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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 23
Hi Peter Could you check the Hi No 23, I checked the link <http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/library/180-degrees.htm> directly from your post and it worked fine. Should you have any further trouble, try opening the A useful address is also Have fun
Good to hear from you. Hi Vineeto, (is that still your sannyas name? No offence meant I was given the name Nirav. My so-called spiritual backgrounds are roughly the teachings of Mr. Krishnamurti and BSR). We have met on a short occasion in Byron I call it the No 12 incident. Yes, Vineeto was my name in sannyas days and I have decided to keep it for various practical reasons, one being that my original German name is difficult to pronounce in English and I now live in an English speaking country. As you probably know, I had been following Rajneesh and his spiritual teachings for 17 years before I started to apply the method of actualism. The improvements in my life that I achieved with actualism in only one year have far exceeded the meagre results that my assiduous and persistent application of spiritual teachings, therapy and meditation had produced in all seventeen. I am curious as to why your background should be ‘so-called spiritual’ if you have followed the teachings of several spiritual teachers? Personally I have no trouble with declaring that a good part of my life was devoted to a full-on spiritual search and the only reason I could abandon it with such confidence was that I knew by extensive in-depth experience that the spiritual teachings didn’t work. Now it has been this incident that has been a continuous source for me to doubt and redoubt the position I had taken in the matter of evaluating the validity of the method of actual freedom being the continuous running of the question ‘How am I living my life this moment?’ I just only recently (couple of weeks) have been doing this with pure intent and so far I have achieved very satisfactory results. The question you used is different to the method of actualism – which is asking yourself each moment again: ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ – I am not nitpicking here, the difference is remarkable. The actualism question will immediately focus you on to how you are experiencing this very moment, the only moment one can actually experience. The question you are asking is a spiritual question whereby you can easily create a ‘me’ who is ‘living ... life’ feeling good while ignoring or sublimating the ‘me’ who is ‘living ... life’ feeling resentful, angry, sad, etc. The actualist question, if run with pure intent, will leave nothing unobserved, nothing hidden, nothing repressed, nothing sublimated in the interests of ‘my’ gratification and ‘my’ glory. If you ask yourself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and you are sincerely feeling happy in this moment, that’s great. When you are not feeling happy, then you start investigating what was the trigger for the particular emotion you have since you were last happy. You look at the very reasons, why you are not feeling happy in this moment. Usually you don’t need to go back very far, half an hour, a day, at the most a week. The method of actualism is not about unravelling or healing childhood hurts, but is about tracing every single emotion, feeling and belief that you find lurking inside so as to become happy again as soon as possible. You will find that you will also focus on becoming harmless as it is impossible to be happy unless one is harmless – unless one feels God-like, of course, which is where your pure intent plays its part. Running the question – ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ works, immediately – and that, for many, is the scary bit. One actually diminishes and eliminates one’s very identity by removing the problems and feelings that give one’s identity credence and substance. The possibility to start of from the so-called state of Virtual freedom has appeared to be (for me that is) a great way to demolish all kind of self-deluding states where I can be present as an entity in whatsoever form except being present as this flesh blood body system apperceptive of this wondrous world where only malice and sorrow somehow can affect this basic sense of harmlessness and happiness. Hence I agree with the statement that it is essential that I eradicate this malicious habit of I. One doesn’t start off from virtual freedom, in actualism, you start at the beginning, where you are at in this moment. As you continue to investigate what keeps you from being happy and harmless and you eliminate more and more of the spiritual-world and real-world beliefs that trigger you to be malicious and sorrowful, you eventually begin to experience a stage of Virtual Freedom. Virtual Freedom is the stage you reach when you are harmless and happy 99% of your time. Peter has produced an extensive Actualism is so new and so radically different to anything that has been taught as wisdom up to now that it takes persistent reading, re-reading and mulling over particular topics to understand that it is in fact 180 degrees opposite to all spiritual beliefs. For instance, in actualism there is no such statement ‘that it is essential that I eradicate this malicious habit of I’ . To regard ‘I’ as a habit is spiritual-speak for it ignores the fact that ‘I’ am both a social-psychological entity and an instinctual-psychic entity and that the instinctual component of the identity is genetically encoded in each and every human being. To dismiss this genetic component as mere habit is to perpetuate the ignorance of ancient flat-earth wisdom. It is clearly not habit that causes all the wars, rapes, murders, tortures, child abuse, domestic violence, despair and suicide. It is ‘me’ in my totality, the alien entity inside this flesh and blood body, that a sincere actualist aims to eradicate, both the ‘good me’ and the ‘bad me’. In spiritualism one aspires to merely get rid of a ‘malicious habit’ by replacing it with a good habit. In actualism it is understood that all habits, both the good and the bad, and all one’s beliefs and feelings, both the good and bad, are arising out of the same instinctual entity and must be addressed in their totality – without presumption, favouritism, discrimination or prejudice. Because this will always produce the destructive attitude of ‘Fuck you me first’ and it will never allow for ‘You first me second’ which I would say is essential altruism not that I am there but I can see the light of Virtual freedom. ‘You first me second’ is the religious-spiritual moral of ‘Thou shalt be unselfish and thou shalt be rewarded in heaven’. The altruism we are talking about is the act of ‘self’-immolation that has no rewards for ‘me’ except – as Richard reports – the glorious satisfaction of fulfilling one’s destiny for the benefit of this body, that body and every body. Virtual Freedom, the stage where you are harmless and happy 99% of your time, is certainly the first necessary step in the process towards an Actual Freedom from the Human Condition. Security other than the body not immediately in a life-threatening situation or possibly harmful at a certain moment is an illusion we thin skinned animals are extremely vulnerable beings. So from that point of view when bungee jumping better have a good rope likewise when going out parachuting make sure you have a parachute. Yes, it is certainly useful to be sensible and practical when doing any
investigation into the depths of your psyche. In my letter to As the demonstration in Byron Bay has illustrated what fear does in human interaction, I have made it a point to write to No. 12 and tell him that in his words I have a different viewpoint as to how create peace in this world than he has and I have asked him to consider to apologize for his behaviour which by now I label disrespectful. It is not a judgment I know that he did what he did because he is not actual free, this was his cry for help ... or am taking this too serious? The method of actualism is specifically designed to focus your awareness on your own emotions, feelings and beliefs such that you can change yourself, radically and irrevocably. Intuiting or guessing what someone else is thinking or feeling and what are their motivations and beliefs, let alone trying to change someone other than oneself, is a sheer waste of your potential happy and harmless time. Given that you have said you now have ‘a different viewpoint as to how create peace in this world’, you now have the opportunity to apply the method of actualism and turn what can only be a viewpoint at this stage into a verifiable fact – as in becoming actually harmless and happy.
It took a while until I got round to answering your letter. Not only am I very slow with writing letters these days, I also had to reformat and reload my computer, which always puts me back to square one. I will snip out a few of your paragraphs in order that the letters don’t get too long and I will focus on two main issues you have raised. From my own experience with spirituality I know that it needs painful honesty to admit that one has not really managed to become free from their elementary social conditioning (not condition) let alone be free of the much more deeper ingrained conditioning. Ie. Gender conditioning seems to be so much deeper ingrained that many if not all seekers finally will come to the conclusion that there is a fundamental difference between the male and female psyche and that male/female interaction is basically nothing more then a variation on the theme man tries to catch female and female plays ‘hard’ to get but in the end there is some sort of ritual during which man can play is ‘natural’ dominating role and female can submit to that in order to fulfill her ‘natural’ part. This gender conditioning will therefore always either subtly or obviously be intertwining into any relationship be it male</>male, female</>male, or female</>female. Keen readers may conclude that / means the wall that is basically there in any kind of relationship, in other words there always be a sense of separation from the other. The male and female conditioning was the first issue Peter and I investigated when we started living together. To live in peace and harmony was at the top of my laundry list and consequently I was all set to investigate every skerrick of my own conditioning that prevented peace and harmony between us. After years of failed relationships here was a man who offered to investigate with me peace between man and woman and agreed with eager anticipation for the new adventure. The way we conducted our discoveries in each upcoming issue was to weigh what we felt and believed against what we found out to be the facts. It soon became obvious that it was the facts we could both agree on while feelings and beliefs always were prone to discrepancies. In this way I questioned one bit of my female conditioning after the other and I found more and more that the ‘fundamental difference between the male and female psyche’ was comprised of mere beliefs and my social training. I found that all this female identity I had been so proud of consisted of nothing but hot air – everything that my mother and my peers had taught me as to how I should think, feel and act as a woman and all it entailed – my need to be different, my lust for power, my fear of being controlled, my collection of hopes and disappointments and my social role in the ‘women’s club’. What also complicates the investigation is that men are taught what women are like and women are taught what men are like and these images have nothing to do with the facts. As such, one needs to investigate and understand both side of the gender equation, male and female conditioning. Then and only then one can safely observe and understand the animal instinctual gender programming in oneself. When you say ‘man tries to catch female and female plays ‘hard’ to get’, you are exactly pointing to the instinctual role between man and woman – the instinctual drive to procreate that underpins all social conditioning and behaviour, which is indeed different for man and woman. Woman as the child-bearer instinctually looks for security and permanence whereas the man is instinctually driven to spread his semen as far and wide as possible. These gender differences are inherent in everybody – this is the default programming of our instinctual animal software implanted to ensure the procreation, propagation and survival of the species. In order to get to the bottom of this instinctual programming I first needed to observe, then investigate and finally eliminate all of my moral, ethical and spiritual conditioning as to what I had been taught it means to be a woman. When stripped of those attributes of my identity I discovered that I was simply a human being, exactly as Peter was simply a human being, and our only difference is in the plumbing and not the wiring. One of the earliest and utterly delightful rewards of my diligent in-depth investigation into the gender programming was the enjoyment of free and pure sensuous sexual pleasure – unrestricted of guilt and freed from the instinctual animal drive. For that outcome alone it is be well worth practicing the method of actualism. * Now it has been this incident that has been a continuous source for me to doubt and redoubt the position I had taken in the matter of evaluating the validity of the method of actual freedom being the continuous running of the question ‘How am I living my life this moment?’ I just only recently (couple of weeks) have been doing this with pure intent and so far I have achieved very satisfactory results. The question you used is different to the method of actualism – which is asking yourself each moment again: ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ – I am not nitpicking here, the difference is remarkable. The actualism question will immediately focus you on to how you are experiencing this very moment, the only moment one can actually experience. The question you are asking is a spiritual question whereby you can easily create a ‘me’ who is ‘living ... life’ feeling good while ignoring or sublimating the ‘me’ who is ‘living ... life’ feeling resentful, angry, sad, etc. The actualist question, if run with pure intent, will leave nothing unobserved, nothing hidden, nothing repressed, nothing sublimated in the interests of ‘my’ gratification and ‘my’ glory. If you ask yourself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and you are sincerely feeling happy in this moment, that’s great. When you are not feeling happy, then you start investigating what was the trigger for the particular emotion you have since you were last happy. You look at the very reasons, why you are not feeling happy in this moment. Usually you don’t need to go back very far, half an hour, a day, at the most a week. The method of actualism is not about unravelling or healing childhood hurts, but is about tracing every single emotion, feeling and belief that you find lurking inside so as to become happy again as soon as possible. You will find that you will also focus on becoming harmless as it is impossible to be happy unless one is harmless – unless one feels God-like, of course, which is where your pure intent plays its part. Running the question – ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ works, immediately – and that, for many, is the scary bit. One actually diminishes and eliminates one’s very identity by removing the problems and feelings that give one’s identity credence and substance. You were correct in your perception that I did not use the actual freedom method as is suggested by Richard being asking the question ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive<H?A(I)ETMOBA>. ‘(a sequence of 9 words). Rather I was running a variation on that namely: ‘How am I living my life this moment’ <H?A(I)LMLTM> (a sequence of 8 words). For a while I found myself indulging in linguistic nitpicking (what the fuck can the difference be here?) also there was a sense of ‘she thinks she knows better huh’. Clearly I must accredit myself for having been correct in applying the first part of the sequence H?A(I). But then I realized that merely you had corrected my false sense of being in agreement with the actualist point of view as to the suggestion to apply a method to create peace. After having overcome my initial resistance to experiment in order to check out whether I could take benefit of the mentioned difference I initially decided to experiment with both alternatively. Indeed the effect was stunningly more effective if I run the 9-word-sequence. And then I asked myself how come this difference in effect? Which you mainly pointed out as in what I now call the ‘Richard sequence’ the risks of self-aggrandizement or self-gratification are being dealt with effectively. So comparing <A>< LMLTM> (in which A stands <for how am I> to <A>< ETMOBA> It became clear that even scientifically it can be proven that indeed the pointed out dangers are present in the rest of the 8wordsequense(the mine one): <L> <*MY*> <LTM> where the left star is representing the self-aggrandizement and the right star self-gratification thus looking at the 9 word sequence one can see that these (**) risks at least are minimized to a maximum degree in this sequence. <E> <TM> O <B> <A> in other words this 9character sequence is better period^ note^: I’m not saying sequence of 11 symbols as I have left out the question mark <?> and <( )>^^ as these are merely a way to put certain emphasis on the parts of the sequence that gave rise to misinterpretation from my part. So I have no trouble at all in admitting that I did apply the method incorrectly as I know that my intent was definitely in agreement with the suggested goal/direction/purpose of actualism being ‘creating peace on earth’. Hence your feedback has not been interpreted as a rejection of the 8word sequence (the mine one) but rather been received as a free trial out of a new more effective program (free (of charge) likewise as is the AF-screensaver which I have not yet downloaded because currently I don’t run an antivirus program). As such I express my gratitude for bringing this to attention. So far so good. It looks like that you are quite enamoured with playing with the letters of the sequence of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ As an actualist, I am more interested in which way applying the method has so far brought any changes in your life, how ‘indeed the effect was stunningly more effective if I run the 9-word-sequenc’ and what insights into ‘the Stygian depth of [your] own psyche’ you have gained. Actualism is, after all, about actual change in one’s life, a change that results from slowly, slowly becoming aware of one’s social and spiritual conditioning, be it Dutch or English, male or female, Baptist or Sannyasin, Krishnamurtiite or geotheistic. I am curious as to what you have discovered about yourself and what tricks of the psychological entity called No 23 you have come to know in yourself.
What adventure, what delight.
Two days ago you commented to Richard on my post to No 16 –
... me thinks that there is fair risk that this list is moving into the bullshit zone and if that is so I think Vineeto may be credited for heading into that direction with No 16. I thought actualism at least was a non-pamper list but her emphatic response to No 16 very well ‘understandable’ fears with regards to Cultism is to me almost sickening. Jesus Vineeto how can you buy this kind of crap that No. 16 is selling you? Then in a response to Richard’s letter on that topic you wrote – Richard – I cannot speak for Vineeto, of course, but why is it that discussing in detail any issue that anyone may come up with is to be construed as being to pamper them and, by implication, should not be entertained on a Mailing List set-up to investigate and explore all that is standing in the way of freedom ... unless I am misunderstanding what you are saying here, of course. Besides ... why is it that I am not pampering you in responding to any or all the issues you raise? Maybe I better pick it up from here. As you point it out that you cannot speak for Vineeto which I agree with, I leave that up to Vineeto if she would like to respond to that because it is indeed meant for Vineeto I admit this could be come confusing but on the other hand I have decided to treat this list indeed as a public forum and as such my opinion {I think Vineeto may be credited for heading into that direction with No. 16. I thought actualism at least was a non pamper-list} can be regarded as off the mark. <snip> I do not see myself pampered in the way you respond to me I think there is a rather mature kind of interaction going on I fully respect your space I have no need to compete or argue with you. When you say that your ‘opinion {I think Vineeto may be credited for heading into that direction with No 16. I thought actualism at least was a non pamper-list} can be regarded as off the mark’ does that mean that your question is now answered? Or have you simply removed the question because you thought it to be inappropriate (‘off the mark’)? I do not know what you consider to be the criteria for the difference between ‘pampering’ on the one hand and for ‘a rather mature kind of interaction’ on the other. Maybe you could give me some examples.
I do not know what you consider to be the criteria for the difference between ‘ pampering’ on the one hand and for ‘a rather mature kind of interaction’ on the other. Maybe you could give me some examples. What is the difference between pampering and a rather mature attitude? As I already stated that the opinion about you being pampering was of the mark I do not recognize the question as a vital one. Sorry Vineeto a vital question would have been: What do you mean with going to the Bullshit zone? And what kind of authority do you assume me to be? As you already know the vital questions I am supposed to ask you, I will
leave any further conversation to No 23 and
To No. 12: To me the turning point in my faith in actualism as a group of people that are really concerned about creating peace on earth came when there was no response from any of the actualist crew to No. 12’s question about as to whether there had been made an improvement on the AF-method by adding to the sequence ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ the sequence ‘on our (patafotk update <our> this) planet Terra’. So this remains unanswered and I have my reasons for taking this question as an honest question and as such one might expect it would have been honoured with a sincere reply however not so. So indeed this is disappointing and in my opinion reflecting an attitude which I hesitantly would label arrogance. So... ... Richard, indeed a simple yes or no would have sufficed. To me this lacking of response has been greatly undermining your credibility and almost put you in the gallery of the rest of the guru’s and non guru’s. As you seem to have abandoned your ‘faith in actualism as a group of people’ , you indicate that actualism for you is a belief system. For those who understand that actualism is a method to be applied in order to become free from the Human Condition of malice and sorrow, faith is of no concern. Actualism is a practical do-it-yourself method devised to investigate and discern what is silly and what is sensible which then eliminates the very need to have faith, trust and belief. In order to find out the facts about ‘the improvement of the AF-method’ devised by you, you will have to apply it sincerely and diligently on yourself and then report the results. As it is your method, you are obviously the one who should try it out and you will be the arbiter as to whether this method works better than the original actualism method. I am in no position to answer your question as I use only one method and I know that it works for everyone who uses it with pure intent. Why should I experiment with a different tool, particularly as it has not even been tested? It is up to you to prove that your new method works and that it works better than the original method. Here are some hints to find out if it worked –
The original actualism method works perfectly to tackle these and many other issues of the Human Condition and if you want to know if your method works equally well then you will have to find out for yourself. In actualism you are on your own, as is everyone else.
No 32: Hello, First of all I want to tell you that I hate every word that ends in -ism. Every time I pronounce such a word my body produces all kind of negative reactions such as shivering, cold and sweeting. To No 32: Maybe you had not read Richard’s post to No 23 before you filed your complaint –
Why don’t you check out the following words for the same physical effect – actinism, algorism, altruism, amorphism, anabolism, anatocism, asterism, Atticism, auto-eroticism, biomagnetism, biprism, bradyseism, catabolism, chemism, chemotropism, daltonism, diachronism, diamagnetism, dichronism, Dynamism, ebullism, echoism, embolism, empiricism, endomorphism, epimorphism, erotism, galvanism, geomagnetism, geotropism, haptotropism, heliotropism, heteromorphism, heurism, homoeomorphism, homomorphism, immediatism, isochromism, isomerism, isomorphism, jism, journalism, magnetism, mechanism, melanism, metabolism, metachromism, metamerism, metamorphism, metasomatism, monomorphism, monosyllabism, morphism, motorism, neologism, nephalism, nudism, optimism, organism, parallelism, paramagnetism, pentaprism, photorealism, phototropism, pianism, pleochronism, polymerism, polymorphism, polytypism, pragmatism, prism, professionalism, putanism, rheumatism, satellitism, seism, sensism, tourism, transformism, traumatism, trichroism, triolism, ventriloquism, vicarism, vicinism, vocalism, volcanism, voltaism, voltinism, volunteerism, vulcanism, witticism (not to be mixed up with dimwitticism). 22 out of 93 mmh not a bad score but nevertheless, Vineeto, could you please provide the meaning of the lacking ism’s so that we all can stick to dictionary meanings. I’d call this a rather inventive though kind of elaborate way of showing some sense of humour and indeed if you, No. 32, have any ism-allergy (which I find quite understandable btw), this may be an antidote for it. I found the list that was supplied quite interesting hence my effort to bring some more clarity into this ism-stuff. Maybe there is little bit of overdoing in it but admittedly it has been done rather thorough (well you know this is the German way perhaps). 71 out of 93, you have been quite successful. I have used the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, also known as the Oxford Talking Dictionary, available only as CD or annual subscription on line. Unfortunately the available online Oxford Dictionary is not as comprehensive as my CD. A lot of ism-words are Latin or Greek in origin and if you are really interested in their meaning, you might be able to deduct it by taking them apart and look up the syllables ... or buy the Oxford CD as it comes in quite handy for all sorts of communication purposes. I am not going to provide all the meanings for the words because the topic of the post to No. 32 was his personal antagonism against -isms. I subsequently provided words that ended with -ism which contained no characteristic of ‘currents’, ‘theory’, ‘belief, system, knowledge, education, future, special, great, better’ to show that the ending -ism cannot be generalized as he did. As for ‘ism-allergy (which I find quite understandable btw)’ – I found all of my psychological allergies worthy of investigation because a psychological allergy is just another word for an emotional reaction to the world as it is and any form of antagonism is bound to prevent me from being happy and harmless. * ... witticism (not to be mixed up with dimwitticism) ... of the journey to Actual Freedom, Virtual Freedom, PCE, ASC, ‘self’-sacrifice * dimwitticism, the thinker and the feeler, ‘I’, narcissism of Enlightened Ones ... YEP I did my homework didn’t I. Peter coined the word ‘dimwitticism’ and it has its roots in the Australian slang-word dimwit, which can be translated as dull-witted. He could apply for the word to be entered into the new edition of the Oxford dictionary as it is a very useful term for the foolishness that passes for wisdom and Truth and is mindlessly repeated over and over again. The world is full of dimwitticisms.
For example, following my extensive investigating into my emotional problems with authority, an insight revealed the root cause – my belief in a disembodied Higher Authority. Once I realized, without doubt, that the existence of a God by whatever name was nothing but a commonly held belief and not a fact, the whole range of emotional charges around authority – any authority – disappeared completely, never to return. I described the process of this realization in Peter’s Journal –
A while ago Vineeto you used the term ‘disembodied authority’. I looked into that for a while and I came to find that this might be the issue at large why with what human beings basically are struggling. What generally we do in order to avoid taking responsibility for our own ‘personal power’ ... I was talking about taking responsibility for every action in my life, i.e. my words and deeds, which is something completely different to ‘taking responsibility for our own ‘personal power’’. Modern self-love preachers like Oprah Winfrey espouse to love yourself, to empower yourself, to take back your power, to assert yourself, and so on, and this process only attempts to shift one’s identity from being powerless towards being powerful. In actualism I don’t attempt to gain or take responsibility for my own ‘personal power’, because power is in itself a feeling and an emotion-based concept. In actualism I became aware of my feelings and thoughts and I took responsibility in that I made it my single-pointed aim to become free from my malice and sorrow and that included the fervent need to either follow or fight authority figures, be they flesh-and-blood or disembodied. And just to head off an objection at the pass before it breaks loose – it is eminently sensible not to violate the authority of the law and police of the country you are in. ... is projecting a portion of that into an authority figure and next disembody that authority in such a way that this authority can no longer be questioned/ approached in a way that there can be dialogue between the questioner and the authority figure. What I meant by my belief in a disembodied Higher Authority was the notion that there is a Somebody or Something that is the supposed arbiter of the human-made values of good and bad, right and wrong. An example of a ‘Somebody’ is a God or Goddess, by whatever name, a mystical Jesus or Buddha, a dead Rajneesh or Krishnamurti, and so on. An example of ‘Something’ are material things that are often revered and deified such as Mother Earth, the Universe, the moon or the planets, Energy, Chi, Intelligence or faceless amorphous forces such as the Government, Globalization, Materialism, and such like, that are the usual fuel for conspiracy paranoia. During the time I struggled with my feelings about authority figures I did not ‘disembody that authority’ but I came to realize that I simply wanted to have the same power that the authority figure seemed to hold. The very reason I made a person into an authority figure was because they had something I wanted, either material as in riches or worldly position, or non-material as in spiritual powers, blissful altered states or a booked seat in spiritual heaven. In practicing actualism, my solution was not to have a ‘dialogue between the questioner and the authority figure’ (for instance a dialogue between Rajneesh and me) but I looked into my own psyche in order to find out why I felt compelled to make a person into an authority figure in the first place. And just to head off another objection at the pass before it breaks loose, I am not talking about a person who is an authority as in an expert in a particular field of expertise. If I find someone who is an expert in computers or accounting for example, then I am all ears because I may learn something that I did not know and can try out for myself to see if it works and is useful. With regard to this I like to let God outside of that as an example I rather look at what I see is happening through the effect i.e. the television has. If I may ask, why would you rather ‘let God outside of that as an example’ – or any other disembodied authority figure for that matter? Why not start with the obvious and most basic issue of authority ‘with what human beings basically are struggling’? The same process is happening watching i.e. a political leader on TV (is watching the image <which has become a symbol of an authority>). We accredit him with worldly authority (which is assigned power/ responsibility) hence creating disembodied authorities hence draining our own reasonability to be present on a political level (the powerful me as a social identity). Just a short thought that came to mind. A person that is alive is not suddenly disembodied because he or she appears on television. If you see the Dalai Lama on TV then that is an image of the flesh-and-blood Dalai Lama and if you see the Dutch queen on TV, that is an image of the flesh-and-blood Dutch queen. Further, it is not the image that ‘has become a symbol of an authority’ but ‘I’, the identity, project ‘my’ feelings of authority on to the actual flesh and blood person and relate to him or her with feelings of admiration, awe, devotion and/or envy, hate and resentment. You seem to be suggesting that you should go out and become an admired/resented authority figure as in becoming ‘a political leader’ yourself in order to resolve your emotional conflict with authority. Then when you become a political leader, yet another ‘powerful me as a social identity’ will come along and will want to dethrone you because they too like to rile against authority. Have you ever contemplated on the fact that the whole system of democratic government is an adversarial system consisting of competing ruling and opposition parties, forever in conflict and never in harmony? And just to head off another objection at the pass before it breaks loose, I am not saying a dictatorship is better because at least a democracy offers a watchdog against endemic outbreaks of corruption. The actualism method, however, is designed to do the opposite of blindly following or thoughtlessly riling against authority – you become aware of, investigate, understand and become free from the feelings of admiration, awe, devotion and/or envy, hate and resentment in your own psyche – then you are free to see the flesh and blood fellow human being bereft of your own emotion-based projection of authority and you are also able to see the facts as opposed to simply carrying on believing what everyone else believes underneath the ‘self’-centred feelings of power and powerlessness. Now that I am my own authority, deciding what is silly and sensible, using
the common and practical intelligence of the human brain, I can see that an assigned and elected political leader is
nothing more than someone doing his or her job in the complex administration of a country just as a clerk, a farmer or
scientist is doing his or her job in the running of their business. Personally I found ‘to be present on a
political level’ unnecessary because a lot of other people are doing their job in running the country as best they
can in the circumstances. I also found that, as But if you are sincerely interested in improving the lot of your fellow human beings, I have yet to hear of a better contribution that any one person can make towards the betterment of the human species than for that individual to prove that it is possible to eliminate their own feelings of malice and sorrow.
Footnote: 1) The offerings were made as it came to me that Peters believe in actualism is based on the premises that Richard is the one and only free of the human condition. I have accepted in the beginning this as a possibility however this is no longer acceptable for me as it would really narrow down my current belief system where there is room for the so-called immortal Soul. Not of course as I being it separately yet it is us who have to discover wether this is true or not. As I sense a Soul quality in that what is calling
itself the behaviour No 22, I respond to that from a quality called No 23 (Sannyas name) love also No 23 to No 22, 17.7.2001 Vineeto’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust |
