With the help of pure intent and self-awareness I have removed the imprinted ethics and morals of my social and spiritual identity that kept the lid on those primary instinctual passions, and now I am able to see those bare instincts operating in me. Neither expressing nor repressing any emotions really does the trick and sets the magic in motion that carries me through again into the actual world of delight and perfection.

Does this answer some of your question?

Further, there is a plethora of writing on our website, you can either go to the ‘map’ for orientation or to the page on ‘Our Animal Instincts in the Primitive Brain’ in the library.

23.11.1999

Thank you for your post. Good to hear that you like the web-site. It is such a gold-mine of information, the only question is where to start reading, isn’t it?

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I just woke up from one of those wonderful light after-dinner naps and the memory is still so remarkably fresh that I thought of describing this little PCE to you. It was fascinating and delightful to have thoughts and half-thoughts while drifting in and out of sleep like in and out of water and at the same time the brain was aware of itself being half asleep and doing its fluid thinking. What an extraordinary thing our human brain is, I thought while dreaming along, that it can unwind its thoughts from the day, be aware of it at the same time and this all while I am on the couch taking a nap, and listening to Peter clicking away on the keyboard! Such a nap beats any sort of meditation by a country mile!

I agree, there is nothing like a good nap.

I did not talk about just having a good nap. I was trying to describe to you a pure consciousness experience that happened while I was in that hypnogogic state where one is asleep and aware of being asleep at the same time. From this utter relaxation it is very easy to watch the brain thinking – or, as Richard put it:

Richard: This brain, which is what I am (‘what’ not ‘who’) has this amazing ability to not only be able to be consciousness being aware but to simultaneously be consciousness being aware of being consciousness (without an ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious).

This actual world is truly wondrous ... no need for any imaginative/intuitive metaphysical mystique whatsoever. Richard’s Journal, Appendix 5

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I understand the part about neither expressing or repressing the emotions. As I stated above I’m trying to actually understand what it is to be intimate with the instincts. This may be what I have been calling the thing itself which is what’s left when I stay with the feeling without naming it.

‘Neither expression or repression emotions’ is not a question of ‘not naming’ a feeling. I personally found it very important to name, distinguish, judge, discriminate, evaluate and investigate each feeling and what has triggered it, in order to get to the source of that feeling. The aim of the game is to replace feeling with actuality, belief with fact and discover ‘who’ one thinks and feels one is. In this way, more and more beliefs have evaporated into thin air as being simply silly and the accompanying feelings of fear, guilt, loyalty, worry, sorrow, etc. disappeared with them. It takes courage, persistence and bloody-mindedness to not only watch one’s affective feeling rise and fall, but to actually investigate and eliminate them. They constitute the major part of our identity, ‘who’ we feel we are.

Then, and only then, your instincts will come to the surface.

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As for eliminating instincts, I found that the method works as effectively for discovering, experiencing, investigating and eliminating instincts as it does for investigating the beliefs, morals, ethics and values that shape our social identity. Personally, I had to get rid of my moral, ethical and spiritual restrictions first, in order to be able to admit to, acknowledge and recognize the ‘gross’ instinctual passions that lie at the core of my ‘self’. First I had to question my ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, before I was able to recognize and investigate my own raw survival instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

My understanding of what you have said is to keep using the method and deal with issues as they come up. Although I have been working on beliefs and emotions for a long time this area of instincts is new to me so I don’t know exactly where I’m at with it. For instance, if I don’t name a feeling and stay with it there is an energy that seems to be in the area of the old brain. Is this an instinct that is producing this energy? How do I become intimate with the instincts?

Having been programmed first with the Christian and later with Eastern religious belief, the fact that humans are born with a set of instincts – and not born ‘innocent’ – has been quite a new discovery for me. Christians say that one is born with original sin because of Adam’s disobedience, and in a way they come close to the fact that without moral and ethical restraint, we humans behave no differently than wild animals, instinctually driven.

Slowly, slowly, after I removed the layers of moralistic and ethical values I could dare to acknowledge and experientially discover that ‘me’, at the very core, consists of nothing else but crude and cruel survival instincts – fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Discovering and seeing in action each of these instincts was an adventure by itself, thrilling, fascinating and very revealing into the human nature.

First one removes the ‘truths’, convictions, intuitions and feelings that were instilled in us to make us a fit member of society – a man, a woman, a wife, a husband, a scientist, a clerk, an American, a follower or a ‘true’ believer. And it is great fun to dismantle those identities and eventually become an anonymous nobody. Then, on honest investigation, you will be able to recognize these instinctual passions as ‘you’, all of ‘you’. It is not a matter of having an ‘ intimate ’ relationship with one’s instincts, but to acknowledge, feel and experience that ‘I’ am my instinctual passions, nothing else. ‘I’ am rotten to the very core.

That experiential acknowledgment that underlying one’s precious feelings are the animal instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, gives one the motivation and pure intent to actively devote one’s life to irrevocably changing oneself.

5.12.1999

I am joining in the discussion, as I had a thought about something you have written to Peter in your last letter –

I did get caught up in the urge of wanting it this week which I think could have been the desire instinct being activated. This very desire of wanting it was keeping me from enjoying the now moment.

One of the first things on the path to Actual Freedom which I had to investigate and eliminate was that hoary old spiritual belief that if only one stops wanting something, it will be granted by the Grace of Existence. After 17 years of spiritual search without results I was finally suspicious enough to question the very belief itself.

When I, for the sake of clarity, replaced the word ‘freedom’ with something material, like a car or money, it became blindingly obvious that by stopping to want it I would also prevent myself from getting it. When I ask myself the question ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and I get the answer that I am not happy because I am not 100% free, then the next question is how to proceed from here. I had to be careful not to deceive myself by thinking that I only have to stop the urge for freedom in order to be happy again as it only served to stop me right in my tracks, leaving me with nothing I could do to reach my goal except wait and hope.

What I do is to find out why I am not 100% happy with my present situation, what little feeling, or emotional churning there is that spoils this moment. Then it is not just ‘not-being-free’ that is bothering me but some particular feeling, some particular emotion about something that maybe happened an hour ago. This more specific component of ‘not-being-free’ can then be examined, investigated and removed without stifling the desire and intent for freedom, which is my fuel and guideline to keep asking the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’, to keep investigating into how I experience the Human Condition in me.

Richard has written heaps on ‘desire’, to be found under his Selected Correspondence, sorted by subjects, on his website.

There is definitely no short-cut to actual freedom by stopping to want freedom, and then bingo, you are ‘That’ – it is the other way round. I want actual freedom like I never wanted anything in my life, it is my one and only desire, it is that very desire that motivates me to dive into the ‘cupboard’ of my psyche, my identity, my feelings and passions over and over and over, to sweep out all the cobwebs that I can find. This desire fuels my intent and makes sure that I never dishonestly settle for second best, for an imaginary freedom instead of the genuine, actual, tangible article.

The following two paragraphs are from the bit that I have written for our diagram of ‘Who am ‘I’ vs. What am I’, which you can find on our website. I consider the diagram an excellent schematic to understand the process of what happens on the path to Actual Freedom and Peter’s and my writing explain it a bit more.

‘In order to get closer to one’s avowed aim, the living of a PCE for 24 hours a day, one then has to get off one’s bum and dismantle who one thinks and feels one is. The change that needs to happen can only happen in the social identity, in one’s own Human Condition. The only thing ‘I’ can do is actively diminish ‘me’ – examining and investigating my social and spiritual conditioning and my set of survival instincts – all my passionate beliefs and my affective imaginations. So when I get confused, or impatient, or fearful, or greedy for more PCEs or discouraged, or, or, or ... this is where I have to look, this is where I can change something. This is where ‘I’ can speed up ‘my’ demise. When I am emotional, slightly off-track or very disturbed, I am the ‘me’, my identity – and I can only do something about this identity. That means, ‘I who I think and feel I am’ is the thing that needs to be taken apart, the thing that needs my full attention, pure intent and concentration. My social identity and my instinctual passions are the only thing I can do something about, because that is ‘me’, obstructing and preventing the perfection that is already here from becoming apparent. In that sense the actual me, what I am, doesn’t really get bigger, ‘what I am’ only becomes more and more apparent.

There is no point in waiting for the ‘Grace of Existence’ to descend and deliver a PCE. When all is said and done, waiting for a PCE derives from a grim-world view where one doesn’t want to be here but wants to go somewhere else – into a PCE. There is nothing I can do about the actual me – ‘what I am’ is already perfect, it is already as it should be. But I can actively do something about the obstacles that prevent me from experiencing the actual world; I can remove, slowly and meticulously, the stuff that the identity consists of. I can investigate into each belief, each hope, faith and ‘truth’, examine experientially each feeling and emotion that is triggered by people or situations, until I finally uncover the bare animal instincts. By that time the social identity and the instinctual passions have become rather thin and transparent so that ‘what I am’ can be more and more clearly experienced. Vineeto, List AF, Alan

On the path to Actual Freedom the ‘bad news’ is that I have to get off my bum, investigate every idea and imagination, every dream, hope and faith as much as every bout of anger, impatience, complaint, fear, love and compassion. It is the opposite of meditation because I actively pursue every obstacle to being happy now, here, and for that I use my capacity to think, contemplate, reflect, judge and investigate in order to find and eliminate the Human Condition in me , bit by bit.

The ‘good news’ is that there is nobody who can speed up or prevent my progress on the path to Actual Freedom except myself – it is all in my own hands. I am my own judge whether I am happy or not, honest or not, free of particular beliefs and morals or not. Nobody is interfering with this process and nobody can. And it is a journey of a lifetime – with imminent and incrementally increasing rewards of more and more freedom from bondage, malice and sorrow.

Life is so good, that I keep wondering what all the fuss that I made and others are still making about this ‘oh so terrible life’. According to my old real-world standards and values I have definitely gone mad. And it is utterly worth it.

16.12.1999

The last weeks I have been fully occupied with the delicious task to ‘translate’ the PowerPoint presentation of an ‘Introduction to Actual Freedom’, that Peter has put together, into html-format for the website. You can access it from our homepage or the ‘map’. The first files take a bit of loading, because some of the pictures are rather big but it is worth the time as it is a delightful and exquisitely illustrated and comprehensively written introduction to Actual Freedom.

So now, having completed this project, I re-enter the discussion again. Something you wrote to No. 3 the other day has made me prick my ears.

I agree that the task for ‘me’ is to push the button to start the process of self-immolation. The truth for me right now is I am dedicated but I am not 100% committed. I have intent but it is not pure intent. What would it take for me to make the leap to be 100% committed with pure intent?

Can I make this leap? Can I become 100% committed with pure intent? What is stopping me? Obviously it is the ‘me’ that is stopping me and like you said it is up to the ‘me’ to keep the question ‘how am I’ going. As you said it is up to ‘me’ and ‘I’ to bring about the process of ending themselves. The best that ‘I’ can do right now is to keep the question ‘how am I’ going. I am dedicated to that.

To understand my intent for freedom I firstly had to take an honest and extensive stock of my life so far. I reviewed all the paths that I had tried, all the adventures I had taken as well as my intentions behind them. I found that as a youth I had marched for peace, freedom, equity and various ideas of a better world. I had been involved in Women’s liberation, only to find women as incapable of living in peace and harmony with each other as men. I then turned to changing society by education, studied social work and was full of ideals to ‘heal’ society. Yet, working as a social worker for heroin addicts I quickly discovered that I had no solution to offer for any of these ‘drop-out’, on the contrary – I could understand their reasons for turning their backs on a society that I saw as corrupt and hypocritical, restrictive and compromising.

For several years I got involved in primal therapy, which claimed that the solution lay in experiencing and expressing emotions under ‘nursery conditions’ and then all will be well. I learned to identify my emotions more in detail, but merely expressing them did nothing to resolve them, they kept appearing again and again without fail. Life did not become easier through therapy, only more expensive.

The next solution on offer was Eastern spirituality. Combined with a plethora of new-age therapies, the cozy security of a newfound family it seemed the best on offer. The intention now was to change myself rather than changing the world. For the next 17 years I got gullibly sucked into the rich imaginary fairy stories of Eastern beliefs, new-age superstitions and serious meditation.

To make a long story short – none of my enterprises brought me freedom, peace and happiness. It didn’t teach me how to live with a man in peace and harmony. I knew only too well that I was still enjoying fight, spite and bittersweet sadness and I still felt lonely and fearful. To acknowledge failure was enough to fuel my intent to explore something new, something practical.

Also, I wanted to live with a man in peace and harmony, 24 hrs a day, every day. For that goal I was willing to question my dearly held beliefs of gender identity, social morals and values, spiritual beliefs and convictions. To live not only in peace but to share a life of fun and adventure, intimacy and harmony, I considered more valuable than anything else I had done up to now.

All these considerations gave me enough drive to investigate, question, discover and turn beliefs upside down to find out about them and compare them with verifiable facts. It was all very confusing in the beginning to say the least, but the thrill of investigating why all those beliefs had never worked kept me digging deeper and deeper into the very substance of my identity. And every success, every result, every belief replaced by facts drove me further into more inquiries, encouraged me to identify, trace back and investigate my ‘precious’ feelings and emotions.

You see, intent does not grow in a day or is instantly 100% at the start, it gets bigger and more and more purified with increasing discoveries about the Human Condition in oneself. To acknowledge malice and sorrow in action in oneself, day by day, gives one the firm intention to factually do something about it, to actually and irrevocably change oneself.

And then, with persistent and honest investigation into one’s beliefs and feelings, with rocking ‘the boat’ of one’s identity to the limits, there is bound to be a pure consciousness experience. Asking myself the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of beings alive?’ never had a calming effect on me – on the contrary. To investigate a surfacing emotion, to label and define it and trace its root and underlying belief usually intensified the thrill until I triumphantly got the bugger by the throat and bingo – there lay dead another dearly held ‘truth’ or conviction, value or loyalty. To break through to the very core of one particular emotion leaves me with the actual and that often brings about a PCE.

To give you an example of what I mean I post you a bit that I wrote at the time of one particular discovery –

‘Finally one evening, when talking and musing about the universe, I fully comprehended that this physical universe is actually infinite. The universe being without boundaries or an edge means that it is impossible, practically, for God to exist. In order to have created the universe or to be in control of it God would have to exist outside of it – and there is no outside! This insight hit me like a thunderbolt. My fear of God and of his representatives collapsed and lost its very substance by this obvious realisation. In fact, there can be no one outside of this infinite universe who is pulling the strings of punishment and reward, heaven and hell – or, according to Eastern tradition, granting enlightenment or leaving me with the eternal karma of endless lives in misery.

This insight presupposes, of course, that there is no place other than the physical universe, no celestial, mystical realm where gods and ghosts exist. It also implies that there is no life before or after death and that the body simply dies when it dies. I needed quite some courage to face and accept this simple fact – to give up all beliefs in an after-life or a ‘spirit-life’. But I could easily observe that as soon as I gave up the idea of any imaginary existence other than the tangible, physical universe, everything, which had seemed so complicated and impossible to understand became graspable, evident, obvious and imminently clear.

When the enormous consequence and implication of slipping out of this insidious belief in any God or Higher Being dawned on me, I was at the same time free of anybody’s authority. I was free of the fear that had been spoiling every relationship with every man in my life: father, brothers, male friends and boyfriends, employers, teachers and Master.

Now I am my own authority, deciding what is silly and sensible, using the common and practical intelligence of the human brain. I am responsible for every action in my life and I can acknowledge that now. However, this means that from now on I cannot blame anybody for making me jealous, miserable, grumpy, afraid, angry or frustrated over any petty issue. Now there is no more excuse, no more hiding place. They are my reactions and my behaviour, which I have to face and change in order to be free.’ A Bit of Vineeto

Daring to question ‘God’ by whatever name had eliminated one of the major columns my identity-structure was based on and caused the whole construct to tumble – for a few hours. Then I could experience the actual world as it is, without the restricting and fearful guardian of the ‘self’ in operation – which in turn fuelled my intent for more such discoveries. The serendipitous spiral of actual freedom is set in motion. On the path to actual – as opposed to imaginary – freedom I found that the only way to end fear was to face it and investigate it, and the only way to end pain was to find and eliminate its cause, for ever.

And it works.

‘Knowing full well the cost’, as No. 3 said, which is ‘me’ in my entirety, it is gloriously delicious to be amongst the forerunners of human evolution. To be able to successively and irrevocably free oneself from the ancient animal heritage of the instinctual passions that are but a redundant remnant of thousands of years of malice and suffering is the best I can ever do with my life. Living at the cutting edge of the discovery to a new, non-spiritual, down-to-earth and actual freedom from the Human Condition takes on an exquisite momentum by itself that makes life exquisitely thrilling and wondrously delicious, day after day. And it all is available by sincerely asking the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’

20.12.1999

Good to hear from you. I am glad you can now re-enter the discussion. I have read the new ‘Introduction to Actual Freedom’ and I was quite impressed. I found it to be excellent. Actually I think it is perfect.

Thank you for your feedback on the introduction. I agree that Peter did an excellent job in putting it together and I find it exactly the coherent preamble that can give newcomers an overview and entry into Actual Freedom. It probably needs reading more than once given that AF flies in the face of all normal solutions and traditional beliefs. Did you notice that I forgot to put a link ‘back to homepage’? Once one enters the introduction, one is trapped to read it again and again and again...

You have brought up this subject of pure intent at a good time because I really don’t want to look at it right now. I have gotten in touch with the bare awareness of fear and it seems hopeless right now.

I see it and I feel it but I don’t want to mess with it. I just want to calm it down and leave it alone. A PCE seems very remote. I am not concerned about a PCE. I just don’t want to upset ‘me’ anymore.

This reminds me of a day when I was so badly in the grip of fear that I couldn’t think straight, didn’t know how to get myself out of this overwhelming feeling and could hardly talk for my cluttering teeth. I thought that I will never gather enough gumption to become free, I am just too much of a coward. Telling my story to Richard he said something to the effect of: ‘what else would you want to do with your life – be miserable like right now for the next 30 odd years? Seems pretty impossible to me. Of course, you will keep going.’

On the path to freedom from the Human Condition I have encountered fear lots of time, firstly because I decided not to run from it anymore and secondly because questioning ancient wisdom and inherited instincts is not a familiar thing to do, to say the least. When you read my conversations with Alan – there was a time when we talked of almost nothing else but different forms of fear. We ‘entertained’ each other with scare-story after scare-story, private worries and collective atavistic fears, and it was very helpful to talk and write about it. After all, dismantling one’s set of beliefs and values, one’s very identity, is a scary thing to do.

But then, I have been fearful all my life. I have been running from fear for as long as I can remember, trying half-hearted solutions, distractions, movies, food, company, music, commune-life, work, meditation, mantras, security in boring or distressing relationships, being occupied with this or that and much more. Nothing has worked to permanently get rid of fear. Fears kept popping up and spoiling my days, making inner peace impossible.

By asking ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ I have learnt to face my fears and dig into them until I find their very core. In the beginning of my inquiries, my fears where concerned with my social identity. ‘Who’ am I in other people’s eyes, can I survive without their approval, without the support of my peers, without the company and security of the social spiritual club that I called my friends? Well, I discovered that I could. Facing my fears, questioning dearly held beliefs and investigating the facts of each situation has improved my confidence and surety, which in turn facilitated my next encounter with fear. As I said – the serendipitous spiral of actual freedom was set in motion.

As I ask the question ‘how am I’ the answer I get is cautiously. The belief I have right now is that I really can’t do anything about it. I have been on this path of self-discovery for 30 yrs now and this is where I’m at. I am directly in contact with my core right now. ‘Me’ at my core right now seems so rock solid that I couldn’t blast it out with dynamite.

Thirty years of spiritual search do indeed show a persistence not to settle for second best. You don’t seem to give up at the first scare. Yet, whatever teachings you have picked up on the way need to be discovered, questioned, investigated, examined and eradicated. The diagram ‘the path of self-aggrandizement’ in the ‘method’-part of the introduction shows clearly the direction in which spiritual beliefs and Eastern religions have guided us. As I have told you, I had been gullibly sucked into Eastern religious myths and it took extensive questioning of all the sweet spiritual fairytales to uncover the lies, deceits, beliefs and underlying intentions of the spiritual endeavour. Actual Freedom, being actual and not spirit-ridden (spiritual) lies indeed 180 degrees in the opposite direction to all spiritual teachings, present, past and future. You will find out for yourself as you go along.

Realizing that I have the belief that I can’t do anything about it is beginning to make a difference. Actually the ‘me’ is dissipating now as I am typing this. Ok Vineeto, reading your post got me to look at the belief that I was having about it and I now realize that the belief that I can’t do anything about the ‘me’ was holding it in place. As I now ask the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ The answer I am getting is peacefully.

You have just described how you discovered and questioned the mother of all beliefs – ‘that you can’t change human nature’, or, as you say, one ‘can’t do anything about’ one’s instinctual passions. As you have experienced, even the slightest doubting of this ‘Truth’ diminishes its solidity and veracity. Gathering courage after a fear-attack one resumes the questioning, each time with a little more suspicion towards and awareness about one’s own beliefs, each time with the memory that a fear directly encountered and questioned cannot last. Another day, another victory.

PS As the self-appointed librarian I cannot resist to tell you about the library page of ‘Fear’ with all the selected writings and correspondence from Richard, Peter and I, as well as the page about ‘Affective Feelings , Emotions and Calentures’, which might give you some useful hints and familiar descriptions. Since I often make some mistake when I give the direct link, you can also find those pages through the ‘Map’, directly accessible from the AF homepage.

25.12.1999

I have a new situation to deal with since talking with you last. My Mom is in the hospital and I am spending most of my time taking care of her. This subject of fear is still appropriate in relation to how I am dealing with this situation. The second I start thinking about it I am overwhelmed with fear, worry, etc.

However, I find that running the question ‘how am I’ is helping me to deal with the situation. Asking the question has helped me to stay in the moment and what I find is everything is ok in this moment right now. All my fears are in regard to how am I going to manage taking care of her at a future time. Right now at this moment in time she is taken care of.

Life seems to have given you a serendipitous opportunity to have a closer look at the instinctual passion of nurture, its correlating feelings of love and belonging and the implications of being a social identity as a family member. Quite an exciting range of possible discoveries that could help answer your earlier question of ‘How do I become intimate with the instincts?’

Love and compassion, sympathy and empathy are our usual ways of relating to family and friends and through the same emotional ‘channel’ we also invite the their fears and worries, sorrow and resentment, anger and hatred. There is only one way when one relates to people affectively and that is within the rules and ways of the Human Condition. The moment I feel sympathy for someone I am also swamped by their fears, the moment I am empathic for someone’s suffering I plug into the collective misery of mankind. The need to belong makes one susceptible to everybody’s feelings, be it anger or fear, greed or suffering.

This is not just a poetic expression, it is my very experience. In order to become happy and harmless I had to examine my every relationship – to Peter, to my peers, to my work-mates, to my parents and relatives. Whenever I ‘reached out’ emotionally, understanding someone’s sorrow, fear or anger, I could not help being affected – that’s the very idea of ‘sharing’ and the common remedy against feeling lonely in the first place. But there is no choice of feeling just the nice, good feelings with or for someone and disregarding their negative feelings – by the very nature of emotions I am being hooked into the emotional web the moment I choose to go along with affective feelings.

The alternative was to consciously and deliberately decide to leave the cozy nest of bitter-sweet feelings, to abandon the ‘squabbling and miserable humanity’ and examine and then eliminate feelings and emotions in myself. I have found that the ‘good’ emotions were even more insidious than the ‘bad’ ones. Many people would like to get rid of anger, sadness and fear, but who would want to abandon love, compassion, beauty and bliss? But once I understood the intrinsic connection between love and fear, compassion and sorrow, empathy and suffering, I decided to get free of the lot.

When I love someone I am afraid to lose him or her. In order to have compassion for someone the other needs to be ‘in the pits’ emotionally – otherwise there is no use for my compassion. Empathy is even more insidious – the suffering creeps under the skin and one never quite knows what is happening. And all this sorry-go-round for the sake of not feeling lonely, bored and fearful? I discovered that by examining and eliminating my very identity as an appreciated and valued member of society I eliminated loneliness and boredom at the same time. And not even the closest friendship can ever take away one’s fear of death – for fear to stop the very ‘I’ that generates this fear has to become extinct.

Love is not the solution, love is the problem. With love disappearing I could for the first time live in peace and harmony, ease and equity with another human being, day-in, day-out, 24 hrs a day, without bicker or quarrel, crisis or boredom. Without love, actual intimacy and genuine benevolence became possible for the first time. What a serendipitous trade-in!

It seems mad to everyone else but they don’t know what I’ve got!

Actually, I have found that everything is always ok at this moment right now and running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ is a great tool for keeping me in this moment.

That’s all for now. Thanks for being there and thanks to all of you for making this list and this website available and for your willingness to help.

The question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ is not only ‘a great tool for keeping me in this moment’ but it is also the precise method to remove every single obstacle that prevents one from experiencing this moment as perfect.

You see, with this method you can do much more than calming yourself or be ‘in this moment’ – you can become actually and permanently free of all the worries and fears, depression and resentment, sorrow and malice, free from the Human Condition altogether. With this method you can examine and investigate what keeps you from being happy and harmless in this very moment and remove the disturbing element, ‘me’, ‘ego’ and ‘soul’, irrevocably and forever.

Of course, this enterprise is not for the ‘faint of heart and weak of knees’ as Richard usually puts it, but it is the best that I have ever done in my life. What adventure, what delight.

4.1.2000

In the last week I have been lost in space, so to speak. We discovered a new screen-saver which presents photos of one’s own choice like a perpetual slide show presentation. On their website they also offer heaps of photos for downloading. If anyone wants to try it out, you can find it under http://www.webshots.com/. I took the opportunity of making a private slideshow of the universe and went on the NASA site for space-shots. The amount and quality of what is presented there is amazing and fantastic. Photos of nebulae and galaxies, exploding suns and planets, swirling clouds of gas in all possible colours comes with detailed information about the number or name, area, size and the changing formations of this ‘universal matter’ and all the human presumptions and hypothesis. But to see and learn so much of the magnificent infinitude of the universe leaves me continuously in amazement and wonder.

For instance, there is Betelgeuse, the top left star in the constellation called Orion, recognizable by the three bright stars in his ‘belt’ – the diameter of this single star is bigger than the orbit of Jupiter around the sun!! Unimaginable vastness, and that is only one star of a huge nebular galaxy, of billions that are known – and billions that are not known (yet). The infinite variety of matter leaves me gasping for breath, the magnificence and perfection are fascinating, to say the least – and I am the bit of the universe that says: ‘Wow, how phantasmagorical, how magical!’

Whoever wants to prove with silly mathematics that this universe is not infinite is just a fool. The instinctual need for a creator and the fervent belief in an immortal soul continuously mess up the clear-eyed perception of the obvious. And mathematicians and theoretical scientists are no exception.

And there is no difference when I get off the computer and come ‘back’ to earth. The sky in its endlessly changing colourful design is as brilliant as distant nebulae, the sounds are a delightful background, the smells of the summer flowers are deliciously sweet, the air is soft, moist and warm... the splendour is everywhere and life is an ongoing delight.

It was fun to spend most of New Year’s Day in front of the television, watching the world responding to the ‘important’ date change, and around the clock around the world we were watching a continual cascade of fireworks blowing up in one city after another. Every nation and town was displaying their exotic and exuberant celebration and the people were happy for a few hours a year – or a century? – before the misery of every-day life was catching up again. So many were disappointed that the prophesized doom and disasters did not occur, that nothing broke down and that they had to get on with their lives as usual.

While in the land of freedom everything is already always well, nothing can go wrong because everything is actual. Without emotions and instinctual passions I simply respond to what is happening, choose what is sensible and enjoy every moment as it lives me. It is all so easy once the ‘self’ is not in command and the instincts are but a faint rumble sometimes before they will finally wither away completely.

Now to your letter –

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Love and compassion, sympathy and empathy are our usual ways of relating to family and friends and through the same emotional ‘channel’ we also invite the their fears and worries, sorrow and resentment, anger and hatred. There is only one way when one relates to people affectively and that is within the rules and ways of the Human Condition. The moment I feel sympathy for someone I am also swamped by their fears, the moment I am empathic for someone’s suffering I plug into the collective misery of mankind. The need to belong makes one susceptible to everybody’s feelings, be it anger or fear, greed or suffering.

I saw yesterday what you are saying about sympathy and empathy. By not buying in to her suffering I was relieved of my suffering and I was better able to take care of her.

Also have seen that ‘I’ am rotten to the core because a lot of my suffering has been worrying about ‘me’ having to take care of her.

To examine the so-called ‘good’ emotions of nurture, affective care, sympathy, friendship, duty, love and compassion is a fascinating subject and can only be done by questioning and examining at the same time the morals and ethics of society that forms one’s very social identity. If one wants to be actually free of the Human Condition, one has to examine and recognize that ‘good’ simply means ‘morally acceptable’ and ‘right’ is just another ethical value, both of which vary from tribe to tribe and from society to society. The ‘good’ is a much a bondage as the ‘bad’ – even more so because it seems much more desirable. As humans we don’t want to lose the other’s affection and reassurance, the appreciation of our peers, the cozy safety of being part of a family or group, the comforting knowledge of doing what everyone considers the ‘right’ thing or the ‘good’ deed.

Freedom lies in the opposite direction. On the path to actual freedom I did not bother to try to solve the moral or ethical problems of what is ‘good’ or ‘right’ but focussed my attention instead on discovering my own ethical and moral values – my social identity in action. ‘Ah, I’m trying to find out what is right? I’m upset that someone did the ‘wrong’ thing? I’m aiming again to be a ‘good’ person?’ These were indications that my moral identity was in action and I used my awareness to examine this very identity and learned to step out of it. What is now left is a simple sensible solution – and mostly my worries were seen to be an S.E.P.-situation, Someone Else’s Problem.

Once I understood that it is only me who can set myself free I also understood that everyone has to do it for themselves as well. What perfect arrangement. It for sure saves one saving people.

I paste you the bit that Peter has written on morals in the glossary, it might clarify the issue a bit further –

Moral — Of or pertaining to human character or behaviour considered as good or bad; of or pertaining to the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil. Oxford Dictionary

Morality is a well-meaning concept designed to serve as a guide for people to curb their instinctual aggression such as to be able to live together reasonably peacefully between the recurrent wars that break out. Generally the forced imposition of moral codes and laws works well enough but they do come at a price – a severe restriction of freedom most usually strongly felt at adolescence, and often the cause of youthful rebellion. This rebellion usually eventuates as they begin to see and experience the hypocrisy evident in the gulf between the moral and ethical codes they have been taught and what actually happens in the world.

This rebellion is wrongly assumed to be a search for freedom and at best results in a slight alteration to moral codes with each generation. The famed youth rebellion of the 60’s resulted in nothing other than a switch from Western formal religious morality to Eastern spiritual morality – the emergence of the New Dark Ages. There are as many versions of what constitutes moral behaviour as there are religions or tribal groupings in the world, and that’s a lot. These differing moral values as to what is good and what is bad is the source of so much confusion, conflict and bloodshed and the principle of ‘human rights’ only serves to preserve these differences forever.

These unliveable moral tenets, passed down from generation to generation and reinforced by family, church and state are upheld at the point of a gun by the police and at threat of imprisonment or death by the courts. This system of enforcing ‘civilization’, maintained by carrot and stick, generally does reasonably well to preserve what we have come to accept as ‘normal’ human existence – an endless series of wars, murder, torture, rape, repression, corruption, suicide and despair. When push comes to shove, moral values very quickly crumble and instinctual animal passions immediately blossom unimpeded. 160,000,000 people have been killed in war this century alone – the bloodiest to date – and 1 billion people have been directly affected by war in the last 20 years alone.

The ancient social and religious distinctions of what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad form the very basis of one’s social identity – instilled upon one in order to make one a fit member of society. Unless one has the courage to dismantle one’s social identity by a process of thoroughly investigating the validity and sensibleness of these morals one cannot proceed further to eliminate one’s biological heritage of instinctual passions.

Once I got rid of the instilled morals that made me ignore the signs of unwanted feelings and emotions, a whole other side of ‘me’ became evident. Malice tops the list, with being sad second. ‘Don’t do that, stop it’ drilled in as a child, runs very deep. ‘Don’t mope around looking miserable’ is another.

Simply by breaking free of these moral and ethical barriers one is then able to have a clear-eyed look at one’s very psyche ‘in operation’ and that very investigation, if conducted with gusto and pure intent, is the ending of ‘me’.

The prize for doing so is peace on earth. AF Glossary

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You see, with this method you can do much more than calming yourself or be ‘in this moment’ – you can become actually and permanently free of all the worries and fears, depression and resentment, sorrow and malice, free from the Human Condition altogether. With this method you can examine and investigate what keeps you from being happy and harmless in this very moment and remove the disturbing element, ‘me’, ‘ego’ and ‘soul’, irrevocably and forever.

Have had my doubts but am now seeing that it is possible.

Have a happy and harmless new year,

Not only possible but absolutely recommendable too. Once one starts changing one’s actions according to the findings of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ in order to become more happy and harmless, the benefits are blindingly obvious. And one incrementally loses bits of one’s ‘self’ on the way.

What a perfect arrangement actuality is, I am still astounded every day about the perfection of it all.

11.1.2000

Good to hear from you and good to talk to you ... I am still enjoying downloading pictures of nebulae, galaxies and clusters from different web-sites and editing them into screen size. Sometimes I change the background of planets, assemble the moons around Jupiter or Saturn and add a few stars when the picture is not wide enough. It is a very pleasant play with forms and colours, the paint-program lets me shade and clone, lighten and intensify, and I can make as many mistakes as I like and revert to earlier stages. Not like painting in the old days, where every stroke was final and every mistake would cost canvas and paint. Demand for work has not started again in the new millennium – the beginning of the noughties, or naughties – and I enjoy the hours without numbers and days without names.

The other day I noticed with astonishment, and a little bit of disorientation, that I would look at things and no thoughts occurred, just the visual intake of colours and forms, shades and movements. Even trying to crank up a train of thought was not very successful. Life just isn’t that complicated that I have to think about it very much. I remember from my spiritual days that I would have given an arm and a leg for hours without thought – and then, when I occasionally succeeded, I was not only afraid to lose it any minute but I would also be very dazed and foggy – and filled with ‘good’ feelings, of course. Now, thinking is available when necessary or when I want to nut out something but the rest of the time I simply enjoy being alive. Such marvellous excellence!

Now to your letter –

For instance, there is Betelgeuse, the top left star in the constellation called Orion, recognizable by the three bright stars in his ‘belt’ – the diameter of this single star is bigger than the orbit of Jupiter around the sun!! Unimaginable vastness, and that is only one star of a huge nebular galaxy, of billions that are known – and billions that are not known (yet). The infinite variety of matter leaves me gasping for breath, the magnificence and perfection are fascinating, to say the least – and I am the bit of the universe that says: ‘Wow, how phantasmagorical, how magical!’

Makes ‘me’ seem very insignificant.

‘Significant’ or insignificant are only words relative to our human values. Of course, the infinitude of the universe puts every ‘self’-centred vision into perspective and belies one’s imagination as to one’s self-importance. When the actual world becomes an everyday experience, there is neither significance nor insignificance, only facts and delight.

Yet, to become free from the Human Condition in order to experience the actual world has been the most significant thing in my life. Every bit that I cleaned up in myself was significant for it changed my life for the better and stopped creating ripples of malice and sorrow in other people’s lives. The only significant thing that ‘I’ can do is to get out of the road.

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While in the land of freedom everything is already always well, nothing can go wrong because everything is actual. Without emotions and instinctual passions I simply respond to what is happening, choose what is sensible and enjoy every moment as it lives me. It is all so easy once the ‘self’ is not in command and the instincts are but a faint rumble sometimes before they will finally wither away completely.

This says it all and my ‘belief’ about it is I don’t have it. I am choosing more sensible solutions but it seems as if the ‘self’ is still in command. I know the actual is always here now but the ‘self’ is keeping me from it. The ‘self’ is a barrier between me and the actual. I can see that this is just a belief and all I have to do is give up this belief and the actual will be revealed. The question that arises is ‘why can’t I give up this belief?’ What am ‘I’ hanging on to?

If the ‘self’ was ‘just a belief’ , as you say – and as all the Eastern religions say – one could simply believe that one is not the ‘self’ and every problem would be solved... But the Human Condition in each of us is not just a belief. At the core, ‘I’ am the instinctual passions.

Peter said it very well in his rave to Alan the other day ...

The chemical surges that cause us to automatically feel and act fearful, nurturing, aggressive and desirous are primary, ‘quick and dirty’, thoughtless and instinctual-emotional and, as such, are ultimately uncontrollable by moral and ethical training or by denial and imaginary transcendence. These chemical surges that arise from the instinctual passions are most definitely not an illusion that one can deny or pretend that one has overcome them – they are very real – readily measurable in response times, sourced from a particular location in the physical brain and empirically observable in action. It was only when this chemical flow ceased that Richard became actually free of the Human Condition. To quote Richard from the ‘Introduction to Actual Freedom’ –

‘My’ demise was as fictitious as ‘my’ apparent presence. I have always been here, I realize, it was that ‘I’ only imagined that ‘I’ existed. It was all an emotional play in a fertile imagination ... which was, however, fuelled by an actual hormonal substance triggered off from within the brain-stem because of the instinctual passions bestowed by blind nature.’

An actualist will not skip over the ‘however’, for in that one word is the key to the difference between an actual freedom and an illusionary freedom from the Human Condition. Peter, List AF, Alan

It is not a matter of giving ‘up this belief’ but a matter of ‘self’-immolation. The ‘self’ is not ‘a barrier between me and the actual’, the ‘self’ is all that ‘I’ am and ‘I’ am ‘hanging on to’ dear life. ‘I’ know that in order to live the perfection that I have experienced in numerous Pure Consciousness Experiences, ‘I’ have to disappear in toto. This ‘clear eyed view of the obvious’, this understanding of the inevitable then gives enough drive to actively pursue the investigation and elimination of the social, emotional-instinctual entity. What a thrill!

*

On the path to actual freedom I did not bother to try to solve the moral or ethical problems of what is ‘good’ or ‘right’ but focussed my attention instead on discovering my own ethical and moral values – my social identity in action. ‘Ah, I’m trying to find out what is right? I’m upset that someone did the ‘wrong’ thing? I’m aiming again to be a ‘good’ person?’ These were indications that my moral identity was in action and I used my awareness to examine this very identity and learned to step out of it. What is now left is a simple sensible solution – and mostly my worries were seen to be an S.E.P.-situation, Someone Else’s Problem. Once I understood that it is only me who can set myself free I also understood that everyone has to do it for themselves as well. What perfect arrangement. It for sure saves one saving people.

It is clear that the only one I can change is me.

What I was trying to clarify is that the first thing to change was my perception of what had to change. All my life I had tried to change for the better, first according to the Christian standards of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ –heaven and hell – and later according to the spiritual standards of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – nirvana and bad karma. What I needed to understand was that both are only slightly different standards of morals and ethics, and to shift one’s inbuilt instinctual passions from aggression to compassion, from sorrow to devotion, from fear to hope and from bondage to dis-identification is nothing other than rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The structure of one’s being is not changed – the ‘feeling being’ itself needs to be questioned and investigated, uncovered and eliminated.

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Once one starts changing one’s actions according to the findings of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ in order to become more happy and harmless, the benefits are blindingly obvious. And one incrementally loses bits of one’s ‘self’ on the way.

Yes, I can see that this is happening. My previous belief was that it happens instantaneously but I can now see that it is happening incrementally.

To discover the different cunning disguises and workings of this instinctual ‘self’ has been the adventure of a lifetime, better than any Agatha Christie thriller could ever be. It becomes a sport, a hunt, a puzzle, as one re-wires one’s brain according to facts rather than relying on feelings and beliefs.

*

What a perfect arrangement actuality is, I am still astounded every day about the perfection of it all.

I’m not experiencing the perfection of it all right now. I feel close but ‘I’ am getting in the way. What is it? What is keeping me from it right now? Ok, I see what is in the way right now and it is worry about someone else’s problem. An S. E. P. as you stated above. Worrying about my mom’s problem is not going to help her or me. Without worrying about it I can simply make sensible choices.

In order that all the S.E.P. can really be someone else’s problem, I had to incrementally disentangle myself from the psychological and psychic web of peers and relatives, friends and acquaintances. I had to step out of humanity itself. For this I traced each feeling that someone would evoke in me back to its source and investigated the emotion and instinctual passion in me. Brought to light and understood the psychic connection lost its mysterious power.

Feeling for someone always has its source in me and that’s what I can change. Nurture is as much part of our instinctual survival package as are desire, fear and aggression. Deciding to stop feeling for someone was often not enough. I had to dig into the reason why those feeling would occur again and again and find the underlying cause, my own survival instincts and my fears of being alone.

In the actual world I am already always alone and it is simply a fact. Yet there is neither any feeling of loneliness nor any need for love because loneliness and love are inevitable attributes of a separate ‘self’. Richard described it perfectly well:

As this flesh and blood body, I am most definitely on my own (unless I am a Siamese twin), but I am not alone. This physical world of animal, vegetable and mineral is the self-same stuff as this body ... indeed this body is the very stuff of this material universe. As this body, I am walking through a magical paradise of veritable similitude. But as an ‘I’ inside this body (either in the head or in the heart), ‘I’ am indeed alone ... ‘I’ am lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning. ‘I’ will do anything in order to end ‘my’ aloneness whilst staying in existence, nevertheless. ‘I’ will invent all manner of psychic adumbrations with which to seek union with and thus create an illusion of ending separation through oneness. In fact, ‘I’ will go to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate ‘my’ very ‘being’ for all eternity. ‘I’ will realise ‘my’ ‘True Self’ and thus gain a spurious immortality and some relative fame or notoriety. ‘I’ desire confirmation, endorsement, recognition and – ultimately – adulation.

‘I’ am a bit of a berk, actually.

There is no ‘me’ inside this body to be alone or to seek unity. With ‘my’ complete demise – ‘I’ as both ego and soul – ‘unity’ vanishes. ‘Oneness’ was merely a concept created by ‘I’ to perpetuate ‘my’ existence as a soul ... now transmogrified into a ‘Timeless Self’.

It is delicious to live freely in this actual world of sensual delight. Richard, List B, No 12

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