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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 16
Only an ego needs to defend its words. I got news for you – I am not enlightened and only enlightened being are without ego. (…) This is simply not true because Richard says he is without an ‘I’ (ego) or a ‘me’ and he certainly does not claim to be enlightened. After all these years of being subscribed to two mailing lists Richard has been writing to, do you really still not know the difference between the extinction of the soul – an actual freedom – and the death of the ego – enlightenment? The difference between the two is the fundamental difference between actualism and spiritualism and not being cognisant of it would easily explain why for you God and a PCE are so easily interchangeable. If you want to become actually free why would you say that ‘only enlightened beings are without ego’? Death of the ego is not on the agenda for an actualist, as it would only lead to ‘self’-aggrandizement. Enlightenment only happened to Richard, the first actualist, because there was nobody who could have warned him of its dire consequences. You know, you are a funny fellow. When I look at the sequence of this thread then it is plain to see that it is you who keeps flogging spiritual beliefs and platitudes in order to prove your case that I am a religious worshipper –
Wouldn’t this be a good time to stop and think, as in reflect, before you dig yourself even deeper into the quagmire of even more spiritual platitudes? Wow, this is a shocking revelation that you don’t even know that actualism is about the extinction of the ‘I’ (ego) and the ‘me’ (soul). Here is what Richard says on the first page of ‘The Third Alternative’ : ‘The day finally dawns when something irrevocable happens inside the skull. In an ecstatic moment of being present, ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul expire. ‘I’ the personality and ‘me’ the being ceases to exist, permanently.’ So if you know that an actual freedom is about the extinction of *both* ego and soul then why did you trot out the spiritual platitude of ‘only an ego needs to defend its words’ in the first place? Extinction of the ego only results in enlightenment and Richard made this clear on the same page from which you quoted yourself –
And Richard often said in hindsight that if he had known in 1981 what he knows today, he could have been able to avoid becoming enlightened and he wouldn’t recommend anyone following his footsteps in this regard. Vis – Richard, List AF, No 60d, 6.2.2005 By the way, given that you have apparently no problem presenting Richard’s words as something you accept as fact, let me remind you that this thread started by you saying that the words I use for a PCE (‘touchstone’ and ‘guiding light’) are those of a religious worshipper –
Here is how Richard describes the role of a PCE is for someone aspiring to becoming free from the human condition –
Can we put this topic to rest now?
Only an ego needs to defend its words. I got news for you – I am not enlightened and only enlightened being are without ego. (…) This is simply not true because Richard says he is without an ‘I’ (ego) or a ‘me’ and he certainly does not claim to be enlightened. After all these years of being subscribed to two mailing lists Richard has been writing to, do you really still not know the difference between the extinction of the soul – an actual freedom – and the death of the ego – enlightenment? The difference between the two is the fundamental difference between actualism and spiritualism and not being cognisant of it would easily explain why for you God and a PCE are so easily interchangeable. If you want to become actually free why would you say that ‘only enlightened beings are without ego’? Death of the ego is not on the agenda for an actualist, as it would only lead to ‘self’-aggrandizement. Enlightenment only happened to Richard, the first actualist, because there was nobody who could have warned him of its dire consequences. (...) It only leads to self-aggrandizement if one does not go all the way and extinguish the soul also. Since you don’t believe Richard’s words about it here is something in your own words from your selected correspondence:
I am stunned that you claim to be an actualist and don’t even understand what an actual freedom from the human condition is even though you have said it in your own words. What makes you say that I ‘don’t even understand what an actual freedom from the human condition is’? – particularly after saying that –
Only an ego needs to defend its words. I got news for you – I am not enlightened and only enlightened being are without ego. (…) This is simply not true because Richard says he is without an ‘I’ (ego) or a ‘me’ and he certainly does not claim to be enlightened. After all these years of being subscribed to two mailing lists Richard has been writing to, do you really still not know the difference between the extinction of the soul – an actual freedom – and the death of the ego – enlightenment? The difference between the two is the fundamental difference between actualism and spiritualism and not being cognisant of it would easily explain why for you God and a PCE are so easily interchangeable. If you want to become actually free why would you say that ‘only enlightened beings are without ego’? Death of the ego is not on the agenda for an actualist, as it would only lead to ‘self’-aggrandizement. Enlightenment only happened to Richard, the first actualist, because there was nobody who could have warned him of its dire consequences. (...) It only leads to self-aggrandizement if one does not go all the way and extinguish the soul also. Since you don’t believe Richard’s words about it here is something in your own words from your selected correspondence:
I am stunned that you claim to be an actualist and don’t even understand what an actual freedom from the human condition is even though you have said it in your own words. What makes you say that I ‘don’t even understand what an actual freedom from the human condition is’? – particularly after saying that –
I said that because my understanding of an actual freedom from the human condition is the extinction of both ego and soul just as you said in the quote above from your selected correspondence:
Yet further above from earlier in our discussion you said:
My understanding of Richard’s enlightenment was because at the time he had not yet discovered that he needed to go all the way and extinguish the soul also along with the ego. Also above you said:
Here it seems very clear that you are saying that an actual freedom is only the extinction of the soul and not the extinction of the ego also. That is why I said you don’t understand what an actual freedom from the human condition is. Thank you for your guidance – blind as you consider me to be I would have blithely gone ahead and immolated my soul without immolating my ego as well and who knows what strange experience would have resulted from doing that. On further consideration however I can’t shake off the impression that this correspondence guided by your inspiration is going round in never-ending circles. I think I will go back doing what I was doing before and use my pure consciousness experience as my guiding light and my load stone in order to know what I got to do to become actually free. Which is what you objected to as being religiously obsessed and which started this whole line of an argument in the first place. Joking aside – there is just no way that an ego can remain intact when the soul ‘self’-immolates – the soul being the instinctual survival passions that give rise to /maintain the ego (the little man/woman in one’s head).
On further consideration however I can’t shake off the impression that this correspondence guided by your inspiration is going round in never-ending circles. I think I will go back doing what I was doing before and use my pure consciousness experience as my guiding light and my load stone in order to know what I got to do to become actually free. Which is what you objected to and which started this whole line of an argument in the first place. Joking aside – there is just no way that an ego can remain intact when the soul ‘self’-immolates – the soul being the instinctual survival passions that give rise to /maintain the ego (the little man/woman in one’s head) in the first place. Very interesting that you originally said ‘I got news for you – I am not enlightened and only enlightened being are without ego’ and now you are saying this: ‘Joking aside – there is just no way that an ego can remain intact when the soul ‘self’-immolates – the soul being the instinctual survival passions that give rise to /maintain the ego (the little man/woman in one’s head) in the first place.’ When you look at how the conversation started it becomes very obvious why I said what I said. To put it back into sequence –
As such you started the discussion with the allegation that using a PCE as one’s touch stone and one’s guiding light was equivalent to ‘altar worship’ and that a PCE was interchangeable with God. You were making the point that actualism is in fact a religion based on my choice of two words – guiding light and touch stone. However, when after several emails I pointed out to you that Richard uses an almost identical description you dropped this line of argument. All that now remained to your argument that I am wrong was my response to your ‘only an ego need to defend its words’ that ‘I am not enlightened and only enlightened being are without ego’. To put this response into context let me show you again how your whole line of argument was based on spiritualist beliefs and platitudes –
You seemingly did not take any notice as you did not reply to this but only insisted on focussing on one of my statements taken out of context. Yet it is precisely because the context of your line of argument was entirely spiritual and because you denied that a pure consciousness experience is something entirely different to a god-experience that I responded the way I did –
Nowhere in the conversation did you demonstrate that you considered actualism as different to the pursuit of enlightenment and therefore I responded both in context and in kind. Had you said ‘only an identity needs to defend its words’ or ‘only an ego and soul needs to defend its words’ then my response would also have been in kind. Now it has been clear from the start that the discussion was about making Vineeto wrong – to you she is a religious worshipper obsessed with PCE (which in your definition is the equivalent to God) and blinded by her passion for an actual freedom (which in your book is equivalent to enlightenment or salvation) – and when this line of argument fell apart you picked the next one. You never responded when I pointed out that for a ‘need to defend’ there needs to be an attack. You also did not respond when I pointed out that this rule wouldn’t even hold water in spiritual circles as I know of several ego-less aka enlightened people who were quite explicit about wanting people to understand their words properly – Jiddu Krishnamurti for instance made a big deal out of people ‘listening’ to him with all their being in order to ‘get’ what he is saying and Mohan Rajneesh once walked out of a discourse and threatened to never speak again because people weren’t listening properly. To say it again for emphasis – if you had said
I would have responded –
In short, if you talk in spiritual terms then this is what I respond to. * On the same topic you recently wrote to No 60 saying that ‘I hate it when she does this and the hate is making me sick’–
If it is of assistance to you, here is what I have observed in myself in regards to facts and feelings –
I am not saying that anything of the above should apply to you – only you can know yourself. I just thought I’d share my own experience with facts and associated feelings as you were contemplating about your own feelings in this situation.
What I’m looking at now is should I even talk to you at all? That doesn’t seem like a good alternative to me because the world is full of people who are not honest including me sometimes. I know that I can just not read what you write and not talk to you and I can go on feeling good and everything will be alright. However, this seems like avoidance to me. Every time I have tried discussing anything with you it has turned into a nightmare with me being made wrong just as you have done this time. Should I just talk to you and treat it as a joke or should I even talk to you at all? Neither one of those alternatives seem right either. Just thinking about sending this is stirring up my feeler so why should I? I guess because I want to eliminate this feeler and looking at it seems better than avoiding it. I’ve tried to pinpoint what it is and hate seems as close as I can get although I’m thinking that there is fear underneath it. What am I afraid of? Authority comes to mind. You obviously wield authority here and you obviously have Richard and Peter on your side so what kind of fair shake can I get going up against the Actual Freedom Trust? Also, you assume a teacher role and you aren’t even honest and don’t know what you are talking about so we can’t just talk as equals because you pretend that you are above me and know more than me when deep down I really think that you are no more than a lying idiot. I must admit I was puzzled as to why you would inform me of the above as these are your feelings and only you can deal with them. The only tentative sense I could make of it is that, given that this is the actual freedom mailing list, set up to talk about how to become free from the human condition, you may want some help as to what to do with these feelings that seem to occur in regular intervals. If you could put aside your notion that I am ‘no more than a lying idiot’ for a few minutes then I can tell you what I did – and what worked for me. At the start of actualism I had to get off my spiritually-fed moral high horse and stop pointing the finger(s) at everyone else and blaming everyone else for my feelings and for what I thought was wrong in the world in order to single-pointedly focus my attention on the human condition *in me*. I had to rethink my notions of ‘right’ and ‘good’ and ‘fair’ because life if neither right nor good nor fair and ‘right’ and ‘good’ and ‘fair’ are simply human-made morals and ethics varying according to culture, religion, and oscillating according to fashion and circumstances. I also had to rigorously question what I considered to be ‘true’ and ‘correct’ because my ‘truths’ were almost all based on borrowed knowledge and the rest was based on instinctive intuition and affective memories. I had to acknowledge that my anger was my anger, no matter who or what had caused it, that my sadness was my sadness no matter which sympathy or compassion for whom might have caused it or who/what had disappointed my expectations, that my desire was my desire no matter what situation or person had caused it to arise, that my fear was my fear regardless of who or what had triggered it. Needless to say that this focussing on ‘me’ also helped me to be rid of any feelings regarding authority as the insights gained from my PCEs allowed me to stand on my own two feet for the first time in my life so much so that I could easily learn from those I wanted to learn from and reject revered knowledge from others without being bothered by feelings of inferiority or pride – after all, feelings regarding authority are all but an ego-soul struggle for power and struggling for power is irrelevant when freedom from my own ‘self’ is at stake. PS: What you call ‘you obviously wield authority here’ is simply me reporting what I found to be the case from my experience and what you call ‘you obviously have Richard and Peter on your side’ is simply that their experiences of actuality and their recognition of facts matches mine (mostly). Life is very, very simple when it is not stuffed up by one’s feelings.
Footnote: 1.) What
is the difference in being obsessed with a PCE or with God? Re: Is something wrong
with my 'PCE'?, 3.8.2006 Vineeto’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust |
