I am perfectly clear that ‘me’ is at the core of it. When one is clear that this instinctual ‘me’ is at the core of it then are you saying that the only way to diminish it is through experiential understanding?

From my personal experience and from what others are reporting, only experiential understanding and deliberate action can diminish and eradicate ‘me’, because each single aspect of ‘me’ has to be brought to light, investigated and made redundant. The first thing for me was to decide to stop being malicious, whatever happens. For that I had to investigate the causes of my malicious feelings, whenever they occurred – otherwise stopping malice would have only resulted in repressing the feeling. The urge to feel and act malicious most often occurs when ‘I’, the identity, feel threatened, attacked, ignored, denigrated, misunderstood, etc. The social identity is nothing but an emotion-based image of ‘me’, learnt and developed since childhood which overlays the animal instinctual passions.

I understand this and realize that it may have nothing to do with you at all. The ‘old brain’ may be reacting to you who it perceives as a threat because of a childhood memory of an authority figure such as a parent.

Our memory is a curious thing. Scientists seem to have found out that the ‘old brain’ has its own separate memory of events, which are mainly emotional-only reactions of our psyche to factual events. Further, memory works in a way that we only recall the last time we remembered the event rather than remembering the original event and, as such, our memory is very unreliable. What I found when I cautiously asked my mother about certain events that I had remembered in a therapy session, my memory didn’t match with her report of the events. But because my memory was an emotionally valued memory, I held it to be true and refused to take on board her report of events.

I could probably say that for a few years I was a therapy-junkie, going through many groups in which I was emoting and expressing anger and sorrow, hitting imaginary parents in the form of pillows, only to start to feel love, forgiveness and compassion for them a few hours or days later. I could never work out why all this hard ‘transformational’ work never showed the desired result – to free me from my ongoing problems in relationships with people. I had maybe dented the authority of my parents but I had never questioned the reason for my need to divide other people into categories of higher and lower powers and then feeling and acting according to my categorization.

Only when I discovered Actual Freedom, and experienced that animal instinctual passions were at the core of my emotions, did I begin to understand why therapy didn’t work. Psychoanalysis is built on the false premise that our ‘unconscious’ emotional memories consist of repressed childhood memories. Analysts presume that by uncovering childhood memories all problems should be solved. Freud and his colleagues were completely unaware of the programming of the instinctual passions in every newborn baby which exist before parents and peers even begin to apply their influence and to add yet another layer – our moral and ethical values – to the program of the human psyche.

*

When I become aware of that identity by questioning the cause of my anger, resentment, bad mood, annoyance, etc., I can then become aware of the contents and program of this social identity – ‘me’ who I think and feel I am.

I am aware of this identity yet sometimes I still have no control over its automatic reactions.

Yes, control over automatic instinctual reactions through morals and ethics doesn’t work. Only eradication will do the trick.

*

Becoming aware of my multi-facetted identity bit by bit, combined with the clear intent to eradicate my malice and sorrow, allows me to diminish my feeling-fed social identity as each particular aspect is being explored and understood.

I understand the bit by bit part such as this incident with you. However, I am not sure about this approach, as it seems to be a never-ending process to explore each particular aspect of it.

My experience is that when I investigate a particular aspect of ‘me’ to the core the issue eventually disappears after a few months of thorough investigation – as happened in tracing my belief in authority back to the belief in some spurious ultimate protective and punitive universal ‘Energy’. I now stand on my own two feet and decide according to what is silly and what is sensible.

Linking an unwanted automatic behaviour or emotional reaction to a childhood memory is the traditional approach to looking at emotions but it doesn’t reveal the functioning of one’s instinctual program. But as you explore a particular emotional reaction and come to experientially understand how ‘you’ at your core is functioning in this particular aspect, then you will eventually see the switch to turn this function off.

For instance, once I know by experience that I am, like all human beings, instinctually programmed to automatically and instantly react in ‘self’-defence, then I can focus my awareness to this instant automatic reaction until ‘I get a foot in the door’, de-automatize my instinctual reaction, understand that it is silly to act that way, until it stops occurring by itself. But the exploration needs to be experiential – cognitive knowledge doesn’t scratch the surface.

*

What makes this enterprise more challenging is the fact that the automatic survival program of the ‘self’ doesn’t easily reveal its secrets. It needs great determination and courage to persist and search beyond all kinds of ‘smoke-screens’ that ‘I’ produce in order to stay hidden and in existence. ‘I don’t feel it anymore’, ‘it’s not so bad after all’, ‘it wasn’t my fault’, ‘I have something important to do now’ – there are literally hundreds of schemes to evade oneself – this is all part of the same discovery game.

This could be happening now as I can’t really see a complete resolution of it through the process you have described. It seems that since I see that the instinctual ‘me’ is at the bottom of it that it could be ended by seeing the fact of this. What has helped in this case with you is that I am not blaming you and I fully realize that ‘I’ am responsible for my own malice and sorrow and that it has nothing to do with you personally.

This realization that no-one else is to blame for one’s feelings is the 180 degree turn away from one’s first instinctual defensive reaction, and it will give you the necessary momentum for further exploring the upcoming issues. What I noticed was when I stopped blaming other people or the weather or the situation for my moods and actions, the ‘heat’ of my emotions had nowhere to go. Literally sitting on a bombshell of emotional energy I could then put this energy into exploring first the trigger and then the underlying cause of my feelings or emotions and thoroughly investigate my moral and ethical beliefs that act to cover up the raw instinctual passions. I uncovered a lot of taboos and moral and ethical considerations that I first had to explore and remove before I experienced the underlying bare instincts soaring to the surface.

There is no instant ‘seeing’ as a main switch for the program of animal instinctual passions as far as I know. But whatever ‘switch’ you have turned through experiential investigation is a reliable step closer to being happy and harmless.

And what more exciting thing could there be to do with one’s life?!

I recall a few days ago you wrote about your unhappiness...

As for ‘a few days ago you wrote about your unhappiness’ – you can only be referring to my writing to Alan a month ago –

Doing some more ‘reflective contemplation’ on the issue I began to understand that comparison is almost a constant undercurrent whenever the ‘self’ is in action. Sometimes as a slight tension in the background, sometimes an obvious sadness invoked by feeling inadequate, comparison to others and my own standards seems to be almost synonymous with being a self. Getting this far in my contemplation there was the conclusion, bright and clear – I not only feel inadequate, I am inadequate, because according to my own standards I haven’t finished my job and my destiny. If I ever want to be adequate, then self-immolation is the only way to achieve my aim. Until then I can strive or resign, toss and turn – there is no solution within the Human Condition. It’s cute how every follow-up of and digging into issues always ends up at the same point, giving me more fuel to live on the edge of the imminent inevitable.

In Actual Freedom, of course there is no comparison – everybody is doing what is happening and one is doing it the best one can because that’s where the fun is. It is really that easy. Vineeto to Alan, 10.5.2000

What I described to Alan was an accurate account of how I deal with an emotion that occurs. As long as there is some trace of an instinctual self remaining, there are occasionally emotions happening, because emotions are the very substance of the instinctual self. However, having learnt how to investigate and deal with my emotions and being no longer blinkered and fettered by the torturous restrictions of my moral, ethical and spiritual conditioning, any exploration into an emotional issue is a thrilling adventure. This is in marked contrast to my spiritual years when my fruitless inquiries into problems through therapy and meditation were never able to remove the ongoing underlying unhappiness and dissatisfaction. With the actualism method I can explore the emotion to its very root, investigate the facts and resolve the issue – like I did in the paragraph described above.

This procedure is 180 degrees opposite to spiritual therapy, which I have tried and applied extensively for years. In spiritual therapy one is encouraged to express the emotion, indulge in imagination and venting and then shift from feeling the bad emotions to feeling the good emotions – moving from anger to compassion, from hate to love and from fear to bliss and Oneness. Despite years of spiritual therapy – and Mr. Rajneesh boasted of having the best therapists in his Ashram – I did not resolve my issues of relationship, jealousy, comparison, greed, lust, fear, anger, power, authority, neediness, inadequacy, pride or loneliness. All those issues have now disappeared by thorough investigation and understanding, by slowly, slowly getting rid of my precious adopted spiritual identity, my instilled social identity and by experientially understanding the makings and substance of the Human Condition.

RESPONDENT:

1. you no longer need to be mothered

VINEETO: ‘Being mothered’ is clearly an expression for not only a physical taking care but also a close emotional relationship. Mother-child is the most primary relationship for a human being when starting life. A mother – or a substitute mother – is essential for the baby to physically survive and in later years – together with the father – essential for the child to learn the basic functions and rules in the world. From the parents one gets one’s first and strongest imprint and conditioning, and scientist say that in the first seven years one’s character is basically formed. In a physical sense it may well be that one ‘no longer need[s] to be mothered’ from the time one leaves home, but the roots of one’s identity are shaped by mother or father and the positive and negative feelings for mother or father usually play a considerable part in one’s life – unless one leaves home emotionally and physically.

Although I had done various primal therapy groups to investigate my emotional ties with my parents, there was still a lot to do and to investigate when I came across actualism. Psychology gives great credence and value to one’s memories of childhood feelings, be it anger, resentment, love, dependency or trauma and works to reconcile the now-adult with the past feelings of childhood – while actualism aims to find the root of a particular emotional hang-up, to understand the cause and eliminate it as part of one’s identity, as a son or daughter. For instance, when the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ brings up a feeling of guilt connected to the values instilled by my mother, I would contemplate about guilt in the Human Condition as one of the moral functions that keep the social and religious system in place. With this understanding guilt is no longer a personal issue between two individuals, but an issue of the Human Condition instilled in me.

With enough courage and the firm intent born out of a PCE I can then step out of that part of my social identity and leave the values of being a ‘good daughter’ behind. The same procedure applies for any other issue connected with the mother-daughter, mother-son relationship, like loneliness, authority, fear and security, duty, peer pressure, etc. One needs not delve into the unreliable memories of childhood hurts but only investigate the feeling that is arising now as it applies to one now and as one is experiencing it now. Understanding is only needed in order that one can take action to be free of the feeling in any future moments where a similar situation may trigger a similar feeling. Be wary of trolling past memories for if one lifts the lid, the garbage bin will forever fill itself up again. Psychological and psychic therapy that focuses on childhood issues has failed for this very reason.

Only then I can say with confidence that I ‘no longer need to mothered’.

RESPONDENT:

2. your mother needs to be ‘mothered’, ie; professionally cared for, nursed and hospitalized etc.

VINEETO: I can go along with your statement that the mother needs to be ‘ professionally cared for, nursed and hospitalized etc.’ , if that is the case, but there is also the issue that people want to be taken care of in the emotional sense of the word. It is usually the demand for emotional care, the pressure to ‘give back what I have given to you’, etc. that creates conflict and stress.

An actualist will deal with this conflict like with any other conflict – not trying to change the other (which is impossible), but changing oneself in that one removes the stranglehold of the Human Condition in oneself and thus becomes un-afflicted and un-affected by the emotional demands of others, be they mother, doctor, brother or peers.

Then one can, with ease and delight, sort out the practical necessities and find the best and most sensible solution for everyone involved.

RESPONDENT:

3. emotions, (like love and compassion), will only ever get in the way of what is actually best for both of you unless you use this serendipitous opportunity to explore the cause of your concerns etc.

VINEETO: As you point out, to say that ‘emotions, (like love and compassion), will only ever get in the way...’ is not enough to free oneself from their clutch. Usually one attempts to suppress one’s feelings by calling them inappropriate. As we know from Richard’s experience of 11 years of enlightenment, love and compassion, the ‘good emotions’, have a strong grip on the ‘Self’ and need extensive investigation into what it is that ties one to this big club called Humanity.

So, any opportunity is a ‘serendipitous opportunity to explore the cause’ of the underlying feeling, emotion and instinctual passion of one’s concern. What’s left is genuine benevolence and actual concern for one’s fellow human being. (...)

*

RESPONDENT:

6. your best may only mean providing temporarily distraction from her difficulties for a while.

VINEETO: Personally, my best would be to learn how not to be affected by someone else’s feelings and demands such that I can make an appropriate and sensible response to the situation and enjoy the other’s company when we are together.

RESPONDENT:

7. while old age and ill-health can be emotionally traumatic for all concerned we live in a very medically advanced society especially in terms of our care of the elderly.

VINEETO: Yes, ‘we live in a very medically advanced society’. Therefore it is very well possible to have an old age that is as pleasant and as comfortable as one’s middle age. One can also have an old age that is as emotionally traumatic as one’s middle age unless one does something about it, and this will have the added advantage that one then won’t be an emotional burden to one’s children!

Strangely enough I have hardly met anyone who was interested in changing his or her painful, sorrowful or traumatic situation for a happy and harmless life, whatever the age or gender. Emotional traumas are for those who like to keep their emotions and their identity. But, in fact, there is no need to have an emotional trauma at all, provided one is ready to give them up and willing to investigate into the source of one’s feelings and emotions.

Eliminating one’s identity and leaving Humanity behind has the great advantage that one does not need to suffer with the sufferers and/or rescue the victims of self-imposed suffering. In my experience, most people want sympathy and com-passion (the word means literally – company in suffering), but nobody is interested in practical methods to bring about actual change – so any attempt to rescue others or offer advice is only like pissing in the wind – you get wet for trying.

But it is always good fun to tell my story...

RESPONDENT: I would say that I am doing ok which is a relative term. I wouldn’t call it good but I would call it ok. When I look at my total situation it seems that I ‘have it made’ except for the problem with my mother. I realize that the real issue is the instincts because if this problem didn’t exist then I am sure that other issues would most likely arise.

VINEETO: People’s automatic response is always to see their own fear, aggression, sadness or misery as being caused by the other person or the particular circumstances. I considered it a great step in my exploration when I could see that, whatever the ‘problem’, it had to do with me. And you are absolutely spot on – ‘that other issues would most likely arise’ – so best to examine the one that is so readily presenting itself...

Whenever I had an issue that bothered me and that I wanted to get rid of, I would dig into the cause of the disturbance layer by layer with the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ The first response was usually a superficial one like: ‘I don’t want to do what the other wants me to do’ or ‘I don’t like what the other just said’ or a similar resentment. Prodding further I’d come across stronger emotions such as anger, guilt, duty, shame, authority, pride or fear – or a mix of several ones. Each such emotion was worth a deeper inquiry as to the underlying rules, beliefs, morals and ethics that triggered and constituted those emotions and distorted my relationship to the particular person. It was often scary but always a great adventure to question my fixed perception and behaviour and explore a solution 180 degrees in the other direction to my familiar reactions. By being suspicious about my automatic belief of what is ‘true’, ‘good’ and ‘right’, I was then able to start assessing the facts of the situation rather than indulging in, or fighting against, my emotional reactions to what was happening.

Facts are what is actual, tangible, discernable, provable, practical, and by knowing the facts one can consider what will be the best for everybody involved. Emotions, by their very nature, are always ‘self’-centred and always non-factual – however, the physical symptoms that often accompany the appearance of the emotions make them very real, and it needs great attentiveness and persistent observation to disentangle oneself from their convincing instinctual grip.

In your investigations you might come across ancient scary tales, collective superstitions, nonsense disguised as ancient wisdom, hoary psittacisms, moralistic no-no’s, ethical taboos, fear of ostracism, weird inner psychic horror movies ... With all those possible ‘ghosts’ emerging from the depth of one’s psyche it is important to clearly distinguish between fact and feeling. Facts are tangible, constant, reliable, whereas feelings will invariable fade if one stops feeding them.

By tracing each of the upcoming emotions to their very roots I was then able to determine that they had nothing to do with the practical facts of the situation, but were the chemically induced and socially established reactions of the instinctual survival system. It was, however, essential that I gained this insight experientially in order to replace the emotion with contemplation and sensibility rather than merely suppressing it. Suppressing emotion is sheer postponement and a sure way to accumulate problems until they become unbearable. Once I had extracted every bit of necessary information by experiencing the emotions I could then make sensible judgements and appropriate changes in my behaviour such that I could resume being happy and harmless again.

In the glossary of the The Actual Freedom Trust Library you can find annotations and related correspondence on affection, aggression, desire, doubt, fear, feeling, emotion, instinct, nurture, pride, sorrow as well as their antidotes – actual, apperception, contemplation, fact, happy, harmless, sensuousness, judgement and common sense. Reading and re-reading I found to be an excellent tool to make myself familiar with, and accustomed to, the radical and iconoclastic way of actualism and to rewire my brain into the new way of thinking and acting.

But following the anger there came resentment? We have been well trained to put the emotion aside to deal ‘sensibly’ in a situation, but the emotion does not disappear. The spiritual version has been to dis-identify, as in – ‘this is not me, just my ego...’ By neither repressing nor expressing the emotion one is able to discover that particular aspect of the Human Condition in oneself that gave rise to the emotion in the first place. It is studying one’s own inner workings, seeing the tricks of the cunning entity that inhabits each of us. Have you ever watched a magician at work? His tricks look all so coherent and really miraculous, but once you know his tricks, the credibility of his whole show falls in a heap, it is not convincing anymore. The same applies to the ‘self’ – once one of its tricks is dismantled, one particular conviction or belief, one emotional response to a situation, it does not work so well the next time, and the third time it won’t work at all... Then one corner of the ‘self’ has been cleaned out. One track in the brain has been re-wired.

Hmm, that makes sense, and my experiences so far would show this to be true. I just need to keep going with it, not giving up. I think that if I had a recent PCE then that would help even better.

At quite an early point on my way to actual freedom I found that as I proceeded the rungs of the ‘ladder’ would disappear behind me. With every understanding of a particular belief that belief lost its substance – I could not believe it anymore, the rungs disappeared by the very fact of seeing it as a belief instead of a truth. The same applied to feelings and emotions. Realizing that my emotion consisted of a combination of my instincts and vivid imagination they lost their credibility. This understanding made it clear that every attempt to give up was merely a postponing of what I had already seen as the desirable goal in life – to be free from malice and sorrow. And as for postponement – the very fact that there is no life after death puts postponement in its place – a waste of precious time, time that I could be happy was wasted in delay because of my lack of courage. That understanding spurred me on, it gave me back pressure to persist in spite of fear, fright, apprehension, trembling or cowering. Yes, fear is par for the course but one can do something about it, one can ride on the thrill into yet another discovery.

I think the main problem for me and also probably for most people is to overcome the habit of following emotions or impulses that habitually arise in one’s psyche. For a simple example if I sense an itch on my arm I usually scratch the itch instead of paying attention to the itch, investigating the sensation behind it. I think the itch is a good example because, at least in my case, when I start paying attention to it the itch intensifies before it goes away. Likewise when I feel unappreciated at work I tend to compensate with food or sometimes (especially in the past year) meditation!!! I would feel really calm and good after Vipassana. Chocolate and coffee with ice cream make me feel great, too. Speaking of which I have to run to the kitchen to brew us a couple of cups of this ‘divine’ liquid.

This question of yours fits in with the issue of the other letter about Vipassana, so I will combine the two letters. Today I find it strange that none of all the ‘oh so wise’ spiritual teachers really were able to make a distinction between sensations and feelings. I myself only learned to be precise when I came across Actual Freedom, and now the difference seems so obvious that I don’t know how I could have ever mixed the two!

Sensations are everything we perceive with our senses – touch, smell, taste, colour, form, sound, itch, pain, moisture, temperature, sexual pleasure, etc.

Feelings are affective reactions to our surroundings.

When you have chocolate and coffee with ice-cream you mix sensation and feeling, the pleasure of the senses tasting sweet and bitter and then, consequently, you are ‘feeling’ good. But one doesn’t need ‘feeling’ to fully enjoy a cup of coffee with ice-cream, on the contrary, ‘me’ as a feeling identity acts as a buffer to the intensity of the sensate pleasure. ‘Feeling’ is only there as long as a ‘me’ is alive. ‘I’ am feelings and feelings are ‘me’, ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’, ‘I’ am love and love is ‘me’. Check it out for yourself. You might find that you are conscious of the sensation and a split second later you have a feeling – or mixed feelings – about it. But in that split second you were aware only of the physical sensation.

There has been such good writing lately in both Peter’s and Richard’s latest correspondence with paragraph upon paragraph of accurate descriptions of what actualism and Actual Freedom are all about. As the self-appointed librarian I wish there were adequate ‘exhibition rooms’ in order to not have those words disappear in the vastness of the website.

Yesterday I found in Richard’s latest correspondence a description of the self in action that was so excellent and brilliant in its accuracy and preciseness that, in view of our latest discussions about emotions on the list, I will post it here.

Respondent: There is, for me, something very similar in both positive and negative feelings. What am I trying to say? I think there is a central figure that in one case (positive feelings – like being in love) is grasping and in the other (negative feelings – being angry, repulsed) is pushing away. There is a centre to all this feeling that tries to maintain itself by what – by nurturing itself by grasping for things, or defending itself by pushing things away? Is this the primitive self structure you are talking about?

Richard: Yes. Richard, General Correspondence, No 9

‘Pushing away’ and ‘grasping’ – these are indeed the two opposite actions that I observe as ‘me’, the ‘self’ in action, depending on the emotion that is arising at the time. And in this very description of the ‘primitive self structure’ there also lies the solution for catching the bugger and moving closer towards self-immolation. To stop pushing away bad, fearful, angry and sorrowful feelings and to stop grasping the good, loving and blissful feelings leaves ‘me’ with nothing to hang my hat on – an absolute fascinating experience when put into practice. There is a quality of suspense when I not let feelings take me on a ride, be they ‘good’ or ‘bad’, a thrill of doing the unfamiliar, an aliveness that is experienced just before popping through into the actual world in a PCE.

The other fascinating observation was that refusing to go along with any emotion in one direction – ie fear – the temptation then appears to draw me into the opposite direction – ie feeling on cloud nine. Considering that instinctual passions and chemical reactions in the brain go hand in hand the pairing of emotions makes sense because to counteract a strong fear the amygdala will pump a strong dose of chemicals producing ecstatic feeling in order to overcome the fear to ensure one’s survival. In order to permanently get rid of the bad feelings, at the same time I will have to examine and get rid of the accompanying good feeling as well.

Peter said it well in his recent letter to mailing list B:

2. What made you realize that the PCE was of this world and not from ‘above’?

The major reason was that I had experienced both a PCE and a Satori, and both of equal length. The only similarity between them is that they are both experienced as ‘other’ worldly – i.e. outside of one’s ‘normal’ experiencing of normally grim reality.

The Satori experience is of another world where ‘I’ feel love, oneness, wholeness, spaceless and timeless. The experience is ‘of the heart’, a feeling-only experience where normal ‘I’ is replaced with a new grander version who is at-one-with the universe. This experience is termed an altered state of consciousness whereby ‘my’ consciousness or perception is altered from fearful mortal to fearless immortal. All of this merely goes on in the head but is felt in the heart due to the increased chemical flows triggered by the primitive brain. Many altered states of consciousness experiences happen during a dark night of the soul when thoughts of hopelessness, depression, futility and even suicide are running. The very desperate near death thoughts can induce a near death experience that triggers a chemical flow to the body and brain that produces euphoric feelings. These feelings are usually accompanied by imaginary visions of a religious nature, dependant solely upon the person’s culture or current inclination. Thus it is that Christians can ‘hear’, ‘see’ or ‘feel’ the Lord or the white light leading to Heaven while Eastern religious followers feel Oneness, Wholeness, Godliness, God intoxicated or whatever. The tell-tale clue of an altered state of consciousness experience is that the ‘new perception’ is always cultural or religious specific and it is always accompanied by powerful emotions triggered by chemical flows from the instinctual primitive brain.

A pure consciousness experience, on the other hand, has neither an imaginary (cerebral) nor an affective (emotional) component. <snip>

3. Is the PCE neurological, biological, psychological ... or what would you say?

Given that a PCE, or peak experience as it sometimes referred to, can often be induced by drugs or traumatic experiences that alter the brain’s chemical balance it would indicate that the onset of a PCE is neuro-biological phenomena. This is confirmed by the fact that modern neuro-biological research by Joseph LeDoux and others are beginning to trace emotions such as fear to the automatic reaction of the primitive brain. The amygdala in particular is being identified as the source that activates a flow of chemicals in the body as an automatic fight or flight response in the face of danger. This instinctual chemical flow reaches the neo-cortex or modern cognitive brain a split second later and is interpreted by the alien entity as psychological and/or psychic fear. In the PCE, it would seem that this pathway from the ancient instinctual brain to the modern cognitive brain no longer functions, i.e. it is temporarily blocked. The modern brain, thus freed from its instinctual ‘self’-centred passion-producing companion, the primitive brain (amygdala), is able to operate freely with a pure consciousness.

The physical senses – the stalks of the brain – are similarly freed of the ever-fearful guard duty that is imposed on the modern brain by the instinctual primitive brain. This freedom from chemical assault results in a startling sensate-only experience of the actual world that is best described as sensuous delight. It is as though colours are far more vibrant, sounds far louder, tastes more flavoursome, touch more sensual, smells more fragrant and everything is experienced as vibrant and not merely passive.

In the PCE, the experience of ‘self’-lessness, the lack of any instinctual passion, the clarity of thought and reflection and the heightened physical senses all accord with the neo-cortex being freed from the insidious influence of the animal instinctual reptilian brain. How this happens physically in a PCE is, to my knowledge, yet to be mapped by empirical science but there is clear evidence that a permanent disconnection has been deliberately induced by at least one person and is being deliberately induced by a handful of others.

This is, of course, a clinical scientific description only and the process cannot be separated from its psychological and psychic ramifications and, as such, the term ‘self’-immolation is a more evocatively accurate term to describe this process. Peter, List B, No 10

Contemplating further I realized that to stop pushing away and stop grasping might at first look similar to the Buddhist practice of ‘neti-neti’, ‘neither this nor that’. The approach of Buddhists and all other meditators is to remove the self from the source of trouble which at the same time removes one from the experience of the sensuousness of being alive. Spiritualism moves away from sensate and affective feelings in order to not be here while an actualist questions and eliminates affective feelings because they prevent me from being here, being the senses-only experiencing the delight of being alive in this actual perfect abundant magical world.

But Buddhists are exercising a technique to remove themselves, to dis-identify and finally to dissociate from either this or that feeling, implying that there is a true self, which they want to keep, that can remove itself from this or that feeling or thought. In actualism the emotion is experienced by neither repressing nor expressing, neither pushing nor grasping and thus one is able to examine it in reflective contemplation so as to explore the very nature of this emotion. One does not remove the self from the emotion but whittles away at the self which is the very program producing the emotion in the first place. This process, if undertaken diligently and persistently, will inevitably lead to self-immolation.

Actual Freedom lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to all religious practice and belief.

I would like to add something concerning my occasional trouble with writing that I wrote to you about last time:

A few months back I had stopped writing thinking I had nothing to contribute until I was free. A bit like – I’m not going to breathe anymore until I get what I want – which won’t get me closer to my goal. Or, to use another metaphor, one is standing on the brakes and wondering why the car doesn’t move. Now I have recently discovered another hump to overcome – ‘I might as well stop writing because Peter and Richard can say it much better than I ever will be able to anyway.’ Vineeto to Alan, 23.4.2000

Doing some more ‘reflective contemplation’ on the issue I began to understand that comparison is almost a constant undercurrent whenever the ‘self’ is in action. Sometimes as a slight tension in the background, sometimes an obvious sadness invoked by feeling inadequate, comparison to others and my own standards seems to be almost synonymous with being a self. Getting this far in my contemplation there was the conclusion, bright and clear – I not only feel inadequate, I am inadequate, because according to my own standards I haven’t finished my job and my destiny. If I ever want to be adequate, then self-immolation is the only way to achieve my aim. Until then I can strive or resign, toss and turn – there is no solution within the Human Condition. It’s cute how every follow-up of and digging into issues always ends up at the same point, giving me more fuel to live on the edge of the imminent inevitable.

In Actual Freedom, of course there is no comparison – everybody is doing what is happening and one is doing it the best one can because that’s where the fun is. It is really that easy.

I liked what Peter said to someone on mailing list B today:

An actualist is someone who is actively, intently, stubbornly, full bloodedly, whole-heartedly and totally consumed in the pursuit of an individual actual freedom from the human condition. An actualist is concerned with action not advocacy, and with practical implementation and radical change, not theoretical observation and superficial adaptation.

To undertake this process one needs to firmly know that both the real world and the spiritual world offer no solutions and how you come to that knowledge and understanding, if you do, is your business entirely. I was simply making a suggestion based on my experience and I also realize that those who follow this increasingly trodden path need not have to experience all that those who went before did.

However, any pioneering effort in the early days needs a boots-and-all approach or you will either not start or turn back at the sign of the first storm. Peter, List B, No 10

That’s the fun about actualism, the wide and wondrous path – the adventure is my life and my life is an ongoing adventure and exploration – and everyone does it differently according to what is happening and what issue they are tackling at the moment.

Looking back there were always issues that I explored, feelings and beliefs that I was deeply involved in, experiencing and exploring. Initially, the exploration was highly twisted and obstructed by morals, ethics, spiritual beliefs and social conditioning; torturous straightjackets that made every move seem wrong or bad. But only because I had experienced the failures of those beliefs, morals and ethics, could I then apply the understanding that the solutions offered are in fact not leading to a happy and harmless life, let alone peace on earth. On the contrary, they all lead 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

One of the later explorations was experiencing time. By exploring the emotions and instinctual passions that prevent me from being here, I am more and more able to simply be here, in this moment. First I realised that the future is slipping away. The past had been gone with all the emotional issues resolved that had tied me to past memories. It is fascinating to notice how by being here the notion of ‘real’ time – this imagined web of ideas and feelings about past and future and their supposed implications for this moment – is falling by the wayside and disappearing with alarming speed, leaving me at times disoriented as if a fairytale has turned into a pumpkin. But as I recovered from the confusion and its ensuing insecurity the ‘pumpkin’ turns out to be utterly delicious – each moment is a delight because it is actually happening, it is neither felt nor imagined but happening right this very moment – whatever is happening is actual. There is such an innate pleasure and satisfaction in the experience of the very actuality of this moment that whatever I do is a bonus on top of it – what abundance.

The other thing that I discovered is the seemingly inexhaustible persistence of ‘me’ inventing myself all over again after hours of happily doing what is happening. Spoiling the fun ‘I’ start furphies such as self-doubt, worry, comparison, impatience, fear or begin looking for some other self-centred emotional issue. Sometimes I wonder if my female-tinged emotional conditioning is particularly sticky or if male conditioning provides a similar fertile affinity to being an emotional being.

What is your experience?

You really get the chance to experience the full range of emotions and investigate them as far and deep as you want to go. Tender emotions are by their very nature the ones that we want to feel and keep and are therefore a bit more tricky to observe and investigate. Yet, the tender emotions are inextricably intertwined with the fearful and aggressive emotions and instinctual passions and one cannot get rid of the ‘bad’ ones without investigating love, sympathy, empathy, compassion, gratitude, belonging, pining, hope and desire.

A serendipitous wide-ranging field for investigation into the Human Condition indeed.

I wrote in my last post –

Once you understood that it is the emotions and feelings and the underlying instinctual passions that prevent you from experiencing the actual world, then every situation and everybody that triggers an emotion gives you another opportunity to contemplate, examine and explore this emotion in order to be able to get rid of it. Once the emotion is eliminated in yourself, nobody can trigger that emotion in you again, however emotional that person may be himself or herself.

The more I understood the impact and the ripples that each of my feelings, emotions and instinctual passions and its ensuing action was having on me and people around me, the more my intent grew to investigate those feelings and emotions and change my behaviour in order not to cause any more of those ripples. The intent for peace, to become completely harmless, made me look not only in the direction of the obviously uncomfortable emotions like guilt, anger and fear, but also at the cherished ones like hope, love and euphoria. The more I dug into each of the feelings that I experienced at the time, the more I understood the self-centred nature of each of them. When I am drowned in emotions I cannot sensibly consider other people and the impact my behaviour has on other people around me.

So, in order to become happy – free of guilt and remorse, apologies and resentment – I also had to change myself to become harmless and stop causing ripples in people’s lives. One does not work without the other.

‘I’ am not needed at all. Virtual Freedom is the ongoing increasing experience of ‘my’ redundancy, kind of getting used to not interfering with perfection. The way I see it now is that death is simply an extension of this continuing discovery of ‘me’, the spoiler, being redundant, turning 98% redundancy to 99% and 99% to 100% ... ... pop.

Will this ‘I’-less state result in being slow, lethargic or will our natural body system of being active – passive self-regulate into a balanced state? There will be no more ‘I’ to psychologically motivate us and to influence the body to ‘get up and do something’ rather then, for example, to sit and enjoy a sunset. Or is being slow and lethargic an emotional state that will be weeded out by then?

If in asking the question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ I get the answer ‘lethargic’, I know that there is a feeling to be looked at and investigated. In my experience, lethargy was a reluctance to investigate a scary issue, to question a deep-seated dearly held belief, to sort out peer-group pressure and explore what I had deemed to be the truth for many years. Lethargy, for me, is the same feeling that Alan calls ‘stuckness’, a seemingly non-feeling dull state where feelings are kept under the carpet because they are too scary to acknowledge and explore. Lethargy is simply another word for not wanting to be here, for whatever reason.

What got me out of lethargy or stuckness or denial or melancholy was always the sensible thought that it is my time and my life that I am wasting and that the issue will not go away by itself – nothing will change unless I change.

Enjoying being lazy is something different altogether. Doing nothing really well is an art that needs to be learned like every other ingredient of being happy and harmless. Doing nothing when there is nothing to do instead of running around frantically because ‘I’ need to add ‘meaning’ to life was an issue that I had to investigate over many months. For me, being capable of doing nothing involved exploring the fear and guilt of being useless, the need to belong to the group that was ‘doing something useful in life’ and the need of ‘me’, the identity, to assure my importance to others and to ‘myself’ with something that ‘I’ had produced. Additionally, there was the fear of boredom, the fear of being ostracized, the fear of loneliness, the fear of depression when there won’t be another meaningful task to get me out of bed the next day. All these fears were very real when experienced but none of them had actual validity for my physical survival.

The only thing I need to do is earn a living, pay the rent, fill the fridge and obey the laws of the land – the rest is a free choice of what pleasure to do next... There simply are no other rules as to what one has to do in life. And once I eliminated the need for, and the bondage of, the societal and religious morals and ethics, I am free to choose the best – which is to devote my life to becoming free from the Human Condition.

When I can enjoy doing nothing really well, I can also distinguish the difference between lethargy and laziness, guilt and hedonism, the feeling that I ‘should’ do something and the pleasure of getting my teeth stuck into an engaging project or issue. Investigating the Human Condition always boils down to ‘what feeling is preventing me now from being happy and harmless?’ – and then doing whatever is needed to change to becoming more happy and more harmless, until all of ‘me’ is eliminated in the final ‘pop’.

Have you ever watched a child dying of starvation? Its weak cries and vacant eyes, as it lies awaiting death? Have you ever walked past derelicts lying on the sidewalks, the stench of their rotting bodies wafting through the air as pedestrians step over them? Have you ever been raped by a stranger with a knife at your throat? Or had your toenails torn out one by one by some mad religious fanatic?

And all this without a thought of beauty, horror, fear, terror, judgment???

I am glad you are concerned about the suffering of other people. 160,000,000 killed in wars this century alone is sufficient evidence that something is terribly wrong with human beings. If you have a closer look, most of those wars were and are religious wars, people killing each other for their particular religious conviction and noble ideals. I know about the suffering both from experience of universal sorrow and from daily TV reports. Just the other day I saw ‘Oh, What a Lovely War’, a musical on World War I. 600,000 soldiers died on the English side alone, and at the end of the war they had gained no ground. The suffering of these soldiers was gut-wrenching, as they were living in trenches for no apparent reason but the questionable honour to die for the queen and country, in their sleepless nights listening to the cries of the wounded mates out in the fields. The survivors would even spare their wives and mothers about the horror-tales of war they had experienced.

But to have feelings of ‘beauty, horror, fear, terror’ about these facts doesn’t help anybody. ‘Horror, fear and terror’ is only an instinctual response that this might happen to me tomorrow. It won’t help me find and eliminate the cause of the violence and suffering. That you add ‘beauty’ to the list suggests the bittersweet feeling of compassion, which is just another word for ‘suffering together’ (common pathos). Compassion has been proclaimed the merciful solution to suffering but has only perpetuated it.

Mother Theresa is considered a great example of compassion, but all she did was feed and raise orphans to become a saint and be rewarded in heaven – while the pope is creating an unlimited supply of poor children with his prohibition of birth-control. I can see her compassion only as an extremely selfish behaviour. Or would you prefer the compassion of the Dalai Lama – his very title means ‘the Lord who looks down with compassion on the world of sentient beings’. In his ‘holy’ country the peasants starve while they work their butts off to pay for the dead Lamas to be replicated in gold – that is compassion! In Thailand and Vietnam, Buddhist monks have set themselves on fire for a compassionate cause, thus merely adding to the terror that was already happening.

No, ‘judgement’ is the only faculty I consider worth applying. Without the soothing veil of emotions I am experiencing the full impact of the horrendous amount of suffering that people create for each other every day. This very impact gives me the fuel and intent to stop being a contributor to both malice and sorrow, to become completely happy and harmless. And the only person I can change is myself. This means, not just applying the usual ethics from this or that religious conviction and be as good as one can repress oneself, or transcend oneself, but to extinguish the very entity inside that is the seat of our innate animalistic instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. To extinguish not only the ‘one I think I am’, the ego, but also the ‘one I feel I am’, the soul, the Self.

It takes courage to step outside of all of humanity’s values and the ‘tried and failed’ solutions. Your particular solution suggests I should be feeling guilty for being happy, because other people are suffering. That would add yet another person to the already vast number of suffering people. Having spent 15 years on the spiritual path I have experienced the enormous impact those ‘solutions’ have on the continuation of suffering and confusion people are living in.

The reason for the confusion is that none of the spiritual teachers and enlightened beings have ever dared to question the soul or ‘being’. They all are content with exchanging the little ego with the grand ‘feeling one with the Universe’, exuding compassion for thousands of years, while every one of them teaches a different version of their particular way to bliss, redemption, paradise or enlightenment. The outcome has been poverty, religious wars and the generally accepted notion that the solution to the world’s suffering could only be found in afterlife or by turning away into the imaginary world of bliss beyond ego. To see the poverty, discrimination, disease, sexual repression and degradation of women in India alone tells enough about the impact and effect Eastern religions have on people’s lives.

That we are ‘feeling beings’ is held as the distinction between us and the rest of the animal world. This proud distinction unfortunately is founded on the instinctually produced feelings of malice and sorrow, for which we have invented antidotes of love and compassion. Our sorrow is based on a feeling of dread at its very core, and many people know only too well the spiral down from sorrow to despair to horror and finally dread. Suffering is accepted as an integral unchangeable part of the Human Condition and is even lauded as a noble trait. To suffer rightly or deeply is held in high esteem and often evokes a bitter-sweet feeling. Compassion or empathy is also held in high esteem. As humans we are subject to physical dangers, losses, ill-health, accidents, floods, fires, etc. which can cause pain. But to have and indulge in emotional suffering additional to the hardship is to compound the situation to such an extent that the feelings are usually far worse than dealing with the facts would be. Further, the feeling of sorrow usually leads to feelings of resentment, retribution, revenge or anger and this backlash is then maliciously directed at others who will then have to suffer, and they in turn feel ... and on, and on, and on, it has gone for centuries.

‘Neither expression or repression emotions’ is not a question of ‘not naming’ a feeling. I personally found it very important to name, distinguish, judge, discriminate, evaluate and investigate each feeling and what has triggered it, in order to get to the source of that feeling. The aim of the game is to replace feeling with actuality, belief with fact and discover ‘who’ one thinks and feels one is. In this way, more and more beliefs have evaporated into thin air as being simply silly and the accompanying feelings of fear, guilt, loyalty, worry, sorrow, etc. disappeared with them. It takes courage, persistence and bloody-mindedness to not only watch one’s affective feeling rise and fall, but to actually investigate and eliminate them. They constitute the major part of our identity, ‘who’ we feel we are.

Then, and only then, your instincts will come to the surface.

I am fascinated by your expression of ‘rejection of emotional behaviour’. Do you literally mean ‘rejection’ as in repressing it and not letting it come to the surface, or ‘rejection’ as in not giving it any attention, or ‘rejection’ as in sitting it out without much ado about it? Does ‘rational analysis’ mean you ‘reject’ the emotion or does ‘rational analysis’ include investigating the upcoming emotion? I am curious to learn what works best for you.

No, I didn’t mean that you ‘get to choose A, B or C’. I was asking what you meant by the phrase ‘rejection of emotional behaviour’ and suggested three possibilities. Are you saying that your method is ‘sitting it out without much ado about it’? Of course you can choose any method, the question is which one works. Does method ‘C’ work for you in that the emotion does not come back or are you sometimes faced with the same emotion (over the same cause) again and again?

After rational analysis of the situation, the next step for me was to investigate further into the cause and deeper into the nature of the particular emotion happening at the time. In order to determine the underlying cause of the emotion I would search to uncover the next layer, the ‘deeper’ reason for my upset, the belief and passion underneath the apparent first disturbance. Often I would detect a fear much more far-reaching than the first apparent reason, for example, a general feeling of insecurity or an atavistic feeling of fear that seems to have no obvious or rational cause. To discover a deeper layer underneath the first apparent reason is a more daring exercise but immensely rewarding because it helps to uncover the basic passions that constitute the Human Condition.

By experiencing the emotion on a deeper layer I could then begin to understand the intricate web of human behaviour in general and my repeated feelings and behaviour in particular and this very experiential understanding was another nail in the coffin of ‘me’, the lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning entity inside. Bringing the emotion at its core out in the open, seeing it for what it is, invariably diminishes and successively eliminates its influence on my life and thus reduces the oh so convincing power of the passionate ‘self’.

*

And then, how does ‘the direct approach of discarding it’ actually work? Again, I am not sure if ‘discard’ means throwing it away – and does it stay away? Or is it more a ‘disregard’ because you already know everything about this particular emotion and it just keeps coming back as a bad habit? For instance, I have found my ‘sticky self-doubt’ coming back again and again despite extensive investigation until I realised that is consisted of nothing more than a bad habit.

It is a great start when investigating affective feelings and emotions to know that there is no practical reason or sensible argument for keeping them. This understanding surely helps to explore the emotions on a deeper level in order to become permanently happy and harmless.

However, having emotions is not just a ‘bad habit’ that one could reject like an unwanted behaviour pattern. Emotions have their roots in the instinctual passions that constitute our very being, the one ‘who we feel we are’, the core of our identity by whatever name. Therefore a mere ‘rejection’ on the basis of ‘rational analysis’ is helpful in reducing and removing the top-layer of emotional disturbances and irritations as well as the unwanted habitual behaviour patterns that one has accumulated since earliest childhood. Yet a deeper exploration is needed in order to uncover and experientially understand the underlying instinctual passions.

I had a simple rule of thumb – those emotions and feelings that didn’t go away by rational reasoning and sensible practicality surely had their root in social conditioning, atavistic fears, the need to belong or other basic survival instincts. Those emotions needed repeated exploration, talking, reading, inner search-and-destroy missions and clarifying insights. I found such exploration beyond my former surface snorkelling of spiritual practice and therapy such a fascinating and exhilarating enterprise!

After rational analysis of the situation, the next step for me was to investigate further into the cause and deeper into the nature of the particular emotion happening at the time. In order to determine the underlying cause of the emotion I would search to uncover the next layer, the ‘deeper’ reason for my upset, the belief and passion underneath the apparent first disturbance. Often I would detect a fear much more far-reaching than the first apparent reason, for example, a general feeling of insecurity or an atavistic feeling of fear that seems to have no obvious or rational cause.

To discover a deeper layer underneath the first apparent reason is a more daring exercise but immensely rewarding because it helps to uncover the basic passions that constitute the Human Condition. By experiencing the emotion on a deeper layer I could then begin to understand the intricate web of human behaviour in general and my repeated feelings and behaviour in particular and this very experiential understanding was another nail in the coffin of ‘me’, the lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning entity inside. Bringing the emotion at its core out in the open, seeing it for what it is, invariably diminishes and successively eliminates its influence on my life and thus reduces the oh so convincing power of the passionate ‘self’.

At root, fear may be the most basic of all passions, but one has nevertheless to work at peeling away all the outer layers in order to reveal the root and then be able to eliminate it.

I have been peeling away the outer layers for a long time. How are you saying the root is to be eliminated once it has been revealed? That is what I am trying to get at.

I fully go along with Richard’s experience, as it accords with my own pure consciousness experiences – ‘only elimination will do the trick’, elimination of ‘me’.

The ‘outer layers’ consist of feelings like greed, sorrow, grief, loneliness, jealousy, loyalty, love, compassion, belonging, worry, discontentment, resentment, annoyance, anger, retribution, cynicism and pride. As you investigate each of those feelings when it arises, those feelings will incrementally disappear along with the bit of ‘you’ who feels and feeds those feelings. In my case, when my love and loyalty for my spiritual teacher disappeared, Vineeto the spiritualist also disappeared, when my pining for another’s love disappeared, Vineeto the romantic dreamer disappeared as well. With every aspect of the human condition that I fully and experientially understood, a bit more of ‘me’ disappeared. This is how you can tell that your method of ‘peeling away the outer layers’ works.

Once you have ‘revealed’ the root of a particular feeling in its totality, i.e. once you brought into the bright light of awareness, then that complete exposure and experiential understanding is at the same time the elimination of that feeling. If a feeling has not disappeared, then it has not been totally understood in all its aspects, and you then have another opportunity to look at it and examine it. Given that ‘I’ am all I think and feel myself to be, then the day I understand all of my emotions and instinctual passions in their totality, ‘I’ will disappear forever, never to return.

It’s an incredibly exhilarating adventure.

You wrote asking for clarification of a quote you found on the web –

‘Watching’ is a spiritual term and means that you dis-associate yourself from these particular feelings (which spiritual people insist on calling thoughts), and in an imaginary process you move your identity away from those feelings to a realm where ‘you are not your feelings’. Consequently, from that imaginary realm of ‘being’, you imagine that you are ‘not controlled by them’.

This has nothing to do with actually getting rid of those feelings, and it is proven by the fact that feelings keep appearing again and again.

To actually, and permanently, get rid of ‘desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness’ one has to investigate into the root cause of those feelings and discover the instinctual passions from where they keep arising. This means dismantling one’s identity – because ‘I’ am my feelings and instincts – and results in a process of ‘self’-immolation. The very existence of the ‘self’ is being investigated and threatened by the questioning of emotions and feelings, and it is not something everyone is ready to undertake. It is so much easier to imagine that one is not those ‘desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness’, and as such one keeps the head in the clouds and the dirt under the carpet. Vineeto, Selected Correspondence, Feelings 2, Vineeto, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, No 14, 24.4.1999

Gary: I think perhaps Vineeto might be referring to a common misunderstanding among the devotees and followers of J. Krishnamurti, among whom I used to count myself.

Thought and thinking is given a tremendous amount of attention among the Krishnamurtiites but feelings and passions correspondingly little. Krishnamurtiites speak a lot about bringing thought to an end, little realizing that human beings are for the most part deeply emotional and instinctual beings. Gary, No 33, 28.8.2001

If Vineeto is reading this correspondence, and if she can clarify this point, that will be good – somehow I think this seems to be the statement of my problem.

Yes, I am reading with interest every post that is coming in. I can understand your confusion when I remember how I used to respond to overwhelming feelings – usually a lot of frantic thoughts arose as I tried to get rid of the unpleasant feelings. You describe it well in your letter to Gary –

I haven’t felt anger for a while; sad – yes; I see only fireworks going on in my head which results in a lot of unpleasantness; there seems to be a lot of thoughts with a quality of unpleasantness non-stop; the body seems to be involved but a lot seems to be happening in the head and all my focus seems to be there... however I will try and attend to them;

The thoughts ‘with a quality of unpleasantness’ are in fact feelings. When an unpleasant emotional reaction occurs, for instance a reaction to something someone said to you, then the automatic response is to try and ‘make the unpleasant feeling go away’, and this effort is often accompanied by frantic thinking. This thought-response is secondary to the affective feeling response which happens first. This fact can be observed by becoming aware of one’s own responses as they happen and they are best observed in reactions such as anger or fear where the automatic response is clearly felt as a strong bodily response in the heart, or in a sexual reaction where the automatic response is felt in the groin, or in grief or sorrow where the reaction is felt in the heart or gut.

In order to become aware of a feeling when it is occurring, the first thing one has to do is to stop trying to make it go away as we have been socially or spiritually conditioned to do. As long as you object to having the feeling you cannot observe it. This means one needs to become aware of and understand one’s automatic reaction of suppression – and/or dis-association – in order to be able to experience the feeling fully so that you can then feel what the feeling feels like and give it a name.

As a general rule of thumb it is impossible to examine a feeling while you are having it because, as you will have noticed, invidious and euphoric feelings, emotions and passions prevent clear thinking from happening – so the next thing to do is to get back to feeling good by recognizing that it is silly to waste this moment of being alive by being angry, irritated, fearful, sad, etc. When you are back to feeling good you can then begin to examine what made you angry, anxious, gloomy, etc. in the first place – when did the feeling first start, what was the event or situation that caused my affective reaction, why did I feel insulted, sad, angry, worried, etc., which of my cherished beliefs was being questioned, what part of my identity was being attacked, was there a fear underneath the initial feeling, what was this fear about ...?

In this way you are conducting a scientific inquiry into your own affective experience, you are in fact examining your own psyche in action – but at first you have to allow the feeling to come to the surface so that you can conduct an extensive examination into all its aspects. Once you get over the initial moral and ethical objection to having unpleasant or undesirable feelings in the first place, you will notice a keen interest and fascination developing that comes from being able to be aware of your own feelings and emotions while they are happening and from being able to investigate them as soon as you are back to feeling good.

This investigation into your feelings has to be experiential if it is to bring any tangible results – thinking about feelings and emotions abstracted from practical down-to-earth personal experience will not enable you to penetrate into the very nature of your psyche. So the first thing is to stop one’s usual habits of fighting, denying or expressing one’s feelings, blaming people and events for causing one’s feelings or dissociating from one’s feelings. By doing so you allow yourself to experience feelings all the while making sure that you keep your mouth shut and your hands in your pocket, otherwise you might do or say something you regret later on.

Thus far there have only been two alternatives to coping with the feelings and emotions that arise from one’s instinctual passions. The first is suppression and the fact that we still need police and armies, laws and judges, moral codes and ethical values, attests to the failure of suppressing emotions. The other alternative is expressing your feelings and emotions, something which is fashionable in some spiritual and therapy philosophies. Expressed sorrow is not only socially acceptable, it is an encouraged activity in that it is imagined to bring ‘closure’ and resolution and it’s generally believed that if you haven’t got something to complain and bitch about then something must be wrong. Humans generally delight in expressing sadness, in being sad, feeling the bitter sweetness of sorrow, watching sad love stories, listening to sad music, etc. On the other hand expressed malice can easily lead to physical violence so humans have created socially acceptable outlets for malice such as sport, gossip, games, films, competitive business, and so on. Rather than having a problem with being malicious and sorrowful most people find meaning, delight and entertainment from feeling the feelings of malice and sorrow, which is one of the major reasons that actualism will be unpopular for a long time yet.

Actualism is not about expressing or suppressing one’s feelings but about experientially examining them in order to get back to being happy and harmless as soon as possible.

No 37 – So – just how does this ‘third alternative’ deal with ‘low levels’ of emotion. Where do I draw the line between what is advantageous for me to express and what is not? Just what is meant by ‘not expressing’ emotion anyway?

You don’t have to draw a line – not expressing one’s emotions means not expressing. The longer you practice the method of actualism the better you become in not expressing or suppressing the emotion when it comes up. I found that even slight expressions of my emotions, say irritation or displeasure, would cause uncontrollable ripples and repercussions in my interactions with people and, because my aim is to be harmless, I don’t want to create ripples.

First, it is crucial to remember that the aim of actualism is not to live without feelings because that is impossible while still being a ‘self’. To do so you would only end up suppressing or dissociating from your feelings and identifying as a ‘non-feeling self’. The method of actualism is aimed to minimise the influence of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and to activate the felicitous feelings – happiness, delight, appreciation, joie de vivre, bonhomie and so on.

For me, as a result of applying this method, the ‘amount/type/quality of feelings’ has changed from ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to felicitous feelings and, all in all, there are far fewer emotions interfering with my being happy and harmless than when I started the process four years ago. The first layer of emotions that one invariably encounters is due to one’s social-spiritual conditioning, that is all of one’s beliefs, one’s morals and ethics which one has imbibed in the course of one’s life. A belief is an emotion-backed thought, which means that many emotional reactions are caused by the continual need to maintain and defend one’s dear-held beliefs and precious social identity. Consequently with each belief investigated and eliminated my life has become easier and also far less emotional.

For example, following my extensive investigating into my emotional problems with authority, an insight revealed the root cause – my belief in a disembodied Higher Authority. Once I realized, without doubt, that the existence of a God by whatever name was nothing but a commonly held belief and not a fact, the whole range of emotional charges around authority – any authority – disappeared completely, never to return.

I described the process of this realization in Peter’s Journal –

One of the first major issues in my relationship to Peter was both my dependence on male authority and the subsequent fight against it – a constant struggle in itself! In my life I had focussed on several, mostly male authority figures – naturally starting with my father. I had either loved them, followed them or fought them – often at the same time. This was the main reason not only for the frustrations and ensuing failure of all my relationships in the past, but also for my difficulties in working relations or friendships. Being either subservient to or fighting against authority would constantly spoil my being at ease with people.

Interestingly, I could only get rid of authority by tracing its cause to the very root: What do I want or need authority for in my life? Why do I create authority? What do I get out of it? What was the ultimate authority behind each representative of power? Which version of good and bad, right and wrong was I to follow? Could I consider living without an external or internal authority in my life? And what would be the consequences?

I explored and discovered in myself the underlying belief that there was Someone or Something, who had created the guidelines of good and bad, right and wrong. And what I found was that those different authority figures represented nothing other than the particular values of moral – or later spiritual – improvement that I took to be right and necessary. These were the values and inhibitions to be followed on the ‘right’ path to a meaningful life. Simply rebelling against these authority figures did not invalidate the power of their opinions over me – I had tried that since childhood. Again and again I found myself dependent on their approval, their love and their support, but I had never questioned the very values themselves. I had only followed or fought those who represented these values. Usually, when I succeeded freeing myself of one authority figure, I soon found that I had only replaced them with a supposedly better one – but it never solved the problem. Slowly I started to understand that in order to be free from authority I had to eliminate the need for, and support of, those very beliefs and values underlying the authority.

Finally one evening, when talking and musing about the universe, I fully comprehended that this physical universe is actually infinite. The universe being without boundaries or an edge means that it is impossible, practically, for God to exist. In order to have created the universe or to be in control of it God would have to exist outside of it – and there is no outside! This insight hit me like a thunderbolt. My fear of God and of his representatives collapsed and lost its very substance by this obvious realisation. In fact, there can be no one outside of this infinite universe who is pulling the strings of punishment and reward, heaven and hell – or, according to Eastern tradition, granting enlightenment or leaving me with the eternal karma of endless lives in misery.

This insight presupposes, of course, that there is no place other than the physical universe, no celestial, mystical realm where gods and ghosts exist. It also implies that there is no life before or after death and that the body simply dies when it dies. I needed quite some courage to face and accept this simple fact – to give up all beliefs in an after-life or a ‘spirit-life’. But I could easily observe that as soon as I gave up the idea of any imaginary existence other than the tangible, physical universe, everything, which had seemed so complicated and impossible to understand became graspable, evident, obvious and imminently clear.

When the enormous consequence and implication of slipping out of this insidious belief in any God or Higher Being dawned on me, I was at the same time free of anybody’s authority. I was free of the fear that had been spoiling every relationship with every man in my life: father, brothers, male friends and boyfriends, employers, teachers and Master.

Now I am my own authority, deciding what is silly and sensible, using the common and practical intelligence of the human brain. I am responsible for every action in my life and I can acknowledge that now. However, this means that from now on I cannot blame anybody for making me jealous, miserable, grumpy, afraid, angry or frustrated over any petty issue. Now there is no more excuse, no more hiding place. They are my reactions and my behaviour, which I have to face and change in order to be free. A Bit of Vineeto

Personally, I found that by continuously running the question of ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ with pure intent I was unable to repress any emotion for long – by focussing my awareness on what went on inside my head and heart, all my beliefs and feelings came to the surface, one after the other. However, I first had to inquire into my spiritual, moral and ethical values that had taught me to consider some emotions as ‘good’ and worth expressing and some emotions as ‘bad’ and requiring repression. Only by examining and becoming free of the social-spiritual straightjacket of automatically classifying feelings as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ was I able to clearly experience and scientifically investigate each emotion as it arose.

As I had set my aim to become free from malice and sorrow, the first obvious thing to do was to stop expressing my malice and to stop imposing my sorrow on others. As for expressing the ‘good’ emotions like love, compassion, empathy, hope and trust – in a sincere inquiry you will soon find out that when expressing ‘good’ emotions one is as much driven by one’s instinctual passions as when expressing ‘bad’ emotions.

We have been taught that the alternative to expressing emotions is to repress them – however, there is now a third alternative. Whenever an emotion occurred, I usually stopped in my tracks, took notice, labelled the emotion, found out when the emotion started, what triggered it and whether any beliefs, moral and ethical values were the cause of triggering the feeling. In the first year of actualism I spent a lot of time on the couch thinking and contemplating about one or another belief or emotion, I talked with Peter about the issue, wrote about my discoveries and attempted to more and more understand the human condition in action. Often I found ‘good’ emotions like desire, hope, trust, attachment, loyalty, compassion and love also triggered off the ‘bad’ emotions and this discovery of the inter-connectedness and interdependence of good and bad then spurred me on to continue questioning the ‘good’ and ‘right’ values I had unquestioningly swallowed.

As for the ‘the dividing line between ‘feeling empathy’ and ‘being benevolent’’ – empathy makes you suffer with the other person, which can clearly be experienced as an emotion. You then either wallow with the other in their suffering or you have an emotional investment in attempting to alleviate the other’s emotional suffering in order to relieve your own co-suffering, i.e. com-passion. Then you subsequently become eager to impose your solution to their problem.

The benevolence that an actualist experiences it not a feeling at all but happens on its own accord when one’s ‘self’-centredness ceases to dominate one’s every thought and feeling. Benevolence arises out of the experience and understanding that we are all fellow human beings doing this business of being alive on this perfect lush and verdant planet earth.

No, in my first post to you I was talking about becoming aware of all of one’s feelings and emotions as they occur. Of course the strong emotions are usually noticed first and as such these are best to start with. If you set your sights on becoming happy and harmless then emotions such as anger, jealousy and resentment are good things to watch out for and observe as they are happening. Once you get the hang of it and begin to explore how you are experiencing this moment of being alive on a regular basis, you will become aware of your more subtle emotions like annoyance, irritation, dismissal, cynicism, touchiness, melancholy, gloominess, listlessness, boredom, disinterest, guilt, shame, withdrawal, sullenness, etc.

Yes, at the beginning of applying the method of actualism feeling an emotion and expressing it is pretty much happening at the same time. LeDoux has empirically measured the feeling response to sensorial input by the instinctual part of the brain, the amygdala, as only 12 milliseconds. However, with pure intent and a little practice you become more and more aware of your emotions right when they are happening and then, rather than expressing or suppressing the emotion, as we have been taught to do, you can observe it, be attentive to it, trace it to its source and completely understand it.

I simply began to consider the journey into my psyche a scientific investigation and as such every emotion I experience has become a vital source of information. My attitude became more and more – wow, that’s fascinating, I wonder why I feel this – rather than the seesaw of ‘damn, another bad emotion again’ or ‘whoopee, another good emotion’. Every emotion occurring is valuable material to find out more about my identity, how ‘I’ tick, what social program I have been taught to follow and what instinctual program drives me to think, feel and act – and then I get to enjoy the process of both discovery and success as I irrevocably change towards being more happy and more harmless.

As for ‘feeling stressed’ – in the beginning of my investigation my emotions sometimes ran high and, because I was determined not to express or suppress them but to be attentive to them, I sometimes felt like a tiger in a cage. What helped best in those situations was to go for a long walk, through the forest or along the beach. The first half hour I was often busy relieving the physical tension that accompanied the emotion but afterwards I was able to think about what was happening and began to make sense of it. When I got home after an hour or two, I was then able to communicate what I had experienced and what sense I had made of it and often I explored the emotional event yet a little deeper in a further discussion with Peter.

The key to success for me was my pure intent. I was determined not to let any emotion slip by unnoticed and not to stop the investigation until I had traced the particular feeling to its source, which was either a belief, a moral-ethical value or a bare instinctual passion.

Speaking personally, I soon discovered that my wanting to express to someone that they were making me upset was simply a way of blaming the other for my feeling upset – a convenient way of avoiding investigating my own feelings and discovering why other people’s acts or words upset me. In other words, I came to realize that if I didn’t stop the cycle of blaming others then I would never experience peace on earth.

Every emotion I have is ‘my’ identity expressing itself because ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’. In order to eliminate ‘me’, all of the activities of this identity, i.e. beliefs, emotions and passions, are gradually brought to the light of awareness. Therefore whatever emotion is triggered, it is always ‘me’ in action and my interest lies in finding out about and incrementally eliminating the malicious and sorrowful ‘me’. As such, I have taken full responsibility for all of my feelings in that I accepted the challenge to eliminate the cause of my feelings in me.

For example if I felt insulted because someone was calling me an idiot or blaming me for something, my normal reaction had been to either grumpily swallow it or to tell the other off, depending on who was the stronger one in the situation. In actualism I investigated why I felt insulted in the first place and examined the reasons that lay behind this feeling. Personally I found that pride, self-image and righteousness were the most apparent reasons for such an emotional reaction. Once I discovered the root of the emotion I was then able to decide that I would much rather live without those examples of my identity and the feeling of insult also disappeared. The advantage of this approach is that nowadays nobody can insult me anymore.

You don’t have to draw a line – not expressing one’s emotions means not expressing. The longer you practice the method of actualism the better you become in not expressing or suppressing the emotion when it comes up. I found that even slight expressions of my emotions, say irritation or displeasure, would cause uncontrollable ripples and repercussions in my interactions with people and, because my aim is to be harmless, I don’t want to create ripples.

If I express to another person that they are upsetting me, then I am blaming them for causing my anger and a careful observation of expressing my upset will reveal that it can never be expressed harmlessly. Similarly, if one expresses one’s sorrow to another, a careful observation will reveal that this does nothing but maintain and perpetuate sorrow in the world.

I also found it immensely freeing when I realized that my emotions are solely my problem to deal with and, when I am sure that there is no malice in what I say or do, other people’s emotions are their problem. This understanding makes all interactions with people incredibly easy, particularly when living together with someone else. You get to live in peace and harmony with the other without having to even try and change the other person in the slightest way.

I have only a few minutes to respond right now. I do find your comments helpful, yet I’m not hearing my concerns addressed regarding the pervasiveness of our expression of emotion. For example, your walks on the beach I’m sure were quite helpful. But that’s an expression of emotion.

No, that’s taking time out by myself in order to sort out my emotions and investigate them.

If you translate the method of actualism as having to ‘lock myself up’, then you erroneously understand it as replacing one moral rule with another. Actualism is not about proposing a new set of morals, ethics and values – in actualism you set out on your own volition to remove all of the programming that generates malice and sorrow. ‘You’ are at root a passionate feeling being and everything ‘you’ do is expression of a belief, an emotion or an instinctual passion in one way or another. Therefore following the current fashion of overtly expressing my emotions is strengthening ‘me’ whereas questioning and investigating my emotions is pulling the rug out from under ‘my’ feet. That’s why the method of investigating one’s feelings by neither expressing nor suppressing the emotion is so effective in diminishing ‘me’.

I think when you have the single-pointed intent to become happy and harmless, then the answer to the question about expressing emotions will be very simple. For me, the intent to become harmless meant that I did not want to express any of my mean and malicious ‘self’ to anyone because I wanted to stop causing ripples, pressurizing others, creating guilt, or manipulating others in any way – in short, I decided not to pass on my malice. In exactly the same way and for the same reason, I decided not to pass on my sorrow in any way, be it by sharing my hurts and disappointments, airing my moods or commiserating with others about life being a bitch.

Similarly, actualism is not about repressing your emotions, as in ‘locking yourself up’. The aim of the actualism process is not to become an emotionless zombie but to eliminate the insidious good and the invidious bad emotions and aim for the felicitous feelings. Richard’s article ‘This Moment of Being Alive’ describes precisely and succinctly how you can rid yourself from malice and sorrow.

Yes, that is exactly what I mean. The longer I applied the method the easier it became to sit with the emotion that occurred, ponder it over, trace it to its source and, upon complete understanding, step out of it completely.

I found that ‘me’ being ‘authentic’ was just as ‘self’-serving as being hypocritical. Being authentic is the new-age version of letting everyone around have a piece of one’s feelings. If you look at today’s authenticity-gurus such as Oprah Winfrey then you can see that the core of their teaching is how to be authentically ‘me’. That’s what people have always done down through the ages – the only difference now is that it has the modern stamp of approval by calling it loving your ‘true self’ – a shoddy mixture of Eastern spiritualism and pop psychology.

What is the real purpose of being authentic? What is the underlying reason for wanting to air my feelings? Why do I want someone else to know where my ‘buttons’ are? Why do I want others to be sensitive towards ‘me’?

Rather than being authentic towards others, I found it invaluable and imperative to be honest with myself, because without honesty and integrity I would have never found out ‘my’ tricks and cunning. ‘Me’ being honest and authentic with others invariably means that I am sharing my sad and grotty ‘self’ with others, which only serves to justify, maintain and perpetuate ‘me’.

The decision to clean oneself up is a unilateral decision – it involves no one else but me. As long as I expect respect, comfort, support, understanding or agreement from others in order to start the journey, I will be waiting forever. Actualism is a do it yourself and do it by yourself method. It is an immense freedom to realize that you are not beholden to anyone else to begin the actualism process but that you can become free at your own pace and do so in complete autonomy and anonymity.

It is entirely up to you what you consider ‘a solution’ – if your solution means you are happy and harmless, then fine. I am simply sharing my experience with the actualism method of investigating my feelings and reporting what has worked for me to make me virtually free from malice and sorrow. In my experience ‘communication of emotion’ has always been an expression of my ‘self’ in action, whereas I am solely interested in questioning and reducing my ‘self’ to the point of ‘self’-extinction.

As for the ‘difference between expressing emotion in the sense of communicating it and acknowledging it’ – you will be able to decide for yourself provided you have the pure intent to uncover your social and instinctual program in order to become free from it. You will then become the most sincere judge of what you are communicating – whether you are sharing your emotion in order to manipulate, blame, pay back, compete, voice sorrow, battle loneliness or avoid looking at what’s going on – or whether you are communicating with a fellow human being about your scientific investigations, sharing the pure joy and happiness about what you have discovered about yourself.

Personally, I have stopped expressing my emotions to others completely simply because I cannot find any good reason to do so. Besides, practicing actualism for several years has left me almost bare of any emotion to express except for the sheer delight of, and continuous wonder about, being alive, right here and right now.

My main addiction to avoid feeling my confusion, separateness, loneliness, fear, resentment and sorrow has been to work, to be continuously busy and to not have any idle time to think or feel what was going on underneath. My other addiction was clinging to my partner for comfort and reassurance despite the fact that we didn’t get on with each other.

Boredom was an interesting emotion for me to investigate. It had several connotations and layers to it. The first and most obvious was that I should be doing something useful, that I should earn my right to be here – quite ridiculous really as I am here already and have always been here without ‘earning’ my right to be here at all! But the necessity to work for one’s survival was passed on to me as a moral to never just sit there, to use my time effectively, to prove my worth by producing something of value for me or others, to earn my right to exist. These morals are instilled before one is able to earn one’s own food and shelter, and as such, those values are not factually connected to the action of providing for oneself. It took me some time to fully appreciate that earning sufficient money for food and shelter is a necessity but need not be an obsession and that I was busy doing things just to re-invent and maintain my social identity.

Underlying boredom I sometimes found emotions that came to the surface when I did not keep them down by being continually busy and occupied. Then boredom became an ally, in that doing nothing would reveal the next thing to investigate, the next issue to look at.

Also, boredom can kick in when I realize that by doing nothing in particular, my identity is thinning out, my importance disappears and my self-centred ‘meaning of life’ evaporates. Beneath the thin veneer of boredom and uselessness I am becoming increasingly aware that ‘I’ am not needed at all.

I pricked my ears at the word ‘attachment’ because it has such a familiar spiritual ring to it. Actualism is not about becoming unattached as in stifling or rejecting feelings as something wrong. It took a lot to understand that ‘I’ am my feelings until I finally ‘self’-immolate, there is no way around it.

The way I can facilitate this ‘self’-immolation is to find all the hooks that tie me to humanity, not stifle my feelings and emotions for intellectual reason but investigate in order to take ‘me’, the feeler out of the situation.

Maybe you refer to the use of ‘avoiding’ in writings like these in The Actual Freedom Trust glossary –

The diligent and intentional pursuit of the perfection evidenced in a PCE, while assiduously avoiding the pitfalls of Glory or Dread, will inevitably result in an actual freedom from the Human Condition – perfection in humans is possible. The Actual Freedom Trust Glossary, Perfection

The idea is to avoid, i.e. not get caught in the seductive and delusionary states of bliss, love glory of spiritual enlightenment because it is a long and unnecessary journey to dig oneself out of it, if ever. Nevertheless, one needs to experientially investigate these altered states of consciousness if one is at all to know the overwhelming effect and seduction of unconditional Love- and Bliss-attacks. One has to come close to the edge of the mindless pit of delusion, so to speak, in order to know what to avoid and why. Avoidance of enlightenment is only possible for me because I have sufficiently experienced and observed the rushes of the chemicals that carry Love, Bliss, Power, Oneness, Being and Knowing. I now know that Enlightenment will be a dead end road, dead as dodo. Now I know what I avoid because I have experienced the passions, not because I have suppressed them or denied them.

The same process of investigation applies for other affective feelings. Unless you feel sorrow you cannot investigate it. Once you have sufficiently dug around in one particular feeling and know all there is to know, you don’t go down the same sad and dull alley again and again, just out of habit or fashion. The cunning entity of the ‘self’ will want to hang on to emotions and feelings even if they have been fully understood, because feeling and emotions is the very substance of the ‘self’. But with sufficient experience one has the choice to deliberately avoid the pitfalls, or, as Richard says, ‘nip the feeling in the bud’. But first, the feelings have to come ‘off the shelf’, be dusted off, be stripped of their moral and ethical taboos and rules and be thoroughly and experientially explored.

It is an utterly intriguing hobby to examine the Human Condition inside one’s own skull!

I found that to effectively explore emotions to the point of eliminating them I had to experience them fully. Only by neither repressing, nor expressing, nor in any way rationally twisting the emotional experience could I meticulously observe, become fully aware of and sensibly contemplate on what is happening in my head, heart and guts and thus investigate the root cause of that particular emotion. Knowing that every emotion is part of the Human Condition relieved me from blaming myself or being resentful for having an emotion in the first place. In order to eliminate the particular emotion such that it would not return again and again, it was essential to explore it deeply at its core and to understand experientially how each emotion originated in my social identity and/or in my very sense of ‘being’. Once having seen the emotion in operation and understood its ramifications to their full extent there was no way I could feel the same way about a particular issue or situation – by having understood this specific piece of my identity it had been extinguished.

Needless to say, this method has not the slightest thing to do with plain rationalization or spiritual dis-identification – proven by the very fact that it works, that it gets rid of the emotion permanently while increasingly allowing the sensual sensuousness and the pure delight of being alive.

I know well the ‘occasional reluctance to explore’, yet the frustration of obviously going round in silly circles has always given me courage to stop wasting my time, to face the fear and ‘reluctance’ and do whatever was necessary to return to being happy and harmless.

This brings up a dilemma in my mind. One of influence and existence. Sometimes I seem happy just to have removed an emotion’s substantial influence without trying to get to the core of it. I find it difficult going into emotions when I’m working so I guess that is why I only attempt to draw on what I have discovered about them to stay out of the spell of any arising emotions. I’m sure there is more to it than that though. For example I think self-doubt needs more investigating as I find sometimes that considering another’s point of view, the basis of some confusion.

Fair enough, you only go as far as you want as fast as you want. As long as you ‘seem happy’ then that seems to work. I simply suggested a way to explore further in case the option to ‘stay out of the spell of any arising emotion’ is not enough for you.

Actually it is not really good enough and I keep persisting even after many failed attempts to get at the root of an emotion. Being free to use bare awareness and not be caught by the emotions is I feel an important step and one which I seem to be gradually, getting the knack of.

Yes, ‘to use bare awareness and not be caught by the emotions’ is absolutely essential for becoming actually free from the Human Condition. Emotions, feelings and beliefs (passionate convictions) are how one sees one’s instinctual passions in operation. They form the layer of our social conditioning which needs to be explored and removed – both for a happy and harmless life in Virtual Freedom and for an experiential understanding of the raw instinctual passions at our very core. And you probably have experienced the instant gratifications when a belief disappears, an emotion doesn’t turn up anymore, a snide remark from someone else falls flat and as being alive becomes gradually a play and a pleasure.

Although, the suggested method of trying to recall a PCE to get out of stuckness only helped in that it brought the obstacle into focus.

This is great success, don’t you think? To have ‘brought the obstacle into focus’ and to know what the obstacle is about which keeps you in ‘stuckness’ is an excellent starting position for investigation. Now this obstacle can be identified, labelled and experientially explored, using apperceptiveness to detect its reasons, connections, source and implications. This has nothing to do with the Buddhist method (Vipassana) of labelling a feeling and then dis-identifying from it. 180 degrees opposite again. An actualist labels the feeling to get the bugger by the throat, to explore it as a scientist, to check out its silliness or sensibility, to determine how it is part of the Human Condition and then, when all is said and done, to permanently step out of having that emotion. This final stepping out often results in a pure consciousness experience.

Last night I was contemplating about Alan’s description of his ‘reflective contemplations’, ‘practising the actual’ and arriving here in the actual world and how this records with my experience. Further Alan says:

‘Reflective contemplation’ is the way to not only get out of stuckness but also to discover what is preventing one experiencing this moment. I realised that this is what had occasioned all of my PCEs – this is what leads to wonder at the joy of it all. Alan to Vineeto, 29.4.2000

Recalling step by step my own process into a PCE last night I found that contemplation serves to focus on the direction – being happy, dismantling the self, comprehending enough of the real world in order to see the self in operation and to step out of it. Contemplation always helps to focus on and remove obstacles and then, with no feeling or belief interfering I can build up the sensuous awareness of this moment of being alive. The wind on the skin, the sounds around, the wiggling of my toe, visual delights, tastes and smells ... Increasing sensuousness tips over into gay abandon, the self as both the controller and the feeler are abandoned and bingo ... I am experiencing what I had previously only reflectively contemplated about – this moment of being alive as a flesh and blood body only.

The gay abandon can, of course, also happen without the reflective part, as a nature experience, in sex or any time when sensual pleasure is sensuous enough to tip over into the self-less experience of being alive as a flesh and blood body only.

Many times I find that an emotion withers away before I get a good look at it. It’s almost as if it is avoiding a detailed look. Up to now I’ve been unable to find a reason for this and guess that all that is required is more attempts and that it will eventually become clear.

Emotions are a slippery lot. They build the basis for our identity, which is as cunning as all get out. Yet the actualism method can be applied to discover every trick – whatever the feeling or emotion that keeps me from being happy here, now, needs to be examined and understood and then, presto, I go back to being happy again.

I find that emotions can wither for different reasons. Either I understand that it is silly to be emotional and make a deliberate choice to move on and ‘smell the coffee’ instead. Or the emotion has been investigated in detail and is just a leftover bad habit to be thrown out and then I can go back to enjoying the moment. If I have avoided an emotion it will for sure come back in a similar situation and thus give me another opportunity to notice it, feel it, face it, label it, explore it, understand it and step out of it.

Sometimes I experience a quick deep understanding which is gone in a flash and I don’t even remember what I understood. What I do notice is that certain reactions don’t occur any more.

These moments of a ‘quick deep understanding which is gone in a flash’ might well be the flash of a pure consciousness experience and are as such worth extending or recalling. The fact that ‘certain reactions don’t occur any more’ points to that possibility. What do you think?