RESPONDENT: You are correct that I understood that believing (in the actualist sense) is emotion-backed. I suppose that there is more than one way to do things in the interest of clarity – one could always use a qualifier in front of the word ‘belief’ – like ‘emotion backed beliefs’ or ‘passionately held beliefs’ etc – as to distinguish from estimations and guesses. I suppose that where much of this is coming from not wanting to butcher ordinary language too much. If I find myself saying for example, ‘I believe her middle name is, uh, Joanne’ – I don’t want to be concerned about modifying it to say ‘I think her middle name is...’ or ‘My best guess is that...’ or whatever.

VINEETO: 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.

RESPONDENT: This probably also comes from bumping up against this issue in my ordinary speech – for example, does saying ‘I hope you have a nice day’ necessarily mean I’m ‘hoping?’ I could just as easily change to wording to ‘Have a nice day.’ So, I sometimes use the word ‘hope’ without the emotion of hope behind it.

VINEETO: 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.

RESPONDENT: Richard is your ‘actual’ hope.

VINEETO: 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.

RESPONDENT: I had a wonderful flight from San Jose to Newark. I loved watching the clouds from above. It was very pleasant to fly above these white and very bright puffy popcorn-like clouds. After some time tears came to my eyes because of the light intensity but mainly due to some tender emotions caused by the experience.

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

*

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: (...) All in all, love produces almost visible psychic tentacles that engulf the other and make him or her a commodity of one’s own desire. After all, love is the expression of the instinctual passions of nurture and desire, packaged nicely into a possessive and exclusive concern for, and focus on, the other. What is usually considered ‘intimacy’ is most often the first honeymoon stage of love. ‘I’ love the other because he/she makes me happy, because ‘I’ feel less lost, lonely and frightened in his/her presence. ‘I’ care for him/her because he/she is the centre and hero / heroine of my dream and the moment ‘my’ hopes, needs, dreams and expectation are not fulfilled, love turns into disappointment, resentment, retreat or even hate.

You see, when one honestly investigates the so-called altruistic feelings of love, there is nothing altruistic about it. Love is utterly selfish and self-centred. Love prevents me from appreciating and meeting the other as a fellow human being because every feeling towards the other, positive or negative, makes me unable to perceive the other as an autonomous human being. Being in love, I create an all-pervasive affective image of the other, consisting of my hopes, needs, fears, dreams and expectations. Only by being an autonomous human being myself can I experience an actual intimacy with my fellow human beings.

RESPONDENT: 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...

VINEETO: 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.

RESPONDENT: 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.

[quote]: 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

VINEETO: 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALAN: To expand on that statement, I am completely ‘stuck’ in ‘there is no point in writing because it is ‘me’ who is writing’. Until both ego and soul are eliminated, everything I do is ‘me’ doing it. So, I am unable to write from the on-going experience of life as it actually is, as Richard puts it. At best, I could write with a memory of life as it actually is (the PCE), but not out of my direct experience (unless having a PCE at the time of writing).

This does not mean I am not enjoying life. Peter recently wrote about his interactions with others ‘with an impunity and salubriousness that I would have deemed an impossibility a few years ago’ and I can 100% endorse this – I am virtually without malice and virtually without sorrow. But that is not enough.

VINEETO: 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:

[Vineeto]: 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, 10.12.1998

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.

VINEETO: I have stopped writing a few weeks ago because I seem to have written about and reported everything I know so far about Actual Freedom, and any further attempt so far appeared to me a mere repetition of what I have already talked about, available on the website.

ALAN: I wonder if you are going through the same as I have for the past several months? I have not even been reading the mailing list much and am about 5 weeks behind (looks as though it has been quite lively!). I certainly have had a sense of, there is nothing new to write or report – and maybe that, in itself, is worth reporting.

VINEETO: I don’t know what you have been ‘going through’, but I can tell you a bit about my recent life. Last October my correspondence on the Krishnamurti mailing list came to a conclusion, and apart from it being great fun, the conversations gave me valuable insight into the teachings and following of a yet another spiritual master. I have summed up the experience of writing on (Richard’s) Mailing List B at the time –

[Vineeto]: 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’. Vineeto, List D, No 8

Since October there was simply no incentive to explore the Human Condition via writing on mailing lists and instead I have been exploring experientially the fact that I am utterly and completely redundant – in short, I have been practicing ‘doing nothing really well’ for the last several months. In this time I found that I am redundant as a ‘useful member of society’ and as a ‘friend’ to other friends, and by stopping writing on the Actual Freedom Trust mailing list I was able to examine in hindsight the role that I had played other than sharing useful information. I deliberately abandoned polishing my ‘baby’, the website, and did nothing of meaning or consequence that could give ‘me’ any importance in any way whatsoever.

A training course in ‘doing nothing really well’ includes examining various shades of boredom, resignation, avoidance, feelings of redundancy and meaninglessness – doing bugger all day after day (apart from the obvious task of making a living) and sensately enjoying the simple fact of being alive for no other reason than being alive. To discover that I am already here anyway and that I don’t need to do anything to justify and prove my existence is not just the adventurous practice of whittling away the unwanted bits of ‘me’, it is ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ as the complete redundancy of ‘me’ altogether.

*

ALAN: 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.

VINEETO: 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.

RESPONDENT A1:‘I forgot to say ... and what about someone like me who does not have a partner, where do I fit in in being free?

BTW... Happy New Year ... it’s nice to hear from you again ...’

VINEETO: Actual Freedom has nothing to do with having a partner or not. Just Peter and me have described our experiences on the path to freedom as we did it, in a partnership. But you might have noticed the conversation on the list, Alan or No 3 are exploring freedom by themselves and for themselves. It may look different or even more difficult in the beginning, but everyone has to discover it for themselves anyway. Don’t let yourself be stopped by not having a partner.

Peter did not make me free nor did I do anything for him. It was very helpful to talk to others about what is happening and ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ – and that’s what we have the mailing-list for. We all look like fools when we learn something new, so that consideration is not really worth to stand in the road, although I know from my own experience that pride can be such a stumbling block, again and again.

When you start with the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ you will find different kinds of reasons, emotions, moods that keep you from ‘feeling good’.

Richard has described the method really well in his article ‘This moment of being alive’.

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.

Yes, it is true, in many issues I checked myself out with Peter, but anyone or anything can trigger an emotion, a resentment and there I went, investigating again into the cause of my emotion. Even the weather can be a good ‘thermometer’: do I get pissed off when it rains? Do I wait for sun to make me happy? Do I blame the weather for not wanting to be here? It does not matter where you start and it is only you who can make you free, a great arrangement, isn’t it!

So let me know how you are going...

RESPONDENT: ‘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.

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.

VINEETO: 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.

RESPONDENT: 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.

VINEETO: 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 i.e. 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’.

*

VINEETO: I’ve been thinking about your letter in the last few days and I wanted to tell you just another story about ‘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 ‘A Bit of Vineeto’. I copied that part for you here.

[Vineeto]: One thing that I particularly didn’t like about falling in love was the pining. Whenever I was not with Peter I felt I was tied to him on a long elastic cord and not able to fully enjoy whatever I was doing by myself. Digging into what could be the reason for my pining, I discovered what I call the ‘Cinderella-syndrome’ – the romantic dream that most women have about the perfect and noble man. We are not only looking for someone who takes care of us when our own strength fails us, but also for someone who gives perspective, meaning, definition and identity to our lives, be it as father of our kids, provider of social status, security or a purpose for life. According to this dream Peter should be the answer to the question which I wasn’t willing to face myself: ‘What do I really want to do with my life?’ I remember a Monday evening after a weekend together, and I had been pining the whole day. I had not enjoyed work as I found myself struggling to get out of this exhausting dependency. Here I was, 44 years old and as silly as a teenager!

After work I took a long walk across rolling hills into a spectacular sunset, trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life. In the end, I had to admit that, whatever it was, it had not the slightest thing to do with anything Peter could do for me.

I wanted to be perfect and I had to do it myself. I still had to clean myself up. Just having found a probable good mate had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t the best I could be; that I wasn’t free. I decided there and then to face the challenge, to abandon the love-dream and go for the actual experience – meeting another human being as intimately as possible instead of looking up to him and waiting for him to be the ‘hero of my dreams’.

That very evening the situation changed. My pining stopped. The fog in the head cleared. My expectations disappeared. I could again stand on my own feet and equally enjoy the time when I was by myself. I had recovered my autonomy – my autonomy in the sense that I am the only one in my life who is responsible for my happiness.

Detecting and debunking the romantic dream placed the first big dent into the wobbling monster of love. Now it was much easier to look at what it was in my ‘self’ that cried out for this love. It has been quite scary at times, to rid myself of the very identity I had as a woman. What would be left of me when I didn’t feel love? How could I relate both to Peter and other people, if not with emotion or intuition? What would I have to offer in friendships or conversations, if not sympathy and consolation? My whole edifice of ‘who’ I was, who I believed myself to be, began to crumble in a heap as I questioned and demolished the attributes of love and emotion. Now naked of all those characteristics and beliefs as well as their resultant emotions and behaviour, which have kept man and woman apart for millennia, I am experiencing for the first time in my life actual intimacy with a man. Now there are no dreams, no expectations, no emotions or any other restrictions that could cloud the thrill of meeting another human being. Now instead of random moments of ‘sweet love’ I am able to give Peter my full attention and bare awareness each time we communicate and so does he. A Bit of Vineeto

I guess, the man’s dream of love looks a little bit different to complement the female dream. I guess you know it pretty well by now. In my experience it was the dream – the longing, the frustration, the hope and despair, the loneliness – which hurt, not the actual being or not being with Peter. And it worked immediately. Psychically it might look like a cord, reaching out or being connected to a particular person and in my imagination I simply and boldly cut that cord. It is a sharp psychic pain or fear of pain and then it is over. The trick is then not to build up that cord of dreams again...

Let me know if it works.

RESPONDENT: For example, if ‘I’ believe or hope ‘I’ set myself up for a disappointment. ‘I’ remember how this felt and avoid doing it, (believing and hoping), again. It becomes natural to live without hope and belief ... it makes more sense in a very practical way ... it leads to happy and harmless...

VINEETO: It is not natural at all to live without hope and belief. Hope and belief are the very attributes of the ‘self’ in action. One may suppress hope in order to avoid disappointment and pretend not to believe so as to not look silly, but in order to live without belief and hope one needs to ‘self’-immolate. ‘Self’-immolation is a very unnatural thing to do – it goes against every instinctive and intuitive feeling. This decision can only be taken with pure intent, derived from an experiential understanding of the Human Condition in a Pure Consciousness Experience.

In your next sentence you are re-inventing hope all over again...

RESPONDENT: ‘I’ share this with others in the hope that they will learn ‘my’ lesson ... to be less alone ... etc, etc, etc, etc...

VINEETO: ‘The hope’ ... ‘to be less alone’ – ‘I’, one’s ‘self’ is lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning and will cunningly do anything not to feel lost, lonely, frightened and isolated. One ‘solution’ to not feeling lost is to pass on one’s Wisdom or ‘Truth’, which is nothing but passing on wisdom about how to paint and polish a car with a stuffed engine.

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

Thank you. Peace all beings.

VINEETO: 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.

RESPONDENT: My heart begins to grow wings, Very feeble wings, but wings

And I am you, also.

VINEETO: This hope you talk about, this ‘only hope’ is at the same time the trap in which one finds oneself imprisoned, hiding and opening like an oyster, as the whim takes one. Once I stopped believing that love is the only way out, I could see that it has not worked for the thousands of years that humans have lived on earth – there has never been eternal love, never been peace on earth, never been harmony between man and woman, let alone equity. By questioning and eliminating love I have experienced an intimacy with another human being, so delicious, so free, so magical that it leaves any love previously experienced far far behind.