‘Today I find it strange that none of all the ‘oh so wise’ spiritual teachers really were able to make a distinction between sensations and feelings.’ Vineeto, Selected Correspondence, Feelings 2

The complete quote was from a correspondence about the difference between Vipassana and actualism. Buddhist teachings are particularly vague about the difference between sensations and feelings. For Buddhists both feelings and sensations are unwanted responses from ‘the body’ that need to be transcended and one is taught to watch them in order to dissociate oneself from both one’s unwanted affective and sensate bodily reactions. To put your snippet in context –

I think the main problem for me and also probably for most people is to overcome the habit of following emotions or impulses that habitually arise in one’s psyche. For a simple example if I sense an itch on my arm I usually scratch the itch instead of paying attention to the itch, investigating the sensation behind it. I think the itch is a good example because, at least in my case, when I start paying attention to it the itch intensifies before it goes away. Likewise when I feel unappreciated at work I tend to compensate with food or sometimes (especially in the past year) meditation!!! I would feel really calm and good after Vipassana. Chocolate and coffee with ice cream make me feel great, too. Speaking of which I have to run to the kitchen to brew us a couple of cups of this ‘divine’ liquid.

This question of yours fits in with the issue of the other letter about Vipassana, so I will combine the two letters. Today I find it strange that none of all the ‘oh so wise’ spiritual teachers really were able to make a distinction between sensations and feelings. I myself only learned to be precise when I came across Actual Freedom, and now the difference seems so obvious that I don’t know how I could have ever mixed the two!

Sensations are everything we perceive with our senses – touch, smell, taste, colour, form, sound, itch, pain, moisture, temperature, sexual pleasure, etc. Feelings are affective reactions to our surroundings and, as such, are emotion-backed thoughts.

When you have chocolate and coffee with ice-cream you mix sensation and feeling, the pleasure of the senses tasting sweet and bitter and then, consequently, you are ‘feeling’ good. But one doesn’t need ‘feeling’ to fully enjoy a cup of coffee with ice-cream, on the contrary, ‘me’ as a feeling identity acts as a buffer to the intensity of the sensate pleasure. ‘Feeling’ is only there as long as a ‘me’ is alive. ‘I’ am feelings and feelings are ‘me’, ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’, ‘I’ am love and love is ‘me’. Check it out for yourself. You might find that you are conscious of the sensation and a split second later you have a feeling – or mixed feelings – about it. But in that first split second you were aware only of the physical sensation. Vineeto, List AF, No 7, 24.4.1999

As for Barry Long – he has blurred the distinction between sensations and affective feelings despite your affirmation that ‘this distinction also obvious to any moderately intelligent child or adult’. He taught that love is a sensation, which is pure nonsense. In a deliberate distortion of common sense Barry Long has arbitrarily chosen to label the desirable feelings ‘sensation’ and the undesirable feelings ‘emotion’, completely ignoring the fact that love is an emotion and, in the case of Enlightenment, an all-consuming passion.

The Buddhists label both feelings and sensations as ‘feelings’ from which one should watchfully distance oneself in order to become one’s eternal Higher Self. Vis –

‘There is the case where a monk, when feeling a painful feeling, discerns that he is feeling a painful feeling. When feeling a pleasant feeling, he discerns that he is feeling a pleasant feeling. When feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling, he discerns that he is feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling. When feeling a painful feeling of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a painful feeling of the flesh. When feeling a painful feeling not of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a painful feeling not of the flesh. When feeling a pleasant feeling of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a pleasant feeling of the flesh. When feeling a pleasant feeling not of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a pleasant feeling not of the flesh. When feeling a neither- painful-nor-pleasant feeling of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling of the flesh. When feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling not of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling not of the flesh. In this way he remains focused internally on feelings in & of themselves, or externally on feelings in & of themselves, or both internally & externally on feelings in & of themselves. Or he remains focused on the phenomenon of origination with regard to feelings, on the phenomenon of passing away with regard to feelings, or on the phenomenon of origination & passing away with regard to feelings. Or his mindfulness that ‘There are feelings’ is maintained to the extent of knowledge & remembrance. And he remains independent, unsustained by (not clinging to) anything in the world. This is how a monk remains focused on feelings in & of themselves. http://world.std.com/~metta/canon/majjhima/mn10.html

Practicing actualism, however, one becomes more and more sensuously aware of being alive as the affective filters that overlay the senses are being investigated and removed, i.e. as less affective feelings intrude, then more sensuous sensations are able to become evident. When no fear, desire, aggression or feelings of nurture interferes with me sensately experiencing the world around me, then the magic and abundance of this actual physical world we all live in becomes stunningly apparent in its utter exquisite deliciousness.

Barry Long has been getting this wrong for years because he’s just preaching old time religion.

You must be referring what I wrote to Gary last year –

When I discovered how gullible I had been and how much I was sucked into all that Eastern spiritual gobbledygook, it seemed to me that at some time in life I had had a choice and decided to be gullible in life. Eventually I came to understand that everybody is born into this world as a helpless and already instinctually programmed creature. As such, they have to choicelessly believe whatever those who are feeding and clothing them are propagating to be the truth. Our social conditioning is a history of believing what others are telling us. We learn to believe from the very first word spoken to us and beliefs and psittacisms are a big part of our social identity. There is no way to avoid having beliefs but once I tore a hole into the thick layer of beliefs that I considered the Truth, there were no holds barred. What a relief to discover that one is able to get rid of them, isn’t it? <snip>

The dread of ‘divine punishment’ was very real to me for some time – ‘what if everyone is right after all and I end up in (Eastern) hell?’ Each time one steps away from humanity’s beliefs to stand on one’s own two feet, there is this mad feeling of ‘oh dear, what have I done?’ And yet, when discovering the actual underneath the belief, the actual is so self-evidently obvious that I always thought ‘how come I haven’t seen this before, how come nobody tells you about it, how come nobody else sees this?’

The psychic world of divine and evil, with its atavistic feelings and psychic power structures, is not to be dismissed lightly. It is not a small thing we are doing, stepping out of ancient psychic history and leaving behind at least 3,500 years of recorded superstition and belief, hope for heaven and fear of hell. I encountered fears of being burnt as a witch, expelled from the tribe or starved to death – which in not so recent history were not just psychic imagined fears. These fears all seem to be woven as an ancient memory in our brain cells and are automatically triggered the moment one dares to steps out of the tribal, religious or social group one has belonged to.

Two things always helped me to overcome those fear-attacks – one was the obvious fact that feelings are not actual. Nobody is actually persecuting me or physically threatening me. The other thing is the understanding that I am deliberately and actively dismantling my very ‘self’, all of ‘who I think and feel I am’ and of course that will rock the boat, it wouldn’t be an actual change if it didn’t! Then, the journey becomes really thrilling ... <snip>

I always say, spirituality was the best on offer at the time. The longer these God-men promote their wisdom and lifestyle in the West, the more they are coming under observation and scrutiny, and reports of their deeds are spreading with the help of modern communication. Soon there won’t be much left that is not known about a life of a God-man. The mystery and mystique of enlightenment, so important in maintaining reverence and faith, is more and more being examined in the light of how, or indeed if, the holy men are living their own teachings. The lies and confusion that enlightened people are promoting and acting out, in the name of God’s will, are now public knowledge, and the internet is one of the best tools to make this knowledge known to whoever wants to know.

Ramesh Balesekar’s callous fatalism, Adi Da’s extensive sexual orgies, St. John de Ruiter’s message from God to take two more wives into his existing family, Ma Anmachi’s disciplinarian cruelty, M. Rajneesh’s criminal scandals in Oregon, J. Krishnamurti’s secret love affair with his best friend’s wife, Barry Longs’ philosophy of the golden rod that transmits divine grace, Ishwara Maitreya’s mad utterings of God’s latest wisdom, the Actual Supreme Being who deeply apologizes 13 times on one single page for the mess he created in the world ... once one starts looking with the clear eyes of a non-believer, there is plenty of dirt and insanity to discover, masquerading in the name of Love and Compassion. There are no good gurus and bad gurus, as some people, who only find fault with one and not the other, are trying to point out – the very institution of enlightenment is rotten to the core.

In my process of disentangling myself from being a disciple I discovered two components to religious belief – one, as you said was the lure of ‘immortality, Truth, Timelessness’, aspiring to achieve an imaginary perfection in enlightenment, and the other was love, my affective belief in the master’s ultimate authority and my inferiority. Vineeto to Gary 3.8.2000

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