RESPONDENT: But I believe that the remaining human instincts as basic as the ‘will to live’, or less basic such as to be creative, to make one’s surroundings beautiful continue to operate in the background of one’s psyche even in the state of apperception. The difference lies probably in that the focus of the psyche on ‘how I want it to be’ is relaxed or gone as one is enjoying this moment of the life.

VINEETO: Apperception, by definition, is a state when there is no self in operation, which means no social identity and no instinctual passions. From the glossary –

apperception — conscious perception, comprehension, the mind’s perception of itself. Oxford Dictionary

Richard: Apperception is the exclusive attention paid to being alive right here and now. This type of perception is best known as apperception, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself. Apperception is an awareness of consciousness. It is not ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious; it is the mind’s awareness of itself. Apperception is a way of seeing that can be arrived at by pure contemplation. Pure contemplation is when ‘I’ cease thinking ... and thinking takes place of its own accord. Such a mind, being free of the thinker – ‘I’ – is capable of immense clarity.

Apperception is to be the senses as a bare awareness, a pure consciousness experience of the world as-it-is. Because there is no ‘I’ as an observer – a little person inside one’s head – to have sensations, I am the sensations. There is nothing except the series of sensations which happen ... not to ‘me’ but just happening ... moment by moment … one after another. To be the sensations, as distinct from being an ‘I’ inside perceiving the world outside, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and magic.

In Virtual Freedom , with apperception operating more or less continuously, ‘I’ find it harder and harder to maintain credibility. ‘I’ am increasingly seen as the usurper, an alien entity inhabiting this body and taking on an identity of its own. Mercilessly exposed in the bright light of awareness – apperception casts no shadows – ‘I’ can no longer find ‘my’ position tenable. ‘I’ can only live in obscuration, where ‘I’ lurk about, creating all sorts of mischief. ‘My’ time is speedily coming to an end; ‘I’ can barely maintain ‘myself’ any longer... The Actual Freedom Trust Glossary

As for ‘to be creative, to make one’s surroundings beautiful’ –

The incentive to make my surrounding pleasing to the eye is simply common sense and delight in operation, whereby what is pleasing to the eye is different for everyone. Creativity is simply an expression of being alive as a sensate and reflective human being – it’s a pleasure to play with all that’s available, to arrange things according to my taste and liking, to produce something according to my expertise, be it for money or for mere fun. When I play on our website for hours and hours, it is not because what I am doing has some innate meaning or importance – maybe nobody will ever read it. Arranging and re-arranging, copying and pasting, sorting and collecting, scheming and categorizing is simply my way of appreciating what others and I have written about Actual Freedom to date. And it may be useful to somebody else to make sense of life, the universe and what it is to be a human being.

Creativity, as it is usually understood and applied, is inextricably intertwined with the creative person’s identity, an expression of his or her ‘real me’, one’s innermost being or ‘true self’ and, as such, it only reinforces the shackles of one’s identity. Beauty is the feeling perception of what the ‘self’ loves and creativity is the process of expressing that feeling of beauty or whatever other feeling the creative person wants to express.

Now, that my ‘self’ has lost the grip over me most of the time, I am simply doing what is happening and enjoy what I am doing. That doing may be working for people, sorting their financial affairs, writing letters, thinking something through, watching TV, redressing web-pages, cooking a meal, washing dishes, having lunch in town or lying on the couch. Having eliminated the basic resentment of ‘having to be here’, I now find that whatever I do is the delightful expression of being alive. Creativity or doing nothing is now all part of the same delight – being the universe’s experience of itself as a sensate and reflective human being.

*

RESPONDENT: Is it easy for you to differentiate between the feeling of love and dependency and the sensation of fulfillment, freedom and happiness that comes when two people share intimacy?

VINEETO: I like your question. For an actualist, to investigate the good emotions of love, beauty and compassion is as essential as examining the bad emotions of anger, fear, resentment and depression.

In order to investigate the feeling of love and all its accompanying emotions, I had to sharpen my awareness and become persistently alert to detect when love was kicking in. Love is, after all, the most honoured and appreciated of all human emotions, and one is very easily tempted to brush over the nice sweet feeling when it happens.

Investigating and dismantling the good feelings is a real detective adventure game, because, as you mentioned to No 8,

[Respondent]: ‘it seems that the mind is very eager to plaster an emotion on any simple sensation’.

Our identity thrives on feelings, it cannot exist without feelings and emotions – therefore detecting the emotion ‘plastered on any simple sensation’ is to separate out and successively eliminate your very identity – ‘who’ you think and feel yourself to be.

In the beginning, my guiding light was the memory of the pure consciousness experience when there was clearly no emotion happening, as well as the first brief moments of actual intimacy with Peter that occasionally occurred.

In hindsight I can describe love as a bundle of various emotions that arose –

• a gratitude for the shared pleasure,
• a sense of beauty that the other seems to have or emanate that nobody else has,
• a desire to get more of the delicious feeling of not being alone,
• a growing dependency that I believe I can only be happy with the other,
• a feeling that the other is giving meaning to my life,
• a growing possessiveness and then jealousy when the other doesn’t spend his or her time with me,
• a feeling of excitement and anticipation before appointments and an emptiness after leaving,
• a pining, dreaming, mental and emotional pre-occupation when not together,
• wanting to change the other in order that the ‘shared happiness’ will be more perfect and last forever.

All in all, love produces almost visible psychic tentacles that engulf the other and make him or her a commodity of one’s own desire. After all, love is the expression of the instinctual passions of nurture and desire, packaged nicely into a possessive and exclusive concern for, and focus on, the other. What is usually considered ‘intimacy’ is most often the first honeymoon stage of love. ‘I’ love the other because he/she makes me happy, because ‘I’ feel less lost, lonely and frightened in his/her presence. ‘I’ care for him/her because he/she is the centre and hero / heroine of my dream and the moment ‘my’ hopes, needs, dreams and expectation are not fulfilled, love turns into disappointment, resentment, retreat or even hate.

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 –

[Vineeto]: After a minute or two that appeared to contain an eternity of complex understanding, Peter said to me, ‘Hello, how are you? Good that you are here!’ ‘Here’ obviously meant that there existed a place outside my belief-systems! I turned round, out of my shock and bewilderment, into the actual world, and saw that I was simply sitting on the couch with Peter. Here was someone sitting next to me, another human being, not particularly a man, lover or boyfriend. Just a human being, smiling and pleased to meet me, eager to explore with me the next event in life. He is interested. And I am interested. Who is this person? What will happen next? What will he say next? What will we do next? It is exciting, alive, right here and a great pleasure! A Bit of Vineeto

You might also want to check out sample article No 3 of Richard’s Journal on the website, as well as his writing on the topics of love and sex.

RESPONDENT: Hi Vineeto... back from my vacation in the US Pacific NW (avoiding ‘certain’ parts of Oregon), enjoying myself too thoroughly. Now back to work...

VINEETO: Good to hear that you had an enjoyable holiday. Funny that you should say you were ‘avoiding ‘certain’ parts of Oregon’ – these ‘certain’ parts of Oregon are the only landscape of the US I have ever seen in person apart from the bus ride to and from Portland airport. <snip>

RESPONDENT: It’s too bad you didn’t experience more of the region... it is truly beautiful geography. Amazing that you were insulated from the majesty of nature en route to such an ‘important’ place. The forests/mountains/water make a far grander ‘church’ than any guru’s ashram. I found I was quite drawn to the environment of the NW, and shortly after I returned I was approached about an interesting job opportunity in the area. Clearly divine forces at work, huh? ;-) So, a move may be in the offing.

VINEETO: Oh, on my journeys to the Oregon Ranch – four altogether – I was entirely focussed on seeing Rajneesh and our new commune. In my years of spiritual search I was geared to finding the ‘inner beauty’ that was represented by Rajneesh and ‘his people’, nothing ‘outer’ mattered much to me. My disregard for the magnificence around me is yet another proof of how much spiritual belief and religious devotion were clouding, distorting and restricting my perception and making me oblivious to the splendour of the actual physical universe.

Many spiritualists claim to see and experience this magnificence and splendour but what they feel is beauty, which means they also see and experience ugliness. As such, they can only sustain the feeling of beauty by denying or turning away from their feeling of ugliness. This is also evident in the religion of animism that underpins much of Environmental belief – whilst they see beauty and goodness in Mother Nature they also see ugliness and evil in materialism and technological progress.

RESPONDENT: I’m not having PCEs but I am having direct experiences. I will write when I have more to say. That’s all for now.

VINEETO: As I said above, in order to understand what Actual Freedom is about it is essential to remember a pure consciousness experience. It is vital to investigate precisely those ‘direct experiences’, and determine when and where and how the experience is being polluted by the ‘self’, by the feeling and spirit-ual interpretation of the actual sensate, sensuous experience.

It is a fascinating adventure to explore one’s sensate experiences with the magnifying glass of attentiveness and heightened awareness and to discover the ingredients that invariably occur to stop or prevent one’s direct experience of the actual world. Particularly in the beginning I would often be thrown into a turmoil of fears and ‘bad’ feelings when trying to remove the ‘good’ feelings of love, beauty, spiritual meaningfulness or virtue from a sensate experience. Suddenly all hell broke lose, the ‘bad’ feelings of loneliness, starkness, dread or vice would come to the surface. Moral and ethical values would appear as noisy and frightening doubts in my head calling me traitor, whore, evil, animal. But remember, those feelings – as scary as they may look at first – are nothing but the flipside of the coin called morality and can confidently be dismissed along with all the good feelings. The ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ feelings are the rose-coloured and grey-coloured glasses one has to remove from one’s eyes in order to experience the actual world as magnificent as it is.

What is left is pure delight.

RESPONDENT: Whilst I have no memory of a PCE, I do remember that I used to sit outside my parents’ house and contemplate the beauty around me until I one day came to a point where there was, for a split second, no ‘me’ there. Unfortunately the feeling function kicked in suddenly I felt the ‘tremendous love’ for the universe and ‘God’. This unfortunate incident led me down the path of the spiritual seeker who is trying to attempt to ‘make sense of it all’.

VINEETO: I know from my own experience how tempting this grand feeling of ‘tremendous love’ for all is. I am glad that Richard had warned us not to ground on the ‘Rock of Enlightenment’, so I did not have to get lost into that passionate fantasy for too long. But it is good that I had the experience of that tremendous love so clearly because I know now from my own experience, where not to go. It only leads to power, sorrow for all and the whole enlightenment-saga.

That ‘split second’ of your experience is, as Alan points out, a fascinating bit, a split second of a PCE. When such a moment comes around the corner next time, you could stay with the physical – with the actual – with the senses. Then feelings of love and beauty have less chance to overtake the pure consciousness experience.

RESPONDENT: Vineeto, I would like to know something more about the happiness, benevolence and magnificence of the actual world. I can understand that it would be harmless because without ‘I’ there would be no malice. But wherefrom the happiness comes? Is it just the absence of sorrow?

VINEETO: I had some lengthy correspondence on mailing-list C about benevolence.

Once you see the actual physical universe without the grey glasses of malice and sorrow and without the rose-coloured glasses of love and compassion, the magnificence becomes apparent. Take a sunset. Someone in love will see the beauty of the particular scene and be full of gratitude, love and awe. Someone who just split up with his girlfriend will see the sorrow, the transitory nature of all things, the ending of a day, a life, a period. Someone about to go to war will see the power and beauty of his God, pray for protection and feel supported in his passionate mission by the display of the glorious colours.

An actualist might see this immense fireball of helium in the sky, giving warmth and light and life to its orbiting planet called earth, all seen through the layer of atmosphere, giving it the wonderful display of ever-changing colours, different each day. To lay any feelings or imagination or even a creator-God over this magnificent event is to miss the actual experience of it. To experience the world around me without the distorting filter of self-centred emotions, feelings and instincts enables me to perceive and appreciate this infinite magnificence, this purity and perfection and this magical actuality of each moment in paradise.

RESPONDENT: Or is there anything positive about it?

VINEETO: ‘Positive’ is too small a word, for it is only invented to counteract the original objection to being here. The Human Condition in each of us inevitably results in not wanting to be here but to be somewhere else, in imaginary heights or in a hope for a better future or life after death. When senses and awareness are freed from the shackles of emotions, feelings, beliefs and instincts one is – as Richard says – ‘the universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being’, nothing less. Then, one is as benevolent as the rest of the universe.

I understand where your question may come from. The absence of sorrow, when one is empty of tears, can be experienced as a starkness, grey, empty and dull reality. Because this seems unbearable, one then cranks up some positive thoughts and feelings to ‘believe’ that life is not so terrible after all. This so-called happiness has nothing to do with the gay and abundant experience when there are no feelings and emotions.

The wide and wondrous path to Actual Freedom is to investigate and remove whatever feeling, emotion, belief or instinct surfaces until slowly, slowly the actual world becomes apparent – and its magnificent and benevolent nature. And you are then the bit of the universe that says ‘WOW, isn’t the physical universe extraordinary and amazing, wonder-full and perfect!’

RESPONDENT:

• I can’t remember a PCE, is that a problem.

VINEETO: There is another topic-page on Pure Consciousness Experiences, that I have put together. It contains descriptions and definitions of PCEs, how to recognize a PCE and distinguish it from an Altered State of Consciousness, and suggestions of how to induce a PCE.

I myself didn’t have a PCE until four month of intense investigations into actual freedom, but I had enough understanding that the old solutions didn’t work and I had the intent to investigate something new.

However, to become actually free it is very helpful, and eventually vital, to remember a PCE in order for you to have clear experiences of the freedom that you are aiming for. But don’t let the worry of not remembering one right now spoil your enjoyment of the moment or diminish the intent of your investigation into your emotions and beliefs. Sooner or later, if you are sincerely, honestly and persistently inquiring, a PCE will sneak up on you, possibly after you have seen through a particularly ‘dense’ belief. When it happens, it is good to look out for the ‘good’ emotions of gratefulness, bliss, love and beauty so they do not to take over, thus inviting the ‘self’ back in and destroying the purity of the peak experience.

RESPONDENT: It has been a foggy day here in NY/NJ. As I drove through the woody areas, my windshield decorated with random droplets of mist, I was happy to be where I was and doing the driving. Mysterious misty mountains and low, cloudy skies were touching my car. It was very intimate and peaceful.

VINEETO: This is a delightful description. Did you happen to notice if there were any feelings or emotions while you were experiencing this intimate and peaceful surrounding, any feelings of beauty, gratefulness, awe or fuzzy feelings of belonging? It would be interesting to examine such experiences carefully to distinguish between a peak experience or PCE and an experience of beauty and ‘good’ feelings – that is, if you want to know the difference for yourself.

Here on the East Coast of Australia we are now having delightful autumn days, the rainy season is finishing, leaving the landscape lush and green with shiny leaves, glittering now in the softer sun of the late evening. There is a certain time of the day, when one suddenly notices that the light has changed, the shadows deepen, the colours have more depth as well, the light on the leaves has a golden glow – and the birds start singing again after a few hours of rest during the day. Then the Eastern horizon turns into that delicious combination of pink and deep blue stripes while on the Western side the sun sets in peach, light blue, purple and orange. It is a particular delicious spectrum of colours – and all with the background of twittering, chirping birds, sounds of cars driving along and the clicking of two keyboards...

RESPONDENT: My logical thinking is that if I understood (intellectually) this thing before reading about actualism – it must be because of spiritualism, because that is what I was exposed to till that time. There could be one more reason, however. As Richard suggested, I looked into my Hindu belief of ‘all paths lead to the same goal’. It could be because of this belief, when I read about actualism, subconsciously, I kept on correcting my previous understandings and made myself to believe that, that is what I understood so far also. I am looking into it but some of the events/understandings I can clearly recollect happening much before.

VINEETO: There is a much more simple explanation. Since actualism lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to spiritual beliefs, you probably have not yet discovered what ‘actual’ is – facts existing independent from one’s ideas, feelings, interpretations and hopes. It is a great moment when one for the first time discovers a bit of the actual world. I can highly recommend concentrating on investigation of facts. One of the keywords is ‘independent’ from my own interpretation, feeling about it, imagining about it, philosophising about it. Just the simple fact of a coffee-cup being a coffee-cup, a tree being a tree – not some life-producing oxygen-machine or item of beauty – simply a tree, trunk and branches, birds and insects, smells and leaves rustling in the wind. It’s good to start with something so simple as an everyday object and investigate how many ideas and feelings we are weaving around those objects. It’s good fun and it will give you some experience about plain facts.

VINEETO: Due to the intrinsic quality genetically built into the physical fabric of the universe to be the best it can be, every human being has the potential to evoke naiveté and intent – the innate drive to look for a way out of the grim everyday experience of life. Given that Richard has discovered that one can indeed eliminate one’s identity, conditioning and instinctual passions, and has also devised a method to delete one’s inherited genetic software package, so to speak, it is now possible to use the experience of a PCE to reach to an actual freedom from the Human Condition, permanently.

It is no longer necessary to interpret one’s glimpses of the perfection and purity of the actual world as some kind of god-given grace, thus degrading and distorting the experience of pure magnificence into a feeling-based self-centred interpretation of beauty, love or ‘the divine’. Out of those moments of a pure consciousness experience to dare and acknowledge ‘what I am’, a living and apperceptive organism lived by this splendid and perfect universe without separation by any sense of ‘being’ whatsoever, is to take the first step in direction of an actual freedom.