knowing is letting go of the intellect. In trying to analyze how ‘I’ am experiencing this moment I am stuck in the mind and prevented from attaining any sort of pure, thoughtless awareness.

Indeed. Most people have been trained to suppress their feelings and, as such, feel stuck when trying to discover ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’. The ‘pure thoughtless awareness’ experience you are trying to attain is the common affective religious experience as in being there ‘abundantly happy, endlessly grateful and consciously connected with the Pure Source’, as you said further down. What I am talking of is ‘how are you experiencing this moment of being alive’, right here and now on earth as, it is with people as they are, which is 180 degrees different to becoming un-attached, retreating inside and going there to be with God.

Pure sensate-only sensual experiencing is only experienced in brief moments, because human beings are continually tossed about on a raging sea of tender and savage feelings, emotions and passions.

Eastern spiritual teaching is not aimed at finding out what is going on in one’s psyche, investigating these feelings and passions but is aimed at suppressing the bad feelings and savage passions and giving full reign to the good feelings and tender passions. An old, ancient, fear-driven idea that has been tried and found wanting for millennia because it not only fails to address the problem of human malice and sorrow, it prevents one from even finding out exactly what is the problem inside oneself.

I for one was vitally interested in why I was sad, melancholic, peeved, annoyed, angry, unattached, alienated, euphoric, blessed out, humbled, grateful, loving, hateful, resentful, bored, envious, etc. Why all these feelings prevented me from being happy and harmless 24 hrs. a day everyday? But in order to become interested and begin questioning and investigating I had to abandon my spiritual conditioning.

To No 14: I agree with Peter here. But I can see very clearly the following too ... if we just replace a couple of words: The practice of detachment from the spiritual world, the feelings, emotions and passions in general is fundamental to entering fully into the more material, rational, ‘intelligent and logical’ world (as one sees it).

You use inverted commas as though you are directly quoting my words, which is not the case. I have never used the words rational or logical to describe the actual world. Rational thinking and logic are no substitute for a clarity of thinking that is unimpeded by ‘self’-centred – or ‘Self’-centred – emotions and feelings arising from the instinctual passions. Rational and logical type thinking and philosophies were invented largely by impractical men ‘holed up’ in ivory towers, who were neither in touch with their emotions and feelings nor their physical senses.

It is vital to explore and investigate the affective feelings and emotions that arise from the instinctual animal passions – both the tender or so-called ‘good’ and the savage or so-called ‘bad’ – for the secret to being actually free of malice and sorrow lies in this very exploration. It is essential to understand and fully comprehend that one’s feelings and emotions are part and parcel of the Human Condition and not a personal fault, failure, stigma or ‘evil’. Fear, aggression, nurture and desire are innate passions that every human being is programmed with by blind nature. Active observing and investigating – neither suppressing or expressing – has the added advantage 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.

Few spiritual believers are prepared to make this investigation of feelings, emotions and instinctual passions for they believe that if they dare to question the spiritual ‘good’ feelings they will simply end up back in the ‘real’ world that they have been desperately trying to escape from. Some fear that to question their spiritual beliefs is to go towards the devil or evil while others see it as ending up in a sort of robotic catatonic 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’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul wasn’t in the way.

I don’t practice detachment in any way at all. What I did was undertake a thorough investigation into all that prevented me from being fully and intimately involved in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are. This includes working in the market place, running a business, living with a companion with all the delights of intimacy, equity and sensuous sexual play, being free to enjoy all of the sensual delights such as eating meat, drinking coffee and smoking tobacco and being able to directly relate to all of my fellow human beings without imposing ‘my’ instinctive feelings or ‘my’ ethical or moral judgements upon them.

Fearful or angry thoughts are feelings, not thoughts. Fear is a feeling, as is anger. Feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts. A feeling is sensately experienced in the body, either in the heart area or the gut, due to the flow of chemicals from the instinctual brain.

Spiritual belief is that bad thoughts and wrong thinking are the cause of our malice and sorrow and completely ignore the fact that it is the feelings that arise from the instinctual passions that are the real problem.

What you label ‘energy fields’ are in fact your very own feelings and emotions. It is common in the real world to blame others for one’s own fear and anger and it is common in the spiritual world to blame others in general – the unconscious, evil or normal people – while disowning these same feelings in oneself.

This is what is called dis-identifying with one’s feelings. This is the quintessential religious/spiritual practice whereby one dis-identifies from the bad feelings that arise from the savage instinctual passions – it is not ‘my’ anger or ‘my’ fear – and identifies with the good feelings that arise from tender instinctual passions – the real ‘me’ who is all-loving and all-encompassing.

This Eastern spiritual method of denying one’s own bad feelings of malice and sorrow, and accepting that they just come and go, means that one avoids the possibility and opportunity to irrevocably change oneself such that the animal instinctual passions can be eliminated altogether. This is the classic spiritual formula of ‘denial pus acceptance equals no possible change’.

Curiously, in Eastern spiritual teachings there is never the compulsion to look inwards so as to seek the very source of the fear, aggression, nurture and desire. One is only encouraged and taught to look inwards for the grand ‘self’-fulfilling feelings of Love, God, Bliss, Timelessness, etc. Ye shall find what ye seek ... and ignore what you want to ignore.

I take it your fascination does not include the periods when ‘these heavy energy fields ... seem very real and I can’t imagine that I will ever feel happy again’?

Personally in my investigations into my psyche, I found it unnecessary to go back into childhood memories or past hurts. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of time’ has always served to keep me busy with the immediate and I found that the most I ever had to skip back was a few days to discover what was causing me to be either unhappy or malicious. Then, when I recognized the incident, reaction, onset of a mood, etc. and I could label it as jealousy, resentment, feeling inferior etc. I was then able to recall similar events and times when exactly the same event had arisen to make me sad or make me angry at someone. Then it simply became a matter of – ‘how long am I going to go on doing this same thing, how many times is this going to go on before I stop’. Once one dares to acknowledge, recognize, and catalogue the debilitating role that feelings play in one’s life it then becomes impossible to be the way you were – one has begun the process of radical and irrevocable change.

One of the more curious aspects of the human brain, if I have understood it properly and if it is indeed factual, is that the primitive brain seems to have its own separate memory which is an emotional-only memory of past events. There is also evidence that any long-term memory recall is very short on factual detail and further, that we only recall the last time we remembered the event rather than being able to trace back to the original event. Thus it is that these past memories are primarily psychological and psychic in nature, i.e. they are ‘my’ often irrational and largely emotional memories. When a present event triggers an automatic kick-in of an instinctual reaction it activates an emotion-backed thought in the neo-cortex, and this often opens a floodgate, as it were, and we get past emotional memories flooding in as well. Many people also access these emotional memories deliberately as they like the bitter-sweet feelings of sorrow or grief, or lusty feelings of anger and revenge.

But generally what happens with a triggering event is that we get a first hit of feeling reinforced by feelings from the past which serves to create and affirm a very-real chemical-backed ‘me’ stretching out over a time period we fondly, or despairingly, call ‘my’ life.

To actively dredge up past memories does nothing but keep ‘me’ in existence as a psychological and psychic entity. They are best nipped in the bud as quickly as possible so that one can focus one’s attention and awareness on the main event – one’s happiness and harmlessness now.

I can attest to the fact that with the diminishing of ‘me’ as a credible entity, these emotional memories do indeed wither. An actual memory of people, things and events still exist, but they have no emotional component. Undeniably it was this flesh and blood body that was there, did those things, met those people, but it was someone else who suffered those hurts, who had those feelings, who felt lost, lonely and frightened. This is not in any way the formation of a new dissociate identity, or a denial of anything that happened in the past – it is simply that it as though all emotional content of my memory has been erased. It was not me, as-I am-now, who suffered and caused others to suffer. It was the Peter who started this process of ‘self’-immolation.

Good Hey.

It’s always important to acknowledge how much change for the better has happened, to pat one’s back as it were, for it is a sensible acknowledgement of success – the very substance of the confidence needed to go even further.

And I suspect that we’re never going to be able to leave these emotions behind us, they will always be there but in a less intense way.

A friend from my spiritual days once asked me about actualism and I said it was about becoming free from malice and sorrow. She looked a little quizzical, so I said ‘not being angry any more’. She said she wanted to keep her anger for she had to fight for herself to get what she wanted. I said ‘what about not being sad any more?’ She said she liked feeling sad – that bitter-sweet feeling of sorrow, a sad song, a sad love story ...

Freedom from malice and sorrow will not appeal to many.

The important thing is the relationship we have to our emotions and instinctual passions, if we can see clearly what’s going on inside of us we can eventually (or even suddenly) take full responsibility for our actions and live in a harmless way. Once again it is important that we stop fooling ourselves and dare to see what we’re actually doing. So when you talk about eliminating the instinctual animal passions do you mean that they disappear or that they still exist in our body but that we’re looking at a totally different landscape so to speak.

Not only am I talking about the elimination of instinctual passions but the ‘me’ who feels sad, angry, lost, lonely, frightened, etc. If ‘you’ maintain a separate relationship to your emotions this is dissociation for ‘I’ am my passions and my passions are ‘me’ – they are not separate. Likewise if ‘I’ maintain control over ‘my’ emotions it is ‘me’ maintaining control over ‘me’ – a task that requires almost constant vigil and on-guardness. Self-immolation, or the ending of me is the only way to be actually free of ‘my’ instinctual passions for they are one and the same thing.

I most likely won’t be part of the mailing list group for much longer. I can only deal with groups for a short time then I just want to be quiet. I am very interested in the whole ego thing so I will be responding to what I read in the magazine when I get my copy here. Just be open-minded and see what I have to say. You may not agree with any of it, which is fine, but you may also see where I am coming from.

Yes, I did note with interest your post on the subject of ego. Given that my interest is peace on earth and I like to reply in detail I can’t comment on your post on the list so I will take the opportunity to do so here.

You say you can’t hate but you obviously can still blame other human beings for as you said at the start of this post –

These feelings usually range from being upset, miffed, impatient, perhaps even angry or swing back the other way to feeling pity for them, sad, despairing, hopelessness and perhaps even depressed. If you ‘can’t hate’ which of these other feelings do you ‘still have’? When you say

do you include the human beings who are in the governments that run this world and do you include all the wars, murders, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, despair and suicide in this wonder-full creation that is not ‘separate from your own being’?

I presume you see what I see – people being malicious or angry to the point of killing others and people being sorrowful or sad to the point of killing themselves. You have said you don’t feel hate any more and now you say you can feel deeply sad in your awakened state. It is good to find someone in an awakened state who is willing to be honest about what is going on with them and how they experience the world rather than say it can’t be put into words. I am curious though when you say that after your ego-death, if I can use that term, you no longer identify with the nightmare of ‘fear, suffering, hatred’ yet you still feel the suffering of others. Is it that you no longer think you are identified with other human beings but you still feel identified? If so, this would be in accord with my experience in that transcending the thinking self still leaves a feeling self, often denoted as an impersonal self or a grand Self.

But curiously enough you still say you suffer as in ‘it saddens me deeply to see what is happening in the world’. I presume this deep sadness for others is a suffering for others as in feeling compassion for others. This again would be in accord with the transcendence of a personal self and personal suffering to a state of being an impersonal self who then feels sorrow for others – an impersonal, non-identified suffering. Again this is in accord with my experience – the ending of personal psychological suffering is not the end of suffering for then one has the experience of suffering for all of humanity, a psychic suffering, whereby misery and pain can literally drip off everything. My experience in the psychic world is that this type of suffering can be far deeper than one’s own personal suffering for one then takes on everyone else’s suffering. No wonder the Enlightened Ones are driven to save the world and desperate to entice others to join them in their crusade, for underpinning the Divine lays, ever lurking, the desperation of universal suffering – often referred to as the Diabolical.

Of course, there is no Divine or Diabolical, bliss or despair, malice or sorrow or any of the instinctual passions in the actual world. All these feelings and beliefs, ideas and fantasies exist only because they are the psychological and psychic machinations of a wayward identity within the flesh and blood body. These feelings may well be real, and are felt to be so because of the chemicals that surge through the human body from the reptilian brain ... but they are not actual, as in existing in the physical world.

Instead of responding to other Sannyasins’ experiences and insights, they keep on hammering and repeating into boredom their own hard-found truth.

Very few people on the list have talked of their personal experiences and insights and those that did I responded to. They may not have liked the response, but I did respond and tried to point to the possibility that there could be another experience that is possible as a human on this planet in these marvellous times we live in.

Boring has been a word that has been used a lot about our writing. I would get very bored and resistant to reading Richard’s writings. I would often nod off to sleep, day-dreaming, etc. Then I began to realize ‘my’ investment in being bored. ‘I’ would sort of close down as it all became too much or my mind would go into a sort of grid lock. I would get headaches from trying to understand, from trying to ‘kick-start’ my intelligence, from trying to untangle what was fact from what was belief.

But that was just for me – maybe for you they are just plain boring.

Are you covering up your feelings of failing by projecting them on to everyone else? Does this help you to feel less?

No. I have spent some18 months ridding myself of the feelings such that the need to either repress them or express them ever comes up. I can’t tell you how good it is to be free of the remorseless and fickle emotional churnings and thoughts generated by a sense of ‘self’.

Peter, what you are describing here, between your excessive discursive pronouncements is simply... taking responsibility for one’s feelings. And I know, it is not popular, widely accomplished, frightening, etc, etc,... BUT IT IS HARDLY NEW!!!! New for you obviously.

It is a good opportunity to examine that hoary old platitude ‘taking responsibility for one’s feelings’.

I always wondered what was at the core of it? What it really meant?

Let’s stick to some practical personal examples – those that concern the actual world of people, things and events.

I had a number of relationships with women in my life that all degenerated to the point where neither I, nor my partner, were happy. I saw that my feelings, be they jealousy, anger, sullen withdrawal, resentment or whatever, were not only making me unhappy, they were directly causing my companion to be unhappy. And that further, on many occasions the feelings I had towards her were malicious (albeit psychically conveyed). To ‘feel’ anger towards someone is to be malicious – one does not have to resort to physical or verbal violence.

When I began to realise this I was so horrified that I withdrew from relationships altogether. It was only when I met Richard that I decided to do something about my feelings and emotions. Eliminate them entirely so not only could I live happily – free of sorrow, but that I could live 24 hrs. a day with someone else and not cause unhappiness in other – free of malice.

In my work, if I made a mistake I would admit the mistake, endeavour to fix it, and then make sure I didn’t do it again. With a feeling such as anger, there was nothing I could do to fix it afterwards, except do my damnedest to make sure I didn’t get angry again, ever, in the same situation. And then, when I saw anger again in another situation I would do exactly the same thing. My aim was to eliminate anger in me. It was useless to say sorry, beg forgiveness, and sheer hypocrisy to say ‘I take responsibility for it’ and then not do all I can not to have it happen again.

Many spiritual people even claim their right to be angry, and insist on ‘loving’ themselves for it rather than feel the guilt that usually follows. The other classic is to claim the ‘right’ to be angry back – enshrined in the ‘normal’ world as Justice, or defending one’s right.

The claim of ‘taking responsibility for one’s feelings’ has to be seen for the cop-out it is, if one is to be serious about becoming free of malice and sorrow, and if one at all cares about one’s fellow human beings.

By neither expressing or repressing, having a pure intent to experience the purity and perfection as evidenced in a PCE, a pure consciousness experience, it is now possible to eliminate both sorrow and malice from one’s life to the point where they are virtually non-existent. I say this from personal experience not theory. Then, and only then, is it possible that a final self-immolation will occur – (of both ego and soul).

Thought encloses itself in its own word’ What then is this activity from which one ought to abstain? It is the disordered activity of the mind which, unceasingly, devotes itself to the work of a builder erecting ideas, creating an imaginary world in which it shuts itself like a chrysalis in its cocoon.’ – The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

Eastern philosophy and religion deny and negate the innate intelligence and common sense operation of thought while giving full and unbridled reign to the affective and imaginary faculties. ‘Get out of your head and into your heart’ can be translated into ‘give up common sense and you can imagine and ‘feel’ anything you want to’. Feelings of Love, Oneness, God, etc. abound – varying only by the particular belief system one is influenced by at the time.

Hence Christians ‘see’ and feel Christ, Buddhist ‘see’ and feel Buddha, scientists ‘see’ parallel universes, etc. etc.

And feelings and emotions form part of the ‘self’ – they are who we feel we are and as such ‘form a world of their own’ – very real and very substantial in that we kill and die for our passionate heart-felt feelings – and yet to date they have got off scot-free. It is significant to realise that feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts – a fact easily observed in one’s ‘self’ is given sufficient awareness.

It’s good to get a response from you, so we can continue to discuss these matters. It does seem a long while ago now, but I know of many who are still suffering from the collapse of the Ranch and the many unresolved questions. ‘Time heals all wounds’ is a platitude I was never fond of, as emotional memories from the past would often return to ‘haunt’ me.

I deliberately chose to investigate my feelings, emotions and instincts as they arose in my daily life in order to experience life at the optimum, here, now, in this only moment of being alive that I can experience. Delving into the past, as in childhood stuff, is most often a futile skimming of the surface and an attempt to blame others, but the Ranch became pivotal for me in investigating the instincts of fear and aggression that we are all instilled with by blind nature.

If you are experiencing some other personality in this space of being that you call witnessing, as far as I’m concerned you are not just witnessing! There is no personality in this space what so ever. There is no me in this space! There is just witnessing! Feelings are nothing more than subtle thoughts, and I’m not talking to you about thoughts,

Feelings are indeed nothing more than subtle thoughts, but it may be useful to dig in a bit deeper here rather than gloss over this. Feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts. To give you a practical example – once Vineeto was late for an appointment and I started to think why she was late. Very soon the underlying emotion grabbed hold and soon I was feeling jealous and the longer it went on the more it raged. It is the feelings and the underlying emotions that are the cause of our sorrow and malice as human beings and yet we stubbornly refuse to even acknowledge that they may be the problem. We still insist on following the Eastern Religious and philosophical notion that it is thinking that is the problem. Hence the doctrine of no-mind!

It is the feelings and passions that we humans kill and die for.

Here is a suggestion from someone who is very bored with your combination of ignorance and arrogance and the long boring letters that I have to delete. Go to One.List.com a very nice site where you can start your own list.

Speaking personally, I often found in life that if I became very bored with something, was very fearful of something, or was very offended by something, it was the very next thing in life I needed to investigate, tackle, explore, find out about – in order to rid myself of these very emotions such that I became happy again. Of course, this may not be the case with you, you may well be happy with your life and your chosen path.

Slowly, slowly one gains courage. Be brave, Anand Deleeto, trust your intuition. It was not there before, it is not there now. Dare to wipe away and enjoy the bliss.

On the spiritual path, Deleeto, you will be admonished to leave your mind at the door, surrender your will, and trust your feelings. You will be encouraged to sit silently and go within to encourage a stilling of personal thoughts in order to begin to feel Bliss and Oneness. In short, you will give full reign to your feelings and emotions. ‘You’ who you feel you are will become grander and grander, bigger and bigger, and if you really work hard at it, one day – POP! ... you will realize that you are GOD!

So if you trust your intuition, trust your feelings – you are but doing a wonderful job in keeping your ‘self’ in existence – from ‘self’ to ‘Self’.

For me, I knew my ‘self’ was the problem and eventually saw that to blow it up in self-aggrandizement was to be going 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

But this is just what I have found. You will obviously make your own observations and judgements as to what you do with your life-time on earth.

... in Buddha hall and watching people meditate and wondering what was going on inside everyone’s head?

You should have wondered about your own head as you still should...

Indeed, I wondered about both my thinking and my feeling – both my logical imagination and my irrational intuition. Both drove me to distraction, both drove me to lash out, both plunged me to despair, both plagued me, both dominated me, both bound me in shackles. Both inhibited the ability of my brain to function sensibly and both inhibited my ability to be here, now in this ambrosial, paradisiacal actual world.

Testing. You’ll grow out of it!! Hopefully

The amazing thing about eliminating feelings, emotions and instincts is that they are then finished, kaput, finito, gone, stuffed, finished, never to return.

So, no, I won’t grow out of it, or return to ‘normal’, nor will I become Divine, to go ‘somewhere’ else.

I will be this flesh and blood body, happy and harmless, until I die and then I will be finished, kaput, finito, gone, stuffed, finished, never to return. Good Hey.

Let me get this straight. Are you saying you have no feelings, emotions or instincts?

The amazing thing about running ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ as opposed to being a ‘watcher’ to this moment of being alive is that one is inexorably drawn to eliminate anything in the way of one’s own happiness in this moment – the only moment I can experience being alive. If I was happy ten minutes ago, it is of no consequence if I am not happy now. If I am not happy now, then I have something to look at, something to root around in, something to discover. Inevitably the root of my unhappiness will be some belief or psittacism (parrot-fever), some instinctually driven pattern, that is causing me to feel fearful, angry, melancholy, peeved, guilty, resentful, etc. And searching, finding, investigating, understanding, contemplating upon and realizing will have the same effect as one does when one shines a light in a dark corner – all becomes startlingly clear and obvious, and eventually the feeling, emotion or instinct withers and dies, never to return.

It is a scary process, for these feelings and emotions are ‘who’ we ‘think’ and ‘feel’ we are – one is demolishing one’s very ‘self’. This is the reason that most people will firstly deny that it is possible to eliminate them, (much, much safer to merely watch one’s ‘self’ and cultivate a superior spiritual Self) or if they do allow the possibility that it might just work – they ‘head for the hills’.

When I met Richard I remember thinking ‘What if he is right?’ and ‘What if it works?’ It would mean the end of ‘me’, extinction, finished.

But I figured I was on a search to find freedom, in this lifetime, as this body, and if this was the cost – so be it. The alternative was more of the same, obviously second-rate life, or going back into the spiritual to search where I had already looked fruitlessly for 17 years.

After all, the definition of a lunatic is someone who endlessly keeps doing something despite the fact that it doesn’t work.

So, yes. The last time I was angry was some 2 years ago and the last time anyone got me upset was 18 months ago. I can’t remember the last time I was sad, and even melancholy has disappeared from my life. I actually enjoy being alive, and in the last 12 months have come to like my fellow human beings – and not to react to them out of fear (with its partner – aggression).

After all – to be happy one needs to be harmless, to be harmless one needs to be happy.

This process of eliminating feelings, emotions and instincts one does oneself – one does not wait for some mythical Divine intervention. Hence it is essential to rid oneself of the belief in a God, an after-life, an Existence that is ‘looking after you’ ... all an ‘escape route’ for the very ‘self’ you are aiming to eliminate to stay in existence.

Only when one has done all one can do eliminate one’s very ‘self’, when one lives in a virtual freedom, is it possible that a final, and irrevocable, death of the psychological and psychic entity – a self-immolation – will occur.

This virtual freedom – obtainable by anyone, given pure intent – far exceeds the wildest dreams of what is possible to experience as a human being, as I have described in my journal.

So, I hope this gets it a bit straighter for you. I know it is difficult, if not downright inconceivable, that everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong. It took me months and months, but I always remained ‘open’ to the possibility that it might be the case. And it sure explained a lot that was wrong, and why after all that time and diligent effort spent on the spiritual path, I could not honestly claim to be either happy or harmless.

‘Me, for example, I like most of my beliefs and feelings and stick to them. ... What struck me most was that you do not admit the feeling of love or other positive emotions. The feelings are stronger or poorer, more or less helpful, but why to dismiss them altogether? Perhaps I had not so many ups and downs in my life so that I am sceptical towards a perpetual, not to say antiseptical happiness, like a boring paradise.’

Firstly, hello. Good to talk to you. I do appreciate your comments on the book and can well understand that you found it a little difficult to understand and somewhat confronting. I will reply to some of the points you make.

I too found it more difficult to conceive of living without the Good emotions, but I could not deny that while they offered hope of bringing peace and harmony, in practice they failed again and again. They were for me a dream that remained unfulfilled. Love would always turn to hate or jealousy; enthusiasm and hope would lead to disappointment and despair, etc. It is my experience that the Good emotions and feelings always come in a package with the Bad ones, hence our need for morals, values and ethics to hopefully ‘keep the lid’ on things.

To advocate the deliberate understanding, exposing and elimination of emotions and feelings is of course quite radical, but I see nothing else that works.

What I have found on eliminating them is that they formed a program of neurosis in me which prevented the underlying benevolence, purity and stillness that is evident in the physical universe from having any chance to become apparent in me.

To experience delight 24 hrs. a day, every day, to experience the freedom and happiness as a constant, permanent, effortless, sensual experience, no matter where, no matter when. The easy movement, the wind, the smells, and the sights. To have that rather than sorrow, sadness, frustration, and the other human emotions. To find a way to actually increase delight and diminish malice and sorrow is to fly in the face of ancient wisdom, but what the hell!

For me concentrating on little things like not getting upset about the weather was a good start. It always seemed pointless to allow myself to get upset by the weather. It is a fact, cannot be changed, and yet my mood, my enjoyment of the day was dependant on it being sunny or raining. Once I had eliminated this, I tried something else – maybe trying to not be angry about something or someone in particular. I found that to see things as silly or sensible rather than right or wrong, good or bad, etc. was useful. I found each step worked – that I experienced more delight and less malice and sorrow – which is the aim of the exercise after all.

So, once again I do appreciate your comments and understandings. No one else has replied or commented on the book so fully – I think it is too confrontational for most, and many of my friends have spent years on the spiritual path and are not pleased or even willing to have their beliefs challenged.

It’s such a pleasure to talk of these things with you – I personally found the challenge to be happy and harmless very daunting at the start but I just nibbled away at it bit by bit. And as you can see from the book it took a while to get my head out of the clouds and come to my senses. I would welcome further discussion if you wish.

Just to set the record straight ;-). At this point I find it neither necessary nor desirable to respond in a personal way (meaning addressing any members <finding them either supporting or not supporting the worldview currently presented as ACTUALISM>). The basic goal and purpose to establish (becoming happy and harmless while living a life in which there is no denial whatsoever of any bodily functions or qualities attributed to what is generally referred to as the human body) has been agreed upon as to be possible beneficial.

If I may point out something both from my own experience of spiritual years, and from observing others, that may be relevant. If you run the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and come up with the answer ‘I am being angry right now’ or ‘I am feeling sad right now’ then you have something to investigate. If, however, you adopt the spiritual approach of ‘there is anger arising (in my body)’ or dissociate from the anger by asking ‘who is being angry right now?’ – as though it was someone else but you being angry – then you are indulging in the spiritual practice of denial and cultivating a new, holier than thou, dissociated identity.

The simplicity of running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ with sincerity is not an easy exercise, but for someone who dissociates from their feelings it is impossible.

Well, this path to Actual Freedom is proving continually fascinating and thrilling. Lately two events have proved particularly revealing as to the fact that no matter how much I clean myself up, or strip myself of the emotions that arise from the instinctual passions, they are still there lurking beneath the surface. Richard reported the same occasional bleed-throughs, even while in his enlightened phase, and this is the empirical evidence that only self-immolation can remove the impediments to living a pure consciousness experience, 24 hrs. a day, every day.

Virtual freedom – the 99.9 % version – is not to be sneezed at, for it is a state that is far more salubrious, sensible and harmless than any dissociated state that the spiritual world offers. Only by freeing oneself of all spiritual belief and actively investigating and diminishing the instinctual passions that lie beneath is it possible to be 99.9% happy and harmless. Only then can one be almost actually happy and harmless and then the obsession focuses on the ‘almost’ bit. Almost means that one can never quite trust oneself that one’s happiness and harmlessness cannot be disturbed by someone else or some event. That a bleed-through of malice towards another, or sorrow for oneself, will not occur. However it is only by living in Virtual Freedom, the ‘almost’ stage, that enables me to clearly see ‘me’ at my core, free of the cloud of beliefs, emotions, feelings and neurosis that is normally ‘me’.

One of the events that triggered a bleed-through was my starting to write about Actual Freedom on another mailing list. As I have written, there was a whiff of fear at sticking my neck out, a why do I keep doing this, why not stay safe? This only came after the action and as I looked beneath the fear, the underlying reason was an insecure ‘me’ – unable by ‘my’ very nature to be 100% free of malice and sorrow, unable by my very nature to be sure that there would be no ‘bleed-throughs’. I remember reporting to No 5 about feeling frustration when I wrote to him last year, but it was only by sticking my neck out, actively exploring while remaining aware, that the issue was stirred, the discovery made, the observation noted and the next ensuing action taken.

This sequence initially requires stubborn effort but as success breeds success a momentum gathers, serendipity abounds and the process becomes not ‘my’ doing it and then all ‘I’ have to do is dare to take the foot off the brake.

As for the whiff of fear, and as Vineeto noted the other night, the real discovery, the real issue to investigate, usually lies beneath the fear. Take the action, feel the fear and then look at what lays beneath the fear. If you stay stuck with the fear, no action in the first place, no discovery, no adventure, no change.

Another feeling that arose from starting to write to this list was when Vineeto said she would write on the same list as well. A feeling of ‘it’s my turf, don’t butt in’ arose, a childlike possessiveness that was rationalized away by the quite sensible consideration that two of us writing would be too much and the list members would feel attacked. They will no-doubt feel personally attacked anyway, as it is par for the course whenever anyone is faced with facts that expose the failure and mendacity of one’s cherished beliefs. For me, if I simply rationalized away my feelings and emotions I would have missed the opportunity to experience them in action, as my ‘self’. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is not about an abrupt rationalization, denial or repression of feelings and emotions. Nor is it about interminable therapizing and never-ending superficial-only investigation. There is a third alternative – an active experiential investigation, both as an instantaneous observation and a thoughtful contemplation, solely aimed at evincing a radical empirical permanent change

Vineeto and I, as usual, came to a mutual sensible consensus that, for now, one of us writing on the list would be better than two. And I liked the fact that without taking action – in this case writing to a mailing list – ‘I’ would have remained safe, hidden, unveiled, unrevealed, forever lurking, however quietly.

The other event worthy of report relates to my now being fully involved in the world of people, things and events and not a spiritual hermit in some sheltered workshop for those shell-shocked by ‘real’ world, as I was for years. This probably relates to No 3’s work experience that he posted. I’ll include it in this post as the value of this list is in the mutual sharing of experience, information and discoveries in order to test their validity and effectiveness – to glean from others what works and what doesn’t, mainly so we don’t have to unknowingly and needlessly repeat what others have already found to have failed.

I have always found the idea of having to retreat from the world into an ashram or an insular community somehow a cop-out, albeit an attractive one compared to having to battle it out in the ‘real’ world. Many talk about bringing their meditation into the market place, withdrawn into their own inner world, protected by a self-made bubble or cocoon, isolating them from the ‘bad vibes’ of others, all the time claiming they are being ‘present’. This is what Richard means by being twice-removed from the actual world.

My experience is that one can become virtually free of malice and sorrow and can activate delight to such a level that one’s interactions with one’s fellow human beings are invariably harmonious and pleasurable – 99.9% of the time. This is in itself quite outstanding. I do not grumble, bitch, complain, blame, berate, beset or attack anyone, nor do I feel resentful, jealous, envious, belittled, hard done by, pissed-off, etc. However, on very rare occasions an emotion will be triggered for there is still a ‘me’ lurking around, instinctually programmed and thus ever-ready to rise to either defend or attack.

The particular occasion that raised a feeling response was of having to do something that made no sense – just a wee bit and such that I was easily able to observe the fact that ‘I’ was not needed to be in control, quite the opposite, in fact. This having to do something silly is a common occurrence in the market place where one sells one’s time in return for money and most decisions are made on the basis of right/wrong, good/bad, me vs. you, etc. and not on the basis of mutual consensus based on common sense.

On this occasion, all of my usual skills of persuasion, facilitating an open discussion of the pros and cons, etc. failed to elicit a consensual sensibility and I was left with that childlike feeling of being forced to do something that I saw as silly. T’was just a flash, an irrational and impulsive response, but again it was ‘me’ at my core. These little flashes, startlingly apparent when all the usual emotional clutter is removed, serve as a reminder to the fact that no matter how much one cleans oneself up, or strips oneself down of the emotions that arise from the instinctual passions, they are still there lurking beneath the surface. The whole point of the process that is undertaken on the path to Actual freedom is to actively whittle away at one’s social identity – all the beliefs, morals, ethics and psittacisms instilled and co-opted since birth – so that one is able to get down to investigating the raw instinctual passions – both the supposed good and bad. This investigation is the hairy part where any who have managed to get there have traditionally opted for safety and gone with the ‘good’ passions, adopted a new set of spiritual beliefs, morals ethics and psittacisms and away they went – with a new identity pasted over the old rotten ‘me’. This explains why the enlightened ones still have malice, albeit excused as Divine anger, and still have sorrow, albeit disguised as Divine Com-passion – feeling pity for others from their higher, holier and more exalted position.

To get back to my work-related issue. I do like it that I can function and operate in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are – without a protective cocoon – with an impunity and salubriousness that I would have deemed an impossibility a few years ago. This is directly attributable to abandoning the folly of accepting myself as I am, to not sitting in the corner with my eyes closed, but getting my head out of the clouds and coming down-to-earth – where meaning is abundantly and sensuously obvious each moment again. The key to the ultimate stage of self-immolation lies in experiencing and dispassionately observing these bleed-throughs. In knowing that perfection and purity, the total eradication of malice and sorrow is only possible with my extinction. Utterly fascinating and thrilling.

As I went back over what I wrote there is one sentence that is worth elaborating on. It is when I said ‘an event raised a feeling response– just a wee bit and such that I was easily able to observe the fact that ‘I’ was not needed to be in control, quite the opposite, in fact’. What I observed was that ‘I’ was the source of the feeling response – as a thought and as a chemical flush – and yet ‘I’ was redundant in taking appropriate sensible action and being considerate of the person I was talking to. Normally ‘I’ am the source of the trouble and ‘I’ proceed to stuff up the solution. ‘I’ am nothing but a chemically-fuelled rotten little feedback loop, an errant, stubbornly perverse virus in an otherwise perfect operating system.

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