This is Vineeto. I thought I join the conversation at this point.

To Peter: This is, I grant you readily, most excellent bait. I’m interested, OK? I’m listening. But what is it bait for? I don’t understand.

What am I missing? Are you saying, plain and simply, ‘I have a plan for living with a woman?’

After investigating the outcome of my 17 years of spiritual search I had to come to the conclusion, that in terms of my ‘day to day’ life I had not achieved anything. I was still angry, still sad and still not able to live with a man in a peaceful, happy, fulfilling relationship. And I only had achieved a few hours of bliss and peace, sitting in my room, closing my eyes, retreating from this awful disturbing world and riding on my guru’s voice’s energy from the tape. It always faded when I started to communicate with people in day-to-day affairs.

Despite my determination to become enlightened I had not managed to get rid of my desire for happiness and my dream to live with a man in a happy relationship. Something never jelled. It was always either – or. Sex and the real world had to be transcended on the way to the ultimate lasting bliss – and it was going damn slow too!

Now, in my investigations into my own psyche in the ‘contract’ I had with Peter – to look at anything that would be in the road between us – I have discovered more of my ego than in all the years before. And not only discovered, also eliminated. And not only the ego, also the whole system of my precious heartful feelings got pretty well shattered and taken apart.

There is simply no way to keep the good feeling and throw away the bad. I have written about my journey at length in the last chapter of ‘Peters Journal’ on the web.

You are welcome to check it out for yourself.

It had been not only immense fun but it was also incredible helpful to do the whole process of cleaning myself up with a mate who had the same intentions, and also it was vital to keep me on the ground, to check out facts and belief, imagination and actuality. And I could see on the results right away, if I was off into some trip or really meeting the other person without any imagination in the road. Absolutely recommendable.

And what is the good of enlightenment, if there is no peaceful equal living with another person – and the other gender is usually the ultimate test, it usually being the eternal battle. After all, I have only one life, only this moment to be happy (or miserable) and why not live it in the best and most pleasurable way possible? Free, independent, harmless, fully alive and in my senses, with sex as the icing on the cake!

No. 2, I really enjoy your scrutiny and your detailed interest. It is such good fun to talk about freedom and tell the stories of investigation and success. Great, you’re here!

20.10.1998

I just finished reading Richard’s Journal, finally got some time and spent the weekend reading it, so now I feel like I can talk with you again. I can hear the freedom he describes singing to me. I can feel the intention too, it has always been there, but I have only recently recognized it.

I've had the PCEs Richard describes. Quite a few of them actually, this past year especially. Have seen in them that in spite of what I usually believe, there is nothing to fear in the universe, that it is utterly and completely friendly, including death.

Yes, that is how I experience it too. The peak experiences are feeding my intent, the urge me to do something about the time when I am not having a peak experience. The memory of these perfect moments, hours or days have always been driving me forward, to investigate further, to face fear, pride, embarrassment, loneliness, doubt and dread. And these peak experiences have been my reference point, the lively proof, that it is a fact that the solution to all my problems lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction than I had always searched for. The fact of experiencing the moment of being alive as a direct intimacy with everything around me made it impossible to turn this into another belief-system. With that clarity one can face and investigate any ghost in one’s cupboard until it is eliminated.

A ring-necked lizard has been sunning itself on a rock, accompanied by lizardly calisthenics. It darted off a moment ago in some haste. Then the cat moved slowly into view, cautious, each paw tentative, blue gaze sweeping the rocky ground.

We would like to call what motivated that wise alert sunlit animal to flee ‘fear’ wouldn’t we? I suspect the animal’s awareness and reaction to danger was experienced without any sense of ‘Oh no, what should I do?’ that I associate with human psychological fear, but rather the alert, fully aware action of basic animal intelligence operating to preserve its functioning. An active, momentary knowing of what to do without the need to stop and consult any kind of map. Yes, the animal had ‘fear’ but it was fully experienced fear with no psychological overlay, just pure reaction as it needed to occur, nervous system fight or flight response activation, and boogey! But who knows, maybe it was terrified.

Whatever ‘ghost’ of my conditioning, my instincts, emotions or beliefs I have encountered up to now – the core of each one of them was fear – fear to die. This instinct for survival that the self reproduces ceaselessly is quite a curious phenomenon. And yet there is a switch to every fear, however intense, and that is the thrill to find out, to accept the adventure and take a step beyond my self-set limits. Often it took hanging in fear and suffering for some time until I had enough of it and was ready to face it and investigate. But one gets more experienced each time and the success has made me more daring yet until I was ready and eager to take on the challenge of death itself, to find out how to eliminate myself completely. Up to now it has been an utterly thrilling journey and still is. One never knows what trick lies around the next corner. A bit like a Houdini show!

