It is indeed an interesting trip! This fear of abandoning ship, which I remember from my own process, is the very proof that something had actually changed and I was not simply replacing one belief with another. I didn’t understand the nature of the fear at the time, yet whenever I stopped to reconsider the sensibility of my choice for Actual Freedom I knew I was better off ‘without the rudder’ of the traditional ‘Tried and Failed’.

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

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

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

It is always a great opportunity when ‘fear, anger, dread, depression’ are coming to the surface by themselves. This is not just ‘negativity’ to be suffered through, this is the very stuff that underlies the ‘good’ feelings and that forms the basis of the Human Condition. This is the identity in action – and only an identity in action can be investigated. Progress for me happened when I had found the core belief or instinct of a particular feeling – ‘ah, that’s the underlying belief, oh dear, but that’s who ‘I’ am, oh dear...’ Some ‘eradications’ of feelings and beliefs felt like major heart operations until I grew used to remembering that they are nothing but feelings, experienced like a life-threatening procedure, felt as very real but never actual. The ‘operations’ did not leave any scars, neither emotional nor physical.

Doubts about the path, the actualism method and if I was going in the right direction were often insidiously persistent. I had to tackle my doubts by meticulously investigating the facts, weighing the actual situation against my, often overwhelming, feelings and inquire into the root of my occurring emotions and feelings. Eventually I recognized doubt as a cover for fear itself, the fear to move closer and closer to extinction. The trick to encounter fear is to look for the thrilling part in the experience, which might be tiny at the start, the little YES in the cloud of angst, and then one can surf the wave of thrill beyond one’s boundaries of what is considered familiar and safe.

What helped me a lot through all the weird and sometimes daunting experiences on the path was the pioneering spirit and the ambition to write down and report what I found out on this utterly new, first-time-in-history, adventure. Being a reporter as well as experiencing what happened increased my attentiveness and prevented me from both indulging in emotions for indulgence sake and from ‘keeping my distance’. I wanted to be able to describe the process as precisely and detailed as possible, and that very ambition has carried me through many strange adventures until the identity of the reporter itself became redundant. Writing down and reporting any of your experiences at this stage can be helpful for yourself and for others on this pioneering adventure.

Unlike Jane Roberts, who imagined herself to be a conduit for an ancient mythical Jewish wise-guy called Seth, I know that mere thoughts do not attract violence, but one’s actions can certainly attract violence or malice. In the course of becoming happy and harmless, my main concern was that I, for my part, do not inflict suffering on other people through my carelessness or malice. In order to become free of malice I had to examine my behaviour as well as my feelings and to find the roots of how and why I think, feel and act maliciously towards others. The first and most important thing for me was to stop acting on any impulse of violence towards others (and myself) and then, in due course, trace the cause of these impulses.

I found anger and fear inextricably interlinked – there is anger resulting out of fear and then there is fear produced by repressing anger. To be able to investigate and eliminate one’s underlying beliefs, morals and ethics it is vital to experience, examine and understand one’s ‘self’ in action as those different emotions.

Facing fear was and still is an ongoing issue, but it has become a breeze compared to the early months. The more I understood the workings of ‘me’, my ‘self’ in action, the more my intent grew to self-immolate in order to be free from fear, the core survival instinct in every human being. Many of our fears are closely related to the social identity of beliefs, morals and ethics and with investigating and removing this layer most of my social fears have disappeared. Tackling fear sometimes meant sitting out the storm of a fear-attack with stubborn determination before I could explore the triggers and causes, and sometimes, after extensive examination, a simple tasty cup of coffee could redirect my attention from a silly repetition of fearful thoughts. In the end it is the altruistic, unselfish willingness to sacrifice what ‘I’ hold most dear, that wins over the fear born out of psychic and psychological self-preservation and keeps one going on the path to a permanent freedom from fear.

My ‘concern about the future’ goes as far as covering the basic necessities for my physical survival – a place to live, spending money, clothes, food and obeying the law of the land. For work I found it sensible to keep a car, so I take care that it is registered, insured and running well. Neither a fearful nor hopeful imagination about the future nor feelings, beliefs, morals, values and instinctual passions interfere with this simple and solely practical ‘concern about the future’ and life is easy and carefree.

As far as ‘the world inhabited by other people’ is concerned – there are some practical safety measures to be considered. When appropriate, I will keep my mouth shut and not talk about Actual Freedom, because people seem to get really upset when their dearly held beliefs are questioned. The Internet for instance, is a much safer place to have a conversation about Actual Freedom. But most of what is considered ‘danger’ is, in fact, merely emotionally perceive and disappears with the thorough investigation of one’s emotions, feelings and instinctual passions – the actual world is an imminently safe place to be.

A side-note – once you actively start investigating those hopes and fears whilst experiencing them, you will find out for yourself that they are very real but not actual. Thinking about one’s fears without thoroughly investigating what they are based on will, on the other hand, merely confirm the mother of all beliefs – that ‘you can’t change the human nature’.

Once I started to investigate a fear that arose from changing myself, the next time I found I could not take the fear as serious as before, for I knew that by exploring the fear it would eventually reveal its illusionary nature. With each fear removed, my brain was functioning better and clearer than before and was less restricted by chemically driven irrational hopes and fears. But it takes daring and initiative to start exploring one’s ‘ghosts in the cupboard’ , as Alan and I used to call them. Freedom from the Human Condition does not happen by itself and it does not happen overnight. It needs persistent and bloody-minded pure intent and thorough investigation – and then the rewards are beyond your wildest dreams.

I keep saying to Peter that if people only knew what they were missing ... all my dreams have come true, one by one.

I don’t know and I don’t really care. ‘Body-preservation’ without the instincts is none of ‘my’ business because ‘I’ won’t be here anymore...

Once the ‘self’ is as weakened as it is now, I am simply doing what is happening. ‘I’ am not needed to keep this body alive, on the contrary, ‘I’ had been continuously interfering with my physical well-being by worrying and fighting, dieting and indulging, being stressed or depressed, fearful or driven. My health and well being are now better than ever, I have stopped worrying about vitamins or minerals, starch or protein, vegetarianism or health-dieting, natural or homeopathic medicine long ago. Also I take it that the medical technology in this country is so advanced as to give me a good chance of staying healthy as long as possible ... and when my time is over I can surely say that I had had a perfect life, every day, 24 hrs a day, for years and years and years.

With the ‘self’ the fear of death also dies. Once ‘I’ am gone there won’t be anybody left to be afraid of death. Of course I can still jump out of the way of an approaching car or an attacking dog. Intelligence and apperceptive awareness together with the physical startle-response are enough to keep this body alive as long as is possible. It is the psychological and psychic fear of death that casts shadows of fear and doubt into our lives and prevents us from experiencing the safety, magnificence and abundant perfection of the actual physical universe.

So don’t let your doubts and fears take over and stop you from investigating your psyche – there is much magic to be discovered.

PS: I found a little quote from Richard that might give you further encouragement ...

Respondent: The strong survive and the weak die. That is the law of the jungle.

Richard: Not so ... it is the fittest that survive: ‘survival of the fittest’ does not necessarily mean (as it is popularly misunderstood) that ‘the strong’ (most muscular) always survive. It means ‘the most fitted to the ever-changing environment’ (those who adapt) get to pass on their genes. If the most muscular are too dumb to twig to this very pertinent fact they will slowly disappear of the face of the planet over the countless millions of years that it is going to take via the trial and error process of blind nature. One can speed up this tedious natural process in one’s own lifetime and become free ... now. Richard, List B, No 21c, 29.3.2000

VINEETO: But the Human Condition in each of us is not just a belief. At the core, ‘I’ am the instinctual passions.

RESPONDENT: Yes I agree that this is so. The scientific evidence is indisputable. ‘I’ am the instinctual passions and I don’t like it but right now I’m tired of becoming. ‘I’ just feel like accepting the fact that ‘I’ am my instincts and be done with it. <snip> I don’t have any drive left. <snip> I feel like just staying with the ‘feeling being ‘and quit trying to change it. I feel bogged down and stuck.

VINEETO: In moments of extreme fear and doubt, these feeling seem to be the only thing that exists and they seem to last forever. The very nature of instincts is that they are utterly convincing and trigger an overwhelming automatic ‘quick and dirty’ reaction, if you remember the findings of Josef LeDoux’. (You’ll find relevant information under ‘Instincts’ and ‘Fear’ in The Actual Freedom Trust library.)

In the beginning it is often only some time after the ‘attack of the instincts’ that is one able to look at the situation with awareness, common sense and intelligence. You may then question if the response to stop the inquiry because of fear was really your best shot.

But if you prefer to stay ‘with the ‘feeling being’ and quit trying to change it’, at least you are not alone – six billion people prefer to stay with the Tried and Failed. Being a ‘feeling being’ usually means feeling ‘miserable’, ‘bogged down and stuck’, ‘helpless and hopeless’, not to mention anger, hate, malice, resentment, jealousy, insecurity, fear, neediness, greed, loneliness and sorrow.

RESPONDENT: I have a sense of abandoning humanity but I have no energy left for investigating. I have doubt like all of this investigating is what is bogging me down. <snip> I get the message loud and clear that my own survival instincts are the underlying cause but I feel helpless and hopeless to do anything about it. It even seems right now that the effort to do something about it is the cause of the problem.

The actual world of sensual delight seems like the memory of a fairy tale. I have lost it.

VINEETO: No 3 says it perfectly well: ‘Do these feelings really serve you in any real beneficial way, what are the practicalities of doing away with this, that says this is your limit you will not venture past this. The main thing is, if it is controlling you, then you are believing it. Let’s face it, emotion is truth but not fact, truth is not freedom, fact is, as can be directly perceived or deduced with reason.’ [endquote].

RESPONDENT: I’m up against the mother of all beliefs that I can’t do anything about it. I can’t change the instincts. This belief is so strong that it looks like a fact so what looks best to do is accept the fact that I am my instincts. This seems like the only possible relief.

VINEETO: Your reply shows that you are taking this ‘mother of all beliefs’ as a reality that you won’t question and therefore you accept that you cannot change. Fair enough, it is a deeply ingrained insidious belief, not only repeated for thousands of years by millions of people as the only wisdom but also deeply rooted in our genetic instinctual heritage. It needs pure intent, courage and awareness to start questioning the ‘truth of our ancestors’.

The moment I questioned anything that I had believed all my life I was up against a whirlpool of fear, belief being the very substance of my identity. There are only two ways to respond to that fear – to go back to being miserable without possibility for change, or to stop running, face the fear and start investigating. The first was not a long-term option for me – knowing about Actual Freedom and not pursuing it meant that I would never be able to face myself in the mirror again with dignity.

Whenever I gathered enough courage to stop running and face the fear I was up for a surprise – the biggest part of fear was being afraid of fear itself. The moment I stopped avoiding fear, the remaining fear was substantially reduced. Still big enough to make me shake – but I had understood enough to know that I could not run forever. Fear, the very core of our software, the Human Condition, will only disappear as that software is being eliminated, anything else will only be a postponement or an avoidance.

So whenever fear hits me I ‘hold on to the mast and let the storm pass’, not make any decisions because of fear but sit it out. It always passes.

Of course, one has to acknowledge that ‘I am my instincts’. But serendipity has it that we are not only inflicted with instinctual passions but are also equipped with intelligence and the ability to be aware of what is happening. It is these very qualities that have the potential to separate us from the other animals. These are the tools to re-wire the brain, to slowly, slowly shift the balance from passionate beliefs to clear facts, from automatic instinctual reactions to considered, sensible, appropriate action and sensual delight.

I leave you with a recipe from Richard to get out of stuckness, Alan’s favourite piece of writing – by the way, Alan, how are you doing?

Richard: To get out of ‘stuckness’ one gets off one’s backside and does whatever one knows best to activate delight. Delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all ... and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now. Then one is no longer intuitively making sense of life ... the delicious wonder of it all drives any such instinctive meaning away. Such luscious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté – the nourishing of which is essential if fascination in it all is to occur – and the charm of life itself easily engages dedication to peace-on-earth. Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is ... and one is the experiencing of what is happening.

But refrain from possessing it and making it your own ... or else ‘twill vanish as softly as it appeared. Richard, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, Alan, 13.12.1998

*

VINEETO: So whenever fear hits me I ‘hold on to the mast and let the storm pass’, not make any decisions because of fear but sit it out. It always passes.

RESPONDENT: I think that accepting the fact that ‘I’ am my instincts was facing the fear. This freed me up to see the actual. I am not having a PCE but there is a kind of peacefulness now. When I was talking to my friend on the phone I realized that what was actual was I was sitting here and talking to him. Everything else was made up (imagined).

VINEETO: Fear is never imagined. Emotions are never imagined although imagination can add fuel to the initial emotion. The physical reactions that accompany particular emotions ensure that you experience them as very real at the time. Instinctual passions are not mere imagination as one would imagine a bag of potato chips – they are the result of the chemical flows that are automatically produced by our genetically encoded software. When you were overwhelmed by fear or anger you did not experience it as imagination but as a very real situation. Nothing will change if one only regards instinctual passions as imaginary. The solution lies in a scientific and experiential exploration of the Human Condition. And once I understood a belief or an affective feeling in its totality, I was able to leave it behind.

One thinks and feels oneself to be locked up in a small world as a restricted and myopic ‘self’ and that seems to be the only world there is. But once one diligently and persistently examines the ‘self’, each particular belief, feeling and instinctual passion that it consists of, one discovers the door and dares to walk out, leaving one’s self behind. In the beginning there are only short moments of freedom, fleeting experiences of the perfection that is possible, then those moments increase until it becomes obvious that the only sensible way to live is as experienced in the PCE, every day.

It is possible, but one needs to make freedom the most important thing in one’s life.

It is purely a matter of what you want to do with your life.

ALAN: Weird stuff has been going on this evening and I know none of it is real. Or rather it is real, very real, but only something ‘I’ am creating. From heart palpitations, pressure in the head (like it is about to explode), shivering, melancholy, floating sensations, light headedness – and underlying it all a nothingness, sense of meaningless, a vast doubt (knowledge?) that it is all just me making it up. Is this just ‘me’ trying to pretend there is a process going on or is there a process going on? Or is there a process going on and ‘I’ pretend to know there is a process going on, in an attempt to cover up the process going on.

VINEETO: It is interesting you should just now describe this experience! It reminds me of a weird and fascinating experience I had just two nights ago. I had had a light smoke, when I suddenly started to feel nauseous and very dizzy in the head. The physical symptoms came along with an acute fear to through up, to black out, in short, to lose control over my body and my life.

While Peter kept inquiring if there maybe was also some fear involved, not just a physical reaction, I was desperately trying to obtain control over my body. At the same time I was, of course, suspicious that it was all a play up of the ‘self’ trying to survive, but didn’t know how to deal with it.

When I finally laid down on the floor and ‘surrendered’ to the option of being unconscious and was actually getting interested and thrilled by the possibility of observing the experience, it very quickly disappeared like a ghost. It left me astounded about the power of ‘reality’, the vividness of the experience that fear created with all the ingredients of a ‘serious’ disease, becoming unconscious.

Only by accepting it as an adventure and at the same time doubting its actuality it lost its power over me, leaving me battered but proud like after a victorious, well-fought battle. The next night it happened again but was all much less dramatic, the temptation was there to delve into the fear, the physical symptoms were ready to emerge again, but this time I didn’t believe in the actual danger and it quickly went.

A word about stuckness: the emotion that usually kept me from looking at the issue was mainly fear, sometimes disguised as confusion, mental laziness or simply avoidance. But after a few days, or a few hours, I would simply see the silliness of avoiding the issue and thus wasting my time by not being ‘here’ and then start off the examination. It often would go like this: OK, damn, what is it this time? What has happened just before I turned numb, or grumpy or zombie? Ah, that person said something. No, can’t be it, I’m over with this. Oh, well, maybe still a little trace? Wow, big fear now. What belief made me react? Where is the hook? And then, like a dog, I would pick up the scent and follow the trail until I had the bugger by the throat. The first resistance was the most difficult to overcome – once I had started to investigate, thrill would keep me going, and curiosity, of course.

Sometimes I would find a childhood issue, like in my early mail with Konrad, some attachment to a cozy feeling or simply the instinctual fear of stepping outside of all of humanity’s concepts and beliefs. The wish to get out of the emotion (fear or whatever) into ‘here’ before I had checked it out thoroughly and understood it in its complexity was often a hindrance and would only prolong the process. One can’t go in two directions at the same time. Once I reached the bottom of the ‘pit’ and saw what the particular issue consisted of, being here was the natural by-product.

Yes, being here is the simplest thing to do – once I am here; but cleaning oneself up entirely so as to not to be pulled back by anything is also the most courageous thing to do. When an emotion gets you into its grip it is quite a bit of work to find out all its implications, and rarely someone dares to do it. Like, when you thoroughly investigated sorrow...

ALAN: Your mail has prompted me to investigate further the ‘zombie state’. I discovered that I was waiting until I had more ‘time’ to actually be ‘here’ – what a joke – this moment is all I have and here I am waiting – and what a lovely excuse for not being ‘here’. I discovered doubt – doubt that you, Richard and Peter are living a delusion, doubt that you and Peter are blind followers of Richard – and what a lovely excuse for not being ‘here’.

VINEETO: Yes, I do understand the doubts you are talking about. After all, we are just a handful of pioneers compared to the whole world of believers. I had these doubts again and again, they usually took the form of doubting my effort, ‘Am I really on the right track’?, ‘Am I doing all that is needed’? or ‘What if I end up enlightened?’ Peter and I found emotions going round and round in a circle: fear – frustration – doubt – fear and the only way out was to muster our intent and investigate the facts of the situation. I take it that when you are ‘here’ there is no doubt that you are not following a delusion?... or following the only sanity there is?

ALAN: I agree on the ‘a seemingly non-feeling dull state’. I am not sure that ‘where feelings are kept under the carpet because they are too scary to acknowledge and explore’ applies to my current ‘stuckness’ – but I may discover differently. It has occurred to me that I may be in what Richard referred to in Article 26 of his journal.

Richard: However, a word of experiential advice: just prior to apperception occurring, ‘I’, the beholder – the one who wants to be in control – can view life as being bereft of depth.

Everything can become flat, two-dimensional, barren and stark. This is not actuality, although one may be inclined to feel it to be so. This is reality, stark reality, and is not to be confused with actuality. Actuality is never, ever, stark. This starkness can influence one to pull back, to retreat into ‘normal’ life. Courage of one’s conviction and confidence in the purity of the actual is essential if one is to proceed. All of one’s ‘being’ wants to back off and regain the once-despised reality that looks so attractive now, from this extreme position. This stark reality is a barrier; it is a desert of monumental proportions that one can only traverse if supplied with the fortitude garnered from the peak experience. Then one is willing to endure the ghastly reality masquerading as the actual. The very ground beneath one’s feet can appear to shift, to disappear, and all seems to hang upon nothing. Unsupported and alone, one is in the outer-most reaches of ‘being’.

The feeling is that one cannot survive this appalling emptiness without going mad. To be in durance vile is not for the faint-hearted, the weak of knee. Nerves of steel are essential if one is to meet one’s destiny. It is the adventure of a life-time. Richard’s Journal, Article 26, There Are Three I’s Together But Only One Is Actual

I am certainly seeing life as flat and two-dimensional. Apart from the ‘fear’ mentioned above and a flash of irritation a few weeks ago, I have felt no emotions for some time. As you said, above, a ‘non-feeling dull state’. I do not even have any longing, or nostalgia, for the feelings to come back. It is a ‘nothingness’. Not even frustration at being ‘stuck’. Nor is there any sense of ‘the feeling is that one cannot survive this appalling emptiness without going mad’, as Richard described it. And it does not mean I am not enjoying life – I am, immensely.

VINEETO: This wide and wondrous path is indeed a fascinating journey with all sorts of landscapes. In our past correspondence, we have talked about ‘ghosts in the cupboard’ and now you say you seem to be in what Richard describes as a desert like place. I remember sometimes I likened the path to wild water rafting or a roller coaster and yet another time to a ‘limbo lake’. I wrote about it nine months ago – maybe it is similar to what you experience –

Limbo: 1 A region supposed in some beliefs to exist on the border of Hell as the abode of the just who died before Christ’s coming and of unbaptized infants. 2 An unfavourable place or condition, likened to limbo; esp. a condition of neglect or oblivion to which people or things are consigned when regarded as superseded, useless, or absurd; an intermediate or indeterminate condition; a state of inaction or inattention pending some future event. Comb.: limbo-lake the abode of spirits or tormented souls. Oxford Dictionary

[Vineeto]: Well, I definitely could relate to that description, I know the ‘place or condition of neglect or oblivion to which people or things are consigned when regarded as superseded, useless, or absurd’ , and I also know well this ‘intermediate or indeterminate condition; a state of inaction or inattention pending some future event’. And some feelings of doubt, lost-ness or insecurity about the right direction are very normal when one is in limbo. Suddenly all made sense again – o.k., if I am in limbo, that must be par for the course. How could I ever think that anything could go wrong? It was a great relief to realize that nowhere can I go wrong or miss the mark – limbo is a place of no direction and no movement. My only responsibility now is to keep my foot off the brakes; all else is proceeding perfectly well.

While contemplating upon where I could possibly stand on the brakes, I noticed a slight shift in my determination. How long am I going to play in this safe ‘sandbox’ called Virtual Freedom, and when will I finally grow up and actually do what I have been thinking and talking about for two years – to be free, irreversibly, without leaving a backdoor open to revert to ‘normal’ or slip back into having an identity should being free become too scary? It was like straightening from a hunched position of playing in the sandbox, leaving the well-known safe area behind and standing upright. Virtual Freedom has become a nursery and it is becoming too small a playground. And it seemed immensely sensible to move on, just like leaving home when I have grown up. When leaving my parent’s home there was no regret, not much fear but an immense excitement to explore the big wide world. Now the situation seems similar. Just the next sensible thing to do. Just doing it. Stop imagining it, stop desiring it, stop thinking about it, and, for heaven’s sake, stop feeling about it. Just doing it. I don’t mean repressing any upcoming thoughts or feelings, but to stop feeding the ‘engine’, whenever I have a choice. Vineeto, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, Alan, 3.9.1999

It is always the doing of being alive that leads me to the next understanding, the next discovery of what prevents my freedom.

And all the while the pervading doubt, the questions – why am I doing this? what is the point? what am I doing wrong? And underlying the doubt was fear – fear of the unknown. Then the realisation of the enormity of the task I am undertaking – the actual elimination of my ‘self’. Sure, I have written these words, or similar, many times but I suddenly ‘got’ that this was what I was engaged n – there would be no more Alan in any shape or form, other than a collection of memories of the life and experiences of this body known as Alan. But Alan, the person will no longer exist.

It is strange, I remember similar fears and thoughts, but now, looking back, I can hardly relate to the Vineeto that had those fears. Afterward a long process of elimination of the social identity, the ‘self’ appears as nothing but a big idea with knots and ties to everyone and everywhere. Unhooking those ties one by one made the ‘self’ so loose and insignificant that now even its disappearance may be gentle compared to the big fears and stories of death a few months ago. But, nothing can be said ‘until the fat lady sang’.

And when you think back, the Alan from a year ago does not exist anymore, the Alan who started the journey has long ago changed into someone else. And yet, it is enormous, it’s the adventure of a life-time that we are engaged in. Wonderful, delightful, thrilling, scary and occupying every minute of my life. I have never been so alive.

Perhaps it was reading what you have written on this subject, Vineeto, which triggered this experience. You have written much on your experience of sensing imminent death, but up until now I had no sense of it. And along with this sense of ceasing to exist a constant question and uncertainty has been running of the ‘who am I?’, ‘what is real?’, variety mentioned above. Every thought and action raises the question of who is doing it. At times a wave of ‘meaninglessness’ (that is the best I can describe it) washes over me and the world seems to tremble.

I noticed a certain sequence with fear: first I object: ‘here it comes again, I thought I was over with this one, I don’t want it now, I want to sleep, enjoy, etc...’ Then, becoming more aware and seeing that I don’t get rid of fear in this way anyway, I take on the job and start investigating. And with ‘acceptance’ comes the understanding that fear is actually the door and the fuel to freedom, and by welcoming it I discover the thrill that rides me forth to the delight of coming ‘here’.

I had found the ‘who am I’ question quite confusing and even an obstacle to getting on with my ‘demise’ and freedom; it would entangle me in the different ‘who’s’ that were trying to run the show in my head. In confusion, I rather look for my intent, look for the reason why I am searching for freedom and for the goal that I want to reach.

At the same time as experiencing the above, I have been contemplating what Richard wrote on getting out of the ‘zombie state’, which is well worth repeating and has been of immense benefit:

Yes, it is such a wonderful piece of writing, I stick it right back in again. I read it numerous times and it always has its effect.

Richard: ‘To get out of ‘stuckness’ one gets off one’s backside and does whatever one knows best to activate delight. Delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all ... and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now. Then one is no longer intuitively making sense of life ... the delicious wonder of it all drives any such instinctive meaning away. Such luscious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté – the nourishing of which is essential if fascination in it all is to occur – and the charm of life itself easily engages dedication to peace-on-earth. Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is ... and one is the experiencing of what is happening.

But refrain from possessing it and making it your own ... or else ‘twill vanish as softly as it appeared. Richard, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, Alan, 13 Dec 1998

Vineeto, I am interested to hear more of what you call ‘no feeling’ in your mail to No 4. Is this the same as ‘stuckness’ or something different?

With ‘no feeling’ I mean a kind of neutral-dull, non-responsive outlook on life. It may start with having ‘no feeling’ but then I quickly get bored with it not being quite alive and annoyed about wasting my time. It is usually fear in its first stage when I try to push it away. Digging deeper I usually find feeling, emotion, fear and holding on to dear ‘self’.

It is very different to ‘no feelings and emotions’ where there is simply the delight to be alive. Does that make sense to you?

VINEETO: I think it would be a great idea to write down a longer description of those outstanding events on the path to freedom. <...>

ALAN: OK, here is last night’s instalment. I went back to work in the office I was in 5 years ago. My office no longer existed and although many of the people were the same none of them recognised me and I wandered around feeling very lost and scared and lonely. This dream followed on from my further enquiries yesterday into the ‘waiting’ I previously mentioned. Behind the ‘waiting’ I discovered the fear of leaving the herd, which we have also been discussing. So, the broom is out for another rooting about in the dark corners.

VINEETO: I sometimes suspect that my fear of leaving the herd is actually the fear of having left the herd!

Whatever tool or means, it’s good to find the reason underneath ‘not feeling good’.

Leaving the herd has been an ongoing theme for me. It started with leaving the woman’s camp, leaving the Sannyas fold, the work place and closest friends there, leaving the group of seekers, friends and well-known ways of relating. Now, when writing to the Sannyas list, whiffs of fear sweep through, sometimes for minutes, sometimes longer – it becomes so very clear that I am not only leaving one particular religious group, I am leaving the whole of the psychic world behind. By ‘psychic world,’ I mean the ability to ‘feel’ where the other is at, to intuit his or her position, to understand them psychically and psychologically. It is like speaking a different language – the language of emotions vs. the language of common sense and facts. Very often there is no communication possible. But, as I told you before, whenever I go back into the psychic world of feelings and emotions, I only get confused, and then I can’t communicate clearly at all. It is an old rut, a habit that I am determined to eradicate along with its accompanying fear.

Yesterday we again saw Monty Python’s ‘The Search for the Holy Grail’, and one scene particularly struck me for its aptness –

King Arthur and his knights encounter the monster with the thousand teeth in the cave and are pursued by it, back and forth, on the screen. The chase is played out in a simple cartoon. There seems to be no way out for the knights, they surely will be devoured any minute, when suddenly the animator, who was busy painting the monster, dies from a heart attack. The monster duly disappears and the knights find themselves, alive and well, in 20^th century English countryside – here.

I had a good laugh, because that’s what I find myself doing – sometimes there is this ‘monster’ of fear chasing me until I find the cartoonist (‘me’) and the show is over!

VINEETO: For me, a vital drive has been the – instinctually driven – searching for the ultimate achievement...

ALAN: Can you expand on ‘instinctually driven’. Do you mean that having experienced what is possible, there ain’t no other high – where do the ‘instincts’ come in?

VINEETO: With pleasure. I have spent wonderful hours on the balcony the other night, watching the sky and listening to the different sounds of the night while contemplating about all the different instincts that I have encountered and learnt to understand on the path to freedom. So this is what I have come up with:

Fear – We all know it at nauseam; it includes trickery, cunningness, numbness, confusion, escape, denial, excuses, guilt and beliefs in all kinds of good (helpful) and bad (harming) spirits. And, of course, there are panic, terror and good old dread and the escape into enlightenment. But fear is also the doorway to courage, thrill and excitement to reach closer and closer to one’s destiny.

Aggression – Besides physical attack, aggression has many more subtle nuances: blaming, resentment, verbal abuse, nagging, boredom, being the victim, arrogance, clever-clever, competition, self-destruction and depression. I made use of this instinct for becoming free as a bloody-mindedness, persistence, not to ‘let the buggers get me down’, smugness and refusal to run with the crowd.

Nurture – It took me a while to wade through the ‘good’ feelings and emotions down to the basic instinct of nurture instilled to preserve the species. All the romantic movies thrive on nurture to tug at one’s heart strings, both with the heroic man and the loving but helpless woman. The willingness to kill and die for love for country, justice and religion is continuously adding to the 160,000,000 killed in wars this century alone. Further you find this instincts thriving on all kinds of NDA beliefs and action by attempting to ‘save endangered species’, ‘care for Mother Nature’. When leaving the fold of humanity, I found that I am moving away from this instinct of nurture – the collective belief in the ‘good’.

It is useful for freedom as the pure intent to have peace-on-earth not only for me but for humanity as well and to sacrifice my ‘self’ for that goal.

Desire – With desire we collect things and strive for power and improvement for ‘survival’ – ceaselessly and endlessly on the go. In the spiritual world this desire is turned into the search for enlightenment, the ticket to immortality and power in the ‘other-world’.

Now I come to the point that I was making: ‘For me, a vital drive has been the – instinctually driven – searching for the ultimate achievement...’ I experienced it as the instinct of desire that has driven me to search for freedom, to clean myself up, to be the best ‘I’ can be.

ALAN to Peter: I understand completely the ‘deciding to do something was the end of the deciding phase and all its thinking and feeling and the start of the doing of it’ . This is what, I think, I have done over the last couple of days. One cannot be absolutely certain, as this is unknown territory we are exploring, but there is a different ‘flavour’ to the experience. It is as though all the preparatory work has been done – the elimination of the beliefs and feelings – and now one is getting down to the ‘nitty-gritty’ – the actual doing of it.

Peter: It was as though I was in great physical danger – which I was not at all. It was the kind of fear that overwhelms one in a life-threatening situation. It was not induced by ‘me’ thinking or feeling about death – quite the contrary. I remember thinking – ‘This is the fear when it comes and its here now.’ Peter to Alan, 3.6.1999

... My experience today was not, similar to yours, brought about by any thoughts or emotions about dying – no heroism, no imagination, as you say – completely ‘uninvited’ and a, matter-of-fact, sense of ‘ahh!, the moment has come – ‘I’ am about to expire’.

VINEETO: I can easily relate when you and Peter say that ‘the doing of it’ has started. There is a clear determination that has an altogether different quality to the previous phase of imagining death and then finding out what thoughts and emotions happen out of it. Now, there is more a sense of standing in the frontline, so to speak, and the command ‘jump’ can happen any moment. When it became obvious to me that death had stopped being an imagination which I could turn on and off at will, I was flooded with all kinds of physical symptoms of the instinctual fear of death. And it has been and still is fascinating to explore them with as much common sense as I am capable of.

Two weeks ago, when this bare instinct of survival arose for the first time in its full gamut, I was feeling sick and throwing up, with the stomach like a stone, numbing cramps in the heart area and dizzy in the head. When those physical symptoms reappeared the next day, I wondered where I was going wrong. It seemed an odd and arduous way to end ‘me’ – and I started to look for a way to be happy and healthy while continuing the ending of ‘me’. The question for me was, where did ‘I’ add to the drama, where did ‘I’ interfere or exaggerate? It became obvious that the primitive self, this silly, ancient survival mechanism, is pumping chemicals into every organ, and is actually jeopardizing and endangering my physical well-being – quite the opposite of what it was designed to do in the first place.

A week later I had another strong fear-attack, which I observed fascinated and rather unemotionally. My whole upper torso became numb, blood drained out of my head, heart, chest and arms. There wasn’t enough blood in the brain, so my vision had blind stripes, very curious. It took me a minute to figure out what was happening. I went along with it at first, thrilled and fascinated by the prospect of watching myself, my body, die, but a short while later common sense started to set in. If this was the beginning of a physical heart-attack then this was the wrong way, a ‘dead-end’, as Peter just said. Upon this understanding, the symptoms slowly subsided.

Trying to understand those experiences in hindsight, I would say that on both occasions I had a certain pushy-ness, an almost violent attitude to progress at all costs, no matter what will happen, ‘I’ want freedom now and ‘I’ want to make it happen. I can see that this urging only increased the fear, making the obstacle bigger than before. I understood that the ending of ‘me’ has to be 100% voluntary, ‘I’ have to agree boots and all, and doubt or hesitancy cannot just be brushed over. So I took another look around for my possible objections.

1. Fear number one had been: what, if I get accidentally enlightened? For that exploration I went into this grand fuzzy feeling, observed how it expands in the chest, how it swamps the brain with waves of love and bliss until one loses all common sense and is convinced that one is one with it all. When I didn’t fall for the seductive power of this feeling the rush of glory subsided and plunged me into instinctual fear. But that experience to remain ‘unseduced’ was enough to give me the confidence that I won’t be struck by, or stuck in, enlightenment, whatever happens.
2. Fear number two was: will I be able to physically survive? Well, I knew that Richard did, and he had described some quite dramatic experiences in his time before enlightenment. But I also had my own peak-experiences which convinced me that I am very capable of surviving without the ‘support’ of the primitive survival mechanism – on the contrary! As I had described before, when the physical symptoms of the adrenaline rush were developing towards what felt like a heart-attack, my commonsense decided that this was silly, and I could easily decide not to follow that drama any further.

*

VINEETO: The exploration of fear had seemed the direction to go on the way to an actual freedom – up to a certain point. Fear was usually the indicator that there was something essential to discover, to explore or to eliminate. And often I have come out the other side of fear with a realization, a wider view and seen through a certain belief. Fear has been a guide and an ally – as Mark calls it – and hanging in there by neither repressing nor expressing it, the fear has usually lead to more understanding and a freedom from a particular aspect of ‘me’.

At a later stage, by the sheer appliance of common sense, the feelings of fear were exhausted, and the reasons for being fearful became more and more ridiculous. That was when ‘fear, the bare instinct’ came to the surface, giving me the opportunity to explore this raw instinctual passion that I am born with, exactly like every other human being on this planet. Tackling this bare instinct in me meant at the same time tackling the issue of leaving ‘humanity’ – ‘being a traitor’ , as you put it. During this time I was checking out again whether there really is no solution to the Human Condition within the Human Condition. Sometimes I did consider myself going seriously mad and sometimes I was aghast by the amount of destructive madness that I observed in the way human beings treat each other. Eventually I gathered enough evidence to be completely convinced that there was no other solution but to step outside of Humanity altogether, to abandon my ‘humanity’, my instincts, my ‘self’.

Tackling the survival instinct, mainly surfacing as fear, it became blindingly and nauseatingly obvious – both literately and figuratively – that I was generating this instinct by believing in its ‘reality’ and ‘seriousness’. Also, I became aware that in this way I was jeopardizing my physical well-being and happiness. There was ‘me’ experiencing fear and playing out a drama, all the while there was no actual danger to my body, unless ‘I’ produced it. Seeing this, the belief in fear itself is weakened and was left behind – fear is no longer the guide for the ‘right’ direction. Mental anguish sometimes grinds away in the background like my computer during the virus-check, doing what it has to do, but the end of ‘me’ is clearly in sight.

VINEETO: I have come out of a maze of strange days, full of both bouts of fear, doubt and desperation interspersed with long stretches of a wondrous soft and sensuous peace and contentment. The journey towards no-control has been a rocky one, thrilling indeed because it is so untrodden. Having experience the contents of various emotional attacks I have decided, for a change, to look at them from another angle – trying to understand what is happening. What we found was a repetitive circle of fear – frustration – doubt – and again fear, and the only way out of this circle is intent, the pure intent to not stop at second best, whatever happens.

For some reason the wide and wondrous path to freedom seemed to have turned into a thorny thicket, in itself a clear indication that I got off the road. As I have written to you earlier I had decided to leave Virtual Freedom behind and go for the genuine article – extinction. Since no one has completed the direct route to actual Freedom before, this is now truly unchartered sea. Understanding the need to give up the way I had controlled my life I am now like a ship without tiller, seemingly tossed by the moods of the ocean. It appears that fear is the last one of those insidious instincts, the root core of each being human, the instinctual fear of survival. But in its nature it is only real, not actual. This core fear is standing in the way of me experiencing the actual world, it is standing in the road to freedom. A yet un-met challenge!

Because it would be scary to be like me? As ignorant and clumsy and stupid? As inconsistent and confused?

The journey so far has been also scary, yes, but incredible rewarding. I see it as no bad thing to be inconsistent and confused. After all, you are on a discovery journey. Ignorance, stupidity, inconsistency and confusion are part of the Human Condition that is being investigated. A bummer of a birthmark for each of us, that is true. The way to overcome the ignorance and confusion, created by the many beliefs, was to investigate the facts of each situation, and facts are simply facts. Further, it has taken many leaps to overcome pride and fear again and again, but the fascination and thrill of investigating and eliminating my own shackles has given me the necessary fuel.

As ‘full of malice and sorrow’, to use your all’s rather religious terminology?
...after all, it was Peter’s ‘advertisement’ for freedom from malice and sorrow that caught my attention.

Strange that you should judge the expression that caught your attention a religious terminology. If it is something you want to achieve, why put it down as a mere belief? Don’t you want to be free from malice and sorrow?

In fact, I would say that my very own ‘seeing the obstacles to paying attention now’ amounts closely to ‘how am I experiencing this moment alive?’ It’s just that, I suppose, I’m not very good at it, and the obstacles are formidable.

Yes, the obstacles seemed formidable, especially when I started looking. Taking the obstacles one by one without bothering about the one to come has helped me immensely to keep my feet on the ground and my mind off discouragement. Each moment, now, there is only one obstacle, the one that is bothering me in this moment. Like: ‘Why did this particular remark or behaviour upset me?’ ‘Why am I stressed out when I could do it also relaxedly?’ And after every obstacle removed comes the joy of yet more freedom, deeper understanding, greater confidence and more happiness ...

At the moment I have the opportunity to look at pain and the objection to that. As the pain gets more extreme the objections become more pathetic like ‘Oh I’m dying’. Then there is a moment of stillness and no objection at all. I guess you could call it at peace with pain.

Yes, I know that struggle. I had it particular strong with fear. First fear arises, whatever the trigger was. The first reaction is objecting to fear, trying to make it go away. Sometimes it took hours until I realised that this does not work. Now, it goes a lot quicker. Now I take on the challenge, ‘o.k. fear, show me your face, show me your name, what is the issue today!’ Fascinating how at least half of the terrifying emotion disappears by simply neither repressing nor expressing.

But then the investigation starts, I want to get the bugger by the throat, examine the issue so it won’t be back tomorrow with the same emotion again. And this ‘peace’, as you call it, is the perfect inner condition for investigation, for I can coolly, with no objection, investigate into the background of this fear, root around in conditioning, collective fears, or unquestioned conviction.

And then, when everything is pulled into the open, examined in the bright light of my awareness, it cannot uphold its existence – fear turns into thrill, the thrill of impending destiny, my extinction. And I know I am back on the track to freedom. Yippee!

I pondered for a few days over my last post to you and think that I may have been a trifle too definitive in my response re your ‘heart flutters and pains’. In fact, there is so little data about physical occurrences from practicing actualists and in what way they may relate to the practice of the method, that so far one has to consider all reports as idiosyncratic to individual actualists. We might not be able to have enough data from enough actualists to be definitive for a long time to come.

The main point of my post was to not get seduced into believing that the physical events per se are ‘the real thing’, whereas I consider the tangible signs of an ever diminishing ‘self’ to be much more potent evidence of success on the path to freedom. And how much my ‘self’ has been diminished can easily be assessed by answering ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and ‘how am I in relation to other people?

I have had some physical symptoms of fear and even terror mounting in the last few days, which were so strong that I even considered visiting a doctor to check out if my brain was all right. Each night the bed seemed to vibrate as if someone was walking on the floorboards, setting off an intense fear. My heart seemed to go faster and yet my pulse rate stayed the same. It took me a while to sort out that there was no intruder ‘walking on the floor boards’ but that all of this was produced within my own head because whenever I got up and switched on the light or had a walk around the house, my feeling of fear ceased. The moment I went back to bed, however, all the physical symptoms and feelings were back again.

Today I read again your early correspondence with Richard and found some interesting comments. Vis:

Richard: If you look carefully at a panic attack you will see that they go nowhere. Nothing happens other than the panic – which can climb to a crescendo – but if one stays doing whatever is the normal thing to do at this time of the day, nothing untoward will occur. I became very adept at handling panic attacks – however unpleasant – by doing nothing about them whatsoever. They were simply a nuisance and did not mean anything intrinsic at all ... though one can hang them on to whatever one wishes to at the time and get into all of a sweat about nothing at all. They eventually pass if left to their own devices ... it pays not to feed them with any fuel whatsoever. Doubt is the biggest enemy to face. It is helpful to remember that doubt is a feeling and not a fact. Bear in mind the quality of your numerous PCE’s and just know that if this is what one must go through to be free of the Human Condition ... then so be it. It is all stupid, I know, but so is war and murder and rape and torture and domestic violence and sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicide. This is the situation we humans find ourselves in and it is not necessarily a breeze to get out of it. If it were, no doubt many people would have done it before, eh? Richard, General Correspondence, No 4

This piece of writing pleasantly confirmed what I had suspected – fear and panic, however significant it may seem at the time, leads nowhere and has no intrinsic value to my process of becoming free. Equipped with this reassurance I am confident that, whenever these now so familiar panic attacks reoccur, I can learn to not only observe them with interest but also eventually nip them in the bud by not fuelling them or believing they have any significance.

What I got out of these experiences is the encouragement that feelings of doubt did not enter the picture. There was terror and fascination but there was never a thought that I wanted to stop, or turn around, or that I didn’t have enough guts to proceed. Well, I think for that realization the experiences were worth it, but enough is enough. I am ready to have a good night’s sleep again, undisturbed by any fancy panic attacks.

VINEETO: Given that the topic of our discussion has been your theory that ‘sorrow comes from fear’ and the fact that ‘at root fear is the most basic of all the instinctual passions’ I might add something that is essential to understand fear. Fear in human beings is the direct result of ‘me’ wanting to survive – ‘I’, the passionate alien entity inside this flesh and blood body, will do anything in order to stay in existence. Thus the only way fear can be diminished is to diminish the ‘self’ – the weaker the ‘self’ becomes, the less fear there is. There is simply no other way to permanently decrease and eventually eliminate fear because ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’.

The magic ingredient for diminishing the ‘self’ is altruism. Obviously, when my intent is focussed on a goal greater than ‘me’, ‘self’-interest and ‘self’-centredness then play a minor role in the game – that’s what actualists mean by ‘pure intent’. Contrary to the traditional idea of battling and transcending fear via ‘self’-enhancement, the fact is that only an altruistic pursuit can reliably reduce and eventually eradicate fear because only altruism can break the instinctual ‘self’-centredness that is the very root of fear.

The traditional honourable goals have been to battle malice and sorrow in other people through political, religious or therapeutical pursuits – thus everyone meddles in everyone else’s life and is busy trying to solve everyone else’s problems. For an actualist the altruistic pursuit translates into actively eradicating malice and sorrow from his or her life in order not to burden anyone with his or her sorrow and not to hurt anyone with his or her malice. Fear then disappears on its own accord because the more faint the ‘self’ becomes, as the ‘self’-serving emotions are progressively investigated and eliminated, the less there is for ‘me’ to control, deny or defend.

And as the shackles of malice and sorrow and its accompanying fear disappear, a whole magical and sensuous actual universe becomes readily apparent.

I wouldn’t say the odds are heavily stacked against me. In the current scenario I would say the odds are at least 50/50 or better but I have no way of knowing for sure. The point is that there is substantial risk. It looks like confronting fear itself is the way to overcome fear and not to avoid situations that cause fear.

It is, of course, entirely your choice and your business how you are assessing the odds – I was simply reporting the general figures of stock market gambling which are evaluated at 75% or more losers compared to 25% or less winners.

As for ‘confronting fear’ – people have tried for centuries to tackle their fear of physical danger by confronting it and many of the early pioneers discovered remote and dangerous areas of the planet only because they confronted their fears and left home despite their fears. Nowadays, in the absence of sufficient real physical dangers and explorations, highly dangerous adventure sports are promoted for people to satisfy their need of boosting their adrenalin and their ego – activities such as car and motorbike racing, Everest climbing for tourists, wild water rafting, cave diving, meeting man-eating sharks in plain dive suits, parachute and bungee jumping, etc., etc. There are also those who seek the same rush from other less physically dangerous activities such as playing video games, gambling or watching other people performing dangerous or violent activities.

What I am saying is that the idea of confronting one’s fears is nothing new, it is part and parcel of the human condition and has not resulted in any change towards more benevolence and happiness in human behaviour. People who confront their fear are in no way less malicious or less sorrowful despite the sometimes-enormous effort and time they invest trying to get rid of their fear. In your specific case you seem to want to tackle fear with more risk-taking, i.e. with greater desire, whereas in my experience it is the desire to ‘hit a homerun’, as you say further down, that generates the fear of loss in the first place.

The way I tackled fear was firstly to be sensible in practical situations thereby reducing the risk of actual danger or loss, which served to stop fuelling the fires of passion. Then I set about enquiring into the reasons that lay behind my various fears. My aim in actualism has never been to be free from fear only, but to become free from my malicious and sorrowful feelings and behaviour – and this enterprise initially generated a lot of fear. As I questioned my dearly held beliefs, my spiritual loyalty, my friendships, my role as a worker, as a woman, as a part of a social group – in short my entire social conditioning – the fear sometimes seemed completely overwhelming.

This fear I overcame by simply doing what I had decided to do despite my fears. This is not confronting the feeling of fear itself but simply setting oneself a goal in life and getting on with doing it. This way I did something useful with the fear by turning the feeling of fear into the thrill of discovery. I also did a similar thing with desire – I used it as the desire to succeed in my newfound life’s aim. Nurture was similarly utilized in wanting to be part of the ending to human suffering, and aggression was channelled into a quiet stubbornness and determination to succeed.

To only seek to become fearless is in itself a selfish aim and only serves to enhance and embellish the ‘self’, the lost, lonely and cunning entity inside this body. Those who pursue fearlessness without also investigating their aggression, nurture and desire often succeed in attaining a self-enhancing and self-aggrandizing altered state of consciousness, known in the East as Satori, or if the state becomes permanent, spiritual enlightenment.

Basically, my understanding is that when one gets through the superficial understanding of emotions then one sees that fear is underlying all of these things. This could be wrong and this is why I am putting this out here to see if I am wrong. It looks to me like when one has uncovered these instincts that fear is what is all pervading and not sorrow. Please feel free to take all this with a grain of salt as I am just trying to look at my mind in operation.

My experience is that when ‘one gets through the superficial understanding of emotions’ then I started instigating an in-depth understanding of my emotions in order to eventually to be rid of them. I certainly had to question and examine the full range of my emotions, the desirable ones as well as the undesirable ones. So in order to ascertain the facts about fear and sorrow you will need to abandon any of your own preconceived notions about emotions and instinctual passions and experientially investigate the nature and the cause of each emotion as it arises within you.

Fear can only be tackled by removing the causes of why I am fearful and by questioning what it is that I want to desperately attain or avoid. If I am fearful of being sad then I find out how I can eliminate that specific sadness. If I am fearful of being lonely then I investigate the need to have someone to belong to. If I am afraid of death then I question why I want to be immortal despite the fact that every thing that is born must also die.

In practicing actualism, it has always been my pure intent that urged me to move beyond my initial fears and get on with the business of actively and practically becoming free from malice and sorrow.

That brings up the question of: Can I do it without being greedy? I am a risk taker in a lot of ways so maybe I am addicted to the fear. The root problem still seems to be fear itself and not superficial greed or other desires, etc.

I do find it interesting that you call any other passion but fear ‘superficial’ as part of your theory that fear is the predominant passion. How can you scientifically examine your emotions, feelings and passions if you already dismiss everything other than fear as being superficial? Is it not time to question everything, including this unproven presumption along with your emotional investment in it?

You can easily find out for yourself that gambling without being greedy or fearful is possible when you replace ‘money’ with ‘bubblegum’ – gambling for bubblegum would certainly be without the emotional input of greed and there would be no fear to lose either – but then gambling may lose all attraction.

The question for me was what part of ‘me’ would have to disappear or die in order not to feel the greed and desire for something I desperately wanted. In my case one of the greatest desires I had to inquire into was the longing for the unconditional love of my spiritual teacher. In order for this desire to disappear, Vineeto the loyal disciple had to disappear. On another occasion it was the desire for the unconditional love of a lover, which caused me a lot of pining, anxiety and fear. In order to get rid of the anxiety that accompanied my desire I had to inquire into the romantic dream that lay behind my longing for love. The outcome of this inquiry was that the dreamer Vineeto disappeared together with ‘her’ anxieties about not achieving the dream. At the time this felt like an amputation of a vital and integral part of the woman I felt myself to be, but it sure did the trick. Both my desire and my fear around this subject disappeared miraculously. The romantic dreamer had irreplaceably disappeared.

Given that you say ‘maybe I am addicted to the fear’ then that would also mean that the No 16 you are today would have to disappear in order for ‘his’ fear to cease.

*

Fear can only be tackled by removing the causes of why I am fearful and by questioning what it is that I want to desperately attain or avoid. If I am fearful of being sad then I find out how I can eliminate that specific sadness. If I am fearful of being lonely then I investigate the need to have someone to belong to. If I am afraid of death then I question why I want to be immortal despite the fact that every thing that is born must also die.

In practicing actualism, it has always been my pure intent that urged me to move beyond my initial fears and get on with the business of actively and practically becoming free from malice and sorrow.

There is something here that I am not sure about. You said that ‘fear can only be tackled by removing the causes of why I am fearful.’ This doesn’t make sense to me because there are certain causes of fear that one can’t remove such as death so that is why I am thinking that fear itself needs to be removed instead of the causes of fear. I don’t have much fear of death itself as I have already experienced that but there is still fear. In other words, I still have it wired up that the way to remove fear is to face it instead of removing the causes of it or avoiding the causes of it.

You can, of course, hold any theory or belief you like. But as long as it is not proven as a fact by demonstration that it works to free you from fear it will remain a mere proposition. In the process of questioning my beliefs I aimed to replace my beliefs with facts by finding out what is sensately experience-able, what is sensible and what repeatedly works. Everything else was doomed to the dust bin.

As for the ‘causes of fear that one can’t remove’ – in a ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience it is readily apparent that there is no fear in the actual world because fear, as well as all the other instinctual passions, disappear along with ‘me’, the emotional entity. It is not the physical body that is fearful of death, as you might have experienced in your own near-death experience you described to Gary. The cause for the fear of death is not death but ‘me’. It is ‘me’, the entity inside this body that maintains and feeds the fear of survival because the feelings of fear, anger, greed and nurture serve to keep this entity in existence. ‘I’ have no other substance than the feelings and emotions and imaginations ‘I’ generate. ‘I’ am a fake. ‘I’ am a make-believe. ‘I’ am not actual. That’s why ‘I’ make such a fuss in the first place.

By applying the method of actualism I have investigated every facet of this entity in me, every blink of an emotion, every whiff of a feeling, every superficial emotion and deep passion until I now know all ‘my’ tricks and loopholes, all ‘my’ games and sentiments, all ‘my’ workings and mechanisms – the whole programming of the social identity and the underlying instinctual passions. When I become aware and agree to fully and experientially understand a particular aspect of this programming then this aspect, this part of ‘me’, inevitably disappears.

Once you pick out and experientially examine one of your emotions closely, for instance the emotional involvement in stock market gambling – without applying your preconceived theory that only serves to stifle further investigation – then you can identify and eliminate one little part of your identity and experience the diminishing of fear for yourself.

My experience is that when you have nothing left to lose, because you have explored all the dead alleys of wrong solutions, then you really have the incentive and the courage to break with the past and change in a practical way. Then the change is irrevocable. And eventually the fear of death gives way to thrill as you realize that the death of ‘me’ is already happening.

You say – How do you see it? It looks like at the bottom of it all is fear and that is ‘me’. If I see that fear is ‘who I am’ then what else is there to do but understand it experientially?

To get rid of fear completely it is not enough to just ‘see that fear is ‘who I am’’ and then become fearless as in rising above fear. There is no such thing as a shortcut of a blinding flash of light as the spiritual myths and fables have us believe. There is no fairy wand or Grace of Existence or a helping hand of God that interferes with human destiny and freedom. Becoming free from the instinctual passions is all in your own hands and it is a process of chipping away at one’s self-centredness and fearfulness and passionate survival automatism, bit by bit, experience by experience, in an ongoing attentiveness of how am I experiencing this moment of being alive.

Again, what I say is something you might possibly take at face value and then begin to discover for yourself as you diligently nibble away at your social conditioning such that you can begin to observe your instinctual passions in action in yourself.

It is a fascinating journey once one takes the plunge.

When you say that apparently there is nothing other to be done than observe one’s instinctual passions you have apparently not read all of my post. Vis:

As long as I was ruled by the moral and ethical straightjacket of my social-spiritual conditioning, I would sweep any upcoming emotions and passions under the carpet or cover them up with loving feelings. Fear was usually the only acceptable feeling to experience within the strict moral code of social and spiritual rules as aggression is taught as being unacceptable and usually punished if overtly expressed. Eliminating my social identity allowed the various animal passions to come to the surface and enables me to experience and examine them. Thus I experientially come to know, time and again, that it is ‘me’, the very core of my ‘being’, that keeps these passions alive.

You might deem it unnecessary to examine all your beliefs and social-spiritual values but it is impossible to clearly observe one’s instinctual passions with an unbiased and unrestricted awareness unless one has first done the work of becoming aware of and eliminating one’s beliefs and one’s moral and ethical values.

Yesterday I met an old friend who asked me what I do with fear. He said often he wakes up in the morning and feels fearful for no apparent reason. He could well relate to when I told him that in my spiritual days I had an underlying fearfulness of not doing the ‘right’ thing and of being punished or struck by the wrath of Existence in some way or other for my ‘wrong doing’. He said there was a kind of mantra going round in his head searching for the next ‘right’ thing to do.

We talked about morals and ethics as being ingrained into human beings since earliest childhood. When I left home I was busy replacing my parent’s set of morals and ethics with another, then another and finally with the Sannyas Eastern spiritual set of morals and ethics. As my friend was a Sannyasin, he duly protested and said that Rajneesh did not teach any rules of right and wrong. I suggested that when one has an emotional investment in keeping the image of one’s master pure, one is likely not to notice that the ‘Truth’ is but another set of moral and ethical values. Even the ultimate ‘Good’ and the ultimate ‘Right’ are nothing but human-made values fuelled by ancient superstition and blind devotion to a Higher Being somewhere in the universe. Rajneeshism has its own set of morals, rights and wrongs, goods and bads, rules and social codes, as does Krishnamurtiism, Christianity, Buddhism, etc.

I said that had I questioned not only my own ideas as to what is right and wrong but also the very source of all moral and ethical codes – the belief in a God or Higher Power who enforces good and bad, rights and wrongs by a system of divine reward and punishment. Being good and right brings the reward of good karma, good fortune, respectability and a permanent berth in Parinirvana or Heaven and being bad and wrong brings punishment of bad karma, bad luck and condemnation to suffer endless rebirths or to plunge into the abyss of Hell. When I began to replace these fear-ridden spiritual beliefs with facts most of my fears began to permanently disappear.

Real-world fears are mostly based on religious or spiritual fairytales but it is also necessary to question all of the beliefs that would have us believe that life on earth is a fearful and miserable existence. One needs to question psittacisms such as ‘one needs to fight for one’s rights’, ‘it’s a tough world’, ‘life’s a bitch’, any of the multitudinous doomsday scenarios that are currently in fashion, the insidiousness of rumour and innuendo, the fear-propagating role of protest movements and the continual beat-up of the media in promulgating fear, angst and mass hysteria. To believe all that one is fed by one’s fellow human beings is to give substance and fuel to one’s fears. To make the effort to find out for oneself the facts of each situation is to cut away at the roots of these socially instilled fears ... and this is the very work that an actualist initially has to do in order to become free of the human condition.

The other kind of fear, however, is the raw animal survival fear that only comes to the surface when one’s beliefs and one’s moral and ethical codes have been substantially eliminated, and this kind of fear is indeed something one can only be aware of, and recognize, as the genetically-encoded survival program in action. This very attentiveness is the ending of fear’s ferocious grip. Or, as Richard puts it –

Richard: Attentiveness is seeing how any feeling makes ‘me’ tick – and how ‘I’ react to it – with the perspicacity of seeing how it affects others as well. In attentiveness, there is an unbiased observing of the constant showing-up of the ‘reality’ within and is examining the feelings arising one after the other ... and such attentiveness is the ending of its grip. Please note that last point: in attentiveness, there is an observance of the ‘reality’ within, and such attention is the end of its embrace ... finish. Here lies apperception. Richard’s Articles, Attentiveness, Sensuousness, Apperceptiveness

To live with fear is to know a bone chilling, grinding, pervasive dread that is present from moment to moment.

I know well the fear that you are talking about, the dread and the insanity of it.

I remember watching a film on WW II last year, when I became completely overwhelmed by the feeling of the collective sorrow, guilt, depression and dread that made up the ‘dark part’ of the ‘human soul’. I seemed to be standing at the edge of an immense abyss of hell, which emanated all of the nauseating terror and dread of humanity, the horror that humans do to humans, the pain, the dread of millions of people, stretching endlessly into a grey dead infinity with no hope and no way out, ever. The gravity of it was unbearable.

My eyes were searching for something physical to anchor on. I stood at the window, repeating to myself, ‘this is a fence, this is grass, this is a flower.’ The bright redness of the bougainvillea outside in the garden penetrated a little into this powerful whirlpool of dread that seemed to be threatening to swallow me for eternity.

Then above the abyss of dread there appeared an escape route, seductively blinking a space of light, promising bliss, love and glory as the solution to this overwhelming hopelessness and experience of ‘evil’. I could have snapped into an altered state of consciousness then and there. But I resisted, fully aware that I did not want to replace one kind of insanity with overwhelming feelings by another insanity with the opposite set of overwhelming feelings.

So I fixed my eyes on the red flowers, until slowly, slowly the dread lost some of its density and power and turned into the familiar feeling of fear. But it was far from being over! I started to look for more physicality, for sensate and tangible actuality, longing for the taste of coffee in my mouth, listening to sounds in my ears and feeling the wind on my skin. Nothing but sensuousness would get me out of this vortex of instinctual madness. I activated all my willpower to manoeuvre myself back into the physical world of the senses, where there is neither dread nor enlightenment.

This experience fuelled my intent even more to permanently step out of both the real world of evil feelings and the spiritual world of divine feelings into the actual world of purity and peace. It is possible – and it is evidenced by the pure consciousness experience where I am this flesh and blood body only without ‘self’ and therefore without emotional turmoil or memory. Exploring Death and Altered States of Consciousness

Yes, an actual intimacy is possible with everyone and this very fact is the proof you are experiencing intimacy and not a secure, secluded arrangement between two people.

In the process of investigating fear I noticed two different types of fear, just as you have described them – fears related to various issues of my social identity and plain instinctual fear without any cause or reason. The fears related to my social identity were diminished and incrementally disappeared by dismantling the various facets of my social identity, i.e. nationality, race, gender, belonging to a family, a peer-group and friends as well as my professional and my spiritual image. Some fears needed a practical down-to-earth approach as in checking that my physical and financial survival was sensibly taken care of, but mostly the fears were psychological and psychic fears.

Most of my early correspondence with Alan was about investigating such fears.

When the social identity is significantly demolished, the instinctual fear will rear its ugly head. But as one becomes acquainted with such storms of plain fear for no other reason than being an instinctually driven animal, it also becomes more and more obvious that the only way to get rid of instinctual fear is to eliminate the ‘self’, the very seat of this instinctual fear. Sometimes the sheer bewilderment of doing something completely so ‘unnatural’ – instigating one’s own psychological and psychic death – turns into the excitement of being in an utterly new and unknown enterprise, an enterprise that addresses all the problems of human life, at their very core. It is simply the best game to play in town.