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Selected Correspondence Vineeto Altruism A bit more on altruism. After writing the mail to Peter, I guess I got ‘off my backside’! I was sitting in the garden reflecting on something Richard had written, when suddenly I ‘got it’. The peace and perfection and purity of this actual universe is here all the time – every moment for ever and ever and ever. And, this body is experiencing that purity and perfection for every second of its existence (the body’s existence, that is). Which led to the question – if that purity and perfection is always in existence why am I not aware of it? A few bricks tumbled down – because ‘I’ can never be aware of it. ‘I’ do not actually exist. ‘I’ am all that is standing in the way of that purity and perfection evincing itself each second. For so long as ‘I’ exist the purity and perfection (which is always there) cannot manifest. So, why should ‘I’ get out of the way and allow that to occur? Why should ‘I’ cease to exist? After all, ‘I’ am all that ‘I’ am. And, the only reason for ‘me’ to self immolate is to demonstrate to others that the actual world actually exists. To demonstrate that peace on earth is not only possible but, achievable. Hence, altruism. Of course ‘I’ cannot do it for ‘me’. ‘I’ can only do it for others and for the sake of peace on earth. Facts are such deliciously wonderful things, are they not? I used to have a bit of trouble defining altruism myself. When I discovered actualism the first thing I wanted was to become free for myself. In the beginning I couldn’t quite relate to an altruistic motive because I first had to investigate and eradicate the moral of unselfishness and the passion of compassion. I have written about unselfishness that had run deep in my original Christian conditioning and I think this I where your observation to Peter applies –
However, these acts are not done with an altruistic motive at all. People are merely obeying the morals of ‘thou shalt be unselfish and ye shall be rewarded in heaven.’ In order to discover my altruistic intent I first had to wipe out all traces of this particular moral in me together with the persistent feelings of guilt for doing something for myself instead of doing good in the world by trying to change others. When I first started applying the method of actualism I quite selfishly wanted to become happy and to get rid of my debilitating habits of misery, my crippling feelings of fear and my embarrassing bouts of anger and neediness. A few months into the process of investigating my emotions I noticed that I had also become less and less ‘self’-centred and less and less ‘self’-ish. This was something entirely different to the hypocritical moral of being unselfish because by taking apart my emotions and passionate beliefs I was breaking down the very content and substance of my ‘self’. In my actions I became more considerate of other people and more sensitive to others’ preferences and needs. That’s when harmlessness slid to the top of the laundry list and being happy without being harmless became simply impossible. At this point in the process compassion and universal sorrow started to come to the surface. By being less occupied with my own problems and less consumed by my own feelings – because they were simply disappearing into thin air – I started to clearly see the misery and fighting, the corruption and starvation, the injustice and torture, the rapes and murders, the child abuse and poverty, the devastating plagues and shocking wars that afflict everyone’s lives in one way or the other. There were days when I was simply soaked in helpless sorrow about the misery in the world, a misery so vast that it spread from one end of the planet to the other, an endless reservoir of sorrow stretching from the beginning of the human race until the present day. The only way to extract myself out of this overwhelming feeling of sadness for others was to apply common sense – it doesn’t help anybody that I sit in front of the television and cry my eyes out. However, it is clear that it certainly helps me and everyone else I come in contact with that I am becoming free from malice and sorrow ... and this is where the feeling-only state of compassion was turned into active altruistic intent. The feeling of compassion then became the action of altruistic intent – I am ploughing on despite my fears, against any tendency to rest in comfortable numbness in order to bring an end to malice and sorrow, to prove that actual freedom is possible – not for one person only but for anyone who wants it desperately enough. Peace on earth is not a small matter, it is enormous. Actualism is the participation in the process of making peace-on-earth a scientific, i.e. repeatable, fact ... to prove that it is possible to live free from the human condition, 24h a day, everyday. When actual freedom is proven to be repeatable then it is really an irrefutable fact. After I cleaned myself up from the moral of unselfishness and the blind passion of compassion, altruism started to become more and more apparent – not so much as a feeling but rather as a continuous striving towards my avowed aim of ‘self’-immolation. This altruistic intent results in the deliberate obsession to do whatever is necessary to turn the dream for peace into a fact and to be considerate, caring, good company, harmless and perfectly happy in the world as it is with people as they are. In order to turn my dream for peace into a fact constant application, stubborn determination and keen awareness are needed – in one word, effort. What fuels this effort is altruistic intent and this is what gets me off my butt every day. To sum it up – The process of actualism for me so far has been – to use Gary’s analogy of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke – to successively and deliberately dismantle and break down the ‘dyke’ of my social identity, thus allowing occasional ‘torrents’ of my raw instinctual survival passions to leak through. By this stage I was already virtually happy and harmless and as such experiencing the instinctual passions at their most basic did not result in any dangerous or malicious actions. By experiencing these passions in action I was able to examine and deeply understand their workings, giving particular scrutiny to the tender passions of nurture and desire, including any variation of love and libido, so as to safely avoid the famous trap of Enlightenment. In the course of this investigation I could more and more turn all these raw passions into fuel for one single obsession born out of my understanding of numerous PCEs – to altruistically ‘self’-immolate. This process via the state of being virtually free from malice and sorrow has worked for me so far and I personally cannot see how a simple realisation that ‘if ‘I’ accept that ‘I’ do not actually exist then ‘I’ will cease to ‘be’’ could transport me from ‘there’ to here. However, I am merely reporting my own experience of what worked for me and other actualists could possibly discover other methods to become actually free. So far there has only been one hindsight report but I am determined to add to that, and soon. * It’s a great sport to live so close to the brink, Alan, as exciting as bungee jumping without a bungee. I’ll pass on the latter. Well, you might find out that the difference between a temporary PCE and a permanent actual freedom is nothing but a missing bungee cord – ‘I’ can never return again.
When I first started reading the Actual Freedom web site, I thought the core ideas sounded really interesting. Then when I started to look into the correspondence, I saw that Richard seems to spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the minutiae, quibbling and quarrelling over trivialities, and seeming to be more interested in defending himself than helping the other. It almost deterred me from the start. I thought, how the hell can this guy have the goods he claims to have when all he does is bicker like the million and one pedantic geezers that hang out in newsgroups and mailing lists. It didn’t fit my impression of what a person who is actually free, beyond enlightenment, living a life of such quality that is unparalleled in human history, ought to be. Of course, the ‘core idea’ can sound ‘really interesting’ in theory. People only begin to quibble and quarrel when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of actually doing the work of looking at their own beliefs and preconceptions, their feelings and passions. A little clear-eyed look at the website will reveal that the journals and articles are forthright, down-to-earth and to the point, whereas the majority of correspondence consists of answers to correspondents who raised objections to what was said. In short it is the correspondents themselves who set the agenda by the content and intent of their criticism. I wonder why you feel Richard is ‘defending himself’ – aren’t his correspondents attacking him, often ad hominem? Do you think it is ‘not exactly consistent with someone who is ‘actually free from the human condition’’ to take the time and make the effort to put the facts straight and explain his experience in detail, over and over again? Do you think Richard should instead be a ‘lie-down-and-let-people- trample-all-over-him-pacifist? Do you think Richard should recant his discovery as Galileo was forced to do simply because the majority of correspondents think and feel he should not be challenging the status quo? Is your idea that Richard should be ‘helping people’ by agreeing with them or pampering to everyone’s individual worldview and personal beliefs or that he should not respond to their concerns and attacks? By ‘helping people’ do you mean refraining from ‘discussing the minutiae, quibbling and quarrelling over trivialities’ that many people find important enough to raise as an issue?
You said above ‘And once I stopped doing what caused me to feel sorrowful, then the fear of this sorrow re-occurring also disappeared.’ I am not sure about this because stopping what causes fear in a given situation is not going to eliminate the fear from reoccurring. It will stop the current fear in the current situation but it won’t end fear (‘me’). This sounds more like an avoidance of fear (‘me’). We’ve been at this point before. If I may remind you of the discussion in question –
Ok, this makes some sense and I have started doing this since I talked to you last. I have used the fear to start reducing the risk of actual danger or loss. I still don’t see how this is going to permanently eliminate fear from re-occuring but I will keep looking at it. You cannot eliminate fearful feelings just because it seems like a good idea. In order to free yourself from the genetically encoded survival program you will need an altruistic goal – an aim in life that gives you the non-‘self’-oriented perspective you need in order to dare to radically change. Without an altruistic goal you will go round in circles, trying this method and that teaching, this technique and that medicine without ever evincing any change at the core of your ‘being’. As an actualist I want to become unconditionally happy and harmless, knowing full well that achieving this goal will be the end of ‘me’. Because I have a clear direction I can apply the actualism method with success – whenever I am not happy, as in feeling fearful, worried, anxious or sad, I immediately explore what prevents me from being happy and do whatever it takes to return to feeling happy as soon as possible. Similarly, whenever I am not harmless, as in feeling annoyed, angry, resentful or unkind, I immediately explore what prevents me from being harmless and do whatever it takes to return to being harmless as soon as possible. * Given that even enlightened people do not manage to eliminate anger and anguish – they merely disguise and designate it as being ‘Divine Anger’ and ‘Divine Sorrow’ – I do wonder what plans you have and what method you want to use in order to accomplish your aim of having ‘the cake and eat it too’? Having my cake and eat it too is only a saying describing what I have been doing. Obviously I can’t have my cake and eat it too and that is not my aim. I have been using an old method that I used in the 70’s which has been working. You say
and you also say that
Putting the two statements together, it reads that your ‘old method’ from the 70’s is ‘having my cake and eat it too’. Yet despite the fact that you say your ‘old method’ ‘has been working’ you started this thread with –
It seems that ‘your old method’ is not working after all if something is still missing for you. . Given that you consider the passion for peace on earth to be ‘religious fervour’ I can only say that ‘what’s missing’ is pure intent.
However, in my own ‘self’-investigations perhaps most revealing of all, once I began to unravel my emotional connections with others, was the seemingly bottomless malice and contempt that I discovered buried under layers of appropriate social conduct. This instinctual malice presented itself irregardless of whom I was with and I could well appreciate, given the depth and force of this instinct, the so-called ‘crimes of passion’ that occur when people go ballistic, run amok, and kill or maim their lovers or close, intimate associates, not to speak their own children. The thing about Actualism that differs radically from other approaches, spiritual included, is that one gets a first-hand, up front, down and dirty taste of the inveterate malice at the heart of my existence as an instinctual entity, as well as really doing something about it in a hands-on way. It strikes me that there must be a ‘seemingly bottomless’ wellspring of altruism that has caused you to doing something hands-on in order to free your fellow human beings from the consequences of your feelings of malice and contempt. Personally, since I started actualism I only remember a few instances of intense malice and aggression surfacing but I discovered ample feelings of resentment at being here accompanied by feelings of contempt, annoyance, irritation and indignation towards others. I have not usually thought about it this way – a bottomless well of altruism. Given the experience of malice is usually quite self-centred and extremely aversive, it is easy I suppose to overlook one’s deeper reasons. When I said ‘bottomless wellspring of altruism’ I used altruism in the sense of benevolence in action, the action of becoming happy and harmless in order to free one’s fellow human beings from one’s own malice and sorrow. The final altruistic act in the literal, more accurate, sense of the word will happen when ‘I’ irrevocably disappear, never ever to return.
Given that the topic of our discussion has been your theory that ‘sorrow comes from fear’ and the fact that ‘at root fear is the most basic of all the instinctual passions’ I might add something that is essential to understand fear. Fear in human beings is the direct result of ‘me’ wanting to survive – ‘I’, the passionate alien entity inside this flesh and blood body, will do anything in order to stay in existence. Thus the only way fear can be diminished is to diminish the ‘self’ – the weaker the ‘self’ becomes, the less fear there is. There is simply no other way to permanently decrease and eventually eliminate fear because ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’. The magic ingredient for diminishing the ‘self’ is altruism. Obviously, when my intent is focussed on a goal greater than ‘me’, ‘self’-interest and ‘self’-centredness then play a minor role in the game – that’s what actualists mean by ‘pure intent’. Contrary to the traditional idea of battling and transcending fear via ‘self’-enhancement, the fact is that only an altruistic pursuit can reliably reduce and eventually eradicate fear because only altruism can break the instinctual ‘self’-centredness that is the very root of fear. The traditional honourable goals have been to battle malice and sorrow in other people through political, religious or therapeutical pursuits – thus everyone meddles in everyone else’s life and is busy trying to solve everyone else’s problems. For an actualist the altruistic pursuit translates into actively eradicating malice and sorrow from his or her life in order not to burden anyone with his or her sorrow and not to hurt anyone with his or her malice. Fear then disappears on its own accord because the more faint the ‘self’ becomes, as the ‘self’-serving emotions are progressively investigated and eliminated, the less there is for ‘me’ to control, deny or defend. And as the shackles of malice and sorrow and its accompanying fear disappear, a whole magical and sensuous actual universe becomes readily apparent.
The less I became busy with my own worries, the more I was able to extend my range of attention – which meant that I also became increasingly aware of the amount of suffering and malice there is all around. In my spiritual years I had stuck my head in the clouds because I did not want to cope with the feelings of desperation that are the inevitable result when one first acknowledges one’s own situation and the situation of one’s fellow human beings. One then usually escapes into the ‘trap of compassion’ and is seduced to be content with the compassionate feeling of Oneness and Love for all and misses out on the opportunity of doing something ‘hands-on’ about malice and sorrow – in oneself.’ True again. One often has a corresponding sense of being on a mission to save other less fortunate souls. As I work in the social work field, I can see that social workers often have a sense of missionary zeal that is closely linked to Christian morality and ethics, harkening back to the time of Manifest Destiny, and the emergence of the social work field due, in large part, to the appalling poverty and social conditions during the Industrial Revolution. One sees over and over again that Compassion fails to deliver the goods. I am shocked sometimes by the anger that I see fellow workers express to the very clients they are charged with taking care of. I myself, when younger, worked in a mental institution and witnessed scenes of violence by the caretakers towards the patients and was violent myself towards my institutional charges. One sees the (and it is so-labelled) familiar ‘Compassion Fatigue’ among mental health field workers. A curious expression, it points up the fact that Compassion is phoney, not substantial, and is based on a sense of mission stemming from the professional and personal identity. It so easily turns to anger when others don’t live up to one’s expectations or when one’s sense of grandiosity is not fulfilled. One also sees the pity that fellow workers lavish on themselves by complaining that they are burdened and ‘burned out’ by taking care of so many people. Such a sense of exhaustion immediately relates back to the imperative in the field of being loving and compassionate, denying one’s anger and hostility towards the work, the institutional setting, and (oftentimes) one’s clients. When I took up actualism, one of the first things I encountered was a feeling of guilt for being selfish, i.e. for not complying with the Christian and spiritual ethics of being unselfish. The idea of this so-called unselfishness is based on the instinct of nurture and the corresponding morals and ethics that are meant to balance our natural greed and aggression. You are taught to help others in need on the shaky premise that they will help you when you are in need – whereas it is so much more sensible if everyone first tended to themselves and cleaned up their own act. In order to clean up my act I had to stop getting involved in other people’s lives – as in giving advice, commiserating, being busy with everyone’s emotions or exchanging resentments about how tough life is. I became very ‘self’-obsessed, only concerned about my own emotions and how I can investigate and eliminate them. About a year into the process it became apparent that, in becoming less and less of an emotionally driven being and therefore less ‘self’-centred, my range of perception and attention had broadened. It was then that I understood that altruism has nothing to do with my former ethical ideal of unselfishness but that it arises out of the fact that we are all fellow human beings and that I want the best for me and every other human being. When one is honest and sincere, the best contribution to peace-on-earth means freeing myself and others from the burden of my animal instinctual passions – ‘self’-immolation.
You say ‘More and more I fail to understand people’s emotional reactions, their psychological reasoning or the psychic vibes...’. I think I understand what you are saying – that you can no longer ‘empathise’ with others. I have found that the actions of others becomes more and more easy to ‘understand’, when one is lacking this ‘empathy’. Being driven by the human condition means ‘their’ actions and responses are very obvious and, oft times, very silly – and one is not thanked when one points this out! Yes, I automatically empathized with people as a main tool of communicating, whereas now I am rather bewildered about certain actions or reactions of people. I can say that I understand the Human Condition in principle, how it works and how it worked in me, but I cannot understand anymore why someone wouldn’t apply intelligence and awareness instead of getting angry, sad, silly or spiritual. I cannot put myself into ‘their’ shoes anymore, so to speak. The advantage of this experience is that I have to actually inquire what is going on, instead of attempting to assume, guess, intuit or fill in the details myself. I also noticed a change in how I perceive information about human beings, how they cope and try to make sense of their lives. Watching reports on TV, for instance, I more and more fail to understand what is going on in their minds and hearts and I have given up trying. Watching the different aspects of people’s lives all over the world I am amazed, astounded, astonished and impressed by the variety, the complexity, the wide range of human life on earth. On one side there is this amazing technology that is galloping in many areas such as computer technology, engineering, medical science, biochemistry etc. and I see the intelligence, the effort, the altruism and heroism that people show. On the other side there is immense suffering and violence, brought close up through TV with story after story from all over the world. Every single human being suffers, in one way or another, all six billion of them. I am only able to fully acknowledge this fact because I know and pursue the only sensible way out. Seeing the immensity of the unnecessary, instinctually driven suffering only intensifies my intent to make my contribution for peace-on-earth.
And now to something completely different. I enjoyed very much your letter to No 13 last week, and triggered a contemplation about altruism. You had said: Then tonight, catching up on reading what had been written while I was away, it suddenly got to me. This, what I am engaged on, is of far, far, too much importance to give up this easily. Can I live with the fact that every suicide, every war, every rape, every murder, every abuse, every instance of malice is unnecessary – and do nothing about it? No. Whatever is necessary must be done. My practical mind has always had trouble with ‘altruism’ for the simple fact that even if I become free, everybody will have to discover and achieve freedom for themselves. And, as we have seen, up to now not many people have been intrigued to investigate the proposition. So I figured, cunningly, that it wouldn’t make much difference to the world at large if I became free or not. I pursued freedom simply for my own benefit and delight, knowing that this is the very best I can do with my life. But in the last few weeks this line of pursuit has proved to be insufficient. I noticed that I kept losing my happiness and sparkle of Virtual Freedom as it was sometimes replaced by complaining about physical inconveniences like headaches or a ‘pain in the neck’, weirdness, feeling odd, fear attacks and bouts of doubt. Assessing my situation objectively, I realised that the option to stop or go back to ‘normal’ had disappeared altogether. What would I want to go back to? I had left my old life because it was unsatisfactory and that would still be the case. But something else was needed to get me through the oddness. Stubbornness, guilt for ‘being’ an intruding entity and the glittering prize of actual freedom were not enough. And I found another line of Richard’s writing – a benefit of my extensive playing with the web-site:
There it was again – ‘altruistically self-immolated’ – and this time I could see the word from another angle. It has nothing to do with being altruistic for other people – whether they get something directly out of my becoming free or not. It has to do with being unselfish as in my ‘self’ getting out of the way, so that the perfection can become apparent. ‘I’ won’t even get a medal for my altruistic behaviour – ‘I’ will simply not exist anymore. And thus my hang-up with the Christian – and spiritual – morality of being selfish or un-selfish has finally been resolved. Now I can see the sparkling morning, the dewdrops glittering thousand fold on the thin tea-tree leaves, moving and shining like river stones, the birds chirping their birds-sounds and the air moist and warming for another glorious spring day. Everything is perfect when I stop insisting of keeping my ‘self’. Suddenly it is all easy and I am back on the wide and wondrous path – and the pain in the neck is just a signpost for the right direction. Ah, fantastic. Since I finished this letter I had another discussion with Richard about being here now, in this moment in time, with having a past or a future, and I experienced again the eerie wonderful and odd thing of being here now without a ‘self-induced’ story that keeps the moments together like pearls on a string. From this point of view, from simply being here each moment again there is no question whatsoever that Actual Freedom is what I want, 24 hrs a day. And, being back in having a bit of a past and a bit of a future, I am still determined to make it happen, no other reason needed. The continuing oddness of not really knowing where I left the ‘meaning of life’ that had tied my life together so nicely before, can only be a good sign. Ahoi.
You see, when one honestly investigates the so-called altruistic feelings of love, there is nothing altruistic about it. Love is utterly selfish and self-centred. Love prevents me from appreciating and meeting the other as a fellow human being because every feeling towards the other, positive or negative, makes me unable to perceive the other as an autonomous human being. Being in love, I create an all-pervasive affective image of the other, consisting of my hopes, needs, fears, dreams and expectations. Only by being an autonomous human being myself can I experience an actual intimacy with my fellow human beings. This is how I described my first experience of actual intimacy –
Nice try, but when you use words like eliminated, instead of awareness, you are revealing your repressing control trip. I have been speaking of awareness, in referring to 3 levels of consciousness, I refer to 3 levels of awareness. I think you don’t know what ‘eliminated’ means, maybe you have never experienced the elimination of an emotion or an instinct. It means, this particular emotion and issue have disappeared, it doesn’t exist anymore. Take jealousy. I have neither repressed it nor transcended it, it simply does not occur, whatever the situation, because the one who would be insulted by jealousy or feel insecure by anyone’s behaviour has been eliminated. In a repressed state once in a while the lid invariably ‘flies off’, you cannot repress for 24 h a day, 365 days a year. The spiritual practice of ‘awareness’ only shifts the identity to the ‘watcher’, a newly created spiritual identity. When those ‘transcended’ emotions and instincts come back, they are back in full force. They have not been eliminated or even reduced, only put aside or ‘watched’ by the ‘watcher’. Elimination actually gets rid of the cause, it severs the root. To eliminate an emotion, such as jealousy, I had to find the cause behind it, examine all the supporting beliefs and emotions, like love, possessiveness, fear, greed, insecurity etc. and understand them in their entirety. I have to see the instincts, the core of the ‘self’ in its operation. Only then is it possible to eliminate that particular emotion – a bit of the ‘self’ actually dies, never to return. In fact, with the elimination of the instincts, ‘I’ will cease to exist, period. Psychological self-immolation is the only sensible sacrifice that ‘I’ can make in order to reveal whatever is actual. And what is actual is perfection. Life is bursting with meaning when ‘I’ am no longer present to mess things up. ‘I’ stand in the way of the purity of the perfection of the actual being apparent. ‘My’ presence prohibits this ever-present perfection being evident. ‘I’ prevent the very purity of life, that ‘I’ am searching for, from coming into plain view.
Because this will always produce the destructive attitude of ‘Fuck you me first’ and it will never allow for ‘You first me second’ which I would say is essential altruism not that I am there but I can see the light of Virtual freedom. ‘You first me second’ is the religious-spiritual moral of ‘Thou shalt be unselfish and thou shalt be rewarded in heaven’. The altruism we are talking about is the act of ‘self’-immolation that has no rewards for ‘me’ except – as Richard reports – the glorious satisfaction of fulfilling one’s destiny for the benefit of this body, that body and every body. Virtual Freedom, the stage where you are harmless and happy 99% of your time, is certainly the first necessary step in the process towards an Actual Freedom from the Human Condition.
Vineeto’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust |
