The reason I said that there is a remarkable difference between *feeling* harmless and actually being harmless is because it is easy to assess one’s happiness by checking if I am feeling happy whereas many people may feel themselves to be harmless when they are not experiencing feelings of aggression or anger against somebody. Yet they are nevertheless causing harm via their thoughtless ‘self’-oriented instinctual feelings and actions, something that all human beings are prone to do unless they become fully aware of their instinctual passions *before* these translate into vibes and/or actions.

It was about a year into my process of actualism when I became aware of how much my outlook on the world and on people had changed in that my cloak of myopic ‘self’-centredness began to lift and I no longer saw the world only ‘my’ way and my judgments and actions no longer revolved around ‘my’ interests, ‘my’ beliefs, ‘my’ ideas, ‘my’ ideals, ‘my’ fears, ‘my’ desires and ‘my’ aversions. Consequently I have learnt to judge harmlessness by the amount of parity and consideration I apply to others whom I come in contact with, both at work and at play, and not by merely feeling myself to be harmless.

Can you say more about this? I usually feel harmless but have been thinking lately that I somehow still do harm simply by not paying attention and applying parity and consideration to others with whom I come into contact. How did you do this more and more? And how did you notice that you’re still harming someone even if you don’t have feelings of anger or aggression or the like? And how do you know it’s you harming them? Can you give a few examples? I’m finding it possible to consider this matter more now that I’m happier as its given me breathing room to be less self-centred, but it’s a pretty new subject to me. What keeps your mind on being considerate? Is it just a close scrutiny on the feelings and passions that arise? Are you more perceptive of others because the feelings and passions that are now arising are diminished so you’re naturally more attentive to other things as well, like what’s going on with other people?

Sure. When I met Peter I was full of good intentions to make our living together work, i.e. to be as happy and peaceful as possible, but I had continuous clashes of opinion with him, frustrations of foiled expectation, hurt feelings and revenge of hurtful remarks. I realized that in order to be able live with Peter in peace and harmony I had to sort out a lot – my beliefs, my ‘truths’, my loyalties, my gender ideas, my problems with authority and all other sorts of feelings.

I remember well the first evening when I looked at Peter and saw him as just another human being – not as a partner, a mate, a member of the other gender, a lover, a sexual object, a valuable addition to my circle of friends, and not as someone who would approve or disapprove of me – simple another fellow human being. Suddenly the separation I felt was gone and there was a delicious intimacy, as ‘I’ was no longer attempting to force him to fit into ‘my’ world.

I was astounded and shocked by this experience, being outside of my so familiar ‘self’-centred and ‘self-oriented skin, because I realized that never before, not once in our 3-months acquaintance, had I been able, or even interested, to see him as a person in his own right. I was shocked at how all of my perception and consequently all of my interactions were driven by what *I* wanted, what *I* expected and what *I* believed him to be and how much I was therefore constantly at odds with how he actually was. From then on I paid as much attention as possible to become aware of situations when my feelings, beliefs, expectations and general attitude were standing in the way of recognizing another person, first Peter and later anyone I came in contact with, as equal fellow human beings, as persons in their own right, who live their own life, follow their own goals and aspirations, have their own preferences and tastes, and also, have their own set of morals, ethics and beliefs.

The reason I am telling this story is because this experience was the beginning of a slow and wide-ranging realization that as long as I live in ‘my’ world – made up of ‘my’ worldview, ‘my’ beliefs, opinions, feelings and survival passions – I cannot help but struggle to fit everyone into ‘my’ world, as actors on the stage of ‘my’ play, so to speak, as family and aliens, as friends and enemies, as ‘good people and ‘bad’ people. And not only am ‘I’ busy trying to do this, everyone else – all six billion of us – are equally struggling to fit everyone into ‘their’ world.

It then comes as no surprise that being actually harmless is out of the question – until ‘I’ more and more leave centre-stage, stop resenting being here, stop being stressed, take myself less seriously, take notice of other people the way they are and start enjoying life.

I have a new situation to deal with since talking with you last. My Mom is in the hospital and I am spending most of my time taking care of her. This subject of fear is still appropriate in relation to how I am dealing with this situation. The second I start thinking about it I am overwhelmed with fear, worry, etc.

However, I find that running the question ‘how am I’ is helping me to deal with the situation. Asking the question has helped me to stay in the moment and what I find is everything is ok in this moment right now. All my fears are in regard to how am I going to manage taking care of her at a future time. Right now at this moment in time she is taken care of.

Thank you for your reply. Life seems to have given you a serendipitous opportunity to have a closer look at the instinctual passion of nurture, its correlating feelings of love and belonging and the implications of being a social identity as a family member. Quite an exciting range of possible discoveries that could help answer your earlier question of ‘How do I become intimate with the instincts?’

Love and compassion, sympathy and empathy are our usual ways of relating to family and friends and through the same emotional ‘channel’ we also invite the their fears and worries, sorrow and resentment, anger and hatred. There is only one way when one relates to people affectively and that is within the rules and ways of the Human Condition. The moment I feel sympathy for someone I am also swamped by their fears, the moment I am empathic for someone’s suffering I plug into the collective misery of mankind. The need to belong makes one susceptible to everybody’s feelings, be it anger or fear, greed or suffering.

This is not just a poetic expression, it is my very experience. In order to become happy and harmless I had to examine my every relationship – to Peter, to my peers, to my work-mates, to my parents and relatives. Whenever I ‘reached out’ emotionally, understanding someone’s sorrow, fear or anger, I could not help being affected – that’s the very idea of ‘sharing’ and the common remedy against feeling lonely in the first place. But there is no choice of feeling just the nice, good feelings with or for someone and disregarding their negative feelings – by the very nature of emotions I am being hooked into the emotional web the moment I choose to go along with affective feelings.

The alternative was to consciously and deliberately decide to leave the cozy nest of bitter-sweet feelings, to abandon the ‘squabbling and miserable humanity’ and examine and then eliminate feelings and emotions in myself. I have found that the ‘good’ emotions were even more insidious than the ‘bad’ ones. Many people would like to get rid of anger, sadness and fear, but who would want to abandon love, compassion, beauty and bliss? But once I understood the intrinsic connection between love and fear, compassion and sorrow, empathy and suffering, I decided to get free of the lot.

When I love someone I am afraid to lose him or her. In order to have compassion for someone the other needs to be ‘in the pits’ emotionally – otherwise there is no use for my compassion. Empathy is even more insidious – the suffering creeps under the skin and one never quite knows what is happening. And all this sorry-go-round for the sake of not feeling lonely, bored and fearful? I discovered that by examining and eliminating my very identity as an appreciated and valued member of society I eliminated loneliness and boredom at the same time. And not even the closest friendship can ever take away one’s fear of death – for fear to stop the very ‘I’ that generates this fear has to become extinct.

Love is not the solution, love is the problem. With love disappearing I could for the first time live in peace and harmony, ease and equity with another human being, day-in, day-out, 24 hrs a day, without bicker or quarrel, crisis or boredom. Without love, actual intimacy and genuine benevolence became possible for the first time. What a serendipitous trade-in!

It seems mad to everyone else but they don’t know what I’ve got!

*

I saw yesterday what you are saying about sympathy and empathy. By not buying in to her suffering I was relieved of my suffering and I was better able to take care of her.

Also have seen that ‘I’ am rotten to the core because a lot of my suffering has been worrying about ‘me’ having to take care of her.

To examine the so-called ‘good’ emotions of nurture, care, sympathy, friendship, duty, love and compassion is a fascinating subject and can only be done by questioning and examining at the same time the morals and ethics of society that forms one’s very social identity. If one wants to be actually free of the Human Condition, one has to examine and recognize that ‘good’ simply means ‘morally acceptable’ and ‘right’ is just another ethical value, both of which vary from tribe to tribe and from society to society. The ‘good’ is a much a bondage as the ‘bad’ – even more so because it seems much more desirable. As humans we don’t want to lose the other’s affection and reassurance, the appreciation of our peers, the cozy safety of being part of a family or group, the comforting knowledge of doing what everyone considers the ‘right’ thing or the ‘good’ deed.

Freedom lies in the opposite direction. On the path to actual freedom I did not bother to try to solve the moral or ethical problems of what is ‘good’ or ‘right’ but focussed my attention instead on discovering my own ethical and moral values – my social identity in action. ‘Ah, I’m trying to find out what is right? I’m upset that someone did the ‘wrong’ thing? I’m aiming again to be a ‘good’ person?’ These were indications that my moral identity was in action and I used my awareness to examine this very identity and learned to step out of it. What is now left is a simple sensible solution – and mostly my worries were seen to be an S.E.P.-situation, Someone Else’s Problem.

Once I understood that it is only me who can set myself free I also understood that everyone has to do it for themselves as well. What perfect arrangement. It for sure saves one saving people.

In the light of my current discussion with Richard, it would be interesting to hear of any enlightenment experiences you had.

I had only one, which lasted for about three days, because I really wanted to investigate all its implications. It was an experience first of great love and compassion for all, together with the Great Wisdom that I wanted to spread to all those ‘poor’ beings whom I considered needed my advice. (oops, I knew then, that I really had to keep my mouth shut and my hands in my pocket. I did not want to do or say anything I would have to regret later or feel embarrassed about!)

With the grandeur came a great satisfaction of finally standing on the same podium that I had put Rajneesh on – now I knew from my own experience from which inner space he was talking and how he had been taking us all for a ride. I felt the power and authority and the wonderful tempting glory of it all. What a grand world it is – you know it all, you feel it all, you can help them all and you are superior to them all. Love pours out of every thought, grandeur is your nature and you swan in timelessness and eternity, forever relieved from the pain and sorrow of the personal little world of the poor mortals you left behind.

It was bloody good to have Peter as a landmark for common sense and Richard’s story and warnings as the blinking light-house and so it came that I did not ground on that wonderfully glimmering, seductively promising ‘Rock of Enlightenment’.

It took a lot of effort and re-starting my intelligence and common sense to dismantle the glory of Truth and the seduction of Power. I had to use all doubt and scepticism available to be able to discover the Truth-production machine in my head. The next thing to deal with was the attraction to power and glory. But without being able to rely on Truth, which was now impossible, how much power can you keep up? It was time to leave the wonder-full magician-castle in the clouds and enter the actual world of senses, sex and coffee.

A person who despises love has a reason to repress love, either because of the absence of love in his/her life or because of deep disappointment in love-affairs, which says nothing about love itself but everything about the experiencer, who could be just incapable of loving or is angry with it as it proved to be different from lust, owning, possessing, using the other and expecting the other to be available.

First of all, what you are saying is illogical. A person in whom love is absent does not have to repress it. Second, the continuing disappointments in love-affairs have triggered doubts about the validity of love as the highest considered value of humankind. Only because of my disappointments and the failure in both my love affairs and in those of other people who I have closely observed, was I open to Peter’s proposing an alternative for our relationship – no love but intimacy, examining and eliminating everything that would be in the road between us. And it is for the first time that living with a man is not a disappointment but an immense joy. I am very glad that I am not capable of dreaming the ideal love-dream anymore. Experiencing actual intimacy day after day is far, far superior to love.

‘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.

In the dictionary is a definition based in desire and attachment, and perhaps a sense of ‘caring’ may be referred to. Ie. ‘An intense affectionate concern for another person’ or ‘Intense sexual desire for another person’, as in the American Heritage dictionary. Essentially a definition based on a feeling the self has of connection, desire, and attachment for a person, situation, or thing. Always referring to possession, ‘my wife, my son’. Of course, it is ridiculous to use a dictionary for such a thing when we may look within ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experiencing another human being directly, without my ‘self’ in action 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’.

During my spiritual search, it has never been easy for me to locate this ego, to completely understand what it is I have to get rid of in order to become happy (enlightened). Once I came across Richard’s explanation, derived from his being enlightened and seen through the delusion it was, things suddenly made shocking sense: getting rid of the ego means wanting to keep the ‘good bits’ and throw away the ‘bad bits’. And the sorting out the ‘good bits’ from the ‘bad bits’ made it so confusing.

Slowly I began to understand that the ‘good bits’ – love – are only there to heal, cover up and balance out the ‘bad bits’. Once I really get rid of the ‘bad bits’, the ‘good bits’ are redundant as well. They both prevent me from seeing a tree as a tree, a dog as a dog and a human being as a human being. Those overlaid emotions never let me experience the world as it is, there is always a ‘self’-related colouring that veils the clear perception. And once those both veils are taken off my eyes I can see the magnificence and magic in every tree, creature and human being. No emotion is needed to glorify it. This actual world is already perfect, it doesn’t need any enhancement by the ‘self’, the very sum of all our instinctual passions, emotions and beliefs, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Once I stop doing, feeling, proposing, interpreting, in short messing around, with the world as-it is, then everything is simply perfect. It is ‘I’ who is at the core of all the trouble. And this ‘I’ consists of ‘ego’ and ‘soul’, concepts and emotions, everything non-actual, everything that is not touchable, visible, audible, tastable or smell-able. Pretty radical, isn’t it!

Where we may differ, I think, is that I don’t want to reject love, I just want to reject the cultural definition we have been stuck with for so long. Substitute ‘ego attachment’ for that.

Yet this complete attention to what is actually so [Can we lend it the name love for a moment if that isn’t too disturbing, just to please me? Thank you, you may have the word back in just a minute, to dispose of as you wish.] can occur at any time and under any circumstances. Including the jump from a balcony, sitting in the sunlight, or sexual embrace. And anyone can love, none ‘better’ than any other. One doesn’t need words or ‘understanding’ for it! I think it is what we are meant to do. ‘The universe being aware of itself’ without condition. I think that is right on target. And I want to call it love. Perhaps out of sheer perversity I don’t want to squander the word love on what we normally use it for! Perhaps because it hurt me so much. Or perhaps I have some sense it is better used this way. I don’t know, but I have nothing to prove, it’s just how I see it. It may be that one loves continually in Richard’s actualized state, it sounds as if it might be so. It is the only thing that really matters. There is either complete attention, which I call love for just one more minute, thank you, or there is not, which is the state of being in the ego, or unconscious, or dead. And when we are love we are free, ‘actually free’ is a fine way to put it, if you wish, and we love like the sunlight, and the rain, and the wind, and the earth – because we are one.

Complete attention is only possible if there is no personal investment in you whatsoever, in that moment. This complete attention is not something ‘I’ do, this attention is what is left when there is nothing else that distracts that attention or apperception. Then you simply delight in the very is-ness of things, people and events, without directing, feeling, fearing, inventing, controlling, planning or hoping. So in my experience, it is freedom from the ‘self’, freedom from ‘me’, the feeler and believer, that has to come first and then you don’t need any love. Without malice and sorrow one is simply benevolent, magnanimous, intimate with everyone and swimming in delight. You probably remember this from your PCEs.

I want to keep love – Now, you may have ‘love’ back.

It struck me that when you say, ‘I want to keep love’ , you already admit that it not actual. It is something you decide to keep or throw, it does not exist without your doing. But I do understand that ‘you’ want to keep it, it is an essential part of your identity, of ‘who you feel you are’.

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’ of our Journal. I copied that part for you here.

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...

Months after the shock wore off and I began to explore the amputation, I discovered there were two very different components to what I had previously thought of as ‘love.’ I now think of them as ‘ego attachment’ and ‘real love.’ We have discussed the ego attachment part in previous exchanges and I think we are in basic agreement about the nature of it, give or take a few terms and minor differences in word usages and definitions. The ‘real love’ that I saw left after all the elements of ego attachment were identified, is something completely unconditional, something that does not care whether she does or does not do as I wish, an awareness and regard that does not measure, assess, judge, possess, or expect. I believe it to be connected in a direct way to the kind of observing you describe as ‘my full attention and bare awareness each time we communicate.’ It is what I believe to be ‘real love.’ (Or ‘actual love’ if you wish!) What you and Peter are experiencing when you are free to interact this way.

What do you think?

See, you make a difference between ‘ego’ (something to get rid of) and ‘real love’ (something you want to keep). And then you say, clarity does not arise. How can it arise? Throwing away the ‘bad’ and keeping the ‘good’ has not worked for thousands of years. Humanity is still waging as many wars as 2000 years ago. Every Enlightened Master created yet another religion, and the religious wars are the most horrific ones.

Last night I saw a re-run of ‘Oh! What a Lovely War’, a black-humour musical about the First World War. Seeing the soldiers in the trenches, used as canon-fodder for the game of numbers that the generals were playing was devastating, and all the soldiers were dying and killing for love. Men die for love of country, love for the family, to protect the ones they love, unconditionally. And after the war is over, the surviving men don’t talk about the horrors they lived through so as not to upset the ones they love. A continuum of malice and suffering – and it is called ‘real love’. No one ever puts these facts in one line and acknowledges that they are interrelated.

I could still feel the impact of the horrors those men went through. They stand for all of the suffering and devastation humans go through in the course of the centuries. Seeing the facts of what causes the suffering made it clear once again that I want to do something about this horrendous situation, which is continuing today as horrendously as in the First World War. And the only thing I can do about it is to eradicate every trace of ‘self’ in me, and that includes the instinct of love, eliminate every reason why I would kill, hurt or even insult any other human being. And I know, as long as there is a trace of ‘me’ inside, I am still capable of violence when ‘push comes to shove’.

...is something completely unconditional, something that does not care whether she does or does not do as I wish ... (Or ‘actual love’ if you wish!)

There is no actual love. Love is an emotion, created by our instinctual passions and beliefs and felt as hormonal surges in the physical body as well. But when love is unrequited it is easy to imagine it as unconditional because there is no fire-test in daily life. There is always a gain for the identity in feeling ‘unconditional love’. Heroic suffering is food for the ‘self’. Suffering keeps the identity intact. And one would still kill, if needed, to protect the object of one’s unconditional love. One suffers but one can stay as one is. In this way one is continuing what every human being has tried to do up to now: to keep the emotions and instincts and still be ‘good’. If you look around it has not brought any peace and happiness to the planet in thousand of years.

If that is so, then you have found the first ‘key’ to eliminating anger – seeing the actual situation, sensibly considering everyone involved and understanding that your particular feelings will do nothing to help the situation, on the contrary, they are harmful. You can apply the same understanding to any other emotion arising, be it love, gratitude, resentment, doubt, anguish, sadness, etc. None of our so-called precious feelings are useful for dealing with practical, every-day situations. Care, consideration, attention, intelligence and common sense can do the job much better. The trick is to question the ‘good’ feelings as well as the ‘bad’ feelings and a great part of the social identity will disappear, issue by issue.

Well, eliminating the ‘good’ feelings is being a little tricky for me. Whereas I could see through common sense that ‘bad’ feelings like anger are harmful, I could not see the same thing for love (for example), partly because of my latent faith in the revered wisdom. Now I am beginning to understand the cunningness of this entity ‘I’, which just changes its shape from anger to love. For me just this realization that it is false is enough to determine to eliminate it, though I am also beginning to understand that love may also be harmful and perhaps may result into a war when it is for one’s country or faith. Even if it is love (or Love) for all, it is still ‘I’ and so not different from anger at its very root..

In order to question ‘good’ feelings I had to experience that any so-called ‘good’ feeling, particularly love, is just the other side of the coin of human emotions, i.e. the Human Condition. Love is produced in order to cover up disgust, hate, anger, indifference, self-centeredness and loneliness. Without all the negative emotions, what would you need love for? And at the next layer of investigation I discovered that love consists of nothing but a very self-centred system consisting of control, image, identity, power, bargain and smugness, particularly when feeling Love for All. How much more powerful can you feel when you feel big enough to love all of humanity?! Stripped of its glittering costume of people’s beliefs and needs, love is nothing other than our instinct of nurture, in-built to ensure the survival of the species – and embellished with great ideals and values. But the ideal of love cannot belie the facts of the atrocities caused by malice and sorrow that happen amongst human beings, often in the name of that same love, devotion, faith and loyalty.

So it was a great revelation when I first discovered that to be alive and happy I don’t need to have emotions at all – in fact, the emotions were the very thing that prevented me from being fully alive and permanently happy. Sorting my emotions into good and bad always reminded me of poor Cinderella who had to sort out peas by their size, ending up totally exhausted and bewildered. What a relief and how much easier, to start to eliminate all the peas, ie. emotions. Of course, that proposition rocked me at the very core, but I was desperate and daring enough to give it a go. And the more I stripped away the ‘good’ feelings like love, gratitude, humility, unselfish-ness, compassion and belonging, the more I discovered the genuine article underneath the emotions and beliefs – actual intimacy and delight.

See, the quality of the actual world is delight. The very actual-ness of everything is pure delight. Actualism is ‘the experiential understanding that nothing physical is merely passive; the personal experience of the universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being as opposed to a cerebral or affective perception.’

For instance, listening without the layer of emotions, morals, values, beliefs and instincts, to the hum of the fridge, the sound of cars passing by, the rumbling of the computer doing its thing, is delighting in being alive and this very hearing is one function of being alive. No love is needed to layer on top of the very happening of things, it only destroys the purity and perfection, it only binds it into a man-made system of conditions, belonging, control and fear. If you love one sound, you reject another. To love silence is to despise and be upset by noisy business. Love would utterly spoil the game of being happy, here, now, each moment again, for no other reason than being alive, fully and sensately experiencing the universe around me. Without the self being sorrowful and malicious, fearful and lonely, loving and belonging, compassionate and grateful – nothing else is needed to delight in each moment again.

Un-conditional love was there in front of me like the unreachable carrot, the dream that one day, by the magic of devotion, meditation and the Grace of Existence, my desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness would turn into the fairytale of ‘true’, divine love for ever. But it was a dream, an ideal, only very rarely experienced under extremely positive conditions. With this understanding it was much easier to investigate further into the components of my ‘good’ feelings called love.

I liked this, Vineeto. Even though I cannot say with certainty that divine love is ‘only very rarely experienced under extremely positive conditions’, I am willing to accept that this is something to be looked into.

This is what they call a ‘prima-facie case’ in legal language, meaning there is enough evidence to keep going with the investigation. So, you say that for you there is enough common sense in my statement about unconditional love that you are ready to investigate further. Great. Even if you take only your own experience with Divine Love you might come to the conclusion that those few glorious experiences are not enough to build a happy and harmless life upon.

Furthermore, if you investigate the ramifications and consequences of Divine Love and see what is has done to people’s lives who were devoting themselves to attaining this Divine Love – you might find that the lives of those people are far from happy and harmless. Both in their daily living together in a ‘sangha’ and in their arrogant behaviour towards all the millions of others who they regard as non-believers, the seekers are as competitive, malicious, frustrated, greedy, sad and emotional as everybody else.

So, this Divine Love is

1. only very rarely experienced under extremely positive conditions, and also
2. it is making people neither happy nor harmless 24 hours a day.

I have experienced this Divine Love genuinely and long enough for several times and have investigated it thoroughly – and I wouldn’t want to live it even if someone paid me a million dollars. You can find a description of my experience in ‘Exploration of Death and Altered States of Consciousness’.

Now, that there is a third alternative, who would want to get lost in a delusion of insane dimensions where one can have the delights of the actual world instead of mad imaginations, where one can have the ease of being with fellow human beings instead of having to satisfy crazy worshippers and needy disciples, where one can live in this world-as-it-is with people-as-they-are in perfect peace and harmony instead of being driven to convince everyone of one’s particular version of deluded divinity.

But, it is your life and your peace-on-earth that is the issue of your investigation. I have given you a few reasons why I decided for Actual Freedom and against Enlightenment and Divine Love, but you will have to find out for yourself. And as well as a clear-eyed look at your own experiences and observations you have close to a million words already written about actual freedom to assist your exploration. Check out the new page on the ‘Altered State of Consciousness aka Enlightenment’ that is on our web-site in the library. I am interested of what you find out.

I will give you a short report on something old. When in January, I snapped at you. I knew there was something behind it. So I focussed on why I snapped at you. This led to my need for love, turned into jealousy and turned into competition. For a month, it was fun to find out various things about myself.

I will write about my present stuckness when I get out of it.

This is a good train of observations. This need for love is such an insidious feeling, spoiling the easy, enjoyable interaction with people again and again. Particularly my memory of being outraged because of jealousy was a strong factor of never wanting to experience that rage again in whatever situation, whatever the cost. Peter and I had a mutual contract to investigate and eliminate everything that was in the road between us, and jealousy was definitely on the list of the emotions to be investigated first – I was determined to get to the bottom of it.

What I found beneath my need for love, jealousy and the resulting competition with other women was my strong belief in love as the ultimate value, that love was something ‘holy’ to uphold, aspire to, to want from others and try to achieve in myself. I had always blamed myself for not being loving or still being jealous, but I had never before questioned the need of the emotion of love itself. It is such a ‘holy cow’, both in Western and Eastern culture and religion, that it had been simply unthinkable not to want love or want to give love in exchange.

When Richard said that everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong and that this included love, I started to investigate the very value of love for the first time. Suddenly it made sense why not only I had failed to achieve unconditional love, but everyone around me had not much of a success either. Most of the displayed love was selfishness standing on its head, mixed with a good dose of hypocrisy. I discovered that, by the very nature of emotions and feelings, one cannot feel love without power, possessiveness, jealousy or competition. One cannot have the good emotions without the bad ones. Love is part of our instinctual programming of nurture, of ensuring the survival of the species and of the need to belong to a group in order to survive. Given that the feeling of love is instinctually based, naturally there is power, territorial fights, hierarchy and fear of losing this much-wanted love.

Watching animal programs I could learn a lot about instinctual behaviour because animals have the same rudimentary survival instincts as human, without the overlaying morals and ethics of humans. For this reason their instincts are very easy to observe. Just today I watched a program on ants where the commentator raised the question, ‘how come ants have an altruistic behaviour, sacrificing themselves for the tribe, there must be an altruistic gene somewhere?’ It might look altruistic but it is simply the instinctual program to ensure the survival of the species, whatsoever the cost.

To come back to the subject – investigating my need and high regard for love I found out that, factually, it is much safer and more sensible to rely on my intelligence for my physical survival, instead of relying on the supposed security of love-based relationships with others. Sitting out the fear that came with questioning such a basic instinctual programming I could eventually free myself of its insidious grip and all the ensuing problems that relationships based on love, sympathy, compassion, need, belonging and fear inevitably bring about. Now I can meet and enjoy people as they are, engage in pleasant communication if it happens and have no regrets when they don’t happen. I noticed in the last weeks of work how easy and intimate and actual my relating to people is, now that neither instinctual passions nor the hypocrisy and inhibitions of ‘my’ moral and ethical codes are interfering with the direct response to whatever situation arises.

Life is so much better without love. It is well worth working oneself through ‘stuckness’, doubt or fear. I am interested to hear what you are finding out.

My need-for-love is, I think, based on need to be nurtured at the age of 3 years and younger. Since I have no memory before the age of 3 years, it especially makes it hard. I am not sure what to do. Until recently I used to think that to solve these kinds of problems, eg. need-for-love in me, I need to know their source/origin, but may be there are other ways to solve them too. I can’t say much at present as I am in the middle of it and trying to get rid of need-for-love and fear associated with the similar causes. I agree with you, however, that this need-for-love is quite insidious

As I said before, in my experience, working out childhood or past-life situations is a dead-end road, in that one will never get to the bottom of all the real or imagined hurts, resentments, exasperations or fears. The same is the case for the need-for-love. It is part of the instinctual package that we are born with. Just now, I watched a film-report made by the famous Jane Goodall, where a 6 year old monkey died of grief three weeks after his mother was killed. He couldn’t survive, missing his source for ‘love’ and care. Everybody, whatever childhood they had, is troubled by their need for love, troubled by their instincts, inflicted with the Human Condition.

Only by examining my beliefs supporting love as well as my (imagined) fears of what would happen if I wasn’t loved, could I dismantle this instinct for being loved, which is common to all human beings. In the actual world there is neither love nor need for love. I-as-this-body know perfectly well how to physically survive, how to enjoy being alive and, without the burden of separation and loneliness that the presence of the ‘self’ inevitably produces, simply delight in experiencing the universe around me.

It is the ‘self’ that is the culprit – ego and soul combined. This genetically inherited and collectively reinforced passionate imagination of a separate self in each human being is responsible for every single feeling and act of sorrow and malice on this planet.

And now it is possible to get rid of it, to become free from the Human Condition. And isn’t it a worthy and thrilling adventure to devote one’s life to! I immensely enjoy the virtual freedom that I have already gained from investigating into the Human Condition.

What I had to acknowledge quite in the beginning of my investigation about love was the fact that my ideas and ideals about love and with it the so-called true or un-conditioned love where just ideas and ideals and had nothing to do with the reality of the feelings I had.

The feelings of love that I had had in my life were always poisoned by possessiveness, jealousy, fear of abandonment, anger, insecurity, competitiveness and – in case of rejected love – they turned into hate.

Un-conditional love was there in front of me like the unreachable carrot, the dream that one day, by the magic of devotion, meditation and the Grace of Existence, my desires, hopes, fears and possessiveness would turn into the fairytale of ‘true’, divine love for ever. But it was a dream, an ideal, only very rarely experienced under extremely positive conditions.

With this understanding it was much easier to investigate further into the components of my ‘good’ feelings called love.

When you say:

...And love, Love are kind of feelings. Then what is happy and harmless? I am experiencing being happy and harmless as a kind of feeling right now.

I think here you are applying your ideal of love rather than what is actually happening. I remember the discourses in Poona, where every night there was a hushed competition who would sit closest to the Master, who would get a look from him or even be talked about. There was a tough competition going on – far from happy and harmless. And Rajneesh was as much part of that game as us, his disciples. He would stir the fire of competition, fancy some and neglect others, while all the while telling us to drop desire. Now, that the Master is dead, ‘spread all over Existence’, it is much easier to dream of his Un-conditional Love, and that one day you would attain it. The daily check on reality is but nil. But it is all ‘in the head’ or in the feeling, ‘spirit’-ual, it is not actuality.

Being happy and harmless is not a coating over one’s grotty ‘self’, over the Human Condition in us. Being happy and harmless is only possible when you actively remove the feelings, emotions and instinctual passions that the ‘self’ consists of – what then remains is a happy and harmless human being. What remains is the delight of a perfect universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being.

About your question whether I feel his (Rajneesh’s) presence now. My answer is I am grateful for him still now. And maybe I must add to say that this gratefulness has no demand for the return.

Well, as I see it, the first thing is to stop dreaming and imagining and looking honestly at what emotions, feelings, beliefs, fears, loyalty, faith, passions there are that rule your everyday life. What’s the point of feeling gratitude for half an hour a day, dreaming of the perfect unconditional love to a long-dead old Indian philosophy professor, who thought he was God, when the rest of the time one is annoyed, grotty, angry, resentful, peeved, frustrated, sad, hopeful, ambitions, competitive, tense, fearful, stressed out or bored? Both, being busy with emotions and busy with imagined dreams is not being here, now, where life is actually happening.

I think here you are applying your ideal of love rather than what is actually happening. I remember the discourses in Poona, where every night there was a hushed competition who would sit closest to the Master, who would get a look from him or even be talked about. There was a tough competition going on – far from happy and harmless. And Rajneesh was as much part of that game as us, his disciples. He would stir the fire of competition, fancy some and neglect others, while all the while telling us to drop desire. Now, that the Master is dead, ‘spread all over Existence’, it is much easier to dream of his Un-conditional Love, and that one day you would attain it. The daily check on reality is but nil. But it is all ‘in the head’ or in the feeling, ‘spirit’-ual, it is not actuality.

As I said before, I think this is not my case.

Could you explain further, why you ‘think this is not [your] case’? Did you check your thinking with the actual fact, ie what particular improvement a certain advice of Rajneesh has brought to your daily life? Did you inquire into the nature of your feelings for Rajneesh to find out which feelings and passions, hopes and desires lay behind the dream of ‘unconditional love’?

When I dared to investigate into the devotional relationship that I had to ‘the Master of Masters’ I found several instinctual passions rampantly operating:

• the instinct to herd together – gathering in a group of like-minded people who – in this case – think they are better than anybody else,
• the instinct to seek a strong father-figure who would protect me against the evils of life,
• the need for some authority to map out and guide my life,
• the need for someone to love and be loved by in order not to be alone in this hostile world,
• the need to have a high ideal and an unquestionable meaning in life (in that sense Rajneesh replaced the belief in God as the ultimate matrix)
• the desire to be one day as happy, carefree, blissed out and powerful as he seemed to be.

I had to investigate all of those underlying instinctual passions first before I could make a definitive and honest assessment about my relationship to Rajneesh. Well, that investigation proved to be the ending of my love, my devotion and my dependence on the Indian philosophy professor who thought he was God and who had gathered thousands of people around him who still think he is God.

In fact, my definition of love is: ‘Not putting anything in the way of what your partner wants’. It is a special case of a more general principle: ‘Every individual is there in the first place for him/herself. Therefore it is wrong to ask anything from anybody, or to take anything for granted.’

I agree with you that this would be a good contract to start a harmonious relationship. In my experience though, the moment love with all its conditioning enters, it destroys this wonderful intention. There is simply no way to forever control, i.e. repress emotions, they do surface quite soon in the course of living together, as you can probably testify from your own experience or the evidence your neighbours seem to give you. With love enters inevitably possessiveness, jealousy, expectation for attention, care, admiration, ‘I scratch your back, you scratch my back’, and in no time freedom and harmony are replaced by compromise, discontentment, misunderstanding, battle and defeat.

Like yourself, I have come to see that ‘love’ comprises a whole constellation of moods, emotions, behaviours, and beliefs. At its most fundamental, there are the tender instincts of nurture and desire. These fundamental instincts are then further articulated and elaborated through the process of conditioning and learning into the whole complex constellation of human drives and emotions. I have found that it is impossible to refrain from love, which is a bit like trying to outrun my shadow – a patent impossibility. But I can investigate these various emotions, moods and passions, and it is a fascinating and engaging work indeed. Eventually ‘I’ am becoming a bit threadbare – the moods and emotions are not running my life, nor am I blindly careering about looking for love and acceptance. This ties in with autonomy – I am becoming more and more autonomous.

That doesn’t mean that we cannot enjoy each other’s company and continue to share our lives and our cosy little home together. But the curious thing is the surreptitious thrill of delight to hear the words spoken, something that many, if not most, people living in the Human Condition feel they cannot do without. Again, there is the recognition and awareness that these words ‘I love you’ are the soul’s balm. They are music to my soul’s ears: ‘I’ stand up and take notice emphatically when offered love and acceptance by others, whether employer, co-workers, partner, etc. But again, one asks oneself ‘why’? And at what cost?

I like it when you say 

‘I naively thought that by expunging the word ‘love’ from my vocabulary, I would be eliminating the emotional hold these emotions have on me. I have not found that to be the case’.

because this is exactly my experience. To not believe in the promise of love is one thing, but to actually investigate the feelings of love one has to keep the word ‘love’ in one’s vocabulary. I found love, and its big brother ‘compassion for all’, a much more sticky emotion than, for instance, anger. Love lets you belong – to a person, to a group, to a nation and to humanity as a whole. Investigating love and the tender instincts is all about examining the feeling of belonging and the fear of standing on my own feet.

Your expression ‘these words ‘I love you’ are the soul’s balm. They are music to my soul’s ears’ hit the nail on the head. My ‘soul’, this passionate imaginary ‘me’, needs continuous emotional affirmation from others or needs to feel connected to others in order to stay alive – for ‘I’ am non-actual, ‘I’ do not exist other than by feeling and imagination.

You might have noticed that when you accept people’s praise or love, you are at the same time susceptible to their critiques and condemnations as well – one cannot have one without the other. With nobody to love me or hate me, and with nobody to love or hate, my soul eventually withers away and I become anonymous.

Actual Freedom is about getting rid of the soul altogether, so it neither flourishes nor suffers. This is when I become autonomous.

To No. 14: Just because these two, Vineeto and Peter, have awakened you to something ‘you’ could not see in the way Osho did his awakening, does not mean they have come any further than anybody else!

These people appear to be total mind fuckers, I may be wrong but I don’t think so. They are just in the process of exchanging one type of mind for another. This new mind is just a little more supple and sly, it appears to be a very nice mind, kind and patient and in love with its own sweetness! The taste of no mind has a different taste, like the ocean it is always salty, remind you of anything?

Maybe this is how it appears to you, that Peter and I are total mind-fuckers, because that’s how you define the opposite of Universal Love. But Universal Love is as much part of the problem as the ego.

To be the universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being is such a delight and perfection, that it leaves Universal Love far, far behind. The freedom and simplicity of simply doing what is happening, the intimacy of meeting other human beings without the burden of any identity – both ego and soul – is deliciously fulfilling. No love (human or divine) can offer anything of that quality.

So, even if it looks so from your side, it is not mind-fucking. The word ‘mind’ is too hackneyed by the spiritual people and thus too confusing to be of any use. I prefer the words common sense, practical intelligence, clarity and reflection.

Why is it that the idea and the feeling of love are so important, and yet everybody has been hurt through love?

One is only hurt through love if one has expectations about another’s behaviour, if some sort of bargain has been struck about how love looks, or feels or is supposed to appear.

Yes, that’s right. The trouble is to find the different paragraphs of the ‘contracts’ and dismantle them, so the relating can stay free of dreams and hidden expectations. I had to question and eliminate the feeling of love for the other all together in order to experience the exquisite intimacy of meeting a fellow human being afresh each moment again.

I’ve been enriched by unconditional love, and hurt by love when I had false ideas and beliefs about it.

I found that every idea about love was a false idea and every belief by its nature is a ‘false’ belief. Belief, after all, means ‘to fervently wish to be true’ – as per dictionary.

As for unconditional love, it is nothing but a grand feeling. I have known moments and days of unconditional love-for-all, wanting to give Wisdom and compassion to everyone. But, compared with my peak-experiences, where the ‘I’ was absent altogether and with it any sense of ‘self’, any feeling, emotion or belief, I found that ‘Love’ has three main disadvantages:

1. Unless one goes ‘off’ into enlightenment Love is a fickle business, you come off it with the first one stepping on your toes like in the Poona food-queue.
2. Love makes you feel superior to everyone else, the other ceases to be a fellow human being. It turns others to objects and receivers of your Love – and makes it a relationship of power, not of equity.
3. Love puts a layer of affection over experiencing the crisp and pure intimacy and perfection of the actual world, one wears ‘rose-coloured glasses’.

Richard describes the difference in his journal – and that’s how I experience it, too:

‘Actual intimacy – being here – does not come from love, for love stems from separation. The illusion of intimacy that love produces is but a pale imitation of this direct experience of the actual. In this, the actual world, ‘I’ , the personality, the subjectively experienced identity and self , have ceased to exist; whereas love accentuates, endorses and verifies ‘me’ as being real. A chief characteristic of the peak experience is the seeing through of the belief in ‘my’ existence. And while ‘I’ am real, ‘I’ am relative to other, similarly afflicted, persons; vying for position and status in order to establish ‘my’ credentials – to verify ‘my’ very existence. In the actual world, I am already factual – I do not have to prove myself. Hence an indifference to hierarchy, with its corruptible Authority and Power.’ Richard’s Journal, Article No. 9

So much better, not to have malice and fear, that makes love, any kind of love, simply redundant. One can be benign, friendly and benevolent, literally meaning well-wishing, and is free to act in a way that is of benefit to one and all. Benevolence acts freely, one is not driven by Universal Sorrow as are the Compassionate Ones.

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