VINEETO: Hi Alan,

I followed up a few thoughts the other day, which might be useful to you or others.

I started my investigation about the feeling of impatience. Impatience has always been one of the driving forces in my life and kept me going, counteracting the innate inertia to get me back on the track of what I wanted to achieve. But the more I am actually here and enjoying life, the more the feeling of impatience becomes a nuisance and is, in fact, preventing me from enjoying what is happening here in this moment.

Of course, for most of the process on the path to an actual freedom I need a lot of impatience, a burning discontent and dissatisfaction with life as it is and with the second rate compromise of living that both real-world and spiritual-world solutions have on offer. But with the incremental dismantling of all the emotions that constitute my self I come to understand the role that impatience is playing now – preventing ‘me’ from disappearing.

The main fuel for this feeling of impatience comes from the notion that there is something better ‘out there’, in the future – that magic ingredient that will then make life as perfect as the ending of children’s fairytale – and then they lived happily ever after. And yet it is this very feeling of impatience, that particular bit of my ‘self’, that prevents me from the sensate-only experiencing the perfection of this moment.

Impatience is the ‘self’ telling the ‘self’ to go away in order for life to be perfect thereafter. What a furphy! Who am I trying to fool? This is what cunningness in action looks like. It is fascinating to see the self splitting itself into two yet again in order to pretend that there is change happening without really having to change anything. Seeing through the charade, I experience the thrill that accompanies the shift from a furphy to an actual experience, from ‘feeling impatient’ to actively dismantling the ‘self’, from stepping out of the ‘real’ world to arriving here. I understand that the only way to approach self-immolation is by welcoming the death of ‘me’ with free will, open arms and a full YES. It is a magic formula, that turning around 180 degrees again, a yes to immolation rather than a no to life as it is.

When death is welcome with the same thrilling anticipation as a sexual playmate then I know I am on the right track.

So impatience gets replaced by an understanding of redundancy – the more I experientially understand about the human condition the more ‘I’ become redundant because life in the actual world is utterly safe and already perfect. ‘I’ am not needed to stay alive. The more I understand the chemical, psychological and psychic programming of the brain, the more I can see that this programming is outdated, faulty and redundant in every single aspect – ‘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.

The only way I can reach this 100% redundancy is by being here all the time, doing what is happening without emotionally interfering – and if there is an emotion, then investigating it, nutting it out, sitting it out, thinking it through, understanding its follies and furphies. In the end, every emotion is understood as nothing but an objection to and fear of being here – and an objection to being redundant as an entity.

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ALAN: By the way, what is a ‘furphy’?

VINEETO: A furphy according to Mr. Oxford is

Austral. slang. [f. Furphy water and sanitary carts, manufactured by the Furphy family in Victoria during the 1914-18 war.] A false report or rumour; an absurd story. Oxford Dictionary

Strange connection – ‘sanitary carts’ and ‘an absurd story’! I like the sound of the word, it reminds me of a silly little furry animal running round in circles. I used ‘furphy’ as in a useless emotion that prevents me from getting closer to my pursued goal – freedom. To find out that I have been going round in circles of doubt, impatience or self-deception means I can stop wasting my time. The more I investigated reoccurring silly emotions that did not seem to be triggered by anything in particular, the more I considered them to be furphies – the ‘self’ buying time or ‘me’ being busy postponing my demise.

RESPONDENT: Thanks for your email. Yes, the instincts of nurture, desire, malice, fear and the related feelings of longing, anger, hate, depression, love, attachment, etc should be thoroughly investigated in one’s psyche so that when they arise next time they lose their grip on my behaviour.

VINEETO: To come to the understanding and conclusion that the package of instinctual passions and their subsequent emotions is worth investigating and eliminating is truly a big step towards actual freedom. This understanding is breaking with the traditional approach of covering up and balancing out the ‘bad’ feelings of ‘anger, hate, depression’ with a layer of ‘good’ feelings of ‘longing, love, attachment’, often spiced up with a bit of positive thinking that ‘maybe it’s not so bad after all.’

When you follow an emotion back to its origin as it arises and pin it down to an event, a memory, a belief, a fear, a part of your identity and finally the instinctual passion – then you can see it in the bright light of awareness and the emotion will lose its urgency and conviction and is seen for what it is – a bit of the software programming in the brain that can be re-wired and deleted. The next time, when the same emotion arises, it will be less convincing, the connection in the brain will slowly weaken and each time you investigate a particular feeling or belief, it will become weaker until the relevant connection in the brain is broken and replaced by intelligence and common sense. The important thing is not to act on the feeling impulse, to ‘keep your hands in your pocket’ – and I found that this applies for both the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ emotions. (...)

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RESPONDENT: It takes lots of vigilance to investigate this since often it is very difficult to makes sense of things. I think that labelling feelings helps a lot in the process.

VINEETO: Yes, ‘often it is very difficult to makes sense of things’ when one’s previous parameters of good and bad and right and wrong are falling by the wayside. Sometimes I had the feeling as if the ground was shifting under my feet. But then I could always stick to

• what are the facts of the situation?
• what is silly and sensible?
• what prevents me from being happy and harmless now?

As you say, ‘labelling feelings helps a lot in the process’ and works to distinguish the feelings, beliefs and facts of each situation. In contrast to Eastern teachings like Vipassana, which teaches you to name the feeling and then disidentify from it, actualism goes much deeper than merely snorkelling of the surface. The making sense for me happened when I had detected the belief behind the particular feeling or emotion and was thus able to determine that it was part of my conditioning, my religious / spiritual conviction, my accumulated behaviour from my peer-group, my gender or my national identity, etc. This way I have been able to dismantle, one by one, my beliefs, feelings and emotions and my identity has become thinner and thinner. Now, without a social identity, it is a continuous pleasure to be here and life is easy, carefree and delightful.

RESPONDENT: Is it easy for you to differentiate between the feeling of love and dependency and the sensation of fulfillment, freedom and happiness that comes when two people share intimacy?

VINEETO: I like your question. For an actualist, to investigate the good emotions of love, beauty and compassion is as essential as examining the bad emotions of anger, fear, resentment and depression.

In order to investigate the feeling of love and all its accompanying emotions, I had to sharpen my awareness and become persistently alert to detect when love was kicking in. Love is, after all, the most honoured and appreciated of all human emotions, and one is very easily tempted to brush over the nice sweet feeling when it happens.

Investigating and dismantling the good feelings is a real detective adventure game, because, as you mentioned to No 8,

[Respondent]: ‘it seems that the mind is very eager to plaster an emotion on any simple sensation’.

Our identity thrives on feelings, it cannot exist without feelings and emotions – therefore detecting the emotion ‘plastered on any simple sensation’ is to separate out and successively eliminate your very identity – ‘who’ you think and feel yourself to be.

In the beginning, my guiding light was the memory of the pure consciousness experience when there was clearly no emotion happening, as well as the first brief moments of actual intimacy with Peter that occasionally occurred.

No. 1: What successes are you achieving using a method based upon Richard’s explanations?

I have never really seen a ‘method’ in Richard’s madness, although, there may be one. All I’ve even seen in Richards writings is ‘back slapping’ for being a free, happy, harmless, flesh and blood body living in a veritable garden of paradise where there is no love, no compassion, and an absolute belief that there is no such happening as God or other dimension besides the human body which he is.

There is a very effective method indeed. But only those who are appalled by their own malice and tired of their own sorrow are interested in finding out about it and are moved to apply it to their own lives.

I was simply tired of emotions all together, because when I was driven by emotions and instinctual passions I could not avoid wanting to hurt others or feeling that others were hurting me – so I took up the offer of getting rid of the instinctually driven entity altogether.

I am sorry since you started using the word ‘silly’ for another woman I use it for you with freedom without any fear of hurting you (since I know you have no emotions and won’t be at all hurt).

I did not say I have no emotions – I said

I was simply tired of emotions all together ... so I took up the offer of getting rid of the instinctually driven entity altogether.

It is something entirely new in human history that the possibility exists that one does not merely settle for transcending the ego – as age-old practice has been throughout many countries and religions – but that one can examine and eliminate the very root cause of human malice and sorrow, the animal instinctual passions themselves. Once I had established satisfactory evidence that one can indeed get of one’s emotions and passions entirely, I took up the offer and went full steam ahead.

Yes, silly it is that you think you are free of your limbic system without any clear real medical limbectomy. You are lying to yourself.

As I have never said that I don’t have any emotions at all, your argument is missing the point. You are right insofar that one cannot simply decide that from tomorrow onwards I won’t have any emotions anymore.

However, by investigating feelings and emotions and the underlying instinctual passions – instead of merely watching one’s thoughts – it is very well possible to diminish the ‘self’ to the point of almost non-existent and it is the ‘self’ that is producing and maintaining feelings, emotions and instinctual passions. When I consider what has already disappeared out of my life in terms of the malice and sorrow that I felt and inflicted on others, and when I look at the obvious change that happened by meticulously taking apart my identity bit by bit – then a complete extinction of my ‘self’ is not at all far-fetched. If I can achieve to live happily and harmlessly without being run by my emotions and driven by my instinctual passions (without having a ‘amygdala-ectomy’), then it is possible for everybody who wants to.

It’s like telling myself I don’t hear voices and don’t see colours since I have altruistically ‘decided’ not to see them anymore! For god’s sake can’t you see the insanity of such a claim?? One cannot stop hearing voices unless s/he cuts his ears off, are you van Gogh?

Of course you cannot altruistically ‘decide’ not to have emotions and then they will just disappear by magic – I have never said this. But one can extent one’s awareness and consideration for others to the extent that it becomes one’s sole aim in life to be actually peaceful – to do no harm to one’s fellow human beings, as in not instinctually feeling aggression towards others, not instinctually feeling sorrow for others, not being blindly driven to nurture others and not being blindly driven to desire power over others. But first one needs to change one’s focus from self-realization and self-aggrandizement to becoming ‘self’-less, which is not good news for those who are on the spiritual path.

You say you cut your emotions to be free of their suffer (I was tired of them) ... I am sorry how could you do that without having the emotion of ‘wanting to be free of emotions?’ So you see? Emotions are not that bad, they tell you how to stop your suffering.

Indeed. Back when I was run by emotions and driven by instinctual passions I was still searching for peace and happiness and I had not found it after many years on the spiritual path. In fact, I found that I was moving further away from the world and that I was becoming more fearful and more isolated from people who were not part of my particular spiritual ‘club’. I was further away from being able to live with a man in peace and harmony and sexual enjoyment was becoming even more hampered by spiritual conditionings. The only solution then was to go even deeper into my inner world via meditation and only relate to those with the same belief-system, but this retreating and withdrawing did not match with what I had expected from life. When I came across Richard, my burning desire to be free was still intact – it had not been worn out by my spiritual years. I was simply ready to try a solution that seemed eminently sensible, far more fun and down-to-earth. Its results now exceed my wildest dreams.

After extensive experience with team work, and with what I now know about the Human Condition, I am not in favour anymore of dealing with conflicts, neither ‘out in the open’ nor covertly. Also I have understood that the feelings about a situation may have been triggered by the situation but they always have their roots in our instinctual passions, and sometimes don’t even have a particular trigger. For instance one can wake up in the morning feeling said not linked to a particular situation. What became clear is that nobody but me can sort out my feelings and emotions and I cannot do it for anybody else. This approach has helped me not to get caught up in somebody else’s problems, or blame someone else for my problems, which is, more often than not, a no-win situation.

I have lived in spiritual communes for 10 years where everyone had the ideal to solve conflicts in open discussion, group decisions, crisis meetings and the like. In the end I found these procedures were going endlessly round in circles, and to be invitations for exchanging spite and resentment or indulging in blame and forgiveness and were a mere waste of time.

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Thinking about the relation of sorrow and the instinctual need to belong, one connection seems obvious – sorrow is the both the glue and the price we pay in order to be part of the herd. We relate most closely to other human beings in sorrow, feeling sympathy and empathy and always looking for someone to lean on, and share with, in hard times. Once I questioned sorrow itself, the main feature of connecting with others was disappearing – either I come back to the herd and feel sorrow with others and for others, or I am on my own. Being more and more happy, I found myself at a loss how to connect and relate to former friends – all we had shared was glee over other’s misery, common beliefs, commiseration, sexual flirtation or sympathy. I simply lost interest in friendships the more I discovered the delight of a direct intimacy to fellow human beings, which was so much more rewarding and fascinating that the feeling relationships I used to have.

Up to now there have been two ways to deal with emotions – repression or expression. Normal social conditioning teaches us to repress unwanted and overwhelming emotions by controlling, rationalizing, theorizing, detaching and retreating from an emotional situation. There are also society-tolerated occasions for expressing and venting emotions such as parties with alcohol or drugs, excesses during carnival or Halloween, movies, cat-fights on TV-shows, sporting events and a few other culture-specific outlets.

The current fashion for expressing emotions started with psychoanalysis, experiential psychology and psychotherapy and has become trendy for a whole generation with the 60’s movement and was later assimilated by some of the New Dark Age religions. The strange thing is that one can express one’s emotions forever, but it does bugger all apart from offering a temporary feeling of relief – they always reappeared.

The method of Actual Freedom offers a third alternative – neither repression nor expression of the emotions but an experiential exploration and investigation of both, the so-called ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ emotions and feelings. Whenever such emotions are deeply explored and understood one becomes a bit less ‘self’-centred and a bit more able to enjoy being alive in the actual world. The resulting intimacy with all the people one meets and the things one sees, touches, hears, tastes and smells, as you have described in your PCE, is far superior to any feeling of ‘being close’ or ‘being loving’. Intimacy is the result of diminishing and removing the alien entity, ‘me’, the very wall that keeps me separate from everything and everybody.

Where is this conditioning you talk of ...? Where are the thoughts located?

They are not in the brain. Thoughts are not manufactured by the brain. It is, rather, that the brain is like an antenna, picking up thoughts on a common wavelength, a common thought-sphere. U.G. Krishnamurti, Mind is a Myth, Chap. 3

Does anyone understand what he is saying here? Theories and opinions are also ok. Maybe we can come up with something. If anyone out there does understand this I would appreciate it if you would tell me about it. I am listening.

In my experience, what UG Krishnamurti is talking about is that there is a psychic web, consisting of the thoughts, feelings and passions of all human beings. Some people are more sensitive to picking up these types of feelings than others, be they euphoria, excitement, empathy, sadness, anger, revenge or fear, but everyone does this automatically to some extent.

He may be talking about psychic thoughts although he didn't make that distinction. I guess that would explain his statement.

Yes, he used the term ‘common thought-sphere’ because he, like all other Eastern spiritual teachers, derives his wisdom from the philosophical tradition of Eastern teachings which fails to make the distinction between thinking and feeling.

I offered a different experience, a fresh viewpoint to the Eastern belief, which proposes it is thought only that is supposedly responsible for human misery and anguish, aggression and fear. In fact, the psychic world is a web of psychic feelings, not thoughts. What U.G. Krishnamurti is talking about is picking up psychic fear, psychic anger and collective euphoria, and this is most evident when a large group of people gather together. Mass hysteria, mass grief, mob riots, national fervour or patriotism, sporting crowds, religious/spiritual gatherings, etc., all attest to the overwhelming power of these common psychic feelings.

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Although it is common belief, particularly on this list, that it is thoughts and conditioning which are the cause of the problems in the world, there is overwhelming anecdotal, empirical and personal observational evidence that it is the genetically-encoded instinctual passions that produce feelings, i.e. emotions-backed thoughts, of fear and aggression in each and every human being. Therefore, this ‘common thought-sphere’ that U.G. Krishnamurti speaks of is, in fact, a collective feeling-sphere.

If this is true that might explain our subconscious reactions in that the instincts are reacting to this collective feeling-sphere.

What is your personal observation and experience of your ‘subconscious reactions’ ‘reacting to this collective feeling-sphere’? Maybe you recall incidents where you had the distinct impression that the feelings you experienced were also feelings picked up from the people around you, either in a mass-event, an election campaign or in a gathering of friends where a sudden shift of atmosphere calls for you to shift your feelings about something so as to fall in line with the collective? There are many more examples where one can observe ‘this collective feeling-sphere’ in action, if only one shifts the focus of attention and awareness from a thoughts-only perspective to one’s feelings and emotions.

However, my most recent personal observational evidence is that thought does control the instincts.

Indeed. The only way up to now has been complying with a strict moral and ethical code in order to control one’s instinctual passions. These morals and ethics are conditioned thoughts, underpinned by feelings of guilt, fear and shame – ‘this is good’, ‘this is bad’, ‘this is right’, ‘this is wrong’. This training is so strong that one can control one’s instincts to a certain degree, until push comes to shove and control is lost – a flare of anger, a sexual flash at the ‘wrong’ moment, an overwhelming fear, a feeling of desperation ... everybody knows those moments when control is lost.

This could be related to the ‘switch’ that you previously mentioned.

I had said –

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.

In order to find the ‘switch’ to permanently rid oneself of a particular emotional reaction one needs to first become aware of it in order to explore the origin of this reaction. That origin is very often related to one’s social identity like national pride, gender identity, religious, spiritual or philosophical viewpoints, belonging to a family, a professional self-image, etc, etc. Finding the source of one’s emotional behaviour, i.e. finding the part of identity that is related to this particular emotional behaviour, is not merely a thought activity, one will have to conduct an experiential dig into the psyche, a ‘feeling it out’ while being aware of one’s feelings at the same time. A control via thought will repress (stop) the instinctual reaction for the time being and thus avoid its investigation and prevent one from eliminating the cause of the reaction.

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All sentient beings, to a greater or lesser extent, are connected via this feeling-sphere or psychic web ... a network of energies or currents that range from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ and from the Divine to the Diabolical. When ‘you’, the ‘self’, actively practice expanding from a personal consciousness into the collective consciousness, those vibes, energies or currents are more clearly and distinctly noticed and the instinctual battle for survival is then fought on another, ‘higher’ and grander scale. With apperception, the brain’s ability of being aware of being conscious, one becomes aware of the folly of this collective consciousness and one becomes aware of the psychic powers and grand feelings that are wielded by the gurus as part and parcel of this collective consciousness. In that clear awareness of the nature of collective consciousness itself one is then able to step outside of this psychic web, outside of humanity. Only by stepping outside of the psychic web or the common feeling-sphere is there complete freedom from emotion-backed thoughts.

Are you saying that the only way to step outside of this psychic web is to eliminate the instincts?

Yes. ‘Who I think and feel I am’ is a psychological and psychic entity. Unless this entity is totally eliminated one is forever trapped in this psychic web.

Are you saying that the instincts are what connect us to this psychic web?

Yes. All human beings have the same set of animal instinctual passions, the survival instincts. The core of these passions is the instinctive psychic self – who we feel we really are, deep down inside.

This could be true but also could be illusion.

I am reporting ‘personal observational evidence’ and the evidence of other pioneers who have explored and investigated their emotions and instinctual passions. The only way for you to find out how the psychic web functions, is to experiment and gather ‘personal observational evidence’.

The psychic web is an illusion in the sense that it is not actual as in tangible, audible, visible, etc. But it is very, very real for every human being, evidenced by the unmistakable grip that emotions and instinctual passions have on people and on humanity as a whole. Unless one becomes aware of the psychic web’s functioning in oneself this illusion is one’s everyday reality.

Yesterday I watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games and found it an excellent example of the psychic web in action. A band of 2000 musicians from all over the world was playing, all nationalities wearing an identical blue-red-beige uniform, everyone marching in exact formations while playing the various national hymns from all over the world. The audience’s spirit was soaring high, cheers and tears, overwhelmed by the feeling of ‘we are all one’, ‘we are the world’, feeling unity, glory, bliss and love. It is amazing how simple methods – heart-stirring music, uniforms and people marching in formations – can cast an effective spell on the collective human psyche.

However, the feeling of ‘unity’ immediately dispersed as soon as the athletes of all the countries started marching into the stadium wearing their national costumes, under individual flags. Then the psychic scene changed, the feeling was now of individual national pride. Each nation was now separate from the other and soon each athlete will be competing against the others for the glory of their particular country and for their own personal fame. The feeling of Unity is but a short-lived feeling ... the psychic vibe changes readily when the music changes.

I enjoyed your report of your experience with actualism you wrote to No 38. One part of it I could particularly relate to –

Yes, in the sense that my ‘search’ for truth has ended – and that is quite a relief. Also, my ‘relationships’ and dealings with people are virtually free of emotional entanglement, so they are much, much smoother.

So, I cannot definitively say that I am happier overall.

If I understand you correctly, I can relate to your observation that ‘‘I’ resent being here, and ‘I’ know it’.

When I discovered actualism and came to understand that the instinctual passions are the root cause of all human malice and sorrow I started to deliberately break my ingrained habits of dis-identifying and dissociating from my feelings and emotions – habits which had been part of my previous spiritual practice. I also began to watch television and read the newspapers to see what was going on in the world and to take notice of how I was in relation to other people. It wasn’t easy at the start because what I found was often not very pretty. When I took off my rose-colored glasses of dis-identification and dissociation I was at first overwhelmed with sorrow about the way people are with each other and, more importantly, I was shocked and appalled at the dark emotions I found within myself despite all my diligent spiritual practice and all my good intentions. In short, I discovered that I was as bad and as mad as everyone else, to paraphrase Peter’s description.

One of the first of my previously-hidden feelings I became aware of was ‘my’ resentment of being here and the constant effort required to be ‘me’ and yet I was determined and committed to not let these negative emotions slip away into the background again, but I wanted to actively investigate these feelings, look for the reasons for my resentment, consider and apply any practical changes if possible and where necessary, break my habit of carelessly lapsing back into these feelings – in short do whatever was needed to break the back of this insidious spoiler of my enjoyment of this moment. I found that the commitment to enjoy this perpetual moment of being alive was already half the battle and stubborn determination to not let fear, confusion or doubt stop me, the other half.

The practical and efficient tool – the actualism method – allowed me to not only become aware of my dark emotions but to examine them and incrementally disempower them, or, to put it differently, a tool that enabled me to become increasingly more happy and more harmless the more I uncovered the beliefs, morals, ethics, feelings and passions that prevented me from being happy and harmless. This tool, combined with Richard’s report of successfully applying it, meant that I increasingly dared to stop turning away from the dark side of the human condition, and to explore the darker recesses of my psyche in order that I could investigate the instinctual passions and then do whatever was necessary and appropriate in order to disempower them.

When you say ‘too quick’ I am reminded of the ‘quick and dirty processing pathway’ from the thalamus to the Amygdala that LeDoux and his team discovered (see Library Topics – Instinctual Passions). The emotional-instinctual response by its very nature is ‘too quick’, while a deliberate sensible answer requires thinking and contemplation.

I found this bit to be a fascinating bit of science when I first read about it, and consistent with my own discoveries. It just takes that split-second of deferring my responses to take the wind out of their sails. This helped enormously with the external aspects of my relationships with others. This is an example of the appeal (to me) of AF... its sound footing in the concrete/actual... no need for spirits/gods/planetary influences/etc.

As you say, ‘the external aspects of my relationships with others’ were the first to take care of. For me that meant I became determined to stop expressing any of my angry, sad, resentful, irritated, etc. feelings to the people I interacted with. The more ‘split-seconds’ I learnt to put between experiencing those feeling and expressing a thoughtful response, the less I transmitted these feelings to others.

Whilst the first aspect is to stop expressing such feelings to others, it is equally important not to repress them. It is only by not repressing my feelings of anger, sadness or resentment that I am able to experience them and then inquire into the nature of my beliefs and the bits of my identity that triggered those feelings in the first place. Whenever I became aware that I was feeling upset about a comment someone made, I took the opportunity to look for the reason why his or her comment had upset me.

As an example – did his or her comment in a conversation question a dearly held belief or opinion of mine? In that case I questioned why it was so important for me to maintain my belief and I looked deeper into the particular belief or opinion that had been disturbed. Slowly, slowly, with effort and diligence, those – touchy – beliefs were replaced by sound facts and simple sensibility which, in turn, enabled a joie de vivre to supplant the former ambience of doom and gloom.

Even the so-called felicitous feelings do not escape the spotlight of attentiveness, but that does not mean that I have to retreat into a kind of benumbed feeling-less state, what Alan some time back has called ‘comfortably numb’.

‘The kind of benumbed feeling-less state’ you are talking about is, in fact, also a feeling – it is a feeling standing on its head, and is usually accomplished by repressing and denying one’s unwanted feelings. That’s why it is so important to question one’s moral and ethical values as a first step when taking up actualism, lest one ends up replacing one’s real-world and spiritual-world values with a new ideal of a achieving a no-feeling state. In fact, the no-feeling state is akin to the Buddhist practice of disassociating from one’s unwanted thoughts and feelings.

The other thing I noticed was that becoming happy when everyone else in the world insists on having problems was not always an easy task. Both my internal moral judge and the people I interacted with would question why I was having such a good time for no particular reason – something must be wrong with me, I am not taking life seriously enough, I stick my head in the sand, I must be insensitive to other people’s suffering, I must be cynical, neurotic, silly, mad, etc. etc. I found it essential to examine and eradicate this globally accepted social conditioning of ‘never be too happy’, because the question ‘why am I happy?’ is simply the wrong question to ask on the path of becoming free from the human condition.

I think it is important not to confuse the issue here. You first used the word ‘authentic’ as it is commonly used nowadays meaning communicating your feelings as in ‘more authentic for me to communicate with others what I am upset about’. Now you have used the very same word to describe something completely different, a practice that only muddies the waters of communication and understanding. If we stick with your original use of the word then your statement ‘but being authentic as in being actually present’ is impossible because feelings are never actual – they may be felt as real but they are not actual as in palpable, tangible, tactile, corporeal, physical and material.

Actually present then means physically present, giving your full attention to the person or situation – you can never do that when you are emotional because then you are busy being emotional.

This may seem to you like nitpicking about the meaning of words but I have found it an immense help both in thinking things out for myself and in communication with others to be precise in labelling my thoughts and feelings and make a clear distinction between the two.

The word ‘truthful’ is similarly laden with either spiritual or emotional content – you may have noticed that the truth is different for everyone, it is ‘my truth’ against ‘your truth’ and this generally translates as ‘my feeling’ against ‘your feeling’ and ‘my belief’ against ‘your belief’. Therefore, as an actualist, I am not interested in truth but in facts because a fact is obvious for everyone, it is verifiable, objective actuality. A fact is patently true, manifestly clear. A fact is what is ascertained sensately and thus demonstrably factual.

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Yes, I started with the ‘clear-cut’ emotions and then became more and more attentive to the subtler expressions of ‘me’. Anger is an obvious place to start and by becoming attentive to any feelings of anger as they arise you are also becoming attentive to being harmless. Once you apply the method of asking yourself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ you then go one step at a time and become aware of one feeling at a time as it arises. This way you never get more than you can handle at a time. It seems quite daunting at first – given that actualism is brand-new territory – but if you do it for a while you will notice that the results are quite remarkable and that your interactions with people will indeed become increasingly harmless.

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.

I use the term ‘expressing emotion’ for every word or action that consciously expresses your present emotion. The current New Age fashion is to feel free to express your emotions by sharing them with others, be they malicious feelings or sorrowful feelings. Another fashionable way of expressing emotions is to do so privately but either way is indulging in malice or wallowing in sorrow.

In my twenties and later in my spiritual years I did a lot of therapy groups where expressing emotions was hailed as the solution to a happier life, but I always found the emotional high of the group would wear off after a few days and dealing with my emotions had not become easier at all. The proof that expressing emotions didn’t work to solve my problems was the fact that I, like most others, kept coming back time and time again to do more groups. I found the belief that an expressed emotion will disappear only temporarily true – eventually I had to admit that doing therapy groups was certainly not a remedy, but rather a waste of time, money and energy. The fact that expressing emotions does not bring permanent relief has also been confirmed by empirical studies on therapy patients – and yet despite this evidence the belief still lingers on, particularly in spiritual circles where belief, faith and feelings are always given greater credence than fact and common sense.

When I took up actualism, I first and foremost became wary of expressing my emotions towards others because my primary aim was to become happy and harmless, which obviously meant not passing on my malice or my sorrow to others. It was a tough habit to break at first because by becoming aware of my feelings, I came to see and understand that most of what passes for communication between human beings is sharing of malicious and sorrowful feelings. I also found in the course of investigating my feelings that any kind of deliberately expressing of my emotions was not helpful to my investigations. Expressing emotions only enhanced the present emotions, left me unable to be attentive to experiencing the emotion while it was happening, and left me exhausted and confused.

The best way for me to find out what was going on emotionally was to sit with the feeling, experience and be aware of the surge of chemicals rushing through my head and my body and systematically ask myself questions that would lead me to discover the underlying causes for my feelings. For the method of actualism to work it is vital to experience the feeling so that you can find out what triggered it and what part of your identity is linked to your feeling. Ultimately, to unthinkingly continue on with one’s past habits of either repressing or expressing the feeling stands in the way of a fruitful straightforward investigation.

It is not an easy task and it does take conscious determination to shift one’s attitude from the automatic programming of blaming people, things and events for one’s own feelings – even if one is not expressing them – towards wanting to discover in each and every instance what part of my social or instinctual programming is making me feel angry or feel sad in the first place. It also takes effort to concentrate on becoming aware of one’s feelings in the first place because men in particular are socially conditioned to brush their feelings aside. As Richard says, the method of actualism is an excellent tool and 

Richard: ... a very tricky way of both getting men fully into their feelings for the first time in their life and getting women to examine their feelings one by one instead of being run by a basketful of them all at once. Richard’s Journal, Appendix 4

Yes, there is a vast difference between expressing one’s emotions to other people and communicating about one’s awareness and observation of emotions on this list. The first is ‘me’ in action, whilst the second is a report based on the awareness that ‘my’ emotions are solely a sign of ‘me’ in action and have nothing to do with anyone else.

It is well worth contemplating as to why you think it is important for you to communicate ‘to my wife, kids, and other people about what [you are] feeling’. As one can clearly experience in a PCE, where ‘me’ and my feelings are temporarily absent, feelings are always my identity in action and any identity, by its very nature, is always ‘self’-centred. So the question is why should it be of importance for anyone to express one’s social-instinctual identity in action?

The sole intent in actualism is to become happy and harmless – and that’s the reason why I question and investigate my feelings and emotions. The aim of actualism is not to get rid one’s emotions because one would then only choose to keep the good emotions while suppressing, denying or sublimating the bad emotions – and this enterprise has been tried and demonstrably failed for centuries.

When I started to practice actualism, I soon found out that expressing any of my emotions verbally, through action or through psychic vibes and moods, always caused ripples for other people – in other words, I was not harmless. To express my feelings to others only served to support and enhance the ‘self’-centredness inherent in feelings, whereas the practice of neither expressing nor repressing one’s feelings puts them into a bind, as it were. I am then able to become aware of what I feel and think and thus don’t perpetuate my ‘self’-centred problems by passing them on to others.

I remember the last time when I tried to influence others by ‘sharing’ what I felt. I did some work for an old acquaintance who lived in a town about 25 km away. As a favour she asked me if someone could drop off a parcel at my house so that I could then deliver it to her.

However, when this person rang very early in the morning to ask when it would be convenient to drop off the parcel, I became a little upset. I thought how dare he be so inconsiderate as to wake me up so early for something that wasn’t even urgent. When I later delivered the parcel to my colleague, I mentioned that her friend had rung me up very early in the morning. She profusely apologized to me and then became really upset herself. She said she had instructed him not to ring before 9am and that she would immediately ring her friend to tell him off. At this point I realized that my seemingly calm mentioning of my emotional reaction to receiving an early morning phone call had created palpable ripples in two other people’s lives and that it was now out of my control and irreversible in its consequences.

This incident demonstrated very clearly that sharing my emotions, even in a calm way, inevitably caused ripples in other people’s lives and that I could never be harmless as long as I involved other people in my problems by sharing my emotional reactions.

You don’t have to make an argument for communicating emotions – it’s the very status quo of what makes human beings who they are. The world is awash with emotional sharing, either covertly by silent means or overtly through words and actions. The jealous man or woman can either think about revenge, feel like taking revenge, verbally threaten revenge or put his or her thoughts and feelings into action. Similarly a man or woman can think about stealing, feel like stealing or put his or her thoughts and feelings into action.

Such malicious thoughts and feelings are, even if they are not put into action, palpable signs that ‘I’ am malicious at core and in a similar way sorrowful thoughts and feelings are palpable signs that ‘I’ am sorrowful at core. The method of actualism is not about putting a moral lid on one’s malicious and sorrowful thoughts and feelings but it addresses the very core of the problem – recognizing and whittling away at my malicious and sorrowful social-instinctual identity.

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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.

Human beings have always valued their feelings, emotions and passions as their highest evolutionary achievement, and consider them something that makes them truly human. However the fact is, what makes human beings unique in comparison to other animals is not their inclination for emotions and passions but their ability to think, reflect and plan and the distinctive capacity of the human brain to be aware of itself.

Whether ‘you’ regard it as authentic or not authentic, ‘reporting the emotion occurring in me’ is acting out ‘me’, the social-instinctual entity inside this flesh-and-blood body, because ‘I’ am my emotions and my emotions are ‘me’. Personally, I decided to stop burdening others with ‘my’ authenticity, my emotions and my ‘self’-centredness. I made my emotions and my feelings my business only.

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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’?

Any communication with others as to ‘where it can hurt’ is habitually passed on for the sole purpose of pointing out that the other should change his or her behaviour so as not to hurt ‘me’. It’s the normal cut and thrust, defend and parry of the psychological and psychic battle that human beings constantly engage in and euphemistically call communication.

When I took up actualism and I discovered ‘where it can hurt’, I welcomed this information as a valuable indication of my ‘self’ coming to the foreground and it showed me where to look for my tricky identity. I welcomed every opportunity to find out what caused me to feel hurt, insulted, frustrated, annoyed, etc., despite my occasional resistance, fear, uneasiness or laziness to be aware of exactly what I was thinking or feeling. Whenever I felt hurt I knew that this must be ‘me’, my ‘self’, defending my precious feelings, my pride, my prized personality and individuality. It is only because sore spots have been hit time and again in communication with other people, that I have been able to find out about how ‘I’ tick and only by this process have I been able to slowly whittle away at my identity.

What’s the point of telling others when and where they hurt me and expecting them to change, when this chronic habit only prevents me from becoming aware of exactly what I need to change in me if I am to become unconditionally happy and unconditionally harmless towards my fellow human beings.

*

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.

The only way ‘to get to a place where communicating emotion is superfluous’ is to become aware of precisely what your identity consists of and then actively whittle away at all of its content. What you see as the ‘necessity and vital importance of communicating information about emotion’ – for instance communicating ‘where it can hurt’ – is in fact your feeling and thus an aspect of your identity on guard.

When you have a close relationship to someone – in this case your son – then everything the other feels also has a direct emotional effect on you, which means your son’s emotions are directly connected to your identity as a father.

In order to become free from the debilitating effect that emotions had on me, I made it my single-pointed aim to become aware of each and every emotion that arose before I even considered acting on it. However, if you prefer valuing ‘the importance of communicating about emotion’ then that is, of course, entirely your choice.

Needless to say, actualism is purely voluntary.

In order to successfully apply the method of actualism it is vital to understand that unless you radically break with the automatic and traditionally accepted habit of expressing or suppressing your emotions, the third alternative of experiencing, becoming aware of and investigating one’s emotions as they arise won’t even come into view. ‘Communicating ‘where it can hurt’’, even as an ‘interim solution’, is to continue on the tried and failed ways of the human condition of malice and sorrow. If you want to stop being malicious, at least you have to have the intent to stop – no intent, no chance of result. As far as investigating emotions is concerned, desperately trying to keep your mountains the size of ‘mole-hills’ does nothing to eliminate the cause of your emotion, it is simply the normal way of dealing with the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

Yes, in the beginning of taking up actualism I ‘often felt like a tiger in a cage’, but it was a cage entirely of my own making in that I had made it my aim not to let out my feelings on anyone else. I was not content with the normal solution of expressing my feelings once in a while (letting the tiger loose on someone else or something else) so that I would then be temporarily happy. I wanted to become aware of the ‘tiger’ of my instinctual passions, not just tame them or feel I had transcended them – I aimed at getting rid of the ‘tiger’, ‘me’, altogether. I had spent years expressing my emotions, intentionally in therapy groups and accidentally in daily life, and it had made me neither happy nor harmless. It was only because I stopped what I had done for so long and began to closely observe and scientifically investigate my psyche in action that I was able to slowly whittle away at ‘me’.

If you ‘prefer not to make myself feel that way’ that is fair enough. It is not everyone’s cup of tea to be a pioneer in radically breaking with the social-spiritual traditions and going against the animal-instinctual imperative by putting one’s harmlessness first.

We’ve talked about this before – in my experience the only underlying motive for telling others about my frustration for instance, is that they then do something about it. My practice of actualism began when I really understood that others have naught to do with what I feel – they only provide the trigger, they are not the cause. It is the social and instinctual programming in me that causes my frustration, my anger, my resentment, my sorrow and my fear. Once I understood this vital point, I stopped looking for the solution of my feelings outside of me and thus relieved the people around me from the burden of shame and blame for having triggered my feelings.

It is enormously liberating to put this realization into everyday practice.

What’s the point of telling others when and where they hurt me and expecting them to change, when this chronic habit only prevents me from becoming aware of exactly what I need to change in me if I am to become unconditionally happy and unconditionally harmless towards my fellow human beings.

Again, I am not expressing my emotions on this list but I am reporting my experience of how I have dealt with my emotions and what I have learnt from experientially investigating them. Expressing emotions is passing on one’s feelings, be it in calm words or agitated gestures, acting on the belief that others could and should do something about how one feels – otherwise one would not express one’s feelings towards people.

In actualism my aim is not to diffuse an occurring emotion by expressing it, as is the traditional way, but to become aware of it to such an extent that I can identify how this emotion forms an integral part of my identity – i.e. each and every feeling and emotion observed is a gateway to see how ‘I’ operate. As long as I am busy expressing, suppressing, controlling or diffusing my emotion, I have no means of being attentive to the underlying identity in action. In other words, the aim of actualism is to detect the programming that causes each feeling, whereas acquiescing to one’s desire to diffuse unwanted feelings is to simply remain a compliant victim of this programming itself.

Yes, part of the process of actualism is that one questions one’s concepts and beliefs and in the course of doing so you discover the underlying feelings and passions that hold your concepts and beliefs in place. Unless you discover those underlying feelings and how they relate to your identity, you will only replace those concepts with other, more fashionable, concepts and a different design of your identity. This practice of investigating one’s beliefs and concepts and their underlying feelings is not at all discouraged on this list – investigating one’s psyche is the very basis of actualism.

What is essential, however, is the pure intent to be unconditionally harmless, or, as No. 38 put it recently ‘I’m starting to see that it is always ‘happy and harmless’, it’s a package deal.’ Unless you are ready to take on board the whole package, you won’t be able to even begin to recognize your own malicious and sorrowful programming in action.

You have made it very clear that the way you prefer to deal with your emotions is expressing your emotions in interaction with others and I can understand this very well given that it is feelings and passions that tie human beings together.

Actualism, however, is a unilateral decision to do something about my emotions and passions in me, the only person I can change. In actualism I set out on a course to leave my ‘self’ behind and along with it, my ties to humanity.

What is, in fact, responsible for my emotions is my social-instinctual programming that every human being is endowed with. I, for one, decided to take responsibility for my emotions and used the actualism method to eliminate my programming because I wanted to live in unrestricted peace and harmony with my fellow human beings.

2. I am a cause of ripples of emotion in others when I express my own emotion towards them.

This is the incident you are referring to –

I remember the last time when I tried to influence others by ‘sharing’ what I felt. I did some work for an old acquaintance who lived in a town about 25 km away. As a favour she asked me if someone could drop off a parcel at my house so that I could then deliver it to her. However, when this person rang very early in the morning to ask when it would be convenient to drop off the parcel, I became a little upset. I thought how dare he be so inconsiderate as to wake me up so early for something that wasn’t even urgent. When I later delivered the parcel to my colleague, I mentioned that her friend had rung me up very early in the morning. She profusely apologized to me and then became really upset herself. She said she had instructed him not to ring before 9am and that she would immediately ring her friend to tell him off. At this point I realized that my seemingly calm mentioning of my emotional reaction to receiving an early morning phone call had created palpable ripples in two other people’s lives and that it was now out of my control and irreversible in its consequences. This incident demonstrated very clearly that sharing my emotions, even in a calm way, inevitably caused ripples in other people’s lives and that I could never be harmless as long as I involved other people in my problems by sharing my emotional reactions. Vineeto, Actual Freedom Mailing List, No 37, 15.2.2002

In this incident I did not merely provide practical information about the phone call but I passed on emotionally loaded information. It made no difference that this information was given in a calm voice, it nevertheless transmitted the emotional information that was inherent in my experience with the early morning phone call. The other’s reaction made me realize that I had tricked myself and the other, by thinking I was calm, rational and entirely justified, when I had still blamed them for my being upset and thus my action was the cause for the ripples created.

I did take responsibility for the fact that my passed on feelings created ripples in other people’s lives. I care enough for my fellow human beings that I do not want to add my own malice and sorrow to whatever other feelings people are already having. That they communicated their emotions to me was not ‘vitally important’ to me because there are enough opportunities to observe one’s own feelings when one is behaving maliciously towards others, provided one has the pure intent to find out, that is.

It is a myth that human beings have ‘natural benevolence’ – every human being is born with mother nature’s rather clumsy soft-ware package of the animal instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and this programming is responsible for the human condition that is epitomized by malice and sorrow. What looks like beneficial behaviour to you is the social conditioning in which humans are taught to emphasize and highly value their ‘good’ instinctual passions and repress and control their ‘savage’ passions. However, we still have to rely on lawyers and laws, courts and jails, police, armies and guns to ultimately enforce law and order – a pathetic substitute for an actual peace and harmony between human beings.

Why would you feel the need to ‘better direct’ people’s supposed ‘natural benevolence’? Why do you feel a fear of being emotionally hurt by others if everyone has a ‘natural benevolence’? It’s a spiritual fairy-tale that priests and gurus want us to believe that human nature is essentially benevolent, that babies are born innocent and that they have only been misguided and corrupted by their upbringing. One only needs to take a closer look at 5,000 years of recorded history to see that this duplicitous belief is neither factual nor makes any sense.

As long as one is entrapped within the Human Condition and faithfully follows its rules and tenets, not much light ‘can be shed on how we tick’. Only when I become aware and step outside of the normal human way, which is the way of feelings and passions, am I able to investigate and report about how the lost, lonely, frightened and very cunning entity ‘ticks’ inside this flesh-and-blood body.

If by ‘becoming Happy first’ one could ‘also become Harmless’, the whole world would be happy and harmless by now. The pursuit of happiness is as old as humankind but it still has not produced anything remotely resembling harmlessness, let alone harmony.

Actualism breaks with the instinctual compulsion of human beings to put their own happiness first and put harmlessness second – as a socially conditioned afterthought, so to speak. As long as I put my happiness above being harmless, my outlook towards others is inevitably ‘self’-centred, which means that I cannot consider others as equitable fellow human beings.

Personally, I find discussions of imaginary situations can at best lead to some form of theoretical understanding but the only way to really understand the nature and power of feelings and emotions is for you to do your own explorations in real situations as they are happening. However, in the hypothetical situation you offer, you have communicated some information to your wife about an emotional situation where she wasn’t involved. If she had been involved – as in telling her that it was she who had made you feel nervous – then this would be an example of expressing an emotion.

What happens when people express their emotions is that they make no distinction between the trigger for their own feelings or emotions and the person or persons who deliver the trigger – the person who made some comment, who did something or didn’t do something, who has a viewpoint different than yours, who espouses different morals or ethics and so on. To express your feelings to someone who is but the deliverer of the trigger of your feelings is to shoot the messenger. No matter how cunningly or cleverly this is done, expressing emotions in this way always means you are missing the opportunity of attentively experiencing the emotion and of understanding the nuts and bolts of how ‘you’ operate.

To express emotion is to verbally and/or non-verbally turn the ‘emotional hose’ towards the person who supposedly triggered your feelings, or who happens to be nearby when one wants to emotionally unload, and drench them in one’s feelings. As Richard explained recently: ‘an emotion ... wants to express, communicate or convey itself either verbally (which may be merely tone of voice), physically (which may be merely facial expression or bodily stance) or as a ‘vibe’ – to use a ‘60’s term – which can be picked-up psychically (and is arguably the most pernicious of all expression).’

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Good on you. When you have pure intent, you don’t need the ‘crutch’ of expressing your emotions verbally, physically or psychically. You simply have the intent to be as harmless as can be and with each little success you raise the bar as you go along. As you become more and more familiar with the territory and the cunning of your psyche, you become increasingly able to discover and observe the emotion before it ‘slips out’, i.e. before it is expressed in any way whatsoever. And if you do ‘slip up’, another opportunity will soon come along – it is not easy to break a lifetime’s habit, particularly when everyone else on the planet is busily involved in mindlessly expressing their emotions.

