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Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List with Gary
Hi Gary, You wrote to No 46 some time ago – It hardly seems necessary to go into the specifics to a greater extent or to re-invent the wheel. But suffice it to say that the essence of the method is to thoroughly examine and investigate everything that gets in the way of being happy and harmless. This includes every affective experience, emotion, feeling, and belief. Just to give an example: in the morning I was on the way to work and my partner, in saying ‘goodbye’ to me, stated ‘I love you’ and lightly caressed my hand. In response to this lightly spoken endearment, I experienced a feeling of sadness mingled with regret. The feeling hit me between the eyes, so to speak, and I was interested to look into that feeling and see what I could find out about it, as it would reveal much about ‘me’. One of the things that I came up with was the realization that love in any form is always accompanied by sorrow and sadness, as for instance when love is lost. I think I also experienced a momentary feeling of pity for my partner whose expressions of ‘love’ to me are usually not reciprocated, perhaps in they are in tender expressions of caring but certainly not in word, as I never speak the ‘love’ word anymore. I think there was an irrational belief operating in me at the time that went something like this: ‘What kind of partner are you after all – you should be telling your partner that you love her’. One could easily substitute any number of words in the place of ‘partner’ such as ‘son’, ‘daughter’, ‘friend’, ‘co-worker’, etc. The irrational belief that I ‘should’ be expressing love to these people caused me to feel momentary sadness, regret, and guilt. The longer I observe how I am in relation to other people, the more I find that whenever another person evokes an affective reaction in me then there is some kind of invisible thread or emotional hook also present on my side. I remember a visit from a close relative and how at first I felt guilty for not returning the love, affection and excitement that was offered to me. It was as if a web of invisible, yet sticky vibes was cast out to catch me into feeling loyal to and connected with her. These bonding strings might well be presented as a generous offer of love or friendship, yet – often unbeknownst to the person himself or herself – this offer always contains a request for returned feelings, a demand for support and an obligation for further loyalty. In other words, love is never unconditional, it is always given with conditions and it is only received subject to conditions. In the situation with my relative I was able after a while to understand the nature and source of my guilt by observation and investigation and then, by being free of my feelings of guilt I was able to give her my full attention and care. While we spent time together we were able to talk as fellow human beings, swap stories about how each experiences life and what each had found out so far about the business of being a human being. As for a one-to-one man-woman relationship, I found that the sorrow that you described as being associated with love is due to the inevitable expectation of returned favours and feelings. Love by its very nature cannot stand by itself. Love always needs a giver and a receiver, someone who loves and someone who is eager to be loved. In my ‘past-life’ love-relationships, my dreams of how I wanted to live life were automatically intertwined with the man I loved – as a woman I gave him the responsibility for my happiness and I expected him to do the same. (Then I am also jealously guarding that he is not happy without me!) Soon after I met Peter I found it vital to investigate this dream because it caused me to be miserable whenever we were apart and made my life difficult whenever we were together. When I looked into the love-dream that I had cherished all my life, I was faced with a rather shocking choice – either keep my dream and my identity as a woman and a lover and remain struggling, frustrated and unhappy, or drop all my high-flying ideas and ideals, grow up and take responsibility for my own life. This also meant that I had to put my becoming free from the human condition as number one on my laundry list – above my relationship. That very choice made me not only autonomous for the first time in my life, it also released Peter from the burden of ‘my’ unfulfillable expectations and emotional needs. Nobody else is responsible for my becoming free and nobody is standing in the way of my becoming free. * There was also another part of your post that I can well relate to. You wrote – I myself have been beset by bouts of anger and aggression which are most disturbing. When this happens, I tend to go through periods where I castigate myself, doubting the method, but then invariably rally and re-commit myself to the goal of self-immolation. It is not an easy thing to rid oneself of malice and sorrow. If I practice the Actualism method diligently, it seems like I invariably run up against pockets of malice deep in the bowels of ‘me’ that are still there, lurking in the shadows. It doesn’t mean that the method doesn’t work, and it doesn’t mean that I am misapplying the method. I think in some ways it is evidence that the method is working because these pockets of malice and sorrow then become available for an intelligent investigation. Clinging to malice and sorrow is not the way I want to live. I also occasionally discover pockets of anger, sorrow and fear, sometimes triggered by what I watch on television but mostly occurring for no particular reason at all. The onset of menopause with its sporadic hormonally triggered emotional spurts is yet another great opportunity to observe bouts of intense feelings that don’t have any other rhyme or reason than to show that ‘I’ am still around. For me attacks of anger or grumpiness pass quickest, whereas sorrow can hang around longer sometimes. Just the other day I had trouble shaking off a deep sadness about the senseless slaughter between human beings, past and present alike and the fact that there is no end in sight. I was reminded of a conversation I had with Richard three years ago on the topic of ‘my’ connection with humanity that runs bone-marrow-deep. He wrote –
‘Is one really going to abandon that which produced one …?’ My occasional bouts of intense feelings give evidence that I have not yet abandoned ‘that which produced me’ but I can also see that I have come a long way since I started on the path to freedom. The more experience I gather the more it becomes clear that belonging to humanity through love and fear, malice and sorrow, is not the ‘way I want to spend my life’, as you say.
In October of last year you wrote to me on the topic of relationships. At the time I had nothing much to add to what I had already written, so I left it at that. However, some incidents in the last few weeks have given me an opportunity to gain some more insight into how I am in relation to other people, so I have taken up the thread of our conversation. You wrote at the time – * The longer I observe how I am in relation to other people, the more I find that whenever another person evokes an affective reaction in me then there is some kind of invisible thread or emotional hook also present on my side. I remember a visit from a close relative and how at first I felt guilty for not returning the love, affection and excitement that was offered to me. It was as if a web of invisible, yet sticky vibes was cast out to catch me into feeling loyal to and connected with her. These bonding strings might well be presented as a generous offer of love or friendship, yet – often unbeknownst to the person himself or herself – this offer always contains a request for returned feelings, a demand for support and an obligation for further loyalty. In other words, love is never unconditional, it is always given with conditions and it is only received subject to conditions. This is an important observation you are making, as you are pointing not only to the feeling on your side but also the reciprocal ‘hook’ evoked by another person in you. I have seldom thought of it that way, but of course a relationship is a complex emotional attachment between two or more people, with feelings reciprocated among and between the participants to the relationship. Perhaps the crucial thing is not the specific feeling involved but the fact that an emotional connection of some kind has been made. It may be a feeling of ‘friendship’ or it may be a feeling of passionate ‘love’ but nevertheless an ‘affective reaction’ (as you described it) has taken place and an emotional relationship of sorts, perhaps even rudimentary, has been formed. It has also struck me how little this ‘relationship’ has to do with the facts of a situation and how much it has to do with fantasies and imaginings of various sorts. This is particularly clear in marital unions, which are often formed for the most neurotic of reasons. But even in everyday forming of friendships, you might say, between people, there is a strong dose of imagination involved in one’s making of a friend, because I am often forming an image of the person I am in friendship with and am not relating to the actual flesh-and-blood person. I also realized, somewhat after I responded to No 38’s post to me on the same topic, what an enormous step it is to question and investigate these relationships, and in particular the type of ‘love’ relationship that he was talking to me about. For me to tell him, and this list, that the word ‘love’ is not something I tell my partner is tantamount to proclaiming myself to be loveless, something regarded perhaps as a fate worse than death. However, it is impossible for me to imagine being unmoved to some degree by the syrupy feelings of warm affection, nurture, and what is commonly called ‘love’, in the same way that it is impossible for me to imagine what it would be like to live the rest of my life never ever getting angry or annoyed again. Nowadays I hardly notice ‘me’ as an affective identity interfering whenever I relate to people in day-to-day affairs. When I go out to work or chat with the neighbours I am pleasantly anonymous, nobody really knows what I think or feel about life and the universe, and I am simply what I am and what I do – a fellow human being chatting about the garden, a bookkeeper, a customer standing in the queue in the post office or being served at a coffee shop. It therefore came as somewhat of a surprise when I recently found an emotional ‘hook’ in my living together with Peter. I was contemplating about what exactly is standing in the way of ‘self’-immolation and found a bit of an affective identity in action – the ‘me’ who cherished the cozy corner I had in living together peacefully and delightfully. ‘I’ as an identity feel noticed and understood with Peter, he knows the happy ‘me’, the quizzing ‘me’, the puzzled ‘me’, the impatient ‘me’, he knows about ‘my’ aims and fears, ‘my’ quirks and wonderings. And this cozy relationship will certainly cease to be when I become free because then ‘I’ who is doing the relating will cease to be. I explored this particular ‘hook’ on which my identity hung at first tentatively, then more boldly, knowing well that at any time I could discover the core of it and be lost. As part of this investigation I chatted to Peter about my explorations and a few days later to Richard, just to make sure that I would not succumb to the temptation of ‘forgetting’ a topic so close to the bone. My persistent inquiry triggered a pure consciousness experience and with astounding clarity I experienced myself as completely separate from Peter, two flesh-and-blood human beings not at all affectively or psychically connected in any way. It was utterly amazing and magical that two complete strangers – as in not psychically connected – get to interact with each other in utter intimacy. In such intimacy there is no ‘me’ trying to pull the strings, no ‘me’ thinking or feeling about ‘me’ in relationship to the other, and a fresh, unmediated and direct experiencing happens on its own accord. This PCE confirmed that my holding onto a cozy relationship was nevertheless my identity in action. Although my relationship with Peter is founded on felicitous feelings only and I live with him in perfect peace and harmony, I clearly could see that ‘I’ as an identity was preventing something far, far superior to any psychic or psychological connection – an exquisitely delightful direct intimacy with a fellow human being. A couple of days later, when I checked what was left of ‘my’ relationship to Peter, I realized that not only had I lost any sense of my former affective connectedness but also my feelings of competition and comparison had disappeared. I had always regarded Peter as the better and older actualist and the better and more accurate writer and now I found such emotionally-charged comparisons had completely vanished. I also discovered that this entailed that I no longer feel obliged to respectfully wait until he becomes free before I dare the final jump. Now that I don’t relegate myself to a slot in an imaginary queue, nobody can prevent me from becoming free from the human condition. * The second event that shed some light on how I relate to other people happened when I met a former acquaintance from my spiritual era. In the course of our conversation she asked what I have been doing with my life and, knowing she was a fervent spiritual believer, I first attempted to warn her by saying that because I have become a heretic and a traitor I am very cautious nowadays about telling my story so as to not disturb other people’s dearly held beliefs. Nevertheless she insisted, so I told a bit of my story of how I got involved with actualism. As I began to describe my first major PCE, the woman quickly said she knew what I am talking about – this was enlightenment. When I tried to explain the difference between a spiritual experience and a pure consciousness experience I was soon at a loss for words because whatever words I used to describe the quality of a PCE, she insisted that this was exactly how she experienced the world in her outstanding moments of being at one with the Whole, filled with Emptiness and experiencing the Consciousness that connects everything. As I was familiar with this spiritual ‘take over’ from other conversations, her claiming my descriptions of the actual world as being the same as her spiritual experience came as no surprise to me. What somehow surprised me, however, was that I was completely unruffled by this closing of the door to the possibility of something new as I had sometimes been in the past. In fact I enjoyed our discussion immensely. Not only did I know it was not my choice of words that caused her ‘misunderstanding’ but I was also certain about the fact that, despite all her assertions that our differences were only a matter of semantics, we were talking about two diametrically opposite worlds. I was talking about the experience of being what I am, this flesh-and-blood body devoid of ‘me’ as experienced in a PCE, while she was talking about who she felt herself to truly be – a passionate Being, feeling blissful Unity and Oneness. As you have experienced yourself in a PCE, once one knows the actual world by direct experience, the lovey-dovey bliss of spiritual Unity with an imaginary Source holds no attraction at all. This conversation also confirmed that unless someone is sufficiently discontent with their life as it is, their interpretation of what is on offer in actualism will always be inhibited by the framework of their familiar spiritual teachings. * Lastly I recently made an observation that relates to the last part of your letter – As I am not Actually Free, I can only imagine such a result. However, most definite steps have been taken in terms of demolishing the social identity, a large part of which consists of membership in certain self-protective groupings of one sort or another, and identifying with others based on certain compatible attributes. One of the most important aspects of ‘membership in certain self-protective groupings’ is the social insistence and instinctual craving to belong to a particular group, tribe or nation. The other day I watched a made-for-TV documentary about the siege of Stalingrad by the Germans in WW II, when the Germans almost conquered the city and then got knocked back and enclosed in a surprising counterattack. Both Russian and German survivors of the siege were interviewed and they gave first-hand accounts of tremendous hardship and destitution, of fighting in freezing conditions with meagre supplies, of human beings desperately fighting other human beings in the bombed out rubble of the city. What was new to me from the previous times when I had watched similar reports was that this time I was neither taking sides for ‘my countrymen’ against the enemy nor did I form moral judgements for the poor Russians fighting against the bad Nazis. I was also neither upset nor sad about the enormous suffering inflicted by senseless fighting. I simply listened to this report of the human condition in action and followed with interest the sense that some of the men, fellow human beings, had made of the experiences they went through. I was neither dissociated from the violence as I had tried to be in my spiritual days nor did I associate with the suffering of the people stuck in the desolation and cruelty of war as I had done so many times before. I could watch the report and know for a fact that it is possible to stop being a member of a squabbling and fighting humanity – I can escape my programmed fate, for moments at first and soon forever. Nice to chat again, Gary.
Nowadays I hardly notice ‘me’ as an affective identity interfering whenever I relate to people in day-to-day affairs. When I go out to work or chat with the neighbours I am pleasantly anonymous, nobody really knows what I think or feel about life and the universe, and I am simply what I am and what I do – a fellow human being chatting about the garden, a bookkeeper, a customer standing in the queue in the post office or being served at a coffee shop. This pleasant anonymity is delightful. It is release from obligations, affiliations, and identifications. I come and go with complete ease, whether about town, in the food store, at work, or in the neighbourhood, freed from anxieties about who I am going to meet, what they might think of me, etc. I am ‘another Bozo on the bus’ so to speak, a phrase used by Albert Ellis. With identity effectively diminished, although not eliminated in entirety, there is not that evaluation and comparison with others that stems from the social identity. Yes, and not only that – my instinctual reactions to previously dangerous or fearful encounters have also greatly diminished and if they should occur for some reason, I can observe them, analyze them if necessary, and keep my hands in my pocket until the impassioned inner assault is over. * It therefore came as somewhat of a surprise when I recently found an emotional ‘hook’ in my living together with Peter. I was contemplating about what exactly is standing in the way of ‘self’-immolation and found a bit of an affective identity in action – the ‘me’ who cherished the cozy corner I had in living together peacefully and delightfully. ‘I’ as an identity feel noticed and understood with Peter, he knows the happy ‘me’, the quizzing ‘me’, the puzzled ‘me’, the impatient ‘me’, he knows about ‘my’ aims and fears, ‘my’ quirks and wonderings. And this cozy relationship will certainly cease to be when I become free because then ‘I’ who is doing the relating will cease to be. I had discovered much the same thing a few months ago. I was acutely aware of ‘my’ need to create a cozy nest and cling to my relationship with my partner. My attention seemed to be particularly attracted to the aging process in both she and myself. And I found myself forming a sharp demarcation between being ‘in’ the relationship, and at home, and being ‘out’ there in the ‘Real World’. Connected to this, I discovered morbid fears of growing old and dying, along with anxieties of losing this cozy relationship I was clinging to. I don’t know what triggered all this but it may have been happening around the time that there was so much talk of war with Iraq in the air. I realized that human beings usually all create this comfortable and peaceful corner of reality in their homes as a means of warding off or keeping out the harshness and cruelty of the outside world. This seems to be an instinctive pattern of behaviour, harkening back to the time when our ancestors hunkered in deep caves for protection against predators and other perils of the night. From my own explorations I know that a relationship with a partner has many layers that are worth examining. One of the first issues to be sorted out for me was my female identity – my belonging to the women’s camp as opposed to the men’s club. Part of this female identity was the continuous battle as to who is right and who is wrong – men or women. What I discovered was an unbridgeable gulf between the masculine and feminine version of interpreting the world and that the only way to ensure peace and harmony was to eliminate the gulf, whereas common wisdom has it that the gulf is a given and that one should bridge the gulf with the feeling of love or move closer to the other camp by becoming more feminine or more masculine. Needless to say eliminating the gulf meant eliminating my precious identity as a woman and all that entailed. Once I had sorted out this aspect of my identity, the next obstacle to actualizing peace were my spiritual beliefs and my feelings of loyalty towards the guru and his followers. It soon became obvious to me that as long as I was busy defending my spiritual beliefs, I was again involved in yet another battle as to whose beliefs are right and whose beliefs are wrong. Only by questioning my own beliefs could I begin to find out the facts and thus establish a fact-based common ground for communication. In the same vein, I had to investigate my faith in my much-valued female intuition, for to continue to rely on it prevented me from distinguishing between the fact of the matter and my feelings about the matter. Another issue that quickly emerged was my sexual social conditioning and its instinctual counterpart – the deeply entrenched instinctual patterns that have to do solely with the survival of the human species, the dissemination of the genes of the most successful fighters in the battle for survival. As I became more familiar with the process of investigating my beliefs and feelings, I noticed that each issue was successfully resolved only when I was able to trace my feelings and emotions back to their instinctual core – the primeval survival program that gives rise to all feelings, emotions, moods and vibes in the human animal. This instinctual programming was forged ‘when our ancestors hunkered in deep caves for protection’, but the roots of this programming stretch way back to when the first faunal creatures began to populate the earth. It is therefore essential to dig deep in one’s investigations into one’s own psyche in order to feel, experience and understand the instinctual core of one’s feelings and emotions in order to become free of their insidious grip. * I explored this particular ‘hook’ on which my identity hung at first tentatively, then more boldly, knowing well that at any time I could discover the core of it and be lost. As part of this investigation I chatted to Peter about my explorations and a few days later to Richard, just to make sure that I would not succumb to the temptation of ‘forgetting’ a topic so close to the bone. My persistent inquiry triggered a pure consciousness experience and with astounding clarity I experienced myself as completely separate from Peter, two flesh-and-blood human beings not at all affectively or psychically connected in any way. It was utterly amazing and magical that two complete strangers – as in not psychically connected – get to interact with each other in utter intimacy. In such intimacy there is no ‘me’ trying to pull the strings, no ‘me’ thinking or feeling about ‘me’ in relationship to the other, and a fresh, unmediated and direct experiencing happens on its own accord. It is most striking when determined and ‘persistent inquiry’ of this sort triggers a PCE. Each time this happens, I see with renewed clarity how the affective and psychic entity prevents and precludes the experiencing of the purity and pristineness of the actual world. Yes, at such times it is often like going deep into a dark tunnel of unexplored passions and then suddenly coming out the other end where everything has always been perfect and benign. It is my ongoing conundrum how not only to weaken but to permanently switch off the magnetic force that inevitably sucks be back into being ‘me’ after a PCE. * This PCE confirmed that my holding onto a cozy relationship was nevertheless my identity in action. Although my relationship with Peter is founded on felicitous feelings only and I live with him in perfect peace and harmony, I clearly could see that ‘I’ as an identity was preventing something far, far superior to any psychic or psychological connection – an exquisitely delightful direct intimacy with a fellow human being. A couple of days later, when I checked what was left of ‘my’ relationship to Peter, I realized that not only had I lost any sense of my former affective connectedness but also my feelings of competition and comparison had disappeared. I had always regarded Peter as the better and older actualist and the better and more accurate writer and now I found such emotionally-charged comparisons had completely vanished. I also discovered that this entailed that I no longer feel obliged to respectfully wait until he becomes free before I dare the final jump. Now that I don’t relegate myself to a slot in an imaginary queue, nobody can prevent me from becoming free from the human condition. Seeing my identity in action in a similar way to you can fuel my intent, can it not? If I see clearly what is getting in the way of living in peace and harmony, in other words the ‘downside’ to affective feelings, then would that not tend to spur my intent to be free from those very things that get in the way? The comparison between a pure consciousness experience and my every day
living experience certainly spurs me on. Seeing and understanding, over and over, the ‘‘downside’ to affective
feelings’, as you say, does indeed weaken the magnetism of being ‘me’. However, I think that you need to have
the firm intent to live in genuine peace, whatever the price, in order to be motivated to question and explore your
identity and find out ‘what is getting in the way of living in peace and harmony’ . Then the potent
combination of sincerity, naiveté and wonder will tip the balance towards making ‘the
already always existing peace-on-earth become apparent’, as Seeing similarities between your social/instinctual identity and others certainly gives you confidence as to the accuracy and veracity of your investigations, but what spurred me on was success in becoming more happy and, even more importantly, more harmless. Experiencing that the actualism process demonstrably works over a substantial period of time and in all down-to-earth conditions then incrementally turns confidence into surety. Does the intent lead to a PCE or do you think something else is happening? There are the spontaneous PCEs that everyone experiences at some point in their lives, which I explain as a spontaneous temporary glitch in the instinctual programming that allows the perception to be purely sensate and thinking to be free from any affective influences. These PCEs seem to be more frequent in childhood when the identity is not yet set in concrete, so to speak. However, when a person has a good dose of sincerity, sufficient enough to re-awaken his or her naiveté, then he or she may develop an intent to live the purity, peace and wonder they have experienced in such rare moments of ‘self’-lessness as often as possible – i.e. it takes naiveté to devote one’s life to becoming happy and harmless. Only then, the memory of a spontaneously occurring PCE spurs me on to demolish the elaborate and firmly consolidated edifice of my ‘self’ in order to facilitate pure consciousness experiences happening again and again. You could compare it to living in a securely air-tightened bunker when suddenly a crack appears in the wall and brings in some pure sweet fresh air … and suddenly the whole bunker disappears along with ‘me’. The bunker eventually reassembles itself and the crack is automatically repaired – a process due to the ‘self’-sustaining nature of the social-instinctual programming. It is then up to ‘me’, the one who thinks and feels to be in that bunker, to either wait for another accidental crack – akin to waiting for Godot – or to actively do something so as to experience the magical actual world again. In other words, when the PCE fades, ‘I’ then have to get on with the moment-to-moment business at hand – to demolish the very structure that is ‘me’. A weakened and less ‘self’-centred structure of ‘me’ certainly provides more opportunities for ‘cracks’, i.e. PCEs, but all of ‘me’ needs to be extinguished in order that those ‘cracks’ don’t automatically ‘self’-repair and yet again shut out the splendour and purity of the actual world. I am also interested in what happens when investigation of particular affective feeling leads to the disappearance of that feeling and what causes it to come back. In my experience, it seems that certain issues come up again and again at times. I keep thinking that because they come back, I must have missed something in my investigation into them. When I thoroughly investigate a particular issue, i.e. when I trace it from a mood to a belief to a moral-ethical value to a deep feeling and then right down to the instinctual passions from where it hinges, then it does indeed disappear once I experience and understand it in its totality. As you described above, your ‘need to create a cozy nest and cling to my relationship with my partner’ could eventually be traced back to an instinctual fear ‘harkening back to the time when our ancestors hunkered in deep caves for protection’. When you experientially understand that your instinctual passions are driving you to mindlessly seek protection and fight off invaders, then that awareness of how ‘you’ tick stops you ‘ticking’ this way … and a bit of ‘self’ dies away. In the case of the issue returning, I often find that it is a different
aspect of the issue, a different triggering mechanism, or a deeper layer to it that then comes to the fore. For
instance, my contemplations as to whether there is a God or not was only conclusively understood when I grasped the fact
that in an eternal and infinite universe there is no outside to it where any God could reside and from where He, She or
It could rule. As I have described in However, despite this breakthrough, I still had to examine other aspects of my beliefs in anything at all spiritual, supernatural or divine. At the time, this meant that, whilst my guru was not a divine being and there wasn’t an ‘other-world’, the issue on the table then became my spiritual loyalty and my belief in the truth of his teachings. Despite the fact that I had experienced in a PCE a completely non-spiritual material-only universe that was utterly majestic and magnificent, I still had to whittle away at a lot of aspects of my belief in something other than this physical actual world. In fact, I am still at it because ‘I’ am, by my very nature, non-physical, non-actual and therefore spiritual. In the beginning I also often thought that I had missed something when a feeling or an issue returned but the longer I study the human condition in me, and the more I observe other people, the more I come to understand the perversity and the deeply ingrained structure of ‘me’, the psychological/psychic being that is a direct product of this ancient animal survival program. An estimated one million years of human history – dependent upon somewhat whimsical speculations as to the transition from animal-only to animal-human – is an enormous heritage to unravel. In the light of the extent and density of this programming, when a bit of the million-year old social programming or the billions-of-years old animal instinctual programming resurfaces, I came to understand that I haven’t necessarily missed something, I simply can’t understand it all or take it all in, at once. You could also say that one inevitably misses something the first time round in an investigation because particular issues have many aspects and many layers that are not all apparent at the first examination. This would seem to have a lot to do with sincerity. If one sincerely wants to get rid of something, then one will put the time and energy into doing just that, rather than settling complacently for something less than total elimination of the troubling issue. Yes, I agree, it has all to do with sincerity. Only I know if it is a fact that I have wiped out a particular aspect of my social identity or if I only believe I have or if I am pretending I have – that’s why actualism is a do-it-myself job only, and that is why nobody can do it for me. * I had better stop here and answer the rest of your post in part 2.
This conversation also confirmed that unless someone is sufficiently discontent with their life as it is, their interpretation of what is on offer in actualism will always be inhibited by the framework of their familiar spiritual teachings. I think people will interpret and translate new information into their customary cognitive or experiential framework, much as your spiritual acquaintance did. Recently I had mentioned to someone at work something about not wanting to dwell in emotion about something or preferring not to make a fuss of something or other, and the person stated that I was being ‘philosophical’ about it all. I did not think I was being ‘philosophical’ at all, but I merely made a mental note of what the person said and mulled it all over afterward. I think if one is clinging passionately to one’s identity, and nursing malice and sorrow, the only way to approach living in peace and harmony with other humans is to be ‘philosophical’, in other words live one’s life in accordance to some type of philosophy and religious or moral system by which one creates compartments between how one actually feels and how one conducts oneself in society. This is not what actualism is about at all. Yes, I had similar commentaries from people. In a conversation with a neighbour I responded to some environmental doomsday scenarios that were being promoted as ‘most likely to happen’ by saying that most of them are driven by fear rather than fact and was met with the comment ‘you rationalize everything away, don’t you?’ I also liked No 38’s comment when he said –
Not only it is considered ‘a deficiency to actually pay attention’ to
one’s emotions and beliefs in order to diminish and finally eliminate one’s automatic instinctual programming but
this very process also sets you on the path to a condition considered to be a severe mental disorder within the human
condition. After Richard succeeded to become free from the human condition, It’s such a hoot … and proof that an actual freedom from the human condition is indeed the departure from all the values of the human condition. Being sane means being able to function reasonably well within the human condition and being sane also entails being sad, lonely, anxious, cynical, grumpy, jealous, righteous, angry and cunning. When ‘I’ cease to exist, not only temporarily in a PCE but permanently as in an actual freedom, then this state will not and can not be categorized as being sane by those who are deeply convinced that the current human condition is the end and the culmination of the evolutionary process. * One of the most important aspects of ‘membership in certain self-protective groupings’ is the social insistence and instinctual craving to belong to a particular group, tribe or nation. The other day I watched a made-for-TV documentary about the siege of Stalingrad by the Germans in WW II, when the Germans almost conquered the city and then got knocked back and enclosed in a surprising counterattack. <snip> I could watch the report and know as a fact that it is possible to stop being a member of a squabbling and fighting humanity – I can escape my programmed fate, for moments at first and soon forever. I watched a TV program recently on the Robert Scott expedition to Antarctica. Robert Scott is the British explorer who raced to the South Pole, only to find that Raoule Amundsen and his men had gotten there and planted the Norwegian flag there first. In any event, I was fascinated by this story because it illustrated what people will do in service of an ideal, and in service to their country. These men, owing to a tragic mistake and miscalculation of the weather forecast, sacrificed their lives in the most needless fashion, enduring incredible suffering before they died. Peter found a story in the newspaper today that told about a young 23-year-old who had trekked over the ice of the Antarctica in order to be the youngest to have walked to the South pole. When he got there he couldn’t believe his eyes – in the scientific research station at the pole there was a gift shop selling T-shirts with ‘I have been to the South pole’ written on the front. Not only that, his record was broken some months later when someone even younger completed the same trek. The article also told of a Russian icebreaker that was in the business of taking tourists on an US$ 800.00 a day holiday trip along the Antarctic coast. What had once been a perilous adventure for the intrepid explorer has now become an enterprise for paying tourists, similar to the pay-for-a-spot climbing of Mount Everest. When they reached the part where the men knew finally that they were going to die and in their last letters to their loved ones, I was struck by how they spoke of an afterlife and their souls continuing on after their demise. I did, however, at this point in the program feel some tears jerking inside, so I think there is something there to look into. It was a story about a hero’s journey, in much the same way that people approach going to war, but it was also a story of ruin and waste, of dreams unfulfilled, of hopes shattered. In much the same way that you did, I ‘followed with interest’ this account of a heroic endeavour that went tragic. It really is amazing what humans will do to achieve an imagined immortality ... all the loftiest dreams of humanity as well as the most crushing degradations seem contained in the desire for immortality. Yes, I think you are right – the desire for immortality is woven into most of what humans do. I have come to experience the instinctual part of the drive for immortality – the inbuilt program of fighting for the survival of the species, a genetic programming we naturally share with all animate life. The fact that humans are conscious of this programming has caused a thinking and feeling identity to evolve – ‘I’ and the act of being conscious become one and the same. Given that ‘I’ am an integral product of this instinctual programming whose only purpose is the ongoing procreation and preservation of the species at-any-cost, ‘I’ therefore imagine my ‘self’ to be ongoing and never-ending – i.e. eternal and immortal. As such any hint or innuendo of the fact that what I am is a flesh and blood body only, with a definitive physical beginning – the fertilizing of an egg – and an inevitable physical end – the rotting of the body – is too daunting a thought for most people to even contemplate.
This pleasant anonymity is delightful. It is release from obligations, affiliations, and identifications. I come and go with complete ease, whether about town, in the food store, at work, or in the neighbourhood, freed from anxieties about who I am going to meet, what they might think of me, etc. I am ‘another Bozo on the bus’ so to speak, a phrase used by Albert Ellis. With identity effectively diminished, although not eliminated in entirety, there is not that evaluation and comparison with others that stems from the social identity. Yes, and not only that – my instinctual reactions to previously dangerous or fearful encounters have also greatly diminished and if they should occur for some reason, I can observe them, analyze them if necessary, and keep my hands in my pocket until the impassioned inner assault is over. ‘Greatly diminished’ is a good way to describe it and goes for me as well. Driving to work one morning this week, a car quickly backed into the road between two large snow banks, causing me to rapidly swerve. The car narrowly missed barging into me broadside. I muttered some curse words under my breath and experienced some anger. But I must say the reaction itself was curiously diminished and in a moment vanished. Although the swerving, defensive driving was there, naturally in order to avoid a collision, and an accompanying feeling of outrage or indignation for a split second, I am enough practiced at attentiveness to be able to nip these reactions in the bud. Recently Peter and I were talking about this very quality of virtual freedom – after sufficient explorations into the human condition I am now able to ‘nip these reactions in the bud’ shortly after they appear and many events that usually would have triggered an angry or sad response in the past now fail to do so. At my stage of the process the job now is to remember to stop the once essential but now redundant habit of rummaging around in my psyche in order to regurgitate issues that I have already explored, resolved and understood so as to get on with being happy and harmless as soon and as uninterruptedly as possible. Strangely enough that leaves ‘me’ increasingly with nothing to do, which in itself sometimes stirs the uncomfortable feeling of being redundant – a sure sign that my efforts of actively diminishing ‘me’ have had tangible effect. I recall when I approached the AF list, that I had these questions about ‘self’-defence: whether one would be able to ‘defend themselves’ without having the instinctual passions running ... the familiar adrenalin-fuelled ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction. The persistence of the view that such primitive reactions are necessary in order to physically survive in the world is commonplace. I again found it recently stated in the synopsis of a book on Stress on the Internet, the view that not only is the ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction normal but definitely necessary for survival ... that without it one would not physically survive. I think this needs to be challenged, and the propagation of this view rarely takes into the account the other side of the coin: that the ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction poses a great risk to human survival itself due to the aggressiveness at its core. Yes, history is littered with proof that the ‘fight-or-flight reaction poses a great risk to human survival itself’, particularly when it befalls not only an individual but whole tribes and nations. The enormity of human warfare is brought home to me each time I watch documentaries on the history of the last 50 years, a history I have lived through, which has been a continuous instinctually driven battle for dominance with horrendous and devastating effects. Recently I saw a documentary on the life of the Libyan leader Gaddafi that I found interesting – there was a man with the philosophy and passion of a rebel and freedom fighter, who manoeuvred himself into a position that actually allowed him to turn his dreams into reality. Not only did he succeed in becoming the leader of his country, but he also had enormous financial resources to attempt to put into practice his ideology for changing the world. I recognized many of the political philosophies from my own student rebel days when I was riling against materialistic imperialism, the corruption of the establishment, the domination of the rich over the poor and the ruling class over the working class, and demanding freedom for the masses, redistribution of wealth, equal power to everyone, etc, etc. Gaddafi has been in power long enough to demonstrate how these so - popular - with-the-angry socialistic ideals look like when put into practice. He actively supported various rebel and terrorist movements supplying them with training, money, arms and shelter and established a strictly government-controlled economy that very soon failed to deliver the promised goods. At the same time he promoted a political philosophy that, whilst purportedly encouraging democratic decision-making, was in fact a sure recipe for chaos and incompetence, which in turn kept the people dependant upon his leadership. His life’s work is a brilliant example of the chaos and senseless mayhem that a young rebel flogging an old cause will inflict if he or she imposes their ideas and ideals on others. It seems like without adrenalin-fuelled reactions, one thinks much more clearly and rationally about sensible courses of action. Considered action to address the situation is then the result. One is then neither anxiously fleeing nor aggressively attacking the perceived locus of the threat. The more attentive I am at recognizing my own life situation and reactions to everyday events, the more I think that the ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction is totally unnecessary. Yes, and it is remarkable how very little real threat to my both health and my safety there is when my perception is not clouded by instinctual ‘self’-preservation and when my life-style is not run by senseless pursuit of power, wealth, fame or excitement – in one word ‘self’-importance. The only situation I can think of where adrenalin would serve a useful purpose would be some great calamity, where assistance or help is needed immediately: for instance, if I vehicle were to roll over someone and they were trapped and could not get out, someone under the influence of adrenalin might perform feats of superhuman strength, whereas the absence of this emotive force would require other measures that would not be readily available. What are your thoughts on this issue? As I don’t know much about what chemical reactions happen in the brain, I looked up the Encyclopaedia Britannica –
From the word ‘effects’ I conclude that an increased output of adrenalin
and other chemical neuro-transmitters does not necessarily require feelings of anxiety for ‘increased mental
alertness’ to occur. In other words, the effects can be two separate effects and it is quite apparent that in a
dangerous situation one functions better if the affective reaction can be eliminated. * From my own explorations I know that a relationship with a partner has many layers that are worth examining. Yes. That is certainly so. A ‘relationship’ involves need, dependency, closeness, nurture, aggression, so on and so forth. Perhaps like yourself, I have been investigating emotional closeness. This involves dependency and the need, indeed, the drive to nurture and be nurtured. An emotionally close relationship is a prolonged type of infancy and childhood in which one seeks the closeness of ‘someone who understands’. If you mean ‘someone who understands’ me emotionally, I fully agree with you as my former relationships and friendships have certainly been formed on that basis. Nowadays, I am the only person who needs to understand me emotionally, seeking understanding not for the purpose of commiseration or confirmation but in order to get to the bottom of ‘me’. However, it is nevertheless very refreshing and delightful to talk to ‘someone who understands’ common sense and with whom I can share the sense that I made of the world of people, things and events. Contained in this emotionally close relationship, which is considered the hallmark of adult maturity and independence, is contained the contrary states of it’s absence: abject loneliness, despair, clinging, cloying dependency, fear, and other such negative states. All of humanity’s most lofty ideals and dreams are enacted in one’s primary relationship, whereas as this flesh-and-blood body, apperceptively aware, I am incapable of emotional closeness of any kind. Yes, given that the ‘self’, the alien entity inside this flesh-and-blood body, is the very source and reason for feeling lost, lonely and frightened, the natural reaction is to seek emotional closeness, love and nurture. When I investigated my need for emotional closeness I inevitably uncovered my lost, lonely and frightened ‘self’ and have proceeded to whittle away at it ever since. * One of the first issues to be sorted out for me was my female identity – my belonging to the women’s camp as opposed to the men’s club. Part of this female identity was the continuous battle as to who is right and who is wrong – men or women. What I discovered was an unbridgeable gulf between the masculine and feminine version of interpreting the world and that the only way to ensure peace and harmony was to eliminate the gulf, whereas common wisdom has it that the gulf is a given and that one should bridge the gulf with the feeling of love or move closer to the other camp by becoming more feminine or more masculine. Needless to say eliminating the gulf meant eliminating my precious identity as a woman and all that entailed. Recently I was working with a small group at a professional training. I was the only male in the group, there being three female participants besides myself. The exercise we were working on required giving a potential emotional reaction to various scenarios involving sexuality. After I had disclosed my reactions to these scenarios the other participants remarked that, of course, I had reacted that way ‘because you are a man’. I was a bit surprised at their perception in this regard. It had crossed my mind that perhaps I was reacting from a gender bias. But their remarks too struck me as dismissive in the sense that they consigned my reactions to the ‘male camp’ and disregarded that they might have been made on some other basis than gender conditioning. Besides discovering that I dislike being pegged in this way as either ‘male’, ‘white’, etc (in itself an instinctual reaction), I realized too how seldom I make these kinds of judgements and comparisons of others. It seems to me that only a female identity would be capable of making a judgement that someone is reacting on a ‘male’ basis, or vice versa. Oh yes, you have encountered one of the typical fighting strategies of any identity – attacking the messenger instead of considering the content of the message. This strategy is used by men and women equally and is usually a sign that no further sensible discussion can be had about the topic at hand because the main issue is winning the argument and not having a fruitful discussion in order to find out the facts. As I see it, ‘being pegged in this way as either ‘male’, ‘white’’ is both a reaction of the social identity – being pegged as a member of a family, gender, race, nationality or profession – as well as an instinctual reaction to being classified as either friend or foe. Nowadays if someone accuses me of being ‘female’, ‘white’ or ‘German’, I just laugh because I know for sure that whatever it is they are accusing me of is their problem, not mine. * As I became more familiar with the process of investigating my beliefs and feelings, I noticed that each issue was successfully resolved only when I was able to trace my feelings and emotions back to their instinctual core – the primeval survival program that gives rise to all feelings, emotions, moods and vibes in the human animal. This instinctual programming was forged ‘when our ancestors hunkered in deep caves for protection’, but the roots of this programming stretch way back to when the first faunal creatures began to populate the earth. It is therefore essential to dig deep in one’s investigations into one’s own psyche in order to feel, experience and understand the instinctual core of one’s feelings and emotions in order to become free of their insidious grip. It is well to remember the primeval roots of this instinctual programming, stretching back into the mists of time, back all the way to unicellular organisms. That instinctual passions are deeply encoded and ‘self’ perpetuating is a hard point for many to lay ahold of ... unless they have had that ‘taste of the instinctual passions’ themselves. And in order to have that, the social identity must have been sufficiently weakened so that the ordinary constant backdrop of the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘shouldn’ts’ is no longer running. Then the instinctual passions themselves can be experienced much more clearly and directly. I have experienced these sometimes as bestial urges to kill and devour. These are not acted on in any way, shape, or form. But one comes into direct contact with that which has been hidden and obscured, denied and covered up, dreaded and forbidden. The instinctual passions are then weakened in some manner by the very direct experiencing of them. Well said. The manner the instinctual passions are weakened is that what was previously lurking in dark corners has been subjected to the bright light of unencumbered awareness. There is nothing mystical to it but it is certainly magical. * It is most striking when determined and ‘persistent inquiry’ of this sort triggers a PCE. Each time this happens, I see with renewed clarity how the affective and psychic entity prevents and precludes the experiencing of the purity and pristineness of the actual world. Yes, at such times it is often like going deep into a dark tunnel of unexplored passions and then suddenly coming out the other end where everything has always been perfect and benign. I have this experience quite often. It is the sort of thing that I would not have noticed in my early days using the method. But it is much more apparent to me now. Whenever passions are explored and experienced at depth, this actual world as experienced by the senses comes rushing back in. As an example, I remember back before I started actualism I had hardly noticed what the weather was like unless it annoyed me for one reason or the other. If I did manage to look at leisure at a blue sky with wispy clouds it would only set me off day-dreaming about love or god or freedom whereas nowadays when I gaze out the window I simply enjoy the fascinating array of ever-changing forms and colours, be it hot or cool, sunny or raining, windy or still. * It is my ongoing conundrum how not only to weaken but to permanently switch off the magnetic force that inevitably sucks me back into being ‘me’ after a PCE. I was curious about your use of the word ‘conundrum’, but I see that it is indeed a puzzle of the highest sort. Peter advised me to pay particular attention to what happens during a PCE to cause it to diminish and fade. This has been most difficult to do, but it can be done. It is an ongoing ‘work in progress’. Is this the piece of Peter’s posts that you are referring to?
Peter suggested investigating what causes a period of feeling excellent to fade, not what causes a PCE to fade. A PCE by its very nature is a temporary experience, i.e. such experiences inevitably fade, they don’t need a cause to fade. As such, I can never determine what exactly causes a PCE to fade; I simply experience this fading as the unavoidable effect of being a ‘self’ – the ‘magnetic force’ of ‘me’. It is one thing to experience ‘self’-lessness for a temporary period of time as in a PCE, it is quite another to permanently abdicate the throne. The act of ‘self’-immolation is not the act of prolonging a PCE indefinitely – they are two distinctly separate experiences. A PCE is a temporary-only experience of the actual world whereas ‘self’-immolation is a once-only event that brings an irrevocable end to my very ‘being’. * Firm intent, ‘whatever the price’, is what it takes. It’s a bit like getting out the door to go to work after a long holiday weekend. The bootstraps come into play here. It is important again and again to realize that this is one’s only moment of being alive and this is the only place, right here, right now. Another pleasing development has occurred to me along the way ... the core of ‘self’ hatred that always seethed and writhed within ‘me’ has virtually dried up. With the diminishment of the social identity, the constant ‘self’ flagellation and ‘self’ punishment has virtually gone away. This is a most striking development in itself. Yes, self-punishment, the result of the enforcement and internalization of strict religious and societal morals and ethics only adds to the sorrow of living within the human condition. Life became far easier and much more fun when I succeeded in replacing those internal judges with common sense and the firm intent to become happy and harmless. * You could compare it [a spontaneous PCE] to living in a securely air-tightened bunker when suddenly a crack appears in the wall and brings in some pure sweet fresh air ... and suddenly the whole bunker disappears along with ‘me’. The bunker eventually reassembles itself and the crack is automatically repaired – a process due to the ‘self’-sustaining nature of the social-instinctual programming. It is then up to ‘me’, the one who thinks and feels to be in that bunker, to either wait for another accidental crack – akin to waiting for Godot – or to actively do something so as to experience the magical actual world again. In other words, when the PCE fades, ‘I’ then have to get on with the moment-to-moment business at hand – to demolish the very structure that is ‘me’. A weakened and less ‘self’-centred structure of ‘me’ certainly provides more opportunities for ‘cracks’, i.e. PCEs, but all of ‘me’ needs to be extinguished in order that those ‘cracks’ don’t automatically ‘self’-repair and yet again shut out the splendour and purity of the actual world. I find your bunker analogy to be more than apt for ‘me’ given ‘my’ concern for ‘my’ security. Saddam Hussein could do no better job with his bunker construction than ‘I’ do with my megalomaniacal need to be in control. When I read in your last post to Peter how you are presently experiencing life I cannot take your ‘megalomaniacal need to be in control’ too seriously –
* I am also interested in what happens when investigation of particular affective feeling leads to the disappearance of that feeling and what causes it to come back. In my experience, it seems that certain issues come up again and again at times. I keep thinking that because they come back, I must have missed something in my investigation into them. Despite the fact that I had experienced in a PCE a completely non-spiritual material-only universe that was utterly majestic and magnificent, I still had to whittle away at a lot of aspects of my belief in something other than this physical actual world. In fact, I am still at it because ‘I’ am, by my very nature, non-physical, non-actual and therefore spiritual. In the beginning I also often thought that I had missed something when a feeling or an issue returned but the longer I study the human condition in me, and the more I observe other people, the more I come to understand the perversity and the deeply ingrained structure of ‘me’, the psychological/psychic being that is a direct product of this ancient animal survival program. An estimated one million years of human history – dependent upon somewhat whimsical speculations as to the transition from animal-only to animal-human is an enormous heritage to unravel. In the light of the extent and density of this programming, when a bit of the million-year old social programming or the billions-of-years old animal instinctual programming resurfaces, I came to understand that I haven’t necessarily missed something, I simply can’t understand it all or take it all in, at once. You could also say that one inevitably misses something the first time round in an investigation because particular issues have many aspects and many layers that are not all apparent at the first examination. Your thoughts on this are most helpful. It is a hard thing for me to pinpoint what happens to cause a PCE to dimmer and fade, but essentially it always involves some ‘self’-centred, egocentric experience to take the fore, whether by dint of fear, apprehensiveness, and often (I think) a deep and abiding terror of extinction. Once ‘I’ realize that I am no longer needed, ‘I’ dig my heels in ever deeper and cling passionately to my ‘job’ which is to survive. There are indeed many layers to this thing, and as usual I think I may have berated myself for ‘missing’ something, when the many layers and the density of this programming is to a large extent unconscious and hidden from view. Many of my discoveries while practising Actualism have been serendipitous ... a bit like spontaneous happenings, and sudden realizations in unguarded moments about the nature of ‘me’ and how ‘I’ stand in the way of perfection. This is not to say that there has not been hard effort and diligent persistence involved – a bit like wresting civilization from the wilderness, a deliberate hacking away and toiling to clear the ground. It seems to work in tandem. I can very well relate to what you describe as ‘a deep and abiding terror of extinction’. The trick that often helps me turn this terror into excitement is to remember that ‘I’ have a voluntary mission which is far more dignifying that ‘my’ survival – ‘I’ am to bring about peace-on-earth by vacating the throne, permanently. And although sometimes I feel as though I am only inching my way closer to ‘my’ destiny, I do recognize that I am making progress. I only need to look back at how I used to experience life a few years back to know this is a fact. And yes, unexpected insights and PCEs and deliberate exploration of ‘me’ do indeed ‘work in tandem.’ The serendipitous events happen when I again and again discover the already existing peace on earth in this wondrous and magnificent and not-passive universe. As the master wordsmith describes –
* This would seem to have a lot to do with sincerity. If one sincerely wants to get rid of something, then one will put the time and energy into doing just that, rather than settling complacently for something less than total elimination of the troubling issue. Yes, I agree, it has all to do with sincerity. Only I know if it is a fact that I have wiped out a particular aspect of my social identity or if I only believe I have or if I am pretending I have – that’s why actualism is a do-it-myself job only, and that is why nobody can do it for me. Yes, there’s nothing to really sign on to or live up to. And I can quit any time I want ... not that I would want to. It’s such a fascinating journey ... and so much fun to boot. So much for now. I shall have to turn to your next post, although it will take a while before it gets here. Actualism is not a university study course and there are no exams or grades to achieve, if that is what you mean. I’m not so sure about the quitting ‘any time’ you want – I am certainly hooked for life. Vineeto’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust |
