Personally I found it very useful to adjust my language to aid my ongoing inquiry into beliefs. For me, it seemed easiest to reserve the word belief for the fervent emotion-backed activity of my thoughts and use different words for simply being uncertain about a fact. But then, I guess, each actualist decides what works best for themselves, by themselves.

Well, after I had inquired into the bigger issues of my beliefs I became increasingly attentive to my way of thinking and use of language in order to not inadvertently overlook something. I discovered that when someone said to me ‘I hope you have a nice day’ they were implying that I might not have a nice day because having a nice day is generally considered to be a matter of luck or a matter of avoiding misfortune. As an actualist I no longer rely on hoping that I will have a nice day – I can be sure of it, because I have been busy ridding myself of my feelings of sorrow and malice such that I now always have an excellent day.

As for other people – I can sincerely say to someone ‘have a nice day’ as a kind of encouragement but I know by experience that hoping for it is a no-brainer. I know the human condition and I know that normal people, and spiritual people, regularly stuff up the possibility of having a lovely day by feeling upset, frustrated, annoyed, bored, melancholic, sad, angry or even furious.

Richard is your ‘actual’ hope.

The expression of an actual hope is an oxymoron, evidence that your ‘actual’ clearly means something different than ‘existing in fact as evidenced by the physical senses, in action or existence at this time, existing in act and not merely potentially or apparently.’ Oxford Dictionary. As for hope – I have abandoned hope, faith, belief and trust a long time ago, along with doubt, disbelief, distrust and despair.

This is what actually happened – I was intrigued by Richard’s discovery because I had lost hope in ever finding peace and happiness via spiritual methods. When I applied the actualism method it produced immediate tangible results and repeated success and now I am way past the point of return and the ending of ‘me’ is a sure-fire inevitability. An over-weening confidence based on tangible results and repeated success beats hoping for some future release from the dreary continuum of earthly life hands down.

My life goes very well. There are circumstances (some more than the other – like for example a walk in a park in New Jersey) that trigger in me questioning, checking with myself. Sort of: my head, ‘check’, two hands ‘check’, two legs walking ‘check’, body tension ... mood ... is there any discomfort... is there any stress ... am I happy, smiling... what about my motifs... what motivates my actions... How am I experiencing this moment of being alive... Sometimes I just catch myself reacting based on some emotional response.

One of my most subtle emotions is that I am somehow better than others, a ‘special’ person. It is difficult to see it because it is a very ‘quiet’ emotion; it does not create any discomfort thus signalling its presence...

To become aware of and discover the more ‘subtle emotions’ – the so-called good emotions that don’t seem to ‘create any discomfort’ – is indeed a bit more difficult, and feeling ‘better than others, a ‘special’ person’, is a good example for such a ‘good’ emotion. I found this feeling to be one of the core obstacles in being able to regard and experience other people as my fellow human beings.

In my spiritual days I had plenty of feeling superior to others – it was part and parcel of my belonging to ‘the master of masters’ and ‘his chosen people’. I felt specially blessed and I spent my life trying to become a ‘good’ person by listening to the ‘right’ teachings, practicing the ‘right’ spiritual practices and knowing the ‘right’ way to becoming one with the divine.

But, you guessed it, something was utterly wrong. The ‘right’ teaching did not result in peace and happiness and the ‘chosen people’ fought feuds against others religious groups and amongst themselves, just like everyone else. Over the years it became more and more obvious that my feelings of superiority couldn’t cover up what was very rotten underneath – in my honest moments I knew damn well that I was not ‘good’, let alone the best I could be. I knew that there were times when I was jealous and angry, sad and depressed, bitchy and grumpy, irritable and scared. In fact, despite the millions of wise words I had absorbed, I was neither wiser nor better than everyone else and my feelings of being superior only served to increase the separation I felt from other people.

Then I discovered actualism and began first to whittle away the ‘bad’ emotions, the ones that are very obviously in the way of becoming happy and harmless. But just as my life became easier because I was less sad and less angry, some other emotions came to the foreground and amongst them the feeling of superiority. At some point this culminated in feelings of being perfect and with it a rush of glory, compassion for all and an all-consuming pride swept over me and catapulted me into an altered state of consciousness. ‘I’ had grabbed the perfection of the actual world and claimed it as ‘my’ achievement, ‘my’ prize and ‘my’ glory.

That’s where the second half of becoming ‘happy and harmless’ comes into play. During the time when my feelings of being better than others was exaggerated and magnified like all get-out in this altered state of consciousness, these feelings were rather easy to examine and I could soon recognize that ‘I’, with my imagined superiority, was not harmless at all. On the contrary, in this delusionary state, I was so convinced of the ‘rightness’ and power of my thoughts and feelings that, had I acted on them, there would have been great potential to do harm to others.

The point I am trying to make is that feeling ‘somehow better than others’ is par for the course and is a very interesting part of the human condition to investigate. Soap operas and movie dramas are a fertile arena to observe this trait in action, where the good and pious heroes’ every word and action drip with righteousness and superiority whilst propagating hope, love and virtuousness. So yes, the feeling you discovered is an essential part of the human condition, and is well worth extensive exploration.

On a different issue: I just saw some commentary on the issue of ‘Crop Circles’ – a statement of a crop circle hoaxer who said ‘You could say what we’re doing is propagating belief systems’. It shows how deeply rooted is this urge in us to propagate belief systems, even these that we know are bogus.

THE CIRCLE-MAKER

For the UFO crowd, the circles are signatures left behind by visiting spaceships. For mother-earth mystics, they’re the manifestations of deep waves of natural energy. For psychics, they’re the conscious results of remote-viewing experiments. For fringe physicists, they’re the tracks of ionised plasma whirlwinds. But for Lundberg and his circle-making colleagues, they are the starting points for performance art.

‘Essentially, we’re artists, and for us the most important thing that we do is the stuff after the circles are made, which is all the myth,’ he told MSNBC.com. ‘It’s kind of like a mass-participation artwork. It’s like a mind virus, really. ... You could say what we’re doing is propagating belief systems.’ http://www.msnbc.com/news/787696.asp?pne=msn

Talking about ‘propagating beliefs’, I watched a television program called ‘Touched By An Angel’ for a while and found it to have great educational value. In the program God’s all-knowing angels patrol the world, plying God’s will to be done, offering hope and consolation with amazingly simplistic explanations about God’s messy creation, while their only response to the malice and sorrow in the world is that ‘God loves you very much’ . Banalities such as ‘God is as angry as you are that you have cancer but he will be with you all the way’ or ‘God is fair but life is not’ are offered as truths and are eagerly lapped up for want of a sensible explanation for the situation human beings find themselves in.

I always find it amazing that such convoluted fairy-tales have such a grip on the human race. But then again, the market for beliefs, be they old, newly propagated or recently recycled, is inexhaustible and people will seemingly do anything but give up hope – hope that somehow, somewhere, Somebody loves you, is in charge and has things under control.

It is such fun nowadays to know that I don’t have the need, or even the interest, to buy into any belief whatsoever, because the actual world I live in is so much more magical and magnificent than any fantasy can ever be.

But I hope my words have been useful, peaceful and loving effects on you.

I abandoned hope a long time ago together with faith, trust and belief. Hope and praying for peace is but a poor substitute for actually doing something for peace on earth – in me, the only person I can change.

I remember a while ago indulging in a feeling of listlessness bordering on boredom mixed with growing dissatisfaction about not knowing what to do to become actually, irrevocably and permanently free. Of course, there were things to do and pleasures to enjoy but I missed the gist and the passion of the earlier discoveries and startling realizations. The ‘landscape’ of the wide and wondrous path has surely changed and the gross, unwanted behaviour of the ‘self’ has almost completely disappeared. But the challenge remains to identify the ‘self’ in action – cunning as ever – and return to being unconditionally happy and harmless as soon as possible. Now it seems important to identify the more subtle feelings, moods and affections that indicate ‘me’ coming to the foreground. And they are more the ‘good’ feelings and the ‘no-feelings’ – as I called them once – that I need to be aware of.

I have re-vamped parts of our website, re-dressed some pages, so to speak, and came across a story I told on list C, that seems relevant for our topic:

I was reminded of a particular outstanding experience during the Anti-Fisher-Hoffman-Process in Pune. It was the second time that I did the group, the first time that I was a staff-member. The AFH, as we called it, is a 10-12 day process of looking at childhood issues and overcoming fear, resentment, anger, attachment by using intense bio-dynamic methods. By the third day, with lots of ‘work’ and little sleep, everybody hit their limit. I dragged myself forward, fantasizing about the time when I could sleep again as long as I wanted, if I only made it through the next ‘hellish’ days. Suddenly it dawned on me that what I was doing was waiting. I was wasting my time for ‘redemption’. And I realised that there was no difference from ‘waiting for heaven’ or for enlightenment, or for the right man, or...

With this insight that there is only now, that I live only now, and that there is no heaven to go to – I woke up into full awareness and aliveness. Postponement only brings more misery, hope is for the hesitant one who does not want to take the first step to freedom. This peak-experience lasted for several hours, and while everyone else was tired to the bone I bounced in refreshed aliveness. Later on the event got filed into the category of ‘group-highs’ and the memory of it soon faded away. But for those few hours I had lived in the actual world, here, now, without God, heaven, authority, love, hope and postponement. I had actually experienced that this moment is the only moment we have got, the only moment we can experience being alive, to be either miserable or happy, complaining or fully alive.

And this is where I see one of the main differences between the freedom, Peter and I talk about, and the teachings of the enlightened masters of all ages: the concept of life after death. ‘Eternity’ was a good attraction at the time, improving on the notion of the Christian heaven and hell. The idea was that the soul was eternal, and would live on forever and ever, evolving and in bliss, or, re-appearing in endless re-incarnations, sorting out one’s so-called karma. Enlightenment offered the dream of ‘me’ living on for ever – even after physical death ‘I’ would continue ... and this very dream lead to the most insidious postponement – everything will be fixed with enlightenment or otherwise in Nirvana after death... This belief in eternity comes in many forms and disguises, but if you take a closer look, you will always find that the Divine, the Melting with the Universe, the Dissolution into the Greater Whole – life after death – are an essential part of Eastern teaching. Vineeto List C

Waiting is one of the insidious qualities inherited from the overall spiritual approach to life – the ingrained belief that ‘Something Bigger’ influences our lives, that ultimate salvation is in the ‘hands of Existence’, ‘none of you doing’, ‘God’s control’ and ‘anyway not available in this life-time’ ...

When I wait, I am frustrated ‘that it is not happening’ but I am also bypassing the responsibility to take action – not as an automatic instinctual re-action but as a deliberate contemplated action of sticking my neck out. This avoids playing ‘safe’ as I experiment in order to see what possible emotions would pop up if I did something new, unusual and daring (but not silly). Postponement, a side effect of the fear to stick my neck out, is one of my tricks that let ‘me’ stay in existence. When I postpone, ‘I’ don’t do what is happening, ‘I’ maintain emotional control, ‘I’ pull the levers.

I found that becoming autonomous and independent, free from ‘Humanity’, is a process of many little steps, disentangling myself from fears and apprehensions, beliefs and hesitations, restrictions and self-limitations and giving up the hope that something outside of me is going to change my life.

As I pondered about attentive, naïve and fascinated listening, I have come to see that the major impediment to such listening is the conviction and instinctual feeling of ‘we are all basically the same’. <snip> I found that however seductive and soothing the overwhelming feeling of ‘we are all basically the same’ was, it was nevertheless a feeling and not a fact and as such observable in operation in me. This passionate belief of ‘we are all basically the same’ or ‘We Are All One’ acts as the very glue that holds the psychic web of humanity together – the fervent belief and passionate hope that we as humans are not lost, lonely frightened and very cunning, struggling for survival and desperately hoping that there is a Divine Intelligence, a caring Earth, and a nurturing existence that knows what It is doing. <snip>

The experience of writing on this list has been valuable research for me into the legacy of spiritual teachings. I have learnt how the ‘Friends of J. Krishnamurti’ interact with each other, what they believe, cherish and fiercely defend, how they live their lives, how the Enlightened Ones on this list write, act and live and what solution they offer for malice and sorrow in the world. The solutions offered by various teachers and Gurus may vary at first glance and, as such, cause much dispute and fight amongst their respective followers, but I discovered that every Eastern spiritual advice, teaching and method is about stopping any sensible thoughts and changing how one feels oneself to be – ‘Realize who you Really are’.

*

I think I have also been examining the (for me) final unexplored instinct of nurture. I think I previously wrote that I had been having emotional reactions to certain scenes on television – tears running freely, without there being any obvious feeling extant. It seemed to occur when people were doing things which ‘brought out the best’ in humanity. At one stage, I even considered whether it could be some manifestation of Divine Love trying to sneak in by the back door, so to speak. But, I could detect little in common with my previous experiences of Divine Love – other perhaps than pathos and the fact that I would also then have wept at the same scenes.

I found that the instinct of nurture shows up in many, slightly varying, expressions once one gets past the more obvious feelings of love, friendship, relationship, compassion and Divine Love. Watching human beings in all sorts of enterprises and mischief on the planet via television is and has been a great source of exploring my subtle and not so subtle ‘good’ instinctual feelings that all serve only one purpose – to keep me tied and connected to humanity as a suffering and malicious species. Having an opinion and affective response about what is supposedly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ gets me going round in circles, while looking for the facts of a situation makes it obvious what is silly and what is sensible. And then, in most cases, my opinion and assessment is not required at all and taking sides only serves that ‘I’ stay in existence – emotionally engaged and connected to Humanity.

Whenever I was moved by watching heroic acts of compassion or sentimental stories of hope and love for all, I made it a point to investigate the facts of the situation that are so rosily presented. I always found the loopholes, the unmentioned malice, the hidden selfishness, the suffering necessary for good deeds to happen and the inherent sickness of the genetically encoded program we call the Human Condition. There is no good without evil – or, as No 22 likes to call evil ‘the tortured good’. If one digs really deep one finds that both doing good and doing evil are nothing other than malice and sorrow in action.

The instinct of nurture has the sole function of keeping the species thoughtlessly producing yet more of the same, just as aggression, fear and desire have the function to keep the human species fighting against extinction. There is neither intelligence nor any other inherent value in our blind instinctual drive to nurture, it is the same drive that makes us attack others, defend our territory, fear the stronger ones and grab all one can grab in blind desire. I found Accidental Hero, the movie you mentioned, an excellent example of what can develop out of a sensible response to an emergency situation when the hero’s instincts and ‘self’-preservation catch up with him and everyone else’s ‘self’-centred passions make a confusing emotional drama out of a simple humane response. Lately we had here on the news 3 small children declared as national heroes for dragging their drowning grandfather out of the family swimming pool, whereas they just did the obvious thing in that particular moment.

And then you start off exploring into your psyche, finding out about your hopes, expectations, complaints, assumptions how things should be, ideals and whatever else.

Once I got the knack I had actually good fun exploring. I found that instead of having feelings about a useless hope or dream I could decide to actively abandon that dream, cut it out of my psyche and come back here, into this moment with its magnificent sounds, colours, tastes and interaction. Each time it was like an operation, but the ‘losses’ made me happier and happier, because what I lost was actually the very cause for the present misery or anguish.

‘Love’ hits me where it hurts. I think you are right. It has produced the deepest suffering I have known. So I look at it with everything I've got, which I can’t help, it hurts so much I have to look. It is quite selfish. I would find it difficult not to look at a freshly amputated limb as well.

‘An intense affectionate concern for another person’ or ‘Intense sexual desire for another person’ American Heritage dictionary.

Essentially a definition based on a feeling the self has of connection, desire, and attachment for a person, situation, or thing. Always referring to possession, ‘my wife, my son’. Of course, it is ridiculous to use a dictionary for such a thing when we may look within ourselves.

Yes, I understand from where you are coming from. Love hurts, not only while it is happening with its anxiety, dependence, and resulting petty arguments and revenge. But it hurts even more when the other suddenly terminates the relationship for whatever reason. And one would rather take all the blame for its failure than to doubt and question the very idea of ‘love’, humanity’s strongest hope in the face of loneliness, separation, aggression, sorrow and desperation. Just the hope that there is a solution to all those devastatingly destructive human instincts is so soothing.

I like it that you looked in the dictionary as well as asking yourself what love consists of. After all, ‘love’ is a dream shared by everyone else on the planet.

As you and the other Actual Freedomers have stated, ‘love’ creates suffering. I will sign in here. It does because of the falseness of the ego. The falseness occurs in at least three ways.

1. The first is the level wherein we think we are loving ‘someone else’ when in fact what we are ‘loving’ is an image of that person, not that flesh and blood person at all, and that image we think we are loving is part of us. This is mistake number one.
2. The second falseness arises when we are with a person but see the person either partially or completely through the image we retain, even when we are actually together, so that we have ideas of how they ‘should’ behave based on our mental representation of them, and we always do have expectations when we see another through the eyes of the ego. Thus we are not free to see the person as they actually are. Spouses may call this, for instance ‘Taking me for granted,’ as I recall. We make the concept of the person more important than the person, then we don’t have to look. This is mistake number two.

Yes, you are spot on. When love is in operation, there is only love’s picture that one can see. That very picture is the reason why one can’t be intimate with the person one is with. Love is the very emotion – or the very package of emotions – that makes it impossible to experience direct intimacy with the other human being.

When I met Peter he made a proposition: lets live together in peace and harmony, without love, but in intimacy. At the time I had no idea what he was talking about, but was intrigued by his readiness for commitment and by the word ‘intimacy’. In long years of past relationship I had learned that love had failed again and again. Also I had lived with a woman for some time whose husband had just died after what everyone considered the perfect relationship. She felt herself to be as ‘amputated’ as you describe yourself. So even if love had worked between a man and a woman, there was still the horror that one of them will die first. There is always one who dies first, or leaves. There is always one who is left behind.

Nevertheless, I kept up the hope and belief into the ‘Higher’ or ‘Ideal’ Love, that the Gurus talk about. Although I had been a devoted meditator for some 15 years, I had never reached that state of ‘pure love’ relating to my fellow human beings, it remained but an unreachable cloud of hope, a far away goal to be achieved one day...

It took a few months of thorough investigation into the different beliefs around love until I understood and experienced, that every concept, belief and feeling I hold, positive or negative, keeps me from experiencing the world and another human being as he/she is. It was quite stunning and shocking when intimacy happened for the first time. Delicious in its experience it was nevertheless shocking in its implications for me. I could not deny the experience of intimacy that I had at the time and had to acknowledge the facts of why it was so direct and intimate – but now I had to question all my relating to other people, friends, the spiritual peer-group, parents, acquaintances and work-mates. And, most important of all, this experience of intimacy questioned my relationship to the Master which had been solely based on love and devotion and had held no intimacy at all.

Experiencing another human being directly, without my ‘self’ in action ie. without preconceived ideas, beliefs, feelings of appreciation or rejection, without structure and time plan, as if for the first time, was such a delicious, ambrosial and obviously superior experience to any highs I had ever experienced in love. Mad and daring, I decided I wanted more of this, even if it would cost me all my friends, all my beliefs, everything I had considered of value up to then. And I did lose them all. But the intimacy and resulting peace and harmony that I live with Peter every day, 24 hours a day for the last 12 months without any disagreement, sulking, nagging, compromise, role-play or restriction is worth any sacrifice of hopes, beliefs and ideas. Further, I can also relate to people as they are, with no preconceived hopes or fear which allows an intimacy unexperienced in the times of ‘love’.

Love is like an appendix. As a doctor I’m sure you can appreciate the comparison. What I gather from your writing, your appendix is clearly infected, and badly so. And, I guess you agree, one never fixes up an appendix, it needs to be removed, actually often to save the patient’s life.

Now, in the case of love, you are the doctor and you are the patient and there is no chloroform. The only operating knife you got is your intelligence. And when you cut, you need to be precise and careful, not to let any infected part of the appendix stay in the body.

Ok, what I mean by appendix is the particular passionate dream we have with love. Men dreaming one kind of dream, women dreaming another kind. I have written about the dream and how I got rid of it in our Journal. I copied that part for you here.