No.

In my experience I can only learn something from an intense feeling *after* it subsided. Then I am able to assess what triggered it, what caused it, what pattern may lie behind it, what hidden agenda might be there. When in the grip of a feeling such as fear I am not able to think and observe clearly but after the feeling subsides I am able to reflect on the situation and see what scared me (if it was something in particular) or if the fear was maybe one of those free-floating anxiety attacks that feeling beings notoriously have.

If I find that I was afraid of something in particular then I can explore what it is I am afraid of and why and what needs doing or understanding in order to prevent this particular fear from occurring again. Here is one example where I examined and resolved a particular fear – in this case I actually had to do something about it –

‘I am reminded of a time when I had investigated Actual Freedom to the point that I was getting some tangible results. At the time I worked in a company owned and run by Sannyasins and was reasonably happy in my job as secretary and bookkeeper. However, the more I started questioning my former spiritual beliefs and understood that it was impossible to marry the search for enlightenment with the discoveries of Actual Freedom, the more I became fearful that soon I would be exposed as a traitor and a heretic. My fear became so overpowering that one morning while driving to work I decided to face this particular fear once and for all – and, to my own surprise, arriving at work I gave notice. At the time I did not know any other solution to get rid of my fear than to precipitate what I feared most – losing my job. Since then I have worked occasionally in this company for holiday replacement and whenever they were short of staff, but never again full time. My sudden notice had created a certain shock for the others, but after this had worn off I had no problem relating to them as I had made my non-spiritual position quite clear and they had agreed to employ me again anyway. For me it had been important to openly take a stand in order to be able to disentangle myself from the grip that the spiritual world had on me.’ Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List Correspondence, Gary, 18.8.2000

Sometimes fear is brought on by certain desires, hopes or expectations and then I need to proceed by investigating those desires, hopes and expectations. Sometimes fear arises because with actualism (the process of becoming free from the human condition) I am doing something that goes against the very grain of human nature and the familiarity of having done things before and this fear is part and parcel of the process of becoming free – recognized as what it is it eventually subsides and then I can get on with doing what I want to do – become free from the patterns, the habits and the beliefs that tie me down.

Sometimes, as I mentioned above, fear arises as a free-floating anxiety, apparently for no reason at all, and I found it the most unsatisfying of the fears because there is nothing to discover about it except that it is the nature of being a feeling being – and being a ‘being’ means to be fearful – fear is the very stuff that maintains and sustains one’s being. Over time I learnt not to feed the fear when it arises, not to get sucked into its grip, not to be hypnotized by it, but rather become aware that fear is happening and then disregard it as an uninteresting object or a boring, as in repetitive, piece of drama and get on with enjoying the far more enjoyable things in life such as the sensuous awareness of the air on my skin, the colours perceived by my eyes, the gentle sounds in my surrounding and the pleasure of being here as I am. Eventually such fear goes away similar to a silly dog when you don’t pay attention to its silly performances.

In any case, if there was any information in the feeling of fear you were distracted from then it will be revealed the next time round when you reflect on the situation after the fear subsides. Nothing can go wrong when you keep paying attention to how you are experiencing this moment of being alive.

Seriously, I do read a bit on the site, and continue to dip into my books, on a daily basis, it is amazing how much is missed at the first, or second, reading.

Personally, I had to read Richard’s journal paragraph by paragraph and often contemplate about each paragraph because the experience of not being an ‘I’ was simply not something I was at all familiar with … until I had several PCEs and based on that could remember some previous PCEs as well.

I am going to have to do that because as I go deeper old fears and insecurities surface. Scary sometimes. Did you ever have dark dreams when you first started investigating AF?

I don’t remember any dreams but I very likely had them. I didn’t bother to interpret any of my dreams but I took notice of the fact that something had not been sorted out in my waking hours and that therefore my brain was still busy with unresolved, maybe even unnoticed, feelings during my sleep. The more I allowed myself to become aware of the feelings while they were happening, enabling me to lessen their grip over me, the less dreams interfered with my sleep.

As for old fears and insecurities, there were plenty of them. Some of them were so old they dated back centuries and more – the archaic fear of being burnt as a witch, for instance, for daring to question the existence of god, heaven and afterlife and the archaic fear of expelled from society or of being executed for daring to lift the taboos of sexuality and begin to enjoy it for its own sake.

Such fears can appear really dark and dense but when all is said and done, they are only feelings, not actuality – as long as you keep your hands in your pocket. A good sense of humour is as useful as an enterprising spirit ready to look for the thrilling aspect of fear, which Richard jokingly says, is found ‘down at the bottom left-hand side’. Besides, if becoming free from one’s genetically encoded instinctual passions was all plain sailing then everybody would already be free … and not behaving, to quote your own apt description, like ‘an agitated crowd standing at the entrance to a ‘wide and wondrous path’ discussing with each other as to how to proceed’, if searching for and noticing the possibility at all.

You had asked how I am doing. I am very well.

I am returning to the list after a lengthy hiatus during which time I mainly lurked, reading the posts occasionally, and sometimes in depth. I had rather lost my interest in writing to the list, but had not lost my interest in Actualism.

I can relate to this, as I am now in a phase where I seem to have lost interest in writing to the list unless there is some sensible conversation to be had about practical experiences. But no matter if I write or not, I never cease to be vitally interested in this moment of being alive and in what prevents me from being actually free. There is a commitment that happened deep down inside a few months after I came across actualism, after I experienced what being free from ‘me’ is like. It is a commitment that is irreversible, unlike the new-year’s resolutions that are abandoned days after they were made. I think I have told the story before but it signifies for me the day I realized that I was hooked for life.

At one time I was particularly troubled by doubts and fears so much so that after a couple of miserable days I decided to talk to Richard about it. I said to him that the way I feel now I don’t think I am able to go through with becoming free, I am too much of a coward, I don’t have the strength and saying it I felt as despondent and scared as one can be. Richard listened attentively as he always does and then said, okay, if that is so, what are you going to do with the rest of your life, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and so on? I didn’t have to think long, it was pretty obvious that although I was in the grip of my feelings at the time that they wouldn’t last forever and then I would not be able to resist pursuing the freedom I knew to be the genuine article. There simply was, and still is, nothing else I want to do with my life.

The other day someone asked if Peter and Vineeto ever take a holiday from actualism to which I could only say ‘holiday to where’. I am pleased to be here, I enjoy being here, I am vitally interested in being alive, I am aware of what I do, think, feel and sensately experience – why on earth should I want to take leave from that? It took me much effort to get this awareness going to the point were it happens by itself and now it is impossible to switch it off. The alternative could only be to deliberately do something to dull down, to get lost in imagination, to wallow in feelings, to be half-conscious or drugged and to pretend not to be here. The capacity to be aware of being aware is exactly what makes the human species unique amongst sentient beings and to work towards ridding this awareness of selfism – in any form – is a great adventure.

Instead, I have continued to apply myself to demolition work. I use that short-hand phrase to signify using the method to dismantle the social identity and expose the underlying instinctual passions. Then I have been able to get at the buggers. However, I have had long periods during which nothing much seemed to be happening. Getting a ‘taste of the instincts’ has sometimes seemed like a prolonged forced feeding at the pig trough of the Human Condition. But then, nobody is forcing me, are they? I realize in retrospect what has been lacking has been sustained, unremitting attentiveness on my part and sometimes simply the pure intent to proceed further.

There is something else that helps me and that is to remember to be friends with myself and rather than being down on myself for being irritated or fearful to instead give myself a pat on the back for noticing that I was. This way it’s much easier to pull myself up by my bootstraps and to get back to being happy again in no time. It’s a persistent habit to break, this telling myself off for not being perfectly happy for 24hrs a day, but I do notice it much quicker these days than I used to. Then it is not so much a matter of weening myself off the ‘trough of the Human Condition’, as you call it, but more a slipping out of ‘my’ skin and sensately – and sensuously – enjoying being here.

I also had to realize that after I’ve been through certain intense feelings and passions there is nothing further to be learned from staying in the feeling. I used to be suspicious of Richard’s expression of ‘nipping the feeling in the bud’, ostensibly for the reason that it could be confused with repressing the feeling. But now I realized that I was also avoiding the technique itself because ‘I’ wanted to hang onto being ‘the explorer’ of deep passions whenever they occurred and I can see now that there is neither meaning nor value in ceaselessly examining an instinctual passion over and over and over again. In other words I have come to understand that no valuable insight is to be gained from deeply and repeatedly feeling fear – the most prominent of the passions for me – and this understanding has greatly helped to simply notice and label the feeling, in this case my fear of oblivion, and then get on with enjoying this moment of being alive, which is after all the point of actualism.

I can tell you this: that I have during this period of time always used the Actualism method and have not found it necessary nor desirable to take side-detours or short cuts. I have never found it necessary to find add-ons to supplement my use of the Actualism question. Unremitting attentiveness and cranking up my pure intent have been the keys to pulling through what have seemed like unbearable onslaughts of deep dread and fear.

It’s so simple, isn’t it and yet almost everyone feels the urge to concoct their personal addenda in order to avoid its ‘self’-diminishing effects.

But along with complacency and a relative backing-off from the deeper sources of resistance at times, there has been for a long time steady progress too. I think of a graphic presentation of in which there are peaks and valleys, and regressive movement, but on the average a steady overall increase in happiness and harmlessness.

Yep, and with the increase of being happy and considerate towards others comes a waning of ‘me’ because ‘I’ need an arena of problems and passions in order to thrive.

RESPONDENT: As to any further breakthroughs in Actualism from my part, well, I am presently helping people to learn English, in classes of 8 to 37 students, something ‘I’ could and would have never done before. There is quite a big difference if you contrast what I just wrote with:

I found out that when my ego started to wilt away so did my pride/humility; and thus my fear of being humiliated in public is now virtually gone. That is what I meant some time ago when I claimed to have been subject to what No 54 called ‘Actualist Calenture’ … I inadvertently took up actualism as another shield to protect ‘me’ (the lonely identity) against ‘them’ (everyone/thing but me). Oh what a fool I have been! Silly me…

VINEETO: I enjoyed your post on ‘Actualist Calenture’ (even though the term calenture is somewhat misappropriated here) – it really drove the point home that the identity is not only lost and lonely but is also very cunning. But then, it is such good fun to discover my own tricks – far more fun than any detective novel can ever be.

When I think back I also realize how fearful I had been before I began to practice actualism – a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was not harmless in my relating to other people, which inevitably increased my fear that they would hurt me in some way. When I realized that there was no point in waiting for everyone else to become harmless I began to become astutely aware of how often I had wished to hurt others, be it by words, gestures, or actions. And the outcome of being unremittingly aware of my own antagonism is that I now can be considerate of others while not being fearful of what I imagine people think and feel about me.

RESPONDENT: That way, the fear that is the reliance on external authorities, becomes redundant.

VINEETO: I am curious about your expression ‘the fear that is the reliance on external authorities’. I discovered that it is vital to make a distinction between my adverse and/or loyal feelings towards authorities and a reliance on the expertise of my fellow human beings, be it my computer repair man, software experts, my accountant, the doctors I visit, my optometrist, the car mechanic … or Richard who is an expert in how become free from the human condition. Nowadays I have no fears associated with relying on the expertise of others because I have investigated, understood and dissolved my emotional issues around authority.

RESPONDENT: This site has taught me (whether that was the intention or not) that underneath all the confusion and problems, we are essentially safe and that there is really nothing to be scared of apart from our own interpretations.

VINEETO: The main thing that makes life on this lush and magical planet unsafe is the genetically encoded instinctual programming that relentlessly drives human beings to feel aggrieved and to feel sad and the resultant ‘confusion and problems’ are certainly not the result of ‘interpretations’ – be they mine or anybody else’s.

What was in my own hands, however, was the possibility to become virtually free of my own grievances and my own grieving. For instance when I succeeded in abandoning my spiritual beliefs I subsequently lost most of my fears regarding moral and ethical rewards and punishment, and the more I diminished my social and instinctual identity (not my ‘interpretations’ but the beliefs and feelings that made up my identity), the more I am now able to act and behave sensibly and intelligibly and as such safely.

In other words – only ‘I’ feel fear, fear is not an actuality.

RESPONDENT: I wish you all the best

VINEETO: Thank you. The best that ever happened to me was that I came across Richard and decided to learn how to become free from the human condition. Now life is almost always a breeze and a delight.

Most people I met and talked to in my life were more interested in getting rid of fear which is, next to guilt, the other major side-effect of being a ‘being’. However, I found the pursuit of fearlessness an extremely ‘self’-ish and ‘self’-centred affair, given that feeling fearless only benefits and enhances one’s ‘self’ and is not concerned with bringing an end to human malice and sorrow.

In contrast, the pursuit of innocence – the determination to eliminate the root cause of guilt – is intrinsically altruistic in that I recognize that being a ‘being’ inevitably contributes to the misery and mayhem of human beings. And it is this altruistic, ‘self’-less, component of one’s intent that will ensure the success of becoming free from ‘self’.

If you are saying that the spiritual path is a subtle trap in that the absence of the emotion of fear is defined or replaced by the emotion of fearlessness, I entirely agree with you. The great attraction of the revered spiritual altered state of consciousness is to become fearless. In this deluded state of aggrandizement, one not only rises above the normal human values and rules but also ‘conquers’ the fear of death by imagining oneself to be immortal and at one with the divine force.

Peter Weir once made a movie called ‘Fearless’ which I thought illustrated the delusion of fearlessness very well. The hero has a near-death experience when the plane he is travelling in crashes. As a result, he becomes fearless and is driven to help other people, in particular survivors of the crash. Yet he is also driven to continuously challenge and prove his own fearlessness by taking higher and higher risks.

Fearlessness is not the absence of fear but is a feeling of victory over fear – one conquers fear by becoming a more powerful ‘self’ – according to one’s religion one either becomes God or have the Almighty on their side against fear and mortality. In contrast, in a PCE there is simply no fear because ‘I’, the sole source of the feeling of fear, is absent.

When I read your post I was reminded of the occasional bouts of fear I had in my early days as an when my old world started to fall apart. I had investigated Actual Freedom for several months to the point that I was getting some tangible results. At the time I was working in a company owned and run by Rajneesh disciples and was relatively happy in my job as secretary and bookkeeper. However, as I started to investigate my former spiritual beliefs and began to understand that it was absolutely impossible to marry my previous search for enlightenment with the discovery of Actual Freedom, I also became fearful that my colleagues at work and my spiritual friends would expose me as being a traitor and a heretic.

One morning while driving the 25 km or so to work my fear became so overpowering that I began to not only understand what the source of this fear was, but I also understood what practical steps I had to take in order to get back to being happy and harmless again. What became apparent when I thought my situation through was that I was indeed a traitor to a cause, in this case the belief in the teachings of Mohan Rajneesh and the sooner I admitted to the fact the quicker I could stop being afraid of being exposed. By the time I reached the office I knew what to do – I decided that I had to do something about this particular fear once and for all. The most practical solution that came to mind was to precipitate what I feared most – losing my comfortable job within ‘the fold’. Therefore I decided to give notice that I would quit at their earliest convenience.

Although I was fearful about what others could do to me, I was also acutely aware that I had brought on this situation of my own volition – it was my choice to leave the spiritual fold solely because I was not content with what was on offer in the search for enlightenment. None of the sweet dreams of spiritual freedom would ever do for me any more because I knew, after 17 years of hands-on search, that spiritualism never delivers what it perpetually promises. In other words, I made a deliberate and distinctive choice to abandon the past and devote my life to becoming happy and harmless. In this case, the thrill of daring to take appropriate action rendered my previous feeling of fear redundant.

RESPONDENT: When you have something that you can’t seem to conclude because you know your gene programming will make you feel bad if you don’t do it, and it makes you feel ok/good if you do do it, what do you ask yourself to progress beyond this? Let’s take something we can all relate to – wearing clothes in public.

VINEETO: In most societies, there is an etiquette and quite often laws regarding wearing clothes in public that are considered decent in this particular society and if you don’t follow the laws, social rules and etiquette of the country you are living in you will cause trouble for yourself – you will be punished, ostracized or inconvenienced in some way or other. Therefore, wearing clothes in public is simply a matter of common sense.

RESPONDENT: Yes, it is common sense. However, if I did find myself without clothes, would I feel OK about it? How would I go about getting back to feeling good while wearing nothing in public?

VINEETO: I am missing a bit of information here – why would you find yourself without clothes in public in the first place? I vaguely remember having had some nightmares in my teenage years of suddenly being naked in the middle of town but it never happened in real life. Are you talking about a dream you had, a fantasy, a desire or an actual situation you found yourself in at some time?

RESPONDENT: When I do come across something this difficult, after investigating it, is it a matter of ploughing through the bad feelings as you would with a fear that has no basis for its existence, such as a phobia of not being able to touch the bottom of a pool?

VINEETO: Well, I can tell you what I do about dreams for a start. If fear is happening during sleep I make every effort to wake up. I found that it was important to recognize and remember that I couldn’t solve a scary situation while asleep, I had to slip out of it by waking up. This was at first not an easy task and before going to sleep I needed to gather determination and intent that I would make every effort of waking up as soon as possible when the nightmare began. In this way I set an inner alarm clock, so to speak, that created a stir when those particular dreams happened.

At times when I woke up from a bad dream I found it useful to then walk around in the house and have a glass of water in order to break the spell of the dream such that it wouldn’t continue from where I left off, and if the dream returned I woke myself up again.

After I began practicing actualism I was no longer interested in analysing my dreams because most of the time they do not make sense at all. Even if they present themselves in a somewhat coherent story, the situations are so removed from real life that there is nothing to discover as far as my identity is concerned. I simply examined those feelings that prevented me from feeling happy and being benign that I had while fully awake and the issues that I resolved in daytime then stopped bothering me at night.

Your apparently hypothetical fear of ‘wearing nothing in public’ reminds me of the fears I had at the beginning of the process of questioning my social identity because with every bit of ‘me’ that I examined and abandoned ‘I’ felt more and more naked and exposed. In other words, in the process of dismantling ‘who’ I thought and felt I was I had less and less social masks, ready-made appearances and stereotype facades to present to others and to hide behind, I was more and more directly and impromptu experiencing whatever situation I found myself in. While I welcomed this increasing liberation from the straightjacket of my various ‘personas’ I had previously been I was nevertheless sometimes gripped with the fear that people would recognize and expose me for the traitor I had become.

However, whenever I weigh the gains of becoming incrementally free from the burden of societal beliefs, morals and ethics and the grip of my instinctual passions against the occasional bouts of fear my choice is always clear – it is so good to become more and more ‘naked’ such that I am able to sensuously and sensately experience the delight and wonder of being alive.

The feelings you describe remind me of Peter’s description of ‘past the half-way point’ or ‘the point of no return’. At this point one becomes increasingly aware that so much change has irrevocably and irreparably happened that going back has become virtually impossible. This realization, of course, rings all the alarm bells for ‘me’ and ‘I’ throw up every possible worry and fear ‘I’ can think of.

What I discovered about these fears connected to the feeling of ‘no return’ was that the fact of ‘no return’ was already established – my identity had become progressively diminished during the process of actualism and I had irrevocably changed to the point where I couldn’t imagine ever going back to either a normal or a spiritual life-style. In other words, only by becoming aware of having gone too far did hell break loose in my feeling department.

When I became aware of the feeling of ‘no return’ I eventually discovered that I was also relieved. After all, I had begun the journey of actualism with the intent to go all the way and the recognition that something had irrevocably changed increased my confidence that I would not, and could not, chicken out half way through. I always had the intent that actualism would be a journey of no return and now it had become more factual – i.e. my fears were in fact a sign of success.

I remember one time when I seriously doubted that I could ever become free. I had been miserable and fearful for a couple of days and could not work out how to proceed. I asked Richard for advice. I said things such as ‘I think I am too much of a coward, I don’t have enough guts, I cannot possibly ever succeed in becoming free, I am too much ruled by fear’. He listened and then said something like ‘what else are you going to do for the rest of your life?’ The question made me aware that nothing else would ever be good enough because not only had I tasted the purity of the actual world but I was also enjoying the thrill and satisfaction of doing something that is worth committing one’s life to. I knew then that I could never turn back again and occasional bouts of fear, although sometimes extremely uncomfortable, are an inevitable part of the journey to freedom.

*

I too was hung up with the abandonment theme for many years and, following the fashion, made an early childhood experience responsible for all that later felt wrong in life, until I simply grew tired of continuously complaining that nobody loved me. At some point I had worn the abandonment theme to death and its ending was marked by a short PCE wherein I suddenly realized that I am already here and if nobody liked me, so what. But as I had yet to become aware of and thereby understand the mechanism of the social-instinctual programming in me, this experience remained but a pleasant yet exceptional memory and I fell back into creating bonds – and problems – with people in order not to feel so lost, lonely and to give my life meaning and purpose.

The incident of the short PCE I was talking about happened years before I came across actualism. Socializing with others was then a strong need lest I would feel lost, lonely and very frightened. But I can relate very well to your fear of ‘mental collapse with complete madness’. Some fifteen years ago, a close friend of mine went through a 3-months period of schizoid madness which scared the hell out of me, but I think, apart from everyone’s individual experiences in that field, the fear of madness is part and parcel of dismantling one’s social identity. After all, you are dismantling all the rules and regulations that have been put in place in order to curb the madness of the instinctual animal passions.

I remember a period when I read all the personal accounts of Richard regarding his period of mental anguish after becoming free and asked a lot of probing questions in order to satisfy myself that leaving my ‘self’ behind was indeed safe in regards to my mental health. I have collected all the relevant quotes under ‘Sanity, Insanity and the Third Alternative’.

As a result of this probing I took another look at what is generally regarded as sane and insane and it was sometimes quite shocking to realize that there is only a quantitative difference between the two – ‘insane’ people are often those who are less able to control their instinctual passions or who have developed particularly peculiar and socially-unacceptable ways of dealing with them. I began to establish my own definition of what I regard as salubrious and sensible for my life, i.e. what I consider as mental health, and that is nothing short of being completely free of the madness of the instinctual survival passions.

*

As for your comment about ‘instincts seem to have come to the fore again’ – I am having an interesting encounter with fear these days. About two week ago I awoke about 3 a.m. on a Saturday night and saw a man standing outside out bedroom on the balcony. There had been a noisy party next door so I wore earplugs while sleeping and I hadn’t heard him coming. His appearance sent me into shock. I got up, hid behind the curtain and, while pulling out my earplugs, I started screaming at him to make him go away. I reacted completely instinctually and without any forethought due to the shock and the fact that I had just awoken from deep sleep. He seemed drunk and after the encounter eventually walked away mumbling something about ‘looking for Julie’.

Afterwards I was shocked about my thoughtless instinctual aggressive reaction, defending my territory so to speak, whereas, with benefit of hindsight, the intruder was quite harmless. The incident had opened the door to my core instinctual fear and since then I sometimes lay awake in bed with intense fear, listening to the sounds in the garden, cats or birds rustling through the bushes, apparent footstep on the gravel, wind in the palm leaves. The other night I remembered what I have discovered before – that one automatically searches for an outer cause for one’s fears because ‘the alternative ... is too unthinkable’. As a result I stopped listening to the noises outside and realized that the fear of strangers in the night pointed to a fear that has no external cause – the instinctual passions of fear itself.

These experiences are all par for the course of the thrilling adventure to leave one’s ‘self’ behind and I am convinced that I have to experientially know the debilitating nature of all my instinctual passions in order to muster the courage to irrevocably step out of the human condition.

VINEETO: If you examine the situation you find yourself in then you might notice that it was greed that brought you into this situation in the first place and it is greed that keeps you in a situation that ‘is much more dangerous and could have much more dire consequences’. Vis –

[Respondent]: ‘obviously I don’t want to do the most sensible thing because of greed which is tied to the fear (‘me’). If I see that it is greed which keeps me in this situation and is causing the fear then it would be prudent to stop.’

If you want to ‘make progress toward eliminating the ‘me’ that is causing the fear’ you will have to take into account that greed is as much an instinctual passion that constitutes ‘me’ as fear is.

RESPONDENT: I’m not sure about greed being ‘as much an instinctual passion that constitutes ‘me’ as fear is.’ I haven’t heard about greed being an instinctual passion before. It seems to me that greed arises out of fear and also that greed causes fear.

VINEETO: The instinctual passions are one single operating program whose basic function is to ensure the survival of the species and this single program has various salient aspects to it – the main ones being fear, aggression, nurture and desire (aka greed). This instinctual programming can only be understood – and eliminated – as a whole, it cannot be eliminated in part. Any attempt to single out one passion while ignoring the rest can only lead to selective denial and dissociation – you will find many descriptions of, and teachings for, such practice in esoteric bookshops all over the world. (...)

*

VINEETO: The way I made ‘progress toward eliminating the ‘me’ that is causing the fear’ was that I stopped trying to suppress, sublimate or eliminate my unwanted feelings, and hoping for a world as-I-wanted-it-to-be as I had in my spiritual years, and set my goal in life at being happy and harmless in the world-as-it-is, with people as-they-are. I made the effort to become aware of my beliefs and my good and bad feelings when and as they were happening and I emphasized my felicitous feelings to the point that I could actually begin to enjoy be here for the first time in my life. With resentment gone from my life I found that I stopped blaming others for my moods and stopped using them as an excuse for my malice, which meant that I also found myself becoming more benign.

Becoming aware of what I feel and believe each moment again gives me the option of making a choice each moment again – away from automatically opting for actions determined by my instinctual programming (fear, aggression, nurture and desire) towards a sensible and intelligent decision as to how to avoid dangerous or stressful situations, and how to be at ease and enjoy life so as to be more happy and to be more harmonious with other people.

RESPONDENT: Yes, this makes sense but as I pointed out above sometimes when we are involved with other people we get into situations that are out of our control and sometimes unforeseen things happen.

VINEETO: The challenge for an actualist is to be unconditionally happy and harmless and that includes all involvements with other people and all ‘unforeseen things’ that happen.

*

RESPONDENT: You said above ‘And once I stopped doing what caused me to feel sorrowful, then the fear of this sorrow re-occurring also disappeared.’ I am not sure about this because stopping what causes fear in a given situation is not going to eliminate the fear from reoccurring. It will stop the current fear in the current situation but it won’t end fear (‘me’). This sounds more like an avoidance of fear (‘me’).

VINEETO: We’ve been at this point before. If I may remind you of the discussion in question –

VINEETO: When you say you must be doing something wrong because you are ‘stuck’, it might also be that you did something ‘right’ and then hit a major issue which might generate fear.

RESPONDENT: You have got this one right, Vineeto. There is an undercurrent of fear/sadness still there. I am going against it head on two ways: first, going to the daily life situations in which I would have dreaded to go into, 3-5 years ago, and apprehensive of going for them about 1-2 years ago. Second, keeping my eyes open to look for causes which brought this fear in the first place.

This one is a difficult one as, to best of knowledge, I cleaned myself of fears arising from the incidents from the age of 3 years-now. But I remember I had this undercurrent of fear/sadness at the age of ~4 years too. So, the causes for this fear/sadness must have their origins before the age of 3 years. The best I can think of is that my mother might have beaten the crap out of me before the age of 3, but I cannot have any memory of that. I am not sure how to go about it but I am working on it.

VINEETO: In my spiritual years I believed that I was ‘cleaning myself of fears’ by doing lots of Dynamic Meditation and lots of therapy but I gradually noticed that fear had only shifted to other issues, but it never disappeared or even diminished. I would not be afraid of one particular situation, but nevertheless apprehensive of another, fearful of change, of being alone, of being raped, of not getting what I desired or of not being appreciated by others. Yet, knowing no other alternative at the time, I kept going.

So, from my experience, I can say that digging into the past will never wipe out the causes of fear. Only when I met Richard was I able to understand the reason for it. It is a common belief that human beings are born innocent, ‘tabula rasa’, a clean slate, without any malice and sorrow, and that all evil – fear, anger, sadness – is only created by bad treatment in our childhood years – or maybe by ‘repressed memories’ of bad past lives. The very premise of that belief is wrong.

Human beings are born with certain distinguishing instincts, the main ones being fear, aggression, nurture and desire. These instincts are blind Nature’s rather clumsy software package designed to give one a start in life and to ensure the survival of the species. So despite our good intentions and moral codes, we are relentlessly driven to act instinctually in each and every situation in our lives and this is the base cause of all our angst, suffering and confusion. We, as human beings, also have a highly developed sense of self, overlaid with a social identity, consisting of the beliefs that had been instilled in us from the time when we were first rewarded for ‘good’, or punished for ‘bad’, behaviour. This identity includes the morals, values and ethics that ensure that we are a fit member of the particular society into which we are born. We then take on these beliefs and develop them as our ‘own’ identity. This innate sense of self, reinforced by our social identity, is the very ‘guardian at the gate’, sabotaging any well-meaning, but inevitably futile, attempts at fundamentally and radically changing the Human Condition of malice and sorrow within us.

When I put away my pride and dared to question this emotional, therapy-enhanced, yet utterly useless and harmful identity, I had to acknowledge the reason why the concept of therapy had never worked. One never gets to permanently experience the ‘innocence’ of a baby after digging into one’s memories of birth- or childhood-traumas – because the baby has never been innocent and without fear in the first place! Geneticists are now finding neurological evidence of those innate instincts, yet nobody except Richard has devised a method to get rid of those insidious buggers.

RESPONDENT: There is an undercurrent of fear/sadness still there. I am going against it head on two ways: first, going to the daily life situations in which I would have dreaded to go into, 3-5 years ago, and apprehensive of going for them about 1-2 years ago. Second, keeping my eyes open to look for causes which brought this fear in the first place.

VINEETO: This is how I started to tackle fear after I had understood that fear is the very substance of ‘me’, the ‘self’:

Each time I encountered fear, I would do the reality-check, that is, check out the actual dangers of the situation. ‘What is the worst that can happen’? was always a good question. And in discovering that most fears are only in my head – or guts – and had nothing to do with actual danger, I could go ahead and face them. The other part of the approach was to find out the cause of that fear. Since my favourite pet-excuse, childhood traumas, had proven to be a myth, I started to look for other reasons, closer to here and now. What I mainly found were beliefs that formed my identity – beliefs, when threatened in certain situations, caused the same reaction in me as if I was physically threatened. The ‘self’ doesn’t distinguish between an imaginary danger to the identity and an actual danger to the body. As such, a threat to one’s beliefs is as passionately felt as a threat to one’s life.

Then the real discovery started. By investigating and dismantling one belief after another, this identity became thinner and thinner, fewer situations would threaten the existence of the ‘self’. I had dismantled so many beliefs myself that my fear of people, who could question my beliefs, diminished considerably. And whenever such a fear arose, there was something for me to discover, there was another cause for fear to be removed. After the first successes started to show, I more and more enjoyed the game – finally I had a method that worked, and I could do it all by myself. Neither Guru nor therapist needed.