Selected Correspondence Peter

Living Together

Good luck No 78. I don’t think you or I are going to ever get any girls if they know love is not going to be involved. Maybe after we have attained a virtual freedom, we might be so enjoyable to be around that perhaps we’d then have a chance.

You think I’m joking? Tell me how it goes when you tell a girl about actualism. I’m betting 99.99% of them would run away like Leatherface was running after them with a chainsaw.

What made sense to me was the fact that I needed to do whatever was necessary in order to clean myself up such that I didn’t impose my own innate antagonism and sadness on someone with whom I wanted to share my time with.

If you don’t happen to be with a partner right now then even better because you have the opportunity of getting a head start such that you will become an attractive companion to someone when the opportunity presents herself.

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No 73: I disagree, I am also a 21-year-old male in the States, and I get different reactions from people when discussing what is meant by actual freedom (females for this topic). Some are genuinely interested, and I have had many an intimate conversation relating to what it means to be alive and here now. The bottom line is that you could find people interested in eradicating misery in the forms of sorrow and malice and those that are not.

Finding people interested in giving up sorrow and malice is easy compared to find people willing to give up compassion, empathy, sympathy, and love (particularly girls/ladies). You let me know when you have a live-in companion or even a wife who is not only happy that you’re involved in this, but even ready to do it herself (by the way, it is the last part that would insure success, I think). One can ‘disagree’ till the cows come home, and that don’t mean shit. Prove it for a fact; yes this is a challenge! Go!

Quite a few people have casually dismissed my being able to live with a companion in utter peace and harmony on the basis that I have been lucky enough to find a like-minded compatible companion, thereby completely ignoring the fact that I am reaping the rewards of my own efforts to change myself (exactly as Vineeto is reaping the rewards of her own efforts to change herself). It is clear to me that such people were merely offering an excuse for not bothering to make the requisite effort to become happy and harmless themselves.

Vineeto/Peter, How do you live with a single partner without experiencing loyalty?

Because I live with a woman who is invariably happy and harmless, the question of loyalty never arises.

Or to put it another way, I am constantly aware that I am living with the best woman I could live with, so the idea of changing partners or looking out for someone better or someone new never enters the picture.

Is that a preference or socially conditioned behaviour?

Neither, it is simply common sense in operation. Looking for better than best makes no sense to me.

I prefer having sex with different partners.

Speaking personally, I have always preferred quality over quantity.

At this stage I don’t know if it is simply a preference or my instinctual passions in action.

When I first came across actualism one of its major attractions was my interest in getting to the root of the sexual malaise such that I could freely enjoy the sensual delights of sexual play – something that I found impossible to do whilst shackled by religious/spiritual morality, be it either the Western variety or the Eastern, whilst remaining firmly ensconced on one side of the gender divide, let alone whilst being compelled by the animal instinctual passions to be a sexual predator.

In hindsight, it was fortunate that I had made living with at least one person in utter peace and harmony my number one priority in life at the time and this meant that I then had sufficient motivation to experientially investigate the mores and moralities of societal sexual and gender conditioning as well as the murky depths of the human instinctual sexual drive – to push on beyond where I had always stopped before.

Personally, I have found the whole investigation into sexuality to be one of the most daunting of practical investigations as well as one of the most rewarding. Daunting in that one inevitably confronts the most strident of societal moralities and taboos as well as the strongest of the human instinctual drives both of which make the investigation close-to-the-bone as it were – and rewarding in that, as each murky layer is seen through, one moves closer to the intimacy that living with another person in utter peace and harmony actually is.

Again with the benefit of hindsight – and something which is obvious to me now – the only reason I was able to make such an investigation, and reap such rewards, was that I made intimacy my first priority which meant that getting to the roots of the sexual malaise became a subsequent preference.

When I first came across actualism one of its major attractions was my interest in getting to the root of the sexual malaise such that I could freely enjoy the sensual delights of sexual play – something that I found impossible to do whilst shackled by religious/spiritual morality, be it either the Western variety or the Eastern, whilst remaining firmly ensconced on one side of the gender divide, let alone whilst being compelled by the animal instinctual passions to be a sexual predator.

My sexual social conditioning is both family derived and spiritual (Christian). It sounds something like this: find a suitable good looking/loving woman, bond/marry with her (eventually have 2 kids), respect her and ‘enjoy’ a lasting relationship without cheating on her.

The problem is that after I am involved in a relationship for a longer period of time the sex is not as great as in the beginning so I tend to look for new partners.

Yet again evidence that the instinctual passions are ultimately stronger than social conditioning, hey?

Is your sexual pleasure diminishing/increasing/remaining constant in quality as time passes?

Nowadays sex is such an ever-fresh sensual experience that I no longer suffer from the problem of feeling trapped, being bored, wanting to move on, imagining I am having sex with someone else, retreating inside in order to evoke a personal bliss, being senselessly driven to ejaculate, and so on.

It’s quite remarkable what is to found at the end of the path that humanity has always hung a sign that says ‘do not enter here’.

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In hindsight, it was fortunate that I had made living with at least one person in utter peace and harmony my number one priority in life at the time and this meant that I then had sufficient motivation to experientially investigate the mores and moralities of societal sexual and gender conditioning as well as the murky depths of the human instinctual sexual drive – to push on beyond where I had always stopped before.

What I notice is that after sex there is a very pleasant atmosphere, anxiety-free, relaxing and the problems, mores and moralities vanish albeit for a brief period. I enjoy these moments more and more and as they begin to slip away I track the gradual arising of the anxiety level and what causes it.

As a suggestion, I found it vital to check out the precise nature of the feelings I was having not only after having sex but also whilst having sex. It’s also found it good to keep in mind that any prolonged or strenuous physical activity can produce an increase in hormonal levels that induce feelings of well-being and even euphoria – I have friends who get a high from the hormones produced form prolonged running.

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Personally, I have found the whole investigation into sexuality to be one of the most daunting of practical investigations as well as one of the most rewarding. Daunting in that one inevitably confronts the most strident of societal moralities and taboos as well as the strongest of the human instinctual drives both of which make the investigation close-to-the-bone as it were – and rewarding in that, as each murky layer is seen through, one moves closer to the intimacy that living with another person in utter peace and harmony actually is.

It’s so easy when not in the grip of the values, beliefs and instinctual urges that dominate 99% of my waking life. In such moments it’s surprising that they exist at all and have such a debilitating effect on my well-being. In the after-sex moments I can see the utter futility of real-world struggles and controls, they don’t exist at all.

I can only reiterate what I have said about putting the desire for an actual intimacy first – unless you are interested in the tantric ‘sex-for-the-sake-of-getting-blissed-out-of-it’ approach that is becoming more and more fashionable these days.

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Again with the benefit of hindsight – and something which is obvious to me now – the only reason I was able to make such an investigation, and reap such rewards, was that I made intimacy my first priority which meant that getting to the roots of the sexual malaise became a subsequent preference.

The sexual act is the most direct form of intimacy that I experience and I usually experience it not with my partner as social conditioning somehow gets in the way (I’m working on that) but with (new) partners that are interested only in sex with no subsequent expectations.

And as I have said, the intimacy that I sought was the intimacy that comes from living with another person in utter peace and harmony – from the shared mundane experiences of eating a meal together, watching a television program together, having a coffee in a café, shopping for food, strolling through town, tending the garden, having a chat as well as the mundane experience of mutually enjoyable sex. As is evident from a pure consciousness experience – there is far more to intimacy than having sex with someone.

A pure consciousness experience is evidence that this flesh and blood body is effortlessly jovial and benign when ‘I’ am not around to continually stuff things up. By practicing the actualism method I have got to the stage where I am virtually free of malice and sorrow, which means that it is only very rarely that ‘I’ and my problems and passions interject such that my happiness and harmlessness is momentarily disrupted. Any such aberrations are of minor consequence and in no way spoil my sensual delight in being here in the world-as-it-is with people as-they are.

As you would know, whilst I make no claims to being actually free of malice and sorrow, I have no hesitation in recommending a virtual freedom from malice and sorrow to anyone who is interested – it is to live beyond human expectations.

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Ah! Far, far better than that. The paradise I live in is not artificial, it is actual and I now have an almost constant sensual appreciation of that fact. And further to this, I would now have the same sensual appreciation no matter where I lived on this luxuriant and cornucopian planet. I have simply chosen to live in the best bit of the planet I found in my travels – I voted with my feet to find a place I prefer to live, as millions of migrants do every year on the planet.

As for ‘you two have created’, I presume you are referring to the fact that we live together in the same flat in utter peace and harmony, 24/7. This is not a mutual creation – the fact that I live this way with Vineeto is testimony that the actualism process does work in that I am now virtually free of malice and sorrow, which means that I am a pleasurable companion to live with. And I can attest to the fact that Vineeto, also being virtually free of malice and sorrow, is a delightful companion to live with – we have none of the disputes, disagreements, altercations, withdrawals, retreats, estrangements, holding-backs, holding-ons and time-outs that typify normal relationships.

In short, I am every moment reaping the rewards of my full-blooded commitment to living with a companion in utter peace and harmony.

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Of course. My happiness is not dependant on who I live with. It was serendipitous that the last companion I chose to live with was someone who was also interested in ridding herself of her animosity and her misery, but my happiness is an autonomous happiness that comes from the inherent sensuous pleasure of being alive in this paradisiacal actual world – no matter where I am in this moment, no matter whom I am with in this moment and no matter what I am doing or not doing in this moment. Living with a companion is a bonus on top of this on-going happiness and being able to partake of the intimate delights of sexual play with a willing companion is a bonus on top of that bonus.

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The only feedback I would give is to swap stories and tell you what I did, the changes I made and the steps I took in order that I could live with a companion in peace and harmony. If you are interested, I suggest reading the relevant chapters in my journal – Living Together, Love and Sex and you could try Peace and People for good measure – as its much more fresh than I could write it now from memory.

Perhaps I should preface my reply by saying that at the start of my living together with Vineeto I made a boots-and-all commitment that I would do anything and everything I needed to do in order that I would be able to live with her in amity and harmony. This once and for all commitment left me with no excuses, no escape route, no ‘next time’, no ‘other woman’ – my commitment ensured success as I was unwilling to accept failure yet again.

My success has meant that I have found my longed-for life-long companion, my best mate as it where, and I have no need at all to maintain an exit strategy, no need to ‘take space’, no need to keep an eye out for someone better or someone younger or whatever it is that normal men do. Because I have fully committed to this companionship I have never held anything back, which means I will have no regrets should it come to an end before I die. If it were to end before then, for whatever reason, I would miss her being around, but the missing would not be emotional in that I would have neither regrets nor guilt that I had held anything back, that it ‘could have been better if …’, no ‘self’-indulgent feelings of mourning or loss or grief, no feeling of loneliness, and so on.

No. I have never suggested ‘that the process of living together with a partner who is also interested in becoming free may enhance the actual experiencing of the world’, nor is it suggested anywhere on the website.

Human sensate experiencing of the actual world is a function of the sense organs of human flesh and blood bodies and this experiencing is largely a common-to-all experience given that the human species has the same genetic makeup with the same sense organs. Whilst ever-so-slight variations may occur from individual to individual, the sensate experience of the matter that is the actual world is a common-to-all experience in that each and every bodies’ sense organs experiences the exact same actual world – the universe being universal.

Because of this over-arching commonality of sensate experience it is a delight to be able to swap notes as to the sensual experiencing of the actual world with a fellow human being who is equally capable of delighting in the sensuousness of the actual world. It is impossible to delight in the sensuous of the actual world if one is feeling resentful, aggrieved, annoyed, melancholic, detached, cynical, blissed-out and so on, and it is impossible to swap notes about the sensuousness of the actual world with a fellow human being who is feeling resentful, aggrieved, annoyed, melancholic, detached, cynical, blissed-out and so on.

In my case, living with a fellow human being who is virtually free of the debilitating feelings of malice and sorrow is an added bonus to my own ongoing experience of delight – it is not, as you imply, the reason I delight in being here. The sole reason I delight in being here is that I have, by my own efforts as an actualist, become virtually free of the feelings of malice and sorrow as well as the antidotal feelings of love and compassion – i.e. virtually free of feeling resentful, aggrieved, annoyed, melancholic, cynical, detached, blissed-out and so on.

Very, very rarely nowadays am I affected by the ungracious moods and emotional maladies of others such that it impinges on my feeling excellent or on my experiencing delight, so much so that I could live with any other person without inflicting any emotional demands upon them. The process of actualism is about ridding oneself of malice and sorrow – it is not about finding a companion who has rid themselves of malice and sorrow, or is in process of doing so, in order to attempt to live a vicarious happiness and a surrogate harmlessness by association.

At some seminal stage soon after meeting Vineeto, I realized that the only way I could live in peace and harmony with her was for me to clean myself up – for me to get my head out of the clouds and to get off my bum and set about ridding myself of my feelings of malice and my feelings of sorrow such that I didn’t deliberately or unwittingly continue to impose them upon her. When I realized that the only way I was ever going to be able to live with any of my fellow human beings in peace and harmony was for me to become happy and harmless, I set about the business of making it happen.

This is what I wrote about the realization soon after –

‘Two other ingredients necessary for success are patience and consideration, and my lack of these was soon to become a major issue between us. In typical male fashion I leapt into the process, determined to make it work. I had found a ‘solution’ and I proceeded to attempt to ram it down Vineeto’s throat. I would take the discoveries about Actual Freedom I had made in talking with Richard and try to convince her of their ‘rightness’. She was still very much on the spiritual path, whereas I was beginning to have serious doubts. Of course, she sensibly dug her heels in – she saw it as her simply taking on yet another belief system. We often would come to loggerheads over this, and this was in stark contrast to the mutual discoveries we were making about love, sex and gender differences. Here I was again acting in stereotype – arrogant, authoritarian and wielding power. What this meant practically was that I was again doing ‘battle’, and with the very woman with whom I had vowed to end all this nonsense! Our pact had in fact been about living together and did not include her having to abandon her spiritual beliefs – that was her business, not mine.

One day, as I was driving to see her, it struck me like a thunderbolt. This is not just an intellectual theory – this is about changing my actions, changing my life. A theory is useless unless it is practical, workable, i.e. can be proven in practice that it works. If the battling was to stop, then it was me who had to stop it! This was not about changing Vineeto – this was about changing me! When I saw her that evening I told her I was not going to battle her anymore, wanting to get my way or wanting to change her. The realization that it was me who had to stop battling was so obvious, so complete and so devastating that it was impossible to continue on as I had before.’  Peter’s Journal, Living Together

Yep. One of the first things I had to acknowledge to myself before I set about wanting to change myself was that my past attempts to live with a companion failed because of my feelings of ‘jealousy, possessiveness, hurt, boredom, fury, etc’. It was a significant step to acknowledge the role I played in the previous failure as opposed to indulging in the usual diversionary tactic of blaming the other. Such an acknowledgement can lead to wanting to do something about having these feelings – regardless of whether you are currently in a relationship or not.

As I have indicated above, only you can do something about your ungracious moods and emotional maladies. If you make the effort to become happy and harmless now you will then be doing all you can to make yourself a better, and presumably more appealing, companion for someone to live with in the future – and this will be so regardless of whether that companion is interested in becoming happy and harmless or not.

The turning point in my being able to live in peace and harmony with Vineeto only came when I realized that I had to stop wanting to change her intentions and her behaviour because the only person I could change – and needed to change – in order to live with her in peace and harmony was me.

If you are interested, I have written a good deal about the challenges and the rewards of living with a fellow human being in peace and harmony.

As you would know from your own experience, it is one thing to read something that say Richard has said about some aspect of the human condition but it is another to confirm it as fact by your own observations of others. However a bona fide significance and life-changing consequences only come when you become attentive as to how that particular aspect of the human condition operates in you, as ‘you’, a thinking and feeling entity – be it as a feeling or as a compulsion, be it manifested either as a covert action or am overt action. In other words, it is only the decisive act of attentiveness, or ‘self’-awareness, of the human condition in operation, when combined with sincerity, is the ending of, i.e. the freedom from, that particular aspect of the human condition.

Because I am a seasoned practicing actualist, nowadays most of my observations serve as reminders of how much I have changed since starting this business – of how much of the human condition I have become free of over the years. I do like these reminders because they clearly point to an inevitable end to a process that, whilst seeming so daunting at the start, has proved to be surprisingly straightforward.

The first observation I had was about ‘relationships’ – the man-woman, living-together type. I was laying back in bed with Vineeto the other night, enjoying a particular intimate moment, when I realized the intimacy I was enjoying was the result of going into the relationship fully, of not holding back, of not settling for anything less than the very best. This continually ‘leaning forward’ rather than holding back was the only way I came to discover what was preventing me from experiencing the exquisite intimacy of the day to day peaceful living with a fellow human being. I say this because it is only by intrepidly going beyond the much-vaunted idealism and feelings of love that I managed to discover not only the guileful constraints that love inevitably imposes on both lover and loved, but also the dark underbelly of passions that love attempts to repress.

This ‘holding back’ can take many subtle or not-so subtle forms. Taking ‘space’, remaining aloof, being cool, feeling emotionally, intellectually or spiritually superior, detaching from or suppressing one’s feelings, accepting one’s lot, surrendering, withdrawing, and so on. Whilst the games played are many and varied, the end result is the same – staying as you are, denying the opportunity of change and missing out on the opportunity of investigating what is standing in the way of the changes you know are needed for an authentic intimacy to happen.

The risk associated with this type of ‘self’-investigation is that the subsequent change it evokes means that one is no longer the same person one was when one entered into the relationship and this could well cause consternation and disquiet in one’s companion. What pushed me on past this point was a genuine caring for my companion in that I did not want to continue to subject her to my graceless demands and my fickle moods – after all, it was I who wanted to live with her in utter peace and harmony and to demand that she aspire to do the same would have been to completely miss the point of the actualism process.

I was also reminded at the time of something I had written in the Glossary

Feeling — Physical sensibility other than sight, hearing, taste, touch or smell. The condition of being emotionally affected or committed; an emotion (of fear, hope, etc.). Emotions, susceptibilities, sympathies. A belief not based solely on reason; an attitude, a sentiment. Oxford Dictionary

The three ways a person can experience the world are: 1: cerebral (thoughts); 2: sensate (senses); 3. affective (feelings). The arising of instinctually -sourced feelings within the body automatically produces a hormonal chemical response in the body, which can lead to the false assumption that they are actual. Given that the base feelings are malice and sorrow (resentment, anger, revenge, jealousy, hate, etc. and sadness, depression, melancholy, loneliness, etc.) we desperately seek relief in the ‘good’ feelings (love, trust, compassion, togetherness, friendship, etc.). When the ‘good’ feelings fade or disappear – as they inevitably do after the disappointments of life, some people resort to the imaginary world of Divine Love, Gods and Goddesses to escape from or transcend the bad feelings. To live life as a ‘feeling being’ is to be forever tossed on a raging sea, hoping for an abatement to the storm. Finally, after a particularly fierce storm, one ties up in port to sit life out in safety or putters around in the shallows, so as not to face another storm again. We are but victims of our impassioned feelings – but they can be eliminated. Feelings are most commonly expressed as emotion-backed thoughts and as such we can free ourselves of their grip upon us. AF Glossary

The ‘tie up in port’ bit particularly seemed appropriate for it is descriptive of what most regard as having a good relationship within the human condition – having found someone to ‘tie up in port’ with so you won’t be alone in old age.

Yes, I found it most useful to have a companion who was willing to reveal the inner-workings of the woman’s camp in what is tellingly known as the battle of the sexes. Of course, as a practicing actualist, this willingness to divulge secrets was part of her desire to do all she could to change herself so that she could live with at least one fellow human being in utter peace and harmony.

It was definitely a fortuitous meeting in that we both came to have the same intent – to do all we could to rid ourselves of all traces of malice and sorrow – but it would be wrong to think of it as a co-operative effort. The whole point of actualism is that no-one can do it for me, or with me – it is solely a do-it-yourself business.

You might have read the sea-side café incident that I recently posted to the list and if you did, you might also have noticed that my awareness of my feelings of anger towards her prompted me to take the unilateral action necessary to change myself. Contrary to popular belief, stopping being angry or resentful or melancholic or sorrowful does not require the co-operation of others.

I’d just like to add my comment to your discussion about relationships.

Gary – I think I also experienced a momentary feeling of pity for my partner whose expressions of ‘love’ to me are usually not reciprocated, perhaps in they are in tender expressions of caring but certainly not in word, as I never speak the ‘love’ word anymore. I think there was an irrational belief operating in me at the time that went something like this: ‘What kind of partner are you after all – you should be telling your partner that you love her’.

One could easily substitute any number of words in the place of ‘partner’ such as ‘son’, ‘daughter’, ‘friend’, ‘coworker’, etc. The irrational belief that I ‘should’ be expressing love to these people caused me to feel momentary sadness, regret, and guilt.

No 38 – I had found myself in a very similar position a while back, and it provided plenty of (painful) opportunity for observation. I think I came out of it with increased clarity, but one question still remains:

Unlike Vineeto/Peter, I am not in a relationship with that level of shared determination and application. We do, however have a certain degree of caring for each other. It does give her pleasure to hear the word ‘love’ come out of my mouth towards her. Is it not reasonable to provide her that pleasure on occasion? Is it likely that we have been working through the whole concept of ‘love’, and as it slowly releases its iron grip, it is being reduced to merely a word? And in withholding this pleasure to others, we are hanging on to our concept of ‘love’?

I thought it might be useful to this particular discussion to explain my initial interest in actualism and how and why I came to be living with Vineeto. Although I have told the story in my Journal, most people who have read the story manage to misunderstand, misinterpret or re-interpret it.

When I first came across Richard I spent a good deal of time checking out the sensibility of his story, as well as checking out whether he lived what he talked. I eventually got to the stage where the story made sense and, unlike those I had followed on the spiritual path, it was clear to me that he lived what he talked. As I found myself becoming more and more interested in actualism I found myself faced with a dilemma. How best to road-test actualism in order to find out if the method worked in practice?

Previous to this time I had been full-on on the spiritual path, was not in a relationship, had lived in shared houses for several years and had spent the last year living alone. It was in this latter monk-like period that I gradually lost my grip on reality and had a substantial Satori experience – a glimpse of what enlightenment would be like. It occurred to me that if I continued to live alone then it would be very easy to treat actualism as a philosophy or a belief and the danger was that I would go tripping off into all sorts of fantasies as I had done in my spiritual period.

However, as I have said often before, what really challenged me was Richard’s comment in the Introduction to his Journal – ‘I started from a basic premise that if man and woman could not live together with nary a bicker – let alone a quarrel – then the universe was indeed a sick joke.’ There was such a blindingly obvious sensibility to this statement that I decided that this too would be my starting point in actualism.

In making this decision, I knew I would be testing actualism not only in an utterly down-to-earth arena – one-on-one male-female relationship – but one that Eastern spiritualism failed to address. The appeal of this method of testing actualism was that, whilst I knew from experience I could very happily live by myself, I preferred to live with a companion. I had always wanted to understand the nature of the odious gender divide and I had always wanted to be free from sexual inhibitions as well as instinctive sexual predatoriness. Deep-down I knew that if I wanted to be happy and harmless in the world-as-it, with people as-they-are, then the big issues in life had to be tackled and understood – not dismissed, denied or avoided. And one of the really big issues was man and woman living together in utter peace and harmony.

So it could be said that my deliberately finding a companion with whom to road-test the actualism method only meant I was catching up to where you guys started – faced with the challenge of living with at least one other person in utter peace and harmony. From feedback over the years, it is clear that many people have misunderstood the nature of this challenge. It is not about waiting for, or demanding, that the other person changes – that they become happy and harmless in order that you can be. Nor is it about waiting for some like-minded person to come magically wandering into your life in order for you to change.

Everybody who comes across actualism starts from where they are now, in the life circumstances they find themselves in. If you are already with a companion, then that is where you start, if you are alone, that is where you start. No matter what age, culture, gender, life experience or life circumstances – if you want to become happy and harmless in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are, then right now is always the time to start and right here is the place to start.

This is not to say that you may not want to change your life circumstances in order to make life easier – contrary to popular belief there is no virtue in suffering – or that you may want to take on an adventure or a challenge of some sort. But no matter what an actualist’s life circumstances are, his or her main priority in life will always be to be happy and harmless right now.

I do remember that I spent a lot of time comparing my life experience and life circumstances with Richard’s. Eventually I came to see that making such comparisons was a red herring because my life experiences and life circumstances are what has happened as a fact and what is happening now as a fact. The only salient thing that stood out in Richard’s stories of his time before he became actually free was his whole-hearted intent and stubborn persistence to explore every avenue of his psyche in his quest to become actually free from the human condition – to leave no stone unturned, as it were.

Just to add another thought to the discussion that might be relevant. The last century has seen a remarkable revolution in women redefining their traditional social/gender roles and this seems to have left many men bemused about their own social/gender role. Whilst many women are now refusing to play the role of slave in their relationships, men generally seem reluctant to dare to take the same step.

My own experience is that this social/gender programming, both the male and female, needed to be scrupulously examined in order that I could become free of the effects of both. These investigations were an oft-confronting business because there is a lot of darkness hidden beneath the generally well-meant goodness – however the tangible rewards far exceed the unfulfilled and fickle promise of love.

By putting becoming happy and harmless as a higher priority to hanging on to the mores, habits and hopes of a traditional man-woman relationship, I am now able to relate to women as fellow human beings and not members of the ‘opposite sex’ – not only the woman I choose to live with, but all women.

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Yeah. I had 3 failed relationships and figured that it was impossible for any man and woman to live together in peace and harmony without begrudging compromises. And this resignation came not only from my own personal experiences but from observation of ever man-woman relationship I had seen or read about.

When I became an actualist I found this cynical attitude was no longer acceptable to me. One of the most important admissions I came to make was that I was at least equally at fault in causing the past failures of my relationships. This meant that in trying again, I was determined this time to not hold back – to give it my all. I knew that nothing short of 100% commitment on my part would bring success. Only by making a hundred percent commitment could I be certain that it would be no fault of mine if living together with a new partner in peace and harmony did not work out.

Exactly the same intent would also have applied if I had already been living with someone at the time I decided to become an actualist. I would have wanted to stop holding back and fully commit myself to the task of living in utter peace with that person. This would have meant I would have changed myself such that I stopped being grumpy, moody, resentful, burdensome, demanding, distanced, aloof and so on – i.e. that I was no longer being a burden on the person that I choose to live with.

And, if there had not been a woman I had been attracted to as a companion, then I would have started the process of living in peace and harmony with friends, colleagues at work or family members simply because it makes good sense to start with those closest. After all, the challenge in actualism is to be able to live with one’s fellow human beings in utter peace and harmony – not as a theory or a philosophy, nor as a hope or a ‘self’-aggrandizing imaginary feeling, but as an actuality, in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are.

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However, as I have said often before, what really challenged me was Richard’s comment in the Introduction to his Journal – ‘I started from a basic premise that if man and woman could not live together with nary a bicker, let alone a quarrel, then the universe was indeed a sick joke.’ There was such a blindingly obvious sensibility to this statement that I decided that this too would be my starting point in actualism.

I think my comment above relates to the fact that, while you and I and others have had different life experiences and have different living circumstances, the over-arching challenge facing each and every human being is to be able to actually live in peace and harmony with all of one’s fellow human beings. For this to happen it is obvious that one needs to put actualizing peace on earth above one’s own ‘self’-centred beliefs and ‘self’-centred survival passions.

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Everybody who comes across actualism starts from where they are now, in the life circumstances they find themselves in. If you are already with a companion, then that is where you start, if you are alone, that is where you start. No matter what age, culture, gender, life experience or life circumstances – if you want to become happy and harmless in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are, then right now is always the time to start and right here is the place to start.

Yep. And when you get to the stage of living peacefully with your partner as-she-is – without gracelessly demanding that she should change to suit your ideas, whims and moods – then the same naïve conversations can occur with any human being.

*

This is not to say that you may not want to change your life circumstances in order to make life easier – contrary to popular belief there is no virtue in suffering – or that you may want to take on an adventure or a challenge of some sort. But no matter what an actualist’s life circumstances are, his or her foremost priority in life will always be to be happy and harmless right now.

There is lot contained in the phrase Richard uses – ‘to be free to be happy and harmless – in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are’. Not happy and harmless in some mythical afterlife or some utopian future but right now, in the world as-it-is. And not a freedom conditional upon retreating from the world or on feeling superior to others but a freedom from any skerrick of malice and sorrow in all of one’s dealings with all of the people one comes in contact with.

Only recently an incident bought home to me that my own feelings of malice and sorrow are inseparable from the feelings and passions that cause all the wars, rapes, murders, torture, child abuse and domestic violence amongst the human species. Someone said something about my work that caused me to take offence and because I was sufficiently aware of my reaction I did not react at the time. I did however stew over it a bit later for a while until I was able to get back once more to feeling excellent. The very next day a different person became angry with me, again about a work issue, and I could see clearly that my reaction of feeling offended was of the very same ilk as his anger – both reactions were rooted in instinctive ‘self’-centred reactions, be they defensive or offensive.

What was startlingly clear to me from this incident was that it is impossible for ‘me’ to become actually happy and harmless – innocence personified – because ‘I’ am at root a malicious and sorrowful being. I remember a distinct feeling of shock – ‘what have I got myself into’ that demands ‘my’ demise in order for there to be a successful outcome. But then again I reminded myself that thinking and feeling oneself to be a separate alien entity is a weird and perverse business – the anguish and animosity that exemplifies the human condition readily testifies to this fact.

There is no question whatsoever of going back to being normal – that is an impossibility because I have come too far to accept compromise, let alone consider failure. ‘A stubborn refusal to settle for second best’ is how I would describe the intent to see this process through to its natural completion. As I see it, this stubborn intent is what overcomes the glue-like inertia to stay with the herd and not change and this stubborn intent is what will eliminate the impulse of ‘self’-preservation and ‘self’-perpetuation produced by the instinctual animal survival programming.

• A small group of others who have determined that the method on offer by this person has meaning to them, and they make a conscious choice to lead their lives in a similar fashion. They emulate his ‘philosophy’ and practice his techniques, likely with varying degrees of success. However, they are leading a simulation of the originator’s way (that’s what the word ‘virtual’ means after all), so it is possible that they have suspended some measure of their common sense in order to ‘be like Richard’. I can’t really ascertain that, but if that were the case, then they are dancing around the edges of cult-ness.

Your supposition depends upon your definition of the term ‘common sense’. The common-to-all sense would have it that human beings need to be aggressive in order to survive in the world and that suffering is not only essential but is good for you. On the other hand, to me it is common sense to do all I can to become both happy and harmless.

Perhaps a better way of putting my desire to emulate Richard is that I have abandoned the usual common-to-all-sense and relied on the uncommon-to-all-sense of devoting my life to becoming both happy and harmless. Thus far this sense is indeed uncommon, for I only know of less than a handful of people who have openly declared themselves to be similarly motivated, and I have the good fortune to live with one of them.

And a little reading of history reveals that these international accommodations produce at best a temporary lull in hostilities and a provisional cessation of suspicions and grievances, whilst many only serve to become the basis for future resentments. Inter-tribal suspicions and grievances run far too deep to be ever eliminated via accommodation, conciliation, compromise, pact or the like. The first and only step towards a practical workable solution is for sufficiently motivated individuals to take unilateral action by ceasing to be tribal members – to be a pioneer global citizen rather than continue to be a paid-up passionate member of one or other of the warring tribes.

The very same thing applies to being a paid-up passionate member of one or other of the warring sexes – the only way to begin to end the cycle of hostilities, grievances, suspicions and resentments is to firstly stop being a part of the male tribe or stop being a part of the female tribe. Having done so, one rids oneself of most of one’s social masculine or feminine identity such that the deeper instinctual levels are more readily available for scrutiny. This is the only practical way to bring an end to the battle of the sexes that invariably prevents an unconditional and actual intimacy between the male and female genders.

I wanted to write a post on the subject of relationships. I have been wondering just what a ‘relationship’ is and what the word means to me.

So, let me pose the question: What is a ‘relationship’ between two human beings? Are relationships important? Why? Do you and Vineeto have a ‘relationship’ together? Wherein does it consist?

I will answer this at the bottom of the post as you have also raised similar questions later in the post.

I hear many people around me talk about the importance, indeed, the primacy of having relationships in one’s life. The longer I practice actualism, the less and less important ‘relationships’ seem to be to me. This sometimes causes the reflection that I am indeed an outcast and I sometimes experience anxiety to realize that I am no longer part of any particular group, nor do I want to be. However, the anxiety is only occasional, and at other times there is this enormous sense of freedom and ease, a freedom that can only come when one is free from the obligations of being a member of a particular group, a family, a profession, a community, etc, etc. There is a tremendous comfort for me in just being alone, just sitting in my chair, for instance, doing nothing in particular.

A few thoughts come to mind from my own experience. One of things I noticed when I started to abandon my spiritual beliefs was that I felt myself an outsider but I also observed that if I stopped calling my friends, they also stopped calling me. I came to realize that relationships take effort to maintain and sustain and if either party stops putting in the required effort, then relationships invariable collapse.

The other aspect that I started to become aware of was that my relationships within my spiritual group were invariably based on beliefs-in-common and when I stopped believing, a large component of the emotional glue that held the relationship together also disappeared. But as actualism started to produce results, I found I was more and more content to enjoy my own company, which in turn meant I was less and less likely to seek the company of others in order to fill an emotional void or provide a relief from boredom.

I seem to fluctuate between a sense of alarm and anxiety at my ‘aloneness’ and the thrill of the realization that I am really getting somewhere by using the actualism method. And where I am getting is to be completely and totally free from being a member of the human club. When I set out upon learning about an Actual Freedom, I had many basic questions, some of which persist. For instance, I wondered: will I be able to work? Will I be able to provide for myself and my partner? Will I have a social life? What will that look like? and other questions such as these.

Regarding my ability to work, I have found that I am able to work, and that my capacity for work has, if anything, increased. I am better able to prioritize tasks, think things through and get done what needs to be done.

Your experience regarding working for money closely mirrors my own experiences. By becoming virtually free of malice and sorrow I am not only able to work more efficiently but I am also now able to do my work much better. By no longer resenting having to work, no longer being annoyed by other people, no longer being frustrated that I do not get ‘my’ way and so on, not only am I happier but I no longer create ripples for those around me by ‘my’ incessant demands. I am now equally interested that my clients are as satisfied with my work as I am and that they get as much value for their money as I do for my time committed.

The other issue with work is that I no longer seek meaning, kudos and identity from my work as I had been taught to both expect and/or demand. I am not special in what I do when I work for money – anyone can do my job and many do so, equally as well. My time spent working is what it is – selling my time and expertise to someone else in return for money to pay for food, shelter, clothes and the like. By eliminating all the beliefs and values around the issue of work a good deal of my social identity fell away – and those I work for, and with, are better off for it.

The ‘will I be able to work’ issue also occurred to me when I thought about the consequences of becoming free from Humanity. But I eventually came to realize that this was a belief I had, based on my observation of those who had ‘made it’ to the top in the spiritual world and who then become incapable of functioning and working in the world and end up having to rely on the financial and emotional support of their followers or disciples for their sustenance.

Need I point out that being able to more happily, sensibly and efficiently function in the world is further evidence that actualism is the antithesis of spiritualism.

However, regarding my ‘social life’, I find that I no longer feel the need to affiliate with other human beings the way I once used to.

In days gone by, I used to think that having ‘friends’ was very important, yet now I cannot really say that I have any ‘friends’ nor do I want any. Because the word ‘friendship’ implies an obligation to stick with another person through thick and thin, and I find that I am not prepared to do that. I would much prefer to go my own way and allow someone else the freedom to do the same, so I cannot say that anyone is my ‘friend’ in that sense. I feel much the same about family relationships (and I am talking about family of origin here, not family of procreation). I keep in touch with members of my family. But compared to other people who I see around me, my sense of a family identity is very weak indeed.

During the first two years of practicing actualism I also experienced that my ‘friendships’ dropped away but lately I have had occasion to meet several of these former ‘friends’ and to do work for several members of the spiritual group I was in before. All of these meetings have been delightful as am now meeting fellow human beings, I am interested in them as fellow human beings and, as such, have enjoyed their company. The difference between now and before is that I now make no emotional demands of people I meet which then frees them of the burden of ‘me’, nor do I have emotional expectations of them which then frees me from the constant need to intuit and imagine what they were thinking and feeling about ‘me’.

There is great significance in the phrase ‘fellow human beings’ because the only way you can begin to treat your fellow human beings as fellow human beings is to firstly demolish your own social identity. The first component that has to go is one’s spiritual identity because a Christian never meets a Buddhist as a fellow human being, a Rajneeshee never meets a Krishnamurti-ite as a fellow human being, and so on, because each have different beliefs, that make for differing identities. The very best that spiritualists can muster up is a feeling of oneness – a feeling that always fails to translate into a practical and tangible peace and harmony between members of a spiritual group, let alone between members of competing groups.

Then there are other aspects of one’s social identity that demand attention if one is to ever get to the stage where one can see and treat one’s fellow human beings as fellow human beings and not continue to think and feel them to be separate ‘beings’. A man never meets a woman and sees her or treats her as a fellow human being because men and women have been instilled with opposing gender identities – identities that are mandated by each side in the battle of the sexes and are rife with mutual feelings of suspicion, fear, ignorance and superstition. Similarly, a father never meets a son and a mother never meets a daughter for each has a socially-imposed identity relative to each other – a complex set of social obligations, emotional demands and needs, expectations and resentments that serve to prevent each from either seeing or treating each other as fellow human beings. Similarly, an American never meets an Australian, a Lithuanian never meets a Nigerian and so on, for each believe they belong to a different culture and each call a particular piece of the planet ‘home’. The list goes on, but I won’t, for you will have got the gist by now.

What normally happens in relationships when things start to go wrong, as they inevitably do, is that the each party blames the other for failing to meet their needs, fulfill their expectations, nurture them sufficiently, respect their feelings, and such like. Often a begrudging compromise is reached in relationships or failure is allowed to run its natural course. As you well know from your experience with actualism, the only way out of this mess is to demolish one’s own social identity, piece-by-piece, element-by-element.

And the proof that this process works is that you begin to not only see but to treat the fellow human beings you come in contact with as exactly that – fellow human beings, regardless of their age, gender, kin, race, religion, culture, nationality, and so on.

On the subject of my ‘relationship’ with my partner, the matter gets a bit stickier. Since my need to affiliate with other human beings in groups has greatly lessened, to the point of almost being totally absent, I have wondered at times if I transferred these feelings on to my partner and whether I am clinging to her to get these self-same needs met. I do enjoy our being together, and I look forward to our weekends and holidays together, even our simple presence together in the evening when the day is done is very enjoyable. To be honest: I do find myself clinging to her at times with feelings of ‘love’ and affection. Yet I can say that for every moment in which there is this feeling of love and affection, there are counterpoised moments when the invidious passions are in evidence: resentment, peevishness, annoyance. In short, malice. It increases my feeling that you cannot have the positive, loving emotions without having the whole instinctual package. At least, that’s the way I think of it at this point. In other words, the entire package needs to be deleted.

So, I guess where this leaves me is to say that I think the closest thing I have to a ‘normal relationship’ is my relationship with my partner. It is here that the instinctual passions of nurture and desire occur most clearly and cleanly, compared to my other everyday ‘relationships’. To sum this all up: it seems to me that a ‘relationship’ is about sharing joy and sorrow, sharing the complete pathos and movement of human emotion and human feeling. If one is freeing oneself from the Human Condition, does one need or desire relationships then? In an actual intimacy, is there any ‘relationship’ with the other that one is relating to? Is there any ‘connection’ at all, or is this entirely absent? These are just a couple of the questions that occur.

So, if I may, I’ll now include your questions from the first part of the post, shuffle the order a bit and work my way through the list –

What is a ‘relationship’ between two human beings? If one is freeing oneself from the Human Condition, does one need or desire relationships then? Are relationships important? Why? Do you and Vineeto have a ‘relationship’ together? Is there any ‘connection’ at all, or is this entirely absent? Wherein does it consist? In an actual intimacy, is there any ‘relationship’ with the other that one is relating to?

To take your questions one at a time –

• What is a ‘relationship’ between two human beings?

If you are part of the human condition then ‘you’, as an alien-feeling psychological and psychic entity, need to relate to similar alien-feeling entities, otherwise you feel even more desperately lonely and alien. As you are discovering, the nature of this relating can only be emotive – ‘it seems to me that a ‘relationship’ is about sharing joy and sorrow, sharing the complete pathos and movement of human emotion and human feeling.’

• If one is freeing oneself from the Human Condition, does one need or desire relationships then?

As you actively diminish and wither both your social ‘self’ and your instinctual ‘self’ – your personality and being, or your ego and soul if you like – there is less ‘I’ and ‘me’ remaining to think and feel ‘he or ‘she’ needs or desires a relationship with other ‘he’s or ‘she’s.

I am not being clever here, because if you set off on a moral or ethical course of not needing or not desiring relationships with other people – take it on as a shouldn’t – you can only end up feeling an outcast or alien or becoming a hermit and a celibate. If you do so, history shows that the emotional void that is created by this act of withdrawal will commonly be filled by the ‘discovery of a greater love and meaning – a God, by whatever name.

To retreat from the world of people, things and events is to fall into the spiritual trap of withdrawal and denial which when combined with the fantasy of sublimation and transcendence leads to the pathological state of dissociation and solipsism. In actualism you go the other way – you deliberately move closer, you deliberately become more intimate whenever the opportunity arises. It is only by daring to do this can you discover the previously hidden or repressed layers of affective feelings and passions that are preventing ‘your’ demise and therefore inhibiting an actual intimacy with the world of people, things and events from occurring.

• Are relationships important? Why?

Relationships are vitally important for an actualist for they hold the key to becoming aware of, exploring and incrementally removing the obstacles that inhibit an actual intimacy from one’s fellow human beings. Spiritualists always put relationships with their God, or their Self, first and relationships with their fellow human beings second – but for an actualist the exact opposite is the case.

For an actualist, the closer the relationship, the more valuable the relationship for only close relationships are emotive enough and powerful enough to bring to the surface the emotions that are normally suppressed or glossed-over in ‘normal’ stand-offish relating. It is good to remember that if you are avoiding something or denying something, it is impossible to experientially investigate it and this is nowhere more obvious than in discovering precisely what is preventing you from being intimate with another human being – one to one.

• Do you and Vineeto have a ‘relationship’ together?

Both I and Vineeto have already written a good deal about our relationship and the explorations we made. I won’t go over this territory again but it may be relevant to note that, thus far, it seems that we are the only man and woman who are living together who have a common interest in practicing actualism. Because of this our relationship could be seen as being unique, but it is important to grasp that the process of actualism is an individual process – i.e. an actualist’s becoming happy and harmless is not in any way dependant on anyone else becoming happy and harmless. Vineeto did her thing, I did mine – we just happened to be serendipitously doing it at the same time, whilst living together.

Because Vineeto and I share a common interest in actualism, the main focus of our relationship was a mutual agreement that each would investigate what stood in the way of our living together in utter peace and harmony. Once I stopped my habitual program of trying to change others to suit ‘my’ whims, moods, foibles, demands and expectations, I was then able to become aware of, and be fully responsible for, my feelings, passions and behaviour that were causing me to not be able to live with Vineeto in peace and harmony. Just to make it clear – you don’t need another’s agreement to do this work, because it is something only you can do for yourself and for other’s you come in contact with.

It is an enormous step you take when you fully grasp the reality that expecting or demanding that your companion, wife, husband, son, daughter or whoever, should change in order to please ‘you’ is an essentially malicious intrusion – and that wanting to or trying to change them is an utterly futile exercise that can only provoke hostility and resentment. Then and only then, can you can get on with your own business of changing yourself. This does not negate the fact that you, as an actualist, can share your discoveries with a fellow human being – provided they are interested, of course.

• Is there any ‘connection’ at all, or is this entirely absent? Wherein does it consist?

After years of effort, I am virtually free of malice and sorrow, which means I have no reason to get angry with Vineeto or feel resentful of something she may, or may not, have done because feelings of anger and resentment no longer course through my veins, as it were. Likewise, I am no longer subject to bouts of sadness nor am I overcome by a seeping melancholy at having to be here, which means I make no demands nor have any expectations that she should provide emotional support and a feeling of connection in order to fill the aching void of ‘my’ loneliness.

What ‘I’ have also done, by ‘my’ own efforts, is free her of ‘my’ ungracious demands and capricious expectations and I am thus more happy for being more harmless – which in turn makes me more delightful and more fun to live with. Becoming more happy and harmless is a win-win situation – not only do I gain from the effort, but others benefit from the result, and none more so that those closest to me.

• In an actual intimacy, is there any ‘relationship’ with the other that one is relating to?

I can only talk about a virtual intimacy – an experience that far exceeds the ‘normal’ fickle feeling of love and so-called intimate relationships. In a virtual freedom from malice and sorrow, ‘I’ and ‘my’ thoughts and feelings are so weakened and emaciated that I am unable to impose, let alone sustain, any emotional demands or expectations on any fellow human being – let alone the one I have chosen to live with. By becoming virtually happy and harmless, I am more able to be what-I-am as opposed to ‘who’ I think and feel I am and this has resulted in an on-going, virtually constant, sense of well-being. This on-going sense of well-being in turn negates the need to constantly seek emotional succour or support from others in a vain attempt to assuage ‘my’ feelings of loneliness and alienation.

In virtual freedom, there is a palpable sense of autonomy based upon the factual evidence that I am perfectly capable of looking after myself and providing for all of my needs. The overarching and debilitating sense of needing to survive has been replaced by the simple need to ensure that, when I place a plastic card in a machine downtown and type in a few numbers, that sufficient bits of paper come out to meet my food and shelter requirements. Similarly, my need for a ‘relationship’ has been replaced by the fact that I do not live alone but that I live with a companion with whom I am able to share the delight of living on this verdant planet.

And not only do I get to do things together with a fellow human being that I would not have necessarily done had I been living alone, but I get to wallow in that most intimate of human one-to-one activities – the sensual mutual pleasure of sex.

The challenge that really got my head out of the clouds was Richard’s comment that ‘if you can’t live with one other person in utter peace and harmony then life on earth is a sick joke’. It was a statement of such obvious fact that it made me see that my waiting for someone else or something else to bring about peace on earth, or my wanting to be anywhere else but here, was an absolute cop-out.

Serendipitously, ‘I’ took it as a challenge to turn what was but dream into an actuality.

*

Both I and Vineeto have already written a good deal about our relationship and the explorations we made. I won’t go over this territory again but it may be relevant to note that, thus far, it seems that we are the only man and woman who are living together who have a common interest in practicing actualism. Because of this our relationship could be seen as being unique, but it is important to grasp that the process of actualism is an individual process – i.e. an actualist’s becoming happy and harmless is not in any way dependant on anyone else becoming happy and harmless. Vineeto did her thing, I did mine – we just happened to be serendipitously doing it at the same time, whilst living together.

My experience with the process of actualism is that the appropriate circumstances are always available to either begin or sustain your own investigation as to ‘how’ you tick. In fact, the only time one can make this investigation is right now, in the circumstances you find yourself in now. Given that there is very little variation in social conditioning within the human condition and the animal instinctual programming of the species is identical, every actualist will be investigating common-to-all issues, no matter where they are, if they live with someone or live alone, if they are male or female, black or white, young or old, rich or poor, and so on. To blame one’s lot in life, to see others as more able or better equipped, or more fortunate or whatever is but ‘me’ objecting to very considerable challenge of becoming happy and harmless.

I remember seeing normal relationships as being similar to the three-legged races that were popular picnic games when I was a kid. The idea was that you and a partner tied two legs together with strips of cloth, put an arm around each other’s shoulders and then tried to run faster than other three-legged couples.

*

Because Vineeto and I share a common interest in actualism, the main focus of our relationship was a mutual agreement that each would investigate what stood in the way of our living together in utter peace and harmony. Once I stopped my habitual program of trying to change others to suit ‘my’ whims, moods, foibles, demands and expectations, I was then able to become aware of, and be fully responsible for, my feelings, passions and behaviour that were causing me to not be able to live with Vineeto in peace and harmony. Just to make it clear – you don’t need another’s agreement to do this work, because it is something only you can do for yourself and for others you come in contact with.

It is an enormous step you take when you fully grasp the reality that expecting or demanding that your companion, wife, husband, son, daughter or whoever, should change in order to please ‘you’ is an essentially malicious intrusion – and that wanting to or trying to change them is an utterly futile exercise that can only provoke hostility and resentment. Then and only then, can you can get on with your own business of changing yourself. This does not negate the fact that you, as an actualist, can share your discoveries with a fellow human being – provided they are interested, of course.

It is no small thing to break with the habit of meddling in the lives of others because it is an activity that is universal within the human condition. The psychological and psychic bonds that tie human beings together condemns everyone to think and feel they have to live vicariously through others, via relationship and contracts, comparison and competition with others. The resulting cycle of expectations and disappointments, doubts and suspicions, demands and conflicts as well as hope and despair the ensues from ‘normal’ human relationships means that people are always friend or foe, with me or against me, right or wrong, good or bad, and so on – anything but fellow human beings.

When you say that you ‘haven’t yet fully grasped the reality that expecting or demanding that the other change is a malicious intrusion’ I can understand this totally. The whole process of actualism is a step-by-step process of extracting yourself from the human condition and it is my experience that the most difficult aspect of this process is breaking free of the social and passionate bonds that tie people together. It is this passionate and instinctual involvement in the lives of others that directly leads us to inevitably expect or demand that others change – that ‘I am right and you are wrong’, that ‘you’re hurting my feelings’, that ‘I need to stand up for my rights’, that ‘I want you to respect my wishes/ opinion/ feelings’, and so on.

The only way to fully grasp ‘the reality that expecting or demanding that the other change is a malicious intrusion’ as an experience and not merely an intellectual understanding, is to be actually free of the human condition. The process of actualism is a step-by-step process of experiencing, becoming attentive to and cutting the emotional ties and passionate bonds that give substance to ‘me’ as a social identity and as an instinctual being. You don’t step out of humanity and leave your ‘self’ behind in one step – it takes many steps to get from A to B. But the longer you practice actualism, the more bits of your social and instinctual identity fall by the wayside, as it were, which in turn means the less you demand, expect or hope that others change.

But as you point out, you do get tangible rewards on the way for your persistence and patience.

One of the toughest things to do is break the ingrained habit of blaming someone else for my feelings – to stop saying he/she made me angry rather than saying I am angry and that someone’s words or some particular event was simply the triggered. Not only is this going against our childhood cunning of learning to blame others but it also goes against our ‘natural’ instinctual behaviour.

What I did was start with the most obvious people and they were the people I most interacted with. I had always failed at living with a woman in anything remotely resembling utter peace and harmony so that was the obvious place to start. Once I managed to stop blaming Vineeto for my failures and feelings, I was able to see what it was in me that stopped me being able to live with her completely peacefully with no disagreements, no annoyances, no conflict, no resentments, no begrudging compromises, no secrets, no differing viewpoints. This involved tackling all the man-woman issues that forever condemn men and woman to belong to two separate waring and suspicious camps and my success was stunning, to say the least. The end result of my efforts is a pure and simple delightful companionship and unfettered intimacy with a fellow human being, with the added pleasure of sexual play between male and female.

Once that the problem of living together with a woman was out of the way – and it took many months of very intense effort to be successful – I was then able to fully focus on other areas where I traditionally blamed others for me being unhappy, thereby inevitably feeling malice towards them. Anyone whom I felt had power over me inevitably brought up resentment and when I eliminated this issue I stopped senselessly riling against bosses, police, neighbours, friends, politicians, the system, some life force or ‘life’ – in short, I stopped blaming others and solely focussed on ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’

Crucial to this business of not blaming others or my circumstances for my unhappiness, my sorrow, my annoyance, my fear, etc. is to realize that I was in fact blaming everyone else for not having the same values, morals, ethics or beliefs that ‘I’ did. As such, every woman I had lived with needed to kowtow to my changing and fickle version of perfection and had to put up with my moods, my worries and my resentment. Everyone I worked with was similarly judged as not coming up to my standards and of wrongly judging and treating me – they were wrong, they got angry, they were selfish – they all needed to change, not ‘me’.

It soon becomes apparent that it is ‘me’ who is incapable of living or working peacefully with any of the 6 billion people on the planet – that the problem was ‘me’ – and not everyone of the other 6 billion people.

What criteria is best to use when choosing a partner of the opposite gender to live with (or the same gender if one is so inclined)? The goal being to live peacefully together.

What I discovered was that if my goal was to live together with a partner in peace and harmony then the doing of it was entirely my own business and that it had nothing to do with my partner whatsoever. I found that to make my happiness and my harmlessness someone else’s business was a cop-out.

I have written more on the subject in my journal if you are interested in reading further.

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Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

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