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You ask me why I want others to be ‘sensitive’ to me? I ask you why should you or I be ‘sensitive’ to others? My answer to this is that it’s not that I’m requiring or demanding that others be ‘sensitive’ to my needs – rather that I do realize that generally people are well meaning and benevolent, so that I don’t see any reason why sharing information about how I am feeling should be seen as a ‘demand’ placed upon them. It’s merely information that they are free to do with whatever they want. Giving information about how I feel, or have felt in a purely informative way only allows them to understand me – which allows their natural benevolence to be better directed.

It is a myth that human beings have ‘natural benevolence’ – every human being is born with mother nature’s rather clumsy soft-ware package of the animal instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and this programming is responsible for the human condition that is epitomized by malice and sorrow. What looks like beneficial behaviour to you is the social conditioning in which humans are taught to emphasize and highly value their ‘good’ instinctual passions and repress and control their ‘savage’ passions. However, we still have to rely on lawyers and laws, courts and jails, police, armies and guns to ultimately enforce law and order – a pathetic substitute for an actual peace and harmony between human beings. Why would you feel the need to ‘better direct’ people’s supposed ‘natural benevolence’? Why do you feel a fear of being emotionally hurt by others if everyone has a ‘natural benevolence’? It’s a spiritual fairy-tale that priests and gurus want us to believe that human nature is essentially benevolent, that babies are born innocent and that they have only been misguided and corrupted by their upbringing. One only needs to take a closer look at 5,000 years of recorded history to see that this duplicitous belief is neither factual nor makes any sense.

It is certainly ‘best not to combine the word ‘natural’ and ‘benevolence’’ because it is the instinctual passions that are natural and consequently come to the surface with often horrendous results when the social rules fail to curb the excesses. Children before about age two are ‘natural’ and so are animals – children at this age don’t yet have a social conscience and, as such, are run entirely by their instinctual passions.

What you said, however, is that you wanted to appeal to and direct people’s ‘natural benevolence’ so that they’d be ‘sensitive’ towards you and won’t emotionally hurt you. But apart from the fact that ‘natural benevolence’ is a myth, an actualist aims to become unconditionally happy and harmless, i.e. happy and harmless with people as they are. In order to become unconditionally harmless, I had to stop trying to direct people to live up to ‘my’ preferences and sensitive spots and instead I investigated ‘my’ instinctive need to be in control and change people according to ‘my’ self-centred ideas and feelings. The result is that now I am not only harmless but also happy regardless of what people say to me, or about me, because I removed the cause of my feeling hurt – and the cause is not in others, but in me.

My receiver for psychic currents is almost always automatically switched on, connecting ‘me’ to humanity, and it is these subtle psychic currents that I am going to be watching now more closely in order to ween myself away from these insidious bonds to the passions that exemplify human-ness.

As long as ‘I’ am a ‘being’ there is feeling. And, as we discussed years ago, a feeling can disguise even as a ‘no-feeling’ if I have an investment in not feeling. But it might also be something different. Vis –

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

With ‘no feeling’ I mean a kind of neutral-dull, non-responsive outlook on life. It may start with having ‘no feeling’ but then I quickly get bored with it not being quite alive and annoyed about wasting my time. It is usually fear in its first stage when I try to push it away. Digging deeper I usually find feeling, emotion, fear and holding on to dear ‘self’. It is very different to ‘no feelings and emotions’ where there is simply the delight to be alive. Does that make sense to you? Vineeto to Alan, 6.2.1999

In dismantling the ‘feeler’, I found that ‘Feeling is not a fact’ to be useful; i.e. when the feeling is rampant, to realize that ‘what one feels to be true’ requires the ‘feeling’ to be true – i.e. when I question – ‘will what is felt be true if the feeling were not there to support it?’ I found this working for me rather than going through the whole structure of what caused this feeling etc. as it seems to become circular in my case.

When feelings seem ‘to become circular’ I found it helpful to find out the reason why particular feelings were so ‘sticky’, why it was important for me to feel this way, why I was afraid to question the particular part of my identity that was related to these feelings.

When I apply the method of actualism I do so because I want to become happy and harmless – that is my first and only priority. Then the investigation into how I am experiencing this moment of being alive has a clear direction – what worry, feeling, desire, belief, etc. preventing me from being happy and harmless and if so, why do I hold on to it?

Actualists have written a great deal about how to apply the actualism method and have shared their experiences as to how to make investigations into beliefs and feelings. You will find it under the links to selected correspondences on the library page of ‘How to Become Free from the Human Condition?’ and also under ‘Affective Feelings – Emotions, Passions and Calentures’.

Yes, the test is always if the hold that feelings have on you in a particular situation is weakened or if the feelings return exactly the same way at the next similar occasion. If they do, you simply root around a bit more and probe a little deeper each time.

In psycho-therapy there is often great emphasis placed on remembering past harms and hurts, yet there is never a resolution of the associated feelings of sorrow and malice. Psychotherapy encourages you to remember childhood events in order to ‘heal’ the ‘wounded child’ but this only serves to enhance the social identity that is in part made of those memories. Whereas in actualism it is only necessary to go back to the event that triggered your current feeling in order to build up an experiential understanding of how your social and instinctual identity is programmed to work. Eventually past memories are not needed at all in order to recognize one’s identity in action – with sufficient practice you become aware of ‘me’ in action on the spot and nip it in the bud before feelings go rampant.

I am delighted you understood the pun.

In the beginning I found ‘of being alive’ particularly useful given that spiritual practice focuses so much on how not to be here on this planet – typified by such sayings as ‘going inside’ or ‘finding an inner peace’ – and is only concerned with increasing your moral bank balance for life after death.

However, once I had understood the gist of the actualism method of investigating what is going on each moment again, the question became a wordless attentiveness to being alive now. Physical sensations, thoughtful reflections and affective feelings are equally noticed. The increased awareness of being alive makes the sensual experiencing more delightful, contemplations more effective and enjoyable and it allows me to detect affective feelings as they begin to arise before they fester into raging emotions.

Whenever feelings were ‘rampant’ I was busy investigating the feelings rather than repeating the initial question because I already knew how I was experiencing this moment of being alive – I was being either angry or sad or frightened or euphoric. Then I would ask myself questions that lead to an in-depth exploration of the feeling in question – what triggered it, when did it first occur, why am I so emotional about the particular situation, what part of my identity does this relate to, etc. I would poke around, question and reflect until I had a sufficient experiential understanding of the issue at hand. Most often this process needed to be repeated time and again as I reacted in a similar way to a particular issue and I only concluded the investigation when there was the satisfying insight that allowed me to drop and dissolve the issue once and for all.

Personally I enjoy and prefer the current medium of the mailing list, where everyone receives everything that is been talked about and can then comment or not in his or her own time, pace and manner. With the mailing list as it is, writing about actualism does not interfere with living my life as I find appropriate.