The other day I wasn’t feeling well and after a meeting here at the hospital as I stood up to leave, splitting headache, tremulous, I almost fainted, and when it was happening, I felt nothing like concern for myself, for someone who was sick, or anything like that. What I felt was fear, not about my condition or possible damage to my physical self, but fear about having my weakness exposed to others, and what I normally would call this fear is ‘embarrassment.’ This is simply the truth. That is the kind of a creature ‘I’ am – I don’t actually care for myself but only my appearance – am I safe? will they like me? – in the eyes of others. I recognize it as delusion.

Is there something else to be done besides pay attention to them? How is this identity dismantled?

‘Paying attention’ is something that I have heard the Enlightened Ones use a lot. The idea is to step outside of that particular emotion and ‘rise above’ it where the problem does not exist. Unfortunately it only works for a very short time. As soon as one comes back into ‘the world’, ‘the marketplace’ and the body, those problems are all waiting. Peter describes it at length in his journal in ‘Spiritual Search’ and ‘God’.

What I found fascinating with Richard’s method is that you can actually eliminate the problem and it will never return. Asking myself the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’, I can quickly find out what is not perfect. Tracking the particular emotion, mood or feeling back to its source I usually found the underlying conditioning, belief and fear. When I questioned the belief and checked against the facts of the situation, the belief cannot hold water. Some actions or emotions I could simply stop applying because they were obviously silly. Others I had to investigate deeper and tackle the fear involved when dismantling a dear held value, a chunk of identity or a ‘holy cow’.

Another very powerful question was: ‘who am I in relation to other people?’ It brought the point home to me that everything I think myself to be is in someway or other related to other people. Once I found the cause for a particular behaviour and the underlying fear, I could then easily decide what is ‘silly’ and what is ‘sensible’. It becomes a fascinating journey into the intricate web of one’s psyche, untangling oneself from one string after the other, may they be personal or collective held beliefs.

I am alone, have no companion with intentions similar to mine.

Whenever I needed to sort something out and got stuck with it, it was and is indeed very helpful to talk to a like-minded person. But as well as talking to Peter I used writing as a tool for clarification, either writing down my story or posting a letter to the mailing list. Just to have to put it into words for someone else to understand and to be ruthlessly honest with myself in my investigations were already the first acts of clarifying my inner mess. Slowly my scientific scrutiny has improved as I became more daring, ie the brain started functioning more and more with clarity and purity and less distorted and clouded by ‘self’-produced emotions and beliefs, as it had been trained to.

After I had decided that I actually wanted to clean myself up from being malicious and sorrowful, my intent made me use every situation as indicator to ‘get the bugger by the throat’. Sorting myself out at work – I work in a sannyas-company, my former spiritual peer-group – was as much part as of it as checking out the gender differences in the relationship.

Cleaning oneself up results in seeing the world and other people with different eyes, less driven by the miserable interpretation of one’s sorrow and fear and more receptive to seeing it as the delightful place it is. And who knows, someone might be attracted by the results you are achieving in your daily life...

Have been following your posts with interest. Thanks.

I am simply delighted to have yet another person to talk to about my favourite subjects – the discoveries of what it is to be a human being. I am glad you got so much out of reading Richard’s Journal and our posts.

22.10.1998

Thank you for your quick reply. I see that Alan has already responded to part of your writing. It is such good fun to have a lively discussion about various fascinating issues going on between us!

I wonder though, if attempting to re-create these peak experiences isn’t a little bit like a kid who had an ice cream cone, and when it is gone, wants another one, and imagines she might have one all the time. How could one not want this? But the wanting itself seems to me to be a statement of the problem.

When I started my spiritual journey, my driving force was to get out of this miserable world I was living in. The promise was that I would be able to live in the land of bliss, once I am able to get rid of the ego – die as an ego. But then at the same time the rule was not to want anything, to surrender my will, and I ended up being dependent on the Master to tell me what to do and what to aim for. Also I ended up going round in circles because to get what I want I had to give up wanting to get it...

After meeting Richard and Peter it took me a few month and a mind-shattering peak-experience to understand that Actual Freedom is in fact something completely and diametrically opposite to the spiritual path. It is not even an expansion of the spiritual. It is slowly, slowly seeing through the immense web our psychic world is made of, understanding and seeing (getting) that ALL of the psychic world is nothing but an enormous collective passionate belief-system. And that there is an actual world beyond imaginary belief – the peak experience.

Living in a peak-experience everything is perfect, everything is obvious, already happening without me having to control or direct it, in fact it can only happen if ‘I’ am not there. This memory I take back when I become ‘normal’ again, this then works as the thread, the pure intent to move further into scary enquiries.

So I know what I want and I need exactly this will and intent to overcome the fears and doubts which appear when I start cleaning myself up. ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is the only question I need to check out what is happening now. Nothing else counts. Half an hour ago or tomorrow don’t count. And if I am not happy now, then there is something to do, to find out, to clean up. Which doubt, which objection, which emotion is preventing me from being happy now. It look so simple one thinks there must be a catch. But this is all there is to it. This method is so devastatingly effective and that is the scary bit – it works!

And once you see that it works, you become more daring and question yet another threshold of a dearly held belief or ‘Truth’. You will discover that however dear and proven those ‘Truths’ seem, that they are never based on facts.

My vocabulary is not advanced. What I mean by ‘paying attention’ is to experience fear or sadness directly, to feel them without attempting to move away, such as with a belief or an activity of some sort that will distract me from them. I suppose this must arise from a higher level belief of sorts that experiencing what is happening directly leads to a ‘truthful’ response to what is actually so, to have ‘awareness in the driver’s seat’ rather than the continuos reactivity of the ego.

Asking myself the question: ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ I can quickly find out what is not perfect. With this question I can always get to the underlying cause of the particular emotion, which prevents my being happy right now. It is understanding and seeing that emotion and what it derives from that then frees me from its impact – that is, if I am ready to investigate and discard it. For instance, love was such a high valued emotion that it took a lot of investigating into facts until I was ready to question its validity and sensibility to provide happiness – until I could admit that it is this cherished love that causes jealousy, hate, war, dependency, sorrow, misery and, like Compassion, superiority. Seeing it as what it is ripped quite a hole in my (female) identity, but the miseries of love ceased to hold any attraction for me.

Does this description of how I eliminate emotions and belief make any sense to you? Is it something you could try out? I am very curious as what you will make out of it!

‘Am I ready to die?’ is another question I like.

Once I know with absolute certainty what I want to ‘die’ for, it becomes easier. The joy of coming more and more to my senses, to experience this body being alive and enjoying this very aliveness puts ego and soul, instincts, emotions and beliefs in their place – more and more obviously redundant. The experience of ‘almost freedom’ has its own magnetism. It urges you to discover deeper and deeper what it is to be a human being, what your shackles and fears are, and becomes an obsessive journey that is so delicious, so fascinating, so thrilling, that you happily agree to disappear at the end.

24.10.1998

‘Love’ hits me where it hurts. I think you are right. It has produced the deepest suffering I have known. So I look at it with everything I've got, which I can’t help, it hurts so much I have to look. It is quite selfish. I would find it difficult not to look at a freshly amputated limb as well.

Essentially a definition based on a feeling the self has of connection, desire, and attachment for a person, situation, or thing. Always referring to possession, ‘my wife, my son’. Of course, it is ridiculous to use a dictionary for such a thing when we may look within ourselves.

Yes, I understand from where you are coming from. Love hurts, not only while it is happening with its anxiety, dependence, and resulting petty arguments and revenge. But it hurts even more when the other suddenly terminates the relationship for whatever reason. And one would rather take all the blame for its failure than to doubt and question the very idea of ‘love’, humanity’s strongest hope in the face of loneliness, separation, aggression, sorrow and desperation. Just the hope that there is a solution to all those devastatingly destructive human instincts is so soothing.

I like it that you looked in the dictionary as well as asking yourself what love consists of. After all, ‘love’ is a dream shared by everyone else on the planet.

As you and the other Actual Freedomers have stated, ‘love’ creates suffering. I will sign in here. It does because of the falseness of the ego. The falseness occurs in at least three ways.

1. The first is the level wherein we think we are loving ‘someone else’ when in fact what we are ‘loving’ is an image of that person, not that flesh and blood person at all, and that image we think we are loving is part of us. This is mistake number one.
2. The second falseness arises when we are with a person but see the person either partially or completely through the image we retain, even when we are actually together, so that we have ideas of how they ‘should’ behave based on our mental representation of them, and we always do have expectations when we see another through the eyes of the ego. Thus we are not free to see the person as they actually are. Spouses may call this, for instance ‘Taking me for granted,’ as I recall. We make the concept of the person more important than the person, then we don’t have to look. This is mistake number two.

Yes, you are spot on. When love is in operation, there is only love’s picture that one can see. That very picture is the reason why one can’t be intimate with the person one is with. Love is the very emotion – or the very package of emotions – that makes it impossible to experience direct intimacy with the other human being.

When I met Peter he made a proposition: lets live together in peace and harmony, without love, but in intimacy. At the time I had no idea what he was talking about, but was intrigued by his readiness for commitment and by the word ‘intimacy’. In long years of past relationship I had learned that love had failed again and again. Also I had lived with a woman for some time whose husband had just died after what everyone considered the perfect relationship. She felt herself to be as ‘amputated’ as you describe yourself. So even if love had worked between a man and a woman, there was still the horror that one of them will die first. There is always one who dies first, or leaves. There is always one who is left behind.

Nevertheless, I kept up the hope and belief into the ‘Higher’ or ‘Ideal’ Love, that the Gurus talk about. Although I had been a devoted meditator for some 15 years, I had never reached that state of ‘pure love’ relating to my fellow human beings, it remained but an unreachable cloud of hope, a far away goal to be achieved one day...

It took a few months of thorough investigation into the different beliefs around love until I understood and experienced, that every concept, belief and feeling I hold, positive or negative, keeps me from experiencing the world and another human being as he/she is. It was quite stunning and shocking when intimacy happened for the first time. Delicious in its experience it was nevertheless shocking in its implications for me. I could not deny the experience of intimacy that I had at the time and had to acknowledge the facts of why it was so direct and intimate – but now I had to question all my relating to other people, friends, the spiritual peer-group, parents, acquaintances and work-mates. And, most important of all, this experience of intimacy questioned my relationship to the Master which had been solely based on love and devotion and had held no intimacy at all.

Experiencing another human being directly, without my ‘self’ in action ie. without preconceived ideas, beliefs, feelings of appreciation or rejection, without structure and time plan, as if for the first time, was such a delicious, ambrosial and obviously superior experience to any highs I had ever experienced in love. Mad and daring, I decided I wanted more of this, even if it would cost me all my friends, all my beliefs, everything I had considered of value up to then. And I did lose them all. But the intimacy and resulting peace and harmony that I live with Peter every day, 24 hours a day for the last 12 months without any disagreement, sulking, nagging, compromise, role-play or restriction is worth any sacrifice of hopes, beliefs and ideas. Further, I can also relate to people as they are, with no preconceived hopes or fear which allows an intimacy unexperienced in the times of ‘love’.

3. But the grossest error is the division of ‘I’ as separate from ‘you.’ It is the source of all fear, isolation, loneliness, greed, desperation, conflict, and war. It is the essence of the ego. The ego is in essential error. This is mistake number three.

How to ‘eliminate’ ego? I do not know. Is it the source of suffering? Absolutely.

I quote what Peter wrote in his glossary about ego (the first bit is from the dictionary...)

ego – Metaphysics. Oneself, the conscious thinking subject. Psychoanalysis. That part of the mind which has a sense of individuality and is most conscious of self. Self-esteem, self-importance; a person’s sense of this in himself or herself. Oxford Dictionary

The self, seemingly located in the head, is composed of the rudimentary animal self which is then overlaid with the social identity imposed since birth. Who you ‘think’ you are. The ego is wrongly assumed to be the total self, whereas it is only half of it. The other half, the soul, or who one ‘feels’ one is and felt to be located in the heart, is given substance by the instinctual passions and subsequent hormonal surges. It is the soul that, up until now, has been held as too ‘sacred’ to question, let alone dared to be eliminated. The Eastern insistence on eliminating only half the ‘self’, the ego, while giving full credence to the other half, the soul, leads to a narcissistic shift of identity whereby one can ‘realize’ one’s true identity – the ‘Self’. Huge problems then ensue as yet another God or Goddess is realized, to peddle yet another ‘unique’ and ‘profound’ version of the same old God-story with the newly Self-Realized one as the latest star on the block.

The other foolishness inherent in the Eastern insistence on eliminating the ego is that the source of malice and sorrow was wrongly imagined in ancient times to be evil spirits or wrong thought, whereas modern research and scientific study has confirmed the instinctual programming of the primitive brain as the seat of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. This instinctual programming is experienced as emotional passion and, at its core, is felt as the soul, or sense of being. It is feeling with its roots in instinctual passion that is the reason that humans find it impossible to live together in peace and harmony – not thought as the ancients imagined. To hobble intelligence, as does the Eastern practice of mindless dismissal of sensible thought, is to avoid the main issue.

It is only with the elimination of both ego and soul, the ‘self’ in its entirety, can we be free of malice and sorrow and their fanciful, imaginary equivalents – Divine Anger and Divine Compassion. AF Glossary

During my spiritual search, it has never been easy for me to locate this ego, to completely understand what it is I have to get rid of in order to become happy (enlightened). Once I came across Richard’s explanation, derived from his being enlightened and seen through the delusion it was, things suddenly made shocking sense: getting rid of the ego means wanting to keep the ‘good bits’ and throw away the ‘bad bits’. And the sorting out the ‘good bits’ from the ‘bad bits’ made it so confusing.

Slowly I began to understand that the ‘good bits’ – love – are only there to heal, cover up and balance out the ‘bad bits’. Once I really get rid of the ‘bad bits’, the ‘good bits’ are redundant as well. They both prevent me from seeing a tree as a tree, a dog as a dog and a human being as a human being. Those overlaid emotions never let me experience the world as it is, there is always a ‘self’-related colouring that veils the clear perception. And once those both veils are taken off my eyes I can see the magnificence and magic in every tree, creature and human being. No emotion is needed to glorify it. This actual world is already perfect, it doesn’t need any enhancement by the ‘self’, the very sum of all our instinctual passions, emotions and beliefs, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Once I stop doing, feeling, proposing, interpreting, in short messing around, with the world as-it is, then everything is simply perfect. It is ‘I’ who is at the core of all the trouble. And this ‘I’ consists of ‘ego’ and ‘soul’, concepts and emotions, everything non-actual, everything that is not touchable, visible, audible, tastable or smell-able. Pretty radical, isn’t it!

Where we may differ, I think, is that I don’t want to reject love, I just want to reject the cultural definition we have been stuck with for so long. Substitute ‘ego attachment’ for that.

Yet this complete attention to what is actually so [Can we lend it the name love for a moment if that isn’t too disturbing, just to please me? Thank you, you may have the word back in just a minute, to dispose of as you wish.] can occur at any time and under any circumstances. Including the jump from a balcony, sitting in the sunlight, or sexual embrace. And anyone can love, none ‘better’ than any other. One doesn’t need words or ‘understanding’ for it! I think it is what we are meant to do. ‘The universe being aware of itself’ without condition. I think that is right on target. And I want to call it love. Perhaps out of sheer perversity I don’t want to squander the word love on what we normally use it for! Perhaps because it hurt me so much. Or perhaps I have some sense it is better used this way. I don’t know, but I have nothing to prove, it’s just how I see it. It may be that one loves continually in Richard’s actualized state, it sounds as if it might be so. It is the only thing that really matters. There is either complete attention, which I call love for just one more minute, thank you, or there is not, which is the state of being in the ego, or unconscious, or dead. And when we are love we are free, ‘actually free’ is a fine way to put it, if you wish, and we love like the sunlight, and the rain, and the wind, and the earth – because we are one.

Complete attention is only possible if there is no personal investment in you whatsoever, in that moment. This complete attention is not something ‘I’ do, this attention is what is left when there is nothing else that distracts that attention or apperception. Then you simply delight in the very is-ness of things, people and events, without directing, feeling, fearing, inventing, controlling, planning or hoping. So in my experience, it is freedom from the ‘self’, freedom from ‘me’, the feeler and believer, that has to come first and then you don’t need any love. Without malice and sorrow one is simply benevolent, magnanimous, intimate with everyone and swimming in delight. You probably remember this from your PCEs.

I want to keep love. – Now, you may have ‘love’ back.

It struck me that when you say, ‘I want to keep love’, you already admit that it not actual. It is something you decide to keep or throw, it does not exist without your doing. But I do understand that ‘you’ want to keep it, it is an essential part of your identity, of ‘who you feel you are’.

Do you meditate? I mean as in intentional practice? The interest is to share and learn.

No, I don’t meditate any more. I had some 15 years of devoted spiritual effort with few tangible results.

Meeting Peter and Richard I learned a much more efficient way of getting rid of the various ingredients of the ‘self’. I think, contemplate about a particular issue, which I find by asking, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’. Writing or talking usually facilitates and intensifies that investigation. Once the implications of the issue are understood, once I see what role they play in the structure of the ‘self’ – the very thing I am intending to eliminate – the problem disappears. It might turn up again with a little different twist, or as a subtler version, then I have to investigate again. As I said before, everything boils down to fear, fear to die. To get rid of that fear, ‘I’ will have to die. You can bet on that.

I very much appreciate your interest and sincerity. It is a pleasure to exchange with you.

For more information, check out what Peter has written in his Journal on ‘Living together’ and ‘Love’.

26.10.1998

I’ve been thinking about your letter in the last few days and I wanted to tell you just another story about ‘love’...

Love is like an appendix. As a doctor I’m sure you can appreciate the comparison. What I gather from your writing, your appendix is clearly infected, and badly so. And, I guess you agree, one never fixes up an appendix, it needs to be removed, actually often to save the patient’s life.

Now, in the case of love, you are the doctor and you are the patient and there is no chloroform. The only operating knife you got is your intelligence. And when you cut, you need to be precise and careful, not to let any infected part of the appendix stay in the body.

Ok, what I mean by appendix is the particular passionate dream we have with love. Men dreaming one kind of dream, women dreaming another kind. I have written about the dream and how I got rid of it in ‘A Bit of Vineeto’. I copied that part for you here.

One thing that I particularly didn’t like about falling in love was the pining. Whenever I was not with Peter I felt I was tied to him on a long elastic cord and not able to fully enjoy whatever I was doing by myself. Digging into what could be the reason for my pining, I discovered what I call the ‘Cinderella-syndrome’ – the romantic dream that most women have about the perfect and noble man. We are not only looking for someone who takes care of us when our own strength fails us, but also for someone who gives perspective, meaning, definition and identity to our lives, be it as father of our kids, provider of social status, security or a purpose for life. According to this dream Peter should be the answer to the question which I wasn’t willing to face myself: ‘What do I really want to do with my life?’

I remember a Monday evening after a weekend together, and I had been pining the whole day. I had not enjoyed work as I found myself struggling to get out of this exhausting dependency. Here I was, 44 years old and as silly as a teenager! After work I took a long walk across rolling hills into a spectacular sunset, trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life. In the end, I had to admit that, whatever it was, it had not the slightest thing to do with anything Peter could do for me.

I wanted to be perfect and I had to do it myself. I still had to clean myself up. Just having found a probable good mate had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t the best I could be; that I wasn’t free. I decided there and then to face the challenge, to abandon the love-dream and go for the actual experience – meeting another human being as intimately as possible instead of looking up to him and waiting for him to be the ‘hero of my dreams’.

That very evening the situation changed. My pining stopped. The fog in the head cleared. My expectations disappeared. I could again stand on my own feet and equally enjoy the time when I was by myself. I had recovered my autonomy – my autonomy in the sense that I am the only one in my life who is responsible for my happiness.

Detecting and debunking the romantic dream placed the first big dent into the wobbling monster of love. Now it was much easier to look at what it was in my ‘self’ that cried out for this love. It has been quite scary at times, to rid myself of the very identity I had as a woman. What would be left of me when I didn’t feel love? How could I relate both to Peter and other people, if not with emotion or intuition? What would I have to offer in friendships or conversations, if not sympathy and consolation? My whole edifice of ‘who’ I was, who I believed myself to be, began to crumble in a heap as I questioned and demolished the attributes of love and emotion. Now naked of all those characteristics and beliefs as well as their resultant emotions and behaviour, which have kept man and woman apart for millennia, I am experiencing for the first time in my life actual intimacy with a man. Now there are no dreams, no expectations, no emotions or any other restrictions that could cloud the thrill of meeting another human being. Now instead of random moments of ‘sweet love’ I am able to give Peter my full attention and bare awareness each time we communicate and so does he. A Bit of Vineeto

I guess, the man’s dream of love looks a little bit different to complement the female dream. I guess you know it pretty well by now. In my experience it was the dream – the longing, the frustration, the hope and despair, the loneliness – which hurt, not the actual being or not being with Peter. And it worked immediately. Psychically it might look like a cord, reaching out or being connected to a particular person and in my imagination I simply and boldly cut that cord. It is a sharp psychic pain or fear of pain and then it is over. The trick is then not to build up that cord of dreams again...

Let me know if it works.

27.10.1998

Once I stop doing, feeling, proposing, interpreting, in short messing around, with the world as-it is, then everything is simply perfect. It is ‘I’ who is at the core of all the trouble. And this ‘I’ consists of ‘ego’ and ‘soul’, concepts and emotions, everything non-actual, everything that is not touchable, visible, audible, tastable or smell-able. Pretty radical, isn’t it!

Let’s say I’ve seen this is true, as indeed I have, with a few definition differences here and there not of much importance I think to the bottom line: my sense of self is the problem generator, and when it goes, there are no problems. The obvious question is a ‘how’ question, and my experience has been that all ‘how’ questions come from the sense of self itself and are based in the usual motivation of the sense of self, that being of course, fear, and are nothing more than an announcement of the presence of the sense of self. So my first question here for you becomes,

1. How can fear be used to get rid of fear?
   And during the time fear is planned to be used to get rid of fear, it would appear to be necessary to hold the belief that a state of fearlessness can be achieved through the use of fear,
2. and so my second question is:
   Are you asserting the belief in a state of fearlessness that can be achieved through fearful means?

I am lost from where your question is coming from. Naturally, before you ‘jump into the water’ and try something new, you want to know about it. Fair enough. This is not a belief to be believed, but a method to be used.

The obvious question is a ‘how’ question, and my experience has been that all ‘how’ questions come from the sense of self itself and are based in the usual motivation of the sense of self, that being of course, fear, and are nothing more than an announcement of the presence of the sense of self.

I think you are stepping on your own tail with this roundabout thinking, and then wonder that you stumble. You cannot exhaust the ‘sense of self’ by thinking, but you have to actively eliminate it bit by bit. It is not fear that searches for the way out, but the memory of the PCE, where no fear exists. The intent is to have that PCE-like state for 24 hours a day. With success you become more bold and keep investigating in yet another belief which cause you suffering...

2. Are you asserting the belief in a state of fearlessness that can be achieved through fearful means?

You take your PCE – the experience of no ‘self’ and no fear – and try and imitate it as closely as possible in your daily life, by the simple and effective question: ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’. You can start by not complaining about the weather, by actually tasting the coffee you are drinking, by feeling the legs and feet walking on the corridors or by stopping another ingrained habit of complaining ... whatever you like to start with. This is about getting down from the thinking-it-out-chair and getting dirty, ie. you experiment with your life and find out if it works for you. I can only say it worked for me. There is no short-cut, no thinking, thinking, thinking, and then pop! This method is about cleaning yourself up practically, diligently and persistently by removing one cause of unhappiness and malice after the other.

Peter wrote in his journal about fear:

So when I met Richard I found myself saying ‘I’ll give this a try, and I’ll make it the most important thing in my life’. That, as I look back, was my innate intelligence operating – the ‘if it doesn’t work, throw it out and find something that does’ or ‘don’t just freeze in the headlights’. Common sense, really. It wasn’t courage – it was common sense. I also had to retrieve my will and not ‘surrender’, leaving it up to Someone else or Existence – some imaginary roll of the cosmic dice. ‘Leaving it up to Existence’ is to accept being malicious and sorrowful – the dice are in fact loaded that way.

However, I found, as each of these fears was investigated, contemplated upon, made sense of, and understood completely, the belief that supports the fear wilts in the face of facts. And each of these fears then disappears, one by one, demolishing the bricks forming the illusionary ‘wall of fear.’ I simply keep going to where I want to go and the fear melts away – remarkably leaving no emotional scars. It was, after all, just an illusion; the instinctual, primitive ‘self’ hanging on for dear life – silly bugger!

I remember at one point looking at all the beliefs that made up ‘me’, and I saw them as a mountain, dauntingly impossible to climb. I remember fearfully holding on and desperately clinging to ‘my’ beliefs – a sort of a ‘If I let go of them, what will happen to me?’ However, that fearful image disappeared with the passing of time through the diligent and constant questioning and examining of each of these beliefs. What happened for me in the later stages was that fear would return in small and intense packages, which could be termed ‘panic attacks’. ‘Am I mad?’ ‘Am I a fool?’ ‘How come nobody else has seen this before?’ ‘Why me?’ etc etc. At some stage there was nothing to do but recognize that this was fear itself, and just ride out the swing, but only if, after assiduous searching, I found no particular cause to be investigated. Then I became aware that the issue was the very instinct of fear itself.

Gradually the attacks became weaker and further apart. Finally a ‘sit and wait it out’ period seemed to come about. Then I started to realise that it required no effort to be here, nothing was needed to be done beyond a few practical considerations to maintain my existence. This meant letting go of control, having confidence that I, this body, will simply do whatever is required to sensibly maintain my existence. Of course. The experience of effortless ease and delight that I have increasingly experienced on this path to freedom serves only to emphasize that the fearful and aggressive entity in me is both senseless and destructive. This ‘I’ is definitely the only thing in the way of my freedom. Peter’s Journal, Fear

Unless you have established for yourself a life in peace and harmony, with the basic needs taken care of, a life of Virtual Freedom, full of delight and joy, there is no basis to face the ‘big instinctual fears’. At least, this is my experience. If I tried to face death before I am firmly settled in ‘Virtual Freedom’ there is great danger to end in dread, madness or the delusion of enlightenment. Not recommended...

Does that make it more clear to you?

*

P.S. for clarification about ‘ego’ and ‘soul’ and the difference between enlightenment and freedom I have copied three paragraphs of Richard’s correspondence on another mailing list –  

Respondent: So, tell me, how have you arrived, how does that Greater Reality fit into the basic reality of life that I have outlined?

Richard: I would have thought that you would at least have read the basic thrust of what a person has written ... I am not in a ‘Greater Reality’. I was for eleven years ... and I found it wanting. Eastern ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ is commonly considered to be the Summum Bonum of human experience. It is not. By being born and raised in the West I was not steeped in the mystical religious tradition of the East and was thus able to escape the trap of centuries of eastern spiritual conditioning by going beyond enlightenment – which turned out to be an Altered State Of Consciousness – into the actuality of being here on earth and now in time as this flesh and blood body. For many years I sought genuine exploration and discovery of what it means to live a fully human life, and in October 1992 I discovered, once and for all, what I was looking for. Since then I have been consistently living an incomparable condition which I choose to call actual freedom – and I use the word ‘actual’ because this freedom is located here in this very world, this actual world of the senses. It is not an affective, cerebral or psychic state of being; it is a physical condition that ensues when one goes beyond spiritual enlightenment’s ‘Greater Reality’. Beyond the ‘Greater Reality’ lies the actual ... and the actual is already always here now. In actuality there is no ‘Greater Reality’.

When the soul dies the need for transcendental realms disappears. Then I am this flesh and blood body being apperceptively aware. Now I am the sense organs: this seeing is me, this hearing is me, this tasting is me, this touching is me, this smelling is me, and this thinking is me. Whereas ‘I’, the identity, am inside the body: looking out through ‘my’ eyes as if looking out through a window, listening through ‘my’ ears as if they were microphones, tasting through ‘my’ tongue, touching through ‘my’ skin, smelling through ‘my’ nose, and thinking through ‘my’ brain. Of course ‘I’ must feel isolated, alienated, alone and lonely, for ‘I’ am cut off from the magnificence of the actual world ... the world as-it-is. ‘I’ am eternally separate from the benignity of the actual, where the utter absence of any angst and anger at all is infinitely more rewarding than the deepest, the most profound, Divine Compassion and Love Agapé. The purity of the actual world owes its excellence to the fact that there is no sorrow and malice here ... hence no need for succour. The ‘everyday reality’ of the ‘real world’ is an illusion. The ‘Greater Reality’ of the ‘Mystical World’ is a delusion. There is an actual world that lies under one’s very nose ... I interact with the same kind of people, things and events that you do, yet it is as if I am in another dimension altogether.

There is no good or evil here where I live. I live in a veritable paradise ... this very earth I live on is so vastly superior to any fabled Arcadian Utopia that it would be impossible to believe if I was not living it twenty four hours a day ... there is no use for belief here. It is so perfectly pure and clear here that there is no need for Love or Compassion or Bliss or Euphoria or Ecstasy or Truth or Goodness or Beauty or Oneness or Unity or Wholeness or ... or any of those baubles. They all pale into pathetic insignificance ... and I lived them for eleven years. It is remarkably easy to live in actuality. Richard, List B, 23a

Actualism Homepage

Vineeto’s Writings and Correspondence