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Selected Correspondence Vineeto Freedom from the Human Condition You may have noticed that recently Richard quite accurately compared the human condition to heroin addiction –
As with alcohol or drug addiction one needs to recognize the disease in its full extent in order to want to be free of it so that the cure can be effective. Richard professes that he enjoys tobacco, which contains an addictive substance. Where is the line that delimits ‘good’ addictions from ‘bad’ addictions? The topic of ‘addictions’ is a diversion from the issue at hand, which is how to become free from the human condition of malice and sorrow. The reason I found the comparison between addiction and the human condition so apt was that, in the process of examining the human condition in me, I detected very similar reactions to those that I had observed in drug addicts when I was a social worker. Particularly when I investigated the issue of my spiritual loyalty, my thoughts tended to shift from this uncomfortable subject as a way of avoiding the issue, I invented diversions and furphies not to stick to the issue at hand, I experienced hot and cold flushes, I caught myself wanting to start a fight, I suddenly became tired if confronted with the issue, etc. … you might get the picture. The whole cunning ‘me’ swung into action so as to desperately defend ‘my’ precious beliefs and feelings in exactly the same way an addict feels that he is fighting for survival when the drugs are withdrawn. Only pure intent and stubborn determination to get to the bottom of this addiction-like dependency on being a believing and feeling ‘being’ causes me to continue whittling away at my ‘self’ until the very end of this pernicious addiction that is the human condition. Regarding this topic of how to investigate the human condition I would also like to comment on a remark that you made to No 23 the other day –
To ‘question everything’ aimlessly will only lead to a nihilistic outlook on life on earth and an acceptance that real virtue lies in ‘not-knowing’. My questioning everything was only fruitful because I had set myself an aim in life – I had made a definitive choice. This choice – to live with a man in peace and harmony, whatever the cost – gave my questioning and subsequent investigations a direction and a focus. Because I had a practical, tangible aim, my practice of questioning everything had a purpose – to remove whatever obstacle was preventing my living in perfect peace with a fellow human being in each moment. This purpose compelled me to put the insights and realizations that came from my questioning into practice and committed me to apply them to my actions in daily life – thus my former theoretical activity of questioning was turned into a hands-on down-to-earth affair and I came to definitive and reliable answers based on facts and sensibility. My commitment of living with a man in peace and harmony very soon grew into an intent to be free from malice and sorrow entirely because I understood that peace and harmony cannot end at the front door if this peace is to be genuine. And thus I ended up in a far bigger adventure than I had originally anticipated. And now I am in a likely position to be the first woman to become free from the human condition. What a hoot.
It is always a surprise to me to hear once in a while that someone is interested in pursuing Actual Freedom and is appreciating what we write about it. Almost everyone I have met and talked to about AF seems stubbornly convinced that the traditional solutions of ethics and morals or spiritual transcendence must be the sure way to cope with life. I see it that I have come into the world with the Human Condition of malice and sorrow like a car that comes out of the factory already with a faulty engine – and everyone tells me to polish the outside in order to fix it up and make it look all right on the surface. No one considers looking under the bonnet where the problem is, and instead of screwdrivers, spanners and mechanical instructions one gets offered different brands of paint and polish. To translate the metaphor: no one acknowledges the core-problem, the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and therefore the only ‘tools’ that are passed on from generation to generation are rules of moral, ethical and spiritual behaviour, varying from tribe to tribe, which is only a cosmetic fix of hypocritical ‘feel good and do good’. Why not, for a change, inquire into the root cause of the dilemma and fix up the problem itself? That’s what Richard’s method has been for me – the tool to get under the bonnet and fix up my brain, re-wire the synapse, and change the course of brain-activity – from feeling to thinking, from intuiting to contemplating, from meditating to researching, from passionate imagination to clear-eyed observation and from ‘self’-centred myopia to 360 degrees vision. The question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ has been the spanner to fix the engine, so to speak, and I have used it to investigate and research how the brain works in order to incrementally eliminate its software. The bugger in the engine is the ‘self’, this entity in each of us which is not only lost, lonely and frightened but is also very, very cunning. The challenge and the fun has been to find the many tricky ways the ‘self’ disguises and deceits, hides and pretends, delays and objects to exposure – because ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul will do anything to avoid death.
It looks like that you are quite enamoured with playing with the letters of the sequence of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ As an actualist, I am more interested in which way applying the method has so far brought any changes in your life, how ‘indeed the effect was stunningly more effective if I run the 9-word-sequenc’ and what insights into ‘the Stygian depth of [your] own psyche’ you have gained. Actualism is, after all, about actual change in one’s life, a change that results from slowly, slowly becoming aware of one’s social and spiritual conditioning, be it Dutch or English, male or female, Baptist or Sannyasin, Krishnamurtiite or geotheistic. I am curious as to what you have discovered about yourself and what tricks of the psychological entity called No. 23 you have come to know in yourself.
What adventure, what delight.
Last night, I was struggling dense and hard to understand the utter insanity of the human condition, particularly when observing the personal lives of people I meet, of Serbs talking on TV about their eternal conflict with their neighbours and of the insanity of Sir Roger Penrose, trying to find God with mathematical logic. This morning, I finally lost the plot – there is no sense within the Human Condition, I don’t have to understand it, I don’t have to find a solution within it – I failed because, by the very nature of the Human Condition, there is no solution within it. Yet, it is still very strange to me to wake up and notice that the whole time I have been living in a madhouse. Did you ever see the film ‘King of Hearts’ – a very old movie. During WW II villagers have abandoned their little French town and only the inmates of the insane asylum stay. They come out of their safe home and take over the village, playing barber, prostitute, pub-owner and guests. When the German and French army marches in to fight over the village, the inmates excitedly watch their deadly ‘play’ and clap at the good performance. But they can’t understand why those soldiers have actually killed each other instead of simply ‘playing war’. The world becomes too serious and they voluntarily lock themselves into their asylum again. One of the soldiers understands the difference and joins them. Good that nobody knows... Or, as Richard said it:
Hi Richard, Reading through your correspondence on mailing list B I have come across something that I cannot grasp.
 Richard, List B, No 12
What does it mean, when you say ‘‘I’ am the ‘many’ and the ‘many’ is ‘me’’? There was another quote in your correspondence with Alan, where you said:
I have taken it simply that ‘me’, my instinctual programming, is as much part of my DNA as it has been the case in every human being on the planet since ‘the beginning of time’. Yet I cannot identify with being ‘so anciently old that ‘I’ may well have always existed ... ’ Do I need to in order to understand something vital? Does this instinctual ancient ‘me’ have something to do with the ‘many’? I do have a hunch that understanding this could be essential. * Last night serendipity provided the answer to my question to you, which had been going on in my head since I wrote to you. The experiential answer to ‘I am many and many is me’ presented itself in the form a TV program on International Humanitarian Aid Organizations and their role and accountability. For one and a half hours there was ample footage presented on human suffering and devastation in war, famine, genocide and racial ‘cleansing’ on one side and the helpless, well-intentioned, yet almost useless effort of people in the aid organizations on the other side. The presentation was enough to make it utterly and unquestionably clear to me that there is no difference between me and the hundreds of thousands who have suffered and died and those who have, without success or effective change, tried to help – for ‘umpteen hundreds of thousands of years’. On an overwhelming instinctual level ‘I’ am ‘them’ and ‘I’ have had no solution and never will have a solution. The devastation is enormous and the only way ‘out’ is ‘self’-sacrifice.
Boredom is one of the many facets of the disease called ‘The Human Condition’. Every single human being is born with it, with emotions and instincts, which then are overlayed by the social conditioning. To get rid of boredom one can simply let it be there, neither repressing nor expressing it. It will then show its underlying quality – fear. To experience life without fear, the psychological and psychic entity within has to be completely eliminated – the ego, the self, the being, everything we ‘think and feel we are’ has to disappear. Without fear life is never boring, but a thrilling, sparkling, magnificent and wonderful adventure, every moment fresh and delightful, without any grudges against anybody. This life is worth a thousand deaths. I have visited this actual world many times and ‘being normal’ becomes more and more rare, the more I nibble away the remainders of my self. In the actual world there is no separation between me-as-this-body and anything that I hear, smell, touch, see, taste or anybody I talk to. I experience a direct intimacy with everything and everybody I come across, a delightful interaction without tension about the outcome, a simple and exquisite enjoyment of the moment as it is. To experience this intimacy 24 hours a day I am more than willing to disappear as a separate entity, I have no objections whatsoever.
I’ve been increasingly concerned about something I can’t quite put my finger on. I’d like to say a few things about it, without biasing myself to a premature conclusion. Feedback is welcome – and maybe we can have a good discussion. The concern is regarding how the term ‘human condition’ is used on this website. I don’t wish to object to the term itself, rather it’s juxtaposition with virtual/actual freedom. I can think of numerous examples where it is stated that the ‘human condition’ is one of misery and suffering. Now, I don’t disagree with this in principle, indeed – there is much misery and suffering in the ‘human condition.’ The ‘human condition’ is a set of beliefs, rules of the road, instinctual passions, emotion, etc. – lived by the vast majority of the human ‘species.’ But insofar as the ‘human condition’ is a quite variegated set of beliefs and realities... I doubt that it is completely incarnated in any individual. Surely, there are plenty of people that don’t swallow the ‘human condition’ hook, line, and sinker – for example, there are a good number of males who have never completely identified with the societal male gender. Gender conditioning is a fact that many if not most ‘educated’ adults are well aware of. So it is possible for one to be free of parts of the ‘human condition’ without ever investigating AF. Now, my concern is that the juxtaposition of the ‘human condition’ versus a virtual or actual freedom produces a sort of falsification of the actual. It seems to me that each individual, depending on age, sex, culture, socio-economic status, and numerous other variables may only partially live in the ‘real’ world. Take for example, a 4 year old who knows almost nothing about death, God, murder, and is relatively naive regarding violence – well, that 4 year old is only ‘partly plugged in’ to the human condition – though I do acknowledge the obvious instinctual passions. The life of my 4 year old, for example, is mostly wonderful – he does have the whole survival package, but when that survival package is not an issue – I have no doubt that he is happier than most adults. I suppose the bottom line is this – I don’t experience most of my peers as ‘miserable’ human beings because they live in the ‘human condition.’ Yes, I’m sure they have their fair share of misery – but that’s not all the ‘human condition’ is made up of. There is room for enjoyment, interests, and the underlying perfection of life to shine through on occasion. The ‘human condition’ is bad – sometimes really bad, but setting up the polarity that the ‘human condition’ is miserable for every human being, versus a virtual/actual freedom lived by a handful on the planet seems to me to falsify what is actually the case. Don’t get me wrong – why would anyone be satisfied with the ‘human condition?’ Indeed it would be to settle for ‘2nd best.’ But is ‘2nd Best’ necessarily miserable? An unsatisfied hunger seeks satisfaction, but an unsatisfied hunger doesn’t always make me miserable either. The human condition is a fact for every human being on the planet – all human beings are genetically instilled with a set of animal instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. These instinctual passions are then overlaid by a social identity consisting of the morals, ethics and values that are programmed into us by parents, teachers and others to ensure that we will become a fit, useful, and loyal member of the particular society into which we were born. It is up to everyone to choose what to do about this situation one finds oneself in – one can ignore it, deny it, rephrase it, object to it, be angry or resentful about it, be hopeful or sad about it, accept it and somehow get along with it or one can decide that being inflicted with the human condition is not so bad after all. Speaking personally, settling for somehow coping with the human condition of malice and sorrow was not good enough. After I found that both materialism and spiritualism had failed to make me happy and harmless, I seized the opportunity of applying a method to become completely free from the human condition. Indeed, only if you find by experience that ‘the human condition is miserable’ for you, will you be motivated enough to do something radical about it and have the intent to making becoming happy and harmless the number one mission in your life. It is indeed radical to set out on a path to become free from the human condition because your very intent to become free from this ancient social-instinctual programming sets you apart from your peers and your kin. Even to acknowledge that ‘I am afflicted with a disease and I want to become free of it’ takes tremendous courage and this act of acknowledgement alone will set you apart from your peers who remain content with the way things are. And this acknowledgement is only the first step. Each time you are investigating one of your beliefs, or one of your moral or ethical codes, your curiosity and determination will distinguish you from your peers and kin, friends and colleagues. The process of actualism is a personal journey out of humanity, away from humanity, away from the common pattern of malice and sorrow and its panaceas of love, consolation and compassion. As an actualist you are utterly on your own … that’s why a pure consciousness experience is so important. The memory of a pure consciousness experience is your guiding light – it shows you what is possible when the ‘self’ disappears. A PCE makes it startlingly evident why normal every-day life within the human condition is not the be all and end all to living on this verdant planet. When one is haunted by the memory of the purity and perfection of this infinite and eternal physical universe, then settling for second best is impossible. Then a journey begins that is absolutely wondrous and sensuous, thrilling and scintillating. Then ‘my’ life has both purpose and meaning.
Looking further into my thoughts and feelings about the ‘human condition’ – I realize that what is at the core of my concerns first – ‘my’ children and ‘my’ role in raising them. It would be nice if ‘my’ kids had the ability to grow up without most of the baggage within the ‘human condition’. I notice that I am desperate to believe either that the characterization common on this website of the ‘human condition’ is either wrong or overstated – in order to give room for not only my children, but for all human beings to have a happy life. The first, and automatic, reaction to an undesirable fact is to deny the fact, attempt to change this fact or to shoot the messenger. However, once you begin to recognize that your reaction to a particular fact is ‘your’ reaction, based on ‘your’ fears and ‘your’ desires, ‘your’ role as a parent or ‘your’ instinct of nurture, then you are beginning to discover your ‘self’ in action. During the process of actualism, whenever I found myself objecting to a fact, I began to question ‘me’, the identity, who was doing the objecting. After all, it is ‘me’ who I aim to uncover and change. As for ‘give room for not only my children, but for all human beings to have a happy life’ – I don’t see how it makes people happy to describe life within the human condition as happy while wars and murders and rapes and suicides and domestic violence and corruption are going on every day all over the planet. After a life-long search for happiness, I have come to the conclusion that the best I can do for the happiness of others is to stop being a contributor to malice and sorrow – because a PCE made it obvious that the only person ‘I’ can change, and need to change, is ‘me’. I’m now thinking a bit differently about the ‘human condition’. You are absolutely right that to put a gloss over the ‘human condition’ is not going to get anyone anywhere. What I see now is that talking about the ‘human condition’ is already to talk about the diseased parts of it otherwise it wouldn’t be a ‘condition’. The longer I investigated my beliefs, feelings and emotions, the more I came to realize that all of the human condition is a disease – not only ‘diseased parts’, but all of it. To be genetically programmed with a complimentary and conflicting set of instinctual survival passions that then need to be controlled and/or suppressed via the imposition of social conditioning is a diseased state, however way I looked at it. I also found that the ‘good’ parts and the ‘bad’ parts of the instinctual programming were inseparably bound together in the one package and that the age-long ambition to have the ‘good’ without the ‘bad’ parts is therefore doomed to fail. What I think was happening is that I was interpreting the ‘human condition’ as ‘what it’s like for every human being’. The ‘human condition’ is already a generalized term which is designed to focus on the essentially negative aspects of being ‘human’. I do realize that misery is essential to being ‘human’ – but I think I was objecting to that characterization because it seemed to be ‘out of balance’ with the facts. Humans don’t walk around constantly feeling miserable. There is an essential misery that humans carry around with them, but it doesn’t have to engulf one with despair. Even in the ‘human’ state of affairs – there is a buoyancy that keeps arising – even in the darkest moments of one’s life. So – while I can agree that the ‘human condition’ is essentially a miserable one, and thus extremely desirable to ‘get out of’. It doesn’t have to generate despairing histrionics in everyone. The tried and failed solution to the human condition is to fight or balance the bad feelings with good feelings, i.e. balance depression with hope and resilience, anxiety with optimism, fear with bravado, sorrow with compassion, aggression with love, despair with bliss and loneliness with belonging. In actualism I learnt to investigate my feelings and their underlying beliefs, morals and ethics with the aim to examine and understand ‘me’, the passionate identity that produces and maintains my feelings and beliefs in the first place. Because this process of investigation is scientific in nature and non-judgemental as to rights or wrongs, goods or bads, I have no need to counteract, cover up or neutralize any bad feelings with good feelings but can give full reign to the felicitous feelings of happiness, delight, bonhomie and the pure enjoyment to be alive. * This desire leads ‘me’ to constantly look for the silver lining ... the Good ... etc. but ‘I’ am shot down time and time again when I discover that the ‘Good’ in almost every case includes the ‘Bad’ right along with it. Yes, the ‘silver lining’ is just that, an antidote to the dark cloud that always hangs over humanity – the imagination of hope glossed over despair. The ‘Good’ only exists to compensate for the ‘Bad’ – take away malice and sorrow and there is no need for love and compassion. Without malice and sorrow I am spontaneously benign and benevolent, gay and carefree. Conscious of the fact that most people spend their entire lives firmly embedded in the ‘human condition’ – ‘I’ wonder if it’s worth it. Why would I want to contribute to the human condition by raising children within it? Of course I know there are things one can do to weaken the claim of the human condition, but it is useless to think that I have complete control over another’s development and the choices they make. As I see it, the best you can do for your son is to give him a father who is free from malice and sorrow, unburdened by his social identity as a father, a husband, an American, a believer in the ‘Good’ and the ‘Bad’, etc. and free from the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. This unilateral action has two benefits. Not only do you free your son from the burden of ‘you’ and your demands – expectations, confusions, beliefs and passions – but you show your son by living example what is now humanly possible within the human condition – being virtually free of malice and sorrow. I agree completely. The ‘balancing act’ for me has been to on the one hand, admit the fact of the misery of the ‘human condition’ while on the other hand maintaining a zest or enthusiasm for my life and that of others. The ‘human condition’ is indeed a generalization that gives one a picture of human beings much like one you would get just by watching the evening news. Unless you get out of your house and interact with the actual humans themselves – you would never know that the ‘human condition’ is not all there is to being human. This constant experience of most people being relatively happy is enough to restore my confidence in the value of life itself – though it also doesn’t compromise the insight that the ‘human condition’ is indeed a miserable state of affairs which one is best rid of. It was only when I became aware of, and fully admitted, that I was capable of the same malice and sorrow I saw in ‘the evening news’ that I subsequently realized that I was inflicted with exactly the same human condition as the warmongers, the murderers, the thieves, the corrupt and the greedy. It was this awareness and this realization that motivated ‘me’ to get off my bum and do something radical and practical about the human condition in me. As long I considered the wars and rapes and murders as other people’s misery and violence, I would always find reasons to think that the human condition was not so bad after all. Only being utterly fed up with the situation I found myself in gave me the necessary impetus to change. * Maybe the problem isn’t so much the description of the ‘human condition’ as being miserable, but believing it one way or the other. Recognizing this is true in description only means that the actual case will always transcend any description. So this doesn’t mean that my kids have a great shot at escaping the ‘human condition’ – rather, that even if they can’t escape it – that whatever quality their lives take, it cannot be completely described by some belief that the ‘human condition’ is either ‘wonderful’ or ‘miserable.’ This goes not only for ‘my’ kids – but for virtually the whole ‘human race.’ It seems that I can recognize a relatively accurate description without allowing the description to replace the actual state of affairs. What precedes any belief in ‘truth’ is the very living of life itself. So maybe one can nod with the actualists saying that ‘reality’ sucks or the ‘human condition’ is a miserable state of affairs – while realizing that no mere ‘truth’ or description should replace the actual living itself – which escapes accurate description just as a ‘picture is worth a thousand words.’ One can describe the ‘human condition’ as positive or negative just as one can describe a book, a meal, or music as either positive or negative, but one word descriptions fall far short of what it is actually like. Personally, I was utterly sick of the way human beings treat each other, and the more I watched the news and reports on television, the more sick of it I became. This revulsion included how I treated my fellow human beings and no amount of re-definition or obscuration, denial or transcendence – sticking my head in the sand or walking around with my head in the clouds – could disguise the fact that human beings kill, rape, murder, plunder, wage war, commit suicide and can’t even remotely live in peace and harmony with each other. The response to the fact of the horrendous results of human condition may be a matter of personal taste or viewpoint, as you say ‘believing it one way or the other’ … ‘one can describe the human condition as positive or negative’. To me, observing the human condition in action in me and in others left a decidedly foul taste in my mouth. This foul taste still drives me on to not rest until ‘I’ have completely disappeared from this flesh-and-blood body. I’m especially curious how other actualists approach this issue of on the one hand describing the ‘human condition’ as something of a nightmare, yet caring intensely about the concerns of those who are in it? Do you see your caring for others humans as merely alleviating their suffering or somehow wonderful and really beneficial? In other words, do you really see their lives as valuable for them? Or that they are merely a ‘menace’ to their bodies? To be born with instinctual passion and programmed with a social identity is nobody’s fault. The reason I am reporting my experiences with the process of becoming free from this default setting is because my experience proves that is possible for anyone who is sufficiently motivated to become virtually free from malice and sorrow – a state way beyond normal human expectations and any spiritual delusionary states. But I can do nothing for others to ‘alleviate their suffering’ because everyone has to do the work of becoming free by themselves. I once watched a TV report about a tribe in the South American jungle in which everyone over the age of ten was afflicted with blindness, transmitted by mosquitos. Yet when a white doctor arrived, he could only convince one member of the tribe to take the cure. The others decided to remain within the ‘safe’ parameters of their present experience. If you want to ‘describe the ‘human condition’ as positive’ then that is entirely your business. Just remember that, should you change your mind, there is a way out, and a well-documented one at that. Thanks. I shall continue to happily dismantle myself. I knew there were bound to be bumps on the way. I found that it helps to remember that the ‘bumps on the way’ are ‘me’ in action, defending ‘my’ passionate identity. This way I neither have to blame something or someone else for the ‘bumps on the way’ nor do I have to fall back into blaming myself about being inflicted with the human condition. However, this process of questioning, investigating and understanding is often not a comfortable business for ‘I’, as a social and instinctual identity, am made up of nothing other than the beliefs ‘I’ was taught and the passions I experience as being ‘me’. Demons have a way of exorcizing themselves once they are brought into full light. I would put it differently. Despite everyone’s belief, demons have no actual existence – they are ‘my’ imagination and instinctual passions in action. Therefore demons do not exorcize themselves of their own accord but in the process of actively questioning and investigating my passionate beliefs, ‘they are brought into full light’, as you say, where they lose their power and credibility and eventually vanish into thin air. By undertaking this process, ‘I’ am doing the work of dismantling ‘me’, ‘I’ am staging my own exit.
The longer I investigated my beliefs, feelings and emotions, the more I came to realize that all of the human condition is a disease – not only ‘diseased parts’, but all of it. To be genetically programmed with a complimentary and conflicting set of instinctual survival passions that then need to be controlled and/or suppressed via the imposition of social conditioning is a diseased state, however way I looked at it. I also found that the ‘good’ parts and the ‘bad’ parts of the instinctual programming were inseparably bound together in the one package and that the age-long ambition to have the ‘good’ without the ‘bad’ parts is therefore doomed to fail. By ‘human condition’ I mean the disease that does indeed infect all human beings. But, just as a disease like arthritis can ‘flare up’ or abate – it’s quite similar with the ‘human condition.’ You may have noticed that recently Richard quite accurately compared the human condition to heroin addiction –
As with alcohol or drug addiction one needs to recognize the disease in its full extent in order to want to be free of it so that the cure can be effective. * The point that I am trying to make is that the human condition is not without worth. There is much of the felicitous feelings to be had – even within the ‘human condition’. Painting all of the ‘human’ with the brush of misery in the human condition completely ignores the fact that there is much felicity to be had even within the human condition. This is not speculation on my part. If you can’t see it – turn on an episode of ‘Who’s Line is it Anyway?’ Or notice the ‘relative innocence’ that is often available in children. Now, the response I normally read when people speak of ‘innocence’ is that for an actualist – ‘innocence’ only exists in the actual world. But, to be fair, one must admit that children are often ‘closer’ to the actual world than many adults (not always – often). To ignore the existence of ‘felicity’ even within the ‘human condition’ is to misrepresent the facts. You seem to be mixing two separate issues here. One issue is making an assessment of the human social-instinctual programming. A clear look at any period of human history will reveal that there has never been peace-on-earth, i.e. malice and sorrow have always be the norm both on a domestic and a global scale. This assessment of the human condition is not a condemnation of the worth of the lives of 6 billion people but a statement of fact. The question I asked myself was what to do about it? Only because I came to the conclusion that staying within the human condition was the pits, did I have the intent and impetus to meet the challenge to question everything I had ever valued, taken for granted and dearly believed to be true. The second issue is the way to get from A to B, from the human condition to a permanent actual freedom. The method of dismantling the human condition is to question and investigate, and subsequently minimize, both the good and bad feelings and activate one’s felicitous feelings. Once I knew that my aim was to become completely free from the human condition, the next step was to activate everything that would help me to reach my goal – intent, determination, stubbornness, humour, delight, excitement, altruism, spontaneity, naiveté, joie de vivre, curiosity, etc. For additional information on the actualism
method see Richard’s selected correspondence on Again, using the metaphor of arthritis – when people are able to relax their instinctual passions – most people naturally experience an earthy kind of felicity. Some people are obviously better than others at having fun within the ‘human condition’ – but my concern is that this seems to be often glossed over by actualists. Richard has recently stated the ‘worthwhileness’ of even a human existence. You obviously aren’t recommending actual suicide or homicide – only ‘psychological’ or ‘psychic’ suicide. My point in steering away from seeing the human condition as just pure ‘doom and gloom’ is not to present an empty optimism – but to remember the facts. There is an ease – yes, resilience or buoyancy even in the human condition that is not related to belief, hope, or even future orientation. Yet this ease is somewhat fickle in its comings and goings – so that it is desirable to investigate and ‘get out’ of the human condition. But, it’s not all bad all the time. Delight is not only available to an ‘actualist’. I don’t quite understand your point. Only when something is assessed as not worthwhile continuing do I make the effort of freeing myself from it. Or, to put it the other way round, if you can see the ‘worthwhileness’ of living within the human condition, why would you contemplate making the effort to become free from it? To use your metaphor of arthritis – why take a medicine to eliminate arthritis, if you find practicing relaxation brings you sufficient relief? * It was only when I became aware of, and fully admitted, that I was capable of the same malice and sorrow I saw in ‘the evening news’ that I subsequently realized that I was inflicted with exactly the same human condition as the warmongers, the murderers, the thieves, the corrupt and the greedy. It was this awareness and this realization that motivated ‘me’ to get off my bum and do something radical and practical about the human condition in me. As long I considered the wars and rapes and murders as other people’s misery and violence, I would always find reasons to think that the human condition was not so bad after all. Only being utterly fed up with the situation I found myself in gave me the necessary impetus to change. The ‘evening news’ shows one normally only the despicable and miserable aspects of being human. Yet, the ‘evening news’ approach to the ‘human condition’ is a distortion. Yes, the root of the ‘evening news’ lies within each human being – ‘devil inside,’ if you will. But, it’s not all the devil inside. Yes, ‘I’ am capable of performing atrocities – and for that reason am motivated to dismantle my ‘self.’ But, when one is relatively stressfree – there is legitimate delight and wonder available. Now, I’m not speculating – I’m reporting from my own experience and what I can gather from others. Of course, once I had determined that I wanted to become free from the human condition in toto, the next step was to set as my minimum standard ‘feeling good’ … and set about examining whatever was in the way of feeling good. Then I raised the bar to ‘feeling excellent’ and again investigated whatever was in the way of feeling excellent. Vis –
You seem to be putting the cart before the horse, which is to seek out the possible happy aspects of the human condition in order to achieve ‘feeling good’ whilst continuing to deny, repress or dissociate from any bad feelings and their consequences. It’s your life but such an approach to living life has a zero record of success in bringing an end to human malice and sorrow.
‘Worthwhileness’ can be used as a relative term. Once one is aware of an alternative – it may not be ‘worthwhile’ to continue doing something the old way – but, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t ‘worthwhile’ the old way. My wife and I recently bought a mini-van. The old car was a wagon. The old car was sufficient, but the mini-van is better. It’s not worthwhile driving the old car when we can drive the new one. But, the old car served it’s purpose and was worthwhile. In the same way, an actual freedom can be worthwhile to pursue – but that doesn’t make the ‘human condition’ worthless. I know you aren’t saying that the lives of those in the ‘human condition’ are worthless. I’m saying that polarizing virtual/actual freedom on the one hand with the ‘miserable human condition’ on the other can create the wrong impression. Would you want to live your life at all if you thought that all you could ever be is ‘miserable?’ What would you think about giving life to others? Raising children? Might you begin to wonder whether others should prefer to be shot like a dying horse in pain? Since all they can ever be is ‘miserable’ anyway? Or that maybe it would be better if the world never existed at all? These sorts of issues are the crux of why I think it is necessary for an ‘actualist’ to think carefully about how they represent the ‘human condition.’ It is of vital importance to not leave people with the wrong impression. Most of the people on this planet never have and never will have access to either a virtual or actual freedom. Is this your picture of a wonderful, vibrant world? One where a handful of people can live their virtual or actual freedom – while 6.0 billion live merely ‘miserable’ lives? So it is important to see what good – what felicity did actually exist in the ‘human condition.’ None of this is meant to negate the desirability of freeing oneself as best possible. Let me put it this way – if I hadn’t been utterly and completely – as opposed to ‘relatively’ – fed up with the human condition as I experienced it in me and in the way human beings treat each other ever day, I would have never dared to inquire into the possibility to question the human condition, let alone abandon humanity. The human condition is not like a glove one can casually take off at one’s own volition, it is a program that pervades every nook and corner of one’s being. I was only motivated to begin the enterprise of scrutinizing the very core of my being because I was utterly disgusted and fed up with all the human condition results in – ongoing wars and genocides, rapes and domestic violence, child-abuse and gender-battle, corruption and murder, despair and suicide. And this condition of being fed up was not alleviated by the conditional comings and goings of joy or happiness because the overall picture remained the same – that human beings, and that include me, could not and cannot even remotely live together in peace and harmony whilst remaining within the human condition. The possibility that there was a solution to all the devastating shortcomings of the human condition made my life-long search for the meaning of life on this planet worthwhile because the experience of being temporarily free from my instinctual programming experienced in a PCE proved beyond doubt that life is not a vale of tears. * To use your metaphor of arthritis – why take a medicine to eliminate arthritis, if you find practicing relaxation brings you sufficient relief? The answer is in the use of the word ‘sufficient.’ It is preferable to eliminate one’s arthritis when the appropriate medication is available. One needn’t claim that you must reach a miserable state or even become disgusted with the arthritis in order to seek out medication either. One doesn’t have to look very far to know that the ‘human condition’ is a miserable state of affairs on a global level. This is what one sees on the ‘evening news.’ Thus, given the appropriate medication is available, it is entirely desirable to remedy the problem. And yes, it is essential to properly diagnose the problem – which is why is it also important to me to remember the ‘worthwhileness’ of the lives of those living in the ‘human condition.’ I acknowledge that virtually every cognitively mature person asks themselves sometimes ‘is this all there is to life?’ as Richard says he used to ask himself. So, yes, we are all dissatisfied with the ‘human condition.’ But that dissatisfaction doesn’t exclude relative satisfaction. The ‘appropriate medication’, as you call actualism, is not something that deals with the symptoms – the method of actualism is aiming at removing the root cause of the disease, ‘me’. In my five years of experience with the process of taking my ‘self’ apart, I have noticed again and again that whenever ‘I’ find any reason to stay in existence, ‘I’ will fight to hold on to it tooth and nail. Only a stubborn determination to not settle for second best drives me on to whittle away at what ‘I’ hold most dear, ‘me’ as a social identity and as an instinctual being. You can be dissatisfied with your arthritis enough to take medication – but it doesn’t have to make you miserable first. Maybe that’s what it took for you, Vineeto, but it would be unjustified to assume that it will be the same for everyone else. So far you and I have only discussed what’s wrong with actualism, with actualists, with their style and their presentation of the human condition and what is ‘worthwhile’ about the human condition. Thus far everyone who has begun to practice actualism has done so because they are totally fed up with the human condition and with remaining ensnared within it, so much so that they desperately want to be free of it. Until someone proves otherwise, my assumption seems safely rooted in fact.
I’ve been unearthing ever more subtle feelings. The other night, I was out to dinner with my wife, and we got to a place that we’ve been many times. Without going into boring details, the next day it really hit me how I had been acting, and it wasn’t the way ‘I’ was telling myself. I am easily irritated by seemingly minor things. I think it harkens back to being raised as better than others, hence having minimal patience for less-than-perfection. I found that the feeling of superiority had been one of the major reasons why I hung unto spiritualism for so long. However, once I realized without doubt that I was no better than everyone else despite my high ideals and holy practices, my feelings of superiority quickly disintegrated. As I dug deeper into the human condition I discovered that feeling superior is common amongst human beings and each tribal and/or religious group has their particular venerated story why they are special, why they are ‘the chosen ones’ or superior to others. Once I experientially examined the social aspects of my feeling superior and its counterpart of feeling inferior, I found these divisions of higher and lower ranking to be an expression of the instinctual power battle inherent in the animal vigilance of ‘what can I eat and what can eat me?’ (psychoanalysis = OFF). You are spot on that psychoanalysis is of no use as a fruitful investigation into one’s psyche – I found that it only served to explain away, justify and/or excuse my shortcomings, such as irritability, anger, arrogance, selfishness or misery, instead of providing a solution as to how to eliminate the problems. Regardless, the next day it was completely obvious to me what had happened, which really sat me upright. And it was a relief to see it, and for a moment be free of it. Now I just have to get the time delay down to something less than 12 hours. Once it began to filter through that my behaviour did not at all match my idealized picture of me – or as you put it ‘it wasn’t the way ‘I’ was telling myself’ – I was appalled by my often rude and uncaring behaviour towards others, which in turn fired my intent to do something radical about really changing myself. In spiritualism I had done nothing but change my ideals, in actualism I finally had the necessary tools to change my actions by eradicating their underlying causes. All I needed to provide was the passionate intent. The time delay of 12 hours will lessen as you gradually remove the moral and ethical safeguards that are instilled by the process of socialization. These safeguards are meant to curb the bare instinctual passions and consequently they act to shield one from discovering the instinctual passions in action.
I have tried to summarise what I have so far understood from the Actualfreedom website and through interaction with you.
Please correct/comment if appropriate... I will keep to the same style and add a few points to your summary –
As I said, there’s a ‘taste’ to the humour, and if one is paying attention, it’s clear what’s malice-causing and what’s not. Certainly the former is rooted in the basic human situation. The problem with human beings is not their humour but their malice and sorrow and to question humour in general is to start the investigation at the wrong end. In the process of actualism the question for me was which feeling in me made me react to certain jokes and not to others, why did I like to laugh about others’ misery, why did I feel as if I was above everyone else’s stupidity. I also began to pay attention to my own intentions and feelings when I made a joke or a funny comment. I wanted to find out if I was being malicious, when I was letting off steam, when I was trying to hurt, put down, fend off the other or skip over an uncomfortable topic before it could get under my skin. I wanted to find out about – and change – the ‘basic human situation’ in me. I’m sometimes pondered why the latter is ‘funny’. The method of actualism is to increase the felicitous feelings while investigating both the good and bad feelings. Therefore I was not concerned about humour as such – pure humour is simply delightful – but whether my humour contained elements of malice, hate, cynicism, satire, detachment, superiority or plain ridicule. My focus of attention is how to become free from the human condition, i.e. I question my beliefs and my good and bad feelings, and at the beginning I also noticed that my humour was full of those beliefs and feelings. As I whittled away at my beliefs and as my good and bad feelings diminished, humour became not only pure but also far more prevalent than it used to be. Life is not a vale of tears. Life is utterly delightful and pure humour, that is devoid of malice and sorrow, is an integral part of apperceptive awareness. There’s no denying the silliness of humans (have you ever seen them make love – what a hoot!), but why that makes us smile and laugh is not clear to me. The most common form of laughing at the silliness of others is cynicism and the feeling of superiority that they are stupid but I am not. There might also be a dose of unadmitted embarrassment in it, knowing that we humans are all alike when it comes to being driven by instinctual passions. Personally, I found I had to step down from my lofty heights of moral and ethical superiority and admit with crumbling pride that I was just as mad and as bad as everyone else and that my years of training in spiritual detachment had only served to increase my arrogance and my blinkers. As for ‘have you ever seen them make love – what a hoot!’ – I am reminded of Mohan Rajneesh making endless jokes about the silliness of humans having sex. His teaching of free sex was aimed at reaching true celibacy when we would finally be fed up with the silly sex. The sexual drive has always been the toughest obstacle for those who aspired to the purity of divine spirituality and, going by the numerous reports about many enlightened masters and their mistresses, they have yet to succeed to overcome this obstacle. Nowadays, for me sex is not silly at all, but utterly delightful and sensuously scrumptious and it is worth all the effort of having investigated my gender indoctrination, shame, guilt, detachment, denial, greed and fear that used to spoil the fun. So, could that be some sort of genetic programmed response? One could consider the human body as an array and interaction of genetic programs – the immune system, the motoric functions, the nervous system, the digestive system, the blood circulation, etc., etc. The genetic program I am interested in as an actualist are the instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire that give rise to the ‘self’-centred entity inside this flesh-and-blood body. Just as thinking is usually polluted and distorted by these instinctual passions, so is humour. In a pure consciousness experience one can experience for a short time how both thinking and humour function brilliantly without the interference of the passionate ‘self’. If so, then is AF being selective about the programs it suggests we eliminate? I don’t suggest anything. Unless you are discontent with the human condition in you there is no need to change. The aim of the actualism method is to extinguish the ‘self’, the psychological and psychic entity inside this body, – not all the physical programs, as you seem to suggest. It is the imaginary identity, ‘who’ you think and feel yourself to be, that an actualist aims to eliminate in order that what you are can emerge. I can report from my experience that the AF method has been a very successful tool that allows me to question and eliminate my social-spiritual programming and investigate and observe my instinctual passions in action such that they are incrementally diminished to the point where the ‘self’ will eventually collapse. Note that an answer of ‘yes’ is reasonable here. Note that it is always useful to ask a genuine question when you want to learn something you don’t already know.
For me nothing justifies ‘a cessation of investigation’, until the fat lady has sung. That is my aim in life and it does not matter how long it takes because for me there is no other game to play that is worth playing. I left the real world behind when I found that it sucks and I left the spiritual world behind when I found it to be a shallow fantasy and a hypocritical delusion. And, for ‘me’, ceasing the investigation is what ‘I’ most want. The other day I heard a woman say in a TV drama discussing her emotional state: ‘I like being messy because that’s who I am’. I find her statement a good description of normal existence because to be a social-instinctual identity is to be emotionally messy. In that context, my pure intent is that I don’t ‘like being messy’, both for my own sake and for that of others, no matter what consequences it has to ‘who I am’. Speaking personally, rather than wanting to ‘cease the investigation’, I have found the process of self-investigation both thrilling and fascinating – it gives ‘my’ life both meaning and purpose. The way you formulated your reply it appears that there is a ‘me’ who wants to be actually free and a ‘me’ who doesn’t. Yet in fact there are not two ‘me’s’, there is only one entity, who may sometimes want to be free and other times not want to be free. With the memory of the PCE ‘I’ could clearly see that ‘I’ am standing in the way of perfection and therefore ‘I’ agreed to take ‘myself’ apart. The impetus to examine, investigate and change comes from ‘me’ – ‘I’ am willing to die because ‘I’ have unmistakably understood it to be the best and only solution to the human condition. Once ‘I’ made the full-hearted decision to actively stage my own disappearance, the journey became easier and I could make use of my instinctual passions to help ‘my’ mission. Now desire helps me to achieve the best possible, aggression to stubbornly stick to my goal, nurture to altruistically sacrifice my ‘self’ for the benefit of this body and every body, and fear, well, fear gives me the impetus to end fear forever. But it is ‘me’, and only ‘me’, who is willingly doing all the work of becoming free. For comparison –
Perhaps this is where there is an advantage in living with like-minded people – it is more difficult to ignore? Other like-minded people, i.e. practicing actualists, are of no benefit whatsoever as long as ‘what ‘I’ most want’ is ‘ceasing the investigation’. Unless an actualist is eager to roll up his or her sleeves and do something in order to become free from the human condition, other people who talk about their experiences with the method and demonstrate its success by being increasingly happy and harmless can even be perceived as nosy intruders. Personally, I cannot ‘ignore’ the lure of actual freedom, not because I live with Peter or occasionally chat with Richard, but because I am haunted by the memory of the perfection that already always exists and that only becomes apparent when ‘I’ am absent. My backpressure to become free doesn’t come from ‘like-minded people’ asking probing questions but from having tried the normal-world and spiritual-world solutions and found that they failed.
Why did I join? It was obviously because I am still questioning what was all this ‘actual Freedom path’ all about. I am still trying to understand what is ‘actually being here and now’ for you. It’s true that apparently I feel very close to the type of questions you raise, freedom beyond beliefs, what we are instead of who we are, free will or not, the link between personal identity and action, and so on... It’s true also that certain aspects of your literature are contradictory with certain other aspects, but maybe it’s common problems using words... and because you remain a sort of riddle, puzzle, enigma for me, I wanted to have a new check at it, are you Okay with that? In order to genuinely understand what we are on about, anyone coming from the spiritual world would need to suspend disbelief and prejudice, otherwise it won’t be possible to listen to what is being said, let alone understand ... and your interest will die in the bum within half an hour. As you might have gleaned from Richard’s letter to you, actualism is completely new in human history and lies 180 degrees opposite to all spiritual belief – therefore you will need to have both your ears and eyes open in order to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond both the real and spiritual world with their set-in-concrete beliefs and passionate imaginations. I don’t write that to defend religions or the spiritual world, in fact I am closer to you than you think, but there should be more crucial arguments against religions than the hypocrisy of certain gurus. More theoretical arguments, I mean. Instead of merely entering into ‘more theoretical arguments’ I will give you a guided tour into a practical application of actualism on the topic of ‘trying to understand’ . Just as a warning beforehand – this is not an attack on what you are saying in particular, I am simply using your words as a live example of how to investigate the Human Condition of malice and sorrow as it is manifest in oneself. Then you can decide for yourself at the end of this letter if actualism is of further interest to you, or not. When you understand that the Human Condition by its very definition is common to all, then the trap of feeling wrong, bad, accused or insulted can easily be avoided. * ‘If a man is talking alone in the middle of a forest and there’s no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?’ <snip> Thank you for taking time to develop the long message I just received on the mailing-list. And thank you for your sincerity. Your ‘joke’ points to the first requirement of learning something new – you will have to consider it possible that somebody, and even worse, a female, knows more about this subject than you do. Otherwise this common male resentment towards females, that causes you to preface your post with a non-too subtle attack on the messenger instead of listening to the message, will be the first reason to close the shutters, or more to the point, prevent you from even opening them in the first place. However, if you genuinely consider what I write to be sincere, as you indicated, then this might help you overcome this initial obstacle to learning about the Human Condition. * As for your statement ‘the self can’t generate anything’ – if you don’t even want to consider that you, i.e. your ‘self’, is responsible for your words and actions, then you certainly are on the wrong mailing list, as you have firmly shut the door to taking your life into your own hands. I am not going to discuss with you the borrowed beliefs about what the self is or not – beliefs that originated in a time when Wisdom had it that the earth was flat and the sky above was a dome populated by Gods and Demons. To believe this ancient wisdom to be the irrefutable Truth is to remain Neanderthaloid in one’s thinking and to be in blatant denial of modern scientifically proven facts. Have you never experienced a rush of anger and wondered where it came from, have you never been overwhelmed by sadness and wondered where it came from, have you never felt a shiver of fear literally running up your spine and wondered where it came from, have you never felt a gut-wrenching despair and wondered where it came from. Have you ever wondered what enrages human beings so much that they would kill, rape, maim and torture other human beings or wondered why people become so despairing that they would kill themselves. Have you ever wondered ‘who’ or ‘what’ generates these passions that directly cause all this mayhem and suffering? Have you ever wondered why in all Eastern philosophy suffering is considered intrinsic to being human and the only escape is to become a divine Self? I just wondered if you had ever wondered about these things before you accepted the Wisdom of the East as being the inviolable and unquestionable Truth? I have examined all my beliefs and thrown them all overboard. I have stopped believing long ago. No belief can hold water when confronted with facts. I rely solely on facts and on my own thorough examination of myself. I have numerous times experienced how ‘me’, the alien entity inside this flesh and blood body, generates my emotions and feelings and therefore I do know exactly what I am talking about. In various ‘self’-less pure consciousness experiences I have also experienced that this sensate and reflective body can live very well without a ‘self’ and as such, my confidence is based on facts and experience. So, if you genuinely consider what I write to be sincere, as you indicated, then this might help you overcome this particular legendary obstacle to learning about the Human Condition. * Incidentally, it seems to be the greatest desire of our kind to get rid of this unwelcome doubling and return to the pure living, being animal. If you desire to ‘being animal’, considering it ‘the pure living’ then that is entirely your own business. This list, however, is set up for those who want to move beyond the Tried and Failed wisdom of old and are ready to discuss how to eliminate the animal instinctual passions in themselves together with the ‘self’ that generates them. The nature of the self is one of my favourite topics and I’ll be happy to go further discussing this topic with you. First, I can’t agree with the possibility that the self can generate anything. The self can’t generate anything. The self is a delusion. And this very delusion works in our mind to make us believe that the self is at the origin of our thoughts, of our action, and even – as you say – of our animal drives. It’s wrong. Our thoughts come first. And, as a result of the thinking process, the self is created or reinforced afterwards. The self comes second, at the end of action. It’s not at the source of action. Action takes place without the self. The self is not an actor, just a sub-product, a subsequent reaction. How can you say that ‘the nature of the self is one of my favourite topics and I’ll be happy to go further discussing this topic with you’ and in the same breath ‘first, I can’t agree with the possibility that the self can generate anything’ and then ‘it’s wrong. Our thoughts come first’? If you already know about ‘the nature of the self’ then how can there be a discussion or even a ‘trying to understand’ something entirely new and different? You said ‘our thoughts come first. And, as a result of the thinking process, the self is created or reinforced afterwards’ – whereas there is overwhelming scientific and observational evidence that at birth all humans come genetically pre-coded with an instinctual ‘self’ that is then fully developed by the age of about 2 years. This development coincides with the first obvious signs of the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire in every infant’s behaviour. With the first signs of the emergence of this instinctual behaviour we begin to be instilled by our peers with a social identity consisting of morals – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – and ethics – ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – together with a full set of social beliefs and psittacisms. Eastern belief has a bet each way in that it is sometimes held that material existence corrupts a pure soul and sometimes that one comes to earth pre-karma-ed and this karma needs to be worked off. Whichever version is believed, neither recognizes or acknowledges the pivotal role that the genetically-encoded instinctual passions play in giving rise to human malice and sorrow. Simple prove: A very young child does not have any self, he already has animal drives and so on. Given that you have said above – ‘the self is at the origin of our thoughts, of our action, and even – as you say – of our animal drives’, you now seemed to have changed your mind such that someone who has yet to have a self already has animal drives. This is an interesting thread should you want to discuss it further. It seems that in the evolutionary process, mother nature has given our species this tool (among other sophisticated neo-cortex tools chimps don’t have) to allow a continuity in our actions but this tool has taken little by little such an importance, that we try to limit its nasty effects or even to get totally rid of it, if such a thing can be possible. By tool, are you talking about a self? There are ample studies that indicate that chimps have a rudimentary animal ‘self’ very similar to that exhibited by an infant human. In Eastern belief this tool or self is given such importance that it eventually becomes a totally narcissistic ‘Self’, thus overwhelming any chance of sensible thinking in the neo-cortex. The puerile belief, that one can sublimate one’s savage instinctual passions while giving full unfettered reign to the tender instinctual passions so as to transcend being a mortal human and becoming an immortal Spirit, has to be abandoned if one is to become what one can potentially be – a flesh and blood mortal body free of all instinctual passions. And ‘such a thing’ is indeed possible.
Vineeto’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust |
