When you apply the method of actualism and inquire into the exact nature of why you are angry, grumpy, fearful or sad, then you will soon find out that it is never other people, evil things or adverse events that prevent you from being happy and harmless. You will find that it is always your own beliefs, points of view, opinions and principles together with their underlying emotions and instinctual passions that prevent you from being happy and harmless.

At first a particular belief you are looking at might seem too precious to abandon. However, if you continue to actively question what you have been taught to be true and right, you soon will come to experience the relief, freedom and sensual delight that is to be had once these adopted beliefs are investigated and up-rooted, one by one.

Since asking me about instinctual passions, you have posted the following to the list. Vis:

No 23 – Hi No 16, is it true that you only want to talk to the head of the cult?

I wouldn’t say I only want to talk to the head of the cult. I thought I would try and talk to Vineeto until I read her reply to Gary just now and she sounded like a complete robot. It made me realize why I don’t feel like I belong here.

I do find it intriguing that, first asking me about instinctual passions, you now consider me ‘a complete robot’, as a real robot, being just a machine, does not know about feelings, emotions and passions. However, as you have asked, I will give you my two cents on my experience with ‘this belonging issue’.

All my life I wanted and needed to belong – to a family, a country, a group of mates, a boyfriend, a political movement, a therapy group and, most dedicated of all, a spiritual movement. When I had a strong sense of belonging to one particular spiritual group – Rajneeshees – I began to question other groups, religions and tribes I had belonged to before, thinking I was doing great liberating investigation.

However only when I questioned the act of believing itself, which is the cornerstone of belonging to any spiritual movement, did I come to realise that all my questioning of belonging so far had not even scratched the surface of my identity. Investigating the act of believing itself, of course, brought up all kinds of fears, the strongest of which was that then I would not belong to anyone or any group – I would be on my own.

As I said to Gary, when I was questioning my spiritual belief of being a Sannyasin there was great concern that I did not replace one belief with another – I wanted something tangible, stable, permanent, something that I would never ever have to question again, something that did not depend on me believing in it to be true. Therefore I had to investigate my emotional reactions to stepping out of that protective group as I was leaving behind all my friends, my spiritual identity as a Rajneeshee and the security of feeling as though I belonged to a close-knit community.

Those emotional reactions were not only my fear of being lonely and unprotected, but I was also haunted by my own adopted spiritual morals and ethics – was I doing the ‘right’ thing?, would I be punished if there was a God or an afterlife?, what if I was wrong and Rajneesh was right?, who am I to decide the ‘right’ path? ... and so on. It was just as well that I did not blame Richard or Peter – or actualism per se – for these fears and distressing emotions that arose from my own questioning, otherwise I would have never been able to investigate my own spiritual values and my need to belong to a protective spiritual tribe.

Now I belong to no group and to no one and by investigating not only my social identity of beliefs, morals and ethics but also my instinctual survival passions, I am leaving behind ‘who’ I thought and felt I was. For me, the notion that practicing actualism is the equivalent of belonging to a cult is complete and utter nonsense because by taking apart my social identity I am free from the debilitating need to belong to any group, family, nation, race and gender, and by investigating my instinctual passions I am free from the biggest club of all – humanity itself.

Actualism is about becoming autonomous for the first time in one’s life.

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?

From then on, naturally I tried to have this pure consciousness experience more often and then I would take information ‘back’ from that realm of clarity. From such a view ‘outside’ of the ‘self’ it was relatively easy to make out what it consists of, an entity of mainly fear-based beliefs, preventing my direct experience of the world-as-it-is. I decided that I wanted to get rid of this ‘self’ in its entirety, so I would take a particular belief that I wanted to examine and view it in its complete structure. It has been a fascinating journey of one discovery after the other! Every single issue that I encountered and thoroughly examined ended up being exposed as yet another product of the ‘self’, this lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning entity in me that wants to stay alive and kicking, selfish, self-centred and self-related. With every dismantled belief or recognized emotion-related conviction my ‘self’ became weaker and more transparent – allowing me to experience the actual world again and again and again.

Now, stripped of most beliefs and their inherent emotions the ‘self’is not very powerful anymore. Once in a while fear rears its head, reminding me of the last bits of ‘self’, resisting to give up their control-function. But the changes in my life are already so significantly for the better, and as I am fully in my senses most of the time, my experience of people, things and events is fresh, sparkling, actual, magical and delicious. There is no question as to the inevitable death of this alien entity. It will happen in one of these days...

The film ‘The Truman Show’ depicts the making of and living in a belief-structure blatantly obvious. The hero grows up in his surroundings, designed to film and broadcast his daily life around the clock, and he has work, friends, wife etc. Then somebody comes along and plants the first doubt into his head. He examines his situation at close hand, finds more and more strange inconsistencies, plans to escape and is finally able to leave the whole constructed ‘universe’ – he steps outside his known belief-structure and enters the unknown, a world which is neither protected nor planned nor restricted by ready-made beliefs...

When I first began to dig into the idea of what being spiritual means, I was being tormented for a few weeks as to which was the right path and which was the wrong path and what I was to be believe and follow and what was heresy. Finally I popped my head outside of the world of beliefs and spiritual concepts – the first crack in the door. The psychic world, this intricate net woven in our heads and hearts from both personal and atavistic feelings and beliefs is so dense that it seems to be the only world there is. Here is a bit what I wrote at the time –

When I tried to tell Peter about my experiences and insights his simple response gave me quite a shock. ‘But all this is just inside your mind, it is simply your own interpretation, it may appear to be real, but it is not actual.’ Yes, that was true. I could easily see that I was inside the ‘mind’, roaming about in the different chambers of my assembled beliefs-systems, trying to find the one that was ‘right’ and ‘true’ – while in fact, I was just having a little grander and unusually complex perception of this huge labyrinth of thoughts and feelings! I could see more of my ideas or concepts and other people’s ideas, but they were simply ideas. None of them had any relevance to the actuality of the physical world!

In seeing the fact, everything stood still and the whole construct of beliefs suddenly disappeared. Then, for the first time in all my years of the spiritual search, I experienced several hours outside of the ‘psychic world’. Being outside, I could see that this ‘world’ is a huge, all-encompassing construct, created and held in place by the dreams, beliefs, bonds, power-battles, emotions and different spiritual ideas of all of humanity. Everyone is part of it, weaving and reproducing bits of this ‘psychic carpet’. The more people believe in one particular version the more that version becomes ‘real’ or ‘true’. Intuitive or ‘psychic’ people are simply a little better acquainted with the rules and occurrences of this ‘other-world’. It is never actual though, because it relies on constant re-creation through imagination and belief. The moment people cease to believe in a particular religion, idea or value, that very concept eventually disappears from the earth. Actual, on the contrary, is what is already here without anybody applying a feeling, an interpretation, a belief or any other ‘psychic effort’. It is simply here, visual, tangible, audible and tastable.

That night I had stuck my head beyond the blanket of beliefs – including good and bad, right and wrong, love and evil. In the first moments, with the ‘psychic world’ disappearing, this new place was stark, black, scary, a big hole and a bottomless abyss. Suddenly the ground under my feet wavered as the very existence of beliefs ceased. For a while I was lost, frightened and bewildered. <snip>

The next morning the understanding of the night before was still vividly present. I clearly remember walking around a crowded out-door market, looking at all the different stalls with people offering their products together with their particular belief-systems, as they tried to convince the customers of the reality of their particular version of ‘truth’.

There were all kinds of proposals to find ‘truth’ or meaning, whether religious, spiritual or secular. Feral feathers and karmic wheels, goddesses and herbs, ways of natural living and an impressive array of spiritual bookstalls, offering a hundred different solutions to life. Colourful Turks were selling their local hot coffee and delicious cakes; a black boy was playing romantic songs on his guitar, selling them by the hour. He was successful – people bought his dreams, his love songs! A woman in purple dyed feral clothes was selling self-made dream-catchers, talismans and other symbols of her particular conviction.

There were traders of organic vegetables, Indian farmers and food-vans with a wide variety of exotic meals – all served with the conviction of their producer: healthy or hearty, plain or spicy, Italian, Thai or Indian, home-made or magically healing. Hippies from the hills sold their produce along with their dreamy, chaotic life-style; drumming ferals with uncombed tasselled hair presented their life as the most juicy and happy of all. Ecologists proclaimed that only purely native rainforest trees should be planted to save the environment. Everyone was utterly convinced of what they were offering, complete with their corresponding outfit, make-up, special ‘language’ and music. I was quite taken aback by the enormity of what I saw. Being outside of all those beliefs made me see what they consisted of – merely ideas, thoughts, constructs, dreams and hopes; nothing was factual about any of them. A Bit of Vineeto

Therefore, from my own experience and from the many, many conversations I had in the last years, it is clear that merely by living within the Human Condition one is inevitably spiritual.

For some people spiritual values are more religious values, or Eastern religious values, for other people it is saving animals and the planet, for others it is the belief in fairies and earth-spirits or other parallel universes. As I see it, all beliefs and values we are fighting about – or being touchy about – are spiritual beliefs and values, there is no other belief or value than a spiritual belief or value. Our very identity is spiritual, simply by the fact that it is non-actual as in not tangible, palpable, tactile, material or verifiable. All believing is happening in the head and the heart, not as a physical actuality.

And once I found out that I was trapped by my beliefs, ideas, concepts and convictions, that I was producing and continuously reproducing my-‘self’, I also knew that they were part of the bondage and could never be part of the solution. Therefore it was not a question of which belief is the right belief and which spirituality is the right spirituality, but it was a matter of getting out of all beliefs solely because they are non-factual.

I don’t know if my tale makes sense to you because for me it took me months of reading and talking to come to an outsider’s understanding of what ‘spiritual’ really means. It is as if you have to see the planet from outer space in order to ascertain that it is not as flat as one believes it to be from down here. Similarly, it needed a lot of questioning and moving away from my own viewpoint and that of my peers and teachers, to come to a different and comprehensive understanding of what the spiritual psychic world really looks like.

No 75: Have you encountered a situation where people want to test your ‘harmlessness’ by poking, trying to be mean etc. in real lives?

Whenever people ‘test my harmlessness’ they often do so in order that they can then judge my behaviour according to their idea of harmlessness – being meek (in religious terms) or being a pacifist (in secular terms).

(…) The real life that is this mailing list is an exception of course, but then again, if one dares to stick one’s head up above the parapet, there will invariably be those who delight in throwing brickbats – such is human nature.

You might also have observed that pointing out a fact that pulls the rug from under someone’s precious belief often raises their hackles and as such is considered to be an act of aggression in the believer’s eyes. Whilst I would not choose to take someone’s beliefs apart in ‘real life’, as you call it, this mailing list is up front about being a non-spiritual mailing list and has been specifically set up ‘to assist in elucidating just what is entailed in becoming free of the human condition’. As such this list is the very place to openly question and actively investigate all of the spiritual/philosophical beliefs, worldviews and psittacisms that pass for wisdoms and truths within the human condition so as to be able to make a clear-eyed investigation and assessment of the facts of the matter.

(…) In short – I learnt to keep my mouth shut about abandoning beliefs, about becoming happy and harmless and about ‘self’-immolation and consequently the people I meet nowadays rarely feel threatened by what I do or say and therefore rarely treat me differently to everyone else. Mostly they are far too concerned with their own lives to even want to know what I am doing, let alone ‘test’ my harmlessness. Vineeto, List AF, No 75, 23.4.2005

You dum dumb slut ... have you not learned a dum dumb thing in all your years on this verdant azure paradisaical 3^rd stone from the sun of a planet yet? You have redefined the definition of pathetic!

You have conveniently parsed out a few beliefs you refer to as spiritual or religious meanwhile leaving belief intact, alive and well. Belief is belief is belief no matter what label you schtick on them. You cannot get rid of belief... you have only replaced some with others... and now these are the ones Dic has discarded on your doorstep and doorstop and you are stuck with them whether you like it or not. You cannot exist without belief. Your entire existence is dependent upon belief. And not only that but you haven’t even discarded your spiritual or religious beliefs despite your proclamations to the contrary. Belief is spiritual and religious in nature and in its origin as are you. You are not separate from your beliefs and you never shall be. Money is spiritual. Money is religious. Money is based on belief.

Ha, this reads like the Magna Carta à la No 58 –

No 58, by the grace of Himself, king of his den, lord of the net, duke of his firm convictions, and count of borrowed psittacisms, to all his bailiffs and faithful subjects, greeting. Know that we, out of reverence for Nihilism and for the salvation of our ego and soul and those of all our ancestors and heirs, for the honour of Thoughtless Reign and the exaltation of holy Denial, and for the reform of our realm, on the advice of our venerable spiritual teacher U.G.K., hereby advise that ‘belief is belief is belief no matter what label you schtick on them. You cannot get rid of belief... you cannot exist without belief. Your entire existence is dependent upon belief. And not only that but you haven’t even discarded your spiritual or religious beliefs despite your proclamations to the contrary. Belief is spiritual and religious in nature and in its origin as are you. You are not separate from your beliefs and you never shall be. Money is spiritual. Money is religious. Money is based on belief.’

Therefore I No 58, by the Grace of MYSELF, advise you all to render all your beliefs including all your money to Me so that I can do as I shall please for the benefit of Me and Me alone. Apart from this we will procure nothing from anyone, either personally or through anyone else, whereby any of these concessions and liberties might be revoked or diminished; and if any such thing is procured, let it be void and null, and we will never use it either personally or through another. Adapted from the Magna Carta Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. http://www.britannia.com/history/magna2.html

There is only one thing that Your Grace has overlooked in His all-inclusive declaration which is that if this declaration is indeed the Truth, then it would reasonably follow that the declaration itself is also only a belief and therefore dependant on someone believing it.

In other words, just because you have swallowed this belief hook, line and sinker (‘you cannot get rid of belief... you cannot exist without belief’) does not mean that I do. I can get rid of my beliefs and I did, and so can everyone else.

In the same vein, your belief that I am a ‘dum dumb slut’ is a primitive macho conjecture apparently based on your personal feelings towards actualism in general and women in particular – there exists no proof whatsoever that I am indeed that and yet you are driven to endlessly repeat this unsubstantiated drivel.

Money is spiritual. Money is religious. Money is based on belief.

Given that you are on record as being an online gambler, does this mean that you are gambling not with money but with beliefs (or only believe you are gambling) and that when you lose you only lose beliefs (or only believe you lose) and when you win you only win more beliefs (or only believe you win), and does this mean that the whole exercise is a spiritual experience for you, a ‘meditation’ in the market place as it were?

What is money other than a piece of paper or metal or now plastic or a bit that flows through wires/cables and now money is even light travelling through optical fibers. Money works because of belief, because of faith that it is worth something when in actuality it is a piece of worthless inert matter.

This argument is so trite it beggars description. When you give the checkout girl in the supermarket a fifty-dollar note she knows exactly what it is worth and so do you. Money and its value has nothing to do with belief and faith – it has all to do with the agreed upon buying power of the currency.

The world and your existence is dependent upon belief and faith.

Not so. The world existed and did just fine before I was born and will continue to exist and do just fine after I die. Equally my existence has nothing to do with either mine or anyone else’s belief but with the fact that my father’s sperm fertilized my mother’s egg about 19,277 days ago.

Your proclamations that you have no spiritual or religious beliefs are bullshit.

According to the Magna Carta à la No 58 that is – I experience life differently. No spiritual or religious beliefs interfere with my enjoyment of being alive.

You have been conned, duped by your latest guru and you have eaten up his faecal matter like there is no tomorrow and you are a missionary proselytising his faecal matter for all the desperate, deluded and gullible.

Ha, I have verified Richard’s reports with my own experience, not just once but many times and I found my experience consistent with everything he reports. Have you verified the facticity of the meta-physical teachings of your champion U.G. Krishnamurti with your own experience?

You work all day for money... you spend your most precious commodity, all your time, working for money, which is based on spirit and belief ... and then you have the stupidity to say you have ridded yourself of such beliefs.

I am not working all day every day but I do work some of my time to earn the means to pay for the necessities of life, as most people do. This exchange of services for goods – money being the agreed means for each and every barter – has nothing at all to do with beliefs and all to do with trade and mutual agreements.

But there is certainly a range of beliefs and feelings people have around money and I had to investigated many of them myself on my way to becoming free from the human condition. This is how I have described it elsewhere –

When I began to examine the reasons why I was tense and serious whenever I was dealing with money and working for money, I quickly discovered that it was ‘me’, as a passionate identity, who was responsible for all of the ‘bad vibes’ around money. I discovered my anxiety of not being a success, my greed to acquire as much as possible combined with my resentment at having to work for it, my fear of being cheated, my competitiveness to get the best deal come what may and my general reluctance to relate to people in a straightforward manner and fair service-for-money contracts.

The issue of money is an excellent field for investigation for an actualist because it brings a whole range of morals and ethics to the surface for close inspection, not to mention the basic survival instincts that are activated when one is dependant upon money for sustenance and shelter. As you mention, one can also have a particular spiritual slant on one’s assessment of money such as – money is dirty, it’s the work of the devil, it’s lead weight for the soul, money corrupts, money stinks, etc, etc. But money itself is neither dirty nor evil – it is only made to be so by the fervent beliefs and passionate survival instincts of human beings.

Money – notes and coins – is unquestionably actual stuff and there is a common usage of money as an exchange medium for goods and services. When one begins to remove one’s rose-coloured and grey-coloured glasses – the good and evil spirits concerning money – one can experience that money is a simple straightforward tool. I also found I didn’t have to solve the problems that other people have with money in order to be able to use it sensibly rather than passionately – I only had to investigate my own emotions and beliefs in order to get rid of the aversion, tension and greed that money used to trigger.

Today my dealing with money is indeed a game – an utterly non-serious play, which in no way denies the necessity of having or earning sufficient for my shelter and sustenance. I delight in my paid work of putting order in people’s financial records – which is the adult version of ‘playing shop’ that I enjoyed as a girl. Peter recently pointed out that his work is playing the adult version of his favourite childhood game called ‘builder bricks’ – drawing houses and gardens for people in order to pay for his living and his toys. As for assessing how to spend my money, I found it useful to consider the time I need to work in order to pay for my necessities and then make a judgement as to how much more time I want to work in order to buy luxury items such as technical toys. This way common sense prevails over greed because time is my most valuable asset – time to do nothing really well. Vineeto, List AF, No 38, 21.10.2002

Give it up... you should disappear into a cabin in the woods like your boss … as far away from people as they are, as possible.

Face it No 58, despite your dire warnings and persistent discouragements actualism is here to stay.

Wake up ... before your time is up.

I did and got rid of my spiritual beliefs and my social identity – when are you going to follow your own advice?

When I stopped supporting both my own feelings of sorrow and those of others I became increasingly aware of the extent to which my relationships were built upon mutual support for common grievances and loyal allegiances against what we perceived as difficult to deal with people, upsetting things and worrying events – in other words, when I sorted my own feelings out for myself I lost interest in other people’s sad stories and subsequently we had less in common to share. Friendships in the real world are by and large emotional allegiances against an adversarial world –

Yeah, ‘you and ‘me’ against the world. Deep down ‘I’ have always known that ‘I’ am special ... ‘I’ am blessed or accursed or both at once. ‘I’ present a face to the world but it’s not the real ‘me’. Only a handful of people know a piece of the real ‘me’, and ‘you’ are one of them. And ‘I’ know a piece of the real ‘you’, and the real ‘you’ is special too. (Just not quite as special as ‘me’, ok? ;-)). ‘We’ do not fit. ‘We’ play the game, ‘we’ present a face to the world, but ‘they’ will never know the real ‘us’. Only ‘we’ know who ‘we’ really are, and your secret is safe with ‘me’, just as ‘mine’ is safe with ‘you’.

And every poor sucker in the crowd is the same ... feeling special, feeling isolated by a unique blessing/curse, feeling that everyone else fits in except ‘me’ ... ‘I’ must be so much better/worse/both than they are. A ‘close friend’ knows the extent of ‘my’ superiority / inferiority / uniqueness, and allows ‘me’ to know of theirs. That is what ‘we’ are made of.

Yes, and this genetically imprinted feeling that ‘I’ am special is multiplied and reinforced by others whenever one feels as though one belongs to a group, a club, a tribe, a nation, a race, or shares a set of convictions and/or creed, either religious or secular, with others. As I began to unravel the feelings that are ‘me’, it became obvious that I had to actualize what I had understood in my daily interactions with people – and that’s where application and diligence comes in. I became aware of how others automatically reinforced ‘me’ in my various social roles and I noticed how I didn’t want to upset their feelings by changing.

I also began to become aware of the extent to which all of my day-to-day interactions were based on countless assumptions of what is right and true or, more accurately, what feels right and true. As I became more experienced in paying attention not only to my feelings and values but also to the content of all the information I had unquestioningly taken on board, I discovered that many, many of those silent assumptions were more often than not conjectures, opinions, viewpoints, factoids, myths, feelings and false information.

*

… where there is neither sorrow nor enemies, there is also no need for loyal and emotionally supportive friends.

I once thought that even if I chose to be an actualist, it would be unfair to leave certain other people (whose identities need ‘me’ for support/reassurance) in the lurch. Now that I can see what is entailed in this mutual support, it seems there is a much better option: to get rid of this fucking burden, show the other that it can be done, and let them make of it what they will.

Some people will no doubt feel, and say, that you will unfairly leave them ‘in the lurch’. As you know actualism is something you can only do for yourself and by yourself, which means that you don’t need the agreement of others in order to becoming a practicing actualist.

Indeed some might even stop in their tracks and reconsider when they see tangible results but going by my experience I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen. Metathesiophobia is an extremely common affliction.

*

As No 37 recently reported, life is indeed much more simple and easy once the commitment to begin the process of cleaning oneself up has been made.

Something else he said hit home too. When he said (in response to my ‘art of the mindfuck’ message): ‘another objection to being happy and harmless bites the dust’, I was initially stung ... and felt myself ready to protest, no, no that isn’t the point at all ... it’s not an objection to being happy and harmless, it’s ... ... but on further reflection I realised that’s exactly what it was.

Have you noticed that very often when one feels stung it may well be because someone has intentionally or unintentionally pointed out a fact that is contrary to what one believes to be a truth, whereas if what another says is a clear fabrication, one can, if one cares to, easily and calmly set the facts straight?

Hmmm ... not really, mainly because I’m not a person who is easily capable of believing, or of maintaining beliefs for long periods. If I believe something that’s bullshit I generally want to know about it, and even though it hurts for a while I will not stubbornly resist it.

When I started my investigations into what ‘I’ am made of I decided, for simplicity’s sake, to call all my ideas about the world, i.e. people, things and events, beliefs. After all, a belief is an emotion-backed thought and most of my thoughts about people, things and events were emotion-backed.

In the course of my exploration into how ‘I’ tick I uncovered not only my adult spiritual and early-childhood religious beliefs but a whole series of emotion-backed thoughts in the form of political, economical, dietary and environmental ideals, work-ethics and health-issues, sexual mores and gender roles and differences. I also became aware that I had a plethora of emotion-backed thoughts regarding what is right and wrong, fair and unfair, good and bad, true and false – in short, I eventually had to admit that my whole worldview was almost entirely based on emotion-backed thoughts … rather than solid facts and common sense.

Personally, I find (or let me say with confidence now: ‘have found’) it more frustrating to deal with arguments that I perceive to be fabrications and/or simply illogical constructions. I don’t think it will be as much of a problem in future though.

As a rule of thumb, what I learnt from practicing actualism is that whenever I became passionate about an issue, a situation, something someone said or did, some piece of information on TV or such like, I knew for certain that one of my dearly-held emotion-backed thoughts was being touched … I guess that could be the root of the expression ‘being touchy’.

*

Since then, ‘What is ‘my’ objection to being happy and harmless?’ has become a seminal question for me.

Ah, a very potent question, if I may say so.

It is indeed ... and it’s proving very interesting. I am finding all kinds of reasons why I have not found much sustained success with actualism so far, in spite of some good insights and experiences along the way.

Personally I had lots of factual insights and even a few pure consciousness experiences in my years before actualism – what I learnt from Richard was that one can and needs to put those insights into action in daily life in order for them to work their magic.

*

It’s pretty interesting to see myself twist and turn any which way in order to justify not being happy and harmless. But I haven’t found a valid reason yet.

There are 47 objections that have so far been collected on the website but the most persistent one I found is that the human animal finds it extremely challenging (as in threatening to one’s very survival) to do something that sets one apart from the fold.

May I suggest a 48^th? ‘You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater’.

Done. We even had a caricature from ‘The Flacco Files’ from P. Livingstone adapted to illustrate this very common objection.

People have different interpretations of what they consider to be the ‘baby’ that should not be thrown out with the bathwater. Some suggest to throw out the corrupt gurus but to keep the ‘good’ ones, some are happy to throw out God but want to keep the belief in an overarching Energy or Superior Intelligence, some want to keep the ‘baby’ of love, others yet want to keep imagination, creativity, beauty, compassion and so on.

*

Whilst you may not find a ‘valid reason’ for not being happy and harmless, you will certainly find a basket full of emotions disguised as rational arguments for not being so.

Yep, shiploads of ‘em.

Personally I found reasoning necessary in order to establish a prima facie case for actualism but I soon became aware that I had to recognize and address the emotional objections I had to committing myself to becoming happy and harmless. When I examined the emotional objections I found that the most predominant one was fear.

Same here. So much of my thinking is motivated and fed by a mildly unpleasant underlying feeling state, dominated by a fear so persistent as to be almost imperceptible (until it unexpectedly departs, and then I find out just what a heavy burden I’ve been carrying).

The way to lighten this burden for me is to put a name to the fear whenever I can because a fear that has a name is far less powerful and non-mysterious.

First I got rid of fears that had to do with my pride, my status in society, my role-playing as a social identity and then I looked at my fears arising from the morals and ethics I had taken on board since childhood and those added later in my spiritual years.

*

What greatly helped me jump the hurdle of self-preservation was my burning desire to make peace-on-earth possible for everyone and given that I had both the means and the opportunity I had no choice but to take the jump and make a start.

Lately I’ve got very sick of poncing about with this ... shall I, shan’t I, what if ...?, what about ...?, business. It was necessary of course, but now it’s merely a hindrance.

It’s great, isn’t it, when being sick of one’s doubts, whatever the doubts, is winning over the fear of change. That was always the moment when I initiated my next change in life.

Wonderful, but now I see that you are again unconsciously believing. Believing there is no god, no love, no soul, no other lives, etc, etc, etc.

Not so. I don’t believe, either consciously or unconsciously. I only take my information about life from what I can see, hear, smell, touch and taste, the very physical substance. Everything that goes on in the head and the heart is belief and imagination – it is the very stuff the ‘self’ is made of. Once you stop believing in the soul you experientially understand that it does not exist outside of your belief. To believe that there is life after death needs the act of believing. It is not a proven fact. And it doesn’t make it more of a fact that millions of people have the same belief. Once you stop feeding that belief you will suddenly see the fact that this body dies when it dies and that there is nothing else left, no soul to live on for eternity. Once god, love, soul, other lives etc. are not supported, i.e. passionately believed in, by our psychic entity, they disappear. They have as much substance as a ghost – none whatsoever.

Seeing that most of the world is unconscious of their repressions which keep them stuck in their beliefs, you have formed a new belief that all of what the masses believe is wrong. I am not saying they are right. I am saying that if you re-awaken, see your current beliefs, AND NOT REPLACE THEM as Osho has said, you may find your heart and life as a mystery to be lived, not as a believing robot.

Once I experienced the actual world I could see there is no need to pollute it with any kind of ‘human produce’ – call it heart, love, mystery, divine consciousness. From the clear experience of a Pure Consciousness Experience I could see that all my feelings and beliefs are part of the Human Condition, a product of the basic survival instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. I understand that you would want to label my experience of the actual world according to your belief-structure and put it into the drawer of ‘another belief’ because all we have known up to now is consists of beliefs. In fact, belief, trust, hope and faith are held as the highest human values.

The moment you sincerely inquire into the activity of believing, you will find yourself nibbling away at the very substance of the ‘Self’. Very, very scary, but utterly thrilling and immensely rewarding.

Did you ever consider how do you determine if what you believe is actually the case? Well, if it is actually the case, it must therefore exists without the support of your belief – so believing is an unnecessary activity. My honest investigation into my acts of believing and one year of diligently applying the method of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ has led me to experiencing the world in its magnificent, sensuous and delightful actuality – unclouded and unfiltered by any emotions, feelings, beliefs or instincts.

Mr. Rajneesh may have said not to replace the beliefs of your primary conditioning and first-hand beliefs, but he has certainly replaced them with his version of spiritual conditioning and beliefs.

Mr. Rajneesh may have said not to replace the beliefs of your secular conditioning and beliefs, but he certainly replaced them with his version of spiritual conditioning and beliefs.

As I said before, I don’t get that you hear me ... so since I am not addicted to endlessly arguing, as apparently you both are ... I’ll make this short. Pray tell, what spiritual conditioning and beliefs did Osho replace in us?

So now we are investigating what is a belief and what is a fact, are we? Remember, belief per dictionary means ‘fervently wishing to be true’, while fact means ‘what has really happened or is the case’. You say that nothing that Osho tried to instil in us was based on belief, do you? Do you say that everything he talked about were mere facts, evidenced by our senses? That one did not need to believe or trust what was said, one could simply see it, touch it, hear it, taste it or smell it?

I try to avoid battling with quotes, Osho said billions of words and everyone makes their own interpretation of it. But since you seem to claim that there was no spiritual conditioning or any beliefs involved, I found some of his words that point to his belief in God, divinity, soul, immortality, the mysterious ‘inner space’ and the Universe as animated by divine intelligence

‘God is all around you, but you are so full of scriptures, knowledge, so full of your own ego that there is no space left inside you where God can penetrate and enter into you.’ Osho: The Beloved, Vol. 1, Ch. 1.

‘And if we go still more deeply, then the child also chooses the time of its conception. Every soul chooses its own time of conception – when it will accept a womb, at which moment. The moment of conception is not insignificant. It is significant in that it is a question of how the entire universe exists at that moment, and to what sort of possibilities the universe opens the door at that moment.’ Osho: Hidden Mysteries, Ch. 5.

‘A man of sensitivity remains wherever he is – and God seeks him.’ Osho: The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 3, Ch. 9.

‘Your unmoving centre becomes such a dance. And one who knows his centre, also knows his eternity , his immortality. Buddhas don’t die, neither are they born. They simply appear and disappear into the same ocean just like waves. You have to go deeper and deeper every day, you have to bring more and more of the Buddha to the circumference of your life. It happens, certainly – I say it with absolute authority because it has happened to me.’ Osho: Rinzai: Master of The Irrational, Ch. 2.

With Actual Freedom a second de-conditioning took place, a spiritual de-conditioning. And again, I was ready for it, because after all those years of sincere effort my search did not show the results I had been aiming for. This second de-conditioning was much more radical and went far deeper than the first, it is going to eliminate all of me, ego and soul, emotions and beliefs, instincts and ‘spiritual achievements’. It leaves me as this physical body with its senses, free to delight in this pure, perfect and infinite universe as a sensate flesh-and-blood human being. Nothing more, nothing less.

Actual Freedom and the simple and effective method to achieving it is available for everybody who wishes to go for the best – presupposing that you are discontent with your life as it is now.

As I said before ... you missed Osho. All of what he said was to break with ritual, tradition, conditioning, and programmed mindset.

Yes, as I said, he was to break the tradition of the ‘normal’ conditioning, the programming that we had when we came to India. I never denied that he tried to ‘brainwash’ our ‘minds’ from the conditioning of childhood and society. To a certain extent he even succeeded – and then he installed in us the beliefs of the spiritual world ie. re-incarnation, eternal soul and karma, God as a Divine Universe, afterlife, ‘I am not the body’, ‘I am the watcher’. These are the spiritual beliefs which I have decided to investigate.

Now if your bent is to believe, for example, your belief that you have no ego, then you can make a belief out of anything.

Yes, you can make a belief out of anything, that is the nature of belief. It is produces in the head and the heart of the person who believes and has nothing to do with facts.

This time, upon meeting Richard though, I was determined not to give up my belief in Osho for yet another belief. It all sounded great, plausible and sensible what Richard said, but I did not want to just believe another authority. But what Richard said made me prick up my ears and be interested enough to inquire as to the facts of the whole spiritual situation, for myself.

So I started to investigate if what I had so long taken to be the ‘Truth’ was factual or just fantasies of Ancient Wisdom. The deeper I looked, and the longer I investigated, the more I had to admit that I had been sold a dummy. Yes, this fantasy is backed up by great feelings of bliss and love and it is supported by the belief of millions of people, but it is nevertheless a passionate fantasy, produced in everyone’s head and in everyone’s heart. It is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. It is not factual as in corporeal, actual, tactile, material, physical and tangible. It is not even sensible.

I don’t believe that I have no ego. I examined each of my beliefs and each of the many surfacing emotions and eliminated them in the light of awareness. Further I discovered and investigated the underlying instincts that feed both one’s beliefs and emotions to the extent that they have now lost their power over me. In seeing them as the software they are I realised that they can be deleted. For the first time in history humans can free themselves from their animal heritage which has raged in each of us and bound us since millennia. This journey to freedom is more than just eliminating the ego, it is dissolving and eliminating the soul as well, the very core of my ‘being’.

But by rightly hearing Osho, one would see his whole effort is to destroy all beliefs.

He might have thought so himself, and yet it was a belief and not a fact that ‘he is not the body’, that ‘he only visited this planet’, that ‘his soul is immortal and dissolves into the Whole’, that ‘real life starts after death’ – that’s what’s the meaning of ‘Mahapari-Nirvana’, the true and great Nirvana after death. You can find many, many words for what he taught to be the truth – still, it is just ancient Eastern beliefs. It needs trusting and believing, it needs surrender to the master’s wisdom in order to keep up this imaginary world. The moment you stop feeding the belief, for instance in an afterlife or immortality, it will gradually disappear and be revealed the mirage it is.

My insight into his messages is rather blunt. But I like it. I say all that he said boils down to two messages. One is ... everything that you believe is bullshit ...

Could it be that, for your convenience, you call ‘belief’ what you have thrown out, and label as ‘truth’, what you want to keep? If the very act of believing is ‘bullshit’, why do you believe in trust, in God, in surrender? As you say on your web-site: 

‘All are lessons, on the way, god knows where, and nothing can be done, but trust in life’

– and to No 14 and No 4 you said:

‘unless there is trust and surrender, such as what can exist in a master/disciple relationship.’

It simply requires no trust to be here in the actual world as this flesh and blood body.

In my ruthless and relentless investigations of what are my beliefs and what are facts, I found an amazing guideline: Everything that needs ‘my’ doing in any form, thinking, believing, feeling, intuiting, channelling etc. is not actual. Whatever is actual can be questioned and examined till the cows come home, it will stay actual and factual. You can doubt the existence of a tree, it will still be there as a growing plant with a trunk and branches and leaves. But if you question the soul, you’ll end up with nothing substantial. Applying this guideline to all my dearly held beliefs has been at times quite devastating – but now I can be certain and confident for the first time about the facts that I had uncovered under the layer of passionate beliefs. Anything that requires belief or feeling such as ‘trust’, ‘surrender’ or ‘hope’ is not actual – it is obvious and devastatingly simple.

Trust is believing or hoping that something exists (ie that Existence cares for us, that the Master knows what he is doing or talking about, that God is looking after His children). Confidence, on the other hand, is knowing the facts as evidenced by the physical senses.

... but more to do with people stuck believing that where they are is the only truth.

I assume that with ‘people stuck believing that where they are is the only truth’, you mean Peter and me and not yourself?
But before deciding about the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ prematurely, why not first completely understand what we are presenting?
Then you really know what you are accepting or dismissing.

As for ‘stuck believing’ – it’s like ‘believing’ the Santa-Claus story – as a child you might have believed in Santa Claus or the Dutch equivalent. So he was Father Christmas, who knows all your sins and who brings you presents. But once you have seen through the scheme that the guy in front of you is just the neighbour with a wig and a false beard, then there is neither fear nor hope for reward. After seeing through it once, you can never believe that fairy-tale again. It’s not that you now ‘believe’ that there is no Father Christmas, you simply know that he never existed.

The same is the case with the belief in a ‘soul’ or God. I do not believe that there is no ‘soul’ or no God, I simply have seen through the passionate imagination it all is. In several pure consciousness experiences I have gathered enough confidence that my ego and soul are nothing other than my ‘self’, and knowing the purity of living in the actual world without the presence of this ‘self’ I am determined to get out of the way, I aim for self-immolation.

The point is that without ‘me’, the feeling entity inside me, the very act of believing is simply not possible. To be able to believe you need feelings and imagination. Without feelings and imagination there is no ‘me’ that would do the believing, and no ‘me’ that has any investment in believing anything. The faculty that believes is non-existent.

In my waking up, first I learned I was full of shit. That all I believed was somehow flawed, programmed, not me. Then I learned that I could use the feeling sensations in my body, which are tied into the ego-conditioned-mind, to go beyond it all by totally sensing the body. I learned to move this energy around, transform it into other energies. I think P&V are stuck somewhere around here. And it is easy for the tricky ego to regain control. The spiritual ego, and in their case, the non-spiritual spiritual ego, believing it has no beliefs, yet blind to their believing they know-it-all.

It is a bit disconcerting not to be quite able to place P&V, isn’t it? I have never heard of a ‘non-spiritual spiritual ego believing it has no belief’. It is a completely new definition you have invented here to give us the ‘appropriate’ place us in your belief-system. Sounds like a new gene. Quite an amazing invention, really.

Once you drop ALL ideas and beliefs about if someone does or does not live on, if there is a soul or not and just be, then I suggest you can truly be in the here and now. Richard sounds like someone who has his own belief system and is convincing others that his ideas are the TRUTH. What is the difference between that activity and others you so easily condemn?

I don’t talk about the truth, I talk about facts, verifiable by the physical senses. No belief, no truth is needed for finding out about facts. Just common sense.

But as long as you move in the realm of believing rather than investigating the facts for yourself, everything will be a belief to you. Believing, you can only choose between a favourable belief and a not so favourable belief. If you wish, you can make it a belief, what Richard or I say. Then it won’t make any difference if you accept it or reject it.

But you can also check out his suggested method and apply the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and eliminate everything in you that is not verifiable by the physical senses. You can use the method for yourself to become happy and harmless, free from the Human Condition. Then it is not a belief, then it becomes actuality for you.

No one likes their beliefs being questioned, but, in this case Osho did always tell everybody to question everything and he purposefully changed his statements in order to make people question even him. So you are right. Being someone who spent years with Osho, it does give you a right to examine anyone’s belief’s including your own.

All I know is that I know nothing. Who said that? As long as I question everything I will be in the ‘search’ mode.

All I am proposing is that you question your own beliefs – just because it worked for me. There are many good reasons for questioning the ‘tried and failed’ and I have explained most of them. But it is completely up to you which belief you want to question. The good thing about investigating not only your ego but also your feelings, emotions and instincts is that you arrive. The search ends and the entity inside dies, a complete and irreversible death. One arrives in the magical perfection and delightful aliveness of here, in the actual world.

But if one single man can live outside of imagination, can live without love and emotion, then emotions and an eternal soul are not facts but merely the collective products of our fertile imagination and instinctual programming.

Really now, so what. That proves absolutely nothing, just that Richard has developed himself into another type of human being, and obviously one you admire. Again, so what is the big deal here. Enjoy it, revel in it, be it but don’t come up with just another belief system you are trying to convince others is TRUTH.

Truth has to be believed, facts can be verified. I have verified that it is possible to live with a man in utter peace, harmony and equity, and I have verified that one can clean oneself up to be happy and harmless. No believing needed. No truth found. Everyone can do the same if they wish to.

I’m just bored with the underlying assumption that your belief system is somehow superior to others. All belief systems are bogus, yours included.

You are bored with your own assumption.

As long as you want to believe, everything that anybody presents is seen as a belief system. You could also start investigating. You could, for instance, try and remember a pure consciousness experience – and almost everybody has had at least one in their lives. Then you can experience for yourself the facts of what Peter and I are talking about. In a pure consciousness experience, where the ‘self’ is in temporary abeyance, everything is self-evident and obvious, including the fact, that it is only the ‘self’ that is in the road of experiencing the perfection of the infinite universe.

The objection that most people have is that in the actual world, verifiable by the physical senses, there is neither love nor a soul nor divine energy.

There is ‘only’ this flawless, pure, sparkling, magical and infinite universe, experienced by the touch, smell, taste, seeing and hearing. There is only this moment in time being alive.

Since that time, with the realisation that none of what was occurring was ‘actual’, though very, very ‘real’ and simply a product of ‘my’ imagination, I have not again experienced such dread. This is not to say ‘I’ may not be a ‘prima donna’ again and I shall certainly recount any similar experiences.

One never knows how many actors are still waiting behind stage until they had their appearance. It is fascinating, when I think about it. The moment I discovered the ‘drama queen’, it lost its conviction. The moment I discovered ‘me’, the Truth-producing faculty of Enlightenment, it became impossible to believe in the ‘truth’ that I had just produced. The moment I discovered the ‘believer’, the mechanism of believing I could not believe anymore – the mechanism was switched off and disappeared. I had to investigate the facts. One piece after the other fell off ‘me’, while at the same time taking the veil off my physical senses. The colours are now more vivid, the sounds multi-layered, the skin awakes to sense the air in temperature and consistency, the little hair on my forearm being touched by the soft breeze when I walk into town.

I started with the understanding that it is only me who I can change, and that very understanding applies to everybody I meet, live with, work with and to the world at large. So, if anything in the day evoked an emotional reaction, I would start digging around and look for the cause in me, what belief, feeling and instinctual passion caused me to feel annoyed, fearful, angry, righteous, insecure, disgusted, loving, elusive, tired, etc.

The first beliefs that I had to investigate were about male and female conditioning, my female identity, the belief in the ‘right to be emotional’, the ‘truth’ of intuition etc. Along with gender-issues came the problem of believing or fighting a supposed authority, which had been an emotionally charged topic since my early years.

Usually under every emotional reaction I would find a firmly held belief in some ‘truth’ which I then, in due course, questioned and replaced with actual facts, investigated through reading, contemplating or talking with Peter and Richard, instead of simply taking on what others had told me to believe. It can sometimes be a fascinating and sometimes be a frightening adventure, after all, it is your very identity that you are taking apart, who you believe and feel yourself to be.

When one belief was seen in its complexity with all its implications on various areas in my life, when I understood it to be merely a passionate thought and not factual, this belief disappeared. It’s like the fairy story of Sinterclaas (or Father Christmas) – once you know that he is only the neighbour with a false beard, the whole myth falls to pieces and you are never able to believe it again. But each belief has to be investigated on its own ... there is not a mathematical magic formula that deletes them all at once. Eventually you see through the whole lot – and what a relief and liberation that is!

Actualism is not therapy where you give me ‘assistance in eliminating that particular class of belief’ that I have or you imagine I have. In actualism, I assess my own emotional situation, and mine only, by asking the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and then proceed to explore the beliefs, feelings, emotions and instinctual passions that keep me from enjoying this moment in its purity and perfection. If I feel insulted by someone else, I take the opportunity to investigate what deeper reason there is for me to feel insulted by someone else, no matter who they are. I do this for two reasons – firstly so as not to waste this moment of potential happiness by being lost in imagination or by wallowing in feelings and, even more importantly, so I will not get angry with or be malicious towards any of my fellow human beings.

It is always ‘me’, the identity, the alien entity, inside this actual flesh-and-blood body that takes umbrage, feels offended, grows resentful, becomes angry, seeks revenge, etc., and by understanding and becoming fully aware of this identity in action it gradually weakens and eventually dissolves. Nowadays, whatever anyone says I am not insulted because, after four years of intensive self-investigation, there is scarcely any identity remaining to take offence.

*

Given that you talk about ‘unexamined fortresses within [my] mind’, I noticed when reading your posts to No. 22 about examining the minds of actualists, there is a great deal of imagination and belief used to conjure a picture of what may be going on in the mind of another. Just a few examples (emphasis added by me) –

• I do find it reasonable to imagine a some-thing called ‘Peter’ that might be the owner of (a) mind. I find it reasonable to imagine such because all indications from ‘Peter’s’ writings till now point towards the fact of that some-thing called ‘peter’ imagining he owns ‘his own’ mind.
• J... does this brief paragraph give you some indication of how I imagine things to be?
• I imagine that if Peter were not in a cult called actualism he would need to find another cult to be in; and all else failing he would be a cult of one, which in my estimation he already is.
• They think, I imagine ... see he has gone ... that proves what we always say ... very few people are interested in the actual, or capable of exploring it with us in intelligent fact based conversation.
• Out of the small handful of hardcore actualists on this list, I believe Vineeto is in the forefront of extricating herself from the tenacious grip of the delusionary construct called actualism. As such she is most immersed in the Actual.
• I believe one of the major delusions we suffer from as humans is the delusion that our own understanding of what the other has told is identical to what the other actually told us. As such, I believe there is a propensity towards delusion on the part of actualists.

Personally, I have found it far more effective and certainly more factual to investigate my own ‘state of mind’ in order to become happy and harmless instead of remaining trapped in the never-ending cycle of wildly imagining what others may be thinking, feeling, or believing about me. After this imagining, the natural reaction is to then either confront others in a belligerent and futile attempt to try and change the thoughts, feelings and beliefs you imagine they are having, or remain quiet and become sullenly resentful, getting ‘my’ own back later in more subtly devious ways. Whatever the outcome, a ‘score’ is kept, and next time the emotional memory of past imaginations is added to the current bout of metaphysical clairvoyance and the cycle starts over yet again. Imagining what another is thinking, feeling or believing and then attempting to change their thinking, feeling or belief is not only a complicated equation with 90% unknown factors, it is also an arduous Sisyphean task. There are potentially 6 billion people to change and relying on intuition, guestimation and imagination will bring you no closer to gathering an understanding of others’ thoughts, feelings or beliefs. Imagination is simply non-actual.

In therapeutic terms, imagining another’s emotions and attempting to change him or her according to one’s, usually passionate, imagination is called projecting – an utterly useless enterprise.

To be an actualist is to become a literally student of the human condition. Not as a gullible inexperienced child lapping up the knowledge of others but as a mature-age student in that one can study what it is to be a human being – one’s social programming and one’s biological programming – with the very necessary benefit of considerable life experience. This study of the human condition is general and archetypal as well as specific and personal – becoming aware of how it operates in oneself and as one’s ‘self’. Despite tribal lores that produce slight variations in morals, ethics, values and religious-spiritual beliefs, the human condition is typical to all. The knowledge so gained from this study enables one to know, intellectually and experientially, how human beings are both socially and instinctually programmed to operate – as in how they are programmed to think, feel and believe. By being equipped with this knowledge, an actualist is thus more able to extricate himself or herself from the instinctual psychic game of friends and enemies, allies and foes that prevents peace and harmony between human beings on the planet.

If you want to eliminate ‘the belief that his or her mind is definitive when it comes to identifying when the other is ‘feeling insulted or annoyed about facts’’ then that is entirely your business.

For me the ‘topic under discussion’ has always been my own process of becoming free from the Human Condition, investigating and eliminating my own beliefs and feelings whenever they became apparent in interactions with people, things and events. In my experience, it is impossible to eliminate someone else’s belief or change someone else’s feelings, and what a good thing that is! This way it is blindingly obvious that everyone is responsible for their own beliefs and feelings only and it gives everyone the freedom to do something about it in themselves ... or not.

For instance, investigating and eradicating my spiritual beliefs, my emotional bonds to the guru and the spiritual community I had belonged to, was a task that took the better part of nine months to complete. The other night a television report about a different fanatical spiritual community in the US made me shockingly aware of the kind of danger I had put myself in when following Rajneesh to the Ranch in Oregon.

The television program reported and closely examined events at Waco County, Texas, US in 1993, where a spiritual community of about 100 people was fighting a serious and deadly battle with the FBI. The community had gathered around a leader who believed himself to have a direct connection to God and the members were devoted to doing God’s will as perceived by their master, whatever that would turn out to be. The community had come under suspicion for owning illegal weapons and upon federal investigation refused them entry and in an ensuing gun battle four federal agents were killed. The government’s reaction was swift and effective – the FBI arrived, heavily armed, with army tanks and the latest warring equipment for a siege. After the peace-negotiations failed and the larger part of the community refused to leave because God via their master had told them to wait, the FBI smashed holes into the buildings with their tanks and poured concentrated teargas into the rooms for several hours. In the course of events the buildings caught fire and almost everybody in the building died in the flames. A later court investigation returned a verdict of suicide.

Once one decides to leave all the decisions to God and his messenger in order to secure one’s place in heaven after death, there is no free will left to act sensibly. In cases like these, the blind passion of devotional surrender overrules even the basic survival instincts.

The report shocked me for several reasons, the main reason being that only eight years prior to this incident I had been in a very similar situation in the Rajneesh community on the Ranch in Oregon. Both Rajneesh and his secretary Sheela made every effort in their public announcements to rile the Christians, the attorney general of Oregon, the American President and the people of Oregon in particular. In the years of 1984/85, Rajneesh had a heavily armed security force surrounding him both in his house and whenever he showed himself in public. A department of 200 or more people was frantically busy collecting legal evidence for the defence of various lawsuits that had been brought against both Rajneesh and the city of Rajneeshpuram.

He attempted to leave the country and was arrested by the FBI and the community soon dispersed, deflated like a holy holey balloon. It took almost ten more years until I was able to extract myself from the infatuation I had with Rajneesh, his commune and his religion and only a report about a similar situation that had ‘gone wrong’ made me realise that he was in fact a very dangerous man, ready to put the safety and lives of his followers at stake for his own megalomaniacal dream of power and glory.

And he is not the only one who puts his followers carelessly in precarious situations – the ‘Self’-centred narcissism, disguised as ‘I am the only Truth there is’, is common to all Godmen, gurus and saints all over the Eastern and Western world.

It is so good to be free from spiritual belief – eradicated, eliminated, wiped out, never ever to return again. There is no God and there are no God-men, only calenturous souls infatuated by the image of their own grand ‘Self’, desperately seeking followers who are willing to surrender and become eager foot soldiers to their imaginary delusion. This is the kind of belief I am talking about when using the expression ‘elimination of belief’ – it is my own beliefs that are under scrutiny, not someone else’s beliefs.

What you do with your beliefs and your imagination about my supposed beliefs is entirely your business.

Footnotes:

1) No 58 to Vineeto: ‘... was just checking to see if you read my drivel’. (22.12.2004 AEDST).

2) On record as being an online gambler: http://lists.topica.com/lists/actualfreedom/read/message.html?mid=909690773

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Vineeto’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust