remember Vineeto saying she is ‘100% certain’ that there is no God or afterlife. I remember thinking then (and still basically thinking the same thing) that 1) it is impossible to ‘100%’ prove a negative. Of course I don’t believe in Gnomes or trolls (internet trolls are a fact of course and as an actualist I don’t consciously engage in any kind of believing), but that does not ‘100% prove’ that they do not exist. It is of course very improbable that Trolls or a God exists. Don’t get me wrong, I find the notion of believing in God, and afterlife, or any spiritual belief to be unobjective, nonfactual, and a silly waste of one’s precious time. I understand that the notion of anything apart from this physical universe is unconceivable in a PCE, but that still does not seem to warrant Vineeto’s ‘100% certainty’ argument (which seems strangely fundamentalistic in the manner of fundamentalist Christianity to me).

I see that you have addressed your question to Richard but as you have mentioned me, I’ll respond as well.

In one of my early discussions with Richard I asked him: ‘How do you know for sure that there is no life after death?’ His answer was simple and straightforward. He said something along the lines of ‘there is nothing (no entity) inside this body that could survive physical death, because there is only this flesh-and-blood body’. In an instant I could see that what he said made sense.

As a then-spiritualist I had left the option open that ‘something’ could survive physical death but that ‘something’ that I imagined would survive was clearly some aspect of the entity inside and separate from the physical body – someone or something I called soul, Presence, spirit, ‘Being’, or whatever. I never had any doubt that my physical body is mortal and yet all spiritual teaching has it that ‘you are not the body’ because the body is only a temporary abode, they maintain that ‘who you really are is a consciousness separate from the body’, a consciousness that is part of, or ‘at one with’, the ‘Universal Consciousness’ and which can unite with the universal Consciousness either before or after death.

Consequently when Richard told me that there was no entity inside his body, I knew that this was the end of my hope for ‘life’ after death. If one can get rid of one’s entity in toto before death, it sure ain’t something that survives death.

Why did I take Richard’s report that there is no alien entity inside his body at face value?

It was obvious to me that he genuinely experiences what he reports. There is no contradiction in his body language, no obfuscation in his words, no evasion of delicate topics, and not a skerrick of resentment, anger, sadness or condescendence. Within a few meetings I could determine that what Richard said made a lot of sense, whatever topic he talked about, which cannot be said about any of the enlightened people I had met, and I had met quite a few in my time. The spiritual gurus rely on their magnetic energy of Love and Compassion, their authoritative Wisdom, their Ancient metaphysical knowledge while Richard had none of these affective properties. Instead of the affective power play I knew so well from the spiritual gurus, Richard encouraged me to utilize my own common sense and native intelligence in order to assess his reports.

The other thing that gave credence to his reports was that Richard said he had been enlightened himself and managed to get out of it, in other words he could give a personal-experience-insight into the whole realm of spiritual enlightenment. As such I could easily see that he knew far more about the ins and outs of enlightenment than any master or wannabe I had ever met or read for that matter.

As for my belief in God, it fell apart in bit and pieces and I have written about it on various occasions –

Finally one evening, when talking and musing about the universe, I fully comprehended that this physical universe is actually infinite. The universe being without boundaries or an edge means that it is impossible, practically, for God to exist. In order to have created the universe or to be in control of it God would have to exist outside of it – and there is no outside! This insight hit me like a thunderbolt. My fear of God and of his representatives collapsed and lost its very substance by this obvious realisation. In fact, there can be no one outside of this infinite universe who is pulling the strings of punishment and reward, heaven and hell – or, according to Eastern tradition, granting enlightenment or leaving me with the eternal karma of endless lives in misery. This insight presupposes, of course, that there is no place other than the physical universe, no celestial, mystical realm where gods and ghosts exist. It also implies that there is no life before or after death and that the body simply dies when it dies. A Bit of Vineeto

The insight that hit me like a thunderbolt catapulted me into a PCE and with the ‘self’ (and ‘my’ passions and beliefs) temporarily absent it became suddenly obvious that the belief in a God, by whatever name, is part of the passionate defensive armour of ‘me’. In a PCE neither agnosticism, Popperism or any other philosophical abstract thinking have any relevance because the facts of what it is to be a human being become immediately clear, sensately and sensibly. With no passionate entity present it is patently clear that God has no existence in actuality – that he/she/it is nothing other than a universally-sustained and collectively-endorsed belief that billions of lost, lonely and frightened ‘beings’ have a vested interest in keeping in existence.

In a pure consciousness experience a lot of things of what it is to be a human being become stunningly clear whenever I focussed my attention on these topics. Just as when a background noise suddenly stops and its very absence makes you aware of how much the noise had infiltrated your experience, when the ‘self’ and its incessant ‘noise’ is absent, it becomes obvious how ‘I’ constantly live in a fear-filled world of ‘my’ own making and as a consequence ‘I’ am wont to seek succour and solace in beliefs – no matter how inane they may be.

A PCE is not a matter of degree – it is a fundamentally different experience of the world – one directly experiences the actuality of the world as-it-is and of people as-they-are. Not only does the grim reality that ‘I’ normally experience disappear, but so too does the imagined panacea to grim reality – the belief in a Greater Reality (God by any other name). A PCE gives you an outsider’s view for the very first time, temporarily free from the very entity who shapes and distorts this body’s experience of the world. You could compare it to previously knowing only the village you live in and its surrounding hills and suddenly being in a position from where you see the planet from outer space.

Contrary to No 81’s firm belief and persistent repetition, my 100% certainty about a god-less universe and a non-existent afterlife has nothing to do with dogmatism but rather it is the result of deliberately and consistently cracking the firmament of my beliefs and prizing apart the stronghold of the ‘self’-centred worldview that is the inescapable result of the human condition. This process has allowed me to have many direct experiences that God has no existence whatsoever outside of human imagination. And once you know a fact as a fact, that’s the end of having an opinion or a belief or a degree of uncertainty about it.

I always liked a story told about Galileo’s, which, although unconfirmed, helps to make the distinction between fact and belief so very obvious. The story goes, when Galileo was forced to recant his radical discovery that the earth moves around the sun and as such is neither stationary nor at the centre of the universe, he whispered, ‘eppur si muove’ (‘and yet it moves’). His later books spirited out of Italy to the Netherlands confirm that despite overwhelming opposition Galileo was 100% certain of what he had seen and understood – repeatable empirical observation contradicted ubiquitous ancient belief. It is interesting to note that it took until 1992 before the Church formally acknowledged its error in condemning Galileo – that it took so long speaks volumes for the recalcitrant nature of spiritual/religious belief.

My certainty of the fact that matter is all there is and that there is no consciousness outside of matter is the result of sensible contemplations and discussions, cemented and verified by many ‘self’-less experiences. This combination has allowed me to whittle away at my former conditioning and persistently question my intuition, to recognize that what most people believe and preach is not based in fact and by doing so to understand beyond doubt, that the magic of this universe lies in the fact that matter, in this case the human brain, is capable of not only reflecting but also of reflecting on itself.

It is the inherent quality of matter itself that makes it capable of such wondrous magic, just as it is inherent to the stuff that is this planet that it continues to manifest itself as the ginormous variety of terrestrial and aquatic fauna and flora visible on its surface crust. Life is so incredibly miraculous in operation, whichever direction you look, and when you take your ‘self’ out of the centre, i.e. when ‘you’ are no longer the most important person in ‘your’ universe, then the vibrancy of the non-passivity of matter itself becomes vividly apparent and tangibly obvious. As if by magic, all conceptualizing of a duality of dull/dead matter one side and a Transcendental Consciousness on the other side fall in a heap and I am no longer separate from all that is happening. I am matter and as matter I am eminently capable of not only being apperceptively aware but also of reflecting upon the fact that consciousness is an inherent quality of matter at a certain stage of its evolution.

*

As for ‘the Popperian view that some things cannot be known with 100% certainty’ – Karl Popper’s proposition was that, logically, nothing can ever be known exhaustively by the ordinary way of knowing, which in itself is absolute claim that according to his philosophy can never be known exhaustively. Apart from this logical impassé, his theories have, by and large, been refuted and discarded by more than a few people years ago and for a down-to-earth non-philosopher it is obvious that some things can definitely be known for sure – for instance the fact that everyone will die one day.

To distinguish fiction from fact I found the simple scientific principle useful, which demands that legitimate theories must be falsifiable. You might be familiar with the old debating trick where one side is asked to disprove the existence of something that doesn’t exist: ‘Prove to me there isn’t a green-eyed monster under this table. It is an invisible, odourless monster, and you can’t tangibly sense it – it has no mass. But it’s THERE! Now prove to me it isn’t there!’ To pose non-falsifiable hypotheses is the hallmark of a pseudo science.

The claim of the existence of God or an afterlife is equally pseudo science because it is a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Have you noticed that it is impossible to prove that God doesn’t exist? By God’s very nature He/She/It is beyond and above sensual perception. And life after death cannot be proven wrong because dead people don’t talk … and yet their ‘souls’ are reported to make people’s hair stand on end.

Addendum: I want it to be perfectly clear that I do not consider the workings of Vineeto’s mind to be similar to a ‘Christian fundamentalist.’ Rather, one particular statement of hers (i.e. being 100% certain of no God/no after life) seems to me to be similar to some from of dogmaticism – and Christian dogmaticism is one that I’m deeply familiar with personally.

Aside from Richard’s writing, Peter and Vineeto’s explication of becoming free from the human condition, is second to none (that is to me of course). I know all too well how list members can twist statements to fit there all too apparent agenda. Ultimately, one’s exploration of actualism involves rigorous self-honesty, integrity, and finding out for oneself. There is no excommunication in actualism for honest disagreement on our way to freedom. Perhaps, in freedom, all major disagreements will dissolve.

Yes, they do dissolve because, contrary to the affective/ psychic world, which is intuitive and therefore an affective experience that is unique to everyone, the actual world is the same for everyone – it is actual and can be sensately and sensibly experienced as an actuality by everyone once the ‘self’ steps out of the way.

*

A remark on your recent post to No 81, because it’s on the same topic –

No No 81: To believe in god, afterlife, or any sort of dualistic spiritual energy is a belief and therefore silly in my book. Nonetheless, I don’t claim 100% certainty on those issues because I remain skeptical that anyone can know whether or not there is a spiritual realm with 100% certainty. Quite frankly, I see no need for an actualist to be 100% certain. I’d take reasonably/sensibly certain as being quite enough. Which is what I am at this point.

You may reconsider when you think about how many things in life you already take with 100% certainty to be factual. The very process of actualism involves the incremental diminishing of the habit of believing what others tell you to be truth (or Truth) so as to enable to flourish uninhibitedly one’s innate curiosity and naiveté to discover for oneself the facts of the matter.

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.

That’s a very good idea. If I look at beliefs as the feeling-based building blocks of reality (rather than as simply logical propositions about the world which may or may not be true), then I can see why you and Peter place so much emphasis on beliefs. They are the very fabric of reality.

Oh yes, beliefs are ‘the very fabric of reality’ and every apparently ‘logical proposition about the world’ is championed by a group of passionate defenders of this proposition and this is what holds sustains them over centuries despite their blatant silliness and well and truly after their use by date. I’ve more than once heard a person say that they wouldn’t want the facts to stand in the way of their belief or that they wouldn’t want facts to divert them from their truth.

I found that these ‘feeling-based building blocks of reality’ – whether they be in the form of beliefs, ideas, concepts, morals, principles, ideals, opinions, or convictions – have played a major part not only in my underlying objection to being here but also to my ability to recognize and acknowledge a feeling when it was happening.

The second part is the more tricky aspect in that it needs to be understood and taken on board if one aspires to understand the workings of one’s own psyche. To put it succinctly, I found it impossible to investigate the feeling-based building blocks of reality unless I took a clear-eyed look at the beliefs, ideas, concepts, morals, principles, ideals, dreams, opinions and convictions that prevented me from clearly seeing that ‘who I am’ is an instinctually driven being – ‘as mad, as bad and as sad as everyone else’ as Peter put it in his journal.

I discovered various objections to acknowledging that I was an instinctually driven being were due to the moral and ethical values that I had absorbed in my early years at home and in school, administered by parents, teachers, priests and peers. And then I noticed the stumbling blocks of my idealistic dreams – how I wanted to be, how I thought I ought to be, how I dreamed I could be – and they often stood in the way of clearly seeing, feeling and understanding what was emotionally going on.

To translate the impact of ideals, morals and ethics into a real life example – if you threaten a child with punishment, shame and guilt, it will, rather than come clean, most probably lie and hide what it’s been doing, thinking and feeling.

Looking at beliefs this way will be excellent complement to something else I’ve been doing lately. I’ve been reminding myself regularly that reality is an affective construct, and that one affective construct is ultimately as (in)valid as another. Understanding this intellectually is one thing; experiencing it is another; putting it to practical use is another thing again. It’s working in two ways: firstly, it enables me to loosen ‘my’ grip on reality, or reality’s grip on ‘me’ as the case may be; and secondly it gives me the freedom to create a more felicitous reality in which to live on the way to my final destination.

For me the penny dropped when I realized that whatever I do, think, feel or imagine, ‘I’ can never escape ‘me’ – in other words, whatever reality ‘I’ am trying to create, ‘I’ remain always in situ. This insight also wiped off imagination as an option for improving my life in any way.

The ‘more felicitous reality’ that I experience in Virtual Freedom is not created by ‘me’ but it is the inevitable result of painstakingly removing the building blocks of ‘my’ beliefs, ideas, concepts, morals, principles, ideals, etc., thereby diminishing the grip of my instinctual passions. The ensuing vacuity of emotion-backed thoughts allows the felicitous feelings to come more and more to the fore – an essential precursor to ensuring that one’s sensuous awareness is fact-based and not imagination-based.

In my spiritual years I have assisted leaders in several Vipassana groups although I have never lead or wanted to lead a group myself.

I see, that was in your pre-virtualfree-stage.

No, it was in my spiritual years, well before I had even heard of the possibility of an actual freedom – the discovery of which now makes enlightenment redundant.

So as to: [Have you ever been a leader of a Vipassana-group?] You have in your spiritual years assisted leaders in several Vipassana groups but you have never been a leader of any groups. So... might one say that this assisting leaders in several Vipassana groups was during your pre pre-virtualfree-period as it seems to be reasonable to consider your spiritual years as a period in your life, that preceded your virtualfee stage and that there was thus a period in your life that not so much preceded the stage of virtual-freedom but was more a preparation of becoming virtual free (reaching the state of virtual freedom), nevertheless i find no difference in pre-virtualfree-stage and my spiritual years.

Could it perhaps be that you have found my conclusion [I see, that was in your pre-virtualfree-stage] to be somewhat premature and had perhaps you preferred to have it phrased in the form of a question?

The years of spiritual search preceded my coming across actualism but there is no causal connection between my having been on a spiritual search and being virtually free from the human condition.

On the contrary, being virtually free from the human condition is the result of abandoning all of the spiritual beliefs I had taken on my spiritual years.

Becoming free of spiritual belief was only the start because being virtually free of the human condition is also the result of abandoning my beliefs about humanistic psychology and social education that I had acquired in my years at university. Further it is the result of abandoning my social conditioning as a women’s lib promoter and a female member of society, of abandoning my cultural conditioning as a middle-class German, of abandoning my professional conditioning as a social worker in a drug addiction clinic, of abandoning my religious conditioning as a Roman Catholic, and so on.

None of the above-described conditioning (which includes my conditioning as a Rajneesh disciple) was ‘a preparation of becoming virtual free’ as you propose – it was all baggage that I had to leave behind. To say that you ‘find no difference in pre-virtualfree-stage and my spiritual years’ only points to your persistence in ignoring the fact that becoming free from the human condition is about abandoning one’s beliefs, as opposed to redefining them, reshuffling them, refurbishing them and relishing them.

The years of spiritual search preceded my coming across actualism but there is no causal connection between my having been on a spiritual search and being virtually free from the human condition. On the contrary, being virtually free from the human condition is the result of abandoning all of the spiritual beliefs I had taken on my spiritual years.

Becoming free of spiritual belief was only the start because being virtually free of the human condition is also the result of abandoning my beliefs about humanistic psychology and social education that I had acquired in my years at university. Further it is the result of abandoning my social conditioning as a women’s lib promoter and a female member of society, of abandoning my cultural conditioning as a middle-class German, of abandoning my professional conditioning as a social worker in a drug addiction clinic, of abandoning my religious conditioning as a Roman Catholic, and so on.

None of the above-described conditioning (which includes my conditioning as a Rajneesh disciple) was ‘a preparation of becoming virtual free’ as you propose – it was all baggage that I had to leave behind. To say that you ‘find no difference in pre-virtualfree-stage and my spiritual years’ only points to your persistence in ignoring the fact that becoming free from the human condition is about abandoning one’s beliefs, as opposed to redefining them, reshuffling them, refurbishing them and relishing them.

I am wondering exactly what you mean by ‘abandoning’ one’s beliefs. It seems more to me that I didn’t consciously abandon my beliefs. It was more like I kept questioning my beliefs and they just disappeared.

Could you provide a practical example of ‘I kept questioning my beliefs and they just disappeared’ in order that we could discuss the topic more specifically?

I think it was more like confronting others’ beliefs on a spiritual list. For example, when someone would say something about ‘otherness’ I would tell them that I don’t believe in any otherness. There would then be a discussion about otherness and I could see what an obvious belief it is. Through this process any beliefs I had seem to have disappeared. It wasn’t as if I decided to ‘abandon’ any beliefs I still had.

I did some research on this spiritual list so as to find out more about what you mean by ‘confronting others’ beliefs’ given that you liken this to ‘questioning my beliefs’ – I see these as opposite processes, not at all alike.

Curiously this is what I found, amongst other posts –

What’s left when all beliefs and ideas including the spiritual is abandoned? What’s left is the world as it is with the organism living in its environment. What’s left, 17 Nov 2004 05:14:16

Considering that on the same day you said to me ‘it seems more to me that I didn’t consciously abandon my beliefs’ I am somewhat confused as to what difference you make between ‘abandoned’ and ‘consciously abandoned’.

For me, abandoning my beliefs was the conscious and deliberate determination to peel away all the conditioning I had taken on board in my life that prevents me from experiencing the magic and perfection that I had experienced in my first major pure consciousness experience.

In order to peel away the layers of ‘me’, the social and instinctual identity I had clearly seen as standing in the way of experiencing the magic of this actual physical universe, I found that it wasn’t enough merely to question my beliefs (or the beliefs of others) for questioning sake, as I had done before. Also, it wasn’t sufficient to question what I considered to be beliefs, mine or other’s – I had to dig into what I felt to be unquestionably true and what I was sure to be right in order to determine whether they were fact and whether they worked in practice.

In other words, I made a deliberate decision to uncover my beliefs in order to abandon them, beliefs that were disguised as truths, held by me as well as my peer group to be valid and right, good and fair. What made them appear to be right and true were not only my own passionate feelings but the fact that others around me also felt them to be true.

Given that beliefs are nothing other than emotion-backed thoughts the task to uncover my beliefs was fairly easy in principle – whenever I got upset about what someone said I could then reasonably assume that one of my dearly held beliefs or values was challenged. In practice, however, it was often not so easy because each belief I uncovered in fact challenged the very person I felt myself to be.

So, the answer to your question ‘what’s left when all beliefs and ideas including the spiritual is abandoned?’ in my experience was that what is left is the feeler. Consequently I then began to investigate the feelings that do not necessarily have beliefs attached to them but that nevertheless stand in the way of me being unconditionally happy and harmless – the necessary prerequisite to becoming free from one’s ‘self’ altogether.

My formal education is in psychology. It’s been a while, but reading all the psychological terms used here on the list have encouraged me to refresh my memory. Cognitive dissonance is a theory of one of the ways the mind or brain functions. What it says is that if something is presented to a mind that is different enough from the thought/ memory/ belief of that mind, the mind receiving the dissonant input will not recognize it. The dissonant input will not be consciously recognized. It may not even be accepted on an unconscious level (we don’t know yet). Getting annoyed at something is not cognitive dissonance. We can be aware of annoyance. The theory of cognitive dissonance is that we are not aware of the too-foreign input. Why it is interesting in the context of this group is that it may be that some ideas do not get across because they are so at odds to what has been previously accepted or believed that those ideas are not even accessible to the person receiving them. I’m not saying that this is happening in the case of No 60 – I actually don’t know. I do think that AF has a lot to say to psychology and I’d like to see the terms used in ways that I understand or at least redefined so that we all know what we are talking about.

I don’t know whose correspondence in particular you are referring to but since I have written about cognitive dissonance I will attempt to clarify the issue for you. Here are four instances where I have written about cognitive dissonance and each time I made it quite clear that it is a very common reaction whenever one comes across new information that contradicts previously-imbibed ideas, understandings and beliefs –

In the years of exploring my psyche, both in my pre-actualist years of spiritual-based therapy and in the beginning of my interest in actualism I experienced in me, and even more so observed in others, what is termed cognitive dissonance – a powerful characteristic of ‘me’, the lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning entity inside this body, primed to surface in order to defend ‘my’ beliefs and ‘my’ existence at all cost. This is what Richard has written about it –

The ‘cognitive dissonance theory’ suggests that when experiences or information contradicts existing knowledge, attitudes, beliefs or feelings, differing degrees of mental-emotional distress is the habitual result. The distressed personality is predisposed to alleviate this discord by reinterpreting (distorting) the offending information. Concurrent with this falsification, core beliefs tend to be vigorously defended by warping discernment and memory ... such people are prone to misinterpret cues and ‘remember’ things to be as they wish they had happened instead of how they actually happened. They may be selective in what they recall, overestimating their apparent successes, while ignoring, downplaying, or explaining away their failures. However it is more than merely a foolish head-in-the-sand psychological aberration, because the new, the fresh, the novel is oft-times met with determined resistance, disagreement, opposition and hostility. Richard, Abditorium, Cognitive Dissonance

It takes great determination, constant attentiveness and a pure intent to become happy and harmless in order to be able to break through this archaic means of ‘self’-survival. To deliberately add feelings of doubt and suspicion to the already existing ‘self’-preserving defence mechanism would be foolish, to say the least, because it will only exacerbate any chances of your becoming free from human condition. Vineeto List AF, No 59, 13.11.2003

And …

What you consider ‘reasonable doubt’ is more likely ‘information’ that ‘contradicts existing knowledge, attitudes, beliefs or feelings’, in other words, cognitive dissonance in action. <…> In order to tackle one’s own cognitive dissonance – the feelings and beliefs that prevent one from taking on board new information that is contrary to the previous information that one has assimilated – one needs a clear incentive to want to move past one’s ‘existing knowledge, attitudes, beliefs or feelings’. In my case this incentive was the dawning of a recognition that my ‘existing knowledge, attitudes, beliefs or feelings’ had made me neither happy nor harmless nor enabled me to live with my fellow human beings in peace and harmony. <snip>

Cognitive dissonance is something quite different to ‘unreasonable doubt’ and by its very nature it is not easily recognized when it occurs. It is important to consider and recognize that cognitive dissonance is a significant defence mechanism to understanding anything new and even more so when the something new is as radical as actualism. Cognitive dissonance is an automatic defensive reaction that takes place before one even becomes aware of what information has been ‘distorted’, ‘reinterpreted’ or ‘warped’. One needs determination and pure intent to want to forego one’s own feelings of apprehension – to want to go into the lion’s den, so to speak – in order to be able to investigate the information that one’s cognitive dissonance has ‘warped’ and which, upon seeing clearly, may cause ‘mental-emotional distress’.

Quite a few people on this mailing list have reported that recognizing the scope and the wide-ranging ramifications entailed in an actual, non-spiritual freedom were ‘a big thing’, not easy to take, difficult to understand at first, caused them to have head-aches, were a blow to their pride, shattered their existing beliefs, questioned their present life-style, and so on. Actualism is no little thing to take on. Vineeto List AF, No 59, 17.11.2003

And …

When I started to look into actualism as an alternative to the spiritualism that I had practiced so long with unsatisfying results, the mind-boggling radicality of the 180 degrees opposite statements often caused my mind to gridlock. From whatever angle I looked at certain issues, I simply could not understand what Richard was saying. However, I had the burning desire to find out all there is to know about this third alternative because I had already experienced for myself that something was greatly amiss in the venerated teachings and practice of spiritualism.

In those situations when I couldn’t think my way out of my mental block, a condition which I later discovered to be cognitive dissonance, I used to ask myself what it was that was preventing me from understanding. Rather than accusing Richard of being bone-headed, stubborn, silly or wrong, I instead chose to question why I was so bone-headed that I could not understand what he had discovered and what emotional investment ‘I’ had in maintaining ‘my’ status quo by not understanding what he presented as his ongoing delectable experience of the actual world. Vineeto List AF, No 60, 26.1.2004

And …

Cognitive dissonance works two ways. There is a possibility that some of you see Richard as something he is not, and will desperately resist ‘seeing’ aspects of his behaviour that are not exactly consistent with someone who is ‘actually free from the human condition’. If Terry sees something, Bance sees something, I see something, no-one speaks about it – it’s all too easily swept under the carpet, because there is a vested interest in not seeing it. Everyone knows what kind of scenarios that can lead to.

First, cognitive dissonance is a mechanism that ‘I’, the entity, use in order to keep things as they are, to maintain ‘my’ status quo as it were, whereas ‘being open’ to understanding actualism requires a 180 degree turnabout in how one has been unwittingly taught to viscerally think about life, the universe and what it is to be a human being.

My own cognitive dissonance stopped when I had my first major pure consciousness experience. I had desperately wanted to know if actual freedom was indeed actual, as in universally applicable to all human experience, independent of anyone’s personal viewpoint and the PCE undeniably proved that it is – when ‘I’ temporarily disappeared the actual world of the senses became apparent. Then I also knew that the actual world Richard describes is the very same actuality that I briefly experienced in my own PCE. Vineeto List AF, No 60, 14.2.2004

Nowhere in those correspondences did I indicate or imply that ‘getting annoyed at something’, as you say, was the same as cognitive dissonance. I am well aware that they are not the same thing.

What is clear, however, is that the misunderstanding and confusion that invariably arise from cognitive dissonance can very easily lead to feelings such as frustration, annoyance, irritation, and even anger. This is what the Encyclopaedia Britannica says about cognitive dissonance –

Cognitive dissonance – the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in a person is relieved by one of several defensive manoeuvres: the person rejects, explains away, or avoids the new information, persuades himself that no conflict really exists, reconciles the differences, or resorts to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order in his conception of the world and of himself. The concept, first introduced in the 1950s, has become a major point of discussion and research. © Encyclopaedia Britannica

Richard: ... hundreds of people have been poking away at what is on offer, especially since coming onto the internet, trying to find the flaws they are convinced must be there – which is one of the reasons why all correspondence is archived – and this only goes to show how badly people have been sucked in for millennia by the many and varied snake-oil salespersons.

I am not at all surprised that people be suspicious.

Richard, this is well said. It’s why I am unsatisfied with your claims of being historically unique in being actually free from the human condition. That said, I’m finding your site useful and insightful. I’m grateful for the content and the attractive interface as well. Kind Regards

Do I understand you right that when you say ‘it’s why I am unsatisfied’, you mean the reason you are unsatisfied is because you have been badly ‘sucked in’ ‘by the many and varied snake-oil salespersons’? If so, then you have arrived at the right place because actualism is an opportunity and a method to root out any and all beliefs that you have inadvertently taken on in the course of your life.

Hi Vineeto. Thanks for your reply. You’ve got it right. Children have little defence against virulent mind viruses such as Christianity.

Oh, and not only Christianity but the whole range of Eastern religion and spirituality as well. The monotheistic religions have a person-like god whom they worship while the pantheistic religions largely found in the East have many gods, so many that everyone is invited to join the ranks of the gods by becoming one themselves. I know, enlightened Zen Buddhists are a bit coy about calling themselves god but ‘the Eternal’, to quote from your other post, is but a synonym of an immortal amorphous divinity. Investigating Christianity is only a small step in the direction of getting rid of all of one’s beliefs.

*

But don’t expect anyone else to do it for you, only you can – by direct experience – determine the veracity of what is on offer on the AF website and only you can determine whether actualism is indeed brand new in human history.

Very true. Have no problem with that – just Richard’s claims of uniqueness.

If you had no problem with actualism being brand new in human history you would not object to Richard being the pioneer of this brand new discovery. What you really are saying is that you think actualism is not brand new because you compare it to the Tried and Failed spiritual methods of Byron Katie and Zen teachers, therefore to you Richard’s discovery is not unique.

It is interesting that thus far only those who are well and truly disenchanted with all religious and spiritual teachings – and that includes Buddhism and Zen – have been able to discover the transparently palpable difference between practicing dissociation and the elimination of both one’s social identity and one’s instinctual ‘being’ that allows the actual world to become apparent.

I am currently investigating Actualism and using the methods.

There is only one method in actualism. If you think that actualism has any similarity to Byron Katie’s four questions or to Zen Buddhist teachings then you need to further investigate in order to discover the genuine actualism method. To give you a hint, the actualism method has an inherent non-spiritual and down-to-earth intent – to become happy and harmless in the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are. There is nothing other-worldly, nothing self-aggrandizing, nothing nihilistic, nothing negative, nothing dissociative and nothing self-centred about that intent.

I’m also finding Byron Katie’s four questions (The Work www.thework.org) to be an excellent means of disengaging from all sorts of thoughts, stories and beliefs. Using feelings as a guide, you can investigate the stories you’ve attached to. Investigation uncouples complex intertwined stories and feelings. The mutual induction between story and feeling unlocks and they dissolve naturally.

I read her website and the interview with Sunny Massad the first time you mentioned her. Her method is very similar to other methods of Eastern spirituality – one is to disengage, i.e. dissociate from one’s ‘stories’ or projections in order to become one’s true Self, which she calls ‘total love’ or being God. Elements of this particular method were common tools in the Personal Growth Movement (Esalem Institute) and the New Age therapy groups that subsequently blossomed and which were later to be refined by Eastern spiritual teachers to the dissociation tools that they are today – ‘you’re projecting’, ‘you are yourself what you hate in others’ and so on. I have spent years doing and assisting in the running of groups where such methods were used – at best the doing of such groups and the use of such methods offer a temporary period of dissociation from the burdens of being a self, at worst both the groups and the methods become an addictive way of dissociating from the business of being here.

Whereas actualism is paying exclusive attention to the business of being here in this physical universe in this only moment I can experience.

*

The final realisation that finished my problems with authority forever is recorded in Peter’s Journal –

One evening, when talking and musing about the universe, I fully comprehended that this physical universe is actually infinite. The universe being without boundaries or an edge means that it is impossible, practically, for God to exist. In order to have created the universe or to be in control of it God would have to exist outside of it – and there is no outside! This insight hit me like a thunderbolt. My fear of God and of his representatives collapsed and lost its very substance by this obvious realisation. A Bit of Vineeto

Mine was dissolved over longer periods of time, intellectually at first, on an emotional/reflex level more slowly. Churches know how to condition their followers.

When the belief in the God of the Churches is dissolved, then one can begin to question the God by any other name, such as the autotheism of the Enlightened beings, the pantheism of Advaita and Jiddu Krishnamurti, the geotheism of modern environmentalism, the belief in an amorphous existence of an eternal all-pervading divinity, the belief in the wheel of Karma, the belief n Nirvana, Samadhi, Mahaparinirvana, etc., etc.

Most Westerners believe that by abandoning Christianity and taking on Eastern spirituality they have eliminated their belief in God whereas they have but moved from the frying pan into the fire, from a clear-cut belief into beliefs and teachings that are so amorphous and chameleon-like that any Tom, Dick or Martha can hang up a shingle and gather a crowd. Abandoning Christianity is merely scratching the surface of the over-arching human belief that Someone or Something has created and/or is running this physical universe.

God not only exists in people’s passionate imagination because of the conditioning of the priests – the belief in some kind of a protective and guiding higher power arises from a deep instinctual need in every human being for a Big Daddy or a Big Mummy to look after them. Some choose to be aloofly agnostic about the existence of god, but in order to root out from one’s guts this ultimate need to rely upon, or rebel against, a higher authority one also has to eradicate the archaic passionate belief that there is a soul, or non-physical life force, within each and every human body – a soul or spirit that desperately craves union and unity, meaning and purpose in a mythical spirit-ual world populated by spirits and Higher Beings. This might give you a hint as to what a down-to-earth non-spiritual freedom implies.

Your letter intrigued me such that I decided to disregard your suggestion and write a reply.

Firstly, may I thank you for an excellent site, which I have found extremely useful, especially the information on PCEs and the method set forth – HAIETMOBA. However, there has been something bothering me about your position which I haven’t been able to put my finger on until now. There seems to be a war going on here between Spiritualists and Actualists. There’s never smoke without fire.

Ha, this is quite an astounding picture you are creating here. There are almost 6 billion people who believe in some spiritual being, in some God or Goddess or in a whole range of gods and goddesses, in good and evil spirits, in some Divine Force … and here is the actualism mailing list explicitly stating right-up-front that it is not only non-spiritual but that it is dedicated to discussing matters that are down-to-earth, i.e. non-spiritual. And do you know what happens? Spiritualists come here, sometimes in twos, threes and fours, to challenge and attack, question and complain that how can actualists be so preposterous as to suggest that you can get rid of all your spiritual beliefs and become utterly happy and harmless.

For you to propose that a small group of practicing actualists are somehow conducting a war against spiritualists when all that is on offer here is a third alternative to being normal or being spiritual does seem to be somewhat missing the point.

In this actual Actual world, in its wondrous, and infinite subtlety, there is no need whatsoever to destroy/eradicate anything at all, including, may I add, the Evil Spiritualism.

What ‘actual Actual world’ are you talking about? The actual world described on the AF website is invisible to anyone harbouring spiritual beliefs because beliefs are feeling-fed thoughts which are a substantive part of ‘my’ identity. ‘I’ can only experience ‘my’ affectively tainted ‘self’-centred world and ‘I’ am forever locked out of the pure and magical actuality.

Spiritualism is not ‘Evil’, as you try to make it out – there is no Good and Evil in actuality. But for those interested in becoming unconditionally happy and unconditionally harmless, spiritualism is the first of the blindfolds that needs to be questioned and removed in order to experience the splendour of the paradisiacal actuality that is right here under our very noses.

Everything, and I do mean everything, is seen to be perfect just as it is, including the Human Condition you so desperately want to be free of.

Well, if everything is as ‘perfect just as it is, including the Human Condition’, then why are you subscribed to a mailing list that offers a way of becoming free of the human condition? Why do you even bother to write to this list complaining that there is ‘a war going on here between Spiritualists and Actualists’?

For me, the human condition is not perfect at all, for me there is something utterly wrong with the way human beings have been arguing and fighting, killing and torturing, suffering and agonizing for millennia – that’s why I took up the offer to radically (at root) change the only person I can change. And the first thing I had to change was my being a loyal spiritual believer.

Before you rush to your computer, itchy mouse fingers at the ready to cut and paste me into oblivion, I suggest you take an even closer look at your intentions behind the destruction of Spiritualism from this wonderful, multi-facetted, infinitely subtle world we live in. ‘tis only a suggestion mind.

I don’t need to ‘take an even closer look at [my] intentions behind the destruction of Spiritualism’ because I abandoned my spiritual beliefs one by one, never to have them return. Actualism is not about destroying spiritualism, actualism is an alternative to spiritualism, which is quite a different matter.

As for ‘this wonderful, multi-facetted, infinitely subtle world we live in’ I can only suggest you sit down and take a clear-eyed look at this ‘multi-facetted’ world by watching some evening news, some real-life stories, some historical contemporary reports of tribes and nations in order to gain a clearer picture of the fact that nowhere do human beings of different gender, family, race, tribe, nation, religion and political conviction live together in peace and harmony. Rather human beings are continually arguing and bickering with each other and many are even killing, maiming, torturing and persecuting other human beings for being a different ‘facet’ than themselves. Take a candid look at how human beings are relentlessly driven to ensure their survival through fearing and attacking, bonding and accumulating. The passionate world of human interaction is quite horrendous and not ‘infinitely subtle’ at all. Human beings are neither happy most of the time nor are they harmless most of the time and most people don’t even like to be here.

‘This wonderful, multi-facetted, infinitely subtle world we live in’ is a world up in the clouds, a dream world to where spiritualists retreat in order not to be confronted with the pain and suffering and misery and mayhem of the dreadful, impassioned world of instinctual ‘self’-survival. I know because I had escaped into this dream world for many, many years – but in the end I had to admit that it didn’t work, that I could never shut out reality completely – it kept creeping in, be it through a fight with the boyfriend, a death in the family, a picture of a starving African tribe or the need to go back into the ‘marketplace’ to earn a living.

Now I don’t have to escape, now I can live with a companion in utter peace and harmony, I can be in the world-as-it-is and live in peace with my fellow human beings, I can earn a living and be happy while I am doing it, I can do nothing and be happy doing nothing, now I enjoy being here – and it all started when I began to investigate my spiritual beliefs, all of them.

‘Tis only a suggestion that you can do so yourself … but to many fervent believers it is quite obviously a great threat.

The AF usage of the word ‘belief’ is deficient.

Begin Quote: Belief that which is believed, an accepted opinion. Conviction of the truth or reality of a thing, based on insufficient grounds to afford positive knowledge. Confidence, faith, trust. A Religious tenet or tenets. Oxford Dictionary

To believe means ‘fervently wish to be true’. The action of believing is to emotionally imagine, or fervently wish, something to be real that is not actual – actual, as in tangible, corporeal, material, definitive, present, obvious, evident, current, substantial, physical and palpable.

A belief is an assumption, a notion, a proposition, an idea that requires faith, trust or hope to sustain in the face of doubt, uncertainty and lack of factual evidence. Whereas a fact is a fact, demonstratively evident to all that it is actual and/or that it works. AF Glossary, Belief End Quote.

The reason Peter took the time and made the effort to write a glossary of terms for the actualism website was to explain how particular words are used in the actualism writings –‘a glossary of words and meanings as used in the Actualism writings and correspondence’ as it says on the Library homepage. Given that Actual Freedom introduces the third alternative to either being normal or becoming spiritual, it makes sense to be as precise as possible in one’s vocabulary in order to convey the discoveries made in using the actualism method as clearly as possible so as to make the difference clear between an emotional-spiritual and an actual experience.

‘It reminds me of the story of the philosopher’s cave (I think it was Kant) – everyone is huddled in a cave, living in imagination and considering the outside world as very, very dangerous. One person has gone outside the cave and reports that it is delightfully safe out here.

Kant then suggests that this one person should go back into the cave to convince others that it is safe to leave.

I sometimes think that I have to ‘feel’ where the other is coming from, in order to communicate – and whooshsh, I am back in the muddle of emotions, beliefs and collective fantasies. Well, slowly, slowly, after a hundred failures I start to grasp that there is no point in going back into Mr. Kant’s cave...’ Vineeto, SC Imagination, List AF, Alan, 6.2.1999

Exactly. I remember writing the story and wondering what word best to use for not being sure as to who was its author. I chose to use the word ‘think’ instead of ‘believe’ because I knew for sure that I had no emotional investment as to who the author was.

For me as an actualist it is vital to make the distinction between an emotion-backed thought and an ‘educated guess’ and as such I use different words for distinctly different meanings. Because I want to investigate all of my emotion-backed thoughts, i.e. beliefs, I need to make sure I don’t confuse them with mere ‘educated guesses’. In other words, I reserve the meaning of the word belief to mean what it means in the actualism writings – both for the sake of my own clarity and for clarity in communicating with others.

‘I do not have a viewpoint in regards to an actual freedom from the human condition. In other areas where I do have opinions, make estimations, find it reasonable to presume and so on, I never hold it to be ‘true and correct’ in the first place ... for I am well aware that it is only a current appraisal until further investigation shows otherwise.’ Richard, SC Actual Freedom, List AF, No 12, 21.11.2000

I wonder what clarity would be achieved by the word ‘belief’ to mean something other than it is meant to mean in the actualism writings? Or, to say it in your own words from a few months ago –

I realize the statement ‘actualism is not a philosophy’ is often repeated on this list – but if one doesn’t understand exactly what ‘a philosophy’ is – as in rooted in belief, then that statement alone isn’t enough for it to sink in. Why am I writing this? Well, because I want to withdraw any and all objections I’ve ever made to actualism. There can be no objection to performing the task ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ since it’s an activity – not a theory. No 37, ’I’ am a believer, 20.4.2003

I take it that when you said ‘rooted in belief’ you did not mean ‘rooted in educated guess’. As such you understood that the activity of investigating one’s beliefs is the activity of investigating one’s emotion-backed thoughts, heartfelt passions, cherished opinions, esteemed worldviews and precious theories and not one’s ‘educated guesses’.

The specific use of words and their associated meanings in the actualism writings is designed to aid this hands-on investigation, not to confuse or obscure it by vague or ambiguous jargon as is the wont in the revered spiritual teachings.

It is as simple as that.

Personally I found it very useful to adjust my language to aid my ongoing inquiry into beliefs. For me, it seemed easiest to reserve the word belief for the fervent emotion-backed activity of my thoughts and use different words for simply being uncertain about a fact. But then, I guess, each actualist decides what works best for themselves, by themselves.

Well, after I had inquired into the bigger issues of my beliefs I became increasingly attentive to my way of thinking and use of language in order to not inadvertently overlook something. I discovered that when someone said to me ‘I hope you have a nice day’ they were implying that I might not have a nice day because having a nice day is generally considered to be a matter of luck or a matter of avoiding misfortune. As an actualist I no longer rely on hoping that I will have a nice day – I can be sure of it, because I have been busy ridding myself of my feelings of sorrow and malice such that I now always have an excellent day.

As for other people – I can sincerely say to someone ‘have a nice day’ as a kind of encouragement but I know by experience that hoping for it is a no-brainer. I know the human condition and I know that normal people, and spiritual people, regularly stuff up the possibility of having a lovely day by feeling upset, frustrated, annoyed, bored, melancholic, sad, angry or even furious.

To practice actualism is certainly ‘disorienting’ – it is bound to. After all, the psyche that you are inquiring into is the result of millions of years of human conditioning and billions of years of instinctual programming – if that is not upsetting the applecart I wonder what is. I remember I had days, even weeks, of being on an emotional roller-coaster because I wanted to question everything, often including things that made sense.

Slowly I began to understand that how I am experiencing this moment of being alive is what is vitally important, as this is the only moment I can experience being alive. As such what I need to experientially investigate is whatever feeling is preventing me from being happy now.

Of course. Clear communication is the very purpose of using words … unless one is has a vested interest in muddying the waters, that is.

Ah, in the light of ‘a tendency to pounce on any beliefs or opinions whatsoever’ I understand your query that ‘the word ‘belief’ is deficient’. However, I think that as long as you stick to pouncing on your own ‘educated guesses’ there is no way you can astray because you will find out soon enough if your ‘educated guesses’ qualify as being beliefs and as such need further examination. It is the passionate intent to get to the bottom of all of your beliefs that is crucial for uncovering all the borrowed knowledge and all of the ideas, principles and convictions that you, like everyone else, have inadvertently taken on board.

… ‘A fact is plain for everyone to see. There is no arguing with a fact, simply because it is a fact. To simply lack all the facts in a great number of circumstances does not necessarily lead to forming opinions, in my opinion.’ Gary to No 49

Funny you should think that it ‘may have been a slip-up on Gary’s part’ – I thought it was a good pun, particularly because right after saying the above he quoted the Merriam-Webster dictionary with the various meanings for the word ‘opinion’.

I know from experience that most of my former opinions were feeling-backed and as such fell into the same category as beliefs. Forming an emotion-backed opinion to everything I encountered has been a tenacious habit arising from ‘my’ compulsive need to always categorize everything as being either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but it is also firmly rooted in the instinctual need to ‘fall into line with one group or another’.

Only lately have I been able to read a report or watch a documentary on TV, or hear someone tell a story or propose a theory without automatically forming an emotion-backed opinion one way or the other. I am discovering the carefree ease that comes with not needing to have an opinion on everything that is going on or everything that other human beings do.

If you want to benefit at all from what the AF site is offering, then the first question to ask yourself is if you are vitally interested in becoming free from the human condition of malice and sorrow. Unless you are utterly fed up with your life as it is now, there is no point in even investigating the third alternative to being normal or being spiritual. Without such an overarching desire one inevitably will keep trying to prove that the materialistic and spiritual beliefs that uphold the human condition are right and object to actualism as being wrong.

If your interest does not lay in becoming happy and harmless, you will remain a defender of the status quo, in this case the belief that someone or something created the universe. Actualism is only of use for those intrepid pioneers who passionately want to become free from the Human Condition in toto.

Living within the Human Condition you are bound to be full of beliefs, everyone is. Like everyone else, you have imbibed beliefs with mother’s milk. The vital question for someone coming across actualism is – do you want to examine the beliefs you have taken on board in the course of your life. Your insistence that you ‘don’t want to begin with’ beliefs only prevents a sincere investigation.

In making the statement that ‘energy/mass is a finite number which means the universe must be finite’ you are ignoring the fact that in an infinite and eternal universe both the energy and the mass of the universe are also infinite.

In an infinite universe energy does not ‘become less’, therefore it appears that the 2^nd law of thermodynamics works to describe local events and does not apply to the universe as a whole.

I presume you were born from a father and mother like the rest of us humans? If so, it is obvious how you ‘arrived to the present moment’ and that you have thus far only existed for a finite time and that you will only exist for a finite time.

‘The phenomenon of expansion of universe’ is a theory that is solely based on a particular interpretation of positive redshift values and this interpretation has remained sacrosanct because it appears to prove a beginning and as such a creation of the universe. There are many, many refutations of the ‘Big Bang’ theory as well as alternative explanations to the ‘Red Shift’ theory available both in print and on the internet – you have simply chosen to selectively present only those theories that agree with your already existing belief about a finite universe and a creator.

In other words, you would need to be interested in questioning your pre-existing beliefs in order to be able to even consider that the universe might in fact be infinite and eternal. So far all you have done is present your pre-existing beliefs in order to prove that you are right and actualists are wrong.

Human imagination of what the universe ‘may be’ is inexhaustible. Imagining what the universe ‘may be’ only produces yet more science fiction.

The human elaboration of the instinctual animal ‘self’ into a sophisticated and cunning psychological and psychic identity makes it almost impossible to conceive or consider how this flesh and blood body would experience the universe without this parasitical identity … unless one remembers a pure consciousness experience. In such a ‘self’-less pure experience the usual ‘self’-centred restrictions on one’s normal perception and understanding are temporarily out of order. Only in a ‘self’-less state can the universe be perceived as it is – infinite and eternal.

As long as ‘I’ am governing this body’s sensual perception, my ‘self’-dominated and ‘self’-oriented perception will always inflict its own limits on what I perceive and as such will impose its ‘self’-centred nature onto the physical universe. Similarly, the thinking process is contaminated by ‘self’-dominated and ‘self’-oriented thoughts and feelings – the identity is running the show all the time – and therefore a clear understanding of the actual world is impossible whilst ‘I’ insist on ruling the roost.

That’s why I said that in order to understand the nature of the universe, the first unavoidable step is to rigorously question one’s own beliefs and feelings in order to incrementally diminish the dominating role of one’s ‘self’-centred thoughts and feelings so as to slowly enable a more clear-eyed perception to come about – there is no other way.

I had great fun talking about the infinite nature of the universe as it always gives me an incentive to experience the infinity I am writing about.

However, a theoretical, i.e. non-experiential, discussion about infinitude can never produce satisfactory results because unless you question and investigate your pre-existing beliefs first, you are actively preventing the possibility of an intellectual understanding that the physical universe is infinite and eternal, which is the prerequisite for an experiential understanding of the infinitude of the actual world.

The Work is definitely not spiritual – it’s a method for self investigation.

Has it ever occurred to you that the method is only as good as the goal one wants to achieve with using the method? And you made it clear what you use Byron Katie’s method for –

The Work does not invalidate concepts – it simply allows you to examine the effect they have on you.

In my spiritual years I thought that self-investigation was for the purpose of becoming more humble – the aim being to enhance my good emotions and sublimate and transcend my bad emotions. I believed that this work would diminish my ego so as to bring me closer to the Divine, and I strongly believed that if I could succeed in surrendering to the Divine I would solve the problems that my ego caused.

Only when I met Richard and learnt about an actual freedom from the human condition did I realize that I had been following the fashion of concentrating on only one aspect of the problem, my ego, yet completely ignoring the major aspect of the problem, my soul. By only investigating the unwanted parts of my self I had empowered the cherished parts of my self – and thus only aggravated the problem of being a ‘soul-self’, an instinctually driven identity.

In short, if the aim is not ‘self’-immolation it is inevitably ‘self’-aggrandizement and ‘Self’-empowerment.

The whole God concept is so loaded up with preconceptions.

Yes, ‘the whole God concept’ is pure fantasy, all of it, from beginning to end.

I prefer the term ‘nature’ or ‘universe’ in which case physical matter would be a significant subset contained within ‘God’.

‘Physical matter … a significant subset contained within ‘God’’ is still a concept ‘pertaining to a spirit’, i.e. a spiritual, whereas actualism is utterly, completely, absolutely, totally, without exception non-spiritual. God by whatever name and by whatever preference is a spiritual fairytale invented and kept alive by passionate minds and contumacious souls. In other words there is no such thing as an actual physical God. To believe that the physical universe is Divine is subscribing to Pantheism –

‘the belief or philosophical theory that God and the universe are identical (implying a denial of the personality and transcendence of God); the identification of God with the forces of nature and natural substances.’ Oxford Dictionary

This physical universe is experienced as far, far more extraordinary when stripped of the veneer of being relegated to ‘a significant subset contained within ‘God’’.

*

So far my investigations have not led me to invalidate my misgivings about the anti-guru guru Richard’s self proclaimed status of being the one and only human being to have ever achieved an actual freedom from the human condition.

Given that you make no distinction between a spiritual freedom and an actual freedom your ‘misgivings’ are based on voluntary ignorance and as such irrelevant. You could just as well have ‘misgivings’ that Rome has no Eiffel Tower because you insist to ignore the many road signs that say that Rome is not Paris. You are driving by the wrong map.

Wrong map? Depends where you want to go.

Looks like you are still a few country miles away from understanding the difference between spiritual and non-spiritual. To understand the diametrical opposite requires a weariness of the empty promises and haloed wisdom of spiritual teachings, a non-antagonistic attitude from the reader, a suspense of his or her suspicion, cynicism, sarcasm, doubt and pride and a good dose of naiveté. But above all, in order to understand what actualism is on about, one needs the intent to do so – and this intent is none other than the intent to be harmless towards others in order that one can be happy.

I certainly don’t want to go to planet Vineeto where the mental ecology has been clear felled and replaced with a dogma.

It’s not the ‘mental ecology’ (whatever that is) that ‘has been clear felled’ but the whole fantasyland of spiritual ideas, sacrosanct concepts, dearly-held beliefs, sacred psittacisms, venerated truths, ancient superstitions and so-called wisdom. Of course, for someone who still holds the pantheistic notion that ‘physical matter’ is ‘a significant subset contained within ‘God’’ any description of a god-less physical universe appears like a ‘dogma’ or worse.

I remember that at some point in my investigations into my spiritual beliefs the world seemed terribly bland and bleak without the comforting assurance of the shared-by-all fantasy that a divine force is looking after things. But I soon came to realize that this was an image solely created by my fears and with the encouragement of Richard’s report that there is an actual world hidden by my beliefs and feelings I proceeded to question my cherished ideas and feelings and eventually discovered the vibrant splendour and the vivid abundance of actuality in a stunning PCE.

To have an unmitigated experience of the purity and perfection of this magical wonderland we all live in is something not to be missed.

Footnote:

1)‘If this ‘me’ is not afraid of losing itself, of no longer having anywhere to lay its head, in short, when, pushed by the magnificent dynamism of absolute doubt, it is not afraid of disassociating itself from everything; of rejecting its old associations, and rejecting the new snares laid by the objects of the world in order to bind it to them; of destroying the new entity which is being re­built on the ruins of the crumbling entity, when this ‘me’ transformed into an incandescent torch, mercilessly burns all that is itself then one day, becoming supremely conscious and no longer finding anything with which to associate, that which remains of it leaps all together into the eternal flame which consumes all, except the Eternal, and being dead as an entity, it is nothing but life.’ Comedie Psychologique by Carlo Suares, reproduced in ‘Living Zen’, chapter XX, page 172