How long was it for you to dispense with the haietmoba for a ‘wordless’ approach? And do you think a haietm or even ‘how am I feeling?’ could work as well?

The moment I fully committed myself to the aim of actualism – the extinction of my ‘self’ in toto, ego and soul – the method became an ongoing wordless approach.

So, do you still employ the haietmoba?

Of course, a wordless attentiveness is most times operating … once you make the effort to switch it on it is nigh on impossible to switch it off again, and it would be silly too. Nowadays being attentive to how I am experiencing this moment of being alive is a delight and not the effort it used to be in the beginning.

*

Sometimes (like No 60) I find the whole haietmoba tiring. No 37 claims to be using a wordless approach but he has not giving us any details so I don’t know what exactly he is doing. I am determined to dig, but sometimes I wonder if my shovel is just to heavy for me to wield. I just can’t comprehend how you and Peter became virtually free in a scant 2 years doing this.

Yep, it’s all about the strength of one’s intent and commitment to the task at hand. Once I comprehended what was at stake it was all systems go. To merely try the actualism method for a year or two in order to see if anything happened was never an option for me.

Which probably describes why No 23, then No 60 and now me are not reaping the full benefits that the af method can provide. I’m still holding back, not wanting to commit to another possible ‘rabbit chase’. Compared to the zeal and hours of time I spent meditating, praying, contemplatively reading scripture, and chanting, my ‘practice’ of af method has been pathetic. Nonetheless, merely removing spirituality from my life and half-assedly paying attention to my emotions has been helpful already.

I found that it was useful to remind myself that what I was doing was going in the opposite direction to everyone else and because of this I found it is far more productive to pat oneself on the back for what one has already achieved in terms of becoming happy and harmless.

Change happens one step at a time. There was much involved in extracting myself from the resinaceous world of spiritual beliefs – abandoning my spiritual tribe, many of my friends and acquaintances, quitting my job, losing my customary social entertainment. Such was the change that it took some time to fully digest and integrate and for the consequences to fall away.

Then one morning I woke up and realized I was neither hurting about my loss nor could I remember what I was supposedly missing, and that was the moment when I realized I was ready for the next challenge whatever it might be.

Once you take the first step in the right direction on the path out of the human condition, each of the following steps one needs to take becomes apparent along the way.

*

I also wonder about the fact that you and Peter were virtually free around 1999 and seemed close to actual freedom. Yet 5 years later and no dice.

My explanation is – and there is really no precedent to this direct route of becoming actually free via avoiding enlightenment – that it was relatively easy to get rid of my negative feelings such as anger, resentment and sadness, the freedom from which resulted in a virtual freedom, while the good emotions such as compassion, sympathy, empathy, loyalty and belonging to humanity at large are far tougher nuts to crack and as such take far longer to identify, understand and become free of.

So, do you think it’s best to ‘go after’ both the positive and negative emotions or mostly focus on the unpleasant ones at first?

Whichever one is preventing me from being harmless and happy right now. Having said that, I found that putting being harmless first meant that I initially became aware of feelings such as irritation, anger, resentment, frustration, blame and so on.

*

Have the last 5 years been a stalemate? No changes?

A stalemate? Not at all, although sometimes, when I grow impatient, it may feel that way.

Do you still grow impatient? Or is that the past?

Yes, I do. I am bound to as becoming actually free is the overarching passion to which all other instinctual passions have become deferential. Yet each time when I experienced a bout of impatience I have come to realize that it never serves to speed up the process, on the contrary, impatience, if left unchecked, can fester into doubt and throw me off the wide and wondrous path. So I have learnt to recognize the symptoms of impatience earlier and quicker in order that I can nip them in the bud more easily before the feeling takes over entirely.

What remains is the determination see it through and the confidence that an actual freedom is bound to happen simply because ‘I’ do no longer have a choice in the matter.

*

And what about the only other people that seemed to be near a virtual freedom? Where the heck is Alan, Mark, Gary? Dead, insane?

You will have to ask them yourself. I only know of what they have written to the list.

Ya, I knew you’d say that. I have contacted their email but no response. I guess if they ‘abandoned’ af they would at least have sent a one message warning back to the list, so I can only assume things are going well with them.

Yep, that’s what I think too. Whatever it is they got from practicing actualism has, according to their posts, improved their lives and allowed them to be more happy and harmless than they were before coming across actualism.

*

Whilst it is understandable to look for allies on the way,

It’s not that I’m looking for ‘allies’, but more that I’m looking for some basic statistics of the af method working for someone besides the members of the AF Trust. I don’t think that is unreasonable at all.

It’s not a matter of being reasonable or not, it’s a matter of common sense. You’ve got to work with what you got. And, as I said before, the best way of verifying with 100% certainty that the method of actualism works is to either remember a PCE or to evoke a PCE by the intensity of your enquiries into the human condition. When you have the clear goal of becoming free from malice and sorrow, it is you who assesses your own success, initially by the benchmark of others who have trod the path if necessary and by comparison with your life before you started on the path, but ultimately by your own pure consciousness experience of the already existing, and always existing, peace on earth.

*

… particularly when one takes on the task of questioning *all* of the so-called wisdom of humanity, actualism remains a do-it-yourself-by-yourself business and the desire for allies, friends, collaborators and such like is yet another of the ‘self’-perpetuating instinctual passion to be recognized, understood and disempowered.

Nonetheless, you make an excellent point here and I will look out for this.

Now, that I tasted life without the need for allies, friends, collaborators and such like I wouldn’t have it any other way. There is such joy, freedom and dignity to be able to stand on one’s own feet, to say or not to say what I know to be actual and factual, even if most people in the world disagree – and they do.

1.2.2005

For me, a vital drive has been the – instinctually driven – searching for the ultimate achievement...

Can you expand on ‘instinctually driven’. Do you mean that having experienced what is possible, there ain’t no other high – where do the ‘instincts’ come in?

With pleasure. I have spent wonderful hours on the balcony the other night, watching the sky and listening to the different sounds of the night while contemplating about all the different instincts that I have encountered and learnt to understand on the path to freedom. So this is what I have come up with:

Fear – We all know it at nauseam; it includes trickery, cunningness, numbness, confusion, escape, denial, excuses, guilt and beliefs in all kinds of good (helpful) and bad (harming) spirits. And, of course, there are panic, terror and good old dread and the escape into enlightenment. But fear is also the doorway to courage, thrill and excitement to reach closer and closer to one’s destiny.

Aggression – Besides physical attack, aggression has many more subtle nuances: blaming, resentment, verbal abuse, nagging, boredom, being the victim, arrogance, clever-clever, competition, self-destruction and depression. I made use of this instinct for becoming free as a bloody-mindedness, persistence, not to ‘let the buggers get me down’, smugness and refusal to run with the crowd.

Nurture – It took me a while to wade through the ‘good’ feelings and emotions down to the basic instinct of nurture instilled to preserve the species. All the romantic movies thrive on nurture to tug at one’s heart strings, both with the heroic man and the loving but helpless woman. The willingness to kill and die for love for country, justice and religion is continuously adding to the 160,000,000 killed in wars this century alone. Further you find this instincts thriving on all kinds of NDA beliefs and action by attempting to ‘save endangered species’, ‘care for Mother Nature’. When leaving the fold of humanity, I found that I am moving away from this instinct of nurture – the collective belief in the ‘good’.

It is useful for freedom as the pure intent to have peace-on-earth not only for me but for humanity as well and to sacrifice my ‘self’ for that goal.

Desire – With desire we collect things and strive for power and improvement for ‘survival’ – ceaselessly and endlessly on the go. In the spiritual world this desire is turned into the search for enlightenment, the ticket to immortality and power in the ‘other-world’.

Now I come to the point that I was making: ‘For me, a vital drive has been the – instinctually driven – searching for the ultimate achievement...’ I experienced it as the instinct of desire that has driven me to search for freedom, to clean myself up, to be the best ‘I’ can be.

Richard said in his correspondence:

Nothing worth anything is gained without extending oneself way beyond the norm. One has to want freedom like one has never wanted anything before. I say: rev up desire until one feels that one must surely implode ... and rev it up some more. Unless freedom is one’s number one priority in life – amounting to an obsession – one will always live a second-rate life. Richard, List B, No 19

It has been, up until now, a passionate enterprise and the passions (instincts) have served their purpose very well. Nevertheless, once it became blindingly obvious that ‘I’ had reached the end of what is possible, this instinct to be the best I can be was left with no goal to go for. As I see it, all the instincts could be used as a perfect vehicle to reach to this point of 99% and now they have to be left behind in order that I can become actually free. Living in Virtual Freedom is a perfect way to enjoy the ordinary, easy, delightful and perfect day-to-day life, without the swings of highs and lows. Vineeto, List AF, Alan, 30.3.1999

*

Whilst it is understandable to look for allies on the way,

it’s not that I’m looking for ‘allies’, but more that I’m looking for some basic statistics of the af method working for someone besides the members of the AF Trust. I don’t think that is unreasonable at all.

It’s not a matter of being reasonable or not, it’s a matter of common sense.

aye, but sense ain’t that common. The ability to wield it is, but the actual using of it is kinda rare methinks.

You are sure right – common sense is nowhere to be found when beliefs and passions dominate. Yet it is remarkable how much common sense has been applied in the practical achievements of life such as engineering, medicine, science and safety despite those cherished beliefs and passions.

*

… particularly when one takes on the task of questioning *all* of the so-called wisdom of humanity, actualism remains a do-it-yourself-by-yourself business and the desire for allies, friends, collaborators and such like is yet another of the ‘self’-perpetuating instinctual passion to be recognized, understood and disempowered.

nonetheless, you make an excellent point here and I will look out for this.

Now, that I tasted life without the need for allies, friends, collaborators and such like I wouldn’t have it any other way. There is such joy, freedom and dignity to be able to stand on one’s own feet, to say or not to say what I know to be actual and factual, even if most people in the world disagree – and they do.

ya, there are no friendly faces (accept No 32’s – lol) when coming out of the af closet. This will be worse than when I came out of the atheist closet. I can see an atheist friend of mine ‘so your goal is to have no self and emotions ... um ... what about love? ... well I don’t know about this ...’.

If you talk about this mailing list, I’d say there is more than one friendly voice although the objectors are usually far more vocal than those who simply get on with the job of freeing themselves from their beliefs and other aspects of their identity. As for ‘coming out of the closet’ I found that other than this mailing list I generally prefer to keep my mouth shut unless someone specifically asks me about actualism.

No, I don’t know about this, but it’s scarred as hell.

Yes, it is sometimes scary as hell when you leave your familiar social environment behind and embark on a journey into your own psyche. But it is also very exciting, thrilling, enlivening, entertaining, satisfying and rewarding to recognize and abandon bag-packs full of one’s own emotional rubbish, to become free of the burden of one’s social conditioning and to unleash strap after strap of instinctual ties.

The effect is immediate and a sure gauge if one is still on the right track.

6.2.2005

I have to get this attention up and going then all my haietmoba (lol, even the ‘shorthand’ version is long) being too long stuff perhaps will become redundant.

The issue, as I see it, is how vital your interest is to find out how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and how vitally interested you are in changing how you experience life right now.

Yes, instead of spiritual detachment, I need a vital interest.

Peter and I discovered that the spiritual training of detachment dulled down the vital interest in exploring the feelings that prevented us from enjoying this moment of being alive. Consequently we made a schematic in order to illustrate the dichotomous relationship between spiritual teachings and actualism.

*

If you are not vitally interested then the length of question is irrelevant. If you are interested then you will not only want to ask the question but you will make the effort to sincerely answer the question.

I do think it does come down to one’s intent and speaking for myself, my keeping a distance from actualism with factualism poured water on any ‘vital interest’. So now I’m jumping in to af with both feet, finally.

What you call ‘factualism’ may well have been the period you needed to establish a prima facie case for actualism – abandoning a sufficient number of your beliefs in order to acknowledge certain facts as to what it is to be a human being.

*

I sometimes get a sense from reading you, P, and R that you three have a real sense of ‘gaiety’ about you. That would be a welcome change for me.

Oh, yes, resentment of having to be here was one of the first issues I tackled and had to abandon because it is obvious that a grumpy person is locked out from ever experiencing the magical wonders of actuality.

I just again noticed today how I let silly things bother me. If I’m aware, I can change that. Also, to me, being an actualist means that I can use what I find works to remedy the situation. There will be some personal differences in my and your journey, while being generally similar, in the end.

Whilst social and gender conditioning may slightly differ according to people’s cultural upbringing, the instinctual passions are common to all. Given that the solution to the human condition is, in a nutshell, to step out of one’s ‘self’, I don’t see how there can be major differences in a journey that goes from fiction to fact, from being driven by feelings to being sensible and from ‘self’ to no ‘self’. You may also find Objection No 26 an interesting topic to read.

*

It funny that some find af to be ‘clone-like’ (not saying No 32 does, for I think he was joking, but others do). Really, af seems to be nearly on the opposite side of the fence.

What the objectors find ‘clone-like’ is the fact that everyone, when they have a ‘self’-less experience, find themselves in the very same actual world that Richard describes so eloquently.

True, a PCE is considered by an experienced actualist as objective experience. This is sensible to me, but I need to have my first adult PCE to be sure (I’ve had the excellence experiences to provide some evidence, but I don’t consider it conclusive yet).

A PCE is by its very nature an objective (as in sensate) experience and not merely considered as such by ‘an experienced actualist’. A pure consciousness experience is a ‘self’-less experience – there is no psychological/psychic identity present to have a subjective (as in affective) experience.

*

Additionally, a fact remains a fact whoever speaks it and common sense is equally universal for those able to recognize and apply it.

Yes. Unfortunately, postmodernism has warped some people’s mind into thinking that objective facts are questionable at best or even impossible.

I don’t know much about postmodernism except that it is mainly used to describe a particular style of art and architecture and a fashion of deconstructing literature. However, I know the phenomenon you are pointing to very well because it is the basic tenet of Eastern Mysticism and the most important prerequisite and main ingredient for the delusion of spiritual Enlightenment.

I am reminded of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with someone who is currently practicing and teaching dissociation. After a preliminary chit-chat about the weather and mutual acquaintances we came to his favourite topic – the concept that all that exists is only a product of one’s mind, that nothing exists in actuality. I warned him that the conversation would prove to be futile as he and I live in completely different, incompatible worlds but he insisted on continuing our conversation.

I pointed out that he was sitting in a material chair, that exists as an object independent from his thoughts, beliefs and feelings, that his feet firmly were placed on the timber decking that existed well before he entered the veranda, that I was here before he came and supposedly created me with his thoughts, beliefs and feelings, that the cup of coffee I made for him has the flavour it has because the coffee beans have been roasted and infused with hot water and not because he is ‘creating’ the flavour, and so on.

Undeterred he changed tack by saying that after he left, our conversation will be but a memory whereupon I responded that he is shifting the topic because what we are talking about is what he is experiencing right here, right now. Whatever I said that the physical world surrounding us was actual, he kept insisting that he and I were creating what we saw with our thoughts and that if it was not for our thoughts, we would not be here nor would there be the house in which we were sitting nor a the garden outside. However, when he recognized that he couldn’t convince me to see the world his way, he abruptly left without as much as a good bye.

The strange thing was that I was left feeling that someone had just tried to seriously mess with my mind, and it felt like an almost physical twist of my brain. I then remembered that I had had a similar feeling when I first came across actualism, although then it was me trying to twist my brain in order to understand what Richard was saying. At that time I had myself passionately believed many weird concepts, spiritual and philosophical, including the belief that ‘I’ create at least some of the physical world ‘I’ live in but actualism made eminent sense to me and this sense gradually turned my upside-down mind the right way up.

It’s not for nothing that one ultimately needs to experience the actual world in a PCE in order to fully comprehend the diametrical difference between spiritual/philosophical beliefs and actuality and to be able to withstand the manipulations of those trying to pull one back into the fold.

*

Once you take the first step in the right direction on the path out of the human condition, each of the following steps one needs to take becomes apparent along the way.

If one is perceptive, yes. I do wonder if anyone can really do this work effectively though.

You can stop wondering because I know of quite a few very ordinary people who can, myself included.

I meant everyone.

Everyone can who sincerely wishes to become free from the human condition.

*

I think some need more direction (frankly I’ve been looking much of my life for just that, but I think I can dispense with that, and do what I need to do on my own).

There are, of course, plenty of experiential reports from practicing actualists available that will be of assistance but you will find that direction comes from your own commitment and dedication to do whatever is needed to eventuate peace on earth. No goal, no direction.

yes there is enough but I yells, ‘no you’re rejecting the wisdom of the ages, of millions, for a few quacks!’ I don’t buy this I’s warning anymore for many reasons.

Personally, I found it easier and less confusing to understand those warnings for what they are – feelings of fear, doubt, hesitation, suspicion, etc.

*

I am bound to as becoming actually free is the overarching passion to which all other instinctual passions have become deferential. Yet each time when I experienced a bout of impatience I have come to realize that it never serves to speed up the process, on the contrary, impatience, if left unchecked, can fester into doubt and throw me off the wide and wondrous path. So I have learnt to recognize the symptoms of impatience earlier and quicker in order that I can nip them in the bud more easily before the feeling takes over entirely.

Ah ... have a passion for H&H but not impatience. That is a good distinction.

No that is not what I meant.

While I can see how your meticulous replies can be tiring to others, I more and more see it as a welcome sign of thoroughness.

Good, because thoroughness is all it is. I found that if I wanted to get to the bottom of my problems, I had to be thorough, much more thorough than I had been in my spiritual explorations and much more thorough than I had been in all of the therapy groups I had done. In order to do so, I had to dust off my capacity to think and reflect, something which I had left with my shoes outside the gate. I then had to learn how to think something through from beginning to end and, when distracted, pick up the thread again, get back to the point and continue on, until I eventually unearthed the facts of the matter in question.

I became aware of the many tactics I employed in order to avoid a thorough investigation particularly when the topic was scary or uncomfortable – feeling tired, wanting to blame, getting confused, feeling numb, playing dumb, forgetting the subject, confusing the issue, seeking a distraction, becoming emotional, and so on. It needs a good deal of persistence and intent to bypass all those ‘self’-created obstacles … but then again I was thoroughly fed up with suffering and thoroughly fed up with being angry. It was clearly time to change.

Though, being human, I think you sometimes misunderstand parts of some posts.

I am only too happy to discuss any part of your posts you think I have misunderstood – clarity is one of the benefits of written communications.

*

Ya, there are no friendly faces (accept No 32’s – lol) when coming out of the af closet. This will be worse than when I came out of the atheist closet. I can see an atheist friend of mine ‘so your goal is to have no self and emotions ... um ... what about love? ... well I don’t know about this ...’.

If you talk about this mailing list, I’d say there is more than one friendly voice …

True – on this list. T’is only a list though, not the flesh and blood bodies with clever entities all around me (and inside me) in my actual life.

Ah, when you say ‘t’is only a list though’ you are indicating that people on this list are something other than flesh-and-blood bodies.

Personally I know that I am flesh and blood and the same is the case for everyone writing on the mailing list – there is simply no other way these words can appear on my screen every day. When I write, I write to actual people, I don’t just reply to words appearing on my screen, even though I don’t know what the writers look like, whether they are African, Asian, Indian or Caucasian, male or female, young or old.

To regard and treat people on this mailing list in a different way to those one meets in person just because one does not see their faces or hears their voices is a dissociative trick that many people on the net seem to engage in. Haven’t you noticed that these ‘faceless’ people can evoke the same intense emotional reactions via the written word as someone you can see and touch can do when talking to you directly? Haven’t you received useful, in fact life-changing, information on this list that only a flesh and blood human being can pass on to another flesh and blood human being?

To separate this mailing list from the rest of your life is to miss the opportunity it provides.

30.4.2005

I remember Vineeto saying she is ‘100% certain’ that there is no God or afterlife. I remember thinking then (and still basically thinking the same thing) that 1) it is impossible to ‘100%’ prove a negative. Of course I don’t believe in Gnomes or trolls (internet trolls are a fact of course and as an actualist I don’t consciously engage in any kind of believing), but that does not ‘100% prove’ that they do not exist. It is of course very improbable that Trolls or a God exists. Don’t get me wrong, I find the notion of believing in God, and afterlife, or any spiritual belief to be unobjective, nonfactual, and a silly waste of one’s precious time. I understand that the notion of anything apart from this physical universe is unconceivable in a PCE, but that still does not seem to warrant Vineeto’s ‘100% certainty’ argument (which seems strangely fundamentalistic in the manner of fundamentalist Christianity to me).

I see that you have addressed your question to Richard but as you have mentioned me, I’ll respond as well.

In one of my early discussions with Richard I asked him: ‘How do you know for sure that there is no life after death?’ His answer was simple and straightforward. He said something along the lines of ‘there is nothing (no entity) inside this body that could survive physical death, because there is only this flesh-and-blood body’. In an instant I could see that what he said made sense.

As a then-spiritualist I had left the option open that ‘something’ could survive physical death but that ‘something’ that I imagined would survive was clearly some aspect of the entity inside and separate from the physical body – someone or something I called soul, Presence, spirit, ‘Being’, or whatever. I never had any doubt that my physical body is mortal and yet all spiritual teaching has it that ‘you are not the body’ because the body is only a temporary abode, they maintain that ‘who you really are is a consciousness separate from the body’, a consciousness that is part of, or ‘at one with’, the ‘Universal Consciousness’ and which can unite with the universal Consciousness either before or after death.

Consequently when Richard told me that there was no entity inside his body, I knew that this was the end of my hope for ‘life’ after death. If one can get rid of one’s entity in toto before death, it sure ain’t something that survives death.

Why did I take Richard’s report that there is no alien entity inside his body at face value?

It was obvious to me that he genuinely experiences what he reports. There is no contradiction in his body language, no obfuscation in his words, no evasion of delicate topics, and not a skerrick of resentment, anger, sadness or condescendence. Within a few meetings I could determine that what Richard said made a lot of sense, whatever topic he talked about, which cannot be said about any of the enlightened people I had met, and I had met quite a few in my time. The spiritual gurus rely on their magnetic energy of Love and Compassion, their authoritative Wisdom, their Ancient metaphysical knowledge while Richard had none of these affective properties. Instead of the affective power play I knew so well from the spiritual gurus, Richard encouraged me to utilize my own common sense and native intelligence in order to assess his reports.

The other thing that gave credence to his reports was that Richard said he had been enlightened himself and managed to get out of it, in other words he could give a personal-experience-insight into the whole realm of spiritual enlightenment. As such I could easily see that he knew far more about the ins and outs of enlightenment than any master or wannabe I had ever met or read for that matter.

As for my belief in God, it fell apart in bit and pieces and I have written about it on various occasions –

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. A Bit of Vineeto

The insight that hit me like a thunderbolt catapulted me into a PCE and with the ‘self’ (and ‘my’ passions and beliefs) temporarily absent it became suddenly obvious that the belief in a God, by whatever name, is part of the passionate defensive armour of ‘me’. In a PCE neither agnosticism, Popperism or any other philosophical abstract thinking have any relevance because the facts of what it is to be a human being become immediately clear, sensately and sensibly. With no passionate entity present it is patently clear that God has no existence in actuality – that he/she/it is nothing other than a universally-sustained and collectively-endorsed belief that billions of lost, lonely and frightened ‘beings’ have a vested interest in keeping in existence.

In a pure consciousness experience a lot of things of what it is to be a human being become stunningly clear whenever I focussed my attention on these topics. Just as when a background noise suddenly stops and its very absence makes you aware of how much the noise had infiltrated your experience, when the ‘self’ and its incessant ‘noise’ is absent, it becomes obvious how ‘I’ constantly live in a fear-filled world of ‘my’ own making and as a consequence ‘I’ am wont to seek succour and solace in beliefs – no matter how inane they may be.

A PCE is not a matter of degree – it is a fundamentally different experience of the world – one directly experiences the actuality of the world as-it-is and of people as-they-are. Not only does the grim reality that ‘I’ normally experience disappear, but so too does the imagined panacea to grim reality – the belief in a Greater Reality (God by any other name). A PCE gives you an outsider’s view for the very first time, temporarily free from the very entity who shapes and distorts this body’s experience of the world. You could compare it to previously knowing only the village you live in and its surrounding hills and suddenly being in a position from where you see the planet from outer space.

Contrary to No 81’s firm belief and persistent repetition, my 100% certainty about a god-less universe and a non-existent afterlife has nothing to do with dogmatism but rather it is the result of deliberately and consistently cracking the firmament of my beliefs and prizing apart the stronghold of the ‘self’-centred worldview that is the inescapable result of the human condition. This process has allowed me to have many direct experiences that God has no existence whatsoever outside of human imagination. And once you know a fact as a fact, that’s the end of having an opinion or a belief or a degree of uncertainty about it.

I always liked a story told about Galileo’s, which, although unconfirmed, helps to make the distinction between fact and belief so very obvious. The story goes, when Galileo was forced to recant his radical discovery that the earth moves around the sun and as such is neither stationary nor at the centre of the universe, he whispered, ‘eppur si muove’ (‘and yet it moves’). His later books spirited out of Italy to the Netherlands confirm that despite overwhelming opposition Galileo was 100% certain of what he had seen and understood – repeatable empirical observation contradicted ubiquitous ancient belief. It is interesting to note that it took until 1992 before the Church formally acknowledged its error in condemning Galileo – that it took so long speaks volumes for the recalcitrant nature of spiritual/religious belief.

My certainty of the fact that matter is all there is and that there is no consciousness outside of matter is the result of sensible contemplations and discussions, cemented and verified by many ‘self’-less experiences. This combination has allowed me to whittle away at my former conditioning and persistently question my intuition, to recognize that what most people believe and preach is not based in fact and by doing so to understand beyond doubt, that the magic of this universe lies in the fact that matter, in this case the human brain, is capable of not only reflecting but also of reflecting on itself.

It is the inherent quality of matter itself that makes it capable of such wondrous magic, just as it is inherent to the stuff that is this planet that it continues to manifest itself as the ginormous variety of terrestrial and aquatic fauna and flora visible on its surface crust. Life is so incredibly miraculous in operation, whichever direction you look, and when you take your ‘self’ out of the centre, i.e. when ‘you’ are no longer the most important person in ‘your’ universe, then the vibrancy of the non-passivity of matter itself becomes vividly apparent and tangibly obvious. As if by magic, all conceptualizing of a duality of dull/dead matter one side and a Transcendental Consciousness on the other side fall in a heap and I am no longer separate from all that is happening. I am matter and as matter I am eminently capable of not only being apperceptively aware but also of reflecting upon the fact that consciousness is an inherent quality of matter at a certain stage of its evolution.

*

I don’t remember you saying exactly ‘I’m 100% certain there is no God.’ (as you may have guessed this does go into the Karl Popper view that 100% certainty is impossible for certain topics/questions). I remember you saying something to the affect of ‘As for myself, I am certain there is no God or afterlife.’ Now to me that is not exactly the same statement as Vineeto’s. It seems to me that you did not entirely dismiss the Popperian view that some things cannot be known with 100% certainty. To me what you were saying is that you are sensibly certain (not 100%/godlike/ absolutic certain) that there is no God or afterlife. Speaking of the God and afterlife debate, I can easily see the ridiculousness of the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving Being. As for an ‘afterlife’ I suppose their could be some small probability for a physical/ energetic ‘survival’ of some aspect of human consciousness. It would not be ‘spiritual’, but rather a different manifestation of this physical universe. Now, since I don’t engage in believing, I am not proposing that I believe this (not only do I not, I never will again), just saying I don’t see the possibility or even need for an actualist to say with ‘100%’ certainty that such a course of events is impossible. Of course, if my identity ever self-immolates, perhaps I would see things differently. Yet, I presently think I’d reject this ‘100% certain’ notion even after I had attained an actual freedom (or a virtual freedom for that matter). I’d simply say: ‘As for myself, I am sensibly certain that there is no God or afterlife, and that is that.’

As for ‘the Popperian view that some things cannot be known with 100% certainty’ – Karl Popper’s proposition was that, logically, nothing can ever be known exhaustively by the ordinary way of knowing, which in itself is absolute claim that according to his philosophy can never be known exhaustively. Apart from this logical impasse, his theories have, by and large, been refuted and discarded by more than a few people years ago and for a down-to-earth non-philosopher it is obvious that some things can definitely be known for sure – for instance the fact that everyone will die one day.

To distinguish fiction from fact I found the simple scientific principle useful, which demands that legitimate theories must be falsifiable. You might be familiar with the old debating trick where one side is asked to disprove the existence of something that doesn’t exist: ‘Prove to me there isn’t a green-eyed monster under this table. It is an invisible, odourless monster, and you can’t tangibly sense it – it has no mass. But it’s THERE! Now prove to me it isn’t there!’ To pose non-falsifiable hypotheses is the hallmark of a pseudo science.

The claim of the existence of God or an afterlife is equally pseudo science because it is a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Have you noticed that it is impossible to prove that God doesn’t exist? By God’s very nature He/She/It is beyond and above sensual perception. And life after death cannot be proven wrong because dead people don’t talk … and yet their ‘souls’ are reported to make people’s hair stand on end.

Addendum: I want it to be perfectly clear that I do not consider the workings of Vineeto’s mind to be similar to a ‘Christian fundamentalist.’ Rather, one particular statement of hers (i.e. being 100% certain of no God/no after life) seems to me to be similar to some from of dogmaticism – and Christian dogmaticism is one that I’m deeply familiar with personally.

Aside from Richard’s writing, Peter and Vineeto’s explication of becoming free from the human condition, is second to none (that is to me of course). I know all too well how list members can twist statements to fit there all too apparent agenda. Ultimately, one’s exploration of actualism involves rigorous self-honesty, integrity, and finding out for oneself. There is no excommunication in actualism for honest disagreement on our way to freedom. Perhaps, in freedom, all major disagreements will dissolve.

Yes, they do dissolve because, contrary to the affective/psychic world, which is intuitive and therefore an affective experience that is unique to everyone, the actual world is the same for everyone – it is actual and can be sensately and sensibly experienced as an actuality by everyone once the ‘self’ steps out of the way.

*

A remark on your recent post to No 81, because it’s on the same topic –

To No 81: To believe in god, afterlife, or any sort of dualistic spiritual energy is a belief and therefore silly in my book. Nonetheless, I don’t claim 100% certainty on those issues because I remain skeptical that anyone can know whether or not there is a spiritual realm with 100% certainty. Quite frankly, I see no need for an actualist to be 100% certain. I’d take reasonably/sensibly certain as being quite enough. Which is what I am at this point.

You may reconsider when you think about how many things in life you already take with 100% certainty to be factual. The very process of actualism involves the incremental diminishing of the habit of believing what others tell you to be truth (or Truth) so as to enable to flourish uninhibitedly one’s innate curiosity and naiveté to discover for oneself the facts of the matter.

8.5.2005

Given that you have a conversation with Richard on the same topic I took the liberty to cut parts of the post in order to keep it more succinct.

I remember Vineeto saying she is ‘100% certain’ that there is no God or afterlife. I remember thinking then (and still basically thinking the same thing) that 1) it is impossible to ‘100%’ prove a negative. (…) I’d simply say: ‘As for myself, I am sensibly certain that there is no God or afterlife, and that is that.’

In one of my early discussions with Richard I asked him: ‘How do you know for sure that there is no life after death?’ His answer was simple and straightforward. He said something along the lines of ‘there is nothing (no entity) inside this body that could survive physical death, because there is only this flesh-and-blood body’. In an instant I could see that what he said made sense.

It does make sense.

Given that the topic of the thread is about 100% certainty, for me, making sense of a report contradictory to my previously held belief was the starting point to questioning what I had previously held to be true or right or good.

*

… when Richard told me that there was no entity inside his body, I knew that this was the end of my hope for ‘life’ after death. If one can get rid of one’s entity in toto before death, it sure ain’t something that survives death.

I likewise have no ‘hope’ in an afterlife.

Given that the topic of the thread is about 100% certainty, to abandon hope in an afterlife is equally not enough to deliver 100% certainty. When I met Richard, even though I was a spiritualist at the time, I had a somewhat agnostic stance in regards to a life after death – I thought that it did not matter much either way. Yet only when I experienced in a PCE that ‘I’ as ‘being’ do not exist in actuality – and therefore this ‘being’ is nothing at all that would survive the death of this body as an actuality – did I know with 100% certainty that any investment in a life after death is definitely a waste of time and energy.

To my surprise it turned out to be an enormous relief to finally and irrevocably abandon any notion of a ‘bank account in heaven’ as I put it at the time, i.e. accumulating kudos for karma, God, the value of my soul, an imaginary accrual of good behaviour and right beliefs for an invisible judge. I discovered that the deepest seated beliefs were the ones I had taken on board as a child – the Christian heaven and hell, and although I was not aware at the time, they were only transformed into more ephemeral religious /spiritual/ mystical/ philosophical beliefs of Eastern persuasion.

Only by unreservedly abandoning all belief in non-material realms was I able to unreservedly say yes to being here in this physical universe.

*

‘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!’ A Bit of Vineeto

Of course Godists will say God is what is outside of the edge of the universe or say he’s one with energy or some other unfalsifiable statement. It’s silly, I know, but one can’t ‘prove’ them wrong either.

The point to remember is that, as it is the spiritualists who propose something that cannot be sensately experienced, then the onus is on them to prove it and it is irrelevant how numerous – or vocal – the believers are because what is a fact and what is a belief has nought to do with numbers of believers nor the degree of passion with which others hold to their beliefs.

*

‘This insight presupposes, of course, that there is no place other than the physical universe, no celestial, mystical realm where gods and ghosts exist.’ A Bit of Vineeto

Ah, a presupposition which is not a fact, now is it. It is a reasonable/sensible presupposition of course.

Yes, a presupposition, as I was describing how my belief in God fell apart before I had a PCE that provided the experiential certainty that God only exists in human imagination. As you would know, it is possible to have insights whereby something that was not clear before suddenly becomes crystal clear and such an insight can provide sufficient certainty to abandon one’s previous mindset and be open to new ways of thinking and new ways of acting. For me the insight that the belief in God was nothing but a passionate fear-driven belief meant that I started to become vitally interested in being here at this moment in time in this place in physical space – an essential prerequisite to being able to become attentive to how I am experiencing this moment of being alive.

*

And once you know a fact as a fact, that’s the end of having an opinion or a belief or a degree of uncertainty about it.

So, you do consider their statement: there is no god – a fact? I can see someone saying to really have no opinion/belief would be to say: There is no evidence of a God and no possibility for experiencing/believing in one in a PCE. However to say that I know 100% that there is none, would be going farther than necessary.

I know for a fact that there is no God because I know for a fact that God is a construct of ‘my’ fear and hope, of ‘my’ passionate imagination. No imagination – no God, no passion – no God. It is essential to go this far in order to become free of the human condition in toto.

By the way, I’m not aware of myself having any ‘doubts’ about there being a god. I just don’t think I/one can rule it out 100% /absolutely. However, god is a horrible belief and humanity would have done better to never have had it in the first place.

To not be able to ‘rule it out 100% absolutely’ is another way of saying that you have doubts. The belief in a god, any god, is indeed a horrible fear-driven belief for which people kill each other every day, and when I came to realize and fully comprehend this fact I made the decision that it was time to bring it to an end, in me.

*

My certainty of the fact that matter is all there is and that there is no consciousness outside of matter is the result of sensible contemplations and discussions, cemented and verified by many ‘self’-less experiences.

It takes either some serious guts or naiveté to be 100% sure in one’s experiences like that – even ‘self’-less ones. I definitely don’t have the naiveté for that yet, and I may even be lacking the guts – but I think I have those.

Yes, naiveté requires guts because you are very often seen as a fool in the eyes of the mostly cynical world. What I found was that both naiveté and courage grew with my successes with the actualism method – what other people think and feel about me is of no importance when I am genuinely happy and harmless.

*

It is the inherent quality of matter itself that makes it capable of such wondrous magic, just as it is inherent to the stuff that is this planet that it continues to manifest itself as the ginormous variety of terrestrial and aquatic fauna and flora visible on its surface crust. Life is so incredibly miraculous in operation, whichever direction you look, and when you take your ‘self’ out of the centre, i.e. when ‘you’ are no longer the most important person in ‘your’ universe, then the vibrancy of the non-passivity of matter itself becomes vividly apparent and tangibly obvious. As if by magic, all conceptualizing of a duality of dull/dead matter one side and a Transcendental Consciousness on the other side fall in a heap and I am no longer separate from all that is happening.

Yes, all the actually existing properties normally ascribed to ‘spirit’ are actually part of the inherent nature of matter: like being dynamic for instance.

Yes, and the properties normally ascribed by spiritualists to matter itself are anthropomorphic and imaginary, such as qualities of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, friendly or hostile, beautiful and ugly, natural and unnatural, sacred and profane, etc. Why some people have problems with the fact that actualism is diametrically opposite to spiritualism is well and truly beyond me!

*

… his [Karl Popper’s] theories have, by and large, been refuted and discarded by more than a few people years ago and for a down-to-earth non-philosopher …

This is just it. RP and you (and me) are not philosophers and yet others expect you all to write like them. Someday, a professional philosopher will be an actualist, and there writing will probably be ‘more convincing’ for those like No 81. Actualism is still in its cradle, but I know for an undisputable fact that it is increasingly making me happier and more harmless.

Not only is actualism not a philosophy but it will not bring any tangible increase in one’s happiness and harmlessness if people choose to treat it as such. The only thing that will convince philosophers of all persuasions to get off their butts and do something about the human condition in themselves is when the failure of their particular philosophy in their day-to-day living becomes apparent to them.

*

The claim of the existence of God or an afterlife is equally pseudo science because it is a non-falsifiable hypothesis.

Ding Ding Ding. Yes, if someone wants to cop out and say ‘I just have faith’ or ‘I trust my ASC’ then they can swim in there non-objective, unscientific, and nonsensical beliefs/feelings. However, they have no basis whatsoever in considering the belief in ‘god/afterlife’ to be objective, sensible, testable hypothesises.

Have you noticed that it is impossible to prove that God doesn’t exist?

Actually, has not that been my whole point about the 100% certainty thing? That is what I’ve been getting at.

I don’t follow – first you agree that non-falsifiable theories ‘have no basis whatsoever in considering the belief in ‘god/afterlife’ to be objective, sensible, testable hypothesises’ and then you turn around and ask me why I am 100% certain that a non-falsifiable hypothesis is pure fiction?

I am certain because in a PCE, where the one who is capable of believing in such childish hypothesis is absent, it is as plain as one’s bellybutton that God and an after-life are nowhere to be found.

To say it again for emphasis – if people choose to imagine something that cannot be falsified, such as a non-tangible invisible inaudible odourless ‘being’ and an invisible intangible space-less realm for dead souls to dwell in then it is up to them to prove its existence.

*

And life after death cannot be proven wrong because dead people don’t talk … and yet their ‘souls’ are reported to make people’s hair stand on end.

Curiously, what do you think is going on when someone hears a sentence in a family members voice after they die? I think it has something to do with the brain and imagination/feelings, but just curious.

I know from my own experience that my psyche was capable of spooking me with all sorts of fantasies that appeared very real at the time. You may also find the following conversation of interest as well as the selected correspondence on the Psyche.

*

Perhaps, in freedom, all major disagreements will dissolve.

Yes, they do dissolve because, contrary to the affective/psychic world, which is intuitive and therefore an affective experience that is unique to everyone, the actual world is the same for everyone – <snip>

I think this statement may just be about the most confronting thing about actualism to the self. I can feel myself balk at the notion of ‘one actuality’ for everyone, even though I intellectually agree. I mean this is a central part of the AF process, to dismantle all beliefs/emotions, leaving only the experience of the actual. If one has not had any PCE’s this will sound sick, scary, and very disturbing. If one has had PCE’s then one knows that not only will this bring perfect happiness, but perfect harmony as well.

Yes, it is stunning to say the least – it is what makes actualism 180 degrees opposite to all spiritual beliefs. There is only one actual world and it is right here under all our very noses, accessible for anyone who dares to leave their ‘self’ behind.

When I came across actualism, I was adamant that I would only question my spiritual beliefs if I was sure that the actual freedom Richard was talking about was universally factual. This query as to what is universally factual became so intense that something was bound to happen – and one day the structure of my belief system cracked and allowed me to see and experience the world as it actually is, devoid of the veil and distortion of ‘me’. I knew then and there that this actuality has indeed always been here and that it was universally factual because it does not depend on anyone’s belief – in fact, as long as the PCE lasted, all my beliefs and values or anyone else’s beliefs and values did not exist at all.

*

No 81 might be right when he says there is no difference in sensible certainty and 100% certainty, though I still think I’d choose my words differently. Sensible certainty implies the openness to revision.

To say that ‘sensible certainty implies an openness to revision’ puts sensible certainty almost in the same category as being agnostic about the issue. In the same vein, I always find it fascinating that spiritualists laud the notion of being ‘open’ and yet they remain utterly closed with regard to questioning their own beliefs.

Though, since no experience could convince me of there being a god, perhaps that would be 100% certainty, but still that doesn’t seem quite right to me. I know god cannot be proven or dis-proven, and I simply leave it dead as rank superstition. However, I’d think it would be theoretically possible to prove if some intelligence survives death, but people have been attempting and failing at that for some time, so there is no reason to believe it will ever be substantiated, and hence I leave that too as rank superstition.

As a PCE is the experience that matter is not merely passive which includes the experience that intelligence is an inherent quality of the human brain (matter), in such an experience it is also possible to clearly see that a disembodied intelligence (a non-material intelligence by whatever name) is nothing but a fairy tale. This is what I mean when I say that matter/energy is all there is.

14.5.2005

And once you know a fact as a fact, that’s the end of having an opinion or a belief or a degree of uncertainty about it.

So, you do consider their statement: there is no god – a fact? I can see someone saying to really have no opinion/belief would be to say: There is no evidence of a God and no possibility for experiencing/believing in one in a PCE. However to say that I know 100% that there is none, would be going farther than necessary.

I know for a fact that there is no God because I know for a fact that God is a construct of ‘my’ fear and hope, of ‘my’ passionate imagination. No imagination – no God, no passion – no God. It is essential to go this far in order to become free of the human condition in toto.

Ok, is it possible to become virtually free, without going that far? Whew, I can see/feel the grip that radical/universal skepticism has on me right now even though I’m skeptical of skepticism as well!

Even though I had considered myself an atheistic spiritualist – I had thought that not believing in the Big Daddy in the Sky type God qualified me as an atheist – I was surprised at the burden that fell off when I gained the experiential certainty that there is no such thing as a Divinity or Presence or Principle or Absolute let alone a Higher Intelligence in the actual world – such things only exists for those who choose to believe in them. When I finally and irrevocably abandoned my belief in all things spiritual and metaphysical I was astounded how enormously relieved I was to be freed from the ever-present underlying fear that this divine ‘Something’ is constantly passing judgement on me, freed from a nagging suspicion that ‘Somewhere’ ‘somewhen’ there will be a Time of Reckoning with reward and punishment, and freed from the comforting yet debilitating feeling that a higher Power is in control of this universe, tying me to the Divine Laws of right and wrong, good and bad.

I can whole-heartedly recommend getting rid of both belief and disbelief and to risk finding out with 100% certainty that all gods are a fiction of human imagination. The benefits are tangible and palpable in that one then becomes irrevocably free of all of the God-fearing feelings that have dominated, and continue to dominate, all human thinking and feeling.

*

The claim of the existence of God or an afterlife is equally pseudo science because it is a non-falsifiable hypothesis.

Ding Ding Ding. Yes, if someone wants to cop out and say ‘I just have faith’ or ‘I trust my ASC’ then they can swim in there non-objective, unscientific, and nonsensical beliefs/feelings. However, they have no basis whatsoever in considering the belief in ‘god/afterlife’ to be objective, sensible, testable hypothesises.

Have you noticed that it is impossible to prove that God doesn’t exist?

Actually, has not that been my whole point about the 100% certainty thing? That is what I’ve been getting at.

I don’t follow – first you agree that non-falsifiable theories ‘have no basis whatsoever in considering the belief in ‘god/afterlife’ to be objective, sensible, testable hypothesises’ and then you turn around and ask me why I am 100% certain that a non-falsifiable hypothesis is pure fiction?

Non-falsifiable theories are not factual or testable, but that does not make them 100% false, is my point.

Non-falsifiable theories are pseudo-scientific fantasy, and the very quality of them being non-falsifiable makes such theories mere products of imagination, i.e. ‘100% false’. Here is how Reginald Firehammer (from the autonomist website you considered excellent) defines Pseudo Science –

2.) For an explanation of the principle of falsifiability see http://theautonomist.com/autonomist/science.html …

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