To realise that we ‘have a mind rather than it having us’, as you so aptly say, I also realised that we need to get rid of ‘us’, not get rid of the ‘mind’. The moment ‘mind’ is cleaned from ‘me’, the beliefs, feelings, emotions and instinctual passions, mind can function perfectly and sensibly, not interfered by fear, aggression, nurture or desire.

That, in short, is the difference between spirituality and actual freedom. Eradicating ‘I’ and ‘me’ from body and brain lets one function smoothly, sensately and sensibly as a flesh-and-blood-body only.

... you might actually understand that we’re probably saying the same thing. Is not your eradicating, dropping? or seeing the conditioned mind to go past it?, or as I said... put it in its right place?

Why do you think we got banned from the Sannyas list? You seem to be the only one who still insists that you and I are talking about the same thing. And why do you want to think that it should be the same thing anyway? Would it be less disconcerting what discoveries Peter and I are reporting? Is it to confirm that you are already on the right path, just a few ‘semantic differences’?

When I say, I eradicate an emotion I mean that I go to the root of that particular emotion. What I find, if I dig deep enough, is fear as part of the survival instinct, the ‘self’. To question that ‘self’, including its big brother, the ‘higher Self’, is to eventually chip away at the emotion-producing agent of this psychological and psychic entity inside of me. Once that particular emotion is investigated, traced to its root and then eradicated, it has no place at all, no right place and no wrong place – it does not exist – its passionate but imaginary nature has been exposed.

When you say you are ‘dropping’ an emotion, that simply means letting the idea go in favour of ‘going past it’ to the bigger idea of ‘becoming one’, of ‘evolving consciousness’, of enlightenment where you then become one with everything. This identity of the big ‘Self’ has never been questioned before. Dropping is not the same thing as eradicating at all. It is 180 degrees in the opposite direction to spirituality.

Actual freedom is about being here in this physical universe only, as this physical body only, perceiving as the physical senses only. There is neither god, nor soul, nor compassion, nor witnessing, nor feeling, nor intuition in actual freedom. There is only this abundant, magical, perfect, infinite and pure universe, experienced through the physical senses of this flesh-and-blood-body.

Can you see the difference?

I am a little confused ... I came something you wrote about emotions, this morning, which seems to contradict what you wrote earlier. Putting it into context it is like this...

You do know, do you, that actualism is not about not having emotions, let alone outlawing them? Vineeto, General Correspondence, No 11, 27.12.2006

But then this from: http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/vineeto/selected-correspondence/corr-180.htm...

Feelings are indeed where the Human Condition lives on, unchanged, in all its wretched misery and sorrow.

Yes, it’s 180 degrees in the opposite direction to where we humans have searched for solutions. In the course of my exploration into what my ‘self’ and the Human Condition consist of I was amazed how many times I found ‘180 degrees opposite’ the appropriate expression.

Just a few such opposites as an example: emotions – no emotions... Vineeto, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, Gary, 19.8.2000

?

Ok, to put all of this in context –

• ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’ – instinctual passions and the resultant emotions and feelings are the very substance of ‘me’. In other words, instinctual passions in humans form themselves into an identity, a ‘self’ and only when the ‘self’ disappears, emotions and passions also disappear. You can experience this in a pure consciousness experience where the ‘self’ is temporarily absent with the consequence that all emotions and passions are also absent.

• It is not possible to simply reject emotions, to outlaw them, as some fiction writers suggest. History shows that to try and be a stripped-down ‘self’ has resulted in a split between one’s cognitive and one’s affective faculties (with the later pushed into the unconscious) and the continuous effort of suppressing and repressing one’s existent emotions is both useless in the long run and harmful to both oneself and others. In extreme cases such suppression can result in alexithymia and/or a psychopathic condition.

• Instead of rejecting, suppressing and repressing one’s emotions the actualism method invites you to become aware of your emotions (including the presently unconscious ones) as and when they are happening, particularly when they are interfering with you being happy and harmless. Bringing your feelings and their embedded beliefs and patterns into the light of awareness then enables you to make a conscious choice.

• Richard: ‘What the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom is on about is a virtual freedom wherein the ‘good’ feelings – the affectionate and desirable emotions and passions (those that are loving and trusting) are minimised along with the ‘bad’ feelings – the hostile and invidious emotions and passions (those that are hateful and fearful) – so that one is free to feel well, feel happy and feel perfect for 99% of the time. If one deactivates the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and activates the felicitous feelings (happiness, delight, joie de vivre, bonhomie and so on) then with this freed-up affective energy, in conjunction with sensuousness (delectation, enjoyment, appreciation, relish, zest, gusto and so on), the ensuing sense of amazement, marvel and wonder can result in apperceptiveness (unmediated perception).’ Richard, Articles, A Précis of Actual Freedom

• The consequence of choosing the felicitous feelings is that, whilst both good and bad feelings nourish and maintain the ‘self’ (you might have noticed in yourself and others how for instance suffering and/or virtue puff up the ‘self’), the felicitous feelings leave ‘me’ unemployed. When everything is all right and a delight to behold, there is nothing for ‘me’ to do or fuss about and ‘I’ incrementally wither away to the point where I am able to live virtually free from malice and sorrow.

• The final step comes when ‘I’ expire and with ‘me’ all instinctual passions, emotions and feelings disappear forever.

Reading of the extensive and systematic involvement of Zen masters and monks in war-crimes has shocked me – and I guess it has shocked you as well. Here there is another description of what humans do to humans, always calling the other one the inferior race, an animal, inhuman, heathens, fiends and dangerous enemies to justify the ferocity and cruelty that is displayed in wars, collective acts of instinctual aggression. 160 million people were killed in wars this century alone, and those 160 million include the 350,000 Chinese of Nanking, the 6 million Jews of WW II, the 800,000 German and 1.1 million Russian soldiers in Stalingrad, the 800,000 Tutus in Rwanda, the 100,000 Muslims and Serbs in Bosnia, the hundreds of thousands dead on both sides of the 40 years of Cold War and all the others that died for country, religion and ideology.

As for Rwanda, have you heard their music? My friends made a Rwanda music CD recorded there. It so beautifully and deeply touches my soul, which is of course the root cause of sorrow and malice of Human kind. hehehe. If any one are interested in the CD. Please mail to me.

Music plays an important part in the manipulation of emotions. It has been used to control and manage people, to raise their passion, to bind them to their culture, to soothe them or hypnotize them. With music you can play people’s feelings like a piano and many talented leaders have used music very skilfully for their power-grazed purposes.

RESPONDENT: Why don’t you try selling it to some other mind dwellers. (Christians could be a challenge). But why don’t you ‘FUCK OFF’ and die somewhere else! Or just shift to a psychology based list where I’m sure you can waffle on for a life time! No 23, the Osho lover

VINEETO: At least you seem to know that I am talking about the death of the ‘self’, and you state that you are not interested. One of your ‘mind spaces’ has come back to life and is kicking again. This is exactly my point, that in just watching and ‘being the witness’ those primary emotions and instinctual passions don’t disappear, they are at the most transcended. You go from one corner of the ‘self’ into another corner of the ‘self’, now called ‘That’. You never leave the ‘self’ behind. You never step out of the Human Condition of sorrow and malice, nurture and desire. Watching and meditation is like rearranging the furniture on the Titanic, fiddling with minor issues while you would better leave the ship of the ‘self’ and of ‘being’ altogether. And, as you can see, those emotions can come back any time.

RESPONDENT: I know this won’t effect you as you have removed yourself from your heart and other unimportant things!

VINEETO: The other way round again: I have removed feelings and emotions from me, not removed myself from my ‘heart’. The Heart or Soul is only a passionate imagined entity, felt as real, but not actual.

‘Go into your Heart’ means focus on the good feelings and negate and sublimate the bad feelings. Once you experience the purity and perfection of being without any self whatsoever in a pure consciousness experience, you strive to get rid of the very act of believing and feeling itself, you aim to get rid of the see-saw of feelings, both good and bad. And it works. By focussing on the felicitous feelings instead of feeling ‘good’ and ‘bad’, one can investigate and eventually eliminate one’s beliefs and feelings and in the end extinguish the very source where emotions arise – our animal instincts.

Only then can you experience the purity and magic of this actual world.

Yes, I think I likened it, in a post some time ago, to a fisherman casting hooks. The ‘cleaner’ one becomes, not only are less and less ‘hooks’ thrown, but others barbs simply ‘slip off’ unnoticed, as you confirm in your next remark.

We had an interesting conversation with a friend last night. She asked me: ‘What about affections? Don’t you think, it would be of help to feel other’s feelings, while not having them yourself, and then you can really understand what they are going through?’

I found that a very interesting question and while I answered her I realised that this was exactly what I was trying to do in the last months when I was writing. Once in while I would slip into the emotional world of the sannyasins, trying hard and sincerely to understand where they were coming from, what emotions were behind their words, what fears behind their snide remarks. The outcome was always confusion, I ended up emotional and fearful myself and was unable to answer clearly. I first had to work myself out of the self-constructed mess before responding.

Understanding that this had been my investigation in the last few months, I could see that this option had failed each time. It is simply not possible to empathically understand someone without ending up in one’s own mess of feelings. And the other way round also proves the point: the moment I am ‘here’ and not in my feelings and emotions, I don’t ‘feel’ the other, I understand his or her words, but not the hidden agenda.

It still astonishes me how people can so easily turn their backs on Actual Freedom, as epitomized in Peter’s mail to No. 3 – most are simply not interested in discovering how magnificent life can be. I was discussing this with my wife last night and it got back to the familiar sticking point – giving up emotions and becoming a ‘zombie’, as she puts it. Is this an objection you have come across? So far, as what starts one on the exploration, I think you are correct that some disillusionment et. is necessary, but then all who live within the Human Condition suffer disappointment, longing and desperation. Speaking personally, it was my memory of a PCE which started me on the search for ‘answers’ – I wanted to again experience that purity and perfection. It was a decision which took years to make. How did you get started on the spiritual path?

‘Giving up emotions and becoming a zombie’ – this is almost a standard expression, as if a zombie has no emotions. When I compare my life now with two years ago, then I had been living a zombie-life all my life, with a few exceptions. I had been dull and predictable, a biological mechanism programmed with different roles, beliefs emotions and instinctual passions, just like everyone else around me. Being programmed with emotions is like being out at sea – any moment the weather can change into a raging storm, rain or sunshine, for no apparent reason. ‘Zombie’ means being full of emotions, but keeping them so utterly repressed and distorted that one is 90% shut down.

The comparison of ‘no emotion’ and ‘zombie’ also reminds me of the latest science fiction films, where the robots and computers are very human-like in that they have been programmed with rudimentary emotions. Kryton in ‘Red Dwarf’ is a cute example, Hal in ‘2010’ another. The scientist working with the supercomputer Hal in ‘2010’ (a follow-up film of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001) said to his team: ‘Whether carbon- or silicon-based life forms, both species need to be treated with the same respect.’ What a hoot. In the same anthropo-centric manner that we would like computers to have human-like qualities we are searching in animals for ‘human-like’ behaviour – while completely overlooking the fact that we are observing our own animal-heritage, our core instincts and rudimentary self.

While now, having eliminated the fog of emotions which were cluttering every perception, restricting and distorting intelligence and apperception, life is easy, comfortable, peaceful, happy and imminently delightful. I am more alive than ever, the senses sharper and enjoying whatever is happening, the brain functioning perfectly to sort the sensible from the silly – and sometimes I am silly just for the fun of it.

So, the expression ‘zombie’ for ‘no emotion’ is a misnomer. For the ‘self’, our lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning entity, it is a reality that ‘I’ am my emotions and without them ‘I’ will only be a robot. For me, maybe particularly with a conditioning and instinctual programming as a woman, emotions were all and everything I thought and felt myself to be. To question emotions is to question one’s very ‘self’. It needs lots of courage, pure intent and, if possible, the remembrance of a peak experience, to dare to look for something beyond this safe and familiar world of up-and-down emotions.

Meeting Richard was another help for me, for he was not at all the man one could call a ‘zombie’ – yet he is without emotions. Here is a man as normal and ordinary as Mr. Smith but at the same time radiantly alive, friendly, peaceful, gay, humorous, carefree, considerate and perfect as only legendary heroes would have been described – and this day after day, whenever I met him, without any flaw. Here I could compare the facts with my fears, the day to day actuality with my dark and confused fantasies.

But the main reason for taking up the third alternative was because I dared to acknowledge that ‘being normal’ had no attraction for me nor had all the spiritual practice borne any solutions for a happy life. The highly prized emotions had only caused trouble, fight, jealousy, disappointment, hope and desperation in my life.

– giving up emotions and becoming a zombie, as she puts it. Is this an objection you have come across?

I have come across that objection many, many times. Women hold emotions, particularly their own, in high esteem; it is the familiar territory of the power she yields and the most important part of a female identity besides being a mother. Men may have developed other identities, many manage to avoid feeling their emotions like all get out, which, of course, does not help to become free of them.

To me, it was obvious from day one, that if I wanted to live in peace and harmony with Peter, then an exploration and a questioning of all my emotions was inevitable. In the end, this exploration proved to be the dissolution of the male and female camp and resulted in a delicious actual and ongoing intimacy between us, something which, apart from a few glimpses, I had never experienced before.

The other aspect of emotions lies in a broader context, and I am encountering this lately as it is becoming more obvious. Feelings, emotions and instinctual passions are the only connection between ‘me’ and ‘Humanity’. Empathy, sorrow and compassion make us feel connected to the greater ‘community’ of humankind, thus perpetuating sorrow without any solution. Severing the ties to this suffering ‘Humanity’ and standing on my own two feet without even the option of ‘feeling’ the other if I wanted to, is a bold step, and has been a process that took me a few months.

The turning point was the experience that, one evening before sex, I had a flash of wanting to kill Peter. I perceived him as being a deadly threat to ‘my’ identity, and my instinctual reaction resulted in the wish to kill him. The surfacing of this raw instinct in me, directed against my best and most intimate playmate, was a severe shock – it became blindingly obvious and self-evident that ‘I’ am rotten to the very core. To guarantee peace-on-earth, ‘I’ will have to become extinct.

The reason I write is to ultimately to find out about myself. If I get upset about something, annoyed, repulsed or angry, it means there is something in me that is not squeaky clean. And my game is called ‘actual freedom’ and that means being free of anything that prevents me from experiencing the actual world as-it-is. And as long as there is any feeling or emotion triggered in me, I will never experience how this actual world really is! Therapists have found a part of this understanding – they call it ‘projection’. Projection means, I see something in someone else that I have in myself. The say, ‘forget about the other.’ Why does it annoy me? Oh, because I reject it in me. Aha, I am dishonest, that’s why I am annoyed that the other is maybe dishonest (or a Hitler, or authority-fixed, or proselytizing, etc.)? So then, what I do is search in me for the reason for feeling dishonest. In what terms am I dishonest with myself? Am I believing something that I have already experienced to be otherwise? So then, why do I want to hold on to this belief, which I have already experienced as false? Fear? Yes, of course, fear! All my fear is fear of death. Fear that denies the fact of death. One day ‘I’ will have to die. Full stop.

See, Irene, this is how I deal with what you call might ‘intuition’. I turn it on myself. ‘I’ am the only person I am interested in because it is this ‘I’ that stands in the way of my happiness. It is ‘I’ who has to be eliminated. Full stop.

And that fear of death creates all the tricks, throwing up issues, ‘truths’ and beliefs, emotions and disharmony. It can be traced down to that basic fear. Always!

So I have decided to be free of that fear. I have decided for the unnatural solution, 180 degrees away from the instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. All of them are based on the fear of death. And those instincts are the fundamental corner stone, the very reason for all of humanity’s values, be they ethical, moralistic, religious or spiritual values. In their very nature those instincts are destructive. The instincts only ‘care’ for the survival of the species, the strongest, the most aggressive, the crudest.

IRENE: Vineeto,

I have found it incredibly helpful to have been so ‘woken up’ by you, so thank you for having been who you are, Vineeto. It leaves us now free to pursue our own respective ways. I wish you all the self-awareness you can muster ... Irene

VINEETO: I am glad to hear that what I was – whatever that was – has been the trigger for your ‘waking up to more vividness’ if I understand you rightly. I can relate to your description when I remember the great liberating experiences when a held-back or not noticed emotion in me finally broke through and was acknowledged.

And then there is this issue of alexithymia that I would like to talk about and explore with you. You said,

IRENE: ... Richard’s ‘proof of being free’ [is] namely his inability to recognise and express any feelings at all. As you know this is a well-known neurological or psychiatric disorder, called alexithymia.

VINEETO: Nevertheless, it seems to me that what psychiatrists call alexithymia is an incapability of someone to cope with certain or all his/her emotions and therefore he/she has a neurological reaction in the nervous system that shuts up the feeling faculty altogether. I would put that into the category of extreme repression, beyond the reach of consciousness. While Richard says about his condition:

Richard: ‘Literally, I have no feelings – emotions and passions – whatsoever ... and have not had for five years. (This is why I have been diagnosed as ‘alexithymic’ by two accredited psychiatrists ... which is not strictly correct for alexithymia means not able to feel feelings. Other people can see such a person being angry, for example, but he/she will not be aware of this. It is not a case of him/her denying their feelings – or not being in touch with their feelings – but is a morbid condition. It is most common in lobotimised patients.) This is all the result of finding the source of ‘myself’ ... I discovered that ‘I’ was born out of the instincts that blind nature endows all sentient beings with at birth. This rudimentary self is the root cause of all the malice and sorrow that besets humankind, and to eliminate malice and sorrow ‘I’ had to eliminate the fear and aggression and nurture and desire that this rudimentary self is made up of ... the instincts.’ Richard, List B, No 12, 16.3.1998

Actual freedom for me means that I investigate and in this way eliminate the cause and the source of emotions – be they personal, self-centred or universal – and after removing the cause they simply don’t occur any more. For instance insult: it was one of the first things I learned when meeting you and Richard, that one can choose to become un-insult-able. This possibility appealed very much to me from the very beginning. What an awful hindrance for communications it has always been for me when I would get insulted by what someone said, and then I could not continue talking to that person. Then I was the one who was suffering because of feeling insulted, resentful and lonely on top of it.

Irene, there is no hidden agenda in my story. I simply want to explain why I began to consider it a good idea to get rid of emotional reactions. Feeling insulted is only one example of all the disturbing emotions that not only made a peaceful life with men and women difficult and in the long run impossible. First, of course, I only considered to get rid of the bad emotions, later I saw that they all hang together in one piece. ‘Getting rid of’ for me means that whenever I came across a hiccup – in the beginning it was mostly triggered by Peter – I would try and find out the hidden agenda of this particular emotion. Maybe this is all old chocolate for you, but this ‘getting rid of’ has so often been misunderstood as repression. I am definitely not a proposer of repressing any emotions, I have done that long enough and achieved no peace whatsoever by it. All the feelings pop up one day anyway.

In sannyas I have experimented with expressing emotions. Lots of therapy-groups, seven times I was a helper in the ‘Anti-Fischer-Hoffman-Process’, an intense de-conditioning for childhood issues. I went into the group again and again, fascinated by the tantamount and variety of emotion that each participant was capable of producing. Therapy works for a while, it produces great highs, you certainly know similar highs from groups you have done. But observing over a longer period of time I could see that one trigger for emotions was thrown out but soon, on that seemingly empty ground, there grew some other emotions, maybe they got dressed up with a different story because the root cause had not been removed.

Especially after the first AFH-group this was very obvious for me. After a process of ten days expressing first hate and fear, then love and forgivingness, I was left rather confusingly empty of applicable behaviour how to relate. But that changed quickly within a week or two. I had not questioned or removed the beliefs of who I thought and felt I was. I had only changed some fears related to my parents. But, for instance, all other authority-issues had remained. It never occurred to me then that I could question the very act of believing itself!

I know what you mean when you talk about the vividness of a strong emotion, high voltage and an intense feeling of being more alive than ever. But I also remember experiencing the painful clamp of being possessed when in raging anger, the gnawing tortured need in jealousy, and desperation and hopelessness in deep grief. I prefer to be fully alive without this kind of intensity. How is it for you?

Yes, I have considered this. It is always a hurdle getting out of struggling and the agitated state of objection to an emotion. So when that state of struggling ends it does feel like a reward of sorts. My solution is a permanent ‘no objection at all’. That at the present is not a one off and requires continual effort of inquiry.

When an emotion is happening, for instance anger, it is harmful in two ways. Firstly I am not happy because I am angry and second I am angry at someone else and may cause harm to that person, be it by snide remarks, withdrawal or any other action. Of course I don’t want to be angry. If the aim is to be happy and harmless then I no longer tolerate anger in my life. One does everything possible to eliminate it and not merely watches its rising and falling in the mind or heart.

But the only way to successfully get rid of anger is to examine the root cause of me getting angry in that particular situation, find the expectation, the frustration, the ‘self’ in operation. Once I found the root cause and ‘got it’ – as Alan says – it is immensely rewarding, a great relief and a joy to have dismantled yet another obstacle to being free.

And with every success there was more eagerness to find the next hurdle. The obsession for freedom takes a life of its own, wearing down the original objections.

Your ‘permanent solution’ of ‘no objection at all’ sounds a pretty dry experience to me. Freedom from the churning emotions, feelings, beliefs and instincts, which is freedom from ‘me’, results in a delicious, sensuous continuous enjoyment moment after moment, fresh each time, rich and magnificent, crisp and perfect. An ongoing delight to be alive.

Yes, the ‘I got it’ though does not always mean the emotion is finished within its entirety, but that in that particular circumstance it is finished with. The fact that one has released that it must go is what assures its eventual end.

The realization for me is not that ‘it must go’. Actual freedom has been an understanding, evidenced by various peak experiences, that ‘I’, the psychological and psychic entity within this body, inhibit the experience of the already existent perfection and purity of the physical universe. So ‘I’ decide to self-immolate, ‘self’-sacrifice for the perfection to become apparent in this life, on this planet. The growing comprehensive realization of what this ‘I’ consists of, all my emotions, feelings, beliefs and instincts has been an ongoing discovery and understanding. Elimination happens when I fully comprehend the passionate imaginative nature of an emotion as opposed to the delight of direct intimacy. The same applies when I understand the collective imagination of a belief as opposed to the actuality of facts. Then there is only the obvious to do, then there is no choice at all.

Richard: When I see clearly ... then I can proceed ... for then there is action. Seeing the fact – which is seeing without choice – then there is action ... and this action is not of ‘my’ doing. Richard, List B, No. 23a, 12.10.1998

Now coming to the method. I tried asking ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’. Most of the time I get the answer ‘happy’, or when I stress upon ‘this moment’, I get blank with no answer, because in this moment there is no feeling. The feeling is only in the moment just passed by. But still ‘I’ do not have that experience all the time. Because ‘I’ is the heap of all the passed moments!

I found that the interesting thing started when I got the answer ‘not happy’ or ‘no feeling’. I knew then I had something to look at. Upon closer look I always found a lurking feeling or fear disguised as ‘no feeling’ – the cunning entity inventing whatever trick to keep me from exposing it. It takes a lot of persistence, bloody-mindedness and ruthless honesty with oneself to dismantle one trick after the other. Sometimes I would sit days with that ‘no-feeling’ of numbness until I gathered courage and determination to examine it deeper. This process may take months until you are free of one particular emotion. But with the pure consciousness experience in mind you always have a comparison that keeps you going.

VINEETO to No. 7: I don’t see how this – Dell-Carnegie-style – method could work in long term. It suggests attempting mind control over emotions, it does absolutely nothing to get rid of the emotions themselves. It does not get to the root cause of the emotional reaction – the Human Condition, inherent in the psychological and psychic entity within the body.

RESPONDENT: From my experience, certain emotions like anger can be dealt with by plain common sense. Just by understanding (and I am talking of only intellectual understanding), that anger is not going to improve or help the situation and on the other hand, it is going to harm yours and others’ mental and physical peace, the anger vanishes. I have tried and tested it and it works. It is not repression so it doesn’t come back even in long run. Not that the anger does not arise, but as soon as it arises, you can see it vanishing in the light of your understanding.

VINEETO: What you are describing sounds like more than just intellectual understanding and more than the method of ‘positive thinking’ that [ Respondent No 1, List C] was proposing. You say you are using ‘common sense’ and ‘not repression’. And you say, anger about that issue does not come back? Not even in the long run? It does not hang around, maybe as being peeved or annoyed? Or an expectation for a reward, a righteousness, a better-than-you-feeling?

If that is so, then you have found the first ‘key’ to eliminating anger – seeing the actual situation, sensibly considering everyone involved and understanding that your particular feelings will do nothing to help the situation, on the contrary, they are harmful. You can apply the same understanding to any other emotion arising, be it love, gratitude, resentment, doubt, anguish, sadness, etc. None of our so-called precious feelings are useful for dealing with practical, every-day situations. Care, consideration, attention, intelligence and common sense can do the job much better. The trick is to question the ‘good’ feelings as well as the ‘bad’ feelings, and a great part of the social identity will disappear, issue by issue.

The second ‘key’ is to examine the underlying reason why anger (and any other feeling and emotion) arises in the first place. What is ‘my’ perception of the world, which of ‘my’ expectations are not met, what is it that ‘I’ am imposing on the world-as-it-is and the people-as-they-are that ‘I’ feel angry about? Persistent questioning of the root cause of my getting angry as well as applying common sense had immediate and drastic results – more and more the ‘self’ was seen for what it was in the light of this awareness; it was seen as an alien intruder that continuously spoiled the joy and ease of being ‘here’.

RESPONDENT: Yes, I also think that it is more than intellectual understanding. Till I find a more appropriate word for it, I would prefer to use ‘common sense’. It is not positive thinking and it is not in expectation of reward. But I guess this common sense is the result of good old Vipassana. The difference after getting introduced to actual freedom is that now I know that ‘I’ am not different from anger, whereas in Vipassana I am the witness watching the anger passing away.

VINEETO: I don’t see how it can be ‘the result of good old Vipassana’, where you were ‘the witness watching the anger passing away’, if you say that at the same time you ‘know that [’you’ are] not different from anger’. Either you know that ‘you’ are the anger, that ‘you’ are the emotion, which is not what is taught in Vipassana – or you practice Vipassana and merely witness the anger passing away until it arises next time. But that does not eliminate the emotion, as ‘you’ remain intact, and at the most ‘you’ only transcends it.

To really grasp the fact that ‘you’ are emotions and emotions are ‘you’ results in you being willing and eager to investigate into the deeper layers of ‘you’ to eliminate the very cause of anger arising in the first place. To really face the fact that ‘you’, and only ‘you’, are the cause and reason of anger arising – as well as all the other emotions – is the first and essential step to do something about this emotion rather than merely witness it. The acknowledgment of the fact that the Human Condition in you is preventing you from being happy and harmless creates the burning intent and necessary guts to investigate further into the very substance of who you think you are and who you feel you are. That’s when common sense starts to come to fruition.

If that is so, then you have found the first ‘key’ to eliminating anger – seeing the actual situation, sensibly considering everyone involved and understanding that your particular feelings will do nothing to help the situation, on the contrary, they are harmful. You can apply the same understanding to any other emotion arising, be it love, gratitude, resentment, doubt, anguish, sadness, etc. None of our so-called precious feelings are useful for dealing with practical, every-day situations. Care, consideration, attention, intelligence and common sense can do the job much better. The trick is to question the ‘good’ feelings as well as the ‘bad’ feelings and a great part of the social identity will disappear, issue by issue.

Well, eliminating the ‘good’ feelings is being a little tricky for me. Whereas I could see through common sense that ‘bad’ feelings like anger are harmful, I could not see the same thing for love (for example), partly because of my latent faith in the revered wisdom. Now I am beginning to understand the cunningness of this entity ‘I’, which just changes its shape from anger to love. For me just this realization that it is false is enough to determine to eliminate it, though I am also beginning to understand that love may also be harmful and perhaps may result into a war when it is for one’s country or faith. Even if it is love (or Love) for all, it is still ‘I’ and so not different from anger at its very root..

In order to question ‘good’ feelings I had to experience that any so-called ‘good’ feeling, particularly love, is just the other side of the coin of human emotions, ie the Human Condition. Love is produced in order to cover up disgust, hate, anger, indifference, self-centeredness and loneliness. Without all the negative emotions, what would you need love for? And at the next layer of investigation I discovered that love consists of nothing but a very self-centred system consisting of control, image, identity, power, bargain and smugness, particularly when feeling Love for All. How much more powerful can you feel when you feel big enough to love all of humanity?! Stripped of its glittering costume of people’s beliefs and needs, love is nothing other than our instinct of nurture, in-built to ensure the survival of the species – and embellished with great ideals and values. But the ideal of love cannot belie the facts of the atrocities caused by malice and sorrow that happen amongst human beings, often in the name of that same love, devotion, faith and loyalty.

After seventeen years on the spiritual path, including lots of therapy and new-age discussions, I had still experienced myself to be in utter confusion as to how to deal with emotions. Some emotions were to be kept, some to be transformed, but then most of them would reappear without invitation and did not disappear permanently by ‘watching’. Then again, I was not only to rise above the bad thoughts and emotions but also to dis-identify from ‘being the body’ all together, which ultimately proved to be neither possible nor an option.

So it was a great revelation when I first discovered that to be alive and happy I don’t need to have emotions at all – in fact, the emotions were the very thing that prevented me from being fully alive and permanently happy. Sorting my emotions into good and bad always reminded me of poor Cinderella who had to sort out peas by their size, ending up totally exhausted and bewildered. What a relief and how much easier, to start to eliminate all the peas, ie. emotions. Of course, that proposition rocked me at the very core, but I was desperate and daring enough to give it a go. And the more I stripped away the ‘good’ feelings like love, gratitude, humility, unselfish-ness, compassion and belonging, the more I discovered the genuine article underneath the emotions and beliefs – actual intimacy and delight.

See, the quality of the actual world is delight. The very actual-ness of everything is pure delight. Actualism is ‘the experiential understanding that nothing physical is merely passive; the personal experience of the universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being as opposed to a cerebral or affective perception.’

For instance, listening without the layer of emotions, morals, values, beliefs and instincts, to the hum of the fridge, the sound of cars passing by, the rumbling of the computer doing its thing, is delighting in being alive and this very hearing is one function of being alive. No love is needed to layer on top of the very happening of things, it only destroys the purity and perfection, it only binds it into a man-made system of conditions, belonging, control and fear. If you love one sound, you reject another. To love silence is to despise and be upset by noisy business. Love would utterly spoil the game of being happy, here, now, each moment again, for no other reason than being alive, fully and sensately experiencing the universe around me. Without the self being sorrowful and malicious, fearful and lonely, loving and belonging, compassionate and grateful – nothing else is needed to delight in each moment again.

I am enjoying our discussion about investigating emotions.

I can say that I am quite an expert on experiential therapy, since I have done many New Age therapies, beginning in 1978. I started with Arthur Janov’s primal scream groups and later continued therapy in Poona doing all there was on offer – encounter, Tantra, Reichian bio-energetics, Hypnosis and the Fischer-Hoffmann-process. I not only participated in the last mentioned group, called the ‘AFH’ in Poona, but repeated it as an assistant six times. It is an intense kind of primal group, focussing on negative feelings from childhood, however far back one can extract or concoct a memory, acting out any ‘anger’ and ‘past hurts’ to the point of exhaustion and then forgiving one’s ‘poor ignorant’ parents.

Nobody seemed to be bothered that this group, like all therapy, is purely staged in the imaginary world of past emotional memories, where facts don’t really matter, as long as ‘valuable’ emotions are expressed – ‘vented’ – and then transformed into love and forgiveness. There is neither concern if these events really happened nor is there evidence that those supposedly transformed emotions are improving one’s everyday life. Consequently, after the group-high wanes, one is back to the troubles of daily life and is left yearning for another emoting experience. One is, in fact, often enticed into even more expressing or emoting in order to feel alive and to feel the calm and ‘peacefulness’ afterwards.

The aim of those primal therapies is to make the individual feel better, temporarily relieved from the excess of accumulated emotions. The aim is not to permanently get rid of anger, sadness, fear and malice or how to live in peace with one’s fellow human beings.

I certainly learned how to notice and/or create emotions, sometimes shifting them from feeling sad to feeling angry, to feeling loving, to feeling lonely – whatever I unconsciously believed appropriate in the moment. But this apparent ‘control’ did not enable me to live my life peacefully, it did not eliminate hate, jealousy, loneliness, anger, resentment, neediness, despair and depression. On the contrary, because I had spent so much of my time in a therapy-environment, a big part of my identity thrived on having emotions, thinking about them, feeling them, expressing them and justifying them with all kinds of NDA-beliefs like astrology, chakras, the ‘mood of the day’, numerology and such nonsense. Looking back on what practical improvement therapy has contributed to my life, I see that it has been nothing but moving furniture on the Titanic, ie. fiddling with bits while the main problem, the ‘self’, stayed alive and kicking. In fact, the ‘self’ gets even more strengthened by boosting one’s emotional identity.

KONRAD: And now comes the crux of my response to you. You wrote: ‘For me the relationships to different people have clearly shown me the flaws I still had to tackle, shown the occasions where consciousness is not pure but inflicted with greed, anger, superiority, jealousy, sorrow, pity and other such emotions’. [endquote]. I have big trouble with this statement. Consider, for example, greed. Greed is basically the desire to have more material things. If you succeed in eliminating greed, you also do not respond positive to those methods and factors in existence that can expand your means. This includes the capabilities of your fellow men. So you see? Greed is a two-sided emotion. If greed is accompanied by a clear insight in how means are brought into existence, it does not necessarily lead to violence. It can even lead to its opposite.

VINEETO: Greed is part of the survival instinct that we inherited from our animal ancestors and as such is blind and destructive. No method of control has kept the lid on it. All the wars, rapes, robberies, billionaires, white-collar thieves and poverty still go on. To state that you only need to channel and control greed is a poor solution which has been tried and failed by many before you.

KONRAD: Take anger. If you never feel anger, you cannot feel revolted by the fact that Nazi Germany has slaughtered 5 million Jews. So the elimination of this emotion can make you stop investigating the causes of this, and thus make it possible that it will happen again. Therefore the question is not how to eliminate anger, but to investigate when anger is at its place, and when not.

VINEETO: Anger is in its very nature destructive. How can anger about Nazis in Germany eliminate suffering. The retribution from the ‘good’ guys that took place at the end of World War II was as cruel, uncontrolled and devastatingly disastrous as the actions of the ‘bad’ guys before. To investigate the causes of violence and eliminate them, I don’t need to be angry, I only need to apply understanding and intelligence. Anger will always be blind.

KONRAD: Superiority? If you cannot judge a certain method to be superior, and therefore you applying this method as making you being somebody superior, you will never defend this method to others as really being superior. In this way you will never try to make things better.

VINEETO: I have talked about superiority before. I judge a method as being superior if it works. That is simply applying my brain as to what is sensible and what is stupid. There is no need to feel superior because I can see the obvious, if a method works, has results in daily life or not. And if it is obvious then anybody can check it out. It does not need an extra authority applied to it to make it more True. Why believe an authority if I can find out for myself? I can tell from my life that Richard’s method works, there is no need for feeling superior. Whoever objects is simply silly, blinded by beliefs that have been repeated for centuries.

KONRAD: Jealousy? This one is a little more complex. Jealousy consists of the fear of losing your spouse. But this is also a sign that shows how special she is in your life. This is, why many women are flattered by the fact that their spouse is jealous. The problem with jealousy is not so much the emotion, but how it is shown. If you try to limit your spouse in her actions (by trying to place her in a position whereby she is not able to meet other men) then she will experience this as suffocating. However, if you understand, that vinegar is not the way to attract flies, but honey is, you express this jealousy of yours differently. You do not try to limit her span of activities, but you express your feeling about how special she is more directly.

VINEETO: Now, this statement on jealousy is really cunning. I suspect you are quite afraid to tackle that issue. That’s why you turn it round and say that the woman wants you to be jealous. You express your feeling about how special she is not because you mean it but because you want to bind her. You are not openly jealous, just more tricky. Jealousy is part of possessiveness that comes in the packet of instincts to continue the species. It has been the cause of many horrendous crimes and murders. Most impulsive crimes are crimes of jealousy.

In my relationship with Peter there is neither possessiveness nor jealousy. We simply live together because we enjoy to. Each is free to do what he/she wants and that is the basis of our peace and harmony. When I felt jealousy I simply had to look for the cause of it, and that cause is fear, fear of being alone, insecure, unprotected, abandoned. Eliminating the fear has made jealousy completely redundant. And why should Peter prove through jealousy that I am special to him. I am, that’s why he lives with me. There is no need for any other proof. If one day he should decide to live alone, or with someone else, I will still be at ease because I have no fear to be on my own.

KONRAD: Sorrow? Don’t you feel any sorrow about the victims of wars? So I cannot see any reason why this is a negative emotion. Only, if you are a sad person and you expect of others to help you end it, this places a burden on others. However, if you investigate the root causes of it yourself, it leads to clarity.

VINEETO: The sorrow I felt for the victims of wars did nothing for the victims of wars. It neither stopped the wars nor did it console the victims. It simply added to the sorrow that is already plentiful and rampant in the world. Clarity comes when I find that compassion for others creates as much mess and interference in other people’s lives as it continues the cycle of superiority and inferiority. The famous Mother Theresa is an obvious example. You seem to be trying to exorcise the Devil with Beelzebub, as the saying goes. Compassion adds to sorrow and suffering, it does nothing to eliminate it.

KONRAD: The point is not whether emotions are negative or not, but how you deal with them. You only have to be perfectly clear about their origin. This is what I have against the approach of Richard. By eliminating emotions as such you do not become better, but worse. The important factor is not whether you have emotions, but whether you deal with them from full understanding. So the only thing you have to be careful about is whether you control your emotions, or your emotions control you. If this last thing is the case, you can make improvements into the lives of others, and in that way you make improvements into your own life as well. At least you are a contributing factor.

VINEETO: How do you know that by eliminating emotions I become worse. Since you don’t know how I live, that can only be an assumption. The point is that the old system of Good and Bad, of judging emotions and controlling the bad ones has failed for 3000 years. The prisons are full of people who fail to control them. Your neighbours are another good example. Even Gandhi, after repressing sexual feelings for eighty years admitted sexual dreams in his very old age, and he was no weak man. I have replaced the value system of Good and Bad with ‘silly and sensible’ and it works. Why don’t you give it a practical try?

Another story to help you with the decision: Kant, the famous philosopher, was asked by a young girl if he wanted to marry her. It took him three years to weigh the Pro’s and Con’s of marriage and since they were equally balanced in his findings he went over to agree to the marriage. Her mother opened the door and told him that she got tired of waiting for his answer, married someone else and had two children.

So, if you wait too long, life might be over and you find you wasted it on something that doesn’t work.

KONRAD: You know what? I stop here reading you. Probably the rest you write is just one huge attack on what I represent, and probably there is nothing good you can find in me, now that your mind is set. So I do not want to waste any more energy on you. Not again such a stupid exchange of misunderstanding upon misunderstanding. The basic problem with our communication is that you have drawn far-reaching conclusions from some honest mistakes. How could I know whether you were a man or a woman, when your e-mails begin with ‘Peter’? And then again, how could I know that Vineeto is a woman’s name? I just thought it to be some name Osho Rajneesh has cooked up.

VINEETO: I took some time to let your letter sink in and to mull about the response. I usually like to let some clarity emerge before I answer, especially when the letter is as emotional as yours has been.

I did not mean to attack you when I said: ‘Logic is the male weapon to tackle life, but it has utterly failed.’ It is simply my experience. For instance, I have seen you discuss with Richard for pages and pages as to whether there is anything worthwhile in his approach to freedom. Now, if someone offers me a key to a prison door, like he does, I don’t think up reasons why it should not work, compare it to other keys with a different colour or form – I try it in the lock. Only then I can decide with the confidence of the experience, that the key opened the lock or not. His key to the prison door of the Human Condition is the simple question, asked with intent and honesty over and over again: ‘How do I experience this moment of being alive?’ and then examine the upcoming emotions, feelings, beliefs and passions.

Now, this is what I call using common sense instead of logic: logic in this case is used to defend an old pattern and not look at its mis-functioning, common sense is trying something new. And in my life I have mainly come across men who were very good in finding excuses with abstract logic not to try something new, neither to examine nor feel their emotions, let alone get rid of them. It could be scary but it may well be successful. I have seen logic being used to wander from the subject, to build castles in the clouds, to create theories that don’t hold any water when it comes to actual situations of daily life.

Women, on the other hand, generally use emotional outbreaks to distract and divert from an issue or subject that scares them. They are conditioned to swim in emotionality rather than sort things out, i.e. eliminate the cause, with a strait-forward intelligence. Accordingly, I had used sulking, guilt, stubbornness, being paranoid or angry to not give up my dearly held familiar beliefs and behaviours – often unconscious – even if those beliefs had failed for years. In order to live in peace and harmony, instead of using my well-practiced defence mechanisms, I had to put exactly those female ‘weapons’ under scrutiny and cast them aside.

Only without the clouding of rationalizing, emotions and instincts can COMMON SENSE – our innate intelligence – start functioning to solve our practical problems. It has been this very common sense that brought us all the comfort, technology and communication that we are enjoying today.

In the first place I am not attacking you, I am questioning your theories. I for myself know there is a vast difference between the two, because I can easily function and live without theories or beliefs. But it seems that you don’t see a difference between your teaching and your person or ‘self’.

Your response has exactly proven the point I was making about feeling insulted. Having cleaned myself up of emotions I never feel insulted, annoyed, attacked or even bored by anyone’s statement. Therefore I can examine the given argument for its contents and check out the facts. This is where I found Richard’s method invaluable. I can look at the issue rather than the personal feelings. If the issue evokes an emotion in me, then that has to be checked out first. Usually I would take some time and examine why this particular point brushed me up the wrong way. Given that every emotional response is a defence mechanism of the ‘self’ – which I consider harmful and redundant – it was then obvious that these very emotions were the substance of the ‘self’ and had to be eliminated.

My main question to you has been and still is: Does the concept that you are teaching change the person in his behaviour to other fellow human beings, or does it avoid exactly this frightening, but so vital issue. Neither logic nor the controlling of emotions has ever succeeded in eliminating malice and sorrow, wars and ‘domestics’, suicide and murder from the world. I understand that this is exactly what you are trying to do with your concept. I just doubt that it works, and further, you have actually proven in your response to me that it doesn’t work. Your concept of logic and tautology does not appear to change your behaviour to fellow human beings, ‘when push comes to shove’ (as the Australians say).

KONRAD: How far does this lack of training go? Have you ever been on a high school or some equivalent? Do you, for example, know what the abc formula is in elementary algebra? Or are you ignorant about that one? Or does it even extend further? Are you able to solve simple puzzles like: ‘If the weight of something is one kilo more than half its weight, how much does it weigh?’ (2, of course) with the aid of simple algebra? For if you are not able to do this, you are not even able to really understand what I am talking about. You are then definitely completely and totally blind to the connection that exists between household appliances and the understanding of physics and logic. And then it is definitely the case that if you assert that all of these things are just the result of the application of common sense, you do not know what you are talking about, and are therefore hardly in the position to refute my statements.

VINEETO: Well done, this time you hit the target: I was annoyed and I think that is what you wanted to achieve! First I tell my story and then I will have a look at your side of that game:

In order to get to the root of my annoyance I had to look at the ghost that you had revived. It was connected to an experience that the little girl I was 35 and 40 years ago had when the boys said: ‘We do not want to play with you because you can’t climb trees as well or because you are wearing a skirt’ ... basically because I was not a boy! I am sure they believed their reasoning to be as serious and valid as you believe yours to be!

Then, feeling excluded from the pleasures they seemed to have, I competed with boys on intellectual terms to be part of their club. I topped high school with best grades in the male subjects like maths and physics, but I still did not belong. I did not understand about male and female battling, about sex, or why humans are so quick to attack and hurt each other – so just being good in math did not work. Nor did later in life any of these subjects help me to be a better or happier human being. Mathematics still can’t explain how egg and sperm turn into the girl I was then or the woman I am now. Life consists of very much more than equations and puzzle-solving! Those algebraic puzzles were a favourite pastime in my teens, but since then I have moved on to more life-related questions like: How to become completely happy and harmless!

If the above mentioned training is what you request from women to accept her as a partner in communication about vital questions of human behaviour, without arrogantly snorting on her, then I pass and have no further interest in any exchange. This is the typical male world, consisting of competition, arrogance, throwing about knowledge which is irrelevant to the subject talked about. If you insist to stay in that world of equations then good luck!

Recently, I must admit, because of my deep involvement with Richard, I began to study emotions. For Richard has made me aware of the fact, that emotions as such are a terra incognito, at least to me. An area where almost everybody is ignorant about, but not as ignorant as you think, it turned out. Now what I discovered is that there is something in the brain, called an ‘amygdala’. It is situated exactly at the position Richard said he observed a change in him. Namely at the base of the spinal chord, where he felt ‘something turn over’. This amygdala has one important function. It causes the emotions present in the limbic system to be represented in consciousness. If it stops functioning, this causes all the emotions to be present, even to function, but they are no longer observed in consciousness. Why not? Because the limbic system is not able to reflect on itself. Only the cortex has this ability.

Richard is a very interesting phenomenon. For he shows clearly, that the emotions can be functioning completely independent from the cortex. To realize this is also a vindication of everything he says about himself. So this proves, that there are at least two centres from which action can emerge, possibly even three. Namely the cortex, the limbic system, and the nervous system itself. So I discovered, that Richard was right about that ‘animal part’ of emotions. Emotions are indeed innate, as he asserted. I was wrong on this account. What I designated with the term ‘emotion’ was not the same as emotion, but emotion together with its control. I had here a confusion Richard did not have. So I talked from the position of some kind of synthesis of emotion and ratio. But now I have a clear distinction between those two concepts.

How did you find out for yourself that emotions are indeed innate? Did you have the experience of your own innate emotions. Did you have the experience when those innate emotions where temporarily not functioning as in a peak-experience? Did you understand the instincts that these emotions are based on by your own experience? Have you experienced how, through persistent investigation into the nature of those instincts, they become conscious and eventually cease to operate, for instance the instinctual sex-drive or the instinct to nurture?

Or have you simply collected information from psychoanalysts who vary immensely in their findings because everyone applies a different theory to what he observes in other people! The way to explore emotion is to experience it without repressing and without expressing. Applying apperception, the particular emotion is then seen for what it is, understood in its complexity. It then reveals its underlying belief and finally the underlying instinct. It is a thrilling adventure to dig into one’s emotions, to ‘round them up’ one by one and experience them losing their impact on one’s life. This is what is really worth writing about. Everything else is only second hand knowledge, and specially on the subject of emotions very loaded with subjective concepts and hidden agendas. You can only believe someone’s knowledge but in actual freedom you can verify what we are saying with your own experience.

<snip> For he cannot be troubled by an error, because nothing can trouble him. And this is, because his particular malfunction is exactly in the area of emotion. In other words, since attacks of others DO disturb him, but he is UNABLE to EXPERIENCE these disturbances, he can admit such things, and STILL there can be something wrong with him.

What makes you say that attacks of others DO disturb Richard? If people repress emotions to the extent even of being catatonic, there are usually ways to detect the existence of emotions and what kind of emotions they are. There is an obvious physical dysfunction and/or a practical malfunction apparent in the lives of people who repress emotions, even if it is to the extent of them not experiencing them, that will give a clear indication of those emotions happening. I am surprised you can detect this apparent malfunction in Richard through e-mail. I have not discovered any malfunction, neither physical nor in his practical life, and I have met him many, many times in person over long periods. So I do need a bit more proof from you about your theory.

Let me say this last thing differently. Usually, if somebody is a ‘madman’, as Richard says, such a person cannot even consider the possibility that he is mad. For admitting this causes emotional unrest. But since Richard has an inability to experience his emotions, he can admit to such a thing, without it resulting in emotional unrest. Of course, it DOES that. Only, because his amygdala does not function properly, he is not able to experience this unrest. This makes him free to utter such statements, while other people with psychic defects cannot do this.

Here again you just state that ‘of course, it DOES that’. Where do you get your certainty from? You cannot conceive that someone can live without emotions because you don’t have the experience for yourself that it is possible to eliminate emotions. Once you have eliminated even a single emotion by examining it and digging into it, you might begin to consider it possible for someone else to have done the same. Or do you find it easier to prove that Richard has emotions just so you don’t have to investigate your own? Then, good luck, it won’t be easy.

The beginning period of my exploring and applying actualism was not so cheery – on the contrary, there were bewildering, anxious, fearful, very confusing and sometimes dreadful episodes, particularly in the time when I was struggling to get disentangled from the spiritual world. You can find a description of our experiences of the first year in ‘Peter’s Journal’ and in ‘Vineeto’s Bit’ on the actualism web site. On the path to Actual Freedom I needed to backtrack, unlearn the ‘watcher’ and abolish my spiritual identity in order to be able to start dismantling what had been left behind, unexamined and untouched, when the spiritual process of distancing and dissociation began.

The approach to feelings, emotions and instinctual passions in Actual Freedom is distinctively different to therapy or spiritual practice insofar that I not only experience the feeling and label it, but I also explore the very cause that makes me feel this way. What triggered it?, did someone say something to me?, what particular fear is triggered?, what is the connection to what I believe to be right or true or good?, what is the underlying moral or ethical connotation?, what guilt, shame or taboo have I transgressed?, what would actually happen, if I explore further?, which part of my identity is threatened?, how do ‘I’ function?, what are ‘my’ tricks? ... there were a hundred-and-one questions to be explored before I would get to the bottom of ‘me’ and see my identity in operation.

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.

To No. 00 : I am feeling sorrow over my run in with Vineeto so I have already started running that through my filter of what is the impeccable thing to do about that instead of seeing this thing (sorrow) as a fact. If I see it as a fact, instead of what caused me to act out of malice and then how to deal with the sorrow, then there is nothing to be done about it.

The spiritual solution to emotions and emotion-backed thoughts is to not label the feelings and thoughts, not judge them, stay with them and not attempt to make sense of their cause and source in order to practice ‘not-knowing’. In this way the spiritual seeker attempts to regain composure as quickly as possible and to resume the ‘not-knowing’ state of so-called innocence. In my experience this practice only worked for short periods of time until my cycle of emotional reactions kicked in again at the next similar occasion.

I was twigged by No. 1’s letter to write to her to report the success I had with a different kind of inquiry into emotions and instinctual passions whereby I clearly label the affective feeling by name and kind, trace it back to its trigger and then root around to work out why I felt the way I felt in the particular situation. Usually I would hit on some kind of belief, moral or ethic that was some aspect of my social identity – be it gender, racial, national, ideological, political, spiritual, professional, or belonging to a particular group – that I then investigated further. When brought to the light of awareness with the sincere intent to eliminate these facets of my identity they eventually disappeared out of my life. The next time the same situation arose that had made me angry or fearful or sad or frustrated, it was no longer aggravating or threatening, for that part of ‘me’, that part of my identity that automatically reacted, had been eliminated.

Now my interaction with people is fun, fair, considerate and delightful. What at first seemed to be an impossibility and too much of a challenge to sort out has now, after a considerable period of investigation, resulted in a change such that I am permanently relieved of the grip of malice and sorrow.

What I’m looking at now is should I even talk to you at all? That doesn’t seem like a good alternative to me because the world is full of people who are not honest including me sometimes. I know that I can just not read what you write and not talk to you and I can go on feeling good and everything will be alright. However, this seems like avoidance to me. Every time I have tried discussing anything with you it has turned into a nightmare with me being made wrong just as you have done this time. Should I just talk to you and treat it as a joke or should I even talk to you at all? Neither one of those alternatives seem right either. Just thinking about sending this is stirring up my feeler so why should I? I guess because I want to eliminate this feeler and looking at it seems better than avoiding it. I’ve tried to pinpoint what it is and hate seems as close as I can get although I’m thinking that there is fear underneath it. What am I afraid of? Authority comes to mind. You obviously wield authority here and you obviously have Richard and Peter on your side so what kind of fair shake can I get going up against the Actual Freedom Trust?

Also, you assume a teacher role and you aren’t even honest and don’t know what you are talking about so we can’t just talk as equals because you pretend that you are above me and know more than me when deep down I really think that you are no more than a lying idiot.

I must admit I was flabbergasted as to why you would inform me about of the above as these are your feelings and only you can deal with them. The only tentative sense I could make of it is that, given that this is the actual freedom mailing list set up to talk about how to become free from the human condition, you may want some help as to what to do with these feelings that seem to occur in regular intervals.

If you could put aside your notion that I am ‘no more than a lying idiot’ for a few minutes then I can tell you what I did – and what worked for me.

At the start of actualism I had to get off my spiritually-fed moral high horse and stop pointing the finger(s) at everyone else and blaming everyone else for my feelings in order to single-pointedly focus my attention on the human condition *in me*. I had to rethink my notions of ‘right’ and ‘good’ and ‘fair’ because life if neither right nor good nor fair and ‘right’ and ‘good’ and ‘fair’ are simply human-made morals and ethics varying according to culture, religion, and oscillating according to fashion and circumstances. I also had to rigorously question what I considered to be ‘true’ and ‘correct’ because my ‘truths’ were almost all based on borrowed knowledge and the rest was based on instinctive intuition and affective memories.

I had to acknowledge that my anger was my anger, no matter who or what had caused it, that my sadness was my sadness no matter which sympathy or compassion for whom might have caused it or who/what had disappointed my expectations, that my desire was my desire no matter what situation or person had caused it to arise, that my fear was my fear regardless of who or what had triggered it. Needless to say that this focussing on ‘me’ also helped me to be rid of any feelings regarding authority as the insights gained from my PCEs allowed me to stand on my own two feet for the first time in my life so much so that I could easily learn from those I wanted to learn from and reject revered knowledge from others without being bothered by feelings of inferiority or pride – after all feelings regarding authority are all but an ego-soul struggle for power and struggling for power is irrelevant when freedom from my own ‘self’ is at stake.

PS: What you call ‘you obviously wield authority here’ is simply me reporting what I found to be the case from my experience and what you call ‘you obviously have Richard and Peter on your side’ is simply that their experiences of actuality and facts matches mine (mostly). Life is very, very simple when it is not stuffed up by one’s feelings.

I might still not be at ease regarding the everyday mundane repetitive tasks and once I start enjoying even those, I would think that I have changed for good.

Part of being able to enjoy ‘everyday mundane repetitive tasks’ for me was to have a close look at what was really necessary. For instance I decided to reduce my overheads in order to be able to sell less of my time for money. Having adjusted the balance of my time as compared to ‘their’ time it was then much easier to enjoy the time I had to sell for money and the fact that when I do my work well this in itself is a satisfying activity helped in enjoying the process of it.

The other thing with ‘everyday mundane repetitive tasks’ was that I had to look at some underlying resentments – as if someone else was making me do those task and not that I had in fact chosen the situation where those tasks were a necessary part of my life. For instance, what’s the point of objecting to having to wash the dishes when I clearly made the choice that I prefer to eat from clean dishes rather than have last night’s dinner still on them? Once I am aware, and am able to determine, that all I do is in fact my own choice, if possible my deliberate choice, then any resentment goes out the window. And without resentment any task can be a joy, a sensate pleasure or a mental challenge to do, if only I apply enough attentiveness to all that is involved in accomplishing it.

I clearly see the sense behind your approach… but I still have the ‘resentment’. The feeling inside me refuses to go away… the silliness expresses itself as postponement and switching to more enjoyable tasks. Most of it is gone but still something is left. I have some task to do which is not all that bad but still I seem to prefer reading a book and reflecting about things rather than doing the task at hand. I am not sure how to get rid of this basic resentment. Any more tips on this aspect would be welcome.

You are aware, are you, that you make a choice, each moment again, to hang onto the resentment in favour of taking on the challenge of enjoying the task at hand?

Nobody said that becoming actually or virtually free from malice and sorrow (resentment being a facet of sorrow) was effortless and on the way personal sacrifices have to be made in order to achieve your goal. Your resentment is one of those sacrifices required.

Courage!

On the same topic you recently wrote to No 60 saying that ‘I hate it when she does this and the hate is making me sick’–

No 60: Same kind of thing that’s happening all over the place with Vineeto. Her statement ‘only enlightened beings are without ego’ was clearly and obviously wrong. You pointed it out. Instead of acknowledging the obvious truth then and there, she’s once again straight onto the front foot trying to shove a red herring down your throat, telling you what YOU don’t understand, etc, etc, etc. On and on it goes.

Yes, I agree. This is the part with her where I start getting sick so I’m trying to look at that and see exactly what it is. I think you nailed it but I don’t know why that reactivates my feeler. It seems like it has to do with not getting to be right even when I am sure I am right and prove I am right. But still there is more to it than that. I think it has to do with hate. I hate it when she does this and the hate is making me sick. 25.8.2006

If it is of assistance to you, here is what I have observed in myself in regards to facts and feelings –

• When there is no doubt in my mind that what the other is saying about me is non-factual I usually have no emotional response at all. For instance when you called me religious worshipper, blind, obsessed and that I am defending my ego, I knew for a fact that this is not the case and consequently there was not even a hint of an emotion. Just like when someone says 5+5 is 55 or 12 there is no reason for me to get upset about it.

• When there is a possibility that what someone else says about me could have some facticity to it or could be partially right then often feelings of doubt and uncertainty arise, maybe coupled with fear and/or defensiveness. Nowadays with the actualism method these situations provide the opportunity for me to look at what has been said, sort out fact from imagination, my emotions from the other’s emotions and once I am satisfied that I know the facts, then the emotion subsides.

• There is a third possibility that I remember well from my frequent power battles with my previous partner about 15 to 20 years ago – certain situations in which I knew damn well that he had the facts on his side but I would not want to admit it and worse, I could not divert him from the topic, confuse him or make him feel wrong (which I was usually quite good at). In those situations I sometimes had intense feelings of hate, not only for reasons of my hurt pride of loosing the battle but particularly because I had sold my integrity in defending what I knew to be lies merely in order to win the battle. Needless to say that nowadays I know in advance how silly it would be to put myself into such a situation and therefore I don’t.

I am not saying that anything of the above should apply to you – only you can know yourself. I just thought I’d share my own experience with facts and associated feelings as you were contemplating about your own feelings in this situation.

Have you ever felt aggression, hatred, condescension or any other negative feelings at all when you read correspondences of No 16, No 65, No 58, No 60, No 23, No 71 or anybody else? None of the above mails triggered any negative feelings at all?

As I am not free from the human condition I do have feelings from time to time, although ‘aggression, hatred, condescension’ are not amongst them. That said, I do find some posts from correspondents rather silly when they waste their time concentrating on red herrings or fighting against imaginary windmills instead of talking about the issues at hand, namely how to become free from the human condition. On many occasions I understand the reasons for this behaviour as I too had to struggle in the early days with similar resistance to looking at my own feelings and beliefs rather than blaming others for my feelings and instinctively defending my beliefs.

If not, do you have a ‘feeling’ when you read/reply? What is the ‘feeling’?

No, not when I reply. Even when I occasionally have one or the other feeling when reading a post, I never write, let alone click ‘send’, when I am in any way emotional. Very early on in actualism I understood that the way to deal with one’s emotions is to neither suppress nor express them and since then I have always made it a point to keep my hands in my pocket, so to speak, until I have investigated/abandoned any emotional issues that may have arisen.

Is it that of caring, friendliness?

The reason I reply to correspondence on this mailing list and share my experience with the actualism process, which often involves correcting misunderstandings and misrepresentations, is that of fellow-ship regard which is different to the feeling of ‘caring, friendliness’ in that it is actual rather than affective.

Dull listlessness and resentfulness are indeed feelings and not very pleasant ones at that – indeed they can literally ruin your day.

If, as you say, feeling dull listlessness and resentment is practically your default state, regardless of whatever current events or current circumstances or personal interactions, then I can only suggest that you may need to take a good look as to why this is so. In other words, rather than focussing on details at this stage, maybe a general overall assessment or stocktaking as to whether or not you want to be free of these feelings and whether or not you are willing to pay the price that this change will involve may well be in order.

I am reminded of what you wrote to Richard recently –

• Why ‘must’ there be more to life than the miserable reality people live in?

• The universe is not predisposed to good or bad there’s no reason to expect life to be happy.

• Also, ‘meaning’ is of human invention life and the universe can’t have a purpose or meaning.

• If misery helped survival, having miserable humans would be blind nature’s perfection.

With a default attitude towards life and the universe such as this it comes to no surprise that the feelings of dullness, resentment and listlessness are the predominant ones for you and having such an attitude demonstrates well why it is necessary to investigate all of one’s beliefs, attitudes, worldviews and philosophical outlooks towards life if one wants to become happy and harmless.

Whenever I could not remember which particular incident, event or circumstance had triggered my last outbreak of feeling bad I would look around inside, as it were, and find the belief/ attitude/ worldview/ outlook that fed and maintained my current feeling-state. Equipped with this information I then did whatever was needed to feel good again in order to be able to have a closer look at, become more aware of and, if necessary, understand comprehensively the underlying feeling pattern – the belief system – that had caused me to feel miserable in the first place.

*

To No. 101: ‘When you practice the actualism method, it’s important to remember to examine the feeling in question only after you managed to get back to feeling good’

Have you ever watched a child getting upset when their favourite toy is taken away by another child for instance and then the mother or teacher steps in and diverts their attention by pointing to a bird flying by or a showing them a fragrant colourful flower or inviting them to join a different game that’s going on. Young children are usually able to very quickly forget their previous upset and accept the nudge to being happy again whereas adults often insist on the seriousness/ importance of their own particular problem and/or feeling and choose to continue to feel bad.

When you set your aim to become happy and harmless you enter into an agreement with yourself, so to speak, to not let anything stand in the way of getting back to feeling good – in other words you make a conscious decision to make feeling good about being here, right now, your default feeling state. This intent in turn helps to re-kindle one’s own long-lost naiveté which then helps you to return to feeling good for no other reason than that you are alive and conscious in this spectacular abundant universe. As an adult you have the added bonus of being able to take note of the triggers that had caused you to stop feeling good in order to avoid this particular pitfall the next time round.

When I was first starting to practise actualism, I was doing something that sounded a lot like what No 00’s describing. basically, figuring out how the instincts work. I was taking my emotional state as a black box and watching very carefully which inputs resulted in what outputs, and further, how some of those outputs had a tendency to make me want certain inputs. I was surprised at some of the results... it turned out that what I wanted was pretty different from what I thought I wanted. the desires for being, power, and sex, and continuity of being (different from just the desire for being, somehow... like a restless drone in the background) lent their influence in so many ways, and apparently, almost always continuously.

I stopped doing it because even though it was fun and there were a couple big break-throughs, eventually I just hit a lot of dead ends. It took more energy than I had to keep doing it, so I lost interest and decided to just pay more attention to sensate experiencing and enjoying myself.

I like your description of the black box of undeterminable feelings. It demonstrates well that when you ‘have’ feelings, as an outsider, so to speak, they remain strange and mysterious. Once I acknowledged that I am my feelings and my feelings are me, then I found myself right in the midst of the ‘black box’ and my feelings became more accessible, more observable, less mysterious and volatile.

I could easily see in what way I could replace a feeling compassion for the suffering all of human kind (which has no tangible effect whatsoever except on me who is feeling it) with an active and tangible change in the way I treat people in my immediate surrounding.

I always have difficulty with this one.

You are not the first. Here is an example of what someone wrote many years ago with a remarkably similar agenda to your own –

You might have stumbled upon something richard but at the rate your going someone else with enough intelligent and love for his fellow human beings to learn how to communicate is going to get the actualism message across because your failing miserably. An Observation, Listbot, Mon 12.9.1999

It is simply not possible to preserve the good emotions and discard, or distance oneself from, the bad emotions – this has been tried for 5000 years of recorded history and peace on earth is nowhere in sight. If you want to be free from the human condition then the instinctual passions will have to go as a whole package, nurture included.

Why does actualism/actualists see the good feelings as ineffective motivators of practical actual caring, i.e. compassion as having [quote] "no tangible effect whatsoever except on me who is feeling it [unquote] but eagerly acknowledges the bad feelings as motivating all the murder and mayhem in the world?

In a ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience it is readily observable that both the loving and desirable feelings as well as the hostile and invidious feelings are but two sides of the same coin and arise both out of the instinctual animal survival package. Not only are the good feelings ‘ineffective to eliminate suffering and violence, they actually contribute to it. Emotional caring only cares for those one feels connected with and will always exclude those who don’t fall into that category. Furthermore, actualism doesn’t state that ‘all the murder and mayhem’ is only motivated by the bad feelings but that it is caused by the whole of the instinctual survival package every human is endowed with at birth.

The best practical actually caring thing anyone can do is to become aware of their own instinctually driven feelings and passions in order to stop imposing them on their fellow human beings.

My experience with becoming gradually free from aspects of my identity is that as those aspects fall away I gradually forget that they ever existed. As such I not only not miss those aspects that I left behind but I often wonder what all the fuss is/was about.

For me, nipping in the bud comes mainly into play when I have already understood the core of the problem and need to entirely erase a persistent visceral habit. For instance when I applied myself to investigating the issue of love, I fairly quickly understood the dream that lays behind the pining feeling of love and awareness revealed the manipulating possessiveness of the feeling of love. However, it took me much longer to detect these feelings the moment they arose and to disempower the emotional feel-good hooks and tentacles before they had a chance to really take hold. Such feelings seem to have a life of their own until ongoing attentiveness and a sustained period of ‘nipping in the bud’ finally cut them dry.

I know well the seductive temptation to dramatize ‘me’ under the guise of ‘self’-exploration (and most Western therapy groups thrive on this tool of ‘self’-enhancement) – that’s why the pure intent to become free from the human condition in toto is essential. After I decided to give actualism a go I recognized that this would involve abandoning all that I had tried in the past – I would describe this turn-around as ‘cutting the crap and getting out of misery as fast as possible’.

My experience is that one does not need to exaggerate feelings as attentiveness itself reveals not only the invidious nature of affective feelings but it also reveals the full range of affective feelings whether it be from feeling slightly annoyed to being overcome by blind rage, from feeling a mild ennui to plummeting into gut-wrenching despair, from feeling a little worried to sinking into a full-blown paranoia, from feeling a little detached to plunging into a dissociative state, and so on. No need for exaggeration as every human being has the capacity to feel the feel the full gamut of affective feelings.

For me to keep my hands in my pocket while neither repressing, nor expressing nor acting upon my feelings but allowing myself to feel the feeling in order that I could be attentive to the nature of the particular feeling whilst it is happening was extremely sensible advice. This allows me to put the feeling in a bind – it is like holding the feeling under a microscope rather than letting it go unobserved or letting it run rampant as is normally the case.

*

On the way to an actual freedom the apparent ‘price’ I pay is in fact a gradual unburdening of unnecessary emotional baggage and silly worries – i.e. nothing at all valuable is lost on the way while a valuable and delicious freedom is gained. It’s a win-win situation.

What I found was that the ‘background noise’ is actually the engine of ‘me’ running all the time ready to flare up at any given opportunity. Although the opportunities to ‘flare’ become more and more rare, given that I am no longer bait for most of the usual follies and passions, the engine noise will only stop when ‘I’ am finally extinct.

Once I got tired of berating myself for feeling worried and being emotional I decided to focus on eliminating the ‘silly’ actions that produced stress in my life. As an example, I found that having less material goods and less financial security meant that I needed to work less which then gave me less to be stressed about, more time for myself and thus more time to sort myself out. I also found that the more I considered the effect my words and actions would have on others, the less fearful I had to be of people in general to the point where the fear subsided and I found that I actually like other people as fellow human beings. (See also: richard/audiotapeddialogues/puttingtheotherbeforeoneself.htm)

Something Richard said recently made me prick up my ears. I was telling him about something that worried me during the previous week and he said ‘it doesn’t make sense, it must be a feeling’.

In my experience with the actualism method, I didn’t nip many emotions in the bud until I was certain that the whole issue that brought on the emotion had been examined and clearly understood.

By neither repressing nor expressing an emotion I have opportunity to ask some investigative questions, either in the situation, if I am not too upset, or some time afterwards when the worst of the storm has passed. My questions go something like this – what brought on the emotional reaction, what is the underlying cause, what is the reoccurring theme, what is the belief behind it, what is it I particularly hold dear that caused my getting upset, what part of my identity feels insulted, threatened, annoyed, etc., what action do I possibly need to take in order to prevent a reoccurring of my upset, and finally, what part of ‘me’ do I need to let go of in order to permanently become free from this particular emotional reaction?

Some emotional reactions I could easily dismiss as being plain silly such as complaints about the weather, about obstacles in the traffic, about people being late, and so on. These situations merely needed a change of attitude, some attentiveness to stop the old habit and then the emotion would not occur again by my sheer determination not to let such trivia bug me. For those issues that needed no further inquiry, nipping any upcoming emotional reaction in the bud was the perfect and only sensible solution.

Other issues took more inquisitiveness, attentiveness, guts and intent to look at the uncomfortable dark side of ‘me’ in order to get to the bottom of reoccurring emotional reactions. For instance, when I first met Peter I had a lot of male-female issues that caused me to get upset which could only be resolved by me finding out the facts of the matter and then letting go of my various idea, opinions, beliefs and feelings around being a woman, i.e. my social identity of being a woman.

Another area that needed extensive exploration had to do with my feelings of love and loyalty for my former spiritual teacher. I began to inch my way into slowly questioning the sensibility of being loyal in the face of blatant contradictions between his teachings and his behaviour and his promises and the actual outcome of practicing his teachings, but for a while each time someone else said something against him I flared up, so much so that for the first 3 months Peter and I agreed to not talk about ‘the war’. It was clear for me that this could only be a temporary measure and I steadily proceeded with finding out the facts of the matter despite my reoccurring feelings of fear, doubt, suspicion, defensiveness, treachery and abandonment that this course of action could sometimes create. Those feelings only permanently disappeared when I managed to irrevocably let go of my identity of being a follower, a member of the clan, a worshipper and lover of a Godman, a New-Age goody-two-shoes and a spiritual seeker and believer.

From those two examples you can see that the actualism method is not a superficial tool to make bad feeling go away – it is, when used correctly, a powerful instrument for radical, i.e. eradicating, change. It’s my identity I willingly let go of when I apply attentiveness and understanding and as a consequence the feelings that were produced and maintained by the respective parts of my identity also disappear.

As an analogy, you could say that the good and bad feelings are only the tip of the iceberg, the tangible aspect of one’s identity. As such, when I pay increasing attention as to how I experience this moment of being alive, increasing parts of the iceberg, ‘me’, come to the surface – and this is a necessary process if one is to bring one’s ‘self’ to the light for progressive dissolution.

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

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

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

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

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

How to link the identity to my feelings? That’s easy – the pure consciousness experience makes it undeniably clear that ‘I’, the social and instinctual identity, am a feeling identity … therefore any affective feeling is always an articulation of one’s identity in action. Even if one does not have a clear memory of having had a PCE, the simple act of being attentive experientially reveals that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’.

When I began to pay exclusive attention to this moment of being alive I soon became aware that my social and instinctual identity thrives on gloomy and antagonistic feelings as well as loving and compassionate feelings whereas feeling happy and delighted deprives the identity of its nourishment. Hence Richard’s method to minimize both the good and the bad feelings while activating and enhancing the felicitous feelings made imminent sense.

This method is not to be confused with the spiritual method of not identifying or not associating with one’s feelings and thoughts – as in the Buddhist practice of detachment – as this practice only serves to create a new pseudo identity, an identity who actively dis-identifies from unwanted aspects of one’s old identity. In actualism I readily acknowledge that ‘I’ in toto am the problem and then proceed to facilitate ‘my’ demise.

As for ‘how did you investigate those feelings’, i.e. those feelings that don’t necessarily have beliefs attached to them – I found that there was no need to make a distinction between feelings with beliefs and feelings without beliefs. Given that my aim is to eliminate ‘me’, the identity, in toto, any feeling that prevents me from being happy and harmless is acknowledged, felt and labelled as it arises, neither expressed nor suppressed but attentively observed, in order that I can then either nip it in the bud or, if need be, explore and understand it fully so as to then be able to abandon it.

Feelings connected with beliefs inevitably surfaced whenever the particular belief was challenged. The only way to completely disempower the feelings is to abandon the belief – no belief, no need to feel defensive, feel aggrieved, feel the need to attack and so on. Even when I thought I had eliminated my major beliefs, such as my religious and spiritual beliefs, I would nevertheless discover yet more beliefs that I had inadvertently taken on board and these beliefs made themselves apparent by the fact that I got upset or sad or irritated about what someone said or did.

Undertaking an exploration of one’s own feelings when and as they are occurring – becoming fascinated with the business of being alive – is the means to developing apperceptive awareness, a prerequisite to becoming free of the human condition itself.

‘Now it seems important to identify the more subtle feelings, moods and affections that indicate ‘me’ coming to the foreground. And they are more the ‘good’ feelings and the ‘no-feelings’ – as I called them once – that I need to be aware of.’ Vineeto, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, Alan, 23.4.2000

The word I would use now, in hindsight, for those ‘no-feelings’ of lack-lustre and listlessness is resentment of being here. Within the human condition there is a basic resentment of not wanting to be here, wanting to be somewhere else, waiting for something else to happen than what is happening now as a basic attitude to life which is then reinforced by the various religious and spiritual conditioning that life on earth is essentially suffering and that the real life will only happen for the spirit after you die.

This resentment to being here, as this body, in the world-as-it-is with people-as-they-are, was what was responsible for my dull feelings, no-feelings, my listlessness, my boredom, my waiting for something else to happen, in short, it had permeated almost all experience of life in that it had cast a dulling shade over everything I experienced.

The way to deal with resentment in the actualism method is the same way you deal with all other feelings that interfere with you being happy and harmless – when paying attention how you experience this moment of being alive, you notice it, then label it which helps you realise that it would be silly to carry on with it when you can instead enjoy being alive. With a steady increase in attentiveness the shift of resenting being here to appreciating being here becomes progressively easier until you finally kick the insidious habit of resentment altogether and delight in being alive for the simple reason that you are alive.

As ‘I’ am a feeling ‘being’ I cannot experience life devoid of feelings (unless in a PCE) – any ‘no-feelings’ are still feelings of dullness, lacklustre-ness, listlessness, resentment or boredom or are the result of one repressing one’s feelings and as such are not neutral at all.

From the three kinds of feelings – good feelings, bad feelings and felicitous feelings – the felicitous feelings are in fact the neutral feelings in that they render ‘me’ useless as my experience of life is already enchanting and delightful while both the good and the bad feelings give ‘me’ credence and sustenance and thus increase the dominance of ‘me’ as a feeler.

As Richard recommends –

Richard: I can recommend that one minimises the effect that both the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ feelings have on you (the enhancement of the ‘good’ feelings has been tried and tried again and again and has failed and failed again and again). The affective energy previously channelled into the vain attempt to combat the ‘bad’ with the ‘good’ is now released to expand the felicitous feelings which, along with sensuousness (another no-no in spirituality) and naiveté‚ will result in a wide-eyed wonder which may very well eventuate in apperceptiveness ... given sufficient pure intent to bring about peace-on-earth by allowing the already always existing perfection to become apparent. Richard, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, No 12b, 27Feb99